His throat tightened at that thought, and he did a quick 360 scan of the horizon. With no threatening clouds in sight, Reese relaxed. That was the last thing he needed to deal with, and him sporting only one halfway healed arm.
The first order of business was to clean up the vomit Byron had left on the starboard deck. He looked around for a moment, then found a plastic bucket with a rope tied to the handle. He tossed it overboard, scooped up some water, and splashed the deck clean. After he stowed the bucket on its hook, he returned to the helm and greeted Tony with a nod. "How's it going?"
Tony took a deep breath. "If you know your way around a sailboat, I'd be happy if you took over. This is nerve-racking—Uncle Byron never let me drive the thing before…”
Reese nodded, but didn't reach for the helm right away. Instead, he examined the lines and the sails. "You know if there are any problems with the lines up there?" he asked, with a jerk of his chin to indicate the mainsail.
“I don’t think so. I just don't know what I'm doing. I tried to raise up the sail when we left port or harbor, or…wherever we were back there…but the thing started flapping and it kind of spooked me so I was afraid I'd done something wrong, or would do something wrong, so I just left the motor on."
Reese ducked under the large boom attached to the mast in the center of the deck and examined the other side. The rigging looked secure, and he couldn't see any immediate damage. "Well, she looks sound enough. There's no sense in wasting fuel when we can probably get better speed just by using the wind.”
He turned and looked beyond Tony at the second sailboat that dutifully followed them, tied to Tiberia’s stern. "What's the story with that one?"
Tony looked down and his hands tightened on the silver ship’s wheel with white knuckles. "That's Intrepid. It's Uncle Byron’s friend’s boat. Aunt Libby said when they came back to shore and found…well, you know, all the destruction. They were supposed to meet up with their friends. They found the boat, right where it was supposed to be, and a note."
Reese waited for a long moment and enjoyed the sound of wind as it whistled through the rigging. He glanced out at the eastern horizon. There wasn't a single other vessel in view. They were still well within sight of land, maybe only a mile offshore. Other than smoke that rose from more than a dozen locations along the coastline, there was no indication that anything was wrong on land. But he could feel it.
Everything was too quiet. The radio didn't have its usual constant chatter. There weren't any seagulls that circled overhead. Reese remembered the giant flocks of shorebirds as they wheeled overhead along the shore in Boston and realized that most of the birds must've congregated over the mass of debris in hopes of finding more food than out at sea.
"What’d the letter say?" Reese asked, almost afraid to know the answer.
Libby poked her head, with her long silver mane, through the hatch and emerged from below decks, followed by Jo. "The letter said our dear friends Saul and Mary Wilson had gone ashore to find their grandchildren. Their daughter had been in town to meet them, staying at a hotel nearby. The letter was dated the day after the tsunami." Libby clutched at the aft railing and stared across the gap of water to Intrepid. "They loved that boat. They spent more time on it than Byron and I did on this tub that's for sure. Saul told us to take it," she said finally.
"Take the boat?" asked Jo. "I thought you said he loved it?"
"He did, and that's why he wanted us to have it. I think he knew what they would find onshore, and he knew…” Libby closed her eyes. "He knew that Mary wouldn't be able to handle the truth…the truth of what they’d find in the wreckage. There was no way their daughter and grandchildren survived that. There was no way anybody survived it. The only people that made it out alive were the ones who left when they had the chance. At least that's what we’ve found so far.”
"So you guys sat around how long…?” prompted Reese.
"We watched the remains of Portsmouth burn for the last four days. We saw a handful of survivors roaming around on the shore, but there was too much debris in the water—no one was able to get to us, and we weren't able to get to them. It was worse than Boston. The buildings were smaller, or less well constructed—I don't know,” she said and stared out at the water. “But it looked like an atomic bomb went off up there. Everything was wiped out." Libby looked down at the wake as it foamed and swirled behind Tiberia. "There were so many bodies…I’ve never seen anything…I never want to see that again."
Jo put a hand on Libby’s shoulder, and the older woman graciously covered the comforting hand with her own and squeezed. "Thank you, dear." She turned and faced Jo, then enveloped her in a hug. "Thank you so much for saving my Byron’s life. I don't know what I would've done if I'd lost him."
"As much as it pains me to say so, we’d be a lot more stable and a lot better able to face rough weather if we weren’t towing another boat," Reese observed.
Libby extricated herself from Jo's arms and stared at Reese for a moment.
