Chapter Nine
By noon of that same Friday, Samuel Boylston had been in Nassau forty-eight hours. He had not been able to get away as quickly as planned, hoping each hour would bring word of the fate of the Muñeca, and had arrived Wednesday noon by Pan Am from Miami.
Before he left he had received a wire from Jonathan Dye saying that he was staying at something called the Harbour Central House on Victoria Avenue. Sam had arranged to have a rental car reserved for him and waiting at the airport. It was a small Triumph sedan, weakly air conditioned. The rental clerk gave him a Nassau map and he studied it for a little while before driving off. He had been in Nassau at other times for both business and pleasure, and it did not take long for him to refresh his memory of the layout of streets, and it took no longer than the trip from Windsor Field to the city for him to adjust his alarm system to driving on the wrong side of the street.
He found the Harbour Central House two blocks up the hill above Bay Street and parked in front just as Jonathan came with long loose lanky strides up from Bay Street. He was a big knuckly young man with coarse black hair and that variety of tough, underprivileged-looking skin which remains pale despite all exposure. He had a calm dignity which Sam interpreted as an infuriating kind of self-approval.
Sam got out for the awkward measure of the handshake and said, “Any word yet?”
“No sir. It’s sort of — slacking off.”
“How?”
“There’s only about so much area to cover. I can show you on the chart I’ve got, sir. It’s not they’re not anxious to do everything. There’s the Aircraft Crash and Rescue people, a lot of them volunteers. And the commercial aircraft people. And the Marine Operator telling all the pleasure boats to be on the lookout. The people at the Ministry of Maritime Affairs have been wonderful. But the weather has been perfect, and they know exactly when the Muñeca left Nassau last Friday morning, just 5 days ago today, heading for Little Harbour in the Berry Islands. They didn’t take off until maybe ten thirty in the morning, and Mr. Kayd didn’t call in at nine on Saturday morning. They cruised at sixteen miles an hour and usually got where they were going before dark. So the search area wouldn’t be more than a hundred and twenty or thirty miles across. But they’ve covered three times that much area, sir. The wind has been out of the east and the northeast just about every day, and they’ve allowed for drift. They haven’t said it to me, and they won’t say it to you, but you get the feeling — they think that somehow it sunk in deep water. They’re going through some motions still, but...”
Sam saw the pure misery in the boy’s eyes as he turned away and stared down the slope of the street toward the harbor.
“What kind of a place is this where you’re staying?”
“Simple. Clean enough. Sixteen shillings.”
“You could get your gear and come along with me as my guest. I’ve got a reservation at the Nassau Harbour Club.”
“I guess I’d just as soon stay right here, sir.”
“Then get that chart of yours and ride on out with me while I register. We’ll talk some more and I’ll bring you back.”
The room they gave him was on the second floor with a small balcony overlooking that part of the harbor. Sailboats with blue sails were racing around a marked course in a windy chop.
From the side windows there was a view of the free-form swimming pool below, of tidy tanned girls swimming, of waiters bringing drinks to round metal tables. At the long docks with their finger piers were the pleasure boats, clean and colorful, bright work winking in sunlight, moving and lifting against the mooring lines to the push of wind, tide and chop.
Jonathan spread the chart out on one of the twin beds. There were patterns marked on it in different colors of crayon.
Jonathan said, “One of the Aircraft Crash and Rescue people marked it up to explain how a search pattern works. This is a square pattern here. It’s a spiral with square corners. They know how far they can see from the altitude they fly at, and on each leg they overlap about a third of the area they could see the last time past. When they go down to check something, they use loran to get back to the point where they broke off from the pattern. Anything they see floating, they check it to make sure it isn’t debris from the Muñeca.”
“How would they explain two seaworthy boats disappearing with no trace at all?”
“Well — fire and explosion is one way. The Muñeca was diesel powered, but the smaller boat Mr. Kayd bought in Florida was gasoline. If it was tied alongside the big boat something like that could have happened. Then there are coral heads. The navigation charts of the Bahamas aren’t real accurate. A coral head can build up from the bottom maybe fifty feet down, and the top of it might be only a foot across and two feet under water, but they’re hard as granite. At cruising speed one could open up the bottom of a cruiser so that it would go down in seconds practically. If they went plowing into a whole area of coral heads, maybe it would open up both hulls.”
“So that would bring it down to the question of just how competent that Captain Staniker might be, and how well he knows the waters and the special problems of the area.”
“From what I’ve found out I guess he knew what he was doing, sir.”
“I’m her brother, Jonathan. Would it be at all possible for you to call me Sam?”
“I guess so. I guess I could — Sam.”
“She wouldn’t have been over here if I hadn’t leaned on you two. I suppose you keep thinking about that.”
The boy sat on the bed, looked down, frowning. “I guess you do too, sir. Sam. But what’s the good of saying if this and if that? There’s that saying, if your aunt had wheels she’d have been a tea cart. Leila and I, we talked about it a long time before we agreed to play it your way. She was a lot more indignant about it than I was. I made her see it from your point of view. You were motivated by love for her. When the motivation is okay, you can overlook lousy performance.”
“Lousy performance?”
Jonathan looked up at him, slightly surprised. “You want to deny people the privilege of making their own mistakes. It’s like you don’t want to give yourself or anybody else any leeway. Leila said you were pushing us around just for the sake of pushing us around. It could look that way, you know. I said you were concerned about her having a good and happy life. She put her finger right on the flaw in that one. She said there must be a thousand definitions of what constitutes a good and happy life, and so it was a thousand to one that what you wanted for her would relate to what she wants for herself. Certainly it was a lousy performance, because there was no need for us to prove anything to each other, and certainly not to you. You see, Sam, if Leila and I had any doubts or reservations, we’d have taken a leave of absence from each other to check it out. At nineteen and twenty-one we’re both a little tougher and more mature than the average. What we want to do with our lives is not sacrificial. For us it’s self-seeking, because that’s where the satisfaction is. And what could make our lives full might sound like nonsense to you.” He paused. “Just as your life sounds like nonsense to us, Sam. You do what you do very successfully. But there are people who are the best in the world at juggling flaming torches, or dancing on ice skates, or collecting old Roman coins. It doesn’t mean everybody should get the same charge out of it.”
“So you went along with it because my motives were pure.”
“Because if we didn’t, it would have been years before you and Leila would have re-established a good relationship. She said it didn’t matter. I said you are the only blood kin she had and it does matter.”