Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality: The Complete Novels Wild Angel and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell (50 page)

Max nodded thoughtfully. “So Henry is smaller than you are.” Jody nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“I wonder if the other monsters pick on Henry because he’s so small.”

Jody stared at Max. Obviously, she had never thought about Henry’s problems.

“I think the other monsters would pick on a little monster like Henry,” Max continued.

Jody frowned. She was working through this new view of Henry, a small, scaly monster who had problems with his peers. It was a struggle, but her sympathy lay with the underdog.

“That’s not nice,” Jody said. “It’s not nice to pick on someone smaller than you are.”

Max shrugged. “Well, some monsters can be kind of mean. I don’t know whether Henry is or not, but those other monsters might be.”

Jody was still frowning.

“I wonder why Henry hides under your bed,” Max mused. “It can’t be very comfortable down there.”

Jody thought about this. “I think he’s hiding from the other monsters,” she said at last.

“And he figures he’s safe under the bed because it’s dark and the other monsters can’t find him there.” Max nodded. “I think you’re right.”

Jody bit her lip, considering that possibility. She was, Susan thought, growing fond of Henry—and angry at those other monsters, the mean ones.

Max leaned back, looking out the window at the dark ocean waters. “Sometimes, darkness can be useful,” he said. “It hides many things.”

At that moment, the lights came on.

Nancy smiled. “Oh, good.” She spoke to Jody. “Now I can take you back to bed.”

The little girl went without a protest. She was, Susan thought, still deep in thought about Henry and the other monsters.

“You did a good job with Jody,” Susan told Max as they walked to their staterooms. “Seems like you really know your monsters.”

Max shrugged. “It’s part of the business,” he said. “As a writer, you have to know the bad guys as well as the good guys.”

“I think you had Jody feeling sorry for Henry by the end,” Susan said.

Max nodded. “Oh, Henry isn’t such a bad fellow,” he said. “A sweetheart, as monsters go.”

After the lights came back on, Tom checked the passenger list. No one named Patrick Murphy was on the list. As Tom already knew, Weldon Merrimax was not on the list either. A check of the crew roster revealed no Patrick Murphy. He had been dressed in old fashioned clothes, which suggested that he might be part of the melodrama performance, but no member of the entertainment staff matched Mr. Perkins’ description of Patrick.

It was past midnight by the time Tom completed his interview with Mr. Perkins and arranged for the man to come to his office in the morning. As each passenger boarded the ship, an ID photo was taken. Tom figured Ian could sort out the photos of men of the appropriate age—which would probably be a few hundred individuals. Tom would have Mr. Perkins review the photos in the unlikely chance that he might spot Weldon or Patrick.

Tom had more faith in the memory of Nic, the bartender at the lotus Eaters’ lounge. A bright-eyed young Irishman, Nic remembered both men—Weldon had paid cash for his drink, an unusual occurrence on the cruise ship. And the other fellow had offered to pay for his drink with gold dust.

“I figured him for one of those historians or a player in the show,” Nic said. “It was either that or he was off in the head.”

The man had been wearing a cowboy hat and a sheriff’s star. “He came up to the bar, looking wild,” Nic said. “He told me ‘I reckon this is the strangest dream I’ve ever had.’ So I laughed and asked him what he wanted to drink.” The man had ordered a whiskey. When Nic asked for his cruise card, the man asked him what the hell he was talking about.

Nic shrugged. “I told him it was a card with his name on it—but if he gave me his name, I’d see what I could do. He told me his name was Pat Murphy, so I punched him into the computer, found his name on the list, and charged his account.”

“Pat Murphy?” Tom said.

“That’s right. Stateroom 144.”

Tom nodded wearily. The drink had been charged to Susan’s friend, Pat.

“So d’you really think he killed that fella?” the bartender asked. Tom shrugged. “Hard to say: no blood, no sign of the body.”

“Well, that’s easy enough to explain,” Nic said. “Over the side, splash, and the body’s long gone.”

Tom nodded. Hoist the body over the railing and drop it in the ocean. Few people were out on deck after dark. Even if the crime were discovered and the engines were cut immediately, momentum would carry the ship half a mile or more before it stopped. No one would ever find the body. “Easy to dispose of the body, but not so easy to get away with it,” Tom said. “If there’s a murderer aboard, he’s not going anywhere.”

Nic nodded.

“Keep your eyes open,” Tom advised the bartender. “Let me know if you spot anything unusual. I’ll be talking to the captain about a bonus for anyone who supplies information that helps me with this.” Nic nodded solemnly. Tom left him, knowing that word about the incident would spread fast. The
Odyssey
was a small town, and gossip was a way of life. By morning, everyone in the crew would be on the lookout for Weldon.

Tom left a message for the purser—asking him to tell the cabin stewards of the situation and to alert Tom if anyone noticed evidence of a wounded passenger: bloody towels, a cabin that the steward was not allowed to clean. Then, just a few hours before the time Tom usually got up, he went to bed.

Until Tom located Weldon and Patrick, it would be difficult for him to proceed. Until he found or identified the victim, Tom couldn’t question the victim’s friends and acquaintances. Without the body, he had little physical evidence. He bagged the playing cards and the drinking glasses. If it ever became clear that a crime had actually taken place, Tom might use fingerprints on those items to link the criminal to the crime.

But so far, all he had was the mumbled testimony of a drunken man. Nothing more.

That night, as Susan fell asleep, she thought about Jody’s monster. All covered with scales, the little girl had said. Lots of teeth and big claws.

Susan remembered a monster like that from Maurice Sendak’s children’s book,
Where the Wild Things Are.
A fierce but cuddly sort of monster, she thought.

When Susan was growing up, she had had a monster under her bed, too. Her monster had been one of the ones that carried away bad little girls. Her mother had told her about those monsters. They snatched little girls who were untidy or noisy or bossy, little girls who stayed up too late or asked too many questions. Susan’s mother hadn’t said exactly what the monsters did to the bad little girls. She didn’t have to. Susan had had an excellent imagination, something that her mother had deplored. Susan had known the monsters did something dreadful to the little girls they captured.

Susan’s mother had not really liked children much. Susan realized that now. Her mother had wanted a little girl who was tidy, quiet, and compliant, who went to bed without complaint and accepted her mother’s pronouncements without question. Susan had done her best to be that child, but it had always been an imperfect imitation.

Susan fell asleep imagining Jody’s monster crouching under her bed, hiding from the larger, meaner monsters. She preferred Jody’s monster to her own.

It’s shaping up to be a very promising cruise. At the dance last night, I ran into Ian, the cute programmer who is seated at our table at dinner. Just my type—a little nerdy, a little too smart for his own good, obviously aware of both my intelligence and my feminine charms and therefore sweetly attentive.

We had a few glasses of champagne and we ended up sitting out by the pool, beneath a canopy of brilliant stars, talking about quantum mechanics, the nature of reality, the Bermuda Triangle, and Weldon Merrimax.

He asked me what my dissertation was about, and I told him in detail, not sparing him the mathematical analysis. He listened intently with an earnest expression of geeky concentration. Ah, the way to this Bad Grrl’s heart is through her dissertation. He seemed quite intrigued by the notion of superposed realities.

I asked him what he was doing on the
Odyssey,
and he told me about the cruise card system and how it tracked passengers. And he told me about an intriguing glitch in the system. It seems that Max Merriwell’s pseudonym, Weldon Merrimax, had bought a drink and bilked a fellow passenger at poker.

“I thought it might be a problem in the system,” Ian said. “But it turned out that the bartender let someone sign as Weldon without checking the computer. Just human error.” He shrugged. “But it still could get interesting. You know about that note that Max received this morning?”

Susan had told me about it, of course. Apparently Tom had shown the note to Ian.

“The handwriting on the note matches the signature on the charge slip,” Ian said, smiling that charming, geek-boy smile. “And it all happened just as the ship moved into the Bermuda Triangle.”

Ian is quite enthusiastic about the Bermuda Triangle. He told me more than I cared to know about the hundreds of ships that sailed into the Triangle, never to emerge. He looked quite mischievous as he described planes that had vanished without a trace. I asked him point blank if he believed the stories about paranormal phenomena in the Bermuda Triangle and he grinned. “I enjoy them,” he said, and he wouldn’t say a word one way or the other about belief.

In that same spirit, I told him that he didn’t need to look to the Bermuda Triangle for an explanation of Weldon Merrimax’s sudden appearance. “I don’t think you need to look any farther than Max Merriwell,” I said. “The man is a vortex of possibilities. He spins around and flings out possible realities, inhabited by Mary Maxwell, Weldon Merrimax, and god knows what other versions of himself.” I explained to him that under certain circumstances, quantum phenomena could intrude into our experience. (The Bose-Einstein Condensation is one example of such a phenomena. )

Around about then, the lights went out. We stayed where we were and continued to talk about possibilities. I rather hoped he might take ad vantage of the darkness to make a pass, but he seemed a little too intrigued by the possibilities of quantum mechanics and the I
Ching
and the Bermuda Triangle. We kept talking until the lights came back on.

“Now you tell me a story,” the dragon said. “Make it an interesting one. Make sure there’s a dragon in it.”

The woman hesitated for a moment, considering all the stories involving dragons that she had heard over the years. In most of them, the dragon met an untimely end. She thought it prudent to avoid telling any of those.

“There was once a young woman who left her home and family and went to seek her fortune,” she began.

—from
Here Be Dragons

by Mary Maxwell

Susan woke just as the
Odyssey
was entering the harbor of Hamilton, the capital city of Bermuda. She sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes. Through the sliding glass doors, she could see Pat on the balcony, sitting in one of the two lounge chairs. A coffee pot and a plate of pastries were on the small round table beside her.

Susan pulled on a plush white terry cloth robe with the
Odyssey
logo on the pocket and joined her. The air was warm. In the distance, she could see the roofs of houses in Hamilton.

“I was beginning to wonder if you’d ever get up,” Pat said. “Want some coffee?”

Pat poured Susan a cup of coffee and told her to help herself to one of the pastries. “I ordered them from room service. And it’s all free. Isn’t that great?” Pat had a starving graduate student’s appreciation of free food.

Susan sipped her coffee. “So where were you when the lights went out?” she asked Pat.

“Out by the pool, talking with Ian.”

Susan raised her eyebrows, inviting her friend to say more.

“We just hung out and talked about physics, the Bermuda Triangle, and that note Max got from Weldon Merrimax.”

Susan stared at Pat. “What?”

Pat grinned, enjoying Susan’s surprise. “Well, Ian said it was from Weldon. The handwriting matches the charge slip that Weldon Merrimax signed.”

“Wait a second. Weldon Merrimax signed a charge slip?”

“Yeah, someone posing as Weldon bought a drink in Aphrodite’s Alehouse the other night, then cheated some other passenger at poker.” Pat shrugged. “Weird, huh? Anyway, the lights went out, Ian and I talked for a while, then the lights came on, and I came to bed.”

“I wonder if that’s the guy Tom was looking for,” Susan murmured.

“What guy?” Pat asked.

Susan described her encounter with the guy in the bar.

“So then you were sitting alone in the bar and Tom showed up?” Susan took another bite of her cheese Danish and licked sugar from her fingers. “I got the impression that the bartender called him.

He wanted to talk to that guy I’d been talking to. He said something about some confusion over a cruise card.” Susan poured a second cup of coffee.

“So you had a drink with Weldon Merrimax, and then Tom showed up.” Pat was delighted.

Susan shook her head. “Tom was just doing his job. Remember, I didn’t bring you along to play matchmaker.”

“I’m just making an observation, that’s all. Max told us to make careful observations of the world around us. That’s all I’m doing.”

Susan shook her head again, smiling. Pat was irrepressible. Looking out over the sparkling water, Susan admired the houses, painted in beautiful pastel shades of blue and pink and yellow.

“Hey, I found out that we can take a one-day scuba-diving class while we’re here,” Pat said. “I figured I’d go to Max’s workshop and then go diving. Do you want to come?”

Susan shook her head. She wasn’t a strong swimmer and the idea of going underwater with a tank strapped to her back didn’t appeal to her. “I don’t think so. But you go ahead.”

“What are you going to do?”

Susan frowned. She wanted to explore the town, but she was hesitant to do it alone. “I had thought about doing some shopping in Hamilton.” She hesitated. “I guess I could buy a map in the gift shop. But I’ll probably get lost.”