Gulf Coast Girl - Charles Williams(9)

in a white turban. Our eyes met and she started to laugh.
Soap ran down her face. I kissed her and got soap in my
mouth. We held onto each other and strangled with laughter
while the rain rinsed her hair clean. We could never pin down
afterward what had been so funny about it.
When the sun came out we sat in the cockpit with towels,
drying it. It gleamed like freshly burnished silver against the
smooth, tanned skin of her face and shoulders. If I live until
I’m ninety and never see anything beautiful again, they don’t
owe me a thing.
That night when we prepared dinner she changed into the
white dress again, and when she came out of the forward end
of the cabin she had a small bottle of perfume in her hand
and was touching the glass stopper to the lobe of an ear.


She smiled, a little shyly. “I know it’s ridiculous,” she said.
“But it was there in the things I sent aboard—”
“No,” I said. “It’s not ridiculous. On this ship the mate
comes to dinner every night with just a suspicion of Tabu
behind her starboard ear or she’s logged a day’s pay. Put it in
the night order book.”
“Night order book?” she asked, and it was the first time I
had ever seen that particular roguishness in her eyes.
“Things are simplified on ships, aren’t they?”
We were ecstatically happy, and we didn’t care how long it
took us to get into the Yucatan Strait. But twice more I awoke
at night with that strange feeling she was going through
some hell of her own there beside me. She would be lying
perfectly still, staring up at the sky, as rigid and tense as
someone petrified with fear.
I couldn’t get to it. Whatever it was, she never let me come
near it.
Gulf Coast Girl — 168
Sixteen
She liked to swim, and had no exaggerated fear of sharks. I
coached her to get her out of the dog-paddle class, and she
improved tremendously. She was a natural. She was in no
sense an athlete, but then neither are most really hot girl
swimmers. You don’t have to be lumpy-muscled and bony to
get around in water.
We spent hours at it, lots of times even when there was
enough wind to have been under way. This was paradise and
we were so wonderfully alone it was impossible to be
concerned with headway or making a schedule or taking
advantage of every capful of wind. The world between the
Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer was our oyster, and we had
the rest of our lives to savor it. We swam, and we lay side by
side at night looking up at the stars, and we fished and read,
and we dived with the aqualungs.
Diving fascinated her, and she was never afraid of it from
the first. We were over the Northern Shelves in the
beginning, and in three days she was going to the bottom
with me in a shoal spot we found where the water was only
ten fathoms deep. She loved confronting startled schools of
fish—any kind of fish. They were all the same to her, and
actually were nearly all red snapper.
“They look so absurd.” She laughed. “Not really scared, but
just offended, as if you’d done something in very bad taste by
coming down there bothering them.”
Gulf Coast Girl — 169
“Fish expressions are deceptive as hell,” I said. “They’re
probably whistling at you. You do have nice legs.”
She made a face at me. “I wouldn’t know about that. It
seems to me you haven’t mentioned them recently. Not in the
past hour or so.”
“You know why I joke, honey?”

Laughter faded, and the eyes were soft. “Yes. We have to, I
guess, Bill. You get too filled with wonder and you’d just bog
down and go dumb if you couldn’t relieve the pressure with a
little lightness.”
“Maybe we should have been Latins,” I said. “Then we
could be intense and articulate at the same time.” I thought
about that. Then I said, “No. The hell with it. I’d have to
change the name of the boat again, to some brunette
goddess. I’ll struggle along with you the way you are.”
We had a day of good breeze, and worked up into it for 16
hours, running for the Strait. Then it fell again and the
current set us west and north for two days and nights. On the
eighth day after Barclay and Barfield had drowned we were
far out on the northern edge of the Shelves where the
Campeche Bank drops off into the depths.
We took a sight at noon and worked it out. We were at
23.50 North and 88.45 West. When I put it on the chart I saw
we were right on the hundred-fathom curve.
It was hot in the sun and very still, and the immense
pastures of the Gulf heaved gently all around us. A gull sat on
a piece of driftwood off to starboard and stared at us, and a
school of flying fish burst out of the side of a ground swell to
go ricocheting off the next like skipping stones.
She was quieter than usual, and last night late I had roused
once to find her lying awake beside me again.
“What is it, angel?” I’d asked. “Is something bothering
you?”
Her voice had sounded all right, however, when she
replied. “Oh, I was just thinking about us, Bill. I didn’t bring
you much of a dowry, did I?”
“What kind of talk is that?” I asked, puzzled.
“Silly talk,” she said. “Go back to sleep, darling.”
Gulf Coast Girl — 170
I put my head on her breast. There was almost a full moon
now, and it was low in the sky. The boat rocked gently and
she hugged my head to her with sudden, impulsive
fierceness.
“Oh, Bill, Bill, Bill—”
She stowed the sextant in its case now and we went on
deck. A school of porpoises was playing around to port. She
looked at them with quick interest.
“Let’s dive,” she said, “and see if we can watch them from
below.”
I dropped a line over the side to make the aqualungs fast to
when we were ready to come out. I watched her slip her arms
through the straps of one of them. She had torn the bathing
cap the other day and had to throw it away. Her hair was
free, down on her shoulders. She was nude except for that
single wisp of swimsuit and beautifully tanned all over now,
more like some magnificent pagan than ever. Just before we
put on the masks she came close to me and kissed me, hard,
on the mouth with her arms fierce and tight about my neck.
I caught her. “Not many things could make me lose interest
in porpoises,” I said, “but—”
She slipped away from me, adjusted the mask, and slid into
the water. I followed her.
The porpoises were gone, of course, by the time we got out
there. We came back and swam just below the surface in the
shadow of the Freya, looking the hull over again to see if we’d
begun to collect any marine growth. It was cool and pleasant,
and I loved watching the silvery flow of hair about her head
as she swam. A few minutes later I saw a small shovel-nosed
shark off to one side and below, and swam down to watch
him. He retreated, going deeper. I looked back over my
shoulder, and she was still under the boat.
I sounded again, and the shark kept his distance. He was
quite small, and utterly harmless. I swam down a little more,
and I could still see him circling below me in the clear blue
water, which grew darker as it fell away into the depths. I
was down about a hundred feet.
A school of some kind of small fish I had never seen before
swam by me in a big circle and I watched them idly, enjoying
the relaxation of lying suspended in the water. It must have
Gulf Coast Girl — 171
been several minutes later that I turned and looked above
and behind me to be sure she was still under the boat. I saw
the boat, all right, but she wasn’t there.
I looked straight above, toward the ground-glass screen of
the surface. She was nowhere in sight. I began to be uneasy.
But maybe she had gone back aboard for some reason. I was
turning to look behind me again when a flash of silver caught
the corners of my eyes at the edge of the mask. I froze with
horror. She was at least a hundred feet below me, going
straight down.
I pushed my feet up and sounded vertically, pulling myself
down so fast I could feel the pressure clamp on my head like
a vise. I tore at the water. I gained on her, but the depths
were gaining on us both. It was terrible, not being able to call
out to her. She was swimming straight down. I could see her
legs kicking, and the silvery undulation of her hair. The
squeeze was beginning. I was growing drunk and the water
was darker all about me. She was down past 300 feet, not
swimming now, turning a little, falling into the infinite and
darkening blue below me. I could never reach her because
she was going into that terrible wall of pressure faster than I
could gain on her. Maybe I imagined it, or it was a trick of the
waning light, but I thought I saw her lift one arm and beckon
just as she faded into the depths. I closed my eyes to shut it
out. I clamped them shut, and it was on the backs of my
eyelids like a motion picture screen. It’s there yet.
* * *
It must have been pressure that drove me out—pressure and
training, because I remembered nothing of it at all. After a
while I was conscious of being on my knees in the cockpit of
the boat with my forehead on my arms on one of the seats,
praying. I hadn’t had an identifiable religion for years and
had never believed in immortality, but I was asking
Somebody to be good to her.
“—be gentle with her. Take care of her. Please, please,
please, be gentle with her—”
The sun beat down on my back and water dripped off me.
After a while I stopped, and for the first time I realized I had
been praying aloud because when my voice ceased I began
hearing the silence. The whole boat was drenched with
Gulf Coast Girl — 172
silence. There was an emptiness about it you could actually
feel. It pressed in on me. I went down in the cabin and it
drove me back on deck. I sat on one of the cockpit seats with
my face in my hands, still numb with shock and only half
aware of what I was doing. Less than an hour ago she had
been right here, here in the cockpit, alive, warm, lovely,
brilliant, thrilling to touch and look at.
That was it, I thought. She was here all about it; not a
million miles away, but right here, offset only by a thin,
transparent sheet of time one hour thick. Why couldn’t you
reach through an hour’s time the way you could through a
foot’s space? What was time but a ball of mud spinning on its
axis? Time? Her watch down there in the cabin was set on
90th meridian, Central Standard Time. The chronometer
within three feet of it in space was six hours away on
Greenwich, zero meridian time. The local apparent time
where we were ourselves was 88th meridian. Time? I wanted
to cry out. Offset slices of time lay side by side here like
laminations of plywood and she was forever unreachable
because she was on the other side of one thin, unshatterable
pane of it.
I realized I wasn’t completely rational, and tried to get a
grip on myself.
What had happened? How had it happened? I’d told her,
warned her over and over about depth and the awful things
pressure could do. She’d been above me, right there under
the boat. Maybe that was it. She must have been too near the
surface, under the stern maybe, and had been hit on the head
by the rudder or propeller as it slid off a passing swell. I
stopped. No. She hadn’t been falling, except at the very end.
She’d been swimming down. I could swear it. I saw the long
legs kicking, the way I had taught her.
But maybe she had been dazed by the blow and didn’t know
which way she was swimming. Or she could have been
knocked out momentarily and settled beyond any distance
she’d ever been before and had been seized by drunkenness,
the rapture of the depths, brought on by breathing air at too
great pressure. When I saw her she’d been at least 200 feet
down, and she’d never been below sixty before.
Then I stopped and raised my head and stared unseeingly
out across the water. No. She wouldn’t have. It was
Gulf Coast Girl — 173
unthinkable. Why would she? She was happy, wasn’t she?
Wildly, deliriously happy, as I had been. Of course she was. It
was apparent in every smile, every laugh, every word she
said, every gesture of love.
But I was remembering now. I was thinking of those times I
awoke to find her rigid and tense, staring into the darkness
beside me. Those times I’d had that feeling she was being
tormented in some recess of her mind she’d never let me
near. What about the way she had kissed me, suddenly and
fiercely, just before we’d gone over the side?
Was it “Macaulay? Of course it wasn’t. She wasn’t in love
with him. And he’d betrayed her. He’d lied to her, and
double-crossed her. The very fact of her trying to find excuses
for him only showed him up for what he was. She didn’t owe
him anything. She’d paid it all. She’d even stayed and tried to
save him after she knew what he had done, stayed at her own
danger.

I didn’t bring you much of a dowry, did I?
I sat up straight, feeling sick. There it was. That was it. I
had failed her. I could see all the clues, now that it was
forever too late.
“I’ve been doing this a little longer than you have,” she’d
said. “There is no escape.”
She’d already had too much of being hunted, with
Macaulay, and I’d failed in trying to show her we could get
away. I remembered the way she had looked at me when I
was showing her on the chart, the places we’d go, the things
we’d do. She’d been like someone listening to the babbling of
a child. She didn’t believe it. She wanted to, and she tried,
and she pretended to, but in the bottom of her heart she
couldn’t. There were too many of them after us now. She and
Macaulay had never been able to get clear away from
Barclay’s crowd, and now we had not only them but the
police.
We were doomed, she thought, and she blamed herself for
it. She’d tried to keep it from me, to give us what time there
was, but in the end it was too much for her. And I’d been too
blind and stupid to realize she was being tortured by it. Oh,
God, if I’d only been able to show her, to make her
understand we could escape! Just one more chance, now that
I knew what it was. Please. Please. The whole world was
Gulf Coast Girl — 174
before her, and I let her kill herself. It was agony. I couldn’t
sit still. I stared down into the water where she had gone. The
sloop rolled. I forced myself away from the rail.
“No,” I cried aloud. She hadn’t done it deliberately. It was
an accident. Nobody could have been outwardly as happy as
she had been and be tortured by something like that at the
same time. She had been happy. It was an accident.
“It was an accident,” I cried out wildly. “An accident.”
But she’d been swimming down.
The sloop rolled. The silence screamed.
I went below. She came at me from everywhere at once. I
was drowned in her. Everything was saturated with her.
She’d touched this, she’d stood there. She came from behind
the curtain in a white dress dabbing at the lobe of an ear with
the glass stopper of a perfume bottle. “I know it’s ridiculous
—” she said. The ghost of the perfume was still there. It was
all over the cabin. The mattress and pillow were back on the
bunk where they were stowed during the day, and the
perfume was on the pillow where her head had lain and there
was one long, shimmering, ash-blond hair. I knelt beside the
bunk and pressed my face into the pillow, holding it with my
arms.
“Swede,” I said. “Swede—Swede—Swede—”
I knew the danger of it. It was morbid. I stopped.
The sloop rolled. The silence rose and screamed.
The sun went down. It was night. I couldn’t sleep. When I
closed my eyes the picture was there on the backs of my
eyelids, the infinite blue and that last flash of silver,
beckoning as it faded.
I’ve got to quit seeing it, I thought. I’ve got to. I’ve got to.
The boat rocked. There was no wind.
At dawn I took star sights and worked them out because I
had to have something to do. The current had set me 18 miles
to the northwest. I started the engine and ran back. I wasn’t
sure why, except that 23.50 North, 88.45 West was a place. It
had existence. It was fixed. Nothing else had reality. I shot
the sun at noon and plotted my position. I was at 23.46 North,
88.44 West. I had missed it four miles. I was too far south.
Gulf Coast Girl — 175
“Well,” I said reasonably, “it’s all right. I knew that wasn’t
the place, anyway.”
I stopped. I’d said it aloud. I looked out across the heaving,
trackless miles of water. I knew that wasn’t the place. I went
below and looked at myself in the mirror.
It was night. It was day. It was night again. In the day there
was sun and at night on the back of my eyelids she was a
flash of silver, falling through blue.
Once I went to sleep. She fell like poured quicksilver
through a cloud, but I flew down and caught her. I took her
by the arm and turned her around and kissed her and we
went on falling through the cloud, but now the color was
changing from blue to rose. We clung together.
“You didn’t let me explain,” I said. “You’ve got to listen. I
can’t live without you, Swede. I didn’t make you understand
the first time. Give me another chance—”
“Come with me,” she said. “We’ll live in raptures.”
I awoke and somebody was screaming. I shut my mouth and
it stopped.
The current set me to the north and west. I ran back. I
drifted. I ran back. I used up all the fuel and could beat my
way back only when there was wind. I took star sights at
dawn. I shot the sun at noon. I took star sights at dusk. None
of them ever worked out exactly on 23.50 North, 88.45 West.
I was always off a mile one way or three miles another.
I ran out on deck and looked across the miles of water
glittering under the sun. Then the whole thing came to me at
once. It was Macaulay. He’d been right all the time. He was
the only one of us who was sane. And I’d been stupid enough
to think he was mad. I, with my smug superiority and my
cheap little bag of tricks like spherical trigonometry and
azimuths and sun lines and hour angles and bearings from
fixed points, having the effrontery to say a man was crazy
because he thought he could go back and find something he’d
lost in an ocean. Of course he could go back and find it. The
whole thing was absurdly simple. It didn’t even take thirdgrade
arithmetic.
When you got to the spot, you’d know. It was as simple as
that.
Gulf Coast Girl — 176
I looked off to starboard. A seagull was sitting on a piece of
driftwood.
That was it. That was the place.
I remembered. There had been a seagull sitting on a piece
of driftwood just before we dived.
“Nice seagull,” I said, moving softly. “Pretty seagull. Don’t
go away. I’ll bring you some bread crumbs. Don’t fly away.”
When I came back on deck he was still sitting on the piece
of wood. “Nice seagull,” I said. I threw the bread crumbs. He
flew away. I began to cry.
I threw some more. Maybe he would come back and mark
the place again. He had to come back because the other piece
of driftwood had a seagull on it. I could see her. She was
beckoning, a flash of silver falling into blue.
“Swede, angel,” I said. “I didn’t make you understand. We
can escape.”
I began to feel weak. I hadn’t eaten anything for a long
time. I ran a hand across my face, and felt shaky all over,
waiting for the seagull to come back.
Something heavy was on my shoulders. I felt the straps
across my chest. I was wearing the aqualung. That was what
I’d gone after.
I screamed.
I tore it off and ran below. I fell into a bunk and lay there,
shaking. My mind was clear again. I covered my face with my
hands.
Gulf Coast Girl — 177
Seventeen
It’s all past. I’m rational again, but it scares me to think how
near the edge I was a week ago. The whole thing was morbid
and neurotic, and it almost cost me my life. I’m ashamed, and
she would have been ashamed of me.
The sense of loss is no less terrible than it was, but I can
accept it now and go on, the way you’re supposed to. Instead
of lacerating myself with all that morbid what-might-havebeen
I try to remind myself that we did have eight days and
that there are millions of people who’ve lived out their entire
lives without one hour of what we knew.
Writing it down has helped. What I wanted to do was see it
all in one piece, and I did, and I think I see now that she
couldn’t have done it deliberately. She was happy. Right to
the end. The end was an accident. It had to be.
I’m going on to the Caribbean, the way we had planned.
There is a little wind now. I’ve been steadily under way for
two days. After I regained my senses there was no wind for a
long time and I continued drifting to the westward, but I’ve
regained nearly all that on my way into the Yucatan Strait.
My sight at noon today put me eight miles northwest of the
spot she died. It’s now one p.m., and if the wind holds steady
I should pass somewhere over 23.50 North, 88.45 West just
at four p.m.
Gulf Coast Girl — 178
I don’t know any of the service for burial at sea, and there’s
no Bible aboard so I can’t do much, but I do intend to drop
something of hers just to mark her grave. That white dress I
liked so well, I think. I’ll weight it.
* * *
I’ve just lashed the tiller again and come back below. It’s 3:30
now, and the breeze is holding on, what there is of it. I don’t
think I’m logging more than two knots, but at least I’m on my
way and all the sickness has ended. It’s good to be
clearheaded and well again. I still don’t understand why they
had to take her away from me, but maybe you’re not
supposed to understand it. Maybe you’re only supposed to
learn to live with it.
I went to get the white dress ready, but while I was in her
things I found the little flask of perfume. It would be much
more appropriate; I don’t know why I didn’t think of it in the
first place. There’s something personal about it. It’s so
completely hers. It has a French name I’m not familiar with,
and I never knew anyone else who used it.
It’s here on the chart table where I’m writing. I removed
the glass stopper and held it under my nose for an instant,
and in replacing it I spilled a drop on the chart under this
book. It’s amazing how one drop of something so delicate
could invade a whole compartment. It must be very
expensive.
Of course, when I drop it the chances are I won’t be within
a mile of the place she died, but she’ll understand. Navigation
is never that exact. In the final analysis it’s only a human
being measuring something with an instrument designed by
another human being, and as such is subject to human error,
however small. That’s one thing that scares me about the way
I was—thinking, like Macaulay, that you could go back to a
place on the ocean where you’d lost something. He was mad,
of course, and I was very near to madness myself.
She had a habit of sometimes coming up behind me when I
was working over the chart table like this and drawing her
finger tips very softly up the back of my neck. It was a
delicious, shivery sensation that made my whole back tingle,
and then I would smell the good, clean, salt-water-and-sun
smell of her and that faint suggestion of perfume, and I’d turn
Gulf Coast Girl — 179
and the gray eyes would be laughing at me very near to mine
because she was so tall, and silvery hair would be brushing
shoulders as smooth as satin and beautifully tanned, and then
we would look squarely into each other’s eyes and the teasing
and that always precarious veneer of lightness would blow up
in our faces.
“That’s not fair,” she would whisper shakily just under my
lips. “You’re cheating.”
That’s just the way it always began, with that same
sensation of finger tips being drawn ever so gently up the
back of the neck, and before I turned I would be conscious of
the fragrance of you. Remember?
Who am I to say Macaulay wasn’t right, after all? But, no.
The whole thing is absurd. Science is one thing and madness
is another, and Macaulay was mad. But, still—
You never understood. We can escape, darling. Give me
another chance to show you. Let me tell you. We’ll go to all
those places. They’ll never catch us. Antigua—Barbados—
Martinique— The trades blow in the afternoons and the
nights will almost make you drunk. We’ll look up at the stars.
Swede. You’re everywhere— That wasn’t the place the
other time. I know it now, because the seagull flew away. But
I’ll find it. I’ll tell you.
I can close my eyes and see the whole thing—the blue, and
that last, haunting flash of silver, gesturing as it died.
It was beckoning. Toward the rapture. The rapture . . .
Gulf Coast Girl — 180
Fowey Rocks Abeam
The master of the Joseph H. Hallock closed the journal. The
poor devil, he thought. The poor, tortured devil. Four o’clock
—and we raised the sloop a little after five.
He sat for a moment, thinking with that vaguely puzzled
frown on his face again. It was late, after 2 a.m. and very
quiet in the dim seclusion of his office.
It was odd, he thought, still trying to come to grips with the
disturbing factor, that it should have been the girl who
realized there was no escape for them in that boat. Or any
boat. It should have been Manning. It was something not
likely to be known except by shipmasters and persons who
had cruised on their own craft—and Manning had said he had
cruised the Caribbean once for eight months.
Changing the name of the sloop was farcical. Painting out
what was lettered on the stern didn’t alter the identity of any
kind of seagoing craft. There were papers. And more papers.
It was as futile as writing your own name on a borrowed
passport. Manning should have known that, as he should have
known it took about ten pounds of paperwork and red tape to
enter any foreign port in the world with a boat, and that
included fishing villages. They all had port authorities, and
they all demanded consular clearances from the last port of
call, bills of health from the last port, registry certificate,
customs lists, crew lists, and so on, ad infinitum, and in the
case of pleasure craft they probably required passports and
Gulf Coast Girl — 181
visas for everybody aboard. They didn’t have a prayer of a
chance of getting away with something like that, and
Manning should have been the first to know it. Not the girl.
But from the evidence of the journal, Manning was certainly
no utter fool, and not particularly given to wishful thinking.
He appeared to be quite intelligent, in fact. Then was it sheer
desperation, knowing there was no escape for them in the
States with the police and a gang of criminals looking for
them? Of course, the question was academic, since they had
both died before they’d had a chance to flee anywhere, but
the whole thing persisted in bothering him. And there was
something else that nibbled at the edge of his mind.
He changed into pajamas and climbed into his bunk. He
turned out the reading lamp on the bulkhead above his
pillow, still puzzling over it. Then he sat upright. “I’ll be
damned,” he said softly. “I’ll just be damned. It would be
perfect.”
Just Manning? he wondered. Or both of them? He hoped it
was both of them.
* * *
It was sunset again, two days after they had taken the Freya
in tow. The Joseph H. Hallock. was waddling, full-bellied, up
the coast of Florida just south of Fowey Rocks. She was well
inshore from the main axis of the Stream, since they had
made arrangements by radio to have a Coast Guard boat
meet them off Miami and take the Freya off their hands. Or,
at least, that was the master’s excuse to Mr. Davidson, the
mate. He felt, actually, a little like Conrad’s master in The
Secret Sharer, a story he was sure Manning had enjoyed.
He was on the bridge now with Mr. Davidson, who was
waiting to catch Fowey Rocks light in the pelorus as it came
abeam, to complete his four-point bearing. The master
himself was staring astern in the afterglow where the Freya
rode easily at the end of her long towline. He had been
watching her as they passed each of the keys during the day,
but this was the closest they would come inshore until they
were off Miami itself and the Coast Guard came out to get
her.
When you resolved the contradiction and acknowledged
that Manning couldn’t possibly have believed any of that
Gulf Coast Girl — 182
moonlit dream about escape to the tropics in a boat, he
mused, what did you have left? You had left the twin facts
that Manning was a writer, and that he was trying to save
himself and that girl he was so much in love with.
They had nowhere to go, the girl had said. Nowhere to go,
that is, as long as they were being sought by a gang of
criminals and also by the police. But if they weren’t being
actively sought by anyone, they could come back to their own
country, where they would attract less attention than
anywhere else on earth. And they would no longer be sought
if everyone believed them dead.
There could be little doubt they’d be given up as dead. Not
many people would have the specialized knowledge to cause
them to wonder at that contradiction in Manning’s story. And
certainly the facts were convincing enough. The boat was
only 36 feet long, was on the open sea, and had been
searched by three men. The entire area had been searched by
the ship itself, and there had been no survivors and no other
boat. The sloop had been under way, and its dinghy was still
there on the cabin. The last person aboard had disappeared
less than an hour before, because the coffee was still warm,
and the sloop was nearly 150 miles from the nearest land.
And the clinching argument, the master thought, was that
eighty-three thousand dollars lying there on the settee in its
satchel. In a world where money mattered above everything,
who would believe two people would deliberately and
unhesitatingly give away an amount like that just to have
each other for the rest of their lives? It was unanswerable, he
thought, and he loved them both.
He wondered if they had found the plane. It was rather
unlikely, he thought. The whole story was probably true
except the ending. It almost had to be, for the benefit of the
rest of that gang, who knew everything prior to the actual
departure of the boat from Sanport. And if the circumstances
of the plane crash were as Manning had set forth, finding it
was obviously impossible.
But I don’t know any of this, he thought. I’m only
theorizing. I don’t really want to know, absolutely and finally,
because I’d be obligated to report it. They hadn’t committed
any real crime, unless it was a crime to defend oneself, and
he hoped they got away with it.
Gulf Coast Girl — 183
Mr. Davidson came out of the chartroom. “Fowey Rocks
abeam at seven-oh-three, Cap,” he said. “Seven miles off.
Pretty close in, for northbound.”
“Just keep a good lookout for fishermen and southbound
tankers,” the master replied. “We’ll haul out as soon as we
drop our tow.”
Then he saw what he had been watching for, astern and
slightly inshore from the Freya. It could be driftwood, or it
could be a head, or two heads. He peered aft in the gathering
twilight, and almost raised the glasses.
No, he thought reluctantly; if I know, I have to report it.
But nobody is interested in the unverified vaporings of a
sentimental old man.
He wondered what Mr. Davidson would think of all this
moonshine. The mate was a good man, who knew his job, and
he had searched the sloop thoroughly. But being a sound and
practical seafaring man not given to foolishness, he had,
understandably, not bothered to look under it. It would have
been easy for them to ditch the diving gear and climb back
aboard on the offboard side just before the towline tightened.
They would make it ashore without any trouble, with the
life belts. And they probably had enough money to buy some
clothes to replace their bathing suits. Not that they would be
likely to attract any attention in Florida, however, if they
went around in their bathing attire for years.
But they were drifting back rapidly. Would he have to lift
the glasses to satisfy himself? Then the objects separated
momentarily for an instant before they merged again as one.
And one of them had been definitely lighter in color than the
other. The master sighed.
“Bon voyage,” he said softly. He turned and went into the
chartroom with the glasses still swinging from his neck.
Gulf Coast Girl — 184