Jan Burke - Eighteen

Sarah saw the fear in Hastings eyes.

“The trunk is custom made, isn’t it?” she said to Robert. “It’s built to be the same size as a soldier’s berth on the ship.”

“Yes.”

There was a knock at the door, and in another moment, Ada and Dolman had joined them.

Hastings glared angrily at Ada.

“You’d like to see me arrested, wouldn’t you?” Ada said to him.

He nodded vigorously.

“The feel is mutual.” She turned to her granddaughter. “Do you know how Elliot died?”

Sarah shook her head.

“Tell me, Sarah, was the Queen Mary air conditioned?”

“Not all of it-not until later years, after the war.”

“And before the war?”

“Not on all decks. It wasn’t necessary. The ship was built for travel on the North Atlantic. The electric fireplaces in the first class cabins-”

“Never mind the fireplaces,” Ada said. “You just made an important point. The ship was built for North Atlantic crossings.”

“You knew that, didn’t you Mr. Hastings?” Robert said.

Hastings made an angry sound behind the gag.

“Oh, pardon me. I’ll remove the gag, but I’ll expect you to keep your voice at a conversational level. If you don’t-” he nodded toward Captain Dolman, who held a gun aimed at Hastings. “I’m afraid Captain Dolman, who is an excellent shot, will be allowed to fulfill his fondest wish.”

“Now see here,” Hastings said as the gag was removed, “I’ve heard for years about Ada Milington’s crazy parties, but this is too much! Let me go now, and we can forget this ever happened.”

“As you’ve forgotten what happened to those men you murdered?” Ada asked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Sarah,” Ada said. “How many standee berths were placed in the cabin class swimming pool?”

“One hundred and ten,” she answered promptly. “Was that where Elliot was assigned while on the ship?”

“Yes,” Dolman answered. “My unit was sent to that hellhole.”

“It was crowded for everybody!” Hastings said. “There was a war on, remember? We needed to get troops to Europe and the Pacific.”

“And that was your responsibility,” Robert said.

“Yes, of course it was. I made this ship ten times more efficient for the transporting of troops.”

“The numbers got bigger and bigger, thanks to you.”

“That’s right. That’s why you didn’t grow up speaking German or Japanese, sonny boy.”

“I fought against them,” Dolman said, “but they were the enemy then, and the war was on. But you weren’t supposed to be our enemy, Hastings. Troops weren’t supposed to die because of you.”

“You’re insane! All of you! I worked at a desk job! I didn’t kill anybody. Sarah-” he pleaded, turning to the one person who seemed inclined to show him mercy.

But Sarah had been thinking about the questions that had been asked so far. “The ship has no portholes in the pool area,” she said, frowning. “The room is completely enclosed. During the war, the pool was drained, but that would mean that the temporary berths were positioned…” She looked at Robert.

“Yes, you’ve guessed it.”

“Directly above one of the boilers,” she finished, staring at Hastings now.

“We crossed the damned Equator in a ship built to go from Southampton to New York,” Dolman said. “The tropics, Hastings. Do you know what it’s like to watch men dying of the heat? Suffocating to death? No fresh air, just the stench of people getting sick and sweating and some of them dying. Temperatures over a hundred and ten degrees-and that’s on the upper decks. Down where we were, it was a damned oven, Hastings. I say we put you in that trunk and we heat it up until you feel your blood boiling. You should have had to watch men like young Elliot Parsons die. I had to, Hastings, and I’ll never forget it!”

“There was no way I could have known-” Hastings pleaded. “We were just trying to do out best to fight the war.”

“Until now,” Dolman said, “I didn’t know who made the decisions about how we were going to be loaded in there. There wasn’t any escape for us then, and there shouldn’t be any for you now.”

“You aren’t going to kill me! Not for something that happened so long ago! Not for a simple miscalculation!”

“What do you want from him?” Sarah asked.

“Withdraw from the Congressional race,” Ada said.

“What?”

“And resign from office,” Robert added.

“You’ll never get away with this!”

“People get away with things like this all the time. You’ve been getting away with murder for over fifty years.”

“It wasn’t murder, I tell you! We didn’t know.”

Sarah frowned. “But you must have known.”

“What?”

“The voyage Elliot Parsons sailed on-it wasn’t the first voyage to cross the Equator.” She looked at Hastings. “You didn’t miscalculate. You accepted the fact that some men might die on the voyage.”

There was a long silence, broken only when Robert said, “Bravo, Sarah.”

“We can prove all of this, Hastings,” Ada said. “Retire as a State Senator, or lose an election in shame.”

“Do you think anyone is going to care about what happened then?”

“Put him in the trunk again!” Dolman said. “He’ll have just as much room to move around as we did. Let’s see him win an election from there.”

“No-no! I won’t run for office. I swear I won’t. Just let me out of here!”

“Don’t trust him!” Dolman said.

“There’s another alternative,” Robert said, opening a drawer in a built-in desk.

“What?” Hastings asked, apprehensively.

Robert didn’t answer right away, but when he turned around, he held a syringe.

“What’s in there?” Hastings asked.

“Oh, you’ll just have to trust me,” Robert said, “maybe it will give you a fever-something that will make your blood boil, as Captain Dolman says-or maybe it will just help you to sleep.”

When State Senator Archer Hastings awakened, he was hot, unbearably hot, and thirsty. He was still on the ship, he realized hazily. The damned ship. And, he realized with alarm, he was not in his bed, but in an enclosed space-the trunk. He pushed against the lid-it flew open.

Shaking, he crawled out of it, onto the bed. He was still hot, miserably hot, and the terror of the trunk would not leave him.

He reached for the phone next to his bed, and said thickly, “Help. Send a doctor in to help me. I’m ill.”

Not much later, a doctor did arrive. He stepped into the room and said, “Are you chilled?”

“Chilled? Are you mad? I’m burning up!”

“So am I,” the physician said, and turned down the thermostat. “Open the portholes and you’ll be fine.”

“Those damned people!” Hastings exclaimed.

“Which people?” the doctor said, in the tone of one who has encountered a lunatic.

“Mrs. Ada Milington-is she still aboard?”

“Oh no. I’m the last of Ada ’s party still on the ship. She said you’d had a bit too much to drink last night and asked me to make sure you got off the ship all right. She was in a rush.”

“I’ll bet she was.”

“She asked me to give you a message. She said for you to remember that you have an open invitation to a pool party.”

Hastings frowned. “Where’s she off to? I need to talk to her.”

“Oh, I believe she’s well on her way to Glacier Bay by now-one of the Alaskan cruise lines. She said something about her grandchildren getting married at sea. Quite eccentric, Ada,” the doctor mused, as he was taking his leave. “Yes eccentric-but I’d take her seriously, if I were you, sir.” He paused before closing the door. “Shall I ask the hotel to send someone to help you with that trunk?”