It's Murder, On a Galapagos Cruise: An Amateur Female Sleuth Historical Cozy Mystery (Miss Riddell C by P.C. James (easy novels to read txt) 📕

She stopped. Her mind made up, she headed back toward the lounge where snacks had been laid out for those waiting to leave the ship.

“Maria,” Pauline said, as the server emerged from the kitchen area with a tray of croissants.

Maria placed the tray on a table and removed the empty one she was replacing. She walked to where Pauline was waiting.

“Yes?” She asked.

Pauline hesitated. “I can’t approve of what you did,” she said, “but I will take your secret with me today. I wish you all the happiness you can have in your life. Goodbye. God bless.”

With that, she turned abruptly and walked away leaving Maria gazing sadly at her retreating figure.

“Well?” Freda demanded, when she was allowed into Pauline’s cabin.

“Well, what?”

“As half this detective team I want to know what you told the captain.”

“You quit the team, if you remember, but I will tell what I told him. He need have no fears arising from this incident.”

“You didn’t tell him about Maria?”

“It goes against everything I hold dear,” Pauline said, “but I think this may be the one instance I’ve ever met where justice has been served without the law’s involvement. Maria has justice and, I believe, in his own way, so has Jose, or whatever his name was. Now let’s go. I never want to see this ship or these people again.”

“Why? What have they done?”

“Nothing,” Pauline said. “It’s what I’ve done that makes it impossible for me to meet them again.”

“You’re too hard on yourself, Polly. No one would have handed Maria over to the police.”

“I’m not no one and I believe in the law and its importance for the safety of us all. You’re happy at my decision; I’m glad of that. But, I am not and I will live with what I’ve done forever.”

“What made you think it was Maria, Polly?” Freda asked, as they sat on their hotel’s terrace in the bright sunshine overlooking one of Quito’s quieter parks.

It was the first time they’d been alone that day. The disembarkation had been orderly but busy with people and the leave-taking noisy. The coach ride back to Quito had been quieter, everyone feeling that letdown that comes at the end of every trip. The coach dropped each group at their hotels and the goodbyes now were weary ones. Pauline and Freda were among the last to be dropped off but there were still too many passengers to talk safely.

“The first moment was when you asked her if she knew Jose from before and she didn’t answer.”

“She did,” Freda said.

“No, she didn’t. She shook her head. A person like Maria couldn’t actually say a lie but she could shake her head. Many people are like that.”

“But she told us about what he’d done.”

“Yes. She had to or we would have been suspicious of her agitation over the questions.”

“And that was it?”

“It was the first suspicion I had we were wrong about Jose. Then Pedro said Jose pretended machismo but was not a manly man and I thought of the people Jose had quarrels with, Arvin, Pedro, Rod, and Maria.”

“But Arvin quarreled with Jose, not the other way around.”

‘Possibly but Arvin didn’t wear his glasses. What if Jose had been stealing his bag from his room and Arvin had been wrongly persuaded it was all a mistake?”

“But Pedro and Rod? How could they be involved?”

“Jose was a man who sniffed out weaknesses and attacked them without mercy. I’m sure he heard Rod speaking Spanish to one of the crew, heard the discrepancy and saw an opportunity for blackmail. And poor Pedro was even more at risk. I’m sure Jose knew Pedro’s weakness from long before and again saw the opportunity for gain.”

“But if Maria had gone to the captain, he’d have been found out,” Freda said.

“Jose had only to go to the captain first and say it was Maria who’d led the guerillas to the village that day. We may have believed Maria over him but it would be hard to prove otherwise. He wasn’t a ‘manly man’, to use Pedro’s words, but he was cruel and audacious. I suspect in the end, it would be Maria who broke first.”

“But none of these things say Maria did it,” Freda said.

“On their own, each one was as unproveable as the evidence against our suspects in Jose’s death. But together, I saw a pattern, not a series of random chances, and people – people with weaknesses, ripe for exploitation. From that, I saw a different Jose.”

“I still don’t see why Maria and not the others.”

“Do you remember the first time we met Maria?”

“Not really.”

“I noticed and mentioned her name badge said she was from Peru. She was quick to say she now lived in Ecuador and added ‘among good people’. I thought it an odd thing to say. I live in Canada now but I don’t think Britons are not ‘good people’ and Canadians are better.”

“It was just her way of saying how much she liked her new home,” Freda protested.

“I thought that too, until everything we thought we knew began to shift.”

“But you were still guessing he’d done something to Maria, personally I mean.”

“And if it was only what I suspected I would have given my suspicions to the police. It was the horror of what she told us and her offer to show her scars to prove it that, in the end, decided me.”

“What if Maria had denied all of it.”

“Then my decision would have been a much harder one to make, for I was sure I was right.”

Freda shuddered, though the evening was warm.

“I like what you do even less, now,” she said.

“This case has opened my eyes too,” Pauline said. “Now, I’m going to have an early night. It’s been a long day and I didn’t sleep at all last night.”

“With your conscience, I’m surprised you ever sleep at all,” Freda said, rising from her chair and following her sister into the hotel.

Pauline didn’t reply. In her mind, she saw Jose letting go