Dark Passage (14 page)

It was hard to believe that five days had already flown by when the
Islander
pulled out of King's Wharf for the return trip to Baltimore. Julie had been on such good behavior during our family outings that Georgina relaxed the rules and allowed her to return to the teen club. On one condition. Not caring how much embarrassment it might cause Julie, Georgina actually escorted her up to Tidal Wave, subjected whatever youth counselor was on duty at the time to a lengthy interrogation – what will you be doing? where will you be going? who is going to be in charge? – before actually letting Julie go.

In the meantime, I was determined to maximize the time we spent together as sisters, which had been the whole point of the cruise, after all. After lunch on Thursday, I insisted we all put on our bathing suits, grab a good book and chill out in the solarium.

It didn't take much arm twisting.

We weren't saying much, luxuriating in the delicious depths of the whirlpool. I was in a near meditative state with my eyes closed, until some child – who shouldn't have been in the adults-only solarium to begin with, I should point out – shrieked. I opened my eyes, and had to blink twice.

‘Georgina, isn't Julie supposed to be at some Nintendo Wii bowling tournament?'

Georgina shook her head, setting tendrils of her butterscotch hair trembling. ‘What?'

I pointed a wet finger. ‘Over there.'

Dressed in her bathing suit, flip flops and a gauzy cover-up, Julie stood with her back against the etched glass wall of the Surf's Up café. Supporting himself by one arm braced against the panel behind Julie's head, Connor Crawford leaned toward her, his face only inches from hers. We were too far away to overhear their conversation, but Julie appeared to be amused because she smiled into the young man's eyes, pushed a hand flat against his chest and gave him a playful shove.

Georgina rose out of the hot tub as if she'd been shot from a cannon. Without even stopping to grab a towel, she marched straight toward the couple, determination in her step and fire in her eyes. Julie saw her coming, but for Connor it was too late.

Georgina grabbed him by the upper arm and yanked him upright. ‘You! Stay away from my daughter!' she shouted. ‘In case you hadn't noticed, Julie is fourteen years old. Do you know how to spell that, young man? That's fourteen, as in J-A-I-L-B-A-I-T.'

Julie's lower lip quivered. ‘Stop it, Mother, you're making a scene!'

‘I'm s-s-sorry,' Connor stammered. ‘We were just …'

‘I have eyes! I could see what you were just!'

Julie blinked, fighting back tears. ‘The Wii was over, and I thought I'd come join you in the pool! Connor was only getting a hamburger.'

I'd reached them by then, still dripping but carrying a towel for myself and for my sister. ‘Georgina …' I held out the towel.

She ignored me, her attention still riveted on the hapless Connor. ‘I'm warning you, young man. If you so much as
touch
my daughter …'

Connor raised both hands in front of his face. ‘I get it, ma'am. I'm going.' He backed away, stumbled over a lounge chair, then fled through the double doors that led outside to the main swimming pool.

Julie burst into tears. ‘This is so embarrassing,' she wailed. ‘You've ruined everything! I'm going to my cabin and I'm never coming out. Never! Do you hear me?
Never!
' And she dashed off toward the elevators.

‘Well, that went well,' I said, handing a towel to the still-smoldering Georgina.

Georgina used it to wipe the sweat off her brow, then draped it loosely over her shoulders. ‘I can't prove it, but I'm convinced that kid is the one who bought Julie those Sex on the Beaches. He probably thought it was hysterical to get a child drunk.'

‘We can't be sure if Connor was there or not, Georgina. When I first saw Julie with the boys they were too far away for me to recognize anyone.'

Georgina screwed up her lips, then relaxed. ‘Well, now
I
need a drink.'

‘Should I go down and check on Julie?'

Georgina shook her head. ‘She'll be all right. She'll sulk in the cabin for a bit, until that gets boring, then she'll be out and about, acting as if nothing had happened. Trust me.'

‘Passengers are lured to [cruise ship] auctions of supposedly investment-grade, collector art. Free champagne flows like water. Since the sales take place at sea, making claims under consumer protection laws is difficult. Buyers may have little recourse if the art is misrepresented. Cruise ship auctions sell the art on display, but the winning bidder actually receives a different (but supposedly equivalent) piece which is shipped from the auction company's warehouse. Many art buyers at cruise ship auctions have later found that their shipboard masterpieces were worth only a fraction of the purchase price.'

www.Wikitravel.org
, March 12, 2013

A
pparently, Mother knew best.

Bright and early the next morning Julie was up, dressed in a pink-flowered sundress and white sandals, ready to join us in the Oceanus dining room for breakfast. Julie must have been hungry, because she ordered the farmer's special – steak, pancakes, scrambled eggs and fried tomatoes – a breakfast so large and relentlessly American that it would even have pleased the lady toting the emergency tuna fish and Tang.

For several days, the cruise director had been touting an art auction. Over breakfast, we decided to check it out. Ruth and I waited in the atrium while Georgina escorted Julie up to Tidal Wave and supervised while Julie signed up to audition for a teens-only talent show followed by a pizza party.

‘Free champagne. What's not to like?' Georgina pointed out when she rejoined us in the atrium about fifteen minutes later. We snagged glasses of bubbly from a passing server. Earlier in the voyage, I'd passed through the art gallery on our way to check out our cruise photos; they'd planned it that way, of course. For the auction, however, space in the photo gallery had been appropriated to accommodate additional paintings, and others were displayed on easels arranged cheek by jowl, encircling the balcony.

Ruth consulted her brochure. ‘Tarkay, Fanch, Krasnyansky, Dali, Peter Max … I've heard of them, but who the hell's Eslaquit, Tamrat and Loomis?'

I gestured with my champagne flute. ‘That's an Eslaquit.'

We stared at the painting, an over-the-sofa-sized representation of a yellow-faced child wearing an electric-blue dress, posing in a field dotted with poppies. ‘My God,' Ruth said.

‘And here's another one,' I said, moving on. ‘You can have a pair, if jaundiced children appeal to you.'

‘The brochure encourages us to bid on a piece of this valuable art to take home as a memento of our trip.' Ruth considered me over the top of her reading glasses. ‘I didn't see any psychedelic unicorns leaping over rainbows while we were sightseeing, did you? I'd rather take a photograph of Bermuda and have it framed as a memento, thank you very much.'

Artist Mikal Tamrat turned out to be primarily inspired by sunsets – or rises, it was hard to tell – thickly spread with a palette knife in oils of vibrant neon, although Loomis wasn't too bad, if your taste ran to naked figures and disproportional body parts rendered in pastels.

Georgina considered a Loomis thoughtfully while sipping her champagne. ‘It's a lot like a puzzle that has to be put back together,' she said, tilting her head to one side. ‘Remove the arm from the tree, pick the breast up off the floor …'

‘Be careful with the bubbly, Georgina, or you might end up owning a painting of dogs playing poker,' I teased, moving on.

Ruth poked me lightly on the arm. ‘Say, isn't that what's her name, the woman married to the frequent cruiser guy?'

I had to think for a moment, then it came to me. Nicole Westfall. The wife of Phoenix Cruise Lines' most recent Gold Trident award-winner, Jack Westfall. Dressed in a black sheath, cinched in tightly with a wide gold belt, Nicole balanced on dangerously tall heels behind a French provincial credenza, talking earnestly with a passenger. As I watched, she bent over a notebook, her golden hair swinging loose, and tapped one of the laminated pages. ‘She must work for the auction house,' I said as we drew closer. ‘This will be a busy day.'

‘… to be honest with you,' I overheard Nicole tell the man. Ha! Honest people don't feel the need to remind you of how honest they are, as my mother always used to say.

‘One must keep one's head about one at an auction,' Ruth announced grandly, ‘especially when the bidding is fueled by champagne. It's
my
policy never to pay more than ten dollars for sad-faced clowns or starving orphans. For kittens or Elvis, I'm willing to go a bit higher, but only if they're painted on black velvet.'

That made me laugh so hard that I sloshed champagne on the floor. When no one was looking, I rubbed it well into the carpet with the toe of my sandal.

‘This Dali isn't too bad.' Georgina was standing in front of a lithograph of two fishes, one red and one blue, entitled ‘Pisces.' ‘I wonder how much it's worth?' She peered closer. ‘And, look, it's even signed!'

‘If we were on land, I could answer that question,' I said, thinking about how often I pull out my iPhone to Google something. ‘Maybe that's why they charge so much for the Internet on board, and keep the speed so glacial. Makes it hard to do due diligence.'

None of us were the least bit interested in anything Nicole Westfall had on offer but we were curious, so when the auction began some ten minutes later, my sisters and I stood well back, casually observing what soon became a sort of well-orchestrated, inebriated sales hysteria. Works I wouldn't have paid twenty dollars for – even if I'd had a place to hang them – went for prices in the thousands. ‘You may pay a thousand dollars for this painting today,' Nicole drawled into her clip-on microphone, working the audience like a television evangelist, ‘but when you get it home, the price can only go up, up, up, and up! Ten, do I hear ten thousand?'

It was as bad as watching QVC.

When one of the Dalis went for twenty thousand, Ruth made quiet
whoop-whoop-whooping
sounds.

I sent an elbow into her ribs. ‘Shhhh.'

‘Just my bullshit detector going off,' Ruth said. ‘And when that idiot gets his masterpiece home and reality sinks in … well, I don't think there are any consumer protection laws out in international waters.'

We stayed a few minutes longer, watching in disbelief as Nicole knocked down a Peter Max and a Miro for more than it cost Georgina to send Colin to private school for a year. ‘These people are nuts,' Georgina said. ‘Let's get out of here.'

We ditched our empty glasses on a tray on top of the piano and retreated to lounge chairs on one of the upper decks where we soaked up the sun, people-watched and read until lunchtime.

After lunch, while Ruth went to the library to return a book, Georgina and I rode the elevator up to Tidal Wave to pick up Julie. She wasn't in the club room proper, nor in the video arcade, so we went looking for one of the youth counselors.

‘Maybe the pizza party isn't over yet,' I suggested.

Georgina consulted her watch. ‘It's almost two. It has to be over by now.'

The youth counselor on duty behind the desk smiled as we approached.

Georgina squinted at the young man's name tag. ‘Wesley, have you seen Julie Cardinale? I checked her in around ten.'

‘Cardinale?' He bent his head, ran a finger down a list fastened to a clipboard.

‘Right.'

‘After the pizza party broke up, she went into the bar.' He hooked a thumb to the right, pointing us toward Breakers!, the teen center's juice bar.

The bar was crowded with young people, sitting on toadstools around small, round tables, enjoying sodas and fruit smoothies. A few were drinking coffee. Everyone was trying to talk over whatever racket passes for music these days. We stood in the doorway and scanned the crowd. ‘I don't see her,' I said.

Georgina took a deep breath and marched over to the bar. By the light of a colossal, blue-neon wave mounted and undulating overhead, one of the bartenders, a young woman, was busily filling a blender with ice, bananas and pineapple. The other was running someone's sea pass through a scanner. ‘Excuse me,' Georgina asked the guy manning the scanner, ‘but I'm looking for my daughter, Julie Cardinale. Have you seen her?'

Rohan from South Africa stared at my sister as if she'd just asked him to calculate the square root of pi out to twenty decimal places. Then he smiled. ‘We see a lot of girls here, ma'am. Can you be more precise?'

The blender began to whine and grind. ‘She's fourteen, with red hair!' Georgina yelled over the noise.

‘Looks just like her mother here,' I pointed out helpfully.

The second bartender switched off the blender and grabbed a tall glass. ‘I mixed her a Virginia Colada about half an hour ago,' she said as she poured. ‘She was sitting over by the window with a couple of other kids.'

Georgina glanced over her shoulder, turned her head back and said, ‘Well, she's not there now.'

While Georgina continued to quiz the bartenders, I wandered over to the tables and asked if anyone had seen Julie. Several of the boys remembered seeing my niece sitting with a mixed group of teens, but hadn't noticed when she left.

Back at the check-in desk, Georgina was having a fit. ‘I checked her in at ten-oh-five Wesley, and it was
your
job to keep an eye on her!'

To his credit, Wesley's face was lined with deep concern. ‘I'm sorry ma'am, but the pizza party broke up about the same time as the movie was starting, and that coincided with lunch … I was totally slammed. You know, she's probably just gone to the restroom, or back to your cabin.'