Dead in the Water Read Online Free PDF Page B

brochure, but maybe it was okay.
    In the dining room of her temporary home, the
Robert X. Morris
, Ruth Hamilton sat on an overstuffed chair and sipped her tea, eavesdropping on the argument two of the other passengers were having on the opposite side of the room, not ten feet away.
    “It’s my vacation, too. And I’ll be damned if I’ll spend it on this wreck.” That was Ms. Elise van
Buren-Hadley
, as the lady had said it.
Hadley
, as in, forget to say that and I’ll turn you to stone with a mere gaze.
    Quite possible, Ruth thought, and went on placidly stirring her tea.
    “I mean,
really.
” The woman wrinkled her nose and moved her shoulders in a gesture of complete and utter distaste. She practically raised her lizard-skin flats off the ground.
    Ruth could understand her disappointment. The
Morris
was not as advertised, and the dining room was a particular disaster. Small and gloomy, despite two sets of large square windows that framed the profiles of sleek, blond Ms. van Buren-Hadley and her husband, Phil, whose sandy brown hair and short, trimmed beard reminded Ruth of Stephen. The windows were covered with yellowed venetian blinds that muffled the sepia sunbeams of Long Beach, a long-polluted suburb of Los Angeles, and cast the combatants in a drab olive light.
    The furniture felt dirty, and the carpet was an ugly dark green that curled up near the walls, and the three coffeetables had cigarette burns in them. One was an old kidney shape that Ruth thought might have fetched a good price at an auction, if only it had been taken better care of. The other two were standard oak veneer rectangles; motel issue.
    But the best part was the walls. They were papered with blue and green in a sea-kelp pattern, and over this were draped dusty dark blue fishing nets. And in these nets—Ruth had held back a peal of laughter when the sexy first mate had grandly escorted her into the room—dozens of stuffed fish bounded the waves among bright orange starfish and blown-glass bubbles of aquamarine. The taxidermist had not done a very good job: the fish looked furry and moth-eaten, and it seemed their glass eyes cried with humiliation.
    And in an apocalypse of good taste, a culmination of all that seemed to be this ship, the
Morris
, the entire weepy school swam toward the room’s pièce de résistance: a three-dimensional model of the
Morris
itself, created out of match-sticks. Under glass, as it were, captured inside an oversize cutout of a bottle that rode plaster waves of Day-Glo turquoise.
    “I kinda like it, honey,” Mr. van Buren said in a slow Southern drawl. He reached for his wife’s hand. With an angry jerk of her head, Ms. van Buren-Hadley crossed her arms. Yuppies. Their clothes must have cost them a fortune. They dripped good living. Ruth’s stomach growled and she eyed the cookie plate wistfully, but didn’t want to spoil the mood. She had a suspicion they’d forgotten she was there, and she didn’t want to remind them in case they got embarrassed and stopped fighting.
    Her hazel eyes twinkled and she took another sip of tea. Wondered if that crazy old cook had washed the pot out within the last decade. That was likely, since the tea tasted like soap.
    She looked down at her gnarled, arthritic fingers, and beyond to her bony feet in her nautical-themed espadrilles with anchors appliquéd on the tops. She had on a pair of navy slacks and a white sailor middy blouse piped in blue trim. Her grand-nephew, Richard, said she was a “hot old dame,” and she did her best, but she
was
old, damn it. Seventy-one(though she had managed to lie her way onto the freighter by claiming she was sixty-eight; they had an age limit). There were wrinkles all over her face and her lipstick bled into the skin around her mouth; her chin was a turkey wattle, and though she was in love with her frosted blond hair, she was sure she looked ridiculous in it. Still, people were forever telling her how attractive she was, for her