Voyage of the Dreadnaught: Four Stella Madison Capers (4 page)

Unless Millie had another plan of her own
that none of the rest of them knew about.

4

The captain’s quarters looked like an
entirely different place than the day Stella had her first glimpse
of it. Now there were brown plaid drapes at the windows, to lend
privacy and keep out cold drafts on chilly evenings (Stella loved
plaids, they were so homey), a chocolate-colored Berber area rug
tacked over the old oriental, and a frosted glass globe of
Edwardian design (from which the boat actually had its origin) to
replace the tasseled lampshade from the bootleg era. Not to mention
every inch of the wooden walls had been scrubbed and oiled until
they shown like honey.

Her book collection was in place (as if the
shelves had been made to exact specifications!), and even the old
stove—which now had a warm fire crackling away just to see how it
would feel—had been newly blacked and polished over all its nickel
trim. There was a new comforter set with matching pillows (browns
and plaid) in a lovely little bedroom adjoining the quarters, too.
That included their own private bathroom with a shower.

It should have been heaven.

Instead, Stella sat on the couch (under her
favorite rose-colored throw) beneath the Colonel’s questioning gaze
from where he sat behind the desk (with his writing things all
around) and – for the first time– felt uncomfortable in his
presence. She was amazed at how quickly she slipped back into her
old ways. Like a puzzle piece locking into place, the practice of
diverting confrontation by bringing up a shocking but less
dangerous subject, came as naturally as breathing to her. It always
had. Yet, it was not having the same effect on her new husband as
it had on the previous one.

“I don’t believe it,” he finally pronounced.
“I just plain don’t believe it.”

“Do you regret all this then?”

“Stella, I would have married you if you
were a hundred and three! Do you really think age has anything to
do with it?” He rose up from the desk, unconsciously hiked up the
back of his loose-fitting khaki pants, and began to pace.

In spite of the tense moment, she thought
how all the rigors of the last few weeks were causing him to shed
pounds, and wondered if he shouldn’t buy a smaller size. “Looks are
deceiving, Oliver. Especially these days.” she went on.

“And that’s the point!” He turned around
just as she was putting the cap back on the coconut oil that had
become a nightly ritual to rub onto her face. “Stella--” His tone
was imploring. “You can’t possibly sit there in those flowered silk
pajamas, with that white, Chinese-collar robe thing that
practically matches your hair, and expect me to believe you’re
eighty-one years old! It’s ridiculous!”

“Longevity runs in my family.”

“Hogwash! Even face lifts and Botox have to
be disguised with fancy hairdos and make up. You haven’t a thing
under that oil but your natural skin.”

“Must be the Swedish coming out in me,” she
mused. “Did I ever tell you my mother’s family immigrated to
Minnesota from Sweden, Oliver? Way back in… the late eighteen
hundreds, I think it was.”

He sighed and sat down at the desk, again,
so heavily that the leather squeaked under the strain. “After all
we’ve been through, Stel. It’s disappointing you feel you have to
hide anything from me.”

“It isn’t as if I made a conscious effort to
hide it. It’s just that the subject never came up. And now, only
because you flipped through my passport.”

“It was sitting right here on my desk, where
Gerald dropped the mail this morning —both of ours came—I was just
taking them out of the envelopes. Besides, that’s not the point.
I’m talking about whatever it is that’s makes you feel it necessary
to pass yourself off as someone twenty years older. I already said
I don’t believe the eighty-one-year-old bit. Not for a minute, I
don’t.”

Stella didn’t know what to say about that,
so, she didn’t say anything.

“Well… I’m sure you’ll tell me the real
story whenever you feel safe enough. Let’s just let it go at that,
my dear.”

How odd that he should use the word,
safe.

“I suppose it’s this whirlwind romance of
ours.” She gave a relieved sigh at having barely avoided
catastrophe. “Do you realize I know as little about you as you do
me? A military career and you write hero books. That’s all I know
about you: outside of being divorced and having two grown-up sons
you never see—they’re so busy off in the military, themselves. Why,
for all I know, you could be a… a former inmate of a mental
institution.”

“Oh, Stella – for crying out loud – don’t
you think I’d have told you if there were something as serious as
that in my past?”

“Not really.”

“Well, I would.”

Better not go there, then, as that serious
omission might give him an even worse shock. Even though there was
a perfectly acceptable explanation if she was ever allowed to
explain. “People often try to get others to think differently of
them than they actually are,” she pointed out. “It doesn’t always
mean they’re hiding something criminal. Take Mason, for
instance.”

She got to her feet and walked over to push
back a shock of gray curls that had fallen onto his forehead. “He
lets everyone assume he’s nothing more than a self-centered,
hard-drinking carpenter, and in reality, he won some sort of Medal
of Honor he doesn’t want anyone to know about. Imagine being
ashamed of a Medal of Honor!”

“Soldiers often feel guilty if they happen
to survive when so many of their comrades don’t.”

She settled comfortably onto his lap and he
locked his arms around her waist.

Thank goodness! She didn’t think she could
stand it if there had been any true rift between them. “And look at
Millie. All that fuss about Sam’s memory and… they weren’t even
together until just before he died. He left her for a younger
woman.”

“Maybe she likes to forget the bad parts and
remember it that way, herself.”

“My point exactly, dear. Not to mention they
were still married the whole time, so it wasn’t exactly an untruth,
either. Still, it all hit her terribly hard. No money of her own to
fall back on. Did you know she spent years squirreling things away
for hard times? And not just food, either.”

“I take it you saw the famine chest.”

“A famine chest I can understand—we should
all have one. Hers is a monstrosity, but I can understand it. But
the art! Less than two weeks after J.D.--Mr. Willoughby, I mean—so
graciously forgave her for selling off all that other stuff, too.
There’s no way she could be trading it in to pay electricity and
repair bills, anymore. Where could she cash something that famous
in where it wouldn’t be found out? If I didn’t know better, I’d say
she had an entirely different plan for herself. One that doesn’t
include the rest of us. You know, I don’t even think Gerald
knows—and he’s her cousin. Nobody does.”

“What art?”

“All those famous modern art pictures I
found in the dumbwaiter, this afternoon. The only reason I saw them
is because I was late and needed a ride up instead of climb those
hundreds of stairs. And there they were! All wrapped in brown paper
and tied up with string—ready to mail. You don’t do that just to
move something to another room or leave in a closet. And they
certainly aren’t to decorate her cabin on the
Dreadful
,
either.”

“
Dreadnaught
, Stell. You know how it
physically pains Stuart to hear you call it that.”

“It’s a much more fitting name, if you ask
me.”

“Try thinking about it as our gateway to
adventure. By the time this trip is over, I’m sure we’ll be almost
as attached to it as Stuart is. Look how our Captain’s quarters
spruced up so well.”

“Oh, they did! You know I was almost envious
of everyone else moving aboard before we did? I’m that fond of all
this, already. I thought Millie was, too. She did tell me those
pictures were worth a fortune, though. Then again, maybe she had
second thoughts about leaving them in an empty house and decided to
send them to the family directly. Do you think that’s what it
was?”

“That sounds a lot more like our Millie than
absconding with them. Remember how upset she got at the prospect of
going to jail? She probably just forgot about the paintings in all
this confusion of moving. What do you want to bet she’ll remember
them halfway through Canada somewhere, and then fuss about it all
the way to Alaska.”

“You’re probably right.”

“We’ll ask her.”

“Which is entirely possible, because we’ve
all worked ourselves into a stupor this week, trying to keep up
with Stuart. I wonder why the first thing we do, when anything
doesn’t seem quite right, is to think the absolute worst of people?
I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole thing turned out to be--”

The familiar strains of the Marine Band
piped up from his shirt pocket, and Stella got up to put another
log on the fire while he answered the phone.

“Henry, here. Oh, hello, Mason. Not back
yet? No, just Stella and I. Villa looked all dark and locked up
when we put the car back in the garage. Didn’t even go in.”

Stella stopped poking at the fire and turned
around in time to see the Colonel’s gray eyebrows scrunch together
into his thinking expression. “Course we will. Be there as soon as
we can.”

She felt a tightening in her chest. “Now,
what happened?”

“Millie isn’t at the house, and it’s been
over an hour since she was supposed to meet Mason there.” He got to
his feet and slipped the phone back into his pocket in one smooth
motion. “Not answering her phone, either.”

5

What could only be called a “wild goose
chase” ensued. Stella threw some clothes on over her pajamas, and
rode back across the bay with the Colonel and Stuart (who was
driving all out), to search for Millie. By that time Mason was an
exhausted wreck, having called every emergency room in town,
thinking her heart condition may have got the better of her
somewhere with all the stresses and strains of the move. Then he
single-handedly began a search of all nooks and cupboards in the
mansion from the attic down.

By the time the others arrived, he had
reached the kitchen on the main level.

Stella forced herself not to think the worst
and hurried off to search on her own. But what Millie had told her
earlier about being stranded in the frozen north, hundreds of miles
from grocery stores (maybe even electricity!), she certainly
wouldn’t blame her if she decided to go live back east with one of
her children, after all. True, each of them had been sincere about
sticking together. Especially after discovering what their
individual prospects would be, should they all have to fend for
themselves separately. All of them agreed they were more than
capable of pooling their resources and living the same way they had
here at the Villa, somewhere else. But Alaska!

To some place Mason had acquired in a card
game, sight unseen.

Why, the only reason Stella wasn’t quaking
in her own boots, right now, was because it would be a grand
adventure just getting there. Sort of an extended honeymoon. And if
things turned out too badly, she and the Colonel still had enough
money to rent something small to get by on. But the others didn’t.
And considering how attached they had all become she hadn’t thought
twice about not pitching in.

The truth was, pitching in for this little
misfit family was beginning to change her life. It had brought her
out of some of her own thin places, and she had no desire to go
back to those, again. She couldn’t go back! Which was why she
wanted to have a private talk with Millie, in case she really was
thinking of desertion. They had to stick together!

If they didn’t, the whole thing could turn
into a disaster, and nobody would succeed.

She was thinking of all these things as she
headed down to the wine cellar (whether by premonition, or it was
simply the last place she had seen Millie), and threw back the
latch on the door. Even though it was impossible to accidently lock
oneself inside, and her friend could only have latched it if she
had come out.

Which was exactly how Stella discovered an
unconscious Millie, draped over a row of plastic bins, as if
someone had conked her on the head. Something that proved false, as
did a heart attack. In the end, it seemed the heavy door had
somehow closed on its own, and –after realizing her cell phone
wouldn’t work in a place that could have doubled as a fallout
shelter in case of World War III—she proceeded to console herself
in the emergency liquor supply while waiting to be rescued.

Something that could happen to anybody,
especially if they were claustrophobic.

Still, with one problem after another faced
and solved by the increasingly brave band of adventurers, they did
actually manage to sail out of the protected southern California
bay, three days later.

It was a glorious spring day, the sea was
calm, and the
Dreadnaught
behaved beautifully. So
beautifully that the trip seemed charmed. So, it was no wonder,
after ten days of worry-free voyaging (they even did several stints
of night-traveling because the moon and stars were bright and
spectacular), and only brief stops in San Francisco and Portland,
they finally ended up anchored off Vancouver, Canada, to show their
passports and wait for a border inspection to proceed north.

Captain Stuart did everything by the book.
In fact, he had made this run several times in his working days (on
more modern vessels, but the course was the same), and left his
little group of passengers to rest and relax on board while he
collected all their passports and set out to take care of business.
All of which went through without a hitch. Even during the long,
and thorough, inspection. After that, a few hours of sight-seeing
and the purchase of a few last-minute items, and they were soon on
their way, again.