In food, or in something to drink? There’d probably be less chance of his suspecting anything if it were in something to eat. She could pulverize three of them, mix the powder with canned potted ham or something equally spicy to cover the taste, and make a sandwich of it. No, she thought then. The chances were he was going to be suspicious of anything she offered him. Irrational he might be, but he was no fool. She thought for a moment. Then she saw the answer, and she smiled for the first time in four hours.
She slammed the drawer shut and strode back to the galley section of the cabin. Having shaken three of the tablets from the bottle, she set them on the tiny drainboard shelf next to the sink and reached up into the stowage racks for a glass. She took two teaspoons from a drawer, set one of the tablets in one spoon and used the heel of the other to crush it, pressing them between her fingers. She dropped the resultant powder in the glass and was reaching for the second tablet when she felt Saracen go into a hard left turn and at the same time roll down to starboard. Both the glass and the bottle of codeine tablets started to slide. She caught the glass, but the bottle escaped her and fell on deck. It didn’t break, but it rolled and slid all the way across to the starboard side, spilling the tablets as it went. She set the glass in the sink, so it couldn’t roll off too, and went lunging after the bottle. She had it and was down on her knees picking up the scattered tablets at the foot of the companion ladder when Warriner screamed just above her. He was already in the hatch, coming down the ladder.
She sprang to her feet and wheeled to run, but it was too late. When she slid through the doorway into the forward cabin he was right behind her and there was no time even to close the door. Trapped now, she turned, seeing the agony of his face and trying to will herself not to fight him. “It was a shark!” he cried out. He caught both her arms in a grip that made them hurt. “It was a shark!” And while she was still struggling with the panic inside her, she began to grasp that he hadn’t come down here to attack her. He wanted help, comfort, something he thought she could give him, and if she could soothe him, or at least keep from antagonizing him, she might survive this crisis too. And it would be the last one. Then she remembered she still had the opened bottle of codeine tablets in her hand. She shoved the hand down beside her thigh to keep them out of sight.
“Don’t you see, it was the shark!” Then Saracen, running at full throttle with no one at the wheel, careened off the side of a swell and went into another hard turn. They lost their balance in the welter of sailbags and cases of stores around the door, and she fell backward onto the bunk. She sat up. Warriner dropped to his knees between the bunks and pressed his face into her lap, encircling her legs with his arms. His shoulders shook. Her left hand was free, but the other, holding the bottle, was trapped by his arms.
She reached down and gently stroked his head. “Of course it was the shark, Hughie.”
He raised his head then and looked up at her, and while his eyes were still wild there was nothing dangerous in them. On the contrary, they were almost beseeching, like those of a frightened child. The words began to pour out, tumbling over each other. “It was a big hammerhead, over twelve feet long. I tried to drive it away. I tried to save her. I hit—I hit it on the nose. But she was up on the surface, splashing too much. If she’d come down where I was—they won’t bother you under the water, you know that, everybody does—but she wouldn’t dive. It was horrible, the shark cut her in two, the water was all bloody…”
She had no idea what he was talking about, but what he wanted was plain enough. He was asking her for exoneration. It was the other boy who’d started the fight or had thrown the football through Mrs. Cramer’s window. She stroked his head again. “It wasn’t your fault, Hughie. Of course it was terrible, but you did everything you could.”
His arms had relaxed their grip around her legs, and she was able to slide her right hand free. While he was still looking up at her face, she brought it up the side of her thigh and shoved the bottle into the pocket of the Bermuda shorts. She sighed. He hadn’t seen it.
“You believe me, don’t you?” he asked.
“Of course I believe you,” she said.
“I knew you would. Somehow I knew it.” He hugged her legs again, almost as if in gratitude, and pressed his face against her knees. His voice was almost normal as he went on, “You won’t leave me, will you? It’s so awful—” He stopped.
She glanced down. He had raised his head again, but this time he was looking at something behind her on the bunk. It was the shotgun. She felt the chill of gooseflesh spread up her back. He went on staring, and then he whispered, “You were going to kill me.”
“No. Hughie, no. Listen—please, it’s not even loaded.”
He still hadn’t moved, and his voice was no louder than before. “You want to kill me too.”
He reached around behind her and slowly pulled it out by the barrels. There was nowhere she could run, nothing she could do. There wasn’t even anything in her mind except the bitterness of the thought that after four hours she’d been within a few minutes of winning, and now she’d lost. Maybe the fear would come in a minute. She was simply too tired to handle more than one thing at a time.
With a wild outcry he lunged to his feet then and swung the gun against the side of the boat. The stock splintered and broke off against an oaken frame above and behind her head. She ducked down between the bunks as he swung again—not even at her, as far as she could tell, but merely in some fury of destruction directed against the gun itself. The barrels rang against the upright pipe of the bunk frame. He beat it twice more against the pipe and threw it behind him, into the after cabin. Above the noise of the engine she heard it slide and bounce along the deck and crash into something, probably the ladder at the after end. At the same moment, while he was turning and off balance, Saracen rolled down and the bow swung off on another violent change of course. He fell over against the bulkhead beside the door and slid down atop the sailbag behind which the compass was wedged. He was on his feet almost immediately, facing her. When she’d seen him lose his balance she’d started to scramble up, hoping to get out the door, but there wasn’t time. He was right beside it. There was nowhere to go, anyway. She sat down on the bunk again, trying to conceal her fear. Don’t fight him, she thought; don’t try to run. Her only chance to survive was to use her weapons instead of his; there was a lost and frightened boy inside the maniac, and maybe she could reach him. And he could already have killed her with the gun barrels, but he hadn’t.
He stared at her wildly for a moment and had taken a step toward her, when he turned, as if he’d remembered something. When he bent over the sailbag she knew what it was. He’d seen the compass when he fell, and the scratch pad with its penciled notations of the course. He lifted the compass out and with another cry of fury he turned and threw it against the starboard side of the cabin. The box splintered, and it fell to the deck in a ruin of broken glass and spilled alcohol.
Then, before he even had a chance to look back at her, she said gently, “Hughie, come here.” When the frenzied eyes swung around and fastened on her, she touched her knees, where his head had rested before.
“You wanted to kill me!” he cried out. His hands clenched and opened, and he took a step toward her, coming between her and the door. She saw the hands come up level with her throat, but there was a faint uncertainty or hesitation in his movements now, and she’d detected just a trace of defiance in the outcry. Without that, perhaps she couldn’t have found the self-control to do it. She continued to look up at him with perfect serenity.