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“I have no idea,” said Odelia, “but it looks as if that girl is in some kind of trouble.” She paused, then locked eyes with her husband. “Wanna go over and find out?”

“No way,” said Chase. “We’re on vacation, babe.”

“Damn my inquisitive brain,” said Odelia, as she chewed her bottom lip uncertainly. “If I don’t find out what’s going on it’s going to drive me nuts. I just know it.”

“Dooley and I will find out,” I suddenly found myself saying. “You just stay right here and relax. We’ll be back in a sec with all the news fresh from the grapevine.”

“Max?” asked Dooley as his head peeked from under the chair. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I am,” I said as I jumped down from the chair. “Let’s go. We need to give Odelia a helping paw. Otherwise she’ll go off sleuthing and ruin a perfectly good honeymoon.”

And so we set off in the direction the party of four had disappeared to, carefully avoiding being trampled on, always a cat’s greatest fear—or at least one of them.

5

It didn’t take us long to catch up with our quarry, and by the time we had, they were joined by another person, this one not wearing a uniform. He was a burly man, with one of those square chins with a cleft in the middle, and intelligent eyes. If you want to know what intelligent eyes look like, I can’t really tell you. I guess the nearest I can come is to compare a cat’s eyes with those of a cow, for instance. This man didn’t have cow eyes, though the girl who was being frogmarched off now slightly resembled one as she gazed admiringly into the man’s handsome face. He had all the hallmarks of a romantic hero.

“I’m sorry, sir,” said the girl. “I thought it was my phone, and by the time I realized my mistake, it was too late.”

“You really thought a Samsung foldable phone that costs upward of two thousand bucks was yours?” asked the man with the cleft chin, his voice dripping with skepticism.

“Yes, sir,” she said, eyes wide and innocent.

“Show me your phone,” said the guy as the company halted to a stop.

“If you don’t mind, I’ll be off now, Garth,” said the man in the uniform. He had a shock of white hair and a tanned face and if I were to hazard a guess I would have pegged him as the ship’s captain. He certainly looked like a captain. And if you’re asking me what a captain looks like, once more I find it very hard to explain. I guess he looked as if he could star in a reboot of Love Boat and do a terrific job as Captain Merrill Stubing.

“Sure,” said Garth. “I’ll handle this.”

And after a final penetrating look at the girl, the captain was off.

“I–I don’t have my phone on me at the moment,” the girl said. She was young and fair-haired and she was around fifteen or sixteen years of age.

“Oh, Ruby, for Pete’s sakes, don’t lie to the man,” said what obviously was her mother, a handsome woman with flaxen hair and a round face.

“Yeah, don’t make things worse for yourself,” said the man I assumed was her dad.

“No, but it’s true, I must have forgotten it in the cabin,” Ruby insisted.

“Does your daughter own a Samsung foldable phone worth two thousand dollars, Mr. Kettering?” asked Garth now.

“No, she doesn’t,” said the man, looking a little ill at ease.

“Daddy!” said Ruby, then rolled her eyes. “Oh, the doofus,” she muttered.

“I promised that after the last time this happened I would stop covering for you, young lady,” said her dad. “Now tell this nice gentleman exactly what happened.”

“Nothing happened! I just thought that was my phone so—”

“She owns a Samsung but not one of those foldable ones,” said the girl’s mother quietly. “And we’ve been in this type of situation before, isn’t that so, Ruby?”

“Mom!”

“Ruby’s got a slight problem with…” The woman lowered her voice. “Kleptomania.”

“Can you please repeat that, Mrs. Kettering?” asked Garth, who I assumed was in charge of ship security.

“Kleptomania,” the woman repeated quietly.

“What’s kleptomania, Max?” asked Dooley.

“Um, well, kleptomaniacs are people who can’t stop taking things that don’t necessarily belong to them,” I said. “Shoplifting, but also stealing things from other people. They don’t steal for profit, but simply because they can’t help themselves.”

“So it’s like an addiction?”

“More like an affliction.”

“Poor girl.”

“And poor people whose very expensive phone she just tried to steal.”

“Look, I think I might be able to convince the person whose phone you took not to press charges,” said Garth. “But you have to promise me that this will never happen again, all right?”

“Ruby?” asked her mother, as the girl stood frowning darkly into the middle distance, obviously not happy that her parents had ratted her out. “Ruby, tell this man you’ll never do it again.”

“All right, fine,” said Ruby finally. “I’ll never do it again, sir.”

“Garth,” said Garth with a smile. “Garth Dagit. And I’m going to hold you to that, Ruby. Also, if this does happen again, I’ll have no alternative but to report it to the authorities.”

“And what authorities would that be?” asked Ruby’s dad. “American authorities or…”