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 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 . . .
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 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