She paused. She tried to spare his feelings. 'I really didn't see.'
Which of course meant Yes.
The bastard had come back here after the confrontation in Tobin's cabin and taken Cindy away. But why, after the way he'd treated her last night, would she go?
Then he smiled to himself.
She'd go because women like Cindy seemed to derive perverse pleasure from men who treated them badly. Tobin had never understood this, and didn't care to, really.
When his gaze fell on Joanna again, he saw that she was watching her lover, Jere Farris, in the arms of his wife on the dance floor.
Tobin said, 'You can do better than him, Joanna. You really can.'
She smiled with her soft forlorn eyes and said, 'Weren't you the one asking about Cindy a few seconds ago?'
'Good point,' he said, and went back to his cabin.
32
Tobin, back in his cabin, calculated the time and decided to hell with it. He had to find out why somebody took the newspaper clippings relating to Everett Sanderson's presence on the cruise ship and left everything else.
He took one of Sanderson's brochures, looked at the phone number and town name and zip code rubber- stamped on the back of it, and then picked up the phone.
He first tried the number of the agency itself and got a ghostly answering machine, one of those recordings that sound as if they'd been made by a poltergeist. It said the agency was closed and would be open at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow, if tomorrow was a weekday. Then, fortunately, it left another number to call in case of emergency.
Tobin certainly considered this an emergency. On the fourteenth ring a woman with a cigarette cough answered the phone. Tobin said, 'Hello?'
The woman kept coughing and finally said, 'Who the hell is this anyway?'
The detective agency wasn't nearly as friendly as it had promised to be in the brochure.
33
It was while she was slathering her rather nice twenty-eight-year-old body with a bar of very soapy soap that Cindy thought she heard some kind of bump or thump in the cabin outside of Kevin Anderson's bathroom.
She stood very still, aware suddenly of just how naked naked really was, and held her breath the way she had when she'd been a little girl and played boogeyman with her brother and her brother was three steps away from finding her hiding under the bed-held her breath and strained her hearing so hard she got a slight headache.
But there was just the warm water beating on her body, beading on her body, and the pleasant exhaustion that came at the end of a long day.
Then she decided she was being paranoid. Maybe Kevin had just opened and shut a drawer with undue power. He liked doing stuff like that-flinging back doors and jerking up chairs from the floor and twisting them around to sit on. It was because he did things like that, or so she supposed, that she'd finally accepted his apologies for last night ('I've just been sort of uptight, babe,' was the way he'd said it, not ever using the exact word sorry exactly but she knew that for a guy like him-he had, after all, had his own network series and there was the promise of another-that for a guy like him even those words had been difficult to say) and so, at the last, Tobin gone, she'd said, yes, all right, she'd go back to his cabin with him, both of them knowing of course what that meant.
Kevin had wanted to take her two steps inside the cabin door. The nun's outfit had really fired up most of the men. But inside its heavy black folds she'd run with sweat and insisted on taking a quick shower, during which time she'd started composing a letter to Aberdeen about how weird this trip was becoming, with a TV star practically begging her for her company.
A door slammed.
She couldn't be sure of it.
It might have been any number of other things- somebody drunk falling against the wall in the corridor, Kevin sliding back the closet door with his usual enthusiasm-but somehow she thought not.
Somehow she thought a door had slammed.
Tired of all her apprehension, she turned off the shower, slid back the door, and grabbed a big white fluffy towel.
She dried off quickly, took a smaller towel to use as a turban for her hair, and then left the slippery tiles and steamy air of the bathroom.
She found Kevin immediately and began screaming almost as immediately.
34
'That little squirt on TV?' the woman said.
'That's me.'
'What the hell you doin' callin' here at three in the morning?' Her voice had gotten much friendlier since he'd explained who he was. Fortunately, or so she confided, she'd always preferred him to Richard Dunphy.
'You know that a man named Everett Sanderson was murdered.'
A mournful pause. Sigh. 'Yep.'
'He was your husband?'
'Nope. Brother-in-law. His wife died twenty years ago or so and he never remarried. Ever since he lived upstairs in our youngster's room. Him and Merle, that's my husband, they ran the agency together.'
'That's what I'm calling about.'
'The agency?'
'About what Everett was doing on the cruise.' Another pause. 'You'd be wantin' to talk to Merle about that.'
'Could you hand the phone over to him?'
'Can't.'
'Asleep?'
'Gone.'
'Where?'
Pause. 'I really shouldn't be talkin' to you. Merle hates it when I talk to people about his business.'
'When will he be back, Mrs. Sanderson?'
'Tomorrow morning sometime.' Beat. 'He's doin' a divorce case. One of those stakeout jobs. He'll be real tired. He'll want a big breakfast-three eggs and some sausages and some wheatcakes and some toast with peanut butter and jelly-then he'll want to roll right into bed.'
'What would be a good time to call him?'
