by Janet Dailey
"Nattie," she murmured, trying to swallow the fear that still choked her throat. "I—" She glanced around, seeing the rose-flowered paper on the walls, the white woodwork, the chintz curtains at the windows, and the old chiffonier against the wall, the top of it cluttered with framed family photographs and crystal atomizers. The spare bedroom at Nattie's house—that's where she was. She remembered now—Nattie had picked her up the night before at the hospital and brought her home to her small cottage-style house in the Channel. She felt the pressure ease from her shoulders and realized Nattie had been holding her down. "... I was dreaming, wasn't I?" She saw she was clutching at the sleeves of Nattie's chenille robe, and she let go of them to run a hand lightly over her cheek, feeling its soreness, its ache.
"The way you were thrashing around, I'd say it was more like a nightmare," Nattie declared as she rose from the edge of the bed.
"It was a nightmare." She relaxed against the feather pillow and felt the last of her terror drain away. "Has it only been five days that I've been home, Nattie? In some ways it feels like a lifetime." Nattie didn't comment as she walked over to the window and raised the shade, letting in a bright glare of light. Remy winced at it and lifted a hand to shield her eyes. "What time is it?"
"Going on eleven o'clock."
"It can't be." Remy started to sit up, but her injured rib raised an immediate and painful objection.
"Maybe it can't be, but it is," Nattie stated, then laid a brightly patterned velour robe over the spindled foot of the bed. "The bathroom's across the hall and the coffee's in the kitchen."
Ten minutes later Remy walked into the living room, a cup of black coffee in hand, wearing the caftan-style robe over the cotton shift Nattie had loaned her the night before. Nattie sat curled up in a colorful chintz armchair, the Sunday edition of the Picayune on the floor beside her, the section with the crossword puzzle folded open on her raised knees.
Nattie gave her an inspecting look, then said, "As soon as I get this puzzle finished, I'll get you some witch hazel for those bruises on your face. It'll take some of the swelling down and ease the sting."
"Thanks," Remy said, then hesitated. "I'll need to use your phone to make a call."
"If you want some privacy, there's an extension in the kitchen, or you can use the one in here." With a nod of her head, Nattie indicated the beige phone on the end table next to the sofa.
Remy glanced at the phone and wished she could wait until she'd drunk her first cup of coffee before making the dreaded call. But she knew that postponing it wouldn't make it any less of an ordeal. She crossed to the end of the sofa and sat down carefully on its hard cushion, then picked up the receiver and dialed the number from memory.
"Hello?"
"Mother, it's Remy—"
"Remy! Where are you? Are you all right?" she rushed the words then turned away from the mouthpiece and called, "Frazier, it's Remy. She's on the phone." Then she was back. "We've been so worried about you. We didn't know what to think when the hospital phoned us this morning and said you were gone."
"Remy, is that you?" her father broke in with the demand.
"Yes, it's me. And I'm fine—"
"Where are you? We'll come get you."
"No." This time it was Remy who broke in. "I'm not coming home—not now. I'm only calling to let you know I'm fine and I'm perfectly safe where I am."
"But where are you?"
She hesitated an instant, then replied, "I'll talk to you later." And she hung up. She stared at the phone for several more seconds, then looked at Nattie. Her dark eyes regarded Remy with open curiosity, but she asked no questions—she hadn't even asked any the night before, when she'd picked her up at the hospital. Beyond telling Nattie that two men had beaten her up and flatly stating that she wasn't going home, Remy hadn't offered any other explanation—and Nattie hadn't demanded one. But she was entitled to know. "I'm sorry to draw you into the middle of this, Nattie, but they want to put me in some clinic outside of Houston. They were going to have me flown there this morning. That's why I snuck out of the hospital last night. I didn't know how else to stop them."
"That must be the same clinic they were talking about sending you to when you first came back," Nattie guessed.
"Yes. There's more, though, Nattie," Remy said, then briefly told her about the insurance company's claim of fraud over the sinking of the tanker, her belief that she'd witnessed something that night on the dock, and her attempts to find out what it was.
"Are you sure you should be telling me all this?" Nattie frowned warily.
"I have to. You see"—Remy paused and cradled her coffee cup in her hands—"before those two men beat me up, they warned me to stop asking questions and to keep my mouth shut."
"And you don't plan to do either one, do you?" Nattie folded her arms across her chest in a gesture that indicated both resignation and challenge.
"How can I? Somehow I have to find out what or who I saw that night. Until I do, how will I know whom to trust? Whom to believe? Obviously I'm a threat to somebody." She stared at the black coffee in her cup. "And the more I think about it, Nattie, the more convinced I am that there's a connection between the man I was seen struggling with in Nice and the two men who worked me over. Maybe they aren't the same men, but they must have something to do with the Dragon. It's too much of a coincidence for it to be anything else."
Nattie swung her feet to the floor and laid the crossword puzzle aside. "You're saying you think somebody followed you all the way to France and cornered you there?"
"It makes sense, Nattie. Whoever doesn't want me to talk now couldn't have wanted me to talk then. Maybe that's what we were arguing about when he struck me and I hit my head on that tree." She sighed at the irony. "He must have thought he was home free when I ended up with amnesia."
"And he couldn't have been too pleased when he found out you were asking questions."
"I know." She combed a hand through her hair and glanced at the room's small fireplace, framed in metal stamped with a design of entwined morning glories. "He probably thinks I'm close to remembering what happened. Who knows? Maybe I am."
"Or maybe you were just getting close to the truth with your questions."
"But I haven't talked to that many people. I met with one of the river pilots who guided the Dragon, and I talked to Charlie—Charlie. I was supposed to call him last night," she remembered, reaching for the phone.
"Who's Charlie?" Nattie frowned.
"Charlie Aikens. He works on the dock where the tanker was loaded. He was going to find out who was working the night the shipment of crude was loaded—or at least try to." Unfortunately, his number was in her purse, which the hospital had locked away somewhere for safekeeping when she was admitted. She had to get his number through Information.
On the fourth ring, a woman answered; Remy hadn't expected that. Somehow she'd gotten the impression from Charlie that he lived alone. Of course, that didn't mean he couldn't have company.
"Is Charlie there?"
"No, he isn't."
She caught the stiff, almost defensive tone in the woman's voice. "I'm Remy Cooper, and Charlie was getting me some information on shipping for a friend of mine's book. Do you know when he'll be back?"
"He won't. . . not ever." There was the smallest break in the woman's voice. "Charlie's dead."
Remy froze, every muscle contracted in shock and alarm. "When? How?" They were the only words she could get out.
"Yesterday. They told me there was a section of the dock that had been damaged a while back, and he was checking to see if it'd gotten worse. They think he got dizzy or slipped. He fell in the river."
"Are you sure? Did anyone see it happen?" She felt sick, sick with fear and guilt. She didn't even look at Nattie when she took the coffee cup from her hand and set it on the end table.
"They heard him cry out when he fell, but there was nothing they could do. The current swept him away." The woman kept talking, as if she needed to say all these things to believe th
em herself, her voice flat and thin with grief. "Charlie's my brother, the only family I had left. They recovered his body this morning. The funeral home said I should bring them a suit to bury him in. I thought he had one. Why does Charlie have to be buried in a suit?" she protested in a sudden burst of anguish. "He hated them—called 'em 'monkey suits.' Momma always used to make him wear one to go to church, and he'd argue with her. 'God don't care if I'm wearing a suit,' he'd say. Do you think I have to get a suit for him?"
"No. No, I don't think so," Remy murmured. "I'm . . . I'm sorry." Numb, she hung up the phone and turned to Nattie. "That was Charlie's sister. She says he's dead. If that's true—" She stopped and fought off the sudden surge of panic. "Was there anything in the paper about a drowning yesterday?"
"I think there was something, but I didn't read it."
They both got down on the floor beside the chair and went through the newspaper, section by section, page by page. Remy found the paragraph-long write-up on a back page of the B section. It gave the same account Charlie's sister had, with the added detail that it had happened in the morning, and said the search was continuing for his body. Remy sat back on her heels and stared at the article.
"I know exactly what you're thinking," Nattie announced.
"What if it wasn't an accident?" Remy finally said it out loud. "What if he didn't fall into the river? What if he was pushed? He was asking questions for me, Nattie." Still holding the folded page with the article, she got to her feet and started to pace, automatically hugging an arm to her bandaged ribs. "I already know that the man who grabbed me that night on the dock was the same man who held me while his buddy hit me. I recognized his voice. He could have found out that Charlie was asking questions—and made sure I didn't find out his name." As another thought occurred to her, Remy stopped and swung back to face Nattie. "They had to know I'd find out about Charlie. Maybe they even wanted me to. Maybe they thought if the beating didn't scare me into shutting up, this would."
"It scares the hell out of me," Nattie said. "Just what could you have seen that night?"
"I don't know." Remy shook her head in frustration. "When I talked to Howard Hanks, the insurance investigator, yesterday afternoon, he had this theory that the tanker had never gone down at all—that it was an elaborate hoax to collect the insurance money. He thinks the Dragon is sailing around out there somewhere under another name. The debris the Coast Guard found, the crew in life-boats—that was simply to make it look like the tanker had sunk in the storm. Instead, another crew came on board and sailed off in it."
Nattie's mouth gaped open in shock as she sagged back against the chair. "The man's crazy."
"I thought it was farfetched, too."
"It's more than farfetched; it's downright stupid," she declared in disgust, and clambered to her feet. "Do you realize how many people it would take to pull off a stunt like that? I don't know how many are in a crew, but let's say there's fifteen. With two crews, that makes thirty people. And how did that second crew get on board the tanker? A helicopter wouldn't have flown them out there—not in a storm. Which means they'd have to have gone by boat, and now you got more people involved. What happens if one of the thirty-five or forty people decides he doesn't like the split he got? Do you realize how many chances you've got of being blackmailed? And believe me, silence is golden, especially if you're the one paying somebody to keep his mouth shut. No." She shook her head. "If you're going to commit a crime, the fewer people who know about it, the better."
"You're right," Remy murmured, faintly stunned by the logic of it.
"Of course I am." Nattie sat back down in the armchair and laid both arms on its curved armrests. "If there were any switches pulled, it had to be at the very beginning. That's what you must have seen. Exactly how much do you remember?"
"Almost nothing," she admitted in frustration. "I saw the tanker moored to the dock, and then a man grabbed me. That's it. That's all I've been able to remember."
"Didn't you say it was foggy that night?"
“Yes—”
Nattie held up her hand. "If you've overlooked that detail, what others have you omitted? Think about it, picture it in your mind, and describe every thing you can recollect."
She started to say it was a waste of time, but— what if it wasn't? "All right." She closed her eyes. "It was dark and very foggy. The Dragon was tied up to the dock. I remember seeing the mooring lines and the gangway. There were two men at the rail—"
"What'd they look like?"
"It was too dark. All I could see was their silhouettes. One of them had a cigarette—" She opened her eyes with a snap. "He was smoking. There're No Smoking signs all over the place."
"I don't imagine smoking is one of the smartest things to do when you're loading crude oil on a tanker," Nattie remarked drolly.
"Then why was he smoking?"
"Maybe the tanker was already loaded."
"But it would still be too dangerous to smoke on deck."
"We'll get back to that later. Tell me what else you can remember."
Remy tried, closing her eyes again, but all she could picture was the black shape of the tanker in the mist and the two men at the rail. "Nothing." She shook her head impatiently. "It was too dark."
"Dark?" Nattie frowned. "The ship was dark? Weren't there floodlights? Ships loading at night are usually lit up like Christmas trees."
"Not this ship," Remy stated. "It was mostly dark, except for a few lights on the bridge deck." She breathed in sharply, suddenly remembering more, and instantly grabbed at her ribs as pain shot from them, nearly doubling her over.
Nattie was immediately at her side, curving a supporting arm around her shoulders. "When are you gonna learn you can't be doing things like that? You better sit down." She helped her to the sofa.
Remy clutched at Nattie's hand, drawing her onto the hard sofa cushion beside her. "I remember Cole was standing on the bridge deck with Carl Maitland and a man with a handlebar mustache—the man Howard Hanks said was a demolitions expert." She stared at nothing, the memory of that night coming back in a jumbled rush. "I'm not sure what happened next—after I saw Cole. I think maybe ... I waved to him. That man grabbed me and said something like . . . 'Not so fast, little gal.' Then . . . something about snooping around. The walkie-talkie." She curled her fingers around Nattie's hand. "He had a walkie-talkie hooked to his belt. A voice came over it—a valve had broken, it said, and there was water all over the deck. Water, Nattie. That's it, isn't it?" Turning, she searched the woman's face—not with excitement or relief at remembering, but with a cold feeling. "That's the switch. The Crescent Dragon had no crude on board when it went down because its tanks had been filled with water." She laughed briefly, softly, in harsh remembrance. "And Maitland explained it away by convincing me they were loading fresh water for bathing and drinking. I believed him."
"You probably did that night," Nattie said. "More than likely you didn't recognize the significance of it until later—when the insurance company started making all that noise."
But it was the bitterness of that memory that she was tasting—the bitterness and the ache it caused, not its significance. "Cole was there. He was with Maitland, watching the tanks being filled with water. He was part of it."
No matter how many times she'd considered the possibility of his guilt, she'd resisted believing it. Now she couldn't any longer. The memory of Cole on the bridge, his faced bathed in full light, with Maitland at his side, was too vivid, too clear.
"I know it hurts." Nattie patted her hand in comfort. "Every woman wants to believe her man is good. They seldom are, but that never makes it any easier to accept."
"No." Had Cole been the man in Nice? He'd claimed he was in New Orleans at the time. But she only had his word on that. She'd never checked. She could imagine how upset she must have been when she realized what he'd done— how hurt, how angry, how disillusioned. She would have argued with him, lashed out with the hurt and confusion of betrayal—a betrayal of
both her trust and her family's. But the men who'd beaten her up—she couldn't believe he'd sent them. "Maitland. He saw me at the docks the other day. He saw me with Charlie. He sent those men to give me this warning." She touched the bruises on her face, oddly relieved to be able to shift the blame for them away from Cole.
"It wouldn't surprise me a bit if he had," Nattie responded. "Whenever he came to the house for one of your momma's dinner parties, that Maitland always reminded me of a barracuda, lurking in some dark pool, looking all small and innocent until you saw his teeth."
"Wait a minute. This doesn't make sense." Remy painfully pushed herself off the sofa again. "It's obvious why Maitland did it. He could sell the same oil twice. But what would Cole get out of it? The Crescent Line paid for that crude in advance. I've seen a copy of the cashier's check."
"You certainly don't have a criminal mind, Remy," Nattie said with a shake of her gray head. "He got money from Maitland. They probably worked out some percentage deal to share in the proceeds of that second sale. More than likely he got his money right out of that cashier's check."
"More than likely," she agreed, then sighed tiredly. "But how do we go about proving that?"
"An audit of Maitland's books would probably turn up some sizable checks written to companies nobody's heard of. The money might even have passed through a couple of those dummy companies before it got to Cole's hands." Nattie paused, then asked gently, "What are you going to do?"
"I don't know." Remy walked over to a window and lifted the rayon sheer to look out at the quiet Sunday morning. "I'm not sure. First I want to find out whether Charlie's death was an accident. Tomorrow I can check with the coroner's office and see what they can tell me." A little black girl skipped along the banquette in front of Nattie's house. She was wearing a pink ruffled dress and a dainty hat that was perched atop her braided hair and tied to her chin with ribbons. Remy wanted to go outside, take her hand, skip down the street with her—and feel again that innocent and carefree. Sighing, she turned from the window and met Nattie's gaze. "I have to know if this has gone beyond fraud, to murder."