I set up on my balcony — luckily with a view across the harbor to the sharp-rising coastline opposite our berth — and tried to connect to the internet.
Surprise! I did. The combination of many passengers still off the ship and the early diners getting ready must be creating this opening.
Did I check my email? Respond to my assistant? Send the agent the new bio she wanted that would absolutely make the readers in Kurdistan believe I’d written Abandon All with them in mind?
I searched for reviews by Dee North of Boise, Idaho.
I found them. Scads of them.
The photo was Leah. So, unless someone was spoofing her, Maya had it right. Dee was Leah’s pseudonym.
I started reading.
Whoa.
Maya hadn’t been kidding about her being a troll.
I am sickened by these characters… Overly sexual, overactive between the sheets…
I am weary of reading sophomoric books not remotely worthy of my attention…
I require more than mundane, two-dimensional, sophomoric, drivel, tripe…
I desire nothing more than to force this so-called author to never again foist her blatherings on me. I can’t believe she’s stupid enough to think this sophomoric crap is readable…
Aunt Kit has long told me that reviews say far more about the reviewer than the book. Reading one review after another by Leah, a k a Dee North, I saw what she meant.
She began every sentence of every review with I. She said nothing — and I mean nothing — positive about any book. She launched personal attacks against authors. She included nothing specific about any book or why she hated it.
She was thoroughly nasty.
On impulse, I emailed Aunt Kit. No background, just asked her to look over the reviews and tell me what she thought, included a link, and asked her to text me because there was no telling how long internet service would last.
She’d become much better at text since I’d taught her how to use voice. The woman could write book upon book upon classic book, but she could not type with her thumbs. Also, first she’d have to find the text function again, because she tended not to look at her phone except to use it … well, as a phone.
So, I didn’t expect a prompt answer.
To help the process along and get her started, I texted her, too. Much easier for her to reply than initiate one.
I went back to dig more into the reviews and the internet was gone.
* * * *
We departed La Palma into a rousing sunset.
Behind us, whitewashed houses dotted up steep hillsides like ragged steps and clouds writhed around the prickly tops, blushing vibrant pink and orange.
Before us, the ocean spread toward a sky ablaze. Almost imperceptibly the ocean quenched the fire.
Reluctantly, I closed the book I’d been mostly not reading as I stared at the horizon behind, then in front of us. Time to get cleaned up for dinner.
How much of my reluctance stemmed from not wanting to disrupt the peace of sitting quietly alone watching dark slide in and how much was from anticipating unpleasant fireworks from the Marry-Go-Round table at dinner, I didn’t know.
Sure, the fireworks wouldn’t be directed at me, but it still wouldn’t make for a convivial atmosphere.
* * * *
My phone hummed as I started down the three flights of stairs from the deck where my cabin was to the dining room. I’d knocked on Petronella’s door on the way past. No answer. She’d probably already left, driven by her terror of being late.
A text from Aunt Kit. As I opened it, two more quickly followed.
The first said:
See she likes old saw “This is what passes for literature these days.” … How many books can be the worst ever?
I chuckled. I’d known the multiple “worst evers” would irk Aunt Kit. I’d heard her lecture that superlatives are singular, though I suppose this reviewer might claim each surpassed the previous in worst-ness.
Reading between the lines of the second text, I could hear my great-aunt getting steamed:
Patronizing. Presumptuous. Told Jodi Picoult, John Grisham, J.K. Rowling how to write.
Told established author to keep trying “as everything gets better with practice.”
Decried all romance readers as women who have nothing going for them. Hah!
In the third text, Aunt Kit’s sharp eye for human nature came through:
Needs to express purported moral and intellectual superiority to authors and audiences of books she reviews.
It was like she’d met Leah.
A rush of missing Aunt Kit hit me. Missing her sharp eyes and sharp tongue. Missing her sharing them with me in a way I don’t believe she’d shared them with anyone else. I wasn’t her co-writer, but I was her sounding board. And she was mine.
How would that work with us no longer in the same house?
For that matter, how would anything in my life work.
A new rush hit me. Not panic — Aunt Kit didn’t allow that waste of time and energy, and the habit clung — but uncertainty and drifting unmoored.
And something else…
An uneasiness I couldn’t—
Another hum from the phone.
This text said: Though she failed to use its and it’s correctly.
“Must be a good message to make you go from misty-eyed to grinning.” Odette’s voice brought my head up from contemplating the screen. She was at my shoulder as we reached the bottom of the stairs. “I called to you — you were ahead of me coming from our cabins — but you were so focused you never heard me.”
“Hi, Odette. Our cabins are near each other?”
“Indeed.” She gave her cabin number. “You have Maya and Ralph and me down the passage one way and Leah and Wardham the other. But you cannot distract me from wondering what brought such a response from you.”
I tipped the screen to shield it.
Perhaps because of that movement, she added, “Ah, a man?”
Her question was light enough that I could have easily not answered.
“My great-aunt.”
“Oh, yes, you live together, don’t you?”
Interesting she knew that. It didn’t figure in most information on the author of Abandon All. Not impossible to discover, but it took reading the longest, least media-glitzy articles to find, much less to remember.
“Not anymore.” I heard sadness in my voice. “She’s moved into a place where she can be more comfortable.”
“It’s difficult when that’s necessary.”
It took me a beat to realize she thought Aunt Kit needed help, perhaps had dementia of one form or another. The moment to correct that impression passed when she continued.
“But you surely have enough men onboard who’d be willing to send you intriguing texts, as well as anything else you’d like. The drawback being that they’re mostly old enough to be your father, if not your grandfather. Goodness, some of them are old enough to be my father.”
Petronella waved from a spot in front of the just-opening dining room doors, where the maître d’ greeted everyone with a smile and a hearty “good evening.”
I raised a responding hand.
Odette chuckled, “I’ll join you in cutting in. Any ire from the rest of those lined up will be divided between us, swamping neither.”
“We could go to the back,” I muttered. The order of arrival made no difference, since tables were assigned.
“But agitation is not good for digestion.”
Without pointing or nodding or otherwise indicating Petronella, her reference was clear.
“At last,” Petronella sighed. “I was so afraid you’d miss dinner completely.”
The line had barely started to move through the doors when there was a stir behind us.
“Let us through, let us through,” came a familiar voice. It was the leader of the Valkyries. Behind her hobbled Coral on crutches and with a huge cast from her toes up to nearly her knee. It could have gone a lot higher and we still would have seen it because her dress was slit to… I don’t know exactly where because I refused to check.
“Oh, you’re back,” crooned Petronella.
“Yeah.” Coral gave no sign of recognition. She also gave no sign of interest in anyone else.
“Those awful, awful shoes,” Petronella continued. “No wonder you fell.”
Coral rounded on her. “Are you saying I fell because I can’t walk in heels? I’ve been walking in heels since I was a baby. I did not fall because of my shoes.” She turned her back on us to whine, “Are we ever gonna get in? This hurts, you know. I’m in pain.”
The rest of the group followed, crowding us back.
“You. You there. Seat us immediately,” one of the men ordered the maître d’.
“But…” Petronella watching the departing back of the maître d’, appeared to be in more pain than Coral.
“Now, no reason to worry.” Odette took Petronella’s arm, while twinkling up at the head waiter. “These kind gentlemen would not let us starve.”
Their following banter gave me the opportunity to text back to Aunt Kit. Going in to dinner. More later.
As we walked single file toward the far end of the dining room, my phone hummed. Without taking out any of the servers balancing trays, I quickly read:
Look at her history. Patterns.