"Close the door. Now then, one of the Lerida seamen, Manuel Para, has been murdered."
"Yes, I know." Luther glanced at Marcia and smoothed his scant hair nervously. "It must have happened about the time we were talking. Do you know who did it, Captain?"
"That," said the Captain bluntly, "is why I sent for you. You were on deck about that time. Did you see Para?"
"Either alive or dead?" An obscure twinkle came into Luther's faded eyes for an instant and vanished. "No," he said soberly. "After I spoke to Miss Colfax, I walked on around the deck and then inside the ship. I was lounging around the lobby of the upper deck—the deck which I suppose you call the boat deck; at any rate, where the life rafts and lifeboats are mainly located—when I heard of the murder." He hesitated and then lifted his stooped yet somehow elegant shoulders in a brief shrug. "I have no alibi, Captain, if that is what you want."
"It would help," said Captain Svendsen dourly. "I'll have to have statements from each of you." And again there was a knock on the door. This time, however, it was Major Williams, followed by three other officers.
The Captain with Colonel Wells' assistance, gave them quick directions. The Lerida passengers were to be placed under guard. The decks were to be searched again, the patients carefully checked. Inquiries were to be made about a patient with a bandaged face having been seen about the ship. Inquiries were to be made about Manuel Para—who had seen him, where, when.
Marcia turned to speak to Mickey, but Josh Morgan stood beside her instead. Mickey, though, met her look and smiled.
Ordinarily, Mickey's almost classically proportioned features wore not so much a somber expression as one of immobility; so the sudden warmth of his smile and the light it gave his clear gray eyes were like a flash of sunlight through a flat, gray sky. How many times in the past had she remembered that smile and clung to the memory as if it had been a lifeline thrown to her through the storm! Even then it was warm and candid and reassuring. Gili's claims were—must be—as fantastic as they sounded. And the fact of murder could not really catch Mickey and herself in its suffocating web.
She told herself that defiantly, but there was no chance to talk to Mickey. There was no chance to talk to anybody, for the group around the Captain suddenly broke apart. An officer went to Mickey and Luther and all three moved toward the door. The Captain went quickly away too, adjusting his oilskins with impatient, angry-looking red hands. Josh Morgan started to speak to her, but a young lieutenant intervened curtly: "Will you come with me, Miss Colfax?"
So she went along the narrow gray passageways again, with the motion of the ship pressing up against her feet, and the lieutenant at her elbow. They went along the stairway, and at the lobby around what had been the purser's desk, knots of nurses turned pretty, young faces and perky little caps to give them curious, suddenly silent, glances.
They reached the cabin on B deck and already a seaman, with a revolver strapped on a belt around his waist, stood in the passageway. "I've searched the cabin, sir," he said quickly to the lieutenant. "I did not find any sort of knife. No gauze, either. But there are three red bathrobes . . ."
"Thank you. I'll report it."
The young lieutenant opened the door, motioned her to enter and closed the door firmly behind her. Daisy Belle Cates was already in the cabin, pacing up and down its narrow length, smoking nervously, pausing abruptly with a sharp look of question on her long, fine face.
"Marcia!" She came quickly and put her brown hand with its broken fingernails on Marcia's shoulder. Her voice was sharp and thin as a knife. "Is it true? Did you find him? They made me come here. I was in the nurses' lounge and they sent a seaman to find me. He searched the cabin." She caught her breath. "Who did it? Who killed him? What did you see?"
Daisy Belle had courage. Daisy Belle had faced the storm on the Lerida with the horror of the night in the lifeboat without flinching, with coolness, making sure Luther had a warm coat, taking a turn at the oars along with the men, passing brandy from hand to hand, never showing in any way the fear that, as a sensible woman, she must have felt. Daisy Belle could look at death and say, "My face is not much loss, but I've always rather liked my legs." It was strange to see terror peer openly from Daisy Belle's eyes.
The next moment, though, it was veiled. She had taken Marcia to the bunk, drawn up blankets around her, called the guard and asked for hot coffee, anything hot, and got it very quickly. Marcia, staring at the gray underside of the bunk close above her head and seeing on its clean and shining blankness the face of Manuel Para, told again that short and ugly story, with its even shorter and uglier footnote.
"Was it the patient?" asked Daisy Belle.
"I don't know. I couldn't possibly say."
"Heinzer," said Daisy Belle blankly. "Heinzer—I never knew anybody by that name."
And Gili flounced into the cabin, her eyes glittering and narrow, her face both angry and frightened. She flung herself into a chair with a furious and baffled look at a young officer who had escorted her there and who now settled his blouse around his shoulders with a suggestion of relief and left hurriedly. And then Gili saw the coffee, helped herself largely and hungrily to it, looked at Daisy Belle and at Marcia over the edge of the cup and said unexpectedly: "They said he was murdered. That's two."
Daisy Belle was bringing another cup of coffee to Marcia. She stopped so abruptly that the coffee splashed into the saucer.
"What do you mean? Two?"
Gili eyed her. "Things go in threes. Always," she said it coolly. But when she lowered the cup there was a grayish line around her scarlet mouth. Daisy Belle said violently, "What utter drivel!" And, as coolly as Gili, poured the spilled coffee from the saucer back into the cup. Her hand was shaking, nevertheless.
And Marcia thought queerly, if Gili is frightened—and she looks frightened—then she didn't do it. And Daisy Belle was frightened, too.
The fact was, of course, that suspicion had already added itself to the cabin, as inevitably and almost as horribly as murder had added itself to the lifeboat. "There's a dreadful contagion about murder," Josh Morgan had said. "Perhaps it's fear, perhaps it's something else."
So began actually a period of waiting which held Marcia and Daisy Belle—and Gili, perhaps, too, although Marcia never knew what Gili was thinking and planning behind those slanting, green eyes—in a kind of spell of inactivity. They could only wait. Wait and listen for any hint as to the investigation which was going on in the rest of the ship.
The rest of that day passed like that, except that Daisy Belle, first, and then Gili were questioned by the Captain.
He came with Major Williams to their cabin in order to do so; and he was unexpectedly, indeed brutally, frank. He had questioned the others who were on the Lerida lifeboat. He enumerated them, checking each off on his fingers, his oilskins and his solid figure and red face seeming to fill the cabin. "Andre Messac, Luther Cates, the seaman, Urdiola, Miss Colfax." He paused, looking at Gili, who avoided his gaze sullenly and then at Daisy Belle, who rallied to the attack promptly.
"What do you wish to know?"
He told her bluntly. "Anything you know about the murder of Para. Or Castiogne."
"But I've already told you I know nothing about Castiogne . . ." began Daisy Belle, but he cut in.
"Tell me, please, exactly what you did today. Where you were, who talked to you, everything."
"I see," said Daisy Belle after a moment. "We are all suspect. Very well. I'll try to remember." She lighted a cigarette deliberately, put back her head with its thin, reddish-gray curls and faced him coolly. She had had breakfast early. She had gone on deck for a cigarette or two, found it cold and dismal, drifted back through the ship and eventually to the nurses' lounge where she had found some magazines and read. She had gone to lunch, had looked for Marcia there and didn't find her.