Which made her wonder who this mystery person that Robert was meeting could be. She now posed the question, but Captain Gerard shook his head.

  “Like I said, he never divulged that kind of information to us.”

  “But he must have told you who was coming if they were going to eat on board,” said Chase. “Or if they were going to stay for a couple of days.”

  “He had a habit of springing surprises on us,” said the captain. “But then still expecting a five-star service for himself and his surprise guests, which made us have to jump through hoops to make the impossible possible, like sourcing the most elusive dishes out of thin air. One time when we were traveling from one port to another, he suddenly said he had a craving for apple sauce. But since we didn’t have any apple sauce stocked, or any apples we could puree, he demanded that a helicopter be chartered to get the apple sauce and land on the helicopter deck. And then he didn’t even eat it.” He shook his head. “Such a waste.”

  “Sounds like you weren’t a big fan?” asked Chase.

  “I was, until I met the guy,” he said with a grimace.

  “Never meet your heroes, huh?”

  “You can say that again.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Gran may have managed to insert herself into the investigation, but that didn’t mean she would prove to be a boon and not a hindrance. Judging from the dark looks Chase kept darting in our direction, I had the impression that he wasn’t fully on board with the concept of Gran joining in the hunt for Mr. Ross’s killer. He may have allowed her to stick around, but that was more out of deference to the Chief and not because he thought she was a great detective. Before long, Gran was traveling along the deck, her eyes glued to the floor, hunting for clues and generally making a spectacle of herself.

  Finally, Odelia felt she needed to intervene and came ambling over. Her interview with the captain having terminated, she had decided to take matters into her own hands.

  “Gran, why don’t you go home,” she told her grandmother. “I’m very grateful that you gave the cats a lift, but I think we can take it from here.” Then she seemed to think of something else. “Wait, if you’re here, then who is looking after Grace?”

  “Oh, you’ve got nothing to worry about,” said Gran. “Tex is babysitting.”

  “Dad? But doesn’t he have to work?”

  “We took the day off,” said Gran simply, causing Odelia’s eyebrows to shoot up into her fringe. “Even doctors have a right to take a day off, you know,” she said, reiterating the same sentiment she had shared with us at the house. “Now what are we looking at here? A possible murder? Max says he smells cyanide on the guy’s breath?”

  “Robert Ross is dead, Gran,” said Odelia. “So as a rule, he’s not breathing anymore.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Did you say he was poisoned with cyanide?”

  “I didn’t say it, Max did. He says he can smell it on the guy’s breath.”

  Odelia glanced down at me, but short of looking like a fool, she refrained from engaging me in conversation. So instead, I confirmed that I had indeed smelled cyanide on the man, and that possibly he was poisoned.

  “So what do you want me to do?” asked Gran.

  “I want you to go home,” said Odelia emphatically.

  “But I want to help! I am the mother of a police chief, you know, so I know a thing or two about police work.”

  Odelia had to smile at this. “All right. Why don’t you put your ear to the ground in town and ask people what they’ve heard about Mr. Ross. And also try to find out if he’s been ashore recently and any people he met in town.” She frowned. “Captain Gerard just told us that Robert Ross asked the crew to leave the ship so he could be alone. He thinks he was probably meeting someone, but since Ross never talked about his private affairs with a member of the crew or even the captain himself, he has no idea who this person could have been.”

  “Could it have been you?” asked Gran. “You had an appointment for an interview.”

  “I very much doubt it. I had never met the guy, so he had no idea who I was. And besides, the captain says he wanted the ship emptied out before ten, which means he was probably meeting his mystery guest at that time. My interview wasn’t scheduled until noon, which would have given him plenty of time to meet his person and then see them off again.”

  “What time did he die?”

  “According to Abe, between ten and twelve, though probably closer to ten.”

  “When his guest arrived. So whoever this guest was, they probably killed him.”

  “That’s why it’s imperative that we find out who this person could have been.” She placed a hand on her grandmother’s shoulder. “And why it is so important that you talk to people in town.”

  “Count on me, Odelia,” said Gran warmly. “Though to do this properly, I’m going to need a couple of assistants.”

  “What assistants?” said Odelia. I had the impression she was simply trying to get rid of her grandmother in a graceful way.

  “You’ve got Max and Dooley. Let me have Harriet and Brutus, and I’m your girl.”

  Odelia smiled. “Fine. You can take Brutus and Harriet, and I’ll take Max and Dooley.”

  “Deal,” said Gran, and the two women shook hands on it.

  “And that’s how we’re sold down the river for thirty pieces of silver,” said Harriet dramatically.

  Gran and her ‘assistants’ left the scene stage left, and Dooley and I, feeling happy with the promotion we had received, followed Odelia as she and Chase began the long slog of interviewing the other crew members. The interviews took place in the mess, located next to the galley, as the kitchen on a ship is called, and where the crew members ate their meals.

  It didn’t take long before a pattern started to emerge. Robert Ross, as Odelia told us between two interviews, might have been a man who hated to interact with the crew of his luxury yacht, demanding that they didn’t look him in the eye and remain ‘invisible’ at all times, but that didn’t stop him from hitting on young female members of that same crew and trying to get them to supply certain extracurricular services. For a man of his stature, this surprised me a great deal, as he probably could have been with any woman he wanted. Still, he seemed to have a certain predilection for the youthful female crew members. And it was as Chase and Odelia were interviewing one such person that they stumbled upon something both ominous and interesting.

  The crew member in question was a young woman in her early twenties with long blond hair and quite a striking beauty. Among other things, she had been responsible for serving Mr. Ross his meals, a task she said she hadn’t always pulled off without a hitch.

  “Robert Ross hit on you? But I thought he wanted the crew to be invisible?” asked Odelia.

  “Mostly, yes, but apparently that rule didn’t apply to me,” said the girl with a grimace. Her name was Suzanne Palmer, and she seemed extremely nervous as she kept chewing her nails, her eyes darting all over the place, as if looking for an escape route. “He even asked me to join him in his suite a couple of times, and when I tried to avoid the question by changing the subject, he called me out on it. But I didn’t want to antagonize him, you know. After all, he was a paying customer, and he was the Robert Ross. But I did ask the captain to assign me some other task and let someone else take over from having to serve him. But then he kept asking for me and accusing the captain of trying to hide me from him. So in the end there was no way around it, unless I resigned. And that wasn’t going to happen because I need this job.”

  “He didn’t actually... go any further, did he?” asked Odelia gently.

  “What do you mean?” asked Suzanne with a frown.

  “Well, did he try to kiss you? Or touch you?”

  She thought for a moment, then nodded. “Once. But at that point, I’d become quite good at avoiding him, so I more or less ducked and made sure to get as far away from him as fast as I could. He complained, of course. Said I wasn’t doing my job properly. And when Captain Gerard confronted him about the attempted kiss, he said it was just a joke, and I shouldn’t make a mountain out of a molehill.”

  “But apart from that, nothing happened?”

  She shook her head. “No, nothing. Though like I said, it was a drag having to work for the guy. Which is weird since I’ve always been a big fan, and so have my parents and my whole family and all of my friends. In fact, when they first heard I’d be working on the Aurora, they were almost as excited as I was that I was going to meet an actual star, you know. Only it didn’t exactly turn out like that.”

  “Do you have any idea, Suzanne, who Mr. Ross was meeting this morning at ten o’clock?”

  She shrugged. “No idea. He wanted us all off the boat, which was strange since he couldn’t even open his own curtains in the morning or get out of bed. But now all of a sudden, he wanted the Aurora all to himself? We figured he was probably meeting some woman he had met in town and didn’t want anyone to know about it, which probably meant one of two things. Either she was an escort or she was married. But either way, I don’t know who it was.” She leaned forward now, a look of interest having appeared in her eyes. “Why, do you think this mystery guest is the one who’s involved in Robert dying somehow?”

  “We’re not sure,” said Chase. “But what we do know is that this person might be the last person who saw Mr. Ross alive, and so we really need to speak to him or her.” He gave the girl his card. “If you can think of anything else, Suzanne, or you hear something, please get in touch. It’s important.”

  Her eyes had gone a little wide now. “Oh, my God. So it is true. Robert was murdered.”

  “Would that surprise you?” asked Odelia.

  “Of course it would. I thought he drowned. But if he was murdered...” Her voice trailed off, and I wondered what she was thinking.

  Chase must have wondered the same thing, for he asked, “Can you think of anyone who might have held a grudge against Mr. Ross, Suzanne?”

  She quickly shook her head. Too quickly, I thought. “No idea. Can I go now?”

  We watched her leave, and as Chase and Odelia shared a significant look, so did Dooley and I.

  “I think she’s the one, Max,” said my friend.

  “You think she murdered Robert Ross?”

  “No, I think she stole our litter!”

  CHAPTER 8

  “What litter? What are you talking about?”

  “The litter monster! It’s her! I’m sure of it, Max.”

  I saw he was pointing to the floor of the mess, where all manner of litter had gathered over the course of the different interviews Chase and Odelia had conducted.

  “It fell off her shoes,” said Dooley. “I swear, Max. It wasn’t there before, and now it’s there, so it must have fallen off her shoes.”

  We both approached the litter, and I had to admit it did indeed look like the type of litter that we like to use in our litter boxes at home. It even smelled the same.

  “But how?” I said. “And more importantly, why? Why would this Suzanne Palmer steal our litter?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Dooley. “But I intend to find out, Max.”

  “That’s great, buddy,” I said. “You find out who’s been stealing our litter, and I’ll try and find out who killed Robert Ross.”

  “Or...” he said, his tail quivering with excitement, “we could discover that it was one and the same person!”

  “That seems highly unlikely, Dooley,” I said. “Now why would Robert Ross’s killer steal our litter?”

  “Like I said, I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. Just you wait and see!”

  I gave him my most encouraging smile. “Keep me informed,” was all I could find to say. A little lame, I know, but somehow apropos.

  Before long, the interviews were at an end, and to be honest, we weren’t a lot wiser than we had been before. Mr. Ross liked to keep himself to himself, except when it came to inviting pretty young servers to his suite and complaining when they turned him down. So we set paw for his suite in question to see if we could find some more clues as to the man’s personality, his life and death, and most importantly, who had brought that about.

  As expected, the actor’s suite was the most luxurious one on the vessel and also the most spacious one. It offered a great view of the vessel’s surroundings, located as it was on the middle deck, and effectively had windows all around. In actual fact, it wasn’t one room but several, all comprising a single suite. Chase quickly started digging around for clues, even though the techies had already been there and had done the same thing. But then Odelia’s husband is nothing if not meticulous and likes to be hands-on in every investigation he leads.

  The actor’s laptop had already been retrieved, as well as his phone, but our humans now checked his other personal belongings. They rifled through his clothes, checked the bathroom for any pillboxes containing medication that might prove interesting and shed light on the man’s life, and generally went through the guy’s personal stuff with a fine-tooth comb. Before long, Chase was holding up a book. It was a biography of Napoleon and had been thoroughly thumbed through, with even markers stuck to different pages indicating they held particular importance to the guy.

  “I think he was probably preparing for a film role,” said Odelia as she, in turn, held up a film script. It bore the title ‘Napoleon and Josephine,’ indicating that the actor, after playing James Fox for many years, was moving on to other parts.

  “Several markings,” she said as she leafed through the script. “Looks like he’s been learning lines and preparing for the role.” She studied the front page. “Director is Jack Foss. Producer Joshua Cunningham.”

  “Let’s get their contact details and get in touch with them,” Chase suggested. “If Ross was stepping out of the James Fox role, that might be important.”

  I saw that Dooley was intently sniffing about, clearly looking for something. “Looking for litter, buddy?” I asked.

  “Well, I seem to have picked up the same smell, Max,” he said. “But I can’t be sure. Can you take a sniff and tell me what you think?”

  “Sure,” I said and sniffed where he told me to sniff. And I had to admit that he was right. There were indeed more traces of our litter on the floor near the bathroom. As if somehow Robert had stepped in litter and it had stuck to his feet or shoes and come off on the carpet. Though of course, it could have been a visitor.

  “I think our litter thief has been here, Max,” Dooley said now. “See? It’s the same type of litter and the exact same smell.”

  “You’re right, Dooley,” I said. And so we approached Odelia with the view to tell her about Dooley’s find, but unfortunately, she was in conversation with a member of the CSI team, discussing ways and means of processing both the Napoleon book and movie script without the evidence being contaminated.

  “I think our litter find is probably more important than this Napoleon business, Max,” said Dooley.

  “I’m not so sure. If Ross was taking on another part, that might have had an impact on his commitment to the James Fox role, and that might have made certain people very unhappy.”

  “Well, we have to tell Odelia about Suzanne,” said Dooley. “Before she escapes, never to be seen again.”

  Chase and Odelia had told the crew not to leave town, but of course, that would be hard to enforce. Captain Gerard had asked if they could stay on the vessel until the investigation was concluded, but since it was a crime scene, that wasn’t possible. Though Chase had promised they’d try to conclude their investigation as soon as possible. And so, most of the crew had decided to book into a hotel for the time being, where they could be reached if necessary.

  We continued our own investigation and soon found more traces of litter, this time underneath the window. Apparently, whoever had carried the litter into the room had at some point stood by the window looking out, and also by the bathroom door. They had certainly used plenty of litter, and since as far as I could tell there were no cats on board, I wondered where that litter could have come from.

  The answer soon became clear to us when we entered a sort of annex to the main room of the suite, and found... a litter box! And inside this litter box sat a small Papillon dog who answered to the name Flame.

  We both turned our backs to her, allowing her to do her business in peace and comfort, then when we heard she had finished, we turned around again.

  “So you have a litter box,” said Dooley, and it sounded as if we had caught Flame in a very grave act of wrongdoing.

  “Of course I have a litter box,” said Flame. “You don’t expect me to do my business on one of the decks, do you? Or, God forbid, in the pool?”

  “No, I guess not,” said Dooley as he gave this some thought. Clearly, he had never wondered how dogs travel on these yachts and where they do their business. And frankly, I had never wondered myself. But Flame was right. It’s not as if there are lampposts aboard a vessel like the Aurora, or trees to do your business against.

  “Okay, so we found traces of litter all over the living area,” I said, deciding to take the interview in hand.

  “And also in the mess,” Dooley added, “right after Suzanne Palmer had walked there. So can you explain that, Flame?”

  Flame smiled. “I don’t have to explain anything. Suzanne was the person who cleaned out my litter box every day, so it stands to reason she would have some on her shoes. And as far as litter in the living room is concerned, I also have litter on my paws every time I leave my box, don’t you?” She arched an inquisitive eyebrow, and I could have told her that cats don’t share their trade secrets with dogs, but since the only way to get her to open up was to open up ourselves, I decided to confess.

  “Yes, we do track litter all over the house, even though we try very hard to avoid it, but inevitably, the stuff will stick to our paws and get tracked all around.”