Alice on Board

  “Decup?” I said.

  Curtis grinned as he bit into his sandwich and chewed a couple of times. “Bra size,” he said. “Sherry approaching Chesapeake deck at the stern.”

  “Oh, God, you guys are so sexist,” Yolanda said. “You want to be known by the size of your jock?”

  “Ouch,” said Curtis. “Okay, okay, you think of a code name, then.”

  I figured it was all in fun.

  “Cougar?” I suggested.

  “Too obvious,” said Lauren.

  “Drama Queen?” said Liz.

  “Too long.”

  It was Pamela who suggested it: “Flotsam, because we never quite know what will turn up.”

  “Flotsam it is,” said Barry. “As long as she has a label, we probably don’t need one for the others.”

  The talk drifted to what we might do in Baltimore the coming week if we had time to go out, but when a light rain began to fall, we decided to call it a night. I hung around a little longer to see if Patrick had sent me a text message on my cell. He hadn’t, but I sent him one about how the evening had gone. Then I started down the back stairway.

  What if it really had been a coincidence that Pamela’s mom took this cruise? I wondered as I passed the Chesapeake deck and kept going. What if she needed a vacation as much as anyone else, and we were treating her as a joke, a threat to everyone’s happiness? She might be trying just as hard to avoid Bill and Meredith, once she found them on board, as we were to keep them apart.

  But as I reached the lounge deck and made the turn, I saw her, drink in hand, standing at the railing outside Bill and Meredith’s stateroom. It was no coincidence.

  14

  GHOST STORY

  It was awkward, but the next day went fairly smoothly. I didn’t know what to call Pamela’s mom when I passed her on deck or in the dining room. I’d always called her “Mrs. Jones” before, so how could I say, “Hello, Ms. Conners” now? And I certainly wasn’t about to call her “Sherry.”

  She’d just smile and say, “Hello, Alice. Nice day, isn’t it?” or something innocuous, and I went on by. I’m sure she noticed that whenever I happened to see her, I was in a hurry.

  Occasionally my walkie-talkie would buzz, and I’d hear a male voice saying, “Flotsam to four, Flotsam to four.” If one of the crew was on the sundeck, and Bill and Meredith were also, that crew member would make sure there were no empty chairs near the couple. If Pamela’s mom was having a drink in the lounge, Rachel might go back in the supply closet, click on her walkie-talkie, and say, “Flotsam served on second.”

  To us, it was a game, but it wasn’t to Pamela. The fact that her mom behaved herself, more or less, made Pamela feel all the more guilty for suspecting the worst, and I saw her wince once or twice when she heard the reference to “Flotsam.” That didn’t last long, though, because Quinton caught on and put a stop to it. But we couldn’t help noticing that Pamela’s mom was usually first at the bar when happy hour began, and her laughter got a little louder as she started her second or third drink.

  Patrick’s e-mails were full of the sights and sounds of Barcelona—one of the few places, it seemed, that his diplomat dad had never taken the family. They were more like essays, really. Sometimes he’d write something in Spanish and see if I could figure it out. ¿Cómo está pasando el crucero?

  He’d tell me about Gaudi’s architectural wonders, “more like sand castles,” he described them. Or he’d start his e-mail with Greetings from the Iberian Peninsula and tell me about the dark cavernous church off the Plaza del Rey, with its metal cages, lit by candlelight, and the plastic body parts that hung on the metal gates, asking a saint’s help in healing an affliction.

  My e-mails were mostly about people—about Pamela’s parents on board and the beach in Yorktown, about the breeze up here on the top deck and the gulls that circled overhead.

  As we set the tables for dinner that night, Barry said, “You girls want to do something this evening, late?”

  “Other than sleep?” Emily said.

  “Hey, you can always make up on sleep,” said Flavian.

  “What did you have in mind?” Gwen slowly lowered a tray of glass goblets from her shoulder to a rack.

  “Ever see the York battlefield at night? Entirely different from how it looks in the daytime,” Barry said.

  “How do you know so much about Yorktown?” Liz asked.

  “Eighth-grade civics class,” said Barry. “Big field trip of the year.”

  “So how do we see anything at night?” I wanted to know.

  “Full moon,” said Flavian.

  Gwen laughed. “You guys are so full of it! There was only a half-moon last night.”

  “Ah!” Flavian grabbed a steak knife off the table and held it like a foil in a fencing pose. “‘The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas …’”

  “Give me a break,” said Pamela.

  “What? You never had to memorize ‘The Highwayman’ back in junior high?”

  “I just want to know how we’re supposed to see a battlefield in the dark.”

  “Leave it to us,” said Barry. “It’s great weather for a change, and we can walk there from the ship.”

  “Okay, I’m in,” I said.

  “Me too,” said Gwen and Pamela.

  * * *

  We got away around ten thirty, those of us who were going. Lauren and Emily opted out. Lauren said she’d seen enough of battlefields in the daytime, she didn’t have to experience them at night, so it was just Gwen and Pamela, Yolanda and Natalie, Liz and me, along with Flavian and Barry.

  I found myself disappointed that Mitch wasn’t along, but Barry said that some of the deckhands had gone in search of a bar, so I guessed Mitch was with them.

  We crossed the street from the dock, and Barry led us to a sort of grotto, where we could just make out a cave in the hillside with a closed metal gate across the entrance.

  “And this is … ?” asked Gwen.

  Barry put one finger to his lips. “The gate swings miraculously open at midnight, and all the tortured souls of British soldiers come out to walk the battlefield.”

  Natalie was trying to read a sign in the darkness. “Cornwallis’ Cave?”

  “That’s it,” said Barry. “The general who surrendered to George Washington. You’re standing on hallowed ground.”

  “I’m so scared,” Liz said.

  “You can jump into our arms anytime,” Barry said, but I noticed Gwen was already in Flavian’s, and ghosts had nothing to do with it.

  I had the feeling that the guys were taking the long way around to the battlefield, wherever it was, but I didn’t care. It seemed as though we were the only ones in Yorktown. Once the tourists left for the day, the place was deserted.

  We walked along the historic streets, Barry telling us how the battle was fought. And then, under a dim streetlight, he stopped and lowered his voice. “What I’m about to tell you is simply what people have reported, but there have been too many of these stories for them to be coincidence.” We started walking again. “There was this man whose ancestors fought with Washington here at Yorktown, and his great-great-great-uncle had come across this dying British soldier who begged him for water. So he put his own flask to the soldier’s lips and let him drink. But the guy was hurt really bad, and he flopped back down again, moaning with pain, a gaping wound in his chest. So this great-great-great-uncle took out his revolver and shot him in the head.”

  “Barry, that’s horrible,” said Liz.

  “It was the most humane thing he could do,” Barry continued. “And a few years ago one of his descendants was here visiting the battlefield—it was almost dark—and he was here with his wife and his wife’s sister. The women had gone on ahead, back toward the parking lot, and to his right, he saw this … well, orb of light, I guess you’d call it—sort of like the top half of a luminous circle—on the ground about twenty yards away, slowly rising higher, until it was a full circle, about shoulder height …
”

  We stopped walking again.

  “… and then he saw that it was a man’s head, a man’s face, coming toward him in the moonlight.”

  I could feel goose bumps on my arms, and Liz grabbed me, both of us grinning but wanting to hear the rest of the story. We were barely moving, we were crowded so close to Barry, who was walking backward, facing us. His expression was serious in the shadows.

  “The man said he stopped and stood perfectly still while the apparition came closer,” Barry continued. “He didn’t speak, and the expression on the orb didn’t change. He described it as mostly sad-looking. And then, for just a moment, the man said, the ghost’s upper torso was visible too—the uniform scruffy and wrinkled and stained with either mud or blood, he couldn’t tell. But the ghost’s hand was holding a flask—holding it out, sort of, like it was offering it to him. And then … it faded out—the face, the torso, the flask, everything.”

  “Arrrgggh!” I said. “That’s all? That’s the end? What did the guy do?”

  Barry shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve heard two different versions of the story. One said he nodded to the apparition before it faded away, like he understood. The other version was that he told his wife and sister-in-law what he’d seen and they didn’t believe him.”

  “Anybody got a flask?” Flavian joked. “Let’s go.”

  I think the guys were taking us in the back way, because the park closed at dusk. We steered clear of the caretaker’s house and bypassed the parking lot. The moon was little more than half full, but now and then the clouds moved across it, and we had to follow Barry single file so we wouldn’t stumble over something or fall in one of the trenches. From what I could see of them, they were only a few feet deep and the sides had eroded so they were more like gullies, but you still had to be careful.

  Flavian and Gwen were bringing up the rear. Every so often when the moon came out from behind a cloud, we could see the blurred outline of a cannon. But mostly the battlefield was just that—a huge open space with a gentle breeze blowing through.

  It felt almost irreverent to be out here on a lark, at a place where the whole course of history had been changed. Weird to think that right where I was standing, maybe, a British soldier could have been struggling for breath and begging for a drink of water.

  Suddenly I heard Liz gasp, and Pamela stifle a shriek. Then Yolanda gave an electrifying scream. Straight ahead, maybe twenty yards away, we saw what appeared to be a … an illuminated head … a face … there on the ground. And just as Barry had described it, the orb—the head, the face—seemed to be rising slowly up … a foot high … now higher … chest high … And then it was as tall as we were, coming right toward us. When a second head appeared, we were all clutching at Barry, trying to run, and then Yolanda screamed again and a light came on in the caretaker’s cottage.

  “Quiet, you guys!” came a familiar voice, laughing. “Now they’ll turn the bloodhounds on us.”

  “Josh!” I cried.

  He was close enough that we could see the flashlight he was holding under his chin as he’d climbed out of one of the trenches, and I heard Mitch’s laughter behind him. The next thing I knew, they were pulling us down in a trench and warning us not to make a sound.

  I found myself half sitting on Mitch’s lap, leaning awkwardly back in his arms, my legs over Pamela, who was lying on her side.

  “You dog!” she whispered, pounding on Josh’s back.

  “Shhhhh,” he cautioned.

  We all waited for the sound of footsteps. Finally Flavian inched up and peered over the edge of the trench. “Caretaker’s on the back step, looking around,” he said, ducking down again. “Got a high-beam flashlight.”

  Nobody moved.

  Flavian rose up again, his eyes even with the grass. “I think he went back inside.”

  “Yeah, but he’ll call the park police,” said Josh. “He’s not going to let a scream like that go unreported.”

  “Yeah, Yolanda. Anyone ever hire you for sound effects?” Mitch asked.

  “Let’s go and at least get back on the road,” said Barry.

  We climbed noiselessly up out of the trench and moved in a single row toward the tree line, following Barry, our dark silhouettes bent double as we crossed the field. We breathed easier once we were back on the road, and we pummeled Josh and Mitch for scaring the daylights out of us, then turned on Barry and Flavian.

  But we hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards when we saw a patrol car turn onto the road ahead of us, lights flashing.

  We staggered in the blinding light and stopped.

  “We’re fried,” said Flavian.

  “But who did we hurt?” I asked.

  “Don’t sweat it,” Josh said.

  The patrol car came slowly toward us. We waited as it stopped and a park officer got out.

  “Where you folks headed?” he asked, stopping a few yards away.

  “Going back to the Seascape, sir,” Josh said, politeness in every syllable. “It’s the only time we get a break, so we decided to look around.”

  “If you’re from a cruise ship, then you know the park closes at dusk,” the park ranger said. I couldn’t see his face in the shadows, but his voice didn’t sound friendly.

  “Well, we know it now,” Josh said. “We’re sort of history buffs, and this was our only chance to see the battlefield. We sail out in a few hours.”

  The ranger studied us a bit longer. “Caretaker reported some noise out on the field.”

  “Yeah,” put in Barry. “That would be Yolanda’s scream. We told her to look out for trenches, and she almost fell in. That’s why we realized we wouldn’t get far trying to see anything tonight.”

  “You wouldn’t know where we could get a map of the battlefield, would you?” Josh was really laying it on, but the officer wasn’t impressed.

  “Talk to your cruise director,” he said. Then motioned us back toward the port.

  The patrol car followed us to within a block of the ship before it turned off. And a half block from the ship, we saw a taxi unload its passengers. When the cab took off, we recognized Curtis, with one of the stewards leaning heavily on his shoulder.

  “Looks like they found a bar,” said Flavian. “Had to go to Williamsburg, I’ll bet.”

  “Hey!” Barry called. “Curtis. What’s up?”

  Curtis stopped and turned his head, but he couldn’t turn his body because the stew was sinking to his knees, and Curtis was trying to hold him up. It was Todd, one of the younger, skinnier guys, and he was obviously wasted.

  “Oh, man!” Mitch said.

  “Yeah. Got a situation here,” Curtis said. “And it’s my ass too if Quinton finds out.”

  “How many beers did he have?” Flavian asked.

  “A couple more than he should have. I’ve never seen him this drunk.” Curtis pulled Todd to his feet, but he wobbled unsteadily for a moment and began sinking again, carrying on a conversation with himself.

  “It’s going to be either Ken or Quinton checking off names when we reach the dock,” Josh said. “And you can’t get very much past Quinton.”

  “McCoy will go by the book, though. They’ll leave Todd behind when we sail tonight,” Barry said. “Turn him over to the park police. And if they didn’t replace Shannon, you know darn well they won’t replace Todd. We’ll be working our butts off.”

  “What’ll we do?” asked Mitch.

  “We can’t sober him up out here—curfew’s in fifteen minutes,” Curtis said. He gave Todd a little shake, but he only laughed, limp as a wet rag.

  “I’ll see who’s on duty,” Barry said, and was gone only a minute or so before he came back. “It’s McCoy,” he told us.

  Josh was helping hold up Todd now, and it was obvious there was no way he was going to walk up the gangplank on his own. We moved on a little farther, Todd’s feet dragging until we could see the ship.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” Curtis said. “We’re having a race, see? I’m going to carr
y Todd piggyback, and Josh carries Flavian.”

  “Wait a minute!” said Flavian, but Curtis went on:

  “The rest of you guys go on ahead. Laugh it up like we’re all kidding around. Tell Ken you’ve got a bet on who reaches the ship first, and we’ll do a little whooping back here on our own. Then I’ll come galloping up to the ship, Todd on my back, and run up the gangplank, as Josh and Flavian follow close behind. You guys stop and talk with Ken while I get Todd down to his bunk and under the sheets. It’s the best we can do.”

  The rest of us went on ahead, kidding among ourselves, letting our voices rise—swatting at one another. Ken smiled when he saw us coming. He checked off our names one at a time on his clipboard.

  “You guys have a good time?” he asked.

  “Oh, yeah. Any time on land’s a good time,” said Barry. And then, turning, “Okay, here they come. Let’s see who wins the race. I’ve got five bucks on Curtis.”

  “Who’s still out?” asked Ken, looking down the dock, then checking his clipboard.

  “Two crazies,” I told him as the shouts in the distance grew louder.

  “They’re all idiots,” said Gwen as Curtis, with Todd on his back, came barreling onto the landing. He raced across the dock, and with a loud “Whoeeee!” went pounding up the gangplank, with Josh and Flavian not far behind.

  “Hey! Keep it down!” Ken chided as Flavian slid off Josh’s back and gave another yell. “Quiet down, you guys, or Quinton will have our necks.”

  We hushed immediately.

  Ken checked off the last name on the list. “Anybody still out?” he asked.

  “You got ’em all,” said Mitch.

  We were in. I was impressed.

  We found out later that Todd threw up on Curtis about the time they reached crew quarters, and the guys put him under the shower, clothes and all. The next morning Todd was subdued, but sober, and Quinton, from whom no things are hidden, said simply, “You lucked out that time, Todd, but it can’t happen again. Same for you, Curtis.”