‘I know. She’s going to break hearts some day.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Just turned fourteen.’
‘She looks older.’
‘I know. They grow up so quickly. Seems like just yesterday she was playing dress up with her Barbies.’
‘Keep an eye on her,’ Pia said as she swiped up a few drops of water from the polished surface of the bar with a damp rag.
I’d set my drink down on a circular end table and had reached for my knitting, but the cautionary tone in Pia’s voice brought my hand up short. ‘Should I be worried?’
Behind the bar, Pia appeared to be checking the rag for imperfections. After a moment, she dropped it into a sink. Her gray-green eyes met mine. ‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s just that working as a bartender I see a lot of alcohol-related craziness. Sometimes I think they should raise the drinking age to thirty. After the hormones have stopped raging, anyway. But in some guys, the hormones never stop raging, you know? Had an eighty-something-year-old in here the other day…’ she started to say when the elevator doors slid open and Liz Rowe stepped out into the lobby. Liz carried an oversized crewelwork bag; the business end of a pair of knitting needles protruded from the top. I waved at my new friend. ‘Over here, Liz.’
Liz joined me, set her bag down in the chair next to me to reserve it, then hustled over to the bar to get herself a glass of sparkling wine, cutting my private chat with Pia short. If only I’d had five minutes – and maybe a glass of Ode Panos – more, I might have been able to cut through the rhetoric about alcohol and hormones and find out why Pia had neatly avoided answering my question. I drained my glass. By the time Liz rejoined me, I was ready for a refill, too.
More passengers trickled in, until the knitting group numbered around twenty. Projects ranged from small, like my hat, to highly ambitious, like a queen-sized lace-weave afghan. I had no idea how the woman had fit it into her luggage. One guy, who wielded his hook with the lightning speed of a gunslinger, was crocheting – I am not making this up – a Stetson hat. I was listening to him explain how he’d modified the handle of the crochet hook to accommodate rug yarn in order to make the tiny, tight stitches he needed for his project when I noticed that David Warren had showed up. He was leaning on the bar, talking to Pia.
‘David knits? That’s a surprise,’ I commented.
‘What?’ Liz glanced up from her work.
‘David Warren. He’s over at the bar.’
As we watched, David reached across the bar, seized Pia’s hand and pulled her gently toward him. He was speaking too earnestly, too quietly for us to hear, but Pia didn’t seem alarmed. She listened, then nodded, before slowly withdrawing her hand.
‘I don’t think they’re discussing le vin du jour,’ Liz said.
As I watched, Pia shrugged, turned and, keeping her head bowed, began filling the glasses on the tray with sparkling wine.
David had been dismissed. For several seconds he didn’t move; then he shook his head, did a smart about-face and disappeared up the double staircase that led to the upper decks.
‘I wonder what that was all about?’ I whispered.
‘We could ask Pia, I suppose, but that would be nosy.’ Liz’s blue eyes sparkled.
‘Of course it would,’ I grinned, ‘but that’s never stopped me before.’
By the time four p.m. rolled around, all but a few of the knitters had packed up and returned to their staterooms. When the coast was relatively clear, Liz and I approached the bar. I nudged Liz. ‘You go first,’ she whispered.
We perched ourselves on a pair of bar stools, comfortably upholstered in the same white leather as the chairs.
‘What can I get for you, ladies?’ Pia wanted to know.
‘I think I’m in the mood for something crisp and dry,’ I said.
‘You got it.’ Pia bent down, opened the sliding glass door on an under-counter refrigerator, selected a bottle, uncorked it and poured me a glass. ‘Try this. It’s called Assyrtiko. If you like Chablis, you’ll like Assyrtiko.’
I took a sip and smiled appreciatively. ‘Zesty,’ I said. ‘A bit lemony. I do like it.’
I set the glass down on the bar. ‘What did David want?’ I asked, hoping to catch her off guard.
Pia’s eyebrows shot up into her bangs. ‘David? Oh, you mean David Warren.’ She caught her lower lip between her teeth and made a major production of twisting the cork back into the bottle. Only after she’d returned the Assyrtiko to the fridge did she return her attention to us. She rested her forearms on the bar, leaned forward and spoke softly. ‘He wanted to ask me a question. I used to know his daughter.’
‘We’re assigned to the same table at dinner,’ Liz confided before I could pry any further. ‘I’ve tried to draw David out, but he doesn’t say much. He looks so sad!’
Pia considered us seriously, her green eyes solemn. Something in what Liz had said must have struck a sympathetic chord, because she managed a cheerless smile and started talking again. ‘He has reason to be. His daughter, Charlotte, used to work for Phoenix. About eighteen months ago, we were serving together on the Voyager. Somewhere between Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, Char simply vanished. They combed the ship for her, of course, but she never turned up. The only possibility was that she went overboard.’
I took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. ‘Did she jump?’
Pia shrugged. ‘Nobody knows. When Security checked the cams, they saw Char out on deck around half past five in the morning, talking on her cell phone. She wandered around the corner, out of range of the camera and poof! Gone! All they ever found was one of her red heels lying on the deck not far from where she must have gone over.’
Something was wrong with that picture. With the exception of the cabaret dancers, none of the staff on board Islander wore high-heeled shoes. ‘Was Charlotte a dancer?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Pia said, ‘but it was her night off, and we were in port, so she dressed up to the nines and went out clubbing with some of the staff. Sadly, Tom and I had a show that night so I couldn’t go along.’
‘How do you know the shoe belonged to Charlotte?’ Liz inquired gently.
‘These were Giulia Ricci’s,’ Pia explained. ‘Red leather. Cost the earth. Char saved her pennies for months in order to buy them.’
‘The brand with the famous red polka dots on the soles?’ I asked.
Pia nodded, leaned across the bar and lowered her voice. ‘David kept the shoe. He showed it to me and asked if I could identify it as Charlotte’s. He’s been carrying it around with him in his briefcase.’ She shivered. ‘Creepy, if you ask me.’
‘My oh my,’ tutted Liz. ‘No wonder he looks sad.’
‘Nobody who knew Char believes she committed suicide.’ Pia pounded on the bar with the flat of her hand, emphasizing each word. ‘She was upbeat, bubbly, engaged to this great guy back home. Her contract with the cruise line was almost over, and she was looking forward to flying back to Minnesota in a couple of weeks. No way she would have killed herself.’
Under the circumstances, suicide didn’t sound very likely to me, either. ‘Could she have had an accident?’
Pia puffed air out through her lips. ‘Are you kidding? The railings on these ships are forty-two inches high, almost as high as this bar. Could you fall over this?’ She slapped the bar again.
‘Not even if I were blind drunk,’ I said.
Pia’s remarkable green eyes flashed. ‘And at five-thirty in the morning Char certainly wasn’t drunk.’
I leaned forward, spoke softly. ‘Do you think Charlotte was murdered, Pia?’
‘Eliminate suicide or accident and what are you left with?’ Pia let out a long, slow breath. ‘Her father certainly believes it was foul play.’
‘Under the circumstances, you’d think David wouldn’t want to have anything to do with Phoenix Cruise Lines,’ I said. ‘Why is he on board?’