'And so, well, I left home when I was sixteen,' Pam was saying, rattling on in a monotonal voice that exposed more than she knew. Her eyes turned, too, and focused on the backpack Kelly held in his hand. Her voice had a surprisingly brittle character that he'd not noticed before.
'Oh, great. I need some of that stuff.' She came over and took the pack from his hands, then headed towards the master bedroom. Kelly and Rosen watched her leave, then Sam handed his wife the plastic container. She needed only one look.
'I didn't know,' Kelly said, feeling the need to defend himself. 'I didn't see her take anything.' He thought back, trying to remember times when she had not been in his sight, and concluded that she might have taken pills two or perhaps three times, then realizing what her dreamy eyes had really been after all.
'Sarah?' Sam asked.
'Three- hundred-milligram. It ought not to be a severe case, but she does need assistance.'
Pam came back into the room a few seconds later, telling Kelly that she'd left something on the boat. Her hands weren't trembling, but only because she was holding them together to keep them still. It was so clear, once you knew what to look for. She was trying to control herself, and almost succeeding, but Pam wasn't an actress.
'Is this it?' Kelly asked. He held the bottle in his hands. His reward for the harsh question was like a well-earned knife in the heart.
Pam didn't reply for a few seconds. Her eyes fixed on the brown plastic container, and the first thing Kelly saw was a sudden, hungry expression as though her thoughts were already reaching for the bottle, already picking one or more of the tablets out, already anticipating whatever it was that she got from the damned things, not caring, not even noting that there were others in the room. Then the shame hit her, the realization that whatever image she had tried to convey to the others was rapidly diminishing. But worst of all, after her eyes swept over Sam and Sarah, they settled on Kelly again, oscillating between his hand and his face. At first hunger vied with shame, but shame won, and when her eyes locked on his, the expression on her face began as that of a child caught misbehaving, but it and she matured into something else, as she saw that something which might have grown into love was changing over an interval of heartbeats into contempt and disgust. Her breathing changed in a moment, becoming rapid, then irregular as the sobs began, and she realized that the greatest disgust was within her own mind, for even a drug addict must look inward, and doing so through the eyes of others merely added a cruel edge.
'I'm s- s-sorry, Kel-el-y. I di-didn't tel-el...' she tried to say, her body collapsing into itself. Pam seemed to shrink before their eyes as she saw what might have been a chance evaporate, and beyond that dissipating cloud was only despair. Pam turned away, sobbing, unable to face the man she'd begun to love.
It was decision time for John Terrence Kelly. He could feel betrayed, or he could show the same compassion to her that she had shown to him less than twenty hours before. More than anything else, what decided it was her look to him, the shame so manifest on her face. He could not just stand there. He had to do something, else his own very proud image of himself would dissolve as surely and rapidly as hers.
Kelly's eyes filled with tears as well. He went to her and wrapped his arms around her to keep her from falling, cradling her like a child, pulling her head back against his chest, because it was now his time to be strong for her, to set whatever thoughts he had aside for a while, and even the dissonant part of his mind refused to cackle its Itold you so at this moment, because there was someone hurt in his arms, and this wasn't the time for that. They stood together for a few minutes while the others watched with a mixture of personal unease and professional detachment.
'I've been trying,' she said presently, 'I really have - but I was so scared.'
'It's okay,' Kelly told her, not quite catching what she had just said. 'You were there for me, and now it's my turn to be here for you.'
'But - ' She started sobbing again, and it took a minute or so before she got it out. 'I'm not what you think I am.'
Kelly let a smile creep into his voice as he missed the second warning. 'You don't know what I think, Pammy. It's okay. Really.' He'd concentrated so hard on the girl in his arms that he hadn't noticed Sarah Rosen at his side.
'Pam, how about we take a little walk?' Pam nodded agreement, and Sarah led her outside, leaving Kelly to look at Sam.
'You are a mensch,' Rosen announced with satisfaction at his earlier diagnosis of the man's character. 'Kelly, how close is the nearest town with a pharmacy?'
'Solomons, I guess. Shouldn't she be in a hospital?'
'I'll let Sara make the call on that, but I suspect it's not necessary.'
Kelly looked at the bottle still in his hand. 'Well, I'm going to deep-six these damned things.'
'No! ' Rosen snapped. 'I'll take them. They all carry lot numbers. The police can identify the shipment that was diverted. I'll lock them up on my boat.'
'So what do we do now?'
'We wait a little while.'
Sarah and Pam came back in twenty minutes later, holding hands like mother and daughter. Pam's head was up now, though her eyes were still watery.
'We got a winner here, folks,' Sarah told them. 'She's been trying for a month all by herself.'
'She says it isn't hard,' Pam said.
'We can make it a lot easier,' Sarah assured her. She handed a list to her husband. 'Find a drugstore. John, get your boat moving. Now.'
'What happens?' Kelly asked thirty minutes and five miles later. Solomons was already a tan-green line on the northwestern horizon.
'The treatment regime is pretty simple, really. We support her with barbiturates and ease her off.'
'You give her drugs to get her off drugs?'
'Yep.' Rosen nodded. 'That's how it's done. It takes time for the body to flush out all the residual material in her tissues. The body becomes dependent on the stuff, and if you try to wean them off too rapidly, you can get some adverse effects, convulsions, that sort of thing. Occasionally people die from it.'
'What?' said Kelly, alarmed. 'I don't know anything about this, Sam.'
'Why should you? That's our job, Kelly. Sarah doesn't think that's a problem in this case. Relax, John. You give' - Rosen took the list from his pocket - 'yeah, I thought so, phenobarb, you give that to attenuate the withdrawal symptoms. Look, you know how to drive a boat, right?'
'Yep,' Kelly said, turning, knowing what came next.
'Let us do our job. Okay?'
The man didn't feel much like sleep, the coastguardsmen saw, much to their own displeasure. Before they'd had the chance to recover from the previous day's adventures, he was up again, drinking coffee in the operations room, looking over the charts yet again, using his hand to make circles, which he compared with the memorized course track of the forty-one-boat.
'How fast is a sailboat?' he asked an annoyed and irritable Quartermaster First Class Manuel Oreza.
'That one? Not very, with a fair breeze and calm seas, maybe five knots, a little more if the skipper is smart and experienced. Rule of thumb is, one point three times the square root waterline length is your hull speed, so for that one, five or six knots.' And he hoped the civilian was duly impressed with that bit of nautical trivia.
'It was windy last night,' the official noted crossly.
'A small boat doesn't go faster on choppy seas, it goes slower. That's because it spends a lot of time going up and down instead of forward.'
'So how did he get away from you?'
'He didn't get away from me, okay?' Oreza wasn't clear on who this guy was or how senior a position he actually held, but he wouldn't have taken this sort of abuse from a real officer - but a real officer would not have harassed him this way; a real officer would have listened and understood. The petty officer took a deep breath, wishing for once that there was an officer here to explain things. Civilians listened to officers, which said a lot about the intelligence of civilians. 'Look, sir, you told me to lay back, didn't you? I told you that we'd lose him in the clutter from the storm, and we did. Those old radars we use aren't worth a damn in bad weather, least not for a dinky little target like a day-sailer.'