Chapter 6
To find out your employer and one of your closest companions is dead once is horrifying.
To have to go through the experience all over again fifteen minutes later is enough to cause your own heart to stop indefinitely.
Neena recovers, comes to, remembers what’s going on, and faints again.
Jackie chases after the gurney angrily.
Gordon keeps asking the same questions on repeat to nobody in particular.
Ricky slips off silently, keeping his brooding thoughts to himself.
Crystal and Nash take to cornering the officer, demanding every single detail, all with a vague tone of accusation.
As this is my second round, I just sit on the hallway floor, staring into nothingness.
Nothing makes sense.
Nothing.
At last the officer who directed the gurney away gathers us all together like sheep—even Ricky from his morose position behind a curtain—and herds us back to the library.
He’s older, bald, built like a concrete block, and walks like a man accustomed to the dark side of existence.
The deep etches across his forehead follow the trail of his permanent-looking scowl.
“Sit down. Now,” he instructs, gathering Ricky from the back of his collar before he can slip off again. “I wanna be able
to see each and every one of you.”
Jackie, Gordon, Neena, and Crystal sit on the long leather sofa, Ricky to the side, and Nash and I find ourselves standing
behind it. Nash looks from the officer to me, and after seeing my face, the burning look in his blue eyes cools.
He closes the gap between us.
Wordlessly rests his hand over mine.
“First off,” the officer begins, glancing from one face to another, “allow me to give my condolences.”
He says this begrudgingly, like a flight attendant spewing out a script that’s required and hating every moment. He speeds
up. “This is a shocking experience for everyone. May the deceased rest in peace.
“My name is Ralph Carragan. Feel free to call me by any name you like. Officer. Security. Ralph. Carragan. I’m the head chief
of security on this vessel and will be your point of contact here on out. And as for you all, I know who you are. No need
to fill me in.”
He shifts his weight. “I’m given to understand each of you were supposed to be providing guest author sessions today in your
appointed conference rooms. Can I presume each of you are under enough emotional duress that you will not be able to attend
to your preregistered sessions in good mental health?”
He pauses.
The group nods.
“Fine,” he says shortly, then beckons the other man in uniform and whispers something to him behind his notebook. The man
nods subserviently and whisks himself out of the room.
“And who’s in charge of organizing these events?” he says, scanning each of our eyes until he comes upon mine.
I raise my hand.
“You, Miss . . .”
“Penelope,” I say. Then, when that doesn’t seem to satisfy, I add, “Dupont.”
“Well, Dupont, several hundred fans of this group have spent a sum of over four million dollars collectively for this vessel
experience. This is a . . . unique situation the ship is in. No insurance measures cover something like this. The higher-ups
have requested—no, insisted—I continue the vessel forward on its journey. The police on land, likewise, find it . . . convenient . . .
to continue. And to that end, the less people know, the better. Can you distract them?”
“What? Like pull off a one-man show?”
The image of me tap-dancing across a stage for the next ten days while the rest of them cry in their rooms floods me.
“I can’t do that,” I say.
“Well, you need to figure out something.”
I raise my brow. “Me? What would you have me do?”
“I don’t care. Just do it in such a way that they are satisfied. Watch a movie. Read aloud these people’s books. But whatever
you do, the important thing we need to maintain here is a sense of normalcy.”
“So just what?” Jackie says, sniffing indignantly. “You want us to pretend nothing happened?”
“Ma’am, we have a murder on the ship in the middle of the Atlantic. Everybody’s stranded here with a murderer. Yes. We need not cause mass panic.”
The image of three hundred women in their late fifties in seashell flip-flops and tropical skirts screaming and running away
from each other while gripping steak knives comes to mind.
At the word murderer, Crystal vomits into an umbrella bin, then slips out of the room.
“As I was saying,” he continues, but Neena, who has been loudly sobbing into one of Jackie’s hankies, jumps in.
“The police say it’s convenient to just . . . carry on?” Neena says. “How is that”—momentary pause for sobbing—“How can you
be thinking of convenience when”—another pause for sobbing—“How is that in any way convenient for us?” (More sobbing.)
“Oh, not for you,” Carragan cuts in. “No. The convenience is on our end entirely. See, on land, we have the disadvantage of
picking through thousands of miles to find a criminal. Here?” he continues, and the tiniest, almost imaginary flicker of a
smile crosses his face. “Here you’re trapped.”
He says it like he’s not speaking to all of us but to the murderer directly.
Like he’s thrilled.
Because some idiot made the idiotic plan to kill someone while being trapped like a rat on a ship with no way out.
A silent electric shock jolts through the room.
So far we’ve all just been focused on the fact that Hugh is dead. It hasn’t registered to anyone—except perhaps Ricky sullenly
regarding us in the corner—exactly how that death happened.
It feels like we just stumbled into a second death.
Because somebody here is our enemy.
Neena faints again, right on Gordon’s lap, to Carragan’s blistering groan of annoyance.
After two minutes of absolute silence, followed by fifteen minutes of sheer chaos—Gordon and me trying to revive Neena, everybody
talking over one another about the insanity of that statement, defending themselves, defending each other, crying out about
the impossibility of Carragan’s statement that a murderer is on board the ship, Crystal coming through the door, seeing the
room in chaos, looking ill, and slipping out again—Carragan pulls Crystal back inside, shuts the door, turns, and in a loud
voice says, “Quiet!”
He frowns. “This is seven of you,” he snaps impatiently.
“Imagine what this level of chaos would be at three hundred. Now, here’s how it’s going to go.
Today, your”—he waves a vague hand at me—“organizer will create a casual, believable message of a change of events on the calendar.
Meanwhile, we will block off the front of the ship and the rest of this hall
for your leisure. I will question each of you over the course of the day. You are to stay away from all other people. Except,
and if you choose to risk it, one another.”
My eyes flicker down at the tiniest shift Crystal makes away from Gordon on the couch. Neena wordlessly offers back Jackie’s
handkerchief.
Jackie jolts at the sudden movement.
I look to Nash and realize his hand is back on mine, and my arms, my whole body, in fact, is numb.
He’s the only one who looks resolutely defiant in this group, resolutely angry. “Nobody in this group did it.”
To which Carragan looks entirely unsurprised, as though there’s always someone in his slew of suspects who says so.
“Of course none of you did it,” he says dryly. “Then riddle me why we have a locked entrance on both sides of the authors’ hall and only the seven of you have the keys? There was no forced entry.”
“Someone could have stolen a key,” Gordon puts in.
Carragan steeples his fingers over his stomach. “Unlikely. The reality is, the killer is most often found in the path of least
resistance. Follow the thread. Find your killer. And we don’t have a broken point of entry. We don’t have anyone who called
the front desk complaining about stolen keys. But what we do have are seven people right here with a load of plausible motivations.
Point is, you’re all guilty until proven innocent—”
“Shouldn’t it be the other way around?” Crystal interjects.
“What are you, a freshman criminal justice major?” he snaps. “In the courts, sure.”
“And shouldn’t you be following that mentality, if so?”
Carragan smiles at her. Momentarily drops his notebook to his side. “How old are you?”
Crystal raises her chin. “Twenty-two.”
“And what’s your full name?”
“Crystal.” In defiance she keeps her lips sealed as for her last name.
He lets the silence stretch between them.
“Well,” he says at last, “Crystal of a staggering twenty-two years with no last name, you can keep that mindset if you like,
but I can tell you right now, I can’t count on one hand how many suspects of mine with your same .
. . mentality, if you will . . . ended up in a less than favorable position when push came to shove, if you get my meaning.
Do what you like, it’s your life, but just know, were it me, I’d be locking my doors at night.
Now,” he says, looking to the rest of us, “like I say, we have nine days left on this ship, and I made a promise to the higher-ups to get off it with someone in some brand-new metal bracelets. Today I’ll question each of you. ”
“And tomorrow?” Nash says.
“Tomorrow you all will return to your jobs while I do mine. Smile. Entertain your fans. And me? I’ll go find a killer.”