Jumping from bed, grabbing his pants and getting into them the way he'd been forced once when an angry husband had been pounding up the stairs, Tobin ran to his door and threw it open.
There, pushed back against the rail, two women struggled over a small brown leather notebook one of them held. Tobin wasn't sure which one owned the thing-all he knew was that the two resembled TV wrestlers, impressive to watch but ineffective.
Tobin, rubbing sleep from his face, walked over to them. Out on the rim of the vast ocean you could see the round yellow sun begin slowly to sink, and closer by a steamer, gray and industrial, chopped through the calm water.
Other passengers had responded to the screams as well and had now tumbled out of their cabins, watching the two women as Tobin approached them.
"Anything wrong?"
It was a silly question and he knew it instantly but he was too sleepy to care.
He pushed himself between the two women and their wrestling ceased.
The dark-haired, slightly pudgy woman he knew, because she was Jere Farris's wife.
Her opponent-a red-haired woman who would have been beautiful if not for a certain hardness in her Katharine Hepburn gaze-he assumed was the one Cindy McBain had told him about. She had a beauty mark on her right cheek. It was a real beauty mark and a nice one.
The redhead snapped the notebook to her breast, then jammed it quickly into her purse, which she snapped shut with the finality of a bank vault closing for the night.
"You bitch," Alicia Farris said. She was a fortyish woman who knew how to dress for her somewhat hefty size, her clothes running to loose and expensive garments that managed to be both sedate and stylish. She was probably fifty pounds overweight but managed to look only twenty. Her face, with good if broad bones, was beautifully made up and her gray eyes were lovely. Among "Celebrity Circle" members, the joke was that Jere was her male clone, and it was true that she did give the impression of managing him rather than being married to him. But Tobin had had drinks with her a few times and found her bright and funny without being cruel or bitchy, something that could not be said about many show-biz wives who stayed home and sharpened knives while hubby went out and dazzled the masses.
"You mind if I ask what's going on, Alicia?" Tobin said.
"It's this bitch, Iris Graves!"
Iris only smiled, as if she were quite used to being called names.
"Anyway, I'm afraid it isn't your business," Alicia said. Then, more softly, "It really isn't, Tobin." She didn't take her eyes off the redhead.
Then Alicia, conscious suddenly of the other passengers watching her, pushed past Tobin and moved on down the deck, her black high heels sharp against the decking, leaving Tobin standing next to the woman.
Her blessings were bountiful, as her tight white T-shirt and stone-washed jeans revealed. And in addition to her somewhat overwhelming body, which managed to combine the spectacular with the graceful, she had very green eyes and cute little ears bearing giant loops of gold, and teeth so white they had to be capped but weren't. Only the imperiousness of her gaze troubled him. Perhaps, in a previous life, she'd been Benito Mussolini.
She turned to go and Tobin put a hand on her arm.
She glanced at him as if he'd just mooched a quarter. "I don't like being touched," she said.
"What's so important about that notebook?"
"My God, do you really expect me to answer that?" She sounded genuinely shocked.
"And why are you following Cassie McDowell?"
She looked at him and shook her head. "I've watched your show so I know you are stupid, Mr. Tobin. I just didn't know how stupid."
A few of the onlookers laughed at her remark. They also watched admiringly as she walked away.
One sunburned seventy-year-old in red Bermuda shorts and a green short-sleeved shirt said to Tobin, "Are you always that lucky with women?"
Tobin grinned at him. "Only when I bathe regularly."
The man said, "Just watch yourself with that little secretary from Kansas."
Tobin felt his blood chill. "What?"
The man now seemed uneasy. "I just meant…"
"You shouldn't have said anything, Ernie," his wife said. She wore a straw hat and what appeared to be knickers and seemed pleasant enough.
"No," Tobin said. "Please let him go on. How do you know about the secretary from Kansas?"
"Well, you know what happened to Ken Norris last night."
"Right. He was killed."
The man shrugged. "Well, the stewards are telling us that the captain thinks she killed him. The secretary."
The sonofabitch, Tobin thought, thinking of the lugubrious captain, a man far more capable of deviousness than Tobin would have given him credit for.
"I didn't mean to upset you," the man said, sounding increasingly defensive.
"That's fine. Didn't mean to startle you."
"Come on, Ernie. Let's go have a mai-tai." The wife smiled at Tobin. "Ernie's always putting his foot in it."
Tobin went back to his cabin and tried to sleep. Uselessly. Instead he kept thinking about the captain, a man whom he'd begun to dislike in a serious way. Finally forcing himself to forget the captain, he started to doze. Then he began worrying about other things, worrying being a process that was with him from the time he opened his eyes till he closed them at the end of the day. There were the children to worry about and his career and his health and there was always the state of his soul, even though he was not sure if he had one. He wanted to be one of those people who could simply put things out of their minds but knew he never would. Ever.
Then he started wondering about the redhead, and why she'd been wrestling with Alicia Farris over a notebook.
Finally, seeing that he'd never get any sleep, he got up, took a shower, dressed for dinner, and went in search of Captain Hackett.
If he couldn't get lucky with any of the women on board, then perhaps he could solve a mystery.