Kathleen Korbel - Sail Away

“When you due back?” Hank asked.

“Beginning of next week. After I take Dulcy to the doctor’s.”

Dulcy. His wife of eight months, who was even now eight months pregnant, tied to the house and testy as a mare with a burr under her saddle. Until the last month, Dulcy had run the ranch single-handed. She still wasn’t happy about not being allowed to join in the drive, but the doctor had been adamant. Whether Dulcy liked it or not, neither her physician nor her husband was going to let her wrangle cattle up in the high mountain meadows when she could barely fit in her saddle.

Which was why Noah wasn’t surprised to see her standing out in the yard waiting for him to show up. Tiny, redheaded, round as a watermelon. Hand to eyes to shade them against the setting sun. Noah waved and kicked his gelding into a canter. Dulcy waved back, something in her hand, and began walking forward.

Walking fast, her movements taut and aggressive.

Noah hadn’t been married long, but he’d been married long enough to know what that posture meant. Something was wrong. Without even realizing it, he nudged his horse into a dead run.

“What’s the matter?” he asked as he skidded to a stop and swung down.

Dulcy had a death’s grip on a newspaper. Her face was screwed up in worry, and her hand was at her belly.

Noah grabbed her. “Dulcy? What is it?”

She handed over the paper. “We were just headed up to find you,” she said. “I think you’d better read this.”

Noah didn’t have to read more than the headlines. “Oh, God. I have to go.”

“We have to go,” she said simply.

He took one look at the tight cast of her eyes and knew it wouldn’t do any good to argue. His chest was on fire, and he’d just found out. She must have been chewing on this thing for twelve hours or more. “We’ll go,” he said, and curled an arm around her shoulder to support her. She wouldn’t have it, though. She just wrapped her arms around his neck and held him and didn’t ask what else this would mean, even though they both knew.

They didn’t care. It didn’t matter that the headline meant his anonymity was over, his cover blown like a storm door in a twister. It didn’t matter that their island of domestic normalcy would never be recovered. What mattered was why.

Noah wouldn’t remember dropping the newspaper. He just held on to his wife, suddenly terrified to his very soul. On the ground, the breeze riffled at the pages, but the headline on the front page was too big to miss. Just above the picture of Noah in his tux at the Academy Awards, screamed the words: Cameron Ross Missing and Feared Dead Off Hawaiian Islands.

One

He wasn’t missing, really. Just seriously misplaced. At least, he thought he must be, since he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten here. Or why. Or when. All he knew was that he was lying on his back in the water looking up at a very blue, very bright sky. And that his head hurt. And his leg. And his ribs on his right side. Other than that, he figured he was probably just fine.

He tried to sit up, but that just made his head hurt worse. He closed his eyes, but that didn’t seem to help. He was thirsty, he was dizzy and he was a little seasick.

He was late. He knew that. He was supposed to be somewhere. He was supposed to be doing something Something important. But whatever it was refused to be identified. And, truthfully, he didn’t try hard. It was too much effort. He should probably just stick to finding out where he was.

The raft. He should look at the raft he was lying on Maybe he could find some kind of clue, a boat’s name or return address or something. He opened his eyes.

No clue. Just a big white inflatable raft with nothing in it but him...in a tuxedo. With bare feet. And a big black Stetson lying across his stomach. In the middle of miles and miles of water.

That settled it. The only thing he managed to do with his eyes open was confuse himself. He closed them and kept them closed. And then, just for extra measure, he plopped the hat over his eyes to keep out the sun.

He really wasn’t sure how long he’d been drifting. Minutes. Hours. Days. He was sweating, and he could tell his neck and hands were burning in the hot tropical sun, but he couldn’t seem to manage the energy to move. The drift of the water beneath him was just too soothing, the breeze only strong enough to cool the sweat on his chest. So he lay there like a well-dressed lump and let the sun cook him to the color of a rare roast and wondered where he was supposed to be.

“Hello? Can you hear me?”

He heard her. He ignored her. Probably a gorgeous woman in an evening dress to go with his tux.

The thought damn near made him laugh. This sun really was frying his brain.

“Hey! Are you all right?”

Her voice was closer now. Maybe she was a mermaid. Or a navy-trained dolphin who’d broken the language barrier. Unless she had his itinerary in her hand with full explanations, he really didn’t want to know.

“Go away.” He sounded like hell.

She laughed, an abrupt burst of surprise. “Why?” she asked, very near now, her voice like that of the Lorelei on the Rhine—except with a different accent. “You waiting for a date?”

He didn’t bother to look over or remove his hat. He was dizzy enough as it was. “Sure seems to me like it’s a definite possibility.”

She laughed again, and he wanted to smile. “Well, I seriously doubt anybody’s going to want to dance with you looking like that.”

“Don’t be silly,” he told her. “I’m in my best clothes...at least, I think I am.”

“You think?”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure of much right now...except that my head is killing me. You have any aspirin?”

“How ’bout if I take you in to land and we can find some?”

That was what finally got his eyes open. “Land? There’s land?”

“Of course there’s land. Where do you think I came from?”

“Twenty thousand leagues under the sea.” He tilted the hat enough so he could squint in the direction of her voice. All he could make out was an expressionist painting of colors. Lurid yellows and oranges in overlapping triangles, the blue of the ocean, and a smaller series of shapes and colors that involved flickering black, deep tan and bright red, tilting and repeating themselves into a pattern that was somehow familiar, no matter how weird. He interpreted it as a shapely woman on a small sailboat, done by Picasso.

He shook his head. “Oh, no you don’t,” he demurred, dropping the hat back over his eyes. “Just let me bake in peace.”

“That’s exactly what you’re going to do if you don’t get off the water,” she protested.

He felt a bump alongside the raft and tried to ignore it. A mirage. A noisy mirage that smelled like coconut oil and plumeria.

“How do I know what plumeria smells like?” he wondered out loud.

Busy doing something that made the raft buck and sway, she ignored his question. “Come on, you need to get someplace safe. Can you tell me what happened?”

“I fell off a boat.”

“I guessed that. What boat?”

He frowned in concentration. “Don’t know.”

That didn’t seem to bother her. “Probably happened during the storm. You’re lucky you ended up so close to land. Now, if you’ll take off that hat and open your eyes, you need to help me get you over.”

He sighed, unbelievably tired, even after just lying around for...for how long? He remembered darkness, the jolt of cold water. A struggle trying to get shiny black pumps off in the water. Which made just about as much sense as anything else he remembered.

“I don’t suppose you could just tow me back like this?”

“Not in a sailboat,” she assured him. “Besides, if you can get over here, I have water.”