Aground (4 page)

“Charter a boat,” Ingram replied.

“How long will it take?”

“Two days, at least. Maybe three.”

“That’s too long. Why don’t we land out there with the plane?”

He glanced at Avery. The latter nodded. “Could be done, if there’s not too much sea running. Early in the morning would be the best time. But you’d have to take it up with McAllister.”

He started to point out that merely getting aboard wouldn’t solve anything; the chances were they were going to need the help of another boat, and one with plenty of power, to pull her off. Then he reconsidered; there were several things in favor of it. He could size up the situation at first hand, see just what it was going to take to get her afloat again, and find out if there was any damage below the water line. Also, she might not be fast aground at all; she might merely have lodged there on a change of tide and float off herself on the next flood. With no anchor out, there was no telling where she would wind up. An abandoned boat was always in danger.

“What about getting over to her?” he asked.

“We have some rubber life rafts,” Avery replied.

They landed in Nassau shortly before six. McAllister was still in the office. He was a portly Irishman with curly black hair, a cigar, and the affable charm of a successful politician. Ingram unrolled the chart on his desk and explained the situation.

“You’re sure that’s the position?” McAllister asked. “The chart doesn’t show a sand bar there.”

“I know,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything. A lot of the Bank’s pretty sketchy in the survey department, and those shoals and bars change with every storm. We checked the course on the way in, and wouldn’t have any trouble finding it again.”

“Any rocks or coral heads close to the surface?”

Avery shook his head. “No. There’s plenty of water to the westward of the sand spit. Early in the morning, before the breeze gets up, we could bring her in well off the shoal and taxi up in the lee of it while they go aboard.”

“Okay,” McAllister replied. “If it looks safe to you. What time do you want to take off?”

“The earlier the better. As soon as it’s light.”

“All right. We’ll put one of those surplus life rafts aboard and have her ready.”

Ingram retrieved their suitcases and they went around in front of the terminal and took a taxi downtown. As they pulled away from the loading zone, she asked, “What do you think happened? What became of them?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You don’t think there’s a chance anyone is still aboard?”

“No. They’d have made some attempt to get her off. There would have been a kedge anchor out astern, or some roily water downstream if they’d been turning the engine. She was apparently abandoned even before she drifted in there.”

“But how? And why?”

He shook his head. “I wouldn’t even try to guess. There’s been no bad weather, and I didn’t see any sign of damage. Hollister couldn’t have taken her down there alone. There had to be others. And as far as we know, they didn’t even have another dinghy to get off with even if they’d wanted to. It makes no sense at all.”

“But what about Hollister?”

“There’s a good chance he’s dead.”

It was a moment before she answered. “Why?”

“He took off his clothes and that watch to go in the water after something. He didn’t come back into the dinghy. And if he’s not aboard the
Dragoon,
that doesn’t leave much.”

“I see,” she said. He turned and glanced at her, but she was staring out the window on the opposite side. She was silent during the rest of the ride into town; when he suggested the Pilot House Club as a good place to stay, she merely nodded. When they came into the central business district she asked the driver to stop, and got out.

“I want to do some shopping,” she said to Ingram. “Take my suitcase and the binoculars, and reserve a room for me. I’ll be along later.”

After he’d shaved and showered he ate a solitary dinner in the patio near the pool. He didn’t see her anywhere. He crossed the road to the Yacht Haven; none of the skippers he knew were around, so he walked downtown, driven by restlessness, and had several bottles of beer in the Carlton House bar. You’re getting old, he told himself; you’ve been too many places for too many forgotten reasons, and now you’re going around again. Remembering the same place offset in different layers of time makes it too easy to count the years in between and wonder where they went. You wake up in the morning and they’re speaking Spanish outside your window, so it could be Mexico again, and you remember lightering bananas down the Grijalva River in a wheezy gasoline-powered tug with a string of cranky barges and the goofy invincibility of youth, and the salvage job off the Panuco River bar below Tampico when the tanker piled up on the south jetty because the skipper wouldn’t wait for a pilot and didn’t know about the bad southerly set across the entrance during a norther, and then you realize the two memories are eleven years apart and somehow they’ve shoved a whole war, several other countries, and a good deal of the western Pacific in between. And Nassau . . .

That had been the good time. Seven years of it, with Frances and the
Canción
. He’d met Frances in 1948 when she’d been one of a party of five Miami schoolteachers who’d chartered the
Canción
for a week’s trip to Eleuthera. They were married that same year, and lived aboard the ketch as skipper and mate in a very special and private world of their own happiness while carrying charters along the New England coast in summer and around the Bahamas in winter—until 1955. She’d flown home to Seattle to visit her mother, and was going to drive back to Chicago with friends to take the plane down to Miami. Everything had seemed to run down and stop then, on that endless bright November afternoon in the Berry Islands with the wind blowing blue and clean from the north, when he got the word by radio. She’d been killed in an automobile accident at a place called Manhattan, Montana. While he stood there holding the handset of the radiotelephone in his hand waiting for the numbness to wear off and the thing to begin to get to him wherever it was going to start, it seemed the only thing he could think of was that if he could only isolate it and pin it down there must be a question in here somewhere for the boys who could always explain everything. After all the places he’d been in the world, the only thing he’d ever been handed that he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to handle had happened to him in a place he’d never even heard of.

You’ve had too much beer, he thought, or you think too much when you drink. He left the bar and walked back, and it was after eleven when he came into the lobby of the Pilot House. The girl at the desk said Mrs. Osborne had tried to call him several times in the past hour. “Thank you,” he said. He went on up to his room, looked at the telephone, and shrugged. The hell with Mrs. Osborne; he was going to bed. While he was unbuttoning his shirt, the telephone rang. He ignored it until the third ring, when it occurred to him the girl would have told her he was in now. He picked it up.

“I want to talk to you,” she said. Her voice sounded blurred, and the words tended to run together. “I was just going to bed.”

“At eleven o’clock? Do you get a merit badge or something?”

“Can’t it wait till morning?”

“No. Come over to my room. Or I’ll come over there.”

Stoned, he thought. He’d better humor her, or she’d be banging on the door. “All right.” He put the instrument back on the cradle and went down the hall.

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 Señora 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.