Lady Afraid (9 page)

“A vain man?”

“Vain is no word for it,” Sarah said. “Spiritually, he eats off gold plates with gold knives and forks. I even heard that, actually, he did do it—once in a while, to impress a fool. He didn’t try it on me, though.”

“He sounds like something that eats its young, all right,” Most said, and then asked, “The wife? What is she like?”

“You’d think,” Sarah said, “that I would understand her better. Women are supposed to measure other women readily. But I never felt I really knew Mrs. Lineyack…. No, I’ll say it stronger: I never did get as much as one tiny glimpse into the window of her soul—which is the way you think of Alice Mildred. A soul. All soul. A thin, tall body that serves no purpose except a hiding place for this soul, spirit, or whatever.”

“The grandmother of your little boy is named Alice Mildred?”

“Yes, Alice Mildred. She’s four years older than Ivan Lineyack, but looks ageless. You don’t think of how she looks when you are around her—Alice Mildred could be the most beautiful of women, or a hag, and the effect of her would be the same. You feel that she’s righteous, puritanical, and along with it you have the most awful impression that she’s completely helpless to enforce this saintlike quality on anyone else even a tiny bit. You feel that she’s a tense, hunted, martyred creature. Even her breathing is repressed, as if she’s afraid to take a full breath. You sense that she hates outwardness, even the normal outwardness of a person like myself, and Lord knows, I don’t consider myself any extrovert. That means she hates everyone. I don’t know how she managed to smother Paul with such negativeness, but she did, or perhaps she just presented an example that scared him stiff. You can imagine what a contrast the parents offered when Paul looked to them for a pattern for himself. And he couldn’t just take a little from the personality of each and be a normal fellow, because the extremes were overwhelming. I can’t understand Alice Mildred mating with a man like Ivan Lineyack, any more than I can believe she could face it or face her own extreme cerebrosis for years. I don’t think she loves Ivan, but she wants to because she feels she should—her type would surely have a guilt complex too, wouldn’t they?… This is all pretty psychological stuff, but I think it’s right.”

She saw that Most was impatient with this talk of inwardness.

He said, “You draw a picture of a complexed woman, the sort who form temperance clubs and betterment leagues.”

Sarah nodded. “She doesn’t, but she should.”

With the impatience still at him, Most asked, “You were married to Paul? Then what?”

“I took Paul from them. He wanted to be taken. We lived on a small ketch, Paul and I, and we sailed from Boston to Miami by the Inside Route, then cruised in the Bahamas. We were in the Miami-to-Nassau yacht race and the St. Petersburg-to-Havana race—” She looked up at him. “You were in that St. Petersburg-Havana race. I remember you. You were on the winner. The rest of the time we were just boat bums, and liked it—at first. The trouble was, Paul had waited too long. He was torn between—Well, it was almost like having insanity in the family. Another mistake he made after we were married was in not finding work he really wanted to do.”

She tried to read Most’s expression but did not get much. She was making Paul sound like a no-good rich man’s pup, wasn’t she?
So he was
, she thought,
but not of his fault.

She spoke grimly now.

“Paul drank,” she said. “He was killed while drinking. An automobile crash, a collision with a farmer’s wagon, and the farmer was seriously injured. I was with Paul. The farmer first said I was not driving, which was true. I was not. A man in a filling-station-lunchroom where we had stopped said I was driving. Then the farmer changed his story and said I was. I do not know why the farmer and the service-station man told those lies in court. It may have been because I was alive—but just barely, I was in a hospital—and they could get damage money from the living. They did, too. The farmer sued me and got all my savings.”

Most, frowning, demanded, “Couldn’t your lawyer do anything about that sort of crookedness?”

“He said not,” Sarah told him bitterly. “And the lawyers against him were the best. They were paid by the Lineyacks.”

Most’s head jerked up. “The Lineyacks were against you—their son’s wife?”

“Against me!” Feeling twisted at Sarah’s mouth; it came as a hard tightness in her arms. “They accused me of taking their son from them and killing him. They took my baby, Jonnie, and they tried to get me sent to prison for being the driver of the car that Paul was driving.”

“That didn’t stick?”

Sarah shook her head bitterly. “No.”

“They kept the child from you?”

“Yes.”

He studied her, then transferred his attention to the floor, and she knew that he was thinking it illogical that she hadn’t seen the child in two years. He was, but he phrased it gently, saying, “How did they manage that?”

“They took the boy away on a trip for several months,” Sarah said. “I couldn’t find where. I had no contact. Later they had a guard who kept me away. And their lawyers threatened me. I’ve tried to see him. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

“That must have been hard to take.”

“I hadn’t seen Jonnie,” Sarah replied, “until tonight…. There is one thing I do not believe you or any man can understand fully, Captain Most—a mother’s yearning for her child.”

Most was uncomfortable as he said, “I believe you mentioned earlier that they got adoption papers on the boy through a legal ruse. Service by publication. Was it legal?”

“Brill said it could be proven illegal,” Sarah said bitterly. “But now I distrust Brill. I’m terribly afraid of Brill.”

She gripped her hands together and came desperately to her feet.

“What did Brill do to me?” she gasped. “And where is Jonnie? Where is my little boy? Why did they take him?”

He looked at her critically. “Let’s break this a couple of minutes,” he said. “You need some time to get hold of yourself.”

Arising, Most reached behind a bulkhead to draw out a glistening mahogany stowaway table which he clipped into the brackets there for it. He put out two cups, cream, sugar, and poured the coffee, and all the time seemed to fill the little cabin with his gaunt size.

Sarah wondered what he thought of this. If he had maneuvered into her past out of curiosity, he must have gotten enough to slap him. But he was, or was acting, impartial as a doctor who’d found a nice gallstone in a patient.

Presently he murmured, “The Lineyacks acted the part of silly and too-fond parents during the marriage, as I see it. Their behavior when your husband—their son—was killed was vicious, but the death of an only son, and I take it Paul was an only child, might affect parents of that sort in that way.”

“I hope you don’t call them normal!” said Sarah violently.

He refused to have her opinions made fully his own, and replied, “I’m not taking their side. But I’ve heard of screwy characters before.”

“They hated me!”

“Or themselves. There’s a psychiatric theory, you know, that exalted actions are often a cover-up for a swindle in one’s own eyes. Sometimes because of the subjective importance of a malfeasance, either physical or mental, the person cannot tolerate any questioning of it. The exalted persecution the Lineyacks turned on you may have been a cover-up which they felt demanded of them without knowing why it was demanded.” Most now shrugged; a quick, warm smile took form on his lips and he lifted his cup. “But let’s stick to the stuff we know,” he added. “We’re sailing people, Sarah, you and I, and we’ve laid courses through strange waters before.”

It was just possible that he had quoted that psychology to pay her off for injecting the same sort of stuff earlier. It was hard for her to know.

“Do you think the Lineyacks did this?” Sarah asked.

He did not give a direct answer. “The motive, when we find it, will probably be more substantial than the psychic of a couple of cuckoo parents.”

There were no more words for a while. It came to Sarah that she was finding Most to be an enigmatic man. He did not rush forward with emotions, reactions, plans that were half-baked. He was no voluble extrovert. Probably in him there was little need freely to communicate his feelings and ideas or the effect of events upon him.

Sarah slapped down a blunt question. “What should I do?”

“Stay here,” he replied, surprising her with the prompt answer. “Stay away from the police.”

“But won’t that make me seem—”

“Guilty of taking the boy from his room? The notes you left already make you that.”

“Yes, that’s true. Only—”

“If this was a simpler thing,” he interposed, “I’d say go to the police. But it isn’t simple. It looks, right now, as involved as the works in a watch—one thing made to happen in order that something else will follow.”

“But… to hide… like a criminal! I could not!”

“Have you thought of this: You were used—but perhaps only partly used. There may be a further role planned for you—scapegoat.”

“But to hide—”

“A teething ring tossed to the police to keep them satisfied—you don’t want to be that.” He threw the idea away as preposterous with movements of shoulders and mouth corner. “Avoid the role arranged for you, and the police at least won’t be inclined to sit on their hands.”

“Don’t”—Sarah’s voice, high and sharp, threw a warning—“think I’m going to just sit here. That man who told me he was a policeman—I want to know if he was. If he was not an officer, the police must receive his description. I want that man found!”

“But it would be useless for you to be in jail when you don’t know where the boy is.”

“Foolish or not, that man has got to be hunted. And if giving myself up is the only way to have him hunted, I will do that.”

“But—”

“He knows where my son is! He must.”

Most hesitated, then fell to contemplating the varnished table surface. His words were being turned back, blunted; they were nothing against Sarah’s concern about the boy.

Sarah, speaking out wildly, ringing-voiced, now told him as far as she was concerned nothing—not her welfare, nor his, possibly, if it came to that—had importance as compared to her child’s safety. He was patient with this outburst.

Most arose and secured a paper and pencil and came back to the table. “Describe the fellow.” Sarah told him all that she remembered of Yellow-shoes. Most pocketed the note he had written and went to a locker from which he got crisp ironed sheets and a pillowcase. He put these on the bunk in the little cabin forward. “You might try to get some sleep, Sarah.” He glanced at the ship’s clock on the bulkhead. “I’ll be gone a while,” he added.

“That man…”

“Now,” Most replied, “I’ll see what I can do about that.” And he went toward the companionway, but paused before climbing up into the night and suggested, “Shade your light. And pull the curtains. If anyone hails the ship, it will probably be some friend of mine. You needn’t answer.”

Sarah nodded. “You’ll find out what you can?”

“I plan to try.” There were three companion-ladder steps up to the cockpit deck. Most went up them with sure feet and she heard the faint labor of a springline against a cleat as he pulled on it, bringing the bugeye schooner nearer the deck. Then he was gone.

Anxiety, impatience with waiting, assailed Sarah with a force she could hardly bear, and she moved dully about the boat, fighting it. She noticed that the cabin portholes were curtainless but that there were monk’s-cloth drapes for those in the stateroom. She drew the latter. But she still disliked the idea of a light, although the darkness was not easy either. Finally she found a flashlight with a metal case palmed almost free of nickel plating, and she took it into the stateroom with her. She lifted herself onto the bunk. But not to sleep. She would do well to merely lie there.

She was a woman who disliked wild urgency at any time, and now it was awful. Her son? Where was he? Who had taken him? Was he safe? Anxiety about the child transcended everything…. It no more than barely passed her mind that her career was perhaps ruined. As far as the Collins Yard was concerned, it was hard to see any prospect short of disaster. Newspaper scandal. Police. A trial. All would fall on her, and it would be made by Ivan Lineyack to look uglier than it was. Mr. Collins, who owned the yard, was a straight-laced man and a perfectionist—Sarah imagined he would deal hard with one who brought scandal to the yard. Yet if he saw it that way, he would stand stanchly for the right; Sarah imagined he would stand by her anyway until this was settled, but then what he would then do was a dark question.

And now she considered the effect all this could have on Most’s future. She had not thought of this before, and it was selfish of her, she saw.

“A
HOY!” A GRUFF VOICE
hailed. “Ahoy! On the
Albatross
! Ahoy!”

Sarah’s head came up. Silence turned hard and rang in her ears.

“Ahoy!… Anybody home?”

A man’s voice, harsh, sand-throated. A man who knew boats, or he would not have hailed this way; landlubbers found something uncomfortable about using the term “Ahoy,” and if they did use it, there was usually telltale awkwardness with the word.

The stranger, who had approached silently on the dock, certainly was not Captain Most.

If he is not a policeman, he will go away, Sarah thought. The hope, once phrased, repeated like a wheel turning. If not a policeman, he’ll go away; if not a policeman, he’ll go away; if not a policeman—All of her body was taut and her nape muscles began to ache from holding her head half raised.

She noticed after a while the crisp click-click of little harbor waves on the hull beside her. And then she heard the shoes of the stranger scuff the dock planks unsurely. This was followed by the telltale squeak of a spring line and the vague sensation of the craft in motion. He was pulling the bugeye nearer the dock! He was coming aboard!

As the unknown landed on the bugeye deck, he caused the considerable thump of a heavy or awkward man. Afterward he did not move for a time. Sarah got an idea the man was listening, that he was cautious, furtive, that he had put earlier boldness away and was now in true and more sinister character.