Perfect. Kayla was a detective's dream. She. was a mouthy-Maxine who wasn't afraid to share her opinions of others, no matter how unpleasant they might be. My job was to keep on saying, "Oh?"
"You know about Flora's parents right?"
"Mmm."
"They were like killed in a horrible car accident. That's when Flora went to live with Charity. Her father was like a real bastard."
I did raise my eyebrows at this. "Why do you say that?"
She giggled a bit and adjusted herself on her lounger so she was half facing me, half keeping an eye on whatever half-dressed man passed our way. She was wearing a too-revealing white swimsuit that didn't do much for her figure, which one day could be just fine but was still on the chubby tomboy side. "No, I mean like a real bastard-a kid without a father. Charity wasn't married when she got knocked up. She couldda cared less when she had the kid. Pretty much ignored him, Mom says. She always tells us we're lucky not to have ended up with a mother like Charity. Anyway, apparently Charity never had nothin' to do with him or his wife, even after Flora was born. They never came to any of the Charity Events. Charity never paid Flora any attention until her mom and dad were killed in that accident. And it wasn't an accident."
My ears grew red. "Oh?" I sat up on my elbows.
"Naw, they were like major drunks, both of 'em. It's no accident when you drink and then drive. That's what Mom always says. I think that's true. Don't you, Mr. Qu...Russell?"
"That's a sad story."
"Yeah, fer sure, like really, and then old Grandma Charity gets landed with another kid she doesn't want."
"Flora."
She nodded. "Oh yeah, Flora." She smiled at a passing blond man with muscular legs shown off to their best advantage in a fetching pair of purple and white swim trunks. He nodded at me and kept on walking.
"Oh what's the use! This boat is like a bowl full of plastic fruit. Looks good, but you can't eat any of it."
As I choked back a laugh, I noticed six men on the other side of the pool near the cantina. It was a group I'd seen before, sticking to one another like a gaggle of newly hatched geese. They were pssting amongst themselves and one was pointing in our direction. Did they know me? Or Kayla? Or Nick? I made a point of staring at them; they noticed and scurried off.
"And Harry's dad. He's supposed to have been like this great musician-jazz or blues or something like that-stuff they listened to like a million years ago...what music do dinosaurs like?" She guffawed at her little joke and kept on when she noticed I wasn't laughing with her. "But really, all he's good at now is getting so buzzed he can barely stand. He's so creepy. I can't stand for him to be around me." She glanced over at Nick to make sure he was still asleep then said, "And then there's my mom and dad. I wish they'd get a divorce already. It's not like everyone doesn't know they want to."
"Maybe they're still trying to make it work," I said, only because it was her folks we were talking about for Pete's sake. I was beginning to wonder if half the stuff coming out of Kayla's mouth wasn't more about a teenager trying to impress me with her knowledge of worldly things and how little she cared one way or the other.
"Are you kidding? No way, dude. Y'know, the only cool person on this boat is Uncle Nick."
Kayla snookered down into her chair and closed her eyes, apparently content that our information exchange was complete. Not at all sleepy anymore, I let my gaze wander lazily around the pool like a butterfly, momentarily alighting on this hunk or that until I caught sight of something that really grabbed my interest-Richard Gray.
It looked like he had just arrived, wearing nothing but a snug pair of black trunks and black slip-on deck shoes. Over his muscular right shoulder he had tossed a dark brown beach towel that matched his chestnut tan. His well-defined chest was coated in a smattering of the same thick, shimmering silver hair that covered his head and was now slicked back as if he'd just emerged from a shower. His thighs and forearms were caramel-coated hams and his belly had just a hint of a roll, indicating a man who liked to keep in shape but not so much as to deny himself fine wine and cuisine.
He caught my look, which I had tossed his way, and he smiled. I watched as he made progress towards us, stopping every so often to chat with people he knew. Who were they? What were they saying to him?
Get lost you chatty Pattys!
Whoa, Quant, get a hold of yourself man.
"Hello Russell, it's great to see you," he greeted me once he reached our part of the pool deck.
"Hi Richard." I could see that he was letting his eyes do a little roaming and I, after sucking in and sticking out the appropriate bits, did the same. Eventually we had to move on. "This is Kayla Moshier," I said with a nod at the prone girl's body.
She lowered her sunglasses and eyed him suspiciously as if to say, "Show me your heterosexual membership card before I pay you any attention."
"Hi Kayla." And then his eyes moved expectantly to the meaty lump that was Nick.
"Oh him, he's ah.. .ah.. .he's Nick." Shit, was he going to think Nick was my boyfriend? "He's Uncle Nick," I blurted out, trying to ignore Kayla's withering stare.
The look on Richard's face told me he wasn't quite buying my line, but he was still smiling so I bumbled on. "Yes, he's an uncle, an old uncle friend of mine, of Kayla's who..." And that's where it...thankfully...ended, for we were interrupted by Flora who'd come rushing up from somewhere.
"Mr. Quant," she got out between pants. "Please, come right away. Something horrible has happened."
Charity and Dottie's suite was twice the size of the one I shared with Errall, with a full dining area and living room divided from the sleeping area by filmy drapery that billowed attractively with even the slightest breeze. Their deck was deeper and wider, with room for a patio table and significant lounging space, and this was where Flora and I found them, Charity spitting bullets.
"Can you believe this outrage!" she called out to me as soon as she saw me coming, and in the same breath added, "Pour yourself a drink, lovely." She was having champagne. I passed.
"The shameless, brazen audaciousness of it all; the bloody, ballsy little fucker!" Charity shamelessly, brazenly, audaciously showed off her command of biting adjectives with a verve that revealed a grudging respect for the ballsy little fucker. "It didn't even take them twenty-four hours to make a move!"
"What is it?" I asked, looking to Dottie and Flora for more. "What's happened?"
The two women knew better than to steal the spotlight from the star, so they remained quiet-Dottie rocking her head in a taciturn to-and-fro motion from where she sat, knitting in hand, and Flora standing next to her grandmother, but making no moves to calm her.
Charity flung herself against the railing with surprising force, almost dumping the contents of her flute into the water below. She was wearing a tailored dressing gown covered with large, black orchids over white. "Why don't they just toss me overboard! Flush me down the toilet with all the rest of the refuse!
That would make them happy!" She turned back to us, noticed I was still empty-handed and said with a level voice, "No drink, lovely?"
She was looking for someone to play with and Flora and Dottie were either too tired or too savvy to oblige her. "Tell me what's happened?" I pleaded.
"Show it to him," she spat at Flora and then looked away as if trying to avoid a slap in the face.
Flora picked up a single sheet of paper from the table and handed it wordlessly to me.
It was a piece of the ship's personalized stationery, ripped at the top so the header read "From the suite of" and there it stopped, as if mocking us with its withholding of information. Below someone had written the words: CHANGE YOUR MIND OR I WILL KILL YOU.
I looked up at Charity and found her gazing at me with a self-satisfied smile on her lips. She raised her glass and whispered, "And so it begins."
"She knew this would happen, Mr. Quant," Dottie said, never looking up from her handiwork. "Have no doubt about that."
"Oh it's true. It's true!" Charity crowed, sweeping her way towards Dottie and affectionately patting the older woman's sweatered shoulder. "You know me so well."
I studied the note, taking in everything I could, from the phrasing of the threat-direct, no nonsense; the instrument used-a blue ink pen; and the style of writing-simple block letters, much different from Charity's flowing script, obviously meant to disguise the writer's true handwriting.
"Do you recognize the writing?" It couldn't hurt to ask.
"Of course not," Charity answered.
I eyed the other two women. They shook their heads. I wondered if they couldn't identify the writer because the writing was disguised or because they simply did not know the handwriting of the other family members. The likelihood of anyone recognizing someone's handwriting has become increasingly remote as the world of electronic communication has taken over. Even so, the author had been careless, no doubt acting on an emotional response to Charity's announcement.
I faced my client purposefully. "You've put yourself in unnecessary danger," I said to her.
She pursed her lips then, and in a very serious manner told me, "You are incorrect, Mr. Quant. You see, I already was in unnecessary danger."
Our table for dinner that night in the main dining room consisted of Ted and Marsha, Charity and Dottie, Flora, Phyllis, Richard and me. It was casual night but you'd never know it by looking at Dottie and Flora who both seemed to have only one type of clothing in a narrow spectrum of bland colours.
"Marsha, dear," Charity declared, "you don't appear to be enjoying the shark."
Marsha had teased her hair until it looked like a see-through helmet of brown webbing. Her face might have been pretty were it not for a pointed chin (a la Wicked Witch) and eyebrows plucked in such a way as to give her a perpetual frown. She wore a navy-and-blue striped dress with shoulder pads befitting a linebacker-which was a fitting complement to her husband, Ted, who looked like a football player gone to pot. His once fine physique had remoulded itself over years of beer-and-pizza abuse into a puffer-fish version of itself, each deflated muscle group covered over by a gelatinous layer of potato chips, deep-fried food and cream sauce. Marsha had outfitted her blank-faced hubby in a matching navy-and-blue striped shirt that was intended to make him (next to her) look adorable but only managed tight-fitting awkwardness. "It's just fine," she lied, her shark in dill sauce untouched. She was too preoccupied to pay attention to her meal or Charity, her eyes across the room where her messy-haired young sons were seated at a table of fawning men who wore beautiful linen jackets and expensive jewellery.
"Really?" Charity kept on. "You haven't touched a bite. We could have saved the shark and served you a minnow." And she laughed at that in an unattractive way.
"I truly love eating shark," Phyllis interjected. "It's like cannibalizing my ex-husband."
Marsha shot Phyllis a look as if she'd just eaten a rotten oyster. And Phyllis noticed.
"What's the matter, honey? Never felt like eating your husband?" she asked with a cackle, shooting meaty Ted a come-hither look. "If not, I might take a bite."
"So tell me, Mr. Gray," Flora twittered nervously, hoping to change the subject. "What do you know about Tunisia? Have you been there before?"
"Do you really expect any of us to believe you had a husband?" Marsha said to Phyllis with a curl of her heavily painted upper lip.
Oh oh.
"I have," Richard began, warily eyeing the exchange between good drag queen and bad drag queen look-alikes. "Tunis itself has a very easygoing, laid-back air about it, certainly liberal by Islamic standards.
I think you'll quite enjo..."
"Do you really expect any of us to believe you haven't been checking out every bubble-butted twink passing by our table? Hoping for a little action on the side?" Phyllis cracked back, knowing not what she spoke of, but, as many do when cornered, she was making things up just to get in her barbs.
Marsha rose faster than a towel in a bathhouse, huffing and puffing and pointing a crimson-hued fingernail at her well-armed verbal opponent. "You take that back you...you...you disgrace of a man. You should be ashamed of yourself."
"Aunt Marsha, please," this from Flora.
Ted was looking wholly discomfited, trying hard to keep up with what was going on and not knowing enough to decide what to do or say. Finally he reached up for his wife's hand with a grease-stained one of his own and said, "Don't get them riled up, Marsha." He yanked on her sleeve, encouraging her to sit back down. "We're outnumbered here."
He was right. By this time several diners in our vicinity had abandoned their own sparkling dinner table conversations in favour of listening to ours-some with mirth, others with barely disguised disapproval.
Marsha looked around and, sensing she was a dartboard in a room full of poison arrows, quickly sat down.
"This is your fault," she barked in Charity's direction. "Putting us on this boat full of fairies and lezzies."
"Fairies and lezzies and drag queens, oh my. Fairies and lezzies and drag queens, oh my." An unamused Phyllis doing Dorothy.
Uncharacteristically, Charity had been sitting back, delighting in the wordplay. But now she made a noisy display of placing her elbows on the tabletop, one hand under her chin, fiery eyes glaring at Marsha.
"You're welcome to leave, my dear," she offered in a venom-tipped tone, her other hand flicking Marsha's attention towards the depthless sea just beyond the windows. "At any time."
"Look at you tonight!" a new voice boomed behind Charity, taking her by surprise. "You are a real vision, Char, a real vision."
Charity turned slightly in her chair to face a beaming James McNichol, inexplicably wearing a tuxedo on casual night along with a spit-and-polish pair of black and white wingtips. The entire dining room could smell his Aqua Velva.
"Oh for God's sake, Jimmy, you startled me. Care to join us? I'm sure Marsha wouldn't mind giving you her seat."
Marsha glowered and turned to her husband for support. Instead she found him digging into his meal like a gold prospector into a riverbed. "I'm just going to check on the boys," she sniffed, pushing back from her plate with an upturned nose. "You can take my spot if you want it."
I watched Marsha stalk away and considered where the Moshier family ranked on my list of suspects.
Thus far I'd noticed that Ted and Marsha, unlike their twin sons, were rather uncomfortable being surrounded by a boatload of homosexuals. But it wasn't until now that they...or at least Marsha, had shown her true colours as an all-out homophobe. Whereas the couple seemed to have already guessed, probably years ago, that Charity and Dottie were a couple, they'd put up with it to stay on Charity's-or rather her money's-good side. Now, with Charity's announcement redistributing all her wealth to charity, I guess Marsha couldn't hold it in any longer. I wondered if she'd later come to think of her outburst as a mistake. It certainly was if she thought there was any hope at all of Charity changing her mind. Or maybe, it didn't matter.. .if Marsha knew Charity wouldn't survive long enough to make the change to her will.
And Ted, well, I wasn't sure about him. He seemed to be less bothered by the whole thing than his wife. I knew from daughter Kayla that Ted and Marsha were not exactly enjoying marital bliss, so maybe he just didn't really care anymore. And as for Kayla, she was a forty-six-year-old, hard-luck barmaid in a teenager's body. I'd have to watch out for her. She was just the type to pull a few surprises from her bustier.
"No, no, no, by no means," James replied to empty air. Marsha had already run off to rescue her boys from the homosexual conversion ceremony she was sure was taking place across the room. "I don't mean to interrupt your dinner. I just wanted to get a jump on other would-be suitors and ask you, dear Charity, if you would do me the great honour of accompanying me to the dance to be held later this evening."
Charity focused on his face for a moment, as if she could actually see the marbles pouring out of his head. Phyllis let out a squawk but remained quiet after I gave her a little nudge under the table. Flora grimaced sickly, Richard appeared bemused by what was going on and Dottie was contentedly spearing vegetables with her fork, a tiny smile playing on her lips.
"Jimmy," Charity finally spoke. "If I accompany anyone to the dance, it will be my Dottie."
James straightened himself out and smiled beatifically at Dottie who kept on eating. "Oh, well, of course," he said magnanimously. "Dottie is not to be left alone in her room. Of course she will come too."
He winked at Charity. Then, before traipsing off, he added, "I look forward to seeing
both
of you there.
What a gay affair it will be."