“You’ve got to sit,” I tell him, and kinda shove him into a chair.
His tray thumps and bumps and the Strawberry Titanic keels completely over.
“So we meet again,” Darren says with an eyebrow cocked.
“That’s one sad-looking dessert,” Marko tells him, eyeing the Strawberry Titanic.
I look Kip square in the eye and just come out with it: “They know, too.”
“About …?” He searches my face, but fear’s written all over his because he knows exactly what I’m talking about. “But you said—”
“That was before you ditched me in the hallway at two in the morning.”
“But … why did you tell them? Why didn’t you just make something up?”
Darren focuses on him. “What was that?”
Marko shakes his head and does a little tisk. “Kipster, that was a bad move.”
Kip tries to get up, but I pull him back down. “Look, I wasn’t going to lie, but you also don’t have to worry—it’s not like you did anything wrong. And it’s not like we’re going to be talking to anyone in your family about it.”
“You don’t understand!” he cries, jumping up.
I yank him down again. “What I do understand is that you’re sneaking around this ship all by yourself, spying on people, and freaking out about your grandmother.”
“The alien queen?” Marko asks.
Marissa and I cry, “Marko!” and Darren does his best to run interference by asking, “What happened with your grandmother?”
He’s asking sincerely, so I look at Kip like, Well? and finally Kip says, “She’s missing.”
Marko’s and Darren’s eyebrows go flying, and they say, “Missing?” Then they look at each other quick, the eyebrows come down, and they turn back to Kip and go, “Did you check the casino?”
“She’s not in the casino!”
“How about somewhere in here?” Marko asks. “It’s a big buffet.”
Darren nods. “Or the bars? The bars are always open.”
Now it’s my turn to run interference. I give Darren and Marko a cool-it signal, then tell Kip, “Look, you’re obviously upset about your grandmother, and you obviously need someone to talk to.”
“Well, you’re a bad choice!”
So yeah. He’s also obviously ticked off.
“Actually, she’s a great choice,” Marissa tells him.
He snorts. “Right.”
“She is. And I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have Sammy to talk to.”
“Likewise with Marko here,” Darren tells him.
“Dude!” Marko gushes, and blows him a kiss.
Well, after that has a few seconds to clear, I tell Kip, “The point is, if you think someone shoved your grandmother overboard—”
“Whoa! Wait!” Marko says. “What’s this?”
“Hold on,” I tell him, then turn back to Kip. “Who can you talk to?”
He just looks down and shakes his head.
“Your mom?”
He shakes it some more.
“JT?”
His head snaps up. “No way!”
“So …?”
There’s a long silence, and finally he says, “Grandfather was the only one.”
I just blink at him. “Uh … not much conversation happening there.”
“I know,” he says, and really, it looks like his eyes are about to bust loose with tears.
“Dude,” Marko says. “You want to come play my drums?”
Marissa and I turn on him. “Marko!”
“I’m serious! It’s great therapy.”
Darren slaps Marko on the back. “It would probably help if we left.”
“Dude, it’s just getting interesting!”
Darren stands and drags Marko out of his seat, then gives Kip a little smirk. “It’s not like I talked to my mother when I was your age, and I sure didn’t talk to other people’s parents. Mostly I talked to Marko here, even though he’s always given questionable advice.”
“Dude! I give great advice! This boy needs to bash on something, can’t you see that?”
Darren just pulls him along, telling us, “So maybe we’ll go catch some rays while you talk things through.” And since none of us are begging him to stay, he adds, “How about I meet you in that Lido Library at three o’clock? We’ll get you online.”
“That’d be great!” I tell him.
The minute they’re gone, I scoot around so I’m facing Kip better and look him square in the eye. “The person I love most in the world is my grandmother.”
“Hey!” Marissa cries.
“Sorry!” I turn back to Kip. “But it’s true. There’d be this huge hole in my heart that nobody could patch up if she died. So I get what you’re saying about your grandfather.”
Which, big help, makes him actually cry. I hand him a napkin, but he wipes his face with his hands instead. And when he’s mostly dried up, I ask, “Your grandfather was your mother’s father, right? And Kate’s your mother’s mother?”
He nods.
“So your mom’s got to be upset about all this, too. She would understand how you feel, wouldn’t she?”
Only instead of nodding, he shakes his head. “She resents them. Maybe even hates them.”
My eyes squint down. “She hates them? Why?”
“Because of me.”
“You?”
“Grandfather brought me here from Kenya. He thought my mother needed a child.”
“Wait. Whoa. What?”
Kip nods. “That was pretty much my mother’s reaction.”
“Can you actually remember her reaction?” Marissa asks. “How old were you?”
“Eight.”
“But …” I shake my head. “What was he doing in Kenya? And why you?”
“He was buying a shea tree plantation.”
“A what?”
“You know—the stuff they make shea butter out of? For creams and stuff?”
“So …?”
“And I was an orphan and a …”
He just drifts off, so I say, “And a what?”
He looks away. “A thief. You know.”
“No! I don’t know!”
“You do what you have to do to eat, okay? There was never enough at the orphanage.” He shrugs. “But he caught me, and instead of punishing me, he hired me to help him. He taught me things, too. The second time he came, I was so happy to see him. I didn’t want him to leave.”
“So he brought you back with him?” Marissa asks, and when he nods, we both just stare until Marissa finally says, “So it was your grandfather’s idea and your grandmother went along with it?”
“That’s the way it always was. I never saw her disagree with him.” He shakes his head a little. “And I spent a lot of time with them. Grandfather seemed to really like having me around. And Grandmother has always been very kind to me.”
“But not your mother?” I ask as gently as I can.
“She hasn’t been unkind,” he says with another little shrug. “She just never wanted a child. She travels a lot and is really into her fashion business.”
Marissa shakes her head. “So why didn’t she just tell him no?”
“None of them ever told him no.”
Now, he doesn’t actually have a sneer on his face, but I can sure hear one in his voice. So my brain races around and finally out of my mouth comes, “Because he was so … powerful?”
He eyes me. “Because he was so rich.”
My brain races around some more. “So he could, what, bribe her into taking you?”
He frowns. “Right before he and Grandmother took that last trip where he had his heart attack, I overheard him begging my mom to become a real mother to me—to stop doing it just for the money.” He shakes his head. “Everything started making sense.”
“Wow,” I say after a minute. “That’s awful.”
“Still better than my life before,” he mutters. “By miles.”
“Okay, but bac
k to your grandmother,” Marissa says. “Why would anyone want to push her overboard?”
“Things were always tense between my uncles and my mother, but since Grandfather died, it’s been really bad—especially since Grandmother was so mysterious about the will.”
Marissa scoops out a bite of chocolate foam. “We overheard that she wants to sell the company and build a hospital in Africa last night at dinner.”
“You did?”
She nods. “It didn’t seem to go over too well. And why get everyone on a cruise to tell them what’s in the will?”
Kip takes a deep breath. “Grandfather wanted his ashes to be scattered at sea, and Grandmother used the will as a bribe to get everyone together. She said a week at sea would tell her things she needed to know.”
“Like whether Bradley should run the company?”
His eyes pop. “How do you know about that?”
So I tell him how JT’s parents had come storming down the hall all angry about what Bradley had said, and at first Kip’s kinda stunned, and then he shakes his head fast and says, “There’s no way Grandfather said Bradley should run the company. It’s just another one of his lies!” Then he kind of scowls and says, “It’s true about Uncle Lucas and Aunt LuAnn, though. I don’t think either of them has ever had a job.”
“But still,” Marissa says. “None of this means anyone pushed Kate overboard!”
Kip looks at me, then at Marissa, then back at me. And I can tell he’s weighing something in his head, so I say, “We’re obviously trying to help, right? So just tell us.”
He gives a little nod and keeps his voice low as he says, “Last night when I finally got up the nerve to slip that printout of my cousins under Grandmother’s door, I could hear voices. There were people in there, yelling.”
I lean in a little and drop my voice, too. “Could you tell who?”
“No. But for their voices to make it through that cabin door? They had to be pretty loud.”
“Could you tell if the voices were male or female?”
“Both. But I didn’t stick around! Or leave the paper. I was afraid of getting caught, so I came running down, and that’s when I bumped into you.” He looks down. “Which is why I was so freaked out. I’m sorry I just ran off.”
I study him a minute and ask, “Was your mother in your cabin when you got back to your room?”
“No. She snuck back in at two-thirty.”
“So she could have been one of the people fighting in the Royal Suite, which means if your grandmother really is missing, she might have had something to do with it.”
He covers his eyes with a hand. “I was so grateful to her. I tried so hard to please her! But then I found out about Grandfather paying her, and now this?” He gives me a pleading look, then says, “But she is a night owl. She works on her designs on her laptop clear through the night sometimes. So maybe that’s what she was doing.”
“You didn’t ask her?”
He shakes his head. “She wouldn’t have told me anyway.”
Now, I’ve been trying to avoid telling him something else, because when you line up all the “overhearing” I’ve done, well, it sounds like I’m the world’s worst snoop. But it just doesn’t seem fair not to tell him, so I finally fess up about Kate and Ginger in the Cheesy Say-Cheese Aisle and about, uh, accidentally overhearing Kate say she was going to call a midnight meeting to discuss the rest of the will.
At first Kip does look at me like I’m the snoop monster. But then he focuses on what’s important. “So they were all in there?”
I give a little shrug. “Your grandmother seems like someone who can get people to show up at midnight meetings.”
Kip thinks a minute, then goes, “Wow. Whatever else is in the will must be really bad.”
“Is the hospital actually written in it?” Marissa asks.
Kip shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“What else is there besides the company?” she asks. “Stocks? Bonds? Cash? Real estate? Valuable art?”
“I don’t know! It’s not like I sat around talking about it! Grandfather and I talked about things like astronomy and chemistry and physics … not money!”
“Okay,” Marissa says, scraping out the mousse dish, “so let’s assume that the company is the main thing, and that selling it to build a hospital is not actually in writing. What happens if your grandmother dies before that gets carried out?”
Kip looks a little lost. “It depends on what’s in Grandmother’s will?”
“And if what’s in her will is that the kids inherit everything, then getting rid of your grandmother would mean your mother and uncles would go from getting whatever’s left over after the hospital is built to getting everything.”
Kip stares at her a minute, then looks over both shoulders. “They can’t know we suspect them,” he whispers. Then he looks right at us and says, “And they can’t know you know.”
“Us?” I try to laugh it off, but the truth is, I do have the creeps.
The big-time, don’t-ignore-me creeps.
And I can’t help looking around, too, and feeling worried that we’re being watched. Because as big as the ship is, I’m realizing we’re trapped.
Trapped on the high seas, with psycho-rich killers who are not afraid of tossing their problems overboard.
TWELVE
I’m feeling totally paranoid as I’m checking around everywhere, but then I realize something.
It’s only about noon.
What if Kate was just … shopping?
So I take a deep breath and say, “Okay. Back up. Why do you think Kate is missing?”
“Aunt Ginger called everyone together and told us she was!”
“Well, how does she know?”
“She said Grandmother’s bed was not slept in, and that when she got up to use the bathroom at six o’clock, she had to close the balcony door, because it had been left open.”
“Wait, so your great-aunt is staying in the Royal Suite, too?”
Kip nods.
“Well … she must’ve been there, then! And she wouldn’t let someone throw your grandmother overboard!”
“I don’t know that she was there! After she told us Grandmother was missing, my mother made me leave. I said I wanted to help, but she made me leave, and I haven’t seen her since.”
I think about that a minute, then ask, “What did you hear Bradley say when you were over by Dessert Island?”
“Dessert Island?”
“You know …” I wave over to where he’d been standing. “Over there!”
He covers his face, and at first I think that, after all this, he’s still worried about telling us, but it turns out he’s just trying to remember. “He kept saying, ‘Find out. Find out and get back to me.’ He said it over and over.”
“Who do you think he was talking to?”
“A lawyer. I’m pretty sure it was a lawyer.”
“Why?”
“Because he told him, ‘I’ll litigate it all the way to hell, if that’s what it takes!’ ”
“Wow.” I think about it a minute, then ask, “What do they do if someone goes missing on a cruise? Ginger’s reported it, right? If they think she’s overboard, wouldn’t they turn the ship around and look for her floating in the water?”
“You don’t just turn a cruise ship around,” Marissa says. “It’s like turning an island around.”
“Then what do they do if someone falls overboard?”
Marissa gives a little shrug. “Put out a life raft? Throw out a buoy? Call the Coast Guard?”
“Have they done that?” I ask Kip. “Have they done anything?”
“I don’t know!”
We’re all quiet a minute, and then Marissa gets us back on track with, “What about Noah? Could he help figure out where your grandmother is?”
“Noah,” he says, and it comes out all breathy. Then he stands up, saying, “Noah’s a great idea. Let’s go!”
We hurry to keep up with him as he h
ightails it out of the Schooner Buffet and down the stairs. Trouble is, he stops after one flight and heads for the hallway.
Right for the Royal Suite.
“Wait!” I cry, grabbing his arm.
“We’re not going in there,” he whispers, then takes off down the hallway to the front of the ship.
“Then where?” I ask when we’re past the alien hive.
“Noah’s room is up by the bridge.”
Marissa zips ahead of me to catch up with him. “Is it by the captain’s quarters?”
I try to walk next to her but there are trays of dirty dishes and cleaning carts in the way, so it’s not easy. “How do you know where the captain’s quarters are? And what’s the bridge?” I was picturing something arching over water.
“You know—the control center?” Marissa throws over her shoulder. “It’s full of computer screens and monitoring systems and stuff. My parents were platinum club members and we got a tour once.”
We’re passing by the forward sets of stairs now, plowing straight ahead, and Kip says, “Uncle Noah told me his room was second from the end on the port side.”
“That’s the left side, right?” I ask, and he goes, “Right, the left,” and actually grins over his shoulder at me.
It turns out that the door to the room second from the end on the port side was open. So Kip sticks his head inside and calls, “Uncle Noah?”
But there’s a cleaning cart out in the hallway, and instead of Noah, a woman with black hair pulled back into a bun comes to the door. “Mr. Marlowe is not here,” she says, flashing top teeth that are outlined in silver. She pulls a paper from her smock’s pocket, unfolds it, and shows it to Kip. It’s today’s Cruzer Calendar, and she points to the events column and says, “Mr. Marlowe is at bingo now.”
I glance at the list of activities scheduled for the day and ask, “He has to be at all those things?” Because there are events listed from seven in the morning until eleven at night.
“Oh, yes,” she says. “Mr. Marlowe is a hardworking man.”
We tell her thanks, then do a U-turn and zip down the stairs to Deck 3, where bingo is already in full swing inside the Poseidon Theater.
Now, compared to how sunny and bright it had been at the Schooner Buffet, the theater seems really dim. There’s a big digital board with lit-up numbers and letters in front of the closed stage curtains, and the room is speckled with players—not packed, but with the size of the auditorium, there are actually a lot of people, maybe two hundred? But they’re all spread out and … quiet.