Read-Aloud Audience Participation Story #10

Choose a resident volunteer to assign to each of the below characters. When their character name is said, they say the designated phrase and complete the action. Have fun!

Mystery On Board

The Circus Spectacular’s eleventh cruise throughout the Caribbean Sea had been going splendidly. That is, until the third night when everything got a little mysterious.

The evening started out normally enough with passengers choosing where to go for dinner aboard the ship. The evening took a downturn when the sushi bar closed. As her group approached the closed restaurant, Betty was very disappointed. She had been eating her weight in sushi since she boarded the ship because she loved it and didn’t have to pay for any of it. As she peered in the dark windows of the restaurant, Betty didn’t want to think about her other dinner options. She was disappointed.

As Betty sent her group of friends on to another restaurant without her, she sat down at the ship’s huge staircase. She looked up to see Joe looking green and stumbling down the stairs. Everyone on the ship knew Joe but not because of good reasons. He was annoying, always asking other passengers to join in his new business venture as an investor. Betty was not looking forward to having to talk to him again.

Joe stumbled down the stairs and told Betty that he thought he had been poisoned. “I don’t know about that,” mumbled Betty. Surely this was one more of Joe’s crazy stories to get her to feel badly for him and give him thousands of dollars for his next business venture. But Joe was serious, saying he had felt just fine until lunch and now he felt like he was dying.

Fortunately, Captain Roger turned the corner and greeted Betty and Joe. He listened to the accusations about poisoning from Joe. “Are you sure you aren’t just seasick?” Captain Roger inquired. Joe emphatically said no, that he had never been seasick in his whole life. Besides, why would seasickness just start on the third day of the cruise. It was poisoning for sure.

It was true that Joe had many enemies on the ship. Betty and Captain Roger both knew that. Soon, word had spread that someone had attempted to poison Joe and people began trickling in. Of course, Francine was one of the first to arrive. As the on-ship gossip, Francine had to be the first to know what was happening...and to embellish the story every time she told it to another passenger.

Joe didn’t mind retelling his story again and again. Soon, everyone, including Francine, thought his poisoning story was true. Immediately, she began to spread the word around the cruise ship: there was someone poisoning the guests!

As you can imagine, the word got around quickly on the Circus Spectacular. Francine was quite proud of herself for keeping the other passengers aware of the potential danger. Her neighbor down the hall, Greg, immediately began an investigation. Well, at least Greg thought it was an investigation. It was more like Francine and Greg walking around Joe’s hallway and looking sideways at anyone who walked by.

By the end of the night, everyone on the ship was on one of two sides: the side that thought Joe was not poisoned and the side that agreed with Francine and Greg and thought Joe was poisoned.

The poisoning mystery was quickly solved, though, when Captain Rogers returned with news from the ship’s chef. Joe had eaten bad fish at the sushi bar. It was a case of food poisoning, not intentional poisoning. 

Betty decided that perhaps she would skip the sushi for the rest of the trip. It wasn’t worth it.