Chapter 11
Two dead men.
It’s unbelievable.
I’m pretty sure at this point I’m never going to sleep again, even if we did vacate my room that is now surrounded in caution
tape and migrate over to Nash’s. And while, yes, the sheets are clean, the room’s an identical shade of interior design perfection,
and the bed doesn’t carry a dead man underneath, the effect is the same: I will never sleep again.
I even at some point around 8 a.m. google that question. Exactly how long can someone live without sleep? The answer, for the record, is eleven days.
I stir my freshly poured cup of coffee from the coffee cart in the corner of the library as I listen to Cedar Pogache, the
second man in command (more like very, very new adult); the one who carried the stretcher with Hugh just yesterday.
He’s much younger than Carragan, and several strands of his long blond hair bounce unwelcome over his eyes every minute or two like a cat batting at a toy hanging in the window.
He’s got adolescent acne on his forehead.
He reminds me of a childhood cat I once tried to dress up in a colonial dress.
His clothes swim over his bony limbs. He fumbles over half of his sentences and takes pains to avoid using words with more than two syllables.
“Shouldn’t you be writing this down?” I say at last, trying to tap into what little reserves of my patience are left. Pogache
has been pestering Nash with questions for the past half hour and has yet to open a notebook. “Or recording it. Or something.”
He halts in mid-pace. Puts both hands on his hips.
Is his goal to look intimidating?
He doesn’t manage it.
“Record, yes,” Pogache says swiftly, lifting his finger. “And I am doing that.” He pats his chest, as if to say the recording device is inside.
I bet.
“So,” Pogache continues, casting his eyes uncertainly around, “if that’s . . . all . . . I think it’s time we take a recess
now. And you should go about your . . . activities,” he says unsteadily.
“Activities!” I cry out, waving a hand at the group of us. “Your security officer and boss is dead hours after he told me he figured out who did it. We can’t go on and have our normal activities. Clearly the time for activities is over.”
The group members are perched back at their misery stations now.
Jackie with her nose in a handkerchief by the bookcase.
Gordon at his sturdy chess set.
Crystal trying to slink out of the room entirely.
Ricky standing by/behind the curtains. (Note: Is it possible for a man to cling to curtains as a sort of security blanket? Is this telling of some holes in his childhood? My one semester of general psychology is coming up short, but I think there’s something there.)
Nash is, as is becoming a norm, by my side.
Everyone is the same except Neena, who’s fidgeting with an unruly charm on her glittering bracelet.
“I think Pogache is right,” she says. Neena glances at me briefly, then waves a hand. “There’s nothing else to do, Penelope.
We’ve got to fill the void of time somehow until we get to land and this wreck is all over.”
Wreck. Wreck?!
“You can’t be serious, Neena!” I exclaim. “Carragan was murdered!”
“And we’re stuck here together another eight days, I know,” she says. “Now, I don’t know a whole lot about murder here, but
the only thing that jumps out at me is that both times they were alone. So as far as I see it, I’m not going to get in a position
where I’m alone ever again while I’m here. Possibly the rest of my life.”
“Tasty Tom’s does have incredible spring rolls,” Gordon notes. “It’d be a pity to miss out.”
“I’m sorry, have you all gone mad? There is a killer on the loose, and the very least you could do,” I say, looking to Pogache, “is arrest all of us suspects
so that none of us end up, oh, I don’t know, killing somebody else.”
Nash clears his throat.
Leans in.
“Would you like to volunteer to be in handcuffs together under the care of that kid?” Nash whispers behind my ear.
Agh.
Fair.
He does look like he’d lock us up deep in the basement in handcuffs together and forget where he put the key.
No sense in being handcuffed with a man on the loose.
“Rest assured we have cameras everywhere.”
I frown. I’m fairly astute at this point about cameras, and I have yet to see one anywhere. “Where are you hiding them?” I
say. “Somewhere in the pictures?”
He ignores me.
“Uniformed people—”
“You mean those in uniform,” I interject.
“And . . . well . . . not . . . uniformed people—”
“Undercover staff,” I say.
“Will be watching you the next few days. You won’t have anything to fear. You will all be . . . be—”
“Safe,” I interject, my frown so deep it’s going to slip off my face.
Oh. My. Gosh.
Somebody take away his driver’s license. I don’t even trust him behind the wheel.
“While I finish up this investigation. As far as this goes, you all just go about your business. Let me take it from here.”
Pogache fumbles to put his notebook in his back pocket and on the third try gets it in. He nods at us. Shuts the door.
“That kid is traumatized,” Gordon says.
“Well, how could he not be? He’s probably next,” Jackie says. She sneezes into her handkerchief.
“And . . . he knows it,” Ricky says, shaking his head slowly. “Knows that looking too deep into that . . . notebook of his
supervisor’s . . . may very well be the death of him.”
“Well, I’m about ready for breakfast. Anyone else?”
All heads turn to Neena, who is focused at the moment on smoothing the wrinkles from her bright purple skirt. She moves to
standing, her eyes bright. Clear.
“Anybody?” she says, turning in a circle.
We’re all silent in return.
“Oh, come on,” she says. “Cheer up. Man’s on the job. This’ll all get settled soon enough. Besides, I simply can’t go another
day without eating. Yesterday about killed me. I’m never going another four hours without some sort of protein.”
I cast a glance over to Nash.
My eyes say it all. You see this too, right? Catching her moving around the hall in the middle of the night and then this?
“Have you lost your mind, Neena?” Jackie says incredulously. “Yesterday you threw a glass of champagne at the bellhop. For, according to you, ‘looking seedy.’”
“I stand by that,” Neena replies. “The man was looking rather seedy.”
“He was looking at his phone while we got off the elevator.”
“Plotting murder for all we knew,” Neena retorts, then flutters her hand in the air. Her eyes cast around us. “So I didn’t like Carragan.
I’ll admit it.”
I put my forehead in my palm. “Neena,” I hiss, “you can’t say things like that about the dead.”
She shrugs, as though we’re disagreeing over something as trite as how well to cook meat. “What? We all thought it. I’m just
saying it.”
“Yes, but he was murdered. And we’re in the middle of an investigation!” I shake my head. “Neena. Honestly . . .”
This is all getting out of hand.
“Don’t take anything she says seriously right now; she’s gone temporarily mad,” Gordon says. “It’s the summer of ’03 all over
again. The Flash Mob in the Mall incident on repeat.”
“Ah.” Jackie nods, tapping her nose, as though it suddenly makes sense.
“How long did it take her to come down from that one, Jackie?” Gordon says. “Three weeks? Four?”
“I know it wasn’t until she got that call from her editor with the latest numbers,” Jackie says. She shakes her head critically.
“I for one don’t even look at my numbers. It’s demeaning work, catering your self-esteem to sales.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t call it demeaning, Jackie,” Gordon says, taking up Neena’s defense. “A little pathetic, really, but not demeaning.”
“You’re all wrong . . .” Ricky slips out from the curtains and flashes a morose, totally miserable expression at all of us.
“It’s the pills.”
We all turn.
“What pills?” I say.
“For her nerves . . . most likely,” Ricky says. “I saw her this morning . . . popping them . . . like candy.”
“I’ll take whatever she’s having,” Crystal says, reaching for Neena’s purse as Neena snatches it out of her hand. “C’mon,
Neena. I want to check out of this trip too.”
Neena pulls herself toward the door. “They’re prescriptions for this trip.” She raises her chin. “So I get a little nervous before traveling. That’s allowed. And now, apparently, my fears are fully realized and turn out to be entirely possible
and we are living in a nightmare. So I’m taking them. Yes.
“The fact is, we’re stuck here now, so the way I see it, I might as well continue existing best I can. I’m going to eat breakfast—and
drown my waffles in all the syrup I can get. Then I’m going to meet my readers—and gab with the charming butler at the pool.”
Gordon frowns.
Everyone, for the record, is frowning.
“And yes,” Neena continues, “most likely I’ll go Hula-Hooping this afternoon during a reader workshop.
I’m taking this trip by the horns, and my plan is to pretend none of this is happening until I’m back in the safety of my therapist’s couch when this is all over.
You can all join me in the dining hall, or you can sit here miserably in the company of a murderer.
The answer is clear to me which of the two I’m going to choose. ”
And then to prove her point, she pulls a pill out of her purse and pops it in her mouth. “Seize the day!”
I look to Nash.
Then the others.
No.
We can’t do it this way.
We can’t just go with the flow.
As she makes to open the door, I call out, “Stop!”
Neena halts. Turns.
Everyone looks at me, and I shuffle toward the center of the room. Put my hands on my hips as I muster up a plan.
“Neena is right.” I turn to face everyone. “The reality here is that like it or not, we have a murderer on the loose and a
teenager with peach fuzz who just mispronounced the word forte fumbling around trying to solve things before something worse happens. Maybe you all can just sit here and let the chips
fall where they may, but . . . well, I can’t. This is a textbook issue. I know what happens when people do nothing—at least
in books. Someone else dies.”
Gordon spins the pawn around in his hand. “Well, what do you propose we do, Pip?”
He’s asking genuinely. He really wants to know.
“Well,” I say, taking a fortifying breath, “the way I see it, we need a proper investigation. We’re stuck on this ship, going
nowhere. And it’s clear we’re not going to get any help on the outside. So then . . . we’ll have to do it ourselves.” I look
around the room. “One of us needs to play investigator.”
I might as well have just asked a bunch of kids who wants to go first and they all put their fingers on their noses. Everybody except Nash becomes immediately fascinated with the objects around them. I try in the silence to get someone to connect eyes.
“Fine.” I throw my hands out. “I’ll do it. I’ve read enough of Hugh’s books. I can piece together an interview. Do some sleuthing.
So you all go off and do your classes, go about life as normal, and we can agree that I’m going to talk with each of you,
one by one, and see if I can figure out what exactly made Carragan come to his realization.”
“He did find a killer among us?” Jackie says, horrified.
“He said he thought he had,” I say.
Nash’s brow furrows. “Or we should all”—his glance to me is subtle but telepathically communicates except us—“separate. Get as far from each other as we can on this ship and stay that way.”
“And remove ourselves by what? Three hundred feet?” I say. “We’re on a small ship in the middle of a big ocean. And yet, someone
has still broken in a locked door once and left dead bodies underfoot twice. The unfortunate fact of the matter is, if someone really wanted to find us, they would. So go about your business. Stay
in pairs or groups of three at the very least.” I cast a tiny glance at Nash to message telepathically except us, naturally. “Let’s keep a running text of where we are and who we’re with so . . .” I hesitate. “If by unfortunate circumstance, someone
we’re paired with did want to do something . . . nefarious . . . there would be a running log on our side of who we’re with
that would keep unfortunate actions at bay.”
The group doesn’t look too happy with that, so I continue.
“Look, the reality is, we’re a smart bunch.
Every single one of us may be many things, but the one thing we all have in common is intelligence.
And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years under Hugh, it’s that people kill for four reasons: love, hate, greed, or just plain craziness.
But there’s a vast difference between how you do it.
Stupid or smart. And yes, there may be one among us who has a secret motivation that is shocking and something
we’d never suspect in a million years. Fine. But there’s one thing I do know that gives me confidence: One of you may be evil
and willing to commit unearthly crimes, but no matter what, you are also intelligent. And intelligent people don’t kill other
people without an alibi. Carragan was alone and was murdered for knowing something we don’t. Hugh was alone and murdered for
something I have yet to discover. So the way I see it, none of you are at risk if you keep to yourselves, communicate where
you are and with whom at all times, and go about your business. The only person who has anything to worry about”—I look around
the room—“is me, I guess. And that’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
Silence follows.
“Well, Pip’s got a plan, as always!” Neena cries out cheerily. “Now, what do we say? Waffles!”