Sammy Keyes and the Killer Cruise by Wendelin Van Draanen Page B

mother?” I ask as gently as I can.
    “She hasn’t been unkind,” he says with another little shrug. “She just never wanted a child. She travels a lot and is really into her fashion business.”
    Marissa shakes her head. “So why didn’t she just tell him no?”
    “None of them ever told him no.”
    Now, he doesn’t actually have a sneer on his face, but I can sure hear one in his voice. So my brain races around and finally out of my mouth comes, “Because he was so … powerful?”
    He eyes me. “Because he was so rich.”
    My brain races around some more. “So he could, what,
bribe
her into taking you?”
    He frowns. “Right before he and Grandmother took that last trip where he had his heart attack, I overheard him begging my mom to become a real mother to me—to stop doing it just for the money.” He shakes his head. “Everything started making sense.”
    “Wow,” I say after a minute. “That’s awful.”
    “Still better than my life before,” he mutters. “By miles.”
    “Okay, but back to your grandmother,” Marissa says. “Why would anyone want to push her overboard?”
    “Things were always tense between my uncles and my mother, but since Grandfather died, it’s been really bad—especially since Grandmother was so mysterious about the will.”
    Marissa scoops out a bite of chocolate foam. “We overheard that she wants to sell the company and build a hospital in Africa last night at dinner.”
    “You did?”
    She nods. “It didn’t seem to go over too well. And why get everyone on a cruise to tell them what’s in the will?”
    Kip takes a deep breath. “Grandfather wanted his ashes to be scattered at sea, and Grandmother used the will as a bribe to get everyone together. She said a week at sea would tell her things she needed to know.”
    “Like whether Bradley should run the company?”
    His eyes pop. “How do you know about
that
?”
    So I tell him how JT’s parents had come storming down the hall all angry about what Bradley had said, and atfirst Kip’s kinda stunned, and then he shakes his head fast and says, “There’s no way Grandfather said Bradley should run the company. It’s just another one of his lies!” Then he kind of scowls and says, “It’s true about Uncle Lucas and Aunt LuAnn, though. I don’t think either of them has ever had a job.”
    “But still,” Marissa says. “None of this means anyone pushed Kate overboard!”
    Kip looks at me, then at Marissa, then back at me. And I can tell he’s weighing something in his head, so I say, “We’re obviously trying to help, right? So just tell us.”
    He gives a little nod and keeps his voice low as he says, “Last night when I finally got up the nerve to slip that printout of my cousins under Grandmother’s door, I could hear voices. There were people in there, yelling.”
    I lean in a little and drop my voice, too. “Could you tell who?”
    “No. But for their voices to make it through that cabin door? They had to be pretty loud.”
    “Could you tell if the voices were male or female?”
    “Both. But I didn’t stick around! Or leave the paper. I was afraid of getting caught, so I came running down, and that’s when I bumped into you.” He looks down. “Which is why I was so freaked out. I’m sorry I just ran off.”
    I study him a minute and ask, “Was your mother in your cabin when you got back to your room?”
    “No. She snuck back in at two-thirty.”
    “So she could have been one of the people fighting in the Royal Suite, which means if your grandmother really is missing, she might have had something to do with it.”
    He covers his eyes with a hand. “I was so grateful to her. I tried so hard to please her! But then I found out about Grandfather paying her, and now this?” He gives me a pleading look, then says, “But she is a night owl. She works on her designs on her laptop clear through the night sometimes. So maybe that’s what she was doing.”
    “You didn’t ask her?”
    He