The Beautiful and the Wicked (8 page)

“My God,” the chief stewardess said, looking into Lila's room in horror, “what happened here?”

Lila inhaled sharply, worried that, in her haste, she'd left money or drugs on the floor. But as she turned, she was relieved to see that it was just littered with sheets, an overturned lamp, pillows, clothes, and underwear absolutely everywhere.

“I was just in the middle of unpacking, Mrs. Slaughter. Or should I call you Edna?”

The woman's eyes widened. “It is most surely Chief Stewardess Mrs. Slaughter to you.”

“Well, that's a mouthful,” Lila said, desperately trying (and totally failing) to lighten the mood. Mrs. Slaughter was a rather tall woman—­taller than Lila, who was quite tall herself. She wore her light brown hair short and heavily layered around her long face, reminiscent of Camilla Parker Bowles. As she looked Lila up and down, Lila could feel her eyes lingering on all that was wanting—­the messy hair, the untucked shirt, the untied shoelaces, the handkerchief improperly knotted.

“Listen here,” Mrs. Slaughter said, her voice cold. “If you think you can be flippant with me, you have another thing coming. Now, you will do exactly what I say, exactly when I say it, with zero hesitation, cheek, sulk, or moods. Do we understand each other?”

Lila nodded in agreement, trying to suppress a smirk. Who was this third-­rate tyrant chastising her like a naughty little schoolgirl?

“First thing, clean this mess up, and then report to the galley in five minutes. Remember, we are still docked and there are a hundred girls just as dumb and pretty as you walking around this marina looking for work. Keep in mind that you are easily replaceable.”

The two women regarded each other silently. Lila nodded.

“Five minutes, then. No later,” Mrs. Slaughter said between tightly pursed lips.

“No later,” Lila repeated. “Of course.”

Once Mrs. Slaughter left, Lila righted the mess she had made as fast as humanly possible, placing her computer and her ever-­important thumb drive underneath her bras and swimsuits. Then she left to find the galley. As she walked down the carpeted hall, she realized she had absolutely no idea where she was headed, but once she climbed the stairs from the lower deck to the main deck, she was ecstatic to once again be outside with the sea and sky and away from the claustrophobic rat's maze of the crew's quarters.

Spotting another member of the crew washing down the deck, Lila approached him. Her legs were still unsteady.

“Excuse me?”

The man turned with the hose in this hand. He was a squat, red-­haired fellow, with meat paws for hands and powerful, stocky limbs. His freckled skin was a deep reddish brown, as if it had been repeatedly sunburned into permanent defeat. He looked at her silently. His inquisitive green eyes were as bright as emeralds. Like everyone else she'd met so far on the boat, she knew him from the police report. His name was Hamish Rankin, but everyone called him Mudge. His Scottish brogue had been so thick during his interview with police that she had to listen to it three times to understand everything he'd said.

“Hi, I'm new to the boat,” she began.

“We're all new,” he said in a heavy Scottish accent. “Name's Mudge. Lead deckhand.” He extended his giant hand with its thick, short fingers. Lila shook it. She had never felt calluses so profound.

“Pleasure to meet you,” she said. “I'm Nicky. Second stewardess. And I'm also late. Would you happen to know where the galley is?”

He gave her a perplexed look, then burst into laughter. “Oh, that's a good one. Next you'll be asking me where's the ocean?”

Lila just stood there blankly. Seeing her serious face, Mudge quickly pulled himself out of his swell of merriment. “You mean you're serious?”

Lila nodded.

“No ship I've ever seen has a galley anywhere but belowdeck,” he said. “But that don't mean I know it all.” There was a sheepishness in his voice. Lila could tell he was trying to be kind and she was grateful for his momentary generosity. “It's back where you came from,” Mudge said, pointing to the staircase that led to the lower level.

With a thanks and a sigh, Lila returned to her subterranean dungeon and hightailed it to the galley, where she found an ever-­frowning Mrs. Slaughter along with a sunny blonde and a tiny, beady-­eyed man in an impeccably white and starched chef's coat. The chef was using long tweezers to carefully place crystallized lilac flowers on a tray of elaborate pastries.

Lila had a hard time explaining to Mrs. Slaughter why it had taken her eight minutes to get to the galley as opposed to the five minutes the head stewardess had allotted. It was imperative that Lila pass as someone who had at least a bit of a clue about life on a yacht, otherwise she knew she'd be out on her ass.

The blonde leaned in to Lila. “Hiya,” she whispered. “I'm Sam.” With her tanned, long-­legged, bubbly radiance and sweet southern accent, Sam was the absolute platonic ideal of an all-­American beauty.

“I'm Nicky, your new roommate,” Lila said with a smile.

“If you can call that a room,” Sam said.

A serious and straight-­backed Mrs. Slaughter cleared her throat loudly, annoyed at the two whispering stewardesses. “You'll have plenty of time to get to know each other, I assure you. Now it's time to get to work. In less than twenty-­four hours, Jack Warren and one hundred VIPs will board this ship expecting nothing less than utter perfection. And that's something, given the current state of affairs,” she said, looking directly at Lila, “that frightens me. I need not tell you that most of the crew is new to this boat, and to its owner, so we must be flawless. Of course, we are greatly honored to have the Michelin-­starred chef François Vatel aboard.” Mrs. Slaughter turned toward the chef, acknowledging him with a ladylike smattering of applause, to which the chef just snorted in response and returned to his painstaking work.

“The French,” Mrs. Slaughter silently mouthed, with a roll of her eyes and a shake of her head. “Chef Vatel and his sous chef will be hard at work preparing for tomorrow, and so will we. I have precisely detailed the tasks that need to get done and the exact time each job must be finished and ready for my personal inspection.”

Mrs. Slaughter handed both Sam and Lila a clipboard. Lila glanced at the endless list of tasks: iron linen sheets, make beds in all ten guest suites, scrub toilets, polish all brass knobs and door runners, restock clean towels, etc, etc, etc. She bit back a groan as she set off to work.

For more than six hours, she scrubbed, polished, folded, and ironed every inch of
The Rising Tide
until her knees ached, her back throbbed, her hands began to cramp in protest, and her fingertips were red and puckered from hours in soapy water. Each and every move she made was icily observed and monitored by the ever-­present Mrs. Slaughter. Whenever Lila looked up from the task at hand, there she stood, with straight back and chin thrust up, staring down on Lila with overwhelming disapproval.

“Miss Collins,” she'd ask in a voice full of disdain, “aren't you familiar with how to iron and fold a fitted sheet?” “Miss Collins, I hope you aren't planning on using Windex to clean the mahogany.” “Miss Collins, are you sure you've scrubbed a toilet before?” And on, and on, and on, and on.

As Lila moved about the yacht, she took in all of its grandeur and elegance—­even if she was seeing most of it while scrubbing the floor on her hands and knees. There was the glass-­encased whirlpool on the top sun deck that Lila had to make streak-­free; a white-­tiled spa (which, she noted, was four times the size of her quarters) that she had to scrub vigorously so that it sparkled enough for Mrs. Slaughter's specifications; a special-­order copper bathtub in the master cabin's en suite bathroom that needed to be polished; a ten-­person screening room that had to be vacuumed and each of the plush leather theater seats gently wiped down.

Lila swept the helicopter pad. She laundered and stacked the towels for the yacht's vast workout room, cleaned its floor-­to-­ceiling mirror, vacuumed under its barbaric-­looking Pilates equipment, and sprayed down all the yoga mats. Then there was making the baking-­soda-­and-­water preparation to clean the walls of the red cedar, eight-­person sauna.

And that was only in the first ­couple hours of work.

But she had to admit, the yacht was one exquisite piece of work, even if it was a total bitch to clean. No expense had been spared, no luxury denied. Each choice was the absolute best and most elegant example of its kind. Lila had plenty of experience living among the most indulgent billionaires imaginable, and she knew that money didn't just buy the fine things in life. It also bought flashy, garish, over-­the-­top displays of hideous grandeur. But
The Rising Tide
was nothing like that. It was perfection, classic and exquisite. It was as close to a work of art as a boat could get.

By midnight, when Mrs. Slaughter tersely said, “That'll do for now,” Lila was beyond relieved to call it a day. She was so profoundly vanquished that returning to her little coffin tucked into a nook of the lower deck sounded like heaven. Lucky for her, her claustrophobia and seasickness were no match for her profound fatigue. But the moment she entered the room, a jolt of energy shot through her as she saw Sam, her bunkmate, stretched sleepily out on the bottom bunk, unaware that she was a thin mattress above a treasure trove of drugs and money.

“Hiya, Nicky. Long day, huh?” Sam chirped. Glowing with vibrant good health, she seemed untouched by the day's endless labors.

Lila just nodded in agreement. She wasn't sure what to say. Did Sam really not feel the lumps and bumps of the contraband beneath her? How could Lila get her off that bed?

“Who knew old Slaughterhouse could be such a horrific shrew?” Sam asked. “I've never been bossed around so much in my whole fucking life.”

Again, Lila nodded. Sam shot her a perplexed look.

“Is something wrong? Or is speaking just not your thing?” Sam asked with a teasing smile.

“It's only that . . .” Lila paused, looking at Sam's cheerful, inquisitive face. She bet that Sam was the prettiest and most popular girl in her run-­down town. Most likely she believed the whole world was about ten times kinder than it actually was, a naïveté shared only by the beautiful and the dumb. “I'm afraid of heights,” Lila lied. “Could I sleep on the bottom bunk?”

Sam, dressed only in a tank top and ruffled pink cotton underwear, bounced right off the bed like a spring. “Oh, totally!” She clambered up to the top bunk, which was so close to the room's low ceiling that sitting up was impossible.

“Thanks. I really appreciate it,” Lila said, shedding her soiled uniform and throwing on a camouflage T-­shirt in size XXL, which she was horrified to discover had a deer caught in a rifle scope on its front. She'd been in such a rush at the sporting-­goods store in the mall when she grabbed it that she hadn't noticed what was on it, which was something she now deeply regretted.

“Nice duds,” Sam laughed. “Now I know why we're bunking together.”

“Why?” Lila asked.

“Because we're both a ­couple of rednecks.”

“Just don't tell the chief stewardess. I don't want to give her yet another reason to hate me,” Lila said as she lay back on her bed. Never had lying horizontally felt so good. “Hey, thanks again for switching bunks with me.”

“Actually,” she heard Sam say quietly as she closed her eyes, “I picked the bottom bunk because it
was
so lumpy. I thought you'd be more comfortable up here. But if you prefer the bottom bunk, then all the better. If you change your mind, let me know. I'm easy. The main thing about me is I don't want any drama. I always get along with everyone, except this one time . . .”

While listening to the sweet nattering of her bunkmate as the yacht slowly swayed side to side, Lila felt her eyelids grow heavy. She blinked a few times before she fell into a profound sleep within seconds.

That night, as the boat rocked Lila like a baby in a cradle, she was visited by her sister in a vibrant, Technicolor dream. In the upside-­down world that her sleeping mind created, Lila found herself back in her childhood home, which was floating in the middle of a vast lake. She and her sister were on its main floor as ice-­cold water began pouring into the house from the windows and under the doors. As Lila rushed about with a bucket trying to keep their home from sinking, Ava was focused on protecting her paintings from the deluge, clutching them to her chest as the water rapidly rose around her. Lila, angry that Ava wasn't helping bail out the house, grabbed the paintings from her hands. Then she looked at them, seeing, with horror, that every canvas was covered in violent black brushstrokes with bloodred slashes through the middle, a sight so frightening that it ripped her out of sleep.

She sat up, hitting her skull on the bunk above her. “Crap,” she said under her breath, rubbing her head and wincing. The panic she felt in her nightmare still clung to her as she tried, in the pure blackness of her windowless room, to shake off the haunting image of Ava getting swallowed up by the water. But, as the sounds of Sam's whistling snore sailed down from above and she felt the ship gently rock below her, Lila managed to calm herself enough to lie back down, close her eyes, and let her painful dream drift out of her memory.

B
EING A STEWAR
DESS
on a superyacht had its downside, as Lila learned bright and early the following morning at her 5:30 wake-up call. But her job also had a great number of potential advantages. If the previous day was at all standard, she would have access to almost every imaginable corner of the ship, including the guest rooms and, hopefully, Jack Warren's massive master suite on the fourth deck.

The very essence of her job was to be invisible until she was needed, and then to promptly recede into the background once her duties were done. Nothing could have suited her mission more. She was there to prove that Elise Warren had killed her husband on the night of his fiftieth birthday, and to gather enough evidence so that she could, once and for all, clear her sister's name. A lot of snooping would be involved, and she was in the perfect position to do it.