“You stole my canvas bag, didn’t you?” Bess said.
Amber nodded. “I wanted to find out more about you three,” she said.
“Are you planning any more ‘accidents’ for us?” Nancy asked.
“No, we’ve run out of accidents. We’ll just have to settle for delaying your departure from the ship so that you can’t contact the authorities before we’ve escaped,” Laura said. She grinned at them. “Is that okay?”
Nancy ignored Laura’s sarcasm. “How does Craig Oliver figure in to all of this?” she asked.
“Poor, naive Craig Oliver. How he ever became an Interpol investigator, I’ll never know. He was so easy to play,” Amber said. “I met him accidentally on purpose at a party and let him fall for me so I would be in a position to watch his every move. Mother and I knew he was investigating the jewelry store robberies. You see, we have all kinds of connections in police departments all over the country.”
“That’s scary,” George said.
“Not for us, it isn’t,” Laura said.
Nancy gave one of the portholes a furtive glance. She could tell that the ship had started through the Welland Canal, which led to Lake Ontario. She had to think fast. They’d soon be in Toronto, and Amber and Laura would escape.
“Somehow Interpol found out that the person behind the robberies—Craig didn’t know it was my mother!—was planning to escape from the United States on a Great Lakes cruise ship. Craig got himself hired to help on the ship so he could work undercover,” Amber continued. “Of course, Craig told me that the job on the cruise ship was his real job.” Amber shook her head in disbelief. “I can play really dumb when I want to. He didn’t know that I knew everything about him. I told him that I thought it would be so much fun if I could go on this cruise with him because I had never been on a cruise ship before.” Amber laughed. “Craig fell for every line I fed him.”
“Where is he now?” Nancy asked.
“He’s locked in the basement of an abandoned house in Port Huron,” Amber said. “He has enough food and water to survive for a couple of weeks, and by then we’ll be buried so deep inside Canada that Interpol will never find us.”
“That’s terrible,” Bess said. “What happens when the food and water run out?”
“One of us will make an anonymous telephone call to the Port Huron Police Department,” Laura said. “They’ll find him and let him go.”
“I don’t think Interpol will like it when they discover that one of their agents was tricked into letting the notorious diamond robber escape,” Amber said. “It’ll probably be the end of his career.”
“We can only hope,” Laura said, looking at her daughter. “He gave us way too much trouble.”
“I’m going to take a shower,” Amber said. “Okay?”
“Okay,” Laura said. “I’ll keep an eye on these three.”
“Where’s your twin sister?” Nancy said, shooting Bess and George a knowing look.
Laura gave Nancy a dirty look. “You think you’re smart, don’t you? Well, there’s nothing to connect Louise to this operation. She agreed to stand in for me during the first part of the cruise, just to make sure things were safe. I was careful during the robberies, but sometimes you do leave fingerprints without knowing it. If Interpol tried to make an arrest, they wouldn’t be able to identify her fingerprints.”
Laura was quiet for the next several minutes, but she kept the gun pointed at the girls.
When Amber finally came out of the bathroom, Laura handed her the gun. “Keep an eye on them,” she said. “I have to go to my cabin to get the rope.”
“Okay,” Amber said.
After Laura left the cabin, Amber said, “We’re not going to hurt you, really—but please don’t try anything. We know what we’re doing.”
“How could you really know what you’re doing if you’re involved in something like this?” Nancy said. She looked Amber straight in the eye. “You know, there’s still time to get out of it. All you have to do is let us go.”
Amber took a deep breath. “I can’t do that,” she said. “You have no idea what my mother would do to me.”
“Look, Amber,” George said, “we’d protect you.”
Amber started shaking her head. “No! Just keep quiet. I don’t want you to say anything else!”
“Please, Amber, just think…,” Nancy said.
Just then the door to the cabin opened, and Laura reentered with a paper bag. “What was that shouting all about?” she said. “I could hear you two cabins down.”
“Nothing,” Amber said.
Laura looked first at Amber then at Nancy. “Good,” she said. She walked over and took the gun from Amber.
There goes our chance, Nancy thought.
For the next two hours Nancy had to endure a movie that she had purposely avoided in the theaters. Amber thought it was hysterically funny.
When it was finally over, Laura looked out the porthole and said, “That’s Toronto in the distance, so it’s time to tie you girls up.”
Nancy thought perhaps the crew would discover them before Laura and Amber had a chance to leave the ship, but Laura shattered that hope.
“We’re going to put you in the bathroom so that when they come to get our luggage, no one will know you’re here,” Laura said. She gave them a big smile. “And in case you’re thinking that some of the crew will come along, checking the cabins after we’re gone, forget it. Oh, they check the cabins all right, but Amber has been complaining about how difficult it is to open her door—so right before we leave, we’re going to fix the lock so that it won’t open with a key. The door itself will have to be removed. That won’t happen until later today at the earliest, and we’ll be long gone.”
“What about our suite?” Bess said. “The crew will notice that we haven’t left the ship and will come looking for us.”
“No, they won’t. Passengers are given two hours after docking before they have to get off the ship,” Laura said. “So, disguising my voice as George’s—since I knew they hadn’t talked to her as much as they had talked to you and Nancy—I called Guest Services and told them that the three of you wanted to wait until the last minute to leave.”
“I see you’ve thought of everything,” Nancy said.
