Free Murder Packs a Suitcase by Cynthia Baxter Page B

historical figure who’s best known for not dying on the
Titanic.
    Actually, Mallory had read about her in one of her guidebooks, so she knew there was a lot more to her. The real Molly Brown was the daughter of Irish immigrants who’d fled the famous potato famine of the 1840s. At age thirteen, she got her first job in a tobacco factory in her hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. She moved to Colorado and married a mining engineer named J. J. Brown, who became a millionaire after inventing a method for digging deeper in the gold mines. Even though the Browns began hobnobbing with the Vanderbilts, the Whitneys, and the Astors, she never stopped fighting for improved labor conditions and women’s rights and even ran for Congress.
    This version exhibited the brash personality that became Molly Brown’s trademark. She explained that the solid oak staircase spanned seven flights and that first-class passengers used it to reach the dining room, where they enjoyed ten-course dinners and champagne. Mallory had to admit that so far, the exhibits had managed to capture all the glamour of the ship.
    But of course it couldn’t last. Molly Brown led the group through the lower deck, where they could hear the ominous rumble of the engine. As they passed the iron gate that blocked off the quarters of the third-class passengers, the lights began blinking on and off.
    The mood darkened even further when the group stopped in front of an actual iceberg.
    Mallory glanced around and saw that everyone in the group appeared to be enraptured.
    â€œPut your hand on it for fifteen seconds,” Molly Brown instructed. “It feels cold at first, but then it starts to burn. It’s thirty-two degrees in here. The night the
Titanic
sank, the air was thirty-one degrees and the water was twenty-eight degrees. Adults can last ten to twenty minutes in that temperature before hypothermia sets in and they suffocate.”
    I guess this is part of the Experience, Mallory thought, jotting down the gruesome figures the tour guide had just rattled off.
    She was disappointed that the exhibits included a real life iceberg, which struck her as the height of bad taste. But her attitude changed once she dutifully filed over to it with the rest of the group and pressed the palm of her hand against it.
    The iceberg was torturously cold and frighteningly solid. In fact, it was only when she had actually touched the enormous chunk of ice herself
—experienced
it—that she fully understood what a formidable foe it had been.
    The re-creation of the deck was almost as cold. Once the group had gathered around the ersatz Molly Brown, she pointed out that here, as on the real
Titanic,
there were stars in the sky but no moon. As Mallory stood shivering in the dark, frigid air, she could really relate to the horror of that night.
    Maybe this is a little
too much
of the
Titanic
experience, she thought, shivering as Molly Brown launched into a detailed description of the horrors that occurred as the ill-fated ship went down. It wasn’t until she was explaining that the passengers had never had a lifeboat drill, since it wasn’t scheduled until later in the trip, that she noticed that some of the children on the tour were turning blue and moved them along to the next room.
    â€œModel of the propeller,” Mallory wrote as she shuffled along with the others. “Molly Brown, actual iceberg, cold then hot…”
    As promised, there was a Memorial Wall near the end that listed all the passengers. The survivors’ names were in bold letters. Mallory was relieved to see that both she and Courtney had made it out alive.
    â€œLook, we survived!” she cried. “See, here’s my name, Lucy Dyer-Edwards, Countess of Rothes. And here’s yours, Mrs. Latifa Baclini.”
    She glanced over at Courtney, expecting to find her rejoicing in their good fortune. Instead, tears were streaming down her cheeks.
    â€œCourtney, are you