Aground

4
The door was ajar. When he knocked, she called out, “Come on in.” He stepped inside. She had on a blue dressing gown and was sitting on the studio couch with her stockinged feet stretched out on the coffee table in front of it. Beside her feet there were a bottle of Bacardi about two-thirds full, two or three opened bottles of Coca-Cola, a pitcher of ice, and a paperback mystery novel. She had a glass in her hand.
She regarded him solemnly, and sniffed. “It’s all right to close the door. You can always scream.”
He was aware for the first time that she had a definite southern accent. Perhaps he’d heard it before but it just hadn’t registered; he was a Texan too, and, although he’d been away so long that he’d lost all trace of it himself, he didn’t always notice it in others when he heard it. She didn’t appear to be outstandingly drunk, aside from the solemnity. The flamboyant mop of tawny hair was all in place, and her mouth nicely made up. But you never knew. There might possibly be other things in the world more unpredictable than a woman with too much to drink, but he’d never run into any of them. He wondered, without caring particularly, if she hit it this hard all the time. It’d be a shame. She was still a fine figure of a woman, but she must be between thirty and thirty-five, and at that age they didn’t stay in there long against the sauce without being marked.
“You don’t have to look so smug,” she said. “I’m perfectly aware of it.”
“What?”
“That my feet are on the coffee table.”
“Los pies de la Se?ora Osborne están en la mesa,” he said, with a parrot-like intonation.
She frowned. “What’s that mean?”
“The feet of Mrs. Osborne are on the table. I don’t know—it just sounded like one of those phrase-book deals. Would it be all right if we talked about your feet in the morning?”
“Captain, I have a feeling that you don’t entirely approve of me. Do you?”
“I hadn’t given it any thought,” he said. “Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters. Don’t you realize I might slash my wrists?”
He said nothing, wondering if two adults could get into a more asinine conversation. She probably wasn’t drunk enough to throw things, so maybe after she got a little of it out of her system, whatever it was, he could leave without starting a scene that would bring down the hotel. There seemed no point in even trying to guess what had brought it on. It was possible, of course, that he’d muffed the cue back there when she’d asked him to register for them, though that was pretty farfetched; if she’d wanted to indulge in a little away-from-home affair, she was certainly attractive enough to do better. There were plenty of younger and more personable men available in a place like Nassau. It was more probable, if that were the case, that she’d merely expected him to make the bid so she could turn it down. In any event, it hadn’t even occurred to him, so maybe he was getting old. Or, as she charged, he just didn’t like her. Well, he didn’t, particularly. Maybe that was the answer; she’d sensed it, and resented it—though he couldn’t imagine why. With those green eyes and that high-cheekboned and suggestively arrogant face she didn’t strike you as somebody who normally bled a great deal over the opinions of the rabble.
She was apparently lost in thought; maybe she’d forgotten he was there.
“What did you want to see me about?” he asked.
She poured some more rum in the glass. “Hollister.”
His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “What about him?”
“I wanted to ask you something. When he was giving you this snow job, did he ever say anything about being a doctor?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“Just this moonshine about being president of a drug firm? Well, it is in the pattern, at that.”
He began to have the feeling now that she wasn’t as drunk as she appeared. She was faking it. “What are you talking about?”
“Still that same old medical angle,” she mused, as if speaking to herself. “His mother must have been frightened by a pregnancy test.”
“You know him, don’t you?”
“Who says I do?”
“You spent over a thousand dollars today just to fly over the Dragoon with a pair of binoculars, looking for him.”
“Maybe I was trying to find out.”
“Who do you think he was?”
“It’s nothing to you.”
“No, but it might be to the police. Or had you thought of that?”
“Never mind the police. If I have to go out and recover my own boat, they can look after themselves. I tell you I don’t know, anyway. I’m just guessing.”
“Did he have a watch like that?”
“Yes,” she said. “But that’s no real proof. They’re not too common, but still there are others.”
“What about the description I gave you?”
“It could fit him. Along with a lot of other men. There’s another thing, though, that’s more important. You must have wondered why he wanted somebody else to survey the boat instead of going himself.”
“Sure.”
“He couldn’t have gone himself because Tango would know him. He’d been aboard the Dragoon before.”
He nodded. “That would make sense. But what would he want to steal it for?”
“I have no idea.”
“Who was he?”
“He’s just a man I used to know. His name’s Patrick Ives. That is, if all these guesses are right.”
“Did he know anything about sailing?”
“A little, I think. I know he’s sailed small boats.”
“Do you think he could have handled the Dragoon—with help, I mean? She’s a little out of the plaything class.”
“That I couldn’t judge; I don’t know enough about it myself. He did know navigation, though; he was a B-17 navigator during the Second World War.”
“He was just asking for trouble if he didn’t know how to handle a boat that size.”
“Well, he seems to have found it, judging from where the Dragoon is now. Do you really think he’s dead?”
Ingram nodded. “Naturally, there’s no way to be sure, but I think he drowned.”
She looked down at her glass. “I suppose so.”
“Was he a doctor?” he asked.
“No,” she said, without looking up. “He was a phony. He liked to pass himself off as a doctor when he was cashing rubber checks.”
He nodded. “That sounds like him. I’ve got one of his checks.”
“Well, it’s no collector’s item.”
“You don’t have any idea at all why he would steal the boat?”
“None whatever, as I told you once before. Would you like me to have that statement notarized, Captain?”
Well, Ingram reflected, he could tell her to take her schooner and go to hell—there was always the easy way out, if you wanted to quit. But it would be an admission of defeat in just as real a sense as any other failure to finish the job. And there was no use getting hacked at a drunk; that was stupid. If she is drunk, he thought. He’d given up trying to guess that one.
He went back to his room and lay staring up at the dark for a long time before he went to sleep. The whole thing was murkier than ever. Assuming she was correct, and Hollister’s real name was Patrick Ives, you still didn’t know anything. Why was she so concerned with catching up with him, and whether he was dead or not? And why in God’s name would a con man and rubber-check artist want to steal a schooner which was of utterly no value to him and which he probably couldn’t even sail in the first place? That was about as sensible as trying to carry off a paved street.
He awoke drenched with sweat and tangled in the sheet, with the feeling that he had cried out in his sleep. When he turned on the light and looked at his watch, it was a little after two. Well, he wasn’t dreaming about it as often now, and eventually the picture would fade; it wasn’t as if there were any feeling of guilt, as though he’d panicked and left Barney there to flame like a demented and screaming torch. He’d got him out and over the side of the shattered boat with his own clothes aflame and Barney’s flesh coming off on his gloves. It was too late, and Barney was already dead, but nobody could have saved him. It wasn’t that. It was horror. It was the fear afterward, and wondering if he would ever be able to smell gasoline in a boat again without being sick with it.
It wasn’t a very big boat that had killed Barney and burned the yard down back to the office and the gate. Her name was Nickels ‘n Dimes, and she was a beat-up old thirty-foot auxiliary sloop in for a number of minor jobs, including some engine overhaul and the installation of a new radiotelephone and a better ground plate on the outside of her hull. They had put on the copper strip when she was on the ways, and the bolt through the hull for the radio connection. She went back in the water Friday afternoon. The separate ingredients for disaster were a long week end, a slow leak somewhere in her fuel system, poor ventilation, and the fact that Barney—who had a poor nose anyway—had a cold on Monday morning. The catalyst was a torch. Barney had the radio ground cable connected to the through-bolt and was preparing to silver-solder it when Ingram came down the hatch and smelled the gas. He yelled, and at the same instant Barney struck the torch.
* * *
He’d left a call for four a.m. When the telephone rang, he was instantly awake. Opening the french windows, he stepped out onto the balcony facing the harbor channel and Hog Island. They were in luck; it was dead calm. The fronds of the coconut palms along Bay Street were motionless in the pre-dawn darkness that was beginning to show a faint wash of rose in the east. He called Mrs. Osborne, found she was already awake, and hurriedly dressed in khaki trousers, T-shirt, and sneakers. When he came out into the corridor, she was just emerging from her room. She was wearing white calypso pants and sandals and a blue pullover thing with short sleeves. Her legs were bare. She looked very cool and fresh and attractive, and if she had a hangover there was no visible trace of it. Must have a constitution like a horse, he thought. He took her suitcase and went out to signal one of the taxis across the street while she settled the bill. She was silent on the ride to the airport. There was no apology, or even any reference to her behavior of last night. Maybe she didn’t even remember it, he thought—not that it mattered. The airport restaurant was closed, but Avery had some coffee in the McAllister office. They drank a cup.
“We’ll just leave your bag here,” Ingram said. “I’ll take mine, since I’ll probably stay aboard. Even if we find we’re going to have to charter a tug to get her off, we can’t leave her abandoned out there.”
They went out and boarded the plane. The deflated life raft was bundled up in back of the seats in the after compartment. Ingram motioned for her to take the co-pilot’s seat, and strapped himself into one of those in back. Faint light was just breaking when they roared down the runway and took off. He lighted a cigar and settled back to wait. It would take over an hour.
Andros was a brooding dark mass below them, and then they were out over the vast distances of the Bank where the water lay hushed and flat in the pearly luminescence of dawn. The sun, peering over the curvature of the earth behind them, sprayed the underside of the wing with crimson and gold in momentary brilliance until Avery nosed down again and it was lost. After what seemed like hours, Ingram looked at his watch again. They should sight her in a few more minutes. He stepped through the narrow doorway and stood in back of Mrs. Osborne. She was staring out ahead. Two or three minutes later he tapped her lightly on the shoulder and pointed. “There she is.” She nodded, but made no reply.
The distant speck grew and divided into its separate components of sand bar and boat. Avery began his descent. Ingram spoke alongside his ear. “Let’s take another look at her before we go in. Get an idea of the tide.”
Avery nodded. The schooner was off to starboard and a thousand feet below as they went past. Ingram stared down at her. The empty deck still listed slightly to port in the early morning light, and there was about her something of the tragic helplessness of a beached and dying whale as she lay exactly as she had yesterday afternoon, on the same northerly heading. Avery swung in a wide circle and they came down past her only a few hundred feet above the water. Apparently nothing had changed at all except that the list might be slightly less, indicating the tide was higher. He studied the water moving ever so slowly past the imprisoned hull.
“Still flooding a little,” he said above the roar of the engines. “But probably pretty close to slack high water right now. You won’t drift much.”
Avery nodded. “You want to go by again?” “No. Let’s put her down.” “Righto. Cinch up your belts.”
Ingram went back and strapped himself in. He watched out the window as Avery swung west, toward the edge of the bank, made a preliminary run to study the water for possible obstructions, turned, and came in for the landing. Water, smooth as oil, came up toward them, and then they touched and the plane was drowned in a seething white curtain of spray. They slowed, and began to settle in the water. He unfastened his belt and went forward. They were about two miles west of the sand spit and the schooner. Avery turned. They began to taxi up toward her.
“We’d best not try to get too close,” he said. “I don’t trust those shoals around there.”
“Within a half mile will do,” Ingram replied. “And as long as the tide keeps flooding, you’d better go back to westward to wait for us.”
“How long do you think you’ll be aboard?”
“I can probably bring Mrs. Osborne back in a half hour or less. But suppose I call you on the radiotelephone, if it’s still working? Have you got either of the intership channels?”
Avery nodded. “Call on 2638.”
“Right,” Ingram said. He stepped into the after compartment, attached the inflating bottle to the valve of the raft, and put enough air into it to keep it afloat. Avery came aft. He opened the door and they pushed the raft out. Ingram knelt in the opening and completed the inflation. Mrs. Osborne was standing behind them now. The plane rocked gently with little gurgling sounds under its hull as they swung around on the tide. Avery held the raft while Ingram helped her in. She settled herself aft. Ingram put his suitcase in, along with the air bottle and the light aluminum oars, and stepped down himself and pushed away from the plane.
He slid the handles of the oars through the tabs that served as oarlocks and began rowing. As soon as they were out from behind the plane, he looked over his shoulder and saw that Avery had approached nearer than he had expected; the Dragoon was not more than four hundred yards away. The sun was just coming up out of the sea beyond her, throwing her into silhouette. Beautiful, he thought—if she weren’t so obviously aground. Boats in trouble always left you with an uncomfortable feeling.
It was still dead calm, and the water lay as flat as steel except for an occasional and almost imperceptible lift and fall from some vestigial remnant of surge running in from the Santaren Channel, attenuated by five miles of shoal water between here and the edge of the Bank. He dug in the oars. As soon as they were clear of the plane, Avery started the starboard engine, swung, and taxied toward the deeper water to the west. Ingram studied the water around and under them as he rowed. Judging from the color and from what he could see of the bottom straight down, it was sand and at least two fathoms deep all the way up to where the Dragoon was lying, and the channel was a good hundred yards wide. The schooner drew seven feet; if they could get her off into it, she could probably make it back to deep water without trouble, provided they made the attempt in good light.
But—he shot another glance over his shoulder—getting her off didn’t look too promising as they came nearer. The blue water of the channel was half a ship’s length away from her stern. The deepest part of her keel would be still another thirty feet forward of that, so she might have to move back some sixty or seventy feet before she found enough water to float her unless the tide came a lot higher than it was now, and he was afraid it was very near to slack high at the moment.
The sound of the plane’s engine died abruptly as Avery cut it off and let the plane come to rest about a mile away. They were now less than fifty yards from the port side of the schooner. He changed course to come around under her stern.
“Can’t we go aboard on this side?” Mrs. Osborne asked.
“There’s something I want to see first,” he replied.
“Oh,” she said. “The name.”
Not exactly, he thought, but made no reply. She was leaning to the right, trying to get a glimpse of it. “Lorna,” she called out suddenly. “And look—you can still see a little of the old lettering under that blue paint.”
He glanced around as they came in under the counter. She was right. The new name had been lettered in black over the light blue with which they’d painted the topsides, but at either end the D and the n of Dragoon still showed. It was a sloppy job of painting. He shipped the oars and caught hold of the rudder post; they stopped, and hung, suspended in utter silence. The tide was almost at a standstill. He waited for the ripples to die away, and then leaned over, peering straight down through water as transparent as gin. His eyes narrowed.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Look,” he replied. “See that long gouge the keel made, leading backward toward the channel?”
“Yes. What does that mean?”
“She didn’t drift in here. She was under way when she hit.”
She looked up. “Then they were still aboard.”
“Somebody was.”
He noted that unconsciously they had lowered their voices. Well, there was something ghostly about it. Maybe it was the silence.
Why hadn’t they at least tried to kedge her off? From the looks of the bottom they’d backed the engine down, throwing sand forward, but there was no sign of an anchor cable, even a broken one. It was possible, of course, that the dinghy was already gone, but they could have floated the anchor astern, using one of the booms for a raft, or carried it across the bottom a few steps at a time by diving. He’d better keep Mrs. Osborne on deck until he’d had a look below; there could be a body, or bodies.
He shoved away from the rudder post and took up the oars again. They went slowly up the starboard side. She was low in the water, all right. Several inches. This was the high side, the way she was listing, and the line of the old boot-topping was almost in the water. If you had her up to her proper water line, she’d be within a foot of floating right now. She must be holed. He peered down but couldn’t see past the turn of the bilge. They continued forward, passed under the bowsprit, and came aft along the port side.
When they came abreast of the main he shipped the oars again and reached up to catch the shrouds just above the chainplates. With the port list, the deck was not too high above them. Gathering up the painter, he climbed on deck. He made the painter fast and reached down a hand for her. She scrambled up, ducked under the lifeline, and stood beside him.
The deckhouses were long and low, rising not over two feet above the deck, with small portholes along their sides. Two or three of the portholes were open, but he could see nothing beyond them because of the dimness inside the cabins. The sun was above the horizon now and warm on the side of his face as it gilded the masts and rigging. Everything was wet with dew. He stood for a moment looking along the sloping, deserted deck. There was an air of desolation about it as though the schooner had been abandoned for weeks, but he realized it was probably nothing more than a general untidiness that offended his seaman’s sense of order. The sails were gathered in sloppy and dribbling bundles along the booms rather than properly furled, and at the bases of the fore- and mainmasts the falls of halyards and topping lifts lay helter-skelter in a confused jumble of rope. Neither of them had said a word. It was almost as though they were reluctant to break the hush.
They walked back to the break of the after deckhouse, and stepped down into the cockpit. It was a long one, and fairly wide, and at the after end of it were the binnacle, wheel, and the controls for the auxiliary engine. Ingram turned and looked back at the tracks they had left in the dew collected in millions of tiny droplets over the decks. There were no others.
“I’ll have a look below,” he said. “You wait here a minute.”
“All right,” she replied.
The companion hatch was open. He went down the ladder. After the sunlight on deck, the interior of the large after cabin was somewhat dim, but as his eyes came below the level of the hatch he saw several things almost at once. What appeared to be scores of long wooden cases were piled high on both sides of the cabin and in two of the four bunks, held in place by a criss-cross network of rope lashings. But it was one of the other bunks, the one on the port side forward, that riveted his attention and caused him to mutter a startled oath as he hurried down the last two steps. In it was the body of a slender, dark-haired man in khaki trousers, lying face down with one arm dangling over the side. He crossed to the bunk with three long strides and reached down to touch his arm, expecting to find it rigid. It was warm, and yielded to his hand, and in the brief fraction of a second in which this registered in his mind and the man began to turn on his side he heard Mrs. Osborne scream, “Look out!” and he turned himself. In back of him, leaning against the companion ladder behind which he’d apparently been hiding, was a hairy and half-naked giant cradling a Browning Automatic Rifle in the crook of his arm. He looked like a wartime atrocity poster. “Welcome aboard, Herman,” he said. “We’re glad to see you.