was one up on you, chum. I didn’t have to worry about mine; I knew where she was.”
That was the question you always had to ask yourself, Ingram thought, before you jumped all the way down his throat. Suppose it had been Rae? But it didn’t change anything; it would be as stupid as hating the Pacific Ocean because she’d been swept overboard by a sea. “Bellew, for Christ’s sake, don’t you think I realize what it’s like? But it’s just something you can’t change; you’ll only make it worse—”
“What do you mean?” Mrs. Warriner interrupted.
She knows, he thought; she knows, all right, but she just won’t accept it. At that moment Rae’s head appeared above the hatch. So he wasn’t even going to get a moment to talk to her alone, to fill her in on who these people were and what had to be done. In fact, for at least the next twenty to twenty-five days—assuming they lived that long—he’d never have a minute completely alone with her. He was conscious of a dark and futile anger but choked it off. The situation was still far too dangerous to be crying over lost privacy and interrupted honeymoons.
He sprang to help her and seated her on the after edge of the deckhouse. “Are you all right now, honey?”
She managed a smile. “Yes. Just a little weak from the reaction.”
“Aren’t we all?” He turned, indicating the others. “This is Mrs. Warriner. And Mr. Bellew.”
“Hi,” Bellew said. Mrs. Warriner leaned forward and took her hand, and said simply, “Thank you. And I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” Rae said. “It’s all over now—” She broke off and gasped. “John! The other compass! He smashed that too. We haven’t got anything.”
Ingram nodded. “I figured he had, or you’d have had it up here. But it’s all right. There’s one in the dinghy. I can make it do.”
He stepped forward and lifted it out. The others had already removed the flashlights and the oilskin package containing their passports. He cast off the painter and pushed the dinghy away from the side. Holding the compass very carefully, he went below and stowed it in a drawer. It was beyond price now, and nothing was going to happen to it until he could get it secured in or on the binnacle. He still didn’t know what was going to happen up there. He went back and sat down beside Rae. “All right, honey, if you’re up to it now, can you tell us what happened? How did you get him tied up?”
“Codeine,” she said. “I gave him three of those codeine tablets from the medicine chest, in a glass of lemonade. I think he’s still all right, and it’s been over six hours.”
The others watched silently while he stepped over and reached down to check Warriner’s pulse. He knew Mrs. Warriner would have already, but he wanted to be sure himself. It was steady. “He’s okay,” he said. He came back.
Rae told them the rest of the story. When she had finished, she looked at Mrs. Warriner. “I still don’t know. I mean, if the codeine idea hadn’t worked, and he hadn’t smashed the shotgun.”
Mrs. Warriner touched her on the arm. “I understand, dear. And you’ll forget it eventually. We all just thank God it ended the way it did.”
“Well, don’t break up, girls,” Bellew said. “Mama’s precious is a-l-l right; he’s not hurt. Tomorrow you can draw straws to see who’s the lucky girl he’ll kill next.”
Rae shot a startled and puzzled glance at Ingram. “What happened to him? I couldn’t make any sense of what he was saying. Something about a shark.”
Before Ingram could reply, Mrs. Warriner and Bellew both spoke at once. Bellew overrode her. “Well, nothing much.” He spread his hands in a deprecating gesture. “He killed my wife, and then this morning he slugged me and locked us in the cabin on there to drown when he abandoned ship. But, I mean, hell, nobody minds these little jokes as long as they keep Hughie happy—”
“He didn’t kill your wife!” Mrs. Warriner lashed out. “And why don’t you go ahead and tell the Ingrams why he locked us in there?”
“Wait a minute! Hold it!” Ingram cut them both off. “Rae’s entitled to know what this is all about.” As briefly as he could, he told her something of it.
Then he went on, to Mrs. Warriner and Bellew. “I want both of you to listen to me a minute. After your experience on
“Unh-unh,” Bellew interrupted. “No sweat at all, pal. All he’s going to need is a basket.”
“So you’re going to kill him? In front of three witnesses. Just what do you do then? Kill us too?”
“I’m not going to kill him. You think I’m stupid, or something? You might say I’m going to immobilize him —”
“Maybe you’d better wait till I get through,” Ingram said. “You might change your mind. If you don’t, there’s a good chance none of us will ever reach land. We’ve got enough food, and the water will stretch, with rationing. But that’s not it. I’m the only one on here that can take this boat down there—the only one who can navigate well enough, in the first place, and the only one who can compensate that compass so we won’t be wandering all over hell and halfway back, trying to make a landfall. And I’m not going to stand here and just look on—any more than Mrs. Warriner is—while you make a cripple or a permanent imbecile out of a boy who’s not responsible for his actions—”
“Jesus Christ, you too?”
“I said wait till I get through. To beat up a man in his mental condition, you’d have to be sicker than he is. And as I told you, none of us is going to stand here and watch it, so if you lay a hand on him this thing is going to blow wide open. I’d say there’s a good chance you can whip me, but if I get beaten up so badly I can’t sail this boat or navigate, you’re not doing yourself any favor, unless you think you’d like drifting around out here while your tongue swells up and you go crazy.
“And there’s another thing I don’t think you’ve thought of. He’s scared to death of you, and if you touch him he’ll go completely berserk. You may be stupid enough to want to see what’ll happen when a man runs amok on a forty-foot yacht with four other people on it, but the rest of us are not. Also, this is no hospital, so what do you do if he dies? So far, everything that’s happened has been the result of an accident or bad luck or his crackup, and nobody’s committed a deliberately criminal act—”
“You call what he did to my wife an accident?”
“For Christ’s sake, Bellew, he panicked! You want to beat him to death because he got scared and lost his head?”
“Captain Ingram!” It was Mrs. Warriner this time. Well, he’d been expecting it.
He turned to her. “Bellew’s right,” he said wearily, “and you know it. I don’t know why you want to saddle yourself with the blame for the whole thing, but your husband didn’t crack up because he thought you and Bellew tried to kill him. That’s just another place to hide, another way to try to pass the buck. There’s no doubt he’s afraid of Bellew, and he’ll be ten times as afraid of him now, but nobody in his right mind who’d known you for as long as an hour would ever believe anything as stupid as that. He was already irrational when he came up with that gem —”
“Wait a minute!” Mrs. Warriner interrupted. “You still don’t know the whole story. Why do you think we were both in that one cabin when you found us? Hughie hit Bellew and locked us in there because when he came below he found this vermin —this incredible, filthy, loathsome pig—already there trying to get into bed with me. What was he supposed to think? If he’d had any doubts before, that would settle them. I hadn’t made any noise; being raped was preferable to having Hughie come running down there and probably be beaten to death.”
Ingram looked at Bellew, trying to keep the contempt from showing any more than necessary. Don’t push him, he thought; he’s pretty close to the edge. But the latter was completely at ease. “Rape! Geez! So maybe I was trying to collect what you owed me; it had nothing to do with it, anyway. Hughie-boy already had his club with him when he came down there. He brought it from deck, because he’d already sighted this boat over here.”
The son of a bitch, Ingram thought. The dirty, sad—
“If you were that broken up over your wife’s death,” Rae asked, “how did you ever happen to notice she was missing?”
