Claire Gulliver #04 - Cruisin' for a Bruisin' by Gayle Wigglesworth

Author:Gayle Wigglesworth [Wigglesworth, Gayle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cozy mystery
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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“I’ll get it.” Claire hurried to open the door for Harold and Pearl. “Hi. everyone’s on the balcony, but it’s really cold. Put on your jackets.”

It felt frosty on the balcony, the air sharp, and the smell of snow waffed on the breeze. Many of the outside cabins had tiny balconies, but Mrs. Bernbaum’s was quite large, stretching the width of her double wide cabin. It had several chairs and a small table and was enclosed at each end by solid panels allowing some privacy from the balconies on either side. The space was crowded with all Mrs. Bernbaum’s guests. They needed to be outside, not only to see clearly, but so they could hear the sounds of the ice breaking off. The ship was parallel to the edge of the glacier and while it was at least a quarter of a mile away it seemed very close, perhaps too close, for comfort. The calm, still, silvery water of the bay was filled with chunks of ice, some big and blue, some small and gray.

The mega movie, Titanic, was recent enough to make the passengers all too aware of the danger of floating icebergs. They appreciated the captain’s amazing skill in guiding the ship carefully and slowly through the water as he circled the bay in front of the Hubbard Glacier. And continuously, the glacier gave up more of itself, calving into the bay. Large chunks of ice with rumbles and sharp cracks, almost like thunder, shivered then slid, gathering momentum, before crashing into the water displacing big waves of water rushing away from the shore. Some waves were large enough to gently rock the ship. Other than the noise of the glacier calving there was complete silence. It was so eerie that the people on Mrs. Bernbaum’s balcony and the balconies on either side of her, found themselves whispering as if in church.

The glacier, itself, was breathtakingly beautiful. When the ship first moved into the bay and the glacier was sighted, it was magnificent, but that was nothing to compare to this closer view. It stretched miles on either side of the ship and it was many stories high, looming over them. And it was blue. Everyone said it was blue; pictures of it showed it blue, but somehow that still didn’t prepare one to see it. The color was everywhere, and the huge crevices revealed the blue went deep into the ice. It wasn’t just a reflection of the sky in the ice, it was blue ice.

Claire couldn’t get enough pictures, until she finally realized the grandeur couldn’t be captured in a small picture, so she stopped with what she had. She would have to burn the image in her brain and then the pictures could remind her of the beauty, the immensity and the silence.

Mrs. Bernbaum was the first to go back into her cabin, and slowly the others trailed behind her as the ship shifted and they gradually lost sight of the glacier. When

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