“I want to do some shopping,” she said to Ingram. “Take my suitcase and the binoculars, and reserve a room for me. I’ll be along later.”
After he’d shaved and showered he ate a solitary dinner in the patio near the pool. He didn’t see her anywhere. He crossed the road to the Yacht Haven; none of the skippers he knew were around, so he walked downtown, driven by restlessness, and had several bottles of beer in the Carlton House bar. You’re getting old, he told himself; you’ve been too many places for too many forgotten reasons, and now you’re going around again. Remembering the same place offset in different layers of time makes it too easy to count the years in between and wonder where they went. You wake up in the morning and they’re speaking Spanish outside your window, so it could be Mexico again, and you remember lightering bananas down the Grijalva River in a wheezy gasoline-powered tug with a string of cranky barges and the goofy invincibility of youth, and the salvage job off the Panuco River bar below Tampico when the tanker piled up on the south jetty because the skipper wouldn’t wait for a pilot and didn’t know about the bad southerly set across the entrance during a norther, and then you realize the two memories are eleven years apart and somehow they’ve shoved a whole war, several other countries, and a good deal of the western Pacific in between. And Nassau . . .
That had been the good time. Seven years of it, with Frances and the Canción. He’d met Frances in 1948 when she’d been one of a party of five Miami schoolteachers who’d chartered the Canción for a week’s trip to Eleuthera. They were married that same year, and lived aboard the ketch as skipper and mate in a very special and private world of their own happiness while carrying charters along the New England coast in summer and around the Bahamas in winter—until 1955. She’d flown home to Seattle to visit her mother, and was going to drive back to Chicago with friends to take the plane down to Miami. Everything had seemed to run down and stop then, on that endless bright November afternoon in the Berry Islands with the wind blowing blue and clean from the north, when he got the word by radio. She’d been killed in an automobile accident at a place called Manhattan, Montana. While he stood there holding the handset of the radiotelephone in his hand waiting for the numbness to wear off and the thing to begin to get to him wherever it was going to start, it seemed the only thing he could think of was that if he could only isolate it and pin it down there must be a question in here somewhere for the boys who could always explain everything. After all the places he’d been in the world, the only thing he’d ever been handed that he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to handle had happened to him in a place he’d never even heard of.
You’ve had too much beer, he thought, or you think too much when you drink. He left the bar and walked back, and it was after eleven when he came into the lobby of the Pilot House. The girl at the desk said Mrs. Osborne had tried to call him several times in the past hour. “Thank you,” he said. He went on up to his room, looked at the telephone, and shrugged. The hell with Mrs. Osborne; he was going to bed. While he was unbuttoning his shirt, the telephone rang. He ignored it until the third ring, when it occurred to him the girl would have told her he was in now. He picked it up.
“I want to talk to you,” she said. Her voice sounded blurred, and the words tended to run together. “I was just going to bed.”
“At eleven o’clock? Do you get a merit badge or something?”
“Can’t it wait till morning?”
“No. Come over to my room. Or I’ll come over there.”
Stoned, he thought. He’d better humor her, or she’d be banging on the door. “All right.” He put the instrument back on the cradle and went down the hall.
4
The door was ajar. When he knocked, she called out, “Come on in.” He stepped inside. She had on a blue dressing gown and was sitting on the studio couch with her stockinged feet stretched out on the coffee table in front of it. Beside her feet there were a bottle of Bacardi about two-thirds full, two or three opened bottles of Coca-Cola, a pitcher of ice, and a paperback mystery novel. She had a glass in her hand.
She regarded him solemnly, and sniffed. “It’s all right to close the door. You can always scream.”
He was aware for the first time that she had a definite southern accent. Perhaps he’d heard it before but it just hadn’t registered; he was a Texan too, and, although he’d been away so long that he’d lost all trace of it himself, he didn’t always notice it in others when he heard it. She didn’t appear to be outstandingly drunk, aside from the solemnity. The flamboyant mop of tawny hair was all in place, and her mouth nicely made up. But you never knew. There might possibly be other things in the world more unpredictable than a woman with too much to drink, but he’d never run into any of them. He wondered, without caring particularly, if she hit it this hard all the time. It’d be a shame. She was still a fine figure of a woman, but she must be between thirty and thirty-five, and at that age they didn’t stay in there long against the sauce without being marked.
“You don’t have to look so smug,” she said. “I’m perfectly aware of it.”
“What?”
“That my feet are on the coffee table.”
“Los pies de la Señora Osborne están en la mesa,” he said, with a parrot-like intonation.
She frowned. “What’s that mean?”
“The feet of Mrs. Osborne are on the table. I don’t know—it just sounded like one of those phrase-book deals. Would it be all right if we talked about your feet in the morning?”
“Captain, I have a feeling that you don’t entirely approve of me. Do you?”
“I hadn’t given it any thought,” he said. “Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters. Don’t you realize I might slash my wrists?”
He said nothing, wondering if two adults could get into a more asinine conversation. She probably wasn’t drunk enough to throw things, so maybe after she got a little of it out of her system, whatever it was, he could leave without starting a scene that would bring down the hotel. There seemed no point in even trying to guess what had brought it on. It was possible, of course, that he’d muffed the cue back there when she’d asked him to register for them, though that was pretty farfetched; if she’d wanted to indulge in a little away-from-home affair, she was certainly attractive enough to do better. There were plenty of younger and more personable men available in a place like Nassau. It was more probable, if that were the case, that she’d merely expected him to make the bid so she could turn it down. In any event, it hadn’t even occurred to him, so maybe he was getting old. Or, as she charged, he just didn’t like her. Well, he didn’t, particularly. Maybe that was the answer; she’d sensed it, and resented it—though he couldn’t imagine why. With those green eyes and that high-cheekboned and suggestively arrogant face she didn’t strike you as somebody who normally bled a great deal over the opinions of the rabble.
She was apparently lost in thought; maybe she’d forgotten he was there.
“What did you want to see me about?” he asked.
She poured some more rum in the glass. “Hollister.”
His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “What about him?”
“I wanted to ask you something. When he was giving you this snow job, did he ever say anything about being a doctor?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”