Death of an Aegean Queen (19 page)

“You did, indeed.”

“And the sooner we know for certain, the better.” Kathryn paused and sighed. “Mr. Bondurant told me that if they can’t prove George is dead, I’ll have to wait seven years before they officially declare him dead! Seven years! Of course, I’d give anything to see George walk in here, right now.” Kathryn raised her eyebrows and looked toward the ceiling. “That would be the most wonderful thing in the world, but, realistically, it’s not going to happen, and if I have to wait seven years for George’s life insurance to pay out, I don’t know how I’ll live. My job doesn’t pay enough to even cover the mortgage.” She lowered her eyes. “I may have to sell the house, anyway.”

Lettie reached around the bread basket and touched Kathryn’s hand.

Marco swiped his napkin across his mouth and pushed back from the table. “You will all excuse me, please? I have to go to the purser’s office and I have to pick up my passport before we dock.”

I jumped up, too, and dashed out beside him. “Marco, please. Do you have to go? I don’t want you to go! Are you mad at me?”

Shoving through the dining room doors, he turned and growled, “Am I mad at you? Mad at you? I am not a child. I do not buy a plane ticket to Milano just to get away from you. No! I am going home because there is something important going on on this ship and the information I need is in Italy.”

“What information?” I asked, walking sideways so as to keep facing him.

The elevator doors opened, unbidden by either of us, and Marco hopped in, but I was right behind him. He punched the button for the Poseidon deck. “I talked to Dr. Girard,” he said, his eyes trained on the blinking buttons. “They have identified four stolen items in various display cases around the ship. Most of the other items they can find no records for. The Carabinieri have a database that should help us.”

The elevator doors opened. I intended to follow Marco, begging all along the way, but I was hijacked by a voice from down the hall.

“Mrs. Lamb?” It was the woman who ran the Internet café. “I have an email message for you.”

Chapter Seventeen

The Internet attendant had caught me while she herself was in the process of unlocking the door to the computer room, opening up for the day. She flicked on the overhead lights and slipped around the room, hitting buttons. As computers booted, one by one, they sounded like an orchestra tuning up. “It came in last night, but it was too late to call you.” A minute later, she brought up my message on one of the screens and pointed to the line below the subject with a crimson-nailed finger. “There’s an attachment. If you need to print it out, let me know. There’s a one-euro charge for printing.”

“A euro per page?” I asked and got an indifferent nod in answer. That was highway robbery, but on a ship like this, they didn’t deal in loose change. Almost everything was covered in the price of the cruise, but anything that wasn’t, I had observed, was priced at a round number.

The mail was from my son Charlie, responding to the message I’d sent him yesterday morning. He certainly hadn’t worked very long at the task I’d given him. I clicked on the appropriate inbox line, expecting nothing much.

Dear Mom,

What kind of unsavory people are you hanging around with? A pervert and a pole dancer? I may have to fly to Greece and drag you home by your ears! George Gaskill, as you said, is a registered sex offender, who lives at 8108 Lonesome Pine Rd. Elkhart, Indiana. He’s married to Kathryn Peterson Gaskill of the same address. Employed by the Altoona, PA school system from 1989 through 2001. Principal of Mann High School from September 1998 to May 2001. They are members of Gethsemane United Methodist Church in Elkhart, and I managed to find their church pictures online. I’ve attached a photo of George and Kathryn, taken in February of this year. George is not involved in any community activities other than church, because I found nothing about him in the Elkhart local news. I got several articles from April 2001, describing the rather juicy trial in which Mr. and Mrs. Benson, parents of Brittany Benson, charged him with child abuse, rape, sexual abuse of a minor, etc. I’ve attached a photocopy of one article. Let me know if you want more.

Brittany Benson, her innocence perhaps compromised at this point, dropped out of college three weeks into her first semester, and went to work as a flight attendant for Delta Airlines. Quit two years later and moved to Miami where she worked as a dancer at the Sandy Jug (I checked their website, Mom, and I don’t think it was ballet).

I couldn’t find out anything about her high school record because those files are confidential, but her next move after the job in Miami is strange. She ups and moves to Lima, Peru. The next address I found for her was in an exclusive part of the city, where most of the residents are American expats and international jet-setters. The house at this address is currently on the market, for an asking price of $3 million, U.S.!

That’s the latest thing I found on Brittany, but you say she’s working on your cruise ship now? Okay, I’ll believe you. Do they have a pole for her to use? Or do they fill the pool with Jello?

Love,

Charlie

I smiled at the screen. This was about as flippant as Charlie ever got, and I was happy to see this levity. Maybe it meant the atmosphere at his school wasn’t as tense as it had been the last time I talked to him. Charlie had always taken things too seriously and since his dear wife was diagnosed as manic-depressive, his life had been nothing but stress at work, alternating with gray clouds at home. Maybe he was learning to laugh at the human comedy.

While the photo Charlie had attached was printing, I studied it on the screen. Kathryn Gaskill sat with her left shoulder toward the camera, her hands folded in her lap. George stood behind her with his hands on her shoulders. I’d only seen George once, that first night at dinner. Strange to think how my trip to Greece had been hijacked by a man with whom I’d shared only a few sentences of innocuous, pointless small-talk.

The photo brought him back to me. The slicked-back dark hair, the trim little goatee, the prominent front teeth. I recalled how he whistled his S’s. Was this the face of a child-molester? I tried to wipe my mind free of what I now knew and look at him with objective eyes. What I saw was a beaten man. Shoulders drooping, eyes without luster, a man upon whom life had dumped more than he could bear.

I wondered how Kathryn had reacted to his conviction. Had she recoiled, avoiding his touch? Hated him secretly while sympathizing with him openly? Did she blame him for their plummeting social position? From professional, upper-middle class, probably with a home in a nice part of town, to used-car salesman and wife living in a town where nobody knew them?

My photo lay on the floor in front of the attendant’s desk, having been spit out with great vigor by a printer that had apparently had a good night’s rest. I walked over, picked it up, and signed the billing sheet with my cabin number and number of pages I’d printed. On regular cheap copy paper, the picture wasn’t as clear as it had been on the computer screen.

“Mrs. Lamb?” Luc Girard walked through the door. “Good. I’ve been looking for you since yesterday. May I speak to you for a minute?”

I wanted to chase Marco down, but “speak to you for a minute” sounded like such a reasonable request, I said okay.

He took my elbow and led me out into the hall. “Have you seen this?” he asked, stopping in front of a display case that held a lovely gold bracelet. “No known provenance. As far as I can tell, this has never been photographed, catalogued, or described anywhere, by anyone.”

“Thessaly?” I bent down and read the brass plaque inside the case with the bracelet.

Girard stepped back from the display case and looked at me over the top of his black-rimmed glasses. “Thessaly’s a big place. Where in Thessaly? When was it found? By whom?”

“Why haven’t I noticed this before?” I wondered aloud. “It’s right outside the dining room.”

“But it’s between the door to the dining room and the men’s room. You probably don’t go to the men’s room often.” Girard turned toward the open double doors to the dining room. “Could we have a cup of coffee and talk for a few minutes?”

“Well,” I said, hesitating. Most of all I wanted to catch up with Marco, but if that couldn’t be done, I hated to pass up this chance to pick Luc Girard’s brain. “Could you wait here a second? I have to check on something. Won’t be a minute.”

“I’ll be in the dining room. I’ll order coffee for you.”

The main desk around which the offices, including security and purser’s offices, were arrayed was on the same deck so all I had to do was run down a hall past the casino and into the vast open space, roughly circular and three stories tall, designed to afford guests every opportunity to spend yet more money on land excursions, jewelry, sweaters, and photos of themselves. Photos now being taken by Nikos Papadakos’s replacement. Marco was nowhere in sight. I asked about him at the main desk, but the attendant on duty didn’t know who Marco was. I talked the man into ringing the security office for me. He shook his head after a minute. “No answer,” he said.

I walked around to the security office door and knocked. No answer.

Girard had taken a table near the entrance to the dining room. Two cups of coffee had already been served. As I took my seat, he pushed his chair back from the table, crossed his legs outside the linen cloth and threw one arm across the back of his chair. “Sophie and I have checked every display on the ship and we’ve found four items stolen from museums, ten with no known provenance, and five that were legally purchased through a dealer or an auction house.”

“So they weren’t all obtained the same way,” I said. “Interesting.”

This was the first time I had noticed how truly sexy Luc Girard was. Way too young for me, more’s the pity, but a serious threat to a younger woman’s heart. His mouth was almost feminine but strengthened somewhat by a roughly shaven jaw line and a sparse goatee that divided itself into three isolated parts: mustache, small tuft under the lower lip, and a few chin whiskers. Behind his black-rimmed glasses, his dark eyes smoldered with what was—to be totally honest with myself—no expression at all. Any message a woman got from those eyes was one she read into them herself. I checked his left hand. On his ring finger was a hefty gold job with an inlaid onyx. It could have been a college ring.

“This cruise line is owned by a Geneva-based company called Helvetia Shipping, but the directors of the consortium are actually Italian, for the most part, with some Americans, Greeks, and others thrown in for good measure. You dig?”

“So who acquired the things we see in the display cases?”

“That’s not going to be easy to find out. But Sophie and I are working on it from several angles.” Girard uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, his hands around his coffee cup. He looked straight at me, then quickly down at his cup. “Sophie, by the way, is a very . . . astute woman. She is incredibly bright, you dig? I thank you for introducing her to me.”

Oh, please. He couldn’t fool me with that “astute” business. The man was falling in love. I shook my brain back to the subject we were allegedly talking about. “Wouldn’t it be a matter of finding out who’s in charge of purchasing?”

“The ship was overhauled and renovated three years ago. I’ve talked to the purser about who did the buying at that time and where they bought from. I’ve talked to Chief Letsos. Have you met him? He’s no help at all.”

“He’s not the most amiable man I’ve ever met.”

“Letsos keeps reminding me, subtly, that he and I are both employed by the company I’m suggesting we investigate. If we value our jobs, you dig, we shouldn’t rock the boat … no pun intended.”

French accent notwithstanding, Luc Girard had firm command of English idiom.

“I don’t care about that myself,” he said without a hint of bravado in his tone, “but I wouldn’t want to ask Sophie to risk getting fired. She needs her job more than I need mine.”

“How can I help?”

Girard turned his face toward the windows and, without looking at me, said, “Did you visit Sophie and Brittany’s room yesterday?”