Voyage into Violence (12 page)

Jules Barron was first on his feet—he was on them almost too quickly for a suave young man who, it could be presumed, lived by charm. He seemed to realize this, belatedly, and then smiled very charmingly around, and said, “The sea air, sir,” to Captain Cunningham. Then he thanked the captain, and smiled at all, and went.

“Well?” Captain Cunningham said to Bill, who with Dorian had lingered after the others.

“Mr. Folsom,” Bill said, “has an uneasy mind. Which may be merely because he knows more than the others. Barron was interested in the pictures, I thought. And in rather a hurry to get away.”

“Quite,” Captain Cunningham said. “I thought that. Except—”

“Right,” Bill said, “except that he satisfied his interest with a couple of glances.”

“Which means?”

“I haven't any real idea,” Bill said. “But his interest was—interesting.”

“We don't,” Captain Cunningham said, “seem to make any very great progress.”

“Early days,” Bill said. “By the way, captain—did your wife have a great-aunt?”

“Had,” Cunningham said. “And, has. Sprightly old girl. Poor as a church mouse, unfortunately. You'll want these back?”

Bill took the photographs, in an envelope. He took them back to the purser's safe.

Left out of things, and with Pam feeling it—after all, who had taken the greater risks?—the Norths had gone to the smoke room for a pre-luncheon drink. Pam wore a sleeveless yellow dress of linen. “Look,” she said, and held her arms out in front of her, over the table. “Bruises. Where he grabbed me.”

Jerry looked. He looked very carefully. It was possible that Pam's upper arms were reddened somewhat where the hands had held, and pushed. It was only possible. Jerry told Pam that, in all probability, she would live. The steward came, and he ordered martinis, “Very dry with a twist of lemon peel,” the steward said, unprompted. “And he's not to drop the peel in.” The steward looked pleased with himself. His was
Carib Queen
service.

“Quite,” Jerry said.

“It was funny about Mrs. Macklin,” Pam said. “Why me?”

“I'm afraid,” Jerry said, “you've dropped a stitch. What was funny about Mrs. Macklin? And you?”

She thought she had told him. She did now. Told, Jerry could not explain why Mrs. Macklin, in her search for Detective Marsh, had come to Pam. He agreed with Pam's suggestion that it would have been more reasonable to go to someone in authority—perhaps the purser. Presumably, pursers were around to keep track of passengers. But it was, from what they had seen of her, too much to expect that Mrs. Macklin would be reasonable. It was even quite possible that Mrs. Macklin had been a little drunk.

“She had a pink scarf with that hair of hers,” Pam admitted. “Still—at first I did think she probably was, but then that she wasn't. Merely peculiar. She must be, to pick that color.”

“Pink?” Jerry said.

Pink too, Pam agreed. Although she had been thinking primarily of the red. It was not an especially good red—particularly for hair.

The drinks came. They were dry and cold, but the lemon peel had been dropped in. The point is one about which bartenders are adamant.

“One thing,” Pam said, after her first sip, “it eliminates Mrs. Macklin. She wouldn't be looking for him if she'd killed him. At least, not on deck.”

“You'd had an eye on her?” Jerry asked.

“On everybody,” Pam said. “Haven't you? Although a sword's too long for a woman. How long is a sword, by the way?”

They varied, Jerry thought, out of a considerable ignorance of swords. This one looked to be about thirty inches—in a straight line which, actually, it did not follow. He thought that, more than the length, the physical strength needed to push it into a man argued against a woman.

“Unless the ship helped,” Pam said, and Jerry looked at her blankly. “By rolling,” Pam said. “Or pitching, I suppose. With that, anybody could merely—well, lurch a sword into somebody. The way it was when we were dancing.”

Jerry saw, then. He said he saw. The
Carib Queen
now seemed almost without movement, and yet liquid moved in their glasses; just perceptibly, the wall they faced across the room seemed to rise, then slowly to decline. There had been rather more movement the previous night.

But the point was academic, Pam said, at least insofar as it concerned Mrs. Macklin. Because it was obvious that—She stopped, because Jerry was shaking his head slowly. “Oh,” Pam North said, “I didn't think of that. Of course. I'd be supposed to pass it on.”

If they wanted to make Mrs. Macklin, against all evidence, into a reasonable person they would, Jerry agreed, have to consider the possibility—the obvious possibility that by asking about Marsh, Mrs. Macklin would supply prima-facie evidence that she had not done away with him. Since, as Pam said, if you have run a sword through a man, you do not look around a ship for him.

And also, Mrs. Macklin might well be fishing—trying to find out what was going on or, rather, why nothing did seem to be going on.

“You'd feel let down,” Pam said, “if you killed a man and nobody noticed it.”

Jerry agreed that one might well. The anti-climax would be—He stopped, since he was no longer being listened to. Pam was looking up the room, toward the doors which led into it from the Grand Entrance forward. Miss Hilda Macklin was coming into the smoke room. She came with a kind of uncertainty, as if doubtful of her welcome. She wore the gray linen suit which did so little for her, who had, hidden under it, so much to be done for. She was alone, and it was apparent that she was looking for someone.

“Mother, dear mother, come home with me now,” Jerry said, under his breath, and Pam nodded that she was afraid so. But Hilda saw the Norths and, if there was nothing in her face to show that her confidence was restored, her pace was quickened. She came to their table, and Jerry stood up. And Hilda said, in a small, uncertain voice, “I hate to bother you. But I'm—I'm worried.”

They looked at her, and looked blanky. And, blankly, Jerry said, “Won't you sit down?”

She did, irresolutely. She said she was Hilda Macklin. Pam said, with what reassurance she could put into so simple a statement, that they were the Norths.

“I know,” Hilda Macklin said. “I—I asked someone. I've been trying to get up courage.” She stopped with that, apparently having failed in her attempt. Jerry asked her if she would have a drink and she said, “No,” and then, almost at once, “Could I have a sherry?” She could; with the aid of the steward she did. She said, too anxiously, “Oh. Thank you” and sipped from the glass. They waited.

“Mother was talking to you this morning,” Hilda said, finally, and the words came in a rush. “She—she seemed so excited. I—I was afraid she was bothering you, Mrs. North. And that you wouldn't understand. Did she—bother you?”

“No,” Pam said. “I don't know quite what you mean, Miss Macklin. She didn't bother me at all. She just—just wanted to know whether I'd seen Mr. Marsh.”

“Mr. Marsh?” Hilda repeated. “He's—oh, I remember. I heard something about him. He's a detective, isn't he? And—why did she ask you that? Did she say?”

“Something about hiring him,” Pam said. “To find out who had searched her stateroom. Yours too, I suppose it is.”

“Oh dear,” Hilda said. “Oh
dear
. I was afraid it was that.” She put the palms of her hands against her forehead, as if to hide behind them. She took them down again.

She took a sip from her glass, as if, again, she sought courage.

“I may as well tell you,” she said, and spoke quickly, as if she snatched at courage. “There wasn't anybody. Nobody searched our room. She just—she makes things up. When she's been—” She paused. “She's dear and sweet other times.” She paused again. She looked at Pam intently, then at Jerry. “I hate to have to tell people,” she said. “But—she's not responsible, sometimes. Not really. I hoped—I hoped getting her away would help. Where everything was peaceful. That she'd relax and—” She spread her hands hopelessly. She had slender hands with pointed fingers, the nails short and unrouged.

There did not seem to be anything to say. But it did not appear that Hilda Macklin expected anything to be said.

“I—I hate to have to talk like this,” Hilda said. “To go around—well, it really comes to going around warning people. Not to take mother too seriously. Now—this Mr. Marsh. I'll have to find him and—” She did not finish. Instead, she stood up.

“I'm terribly sorry,” she said. “Terribly sorry about everything. Bothering you this way—and her bothering you and—and everything. You've—”

Again she left it unfinished. She merely shook her head, and walked away from the table, straight—straight as a broomstick, one would have thought—under the shapeless suit. The Norths watched her; looked at each other.

“The poor thing,” Pam said. “The poor, poor thing.”

Jerry North raised his eyebrows.

“I suppose so,” he said. “But—why? Why make so much of it? So—”

“You don't know anything,” Pam said. “Not anything at all. About women.”

“Probably not,” Jerry said, and raised his eyebrows again, but this time at the steward, who hovered near. The steward went briskly off.

“How dreadful it is for a girl like that,” Pam said. “To have a mother like that. And those clothes. I—I could cry.”

But she did not, and when the steward returned she only momentarily looked with doubt at the glass which held a second martini.

“After all,” Pam said, “we're on vacation. And that poor girl. And you are a man, of course.”

“Only,” Jerry said, providing the missing word.

7

The Norths had almost empty glasses when Bill and Dorian joined them. Bill told them of the cocktail party in the captain's quarters; of the display of pictures and the reactions to them. He was told, by Norths working in relays, of Hilda Macklin's apology for, explanation of, her mother. Pam added a few comments on the misbehavior of parents who batten on their young.

“Obviously,” Pam said, “the poor thing hasn't any life to call her own. And her mother picks her clothes just to be—mean.” Pam paused. “And,” she said, “she's what people call a ‘bad' drinker. I never saw worse.”

Nobody argued against that.

The Norths finished their last sips. The four went aft, in the sunshine of the boat deck, and down to the dining saloon. The plaice was very naice. Jules Barron, although he had been first to leave the captain's quarters, and then had implied hunger, was late in reaching his table. The four at the table so conveniently—as it had turned out—near by were well into vichyssoise, preliminary to plaice. (“The motto of our steward,” Pam North said, “is ‘Let 'em heat fish.'”) Folsom had been in his chair when the Norths and Weigands arrived, and had looked lonely at the big table, separated from the first officer, its only other occupant, by the empty chair of J. Orville Marsh. Mrs. Macklin—who unexpectedly wore a tweed suit—and Hilda, who wore a limp dress of no particular color, were later than Barron, and Captain Cunningham did not appear at all. It was probably, Pam thought, that he had had enough of everybody. Unless, of course, it was his turn to steer the ship.…

It was very warm, very bright, on the promenade deck, aft, and for half an hour they reclined, torpid, and digested plaice. Jerry said, sleepily, that he ought to walk, and did not. Dorian said that, if it came to activity, she had a sketch half finished, and did nothing about it. Pam said it tired her merely to listen to them and Bill Weigand said nothing whatever, and appeared to be asleep.

But he did not sleep long. A steward came to him, bent politely and spoke into his ear. Bill said, “Right,” and, to the others, “Stein's calling,” and went. Afterward, Dorian stretched, suavely as a cat, or almost, and went for sketch pad. “I really ought to get some exercise,” Jerry told himself, and Pam, and shifted his position slightly in a deck chair. And one man said to another, behind the Norths, “What I hear is, somebody fell overboard.”

“The way I hear it,” the other man said, “some woman shot herself.”

It had started; here was evidence that it had started. It had been, for all the discretion enjoined on Captain Cunningham—practiced insofar as was possible—inevitable that it would start. And now it eddied through the ship—moved softly, changing as it moved, from deck chair to deck chair. At the bar it passed, in multiple forms, from Respectable Rifleman to Respectable Rifleman, as they stood shoulder to shoulder. It swirled softly among the tables in the smoke room, and among those—generally older, and more sedate—who frequented the Grand Lounge, from which windows, high above the ship's hull, opened to the sea. It swirled more rapidly in the small cocktail lounge off the dining saloon. In the motion picture theater which opened off A Deck, it was more exciting than the movie. It took new forms in the crew's quarters, and the kitchen was full of it.

The ship, steaming prettily into ever warmer waters, suffused with rumor. This was rather pleasant than otherwise for the hundred and forty-odd passengers. It is not always that, to the
divertissements
offered on a pleasure cruise, the spice of mysterious violence is thus generously added. The managing director of the line had been wrong. Everybody enjoyed it very much, although nobody knew quite what “it” was.

Where it had begun, nobody knew that afternoon, or could find out later. Nobody made great effort; once rumor began, its point of origin became of little importance. Perhaps Stewardess Felicia Brown, although she had been warned, could not restrain dark hints to Mrs. Palsey and Mrs. Fish and young Miss Pratt, the flibbertigibbet, when they met in their crowded cabin below decks. Perhaps an assistant purser, overwhelmed with knowledge so dramatic, had let some of it trickle to his friends. Perhaps, while he could still talk—he could not, yet, talk again—young Cholly had talked too much.