Aleutian Grave by William Doonan

Author:William Doonan [Doonan, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookYear Mysteries
Published: 2014-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

DAY 2- AT SEA - 5:00PM

I slept.

After leaving Georgie’s cabin I spent some time wandering. I walked the decks and I walked the hallways. I had a gimlet at the Beluga Bar and then I went back to my cabin and I slept. I slept for hours and I dreamed.

I don’t know if it was the rocking of the ship, or the weather outside my window that had taken a bad turn, but I dreamed of stormy seas and memories.

The year was 1990. George Bush was in the White House. Gas cost $1.16 a gallon. The Berlin Wall came down, and I was a handsome young man. A dapper sixty-five years of age; I had my whole life in front of me.

I wore a grey fedora and a corduroy jacket and I had a gorgeous lady on either arm. The Concordia Sapphire had just crossed the international date line north of Tonga and I was a day younger. I had not a care in the world. But that’s not true. I had a murder to solve. An aspiring actress by the name of Halene Delacroix went over the railing one starlit night about fifty miles south of Vanuatu. She was from Metarie, Louisiana, and she was twenty-three years old.

It was sheeting rain that night, not a good night for Halene to be out on deck. She had been drinking. She had very likely been doing a little something else too, but I was never able to prove that. She had been having a physical sort of argument with her husband, one that ship’s security had been called to break up. By midnight the husband was back in the cabin but Halene went dancing, made a friend, then made another friend.

We put together a timeline after the fact. Halene and her new beau went off radar for about an hour and a half. But by two in the morning she was drinking again in the smokers’ bar. She ordered a Gin Ricky at 2:15 in the morning from a bartender named Aldo Klegg. It was the last drink she would ever order.

Fifteen minutes later, when Aldo Klegg cut her off for being intoxicated, Halene wandered up top. We know this because it was captured on tape by one of the security cameras. I’ve watched that tape so many times that I can replay it now in my mind. Halene got herself to the railing, stumbling from the drinks. She stood there staring, as people do at railings late at night. She was crying I think. I’m not sure. She wiped her eyes a couple of times and her chest convulsed in what looked to me like a sob. Then someone came up behind her, lifted her clean over the railing and dropped her. He stood there long enough. Long enough. Watching. He had his back to the camera the whole time. Even when he backed out of the frame. No shot of his face.

Every now and again, when I’m at

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.