Five Passengers From Lisbon by Mignon G. Eberhart

Author:Mignon G. Eberhart [Eberhart, Mignon G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780783883496
Amazon: B01KUGU6Q6
Goodreads: 1869791
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Published: 1946-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

11

The foghorn stopped. The patient in the red bathrobe had, in a swift second or two, come nearer, and Marcia turned and ran.

She screamed, too, without intending to do so, but no one could hear, for the foghorn started again. Waves of sound, lost and despairing and lonely, shook the ship and echoed from the fog drowning her voice, submerging all existence like a nightmare in its own confusion.

But it was not really a nightmare. She reached a companionway and whirled into the lighted ship. Two nurses in smart little caps seemed to float out of the lights. They said things to her and instantly there were people and voices everywhere.

The scene dissolved and shifted, again like a dream. She was in a small office. She was in an armchair with chintz cushions. A metal filing cabinet stood in a corner. A nurse with a captain’s bars on her collar was beside her, saying: “Now, now, it’s all right. Now, now...”

But it wasn’t all right, because someone came to the door and opened it a few inches and whispered to the nurse. Marcia watched her pretty young face lose its color, turn pinched and white. She cried: “Who was it? It can’t be! Murder...”

The pale-gray walls had photographs upon them. Between the curtained ports on a bracket was a small green pot of ivy. Beyond the open door was the nurse’s stateroom, its high bunk neat and flat under a blue cover. The whispers at the door stopped. The young nurse closed the door and went to sit at the desk, as if the position reinforced her. She said stiffly: “It’s true. He was one of the seamen, Manuel Para. He was in the lifeboat with you.”

She looked at Marcia and, after a moment, said: “You are cold. I’ll get you something hot.”

But instead she went to the telephone on the wall above the desk. Again Marcia’s whole consciousness seemed to reach out for physical details, small and reassuring. She watched the nurse set an arrow at a number on the face of the telephone as gratefully as if the nurse’s action, as if the cheerful neat little office had the power to deny the dreadful disorder on the deck outside, amid the wet veils of fog, with the desolate, lost sound of the foghorn drowning all creation in its own despair.

The nurse turned from the telephone. “He already knew. He says to check the wards. I have to go. I’ll send someone to you.” Suddenly she was gone.

Why was Manuel Para murdered?

Marcia closed her eyes and immediately it was as if she were in the pitching little lifeboat again, going down, down, down into darkness and destruction, with a dead man in the boat, with Manuel Para and the other seaman in the boat, with herself and Daisy Belle, Gili and Luther and Mickey dim shapes in the night, huddled together. Held inexorably together by the storm as, now, they were held inexorably together by murder.

A long time must have passed when the door opened at last, and it was Josh Morgan.

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