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“It started with sleeping pills,” Stan recalled, his eyes unfocused as he spoke. “My father wasn’t sleeping well, and he would get combative at night. Sundowning, I think they call it. His doctor prescribed sleeping pills and they helped.”
Claudia sat quietly, her hands folded in her lap. She didn’t feel like she was in danger any longer. She got the impression Stan had never wanted to kill anyone, nor had he wanted to hurt her. He had simply felt trapped and, like a caged animal, had lashed out.
She suspected confessing made Stan feel freer than he had felt in years.
“I started giving my father sleeping pills more often than I was supposed to,” Stan admitted. “If he was having a particularly bad day and I couldn’t take the abuse any longer, I’d give him a sleeping pill. If I needed an hour to myself to go run errands, I’d give him a sleeping pill. You get the idea.”
“Is that why your father has spent so much of the cruise napping?” Claudia asked.
Stan nodded. “I was able to order sleeping pills from a pharmacy in Mexico. No prescription required. I know it sounds horrible, but my father ruins everything. He’s ruined my life. I deserve to enjoy myself for a change, don’t I?”
“Drugging your elderly father isn’t the way,” Claudia told him, shaking her head sadly.
“When you put it that way, I sound like a monster. I’m not,” Stan insisted.
Claudia wondered if that was true, but held her tongue.
“This is what a lifetime of being kicked around by a narcissistic jerk does to a person. You may see a feeble old man when you look at my father, but I see the monster who used to beat me with his belt for even the most minor infractions.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” Claudia said, her demeanor softening. Getting some insight into Stan’s childhood helped her understand his motives. It didn’t make what he had done right by any stretch of the imagination, but he had her sympathy.
Stan dabbed at his bloodshot, watery eyes. There were angry crimson scratches on his cheeks where Claudia had raked her nails across his face. He seemed like a pitiful shell of a man as he sat there on the ground with a quivering lower lip.
“I knew it wasn’t sustainable,” Stan admitted quietly. “Shortly before we left for this cruise, my father’s doctor said he needed to have bloodwork done. It was scheduled for the day after our cruise. I was afraid that once tests were run, it might come to light that I had been overmedicating my father. I couldn’t risk that happening.”
Goosebumps broke out across Claudia’s body. “What was your plan?”
Stan sighed. “Every so often, you hear about someone falling overboard on a cruise and you know, being swept away to sea. Sometimes it’s an accident - too much to drink or clumsiness or misfortune. Sometimes it’s intentional - murder or suicide. I figured...” he trailed off, looking ashamed of himself.
“You were going to push your father overboard and claim it was suicide?” Claudia guessed.
“Yes. I drugged him first. He was barely even with it. Then I wheeled him to a secluded spot just past that coffee shop down there,” Stan said, gesturing to the deck below them. “I started to get my father up out of his wheelchair and over the railing, but then...”
“Then Chad came along?”
Stan nodded. “He was very drunk and slurring his words. He got belligerent. He started calling me all sorts of heinous names and said he was going to see to it that I was locked up. I put my father back in his wheelchair and went after Chad - I had to shut him up before he could tell anyone what he saw.”
“Then what happened?”
“I chased Chad up to this deck. There was a struggle. I guess that’s how he lost his sandal? Under ordinary circumstances, Chad could have easily overpowered me. But as I said, he was very drunk and I was able to use that to my advantage. One thing led to another and...”
“And what?”
Stan looked ashamed of himself. “I found that drycleaning bag and held it over Chad’s face. The next thing I knew, he had stopped moving. He was dead.”
“So you loaded his body into a laundry cart and moved him to a lower deck?”
“My plan wasn’t very well thought out,” Stan admitted. “I was panicked. We were already nearing port, so I couldn’t toss the body overboard. I moved it downstairs and stashed it in what I hoped was a seldom-used storage closet. I figured once most people were in Nassau and I’d had some time to think, I’d collect the body and dispose of it somehow.”
“What would you have done if I hadn’t found Chad’s body?” Claudia asked.
“I’m not sure. I thought about staging an accident of some sort,” Stan replied. “But my plan never got that far. I’m not cut out to be a murderer.”
“But you are,” Claudia pointed out. “You are a murderer. You killed someone.”
Just then, two uniformed security guards hurried up the stairs.
As Claudia watched them apprehend Stan without incident, she was struck by how calm and cooperative he was. He almost looked relieved when he was handcuffed and led away. It was like a massive, crushing weight had finally been lifted.
Once justice ran its course, Stan would no doubt be locked up for a long time. But in a way, he had been in prison his entire life. Maybe life behind literal bars would be a welcome reprieve from the personal hell he had been trapped in.
What Stan had done - and what he had tried to do - was reprehensible. He had taken advantage of a frail, vulnerable elderly person who was dependent on him. But did all the blame really rest on him?
It was complicated, to say the least.
Stan’s father was not a nice person. He had been an unpleasant, hateful, abusive bigot long before he had gotten old and sick. Being of an advanced age and having an illness didn’t erase the past. It didn’t magically absolve one of one’s misdeeds.
Before he was led away, Stan turned and locked eyes with Claudia. He gave her a small nod.
Despite the awful things he had done, she wished him well. And she meant it.
