What he couldn’t wait for was to clean up these numbers. In spite of the fact that nobody else seemed to care, Calvin could not force himself to abandon the effort. He had the papers he had been going over with Jon stacked up in his cabin. He’d gotten up once or twice in the night to look them over again. Now, with sunlight streaming thinly through his porthole, he picked them up again and looked at the sheet at the top of the stack. It wasn’t a particularly important sheet, no more important than the sheets underneath it. It offended him anyway.
Calvin had a brass carriage clock sitting in a hollow on the table next to the chair next to his door. It was the same brass carriage clock he had on his desk in his office in New York. He had bought it through the Tiffany’s catalog nearly a dozen years ago and took it everywhere. It said nine forty-five—nearly an hour since the expedition to the showers had started—and Calvin found that satisfactory. By now, those who had been at the head of the line ought to be back upstairs. That included Bennis Hannaford, whom Calvin did not want to see, and probably Jon, whom he did. It was hard to tell, with Jon. He might have been excruciatingly polite, which would mean he would still be at the “showers,” waiting his turn, determined to go last. He might have taken charge and insisted on his own priorities, which meant he would have been the first one through. Given the way Jon had been behaving on this trip, Calvin picked the prize behind door number two.
He tucked the papers under his arm and let himself out into the passageway. He saw Tony Baird come storming down from the main deck and go on storming to the deck below. He saw Bennis Hannaford come up a moment later and let herself into her own cabin. Everything looked normal. Calvin went down the passage to the door to Jon’s cabin and knocked. He was disappointed when his knock was answered by Sheila, who looked bleary-eyed and resentful.
“I don’t know where he is,” she told him, without waiting for him to speak. “He’s not here.”
Then she slammed the door in his face.
Calvin looked down at the papers in his hand and frowned. A door opened back along the passage and Fritzie Baird came out of the mess hall. The mess hall seemed like a good idea. Even Jon had to eat. Calvin decided to go there.
He walked up to the mess hall door, opened it, and looked inside. It was empty, but there was a pile of corn muffins on the table. There was also a scattered collection of plates, covered with crumbs, as if almost everybody else on the boat had been in and had breakfast before him. Then there were the mason jars, three or four of them, nestled now in a pile of not-so-artfully arranged corn husks. None of the mason jars was open, and Calvin wasn’t surprised. Like most of the people connected in one way or another with Jon Baird during Jon’s long marriage to Fritzie, Calvin had received his share of Fritzie’s special gift marmalades. He’d eaten his share, too. He wasn’t likely to volunteer for an assignment like that again.
Calvin went into the mess hall, leaving the door swinging open behind him—a really bad idea on a boat, he knew that, he could just never make himself remember—and approached the food. It wasn’t Thanksgiving breakfast food, if there was such a thing, but then Calvin could never keep the details of holidays straight. He looked over the table and saw that the butter was almost entirely gone. What was left of it looked strangely arranged in the crocks. If he hadn’t known it was insane, he would have said that someone had been eating the stuff with a spoon.
Calvin put his papers down, picked up a corn muffin, and used one of the clean knives to put what little butter there was left on it. He had finished just about half of it when he heard footsteps in the passage that seemed to be coming his way. He looked up, hoping to see Jon, and saw Mark Anderwahl instead. Mark was moving much too fast to be intending to stop, but once he saw Calvin he seemed to change his mind. He had gone a little past the mess hall door. He stopped, backed up, and stuck his head inside.
“Do you know where I could find some baking soda?” he asked Calvin.
Calvin blinked. He hadn’t expected anyone else to have spent a sleepless night over the discrepancies in the cash-on-hand reports for better than a year ago, but—baking soda? Mark Anderwahl looked flushed and upset.
“I suppose they have baking soda in the kitchen,” Calvin said. “What do you need baking soda for?”
“I have to make flares.”
“Flares?”
“Flares,” Mark Anderwahl repeated. “We’ve got to call the Coast Guard some way. We can’t go along the way we have been.”
Calvin Baird frowned. He hadn’t been paying much attention to what had been going on. He hadn’t been close to Charlie Shay, and he hadn’t needed to be convinced that Jon’s theory was absolutely right. Charlie had had a fit of apoplexy, an aneurism, or a respiratory convulsion. Gregor Demarkian was just being annoying by insisting on calling it death by strychnine, which was something that would turn out not to be true. Calvin had never put too much stock in detectives, even in famous ones. What was a detective but a glorified police officer, and what was a police officer but a man who with worse luck would have ended up working the line at Ford? In Calvin’s mind, the most important thing now was to stand behind Jon and not contradict him.