At least something, somewhere, was wrong. Something outside emotion; something within another province, as if a small segment of a familiar picture had been turned askew, placed inaccurately, so all at once the whole picture was rather puzzling and strange.
She tried to seek out that obscurely wrong piece, pin it down, decide exactly how it was wrong, but she could not. It was too nebulous a glimpse, too tenuous an impression. Her thoughts swerved back to the important thing, herself and Mickey and Gili.
The fog seemed thicker and darker; even the sky seemed to press down blackly, smothering the ship, and the foghorn sounded again, roaring all around, isolating the ship in sound as she was already isolated in fog. Mickey did not come back. Josh did not come back. Considerable time actually must have passed. And suddenly Marcia didn't like the empty, cold deck, and the fog, and the deep waves of sound crashing upon her ears. Inside the busy ship were lights and warmth and people; she rose and then saw that someone was standing on the deck, leaning against the railing, a patient, obviously, for he was wearing a long red bathrobe.
Apparently he had only then come out on deck. She'd have to pass him to re-enter the ship by the same door from which she had come. She looked along the deck in the other direction, orienting herself.
She was on the upper boat deck, on the same level with the Captain's quarters. In order to reach her own cabin she'd have to go to the next deck below. Only a short distance away from her, toward the right, was a stairway which must lead downward to that deck. She glanced again at the man in the red bathrobe and, as she did so, he turned a little and she could see the glimmer of white bandages about his head. She did not wish to meet his look; she did not wish to pass him. It was an obscure yet urgent impulse. She turned abruptly toward the open stairway leading to the deck below.
The foghorn stopped and all its clashing echoes died away. The small thud of her heels seemed very loud in the sudden silence. She felt that the man at the railing was watching her. Without definable reason, she hastened her steps so as to pass quickly out of his range of vision.
The deck below seemed deserted, too. She reached the last, wet black step and turned sharply around the stairway.
But the deck was not deserted; it was, instead, horribly inhabited.
Marcia stopped, holding the railing. The foghorn began again, so waves of sound broke over the deck, shaking the ship and all the impenetrable gray world about her with dreadful tumult. It kept on sounding while Marcia stood, looking down at the dark, swarthy little man who lay with his eyes no longer suspicious and wary but blankly open, staring upward. He was Manuel Para and his throat had been cut.
A very long time seemed to have passed when suddenly she knew that someone was coming down the stairway immediately above her, following the steps her feet had taken. She looked up. It was a man in a red bathrobe. She could see him, and he had no face but only white bandages with holes for eyes.
And it was strange, she thought in some remote level of awareness, that there was something familiar about the way he moved down the steps toward her. It was almost as if she knew him.
11
The foghorn stopped. The patient in the red bathrobe had, in a swift second or two, come nearer, and Marcia turned and ran.
She screamed, too, without intending to do so, but no one could hear, for the foghorn started again. Waves of sound, lost and despairing and lonely, shook the ship and echoed from the fog drowning her voice, submerging all existence like a nightmare in its own confusion.
But it was not really a nightmare. She reached a companionway and whirled into the lighted ship. Two nurses in smart little caps seemed to float out of the lights. They said things to her and instantly there were people and voices everywhere.
The scene dissolved and shifted, again like a dream. She was in a small office. She was in an armchair with chintz cushions. A metal filing cabinet stood in a corner. A nurse with a captain's bars on her collar was beside her, saying: "Now, now, it's all right. Now, now . . ."
But it wasn't all right, because someone came to the door and opened it a few inches and whispered to the nurse. Marcia watched her pretty young face lose its color, turn pinched and white. She cried: "Who was it? It can't be! Murder . . ."
The pale-gray walls had photographs upon them. Between the curtained ports on a bracket was a small green pot of ivy. Beyond the open door was the nurse's stateroom, its high bunk neat and flat under a blue cover. The whispers at the door stopped. The young nurse closed the door and went to sit at the desk, as if the position reinforced her. She said stiffly: "It's true. He was one of the seamen, Manuel Para. He was in the lifeboat with you."
She looked at Marcia and, after a moment, said: "You are cold. I'll get you something hot."
But instead she went to the telephone on the wall above the desk. Again Marcia's whole consciousness seemed to reach out for physical details, small and reassuring. She watched the nurse set an arrow at a number on the face of the telephone as gratefully as if the nurse's action, as if the cheerful neat little office had the power to deny the dreadful disorder on the deck outside, amid the wet veils of fog, with the desolate, lost sound of the foghorn drowning all creation in its own despair.
The nurse turned from the telephone. "He already knew. He says to check the wards. I have to go. I'll send someone to you." Suddenly she was gone.
Why was Manuel Para murdered?
Marcia closed her eyes and immediately it was as if she were in the pitching little lifeboat again, going down, down, down into darkness and destruction, with a dead man in the boat, with Manuel Para and the other seaman in the boat, with herself and Daisy Belle, Gili and Luther and Mickey dim shapes in the night, huddled together. Held inexorably together by the storm as, now, they were held inexorably together by murder.
A long time must have passed when the door opened at last, and it was Josh Morgan. He lifted her up and held her against him. "Marcia, Marcia . . ."
He was real, too, like the neat little office, like the photographs, like the homely pleasant details of living, except this reality was much better. She was alive and warm and safe; she had emerged from a fantasy of horror. She clung to Josh Morgan and could not talk.
He seemed to know that. He put his cheek down against her face and held her until her breath came evenly, until the warmth of his embrace had shut out the cold of the lifeboat.
"All right now?" he said at last.
"He was there, Josh. Under the stairway. I started down to B deck, and Para was there. . . ."
"I ought not to have left you alone."
He had gone to find Mickey. Suddenly she remembered that, and Gili and everything that had gone before. She could see Gili's slanting, triumphant green eyes and smiling red lips, and the soft golden shimmer of Mickey's cigarette case.
Josh said: "I didn't find Andre. He wasn't in his cabin. I looked and . . . Marcia, what happened? Was anyone with you when you found him?"
She wouldn't think of Gili now. She replied: "No. Except the patient. He was there by the railing. He followed me down the stairs."
He put her away from him sharply, his hand gripping her shoulder. "Who followed you down the stairs? Tell me everything."
But there was not much, really, to tell. A patient leaning against a railing; a dead man on the deck below; the patient descending the steps above her. She hesitated, and added: "I thought for a moment that I knew him. But I couldn't have known him. And I screamed and ran. . . ."