Dark Passage

THREE

‘240,676 people sailed on 100 cruises from the Port of Baltimore in 2012. “Since beginning a year-round cruising schedule in 2009, the Port of Baltimore has continued to make waves as one of the hottest cruise ports in the U.S.,” Governor O’Malley said. [It] handled the fifth-largest amount of cruise passengers among East Coast cruise ports, 11th largest in the U.S., and 20th most in the world. In 2011 the Port began using a state-of-the-art, climate- controlled enclosed passenger boarding bridge. The bridge is mobile and flexible to accommodate various sized cruise ships. Baltimore is within a six-hour drive of 40 million people.’

Maryland Port Administration, January 30, 2013

‘I thought this cruise was sisters only,’ Ruth grumped when I telephoned her the next morning. ‘I’m not sure I want responsibility for a teenager running loose aboard.’

‘Julie’s not your responsibility,’ I said reasonably. ‘Nor mine. She’s Georgina’s.’

‘Shit, Hannah. Have you looked at Julie lately, really looked? She’s developed – and I do mean developed – into a beautiful young woman. No telling what kind of trouble she’ll get into.’

‘Don’t be silly! What possible trouble could Julie get into on a cruise ship?’

‘You’d be surprised,’ Ruth said, using her firm, older sister, voice-of-experience tone.

‘Other than getting hammered and falling overboard,’ I added, just to show I wasn’t completely out of touch with current events.

‘I watched a CNN special on cruise ship safety a couple of months ago,’ Ruth continued. ‘Did you know that a person falls overboard approximately every two weeks?’

‘I do. I saw the same show,’ I replied. ‘But most of those accidents are alcohol-related, or suicides, not foul play.’

‘With some exceptions,’ Ruth said.

‘There are always exceptions,’ I said, ‘but if the Phoenix Islander is anything like the Queen Mary Two, there’ll be a zillion activities for teens, and they’re pretty closely supervised. Julie’s not going to be standing on the bow like a hood ornament with her arms outstretched singing, “My Heart Will Go On.”’

‘Well, I’m not going to babysit,’ Ruth said flatly.

‘Me, neither. There’s a hot tub on board – several, actually – and one of them has my name on it.’

‘And I’ll be right beside you, sister, holding a pink drink with an umbrella in it. But…’ she added after a beat, ‘a cruise ship is like a small city. I’m worried that some creep will try to take advantage of Julie. You have to admit she’s a bit naive.’

‘Julie may be naive, but criminals certainly aren’t. It seems to me that a cruise ship is the worst possible place to commit a crime. First of all, where would the perpetrator go? Aside from overboard, there’s no place to run, no place to hide.’ I paused to take a breath. ‘Besides, the ship has a database that includes photographs of everyone, both passengers and crew. If some perv were stupid enough to try something, he’d be a cinch to identify. And, good Lord, there are security cameras everywhere!’

‘I hear what you’re saying.’ Ruth hesitated a bit before continuing. ‘OK, you’re right, it’s Georgina’s problem. I, for one, am planning to engage in adult pastimes. Lectures, shows…’

‘Ballroom dancing?’ I interrupted.

Ruth snorted.

‘On second thought, you could probably teach ballroom dancing.’ My sister and her husband were semi-professionals. A few years back, when Ruth was sidelined by an injury, Hutch and his partner, Melanie, had even made it all the way to the finals of Shall We Dance, a television talent show. Ruth and Hutch still danced regularly in local and regional competitions.

‘No dancing, thanks,’ Ruth said. ‘That would be like going to work early!’

‘If you taught, they’d let you sail for free,’ I pointed out. ‘File that away for future reference.’

‘Nuh uh. I’d rather attend lectures on the history of Bermuda, or crop circles, or how to avoid back pain. The rest of the time I plan to lie around like a slug while somebody else cooks my meals and picks up after me.’

‘You need a wife.’

Ruth grunted. ‘Back into your cage, Hannah.’

I laughed and hung up on her.

Our boarding pass instructed us to arrive at the port of Baltimore no later than one, so on the day we were to set sail I picked Ruth up at the home she shared with Hutch on lower Conduit Street. Parking at the Port of Baltimore cost fifteen dollars a day, so to save her some bucks we’d offered to pick Georgina and Julie up too, but Georgina had telephoned in a panic just as I was heading out the door. Julie was running late, so they’d have to drive to the port themselves.

As we made our way up I-97, Ruth kept in touch with our sister by cell phone. By some miracle, we covered the twenty-eight miles to Baltimore in less than forty minutes and managed to arrive at the port at approximately the same time as Georgina. Uniformed parking attendants using orange batons directed us to parking spaces that turned out to be only a row apart.

‘Wow!’ Ruth leaned over the dashboard and peered at the Islander through the windshield, eyes wide as a toddler’s at Christmas. ‘I had no idea the ship would be so enormous!’

‘Twenty-five hundred passengers and eight hundred and forty crew,’ I said, quoting statistics I remembered from the ‘Welcome Aboard: Your Adventure is About to Begin’ brochure I’d received in the mail. ‘Bigger than Paul’s home town, actually.’ I climbed out of the driver’s seat and paused for a moment to admire the enormous vessel, its bow towering over us, high as a fifteen-story apartment building.

Ruth and I had packed light – one medium-sized wheelie bag each – but I was astonished to see what came out of Georgina’s trunk. While we watched, she slung a large, steel-gray suitcase to the ground, followed by a matching carry-on. ‘Your bags, Julie. You handle them.’ Georgina reached inside the trunk for the more modest-sized suitcase she had packed for herself. ‘You’d think we were going away for a month, rather than just a week,’ Georgina complained as she slammed the lid of the trunk shut, aimed her remote at the car and locked the doors.

‘I’ve never been on a cruise before, Mother, so how am I supposed to know what to wear? I had to pack for every situation, didn’t I?’ she said with a sideways glance at me, as if pleading for my support.

Judging from what Julie was wearing that day – strappy, medium-heeled sandals, a blue jean miniskirt, lime-green camisole with spaghetti straps and a sheer, flowered shirt – it would have been easy to fit her entire wardrobe into a single backpack.

I smiled. ‘The hardest thing for me was what to wear for the formal evenings. Since I quit working in Washington, D.C. I don’t dress up much. I was forced, actually forced, to go shopping at Lord and Taylor.’ Paul had been a professor of mathematics at the Naval Academy for more than twenty years, and in the old days there had been frequent formal events at the college, but recently – except for the Ring Dance in May – not so much.

‘So, what did you buy, Aunt Hannah?’ Julie seemed genuinely interested.

‘A pair of swishy black crepe pants and a couple of glittery tops that I can mix and match.’ I was secretly pleased with my selections, and with the fancy sandals I’d bought at Nordstrom that same day.

Ruth tugged on the handle on her suitcase and began dragging it toward the terminal. ‘My formal wardrobe dates back to the mid-seventies,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘It’s so old it’s back in fashion.’

‘Can’t you wear one of your fancy dance costumes, Aunt Ruth?’

Ruth shook her head sadly. ‘Oh, honey, what with all the sequins and glass beads, those things weigh a ton. Wagons ho, ladies! Let’s get this show on the road.’

It took us less than five minutes to cross the parking lot, following the signs into the terminal building where we joined a cast of thousands waiting to pass through the security checkpoints. The last time I’d seen lines that long was at Baltimore-Washington Airport on the day before Thanksgiving. As we snaked our way along the barriers toward the X-ray machines, Julie kept busy with her iPhone, alternating between texting and snapping photos which she uploaded almost immediately to Facebook.

‘For Julie’s sake, I hope there’ll be a reasonable number of young people on board.’ Georgina’s eyes swept the backs and the faces of the people in line around us. ‘What do you think the average age is here? Fifty? Sixty?’

I shrugged. ‘Maybe more. But school’s already let out for the summer, so I imagine there will be plenty of families on the cruise.’ As if to illustrate my remark, a child somewhere began to wail miserably. ‘See?’

‘And, look over there,’ Ruth added, nodding her head toward the entrance.

A boisterous group of young people and adults began streaming into the terminal, wearing identical red T-shirts imprinted in white with a stylized family tree and the words, ‘OMG, I Survived Another Crawford Family Reunion.’

‘Eleven, twelve, thirteen…’ Ruth counted. ‘My God, there must be thirty or forty of them. Haven’t the Crawfords heard about birth control?’

I punched Ruth’s arm. ‘Don’t be mean.’

While we’d been fooling around, a gap had opened in the line in front of us. I eased my bag forward, but it snagged on something. I stooped for a closer look. A rainbow-colored luggage strap embroidered with the name ‘Elizabeth Rowe’ had wrapped itself tightly around two of my wheels. I extricated the strap, then looked around for its likely owner.

Just ahead of me in line was a woman with short-cropped white hair; a pair of sunglasses perched on top of her head. I tapped her on the shoulder. ‘Are you Elizabeth Rowe?’

The woman started, then turned to look at me, her eyebrows raised.

I held out the luggage strap.

‘Oh, thank you!’ she said, taking it from me. ‘Cliff, look. I told you that clasp wasn’t secure.’

The man I took to be Elizabeth’s husband wore a blue-striped short-sleeve shirt that matched the color of the eyes that peered at me through his aviator eyeglasses. ‘What did you say, Liz?’

Liz waved the strap under his nose. ‘The clasp. It’s broken.’

Cliff relieved his wife of the strap, opened and closed the clasp a few times experimentally, then handed it back. ‘Looks fine to me. Maybe you didn’t fasten it securely.’

Liz took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. I could almost read her thoughts. Not wanting to dive headlong into the middle of a family squabble, I smiled and asked, ‘Is this your first cruise?’

‘Oh dear, no. Since we retired, Cliff and I have been fortunate enough to be able to travel fairly extensively.’

‘Do you live in Baltimore?’

‘We spend most of the winter in Florida,’ Cliff chimed in. ‘But, when we get back from this cruise, we’ll be heading back to our home in Maine.’

‘Where in Maine?’ Ruth wanted to know. ‘My husband’s family is from Limington, near Lake Sebago.’

‘We live in Lovell,’ Cliff said. ‘A tiny town near the New Hampshire border.’

‘Kezar Lake’s in Lovell! I know it well,’ Ruth said, surprising me. ‘Hutch and I have stayed at the Lodge.’ She eased around me to ask, ‘Have you ever met Stephen King?’

Stephen King? Had my sister lost her mind? ‘Don’t be silly, Ruth,’ I said. ‘Everybody knows that Stephen King lives in Bangor. In a big, spooky house with a spider web on the gate.’

‘He has a house on the lake in Lovell, too,’ Liz informed me kindly. ‘In fact, Lovell is where King was struck by a van and nearly killed back in 1999.’

Julie’s thumbs paused mid-text. ‘I love Stephen King! He’s so twisted. In a good way.’

Like well-behaved cattle, we’d reached a divide in the rope barrier where a uniformed security guard sent the Rowes in one direction and our party in another. ‘Have a great voyage!’ I called as Liz hoisted her carry-on – still missing its strap – onto the conveyor belt.

Liz waved. ‘Maybe we’ll run into each other again!’

‘I hope so,’ I said, meaning it. ‘Are you early seating or late?’

‘Early!’

Cliff had already disappeared behind the X-ray machine, heading toward the metal detector. Before Liz disappeared, too, I cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled, ‘We are, too!’

Soon we were standing at a long counter in a much shorter line, checking in. We presented our boarding passes along with our passports, had our credit card number verified, then posed, smiling, staring at a little dot above the camera like you do at the Department of Motor Vehicles while our mugshots were being taken. ‘Here’s your sea pass,’ the clerk said a few minutes later, handing me the plastic identification card that would serve as both my room key and a credit card while on board.

‘Let me see your picture,’ Georgina said, snatching the card playfully from between my fingers. Her eyes narrowed. ‘This is supposed to be a vacation, Hannah. You look like you’re going to jail!’

‘If you think that’s bad, you should see my driver’s license,’ I said as I watched our bags being spirited away. The next time we’d see them, they’d be in our staterooms.

Before heading up the gangway, we were accosted by the first of a well-organized team of photographers who would pop up everywhere during the week, like paparazzi, to create lasting (but expensive) memories of our cruise.

‘Why do we always have to pose in birth order?’ I complained as Ruth arranged us in front of a backdrop of the Parthenon: Julie on the end, next to her mother, then manhandled me into the spot between Georgina and herself.

‘Shut up and turn sideways,’ she ordered. ‘It’ll make us look thinner.’

‘Don’t be such a bossyboots,’ I muttered through teeth clenched in the say-cheese position.

Still blinking away the flash, I followed my family as they trooped up the gangway to the entrance on deck two where a crew member ran our sea passes through a scanner. ‘Welcome aboard the Phoenix Islander,’ she chirped. ‘Your staterooms are not quite ready, but you are welcome to tour the vessel, and the Firebird café is open if you’d like something to eat.’

‘When will the cabins be ready?’ Ruth asked.

‘There’ll be an announcement on the public address system,’ the woman said pleasantly. ‘The Firebird is all the way forward, on deck nine.’

‘Well, I could use a cup of coffee,’ I said. ‘You guys coming?’

‘Julie and I will catch up with you.’ Georgina consulted a printout of the Islander’s deck plan. ‘We want to check out the teen center first.’

‘Tidal Wave,’ Julie added. ‘From the brochure, it looks cool, but everything in the brochure looks cool.’

‘It’s on deck ten, just above the café,’ Georgina called over her shoulder as she herded Julie toward the elevators. ‘We won’t be long! Save us a table!’

After they’d disappeared, Ruth muttered, ‘The pictures in that brochure were taken with a wide-angle lens. The real thing is bound to disappoint.’

‘Don’t be such a sourpuss, Ruth! Come along with me. Laissez les bon temps rouler!’