5
Far to the northward a squall flickered and rumbled along the
horizon, but here they appeared to hang suspended in a
vacuum while the sun beat down and the oily groundswell
rolled endlessly up from the south. The air was like warm
damp cotton pressing in on them, muggy, saturated,
unmoving.
Perspiration didn’t evaporate. It collected in a film over the
body, a film that became rivulets, now running, now stopping
momentarily, now moving again with the irritating feel of
insects crawling across the skin. It ran down into his already
sodden and clinging shorts and dripped into his sneakers. His
back ached from crouching under the boom.
Dip, lift, throw—it went on without stop. The man was
working silently above the after cabin, throwing water with a
machine-like regularity now that matched his own, and he
could hear the steady stream from the pump. It had been an
hour and ten minutes since he’d come down from the mast.
They’d thrown out nine to ten tons of water, at least, and still
the buckets came up full. He’d made no attempt to get a
sounding before they started; it was unnecessary. The
problem was too elementary to need any measurements—
either they got the water out of those cabins this way within a
few hours or they were done. If it continued to rise, or even if
it remained at the same level, they had no chance, because
they obviously couldn’t keep this up indefinitely. And
Dead Calm — 47
whenever they stopped to sleep or collapsed from exhaustion,
she’d go down.
He was dehydrated, and the ropy saliva inside his mouth
tasted like brass. He wondered if they had fresh water that
wasn’t contaminated, and then remembered Warriner hadn’t
been suffering from thirst. Straightening, he looked aft. The
woman was tiring; it was evident in the strained and set
expression of her face. And the man, though there’d been no
word of complaint, was in pain from the blow on his head. It
showed in his eyes, below the level of that hard-boiled and
half-contemptuous amusement with which he seemed to
regard everything that happened.
He walked aft and took the pump handle. “Better take five,”
he said. “And get a drink. It’s not going to help things if you
keel over.” He turned to the man. “You too.”
“I’ll bring some water,” she said and went below. Ingram
bent to the pump. In a moment she came back, carrying a
saucepan full of water and a cup and a pack of cigarettes. She
set the water on top of the doghouse, lit one of the cigarettes,
and sat down on deck with her feet on the steps of the
doghouse hatch. There was no protection anywhere on deck
from the brutal weight of the sun, and the trapped air below
would be stifling. The man took a drink and sat down on deck
with his legs dangling in the hatch where he’d been working.
After he’d had a cup of the water himself, Ingram went on
pumping, driven by the compulsion to hurry, to do something,
anything, and by fear of his thoughts if he stopped.
“How about one of your cigarettes, honey?” the man asked.
The woman tossed them toward him silently, without even
looking at him. He lit one and asked Ingram, “How much gas
you figure you had aboard?”
Ingram continued to pump. “Maybe a hundred and fifty
miles at normal cruising speed. Wide open, the way he left
here, not much more than half of that—if he doesn’t burn the
engine up first.”
“So call it a round hundred,” the man said. “It’s been a long
time since I diddled around with the pi-r-square jazz, but
won’t that work out to a good-sized piece of ocean?”
“Yeah,” Ingram replied. “With nothing else to go on, about
thirty thousand square miles.”
Dead Calm — 48
“I had a hunch you couldn’t carry it around in a cup. And
that’s not to mention the fact he’s not going to stop just
because he runs out of gas. We get a breeze, he’ll probably
get one too. The wind blows on the nutty as well as the
beautiful and the pure in heart. Shakespeare. Or was it
Salmon P. Chase?”
“I said with nothing else to go on,” Ingram pointed out
curtly. “We know which way he left here, and it’s almost a
cinch he’s headed for the Marquesas. That’s the reason I went
up the mast, to see if he’d changed course. He hasn’t. And if
we ever hope to make land, the Marquesas are the best
chance we’ve got. So why not follow him? And see if we can
keep this thing afloat? But don’t let me influence you, if you’ve
got a better suggestion.”
The other shrugged. “Keep your hair on. I was just trying to
estimate the chances. Not good, huh?”
“No,” Ingram said. He was about to mention that they had
one advantage in that Warriner would have to sleep sometime,
but bit it back. It presupposed his being alone on Saracen.
The man glanced up as if he’d read his thoughts. “There
were just the two of you?”
Ingram nodded.
“Naturally, you never know what a creep’ll do, but she
might have a chance. He likes a woman around to cry on.”
Ingram wanted desperately to reach for this ray of hope, but
he’d never been good at self-deception. “And go into port
somewhere with a witness?”
“Golden Boy’s not so hot at the long-range view. He might
not think about that for days, especially with a nice bosom to
throw himself on with his Kleenex.”
“Will you, for Christ’s sake, shut up?” the woman asked
wearily.
Ingram glanced at her with curiosity, aware this was the
first time he’d actually seen her since that first glance in the
cabin, when his only impression had been that she was scared
to death and appeared to be naked. Since he’d come back
aboard he’d paid no attention to either of them except as to
their potential value as tools or pieces of equipment in the
matter of keeping this sodden tub afloat and following
Saracen in it. She was probably in her late thirties, or perhaps
Dead Calm — 49
even forty, but a strikingly handsome woman in spite of the
disarray of her hair and the exhausted and sweat-streaked
face. The hair itself was raven black except for a streak of
gray, and the eyes were large and brown, but with more
imperiousness than gentleness in them. She wore brief white
shorts and a white halter which could have been a soiled gray
and still appeared like snow against the tan of her body.
Under other circumstances he might have noted that she had
superb legs, but at the moment he was only wondering if she’d
rested long enough to start pumping again. That, and what the
hostility was between the two of them. Probably Warriner, he
thought, remembering the way Rae had defended him. He
seemed to have some fatal fascination for women older than
himself. Rae was thirty-five. Then, for the first time, he
remembered that presumably there’d been four people on
here.
“What happened to Mrs. Warriner?” he asked.
The man grinned. “After marrying Hughie-boy, what could
happen to anybody? It already has.”
The woman exhaled smoke and looked musingly at Ingram.
“I’d like to correct the impression you seem to have that I’m
married to this specimen of Pithecanthropus erectus. I’m Mrs.
Warriner.”
He said nothing, but his surprise must have showed on his
face, for she smiled a trifle wearily and said, “Yes, I am, aren’t
I?”
“Momma likes ‘em young and mixed up,” the man said, and
Ingram decided today probably wasn’t the first time he’d been
slugged by somebody. Even people otherwise in full command
of their faculties must have found the urge too much to resist.
He introduced himself and added, “We were bound from
Florida to Papeete.”
“I’m very glad to know you, Mr. Ingram,” she said. “But
sorry about the circumstances. This fringe-area human being
is Mr. Bellew. If you’ve been wondering why my husband
cracked up, perhaps the mystery is clearing. Just multiply
your brief acquaintance by twenty-six days.”
But there was still the fourth one. “And Mrs. Bellew?”
Bellew turned toward Mrs. Warriner, his eyes bright. “Why
don’t you tell him, honey? Nobody ever likes my version.”
Dead Calm — 50
“Estelle drowned,” she said. “Or was killed by a shark—”
“Or she was hit by a hockey puck, or some drunk in a sports
car.” Bellew took a final drag on his cigarette and dropped it
between his knees into the water in the cabin. “Hughie-boy
killed her.”
“That’s a lie!” Mrs. Warriner’s voice was under control, but
Ingram could see the fury in her eyes.
“Oh, not deliberately, perish the thought.” Bellew looked at
Ingram and made a deprecating gesture with his hands.
“Hughie-dear wouldn’t even dream of killing anybody—unless
she happened to be in the way when he was trying to save his
precious neck. Naturally, you can’t have that sort of thing.
What kind of world would it be without Hughie?”
“You were the one, if anybody was, you blind fool!” Mrs.
Warriner started to get up, her self-control beginning to slip.
“If you’d watched what you were doing—”
“Break it up!” Ingram’s command cut through the scene
with a parade-ground bark that halted her. “Both of you! You
can fight some other time, if there is one. Get back to work.”
With a venomous glance at Bellew, Mrs. Warriner took the
pump. The other stood up and reached for the bucket. “And
then Hughie hit this nasty old shark right on the nose, and he
says you take that, you nasty old shark you. My wife can whip
your wife.”
Mrs. Warriner started to turn, her face pale. Ingram caught
her arm and wheeled her back to the pump. At the same time
he barked at Bellew, “Shut up and start throwing water!”
Bellew looked at him with lazy insolence for a moment, as
though on the point of refusing out of mere curiosity as to
what would happen. Then he shrugged and dropped the
bucket through the hatch. “You might have a point there,
sport. Drowning makes an awful mess of my hair.”
Ingram returned to the hatch forward of the deckhouse,
dropped the bucket, and began furiously throwing water
overboard, conscious of the wasted minutes. What kind of
madhouse was this? With the boat sinking under their feet,
you had to tear them from each other’s throats and drive them
to make them try to save themselves. Well, they’d pump, God
damn them; they’d pump till they were standing on their
tongues.
Dead Calm — 51
What had happened to the fourth one, Estelle Bellew? At the
moment he didn’t care, but it was a way to keep from thinking
of Rae. Didn’t they even know? How could one call it an
accident and the other say Warriner had killed her? Warriner
was fleeing from something, there was no doubt, from some
terror that had pushed him over the edge into madness. Or
was he only running from Bellew? If you were weak and
unstable to begin with, twenty-six days of Bellew’s sadistic
bullying and amused contempt would drive anybody around
the bend. But why in the name of God had they ever started
out together in the first place, to sail across the Pacific, four of
them in an unsound boat? Well, they must have been friends
then, friends and too lacking in experience to know what
being cooped up on a small boat for weeks at a time could do
to clashing personalities.
But it was futile. His thoughts always came back to the
question from which there was no escape. What would
Warriner do? But if he were insane, how could you even
guess? Where did you start? Would he kill her or throw her
overboard because she was a witness to the fact he’d gone off
and left three people to drown on a sinking boat? Or worse,
did he believe he’d killed Bellew? Presumably, he’d hit him
from behind, and Bellew had fallen into the water, probably
unconscious. Therefore Warriner might be convinced he was
guilty of murder—in addition to whatever had happened to
Estelle Bellew—and obviously there could be no turning back
and no surviving witnesses. But this was assuming a mind at
least partially capable of rational thought, of reasoning from
cause to effect, from crime to punishment and how to escape
it. Well, hadn’t he already shown he was capable of that? He’d
made up that very clever and very plausible story about the
deaths from botulism just to keep him, Ingram, from going
aboard Orpheus and discovering what he’d done. The answer
probably was that there wasn’t any answer, nothing ever
clear-cut and definite; even the hopelessly psychotic must
have rational intervals. Maybe at times he knew what he was
doing, while at others he was completely cut off from reality.
Then what? Rae was no match for him physically; he was a
powerfully built man in his early twenties. You could forget
that. And there was no weapon— He stopped. The shotgun. It
was a twelve-gauge double he’d brought along for hunting in
Australia and New Zealand. But it was taken down, the barrels
Dead Calm — 52
and stock wrapped separately in oiled sheepskin and stowed
in a drawer where it could be sealed by customs in ports
where it wasn’t permitted. She knew nothing about guns;
could she even assemble and load it? No, that wasn’t the
question. Could she use it? Could she deliberately shoot a man
with it? And if she did, what would it do to her afterward?
There was nothing pretty about the results of a shotgun blast
at close range; she’d have nightmares the rest of her life and
wake up screaming— Stop thinking about things you have no
control over, he told himself. That’s out of your hands; just
throw water and keep throwing it. It can’t be running in as
fast as we’re dumping it out now; something’s got to give.
It was less than thirty minutes later that two things
happened almost at once. The first was a definite indication
that they were gaining on the water: as it rushed from side to
side with Orpheus’s rolling, the bucket would sometimes
strike bottom and come up less than full. Maybe less than a
foot deep in the cabins now, he thought, if she were on an
even keel; they’d thrown out probably that much in an hour
and a half of furious pumping and bailing. The other thing was
a breeze.
He’d been so intent on bailing, his first awareness of it was
the cool feel on his face. He looked up. It was straight out of
the west, and as far as he could see the surface of the sea was
wrinkled and dark. “Wind,” Mrs. Warriner called out at the
same moment.
“Right,” he said. “Just keep pumping; you can take the
wheel in a minute.” He dropped the bucket and began casting
the gaskets off the mainsail, working feverishly and praying
the wind would last. He freed the end of the boom, took a
strain on it with the topping lift, and reshackled the halyard to
the head of the sail. He hoisted it, tightened it down with the
winch, and started on the double for the jib. Then he turned
and called back to the other two, “Have you got a genoa
aboard?” No doubt he’d regret it by the time he’d manhandled
it from one side to the other a dozen times or so in these fluky
airs, but every foot of distance was precious. A genoa would
add almost the equivalent of another mainsail to her, and it
was going to take all the canvas they could get on her to move
this hulk in anything short of a gale.
Dead Calm — 53
It was Mrs. Warriner who replied, “Yes, there’s a genoa, and
also a big nylon spinnaker. The sail locker’s forward. Do you
want me to show you?”
“No. I’ll get it.” There was a hatchway to the forward cabin.
He opened it and hurried down the ladder. The light was
dim below deck, the air stifling and saturated with moisture,
and water washed back and forth around his legs. In back of
the ladder was a doorway opening into the locker in the bows
of the boat. The sailbags were stowed in a bin on the port
side, some six or eight of them altogether. He began muscling
them out and looking at the markings on the sides. There were
spare mainsails and mizzens, a couple of jibs, a storm trysail,
a spinnaker, and the genoa jib. He looked at this young
fortune in sails and wished they’d bought a hull to go with
them. He beefed the genoa back up the ladder, dumped it in
the bow, and began unhanking the smaller jib. The breeze was
still cool against his sweaty face, and Orpheus had begun to
come ponderously up into the wind, still rolling heavily. He
got the genoa snapped onto the stay, shackled the halyard to
its head, and hoisted it. He didn’t know where the sheet was,
but grabbed up one of the lines littering the deck, made it fast
to the clew, led it out around the port shrouds, through the
block on the port side of the deck aft of midships, and back to
the winch near the cockpit. Orpheus swung off to starboard.
The mainsail filled, with the genoa aback and blown in against
the shrouds. She began to move slowly ahead. When she had
steerageway, he brought the wheel hard over; she came
slowly up into the wind and fell off on the starboard tack with
both the mainsail and genoa full and drawing. He checked the
compass. They were heading 220. He came right a little and
re-trimmed the sheets, but 225 was the best they could do. It
wasn’t too far from the course they wanted.
He called out to Mrs. Warriner, “You take the wheel now.
Bellew can relieve you there at the pump.”
She came aft. Bellew moved to the pump, for once without
comment. Ingram broke out the mizzen and hoisted it. The
breeze had continued to freshen, and now tiny whitecaps were
winking on the broad undulations of the swell. During all this
burst of furious activity and the excitement of getting under
way, the fear had been pushed to the back of his mind, but
now as he looked over the side it all came back with a rush,
Dead Calm — 54
along with a galling and futile anger. Were they moving at all?
With the same breeze Saracen would have been footing along
at four or five knots, but this sodden coffin had little more
than steerageway.
“Let me take her again for a minute,” he said to Mrs.
Warriner. Maybe they were pinching her, trying to point
higher into the wind than she would sail. She relinquished the
wheel. He came left ten degrees, started the sheets,
retrimmed them, tried her farther off the wind, and came
back. It was no use. She had no feel of life to her anywhere, no
desire to move; she answered the helm with the leaden apathy
of a dying animal that no longer wanted anything but rest.
He hadn’t expected much, but this was even worse. If you
could manufacture your own wind to order, by direction and
force, you couldn’t make fifty miles a day. He came back to
the original course, turned the wheel over to Mrs. Warriner,
stepped over to the rail, and looked down. Below the waterline
streamers of green hair wove backward with their
passage. With ten to twenty tons of water inside her and that
pasture on the bottom, he thought, how could you expect
anything to move her? “When was the last time she was
hauled out?” he asked Mrs. Warriner.
“About eight months ago,” she replied. “When we bought
her.”
Well, that figured; it matched everything else about this
expedition. He stepped down into the doghouse and dug a
chart of the South Pacific out of the litter on the deck. Even if
they weren’t going anywhere, they had to have a position, a
point of departure. Their last position should be in the
logbook, but he didn’t trust their navigation. He’d had a good
fix from three star sights just at dusk last night; from that, by
dead reckoning, they’d made twenty-five miles along a course
of 235 degrees. That should be Saracen’s position at dawn
when he’d sighted Orpheus. She was—call it five miles away,
on a bearing of 315. That would put her here.
He penciled a cross on the chart: 4.20 South latitude,
123.30 West longitude. The Marquesas were roughly twelve
hundred miles to the west southwest, the Galapagos over two
thousand miles behind them, and elsewhere nothing but
thousands of miles of empty ocean. The chances of their being
sighted by a ship were to all practical purposes nonexistent.
Dead Calm — 55
And as for ever catching up with Saracen, even if they could
find her … Face it, he thought. She was already far over the
horizon, making six knots under power. And when her fuel ran
out, she could still outsail this waterlogged hulk with nothing
but her mizzen and somebody’s shirt.
“The wind’s heading us,” Mrs. Warriner called out from the
cockpit. He went back on deck. The breeze had veered around
to the southwest, and she had bare steerageway on a course
that was now a little east of south.
“We’ll come about,” he said. He cast off the genoa sheet,
carried the sail forward around the stay and outside the
starboard shrouds, and trimmed the sheet on the port tack.
They were steering 275 now, which was 35 degrees to the
west of the course they wanted. But in a few minutes the wind
went further around to the southward and they were able to
come down to 245. Then it died out momentarily and sprang
up again out of the northwest. He carried the genoa around
again. Ten minutes later the wind began to soften once more,
and then died with complete finality. Orpheus slogged forward
a few feet, came to rest, and began to roll heavily in the
trough. He looked around the horizon. In every direction the
surface of the ocean had the slick, hot glare of polished steel.
They’d made less than a mile. It was 12:10 p.m.
* * *
Her face hurt. It was lying on something hard that went up
and down and wove back and forth the way the floor had the
only time in her life she’d ever been drunk, and there was that
same sick feeling in her stomach. Somewhere a long way off
there was an engine sort of noise that seemed to have been
going on forever, and just audible above it, or through it, a
voice was singing. It was an old, very sentimental popular
song, one she hadn’t heard for years, but it was still familiar.
What was it? Oh. “Charmaine.” That was it. She rolled over.
Some powerful light glared beyond her closed eyelids, and she
grasped that it was sunlight. She opened them and squinted
with pain. Just beyond her was a pair of wide and very suntanned
shoulders surmounted by a gold-thatched head. At the
same moment the head turned, still singing, and Hughie
Warriner regarded her with concern, which gave way to
evident relief. He smiled. It was a charming and affectionate
Dead Calm — 56
smile, and there was something almost chiding about it. She
tried to scream, or to move, but could do neither.
The song stopped. “See, you’re all right,” he said. “Now
aren’t you sorry you made me do it?”
Dead Calm — 57
6
John wasn’t here. The paralysis of shock snapped then, and
she screamed. “Where are we? Where are you going? We’ve
got to go back!”
Warriner gave no indication he’d even heard her. She tried
to sit up and was assailed by vertigo. The ocean tilted while
nausea ballooned inside her, and she collapsed, fighting to
keep from being sick. She closed her eyes for an instant to
stop the whirling, and when she opened them Warriner had
turned forward again to look into the compass. He was sitting
in the helmsman’s seat in the back of the cockpit, just beyond
her legs. He reached a hand around and caught her left ankle,
not tightly or roughly, but merely as though to soothe her or
to reassure himself she hadn’t disappeared.
She cringed and tried to scuttle backward, but there was
nowhere to go; behind her was only the sea. She was cut off;
she couldn’t reach the wheel or the ignition switch, or even
the rest of the boat, without getting past him. There was
nothing to hit him with, even if she had the strength.
The hand slid down her ankle and was caressing her bare
foot. He turned around again. “You have such beautiful feet,”
he said. “And women so seldom do. I mean, they do to start
with, but they ruin them. Especially European women.”
She could only stare in horror.
Dead Calm — 58
“In fact, I’ve often wondered if Gauguin didn’t run away to
Polynesia simply because he was revolted by the feet of
European models.” His eyes sought hers in a glance that was
amused and intimate, as though they shared some secret joke.
“Of course it’s silly. It’s just something you say to clods at
cocktail parties.”
Dear God, how did you get through to him? “Listen!” She
made it to a sitting position this time, lurched once as Saracen
rolled, and caught herself with a hand on the lifeline. “Please!
We’ve got to go back! Don’t you understand? Turn around.
Turn. Like this.” She made a lateral motion with her free
hand, as though trying to explain the mechanics of wheelturning
to an idiot or to someone who spoke another
language. She realized immediately this was wrong, but was
too frantic to know how to correct it. She went on, the words
tumbling over each other in her haste. “Let me! Let me take
it!”
“No.” The smile disappeared. He gave a petulant little
shrug, as though she had disappointed him, and faced forward
to stare into the binnacle again.
She turned and looked wildly astern. How far had they
come? At first she couldn’t even see the other boat and felt
herself begin to give way to panic. Then she made it out,
almost hull down on the horizon directly behind them. There
was no chance at all of seeing the dinghy at that distance, and
she didn’t know what had become of John. Except that he
wasn’t here, and they were already nearly three miles away
and going farther with every minute. She was the only chance
he had. She turned back and caught Warriner’s shoulder. “Go
back! We’ve got to go back!”
He brushed her hand off. “Please, Mrs. Ingram, do you have
to shout? You’re being unreasonable again.”
“Un—un—Oh, God!” She tried to calm herself; if she went to
pieces she’d never get through to him. “Unreasonable? Can’t
you understand? My husband’s back there. We can’t go off
and leave him. He’ll drown.”
Warriner dismissed the whole subject of Ingram with an
abstracted wave of the hand. “He won’t drown.”
“But the boat’s sinking—”
Dead Calm — 59
“It probably won’t. Anyway, he wanted to go aboard there,
didn’t he? It’s his own fault.” He turned and looked at her, as
though puzzled by her refusal to grasp so obvious a fact. Then
he went on, as if talking to himself. “My trouble has always
been that I trust people too much. I don’t see their real
motives until too late…”
It was hopeless, she realized then. Communication was
impossible. Then what was left? Try to take the wheel away
from him? Even in her desperation she realized the futility of
that. And if she provoked him to violence again, this time he
might kill her or throw her overboard. It wasn’t fear of being
hurt or even killed that made her rule that out, or reserve it as
a final gamble when everything else had failed, but merely the
simple, monolithic fact that her staying on here and staying
alive represented the only chance they had. She had to try
every other possibility first. But what? Then the answer
occurred to her: she couldn’t make him turn back, but at least
she could stop his going any farther. It was still dead calm,
and there was a good chance it would remain that way for
hours, or even the rest of the day; if she could disable the
engine, John might be able to reach them in the dinghy. But
access to it was below; she had to get down into the cabin.
Would he let her?
She pushed herself to her knees, grasping the lifeline, and
made a tentative move to go past him along the deck on the
starboard side of the cockpit. “I—I feel sick at my stomach,”
she said. “I’ve got to go to the head.”
He gestured toward the rail. “Why not there?”
“I don’t like being sick in public.”
“No, of course not,” he said sympathetically. “I’m sorry. I
didn’t think of that.”
She wasn’t conscious of the utter madness of this
conversation until she was halfway down the ladder, and
wondered if she was losing contact with reality herself. All the
landmarks and reference points of rational existence had been
so suddenly jolted out of position, she couldn’t orient herself.
It was as though they were threatened with destruction by the
blind and impersonal trajectories of some hitherto placid
machine that had run amok through a short circuit in its
wiring. Warriner perhaps didn’t intend any harm to either of
them; they just happened to be in his path. Nor was he
Dead Calm — 60
threatening her with violence or placing her under any
restraint; she was merely powerless to do anything about him.
He couldn’t see down into the cabin from where he was, in
the aft end of the cockpit; once she was down the ladder she
was out of sight. The engine was installed under the cockpit,
and access to the compartment was through a removable
panel in the after bulkhead of the cabin. She turned and was
on the point of lifting the panel out when it occurred to her
she had no idea at all what she was actually going to do.
Disabling the engine had a fine sound to it—but just how did
she disable it, and what was she going to do afterward?
The minute it stopped he would come hurrying down the
ladder to find out what had happened. And even if she’d
succeeded in sabotaging it beyond immediate repair it might
be hours before John got here. It would be some time before
he was sure Saracen had stopped, and it would take at least
an hour to row a dinghy this far. She had to have some line of
retreat, a place to barricade herself where Warriner couldn’t
reach her. The companion hatch itself couldn’t be fastened
from inside. The head? No, the door was too light. Warriner
could smash the panel out of it with one kick. The forward
cabin, that was the answer. The door was heavier and had a
bolt inside. Also there were the cases of stores and the heavy
sailbags to barricade it with.
Just hurry, she thought. She lifted the panel out and was
assailed by sudden fear as the noise level, already high,
increased. Would he notice it? She looked fearfully up at the
hatch, expecting to see it darken. Nothing happened. Where
he was sitting was almost above it; probably the difference in
noise level was too small to be apparent up there. The
compartment was dark, but there was a light switch just
inside the entrance. She flicked it on and leaned in.
The engine had been running at nearly full throttle for a
half-hour, and in addition to its ear-shattering racket the
compartment was filled with the fumes of hot paint and
burning oil. She felt nausea push up into her throat again. The
engine itself was in the center of the small space, with the
starting and lighting batteries on her right and a metal locker
containing spare parts and tools on her left.
She studied it, searching for a vulnerable spot to attack.
Though she had once been a sports-car enthusiast and had for
Dead Calm — 61
a short period in her life owned an agency for one of the
European cars, she knew little more about gasoline engines
than does the average woman. She was aware, however, that
they could be stopped by shutting off either the gasoline
supply or the spark that exploded it. There was a valve in the
small copper line coming from the fuel tank to the connection
on the engine, but closing that would solve nothing. She could
take a hammer from the toolbox and smash the line itself, but
that would let the fuel drain into the bilges and convert the
boat into a potential bomb. Then how about pulling loose a
bunch of wires? That was better, but still not perfect.
Warriner could replace them in less than an hour. Then her
glance fell on the distributor. There was the answer. Smash
that, and the power plant was permanently out of commission.
Then she had a better idea. Why not just remove the cap,
where the wires came out? She could take it into the cabin
with her; the engine couldn’t run without it, and when John
got aboard he could replace it and they’d still have the engine
intact. She’d watched him take it off to clean the contacts and
was certain she knew how to do it. All it required was pulling
out those five wires and releasing the two spring clips on the
sides, and then it lifted right off. But even that would take
longer than the single hammer-blow it would require to smash
it, and if he made it down here before she was locked in he
would simply replace it after he’d taken it away from her. She
paused, undecided, and was about to abandon the idea when
another occurred to her.
How many times had John cautioned her never—no matter
how short of space she was around the galley—to set anything
on the ladder? To the person descending, it was invisible until
he’d stepped on it and fallen. She whirled and reached into
the stowage racks above the sink and brought out three
saucepans. She set them in a row on the next-to-bottom step;
under way, Saracen wasn’t rolling heavily enough to throw
them off within the next few minutes, which was all the time
she needed.
She bent over and crawled into the compartment. With the
metal locker pushing against her back and the bottom of the
cockpit crowding her above, it was difficult to balance herself
against the corkscrew motion of the boat’s stern. Here right
up against the engine the racket was deafening, and she could
Dead Calm — 62
feel herself growing sick again from the fumes. She turned
slightly, so as to be headed outward. Now—
She yanked out the wire in the center of the cap. The roar of
the engine cut off abruptly. She began furiously snatching out
the other four, the ones to the spark plugs. She had three of
them loose and was reaching for the fourth when Saracen
rolled down to port and she lost her balance. She fell over on
the engine, her left forearm against the hot exhaust manifold.
The sudden pain was too much for her already nauseated
stomach. All the strength drained out of her and she
collapsed, vomiting onto the floorboards beside the engine.
Light footsteps sounded in the cockpit pressing against the
top of her head.
Maybe even now there wasn’t time to get out. But she had
to have the cap; she’d never get another chance. She groped
blindly for the last wire and had it in her hand when she was
seized by another spasm of sickness. She tore it loose, still
vomiting, and clawed at the spring clips on the side. The cap
came free. She propelled herself toward the opening, and as
her head emerged she saw Warriner’s bare legs hurrying
down the ladder, above her and to her right. She was cut off;
she’d taken a second too long.
Then his right foot came down on the outer rim of one of the
saucepans. It flew from under him and he landed amid a
metallic crashing at the foot of the ladder. She was out of the
engine compartment now, and if she could get by him before
he got to his feet she might make it. As she shot past he threw
out an arm and caught her ankle. She pulled free but was
spun off balance, and she fell over against the port bunk. He
had rolled over and was scrambling to his feet. She bounced
off the bunk, somehow still clutching the distributor cap, and
flung herself toward the entrance to the forward cabin. She
was in. She slammed the door, but before she could throw the
bolt he hit it from the other side.
It came inward. She had her shoulder against it, but her feet
were slipping along the deck as she was forced back. Without
something to brace herself against, the outcome was
inevitable. She looked behind her and saw the piled sailbags
on the port bunk just beyond her legs. Putting her right foot
up against them, she managed to straighten the leg enough to
lock her knee. It was impossible to force him back, but the
Dead Calm — 63
door wasn’t open enough for him to squeeze through. She
could hear his feet sliding on the deck outside as he tried to
get enough traction to bring his full strength to bear. A minute
went by. She could feel herself growing faint, and her knee
was beginning to tremble.
She still had the distributor cap in her hand and tried
frantically to think of some way to dispose of it. Maybe she
could toss it behind something. No. He knew she had had it
when she ran in here; he’d find it, no matter what she did with
it. But it was made of plastic; maybe if she slammed it down
hard enough it would break. She shifted it to her free right
hand and threw it with the last of her strength against the
planking of the deck. It bounced upward at a slight angle,
caromed off the sailbags, passed under her straining and
almost horizontal body, and came down, spinning, near the
bulkhead, less than a foot from the partially opened door, still
intact. If he reached in he could pick it up.
He had never uttered a word. She could hear only his
labored breathing and the scuffing of his sneakers against the
deck on the other side of the door, and the decreasing sounds
of water going past the hull as Saracen slowed and came to
rest. There was a quality of horror somehow in this very
absence of speech that made her shiver. She couldn’t hold out
much longer; her leg was going to buckle any second.
She threw herself suddenly to the left, releasing the door. It
flew inward, and he shot past her, losing his balance and
falling to the deck between the bunks. She scooped up the
distributor cap and ran through the after cabin toward the
ladder. If she could only make it into the open before he
caught her she could throw it overboard. Her head and
shoulders were above the hatch, and she was drawing back
her arm to throw it, when she was caught from below. It
dribbled out of her hand and into the bottom of the cockpit.
She managed to kick free, ran up the last two steps, and
leaped into the cockpit after it. She had it in her hand when
his weight landed on her from behind and she was slammed
down on the port seat of the cockpit with the hand pinned
beneath her body.
But he made no effort to reach beneath her and pull it out;
his hands were digging at the back and sides of her neck as he
tried to close his fingers around her throat. She hunched her
Dead Calm — 64
shoulders up and pulled her chin down, grinding her face
against the cushion. Then his weight was suddenly gone from
her shoulders and she was lifted and thrown onto her back.
She kicked out with her legs and struck at his face, but his
hands were around her throat now and tightening. The
contorted face and wild eyes were just above hers, and she
closed her own eyes to shut them out.
The struggle was utterly silent except for a faint whining
sound he made deep in his throat and the sibilant whisperings
of their violence against the plastic cushion. She could no
longer breathe, and the sunlight penetrating her closed
eyelids began to fade downward through darkening shades of
pink toward final blackness. But her hand was free now. Just
as consciousness was slipping away she raised it and threw
the distributor cap outward. There was no sound of its striking
the deck, so it must have gone into the water. Or maybe she
was already beyond hearing…
Then, strangely, she was breathing again. The hands were
gone from her throat. She opened her eyes. He had stood up
and was leaning across her, with his hands on the port lifeline,
as though he’d forgotten her. She couldn’t see his face.
She slid cautiously backward, toward the forward end of the
cockpit. He paid no attention. She eased herself upright,
poised to leap toward the hatch, and glanced fearfully once
more in his direction to see if he had turned. This time she
saw his face and understood. She looked outward in the same
direction.
It was the distributor cap. It had landed just off the port
side, and with Saracen now lying at rest on the surface it was
sinking almost straight below them through sunlit water as
clear as gin. And as he had the other time at the bottle, he was
staring down at it with horror and with some sick but
inescapable compulsion as it slipped from side to side and
then began a gentle spiral that would end in the ooze and the
darkness two miles below. The agony of his face was
indescribable. He screamed then and collapsed into the
bottom of the cockpit with his face pressed into the seat
cushion.
She stared, still poised to leap but frozen to the spot. His
head rocked from side to side and he clutched the cockpit
coaming with a grip that corded the muscles of his forearms.
Dead Calm — 65
“No, no, no!” he cried out. “I didn’t do it! I didn’t mean it! It
was her fault!” He began to cry then with a ragged sobbing
that made his whole body shake.
She was able to move at last. She ran down the ladder on
rubbery legs and through the after cabin. After slamming the
door between the two, she threw the bolt and began dragging
cases of canned stores from under the bunks and piling them
in front of it. There were six sailbags. She stacked them
against the door also, wedging the last ones against the
upright pipes of the bunk frame. She was trembling and
drenched with perspiration when she had finished, and
collapsed on the bunk, too weak to move. Her face was
swollen and painful where he had hit her, and there was an
ugly red splotch on the bottom of her left forearm where it
had come in contact with the exhaust manifold. She was
scared, and she was sick with anxiety for John, but for the
moment she was safe. Without an ax to smash the door,
Warriner had little chance of breaking in, and there was no ax
aboard. And until they got a breeze he couldn’t take Saracen
any farther away. All she could do now was wait it out.
Saracen rolled desolately in the trough of the swell. There
was no sound from beyond the door except the normal
creakings, slidings, and minute collisions of shifting objects
always present on a small boat at sea, and Rae might even
have been alone. She tried to make some sense of this thing
that had happened to them, but ran immediately into the
opaque and impenetrable wall of the fact that Warriner was
the only clue to any of it, and Warriner was mad. Where did
you go from a starting point like that?
John had suspected there was something wrong with him. If
only she’d paid more attention and hadn’t waked him up by
starting the engine … Well, there was no use crying about that
now. But what had John found on the other yacht that had
made him burst out of the cabin that way and leap down into
the dinghy? Somebody hurt or sick? But in that case why was
he coming back alone? Wait, she thought, you’re close. What
he found must have been some proof Warriner was lying,
unstable, or dangerous, or all three, and he was rushing back
because you were alone here with him. But what proof?
Warriner had tried to kill her; maybe he’d already killed
somebody else. It was abundantly obvious now he hadn’t been
Dead Calm — 66
chasing her to recover the distributor cap; the chances were
he hadn’t even known she had it. He’d been intent simply on
strangling her because she’d somehow stopped the engine.
And his horror at watching it sink had nothing to do with its
being a part of the engine; he probably hadn’t even
recognized what it was. It was the same as with the bottle: he
was seeing something else, or somebody.
I didn’t do it! … I didn’t mean it! …
Guilt? Terror? Who knew, or could even guess? But the
whole story of the deaths from botulism must have been a lie,
so it was possible something else and equally terrible had
happened. Maybe he was responsible for it— She tensed. He
was coming through the after cabin. She sat up and drew back
on the bunk, waiting for the impact as he slammed into the
door. Would it hold?
Then she grabbed her temples and fought a collapse into
hysteria. He’d knocked—a tentative and discreet rap of the
knuckles—and said forlornly, “Mrs. Ingram?”
You’re not mad, are you, Mama? I didn’t know it would hurt
the cat. Stop it! she thought. You’re beginning to crack up
yourself.
He knocked again. “Mrs. Ingram? Please, I didn’t mean it!
You’ve got to believe me! I—I just lost my head for a minute
because I thought you were against me too. But you’re not,
are you? You couldn’t be. You’re like Estelle. The first minute I
saw you, I could feel you talking to me, the way she did. Mrs.
Ingram, what’s your first name?”
She could only feel of her throat and go on staring at the
door.
“Mrs. Ingram?”
She couldn’t be sure, but she thought he was crying. Then in
a minute he said petulantly, “Well, you were being
unreasonable, you know. It was your own fault.”
He turned the handle of the door and pushed, and when it
failed to open he began to lunge at it in rage, like a child in a
tantrum. She watched the bolt in horror, expecting to see it
torn off, but it continued to hold. “You want to kill me too,
don’t you?” he shouted.
Then, as suddenly as it had commenced, the fury subsided.
His footsteps went away.
Dead Calm — 67
She heard him moving around in the after cabin, and after a
while the sound of hammering. It was impossible to guess
what he was doing, but at least he wasn’t trying to smash
down the door. Would John have decided by now that Saracen
was stopped? Maybe he was already heading for them in the
dinghy. She looked at her watch. It was 9:35. He could
probably row it in an hour, or maybe even a little less.
But suppose something had happened to him back there
when he’d tried to get back aboard? The last she’d seen of
him, just before Warriner hit her, he’d been coming toward
them as hard as he could row, directly in their path. No, you
had to have something to hang onto or you’d go as mad as
Warriner, and faith in John Ingram’s ability to cope with
anything that could happen at sea was the one solid thing in
sight. Even if he’d been run down, he would have got back
aboard the other yacht, and he’d have the dinghy with him.
And if the other yacht were sinking, he’d keep it afloat
somehow—
Her thoughts broke off and she looked around in wonder. It
was the growl of the starter she’d heard. Hadn’t he even
looked at the engine? Didn’t he know the distributor head was
gone? The engine fired then and settled down to a steady
rumble. She heard the clutch engage, and they began to move
ahead.
She slumped forward with her face in her hands and wanted
to give up and cry. She’d never thought to look in the spareparts
box to see if there was another one. She should have
known. John detested engines, but he always said that if you
were going to carry the stinking things around they might as
well be in working condition when you needed them.
Dead Calm — 68
7
He’d acquired his first catboat at the age of twelve, and,
except for two years at the University of Texas on the GI Bill
just after World War II, he’d been around salt water and
around boats ever since, most of his adult life as a
professional. He’d captained a towboat in Mexico, worked on
salvage jobs in half a dozen countries and three oceans,
owned and skippered a charter yacht in the Bahamas, and up
until eighteen months ago operated a shipyard in Puerto Rico.
He’d been in an explosion and fire, and inevitably he’d seen
bad weather and some that was worse, but at the moment he
didn’t believe he’d ever been in a position quite as hopeless as
this.
It was 2:45 p.m. Wearing a diving mask, he was some ten
feet below the surface on Orpheus’s port side, just in under
the turn of her bilge, looking at her from below, and the view
was a chilling one. She’d never make port. And their pumping
and bailing would accomplish nothing except to postpone from
one hour to the next the moment she’d finally give up and go
to the bottom.
When the breeze had stopped, they’d all three returned to
throwing water out of her. Twenty minutes ago, after over an
hour’s furious and unceasing effort, they had lowered the
water level in the main cabin to a depth of around six inches.
Their bailing buckets were coming up less than half full each
time. He’d knocked the others off for a brief rest and
Dead Calm — 69
questioned them. Had they hit anything? Driftwood, or a
submerged object of any kind? In mid-Pacific, this was
admittedly farfetched, but there had to be some reason for all
that water.
It was Mrs. Warriner who supplied most of the answers.
“No,” she said. “If she did, we didn’t feel it.”
“When you were running on power, was there any unusual
vibration?” If they had a damaged propeller or bent shaft she
might have opened up around the stern gland.
Mrs. Warriner shook her head. “No, it was perfectly normal.
Anyway, we haven’t used the engine in over two weeks.”
“We used up all the gas trying to find Clipperton Island,”
Bellew said. “Prince Hughie the Navigator knew where it was,
but somebody kept moving it.”
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