IT WAS A HOT, ALMOST TROPICAL NIGHT, BUT CHERRY WAS shaking as though the ship were plying its way through Arctic icebergs.
Waidler, she felt sure, had recognized her. His attitude from the very beginning had been unfriendly, to say the least. Furthermore, Ziggy had told her that Waidler was a very conscientious steward. Even if he and Cherry were the best of friends, he might well feel that it was his duty to report her. She had flagrantly violated two rules:
“Out of uniform aboard ship.” And, very obviously, “out of bounds.”
He couldn’t have missed her damply curling black hair. Waidler knew that Cherry had been in the pool!
Back in her own cabin, Cherry rubbed herself dry and donned pajamas and wrapper. The bunny-toed scuffs warmed her nervously icy feet. What would the next morning bring?
Dr. Monroe would not be “Kirk” when he reprimanded her. He would he very much the dignified young ship’s surgeon. And the captain—the Old Man—? Would he put her ashore at Curaçao? Bleakly Cherry faced disgrace—the end of her nursing career.
And then, to cap the climax, when she hurried into Stateroom 141, she found Timmy fast asleep, one hand curled peacefully under his fat, rosy cheek.
For a moment Cherry felt like bursting into tears. She should have realized that Timmy couldn’t possibly care very much about his panda. If he had, he would have demanded it a long time ago. He had simply put on a scene—just for the fun of it. And she had foolishly sacrificed her nurse’s reputation to fulfill a childish whim.
“That’s Ames for you,” she told herself sternly. “Always letting the heart rule the head. Will you ever learn?”
But she had her reward when the alarm clock went off an hour later. Timmy’s eyes popped open, and then, when he saw what was sitting damply on his glass-topped bed table, his eyes grew big as saucers.
“My Fuzzy-Wuzzy! My fuzzy little Fuzzy-Wuzzy. I thought you had drownded. But Cherry saved you, didn’t she, Fuzzy?”
Cherry carefully pinned a square of rubber sheeting around the soggy little panda. Timmy cradled him in his arms, crooning:
“Nobody could find you, ’cept Cherry. Cherry’s even smarter than Henry. I tole Henry you were on the bottom of the pool. But he just laughed and laughed. He didn’t b’lieve me.”
Cherry’s heart went out to the little boy. He hadn’t dared hope that he would ever see his panda again. That was why he hadn’t asked for it. To Timmy, the pool must seem as bottomless as the ocean. The poor lamb had been silently yearning for his pet ever since he had watched Fuzzy float under the diving board.
Suddenly Cherry had a thought. She had already committed two crimes; why not another? All three of them were for the same good cause. She could hear Mrs. Crane coming into the next room now.
“I didn’t save Fuzzy, Timmy,” Cherry said in a clear voice. “Your mother did. When I got to the pool she had already found him. She’s not a ’fraidy cat. She went right into the deep water and dived and dived until she came up with your little bear.”
Mrs. Crane rustled into the bedroom. She looked puzzled, but Cherry silenced her with a quick glance.
Timmy held out his arms. “Mummy, you got my Fuzzy-Wuzzy! You’re just ‘bout the smartest person in the whole wide world.”
Cherry left them hugging each other. In the bathroom she pounded the sulfa tablets to a powder. Then she mixed the medication with a jar of strained apricots. As she approached the bed, Timmy said firmly:
“I want my mummy to feed me.”
Mrs. Crane smiled gratefully up at Cherry. Her lips said, “You darling, you!”
At the moment Cherry was glad she had told a deliberate lie. But the next morning she was not so sure. With Cherry supervising, Mrs. Crane had prepared Timmy’s sulfa mixture, taken his temperature, which was normal, given him his inhalation, bathed and dressed him for breakfast.
“There,” Cherry whispered when they were alone together in the bathroom. “It wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“It was fun,” Mrs. Crane admitted. “As long as the mercury stops at that nice red arrow I guess I can read his temperature all right.”
Cherry turned to go back to Timmy and froze in her tracks. Waidler had just come in with the little boy’s breakfast tray.
Cherry held her breath. Would he accuse her in front of passengers, or would he wait? Had he already reported her?
Waidler was staring, as though fascinated, at the little black and white panda. Timmy displayed his pet proudly:
“See, Waidy? Fuzzy didn’t get drownded after all. My mummy went right into the deep, deep water and got him back for me.”
The steward set down the tray and said gruffly, “Well, that’s good, Tim.”
He knew perfectly well that Mrs. Crane had not even appeared in a bathing suit the night before. She had been wearing a lovely full-skirted gown of crisp white pique, from dinnertime to midnight.
Waidler picked up the damp panda. “So this is the Fuzzy-Wuzzy you’ve been talking about all the time?”
“That’s right,” Timmy said. “I wanted him awful much cause he always sleeps with me. And last night when I couldn’t sleep, my mummy got him for me.”
Waidler left without giving Cherry so much as a glance. She thought agonizedly: “Now he despises me. He thinks I lied to protect myself. I could never convince him that I lied to Timmy for his mother’s sake.”
Cherry had not yet had breakfast, but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to the point of going out into the rest of the ship and meeting her fate. But a cup of hot coffee might help to bring back her courage, and if she didn’t go to the grill soon it would be too late.
She set her shoulders. Might as well go now and get it over with. Mrs. Crane had already started on the tea and toast Waidler had brought with Timmy’s oatmeal and cocoa. She said:
“Run along, Cherry dear. And you don’t need to come back till noon. Even then all you’ll have to do is supervise. Without you watching me, I’d be sure to give him benzoin instead of sulfa.”
Cherry got out a weak laugh, but she said encouragingly, “No, you wouldn’t. You could really take over from now on, but I want an excuse to keep on seeing my favorite patient.”
“Mummy and I are going to make a pirate ship,” Timmy said, his mouth full. “The sheets are going to be sails and the ‘brella is going to be the mast.”
Out in the corridor Cherry sighed. “You’ve made a pretty mess of everything, Ames,” she told herself grimly. But, somehow, she didn’t regret any of it. Sometimes two wrongs did make a right. Timmy and his mother were very close to each other now; so close that Nanny didn’t have a chance. And as for “Granny”—she had better abdicate in favor of young Mrs. Crane if she knew what was good for her.
Brownie, who was just finishing breakfast in the grill, beckoned to Cherry excitedly. “So scuttlebutt already has my own private scandal,” Cherry thought. “And what a juicy tidbit it’s going to be.”
But Brownie had other gossip to impart. She seemed to have no idea that Cherry was in disgrace, on the verge of dismissal. She whispered:
“Have you heard the latest? The purser’s office was broken into again last night! Miranda was just telling me that she heard nothing had been taken from the safe the first time, and this morning the only thing Ziggy could find missing in his office was the carbon copy of a completely unimportant letter. Somebody who knows something about safe combinations and locks is having himself a time, huh?”
Cherry managed to hide her surprise. “Probably a passenger with a warped sense of humor,” she said easily.
“Probably,” Brownie agreed. “By the way,” she said suddenly, “where were you last night? I tapped on your door at nine and again at ten, but there was no answer. Miranda has a swell little portable victrola. We thought you might like to listen to some of the new records she got for Christmas presents.”
Christmas! Why, today was Cherry’s birthday. A fine Christmas Eve she was going to have! She took such a long time answering Brownie’s question that the plump little stewardess said again, this time suspiciously:
“Well, where were you last night?”
Cherry came out of her mournful reverie. “With a patient,” she said. “Little Timmy Crane. He’s on sulfa, every four hours, day and night, you see.”
“But that’s not answering my question,” Brownie went on, more suspicious than ever. “That’s explaining where you were at eight, midnight and four this morning. But it isn’t saying where you were at nine and ten last night.”
“Oh, my goodness,” Cherry thought, almost amused. “She thinks I’m the one who broke into Ziggy’s office!” She said, smiling: “I spent the night in the Crane suite.”
“Why, I never heard of such a thing,” Brownie exploded. “It says right in the rules and regulations that except when her help is needed in the care of women passengers or women members of the crew, the nurse is not to have night duty.”
“I know,” Cherry said, suddenly weary of the whole talk. “Dr. Monroe did not order me to spend the night in Timmy’s room. He requested it, and in the end it was easier for me to be right there. Don’t you see?”
Brownie looked doubtful. She waited until Cherry had finished breakfast, then followed her down to her cabin. And there, damply hanging from a hook on the inside of her open closet door, was the rose taffeta bathing suit Brownie had admired on Friday. All too obviously, it had been christened recently.
Brownie stared at it and let out a long whistle. “So that’s where you were last night, Cherry Ames. In the swimming pool!”
“That’s right,” Cherry said, not really caring much what Brownie thought any more. “I went in to get Timmy’s panda which he’d dropped into the pool. Now, go and report me to the Old Man. Waidler knows I broke Rule Eleven, too. I guess everybody on the ship knows by now.”
Brownie’s mouth fell open. “Me report you? Are you crazy? I think it’s wonderful you had the nerve to break that silly old rule. I guess you’re not as stiff and starched as I thought you were.” She grinned shamefacedly. “Just for a little while, though, I did kind of think you might have taken that letter from the purser’s files. After all, you do have a key, you know.”
“So I do,” Cherry remembered, immediately forgiving Brownie for suspecting her. “But I’m not concerned with anything but the contents of the medical refrigerator.”
To herself she added: “Or am I? I surely would like to have a look at the carbon copy of that ‘completely unimportant’ letter.”
Brownie yawned. “Well, I’m off to my chores. But you’d better hide that damp little garment before one of the maids sees it.”
She left before Cherry could remind her that Waidler already knew.
Cherry, feeling like a prisoner in the dock, waiting to be sentenced, sat on the edge of her bed. In spite of her own worries, her thoughts kept coming back to Jan and her problems.
The ambergris must be on board the Julita. But, Cherry felt sure, it was not in Timmy’s cabin. She and Jan and Henry Landgraf had all searched Stateroom 141 thoroughly.
Apparently the fabulously valuable powder was not at the home office in New York. Neither was it in the purser’s safe for, according to Jan, her uncle would never have put it in the safe. He would have kept it close beside him in his cabin, just as he wore his money belt day and night. But it was not in the money belt or the lawyer, Camelot, would have listed it in his cable to Jan.
Therefore, Cherry reasoned, it must have been accidentally left behind when the dying man was taken ashore. And then she remembered something Ziggy had almost said about Waidler that first day in sick bay.
“Efficient as all get out,” Ziggy had said. “But even he slips up every now and then. Like at Willemstad last trip—.”
Ziggy had clamped his mouth shut after that. So now Cherry was almost certain of what had happened. An elderly, blustering, salty old passenger whom Waidler couldn’t get on with, stricken with pulmonary thrombosis just as the ship entered the port of Willemstad. A dying passenger met at the dock by his lawyer and rushed ashore.
Waidler, cranky and upset by this unusual occurrence, flinging Uncle Ben’s clothes into his suitcase. A hasty inventory of the shelves and drawers as the dying man was wheeled down the gangplank.
Then, later that Tuesday, after the ship had left Curaçao, Waidler, not so hurried now, would give the cabin one last inspection before the maids tore it apart for a thorough cleaning. Then, and not until then, would he discover that he had neglected to pack all of the eccentric old gentleman’s effects.
What would he do with these items? Turn them over to the purser, of course. But then the purser would have placed them in a sealed container of some sort, listing the contents, and deposited these overlooked effects with the home office. He certainly would have done that sometime between Wednesday and Friday while the Julita was in the port of New York.
Unless—unless, Ziggy, too, had slipped up. Was that why he had suddenly clamped his mouth shut when he was discussing Waidler’s efficiency?
Cherry felt sure that she was unraveling the mystery correctly. If so, the ambergris was somewhere in the purser’s office right now.
But why hadn’t Ziggy put such a valuable substance in the safe? Cherry could guess the answer to that one too. Because he hadn’t known that several thousand dollars’ worth of ambergris was among the old gentleman’s effects.
Uncle Ben didn’t believe in banks. But he was shrewd. He wouldn’t label his share of the fine powder “ambergris” for the temptation of maids and stewards. How would he disguise his treasure when it wasn’t on his person?
Cherry shook her head. That she couldn’t know.
“Oh, dear,” she moaned. “If only I could question Waidler; make him confess he didn’t send all of old Mr. Paulding’s possessions ashore with him last trip. Get him to tell me exactly what was overlooked in the last-minute rush.”
Her hands were tied. Who was she to accuse Waidler of a minor transgression? Any minute now he was going to confront her with proof that she had violated two of the ship’s regulations.
Someone tapped on her door. Cherry jumped up, bracing herself. “Here it comes!”
Then she marched stiff-shouldered to face her punishment.