Page 15 of Wait for Me

Maybe someday…

Logan motioned for her to sit down. “Please?”

Marie hesitated. Then she waved.

Logan looked in the direction of her wave, and saw Jonas bouncing back with Mrs. Ping in tow.

Marie sat down. “Only for ice cream.”

“I’ll take whatever I can get,” Logan told her.

Chapter Seven

It turned out there was more ice cream all afternoon on the top deck of the cruise ship—where the swimming pool was, with its noisy swimmers and splashers. At the rate Jonas was consuming all sorts of ice cream, Marie was sure he was going to be sick.

And forget nap time. All that sugar had to be used up first.

If Logan weren’t busy with his work downstairs in his stateroom, he might have stopped Jonas from eating more ice cream than he already had. But Marie wasn’t going to.

What’s an extra scoop?

It wasn’t like Jonas had this every week.

Sitting by the pool in tee shirt and shorts, Marie looked away from her son in the kiddie pool, playing with several other kids. Mrs. Ping was hovering over her charge, and Marie felt at ease enough to check her email.

The next time she looked up from her iPad, she spotted three men, two hijab-clad women, and one kid, heading her way, presumably toward the several empty teak lounge chairs around her. The kid pointed to the kiddie pool that Jonas was in, and he was escorted there by one of the women.

The men followed the second woman to the lounge chair nearby. Marie smiled, but the woman did not return it. She might not have noticed Marie there, with the sun shining down on them.

But the men.

Something about them made Marie curious. Having mingled with Arab immigrants in France, Marie felt that she knew more about the culture of the Middle Eastern region, but there was still a lot to learn.

To normal eyes, those three men looked like other vacationers from the Middle East, but to Marie, they looked like seasoned fighters. Were they armed?

Then again, she was probably paranoid. Still, in her line of work, the best thing to do was not to appear too eager to learn, too inquisitive, too nosy.

The woman said nothing to the men. In fact, no one around Marie had spoken. She waited to see if she could spot the country they came from. But they had to speak first.

She didn’t recall seeing them in the dining room. Perhaps they ate at the late seating. Or maybe they ate in the exclusive dining rooms or ordered room service.

She wondered which staterooms they were in. She didn’t remember seeing them on her deck either.

In any case, the woman didn’t seem to be prepared for a swim. She was covered from head to toe, but not in the modest swimming outfits that Marie had seem some conservative women wear. The other woman was dressed in a swimsuit that Marie had seen in the Middle East, but she did not go into the pool either.

Marie kept her eyes on her iPad, but her ears were listening.

Not a word.

She could hear the kids laughing and playing. She tried to pick up what they were saying so that she could determine a place of origin. The new kid were too cute for words. Marie guessed that he was about Jonas’s age. The boy spoke in British English to Jonas and Mrs. Ping.

Marie waited for the men to speak, but they did not. Eventually the woman said something to the men about the weather being unexpectedly pleasant—

Arabic.

Marie strained to hear more.

No, no.

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