Dead calm

welter of sailbags and cases of stores around the door, and she fell backward onto the bunk. She sat up. Warriner dropped to his knees between the bunks and pressed his face into her lap, encircling her legs with his arms. His shoulders shook. Her left hand was free, but the other, holding the bottle, was trapped by his arms.

She reached down and gently stroked his head. “Of course it was the shark, Hughie.”

He raised his head then and looked up at her, and while his eyes were still wild there was nothing dangerous in them. On the contrary, they were almost beseeching, like those of a frightened child. The words began to pour out, tumbling over each other. “It was a big hammerhead, over twelve feet long. I tried to drive it away. I tried to save her. I hit—I hit it on the nose. But she was up on the surface, splashing too much. If she’d come down where I was—they won’t bother you under the water, you know that, everybody does—but she wouldn’t dive. It was horrible, the shark cut her in two, the water was all bloody…”

She had no idea what he was talking about, but what he wanted was plain enough. He was asking her for exoneration. It was the other boy who’d started the fight or had thrown the football through Mrs. Cramer’s window. She stroked his head again. “It wasn’t your fault, Hughie. Of course it was terrible, but you did everything you could.”

His arms had relaxed their grip around her legs, and she was able to slide her right hand free. While he was still looking up at her face, she brought it up the side of her thigh and shoved the bottle into the pocket of the Bermuda shorts. She sighed. He hadn’t seen it.

“You believe me, don’t you?” he asked.

“Of course I believe you,” she said.

“I knew you would. Somehow I knew it.” He hugged her legs again, almost as if in gratitude, and pressed his face against her knees. His voice was almost normal as he went on, “You won’t leave me, will you? It’s so awful—” He stopped.

She glanced down. He had raised his head again, but this time he was looking at something behind her on the bunk. It was the shotgun. She felt the chill of gooseflesh spread up her back. He went on staring, and then he whispered, “You were going to kill me.”

“No. Hughie, no. Listen—please, it’s not even loaded.”

He still hadn’t moved, and his voice was no louder than before. “You want to kill me too.”

He reached around behind her and slowly pulled it out by the barrels. There was nowhere she could run, nothing she could do. There wasn’t even anything in her mind except the bitterness of the thought that after four hours she’d been within a few minutes of winning, and now she’d lost. Maybe the fear would come in a minute. She was simply too tired to handle more than one thing at a time.

With a wild outcry he lunged to his feet then and swung the gun against the side of the boat. The stock splintered and broke off against an oaken frame above and behind her head. She ducked down between the bunks as he swung again—not even at her, as far as she could tell, but merely in some fury of destruction directed against the gun itself. The barrels rang against the upright pipe of the bunk frame. He beat it twice more against the pipe and threw it behind him, into the after cabin. Above the noise of the engine she heard it slide and bounce along the deck and crash into something, probably the ladder at the after end. At the same moment, while he was turning and off balance, Saracen rolled down and the bow swung off on another violent change of course. He fell over against the bulkhead beside the door and slid down atop the sailbag behind which the compass was wedged. He was on his feet almost immediately, facing her. When she’d seen him lose his balance she’d started to scramble up, hoping to get out the door, but there wasn’t time. He was right beside it. There was nowhere to go, anyway. She sat down on the bunk again, trying to conceal her fear. Don’t fight him, she thought; don’t try to run. Her only chance to survive was to use her weapons instead of his; there was a lost and frightened boy inside the maniac, and maybe she could reach him. And he could already have killed her with the gun barrels, but he hadn’t.

He stared at her wildly for a moment and had taken a step toward her, when he turned, as if he’d remembered something. When he bent over the sailbag she knew what it was. He’d seen the compass when he fell, and the scratch pad with its penciled notations of the course. He lifted the compass out and with another cry of fury he turned and threw it against the starboard side of the cabin. The box splintered, and it fell to the deck in a ruin of broken glass and spilled alcohol.

Then, before he even had a chance to look back at her, she said gently, “Hughie, come here.” When the frenzied eyes swung around and fastened on her, she touched her knees, where his head had rested before.

“You wanted to kill me!” he cried out. His hands clenched and opened, and he took a step toward her, coming between her and the door. She saw the hands come up level with her throat, but there was a faint uncertainty or hesitation in his movements now, and she’d detected just a trace of defiance in the outcry. Without that, perhaps she couldn’t have found the self-control to do it. She continued to look up at him with perfect serenity.

“Don’t be silly, Hughie,” she said. “You know I wouldn’t hurt you.” She wasn’t sure herself how she accomplished it, but the tone was squarely on pitch, the voice of all the mothers in the world, firm but still gentle, compassionate, and forgiving. She touched her knees again and said, “Come here, dear.”

He came with a rush then. He fell to his knees before her with his face pressed against her legs, and he was crying uncontrollably.

The strength drained out of her, but she managed to remain erect while she gently stroked his head. The clatter of the engine went on. Saracen pitched, and the bow swung off onto another tangent in her blind flight across the surface of the sea. Part of it had been luck, she thought, in that the first, compulsive outburst had been directed against the shotgun, but she knew she could control him now. She had nothing more to fear from him. Except that she still couldn’t make him go back. But the codeine would take care of that.

Then she remembered the compass and looked across to the opposite side of the cabin, where spilled alcohol still dripped down the planking of the hull. Well, she thought wearily, there must be some answer to that too; she’d think of it in a minute. Apparently after four hours of improvising and feeling your way along the rim of disaster you began to develop a belief there was always another handhold just beyond.

14

Russell Bellew had been dreaming he was packing into the Bitterroot country again for elk when he awoke and he was back on that sinking abortion of a boat and the Duchess of California was poking his shoulder with a pair of rulers. She was looking down at him with that usual expression of hers, as if he were something that had just crawled out of the drain in a bus-station washroom. What the good Duchess needed, besides being knocked on her can a few times, was exactly what she’d have had this morning in about five more minutes if Goldilocks hadn’t sighted that other boat and come charging down there with his club just as he got her pinned down on the bunk. Rub it on him for practice, would she?

“Madam called?” he asked.

“Ingram said to wake you.”

He loved that bit with the rulers. He slid a hand up the back of her thigh and squeezed. “You should have used a longer stick.”

“Obviously.” There was no attempt to draw back, or hit him, and she didn’t even bother to change expression. “Then you are awake?”

He sat up. “What does Hotspur want now?”

“There’s a squall coming up.”

“So?”

“So the bird of time has but a little way to fly—”

“Shove it.”

She tore him off about three-sixteenths of an inch of another supercilious smile, dropped it in his eye, and said, “Yes, of course.” She went back on deck.

Cuddly type, the good Duchess. But somebody should have warned her before this that nobody was quite as