Chapter 22
“I didn’t know something like this existed on this ship.”
“Did you not?” Gordon says. His wizard hat is planted firmly on his head, and his hands are spinning at the retro-colored
green and red buttons of the old arcade game. I can’t be sure, but I believe he’s winning. There are quite a few zeros beside his name.
“It’s all so . . .” I scan the room. “Um . . .” How do I say this without offense exactly? “It just doesn’t look like the
kind of thing this type of cruise liner would have.”
Let’s just say, when booking, I was paying far more attention to the thread-count situation and free lobster than if it carried
Donkey Kong.
But to be fair, the chaotically zigzagging golden, black, and red carpet looks like it is vacuumed every hour on the hour,
and despite the thirty or so antiquated gaming machines around us, it’s no challenge for the peacock bow-tie staff, who are
roller-skating around all of us with silver trays in hand.
Someone drops a drink on a tray without looking away from their game, and the staff member doesn’t even slow in gliding by.
There are sconces on the walls here, just like there are all around the ship, but these ones flicker ominously, purposefully,
like we’re in a dungeon.
And the wallpaper, most bizarre yet most fitting, is a deep maroon with figures of gold coins and dragons.
Hence the clever name to the place hanging over the door: The Dungeon.
“I like the one in The Hole better than this. It’s bigger.” Gordon makes a face. “But Hazel hogs the best machines.”
“Who’s Hazel?”
“Reader.”
Ah. So we are now in petty wars with elderly guests we meet on a cruise ship. Nice.
“Have you not been there?” he says, finding this idea so preposterous that he’s willing to break eye contact with the game
to shoot me a glance.
I’m not sure of the goal still, but it looks like his game character is an elf who thoroughly enjoys bounding through a forest.
“No, I’ve only been down there once,” I say, hedging the topic and the fact that the whole place gave me a panic attack.
One of his bushy salt-and-pepper brows rises as he looks me over. He shakes his head and returns his attention to the video
game.
“What?” I say.
“You work too hard,” Gordon says.
“Well, we’ve had a little more going on than just work.”
He shakes his head, and it’s silent between us but for the manic tapping of his finger on the retro red and green buttons.
“You’re too young and life is too short for you to be spending the whole holiday like this.”
“Excuse me, but this is serious.”
“It’s somebody else’s job.”
“Who isn’t doing his job.”
“Do you know that with certainty?”
I swallow.
“You know, what’s interesting to me is you can’t help yourself, can you?” Gordon squints at me, seeing right through me. “You’ve
got the investigator’s heart. You can’t leave things well enough alone. Hugh did too, you know.”
I swallow.
The point is still too raw. “How can I possibly think of doing anything else at a time like this?”
Gordon waves a hand around us. “This is precisely what Hugh would’ve wanted us to be doing.”
“This.” My voice is flat as I look around. “Hugh would’ve wanted us to be doing . . . this.”
“Living.”
He sighs. Pauses from the game (which promptly gets his character killed), fishes in his pocket, and pulls out a couple of
quarters, which he hands to me.
“Here you go.”
“What’s this?”
“Play.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Play a game.”
“No.”
“Trust me.”
“How can I trust anyone?” I say, and dare a glance over at Nash, who is standing guard beneath The Dungeon’s entrance sign. To Gordon’s credit, Nash looks the calmest and most distracted he’s been in days.
Yes, Gordon has an entire inheritance and sum of who-knows-what being sent his way. But on the other hand, he’s the least
likely of us all and we all know it.
Or, of course, there’s that horrible chance Nash is quietly writing his novel in the corner because, of course, he knows who the real murderer is.
It’s himself.
Stop thinking about it.
Stop thinking or you’re going to start passing out or crying or any of the things you need to NOT do right now.
Gordon pats my hand.
He draws my attention back to his eyes. They are soft. Gentle.
Wordlessly he guides me to the machine on the other side of him.
Wordlessly I follow.
“Tell me something, Penelope. Have you done anything relaxing in the nine days we’ve been on this ship?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer. “You know, I’m a writer.”
“I know that.”
“As such, you know I firmly believe that our minds hold within them great capability to provide us with a dark or enchanted
life. Not, in large part, our environments. Our brains. They can twist us up until we’re in a cage and can’t see our way out.
Or they can make each day golden. The mind holds more power than our environment ever could. And the best part of all is that
with great literature, we needn’t leave the comfort of our own chairs to give our brains a jump start on great adventure.
But in today’s case . . .”
He takes the quarters from my hands and drops them into a machine.
“We’ll take a shortcut.”
A big yellow machine with a big yellow smiling ball staring at me.
Pac-Man.
I haven’t played this in twenty years.
The Pac-Man game begins to ask for my attention.
“Go on,” he says. “Just . . . let go.”
Faintly I tap a button to answer the machine’s question. Single player.
The game begins.
Gordon doesn’t turn his attention back to his game until I’m racing the little yellow Pac-Man around the maze and I’ve gobbled
up the second red cherry. I wouldn’t say Gordon is right entirely, but there is something nice about having my attention on something else for a change.
It’s as though my brain has been running an endurance marathon and finally gets a moment to rest.
With a decrescendo and confirming beep beep notifying me that the game is over, Gordon—without looking away from his own game—refuels my machine with quarters and I
keep playing.
It’s not until I’m five games in that he’s willing to talk.
“Now,” he says, giving me a brief look as his fingers play on, “I suspect it’s my turn to be interviewed.”
“That’s correct,” I say.
“And I’m . . . the last one, I hope?”
I nod.
“Well, I can tell you right now I didn’t do it.”
Maybe it’s because it’s been the longest week of my life, but I laugh. I’m getting fully delirious myself. “That’s what everyone
says.”
“Is it?” he says, and raises not one but both of his bushy eyebrows over his blue eyes my way.
“Well . . . no,” I say at last.
Now that I think of it, nobody has claimed innocence, have they?
Nobody, I guess, but Nash.
“Everybody has a clear motivation, means, and method. It’s just that I assume they all would say they haven’t done it.”
“So I’m the only one who’s really laid out that I’m innocent. Interesting.” He whips the red ball around and his character
spins over some kind of ogre. “So you think you know who it is?”
“I have no idea.”
I have an idea.
But I’m deathly afraid to pursue it.
I’m deathly afraid . . . to pursue a reality where it’s not Crystal. It’s not Neena. It’s not Ricky. It’s not Jackie. No,
it’s Nash who’s the perfect suspect.
What remarkable timing that after four years, he suddenly decides now, after a double murder, to tell me of his undying love for me.
What a remarkable instance that Carragan’s body was found in our room in the middle of the night. And Nash? He was two minutes behind me in the hallway, wasn’t he? How could a body get in our
room like that so quickly? Unless . . . unless it was under the bed already. Next to Nash . . . as he waited for the perfect
moment to dispose of it . . .
Maybe he’d planned to throw it overboard.
Maybe my waking him up, wanting to drag him down the hallway, was the perfect setup.
Easier to just roll it out a few feet in a matter of seconds.
Easier to look innocent with a sudden alibi when questioned.
No, Officer, I was with Pip when we discovered the body in our room. Right, Pip?
Right, poor, gullible, love-dazed Pip?
Yes. For all but those two minutes.
Is everybody else terribly suspicious?
Yes.
But deep, deep down, it’s Nash who fits the bill. You can plant a weapon on someone. Maybe the knife made it to his bag. But Hugh didn’t leave a note telling me to look into Nash for nothing. I need to dig deeper.
Tonight, in the silence, I need to look up everything I can about Nash’s life.
“If you were writing a book about all of this, who do you think would be the murderer? How would you have masterminded this
plot?”
It’s such a bizarre question, I find I have no prepared answer. “I’m not sure. I’d have to think about it.”
“You wanted to write, did you not?”
“I . . . yes . . . for a time.”
“And what’s stopping you?”
I start to drop my hand from the Pac-Man game and he gives a sharp look. I start playing again.
“If you’re going to insist on trying to solve it yourself, at least take yourself out of it,” Gordon says. “Think like a narrator.
I always liked the omniscient POV myself.”
“I . . . Gordon . . .” I’m so confused by all this, but the reality is, he’s taking over the interview. He’s taking control
of the whole thing, and I need to grab the conversation back by the reins. “Is it true you are the sole recipient in Hugh’s
will?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “But I have a feeling you’re about to tell me.”
“You are.”
To my amazement, he seems completely unfazed. “Sounds about right.”
“Do you know how much you’re set to gain by Hugh’s untimely death?”
“Millions, I suspect.”
“Millions,” I echo at the same time.
I wait in silence for him to respond.
He doesn’t.
Just keeps playing his game.
“Well?” I say at last.
“Well, what?” he says back.
“Well, aren’t you concerned that that makes you look extremely guilty in all of this?”
“Why should it? I’m not guilty.”
“But you have a strong motivation. Money is a strong motivation.”
“For the poor, the needy, and the perpetually discontent, yes. But I am none of those.”
“Some people find they never have enough.”