Deadshifted (17 page)

Not big enough. “But shouldn’t we know?” I pressed. “Maybe we could move them down, or put
X
’s on the doors—something.” Anything that would get me permission to do a room-to-room search. I would pull the entire ship apart to find Asher if I had to.

“If you don’t authorize it, I’ll go do it anyhow. You can’t stop me.” My voice rose as Raluca frowned.

“I’ll go with her,” Jorge volunteered.

Dr. Haddad emerged from behind his desk at the commotion and eyed us all with equal displeasure. I had Asher’s word he was competent, but I doubted the man had ever had a decent bedside manner. Raluca leaned over to whisper something in his ear, and he sighed. “Five people can go.” He held up two fingers and pointed at Jorge and me. “The troublemakers. Then—” He began to look around. “Her.” He pointed at the woman whose son was Rory’s age—I assumed he’d passed by virtue of being away from him—“and him, and you.” He jabbed his finger at a man with a startlingly bad self-tan, and at Nathaniel, who’d been standing in the back. I felt a silent thrill at his being included in our number. Maybe I’d get a chance to talk to him alone.

“I want to go too,” Rory volunteered.

“No.” Raluca shook her head immediately. “We need you here.”

And I realized what the doctor was doing: giving us people he, or Raluca, wanted gone.

“Don’t I get a choice?” the tan-man asked.

The doctor narrowed his eyes. “I caught you trying to steal Valium.” He looked around and spotted someone. “Marius—you’re in charge of this mess. Take a master key and a radio. And this.” He disappeared back into to the curtained room, returning with a paper list that he handed to Marius. “Check the manifest as you go. Putting X’s on the doors is not a bad idea,” he said, glancing at me with a grunt, then turning to our small group as a whole. “The medical rescue ship will be here in three hours. That’s all the time you’ve got. Wash your hands before you go.”

Then the doctor darted back into his room like a moray eel. Raluca gave our group a pained look. “The medical team’s on radio station five. Good luck,” she said, and walked after the doctor.

*   *   *

I gave Marius a sympathetic glance as the rest of the volunteers followed Raluca back inside, grilled cheeses largely uneaten. He shrugged. “The doctor’s always disliked me. Where is your man, my countryman?”

I shrugged back at him and tried to look competent, but with a side of damsel in distress, just in case it helped my cause. “I’m not sure.”

“Ah. So that’s why you want to do this,” he said, and then turned to address all of us. “We’ll go up and search room-to-room, breaking up into groups of three and doing both sides of the floor simultaneously.” He started making hand gestures to indicate what our plan of attack would be, which sealed my assumption that he was ex-military, and began directing us down the hall. “Head out.”

Marius opened up a door that said
STAFF ONLY
and loaded us into the freight elevator behind it.

“I can’t believe we have to do this,” said the tan-man who’d been roped in. The woman was still sobbing quietly beside me as Marius pressed number 9.

“No one’s holding a gun to your head,” Nathaniel said, then after a dramatic pause, “yet.”

Tan-man leaned forward, pressing the crying woman back, until she stepped on my shoe.

“If we have to do this, we’ll be doing it in an orderly fashion,” Marius said before a fight could start. “We’ll use
X
’s for rooms that we’ve cleared,
O
’s for rooms that are empty, and
S
’s for ones with people who are sick.” He paused to look around and make sure we weren’t all idiots. “Knock first—give the guests a chance to answer. Some of the fancy rooms are big, and some of the guests are slow or deaf. Then, if no one answers, go in and look around. Clear from room to room, including bathrooms, closets, and balconies. Okay?”

“There’s only one master key?” Jorge asked.

Marius nodded. “And it’s mine. I’m in charge of this expedition.”

The elevator doors opened and we spilled out onto the ninth floor’s very nice carpeting. “Outside rooms—you, you, and you.” He pointed to me, the other woman, and Jorge. “Inside rooms, us three.” He pointed to himself, Nathaniel, and Tan-man.

“Boys versus girls,” Nathaniel said with a shark-like grin.

“Quite,” Jorge said, aligning himself on our “ladies” side.

Marius looked at the sheet the doctor had given him. “You all have the Averys. We’ve got the Steinmetzes. Start knocking,” Marius commanded, leaning in to unlock our door and rap loudly on it while doing so by way of example.

Jorge clicked his heels and saluted him ironically.

*   *   *

Our door didn’t open all the way; there was still a latch closed at the top. That was good, I guessed—it meant someone was still inside.

“Hello?” I called through the gap as Marius’s group disappeared into the room behind us.

“What’s your name?” Jorge asked the crying woman.

She sniffled some. “Kate.”

“Okay. I’m not getting fresh or anything, but if you need to, you can hold my hand,” Jorge said, offering it out. Kate shook her head and gave him a sad smile.

At that moment, I would have gladly held Jorge’s hand. It would be nice to find some human comfort in all this mess. But there was an entire ship to search and only three hours to do it in. “Hello?” I asked the gap between the door and doorjamb again. “Mr. and Mrs. Avery?”

“Who are you?” A woman’s startled face appeared on the other side.

I wasn’t entirely prepared for someone standing and well. “I’m—I’m Edie Spence. I’m with the medical team. We’re here to check in on our guests. Is there anyone here needing medical attention?” I tried to sound official. I think Marius would have approved.

The woman’s eye searched me up and down, and then the door closed and reopened fully, latch undone. When she saw Jorge and Kate standing outside she frowned and clutched at her chest. That would be just great, if she were fine up until the point where seeing our trio gave her a surprise heart attack.

“Mrs. Avery?” I said, holding up my list, trying to seem official. “Are you and your husband okay?”

She got over the shock of seeing us, and composed herself quickly. “Of course we are. Why wouldn’t we be?”

“Can we see your husband too?” Visual confirmation was best.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Ask ’em why they’re here!” someone shouted from the back.

“They want to see us,” she shouted back.

“Ask them why room service is running slow!” yelled the distant voice.

The woman looked archly at me. “Well? Why is it?”

The ship swung to one side as a wave hit it. The ocean was getting rougher as the storm neared. I inhaled sharply. Jorge took my nausea-induced silence for anger and stepped in. “We’re part of a rescue mission—”

I started shaking my head as soon as the words were out of Jorge’s mouth.

“We want to go on the rescue ship. We want to get out of here,” she said, cutting Jorge off.

There was a certain kind of person who, no matter how much life had given them, would always be worried that other people were getting more. I started backpedaling. “It’s not a rescue ship, it’s a medical emergency ship. We’re here making sure that no one in this room is experiencing a medical emergency.”

“I’m almost out of wine!” shouted whomever she was related to in the back.

“That’s not a medical emergency,” I said flatly.

“It’s an emergency for me!”

Kate drew herself up to her full five-nothing height. “Look, I just watched my son die horribly downstairs. None of you all look that sick.”

Mrs. Avery looked aghast. I smiled and didn’t even care that it was fake looking. Another minute of this and I would be happy to throw up all of this lady’s shoes. “We’re glad you’re all present and accounted for. Thanks!” I reached in and slammed the door on us for her.

“That was a little abrupt,” Jorge said, finely tweezed eyebrows rising with the hint of an amused smile.

“Sorry.” Kate shrugged.

“Don’t be. I like your style.” I nodded at her. “No one calls it a rescue ship again, okay?” They both nodded.

Marius and his group reappeared in the hall. “Any luck?”

“Can I scratch a dick onto the doorjamb? I feel that symbol would be most descriptive of the occupants inside,” Jorge said. Marius made the kind of pained face that said he knew this was a bad idea all along.

“What about you all?” I asked.

“No one was home.” Marius held up the master key. “Onward.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

We knocked at the next door as Marius unlocked it for us. I didn’t know if I should be relieved or upset that no one answered. I gave Jorge and Kate a look and together we pushed in.

The room was grand. Literally. It had high ceilings—and a piano, bolted in a decorative fashion to the floor. I checked the list. “Mr. and Mrs. Inman?” I called out. No response. Jorge shrugged and started walking in.

We went into a living room bigger than some apartments I’d had. Kate and I went off to the right and Jorge went left. There was a grand bathroom with a grand shower and a grand tub—miles of marble, exquisitely soft towels, and expensive creams and lotions, the spackle of the wealthy-old. Then a bedroom with a huge flat-screen TV, with clothing and shoes tossed out. No one was here. All their belongings, clothing, toiletries. It was a ghost town—a fancy-ass ghost town. Asher was nowhere in sight.

Kate’s thoughts were still next door. “Those people are in a room like this, right?”

I grunted. “Probably.”

Kate’s eyes narrowed. “How come I had to lose my son, and they got all this?”

“One of life’s shitty mysteries,” Jorge answered her from the hallway. “Nothing over here. But the door to the balcony over here is unlocked.”

The door to the balcony on our side was locked, but I still went outside, just in case. The
Maraschino
seesawed back and forth, and I realized that on this higher floor there was greater motion from the sea, which was doing unkind things to my stomach. I didn’t want to lean out too far and see the wino next door—although there was a large partition set up between cabins, so that each fancy room’s residents would feel like they had their own private view—but I did look over the edge. Nine floors up, the water looked very far down.

“I think we know what happened to them.” Jorge swung the open balcony door back and forth behind me. “Bye-bye birdie.”

Kate’s expression went cold. “Hopefully.”

*   *   *

We returned to the hallway where Marius was drawing another
O
on the outside of the room. “Same here,” I said, in response to his curious look. Nathaniel and Tan-man were hanging back behind him. Tan-man still looked unhappy, and Nathaniel appeared smug. What was he getting out of this? The pleasure of watching us dance?

“The Solomons,” Marius announced, pointing behind us. I realized he’d already said it twice.

I nodded quickly. “Sure.”

The Solomons were also absent after knocking, as were the Foxes, the Doltons, the Catos, the Duffields, and the Schmidts. All of their rooms were empty museum-like testaments to capitalism with eerily open balcony doors, as though the occupants had grown wings and flown away. The sixth room had an occupant—but she was dead. Tied to a chair. Someone had had the sense to strap her down but not the time or inclination to do the same for themselves. She was facing an open balcony window.

The person left strapped behind had managed to tilt her chair over into the couch, and she’d asphyxiated on the firm-yet-giving cushions. I pulled her up and saw the teeth marks she’d left in the couch where she’d tried unsuccessfully to gnaw through its leather to escape.

“Who eats couch cushions?” Kate asked aloud.

I frowned, disgusted. “I don’t know.”

Marius’s group was having the same luck across the hall. And every time I saw Nathaniel in passing I wanted to shake him until he poured out answers. We were only halfway done with this hallway, on this one floor, and the cabins up here were twice as large as the ones below. We wouldn’t even finish a tenth of the ship before the rescue boat’s arrival put an end to our search. My stomach was churning. What if I never found Asher at all?

It was that thought that got me as we were entering yet another empty room. The
Maraschino
was rocked by a large swell, and I covered my mouth with my hand and pushed Kate aside.

In a large marble bathroom, the sound of me retching echoed particularly well. I didn’t make it to the toilet, I just leaned over the nearer of the two sinks, clutching its marble sides.

I hadn’t eaten anything in who knew how long. Between my jet lag and the clouds catching up with us outside I couldn’t tell what time it was, but it’d been a while. The only thing I had left to heave up was bile, and thanks to my worry about Asher, I had plenty of it, bright neon green.

I leaned over, hurled, and waited, and then hurled again. If my own stomach hadn’t been empty I wouldn’t have seen it—but there in the pit of the sink, before my own bile pushed them down, were several small frothy things, like the beads of tapioca in those gross bubble drinks that other people liked. I leaned down into the sink, trying to see. I’d been so caught up in the act of puking that I wasn’t sure whether they had been there before me or come out of my own mouth.

When I looked up, Kate was in the doorway behind me, looking horrified.

“Are you ill?”

“No, I’m pregnant,” I said, scanning the countertops. Maybe the former occupants of this room had left some rich-people version of Listerine.

Her frown grew. “I can’t believe you’re out here endangering your child!”

I swallowed drily. I knew I was taking risks, but I didn’t have a choice. If I didn’t find Asher I couldn’t make things right, and I doubted Nathaniel’s plan had left any safe places on this boat. I couldn’t explain that to her, though, not when she was mad at me because her own son had died.

“I’m being as safe as I can.”

Jorge’s voice saved me from trying to explain more. “Hey, ladies? You should come see this now—” I rushed past Kate toward the sound of his voice.