Aeronaut Gone Page 8

“What does it matter the reason?” Ro laughed. “If we survive, it’ll be the tale of the ages. If we die, at least we outlived those…those philandering coxcombs we married.”

  Hettie grinned and they left the cabin, finding Douglas also just leaving the cabin of his wife, sister-in-law, and cousin-in-law. He lifted a flask to them that Hettie had just been manhandling.

  “What do you think?” he asked, laughing almost hysterically. “Are these our final moments?”

  “I should say not,” Hettie snapped. “We’ll be fine.”

  “Without an aeronaut?” A high-pitched, dark giggle escaped Douglas and he sipped from the flask. “I hardly think so. But lie to yourself if you want. And go on lying to yourselves that you’re clever or pretty or that those gents of yours see anything other than the ready money one can practically smell when they’re near you.”

  Ro growled low, but Hettie reached out and slapped Douglas, surprising even herself. “You forget yourself, sir.”

  “Forget what?” Douglas snarled. He turned and made his way up the ladder and out the hatch. “Love your lies, ginger. But when we die, the last thing I’ll say is that I told you so.”

  Chapter 11

  Truman, Neville, Ro, and Hettie gathered in the small bridge area and reassessed their situation. Ro glared at the Longmonts, half-listening to Hettie recount their search down below.

  “Douglas Longmont seems to have forgotten his manners, and is quite convinced we’re all about to die. Perhaps he knows something about the Captain’s fate and it’s affecting his personality.”

  “Perhaps he’s simply an obnoxious goat,” Ro muttered under her breath. Hettie continued as though Ro hadn’t spoken.

  “More likely the debt he’s carrying is weighing him down. I doubt his debts have anything whatsoever to do with our Captain’s disappearance, though. We found nothing to indicate the Longmonts had anything to do with our current predicament.”

  A raucous shout from the Longmont clan caught their attention. This time Betsy and Daisy were going at each of their husbands.

  Betsy’s high-pitched, nasally voice cut through the sky in an intensely irritating way. “You are a reckless fool, Douglas Longmont. You brought us into the jungle and I’ll never forgive you for it. All for what? A dying old man.”

  “We didn’t have a choice. It’s not as though we wanted to come. My father said he’d cut off our allowance if we didn’t come. You do enjoy my allowance, don’t you, my darling wife?” There was nothing affectionate in the way he spoke to his wife, rather his tone was laced with derision and condescension.

  In between Betsy’s accusations, Daisy filled in the gaps with her own stark criticism of Frederick. “We haven’t even seen a sloth. We are going to die here in this—this place. I’ll never forgive you, even if we live, which doesn’t seem likely.”

  For their part, the twins stood there scowling at their wives, making little effort to either defend themselves or to comfort their wives. Ro had never seen so many adults playing so hard at being children.

  The Longmonts were unravelling. Watching the twins turn on each other and their wives—even on their dying grandfather—made Ro extra aware of their predicament. For now, having spent the most time with the aeronaut, Neville and Truman were keeping the ship in the air and doing their best to track the river below them, although none of them knew if they were following the correct river or if they were going the right way.

  Nobody knew when or how the Captain left the ship. They could have been off course from their planned destination for hours. It was clear to all of them that they were off course. They should have landed near the waterfalls by now, or very soon from now which would make them visible by air and there were no waterfalls as far as they could see.

  “We need to find a place to land. I think I can recall how the Captain commanded the ship to lower altitude, but I hesitate to make any course changes until we have a plan,” Neville said.

  “Why do we need to land?” Hettie asked, and Ro echoed the question in her mind.

  “Water,” Neville replied low enough to keep from giving the Longmonts something else to panic over. “Herzfeld didn’t take on more than what we’d need for a day to keep weight to a minimum. Especially given the journey was to see the jungle, landing was always part of the plan.”

  Hettie winced. “In this heat, I assume running out of water would be bad.”

  “Especially for us,” Neville replied. “We don’t have the discipline or the adjustment to an environment to go without water for long.”

  They all looked out at the landscape which had started to reveal steeper canyons on either side of the river.

  Truman broke their tense silence. “Perhaps we are more on course than we thought. But the steep walls of the canyon may require a water landing. Do you think you can keep us on course if I use the apparatus to lower us?”

  The tense silence returned at the mention of water landing. Obscenities passed through Ro’s thoughts but she kept them to herself, although she promised herself she’d let loose as soon as her feet touched the ground. For now, calm was the only choice.

  A man’s yell cut through the air as if to mock her intention of remaining calm. “Now what? I swear this family is the most terrible group of people I’ve ever encountered. Save Grandfather and Jade and Will.”

  Truman muttered under his breath something about wishing for a prison cell to lock these fools into and Ro suppressed a bit of a nervous giggle. She gathered her composure and watched him approach Douglas and Frederick.

  “What’s the meaning of this? You two are behaving like children. Remain calm you fools, while we try and figure out where we can land this ship.”

  Frederick was breathless. “You don’t understand. There was a spider on his neck.” He pointed at Douglas who was panting and turning a dark shade of red. Get the doctor. Hurry.”

  Truman turned to Neville. “Doc, spider bite.”

  Because of course whoever was trying to murder Douglas was still trying to murder Douglas, even though they were all likely to die when they tried to land this airship. Ro found it incredibly short-sided that the killer would still be working so hard to kill him when death was practically inevitable at this point.

  What was left of the crushed spider was on the bottom of Frederick’s shoe. “That’s a banana spider.” Neville examined Douglas. “Where were you bitten?”

  Douglas’s answer was breathless and his speech was choppy. “I—I don’t—” another gasp for air, “I didn’t feel it bite me. Frederick saw it on my neck and knocked if off me, then stamped on it.”

  “You’re lucky. It’s hard to tell for sure since it’s mashed up, but I’m relatively confident that’s a banana spider. One bite is fatal. I think if he’d gotten you, you’d be dead already. Strange that a spider would be here on this airship at this altitude with us. Although they are nicknamed the wandering spider. Perhaps it’s not so strange as we thought.”

  Not strange at all, Ro thought, if Douglas were the target of someone’s deathly scheme, which he certainly was as far as she was concerned. Did Frederick know that Douglas had a nude photograph of Daisy? Men had murdered for less, she supposed. But Frederick had just saved his brother, instead of letting him conveniently have a fatal encounter with a deadly spider. Maybe someone had seen the spider as well and Frederick had been forced to act?

  “Fatal?” Betsy gasped. “Fatal!” She gently pushed back Douglas’s hair and then lifted her hand to her trembling mouth. “What circle of Hell is this? Oh, Douglas! What if I had lost you?”

  Ro lifted an eyebrow and glanced at Hettie. Douglas’s wife Betsy made a positive fool of herself falling all over her husband, playing the part of concerned wife even though only moments before she’d read him the riot act. Who did she think she was fooling?

  Daisy was just as dramatic, though she kept her hands to herself with her husband and sister-in-law as an audience. “Oh, Douglas, you are having the worst luck in this jungle. Are you
certain you are well? You feel nothing? Perhaps we’d better pour a little alcohol over his neck to disinfect it.”

  Betsy looked at Daisy with an expression of something between irritation and loathing but when Betsy noticed Ro’s observation, the fool woman gathered her composure.

  “Douglas,” Betsy said with that same trembling, broken tone, “you certainly have terrible luck. It’s wonderful Daisy was close enough to you to notice the spider before it bit you. I believe you just might owe her your life.”

  There was definitely tension between the two wives and between each wife and her husband, but the twins seemed to have established some solidarity between them. Not that they were friends, but it seemed when they were being harassed by their wives, they banded together.

  Ro had thought it a thousand times just since the sun had risen today that this family was completely bonkers.

  “Let’s hope there are no more.” Neville turned and headed back to the bridge followed by Truman and Ro.

  “Another near miss for Douglas,” Ro said to Hettie.

  “Someone certainly seems to want him dead.” Hettie shuddered and glanced at the boys to see what they thought. No one was objecting to the theory.

  “If so,” Ro amended, “that someone is not very good at murder. It turns out it’s quite easy to die accidentally in the jungle, but difficult to orchestrate an intentional murder. Lucky for Douglas, I suppose. Did Ro tell you what we found in Douglas’s luggage trunk?”

  Both men shook their head, so Hettie filled them in on the crushing debt Douglas seemed to be in, the nude photographs they’d found, as well as their suspicion that Douglas was having an affair with Daisy.

  Truman gathered the four close together so nobody else could overhear. “We need to be very careful. Nobody goes anywhere alone. It’s time to face facts that in addition to being aboard a rudderless, captain-less flying ship over the jungle somewhere in Costa Rica—I’m only assuming we are still in Costa Rica—we are traveling with a group of borderline psychopaths and one of them is doing their best to kill Douglas Longmont before we get out of this jungle.”

  Hettie forced a tight smile to her face. “Stay together, land the ship, find a murderer before they kill Douglas or anyone else that might be in their way. Excellent, nothing to worry about. Just another relaxing day of vacation.” She turned to look at Ro. “Feels like Prince Edward Island, doesn’t it? Do we even dare Paris?”

  “Oh, we’ll dare,” Ro muttered darkly. “We’ll dare to find the attempted killer, leave them to their fate, and then sail off to Paris, into the sunset.”

  Hettie’s head tilted and her gaze met Ro’s with a quirk to her lips.

  “Don’t say it,” Ro ordered.

  “The sun sets in the west,” Hettie rushed out and then ducked as Ro smacked at her. “We’ll be sailing east. The boys will fly this ship. Ro, you and I, will solve the murder. It appears to be our specialty—not to mention continually necessary.”

  “Here now,” Truman started to object, but Ro waved him off.

  “Don’t start. You can’t stop us anyway, and we’re not stupid enough to separate.” Ro’s shoulders drooped. “Whose murder are we solving anyway? The attempted murder of Douglas or the disappearance of the aeronaut. If he’s not on board…I haven’t wanted to say it out loud, but either he jumped to his death or he was pushed. He does bear a striking resemblance to the twins. Perhaps in the darkness he was mistaken for Douglas?”

  “What a vile family. Someone is so set on killing off Douglas they don’t care if the rest of us die in the process—including themselves? That doesn’t sound very reasonable to me. I don’t know how Jade came out to be such a lovely person in the midst of their hideousness.” Hettie shivered.

  “Well, Will and Grandfather Longmont seem all right, and she married into it,” Neville said reasonably. “Perhaps she decided that they were worth the burden of the rest or perhaps she discovered what the rest were like too late.”

  “If I was trapped in the jungle with this family, I might hurl myself overboard too,” Ro said, and then, “Oh wait. I am trapped in the jungle with this family. Shall we go diving, Hettie?”

  Hettie glanced over the side, noted the trees that seemed to contain quite an ominous darkness below, remembered the near miss with the crocodile and shook her head hard.

  “No. I’d rather die of thirst than be eaten by a crocodile. I fear I’d survive the haul only to be something’s lunch.”

  She and Hettie left the men at the bridge and made their way back down to their tiny cabin, giving the entirety of the Longmont crew the side eye as they passed them. There was no point in hiding their irritation now, they might as well know they weren’t wanted and the invitation would have been withdrawn if they could do so without murdering the family via leaving them in the jungle.

  Chapter 12

  “I fear we’re off course,” Neville told Truman, though Hettie doubted the doctor would have said it if he’d realized that Hettie and Ro had returned to the deck. “It was bloody good luck coming across the river, but nothing else matches. Our guess that we were on Herzfeld’s river was wrong, I fear.”

  “Surely there’s more than one river in this jungle?” Hettie said lightly and not as though she were terrified they were lost in the jungle forever. She’d read that ridiculous book about Tarzan the previous year on the ocean crossing and it had seemed utterly ridiculous up until this moment. Does this jungle have apes?”

  “Apes?” Neville asked blankly as though she’d gone quite mad.

  “No,” Ro answered, immediately understanding. They’d both read the book, watched Jane leave with the smarmy fellow, and then reached the shore only to stop by the first bookstore they could find and buy two copies of the second book. It hadn’t mattered that it was stupid, Tarzan and Jane belonged together. “They’re only in Africa.”

  “Oh thank goodness,” Hettie said and then returned to her earlier point. “Surely there’s more than one river in this jungle. What made you decide that we were on whichever one you thought?”

  Neville blushed lightly and leaned down.

  “We assumed it was the nearest one from where we were,” Truman said. “I suppose if we lost the aeronaut rather early…”

  “Men,” Ro muttered. “While you’re considering upon that, Jade said we were almost out of water. She asked Captain Herzfeld about it yesterday when she wanted some to mop herself up with. He said to have a free hand and that we’d need to refill the barrel daily since the ship can’t hold much storage.”

  Neville sighed and nodded, looking back down at the map. “If we’re over this river instead…”

  “Then we’re a fair ways off course,” Truman agreed. “We could follow it back…”

  “Or,” Neville muttered, “we could follow it up, find where it joins the river Captain Herzfeld meant for us to follow, and go back the way we were meant to go.”

  “I realize I suggested you be our navigator, Nevi, but I feel I must point out the best course may well be to reach civilization as soon as possible. Ro and I have been discussing it, and neither of us believes the captain simply fell over the side.”

  The four of them, like friends at a round table, paused as they considered just what that meant. It wasn’t that they hadn’t all had the same suspicions. They’d voiced the idea of it a time or two, but to change it from a possibility to a conviction? That was entirely another thing. Almost at once they turned to face the deck. The twins were standing, hissing at each other near the railing. Their father was sitting in a folding deck chair, seemingly oblivious.

  The two Mrs. Longmonts had shifted from wailing, to dramatically pretending to strengthen their wills, to separating to different sides of the ship, shooting their husbands dark looks for ignoring them in their trauma. Jade and her husband, Will, were arm in arm near the edge of the deck, while Grandfather Longmont was quietly holding the helm of the ship.

  He glanced at Hettie and Ro and then back at the two gentlemen. “H
ave you decided then?”

  “Decided?” Hettie asked, wondering if he was going to admit that it was likely one of his progeny who had somehow contributed to the disappearance of the aeronaut.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “I think that the only thing we’re sure of is that we should stop for water.” Hettie crossed to him. “How are things going for you, sir?”

  He shot her an enigmatic look and then laughed. “It’s a grand adventure. I wish the girls weren’t here. Even Jade who is quite a good sport. Will chose well, didn’t he?”

  “I’ve always liked her rather a lot,” Hettie told him.

  “No doubt why you invited us along.” He glanced at his twin grandsons. “I’d apologize for the rest, but I think I won’t.”

  Hettie laughed at the mischievous look on his face.

  “I fear they’ve been like that since the day they were born. I find sharing the burden to be the preferable way to go.”

  The ship lurched lightly, and they turned to where Truman was fiddling with the hot air and the huge balloon overhead.

  “I say!” Douglas shouted. “What are you doing?”

  “We’re getting water,” Truman replied evenly.

  “Don’t you think you better ask first? Did you forget who you work for?”

  “Be quiet, Douglas,” his father snapped. “We cannot survive without water. Hiring the detective to keep us alive has become distinctly more important. Don’t alienate the man. You can be assured his priority is his friends. Whatever good will we have managed to scrape out of him will see to the rest of us.”

  “We could sail back the way we came,” Frederick shouted at his father, “and get water then. Who cares what the detective thinks or wants? We outnumber them.”

  “If you had half a wit,” his father roared suddenly, “you’d have realized that we’re off course, lost in a dangerous jungle, and incapable of simply turning the ship around. What way, you fool? What way should we go? We need water to survive, so we’re getting some. Now shut your mouth, shut your wives’ mouths, and help when asked. Or so help me God, I will make you regret the day you were born.”