Death on Tour - Janice Hamrick [51]
I felt a little sick inside. DJ hadn’t seen the dead man, didn’t know the death was a duplicate of Millie’s. Whatever had happened, it most certainly had something to do with us. I just wasn’t sure how to find out what it was.
Chapter 8
SHIPS AND SHOPLIFTING
The rest of our tour was to be spent aboard a cruise ship, traveling north on the Nile toward Luxor. On the flight back to Aswan, Kyla sat next to me, our quarrel forgotten. The shock of the death had knocked the sense back into both of us. Alan ended up sitting several rows behind me where I couldn’t see him. I wasn’t sure whether I was pleased or not. I had about a million questions for him, but since none of them were remotely polite, I wasn’t sure I would have the nerve to ask them anyway. Questions like, who are you really? Are you a policeman? A spy? Or are you a murderer? No, none of those would have been appropriate for a plane flight.
Back in Aswan, a bus waited to take us to the docks where four large cruise ships floated on the dark waters of the Nile. The four ships might have been built to the same pattern. Tied together side by side like four horses pulling the same chariot, they occupied only a single mooring in the small harbor, and passengers had to walk through one to get to the next. The captains were clever enough to have them lined up in order of departure, and so when we arrived back at Aswan, we passed through the lobbies of three of the floating hotels before we stepped aboard the Nile Lotus.
I’d never been on a cruise ship before and had to make an effort to keep my jaw up. Chandeliers, curving staircases, marble floors. The tantalizing odor of lunch and the sound of flatware on china drifted through open doors, reminding us how hungry we were, and spurring us from one ship to the next. Our ship, when we reached it, seemed to be in the middle of the pack in terms of luxury and right at the top in terms of brightness and pleasant atmosphere.
Kyla put her hands on her hips. “Well, this looks like it might be acceptable.”
I grinned at her. “Your majesty is pleased?”
“I’ll let you know when we see our room. Depends on how much bilge water is on the floor.”
“And I was assured there was a two-rat limit for every room.”
“Well, okay then.”
Our hand luggage waited in a pile beside the front desk and we gathered our belongings while Anni doled out the keys to our rooms. We could hear shouts outside. Then the ship gave an almost imperceptible shiver and, slowly, like a glossy crocodile sliding down a riverbank, glided out onto the Nile.
Despite earlier events, I couldn’t help giving a shiver of my own. To be floating on the Nile was a dream so deep that I’d never really thought I’d ever see it happen. For a moment, I felt disconnected, as though I were on a movie set and nothing around me was quite real. The noise of the groups scrambling for luggage, calling to each other, asking questions—mostly about keys and lunch—seemed insignificant as I stared out the huge windows of the lobby and the ship slipped through the sapphire water.
“Hey, I got our keys. Come on, let’s dump our stuff and head for the dining room. I’m starving,” said Kyla, breaking the spell.
Our cabins were on the second floor, up the great curving flight of stairs, and Kyla and I looked at each other before we opened the door.
“If we have bunk beds, I call the top,” she said with a grin.
“If we have hammocks, I call the one without the rats.”
But when we opened the door we were very pleased to find what could pass as a very decent, if small, hotel room in any city. If the bathroom hadn’t been raised about six inches higher than the rest of the room with a door that closed like a porthole, and if the banks of the Nile weren’t streaming by outside the huge picture window, we could have fooled ourselves into thinking we were in France.
Kyla threw herself onto the closest bed. “What a morning,” she said.
“Get up,” I said, tossing my bag onto the far bed. I knew that she’d let me have the bed nearest the window as another peace offering. “Lunch