DOUBLE KNOT Read online

  “Caroline.” He kissed her cheek.

  “Hello, Bradley, dear.” She squeezed his arm, then turned to me. “Davis. Change clothes. Right this minute.”

  Right that minute, my phone rang in the shoulder-strap bag somewhere just behind me. Bradley had it out of my purse and in my hand before I could get past the babies. It was my pregnancy buddy, calling to wish me bon voyage.

  “Bianca?”

  “David, get up here. I need to discuss my birth plan with you.”

  * * *

  My birth plan was simple: get the babies out of me.

  Bianca’s, on the other hand, had kept a staff of twenty hopping for months with the only end in sight being the actual birth of the baby, because she wouldn’t stop changing her mind. Last week she fired the caterers and hired a new crew out of Charleston, South Carolina. “After all,” Bianca said, “I’m giving birth to a Southern Belle.” (We’ll see about that.) (And childbirth caterers? Have you ever?) Before it was over, I fully expected her to change her mind about physically birthing the baby and tell me to do it for her.

  “I’ll be right there, Bianca.”

  “You don’t have time to go anywhere,” my mother said. “You need to change clothes or you’ll be late.”

  “It’ll be fine.” Bradley put an arm around Mother’s shoulders and pointed her toward a set of royal blue club chairs beneath an abstract oil painting the size of a garage door. “The ship won’t leave without her. Have I told you how nice you look, Caroline? Very sporty.”

  “Sporty?”

  “Sophisticated,” he said. “I meant sophisticated.”

  Mother, who’s never been in a canoe that I know of, much less on a cruise ship, was dressed as Mrs. Fleet Admiral in Christmas red double-knit pants with a navy blue cotton blouse buttoned up to her chin. Over the blouse, she wore a crisp white linen jacket with gold piping and big gold anchor buttons. On her feet were red Easy Spirit crisscross sandals with a wide wedge heel. The only things she needed were stars, stripes, and a marching band behind her playing “Anchors Aweigh.”

  “Very stylish,” my husband said.

  My mother blushed. Shaking my head, I crossed the room the other way for the elevator in the closet.

  Bradley and I lived on the 29th floor of the Bellissimo in more than ten thousand square feet of the casino manager’s residence. We’d recently redecorated, and by redecorated, I mean we stripped it down to the bare bones and put it back together in a contemporary way with lots of windows, cherry wood floors, beamed ceilings, clean lines and open spaces. Included in the remodel was a (Jack and Jill nursery!) private elevator that only passed between our home and the one above us. Where Richard and Bianca Sanders lived.

  I pushed the up button. This would get me out of changing clothes. Except it didn’t.

  “David, you look like a pregnant twelve-year-old.”

  “How are you today, Bianca?” I lowered myself into a gray slipper chair at her bedside, my sundress blooming around the babies. The chair had no arms, so it would be up to me to hoist myself out of it when the time came.

  “I’m miserable, David. Perfectly and completely miserable. You realize my very life and that of Ondine’s is gravely jeopardized. How dare you ask how I am. How would you be, David, if you didn’t know if you’d live to see tomorrow?”

  Tomorrow, Bianca, I’d be in the middle of the Caribbean Sea.

  Last week, she finally got her wish and was diagnosed with an actual complication of pregnancy, this one not imagined and no laughing matter—gestational diabetes. Who knew pizza had so much sugar? She was on the lowest of the low end of the diabetes scale, and her team of doctors said she could enjoy safe blood glucose levels immediately, within the hour, if she’d just get out of the bed and stop with the Papa John’s.

  Thus the misery.

  “I need to sit up, David.”

  It was like two sumo wrestlers trying to help each other off the floor. I got behind her, then counted down. “Three, two—”

  Mission accomplished, and we were both out of breath.

  Bianca fanned her puffy face with both hands. “What time do you sail, David?”

  (It’s Davis.) “At seven.”

  “Good. You have plenty of time to change clothes.”

  “The Vera Wang jumpsuit.”

  “Exactly.” Now she was fanning herself with the top half of the bed sheet. Her breasts were enormous. And by enormous, I mean freakishly large. “Wear it to the party. Make a very good impression for me. I mean it, David.”

  I sneaked a peek at my watch. If I didn’t get on the ship soon, I wouldn’t make an impression at all. I waited. And waited. I didn’t want to sit down again for fear of having to get up again. “Did you need me, Bianca?”

  She let the sheet go and it floated around Ondine. “It’s my birth plan, David. I need to go over it with you again.”

  We’d been over her birth plan exactly one million times. A suite of labor, delivery, and if needed, surgical rooms had been constructed and completed to her birth team’s specifications at Biloxi Regional Medical Center on Renyoir Street. Every possible scenario for getting Bianca to the hospital, three-tenths of a mile from the Bellissimo (honestly, she could waddle there if she had to), had been accounted for, and Bianca’s transfer team had been at the ready for weeks. If she told me she felt a twinge in her pinkie finger this very second, I could push one button on my phone and have her at the hospital in five minutes, four of those hauling her out of the bed.

  “Everything’s ready, Bianca. Your transport team is on standby, they’re doing two drills a day, and I promise you, everyone’s ready.”

  “It’s not that.” She smoothed the sheet. “It’s the people. I’ve decided there are too many people attending Ondie’s birth.”

  I could have told her that. I did tell her that. Months ago. When she added the nannies (nursery, lactation, day, night, and an on-call—one baby, five nannies) to the roster so they could bond with Ondine at birth, I gently suggested it was too many people for such a deeply personal event. She told me I could scurry off alone and have my babies behind a bush like a woodland creature, but don’t tell her a videographer and someone on hand to touch up her hair and lip gloss were too much. In addition to the videographer, the lip gloss lady, the nannies, the doctors, the nurses, her labor coach, her husband, and her teenage son (ewwww), Bianca wanted her dogs in the labor and delivery suite. Gianna and Ghita, her Yorkshire terriers, who were getting a little gray in the snout, were also on the guest list for Ondine’s birth.

  “It will be one physician instead of four. Two nurses instead of six. Richard will be there, of course, and you. Everyone else is out and you’re in.” She made direct eye contact with me, something she didn’t do often. “I need you there.”

  My phone buzzed with a text from Bradley. Davis, it’s time.

  “Bianca.” I stood. “I can’t be in two places at once.” A theme that had been peeking into the window of my heart since the day we learned I was carrying twins. “What if you go into labor while I’m on the cruise ship having my picture taken?”

  “Work it out, David, and change clothes.”

  * * *

  I grew up in Pine Apple, Alabama, a little spot in the road below Montgomery, where not much happened. I moved to Biloxi and took a position with the Bellissimo almost four years ago, and since then I’ve been incarcerated, poisoned, and had my hair set on fire, and all that’s in addition to learning enough Chinese to get through countless high-roller dinners impersonating Bianca Sanders. I loved my job, I made six figures, I missed it already, and I could honestly say I’d given it my all and I’d hang up my spy hat next week with no regrets. But when it comes to Bianca Sanders, I wondered who in the world would fill my size six shoes.

  TWO

  Jessica DeLuna want
ed my job.

  She had a job of her own; she was Miss Probability.

  Jessica and her husband Maximillian were contracted—not by me—to fill Probability with rich people. They were loosely, or tightly, I’m not exactly sure, connected to DeLuna-Elima Securities in New Orleans, a bank loosely, or tightly, depends on how you look at it, connected to the Knot on Your Life slot machines in Probability’s casino.

  The deal went down over Virginia striped bass.

  The husband, Max, handled a bazillion-dollar trust for the Fillauer Estate, old New Orleans money. A year ago, about when project Probability went into full swing—timing is everything—Jess and Max accompanied the controlling-interest playboy son to the Bellissimo on the occasion of his twenty-first birthday so they could be there to intervene if young Richie Rich Fillauer went a little casino crazy. The Fillauer kid took first in a $500,000 blackjack tournament without touching the trust and the DeLunas were so impressed they didn’t leave.

  Richard and Bianca Sanders, and by Richard and Bianca Sanders I mean Richard Sanders and the person who sits through boring dinners pretending she’s Bianca Sanders—and that would be me—had young Fillauer over to celebrate his big blackjack win. He asked if his financial advisor and wife could tag along. It was the first time I met the DeLunas and I hoped it would be the last.

  That didn’t happen.

  Over jumbo lump crab and shrimp, Mr. Sanders told our guests about the next big thing on the Bellissimo horizon—Probability. Max DeLuna was delighted. He wanted to hear more. Between creamy asparagus bisque and baby wedge salads we slipped out to the Sanders’ library to marvel at the scale model of the fabulous ship. It was when the Virginian bass was served and the amenities and events aboard the maiden voyage were discussed in detail that DeLuna proposed he reach out to his upper-crust clients and gauge their interest levels in booking ($1,000,000 spots) one of the fifty luxurious suites for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Mr. Sanders, in a moment of vanilla bourbon cheesecake madness, hired DeLuna and the wife as Probability’s host and hostess—no background checks, no salary negotiations, no corner office disputes.

  I almost choked on my white chocolate meringue.

  First, as anyone in the gaming industry would tell you, never spontaneously hire casino management. Next, isn’t it curious, and by curious I mean a flaming red flag, that a successful banker would accept an impromptu job over fish? What’s wrong with the job he has? And why the wife too? What was she supposed to do? Lastly, and most important, I wouldn’t have sanctioned the hiring of these two to fold napkins, if for no other reason than the fact that Mr. and Mrs. DeLuna didn’t speak to each other or make eye contact one time in five courses. There’s a story there, a story better not played out on a half-billion-dollar ship in the middle of the sea. Regardless, and without a thought to policy, procedure, or marital discord, Mr. Sanders put them on the payroll.

  It’s (his casino) not like I could kick him under the table.

  From that moment on, Max DeLuna worked offsite doing who knows what. I’d barely seen him since the Virginian bass. Jessica, on the other hand, got a big office right down the hall from my husband. She’d done an impressive job, if an impressive job can be measured by how many times she weaseled her way into my husband’s office for no good reason. That, plus the fact that the ship was, indeed, full of ridiculously wealthy people.

  I was hoping to avoid the DeLunas for the duration of the cruise.

  That didn’t happen either.

  Hers was the first face I saw the second I stepped onto Probability.

  “So! You’re here!”

  Barely. I had one foot on the gangplank and the other on the teak deck when Jess popped up.

  She stared past me. “You’re alone? All by yourself?” She clutched her heart. “No one to see you off?”

  She was looking for Bradley. I swear the woman was after my job and my husband. Every time the subject came up, and it was usually-to-always me bringing it up, Bradley somehow worked the words “wildly fluctuating progesterone and estrogen levels” into the conversation.

  “There’s something not right with the DeLunas, Bradley. And whatever it is, it has nothing to do with me being pregnant.”

  “You need to get to know her,” he’d say.

  “Oh, really?”

  “Give her a chance, Davis. She’ll grow on you.”

  “Are you saying she’s grown on you?”

  He pulled me close. “Oh, my pregnant Davis.”

  Jessica met me, real me, early on. Not something a Super Secret Spy usually sanctions—it’s hard to stay super secret if everyone knows who you are—but in her case, I was ready and willing to make an exception. Her job, as it turned out, was to staff and stock the fifty suites to the whims of the fifty guests’ every imagined desire, and word had come down from the Bianca Sanders Maternity Ward that if Jessica sent one more intrusive questionnaire, Bianca would get out of the bed and kill her. At some point, Jessica would have to be told the guest in the Sanders Suite wasn’t Bianca. Instead, it would be me. Send the foie gras surveys to me. I was all for telling her the truth, thinking it would get her out of my husband’s office. Which is where we were when we swore her to secrecy.

  “So, wait.” Jess looked up from the confidentiality agreement. “When I see Bianca Sanders I’m really seeing you?”

  “Correct.” I smiled.

  “That night at dinner it was you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You two are married?”

  “Right again.” I tucked into my husband a little closer. “We are.”

  And here we were. On Probability.

  “Well, you look just adorable,” she said. “Like a little flower mommy.”

  Next to her, I felt like I was wearing little flower mommy wallpaper. Enough to cover a very large wall. She was barely dressed in head-to-toe cream satin, a cropped sleeveless top over a long pencil skirt, and the skirt was slit. All the way up one of her long brown legs. Jessica was runway tall and stick thin, with long silky black hair, Maleficent cheekbones, and ink-black almond-shaped eyes. To offset all the thin, she had DDD breasts; to offset all the exotic islander dark, she dressed in shades of white—vanilla, antique, and smoke. The package of Jessica was very dramatic and she was well aware of her effect. Let’s put it this way: If the whole room wasn’t looking at her, she wasn’t happy. And since we weren’t in a room at all, Jessica spun me around, hooked an arm through mine, and chattered me to a more populated venue like we were BFFs. Which was part of her grand scheme to rip my job and husband out from under me. This constantly being nice to me.

  She nicely told me my medical crew had just arrived and my photography crew had already checked into their staterooms on Deck Two, the level housing everyone’s entourages. My mother and my others were safely on Deck Seven, the level with ten of the fifty VIP guest suites, including mine. My stateroom attendant had arrived. My butler and personal chef weren’t in the suite just yet, but they’d be along shortly. All was well. Thanks to her.

  She led me through a wide arched doorway into a solid gold atrium, six stories high with a sweeping gold staircase in the middle, where four porters flanked the entrance, three men in navy blue suits stood at the foot of the staircase behind gold desks, two clusters of rich people sipped champagne, and one lady played a golden harp under a blinding crystal halo chandelier. Everyone stopped what they were doing to look at Jessica and she was very happy.

  She made me feel so pregnant.

  * * *

  The ship ran on a central processor somewhere I’d never see, and the passengers were connected to the processor, thus the ship, by personal electronics. I wasn’t issued a room key; I was given a Saygus V2 five-ounce handheld computer. One of its many features was that it operated as a telephone too, which was way down the app list from V2’s primary purpose—t
hat of being the major component of Probability’s security system. It made perfect sense that you couldn’t put this much wealth in one place without a security system to rival that of the Heaven Embassy in Hell. The passengers were connected to all this safety by individual 60GHz mobile transceivers in the shape of a phone. A phone with GPS, gyroscope, accelerometer, compass, proximity and vital statistics sensors. A phone, without which we couldn’t move around the ship, eat, sleep, or gamble. Take every electronic spec you’ve ever heard of or imagined, add ten years of technology, then stuff it into a device barely bigger than a credit card. And that’s how you stay safe, enjoy, and navigate Probability.

  My mother, who had to relearn the television remote every single day of her life, would surely love it.

  A man behind a gold desk named Corwin, who was a dead ringer for Hugh Grant—the hair, the teeth, the accent—did a quick facial recognition and fingerprint scan on me, then waved a V2 in front of my nose. “You understand this replaces your personal electronic devices.”

  “Yes.” I knew that. Guests were warned well in advance that the ship’s system wouldn’t recognize any signal not connected to Probability’s central processor.

  “You can’t lose it.” He passed it to me.

  “I won’t.” It weighed two cotton balls.

  “If you lose it,” he said, “you’ll have to swim home. And in your condition, I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  Jessica hid a yawn.

  Hugh Grant passed me a leather-bound encyclopedia. Gold stamped on the cover: The Compass. The pages were gold-leaf edged. “It’s a passenger directory,” Hugh said. “Inside you’ll find information about the ship and short dossiers on your fellow shipmates.”

  Short? The book weighed ten pounds.

  Jessica made a big show of looking at her watch.

  “Does it tell me how to get to my room?”