Cooks Overboard by Joanne Pence Page B

Then it stopped. She gripped the frying pan tighter, raising it higher.
    Suddenly the lights came on.
    Angie screamed.
    Julio screamed.
    Julio?
    Angie kept the frying pan raised, not sure if she could trust him or not. The steward stood before her wearing a long nightshirt and slippers with no backs, the kind that flopped when you walk in them.
    “ Señorita , you scared me!” he cried. “What are you doing here in the dark? In the middle of the night? With a frying pan?”
    “Someone attacked me.”
    “ Madre mia! Are you all right?”
    She slowly lowered her arms. “Just a littlebanged up. I came down here because I felt seasick,” she said. “But someone was here ahead of me. With a flashlight. Did you see anyone in the hall?”
    “No, señorita , no one at all.”
    “What are you doing here?”
    “Me? I wanted some warm milk. I could not sleep with so much trouble—first the cook leaving, then my friend Sven getting sick. I am troubled.”
    “You’re not the only one,” she murmured.
    “Where is Mr. Smith? Why are you here alone?” he asked.
    “Paavo’s sleeping like a baby.”
    “Then please join me. I will have my warm milk, and you can have your soda, and we will wait out this storm together.” He pointed at the frying pan she still held. “I think you can put that down now.”
    She eyed him suspiciously. “I’ll put it down…but I’ll keep it in easy reach.”
     
    Paavo became aware, in a semiasleep state, that the storm was much worse than anyone had expected it would be. The best thing to do was to try to sleep through it, to ignore the roar of the sea, the banging of rain against the windows, the almost human cry of the wind through the ship.
    He reached out to Angie. She wasn’t there. She must have gotten up to use the bathroom. Maybe her getting up was what had awakenedhim. He rolled over to go back to sleep.
    When he awoke again, the sun was peeking over the horizon. He turned over to check on Angie, but she still wasn’t beside him. Was she up already? That wasn’t like her. He remembered a terrible storm last night. He sat up, suddenly wide awake. Where was Angie?
    He got out of bed and hurried to the sitting area. Empty. The bathroom door was open. Empty.
    The wall bed was down. What was that supposed to mean? Had she tried sleeping on it? Had she grown so out of sorts with him that she didn’t want to sleep with him anymore? Things had seemed okay between them last night. He remembered her talking…she was talking about writing a cookbook again…and he remembered getting more and more sleepy…he must have…oh, hell.
    Christ, where was she? His heart began to race. He couldn’t see her leaving the cabin on her own. She never got up this early on vacation. She never got up early, period. A cold, ugly dread seeped through him. He was ready to run out, then realized he was in his pajamas. He needed to put on his shoes and pants at least. God, what if she’d been hurt? She’d been curious about this ship, about the strangeness going on here, but he’d dismissed it, ignored the danger. That was what civilians did, he’d supposed: ignore danger, then rush headlong into it.
    He tore off his pajamas. Before leaving thecity, he’d decided he was through with police work, through investigating, through having to deal with all the grief caused by men who went bad.
    Yet, early in the cruise he’d begun to develop an uneasy feeling about this ship. Like Angie, he’d noticed that things had been moved around their room as if it had been searched; he’d noticed Livingstone’s strange questions, Sven Ingerson’s strange words and illness, even the way everyone seemed to be constantly watching Angie. Most of those things were explainable and clearly meant nothing ominous. But not all of them were.
    He put on underwear and his jeans. The damnable part was that he hadn’t allowed himself to differentiate the serious from the trivial. He’d chosen to ignore them all instead of