“Sure,” I said.
I got my gear and changed into some sports clothes. She handed me the car keys and I put everything in the trunk.
As soon as we were out the gate she fumbled in her bag for a cigarette. I lit one for her, and another for myself. She drove well in traffic, but seemed to do an unnecessary amount of winding around to get out on the right highway. She kept checking the rear-view mirror, too, but I didn’t pay much attention to that. I did it myself when I was driving. You never knew when some meathead might try to climb over your bumper.
When we were out on the highway at last she settled a little in the seat and unleashed a few more horses. We rolled smoothly along at 60. It was a fine machine, a 1954 hardtop convertible. I looked around the inside of it. She had beautiful legs. I looked back at the road.
“Bill Manning, isn’t it?” she asked. “That wouldn’t be William Stacey Manning, by any chance?”
I looked around quickly. “How did you know?” Then I remembered. “Oh. You read that wheeze about me in the paper?”
It had appeared a few days ago, one of those interesting-character-about-the-waterfront sort of things. It had started with the fact that I’d won a couple of star class races out at the yacht club; that I’d deck-handed a couple of times on that run down to Bermuda and was a sailing nut; that I’d gone to M.I.T. for three years before the war. It was a good thing I hadn’t said anything about the four or five stories I’d sold. I’d have been Somerset Maugham, with flippers.
Then an odd thought struck me. I hadn’t used my middle name during that interview. In fact, I hadn’t used it since I’d left New England.
She nodded. “Yes. I read it. And I was sure you must be the same Manning who’d written those sea stories. Why haven’t you done any more?”
“I wasn’t a very successful writer,” I said.
She was looking ahead at the road. “Are you married?”
“I was,” I said. “Divorced. Three years ago.”
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry. I mean, I didn’t intend to pry—”
“It’s all right,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it.
It was just a mess but it was over and finished. A lot of it had been my fault, and knowing it didn’t help much. Catherine and I hadn’t agreed about my job, my interests in boating or writing – or anything. She’d wanted me to play office politics and golf. We finally divided everything and quit.
I had learned diving and salvage work in the Navy during the war, and after the wreckage settled I drifted back into it, moving around morosely from job to job and going farther south all the time. If you were going to dive you might as well do it in warm water. It was that aimless.
She looked at me and said, “I gathered you’ve had lots of experience with boats?”
I nodded. “I was brought up around them. My father sailed, and belonged to a yacht club. I was sailing a dinghy by the time I started to school. After the war I did quite a bit of ocean yacht racing, as a crew member. And a friend and I cruised the Caribbean in an old yawl for about eight months in 1946.”
“I see,” she said thoughtfully. “Do you know navigation?”
“Yes,” I said. “Though I’m probably pretty rusty at it. I haven’t used it for a long time.”
I had an odd impression she was pumping me, for some reason. It didn’t make much sense. Why all this interest in boats? I couldn’t see what blue-water sailing and celestial navigation had to do with finding a shotgun lost overboard in some piddling lake.
She never did say anything about herself, I noticed, and I didn’t ask. She always kept working the conversation around to me, and inside an hour she had most of the story without ever seeming actually to be nosy.
We went through another small town stacked along the highway in the hot sun. A few miles beyond the town she turned off the pavement onto a dirt road going up over a hill between some cotton fields. We passed a few dilapidated farmhouses at first, but then they began to thin out. It was desolate country, mostly sand and scrub pine, and we met no one else at all. After about four miles we turned off this onto a private road which was only a pair of ruts running off through the trees. I got out to open the gate. There was a sign nailed to it which read: Posted. Keep Out. I gathered it was a private gun club her husband belonged to, but she didn’t say. Another car had been through recently, probably within the last day or two, breaking the crust in the ruts.
We went on for about a mile and then the road ended abruptly. She stopped. “Here we are,” she said.
It was a beautiful place, and almost ringingly silent the minute the car stopped. The houseboat was moored to a pier in the shade of big moss-draped trees at the water’s edge, and beyond it I could see the flat surface of the lake burning like a mirror in the sun.
She unlocked the trunk and I took my gear out. “I have a key to the houseboat,” she said. “You can change in there.”
She led the way, disturbingly out of place in this wilderness with her smooth blonde head and smart grooming, the slim spikes of her heels tapping against the planks. I noticed the pier ran on around the end of the scow at right angles and out into the lake.
“I’ll take the gear on out there,” I said. “I’d like to have a look at it.”
She came with me. We rounded the corner of the houseboat and I could see the whole arm of the lake. This section of the pier ran out into it about thirty feet, with two skiffs tied up at the end. The lake was about a hundred yards wide, glassy and shining in the sun between its walls of trees, and some two hundred yards ahead it turned around a point.
“The duck blind is just around that point, on the left,” she said.
I looked at it appraisingly. “And he doesn’t have any idea at all where the gun fell out?”
She shook her head. “No. It could have been anywhere between here and the point.”
It still sounded a little odd, but I merely shrugged. “All right. We might as well get started. I’d like you to come along to guide me from the surface. You’d better change into something. Those skiffs are dirty and wet.”
“I think I’ve got an old swimsuit in the houseboat. I could change into that.”
“All right,” I said. We went back around to the gangplank and walked aboard. She unlocked the door. It was a comfortably furnished five-room affair. She pointed out a room and I went in to change. She disappeared into another room. She was a cool one, with too damned much confidence in herself, coming out to this remote place with a man she didn’t even know.
Cool wasn’t the word for it. I could see that a few minutes later when she came out on the dock while I was getting the skiff ready. She could make your breath catch in your throat. The bathing suit was black, and she didn’t have a vestige of a tan; the clear, smooth blondeness of her hit you almost physically. There was something regal about her – like a goddess. I looked down uncomfortably and went on bailing. She was completely unconcerned, and her eyes held only that same open friendliness.
I fitted the oarlocks and held the boat while she got in and sat down amidships. Setting the aqualung and mask in the stern, I shoved off.
We couldn’t have been over seventy-five yards off the pier when I found the gun. If I’d been looking ahead instead of staring so intently at the bottom I’d have seen it even sooner. It was slanting into the mud, barrel down, with the stock up in plain sight. I pulled it out, kicked to the surface and swam to the skiff.
Her eyes went wide and she smiled when she saw the gun. “That was fast, wasn’t it?” she said.
I set it in the bottom of the boat, stripped off the diving gear, and heaved that in, too. “Nothing to it,” I said. “It was sticking up in plain sight.”