“We’ve been cruising for several weeks,” the girl said. “If mother did write, I certainly wouldn’t have gotten the letter.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter, does it, now that I’ve found you? Yes, I wrote and told Celia that I was spending a holiday here, and she wrote back saying that you and your fiancé were cruising the Caribbean on your father’s boat, and that you would be in St. Matthew’s today. You see how closely she follows your itinerary, my dear, and a very good thing, too. You never know, do you? And she said I must be sure to look you up while you were here and… ” Miss Betsy Sprague paused for a necessary intake of breath.
The girl said, “It’s great to see you, Miss Sprague, but I’m afraid we’re just off. Ed has gone to check out with Customs and do an errand in town, and as soon as he comes back—”
“Of course, dear. I quite understand. You wouldn’t like to come ashore and have a nice cup of tea while you’re waiting for your young man?”
“It’s kind of you, but really—no. I have to get the boat ready for sea.” The girl hesitated. “I’m sorry I can’t ask you aboard. We’re really not—”
“That’s perfectly all right, dear. I don’t want to inconvenience you in any way. I just promised your mother that I’d try to see you, so that I can send her word that you’re fit and well. And obviously you are. You do keep in touch with your mother, don’t you, dear, when you’re off on a trip like this? She’s bound to be a little anxious, you know.”
“Don’t worry, Miss Sprague. Ed’s at the post office right now, sending a cable to Mom and Dad. We do that at least once a week, so they know we’re O.K. and where we are.”
Miss Sprague beamed. “A very sensible arrangement. After all, the sea is the sea, whatever anybody may say. Well, dear, if you’re leaving so soon, I think I’ll catch the Golf Club helicopter to St. Mark’s—just popping over for some shopping. The Secretary very kindly offered me a seat—his wife is a cousin of one of my girls, you see. So sorry not to meet your fiancé. Celia did tell me his name… ”
“Ed Marsham. He’s a New Yorker.”
“Gracious me. So you’ll be living in New York after you’re married. Think of that. What is it they call it—the Big Banana?”
“The Big Apple.”
“Apple. How curious. One wonders why. Ah, well, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. I’ll write and tell your mother I saw you just before you sailed off to—Where is it you’re going next?”
“I really don’t know exactly. The American Virgin Islands, I expect, and then the Dominican Republic and around there.”
“Not Cuba, I hope?” Miss Sprague lowered her voice, as if pronouncing an obscenity.
The girl laughed. “No, no. We have to be back in Puerto Rico in two weeks’ time anyway, to pick up our crew.”
“Your crew?”
“A couple from New York—friends of Ed’s. Island-hopping is fine with just the two of us, but we need more hands for the long haul home.”
“But you got down here with just the two of you?”
“No, we had two friends with us, but they flew back to the States for Christmas.”
Miss Betsy Sprague beamed again. “I can see you are a really sensible girl,” she said, “with a sensible young man into the bargain. I shall write and tell Celia that you are well and happy and in fine fettle.” She looked at her watch. “My goodness, I must go if I’m not to keep the helicopter waiting. Good sailing, my dear. My regards to your Edward.”
Hurrying up the floating jetty, Miss Sprague nearly cannoned into a tall, fair young man carrying a paper bag from which the necks of a couple of bottles protruded. He wore minuscule blue shorts and a T-shirt with the initials E.M. printed on it. She grabbed his free hand.
“E.M. Why, you must be Ed! So nice to meet you, dear! Good sailing! Good-bye!” Leaving the young man, whose name was Ernest Mulliner, in a state of some bewilderment, Miss Sprague tripped away toward the quayside and the taxi stand.
Half an hour later, gazing down from the tiny red helicopter that was flying her across the narrow strip of dark blue water to St. Mark’s, Miss Sprague saw a white ketch hoisting sail as she moved out of Priest Town Harbour. At the wheel was a slim, bronzed figure in a pale blue bikini. Miss Sprague waved energetically and was answered by a wave from the girl at the wheel. Then the helicopter changed course and the yacht disappeared from sight, as Miss Sprague settled back into her seat and began quizzing the Secretary of the Golf Club as to the best shops on St. Mark’s.
And that was the last that was ever seen of the auxiliary sailing ketch Isabella.
The loss of the Isabella did not exactly make headlines. Toward the end of January, the East Beach Courier ran a small paragraph, as the story was of local interest. YACHT OVERDUE. FEAR FOR DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER was the headline. A week later, the paper reported that the Coast Guard search had now been abandoned, and expressed condolences to Dr. and Mrs. Lionel Vanduren of Harbour Drive, East Beach, whose daughter, Janet, must now be presumed drowned, along with her fiancé, Mr. Ed Marsham of New York City. The yacht Isabella, the Courier noted, had been on a Caribbean cruise, crewed by Miss Vanduren, Mr. Marsham, and Mr. and Mrs. Peter Jessel of Norfolk, Virginia. Luckily for them, the Jessels had left the boat at San Juan, Puerto Rico, before Christmas. The Isabella then visited various islands, having last been reported in St. Matthew’s, British Seaward Islands. The alarm was raised when she did not return to San Juan to pick up Mr. and Mrs. William Harman of New York City, who had flown down to help sail the vessel home to Florida. The presumption was that she had run into a sudden tropical storm or suffered a fire at sea. Just another small, commonplace tragedy. However, the Miami Herald picked it up and gave it a couple of lines.
The London Sunday Scoop would certainly never have mentioned the matter at all had it not been for the fact that it had recently been so desperate for feature material as to concoct a rehash of the already well-worn Bermuda Triangle story, which it was running on two consecutive Sundays. A sharp-eyed junior editor in Features spotted the paragraph in the Miami Herald, and it was decided to run it on page 3 under the headline ANOTHER BERMUDA TRIANGLE VICTIM? MYSTERY OF VANISHED YACHT. The missing pair were described as Miss Jane Vanbarten and Mr. Edward Marshall, and the boat was called the motor cruiser Isobel, but otherwise the story was reasonably accurate as far as it went. The main point of it, of course, was to direct the reader’s attention to the second part of the Scoop’s analysis of the GREAT BERMUDA TRIANGLE COVER-UP (SEE PAGE 25).
Emmy Tibbett, sprawled luxuriously in bed at ten o’clock on Sunday morning with a cup of tea, a boiled egg, and the Scoop, noticed the item and remarked on it to her husband, Chief Superintendent Henry Tibbett of the C.I.D., who was shaving in the adjoining bathroom.
“Listen, Henry. Here’s something about St. Matthew’s.”
Henry pulled his face sideways with his left hand and made a razor stroke through the foaming lather. He said, “St. Matthew’s? The church?”
“No, idiot. The island. Where we shall be in June, if you remember.”
“Oh, St. Matthew’s,” said Henry, enlightened. “What about it?”
“Another boat gone missing in the Bermuda Triangle,” said Emmy. “A private motorboat with two people on board. Just vanished.” She paused. “Did you read last week’s article?”
“No, I did not.”
“Well, I did, and you must admit there’s something extremely odd going on.”
Henry turned from the bathroom mirror and came to stand in the doorway of the bedroom, his face still half-covered in white suds. He said, “For a start, it’s all nonsense, and to go on with, what has St. Matthew’s got to do with it? The Seawards are nowhere near the Bermuda Triangle.”
“Well, they’re not all that far away.” Emmy was on the defensive. “I mean, Puerto Rico is sort of on the edge of it. Look, there’s a map here. You can see.”
“Puerto Rico is a pretty long way from St. Matthew’s.”
“Of course it is. They onl
y mention St. Matthew’s because that was the last place the boat called before she disappeared. She was going back to San Juan to pick up some crew, so she might easily have been in the Triangle when she vanished.”
“It’s people like you,” said Henry, “who keep these preposterous stories going. Don’t you see the whole thing’s just a gimmick to sell books and newspapers?”
Emmy grinned. “I suppose I do, really,” she said, “but I never can resist a mystery—and there are millions of people like me.”
“I get all the mysteries I need during working hours,” said Henry. “I can do without them when I’m on leave, thank you.”
He returned to his shaving, putting in some fancy work on his upper lip. He regarded himself critically in the mirror—sandy hair, blue eyes, generally undistinguished. A useful anonymity for a senior police officer. He said, “Did you talk to the travel agency about Early Bird flights?”
“I did. I’m making the actual bookings next week. I can’t wait to get back to the Caribbean again. I wish we could go now and get away from all this muck.” Emmy gestured at the steady stream of February rain coursing down the windowpanes of the ugly Victorian house, whose ground floor was the Tibbetts’ Chelsea home.
“You couldn’t expect the Colvilles to put us up for nothing in the high season,” Henry said. “And John’s getting us a pretty special price on the boat, too. I’ve always wanted to sail those waters.”
“Are there sharks?” Emmy asked suddenly.
“Of course there are. You know that. But they only come inshore at night, to feed. That’s why John and Margaret warned us last time against swimming after dark.”
“I wonder… I wonder if that’s what happened to those wretched people on that boat. I mean, if that’s why the bodies were never recovered.” Emmy shivered.
“Highly unlikely,” said Henry.
“Well, what do you think happened to them? The Coast Guard hasn’t found any wreckage, either.”
“Then I expect it was a fire,” Henry said.
“Someone would have seen it.”
“Depends where they were. If they were well out to sea—”
“It says here they were cruising the islands. They wouldn’t have been so far from land that—”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Henry. “All you know about it is one small and probably inaccurate newspaper paragraph. Get up and have your bath, and we’ll go and get a beer somewhere.”
CHAPTER TWO
HENRY AND EMMY Tibbett had been to St. Matthew’s before and looked forward with great pleasure to visiting the island again, and to a reunion with their friends John and Margaret Colville, proprietors of the Anchorage Inn. John—a retired English economist—and his wife, Margaret, had taken over the small, whitewashed pub several years earlier, and they had made a success of it—so much so that they had decided to close down the accommodation side of the business during the normally quiet month of June in order to redecorate their six existing bedrooms and build a garden unit with six more. The restaurant and bar remained open, catering to local islanders, the staff of the Golf Club, and visiting yachtsmen.
So John and Margaret had suggested that the Tibbetts should come over from England and spend a week, free of charge, in one of the old rooms that was awaiting its facelift; and knowing they were keen sailors, John proposed that they spend the second week of their holiday cruising out of St. Mark’s. A friend of his with a fleet of charter boats knew of a private boat they could have at a special price. Emmy had protested that they could not possibly afford it, but the chance of sailing Caribbean waters had proved too much for Henry. Afford it or not, one sunny day during the first week of June found them heading across the Atlantic on the first leg of the inconvenient journey from London to St. Matthew’s.
When the interisland boat—the last leg—finally arrived at Priest Town the following morning, John Colville was there to meet them at the quayside—lean, very sunburned, grayer about the temples, and yet younger-looking than Henry remembered. They all piled into his ancient but sturdy jeep, and as they drove out of Priest Town and along the winding, bumpy shore road to the Anchorage, John told them the island news. No more racial unrest, thank God, despite what was happening on some other islands. Golf Club just the same as ever—did you notice the new so-called yacht marina near the harbor? The Club put that up at their own expense to keep the hoi polloi off their jetty—can you imagine? Got a new Governor now—seems a good fellow, quiet intellectual type, not at all like old Sir Geoffrey.
“No problems, then?” Emmy said.
John frowned at the road ahead and did not answer for a moment. Then he said, “No. No problems. Oh, except that I have to warn you about one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, I’m afraid we have another houseguest staying with us.”
“Why apologize?” Henry asked.
“Only because she’s slightly odd. Quite harmless and rather a dear, really.” John sounded embarrassed. “An ancient lady by the name of Miss Betsy Sprague—an old schoolmistress of Margaret’s. Apparently she’s always been keen on traveling, so when some life insurance policy matured last year, she decided to splurge on a trip across the Atlantic, via the West Indies. She has ex-pupils scattered all over the United States—a lot of her girls married Americans during the war. Anyhow, she came to us for a week in January, and then departed for the States, and we thought we’d seen the last of her, except for a one-night stopover on her way home. However, the woman she was to have spent this week with in Florida has let her down, and she wrote to Margaret in some distress. She leaves for England on Thursday, she couldn’t change her booking, and she had nowhere to go, so of course… ”
“Of course Margaret invited her,” Emmy said. “And quite right, too. We’ll look forward to meeting her.”
The bar of the Anchorage Inn was as cheerful and welcoming as ever, open to the cooling breeze under its thatch of woven palm leaves. Margaret Colville, presiding behind the bar, greeted the Tibbetts and prepared rum punches—the traditional welcoming drink of the islands. Emmy sighed with pure pleasure. It was all just the same. Two black men were engaged in an earnest game of darts, while others listened raptly to a radio commentary on a cricket match. A lobster-red quartet of young Americans from a charter boat planned their next day’s cruise with the help of a chart spread out on the bar and gratefully accepted Margaret’s offer of sunburn ointment—things had clearly gone too far for warning words about wearing long-sleeved shirts and floppy hats.
Henry and Emmy had moved from their barstools to a table on the terrace and were about to tackle the huge salad of local lobster provided by John from the kitchen, when Miss Betsy Sprague arrived from the beach like a small, untidy tornado.
“Greetings, greetings, dear people!” she chirruped, dancing up the shallow steps from the garden in her tennis shoes, her navy blue skirt flapping wetly. “Henry and Emily, isn’t it?”
“Emmy, actually,” said Emmy. “But it doesn’t matter.”
“All the way from dear old England! How exciting! I’m Betsy Sprague, the original bad penny, as Margaret must have told you.” She flopped down into the empty chair opposite Henry. “Beautiful at the beach. Beautiful. You must come down this afternoon. Don’t let me interrupt your meal.”
Margaret came out from behind the bar. A little awkwardly, she said, “Hello, Betsy. I see you’ve met Henry and Emmy.”
“Yes, yes, indeed. I have introduced myself, my dear. Remember what I always used to tell you girls? Never be shy about introducing yourself. People like to know to whom they are talking.”
“I remember,” said Margaret, smiling. “What can I get you from the bar, Betsy?”
“Just my usual rum punch, thank you, dear. Aha, lobster I see—in honor of our new arrivals, no doubt. Not that it’s really lobster at all, you know,” she added confidentially to Emmy. “Crayfish.”
“Down here, it’s called lobster,” said Margaret firmly.
/> “Ah, well, when in Rome, I suppose…the trouble that double nomenclature causes…you don’t mind if I join you for lunch, as we are fellow guests?”
“We’d be delighted, Miss Sprague,” said Henry gallantly. Margaret gave him a grin and a tiny wink and went off to mix a rum punch.
“Betsy, if you please, sir. Let’s have no false formality.”
Somewhat surprisingly, Betsy Sprague turned out to be an entertaining and interesting companion. During her short stay on St. Matthew’s, she had obviously accomplished more of a scientific and scholarly nature than the Tibbetts had ever contemplated while on holiday. She talked knowledgeably of the curious rock formations on the island—“Volcanic origin, of course. Some authorities maintain they may be late Precambrian—highly unlikely to my way of thinking. Paleozoic at the earliest, Middle Devonian more likely—what do you think, Henry? This lobster—for so we must call it—is delicious, is it not?”
She then went on to discuss the earliest inhabitants of the West Indies.
“You mean those bloodthirsty Arawaks who ate each other?” Emmy ventured.
Betsy laughed. “Oh, my dear, you are confused. No, the poor Arawaks were the gentlest of people. It was the fierce Caribs who wiped out the Arawaks—literally made a meal of them, as you might say—and of a good many Spaniards as well, for which I can’t blame them. Did you know that the last Carib settlement still exists on the island of Dominica? Oh, very tame and practically vegetarian by now—we Europeans won in the end, of course. We always have done, up to now. We’re just living to see the last of it, of course. The future lies with Africa—very sad for her, but there’s no shirking historical responsibility, is there? Well, we’ll be dead and gone by then. Now, which beach will you visit this afternoon?”
Betsy Sprague was not without tact. When Henry said that they had thought of paying a visit to their favorite spot at Mango Tree Bay, she at once remarked, “What a pity. I was hoping we might have made a joint expedition, but I particularly want to observe the pelicans at Long Look Rock. Another time, perhaps. So if you’ll excuse me, I shall go and trouble Margaret for the loan of her binoculars.” And she was off.
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