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“What did he keep in these?” I asked, impatient for Kenny to access the contents.
“We normally kept our travel documents and valuables in the room safe; anything that didn’t fit into the safe was concealed in the cans. Usually, it was a couple hundred dollars of casino cash and some small items.”
Sure enough, inside the Barbasol can was a wad of bills, all twenties, tens, and fives. Kathleen counted it and determined that none of the money was missing, so we moved on.
I gave the Desenex can a twist and removed the bottom section. It held an SD card.
“I wonder what’s on this,” I said, holding the plastic chip in my hand. “Maybe this is what the killer was looking for when he broke in.”
“That’s the extra memory card we use for our camera. I can check, but I don’t think George had a chance to use it yet.” She inserted it into the slot and turned the camera on. “No, there’s nothing on here.”
“Your turn,” I encouraged her, pointing to the Centrum bottle in her hand. “Open it.”
“Okay.” She twisted the top and peered inside. With two fingers, she reached in and retrieved a single piece of paper folded into a small wad. With trembling fingers, she handed it to Kenny.
“You do the honors. I’m afraid to look.”
He obliged, carefully unfurling it before he placed it on the bed and smoothed out the creases with his hands. Kathleen and I leaned over his shoulder, trying to read the printed words.
“It’s a brochure for the Forsythe Casket Company in Memphis, Tennessee. Does this mean anything to you, Kathleen?”
“I don’t think so. It’s possible that George did business with the company. But why would he need to hide it in his can safe? And why did he have it with him on our vacation? This wasn’t a business trip.”
We sat there silently, staring at the ad for “the finest wood caskets made by old-fashioned artisans”, offering funeral homes quality caskets at an affordable wholesale price.
“How much do you know about the funeral business?” Kenny asked the widow. “Did George usually order his caskets from individual manufacturers?”
“No. he always kept a small supply of caskets at the funeral home. Whenever his inventory was low, he would call up his wholesaler in Boston and have a half dozen shipped to the funeral home. The fancier caskets were selected from a catalogue by the families of the deceased. George would take a deposit and then place the order. They normally arrived by truck within a day or two.”
“So, he probably wasn’t shopping around for a new supplier?”
“He never mentioned that he was having problems,” she answered him. “Harry Gulanian’s been in the wholesale casket business a long time, and he always gave my husband a good price on them. Harry even had an upholsterer to do special linings and handles on demand. Last year, a long-time bagpiper died. His family buried him in a casket lined in the tartan of his band.”
“Besides these fake cans, did George have any other tricks for hiding stuff?” I asked her.
“Sure. Whenever he played golf, he always wrote down the locker number and lock combination on a label that he stuck under the insole of his right shoe; that way, he didn’t have to memorize it.” The three of us looked down at the pair of black shoes still standing at attention by the bed.
“Did he do the same thing with the left shoe?” I asked.
“That was reserved for passwords, like for the PIN for his bank card. You don’t think that he....”
“It’s worth a shot.” Kenny reached over and picked up the left shoe. Carefully lifting the bright blue, oh-so-squishy comfort liner, he found a label with George’s passwords in tiny print fixed to the bed of the shoe. But there was also a second label beside it. This one was handwritten in blue ink.
“Anson Reddy,” he read aloud.
“Who’s Anson Reddy?” I wanted to know.
“I’ve never heard of the guy,” Kathleen told us. “Try the other shoe.”
I scooped it up and hurriedly peeled away the gel inner sole, revealing another label. It took me a few seconds to decipher the miniscule handwriting.
“Miss Adelaide’s School for Young Ladies by Lillian French, page 12,” I read aloud to my companions. “I’ve never heard of it. Have either of you?”
“I haven’t,” declared the widow, “And it’s definitely not George’s usual reading material. He’s into...was into sports, science, and history.”
Kenny shook his head. “Trust me. This book was never been on my summer reading list, not even in the seventh grade.”
“There’s really no way of knowing what makes this important, is there?” Kathleen groaned.
“Oh, I disagree. If it was only the title or only the author that mattered, George would have just written that down,” I pointed out. “But he gives us book title, author, and page number, so all of that information must be relevant.”
“We still don’t know what any of this has to do with the Forsythe Casket Company. It’s almost like the individual clues aren’t directly connected to each other, but they somehow form a whole answer to the puzzle,” said Kenny.
The three of us sat there for a good five minutes, working hard to figure out what these clues had to do with the murder. We tossed out idea after idea, but nothing seemed to make sense. Kathleen summed it up the best.
“Who was Anson Reddy, what did he have to do with an obscure book about a school for young ladies and a casket company in Memphis, and why in heaven’s name would George Delaney ever give a flying fig about it?”
“And yet, if he went to all the trouble of hiding the information from everyone but you, Kathleen, I think we have to take him seriously,” I told her. I glanced at my watch, thinking that in just another handful of hours, the Liberty of the Seas would be tying up at King’s Wharf, greeted by a welcoming committee made up of eager federal agents and nosy journalists.
“He left us three concealed clues,” Kenny declared. “Let’s think. What do a casket company, a girls’ school, and a man have to do with George’s murder?”
“Or is it a casket company, an author, and a man we’re looking at? Are they all connected to Memphis? Miss Adelaide...that’s a character from Guys and Dolls,” I pointed out. “George could have stumbled into a mob hit back in Caulkins Cove and someone followed you two onto the ship to silence him. Maybe Anson Reddy is another victim.”
“I don’t think so, Scarlet.” Kathleen was scratching her chin. “We live in such a small town that you can’t burp without everyone talking about it. Statistically speaking, crime rates tend to rise as you get closer to urban areas, unless there are pockets of criminal activities. Violent crime is almost nonexistent in Caulkins Cove, although I will say there are more thefts during the summer months, when we have an influx of tourists. That’s when most of the store owners file claims related to shoplifting and cars are broken into at the beach.”
Leave it to the insurance agent to have a handle on local crime. Kathleen Delaney had a unique way of looking at the facts.
“Could Anson Reddy be a business associate,” Kenny wondered, “maybe someone from the casket company?”
“Anything’s possible. I just don’t remember George ever mentioning the name.” She suddenly yawned. “I’m sorry. It’s late and I’m starting to get punchy.”
“I know the feeling,” I groaned, “but we have to keep at it. Let’s just concentrate on the facts that we know for certain. George went to Royal Caribbean Online and searched the Internet for information on the Forsythe Casket Company in Memphis, Tennessee. We know when he did this because today’s date is printed is on the bottom of the page. He tucked that page into one of his favorite hidey holes, a fake bottle of vitamins. In one shoe, he concealed a stranger’s name....”
“Could it be the man he thought he recognized on the ship?” the widow inquired.
“It’s possible. You said George was bothered by the fact that the man pretended not to know him. Did he travel a lot without you?”
“He took a few business trips. I suppose it’s possible he met Anson Reddy on one of them.”
“What was the last one?”
She paused briefly to consider the question. “He went to the national funeral directors convention in Nashville last October.”
“That’s the same state where the Forsythe Casket Company does business,” I replied, suddenly alert. Kathleen gave a little gasp of excitement as she began to understand the implications.
“That must be it!” she cried. “Have we found our murderer?”
“Not necessarily,” Kenny pointed out, frowning. “Even if George met Reddy at the convention and he is somehow connected to the Forsythe Casket Company in Memphis, it still doesn’t explain Miss Adelaide’s School for Young Ladies. The book doesn’t seem to fit into the puzzle.”
“Do you think my husband had a premonition that he was going to die, so he left these clues for me to find?”
“Your husband sounds like too sensible a man to deliberately provoke a killer and put himself in harm’s way,” was Kenny’s response. “Perhaps he was gathering clues as he tried to piece together a puzzle and he underestimated the danger he was in.”
I considered the possibility. The trouble was that everything seemed to happen so quickly. As best I could tell, the mystery started right after breakfast this morning, when Kathleen went back to the stateroom to read and her husband went for a walk, and it all just snowballed after that. George felt the need to check something on the Internet after he had run into a man he thought he recognized. Had the killer realized George’s interest in him, perhaps following him to Royal Caribbean Online? Did he glance at George’s computer screen as he walked by, trying to discern whether the funeral director was checking on him? And what if George couldn’t let the puzzle go?
“If he suspected his killer had committed or was about to commit a serious crime,” I asked, “what would your husband do?”
“He’d try to get enough evidence to take the police,” Kathleen insisted. Kenny slowly nodded. The pieces were beginning to fall into place.
“He must have succeeded. It looks to me like his murderer broke in and took this place apart, probably looking for these things because they could implicate him.”
“That makes sense to me.” I stood up and stretched, trying to wake up my left leg. I felt Kenny’s hands on my shoulders, massaging the sore muscles. “Oh, that feels wonderful.”
“And now I’m going to escort you ladies down to the stateroom. You can get some sleep.”
“Mmm, that will be nice.” I could feel the tension of the last few hours melting away as he kept rubbing my neck, going around in small, concentric circles. “I’m shorter than you, so I’ll take the sofa.”
“Oh, I’m not sleeping, Scarlet.”
That got my attention. “You’re not?”
“I’m not.” There it was—the tight-lipped Tolliver thing. It meant he was working on something important and I was damned if I was going to be left out of it.
“What are you going to do?” I wanted to know, my interest piqued.
“I’m going to find out whatever I can about these clues,” he replied.
“I’ll go with you.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Yes, I will. Two heads are better than one,” I reminded him.
“I know I should probably join you two, but the truth is I’m exhausted,” Kathleen informed us. “This has been the worst day of my life.”
“Of course,” I said, wrapping an arm around her shoulder. “Come on. You can sleep in my bed and we’ll ask Thaddeus to keep the connecting door open.”
But when we got back to my stateroom, the lights were off, save for a small overhead light by the closet. The two senior citizens were sweetly slumbering; Laurel was under the covers of her own bed, and Thaddeus, fully clothed, was on mine.
“Come on,” Kenny whispered. “You can sleep in my room. We’ll leave the door open.”
“You’ll come back, though, won’t you?”
“We will. It’s a promise.”
“Be careful!” she said softly as she sank down on the bed closest to the door. She took a moment to adjust herself and then pulled the bedspread up. “I don’t think I could bear it if something terrible happened to either of you!”
What could possibly go wrong in the middle of the night on a cruise ship sailing into Bermudian waters? It’s not really like we’re on our own. Kenny is cooperating with the ship’s security team. Besides, how can the killer possibly know he’s even a blip on our radar?
“Don’t worry. We’ll be back in no time,” he said confidently. We tiptoed across the cabin floor and quietly slipped out the door.
“What’s our first stop?” I asked him as we headed down the corridor, keeping my voice low.
“The security office. I’ve got to run a check on the credit card, to see George’s last few transactions. After that, we’ve got to get into Royal Caribbean Online to have a look at that computer George used. We need the search history.”
“What about the library? Do you think they’ll have a copy of that book?”
“Anything’s possible. We can have a look, but that’s not my priority at the moment.”
Just after one, with the last ten credit card transactions printed up, Kenny and I were escorted to Royal Caribbean Online by Eleanor, a security supervisor, whose collection of ship’s keys was impressive. Once we were safely inside and the door was locked again, she flicked on the lights, revealing a room full of computer desks arranged to offer users some semblance of privacy.
Kenny took a seat at the employee charge desk and, with the help of Eleanor, began to scroll through guest transaction records, looking for some footprint that George had left behind of his Internet use. “This is going to take a few minutes, Scarlet. Bear with me.”
“No problem,” I replied, curiosity getting the better of me. This was my first time in the Internet café, so I took advantage of the opportunity to wander around. Like many other areas of the ship, this room was open to the floor below, offering a great vantage point. I walked up to the railing for a better look. Peering into the darkness, I thought I saw books on shelves lining the walls. Had I found the ship’s library? I leaned over the handrail for a better view.
“Hey, Eleanor,” I called out to her, determined to take advantage of the unexpected opportunity. This was my chance to search for the missing book while she and Kenny were busy with the computer caches. I was not about to take no for an answer. “Is that the library down there?”