Dark Passage Read online

  I volunteered to fetch Julie, only to discover that it wasn’t the enormous selection of desserts that was holding her up; it was – according to the name printed on his Crawford Family T-shirt – blue-eyed, sandy-haired, beachbum-buff Connor. If I had been decades younger … well, never mind. Julie hovered over the sneeze hood separating her from the chocolate-layer cake, feigning indifference as Connor urged her to try it.

  I swept in like the Wicked Witch of the West. ‘Say goodbye to Connor, sweetie. It’s time to go to our staterooms.’

  Julie grabbed a handful of M&Ms, waggled the fingers of her free hand at Connor, said, ‘See ya!’ and trotted along beside me out of the café. Georgina and Ruth had gone on ahead, so we followed them down the elevators to deck four, amidships on the starboard side.

  Ruth was waiting for me in the narrow corridor, leaning against a framed photograph of Santorini – whitewashed houses and churches at sunset, perched along volcanic cliffs. I delivered Julie to her mother, then watched while Ruth slotted her card into the keycard lock, turned the handle, pushed the door open and stepped inside. ‘Wow!’ she said.

  Our room was tastefully decorated, spotless and smelled like freshly laundered sheets. Our bags were waiting for us, too, neatly laid out on protective leather pads at the foot of our beds. A sliding glass door led outside to a balcony furnished with a small, round table and pair of wooden deck chairs. I wandered over, opened the door and stepped out into the breezy, early summer afternoon. Today our view was the city of Baltimore. Tomorrow, I knew, we’d be looking out over the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Near the door to the balcony were a two-cushion sofa and a coffee table on which sat a small bottle of champagne buried up to the neck in a bucket of ice. ‘There’s a card with it,’ Ruth said, picking it up. ‘It’s an invitation. Seems Captain Halikias is inviting you and a guest to a cocktail reception tomorrow night.’

  ‘Cool,’ I said, unzipping my suitcase, looking for my toiletries. ‘You wanna be my guest?’

  ‘What’s the Neptune Club?’ Ruth wanted to know, glancing up from the invitation.

  ‘It’s a frequent flyer rewards program for cruising. Paul and I signed up ages ago. Remember that cruise we took to Alaska’s Inner Passage?’ I looked up. ‘I think that Whats-his-name Simonides bought out that cruise line, so the points carried over.’

  A polite tap-tap-tap interrupted my explanation. Thinking it’d be Julie or Georgina, I opened the door wide. ‘Is there anything I can get for you, Mrs Ives?’ inquired our steward, whose name was Rodolfo, from the Philippines.

  ‘I think we’re all set, Rodolfo, but thanks so much for checking.’

  As Rudolfo backed out the doorway, smiling broadly, Ruth reached for the champagne. ‘This is what I call a warm welcome!’ She began to remove the foil from the cork. ‘Shall I do the honors?’

  ‘Absolutely! But wait, let’s get Georgina.’

  I thumped the ball of my fist on the door to the adjoining cabin. It swung open almost immediately, and Georgina stuck her head in. ‘Is this a private party, or can anyone join?’

  I laughed. ‘Come in, come in. And bring a glass. Where’s Julie?’

  ‘Taking pictures of the cabin on her iPhone and posting them to Facebook. What else?’

  Ruth untwisted the wire hood that held the champagne cork in place, aimed the bottle at the open balcony door. ‘Look out below!’ The cork shot from the bottle and disappeared over the balcony railing. ‘Ooops!’ Ruth giggled. She divided the champagne equally among the three glasses. ‘Cheers!’ she said, handing a glass to me.

  I took it and tapped my glass against hers, then Georgina’s. ‘Cheers! To a wonderful cruise!’

  ‘And remember,’ Ruth said before taking a careful sip. ‘What happens with sisters, stays with sisters.’

  FIVE

  The Chesapeake Bay Bridge is a major dual-span bridge in the U.S. state of Maryland. Spanning the Chesapeake Bay, it connects the state’s rural Eastern Shore region with the more urban Western Shore. With shore-to-shore lengths of 4.33 and 4.35 miles, the two spans of the bridge form the longest fixed water crossing in Maryland and are also among the world’s longest over-water structures. A 3,200-foot suspension span over the western channel with a maximum clearance of 186 feet is high enough to accommodate ocean-going vessels and tall ships.

  Wikipedia, November, 2012

  ‘Where R U?’ Paul had texted.

  I stared at the display on my iPhone in disbelief, then began typing. ‘AT&T signal amazingly strong on Mars.’ I wasn’t as fluent in texting abbreviations as I ought to be in this day and age, and Tweeting was a total mystery. I should take lessons from Julie. LOL.

  Rather than text me back, Paul telephoned. I put the phone on speaker and ’fessed up. ‘We’re on the top deck, sitting in lounge chairs, drinking adult beverages and waiting to pass under the Bay Bridge.’ I’d passed under the bridge many times before, of course, but always on a small pleasure craft. This time, I’d be approximately one hundred and fifty feet closer to its massive, steel undercarriage.

  Georgina raised her glass. ‘It’s awesome.’

  ‘Connie and I decided to take Sea Song out,’ Paul continued. ‘We are going to try to rendezvous with you as you pass by Annapolis.’

  Paul and his sister, Connie, share a lifelong love of sailing. Sea Song is Connie’s aging Tartan thirty-seven sloop. ‘Did you bring a camera?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘We will stand at the rail and pose for you, then.’

  Paul laughed. ‘We won’t be able to get that close, Hannah!’

  Paul explained about AIS, a gizmo on Sea Song’s chart plotter that allowed them to track the position and speed of commercial ships. I learned that Islander was exactly one point three miles north of the Bay Bridge, travelling south at approximately twenty-two knots. ‘Good to know, Professor Ives,’ I said, although I could have come to the same conclusion by simply heaving my lazy bones out of the lounger and peering over the rail.

  ‘So, other than sampling the selection of adult beverages,’ Paul asked, ‘what have you been up to?’

  ‘We got settled in, then had a pretty serious fire drill. Whoop-whoop-whoop, grab your life preservers, report to your assigned lifeboat stations, crew takes roll-call, the whole shebang.’ When I paused to take a sip of my mojito, Ruth grabbed the hand that held my phone and moved it closer to her mouth. ‘Exhausting.’

  ‘Ha ha ha!’ Paul said.

  ‘It amazes me,’ I continued in a more serious tone after reclaiming my hand, ‘how on such a huge ship you keep running into the same people.’ I explained about Cliff and Liz Rowe who I’d met again in the spectacular, sky-view, multi-story crystal and glass Atrium after the fire drill while buying a latte at Café Cino. ‘There must be a hundred members of the Crawford clan on board, and I swear they’re all assigned to cabins on our floor, uh, deck.’

  ‘By their red shirts ye shall know them,’ Georgina muttered.

  ‘Amen,’ added Ruth, ‘although they’ll have to wash their shirts sometime, I suppose. Then what will we do?’

  As if they knew we were talking about them, a boisterous group of five young Crawfords sauntered by, each carrying a long-neck beer wrapped in a foam koozie. The young men didn’t appear the least bit interested in the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, stopping instead to admire one of the uniformed youth counselors as she hooked herself into a bungee harness and began testing out the trampoline.

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ I said. Passengers were rising from their chairs and flocking to the rail. While keeping Paul on the line, I joined them, elbowing my way into a space between two couples on the bow. I felt my pulse quicken. ‘We’re about to pass under the bridge!’ I told my husband as all around me, passengers began oh-ing and ah-ing. ‘It’s hard to believe we can actually fit under it! I’m hanging up now! I’m going to take a video. Love you! ’Bye!’

  I tapped the video app just in time to pan the entire four-mile length of the
bridge, then tipped my head way back to point the lens skyward as we passed under the elaborate superstructure of the westbound span. I captured the spectacular view between the two spans as they curved gently away like a giant Erector set toward the molten ball of late afternoon sun, then panned up again as we passed under the eastbound span where the rumble and whine of the cars and trucks as they passed overhead was almost deafening. Although I knew there had to be plenty of headroom between the smokestacks of the Islander and the undercarriage of the bridge, the illusion was so compelling that passengers raised their arms as if riding a roller coaster, straining to touch its girders.

  ‘There’s Sea Song!’ Ruth cried, pointing in the direction of the three obsolete navy telecommunication towers that dominated Greenbury Point, towers so tall and well-lit that they served as navigational aides for local mariners.

  I shaded my eyes and squinted. Staying prudently well out of the sea lanes, Sea Song’s sail was a tiny triangle of white, far out of range of my iPhone camera. In case Paul had binoculars and was looking our way, however, I waved. ‘Paul’s sweet to do that,’ Ruth commented.

  ‘He’s a bit of a nut, but I love him,’ I said.

  Dressed neatly, but casually, we dined that night at a table for four near a huge oval window, a table that would be ours at dinner for the duration of the voyage. Leaving the Bay, our view was of Maryland’s western shore. From sailing with Connie, I recognized landmarks as we passed – Annapolis, the South River, the wide mouth of the West River where it opens up and divides into the Rhode. We were finishing dessert – a stunning peach melba – when we sailed by the chalky banks of Maryland’s towering Calvert Cliffs, site of the nuclear power plant that kept our lights on back at home in Annapolis.

  After dinner, Georgina and I deposited Julie with a youth counselor at Tidal Wave, the trendy, flashy, seagoing teen center they’d explored earlier. In the hours since we’d last seen it, the space had been transformed into a disco. While a burly photographer snapped pictures of the gyrating crowd of teens, a DJ wearing headphones the size of Princess Leia’s buns called the shots from his perch on top of a tall stool. Awash in an undulating sea of multicolored lights, Phreakin’ Phil – or so I assumed from the name stenciled on a woofer by his feet – presided over an assortment of turntables, MP3 players and mixers, flanked by a pair of tall, narrow speakers, looking for all the world as if he were at the helm of Mission Control in Houston.

  ‘It’s karaoke night, boys and girls,’ he drawled into the microphone as he cued up the next number, a song I’d never heard before. The singer was ditching her boyfriend for good, and she didn’t sound terribly broken up about it, either.

  I asked Julie who the artist was. ‘Taylor Swift,’ Julie said, her body jiving in time to the catchy beat. ‘She’s my absolutely fave!’

  ‘I thought you were in love with Justin Bieber, Julie.’

  My niece screwed up her face. Even in the inadequate lighting it said, plain as day, you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me. ‘I am so over Justin Bieber, Aunt Hannah. Besides, he’s going with that Selena. She sucks!’

  ‘Thank heaven’s for small favors,’ her mother commented, raising her voice so I could hear her over the chorus of ‘we are never, ever, ever, evers’ blasting out of Phreakin’ Phil’s speakers. ‘But I don’t like you using that word, Julie.’

  ‘Whatever,’ my niece grumped.

  Floyd from Arizona, a twenty-something counselor who was ruggedly handsome in a Hugh Jackman sort of way, explained that Phreakin’ Phil – Phreak to his friends – was a pro at beat-matching, phrasing and slip-cueing, but Floyd might as well have been speaking to me in Greek. Smiling broadly, his teeth whiter than white under the psychedelic lighting, and oozing boyish charm out of every pore, Floyd helped Julie overcome her reluctance to join the karaoke party. After Floyd worked his magic, Julie shyly agreed to sing ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ by Bonnie Tyler toward the end of the evening, but she made us promise we’d be nowhere in the vicinity.

  Amused, we agreed. Georgina and I left Julie in Floyd’s presumably capable hands and wandered off to find Ruth. She’d promised to save seats for us in the Trident Lounge, four decks down from Tidal Wave and at the other end of the ship. We found her there, holding down the fort at a small round table. ‘The place was filling up, so I ordered drinks for you both. I hope they’re all right.’

  I sank gratefully into the upholstered chair, then reached for my drink. ‘Ah, a mojito. You know me too well, sister.’

  Ruth grinned.

  From her frown, I gathered that Georgina wasn’t quite so pleased with her drink – a gorgeous, peachy-pink mai tai, loaded with fruit, but she thanked Ruth for it anyway. ‘When does the show start?’ she asked, her lips pursed around the straw.

  Ruth checked her watch. ‘Eight o’clock. Any minute now.’

  As if the producer had overheard, the lounge lights dimmed, the spotlights flared and four middle-aged musicians – two guitarists, a pianist and a drummer – charged onto the stage. They wore white, button-free tuxedos with Nehru-style collars over electric-blue vests. Matching blue-striped ties were knotted at the necks of ordinary, pointed collar white dress shirts.

  Georgina choked on her drink, coughed and whispered, ‘The Da Doo Ron Rons are Japanese?’

  ‘Korean,’ Ruth corrected. ‘Or so says Wikipedia.’

  I melted into my chair. ‘This should be interesting.’

  ‘They’re a rock and roll band, so they cover tunes of the fifties, sixties and seventies,’ Ruth continued while staring at the stage and absent-mindedly chasing olives around the bottom of her dry martini glass with a swizzle stick. ‘A good choice for our demographic, I should think.’

  Without preamble, the combo launched into their signature tune, ‘Da Doo Ron Ron,’ a faithful tribute to The Crystals rather than that young upstart, Shaun Cassidy, who covered and re-popularized the song in the late seventies. Then they segued into an equally authentic cover of the Monkees’ ‘Daydream Believer’ with the lead guitar channeling Davy Jones.

  The lead guitarist was equally well cast as Jim Morrison. ‘Morrison could light my fire any day,’ Ruth said as she flagged down a server and ordered another round. ‘His father was a navy admiral, did you know that? When Dad was stationed in San Diego they overlapped.’

  I raised my glass. ‘Missed opportunity, Ruth, but then, had you actually snagged the guy, you’d have been a widow at twenty-something.’

  She raised her glass. ‘True, but a rich one.’

  The bass guitarist sported a Beatles-style do and managed a credible Paul McCartney, but when the voice of Elvis Presley or Roy Orbison was required, the job fell to the pianist. Alternately gravelly or sweet, the Korean’s amazing voice soared effortlessly into the higher octaves in his rendition of ‘Oh, Pretty Woman’ which he performed complete with Orbison’s trademark dark glasses. By the time he lit into ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’ the whole audience was singing along. At the end of the set, we put our drinks down on the table and clapped until our palms stung.

  I went to bed that night with an earworm. Long after Ruth had turned out her light, plunging our stateroom into darkness, I lay on my back with Orbison’s ‘Crying’ looping through my brain.

  The tune was still haunting me at breakfast the following morning – cry-y-y-y-ing, over you, cry-y-y-y-ing, over you – as hard to shake as ‘It’s a Small World After All,’ until Cliff and Liz Rowe showed up at our table and drove the melody, and all other thoughts, clean out of my head.

  SIX

  ‘Invisibility was the ultimate concealment.’

  Jim Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant,

  Da Capo, 2004, p. 90

  We’d agreed to meet for breakfast at 7.30 a.m. but that plan got shot out of the water when Julie, burrowed deep into the sheets under her duvet, had turned into a block of stone. Georgina stood in the connecting doorway, gazing back into the darkness of her own cabin. She excused her daughter with an indulgent smile. ‘Julie’s not used
to staying up so late, even on weekends. If Scott knew she didn’t get in until almost midnight last night he’d have a conniption.’

  I checked my watch; it was nearly 8.00 a.m. I was working on a headache, and if I didn’t pump some caffeine into my veins pretty soon, I’d be more than grumpy. ‘Ruth and I will go on down, then. Shall we bring you something, or do you want to call room service?’

  Georgina stepped all the way into our stateroom and closed the door quietly behind her. ‘I’m coming, too. Let her sleep. If she wants breakfast later she can pick up something to eat in the Firebird.’

  My sisters and I headed aft toward the Oceanus dining room, conveniently located – at least for us – on deck four. We emerged from the narrow passageway into a bright, spacious lobby that was also home to the Oracle, the Islander’s trendy wine bar. An attractive young barkeep was already at work dumping ice into large, shell-shaped basins – one at each end of the sprawling, horseshoe-shaped bar – where splits of sparkling wine would be kept properly chilled. I made a note to check out the wine bar later.

  Breakfast and lunch aboard the Islander was open seating, but that didn’t mean it was a free-for-all. We were met by the maître d’, who greeted us like long-lost cousins, then handed us off to the first in a long line of servers – Paolo from Brazil, who escorted us to a table for eight near a window. Not that there was much to see. Overnight we’d sailed out of the Chesapeake Bay, past Norfolk, Virginia and into the Atlantic Ocean, well out of sight of land.

  A squad of Paolo’s fellow waiters materialized out of the woodwork to hold our chairs until we were seated, whip open our napkins and float them gently into our laps. Then, with a slight bow, we were each provided with a menu.

  Ruth studied the menu through her reading glasses. ‘Ah, just like home.’

  Georgina giggled. ‘I don’t know about you guys, but I have Eggs Benedict every morning.’