Hours later, days later, years later, she felt rather than heard someone shouting. After a moment, she realized they were shouting at her. She looked up, dazed, to see Andy reaching for her. As if from a great distance she saw his hand close on her shoulder. He gave her a hard shake and she couldn't feel it. "Kate?"
She tried to shrug his hand away. Had to keep swinging.
Had to beat the ice. Had to keep the Avilda with her head up and her feet down. " 'He would answer to hi or to any loud cry,' " she muttered.
He peered at her, his young face red and chapped with frostbite. "Kate! Are you all right?"
"Of course I'm all right," she said petulantly, shrugging again beneath his hand. "What do you want?"
"We've stopped making ice. You can quit now."
Like coming out of a trance, Kate woke to the realization of a deck no longer canting so drastically beneath her feet that she had to fear losing her foothold and sliding overboard. There was no noise from the engine, from which she painstakingly formulated the hypothesis that it had been shut down. No spray hit the deck.
The gusting wind had died to a breeze that barely rippled the surface of the water, as if the Cradle of the Winds were saying, What, me? Hurt you? How could you think such a thing? It was all just a little joke, teehee. You can relax now, catch some Z's. Sleep tight, and don't let those bedbugs bite.
Kate didn't believe a word of it but she was too tired to express her distrust. "Where are we?"
"Some island," Andy said, his voice weary. "Some bay on some island. I didn't ask."
"When killer whales come into a bay it means someone is going to die," Kate said.
"What?" Andy looked closer at her. "You look like hell, Kate. Hit the rack. I'll stow these." He reached for the bat. She resisted for a moment, and then let go so suddenly he staggered back a step. "Go on," he said, recovering his balance. "Go to bed."
Her mind searched tiredly for the correct response.
When she spoke her tongue felt thick in her mouth.
"Who's on watch?"
"We're on the hook, Kate," he said patiently. "We're anchored up in a bay on some island."
"A bay on some island," Kate repeated. "Did I tell you about the killer whales?"
"Yes, you told me." He turned her firmly in the direction of the galley door. "Go to bed."
She twisted her mouth into the semblance of a smile and he winced away from it. "Isn't Alaska just the greatest place?"
In the galley she stumbled into Ned and Seth coming down from the bridge, Harry behind them. As weary as she was the expression on their faces stopped her in her tracks. "What's wrong?"
The two men exchanged glances. "Another boat got caught in the same storm."
"Which one?"
Again that exchange of glances. "The Daisy Mae."
A sick dread grew inside her. "And?"
Seth shook his head, his gaze somber. "They were able to get off a distress call, and their Loran numbers. The Coast Guard responded but by the time they got there, there was nothing."
"They recover the bodies?"
He shook his head again. "Then we have to go," Kate said. "They might have had time to get into their survival suits. We have to go help look. We have to," she insisted at his disbelieving look. "We have to look for them.
They'd look for us."
"We barely made it this far," Harry growled. "The Coasties are on the scene, and half a dozen other boats.
We go back out there and they're liable to have to come looking for us."
She couldn't stop the words. "You make a habit of not looking for fishermen lost at sea."
Suddenly it was very still in the galley. A dark red flush rose up from Harry's collar to flood his face. He stared at her, his lips drawn back from his teeth. She met his look squarely, knowing her contempt was obvious, unable to disguise it. From the corner of one eye she saw him raise one clenched fist, and waited with a curious kind of detachment to see what would happen next.
Seth caught Harry's elbow. With a growled obscenity Harry whipped around. Their eyes locked and for a moment, just for a moment, Harry froze. Seth said nothing, just looked at him. Breaking the spell, Harry yanked his arm free and shouldered past Seth, leaving Kate standing alone, unanswered, exhausted and sick at heart.
She shook off her paralysis long enough to wobble down the passageway and fumble the door open to her stateroom. Her rain gear snapped and was easily discarded and she toed her boots off, but for some reason her sweater just wouldn't come over her head. She looked down at her hands. They were curled in imitation of her grip on the baseball bat. She couldn't straighten them, She couldn't even feel them. They were incapable of gripping the hem of her sweater.
It said much for her state of mind that she was unalarmed. She tucked her hands into her armpits, rolled into her bunk fully dressed, curled up in a ball and fell into a fitful, restless sleep, to dream the same dream over and over and over again, white fog and green water and thickening ice and a sinking boat and drowning crewmen. The last boat to sink was the Avilda, and the last drowning crewman's face was her own.
Her eyes snapped open and she stared into the darkness.
She lay still, listening, trying to figure out what it was that had woken her. She would have bet every dime the Avilda had earned her that nothing short of a nuclear holocaust could have gotten between her and the land of Nod that night.
As usual on the Chain, the weather had done a volteface and the slight swell was barely perceptible. The wind had died completely. The Avilda rode calmly at anchor in her bay on some island like a car in a parking lot. Kate had just decided that Andy's snoring must have woken her when a thump reverberated down the starboard side of the hull, the side her bunk was on, followed by a distant splash, a splash that sounded exactly like oars hitting water.
She rose with an effort, her body aching from the bones out. She sidled into the passageway, pausing when she saw that the door to Seth and Ned's room was ajar.
She pushed it open a bit farther and peered around it.
Their bunks were empty. She took a chance and opened the skipper's door. He, too, was gone. In stocking feet she padded swiftly to the galley and over to the starboard side door to peer out the window.
In the faint light of the stars Kate could detect the outline of the island. There was something familiar about its shape, and she studied it, brows puckering, before a movement below drew her gaze down to the water level.
She stared intently, her eyes becoming accustomed to the darkness, and caught the movement again.
It was oars, oars attached to the Avilda's skiff, a skiff that should be stowed upside down on the aft cabin roof at this moment. Remembering something Abel had taught her about making out indistinct, distant objects in the dark, she shifted her gaze a fraction to the right. On her peripheral vision the skiff registered clearly. It was heading toward the island, and there were three men in it.
Kate thought rapidly. The life rafts were out, she would never be able to deflate a life raft and repack it into its barrel without being caught. Besides, with Harry Gault at the helm she wanted both life rafts right where they were. Her hands clenched. Dammit, she had to know what was going on on that island, what Harry and Ned and Seth were up to.
She heard Jack's voice again, so carefully nonchalant.
"There are survival suits aboard the Avilda, aren't there?"
Without stopping to think, because if she'd thought about it for even five seconds she never would have done it, she whipped around and headed for the opposite side of the galley and the locker beneath the bench next to the galley table. In the darkness she fumbled for the finger hole. She didn't dare turn on a light for fear it would be seen from the skiff. She hooked the hole at last, pulled the seat cover up and out and felt around inside for one of the plastic-wrapped packages, the one that had been opened before.