Murder Above the Silver Waves Read online

  MURDER ABOVE THE SILVER WAVES

  BLYTHE BAKER

  Copyright © 2021 by Blythe Baker

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  CONTENTS

  Description

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Excerpt

  About the Author

  In the summer of 1923, danger crosses the Atlantic, as Lillian Crawford sets out on a voyage to England...

  Banishment from New York aboard a magnificent luxury liner should have been the wealthy socialite’s ideal escape from disgrace, but everything changes when a moonlit stroll leaves Lillian the only witness to a shocking murder.

  Could a hot tempered American millionaire be behind the killing? Or perhaps a certain handsome, blind pianist who guards a secret? And what does the victim’s bitter wife have to hide?

  Determined to answer questions no one else is asking, Lillian enlists the aid of her twin brother Felix – as often as she can drag him away from the card tables. The Crawford siblings’ idyllic voyage becomes a fight for their lives, as they race to uncover the identity of a killer...before they become the next victims.

  1

  “It should be criminal to wear such an atrocious hat,” I murmured, though not terribly worried about keeping my voice down. “Has she not heard that ruffles now belong stuffed in the back of her grandmother’s closet?”

  “Lillian, you are too harsh. She can hardly help it if she has spent the past few years in Pennsylvania, away from reach and tell of the city.”

  I glanced over at my brother, who lazily sat back in the cushioned deck chair, the brim of his straw boater hat angled to block the sun from his eyes. The wind played with the short ends of his hair, where it wasn’t swept beneath his hat.

  We might have been born just minutes apart, but the only way anyone could tell we were twins was by the dark, onyx black of the hair we shared. When the sun hit it just right, sometimes it almost looked blue. It might have been helped by the fact that we both possessed our mother’s eyes, as cold a shade of blue as the Atlantic we were currently sailing across.

  I turned my face up toward the sun shining down on the top deck of the ship, the Promenade, where we had whiled away the mid-afternoon hours for the past four days, since we had left New York the previous Saturday.

  We had settled into a rather comfortable routine, and with only three days left before we reached Southampton, we were all too keen to enjoy the summer warmth of the open sea as long we could. Our ultimate destination of London, if I recalled correctly, oft went long stretches without seeing even the faintest glimpse of sunshine.

  Certainly not my ideal location for a new beginning but it was not the worst, either. I could take the lack of sun for the exchange of high society with which we were about to saturate ourselves.

  “Yes, well, she can hardly complain about her distance from the city, after choosing to marry that tasteless peasant…” I said, hearing the acidity in my own words. “I would have refused him, regardless of what his inheritance from his uncle might be. Might, I shall say again.”

  The young lady we had been commenting on – I could not recall her name, though we had once moved in the same circles – continued her stroll across the deck until she passed out of sight, happily unaware of our attention.

  “Yes, yes,” Felix said, flippant. “You have mentioned turning away the pursuits of not two, but three men now. Dare I say that someone might be – ”

  “You will kill that thought before you let it loose, if you know what is good for you, dear brother,” I said, my fingers grasping the edges of my deck chair perhaps a bit too tightly. “I am most certainly not jealous.”

  His eyes flashed as he glanced sideways at me, and I saw that annoying smirk curl up the left side of his face. He knew he had touched a nerve…and he was relishing every bit of it.

  Ignoring his gloating, I leaned back in the chair and mimicked my brother’s pose, adjusting my wide-brimmed straw hat slightly to block the sun from my eyes. “Mother certainly would not be pleased to see how seriously we are taking this punishment,” I said with a grin of my own. “Wait until she finds out that we dined at one of the world’s best restaurants right aboard this sorry excuse for a luxury ship. I imagine she would not have wanted to give us the satisfaction, if she had known.”

  “Father booked this trip for us, not Mother,” Felix said, in an offhand manner, laying the tips of his fingers against one another as his gaze swept over the deck of the ship and the other passengers making their way by us.

  My eyes snapped in his direction. I glared at the side of his narrow face. “Father? Why would he – ”

  “Pity,” Felix said, looking lazily back at me, seemingly unconcerned with my annoyance. “He did not want Mother to make a hasty decision in light of her wrath.”

  My eyes became slits. “In light of her wrath…” I repeated with derision. “What does that woman have to be so angry about?”

  Felix lifted an eyebrow. “Do you really want to have this conversation again?”

  “No…” I said, crossing my arms. “So this is Father’s way of…what? Trying to make amends with us? To apologize?”

  “In a way, I suppose it is,” Felix said. “If Mother had her way, we would have been crammed into a cargo ship, with nothing more than a crate to sleep on and stale bread to eat.”

  I shuddered at the thought of shivering in the dark, deep underbelly of a creaking vessel, only to wake and find myself staring into the beady eyes of a stowaway rat. Perhaps my imaginings were overdramatic, but not by much. “Even she could not be that cruel.”

  “She is that disappointed,” Felix said. I detected the slightest note of hurt behind his words, as he absently rubbed the toe of one of his brown Oxfords against the other. Every pair of shoes my brother owned were as polished as the rest of his wardrobe.

  I frowned. “I suppose this entire time I have been rejoicing at this ship being part of her punishment…” I said. “Though I suppose I should have known better, with the likes of the Duncans and the Matthews on board. They would never take a ship that Mother called ‘second-rate’.”

  Felix shook his head. “I am sorry to ruin your sense of triumph,” he said. “I thought you knew.”

  “No,” I said. My teeth clenched together. “Mother really would have treated us so terribly, if it had been up to her?”

  “Perhaps,” was all that Felix would say.

  It seemed I did not know my mother as well as I thought I did.

  I tried to push away the uncomfortable, nagging thorn of worry in my chest as I looked out over the deck of the ship. A handsome vessel, to be sure, if not a bit small. Small meant exclusive, though, it would seem. We had crossed paths with more than a few family acquaintances already.

  Father meant us to enjoy this voyage, I realized with a pit forming in my stomach.

  It certainly was impressive. I had quite come to enjoy having my morning tea up here at the top of the ship, being able to look all the way around and see the vast sea spreading in every direction. Tables and chairs dotted
the deck, where guests mingled out under the warmth of the sky, whose only clouds came from the three enormous steam pipes that stretched high overhead. We had already enjoyed the many features the ship had to offer, from the ballroom to the lounges, and my particular favorite, the café.

  “You know, I don’t really think Mother’s sending us away was intended as a punishment after all,” I said, watching a young woman further back on the ship. Her scarf had been yanked from around her neck by an errant gust of wind, and she and a steward who had come to serve her and her party their meal began to chase after it.

  “Really?” Felix asked. “Why do you say that?”

  “If she really meant to punish us, she certainly would not be sending us to stay with Mr. Sansbury,” I said.

  “Cousin Richard, you mean,” Felix corrected me.

  I glared at him, my mouth still hanging open with the unfinished thought. “I have met the man once in my entire life,” I said. “He is Mother’s cousin. Not ours.”

  “He is our cousin,” Felix said.

  I rolled my eyes. “Felix, you understand what I – ”

  “You believe if Mother were truly angry with us for our actions she might have sent us to, say, Aunt Edith?” he asked.

  I bit back the string of nasty comments that I might have said if it were not for the passing by of Mr. Monroe and his wife, a couple with whom our Father was well acquainted. “Yes,” I said. “Or, as I was about to say, to stay with Father’s brother in Florida. Either way, we still will very likely be keeping a great deal of our lifestyle intact.”

  “Yes, I have thought that, too,” he said. “Funny, isn’t it? It seems she cannot fault me as much as I had initially expected about my refusing Father’s offer.”

  I pursed my lips. It was a tender topic, I knew. “I have wondered if she hopes Cousin Richard will be able to change your mind,” I said. “Given his involvement in finance as well.”

  “Oh, I am perfectly aware that is her aim,” Felix said. He shifted in his seat and crossed one leg over the other. “But it isn’t mine.”

  “I know, you do not believe that you have the mind of a proper businessman,” I said.

  He shook his head. “That is not the full of it…” he said.

  I looked away. It was the same wall that I always seemed to find. He would not tell even me what he was truly thinking. He still had yet to share why he had dropped out of college. After that, when Father had encouraged him to see if there was anything he might want to take on as a career, nothing had been a fit for him. As such, he had entirely given up. From the outside, it probably seemed to our parents as if he had no drive at all.

  I knew my brother, though, and knew that he might appear indifferent to many things but he was, in fact, a more determined individual than people thought, one who felt things more deeply than he let on.

  “Well, I suppose it is easier for you,” Felix said with a passive wave. “Mother is only sending you along to keep an eye on me, and to give you a chance to get over Thomas Williams – ”

  “What have I told you about saying his name?” I hissed, gripping the arms of the deck chair once again. I let out a long, heavy sigh and shook my head. “I am sorry. But this is no comfort trip for me. She is furious with me, even though it was he – ”

  “Who broke off the engagement, yes,” Felix said. “It is better if you get used to saying it.”

  My face burned. It suddenly felt uncomfortably hot out on deck, despite the lightweight cotton and low scooped neckline of my dress. “It was not my fault,” I snapped, glaring at a few wrinkles in the fern colored fabric. “He was never good enough to marry in the first place. I am simply grateful that I saw it before we were wed.”

  Felix nodded. “Of course,” he said. “But Father and Mother would have preferred you saw it before they committed a small fortune to the wedding plans. It created an embarrassing situation for them, what with the sudden cancelation being the talk of the town.”

  I fumed. “Surely even you can see that I am not the one to blame for that,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “You think I deserved for him to leave me?” I asked. “To humiliate me – ”

  “Lillian, you would do well to calm yourself,” he said in a low voice. “We do not need to draw any unwanted attention.”

  His comment made me all the angrier and I had to bite down on my tongue to keep from spewing out vengeful thoughts that pounded against the inside of my skull.

  He was right, of course. Here we sat on this beautiful ship, enjoying the accommodations of first class, and all I could see was red because of – because of –

  I drew in a long, slow breath through my nose. I breathed in the salty scent of the sea, allowing the sound of the waves crashing against the side of the ship to fill my mind and push away the frustration that pumped through my heart, making my skin tingle.

  “We are leaving all of that behind,” Felix said, leaning over and laying his hand on my arm. On his middle finger, the silver ring that had belonged to our grandfather glinted in the bright sunlight overhead. Our Mother’s father. Kin to the cousin we were going to stay with. “We might have only agreed to six months in London, but after Christmas, there is nothing stopping us from staying there forever. We can start new lives. Meet new people, new friends. Our cousin will have the proper connections, and no one need know the awkward situations we are coming from.”

  “You’re right,” I admitted. “To be honest, I hardly miss New York at all.”

  “Nor do I,” he said, with the same stubborn resistance in his voice that I heard in my own. No matter how we really felt, we would continue to say we believed it out loud, to reaffirm each other.

  I could not imagine myself missing New York. What was I leaving behind? Parents whose only concern seemed to be how our choices would affect their reputations? Friends who might preen when we were around, but gossiped about us as soon as we left the room? People and places full of poor memories, heartache, and strife?

  A stir among the nearby people caused me to turn my head.

  A tall man strode up the designated pathway on the top deck of the ship, and all eyes had turned to look at him. He was handsome, to be sure, with his long legs and the short, clean cut of his dark brown hair. Not particularly broad, he had a narrow waist and a long, straight nose.

  But perhaps the most striking feature about him was the pair of glasses with black lenses that he wore.

  “That’s Eugene Osbourn,” Felix said, leaning over to me. “I heard he was on board.”

  “The blind pianist?” I asked, my eyes widening. “I had no idea!”

  Felix nodded, watching him closely. “He is supposed to be performing this evening in the theater.

  “Why did you not tell me?” I asked, giving my brother a playful shove.

  “I did not realize it was my job to be your walking, talking itinerary,” he said.

  Mr. Osbourn carried a long, white pole that he held out in front of himself, the opposite end of which brushed against the wooden boards of the deck. He swung it back and forth in front of him as he took slow, deliberate steps.

  A woman held his arm casually, her eyes gazing off into the distance. He was not escorting her; in fact, it was definitely the other way around.

  “Who do you suppose the woman is? The one leading him around?” I asked. “His wife, perhaps?”

  “No,” Felix said. He leaned closer to me, and gestured toward them. “You see the shape of her nose? The way it is slightly turned up at the end? His is precisely the same.”

  “Siblings, then?”

  Felix nodded. He touched his cheek. “The same way you and I share these high, superior cheekbones.”

  I reached up to graze the tips of my fingers against my own, and smiled. “I suppose we do, don’t we?”

  “The envy of all who behold them,” he said with a wink.

  I watched the two siblings make their way past the tables, around the corner. I saw another passenger who h
ad been sitting at one of the periphery tables get to his feet, his chair sliding out into the walk…right across the path of Mr. Osbourn.

  My stomach turned as I anticipated the collision, and I sat up a little straighter –

  Mr. Osbourn missed the chair entirely, sidestepping it neatly and pulling his sister along.

  “Well, that could have been an embarrassing stumble,” Felix said. “I have often heard that those who suffer from impaired vision enjoy improvements, even enhancements, to their other senses…”

  Yes, but so much so that he could almost anticipate the movement of an obstacle placed in his path?

  My eyes fell upon the white stick the blind man continued brushing along the deck. It had not been anywhere near the chair.

  I furrowed my brow. Was it possible that he had…but no, Felix had said he was blind?

  All the stories I had heard of the famous pianist were of his blindness. There were extensive stories about him, articles in all the major newspapers. I had seen several of them refer to him as one of the greatest musical geniuses of our era.

  If he could anticipate the movements of others, perhaps by hearing or feeling some shifting in the floor beneath him, then it was certainly a gift that might have improved his piano playing as well…

  I shook my head, watching as the pair went on down the deck to the continued awe of the rest of the passengers nearby.

  “This sun is making me tired,” I said, looking back over at Felix. “Perhaps we should return to our room to ready ourselves for dinner this evening?”

  “I suppose we might as well,” my twin said, getting to his feet. He looked down the deck, his eyes trailing after the retreating forms of Mr. Osbourn and his sister. “She is rather fetching, isn’t she?”