Dark Passage (24 page)

Keeping her head bowed, Pia turned it to study me sideways. ‘A formidable team.'

‘Yes.'

‘But David has a team, too,' she said.

‘He does?'

‘You and me.'

Amazingly, Pia had given me an opening, and I stepped right through it. ‘What do you suggest?'

‘This morning,' Pia said, ‘all I wanted to do was take the guy down a few pegs, scare the crap out of him. I saw him in the Firebird café, strutting around and glad-handing everyone like he's running for president or something. Now? He doesn't deserve to be walking the streets. He should be cooling his heels in a federal prison.'

Pia turned around, leaned her back against the rail. ‘So, Hannah, how are we going to fit that SOB up with an orange jumpsuit?'

‘I saw David earlier, and he has a plan,' I confessed, ‘but I'm not sure I like it.'

‘Try me,' she said.

‘You worked on the
Voyager
and the
Islander
, you were there when both attacks occurred, you were Charlotte's roommate.' I tilted my head so I could look directly into her eyes. ‘How would you feel about a little blackmail? You know, I saw what you did, but I'll keep my mouth shut as long as you …' I let the sentence die.

Pia was silent for so long that I thought I'd lost her. ‘Pia?'

She raised a hand. ‘I'm thinking, I'm thinking.'

After a bit she said more quietly, ‘This could be dangerous to my health. Look what he did to Char.'

‘You'd have to have an insurance policy. You'd have to convince Westfall that as long as he plays along, everything will be cool. If he doesn't, you have a letter on file with your attorney that lays it all out.'

‘Sounds like a bad movie.'

‘That's what I thought when David first suggested it.'

‘But it could work.'

‘Maybe, particularly if you don't hit him up for a
lot
of money.'

‘How about a lump sum payment? I'm just so tired of the cruise ship routine, I'll say, and all I need is the down payment for a modest home in Arizona and I'll go away and leave him alone?'

As serious as the discussion was, I had to laugh. ‘You remind me a bit of myself. My husband calls me Nancy Drew, girl sleuth, and he's not always being funny.'

Pia grinned. ‘When I was growing up, Nancy was a little too homogenized for my taste. I cut my teeth on Harriet the Spy. Know who my heroine is now? Flavia de Luce.'

I, too, had enjoyed Alan Bradley's stories about the irrepressible eleven-year-old in fifties England with a passion for chemistry and murder. Flavia's volatile relationship with her two older sisters had struck some familiar chords, too.

As I thought about it, though, my passion for righting wrongs had gotten me into some very hot water. A sailboat had sunk out from under me, my car had been run off the road into a pond, I'd been kidnapped and locked in a wine cellar, and I was once arrested for murder. And that was all before breakfast on Monday, as my father had been known to say. As much as Pia might want to help bring Westfall to justice, I couldn't let her do it, not this way.

‘It's fun to fantasize about being Nancy or Flavia,' I said after a moment. ‘But that's fiction and this is real life. It was crazy of David to come up with this blackmail idea, and crazy of me to suggest it to you. You know and I know that Westfall is far too dangerous.'

Pia folded her arms, stared out to sea. ‘Yeah, but it sure would be great to watch the worm squirm, up close and personal.'

I tugged on her arm, forced her to look at me. ‘Pia, promise me you won't do anything foolish.'

‘I promise,' she said. But I had seen that determined look before. In my daughter's eyes when she told me that she wanted to waste the entire year following her college graduation by following the rock band, Phish. In my own eyes in the mirror.

‘I
mean
it,' I said. ‘There must be a better way.'

‘Like what?' she asked.

I didn't have the slightest idea, but I squeezed her hand and said, ‘Don't worry. Leave this to David, and to me.'

‘In the queer mess of human destiny the determining factor is luck. For every important place in life there are many men of fairly equal capacities. Among them luck decides who shall accomplish the great work, who shall be crowned with laurel, and who shall fall back into silence and obscurity.'

William E. Woodward (1874–1950)

D
avid was not in his room when I called, nor in the Firebird café. I was thinking about having him paged when I found him exactly where I had left him, in the Athena, sitting on a bar stool nursing a martini.

‘Fancy meeting you here,' I said, sliding onto the bar stool next to him.

He blinked twice, as if trying to focus. ‘Hannah. How did you get on with Pia, then?'

‘Club soda with lime,' I told the bartender.

David sipped his drink appreciatively, one eyebrow raised.

‘It's far too dangerous,' I told him. ‘There has to be another way.'

David's head bobbed, his lips never leaving the rim of the glass.

I touched his hand lightly. ‘I'm sorry.'

David set his glass on the coaster, rocking it this way and that until the base was precisely centered in the middle of the Phoenix Cruise Lines logo. ‘Don't worry,' he muttered. ‘It's not that I didn't expect it.'

The bartender had delivered my drink. I took a sip and set it aside. ‘Westfall's going to be put away, David. The F.B.I. is going to see to that.'

Head still bowed, he considered me with a single, watery eye. ‘Just let nature take its course, then, is that your recommendation?'

‘Not nature, exactly, but the long arm of the law.'

David drained his glass and raised it in the air, signaling for another. ‘I want to thank you, Hannah. You've been more than kind. I appreciate that.'

We sat side by side, drinking quietly. There seemed nothing more to say.

I finished my club soda, brushed his cheek with a kiss, and bid him goodbye. I left him sitting alone at the bar, long-faced, looking as if he had lost his last friend which, in a way, he had.

‘I have to pack,' Georgina said, ‘and I won't let her go up there alone.'

‘Go where,' I asked, ‘and where's Ruth?'

‘I'm hungry,' Julie whined. ‘I was going to the Firebird to score some nachos. Mom's being a pain.'

Georgina folded a hoodie and placed it carefully in her suitcase. ‘Ruth's at guest services, arguing with them about something on her bill. She may be there for a while. The line was humongous.'

‘I'll take Julie up,' I said. ‘You get on with your packing.'

Julie tore out her earbuds, hopped off her bunk and presented herself to me, beaming. She wore flip-flops, a pair of skinny denim jeans and a white T-shirt that had ‘Friend Me' on it, printed in glitter.

‘Come on, you,' I told her. ‘Let's go get those nachos.'

The Firebird was crowded so it took us a while to find an empty table. ‘Go get your nachos,' I told my niece, ‘while I save the table. And bring me a Coke!'

Julie bounced off to the buffet tables while I looked around. Diners passed me with trays heaped high, as if pigging your way from one end of the All-You-Can-Eat buffet tables to the other was a lifetime goal.

I was thinking about snagging some of the chicken
tikka kabobs we'd passed on our way in when Julie came streaking back, empty-handed. She grabbed my arm and pulled me down, her mouth nearly touching the tabletop. ‘I need to get out of here, Aunt Hannah. I saw him! He's here! And he saw
me
!'

‘Jack Westfall is here?' I asked, my head bowed, too, on a level with hers.

Julie buried her face in her arms and began to weep. ‘I think I might have made a terrible mistake.'

I laid a hand gently on her arm. A horrible sinking feeling came over me. ‘What do you mean, sweetie?'

‘I was positive that the man who attacked me was that guy, Jack, from the art gallery, but now I'm not so sure. I just saw … oooh! I'm really not sure, now, Aunt Hannah, and it's freaking me out!' She began to sob.

‘Let me get this straight. You just saw a guy you think could be your attacker, and that guy is
not
Jack Westfall?'

Without raising her head, Julie nodded miserably.

‘Who is it, then. Who did you see, Julie?'

‘I don't knoooow!' she wailed. ‘I was going to the nachos, and this guy was coming from the other way, and I didn't see him, and I practically ran into him, like, and when I looked up to say sorry, he gave me this creepy look, and I went
eeeek
, and I wanted to barf and I saw in his eyes that he knew that I knew, so what am I going to do now?'

‘Breathe slowly, Julie,' I suggested, gently stroking her back. ‘In. Out. In. Out.'

I was kicking myself for allowing Julie to go off to the buffet alone, but that ship had already sailed.

‘What did the man look like, sweetheart?'

‘He's wearing a black shirt with a squiggly logo, and a black hat!'

I raised my head, stretching a bit so I could see over the decorative etched glass panel that divided our section of the café from the others. A man in a yellow T-shirt waiting for a burger; a guy in a festive Hawaiian number loading his brownie with whipped topping; uniformed wait staff bustling about, but nobody in a black polo shirt.

I swiveled in my chair to check out the other side of the café, but my view was blocked by a broad expanse of black cotton knit with ‘Waterway Marine' embroidered on the pocket. Then, next to me, a familiar voice said, ‘I came over to apologize.'

Buck Carney.

I gasped and pressed a hand to my chest. ‘Mr Carney! You startled me.'

‘I think I startled this young lady here, too. Zigged when I should have zagged,' he explained. ‘Ran right into her.'

‘Julie,' I said, trying to breathe normally and give nothing away. ‘This is Mr Buck Carney, a photographer who's doing a book for the cruise lines. He took some photographs of your mother the other day.'

‘I need a napkin,' Julie sniffed, turning her face toward the wall.

I gave her mine and watched while she pressed it to her eyes, using it as a delaying tactic, I imagined, to gather enough courage to look at Carney.

‘I hope
I'm
not the guy responsible for all those tears, little miss,' Carney drawled.

Julie squared her shoulders, gazed up at him dispassionately. ‘No, no,' she improvised wildly. ‘My boyfriend just broke up with me, is all. It was kind of a shock.'

Carney flashed a disarming, toothy grin. ‘Well, begging your pardon, miss, but that boy must be out of his cotton-pickin' mind.' When Julie didn't respond, he focused his attention on me. ‘Gave me quite a turn when I ran into Miss Julie here,' he said. ‘Never saw a girl who so favored her mother, never. Thought it
was
her mother, in fact, until I got a closer look. I'd love to be able to photograph the two of them together. Do you think that'd be OK?'

I thought of the times Carney'd appeared to be stalking us in the past few days and knew he was lying through his expensively capped teeth. What had Georgina said about Carney earlier? That she was sure he'd been following her and Julie. Considering his disturbing obsession with my sister, the man would have to be blind not to have noticed Julie and try to take her photo, too. Julie, in all likelihood, would have been oblivious. A sudden, sickening through came over me. Had all the attention he had given Georgina simply been a ruse in order to get close to her vulnerable fourteen-year-old daughter? How far would Carney go? I could feel the bile rising in my stomach.

‘You'll have to ask her mother,' I practically spat, trying to hold myself back from saying more. ‘I'm just the aunt.'

‘Will you be at dinner in the dining room tonight, then?' Carney asked.

‘Maybe,' I said, and let it go at that.

‘Good, good. Perhaps there'll be an opportunity then.' He stepped away from the table, then stopped short. ‘Sorry if I upset you, Julie.'

To her credit, Julie dredged up a smile from somewhere and pasted it on her face.

We both watched, waiting until Carney was seriously busy filling up his plate at the buffet – heavy on the fried chicken and mac and cheese – then we fled the café. When we reached the elevator lobby, Julie dragged me into the ladies' restroom, where she stopped to catch her breath, pressing her back against the wall of the handicapped stall.

I closed the door of the stall, flipped the latch, and sat down, fully clothed, on the toilet.

Julie bent at the waist, rested her hands on her knees and took deep breaths. ‘What are we going to do, Aunt Hannah?'

What
were
we going to do?

‘First thing,' I told her after collecting my thoughts, ‘is we tell Officer Martin. If you have any doubts, we mustn't let him go on thinking that you've positively identified Jack Westfall as the man who attacked you.'

But before seeing Martin, I wanted to make sure that Carney was the actual perp, not simply a man who had made an unfortunate wardrobe choice and had the disconcerting, creepy habit of always being there, taking photos. ‘Are you
sure
the man who attacked you was Buck Carney and not Jack Westfall?'

‘I'm not sure of anything anymore, Aunt Hannah!' Julie whimpered. The child was miserable. I couldn't help thinking to myself that if Julie was going to be traumatized by the sight of any man wearing a black polo shirt with a logo on it, she was going to need extensive therapy.

‘Second, I think we should try to behave normally. This man has victimized you once. Don't let him victimize you again. There is nothing anyone can do to hurt you when you're surrounded by family, or in the middle of a crowd. And tomorrow morning, when we get back to Baltimore? The F.B.I. will be in charge, and somebody will be arrested. Your father and your uncles will see to that.'