Sudden Storm by Diane Carey

Author:Diane Carey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590773758
Publisher: M. Evans & Company

Chapter Ten

THE NIGHT WAS treed with mastheads. Cool spring wind off the Atlantic left an extra measure of chill in its salty wake. Old South Wharf was its own kind of hinterland—separated, surrounded by an expanse of water, reaching its long wooden arms out into that vastness as though to embrace the sea that nourished it. In the obliqueness of night, every ship docked looked derelict. Rigging buzzed and whistled as the breeze twisted through the ropes, hulls creaked and moaned, rails bumped the pilings, bowsprits swayed slowly back and forth, deckhouses were overshadowed by the bases of big mainmasts, and not a living soul walked on any deck.

There didn’t seem to be anyone there at all, not at all. If there had been just the slightest glow of a lamp inside a wheelhouse. a shuffle of footsteps inside a fo’c’sle, a whiff of beans cooking in a galley—anything would have been comforting. But tonight the wharf was a graveyard. The only sound was that of waves lapping at the pilings. There was no Jake, there was no Pollock. There was no one.

Abbey scrutinized every ship and boat that looked even remotely familiar, toying with the idea that the boat where she’d seen Jake lurking about might have been moved here for some reason. But to someone who could tell cows apart at a glance, boats all look pretty much the same.

All this would have been disappointing but acceptable had Abbey not also been awash with the feeling that someone was following her, watching her. The wharf appeared completely abandoned, yet there were ghosts. These sleeping ships had eyes. The sensation prevented her from calling out to Jake, though she started to several times, only to swallow her words without uttering a sound. It made her tread lightly on the dock planks, not letting her boot heels clack, and she flinched every time the wood groaned under her weight.

She walked, slowly, all the way to the end of Old South Wharf, scrutinizing every ship as much as was possible without boarding any of them. Some were large barks and brigs, and she couldn’t see over the rails. Others were small schooners and even smaller sloops and sandbaggers, all dark, all uninhabited.

A sense of futility struck her about what she was really doing out here. What had she hoped to accomplish? In the hours that had passed since Pollock and Jake had disappeared on Nantucket’s quiet Colonial streets, they could have gone anywhere on the island, even have left Nantucket entirely. And then there was the question of what she would even say to him about all this.

A terrible aching began in the pit of her stomach and moved outward to her limbs. Her arms quaked to hold him as they had expected to, her legs throbbed with the want. They’d been promised something, and they still craved it. Somehow she had been foolish enough to convince herself—if shallowly—that if she could just find him, all would fall into place. She

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