Crime Novels by Geoffrey O'Brien

Author:Geoffrey O'Brien
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2023-02-03T02:50:51+00:00

15

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INGRAM’S EYES were bleak as he looked down into the fading light of the main cabin. If you had any talent for kidding yourself, he thought, now would be a good time to break it out. With the two of them bailing and Mrs. Warriner at the pump, the water had gained several inches in the past half-hour. They must have lost whole planks off her outer skin in that squall.

He turned and searched the emptiness of the sea down to the southwest and then glanced at his watch. It was 6:50. He dropped the bucket on the deck and went back to the others. “Knock off a minute.”

Bellew looked at him inquiringly. Mrs. Warriner straightened and pushed damp hair back from a face deeply lined with fatigue. “You mean we’re gaining on it?”

He shook his head. “No. We’re not even keeping up with it. But a quarter of an hour one way or the other’s not going to make any difference, and before it gets too dark to see I want to have one more look around from the masthead.”

He slung the glasses around his neck and shackled the sling to the main halyard again. He climbed atop the boom and stepped into the sling with his lifeline around the mast. “Haul away,” he ordered. In the confused sea left behind by the squall, Orpheus was wallowing even worse than before, but he managed the tricky business of getting past the spreaders without accident. When he was up just short of the masthead light, he called down, “That’ll do. Make fast.”

They were lying on a southerly heading at the moment. Legs locked against the dizzying swing of the mast, he looked around him. In the east the blue was already beginning to darken with the coming of night, while off to starboard the sun had dropped over the horizon and the western sky was aflame. It was impossible to escape entirely the beauty of it or to seal the mind against all of memory’s infiltration, and he was glad he was up here where they couldn’t see his face. Then he put the glasses to his eyes and began a cold and methodical search of the horizon to the southwest, fighting the lunging of the mast. He moved on into the south, and around to the east, where the light was beginning to fade. Nothing. Still nothing . . .

Where was she now? Was she still alive? The glasses began to shake. He lowered them and closed his eyes. The feeling passed in a moment, and he had control of himself again. He raised the glasses and came back, very slowly, across the whole area he had searched before, and then on into the dying fire and the wine-red sea of the west. He stopped abruptly. Something came up into his throat, and he swallowed. He tried to swing the glasses back, but for an instant he couldn’t. He was afraid to look again.

All right, he thought savagely; maybe you should have sent one of the men.

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