‘Right.’
‘After the pizza party broke up, she went into the bar.’ He hooked a thumb to the right, pointing us toward Breakers!, the teen center’s juice bar.
The bar was crowded with young people, sitting on toadstools around small, round tables, enjoying sodas and fruit smoothies. A few were drinking coffee. Everyone was trying to talk over whatever racket passes for music these days. We stood in the doorway and scanned the crowd. ‘I don’t see her,’ I said.
Georgina took a deep breath and marched over to the bar. By the light of a colossal, blue-neon wave mounted and undulating overhead, one of the bartenders, a young woman, was busily filling a blender with ice, bananas and pineapple. The other was running someone’s sea pass through a scanner. ‘Excuse me,’ Georgina asked the guy manning the scanner, ‘but I’m looking for my daughter, Julie Cardinale. Have you seen her?’
Rohan from South Africa stared at my sister as if she’d just asked him to calculate the square root of pi out to twenty decimal places. Then he smiled. ‘We see a lot of girls here, ma’am. Can you be more precise?’
The blender began to whine and grind. ‘She’s fourteen, with red hair!’ Georgina yelled over the noise.
‘Looks just like her mother here,’ I pointed out helpfully.
The second bartender switched off the blender and grabbed a tall glass. ‘I mixed her a Virginia Colada about half an hour ago,’ she said as she poured. ‘She was sitting over by the window with a couple of other kids.’
Georgina glanced over her shoulder, turned her head back and said, ‘Well, she’s not there now.’
While Georgina continued to quiz the bartenders, I wandered over to the tables and asked if anyone had seen Julie. Several of the boys remembered seeing my niece sitting with a mixed group of teens, but hadn’t noticed when she left.
Back at the check-in desk, Georgina was having a fit. ‘I checked her in at ten-oh-five Wesley, and it was your job to keep an eye on her!’
To his credit, Wesley’s face was lined with deep concern. ‘I’m sorry ma’am, but the pizza party broke up about the same time as the movie was starting, and that coincided with lunch… I was totally slammed. You know, she’s probably just gone to the restroom, or back to your cabin.’
‘No, she wouldn’t do that. I was taking her for a pedicure at two o’clock. She was supposed to meet me here,’ she said, stabbing the desk with an index finger.
I laid a hand on my sister’s shoulder. ‘It’s not yet two, so why don’t you stay here in case Julie shows up, while I’ll go check the cabin, OK?’ When she nodded, I said, ‘I’ll be right back.’
But Julie wasn’t in her cabin, or in ours.
Thinking she might have gone to the Firebird for a quick snack, I made a circuit of the buffet before returning, empty-handed, to the Tidal Wave on the deck above.
When I got back, Wesley had found a chair for Georgina and had whipped his hand-held telephone out of its holster, using it to summon his supervisor. Over my head, an annoying squeal designed to attract attention blared out of a speaker, followed by an announcement. ‘Will Miss Julie Lynn Cardinale please report to Tidal Wave on deck ten immediately? Julie Lynn Cardinale, report to Tidal Wave on deck ten.’
‘Have you checked with the day spa?’ I asked hopefully.
Georgina nodded; her lower lip quivered. ‘Wesley called them. She’s not there.’
‘She has got to be on board somewhere!’ I insisted. ‘I’m going to get Ruth and we’ll comb the decks, beginning with the swimming pool.’
But I didn’t have to find Ruth; while I was reassuring Georgina, she appeared. ‘I was in the library when I heard them page Julie over the P.A. What the hell’s going on?’
As I filled Ruth in, Georgina began to weep openly. ‘What if she fell down and is lying hurt somewhere?’ Georgina turned her tear-stained face to me. ‘Oh, God, Hannah, what if Julie has fallen overboard!’
I knelt on the deck in front of my distraught sister. ‘It is the middle of the day, Georgina, and there are hundreds of people on deck. If anyone had gone overboard, they would have been noticed. Besides, there are CCTV cameras everywhere, and crew to monitor them. Julie did not go overboard. We’ll find her, I promise.’
The speaker squealed again with another call for Julie to report to the Tidal Wave. This time when she heard it, Georgina came unglued. ‘What is the goddamn point of checking children in if you’re just going to let them wander off whenever they damn well please?’
‘Settle down, ma’am,’ Wesley said.
Georgina’s pale face flushed dangerously red. ‘Settle down? I’ll settle down when Julie’s back with me safely, and not one minute before!’
Looking desperate, Wesley punched numbers into his phone and spoke urgently to someone.
‘Is there somewhere we can go?’ I asked him when he’d finished the call.
‘Security is on the way,’ Wesley explained. ‘They’ll know what to do.’
Wesley had called out the big guns: Benjamin Martin, Chief of Security, wearing a crisp white uniform with black epaulets, each bearing two broad and one narrow stripe. I had no idea what the stripes meant on a Phoenix vessel, but if Martin were in the navy, he’d be a lieutenant commander, the rough equivalent of an army major. Accompanying him was a female officer wearing two stripes on her epaulets – his lieutenant, I gathered – who made a beeline for Georgina and introduced herself. ‘I’m Molly Fortune. Let’s go someplace quiet where we can talk.’
Georgina looked up with red-rimmed eyes. ‘But Julie is expecting to meet me here!’
Officer Fortune took Georgina by the upper arm and gently helped her to her feet. ‘Wesley will stay here, don’t worry. And the rest of the staff is out looking for your daughter as we speak.’
Molly Fortune didn’t object when Ruth and I tagged along, following her into the elevator, and out onto deck eight. As we made our way along the corridors, we passed crew members wearing blue vests marked ‘security’ in yellow. They seemed to be in a hurry.
Fortune led us to an office tucked away between one of the higher end staterooms and the ship’s bridge. A desk dominated the room; three computer screens were mounted above it. If this was the Islander’s security command center, it was unimpressive. Officer Fortune indicated that we should sit down, then reached into a drawer and pulled out a box of tissues, which she handed to Georgina.
I remained standing. ‘Can Georgina stay here with you while I go help with the search?’ I asked the officer.
‘All passengers are being asked to return to their cabins, Mrs Ives, family included. That’s SOP. Standard operating procedure. We’ve launched a deck-by-deck, room-by-room search for your daughter,’ she added, speaking directly to Georgina. ‘Please, don’t worry. We’ll find her.’
‘But, even if Julie were in someone else’s room, why didn’t she answer when you paged her?’
I could figure out the answer to that, but Georgina was already so upset that I kept my mouth shut.
We were startled by a strident blast on the intercom, and a disembodied voice saying, ‘Code Adam, Adam, Adam.’
Georgina, who had to recognize the universal code for a missing child, began to wail. Ruth, sitting closest, wrapped Georgina in her arms and began briskly rubbing her back.
‘I’m doing nobody any good here,’ I said. ‘SOP or not, I’m going out to look for her.’
‘No, ma’am, you aren’t,’ Fortune warned. ‘We can’t have anyone wandering around the ship right now. Please sit down. We’ll keep you updated. Can I get you anything? Coffee? Tea? Water?’
We declined, sitting together as we had at Aunt Evelyn’s funeral, three silent and very distressed little monkeys, holding hands.
After what seemed like hours, but was probably only twenty or thirty minutes, the intercom crackled to life again: ‘Code Sierra, Sierra, Sierra!’