The reporters were circling the story of the Princess Cruises liner that had disappeared in the Caribbean ten months earlier—a ship sailing from Fort Myers to Tierra del Fuego, with brief stops at all the small islands between them, before such cruises had been entirely proscribed. This particular ship had never arrived in Tierra del Fuego, but, these many months later, had run aground on the shores of the Isla Mujeres, Mexico, instead. PLAGUE SHIP: AN UPDATE! Jiselle and Mark had been on a ship like it—perhaps even this very ship, she realized, the name of which was being withheld until the next of kin had been notified, although surely those kin must have noticed that their loved ones hadn’t returned from the cruise they’d set out on nearly a year before. Jiselle remembered the buffet table, every night—mounds of shrimp, oysters glistening in their half-shells, crystal bowls of cold crab and lobster meat, caviar on French bread, tropical fruit sliced into anchors and swans spread across yards and yards of crushed and sparkling ice.
