“Does it have to?” I asked.
She put both hands alongside her face and said slowly, around the tightness in her throat, “I don’t know how to explain it. 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 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.
Then I thought of something else. “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 stupid 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 about fifty miles north-north-east of Scorpion Reef. It’s 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.”
That wasn’t good. You had to assume too many things. You had to assume that Macaulay had known where he was himself and that 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 launch the rubber raft.
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 said 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. With the parallel rulers I laid down a line 33 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.
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 twenty-five 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 said she had 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.
Three-quarters of a million dollars was the prize. Brutality was their profession. I thought of it and felt chilly along the back.
I was still looking at the chart when the idea began to come to me. I looked at my watch. It was just a little less than two hours since we’d cleared the seabuoy. Guessing our speed at five knots would put us ten miles down that line. Growing excited now, I marked the estimated position and spanned the distance to the beach westward of us with the dividers. I measured it off against the edge of the chart. It was a little less than nine miles.
Hope surged up in me. We could do it. There was still enough glow in the sky over Sanport to guide us, and if there weren’t all we had to do was keep the sea behind us and go downwind. The water was warm. You could stay in it all day without losing too much body heat.
I hurried back through the curtain and told her my idea.
She was scared. She couldn’t swim very well, but when I told her there wasn’t a chance in the world of finding that plane and that they’d kill us anyway, she agreed.
I told her to play sick, grab the belt as she got past Barfield, and go overboard holding it while I handled Barclay.
She nodded. “Thank you for everything,” she said softly. She thought we were going to drown.
I put my hand against her cheek. “We’ll make it,” I said. Just touching her brought back that intense longing to take her in my arms. I stood up abruptly and went back on deck. It was very dark. Barfield growled something and went below. I sat down in the cockpit, on Barclay’s right and as near him as I dared.
“Nice talk?” he asked.
“Very nice,” I answered.
“She really didn’t know what he was doing, did she?”
“No.”
“Could be,” he said.
My eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness now. I looked astern and could still see the faint glow over the city. Involuntarily, I shuddered. There was a lot of dark water between here and the shore.
“Did she tell you where the plane was?” Barclay asked.
“Yes,” I said. I repeated what she had said, and asked, “Where did you get the impression it was west of Scorpion Reef?”
“That’s what she said,” Barclay answered. “She said NNW.”
“She was suffering from shock,” I said coldly. “I believe she had just seen her husband butchered in cold blood. And, anyway, it’s a cinch he wouldn’t have been to the westward of Scorpion Reef if he’d been heading for the Florida coast.”
“Maybe,” he said. “We’ll see about it after breakfast. Get some sleep and don’t try anything stupid.”
I started to say something, but at that moment I heard voices in the cabin. She had started up.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Barfield’s voice growled.
“I – feel nauseated,” she said. I could barely hear her. “ – fresh air –”
“Hey, Joey,” Barfield called out. “All right to let her up?”
I waited, holding my breath.