Uncertain Voyage

by Dorothy Gilman

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries; Suspense

Synopsis

Dorothy Gilman, famous for her best-selling Mrs. Pollifax mysteries, crafts a novel pulsing with international intrigue and psychological drama. Uncertain Voyage is certain to hold you spellbound with its tale of a timid young American woman who finds herself in situations that would test anyone’s courage. Melissa Aubrey is touring Europe alone as part of her quest to establish her self-reliance. Still recovering from a nervous breakdown brought on by a disastrous marriage, Melissa is fragile, to say the least. When one of her fellow travelers makes an urgent plea that she deliver a small package to an address in Majorca, Melissa is thrown into a dizzying whirlwind of romance, mystery and danger. Narrator Alyssa Bresnahan’s elegant, expressive voice evokes the artistic young heroine’s changing states of mind. With her performance you will experience the thrill of adventure in foreign lands right alongside Melissa.

Release date: June 30, 2020

Publisher: Fawcett

Print pages: 192

Sample

Chapter 1


The ship had been five days at sea, and now Melissa could feel tension rising in her at thought of their arrival the next morning in Cherbourg and a few hours later at Southampton; for on the following day, Sunday, they would reach Bremerhaven, Germany, and there she would be abandoned, rendered up to a huge and totally new continent—a crocodile with open jaws—where not a friend or acquaintance, not even a name scrawled on a slip of paper, would be available to her for the next fourteen days. It felt to her like a great void into which she must disappear, and even if she emerged from it unscathed a century later her intelligence grasped the fact that she could never emerge unchanged. All that she carried with her was herself—whoever and whatever that might be—and the two sheets of white paper upon which her travel agent had typed a complicated list of dates, names of hotels, and plane and train departures. It was not enough; she was terrified, and at times the terror rose in her like vomit.

"Yes, hello, how are you?" she called out, smiling, as she passed the Fergusons who occupied deck chairs next to hers on sunny days. Self-consciously she quickened her stride, walking more purposefully so that no one would guess her growing subterranean panic.

She had been nearly as frightened when she boarded the ship in New York, but with the difference that at any moment before the ship sailed she could change her mind, turn and leave, run home to safety and to Dr. Szym. Now there was no turning back, for an ocean lay between her and home, and while it crossed her mind that she could disembark in Bremerhaven and ask for an immediate flight back to New York, she knew that she had neither the courage nor the experience even to grapple with a change of those authoritative black words in her itinerary. She felt powerless to change anything, and least of all the brief flare of braveness that had brought her here despite her terror. Surely, she thought, Dr. Szym would not have allowed her to come if there was danger of her cracking?

She reached A deck and pushed open the door against the wind. The sun was shining but there were no bikinis today; people huddled under blankets in chairs, their heads wrapped in bizarre, makeshift coverings—newspapers, shawls, scarfs—so that they had the look of convalescents placed under the sun by attendants. Melissa reached the railing and clung to it, bracing her body against the wind. Below, the sea boiled gray and white against the prow of the ship. To the left and to the right stretched the limitless space of the ocean, constantly, eternally streaming past in its steady course toward infinity. It was the first time that she had crossed an ocean, and its unbounded space continued to grip her with a strange excitement, the ship feeling a small, man-made intrusion upon its surface, a microcosm daring to cross the unsteady floor of the world.

She turned to look at the people around her and instinctively her glance sought out the couples, the higgledypiggledy mismatched people whom she had watched in wonder since the ship left New York. There was this constant procession of life aboard ship that she could not quite capture for herself because she was alone; because almost everyone else had someone—they had each other—andthere had been no one with whom she could become a pair. She had hoped there might be. She could not mourn her marriage, which had ended irrevocably a month ago, but what she longed for, she knew wistfully, was the appearance of that man she ought to have married, the man who would have been waiting for her if she had not eloped at sixteen out of a desperate need to attach herself to life.

Across the deck, leaning against the side rail, she saw the man called Stearns puffing on his pipe and staring out to sea. Of the six people assigned to table 43 in the dining room he was the only one who did not enter into conversation or mingle with the others and she wondered about him because he also traveled alone. He gave no evidence of need. He appeared utterly self-sustaining, calm and deliberate, yet Melissa had begun to picture everyone whom she met as joined to others by invisible strings of dependency that kept them upright, smiling, and stable. Her own cords had been severed, leaving her no one, and out of this had come this vision of threads running from each person to unseen mothers, fathers, lovers, sisters, brothers, and friends, giving them nourishment and security like secret umbilical cords. Surely even this man Stearns depended upon someone, she reflected; in everyone's life there had to be someone, didn't there? She glanced at her watch and noted with a sense of deep relief that it was nearing half-past seven, the dinner hour. There was just time to shower and change into her most attractive new dress, and she turned and fought her way back to the door, her melancholy lifting at the thought of something concrete to do.

But it was different tonight, already change was invading the long dining table, which until now had been a mainstay for Melissa and the high point of each day. The college students, whose wit enlivened each meal, were to disembark in the morning and they had brought centimes and francs to the table to discuss and memorize. Melissa realized with a pang that tomorrow night they would be looking forward, they were no longer immersed in the present to which Melissa had to cling for the sake of sanity. It was true that twenty-four hours from now she would still be seated at this same table but she would be entirely alone, the sole survivor of two ports of call. And beyond that—to the possibility of leaving this ship—she dared not think; it was like trying to envision a landing on the moon, too remote, too unreal even to consider.

Four of them arose from their dessert and with gay remarks went off to their evening, leaving only the man Stearns seated at the opposite end of the table. Melissa lit a cigarette, determined to linger over coffee no matter what inconvenience to the waiters or to Stearns. It looked a long evening ahead and she could sense the imminence of a left-out-of-life feeling.

Stearns suddenly turned his head and looked at her. He said, "I heard you say that you are going to visit Majorca."

She nodded. "Yes. I go first to Copenhagen for a few days, and then Paris and then to Majorca."

"To Palma?" When she nodded again he said, "When?" He seemed very serious.

"About the eleventh, I think; the eleventh of July. It's the last stop before I fly home on the fifteenth. Are you going there, too?" she asked curiously.

He crushed his cigarette into the ashtray. "I wonder if you would meet me on A deck later, say at ten o'clock. There is something I should like to ask of you. It's rather important. Would you mind?"

She looked at him in astonishment. He had scarcely spoken to her before, and perhaps because of this she had labeled him dull. Now he wanted her to meet him on A deck. She blushed. She had not been aware of any overt admiration on his part except—now that she thought of it—she had noticed him once or twice studying her appraisingly. He had said very little at meals, in fact he had seemed to her a complete cipher as a personality; but his invitation made him at once mysterious and possible.

"Why not?" she said charmingly, with an expressive little shrug of her shoulders.

"Good—thank you," he said, and with a nod excused himself and left the table.

"Well! I have an assignation," she thought brightly, and she felt intrigued, happy, lighter. When she thought about the man she remembered that his eyes were a very pleasing shade of blue although it was a pity his cheeks were pitted with the scars of acne or smallpox. He could not be more than forty. "Oh damn," she thought suddenly, "I'm making images again, he'll be Prince Charming himself before ten o'clock arrives." It was what she had done with Charles, she knew now; she had needed him, and so deeply that she had ruthlessly fitted him into a pre-conceived image and then spent the years of their marriage burying Truth to preserve Illusion.

"But—well, really, anything can happen!" she thought delightedly, and enlarging on this, she imagined Stearns telling her that he had fallen madly in love with her: There is a quality about you, he would say in a bemused voice. I have met other women more beautiful, but there is something so real, so genuine about you. That would be nice, she thought, she would like to be real. Then he would of course apologize for being so impulsive but he would point out that if he did not speak now he would never see her again—he too was to disembark at Cherbourg, she remembered. It was her address that he wanted ("there is something I should like to ask of you") so that he could
find her again when they both returned to America. She thought solemnly, "Doctor Szym was quite right, it can be a wonderful world if one is open to new experiences and not afraid!"

She finished her coffee—it was nearly nine—and withdrew to the writing room to address a few cards. Then she returned to her cabin to powder her nose and put on her trench coat. Very dimly from this distance she could hear the sounds of the orchestra in the ball room and she thought, drawing a new mouth with lipstick, "Perhaps he will ask me to dance. He may even kiss me." A feeling of deep excitement filled her. It was possible that now, at last, her life might begin, and snatching up her cigarettes and purse she hurried out and up the stairs.