Murder Takes a Vacation

Mrs. Blossom can find out nothing about Paul, whom she has not seen in two days. Strolling down to the Gold Deck, she is startled to see that his room is now occupied by Gaston, one of the ship’s tour operators. Stiffly, Gaston tells her that staff are allowed to use guest rooms when the cruise is undersold, but he answers evasively when she asks how long he’s been staying there. 

At the registration desk, she discovers Paul’s email address and sends him a brief message of concern. Joining the Normandy tour, Mrs. Blossom is unexpectedly moved by her visit to the site of the D-Day landing. Elinor also attends, but without Marko, who reportedly is laid up with a stomach virus. Mrs. Blossom decides that Paul must have caught the stomach bug as well. 

Returning to the ship, she and Elinor see Marko remonstrating with the staff at the concierge desk. His sister Pat is nearby, in tears. A “scowling” Danny approaches Mrs. Blossom and asks her where she’s been all day. Catching sight of Danny, Pat loudly accuses him of having been in their room. As Danny looks on astonished, Pat tells the captain that Danny slipped into her room while she was napping. Pretending to be asleep, she watched as he stole her diamond ring from her nightstand. 

Danny stammers that he popped his head into her room while looking for someone, then immediately withdrew; he denies stealing anything, and quickly agrees to a search of his cabin. The staff find no ring, but they notice that his safe is locked. This perplexes Danny, who says he never used it or set the lock. 

He discloses his birthdate, so they can try it as a combination, and it opens the safe. Inside are Pat’s ring, a stack of Swiss banknotes, and a beautiful statue of a bird. The statue looks antique and is sculpted from grayish marble with no ornamentation. Seemingly flabbergasted, Danny claims that someone else must have stolen the ring and statue and planted in his safe to frame him.

Mrs. Blossom doubts this, since (as far as she knows) she’s the only one aboard who knew about Danny’s interest in the Quqnoz. She decides he is nothing more than a “garden-variety thief” and thinks it was probably he who searched her room the previous day. Luckily for her, nothing she owned was valuable enough for him to steal. She theorizes that he may have murdered Allan in Paris to steal the statue, but wonders why he would continue to follow her if he had the statue. She also wonders why a professional thief would waste his time on a relatively small cruise ship like the MS Solitaire.

Danny is escorted off the ship to be handed over to the local authorities. The captain tells Mrs. Blossom that the Quqnoz and the money will be put in the ship’s safe until their rightful owners can be determined. He asks her not to tell the other passengers what has happened. 

At dinner that night, Pat joins Mrs. Blossom and Elinor at their table, dressed gorgeously. Seeking to ingratiate herself with Marko’s sister, Elinor praises Pat’s clothes. Pat says her ring is precious to her because of who gave it to her and mentions the unfortunate coincidence of Danny creeping into her room right after she took it off, which she rarely does. Mrs. Blossom winces, wondering if Danny, when he went into Pat’s room, was trying to track Mrs. Blossom with his GPS device. 

To ease the tension between Pat and Elinor, Mrs. Blossom makes a joke about her own weight, but Pat just stares at her gravely. It occurs to Mrs. Blossom that Pat, who eats like a bird, is very devoted to thinness. When the conversation turns to money, Pat opines that “money is the root of everything,” unlike love, which “lets everyone down, eventually” (210). Mrs. Blossom, who feels that she betrayed her late husband’s love, remains guiltily silent.

Back in her cabin, Mrs. Blossom receives a text from Tess asking her to call, adding that Danny Johnson is not a private investigator. Knowing this already, Mrs. Blossom feels no immediate need to call her back. Danny, she decides, has been using her as a “cover,” pretending to protect her so he could rob the other passengers. To her delight, Paul calls, saying he’s in Paris and has gotten over his stomach ailment. He invites her to dine with him in his hotel room the next day. She giddily agrees, though it will mean missing the ship’s opulent farewell dinner.

The next morning, Mrs. Blossom is excited about her date with Paul but discovers that the cruise has been delayed and will not make it back to Paris that day. The cause of the delay is not specified, but she suspects it has something to do with Danny’s arrest. She texts Paul that she cannot join him for dinner. To fill the time, the staff puts together a tour of La Roche-Guyon, a picturesque chateau whose claim to fame is that the Nazi general Erwin Rommel once lived there. Testing her stamina and willpower, Mrs. Blossom trudges up the 255 steps to the top of the castle keep, which gives her some satisfaction. However, she still wonders, “What would give her life meaning?” (220). She knows only that it’s not money or love. Absently, she fingers the golden locket that contains Harold’s unread message to her.

Back onboard, she dutifully attends the farewell dinner, wishing she were with Paul in Paris. The featured performer, a mentalist, impresses her by guessing her “secret” number. She thinks it must be an “ocular” trick, a matter of gauging the movements of her eyes. Suddenly, she remembers Allan’s text message to an unknown party: “She has your eyes” (222). The statue in Danny’s safe, she remembers, had divots where its eyes should have been. She also remembers that the Quqnoz had sapphire “ornaments,” making her think that Allan may have planted the sapphires on her to get them through customs, then texted his accomplice to retrieve them. She thinks of how Allan died—falling off that balcony, leaving a cigar and a glass of brandy behind—yet when she kissed Allan, she didn’t taste tobacco on his lips. Paul, she thinks, was the cigar smoker.

Going back to her stateroom, she Googles “sapphires” and discovers they come in a wide variety of colors, including salmon. Trembling with excitement, she retrieves her pillbox from the safe and opens the secret compartment. Examining the salmon-colored gummies Allan gave her, she finds that seven of them are hard and strangely crusty. A rinse under hot water reveals them to be sapphires, the ones missing from the Quqnoz statue. She sees now why Allan stayed close to her in London: He was hoping to steal the sapphires back from her once she fell asleep. He couldn’t have predicted that she would hide them in the secret bottom of her pillbox.

Hearing a knock on the door, Mrs. Blossom slips the seven jewels into her pocket. Pat Siemen enters, champagne in hand, for the promised idyll on Mrs. Blossom’s scenic balcony. As they chat, Pat reveals that she knows the name of Mrs. Blossom’s hotel in Paris, which Mrs. Blossom never told her. Mrs. Blossom remembers that Pat lives on Lake Como, which is close to Switzerland, and for some reason, this makes her suspicious of her new friend. Just then, Marko enters with Elinor, who seems to be intoxicated or possibly drugged. 

As Marko rearranges the chairs, Mrs. Blossom realizes that she and Pat are now trapped on the balcony. Pat demands that Mrs. Blossom hand over the sapphires, which she says belong to her. Mrs. Blossom realizes that Patience Siemen is actually Constance Saylor, the lady who supposedly drowned in a lake in Switzerland. Constance, she deduces, faked her death. Worse, she thinks, the deaths of both Allan and Constance’s handyman (who burned down the museum) must have been connected with the Quqnoz; now she and Elinor may be next. 

Marko produces a gun and, threatening to kill Elinor, demands that Mrs. Blossom produce the sapphires. Telling him the jewels are in her pillbox, she reveals the gummies to him and then dumps them, along with her diamond earrings, off the balcony. Panicked, Marko leaps to the balcony railing, and Mrs. Blossom knocks him into the river, shouting, “Man overboard!” She then wrenches Pat’s cane away from her and shoves her to the floor, injuring her.

After the crew members pull Marko out of the river, he and Pat are taken into custody. Danny Johnson, who has just been released from jail, is deputized by the ship’s captain, who refers to him as “Agent Johnson,” to protect Elinor and Mrs. Blossom for the duration of the cruise. Danny explains that he is, in fact, an FBI agent, but he was tracking the Quqnoz statue on his own, without telling the bureau. For him, it was a personal matter, since Constance Saylor’s murdered handyman, Daniyal Hassan, was his estranged father. 

Hassan, he says, stole the statue on impulse after setting fire to the museum on Saylor’s orders. Danny found out about this after his father’s release from prison. He hoped to redeem his father by retrieving the statue and returning it to Pakistan, but his father refused to surrender it, thinking he was entitled to the money from its sale. Unable to leave the United States, Hassan turned to Allan, Saylor’s lawyer, to handle the bird’s sale to a Pakistani billionaire in London, not knowing it was a sting operation set up by Danny. 

However, Allan got greedy and let Constance, who now calls herself Pat Siemen, bid for the statue. To get the bird to London without carrying it through customs, Allan had it shipped to his hotel, but, wanting to keep the sapphires close, he disguised them as gummies. As for why he decided to use Mrs. Blossom to carry them through customs, it may have been because he saw Danny on the plane and recognized him as Hassan’s son. 

When Allan failed to get the sapphires back from Mrs. Blossom in London, he sent Marko the text about her having the “eyes.” Meanwhile, Marko, who preferred to keep the money for himself, murdered Allan and stole the statue, figuring he could get the sapphire ornaments from Mrs. Blossom later. Now, to Danny’s great relief, Mrs. Blossom reaches into her pocket and produces the seven missing sapphires. Her diamond earrings, which were in the pillbox, did go into the river, but it was a small price, she says, to save her life and Elinor’s.

Mrs. Blossom visits the upscale hospital where Pat Siemen, under police supervision, recuperates from her pelvic injury. She assures Pat that she has come out of curiosity and concern, not to gloat. Pat warms to her, complimenting her on her courage and resilience in saving her own life. Mrs. Blossom asks her why she was so determined to get the Quqnoz statue back after she had already been paid for its supposed loss in the fire. 

Pat says that Marko, who is not her brother but her lover, “needs” expensive things. Her money was her only hold on him, and since the museum was insured against fire but not theft, arson seemed the best way to cash in. Allan and Hassan (Danny’s father) were Marko’s accomplices in that fraud. After Hassan was arrested for the arson, he faithfully kept Pat’s name out of it; in exchange, Pat paid Danny’s college tuition. Pat and Marko collected the payout and moved to Switzerland, but when the insurance company, finding no trace of the Quqnoz’s sapphires in the ruins, reopened the case, Pat faked her death to shut the investigation down. This was Marko’s idea, and not coincidentally, this ploy gave him control of her millions, which he quickly squandered with his expensive tastes. Meanwhile, Pat altered her appearance with plastic surgery and a starvation diet so that she wouldn’t be recognized as Constance.

Eventually, Hassan, who secretly stole the Quqnoz statue before torching the museum, offered to sell it back to Pat. However, she would have to outbid another interested party: Danny’s (fictional) Pakistani billionaire. Mrs. Blossom realizes now that it was Hassan’s greed, not Allan’s, that led to both of their deaths. After Hassan contacted them about the bird, Marko visited his house and murdered him with a staged gas explosion. By this time, however, the statue was in Allan’s possession.

After Mrs. Blossom took the sapphires to Paris, Allan told Marko that he was the “winning” bidder, but he would have to get the jewels back from Mrs. Blossom. Marko decided not to pay Allan, pushed him off the hotel balcony, and stole the statue. Pat admits that her own injury, for which she uses the cane, was also the result of Marko’s violence, but she insists that he “loves” her because he always comes back to her. On the ship, she says, Marko pushed his way into Mrs. Blossom’s company by romancing Elinor in order to steal the sapphires from their room. Finally, Marko tried to frame Danny for theft to get him out of the way. Marko included the Quqnoz in this frame-up, she says, partly because he was jealous of Pat’s former lover, who gave her the statue as well as the ring. 

Pat tells Mrs. Blossom that her first lover, who gave her the statue and her pink-jeweled ring (which is a sapphire, like the Quqnoz’s ornaments), was looked down on by her father, who tried to buy him off with $50,000. This man was appalled by her family, refused the money, and had nothing more to do with her. Then she met Marko, an “expensive” lover who spent her inheritance freely while dreaming up schemes to make more: The failed vineyard, the museum, the insurance scam, and the theft of the Quqnoz from Allan were all his ideas. She says that love made her foolish, but Mrs. Blossom counters that her continued loyalty to Marko is her only folly. She says she wishes Pat would take her own advice and be the “main character in [her] own life” (247), cut a deal, and testify against him.

Before meeting Danny in the hotel lobby, Mrs. Blossom deletes the recording she surreptitiously made of the conversation, not wanting to expose Pat’s painful secrets, including Hassan’s full culpability, which would probably only hurt Danny more. She tells Danny that Pat “truly doesn’t know anything” (248), and, in any case, she forgot to hit record.

Almost two months later, Mrs. Blossom is enjoying her solo life in Baltimore, dining by herself and attending movies at the Charles Theater. Through texts and emails, she has been keeping in touch with Paul, but she feels no urgency to arrange a face-to-face date. 

At Le Comptoir du Vin, the Baltimore restaurant where Allan had offered to take her, she runs into Danny Johnson, who spotted her at the Charles and followed her out. He says the FBI disciplined him for pursuing the Quqnoz investigation without permission, but he wasn’t fired. Mrs. Blossom tells him that Tess wants to hire her again, to do “surveillance on a per-case basis” (255). Danny and Mrs. Blossom marvel at how cagily they acted toward each other in France, which led to so much misunderstanding and mistrust. She also remains perplexed that a warm, intelligent, down-to-earth person like Pat Siemen could throw herself away on a user like Marko, instead of seeking out the man who truly loved her, the one who gave her the ring and the Quqnoz. Luckily, Pat has finally agreed to testify against Marko.

Danny, who says he really is a part-time stylist, praises Mrs. Blossom’s new hair and wardrobe, which she has modeled after his and Cece’s advice. Finally, she decides to open the golden fortune cookie charm that contains Harold’s last written message. As a gesture of trust and friendship, she asks Danny to read it first, then tell her what it says. As he does so, she realizes that her life is good and has already expanded. She looks forward to filling it with color.