Dark Passage Read Free

mahogany desk where I’d left my laptop. I flipped it open and powered it on. A few minutes later I was hunched over the screen, clicking around the website Ruth’s customer had recommended. ‘Do we want to sail out of New York or Baltimore?’
    â€˜Baltimore,’ Georgina said without hesitation. ‘Getting ourselves up to New York and back would add a couple of hundred dollars to the cost.’
    â€˜Right,’ I said as I clicked on ‘Baltimore’ and waited for the screen to refresh. ‘And I understand that parking is dirt cheap at the Baltimore Cruise Terminal, not to mention convenient.’
    â€˜How many days do you think we can afford to be away?’ I asked a few moments later while scrolling down through a long listing of ships and sailing dates. ‘Here’s a five-day cruise to Bermuda and back, seven days to the eastern Caribbean. Here’s one for nine days, twelve …’
    â€˜Five hardly seems worth the effort.’ Ruth extracted a Diet Coke from the minibar in the vestibule near the door and pulled up the tab
.
‘I’ll have to check with my assistant, but if she can put in a few extra hours, I should be able to clear seven days, or even nine. Lord, I haven’t had a proper vacation since Hutch and I went on our honeymoon. Georgina?’
    Georgina shrugged. ‘Depends on the dates.’
    â€˜There’s a nine-day cruise that leaves in three weeks for the Eastern Caribbean,’ I said. ‘San Juan, St Thomas, Dominican Republic, Haiti …’
    â€˜Who on earth would want to go to Haiti?’ Georgina grumped.
    â€˜Can we afford twelve days, maybe?’ I asked. ‘Here’s another one to San Juan, setting off on the twelfth of June, calling at St Thomas, St Maarten, Antiqua and Tortola, then back.’
    â€˜Sounds divine, but no way I could talk Scott into covering for me at home for twelve whole days,’ Georgina said. ‘Seven, maybe. Ten, max. He
hates
to cook.’
    I turned around in my chair and grinned. ‘That’s why God invented McDonalds, Georgina.’
    She laughed.
    I turned back to the laptop and leaned close to the screen. ‘Looks like June is the window of opportunity, then.’ I swiveled in the chair to face my sisters. ‘Are we all clear, date-wise, for sometime mid-June?’
    I could hardly believe it when both women nodded.
    â€˜OK. Why don’t we each go home, discuss the plan with our husbands and decide how much money we’re willing to spend. For planning purposes, the fares they’re quoting here work out to about a hundred dollars a day, but that includes food practically twenty-four/seven and everything except the booze, so to my way of thinking it’s quite a bargain.’
    â€˜Gosh,’ said Georgina. ‘You can hardly stay at a Holiday Inn for a hundred dollars a day, and all you get for breakfast is a donut and a cup of weak coffee with powdered cream.’
    â€˜I’ll talk to Paul, then tomorrow night I’ll set up a conference call and we can finalize things.’ I flapped a hand at the laptop where photos of cruise ships, quaint colonial ports, pink sand beaches and palm trees had begun to slide and fade across the screen. ‘If we’re going to do this, we should probably hurry, or the slots might be gone.’
    Ruth drained her Coke and set the empty can down on the end table. ‘You don’t need to call me about dates, Hannah. Hutch has been working on a big libel case so I hardly see him anyway. Even if they settle, there’s no way he’ll wrap that up by June, so whatever dates you two decide on is fine with me.’
    â€˜Will we share a cabin, like we’re doing here?’ Georgina asked.
    I thought about the cabin that Paul and I had booked on the
Queen Mary Two
– twin beds squished together made up as a queen, with a pull-out sofa. Three people sharing would have been a tight