It had been necessary to stop Roger from being arrested. After a late afternoon walk on the deck, he had come back to the suite pale and sweaty. “It’s no use,” he had said. “I’ve tried to talk her out of doing an outside audit of her finances, but all I did was make her more suspicious.”
Now that it was done, Yvonne was filled with dread. Roger had sat on the rail for only a few minutes, then said, “Too choppy for this perch.” Just as he tried to move forward, he almost lost his balance. That was when she lunged forward and pushed him with all her might.
Before he fell, his look had been one of surprise. Then as his body began to go down, he screamed, “No, no, no . . .” Her last sight of him was watching his legs and feet go over the rail.
She knew she should have waited longer before telling anyone that he had fallen overboard. It seemed like only minutes before the Captain and other personnel began to search the ship looking for him.
It was only then that she remembered that Roger was a strong swimmer and that he had been on the swim team in college. Suppose they found him alive? There was no way that she could make him believe that she had accidentally pushed him when she meant to help him down off the railing.
The consequences for her of Roger being rescued were so overpowering that she was trembling and shaking when the doctor gave her a tranquilizer. Brenda offered to wrap a blanket around her as she sat on the sofa in the living room of the suite.
It was time to get rid of Brenda, who with uncharacteristic sympathy had also offered to sleep on the couch.
As Brenda was holding the blanket, they could hear a loud knock on the door across the hall. A young crewmember yelled through the door. “Excuse me. We are looking for a Mr. Roger Pearson. Is he in this room?”
They heard a faint “no” from the room’s occupant. “Thank you,” the crewmember said as he moved to the next door.
Brenda turned to Yvonne. “Am I helping you by being with you or would you rather be alone?”
“Oh, thank you, I guess I’ll be all right alone. I may have to get used to being on my own. But thank you again, and I will be all right.”
When Brenda was finally gone, Yvonne got up and poured a stiff scotch on the rocks. She tilted the glass in a silent tribute to Roger. You’d have committed suicide before you faced twenty years in prison, she thought. She wondered how soon she would be getting the five million dollars in insurance money. Probably within a week after she was back in New York. If Roger did siphon off a lot of money from Lady Em, where was it? Did he have secret bank accounts he hadn’t told her about? Well, one thing for sure. If she were ever questioned by the FBI, she was sure that she could convince them that she knew nothing about Roger’s finances.
With that comforting thought the self-made widow decided to treat herself to a second, generous serving of Chivas Regal scotch.