He leaned an arm against the deck wall, pinning her there. “We’re alike, you and I.”
She gazed up at him girlishly. “You like money, too?”
What a tease!
“Oh yes,” he said.
She was riffling through the money as if she were counting it, but not really keeping track, taunting him, the clever bitch.
So, the eyewitness to his crime was as greedy as he was, it seemed; this would be costly, but with Margaret’s fortune, he could control it. He could turn this around...
Then the deck door opened again, and the woman’s daughter emerged. Cora quickly thrust the wad of bills behind her back.
“Mother,” the pretty woman said anxiously, “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
The daughter seemed oddly distraught.
“Dear,” the mother said, “I’ve been talking to this nice gentleman.” She leaned toward her daughter and added in a loud whisper, “He has a lot of m-o-n-e-y.”
Damn her, needling him like this.
Fortunately, the daughter merely looked at him with embarrassment. “I’m sorry about this, Mr., uh...?”
“Vane,” he said with slight bow of his head. “Anthony Vane. It’s so nice to meet you and your delightful mother.”
“And you, too,” the daughter said distractedly, then turned to the older woman. “Mother, it’s time we get back to our stateroom.”
“Yes, and I must try to find my wife,” Anthony said. “I seem to have misplaced her.” He laughed a little, sneaking a look at the mother. No reaction. Her lovely face remained cheerfully placid.
A cool customer, this one. Had he finally found the woman who was his equal?
“I hope you ladies have a pleasant evening,” he said, bowing to the women. “Perhaps I’ll be seeing you later.”
The mother giggled. “If you’re lucky.”
Damn, if she wasn’t a beguiling creature! He watched the pair go back inside, standing there with his heart pounding as if trying to burst from his rib cage. Funny — he’d been calm as he tossed Margaret overboard; only now was his pulse racing, fear and excitement coursing through him.
He leaned at the rail and breathed deeply of the cold night air. It was time to put the rest of his plan in motion — he would go to the casino for a few hours, then when he returned to his room and found his wife not there, he would search the ship (making sure his efforts were witnessed) and finally report that she was missing.
The cloak that was his suaveness gathered about him again, self-composed once more, he headed for Club 21 on the Promenade Deck, wondering what he should do about Cora — kill her, or make love to her.
Or both — in reverse order, of course. He wasn’t sick, after all.
It was only when the dessert dishes were being cleared that Jennifer realized how long her mother had been away on her trip to the ladies’ room, and began to panic. She had been engrossed in conversation with the doctor (Tom was single, she discovered, with a fascinating history as an E.R. doctor) when her mother had said she’d be right back.
But “right back” turned into fifteen minutes and Jennifer stopped listening to what the doctor was saying and began looking anxiously around the vast dining room.
“I’m sure she’ll be along soon,” Tom said, doing his best to put her at ease. “She seems fine tonight.”
“It’s so easy to forget,” Jennifer said. “When she’s behaving like herself, it’s easy to treat her like the adult I knew.”
“There’s nothing to worry about — really.”
Jennifer was shaking her head. “I shouldn’t have let her go by herself. Even I can get lost on this big ship... And you just don’t know how quickly she can change.” She stood, pushing back her chair.
“Why don’t I go with you,” the doctor offered, putting his napkin down. “We both can search.”
Jennifer put a hand on his shoulder. “No. Let me look first, and if I can’t find her, I’ll come back and get you.”
“You’re sure? Because it’s no trouble...”
“I need to learn to handle situations like this,” she told him, firmly but not unkindly, “myself.”
Jennifer first checked the restrooms just outside the dining room near the elevators, then moved on to the Pavilion with its smaller restrooms, and finally descended the grand staircase in the center of the ship to the lower floor. As she hurried along she was reminded of the time she’d lost her own daughter in a big department store, and all kinds of terrible images had rampaged through her mind, until the child was at last found in the toy department, playing happily away with Barbie dolls.
Perhaps the Galleria Shops had caught her mother’s attention; they were located back on the same deck as the dining room. She was taking a shortcut past the galley when she spotted her mother’s red hair through the oval window of a deck door; her mother was standing on the windy deck, talking to a handsome middle-aged man.
When Jennifer went through the door into the cold, spitting sea air, she knew in an instant that her mother was not herself; she could tell by the animated way her mother was talking to the man, who, upon closer look, had the slick, archaic look of a Noel Coward-era gigolo. She remembered noticing him a few tables away, with a dejected-looking older woman seated at his side.
Jennifer got her mother away from the man as gracefully as she could — he seemed to be misinterpreting her infantile behavior as coquettish, thankfully — and, back in their stateroom, called and left word for the doctor that she had found her mother and that they were in for the night.
As Jennifer undressed, she wondered if the two of them were going to survive the trip; in a very short time her mother had gotten so much worse.
Their stateroom (so-called), on the Empress Deck, had two twin beds and an ocean view. It was a little cramped, but nice enough, the decor a soothing mauve and turquoise, with a TV high in one corner, a writing table with fresh flowers against one wall, and a lovely pastel picture of a tropical beach on another.
“I think we should get some sleep,” Jennifer said to her mother. “It’s been a very long day.”
“But I’m not sleepy yet,” her mother responded. She was sitting on one of the beds, bouncing every so slightly.
“We’re going to have an even longer, busier day tomorrow, Mother. We’ll be docking in Nassau in the morning.”
Her mother wrinkled her nose, as if smelling something icky.
“Why don’t you get into your new nightgown,” Jennifer cajoled. “I’ve put your things in the closet.”
Her mother got up from the bed and went to the closet, but instead of retrieving her nightgown, she brought out a small pink suitcase, which she took back to the bed and opened.
Jennifer sighed. “Mother, please don’t get into that. It’s late.”
Her mother ignored her plea, rifling through the pink child-size suitcase — which had once belonged to Jennifer’s daughter — filled with old and new Barbie dolls, accessories and tiny clothes.
Jennifer stared at her mother, who in her heyday had been one of the movers and shakers of the fashion world, designing and launching her own work-out clothes, long before any other designer had. Now she was stripped of any remaining talent, still somehow connected to fashion in the withering recesses of her mind, reduced now to playing with doll clothes, drawn to them, perhaps not even knowing why.
Mother looked up at daughter anxiously. “Where’s Nibbles? I can’t find Nibbles.”
“We talked about that before we left, Mother,” Jennifer said slowly, trying to stay calm but feeling exasperation begin to overwhelm her. “I told you we couldn’t bring everything. Don’t you remember?”
But, then, that was the whole problem, wasn’t it?