Regan and Jack escorted Alvirah back to her room.
“Get right to bed, Alvirah,” Jack said. “The way this ship is rocking, it would be very easy to fall.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Alvirah said. “For forty years I stood on wobbly tables to dust chandeliers. I always said I could have been a tightrope walker.”
Regan laughed and gave Alvirah a peck on the cheek. “Take Jack’s advice. We’ll see you in the morning.”
Alvirah let herself into the room and was comforted by the sight of an almost invisible Willy wrapped up in the blankets and the sound of his rumbling snore. The desk lamp was on. I’m too wound up to sleep, she told herself. And anyhow, I want to record everything that happened today while it’s still fresh in my mind. My editor, Charlie, said if I could get an exciting story out of this cruise, he’d be interested, but he didn’t want a travelogue or just a feel-good piece. “I appreciate all the good deeds these people have done,” he had said, not sounding particularly appreciative, “but it doesn’t sell papers.”
Well, some pretty interesting things have happened today, Alvirah thought as she retrieved her sunburst pin with the hidden recorder out of the safe and settled down at the desk.
“When we arrived at the ship, they didn’t even have a room for us,” she began, her voice soft.
“Mmmmmmm.” Behind her, she heard Willy stir. Sometimes he could sleep through a fire alarm, but with the way the ship is moving, I might wake him up if I talk in here, she realized. I’ll stand outside the door.
In the passageway, Alvirah grasped the railing with one hand and with the other held the sunburst pin close to her lips as she recounted every detail of the day’s events. She ran down the list of what had happened: the room mix-up, Dudley’s fall from the rock-climbing wall, the waiter jumping overboard, the missing Santa suits, and Ivy spotting a ghost. She paused and added one more detail. “It’s funny that Dudley didn’t explain immediately where that bell we found in the chapel must have come from. He had to have recognized that it was from one of the Santa caps. That really is something to think about.”
Alvirah clicked off her recorder and went back inside the room. In the bathroom, she removed her makeup, brushed her teeth, and changed into a nightgown and robe. She crawled into bed next to Willy and was about to flick off the desk lamp from the bedside switch when she noticed the cards that Willy had been playing with were resting in a furrow of the blanket. She picked up the deck, intending to put it in the night table drawer, when something caught her eye.
“That’s funny,” she said aloud. The top card was the jack of hearts but there was something unusual about it. What was it? Around the head of the jack there was a frame with what looked like an abstract design. Alvirah studied the design closely. Acting on a hunch, she carried the cards into the bathroom and turned on the light. A makeup mirror with a magnifying glass was attached to the wall by the sink. She held the jack of hearts up to the mirror. The seemingly abstract design, as reflected in the mirror, was actually a series of numbers.
“I thought so,” she murmured triumphantly as she quickly glanced through the deck. It soon became clear that only the royal cards were marked with the abstract design. She separated the jacks, queens, and kings, and one by one held them up to the mirror. All twelve contained a different series of numbers. What do those numbers stand for and who do the cards belong to? she wondered. When we showed them to Eric, he was so brusque and dismissive I was sure he’d never seen them before.
Hmmm. Alvirah again reviewed the day’s events and remembered how Winston was surprised to find potato chips on the floor of Eric’s room. Now a mysterious deck of cards was found in his drawer. Had someone else been using Eric’s room? Could this have been the unofficial break room for some of the workers who were getting the Royal Mermaid ready this week? I wouldn’t blame them. Next to the Commodore’s suite, it’s the best accommodation on the ship.
But as Alvirah got into bed, her instinct told her that it wasn’t workmen who’d been in the room.
There’s something else going on here, she thought, and I’m going to find out what it is.