Dead Calm (7 page)

But he made no effort to reach beneath her and pull it out; his hands were digging at the back and sides of her neck as he tried to close his fingers around her throat. She hunched her shoulders up and pulled her chin down, grinding her face against the cushion. Then his weight was suddenly gone from her shoulders and she was lifted and thrown onto her back. She kicked out with her legs and struck at his face, but his hands were around her throat now and tightening. The contorted face and wild eyes were just above hers, and she closed her own eyes to shut them out.

The struggle was utterly silent except for a faint whining sound he made deep in his throat and the sibilant whisperings of their violence against the plastic cushion. She could no longer breathe, and the sunlight penetrating her closed eyelids began to fade downward through darkening shades of pink toward final blackness. But her hand was free now. Just as consciousness was slipping away she raised it and threw the distributor cap outward. There was no sound of its striking the deck, so it must have gone into the water. Or maybe she was already beyond hearing…

Then, strangely, she was breathing again. The hands were gone from her throat. She opened her eyes. He had stood up and was leaning across her, with his hands on the port life-line, as though he’d forgotten her. She couldn’t see his face. She slid cautiously backward, toward the forward end of the cockpit. He paid no attention. She eased herself upright, poised to leap toward the hatch, and glanced fearfully once more in his direction to see if he had turned. This time she saw his face and understood. She looked outward in the same direction.

It was the distributor cap. It had landed just off the port side, and with
Saracen
now lying at rest on the surface it was sinking almost straight below them through sunlit water as clear as gin. And as he had the other time at the bottle, he was staring down at it with horror and with some sick but inescapable compulsion as it slipped from side to side and then began a gentle spiral that would end in the ooze and the darkness two miles below. The agony of his face was indescribable. He screamed then and collapsed into the bottom of the cockpit with his face pressed into the seat cushion.

She stared, still poised to leap but frozen to the spot. His head rocked from side to side and he clutched the cockpit coaming with a grip that corded the muscles of his forearms. “No, no, no!” he cried out. “I didn’t do it! I didn’t mean it! It was her fault!” He began to cry then with a ragged sobbing that made his whole body shake.

She was able to move at last. She ran down the ladder on rubbery legs and through the after cabin. After slamming the door between the two, she threw the bolt and began dragging cases of canned stores from under the bunks and piling them in front of it. There were six sailbags. She stacked them against the door also, wedging the last ones against the upright pipes of the bunk frame. She was trembling and drenched with perspiration when she had finished, and collapsed on the bunk, too weak to move. Her face was swollen and painful where he had hit her, and there was an ugly red splotch on the bottom of her left forearm where it had come in contact with the exhaust manifold. She was scared, and she was sick with anxiety for John, but for the moment she was safe. Without an ax to smash the door, Warriner had little chance of breaking in, and there was no ax aboard. And until they got a breeze he couldn’t take
Saracen
any farther away. All she could do now was wait it out.

Saracen
rolled desolately in the trough of the swell. There was no sound from beyond the door except the normal creakings, slidings, and minute collisions of shifting objects always present on a small boat at sea, and Rae might even have been alone. She tried to make some sense of this thing that had happened to them, but ran immediately into the opaque and impenetrable wall of the fact that Warriner was the only clue to any of it, and Warriner was mad. Where did you go from a starting point like that?

John had suspected there was something wrong with him. If only she’d paid more attention and hadn’t waked him up by starting the engine … Well, there was no use crying about that now. But what had John found on the other yacht that had made him burst out of the cabin that way and leap down into the dinghy? Somebody hurt or sick? But in that case why was he coming back alone? Wait, she thought, you’re close. What he found must have been some proof Warriner was lying, unstable, or dangerous, or all three, and he was rushing back because you were alone here with him. But what proof?

Warriner had tried to kill her; maybe he’d already killed somebody else. It was abundantly obvious now he hadn’t been chasing her to recover the distributor cap; the chances were he hadn’t even known she had it. He’d been intent simply on strangling her because she’d somehow stopped the engine. And his horror at watching it sink had nothing to do with its being a part of the engine; he probably hadn’t even recognized what it was. It was the same as with the bottle: he was seeing something else, or somebody.

I didn’t do it! … I didn’t mean it! …

Guilt? Terror? Who knew, or could even guess? But the whole story of the deaths from botulism must have been a lie, so it was possible something else and equally terrible had happened. Maybe he was responsible for it— She tensed. He was coming through the after cabin. She sat up and drew back on the bunk, waiting for the impact as he slammed into the door. Would it hold?

Then she grabbed her temples and fought a collapse into hysteria. He’d knocked—a tentative and discreet rap of the knuckles—and said forlornly, “Mrs. Ingram?”

You’re not mad, are you, Mama? I didn’t know it would hurt the cat.
Stop it! she thought. You’re beginning to crack up yourself.

He knocked again. “Mrs. Ingram? Please, I didn’t mean it! You’ve got to believe me! I—I just lost my head for a minute because I thought you were against me too. But you’re not, are you? You couldn’t be. You’re like Estelle. The first minute I saw you, I could
feel
you talking to me, the way she did. Mrs. Ingram, what’s your first name?”

She could only feel of her throat and go on staring at the door.

“Mrs. Ingram?”

She couldn’t be sure, but she thought he was crying. Then in a minute he said petulantly, “Well, you
were
being unreasonable, you know. It was your own fault.”

He turned the handle of the door and pushed, and when it failed to open he began to lunge at it in rage, like a child in a tantrum. She watched the bolt in horror, expecting to see it torn off, but it continued to hold. “You want to kill me too, don’t you?” he shouted.

Then, as suddenly as it had commenced, the fury subsided. His footsteps went away.

She heard him moving around in the after cabin, and after a while the sound of hammering. It was impossible to guess what he was doing, but at least he wasn’t trying to smash down the door. Would John have decided by now that
Saracen
was stopped? Maybe he was already heading for them in the dinghy. She looked at her watch. It was 9:35. He could probably row it in an hour, or maybe even a little less.

But suppose something had happened to him back there when he’d tried to get back aboard? The last she’d seen of him, just before Warriner hit her, he’d been coming toward them as hard as he could row, directly in their path. No, you had to have something to hang onto or you’d go as mad as Warriner, and faith in John Ingram’s ability to cope with anything that could happen at sea was the one solid thing in sight. Even if he’d been run down, he would have got back aboard the other yacht, and he’d have the dinghy with him.

And if the other yacht were sinking, he’d keep it afloat somehow—

Her thoughts broke off and she looked around in wonder. It was the growl of the starter she’d heard. Hadn’t he even looked at the engine? Didn’t he know the distributor head was gone? The engine fired then and settled down to a steady rumble. She heard the clutch engage, and they began to move ahead.

She slumped forward with her face in her hands and wanted to give up and cry. She’d never thought to look in the spare-parts box to see if there was another one. She should have known. John detested engines, but he always said that if you were going to carry the stinking things around they might as well be in working condition when you needed them.

He’d acquired his first catboat at the age of twelve, and, except for two years at the University of Texas on the GI Bill just after World War II, he’d been around salt water and around boats ever since, most of his adult life as a professional. He’d captained a towboat in Mexico, worked on salvage jobs in half a dozen countries and three oceans, owned and skippered a charter yacht in the Bahamas, and up until eighteen months ago operated a shipyard in Puerto Rico. He’d been in an explosion and fire, and inevitably he’d seen bad weather and some that was worse, but at the moment he didn’t believe he’d ever been in a position quite as hopeless as this.

It was 2:45 p.m. Wearing a diving mask, he was some ten feet below the surface on
Orpheus’s
port side, just in under the turn of her bilge, looking at her from below, and the view was a chilling one. She’d never make port. And their pumping and bailing would accomplish nothing except to postpone from one hour to the next the moment she’d finally give up and go to the bottom.

When the breeze had stopped, they’d all three returned to throwing water out of her. Twenty minutes ago, after over an hour’s furious and unceasing effort, they had lowered the water level in the main cabin to a depth of around six inches. Their bailing buckets were coming up less than half full each time. He’d knocked the others off for a brief rest and questioned them. Had they hit anything? Driftwood, or a submerged object of any kind? In mid-Pacific, this was admittedly farfetched, but there had to be some reason for all that water.

It was Mrs. Warriner who supplied most of the answers. “No,” she said. “If she did, we didn’t feel it.”

“When you were running on power, was there any unusual vibration?” If they had a damaged propeller or bent shaft she might have opened up around the stern gland.

Mrs. Warriner shook her head. “No, it was perfectly normal. Anyway, we haven’t used the engine in over two weeks.”

“We used up all the gas trying to find Clipperton Island,” Bellew said. “Prince Hughie the Navigator knew where it was, but somebody kept moving it.”

She gave him an icy stare but was too exhausted to reply. “How about bad weather?” Ingram asked.

There hadn’t been much, at least nothing to bother a sound boat. Two days out of La Paz they’d run into a freak condition of fresh to strong winds which had kept them reefed down for the better part of twenty-four hours. They’d had a couple of days of bad squalls, the worst of which was around two weeks ago when they were trying to beat their way back to Clipperton Island after they’d decided they’d overshot it. The squalls had left a rough, confused sea, and she’d pounded heavily.

“And it was just after that you noticed it was taking more pumping to keep her dry?”

Mrs. Warriner nodded. “I think so. But it wasn’t all of a sudden. Just a little more each day. And it must have been about three days ago it began to get really bad and come above the cabin floor when she rolled.”

“How was the weather then?”

She thought. “Nothing stronger than light breezes, as I recall. But the day before was squally and rough, and she pitched quite a bit.”

Ingram nodded and spoke to Bellew. “When you get your breath, turn to on the pump. I’m going below to see what I can find, and I’ll relieve you in half an hour.”

He was going through the doghouse when the thought of Rae poured suddenly through the defenses of his mind again, leaving him shaken and limp. No matter how you barricaded yourself against the fear, it lurked always in ambush just beyond conscious thought, ready to catch you off guard for an instant and overwhelm you. What chance did she have? Did she have any at all? Lay off, he told himself savagely; you’ll run amok. Do what you can do and quit thinking about what you can’t.

Below, in the sodden ruin of the cabins, he’d checked the obvious things first, all the plumbing leading through the hull below the waterline. There were two heads. He couldn’t get a good look at the pipes because of the water swirling around them, but he could feel them with his hands. He wasn’t looking for a minor leak, but a flood. They were all right; none of them were broken. He crawled through a hatch into the flooded engine compartment under the doghouse. The big two-hundred-horsepower engine was submerged to its rusty cylinder head in oily water surging from side to side. He groped around for the intake to the cooling system and examined the line with his hands. It was intact. Then the leaks had to be in the hull itself—God alone knew where—and there was no way to find them unless you could get her dry inside so you could look.

But you couldn’t lower the water with the pump alone, and the buckets were useless after you got it as low as the cabin sole. Maybe there was a fire ax or hatchet aboard; he could chop away the cabin flooring below those two hatches and drop the buckets directly into the bilge. His eyes had grown accustomed to the dim light in the compartment now, and he looked around him, studying as much of the hull as was above the water. She was double-planked; he could see the diagonal seams of the inner skin. He took out his knife and began poking it at random into the wood. On the third plank the knife blade went into it as if it were a piece of bread. He felt a chill along the back of his neck and hurriedly started checking everywhere he could reach, even into the water below him. Large areas of the inner planking and of the frames themselves were spongy with dry rot.

He’d gone back on deck then and asked if there was a diving mask aboard. Mrs. Warriner told him where to find one. After kicking off his sneakers, he’d tossed the end of a line over the port side so he could get back aboard, and dropped in.

How long? he wondered now, peering upward through the mask. It was impossible to guess; too much depended on the weather. In the first hard squall she’d go to the bottom like a dropped brick. In at least three places just above him along the turn of the bilge where the green hair of marine growth waved endlessly as she rolled, he could see the loose butt-ends of planks sticking out where her fastenings had worked loose. Around them the calking was gone, the seams wide open for the full length of the plank. Keeping a respectful distance from the plunging and deadly mass above him, he swam to the surface and forward, around the bow. The starboard side was even worse. He counted six planks where the fastenings were coming out. He swam back and climbed aboard.

Bellew stopped pumping, and they came over to him as he stood dripping on deck under the brazen weight of the sun. “Did you find anything?” Mrs. Warriner asked.

He stripped off the mask and nodded. “Yes. But it’s nothing we can do anything about.”

“Then she’s going down?”

“Yeah. I wouldn’t even make a guess as to how long we can keep her afloat, but she’ll never make the Marquesas.”

“What’s causing it?” Bellew asked.

“Dry rot. In the inner planking and some of the frames. It’s a disease, generally caused by lack of ventilation, and once it starts it spreads like smallpox. There may have been only a few small patches of it when you bought her, but whoever surveyed her missed ‘em apparently, and now it’s everywhere. What’s happening is that, even if the outer planking is still sound, the fastenings are pulling out; the wood inside is too soft to hold ‘em any more. Pounding in those squalls probably started them working loose, and now just the rolling sets up enough play and enough stresses to pull them out. The inner planking’s no doubt opening up the same way, and the more she works, the looser it all gets.”

“And there’s nothing we can do?” Mrs. Warriner asked.

“Nothing except keep pumping.”

She sat down at the break of the raised deck and lit a cigarette. She blew out the match and tossed it overboard. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ingram. It’s too bad we had to infect you.”

Still occupied with the practical problem of survival, and its vanishing possibility of solution, he was caught off guard by this lapse into the figurative. “Infect?”

“With our own particular dry rot. Our contagion of doom. We should have been flying a quarantine flag.”

Bellew had glanced involuntarily toward the dinghy still bumping against the side. Ingram saw him but didn’t even bother to speak; he merely shook his head. Twelve hundred miles from land, three people in an eight-foot dinghy designed to carry two the hundred yards or so from an anchored yacht to the dock, inside a harbor—a bicycle would be about as practical a lifeboat.

Bellew shrugged. “So it was stupid.” Then he went on, his eyes bleak. “But I guess you die hard, with unfinished business.”

“Who doesn’t?” Ingram asked.

“Sure, sure, you’d like to know what happened to your wife. Me, I’d just like two or three minutes with Hughie-boy.” He raised brutal hands and made a twisting motion with them, inches apart. Mrs. Warriner sickened and turned away in a silence that seemed almost palpably to echo with the creak and snap of parted vertebrae. Ingram felt sorry for her. “Never mind,” he said harshly to Bellew. “Get back to pumping.”

The other fell to without reply. As though conscious of them now only for the first time, Ingram looked at the bull neck and massive shoulders and arms, thinking that Bellew probably could kill a man with his bare hands. It was a good thing he’d got the jump on him to start with. Or had he? It was impossible to tell what Bellew thought, or why he took orders without argument. He had the look of a man it would be very dangerous to push, and the chances were this docility under curt commands was nothing but a realistic acceptance of the facts that Ingram knew the job better than he did and he had more chance of saving himself if he did as he was told.

Ingram sat down in the cockpit to put his sneakers back on. Water still dripped from his hair. Mrs. Warriner sat facing him, on the edge of the raised deck, her knees drawn up, moodily smoking. “What is your wife like?” she asked.

“Why?” He didn’t like the question; he saw no reason he should discuss Rae with these people.

“If she knows how to handle him, I don’t think he’ll hurt her.”

“I’d like to believe that,” he said bluntly. “But do you mean you didn’t know how to handle him? When I opened the cabin door down there and you thought it was him, you were scared to death.”

The brown eyes met his with perfect frankness. “The circumstances are different. He thinks we’re trying to kill him. Also, it wasn’t myself I was afraid for.”

Ingram nodded, remembering how Bellew had been poised with his club. At the same time, something else disturbed him. Presumably that was her cabin, hers and Warriner’s. Then if Warriner was on deck taking his trick at the pump when he’d sighted
Saracen,
why had Bellew been in there? But maybe Warriner had attacked him somewhere else and dragged him in there while he was unconscious. He shrugged. What difference did it make?

“Would she panic easily?” Mrs. Warriner asked.

“No,” Ingram said. “I don’t think she’d panic at all. Look, she’s no high-school girl, or jittery old maid with the vapors. She’s thirty-five years old, and she was married twice before she married me. Men are nothing new and startling to her. She’s never had to deal with an unbalanced one before, but she
has
been in tight spots, and she’s clever and coolheaded and she learns fast. She tried to fight him to get back to the wheel when he took it away from her, but all that happened very fast and it was pure reflex. If she survived—” His voice broke off, and he pulled savagely at the shoelace he was knotting. “If she survived that time, she’d know better than to antagonize him again. She’d play it by ear.”

“Is there a weapon of any kind aboard?”

He nodded. “A shotgun.”

Their eyes met again. Then she shivered slightly and looked down at the cigarette in her hands. Her voice was very small as she asked, “Could she?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Does anybody, till he’s faced with it?”

“Is she aware that
Orpheus
is sinking?”

“All she knows is that there was water in her, and that your husband said she was. She won’t know what to believe now.”

“But the possibility—or probability—will still exist. So they’d be going off and leaving you to drown.” She was silent for a moment. “Have you been married long?”

“About four months. We were on our honeymoon.”

She nodded. “I can only give you the opinion of another woman who was, in effect, on her honeymoon. Both alternatives are impossible, of course, as long as you continue to weigh them. But inevitably there’ll be a point when she has to stop thinking, and it’ll become a simple matter of instinct versus conditioning. Instinct is a lot older.”

“She may not even remember the gun. Or know how to assemble it if she does—or get the chance, for that matter.”

“But she would know better than to try to threaten him with it? You know, the magic wand of television and B pictures?”

“Yes,” he said. “She’d know better than to point it unless she was prepared to shoot it.” He closed the discussion abruptly and stood up to look down the hatch. There was perceptibly more water in the after cabin than there had been thirty minutes ago. He motioned for Bellew to relinquish the pump.

“I’ll take over for a couple of hours. We can’t all work all the time, and I want to get some idea how fast it’s rising against pumping alone. So the two of you’d better turn in on the settees in there and see if you can get some sleep. You’re going to need it.”

“Right,” Bellew agreed. He started down the steps into the doghouse. Then he turned and asked, “How did he sucker you?”

Ingram explained briefly how Warriner had rowed out and come aboard, and the story he’d told. “It kept bothering me, especially his not wanting to come back aboard here or even wanting me to. But I had no real reason to doubt him, so I couldn’t very well force him to, and I didn’t like the idea of leaving my wife on there alone with him until I knew more about him. Then he turned in, and I decided to have a look anyway. But apparently he wasn’t asleep. You didn’t even know he’d left?”

“No,” Bellew said. “When we heard you walking around, we thought it was still him. We didn’t know he’d sighted a rescue boat when he slugged me and locked us in there. A laugh a minute, that Hughie-boy. Like to run into him again some day.”