Feast of Murder(36)

Bennis was having none of the same problems. She was walking up ahead at Tony Baird’s side, and as the three of them moved toward Berth 102, Gregor found it easy to eavesdrop on their conversation.

“Nobody was supposed to be here before nine,” Tony was saying, “but you know how these things are. Dad and Sheila were here last night and so everybody got antsy that they’d be late or miss out on something or they wanted to get Dad’s attention, so they came. And my mother—have you met my mother?”

“I might have,” Bennis said.

“Well, my mother is a flake. Not that I don’t like her. I like her. I just don’t know what to do with her. I mean, what woman in her right mind would have come along for this weekend?”

“Does your father control her money?”

“Of course he controls it. So what? He couldn’t really take it away from her. She’d make a stink in the press and he’d end up having to give it back just to keep himself from being picketed.”

“I see what you mean.”

“She got here at seven thirty, if you can believe it, dragging me along behind her, and the next thing I knew she was in a cat fight with Sheila. She always gets into cat fights with Sheila. She always goes totally ballistic when she sees the glitter on Sheila’s nails.”

“I take it she didn’t storm off the boat,” Bennis said.

Tony Baird laughed. “Nobody’s stormed off the boat, and I think they all ought to. They’re the ones who’re going to have to put up with all the fighting. I shouldn’t make it sound like that. It’s not really that bad. Except for Mother and Sheila, the rest of them get along pretty well.”

“Who are the rest of them?” Gregor puffed mightily and managed to catch up, putting his head between Tony’s and Bennis’s so that they had to part to let him in. Before he’d come up, they had been walking so close together, their shoulders touched. “I got a guest list with my invitation,” he said, “and little descriptions of everybody from your father when we talked, but I still don’t have any flesh to go along with the names.”

“What kind of flesh do you want?” Tony asked. They had reached Berth 102, and he shone his light directly on the plank going up to the Pilgrimage Green. Gregor found himself nonplussed. He knew the boat was a replica of the Mayflower, of course, and he knew that the boats of that time were smaller than the ones that sailed now. He’d visited the whaling ship at Mystic Seaport and found vessels that would have been considered small by most of the operators of modern day cabin cruisers. Still, he had expected something a little larger than this, and a little more sturdy looking, too. The Mayflower had sailed across the Atlantic. If it had been this small, how had it managed not to sink?

“The fog’s lifting,” Bennis said. “Maybe the driver will deign to bring up our things once it’s gone. I told you we should have hired the other car, Gregor, we would have gotten better service.”

“I’ll get one of the crew to get your things,” Tony said. “My father’s not totally crazy. We are traveling with a full crew and a cook and a waitress besides. He had to pay them an arm and a leg to get them to sail on this thing, but he’s got an arm and a leg to pay them, so I suppose that’s his business. Be careful when you get to the top of the plank. There’s a nail sticking up I’ve been tripping over all day.”

“You were going to tell me about the other people on the trip,” Gregor said, being very careful of the nail, even though he couldn’t see it. He climbed off the plank onto the deck and looked around. Seen from here, the boat looked even smaller than it had from the pier. It also looked … richer. The original Mayflower had been a poor man’s boat, built with good but no luxurious materials. The Pilgrimage Green was all teak and polish, thickly applied wax, and four coats of paint.

Tony led them to a formal hatch door that looked like a little tree house perched inexplicably on the deck. Inside it were a single set of steep and narrow stairs leading to the deck just below.

“All the guests’ cabins are on this level,” Tony told them, “with the crew cabins on the deck below. You two are on the port side toward the center. Not too bad.”

“Is it port out and starboard back or the other way around?” Bennis whispered in Gregor’s ear.

Gregor shrugged.

“My father’s got the entire bow on this deck,” Tony was going on, “and my mother’s got the cabin in the stern. That’s the one she liked best when the boat was being built, meaning it was one of the two or three things she didn’t hate without limit. Sheila hates the boat, too, but we don’t know if that’s because she’d rather have luxury or because she gets seasick sitting in port and then throws up without stop until she gets back on dry land. My cousin Mark’s wife Julie gets seasick, too. She’s got the cabin next to yours. She does PR for Baird Financial. Then there’s Charlie Shay. He’s got the cabin on the other side of you. He’s one of the three partners in Baird along with Dad and Uncle Calvin—am I giving it enough flesh for you?”