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After a demitasse, Captain Masters excused hie One by one, the other officers drifted off to their duties, and Estelle took a tour of the deck with the engineering officer He entertained her with tales of sea superstitions, eerie monsters of the deep and funny tinbits of scuttlebutt about the crew that h

At last they reached the door of her staterooain She accepted when he asked her to join hi

She entered the tiny cabin, clicked the lock on the door and switched on the overhead light Then she closed the cur

tain tightly over the single porthole, pulled the suitcase from under the bed and opened it

The top tray contained her coss, and she removed it Next came several neatly folded blouses and skirts These she also removed and set aside to later stea a nail file around the edges of the false bottom of the suitcase, she pried it up

Then she sat back and sighed with relief The money was still there, stacked and bound in the Federal Reserve Bank wrappers

She had hardly spent any of it

She stood up and slipped her dress over her head-daringly, she wore nothing beneath-and collapsed across the bed, hands behind her head

She closed her eyes and tried to picture the shocked expressions on her supervisors' faces when they discovered theat the sae, al the FBI would post her on their list of ators would question all her friends and neighbors, search all her old haunts, check a thousand and one banks for sudden large deposits of consecutively numbered bills-but they would come up dry

Arta, alias Estelle, was not where they'd expect her to be

She opened her eyes and stared at the now faan to slip away fro into a blurry naled a trip to the bathroom, but her body refused to obey any command to move Every muscle seemed frozen Then the door opened and Lee the mess boy entered with another Oriental crewman

Lee wasn't s

This can't be happening, she told herself The mess steouldn't dare intrude on her privacy while she was lying naked on the bed

it had to be a crazy dreahtestion

She felt detached fro the eerie scene froh the doorway, down the passageway and onto the deck