The Pandora Box (27 page)

As the two boats drew together, Hawk could see he was in his late fifties. Though wearing a hooded jacket, the trim gray mustache indicated someone of meticulousness and distinction. Hardly the pirate or thief variety.

“I’m Robert Stevens,” he said formally as they helped him aboard. “My wife, Ellen, is below with the injured girl. I gave her morphine for the pain but she’s been delirious ever since the accident.”

“I’ll be back in a minute.” Hawk motioned Stevens to sit down. Then he looked over at Starr. “If he moves, shoot him.”

“This is really most distressing!” Stevens complained. “To be treated in such a manner after what we’ve been through. We’ve had a miserable night, as you can see, and I assure you, we only—”

“Save it.” Starr spat nervously over the rail and watched Hawk disappear down the sloop’s companionway. “The less I know about people I might have to plug, the better.”

“We’re sailors, the same as you!” Stevens breathed the words out in a frightened whisper and then was quiet.

Aboard
Seascape
, Hawk eased himself down into a foot of water and floating debris.

The salon and galley were dark and cold, with no effort having been made to clean up or restore the comforts of light and heat. He turned one of the stove burners on until he heard the hiss of escaping fuel, then turned it off again. It wasn’t empty.

There was a heavy odor of cigarette smoke, and as he moved through the dark corridor, he began to feel the overpowering urge to leave. “Mrs. Stevens?” he spoke the name before he opened the first cabin door.

It was empty, with only a black duffel bag swinging slowly back and forth on a nearby hook to signify that it had been occupied.

“In here!” A woman’s voice called from the forward cabin.

The door opened before he had time to turn the handle.

An older blonde-haired woman stood there, dressed in blue foul-weather gear and black gloves. Her hair, pulled back into a once fashionable knot at the back of her neck, was now damp and coming undone. Her face showed the strains of cold and stress.

“Jenny’s in the forward berth.” She motioned him inside. “Maybe you can help?”

Hawk bent down to draw back the blankets. It was difficult to see well in the meager light that filtered in through the porthole, but he could tell the young woman was unconscious. He brushed back a tangled mass of dark hair to lay a hand on her forehead.

It was cold.

“All right, what the devil’s going on here?” His hand moved instinctively to feel for a pulse at her throat. “This girl’s dead.”

He heard the cabin door snap shut behind him and then the click of a lock. He reached to open the porthole and shout a warning, but it had been tightened down with a tool and would take a tool to loosen it. It faced the open sea and not
Pandora
, so he quickly looked for something to break it out with, yelling, “Shoot him, Starr—shoot!”

“He’s asking for the medicine box. Could somebody please get it for him?”

Dee couldn’t see the woman but heard the request from below and with a sigh of relief, headed for Hawk’s cabin to retrieve the medicine box. Just as she opened the door, she heard scuffling on the decks above. Seconds later, she caught the unbelievable sight of Starr’s body tumbling past the stern windows and splashing into the water, right in front of her.

She froze. One, two, three seconds... before she could overcome the shock enough to turn and race back to the radio, grab the mike and press down. “Mayday—mayday—mayday!
White Fox
, this is
Pandora. White Fox
, this is
Pandora
, do you—”

“Put it down, Miss Parker,” said a familiar voice. “Move away from the radio and sit down.”

Dee turned and found herself face-to-face with the woman from the other boat, whom she now recognized as the head nurse from the sixth floor at Wyngate.

She was holding a gun and motioned with it toward the settee. “Where is the journal?”

“What have you done?” Dee’s voice shook with emotion.

“Leveled the playing field, obviously. Your friends are”—she withdrew a cigarette and lighter from her pocket with her free hand and paused long enough to light it with a practiced ease—”lost at sea, I’m afraid. So I suggest you be sensible and cooperate.”

33

Intercept

“The doctor looked clever and I had not one hope of deceiving him.”
~
Nellie Bly

The words fell on Dee like a crushing weight, and she suddenly felt like she couldn’t breathe. Then the hatchway darkened for a moment as Stevens came down.

“We’re all set.” He unbuttoned his jacket and threw back the hood to reveal close trimmed gray hair. “Our things are aboard and we’ve cast off the other boat.”

Dee recognized him immediately as the older gentleman she had seen several times in San Francisco. But the woman he was always with had been gray-haired, not this nurse she would have recognized immediately.

“Bring the medical case down,” the woman replied, “we haven’t much time.”

“So. This is the notorious D.J. Parker.” He looked Dee over with a cold calculated scrutiny. “I am Dr. Eric Von Hayden, young lady. The latest victim of your poison pen.”

Dee couldn’t help the sudden gasp as she recognized the name of the head surgeon at Wyngate, who had received the full brunt of her accusations, in the final installment of her series. She had never actually seen him.

“She doesn’t look anything like Jennifer.” He studied her as if she were an object instead of a person. “But with a head injury we might be able to get by.”

The name triggered the memory of the young aide in the elevator, and the smell of night-blooming jasmine. Dee realized her intuition had been right, and the girl must have been working with them all along. From the very beginning. Then a thought flashed through her mind that Peterson could have been collaborating with them, too, for all she knew. And now she had dragged her friends (and her husband) into it all—to be killed and tossed into that deep, cold sea.

“We’ve got to do more than get by, Eric!” the woman snapped, revealing the tell-tale signs that her nerves were not as cool and controlled as they had first seemed. “Nothing must seem out of place when we’re boarded!”

“Calm down, Anna,” he replied. “We’ve faced worse. You’re just tired.”

“It’s that horrid storm!” She blew smoke out as she sighed. “This whole set back. As soon as we get underway, I’ll—”

“Turn this boat around!” Dee cried out against the casual, mind-numbing chatter. “Go back and get them.”

“Take off your jacket, Miss Parker,” The nurse ground her cigarette out in the galley sink. “And roll up your…”

“If you want the journal…” Dee glanced after the retreating back of Dr. Von Hayden as he climbed out of the companionway and up on deck again. “Then you turn this boat around. Otherwise, you’ll never lay your eyes on it.”

“We’ll see. We have a little something that will make sure you cooperate with us. And we will have that journal, Miss Parker. Probably in less than ten—”

Dee darted toward the aft cabin, and the gun went off. It sounded like a cheap firecracker. But the telling thud of the bullet into the bulkhead just as she slipped into the passageway was real enough. She raced into Hawk’s cabin and slammed the door, only to realize there was no lock on it, so she ran for the adjoining bathroom.

Only a half-louvered door separated the small room from the main cabin, and Dee was horrified to find there was no lock on that one, either. The best she could do was wedge herself between the solid half of the door and the commode, stay low to the floor, and pray she could avoid any flying bullets that came shattering through the louvers.

But no bullets came.

She heard footsteps and then the chink of something being set down outside the door. There was a quiet hiss of...water heating...or air escaping through an open valve. Then a sickly smell and a horrible heaviness pressed down. The last thing she remembered was hearing the outer door snap closed.

When she opened her eyes, she sensed Hawk close by, but her happiness melted into a horrifying despair when she reached out to him. She could not move. She had a splitting headache, and her ears were ringing. Reality fell like a crushing weight. The reason she felt Hawk’s presence was because her head was on his pillow, and it still carried the distinct scent of his aftershave.

She had no idea how much time had passed, but she could see a bit of gray daylight through the open porthole. There was no way of knowing if it was dawn or dusk or somewhere in between. Something felt different about the boat, though. They were rocking, dead in the water, on a considerably choppy sea.

She could hear muffled voices outside the door.

Someone squeezed her hand. “It’s all right, Dee, I’ll get you out of this, I swear. Just hold my hand. Can you hold my hand a little? Can you say something?” he whispered.

Scott Evans was on
Pandora
?

Dee couldn’t speak because her entire head was wrapped with gauze. The small slits for her eyes and nose were suffocating and she felt a rising sense of panic. She did manage an ever-so-slight movement of her hand in his to indicate that she had heard him... but how had he gotten here?

“They’ll kill you if I don’t go along with them.” He continued to whisper close to her ear but she couldn’t see him. “They killed my girlfriend, Dee, because she wouldn’t cooperate. But you and I have one last chance to get out of here. It’s our only hope. You’ve got to trust me, Dee, do you hear?”

“She’s in here.” It was the nurse’s voice.

Heavy footsteps followed.

“We’ve made her as comfortable as we could. This bed has the least motion of all the others, so we moved her in here. There was too much swelling to stitch the wound but we gave her morphine. As you can see, we had to wrap everything and make her as immobile as possible. This is her fiancé, Evan Myers. I’ve already shown them your passports, Evan, they just need to check everything over.”

“This delay could cost her life.” Scott’s voice was distraught. “There’s a surgeon waiting in Tokyo, but we’ve got to beat the weather!”

“Her father had one flown out from the states, when we first called in the accident.” The nurse’s voice was soothing.

“Sorry, Mr. Myers, but our orders are to board every vessel in the area. If all your papers check out and we get full cooperation, you can be on your way, in about fifteen minutes.”

“Everything is just like they said up forward, sir,” another man’s voice drifted in from the companionway. “All the papers check out, and they’ve got a picture of them on this boat that goes back a good twenty years.”

“Kind of you to say so,” said the nurse. “That picture was actually taken in the sixties, when we were on our world cruise. But there’s no mistaking it was
Andor
.”

“Let’s just get on with it!” Scott implored.

They all shuffled out and then Dee could hear the unmistakable sound of an idling engine a short distance away.

White Fox
had arrived but they were getting ready to leave...were they all blind? What was this charade Scott was putting on? The only plan he needed was to open his mouth and call them back.

And where was Marion?

The thought of Marion being dumped the same way as Starr sent a shudder through her. All of them were dead and that caused a blind despair to swirl into an unbearable sense of loss. Where was God? Where were the angels?

All of a sudden, terrible sobs that should have wracked her entire body with their release, welled up inside her until her heart and throat felt as if they might burst. Yet, the great and heavy stupor of whatever monster drug they had used, allowed only a whimper to escape her. She moved frantic eyes but could still not see anything other than the ceiling and a sliver of the open porthole beneath it. The only things in her direct line of vision.

All was quiet until she heard the nurse’s voice through the porthole, as everyone moved up on deck.

“This was supposed to have been the vacation of a lifetime. But I don’t think we’ll go beyond Tokyo now. It’s all been so upsetting!”

It was very convincing. Whatever her real name was, Dee knew it was not Ellen Stevens, even as Dr. Von Hayden was no yachtsman named Robert Stevens, either.

“You can get underway,” the voice of the man in charge replied. “Everything seems to check out all right, and we still have another vessel in the area to board before the weather gets prohibitive. Appreciate if you’d stay in radio contact until further notice, though, Skipper.”

“I’m not the skipper, I’m just the deckhand.” It was Scott’s voice this time. “Mr. Stevens up there, he’s supposed to be the guy who knows everything about sailing. Nearly got us all killed in that storm!”

“Let’s not trouble anyone with our personal differences, shall we?” Von Hayden spoke. “What we’ve been through the last few days was close to a hurricane, as I’m sure these men will attest to. What happened to us could have happened to anybody. Ready to fend off, gentlemen?”

“Yes, sir, we are. Let’s get a move on, Henry. Thompson, let go those lines so we can shove off. Good luck, sorry for the inconvenience.”

“Inconvenience.” Scott sounded as if he were close to a breaking point. “My fiancée could die over your inconvenience.”

“We have a doctor aboard
White Fox
, Mr. Myers, if you want us to transfer her to sick bay.”

“I’ve got a doctor right here, but he isn’t a brain surgeon! Just leave so we can—”

“It doesn’t help to shout, Evan,” the nurse interrupted. “They’re only following orders.”

“Haul up the foresail, Ev,” said Von Hayden. “That’s about all we’re going to need in this wind to get underway again.”

After that, Dee heard only the sound of boots along the deck and then the idling engine of a launch shifting into gear before it pulled away. She tried her best to scream or cry out, but succeeded in nothing more than a muffled moan. They were leaving. Eddinton’s plan was not working.

Next came the familiar sound of lines running through winches, and
Pandora
leaned into the wind and picked up speed, sailing through the choppy seas as beautifully as she had for Hawkins.