used up more than half the gasoline, and every ten minutes would be another mile that nothing would ever buy back—
She began to shake, all over and uncontrollably, and fell back on the pile of sailbags with the back of her left forearm pressed against her opened mouth while tears welled up in her eyes and overflowed. Why sunset? Why did she have to think of sunset? But she knew, remembering the moments of splendor and that shared enraptured silence when the world was only two people and a boat and a fragment of time poised between night and day. Would he be thinking of them? Would he have to? She was up then, throwing the sailbags behind her to clear the door. She slammed the cases of stores aside as if they were empty, and snatched up a marlinspike she somehow saw in her wildness lying among the coils of rope. Her hand was yanking at the bolt to open the door when some vestige of reason made itself heard at last and she was able to stop herself. She sagged against the bulkhead.
One chance was all she would get. She couldn’t throw it away.
He was a young man, with a young man’s reflexes. No matter how fast or unexpectedly she leaped into the cockpit she couldn’t attack him that way and expect to accomplish anything but her own destruction. And with hers, John’s. God, why did she have to be so helpless? There must be some way to stop him. There had to be.
It was then she remembered the shotgun.
Her mind slid away from it in revulsion. It edged back, reluctantly but compelled. She could see its dismembered pieces—two, she thought there were—wrapped in their separate strips of oiled fleece in one of the drawers under the starboard bunk. John had never assembled it since he’d brought it aboard but he did check it from time to time to be sure it hadn’t been attacked by rust. He was going to hunt something with it in Australia, or maybe it was New Zealand. In the same drawer were two boxes of its ammunition…
It was sickening. It was impossible. Why was she even thinking about the thing? And there was no use trying to threaten him with it. You couldn’t threaten a madman.
She looked down then and saw she still had the marlinspike in her hand. It was over a foot long, of heavy bright steel, gently tapering from one thick end to a point at the other—the classic weapon, she knew from the sea stories she’d read, of the bucko mates of nineteenth-century square-riggers driving their crews around the Horn. She’d never be able to hit him with it from in front, but suppose she could get behind him?
She might. His reactions were unpredictable, of course, but there seemed a chance he wouldn’t attack her out of hand if she came on deck, at least as long as she didn’t appear to be trying to interfere with him. And he’d turned his back on her before. But that was before she’d tried to sabotage the engine, she thought; he’d be suspicious of her now. Well, she could look out the companion hatch and see how he reacted before she went too far.
There was another thing, too, she thought with growing excitement: once behind him, she could take a quick look into the binnacle and see what course he was steering. That would do away with all the trouble and possible inaccuracies of this other way.
The marlinspike would have to be well concealed, but still where it could be withdrawn swiftly and without catching on anything. She experimented. After pulling up the bottom of her blouse, she shoved it into the waistband of the Bermuda shorts and down the outside of her left thigh. But the shorts were a snug fit in this area, and it showed when she walked. She moved it around in front of the hip, where it angled down the hollow of her groin to the inside of the thigh. It had passed inside her nylon briefs, and the steel had a cold and alien feel against her skin. That was better as far as concealment was concerned, but she was aware now of the error of having it inside the shorts at all. When she withdrew it, she had it by the wrong end. The place for it was inside the blouse, which was looser anyway. With the heavy end caught under her arm and only the point inside the waistband, it lifted out easily and quickly and was held just right to swing. Conscious of the extreme shallowness of her breathing, she slid back the bolt and opened the door.
She crossed the after cabin, mounted the first step of the ladder, and peered cautiously out. Her head was still below the level of the deckhouse, but she could see him—or rather, she could see his head and the naked shoulders. He was seated behind the wheel, staring into the binnacle.
He still hadn’t looked up, and she had no intention of venturing farther into his territory until he’d seen her and she could assess his reaction. From here she could still make it back to safety before he could get out from behind the wheel and catch her, but going too far would be like misjudging the length of chain by which some dangerous wild animal was secured. She waited, thinking of this and conscious of the incongruity or even the utter madness of the simile. Dangerous? This nice, well-mannered, unbelievably handsome boy who might have stepped right out of a mother’s dream? That was the horror of it, she thought. Conscious evil or malicious intent you could at least communicate with, but Warriner was capable of destroying her with the pointlessness and the perfect innocence of a falling safe, and with its same imperviousness to argument.
He glanced up then and saw her. He smiled in evident pleasure and said something she couldn’t hear above the noise of the engine. It might be a trick, of course, to entice her within range, but she had to risk it. She went up the ladder, trying to hold her arm as naturally as possible while it clamped the end of the marlinspike inside her blouse. The sea was still like glass, aside from the long undulations of the swell, and after the dimness below she was dazzled for a moment by the shimmering glow of sunlight reflected from it. She stepped out onto the narrow strip of deck along the starboard side of the cockpit, very scared now and pretending to look aft along their wake as though searching for the other boat. Slowly, she thought; stop a minute, and then another step or two, and don’t try to smile; that would be too phony—
“No,” he said. “Sit down there.” He indicated the starboard cockpit seat and then added, “Where I can see you.”
It was impossible to tell by his tone or manner whether he suspected her of something, but she hesitated only a second. She didn’t have to go all the way back at once, and it would never do to argue with him. “Why?” she asked, but she sat down, some two or three feet forward of the binnacle and the wheel, with her left arm falling naturally at her side.
“Because your face fascinates me,” he said, tilting his head slightly to the left and leaning over the wheel to view it better. “You have no idea what a study it would have made the way you were looking up and out at me like some hesitant naiad from a grotto—no. Naiads were Greek. You’re Scandinavian.”
“Partly,” she managed to say. She didn’t even know whether he’d meant it as a question or not.
“Oh, definitely Scandinavian. Under your clothes you’re probably as blond as snow.” He smiled, as though to reassure her that at their level of sophistication there was nothing tendentious in this discussion of her private blondness. “But it was your face we were talking about, the magnificent bone structure. Do you know you’ll still be a beautiful woman when you’re eighty? I’m speaking as a professional. I’m a painter, and painters always approach a face from the other side, to see what’s holding it up. Those high cheekbones and the tilted eyes are racial, of course; people say Slavic, or Tartar, or a half-dozen other things, but to me they’re always Scandinavian. If they came out of western or central Asia it must have been along the Arctic Circle…”
He was still too far away to hit, even if he should happen to turn his head. For a moment she saw the whole scene with a sort of wondering horror—a civilized woman of the twentieth century, sitting here with the marlinspike of the Cape Stiff bully-boys secreted against her flesh between her nylon panties and her bra, listening while this handsome boy who was murdering her husband as surely as if he’d used a gun discussed with such charm and evident admiration the structure of her face. How much more of it could she stand? The point of no return was sunset, and if she was still alive then she’d be as mad as he was.
It wasn’t that she couldn’t do anything, she thought, trying to isolate or identify the ultimate nightmare quality of it; she wasn’t tied, or locked up, or even openly threatened, and there was nothing to stop her now from leaping across that narrow space with the marlinspike aswing—nothing except that it might fail, and one chance was all she was going to get. It always came back to that. She had a life expectancy of just one more unsuccessful attempt to stop him, and then John would drown.
