Chapter 10 #2
“People do move around,” Ransom concedes, pulling his lever. His machine trills and pays out again, a tidy little stack. Wow. The man cannot do a single thing wrong. The Vikings on his screen have started saluting him. Mine are staging a hunger strike. “But—”
“There’s more?” I interrupt, because there always is.
Nettie appears suddenly at my elbow, breathless and clutching a goblet of something bright blue. “Trixie! Did you see that man in the horned helmet? Because I saw him. And he saw me. And when a man tips his horns at a woman, that’s practically a proposal in Norse. I looked it up.”
“You did not look it up.”
“I skimmed the vibes.”
“Nettie, I’m so sorry, we’re sort of in the middle of something,” I say gently.
“So am I! It’s called romance. Or lust. Possibly both.” She takes a sip of her blue drink and makes a face. “Sweet mother of mead, this tastes like Viking sweat.”
“How do you know what Viking sweat tastes like?” Bess has appeared behind her, clutching her tray of winnings.
“Field research.”
“What field?”
“The wide-open field of romance.”
“Your field needs a fence, a warning sign, and possibly a quarantine order.”
“Jealousy is a disease, and you’re the whole outbreak.”
They drift back toward their machines, still bickering, and I refocus on Ransom just as he says, “There’s also a minor name inconsistency.”
Wes looks up sharply, his token frozen halfway to his machine. He’s wearing the expression of a man who’s just been bonked on the head with a ceremonial battle-ax. The decorative kind, but still. “What inconsistency?”
The craps table erupts. Someone’s on a winning streak, and the whole room ratchets up another notch, the lights blinking faster, the drums thumping harder, two hundred grown adults in velvet capes vibrating with an almost violent level of glee.
It’s the sound of perfectly sensible people convincing themselves they’re one roll away from buying a beach house.
At least they’re forgetting their troubles.
I’d like to forget a few problems myself.
Instead, I’m collecting new ones by the minute.
“She goes by Marina Maxwell,” Ransom says, his voice cutting clean through the noise. “Legal records list her as Marina Valentine Madsen. Maxwell doesn’t appear in any marriage filings tied to her.”
“Hold on. How did you even find that?” I ask. “You would’ve searched her as Maxwell.”
“I did. Maxwell got me her employment records, and her employment records got me her Social Security number. From there, everything unspools. I still have friends at the Bureau who owe me favors, and federal databases don’t care what name you’re wearing this year.
They only care about the number underneath. ”
A small chill sets up residence somewhere in my chest. The number underneath. As if we’re all just serial numbers in nicer outfits.
“So she changed it,” I say, though even I can hear how weak that sounds. “Women do that. For professional reasons. Personal reasons. Fresh starts.”
“Possibly,” Ransom says, and his tone is so carefully measured it’s almost painful. “Or she’s using a preferred name. It’s not illegal.”
“But it’s intentional,” Wes says finally, a note of defeat creeping into his voice the way water seeps under a door.
So much for the future Mrs. Crawford. I keep that one to myself, mostly because Wes already looks like he wants a do-over.
Ransom nods once, pulls his lever, and collects another win without so much as a flicker of satisfaction. “Yes. It’s intentional.”
The silence between us feels heavy despite the commotion continuing around us.
Elodie’s laugh rings out somewhere to our left. She’s winning again, and I’m not talking about slots. Nettie’s trying to get the attention of the Viking bartender again. A woman at the roulette wheel shouts “Black sixteen!” with the confidence of a psychic or the very inebriated.
Marina glides past our corner, her tray now empty, heading back toward Tinsley, presumably to get more tokens. She’s smiling at something a guest said, and she looks truly happy.
“And I hate to bring it up,” I say quietly, watching Marina disappear into the crowd, “but she was very upset the day we met her. At that bar in Copenhagen.”
Ransom’s mouth tightens, and I know he’s thinking about it too. “It’s not exactly a tourist wine lounge. It’s known among dock crews. Expats. People passing through. It’s not dangerous, but it’s not a place you wander into by accident on vacation.”
“Or it’s exactly where you land when you’re running from something,” I say. “She did have a suitcase with her. Who brings their luggage to happy hour?”
“And she was crying,” Wes says, his voice barely audible over the chiming of the slot machine next to him. “A lot.”
The memory of Marina at that bar flashes through my mind—mascara smudged, eyes red, clutching her phone the way a drowning woman clutches a life ring.
I’d chalked it up to a bad breakup or a job loss or one of those universal human disasters that make a woman drink wine at three in the afternoon.
Heaven knows I’ve had my own three-in-the-afternoon eras.
But now I’m wondering if it was something else entirely.
“We only know a few surface things about her,” I say.
“The fact that she was married to a man named David for fifteen years and has been a widow for a good stretch of time since.” I try to come up with anything else she might have told us on the last cruise.
“And the fact that she’s worked in hospitality her whole life. ”
That, in a nutshell, is the sum total of what I know about Marina. It would fit on a cocktail napkin with room left over for Nettie’s notes.
Ransom adds one more thing, and it lands heavier than all the paperwork, all the missing addresses, and the name change combined. “Have you noticed she scans exits?”
I go still. Around us, the casino carries on with its blinking, chiming, popcorn-scented celebration, but I’ve stopped hearing it, because Ransom’s right, and I hate that I didn’t notice it myself until he pointed it out. I notice everything. It’s my one marketable skill besides finding bodies.
I frown, feeding another token into my machine just to have something to do with my hands. My Vikings rejoice. The famine has ended.
Hey, wait a minute. I think I did notice that about her.
“Lots of women do that,” I say. “It’s situational awareness.”
“Not like she does,” Ransom replies, and his voice has gone soft, which is what he does when he wants to make a point without shoving it.
“She clocks security cameras without appearing to look at them. She never sits with her back fully exposed. She positions herself where she can see movement before others notice it.”
I think about Marina at breakfast this morning, at the cafés in Gothenburg, even now moving through the casino. Always angled. Always aware. Always ready.
Nettie hollers from across the floor. “I WON! I ACTUALLY WON! Bess, look! LOOK!”
“It’s eight tokens,” Bess calls back, utterly unimpressed.
“EIGHT MORE THAN I HAD!”
Wes’ voice turns defensive. “She’s a woman traveling alone in Europe. That’s called being vigilant. Smart and careful.”
“Or it’s a trauma response,” Ransom says gently, and the words settle over us, a weighted blanket of a sentence.
“She told me she doesn’t like crowded rooms,” Wes adds, quieter now. “Some people just don’t.”
I tuck that one away with both hands. She told him.
It seems the captain and our cruise director have been holding private summits the rest of us weren’t invited to, and judging by the shade of pink presently climbing Wes’ ears, he’s just realized he read the meeting minutes out loud to the whole committee.