The table was not laid, but there were two mugs on it, and one of them was still full of coffee. When the hard-bitten old mate in charge of the boarding party walked over and put his hand against the coffee pot sitting on one burner of the primus stove it was slightly warm. There had been somebody here less than an hour ago.
He went over to the small table where the charts were and opened what he took to be the log book, flipping hurriedly through to the last page on which anything was written. He studied it for a moment, and then shook his head. In forty years at sea he had never encountered a log entry quite like it.
“. . . the blue, and that last, haunting flash of silver, gesturing as it died. It was beckoning. Toward the rapture. The rapture . . .”
Before he closed the book he took something from between the pages and stared at it. It was a single long strand of ash-blonde hair. He shook his head again.
Putting the book under his arm, he picked up the small satchel which had been lying in the other bunk and jerked his head for the two seamen to follow him back on deck.
A few yards away in the red sunset the master of the American tanker Joseph H. Hallock waited on her bridge for the mate to come aboard.
Freya, of San Juan, P.R., it said under her stern, and the master of the tanker studied her curiously while he waited for the mate. She was a long way from home. He wondered what she was doing this far to the westward, in the Gulf of Mexico, and why a small boat from Spanish Puerto Rico should have been named after a Norse goddess.
The mate came up on the bridge carrying the big ledger and the satchel. “Sick?” the captain asked. “Or dead?”
“Gone,” the mate said, with the air of a man who has been talking to ghosts without believing in them. “Just gone. Like that.
“Two of ’em, as near as I can figure it,” he went on, sketching it tersely. “A man and a woman, though there wasn’t much in the way of women’s clothes except half a bathing suit. One or both of ’em was there not over an hour ago.”
“Well, as soon as you get that line on her we’d better go back and see,” the captain said. “Anything in the log?”
“Gibberish,” the older man replied. He passed over the book, and then the satchel. “Cap, you ought to be thankful you’ve got an honest mate,” he said, nodding toward the little bag. “Just guessing, I’d say there’s about fifty thousand dollars in there.”
The captain pursed his lips in a silent whistle as he opened the bag to stare briefly at the bundles of American currency. He looked outward at the Freya, where the men were making the towline fast, and frowned thoughtfully. Then he opened the big journal at the page the mate indicated and read the last entry.
He frowned again.
The rapture . . .
When there was no longer any light at all and they had given up the search for any possible survivors and resumed their course, the captain counted the money in the presence of two of the ship’s officers and locked it in the safe. It came to eighty-three thousand dollars. Then he sat down alone in his office and opened the journal again . . .
It was a hot, Gulf Coast morning in early June. The barge was moored out on the T-head of the old Parker Mill dock near the west end of the waterway. Carter had gone to New Orleans to bid on a salvage job and I was living on board alone. I was checking over some diving gear when a car rolled out of the end of the shed and stopped beside mine. It was a couple of tons of shining Cadillac, and there was a girl in it.
She got out and closed the door and walked over to the edge of the pier with the unhurried smoothness of poured honey.
“Good morning,” she said. “You’re Mr Manning, I hope?”
I straightened. “That’s right,” I said, wondering what she wanted.
She smiled. “I’d like to talk to you. Could I come aboard?”
I glanced at the spike heels and then at the ladder leaning against the pier, and shook my head. “I’ll come up.”
I did, and the minute I was up there facing her I was struck by the size of her. She was a cathedral of a girl. In the high heels she must have been close to six feet. I’m six-two, and I could barely see over the top of the smooth ash-blonde head.
Her hair was gathered in a roll very low on the back of her neck and she was wearing a short-sleeved summery dress the color of cinnamon which intensified the fairness of her skin and did her no harm at all in the other departments.
Her face was wide at the cheekbones in a way that was suggestively Scandinavian, and her complexion matched it perfectly. She had the smoothest skin I’d ever seen. The mouth was a little wide, too, and full lipped. It wasn’t a classic face at all, but still lovely to look at and perhaps a little sexy. Her eyes were large and gray, and they said she was nice.
It was hot in the sun, and quite still, and I was a little uncomfortable, aware I’d probably been staring at her. “What can I do for you?” I asked.
“Perhaps I’d better introduce myself,” she said. “I’m Mrs Wayne. Shannon Wayne. I wanted to talk to you about a job.”
“What kind of job?” I asked.
“Recovering a shotgun that was lost out of a boat.”
“Where?” I asked.
“In a lake, about a hundred miles north of here—”
I shook my head. “It would cost you more than it’s worth.”
“But – ” she protested, the gray eyes deadly serious. “You wouldn’t have to take a diving suit and air pump and all that stuff. I thought perhaps you had one of those aqualung outfits.”
“We do,” I said. “In fact, I’ve got one of my own. But it would still be cheaper to buy a new shotgun.”
“No,” she said. “Perhaps I’d better explain. It’s quite an expensive one. A single-barreled trap gun with a lot of engraving and a custom stock. I think it cost around seven hundred dollars.”
I whistled. “How’d a gun like that ever fall in a lake?”
“My husband was going out to the duck blind one morning and it accidentally fell out of the skiff.”
I looked at her for a moment, not saying anything. There was something odd about it. What kind of fool would be silly enough to take a $700 trap gun into a duck blind? And even if he had money enough to buy them by the dozen, a single-barreled gun was a poor thing to hunt ducks with.
“How deep is the water?” I asked.
“Ten or twelve feet, I think.”
“Well, look. I’ll tell you how to get your gun back. Any neighborhood kid can do it, for five dollars. Get a pair of goggles, or a diving mask. You can buy them at any dime store. Go out and anchor your skiff where the gun went overboard and send the kid down to look for it. Take a piece of fishline to haul it up with when he locates it.”
“It’s not quite that simple,” she said. “You see, it’s about three hundred yards from the houseboat to where the duck blind is, and we’re not sure where it fell out.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It was early in the morning, and still dark.”
“Didn’t he hear it?”
“No. I think he said there was quite a wind blowing.”
It made a little sense. “All right,” I said. “I’ll find it for you. When do we start?”
“Right now,” she said. “Unless you have another job.”
“No. I’m not doing anything.”
She smiled again. “That’s fine. We’ll go in my car, if it’s all right with you. Will your equipment fit in back?”