“If you’re selecting a jury,” I said, “I’ve already formed an opinion. I’ll tell you about it, some day.”
What some day? We had about five left, if we were lucky.
“Wait, Bill,” she whispered. “You don’t know all of it yet. When you do you’ll think I’m a fool. You see, he wasn’t on his way down there when he crashed. He was coming back.”
I realized I’d forgotten that. “I know. To Sanport.”
“Not to Sanport. To somewhere on the Florida coast, where he was going to destroy the plane and disappear. Don’t you see? He was leaving me.”
I got it then. “And you’d have gone on to Honduras, thinking he would be there? And when he wasn’t, you’d have been certain he was dead? Down somewhere in the Gulf, or in the jungle?”
“Yes,” she said. Then she smiled a little bitterly. “But I wasn’t the one he wanted to convince. He was just trading me, you see—”
“Oh.” I really saw it at last. “So if Barclay and his men had managed to follow you down there, they’d give him up as dead, too. That was what he was after.”
She nodded.
“Maybe it gets easier as you go along,” I said.
“He was scared. He’d been hunted too long, and I guess it does things to you.”
“But running out on you? Deserting you, leaving you stranded in a foreign country?”
“Not quite stranded, if you mean money,” she said. “You see, it wasn’t in the plane. I thought it was, but it was in a bag of his I was supposed to bring down with me. None of it’s clear-cut, Bill. He was leaving me, and he had to double-cross his friend who bought the plane, but he wanted me to have the money. Maybe he thought it was just sort of a ball game. I was being sacrificed to advance the runner to second.”
And maybe the money was a way of buying off his conscience, I thought, but I said nothing. Macaulay was a little mixed up for me.
Suddenly her eyes were full of tears and she was crying silently. “Does it make much sense to you that I still didn’t call and tell you, after that?”
“Does it have to?” I asked.
She put both hands alongside her face and said slowly, around the tightness in her throat, “I would like to explain it, but I don’t know how. When he told me that, I knew I would leave him, but I couldn’t run out on him until he was safe.”
I tried to see Macaulay, and failed again. How could he inspire that kind of loyalty on one hand and be capable of the things he had done on the other? I said nothing about it because it might not have occurred to her and it would only hurt her, but he had killed that diver, or intended to until the airplane crash saved him the trouble. The way he had it planned, there couldn’t be any second person who knew he was still alive. He’d probably have killed him as soon as the poor devil brought up the box in that Mexican laguna. And he would have killed me, in some way.
That was the only way it would add up. He didn’t want his wife to know what he was mixed up in. So when I went down into that plane he had to tell me what he was really after, and when he’d done that the chances were I’d have fallen overboard the next night. He was a great Macaulay, I thought. He’d started out with an itching palm and wound up itching all over.
“How much chance do you think we have?” she asked.
I tried to think of something to say. But what? They were going to kill us. Everything said they had to. Escape? At sea in a small boat with two of them watching us? And if we did get rid of them some way, what then? I was wanted by the police. In a very short time she would be, too. We had nowhere to go. The trap had double walls.
Then I thought of something else, even worse. “Do you really know where that plane is?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yes. He told me very carefully. And I memorized everything he said.”
I wondered. She thought she did. Barclay was convinced she did. But apparently I was the only one aboard who had any idea of the immensity of the Gulf of Mexico and the smallness of an airplane. If you didn’t know within a few hundred yards you could drag for a thousand years and never find it.
Not that I cared if they found their damned diamonds or not. It was something else. If they didn’t, Barclay would think she was stalling, “—suppose she didn’t know,” he’d said softly. The implication was sickening.
“He didn’t show you on a chart?” I asked. “Or make a drawing?”
“No,” she said. “But it’s near a shoal. The shoal is about fifty miles north-northeast of Scorpion Reef, and is around a half mile long, running north and south. The plane sank two miles due east of it.”
“Was there white water, or did he just see the shoal from the air before he crashed?”
“He didn’t say.”
It was silent in the cabin except for the swish of water across the deck above us. I didn’t say anything for a moment. It was pretty bad. You had to assume too many things. You had to assume, to begin with, that Macaulay had known where he was himself. Then you had to believe the water was shallow enough at that spot to cause surf, so we could find it. If he’d merely seen a difference in the coloration of the water from above, we didn’t have a chance. Then you had to have faith in his ability to estimate his bearing and distance from the shoal in the wild scramble to get out of the plane and launch the rubber raft before he went down.
I tried to reassure myself. He could navigate, or he wouldn’t have tried to fly the Gulf in the first place. He gave the location in reference to Scorpion Reef, so he must have sighted Scorpion. Fifty miles was only a few minutes in a plane, so he couldn’t have gone far wrong in that distance. And there had to be visible white water. He’d been intending to go back to it in a boat, hadn’t he? He must have known what he was doing.
Then something else struck me. “Wait,” I said. “Barclay told me to set a course to the west of Scorpion Reef. Are you sure you told him east?”
“Yes. He must have misunderstood. I said north-northeast.”
“Just a minute,” I said. I went out into the after part of the cabin and leaned over the chart. Barfield was still on deck. With the parallel rulers I laid down a line 22 degrees from Scorpion Reef, picked fifty miles off the edge of the chart with the dividers, and set them on the line. I stared. There was no shoal there. The only sounding in the vicinity was 45 fathoms. I grew more uneasy.
Beyond, another 20 or 25 miles, lay the Northern Shelves, a wide area of shoaling water and one notation that three fathoms had been reported in 1907. Could he have meant that? But if he had, we didn’t have a chance. Not a chance in the world.
In the first place, if he couldn’t fix his estimated position within 25 miles that short a time after having sighted Scorpion Reef, his navigation was so sloppy you had to throw it all out. There went your first assumption, the one you had to have even to start: that Macaulay had known where he was himself. And in the second place, that whole area was shoal. God knew how many places you might find white water at dead low tide with a heavy sea running. Trying to find an airplane with no more than that to go on was so absurd it was fantastic.
Fumbling a little with nervousness, I swung the rulers around and ran out a line NNW from Scorpion Reef. Barclay had said she’d told him that direction. I looked at it and shook my head. That was out over the hundred-fathom curve. Nothing there at all. And if he’d been headed for the Florida coast he wouldn’t have been over there in the first place.
I thought swiftly. We’d never find that plane. To anybody even remotely acquainted with salvage work the whole thing was farcical, except there was nothing funny about it here, under the circumstances. They were going to think she was stalling. She’d already contradicted herself once, or Barclay had misunderstood her.