DOUBLE KNOT (6 page)

Arrangements have been made to communicate with your husband for you. Should you try
to contact him directly and by some miracle succeed, you run the risk of never seeing
him again.

Relax, follow these simple instructions, and all will be well. Attempts to escape,
alert your husband, the authorities, or other passengers will be met with deadly consequences.
It’s up to you.

And that was it.

We were hostages on a luxury cruise liner.

SIX

I clapped my hand over Fantasy’s mouth and pinned her to the bed so she wouldn’t kill
me. Instead, she bit the fire out of me. Anderson Cooper jumped to my defense and
onto Fantasy’s face. There was wrestling and meowing. Anderson didn’t vocalize often
and when she did, because she couldn’t hear herself, it was loud, raw, and cannon-shot
unexpected. I grabbed for (my cat) a pillow and slammed it over Fantasy’s head to
muffle the language. “It’s me, Fantasy! It’s me!”

We both panted for a full minute.

She clicked on a bedside lamp and sat up. “Davis! What the
hell
? What happened?”

“Shhhh!” I scream-whispered. “Be quiet!”

“Me be quiet? How about that crazy cat of yours?” She gave Anderson a very dirty look.
“Besides,” she whispered, “who’s going to hear us?”

My mother.

“Come with me.”

“Davis, what’s wrong?”

“Do you have your gun?”

“No.” She swung her legs over the side of the bed. “I smuggled your cat on, which
was hard enough, thank you. No Hair has my gun.”

I doubted that.

“What’s happened? Who do we need to shoot?”

“Just get up,” I said. “I need you to see something in my room.”

She read my face. “Uh-oh.”

“Don’t make a peep.” I stepped toward the door. “We do
not
want to wake up my mother.”

Fantasy, wearing almost nothing but a tank top, tied her robe around her waist, but
her robe was so short it didn’t do any good. She stepped into her fuzzy slippers.
“What the hell is going on?”

* * *

We tiptoed from one end of 704 to the other by the light of the moon. When we reached
my stateroom, I closed and locked the door. I held a finger to my lips and led her
through the sitting room to the bedroom.

“You’re freaking me out, Davis.”

I passed the envelope. She passed out. (No, she didn’t.)

She went back and forth between the picture of No Hair and the letter. “Oh my God.
We’re prisoners.”

Yes.

“Who is this? Who’s doing this?” She shook the letter. “And where is he?”

She shook the picture.

I had no answers.

We sank to sit on the edge of the bed.

“Do you think they mean it?” she whispered.

“Which part?” I whispered back. “Yes, I think they mean it. We’re trapped and they
have No Hair.”

“Who are
they
?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “Whoever it is, they want us out of the way.”

“Of what?” she asked. “A heist? A con?”

“Or a target,” I whispered. “One of the bazillionaires. Extortion. Blackmail. Kidnapping.”

“It could be escaped prisoners hitching a ride,” Fantasy said. “Or there’s a Bernie
Madoff on this boat. A homicidal first wife. It could be anyone with any number of
agendas.”

“A homicidal first wife wouldn’t lock us in here. Or No Hair there.”

We stared at the photograph of our boss.

We stared at the photograph of our friend.

“Where’s there?” Fantasy asked. “And where did you find this?”

“It was taped to the bathroom mirror.”

“Who taped it to the mirror?” She grabbed my arm. “Davis! Either Jessica, Poppy, the
butler, or all three of them are in on this! One of them did it!”

“No.” I shook my head. “Not necessarily.”

“I didn’t put it on the mirror. Your mother didn’t put it on the mirror.”

“It could have been on the mirror when we left Biloxi, Fantasy.
Anyone
could have put it on the mirror.”

“But you just found it.”

“That doesn’t mean it wasn’t there earlier.”

“Well, think, Davis. Was it or wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know! I can’t remember. I didn’t see it before we left, but I didn’t
not
see it before we left.”

“Which is it, Davis? You did or you didn’t?”

“I don’t know.” I fell back on the bed. “I know I went in there, but I wasn’t looking
for a note on the mirror. I found it ten minutes ago and I have no idea how long it’s
been there.”

“Oh, holy crap.” She fell beside me. “This can’t be happening.”

“It’s happening.” We stared at the ceiling until it got a whole lot worse. “My mother.”

“What?”

“We can’t breathe a word of this, Fantasy. Not one word. My mother
cannot
know.”

“Considering your mother doesn’t know you’re pregnant, I don’t think it will be too
hard to hide this from her.”

We lay there, staring at the ceiling, until Fantasy raised herself on an elbow. “What
are we going to do, Davis?”

“Get out of here. And rescue No Hair.”

* * *

We armed ourselves on the fly, me with a lamp base and Fantasy with a satin nickel
towel bar she ripped right off the wall.

“Let’s start at the front door.”

“You’re not going first.” She pushed in front of me. “You’re too pregnant.”

We crept through the salon barefoot, catching a moonbeam, which sent our distorted
shadows across the floor and up the walls, making the entire endeavor as spooky as
possible. We finally reached the foyer. Pitch black. I patted the wall until I found
a round dimmer switch. I rolled it to the right, illuminating the silver statue display
enough for us to see the cabin door.

“There’s a panel here,” I whispered.

Fantasy was facing away from me, standing guard with her towel bar. She looked over
her shoulder. “What is it?”

“It’s a number pad. I bet it’s—” I popped off the panel, “—an override. Like an emergency
way to open the door.” I turned to her. “What’s the code? We don’t know the code.
We could stand here the whole week and not guess it.” I poked the keypad anyway: seven,
zero, and four. “It doesn’t matter. It’s dead.”

“What?” Fantasy asked.

“The numbers aren’t lighting up.”

“What?”

“Find me a screwdriver,” I said.

“Where am I supposed to find a screwdriver?”

“Hold this.” I turned the lamp around, she held the base, and I unscrewed a crystal
ball finial from the top.

“Good thinking.”

If it had worked.

She smashed the crystal ball with the towel bar; I used a shard of glass to pry the
number pad off the panel. “It’s cut.”

“You cut yourself?” She turned to look.

“The electrical.” The red and blue twist of lines behind the number pad had been snipped
clean.

Back to our sofa.

Anderson Cooper, who’d wandered out my stateroom door, pounced on us, back and forth.

“We need to sleep in shifts,” Fantasy said. “You go first, because your cat is driving
me out of my mind.”

Sleep wouldn’t be easy, in spite of the fact I couldn’t remember being this tired
in my life. Neither of us had a gun. I’d stopped carrying one the minute I passed
the pregnancy test, because babies and guns don’t mix. Fantasy didn’t bring a gun
onboard, because as Bianca Sanders’s guest, it would have been too hard to explain
to the embarkation people why she was packing. We were both lost without our heat.

“We need to check on my mother.”

“Check for what?” Fantasy looked down the hall. All was quiet.

“I don’t want her all the way down there by herself.”

“Well, let’s go get her.”

“Under what pretext? A slumber party? Fantasy, we can’t tell her.”

“At this point, how do we
not
tell her, Davis? You need to tell her.”

“I say we don’t say a word to anyone until we know what we’re dealing with.”

“We’re hostages,” she said. “That’s what we’re dealing with.”

“I mean the enemy within.”

“As in here?”

“Right,” I said. “Chances are someone in this suite is in on it. Where was Poppy for
three hours? She could easily be in on it.”

“And that creepy Burnsworth,” Fantasy said. “He could too.”

“Plus the fact that Jessica didn’t leave our side all day. Until she passed out.”

“Meaning?”

“There are two ways to look at it,” I said. “One, she probably didn’t put the letter
on the mirror because she was with us the entire time. Or two, she’s behind everything
which is why she was with us the entire time.”

“I don’t see that airhead behind anything,” Fantasy said. “Much less this.”

One of my babies bumped into another one of my babies. “Look.” I pointed.

She placed a warm hand on the babies and was rewarded with a kick.

“Davis. We have to get you out of here.”

We listened to each other breathe for the longest.

“We need to set a timer,” she said. “A limit on how long we’re going to wait before
we make a move. There’s got to be something we can do.”

“Like what?”

“We can throw all the furniture off the deck. Someone has to notice a trail of white
sofas in the water.”

“Sofas don’t float, Fantasy. And even if they did, it’s the dead of night. If we throw
all the furniture in the ocean, we’ll be locked in here with no furniture,” I said.
“We could throw ourselves overboard right now and no one would notice.”

“Okay,” she said, “we Rapunzel. We tie bed sheets together. Make a rope. Climb down.”

“The ship isn’t built that way. Didn’t you get a good look at the exterior? The decks
are designed to
prevent
anyone climbing around. And the terraces are built for privacy, tiered and staggered,
so it’s not like we could drop off our deck onto someone else’s. We’d have to go up
or down
two
decks to get to anything or anyone. Let’s say we did. Let’s say there are that many
bed sheets in here. Then we’d have to dangle over the ocean and somehow gain enough
momentum to swing in fifty feet to land on a deck that’s fifty feet down, and we’re
moving at almost forty knots an hour. There’s no way. Whoever we send down will be
lost at sea. And that’s if they don’t land on a Zoom car and splatter at sea.”

She looked at me in the quiet dark. “I didn’t say it wouldn’t be dangerous. Obviously
you can’t do it. You can barely walk.” (Thank you.) “We’ll elect someone by secret
ballot. I’m ready to vote right now.”

“Face facts, Fantasy. We’re stuck here. With Jess. That said, do you think you could
hate her a little less?”

“I don’t
hate
her,” she said. “Much.”

Anderson Cooper had fallen asleep.

“We could build a bomb,” she said. “Blast our way out.”

I studied her face by the light of the moon to see if she was serious. “Do you think
for one second this suite is stocked with bomb-building supplies? Even if it was and
we built one, this unit is probably as strong as a vault. We already know the door
is. If we build a bomb and set it off we’ll still be locked in, but at the bottom
of a pile of rubble after we blow ourselves up. Which will set off the sprinklers.
So if we don’t kill ourselves in the blast we’ll drown.”

“There you go.” She snapped her fingers. “We figure out a way to flood the casino.
You know if a blackjack table took a drop of water they’d find the leak, which means
they’d find us, and we’d be out of here in ten minutes.”

“Fantasy,” I said, “the casino is on the deck above us. We can’t defy gravity.”

We were running out of late-night escape options.

“For now, we need to sit tight.” I tried to get comfortable. “Think about how we solve
problems at the Bellissimo. It’s not by setting off bombs.”

She raised a questioning eyebrow, mentally tracking our three years of Super Spying,
thinking surely we’ve blown something up at one point or another. And she was probably
right.

“We’ve been in some scrapes, Fantasy. Tight spots.”

“Very tight.”

“And every single time No Hair believed in us. He let us see things through. Think
of how many times he could have pulled the plug when it didn’t look like we’d find
our way. Think of how things would have turned out differently if he’d set off a bomb
on us. We have to return the favor. As bad as this looks, taking a desperate or drastic
measure right now might do more harm than good, especially since we’ve been warned
not to. Did you read the part in the note about being
dead
?”

“This is horrible,” she said. “We’re helpless.”

“We’re not. We need to hit it from another angle,” I said. “We play along, pretend
we didn’t even find the note, don’t let on we realize we’re prisoners, and approach
it from behind.”

“Sneak up on it,” she said.

“Right.”

“How is that going to help?”

“We can flush out the bad guy,” I said. “And find out why we’re locked in here. There’s
a
reason
No Hair’s being held and there’s a
reason
we’re hostages, and we need to find the reason. And until we find the reason, we
hang onto this: Who do we know that’s tougher than No Hair? Have you ever known anyone
tougher than him?”

“No.”

“You have to believe he can tough this out until we can get to him. Because if you
don’t believe, I won’t be able to believe.”

“I believe, Davis. I believe.”

We hooked pinkie fingers.

We believed for five quiet minutes until I said, “Here’s the plan.”

“I’m listening.”

“We figure out who locked us up and why.”

“Okay,” she said.

“We turn this place upside down and find a way out.”

“Got it.”

“Then we rescue No Hair.”

“First thing in the morning, Davis. We’ll knock off your list. One, two, three. After
that, let’s go try on jewelry we can’t afford at Tiffany’s.”

“I thought you said you believed.”

She sighed.

“Okay, then this,” I said. “No matter what, we’ll be out of here sometime tomorrow.
We’ll get out, then rescue No Hair.”