Laurey Bright - Dangerous Waters

“Want to go below?” Granger asked.

“Sure.” Tomorrow they’d see their father’s body in the funeral parlor before they carried his coffin to the seamen’s chapel whose doors Barney Broderick had seldom darkened in life. But his beloved Sea-Rogue was where Barney’s spirit lived. This was their real goodbye.

Granger dropped into the cockpit where the mizzen was stepped, a few feet forward of the wheel. He took a key ring from his pocket and opened up the deckhouse to descend the short, steep companionway to the dark interior.

Rogan followed him down. “Have you been aboard since the old man…?”

“No.” Granger flicked a switch but nothing happened. Evidently Barney hadn’t hooked the boat up to shore power. “Hang on a minute.” He fumbled about the galley area behind the companionway.

A small flame flared, and within seconds he’d lit a kerosene lamp hanging from a gimbal. The light flickered, brightened, and steadied. Varnish gleamed on the mahogany interior; a slit-eyed mask from the Philippines leered from one of the few spaces on the bulkheads.

“Guess it hasn’t changed much,” Granger said.

The palm-leaf matting on the floor looked new, but otherwise was identical to what Rogan remembered from years back. So was everything else.

Seats that could serve as narrow berths formed an L at the table, their once-floral coverings faded and thin. A bank of instruments occupied the navigation desk near the companionway. Recessed shelves fitted with fiddle rails to safeguard the contents in rough weather held old volumes that Barney had treasured, along with some paperbacks, nautical knickknacks, and shells and carvings from islands around the Pacific.

In the galley a cutlery drawer sat half open, and a cupboard door hung ajar. Granger said, “The police searched the boat for ID and a contact address.”

He unhooked the lamp and headed toward the stern, pausing at an open door to one side of the short passageway. Taff’s cabin, with colorful pictures torn from National Geographic magazines pinned over the bunk, a battered peaked cap hanging on a hook, a rolled sleeping bag at the end of the mattress, looked as though he’d just stepped out on deck.

Granger moved on to what Barney had liked to call the master’s stateroom in the stern, crammed with more books and a built-in desk. The attached wooden chair had a curved back, the varnish worn pale in the middle, its seat softened by a thin, indented cushion. Rogan had the absurd idea that if he put a hand on it he’d find it still warm.

A marine chart of the Pacific lay open on the desk, with a small pile of tide tables and almanacs. Items of clean clothing were heaped on the relatively roomy berth fitted at the stern, and books occupied the shelves above.

As Rogan followed him inside, Granger turned, lifting the lamp high. The framed picture of their mother still hung over the doorway, where Barney could see it every night before going to sleep.

Rogan swallowed, then blundered back to the saloon.

Granger said evenly, “I guess that’s it.” He rehung the lamp, and turned the flame down until it disappeared.

In the blackness Rogan groped for the companionway. Back on deck he breathed in the pungency of salt water and fish, and a whiff of diesel. “He didn’t deserve to die like that,” he said hoarsely. Like some bit of discarded flotsam, callously abandoned to the cold and dark.

“Nobody does,” Granger agreed.

Rogan closed his fists, overwhelmed by a hot-eyed, skull-thumping rage. Whoever was responsible for causing his father’s secretly damaged heart to finally stop beating—when he found them he’d bloody well tear them apart, limb from limb.

Camille wasn’t sure what to wear to the funeral of a man she’d never known.

The one dress she’d packed—lightweight, creaseless, and simple enough for any time of day—had been fine for dinner with James Drummond. But even with a beige silk cardigan to cover her shoulders it looked a bit frivolous for a somber church service.

Entering the historic seamen’s chapel later, she was glad she’d settled for forest-green jean-style pants with a cream shirt and low-heeled braided-leather shoes.

Two men seated near the coffin wore impeccable dark suits, but other suits in evidence were of the ill-fitting, limp and unfashionable kind resurrected from some forgotten corner of a wardrobe, and the air was pervaded with a faint odor of naphthalene and mildew.

The service was simple and brief. When the minister paused, one of the men in the front pew went to the lectern, and only then Camille recognized her piratical stranger’s dinner companion of the previous evening.

Shocked, she turned her gaze to the second man.

He’d had a haircut, but the broad shoulders straining at the jacket of the suit, and the confident tilt of his head, were already familiar. She half expected him to turn and grin at her with the same bold insouciance he’d shown last night.

But of course he wouldn’t. This, she realized as his brother began to speak, was his father’s funeral.

Camille hardly heard the eulogy, dimly registering words like “adventurous” and “indomitable” and “determined.” She wondered if his sons had really known Barney Broderick. If they too had longed for a father who went to the office every day and came home for dinner every night and read the newspaper and watched TV before going off to bed. She swallowed, assailed by a familiar sensation—half sadness, half anger.

The man in the front pew dipped his head, momentarily out of her sight, but when he raised it again his big square shoulders were straighter than ever.

He didn’t take up the minister’s invitation for anyone to share their memories of the deceased, but a few gristly, weather-creased men spoke of a staunch friend, a fine sailor, a great bloke, and “one of nature’s gentlemen.” The last elderly raconteur told a couple of down-to-earth anecdotes about “old Barney” that had his cronies rocking with laughter and then wiping away tears.

His two sons as they helped lift and carry the coffin were tearless, seemingly emotionless. Outside, the coffin was slid into a hearse and the brothers stood shoulder to shoulder, fielding handshakes and condolences.

Camille waited for a gap and had almost decided to give up and return to the hotel when the pirate brother looked over the shoulder of a man who was shaking his hand, and she saw the quick flare of recognition in his eyes as they met hers.

He said something to the man and then he was pushing through the crowd, throwing a word here and there, moving inexorably toward Camille until he fetched up directly in front of her, so close she took a startled step backward.

Scowling down at her, he said, “Who are you?”

“Camille Hartley,” she told him. “I’m sorry about your father, Mr. Broderick.”

“Rogan,” he said. “Or Rogue, if you like. Did you know him?”

“Not really. I was supposed to meet him here yesterday, but when I arrived I was told he’d…died. I’m sorry,” she repeated.

“Why were you meeting him?”

“He asked me to. It concerned…my father.”

“Your father?”

“Thomas McIndoe.”

For a second he looked confused. Then he said, “Taff? Taff was your father?”

“Yes,” she admitted stiffly.

“So old Taff does have descendants.”

“One,” she confirmed reluctantly.

There was a stir in the crowd behind him, and his brother came to his side. “Ready to go to the crematorium?” he quietly asked Rogan. The notice in the newspaper had said the cremation would be private. “I told everyone we’ll see them later at the Imperial.”

He nodded curtly to Camille and made to turn away and take his brother with him.