Hi Everyone,
Today is my stop on the Blog Extract Tour for Distress Signals by Catherine Ryan Howard. I am thrilled be taking part in this wonderful Blog Extract Tour and delighted to welcome Catherine Ryan Howard to my blog and with a BIG thanks to Alison Davies from Atlantic Books/Corvus for allowing me this opportunity to take part with some other fab book bloggers too. Yesterday @cleo_bannister had an extract on her blog the Blog Tour which you can read here.
I've got the next extract from Distress Signals which you can read below and also find out who else is taking part in this fabulous Blog Tour at the end, so without further ado here it is.....
There was just enough time. Corinne pulled a small notebook from a pocket in her uniform skirt and laid it on the table beside her coffee cup, angling her body so that nobody else would be able to read what was on its pages.
The bridge towered into the sky behind her. All the crew’s outdoor space was sunk into the bow, another cabin attendant had told her, because there was nothing else a cruise ship could do with the open deck immediately below the bridge. You couldn’t put bright lights there for safety reasons, and paying passengers needed bright lights. So with the curved white walls of the bow rising up around them, the crew had the only swimming pool on board that didn’t offer a view of the sea.
For all Corinne knew, he could be one of the officers at the Celebrate’s helm right now, boring holes into her back. From what she’d seen on TV and in movies, officers on the bridge had access to binoculars. She couldn’t take any chances.
The sea breeze blew the notebook open, flipping a few pages with rapid-fire speed. Corinne pressed a hand to it to stop it from blowing away. It was a small diary, the week-to-a-view kind, with her own small, neat handwriting filling the spaces for the last four days with short notations.
Cabine 1002: lit parfait?
Rien.
Cabine 1017: Valises, mais pas des passagers . . .
Cabine 1021: Ne peut pas entrer – le mari dit la femme est malade.
Sunday: the bed in 1002 hadn’t been slept in. She’d found nothing out of the ordinary on Monday. Tuesday: belongings in 1017, but no passengers for them to belong to. Then on Wednesday, a request through the door of 1021 that she not disturb them, from a male passenger who said his silent wife was sick in bed.
All these incidents; they’d all come to nothing.
She’d keep looking.
In the little pocket at the back of the notebook, there was a single sheet of folded paper. Corinne retrieved it now. She glanced over her shoulder. No sign of Lydia yet. No one else on deck appeared to be paying any attention to her. She unfolded the page. Laid it flat on the table in front of her, smoothed out the creases with the palm of her hand.
Then, as she did every morning, she looked at the black and white photograph printed on the lower half of it, studying the man’s features. She closed her eyes, recalled the face from memory. Repeated this a few times until she could remember every last detail.
Looked at him and said, silently, I will find you.
Maybe today will be the day.
Then she carefully refolded the page and placed it back in the notebook, and put the notebook back in the pocket of her uniform.
Lydia would arrive any second.
Corinne couldn’t afford to get caught.
#DistressSignals
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