Ada turned to the rest of the staff, which had gathered in the entry. “We’re off on our cruise!” she announced grandly, waving a kiss at them. Amid tossed confetti and their boisterous cheers of “Bon voyage,” and “Many happy returns!” she took Parsons’s arm and allowed him to lead the way to the van.

He hadn’t loaded the luggage very efficiently, Sarah thought with a frown, seeing that he had strapped the huge trunk to the long rack on the van’s roof. By simply removing a seat, he could have fit it inside. The wind resistance would have been lower, and she would have obtained better gas mileage. She was considering this problem when Parsons, after gently helping Ada into the front passenger seat, surprised Sarah by opening the sliding door to the side of the van and seating himself in the back.

No wonder he had left the seat in place! She felt herself blush at the thought of her grandmother marching up the Queen Mary’s gangplank with this virile-looking male in tow. And if Robert Parsons was sharing a room with Ada -but then, she quickly reminded herself, that was none of her business.

Ada ’s smile told her that her grandmother was waiting for a challenge, but Sarah merely started the van and began the drive to Long Beach.

She couldn’t help but feel herself an injured party, though. She had wanted to talk privately to her grandmother, perhaps even to confide in her about the dream she had had last night-a recurring, claustrophobic dream from her childhood, of being locked in a closet. That was certainly not possible now. She could picture Robert Parsons’s amusement over that.

“A little ridiculous to have Bella and the others throwing confetti,” she said aloud. “It isn’t really a cruise, after all.”

“I’m pretending it is,” Ada answered. “It’s the closest I can come to a cruise. You know I get seasick.”

“I know nothing of the sort. You’ve been on real cruises.”

“And got sick on the last one. Never again. I do love the ocean, I just don’t want to be feeling it pitch and roll as I blow out my candles. So this will be my cruise-perhaps my last one.”

“It’s not a cruise,” Sarah repeated obstinately.

“Technically, no.”

She might have left it at that, but when she glanced at the rearview mirror, she saw that Parsons was smiling. Smugly, she thought.

“Technically, it isn’t even a ship,” she added.

“No?” Ada said, turning to wink back at him.

Sarah felt her fingers tighten on the steering wheel. “No. It’s officially classified as a building now, not a ship. It’s permanently moored at that pier. It doesn’t move. It doesn’t go anywhere.”

“You don’t say,” Ada replied.

“It’s afloat,” Robert said. “It moves with the tide.”

Sarah fell silent.

After a moment, Ada said wistfully, “I saw her sail once, long ago. Back in the days when she did sail, when she was definitely a ship.”

“You saw your first husband off to war,” Robert said.

He sounded bitter, Sarah thought. Was he jealous of Ada ’s previous husbands? It seemed absurd. Perhaps it was only this first husband, she thought. Elliot. She was fairly sure he had been the first. Or was it Arthur?

Sarah knew little about any of Ada ’s husbands. Ada was someone who lived, by and large, in the present day, seldom discussing her past. And by the time Sarah had come to live with Ada, the last of Ada ’s four spouses had been dead for more than twenty years.

Sarah tried to remember the little she had been told. There had been an Elliot, an Arthur a Charles, and finally John Milington, Sr.-the father of the man who had adopted Sarah. Yes, that was the order. She remembered that Ada had married the first one when she was eighteen, and that he had died in World War II.

Bella had once let it slip that Ada had a son from that marriage, a son who so disliked Ada ’s third husband, mother and son had become estranged. Sarah frowned. Or was it a son by the second husband who disliked the third? Sarah could not remember. She couldn’t even recall Ada ’s eldest boy’s name. She did recall Bella’s warning never to mention this son to Ada. Not wanting to cause Ada pain, or to make trouble for the old housekeeper, Sarah had kept her silence.

She glanced at Ada, and saw that her grandmother was frowning. It was then that another implication of Robert’s remark came home to her.

“If you said good-bye to your first husband that day, he must have sailed on the Queen Mary when she was used as a troop ship, during the war.”

Ada nodded. “I never saw him again.”

“But being on the ship again-won’t it be sad for you?”

Ada smiled and shook her head. “No, Sarah dear. Not at all. I was never actually aboard the ship, of course. We said goodbye at the dock. And the ship doesn’t even look the same on the outside now. She was painted a dull gray then, and her portholes were blackened. She was called ‘the Grey Ghost’ during the war.”

“I read about that period of the ship’s history,” Sarah said. “The Queen Mary was able to cross the Atlantic in four or five days, which made her the fastest ship on the sea-capable of outrunning German submarines, if need be. She was even faster than German torpedoes.” She paused, frowned and added, “Faster than the ones used at the beginning of the war. There was a bounty on her. Hitler promised he would give a quarter of a million dollars and Germany ’s highest honors to the submarine captain who sank her.”

“My, you have read up on her,” Robert Parsons said.

Sarah responded as she always did under stress. She turned to numbers. “Yes. The ship made a great contribution to the Allied efforts. During the war, the Queen Mary carried over seven hundred-and-sixty-five thousand military personnel over half a million nautical miles.”

She saw that Parsons was smiling again, until Ada said, “One of those three-quarters of a million was mine.”

“Yes, of course,” Sarah said. “I’m sorry.”

Robert reached forward and took Ada ’s hand.

Ada, never one to brood, soon changed the subject. She began to recite the guest list for the party. Sarah stayed silent, only half-attending as local dignitaries and old friends were named. While a woman of Ada ’s wealth and influence would never have trouble finding guests for her parties, it was her reputation for holding lively, out of the ordinary celebrations which made her invitations much sought after.

At last the Queen Mary came into sight. Sarah, seeing the long, sleek giant before her, its trio of mammoth red stacks cuffed in black towering above them, quickly realized that all the reading she had done about this historic vessel could never do it justice.

“A building?” she heard Robert Parsons ask.

“No,” Sarah said quietly. “A ship, a beautiful, beautiful ship.”

“Nothing like her in the world,” he agreed. “Wait until you’re aboard.”

“You’ve been on the Queen Mary before?” she asked, surprised.

“A few times,” he said, but Ada began directing her to the hotel entrance before Sarah could ask more.

As they were welcomed by the staff at the registration desk, Sarah’s eyes roved over the Art Deco lines of the ship’s interior, the etched glass and shining brass, the rich exotic woods that surrounded her-crafted into curving, sumptuous, smooth surfaces and marquetry unlike any she had ever seen.

She was recalled from her admiration by Ada ’s voice. “The small bag to Mr. Parson’s suite, please. The trunk and the rest of this group to mine, all except those two very serviceable but dowdy bags, which I’m sorry to say, belong to my granddaughter.”

Sarah followed mutely as they were shown to their rooms, noting that like Ada, Robert was staying in one of the royalty suites. Each suite, Sarah knew, featured a large sitting area separated from a spacious bedroom, a private bath and an additional small bedroom with a single twin bed in it-servant’s quarters. In the ship’s glory years, the luxurious suites had been occupied by the wealthiest of first class passengers, who paid the equivalent of an average Englishman’s annual wages for round-trip passage-a large sum, even with the servant’s fare and all meals included.