Death of an Aegean Queen

Copyright © 2010 by Maria Hudgins

All rights reserved.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by an electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

First Edition

First Printing: May 2010

Published in 2010 in conjunction with Tekno Books and Ed Gorman.

Set in 11 pt. Plantin.

Printed in the United States on permanent paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

(attached)

Dedication

For Nelson and Aquilla Bible

Cast of Characters

(in order of their appearance)

Dotsy Lamb—Ancient history professor from Virginia and an archaeology buff

Lettie Osgood—Librarian from Virginia and Dotsy’s frequent travel companion

Ollie Osgood—Lettie’s husband. Back home he’s a building contractor

Marco Quattrocchi—Carabinieri captain from Florence. He and Dotsy haven’t seen each other since she and Lettie went to Italy three years ago

George Gaskill—Car salesman from Indiana

Kathryn Gaskill—George’s wife

Luc Girard—Famous archaeologist and resident lecturer on the
Aegean Queen

Malcolm Stone—Antiques dealer from England

Willem Leclercq—Belgian home designer/architect

Demopoulis—Junior officer in ship security

Letsos—Chief of ship security

Constantinos Tzedakis—Captain of the ship

David Bondurant—FBI agent from U.S. Embassy in Athens

Brittany Benson—Pennsylvania native and member of ship’s dance troupe

Sophie Antonakos—Another member of the dance troupe, from northern Greece

Nikos Papadakos—The ship’s photographer

Lieutenant Dimitris Villas—Policeman from the island of Mykonos

Nigel Endicott—Mysterious passenger from Vermont

Ernestine and Heather Ziegler—Mother and daughter from Chicago

Goatman—Hygienically challenged man who is following Dotsy

Robert Segal—Brittany Benson’s boyfriend

Chapter One

“Why do we have to go to that voodoo island?”

Lettie Osgood glared at me as if I were in charge of the itinerary. In a few minutes a tugboat would pull our ship, the
Aegean Queen
, out of Piraeus Harbor on the south side of Athens. The Greek sun glanced off my sunglasses, warmed the top of my head.

Lettie, her husband Ollie, and I leaned over the rail of the Poseidon Deck and looked down on the heads of late-arriving passengers as they tugged their wheeled carry-ons up the gangway. We were waiting for Marco, a friend of mine from Italy. I had starved off seven pounds and bought new clothes in preparation for this cruise, inspired daily by my “Greek Islands” desk calendar and the photo Marco had stuck into a Christmas card. A picture of himself and me at the Coliseum in Rome.

“What voodoo island?” My brain returned to the present.

“The brochure says ‘day seven, Santeria.’ Didn’t you read your brochure, Dotsy?”

“Santeria?”

“Santeria is just another word for voodoo, and I don’t care what you say, zombies are real!” Lettie scowled at me.

“It’s Santorini, Lettie,” Ollie said. “Not Santeria.”

I bit my lip.

“Santorini used to be Atlantis, scientists believe.” Ollie’s voice had taken on a scholarly tone. “Then it disappeared beneath the waves.”

“So what’s for us to visit?”

It promised, I thought, to be a great trip.

Lettie leaned over the rail and pointed. “That man is going the wrong way.”

I found the man she was pointing to, a rather bow-legged guy in a red-and-yellow sport shirt and Bermuda shorts. He was weaving aggressively through the oncoming foot traffic. Bumping shoulders and dodging suitcases like a tight end with the football. “He’s probably been seeing someone off and he’s trying to get back ashore before they pull up the gangway.”

“They weren’t letting anyone but ticketed passengers through security,” Ollie said. “If he isn’t going with us, how did he get past the guards?”

On the deck behind us, a three-piece musical combo fiddled with their microphones and speakers. Waiters lined up scores of blue drinks in tall glasses on the bar, inserting a little Greek flag and a white flower into each glass. Passengers whisked the drinks off the bar as quickly as the servers could put them out.

“Here’s Marco!”

“Where?”

Lettie clapped her hands and pointed over the rail toward two women, one overweight and one overloaded, who were obviously traveling together. Behind them was a man in a blue shirt and tan shorts. But that couldn’t be Marco. Marco wore a beard.

Marco Quattrocchi, a Carabinieri captain from Florence, was the friend I expected to join us. Lettie and I had met him two years ago when we were on a tour of Italy and a member of our tour group got murdered at our Florence hotel. I had graciously made my observational and analytical talents available to the ensuing investigation, and thereby had become Marco’s friend, then enemy, then friend again. We’d kept in touch, and it was he who had suggested this cruise. Ollie, who normally isn’t interested in the foreign tours Lettie and I love to take, had been persuaded to come along this time because, as he put it, “On a ship, nobody tells you when to get up and get on the bus.”

The man who turned at the top of the ramp and waved to me was Marco without a beard, and I didn’t like it at all. He looked shorter. His upper lip was too thin. I’d never seen his upper lip before. Oh, dear. He disappeared into the side of the ship where the stairs to our deck were located.

“Dotsy! And Lettie!” Marco appeared at the top of the stairs and hurried across the deck. He took Lettie’s left hand, my right, and gave us air kisses on both sides. “Your hair, Dotsy,” he said in his thick Italian accent. “You have …”

“Let it go natural.” I finished his sentence for him. I’d forgotten that, in addition to losing seven pounds, I’d let my hair grow out to its natural auburn and gray. It didn’t occur to me he might not like the changes in my appearance as much as I didn’t like the change in his.

We introduced him to Ollie and sent the men to the bar for drinks while Lettie and I grabbed a vacant table. Marco returned with two of those blue cocktails, Ollie, with a blue thing and a Heineken.”

A building contractor at their home in Fredericksburg, Virginia,
Ollie was known as “The Snowman” to his workers, but they didn’t call him that to his face. Big, barrel-chested, and bald as a trailer hitch, he had no neck at all and a rather button-like nose. I lived in fear of accidentally calling him “Frosty.”

After we were all seated, Lettie said, “When did you get here, Marco? Did you fly straight from Florence?”

“No.” He swigged the blue liquid and poked himself in the eye with the Greek flag. “Unfortunately I could not find a flight straight from Florence to Athens. I had to drive first to Milano. Alitalia has a straight, no-stopping flight from Milano to here.”

I had to become reaccustomed to Marco’s refusal to use contractions. His English was pretty good, but I supposed he thought the use of contractions would be pushing the linguistic envelope. He also had a way of putting the same stress on all his syllables, which made the rhythm of his speech awkward. I had to listen intently when he talked.

The band’s spirited rendition of “Never on Sunday” wound down, and a piped-in announcement broke into our chatter. It was delivered in Greek, then repeated in French, English, Italian, German, and Japanese. “We will depart Piraeus in five minutes. All visitors should now be ashore. If you are onboard and are not sailing with us, you must disembark immediately.”

Ollie slipped a pair of sunglasses out of his shirt pocket, stretched the earpieces over his temples, and looked toward the stairs leading up from the gangway.

“There’s that wrong-way guy again.”

I followed Ollie’s gaze. The man in the yellow-and-red shirt, now toting a duffle bag, was back on board.

* * * * *

Soon after the ship left the dock, we had the mandatory lifeboat drill, which Marco suggested was actually a trick to give the crew a chance to slip our luggage into our rooms. It was the only time until the end of the cruise, he pointed out, that the halls would be clear of passengers. We each had to don the life jacket we found on the bed in our room and wait for the announcement to dash to our designated lifeboat station on deck. Marco and I were assigned the same station because our rooms were on the same level and a mere four doors apart. I waited for him in the foyer at the foot of the stairs leading up to the next level where a long row of lifeboats hung suspended above the promenade deck.

It startled me to see a small Cycladic figure in a display case at the base of the stairs. A female figure carved out of marble with a sloping head and arms folded above the belly, its abstract form hinted at an eerie link between the prehistoric and the modern. I’d seen similar sculptures in the textbooks I used in my ancient history classes and I knew they could be found in Greek museums, but I would never have expected to find one on a cruise ship. I read the descriptive plaque. They claimed it was genuine and from Naxos, an island in the Cyclades, 2500
b.c
.