Gonna go below; get a quick shower. Late morning, no traffic to worry about. Everybody else left hours ago. He turned on the radar, set a two-mile guard band to warn him of other vessels coming too close, and went below deck.
Chapter 2
Stripping off his filthy clothes as he entered the head, he was taken aback to find feminine undergarments hung out to dry on the towel bar.
On the counter, he saw a woman's shower bag with a few typical toiletries in addition to a comb, a brush, a safety razor, and a toothbrush. Where did those come from?
Nobody else was aboard — at 40 feet overall, Sea Serpent didn't have anywhere for a stowaway to hide. The undergarments were dry, so he put them on the berth just forward of the head along with the shower bag and cleaned himself up.
Shaved, showered, and teeth brushed, he put on fresh shorts and a clean T-shirt. Feel human again.
About the time he finished, he sensed from the change in Sea Serpent's motion that she was in the open water of Bequia Channel. Back up in the cockpit, he did a quick 360-degree scan of the horizon.
No other vessels were in sight, and it was a beautiful, clear day. Sea Serpent rolled along at her seven-knot hull speed under perfect sailing conditions.
He climbed back down the companionway into the main cabin and took a quick look around, trying to figure out where the woman's clothes came from. In one of the lockers above the starboard settee, he found an unfamiliar duffel bag.
He normally kept that storage space clear for use by the occasional guest, but he couldn't remember having any company. He put the duffel bag down on the settee to open it and noticed an Air France baggage tag on one of the handles.
The flight was from Charles de Gaulle to Antigua several months ago. Doesn't tell me much.
He unzipped the bag to find a typical sailor's stash: well-worn foul weather gear, a good, sharp rigging knife on a lanyard, a couple of pairs of clean cut-off jeans, one pair of clean but well-worn full-length jeans, half-a-dozen cheap, souvenir T-shirts, two string bikinis, and a pair of beat-up sea-boots stuffed with several pairs of rolled-up woolen socks. This woman was a seasoned sailor, not a tourist.
Feeling around the sides of the bag, he found a zippered pouch, which held a wallet, a French passport, and a dog-eared spiral notebook. He opened the passport and discovered that it belonged to Danielle Marie Berger.
Even in a typical passport mug shot, she was a looker, a little French pixie with short, curly blond hair and an impish smile. You're cute. Where'd you go, anyhow?
The wallet contained a crisp 100 euro note and a few hundred Eastern Caribbean dollars in used small-denomination bills. There were no credit cards, although there was an ATM card for a French bank.
He noticed a week-old ATM receipt from the RBTT bank in Bequia. That's how she got the cash down here. Did I leave her in Bequia?
A French driver's license in the clear plastic window of the wallet matched the passport. There were no photos of family or friends, and none of the other miscellaneous items that he carried in his own wallet. Danielle travels light.
Opening the spiral notebook revealed that it was about one-third filled with notes in a neat script. I can't read much French, so it's not too helpful, Danielle.
On the last page, he noticed the date, 20 October, underlined. Following that, he read, "Sea Serpent, Mike Reilly, Mayreau, SVG." He frowned. That's my boat, and my name.
Mayreau is a small island about five miles north of Petite Martinique. Mike often stopped there for a night or two between Grenada and Bequia.
Working backwards through the notebook, he found that Danielle had been crew on the British yacht, Rambling Gal, for almost a year. Several of the stamps in her passport also listed Rambling Gal.
Head hurts. The sails began to flutter, making a racket. Mike zipped up the sea bag, stowed it back in the locker, and scrambled topside to mind his ship.
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Sailors and Sirens Page 19