Or had she actually proved that? she wondered. Maybe all she’d really proved was that she couldn’t do it now, at one p.m., still five hours before the deadline, the point of no return. What about then, when she knew she was renouncing all hope of ever seeing him again? But she was too tired, too emptied to think about it now. She had to rest. She sat down on the edge of the bunk, and almost immediately, as the tension uncoiled inside her, she remembered that strange pause or hesitation when she was reaching into the drawer for the shells. Something had been trying to get her attention through the protective armor of concentration. What was it?
It had to be one of the things she’d seen in the drawer. The medicine kit! That was it. But why? Was there some connection with that story Warriner had told about the deaths from’ botulism and his vain attempts to treat it? No-o. But, wait. She had it then. The narcotics! Hope blossomed, and then just as suddenly it was gone and she sank back into the depths. Of course there was morphine in the kit, and a hypodermic syringe, but what good was it? It was hardly likely Warriner was going to let her stick a needle in his arm and inject him full of opiates. She stopped. Inject? No. There was something else. Then she sat upright. Codeine! There was a bottle of codeine tablets in it.
She ran out into the after cabin and yanked open the drawer. The medicine kit was in a wooden box with a hinged cover. She threw the cover up and began searching hurriedly through the bottles, plastic vials, and small cardboard cartons. Aspirin, paregoric, iodine, aureomycin, alcohol, sulfa, sutures—here, this was it. It was a small, square-shouldered bottle with a screw top, its neck stuffed with cotton. She lifted it out and read the typewritten label. “One tablet for relief of pain. Do not repeat within six hours.”
There seemed to be fifteen or twenty in it. One, she thought, would make you very drowsy, depending on individual tolerance. She had no idea what a lethal dose would be, but probably anything above four or five might be fatal even to a young man in the prime of life such as Warriner. She didn’t want to kill him, even in this painless and unmessy way, but on the other hand, too small a dose would be worse than none at all. It would only warn him that he’d been drugged. Three, she thought; that should be safe enough both ways. But how to administer it?
In food, or in something to drink? There’d probably be less chance of his suspecting anything if it were in something to eat. She could pulverize three of them, mix the powder with canned potted ham or something equally spicy to cover the taste, and make a sandwich of it. No, she thought then. The chances were he was going to be suspicious of anything she offered him. Irrational he might be, but he was no fool. She thought for a moment. Then she saw the answer, and she smiled for the first time in four hours.
She slammed the drawer shut and strode back to the galley section of the cabin. Having shaken three of the tablets from the bottle, she set them on the tiny drainboard shelf next to the sink and reached up into the stowage racks for a glass. She took two teaspoons from a drawer, set one of the tablets in one spoon and used the heel of the other to crush it, pressing them between her fingers. She dropped the resultant powder in the glass and was reaching for the second tablet when she felt Saracen go into a hard left turn and at the same time roll down to starboard. Both the glass and the bottle of codeine tablets started to slide. She caught the glass, but the bottle escaped her and fell on deck. It didn’t break, but it rolled and slid all the way across to the starboard side, spilling the tablets as it went. She set the glass in the sink, so it couldn’t roll off too, and went lunging after the bottle. She had it and was down on her knees picking up the scattered tablets at the foot of the companion ladder when Warriner screamed just above her. He was already in the hatch, coming down the ladder.
She sprang to her feet and wheeled to run, but it was too late. When she slid through the doorway into the forward cabin he was right behind her and there was no time even to close the door. Trapped now, she turned, seeing the agony of his face and trying to will herself not to fight him. “It was a shark!” he cried out. He caught both her arms in a grip that made them hurt. “It was a shark!” And while she was still struggling with the panic inside her, she began to grasp that he hadn’t come down here to attack her. He wanted help, comfort, something he thought she could give him, and if she could soothe him, or at least keep from antagonizing him, she might survive this crisis too. And it would be the last one. Then she remembered she still had the opened bottle of codeine tablets in her hand. She shoved the hand down beside her thigh to keep them out of sight.
“Don’t you see, it was the shark!” Then Saracen, running at full throttle with no one at the wheel, careened off the side of a swell and went into another hard turn. They lost their balance in the welter of sailbags and cases of stores around the door, and she fell backward onto the bunk. She sat up. Warriner dropped to his knees between the bunks and pressed his face into her lap, encircling her legs with his arms. His shoulders shook. Her left hand was free, but the other, holding the bottle, was trapped by his arms.
She reached down and gently stroked his head. “Of course it was the shark, Hughie.”
He raised his head then and looked up at her, and while his eyes were still wild there was nothing dangerous in them. On the contrary, they were almost beseeching, like those of a frightened child. The words began to pour out, tumbling over each other. “It was a big hammerhead, over twelve feet long. I tried to drive it away. I tried to save her. I hit—I hit it on the nose. But she was up on the surface, splashing too much. If she’d come down where I was—they won’t bother you under the water, you know that, everybody does—but she wouldn’t dive. It was horrible, the shark cut her in two, the water was all bloody…”
She had no idea what he was talking about, but what he wanted was plain enough. He was asking her for exoneration. It was the other boy who’d started the fight or had thrown the football through Mrs. Cramer’s window. She stroked his head again. “It wasn’t your fault, Hughie. Of course it was terrible, but you did everything you could.”
His arms had relaxed their grip around her legs, and she was able to slide her right hand free. While he was still looking up at her face, she brought it up the side of her thigh and shoved the bottle into the pocket of the Bermuda shorts. She sighed. He hadn’t seen it.
“You believe me, don’t you?” he asked.
“Of course I believe you,” she said.
“I knew you would. Somehow I knew it.” He hugged her legs again, almost as if in gratitude, and pressed his face against her knees. His voice was almost normal as he went on, “You won’t leave me, will you? It’s so awful—” He stopped.
She glanced down. He had raised his head again, but this time he was looking at something behind her on the bunk. It was the shotgun. She felt the chill of gooseflesh spread up her back. He went on staring, and then he whispered, “You were going to kill me.”
“No. Hughie, no. Listen—please, it’s not even loaded.”
He still hadn’t moved, and his voice was no louder than before. “You want to kill me too.”
He reached around behind her and slowly pulled it out by the barrels. There was nowhere she could run, nothing she could do. There wasn’t even anything in her mind except the bitterness of the thought that after four hours she’d been within a few minutes of winning, and now she’d lost. Maybe the fear would come in a minute. She was simply too tired to handle more than one thing at a time.
With a wild outcry he lunged to his feet then and swung the gun against the side of the boat. The stock splintered and broke off against an oaken frame above and behind her head. She ducked down between the bunks as he swung again—not even at her, as far as she could tell, but merely in some fury of destruction directed against the gun itself. The barrels rang against the upright pipe of the bunk frame. He beat it twice more against the pipe and threw it behind him, into the after cabin. Above the noise of the engine she heard it slide and bounce along the deck and crash into something, probably the ladder at the after
end. At the same moment, while he was turning and off balance, Saracen rolled down and the bow swung off on another violent change of course. He fell over against the bulkhead beside the door and slid down atop the sailbag behind which the compass was wedged. He was on his feet almost immediately, facing her. When she’d seen him lose his balance she’d started to scramble up, hoping to get out the door, but there wasn’t time. He was right beside it. There was nowhere to go, anyway. She sat down on the bunk again, trying to conceal her fear. Don’t fight him, she thought; don’t try to run. Her only chance to survive was to use her weapons instead of his; there was a lost and frightened boy inside the maniac, and maybe she could reach him. And he could already have killed her with the gun barrels, but he hadn’t.
He stared at her wildly for a moment and had taken a step toward her, when he turned, as if he’d remembered something. When he bent over the sailbag she knew what it was. He’d seen the compass when he fell, and the scratch pad with its penciled notations of the course. He lifted the compass out and with another cry of fury he turned and threw it against the starboard side of the cabin. The box splintered, and it fell to the deck in a ruin of broken glass and spilled alcohol.
Then, before he even had a chance to look back at her, she said gently, “Hughie, come here.” When the frenzied eyes swung around and fastened on her, she touched her knees, where his head had rested before.
“You wanted to kill me!” he cried out. His hands clenched and opened, and he took a step toward her, coming between her and the door. She saw the hands come up level with her throat, but there was a faint uncertainty or hesitation in his movements now, and she’d detected just a trace of defiance in the outcry. Without that, perhaps she couldn’t have found the self-control to do it. She continued to look up at him with perfect serenity.
“Don’t be silly, Hughie,” she said. “You know I wouldn’t hurt you.” She wasn’t sure herself how she accomplished it, but the tone was squarely on pitch, the voice of all the mothers in the world, firm but still gentle, compassionate, and forgiving. She touched her knees again and said, “Come here, dear.”
He came with a rush then. He fell to his knees before her with his face pressed against her legs, and he was crying uncontrollably.
The strength drained out of her, but she managed to remain erect while she gently stroked his head. The clatter of the engine went on. Saracen pitched, and the bow swung off onto another tangent in her blind flight across the surface of the sea. Part of it had been luck, she thought, in that the first, compulsive outburst had been directed against the shotgun, but she knew she could control him now. She had nothing more to fear from him. Except that she still couldn’t make him go back. But the codeine would take care of that.
Then she remembered the compass and looked across to the opposite side of the cabin, where spilled alcohol still dripped down the planking of the hull. Well, she thought wearily, there must be some answer to that too; she’d think of it in a minute. Apparently after four hours of improvising and feeling your way along the rim of disaster you began to develop a belief there was always another handhold just beyond.
14
Russell Bellew had been dreaming he was packing into the Bitterroot country again for elk when he awoke and he was back on that sinking abortion of a boat and the Duchess of California was poking his shoulder with a pair of rulers. She was looking down at him with that usual expression of hers, as if he were something that had just crawled out of the drain in a bus-station washroom. What the good Duchess needed, besides being knocked on her can a few times, was exactly what she’d have had this morning in about five more minutes if Goldilocks hadn’t sighted that other boat and come charging down there with his club just as he got her pinned down on the bunk. Rub it on him for practice, would she?
“Madam called?” he asked.
“Ingram said to wake you.”
He loved that bit with the rulers. He slid a hand up the back of her thigh and squeezed. “You should have used a longer stick.”
“Obviously.” There was no attempt to draw back, or hit him, and she didn’t even bother to change expression. “Then you are awake?”
He sat up. “What does Hotspur want now?”
“There’s a squall coming up.”
“So?”
“So the bird of time has but a little way to fly—”
“Shove it.”
She tore him off about three-sixteenths of an inch of another supercilious smile, dropped it in his eye, and said, “Yes, of course.” She went back on deck.
Cuddly type, the good Duchess. But somebody should have warned her before this that nobody was quite as hard as she thought she was. No doubt she was a better man than drat boar’s tit she was married to, but she was in for a shock when she found out what it’s really like out there when they take the cover off and let you look in. When that ocean started climbing up her leg she’d be screaming her tonsils loose. He didn’t like to think about it himself. Well, it couldn’t be any worse than jumping into France in the dark with those jugheads down there waiting for you. But that was a long time back. Sport, that was a long time back.
But, hell, you had to look on the bright side. Think about Hughie-boy. He wasn’t going to drown. It brought the lump right up there in your throat just thinking that Mama’s precious made it up the ladder before he chopped it loose. And he only had to kill four people to do it. But we don’t mind, do we, fellows?
He went up on deck…
It was 5:10 p.m. when the sun was blotted out and the squall burst around them. Ingram clung to the pump and looked along the deck in the fury of spray and horizontal, wind-hurled rain. Mrs. Warriner and Bellew crouched in the lee of the deckhouse, seeking the little protection they could find. Mrs. Warriner’s hair was plastered to her head and face, and Bellew’s Mexican hat was long since gone, blown overboard in the first onslaught of the wind. The deckhouse hatch was closed, as well as the two where they’d been bailing, and he and Bellew had lifted the dinghy aboard and lashed it. There was nothing else you could do. Except pray, and keep pumping.
Now that they were inside it, where all directions were the same and visibility was cut to a few yards, perspective was gone and there was no way of telling which way it was moving or how far they were from the edge, but he believed from having watched it as it made up that the worst of it was passing to the northward of them—for what that was worth. It wasn’t the wind itself he was afraid of; it was the sea, and that was the same all around them.
It was high, steep-sided, and confused, fighting the ground-swell running up from the south. Orpheus had too little freeboard now, and she was too heavy-bellied and sluggish to ride with the punch and escape any of the beating she was taking. She pitched, lurched over, and was swept from bow to stern by every breaking sea, wallowing helplessly like some huge but mortally wounded animal. She rolled down too far and hung, pinned there on her beam ends for long moments by the inertia of the water inside her, and Ingram winced, thinking of the stresses as the enormous weight of the keel pulled the other way to bring her back. He could hear the creak and groan of her timbers even above the shrieking of the wind and knew that all the while more of her fastenings were working loose and pulling out of rotten frames and planks below him. Swung around and crouched to protect his face from the stinging of the rain and spray, he continued to pump, wondering about the bed bolts of the engine. And the great keel bolts themselves …
But they continued to hold, and in another twenty minutes it began to subside. The sun broke through. The wind dropped and then died completely, and they were still afloat. At six p.m., with the sun low on the horizon, the sea had quit breaking aboard, and they were able to open the hatches to resume bailing. When Ingram looked down at the depth of water in the after cabin he knew there was very little chance she would live through the night.
* * *
It was 1:40 p.m., five minutes now since Warriner had suddenly sprung to his feet and run back on deck to take the wh
eel. Saracen was plowing steadily ahead, back on course—whatever it was. Rae Ingram stood beside the sink in the after cabin, crushing the last of the three codeine tablets between the spoons. The bottle containing the others was recapped and stowed in one of the drawers, ready in case she needed more. She dropped the powder into the glass, but it was the other problem she was thinking of. This idea of hers, she felt sure, would still work. Within a few minutes—with any luck at all-she might be in command of Saracen again. But what good was it if she couldn’t find her way back to the other boat?
The 226 degrees her compass had been reading meant nothing now that he’d smashed it and there was no way to compare it with the steering compass. It could have been as much as twenty or thirty degrees from the actual course. So as far as knowing what their course had been from the other boat, she was little better off than she’d been at the beginning, and now they were at least twenty-five miles away. Somehow she had to find out what he was steering. But how? Try to get a look into the binnacle when she went up? No, that wouldn’t work. It was covered, so you could see into it only from the helmsman’s seat, and he would be instantly suspicious if she tried to work her way around behind him. He wouldn’t let her, and it might even trigger him into another outburst, which would wreck her chances of success with this idea. She couldn’t risk it. Getting control of the boat came first. Wait, she thought, beginning to see the solution. The sun. It was shining, and far enough down from the meridian now to cast a good shadow. It wouldn’t be exact, but it would be a good approximation, probably near enough to bring her back within sight of the other boat.
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