by Jane Haddam
He was just coming out of the shower when Tony came downstairs, and he wrapped the towel around his waist and waited while his son came up to him. A lot of the men he knew reveled in the fact that their sons looked exactly like them. Jon Baird didn’t understand that at all. To him, Tony was an idealized form of Baird, the happiest kind of accident. Bairds were usually either tall and beautiful and stupid or short and ugly and smart. God only knew, both Calvin and their sister, Mark Anderwahl’s mother, fit the “tall and beautiful and stupid” description to perfection. Tony was tall and beautiful enough for anybody, but he was also smart. He came down the passage, looked blankly at the door to the cabin where Charlie Shay’s body lay, and came the rest of the way to his father.
“Look at this,” he said. “He knocked a tooth loose.”
“Who?” Jon asked him. “Demarkian?”
“Of course not.” Tony was contemptuous. “Mark. He caught me tossing the damned radio overboard. I thought you were going to keep them down here while I got done what I had to do upstairs.”
“I didn’t count on your taking three quarters of an hour to find the radio. Did it work?”
“It did when we were closer to shore. I don’t think it would have this far out. Better safe than sorry.”
“Exactly,” Jon Baird said.
Tony looked up the passage, but not all the way up. He didn’t scrunch around or twist his back to get a better view. He let his line of sight be stopped by the wall. “What about the other thing?” he said. “Can I do it now? They’re all wandering around in knots, muttering at each other and getting in the way.”
“I’ve been thinking about that.” Jon Baird nodded. “There are other ways between decks than just those staircases. There are the trap doors, for one thing.”
“Trap doors?”
“Not really. Convenience openings to stuff food through and lines and other things you might need that would be kept in the hold and hard to get to in an emergency. I’ve been wondering if they’d been too small for you to fit through.”
“They sound like they’d be too much of a problem if I didn’t have any help. Don’t things like that usually require one person below and one person above to work right?”
“Yes, they do.”
“Well, then.”
“Don’t get upset.” Jon pulled the towel more tightly around his waist. He hated talking to people when he was undressed, even women in bed. It made him feel off balance. “I was just thinking these things through,” he said. “I suppose you will have to go up the stairs. Do you think you can do it without being stopped?”
“I’d like to do it without being seen.”
“And make a big mystery about it?” Jon said. “No, I don’t think so. We have too many mysteries around here as it is. Let it be perfectly straightforward with a perfectly straightforward explanation.”
“I could get arrested.”
“For what?”
Tony rocked back on his heels. He was so tall, it was difficult for Jon to see his eyes. That gave Jon an anxious moment, but only a moment. It was soon clear enough that Tony was not angry or worried, but amused. Why had he never really gotten to know this boy before? He’d thought Tony would turn out to be like his mother. Instead, he was nothing like his mother at all. Jon leaned over and checked the rest of the passage again.
“All clear,” he said.
“I’ve got an idea,” Tony said.
“What?”
Tony shook his head and went back down the passage, to the door of the cabin where Charlie Baird’s body lay. He took out a skeleton key and let himself in. It was one of four skeleton keys on the boat, any one of which would have opened every door except the one to Jon Baird’s private safe. That was new, not “authentic” at all, and had a combination lock. That, Jon thought, was the problem with bush league celebrities like Gregor Demarkian. They never could teach themselves to think one step ahead.
He had gone down the passage himself, past the door behind which Tony was still contemplating his “idea,” and had started up the staircase to the deck above when he met Calvin coming down. Calvin was flushed and indignant and a little breathless, the way he got when someone in the office suggested he was much too fussy about where his pens were kept. It took Calvin time to work himself into a state like that. Jon wondered what had happened to upset him now.
The staircase was too narrow for two people to pass each other on it. Calvin and Jon ended up stuck facing each other and immobile. It did not seem to occur to Calvin that he had no other purpose in coming down the stairs than to find Jon.
“Go back up,” Jon urged him. “I want to get into my clothes.”
“You’ve got to hurry,” Calvin said. “Mark Anderwahl is making homemade flares, and he’s going to call the Coast Guard.”
Jon pushed at Calvin’s side, gently at first, and then harder, pressing until he got Calvin to move up the stairs. Jon followed without haste, shivering in the cool draft but not otherwise in a hurry.
“It’ll take hours for Mark to make a flare,” he said. “There’s time for me to get into my pants.”
“He was looking for baking powder,” Calvin said ominously. “Or maybe it was baking soda. I don’t remember. But I think he knows how to do this thing.”
“I’m sure he does. I paid his way to Outward Bound myself, and it wasn’t cheap.” Jon had now managed to get Calvin all the way up onto the deck above. He pushed Calvin back along the passage—that was Gregor Demarkian going into his own cabin—and then climbed up into the passage himself. “It’s all right,” he insisted. “I really do have time to get dressed.”
“I don’t think you’re taking this seriously,” Calvin said, his face working himself up into a monumental pout. “I don’t think you’re even beginning to take this seriously. You haven’t been the same since you came back from jail.”
“No?”
“It changed you,” Calvin said piously.
Jon Baird sighed. “I don’t see why it should have,” he said. “It was my idea to go in the first place. This is my cabin along here, Calvin, and I want to get into something warm.”
Calvin blinked, offended, but Jon ignored him. He just forced his way into his own cabin and shut the door. Then he looked around and wondered where Sheila had gone and if she intended to come back.
He also wondered how Sheila had done the night before, with Tony on the agenda, but he didn’t think it would ever be polite to ask either one of them. If that had been the kind of thing fathers and sons confided in each other, Jon would have told Tony not to bother.
3
Tony Baird didn’t need to confide anything to anyone. Sex had never been important to him. It was more like the giant roller coaster at Palisades Park: fun to do but not really necessary to life. Secrecy wasn’t important to him, either. He was firmly embedded in that generation that had shifted the focus from what it was they did to what it was they got caught doing. Since he knew that there was nothing terrible that could happen to him because of what he was about to do, he wasn’t worried about doing it. It didn’t even bother him that he had a fairly good idea, now, why it had to be done. He had learned it first at prep school and had it hammered home to him in college. There were no absolute standards of morality, no objective norms of behavior, no real way to tell an unchanging “right” from an unchanging “wrong.” Everything was relative and connected inexorably to gender, race, and class. Since he’d hit the jackpot on all three, he had every right on earth to do what he had to do to get where he was going. One of the reasons he liked his father was that his father wasn’t old-fashioned at all. His father had figured out all this stuff long before the professor who taught Tony had ever been born.
Charlie Shay’s body was lying on its side under a pile of blankets. It would have been much better for everybody if he could have gotten to it the night before, but Demarkian had been asleep in the other bunk. There had to be something wrong with a man who preferred sleeping with a corpse to sleep
ing in the same cabin with Bennis Hannaford.
Tony got the weights he’d been carrying out of his pockets. They were lead weight sinkers for buoys, left in the hold after a less determinedly Puritan voyage God only knew how many years ago. He put the sinkers into Charlie Shay’s pockets and the cuffs of his pants and his shoes. There were fewer of them than Tony wished there were, but he thought there were enough. Bodies sank, after all. They didn’t float to the surface until they were puffed full of gas and rot. It would take weeks before Charlie got like that. Tony turned Charlie on his back, considered picking him up just the way he was, and decided against it. He didn’t really want to touch any more dead skin than he had to. He wasn’t sure he could carry Charlie around loose like that without making the sinkers fall out to the floor.
Down at the end of the passage where the makeshift showers were, there was a storage bin full of canvas and lines. Tony left Charlie where he was, went down there, and got a little of both. The passage was empty. The whole deck was empty, as far as Tony could tell. The crew must be occupied above, trying to get them moving in this awful calm. Tony didn’t care about the calm. If it hadn’t come up naturally, they would have had to devise something else to take its place.
He got the canvas and the line back to the cabin, went in and laid it on the floor. Then, after a little deliberation, he unfolded the canvas until it made a kind of rug on the wood deck and rolled Charlie off the bunk onto it. Charlie’s body landed with a thud that was much too soft and squishy for Tony’s taste. He swallowed his discomfort and wrapped Charlie firmly up in canvas, the way hospitals wrap babies and patrons in Chinese restaurants wrap moo shu pork.
When the wrapping was done, Tony took a long length of line and tied the package together. He had to wind the line around a half dozen times and was still left with something that looked like a kindergarten child had done it, but he didn’t care. All that mattered was that he get the body up on the main deck without losing any of the sinkers or brushing against the skin of that face. All that mattered was that he get this over with and get it over with quickly.
He threw Charlie Shay over his shoulder like a sack of sand and made his way out into the passage. It was a tight fit but not an impossible one, and the passage was still empty. He went to the staircase and climbed to the deck above. The passage there was empty, too, and so was the final staircase up. If he had been able to do this last night he wouldn’t have been so tense. The rest of them would all have been asleep and he wouldn’t have had to rehearse in his head what he would say when someone came up and found him in the middle of this.
He got the corpse up to the main deck without incident, and then into the bow. He came to rest for a second against a spool of line that had been pushed into the center of the triangle by someone who should have known better. Even if you’ve never been on a boat before, it had to be obvious that it was dangerous to leave a spool like that where it could smash back and forth in the first rough sea. Then Tony stood up again, and flexed his legs, and wondered how Charlie Shay had ever gotten so heavy. There was still not a single person around.
“Am I going to get away with this?” he asked himself.
The answer was no. There was already activity on the deck. He would have picked it up if he hadn’t been so tired. Instead, just as he lifted Charlie Shay’s body into the air, someone behind him shouted, “Hey! What are you doing?” and someone else started to scream. The screaming was definitely coming from his mother, who could scream longer and louder than anyone else on earth. Tony shut all the sounds out and pitched the body as far into the sea as he could. It landed much too close to the boat with a large splash.
“Man overboard,” Julie Anderwahl yelled.
Out in the water, Charlie Baird’s body sank, quickly and inexorably. It took only seconds before it was completely out of sight.
“There,” Tony said to the assembled company. “Housekeeping completed. No need to get all worked up about wandering all over the ocean with a corpse.”
It was a stupid thing to say, of course. He hadn’t expected applause. He hadn’t expected anything. He knew when he went to work on this project that if he completed it this morning he’d get caught, and there he was, caught, and so what? So what?
What he hadn’t expected was Sheila, marching out of the crowd at him, so furious she could hardly breathe.
“You asshole,” she screamed into his face. “I can’t believe you let him do this to you.”
Two
1
THERE WAS A WARM thick wind blowing up from the south, creating a steady pressure against the masts and the lines and the little pennant that was Jon Baird’s version of an official flag for the Pilgrimage Green. The crew was up in the rigging unfurling the sails. Gregor Demarkian stepped out onto the main deck and looked up to watch them, heedless of the fact that Bennis was behind him and in a hurry. He wasn’t holding her up, exactly. She could have gone by him at any time. He knew she didn’t want to go by him, because she wanted to be on the spot when whatever he did got done. Gregor went on looking at the crew in the rigging anyway. He didn’t know enough about boats to know if they had truly been becalmed over the last few hours. He’d always had the impression that it was the sort of thing that happened only in deep water. Truly becalmed or manipulated into immobility, it didn’t matter. It was over now. As soon as the crew got the sails into place, the Pilgrimage Green would be on her way to Candle Island and the state of Massachusetts.
Bennis tapped him on the shoulder.
“Are we going to go do something?” she demanded. “Or are you going to stand here watching the sails go up all day?”
“At least one of the sails is coming down,” Gregor said, because it was true. The sail on the mast in the middle—he was going to have to learn what to call these things someday; not knowing got to be frustrating—unfurled from the top like a kitchen shade. Bennis made a face at it.
“If you turn just a little to your left,” she said, “you can see Calvin Baird’s back. I wish I understood you, Gregor.”
“You understood me fine. I just wanted—there we go.”
“What?”
“The last of the sails are unraveled.”
“So?”
“So there will no be no plausible way to get this boat to stop moving without saying that what you’re doing is stopping this boat from moving. Mr. Jonathan Edgewick Baird can keep us here in the middle of nothing and on our way to nowhere, but he can’t do it without letting us know he’s doing it. Do you see what I mean?”
“No.”
“Come on.”
Gregor took Bennis by the wrist and began to lead her gently toward the bow. With the sails up, the boat had begun to rock again, although without the force or eccentricity of the night before. He rolled easily into it, as if he’d been walking on boats all his life. It was incredible how fast it had begun to seem natural. On the other hand, he was glad he didn’t have to test it against something really violent, like a storm. The bow was only a little way up from where they had been standing, although not in the direction Bennis had indicated when she’d pointed out the body of Calvin Baird. Calvin was standing next to the piled up tables and chairs and equipment that blocked passage from the rest of the deck to the bow on the port side. They had to go through the narrow space on the starboard side, as they had been since that first morning.
Bennis came up behind him and whispered in his ear, “I was just thinking of something. The Murder on the Orient Express.”
“What about it?”
“Well, I just hope this isn’t like that. I mean, that’s the one where everybody did it, do you remember? Except they were on a train, not a boat. Well, if I’d been those people and I were on a boat and not a train, what I’d do is take Hercule Poirot and just throw him overboard.”
“What would you do with Hercule Poirot’s favorite sidekick?”
“Throw me over, too, I guess,” Bennis said.
Gregor sighed. “Then you’d h
ave three deaths to account for instead of one, and with the confusion about jurisdiction you’d have at least three separate law enforcement agencies looking into it, and then one of your coconspirators would break down under questioning—”
“All right,” Bennis said peevishly. “For God’s sake, Gregor, it was only a suggestion.”
“Limit your suggestions to new magic powers for unicorns. And while you’re not suggesting things, do me a favor. Block this passage.”
“Why?”
“So that nobody can get out, why do you think?”
“Gregor—”
Gregor sighed again. “I am going to go in there,” he said, “and behave just like your Hercule Poirot. I am going to give a presentation, and I am going to name a murderer—and I daresay the name won’t come as a surprise to at least half the assembled company. Doing that sort of thing in real life has a few unfortunate side effects, one of which is that key parts of your audience have a tendency to bolt. I want you to block this little passage up so that that’s nearly impossible, or at least a lot of work. Can you do that?”
“If you give me time. Do you really think Jon Baird is going to try to run off somewhere? Where would he run?”
“It’s not Jon Baird who’s going to try to run off somewhere,” Gregor said, and then, because he really didn’t have any more time, he turned away from her astonishment. If Bennis wasn’t so damn convinced that she would make a wonderful amateur detective, right along the lines of one of those new hard-boiled female private eyes, she wouldn’t spend so much of her time astonished.