The topping lift probably wouldn’t hold it alone, not a half ton out there on the end of the boom; but if he backed it up with the main halyard and reinforced the halyard fall with this heavier line it should be safe enough. The awning would have to come down. He’d have to memorize the location of everything; it wasn’t going to be easy, having to do it all in the dark, by feel. He looked at his watch; it was a little after six now, and the tide was beginning to ebb off the Bank. A timber creaked as the Dragoon settled a little and began her slow, inevitable list to port. He began cutting the rope lashings to make slings for the ammunition boxes. A cat’s-paw of breeze blew out of the south, ruffling the awning and making it cooler for a few minutes. The sun was low in the west.
Rae Osborne came up the ladder. She looked cooler and much refreshed in spite of the fact that she had no other clothes to change into; her hair was neatly combed now, and her mouth made up. He looked at the handsome face with its spectacular shiner, and grinned. “You look wonderful.”
She touched the puffed eye with her finger tips, and smiled ruefully. “It’s a mess, isn’t it?”
“Well, as shiners go, there’s certainly nothing second-rate about it. It seems to match your personality, somehow.”
“You mean beat-up?”
“No. Colorful. Flamboyant. And undefeated.”
She laughed. “I’d better think about that. I’m not sure but what it sounds like some biddy in a barroom brawl.”
She went below again and returned after a while with a plate of tuna sandwiches and a pitcher of water. They ate facing each other across the bottom of the cockpit while daylight died in a drunken orgy of color and the intermittent sound of Morrison’s gunfire. She gazed westward to the towering and flame-tipped escarpments of cloud beyond the Santaren Channel, and mused, “I know it sounds stupid under the circumstances, but I’m beginning to see what makes people crazy about the sea. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“You’ve never been around boats before?” Ingram asked.
“No. My husband just took the Dragoon in on a business deal; neither of us had ever owned a boat of any kind, or even wanted to. He planned to sell it to get his money out of it, but he died just a few weeks afterward—almost a year ago now. He was killed in the crash of a light plane he and another man were flying out to Lubbock to look at a cattle ranch.”
“What business was he in?” Ingram asked.
“Real estate.” She smiled softly. “Or that’s one way of putting it. Actually he was a speculator. A plunger. It’s a funny thing—he was the gentlest person I’ve ever known and he looked like an absent-minded math teacher in some terribly proper school for young girls, but he was one of the coldest-nerved and most fantastic gamblers you ever saw in your life. He was forty-eight when he was killed, and he’d already made and lost two or three fortunes. Actually, it never made a great deal of difference to me. Beyond a point, piling up money you don’t need seems like a waste of time, especially if you have no children to spend it on or leave it to, and most of the time I wasn’t even sure whether we were rich or in debt. He was away from home so much I had a business of my own, just to have something to do. I never was any good at that social routine. I’d worked most of my life, and women from better backgrounds and expensive schools always made me feel inferior, and I’d get defensive and arrogant and make a fool of myself. I’ve always been crazy about sports cars, so I had a Porsche agency, a little showroom in a shopping center near where we lived. I still have it.”
“Why were you so long trying to sell the Dragoon?” he asked.
“I couldn’t sell it. There was a tax lien on it. When Chris was killed, several deals he had pending fell through, and it developed he was overextended again and pretty shaky financially. On top of that, he’d just got an adverse ruling on an income-tax thing, so the government froze everything until it was paid. I didn’t want it sold at auction at a big loss, so I held on and the lawyers finally got it straightened out after about eight months. There wasn’t a great deal left other than the schooner and the house. Anyway, as soon as it was cleared up—I think it was in March—I came over to Miami to see some yacht brokers about selling her, and that’s when I ran into Patrick Ives. For the first time in thirteen years.” Her voice trailed off, and she stared moodily out across the water.
“That’s when he went aboard?” Ingram asked.
“Yes. Maybe I’d better tell you about him. It’s not very flattering, but since between the two of us we seem to have dragged you into this, you’re entitled to an explanation. I first met him in 1943 when he was an Army Air Force cadet at an airfield near the little town I came from. He was from Washington—the state, I mean. We were practically in flames over each other right from the first, and he wanted me to marry him before he went overseas. I would have, too, except that I still lacked a few months of being eighteen, and my parents put a stop to it. We carried on a torrid correspondence all the time he was in England, and did get married when he was reassigned to an airfield in Louisiana just before the end of the war. When he was discharged, he decided to go back to school. He wanted to study medicine. He’d already had two years at the University of Washington, before he went in the service. So we moved to Seattle. I got a job, and he tried to start over where he’d left off two years before. It just didn’t work out. Maybe we were both too immature, I don’t know. But that quonset-hut, GI-Bill, all-work-and-no-play type of college life, with another six long years of it staring us in the face before he could even hope to graduate from medical school, was just too much for us. We fought a lot, and he began to fail in all his subjects.” She fell silent for a moment. Then she made a weary gesture, and went on. “We split up. I came back to Texas, and we were divorced that summer—1946. I never saw him again, or even heard of him, until the afternoon four months ago when I was flying to Miami to see about selling the Dragoon. He boarded the plane in New Orleans, and took the seat next to mine.
“Those things when you’re very young are apt to be pretty intense, but no bitterness lasts for thirteen years, and after the first shock wore off it was more like a meeting of old friends than anything. It took us all the way to Tampa to get caught up. I told him what I was going to Miami for, and I’ll have to admit it didn’t lose anything in the way I said it: I was running over to see about disposing of my late husband’s yacht. That was a little childish for a woman almost thirty-five years old, but for some reason I seemed to think I had to impress him—maybe because he was so obviously successful himself. But anyway, that’s probably when he began to form the picture of the wealthy widow.
“He told me about himself. He’d got his M.D. from the University of California medical school and had quite an extensive surgical practice in the San Francisco hospitals—specializing in chest and heart surgery. He was also connected with the medical school as a part-time lecturer on surgical techniques, which brought him to the subject of this trip he was on. It seemed he and some scientist from Cal Tech had worked out a new and more simplified type of heart-lung machine for use in operations where the heart had to be by-passed. I didn’t understand any of it, of course, but it sounded very impressive to me. He was demonstrating it at a series of operations that had been scheduled at a number of medical schools. He’d just been at Tulane, and he was on his way to Miami, and he was as tickled as a young boy when he learned I was living in Houston, because he was going to be in Galveston in another week or so, at the University of Texas medical school.