Charles Williams - Gulf Coast Girl

She glanced briefly at him as if he were something that had crawled out of a ditch after a rain, and sat down on the starboard side holding the plate of sandwiches in her lap.

Barclay smiled coolly. “I trust you’ve recovered.”

She nodded. “I have. Thank you.”

He signed to me. “Take the helm for a while Manning.”

I set the coffeepot on the cockpit deck and moved back. He slipped past and I took the tiller. The sun was low in the west and the breeze had subsided to a light air scarcely filling the sails. Barclay sat down on the weather side beyond Barfield and took one of the sandwiches from the plate. A lock of brown hair was breeze-blown across his forehead and he looked more like a young poet or student than ever, if you forgot the heavy sag of the jacket and didn’t look too closely at the cool deadliness of the eyes.

He glanced at me and then at Shannon. “If you’ll be kind enough to give me your attention I shan’t have to say this more than once. We are now at least fifty miles from the nearest land. Obviously, any further attempt to swim ashore is futile. I have thrown overboard the oars to the dinghy, so you can’t get away in that. Any attempt at upsetting the status quo will be met with a pistol-whipping.”

He stopped. Barfield had leaned forward to take a sandwich from the plate on her lap, and while he was about it he patted her on the knee. She stared at him with icy contempt.

“Listen to the nice man, baby,” he said.

“You are listening, aren’t you, Mrs. Macaulay?” Barclay asked coldly. “I was speaking primarily to you, since you will be the recipient of the pistol-whipping if Manning tries to get out of hand.”

She was superb. She turned and regarded him calmly. “I hear you. But you don’t have to impress me; you forget, I’ve already seen you at work.”

He shrugged. “That being the case, shall we get down to business? Your husband told you where his plane crashed. I should like you to tell us exactly what he said.”

“Of course I’ll tell you,” she said. “Why shouldn’t I? But I fail to see why you had to bring me out here to ask a simple question like that.”

“Obvious, isn’t it?” he said. “But go ahead.”

“All right. It was late in the afternoon, he said, near sunset, when he picked up Scorpion Reef. He changed course slightly so as to hit the Florida coast somewhere above Fort Myers. A few minutes later he began to have trouble with his starboard engine. Then it caught fire. He couldn’t put it out, and he knew he was going to crash. He had noticed a reef or shoal below him just a minute or two before, and tried to get back so he could land on the downwind side of it, where the sea wouldn’t be so rough, but he couldn’t make it. He crashed on the east side of it, about two miles off, and the plane sank almost immediately. He just had time to climb out on a wing, and throw the raft in the water. As you probably know, he couldn’t swim at all.”

“Why didn’t he try to get the diamonds off with him?”

“He had stowed the box in a locker so it wouldn’t go flying around if the weather got rough. And the locker was aft, already under water.”

“What about the other man? The diver?”

This was the only part of it that hurt her. She hesitated for a moment, and I could see the sickness in her eyes. “He said the man didn’t have his belt fastened, and was killed in the crash.”

You could take your choice, I thought. He might have been alone, already a murderer, or he could have left an injured man to drown. Or possibly there was just a slim chance he was telling the truth. She could hold onto that, anyway.

“Very well,” Barclay said. Then he lashed at her suddenly: “Now. Why was he so sure of his exact bearing from that reef? He didn’t have time to take a compass reading before the plane went down, and he didn’t have a compass on the raft.”

She was quite calm. “It was late afternoon, I said. The sun was setting. The plane, the very northern end of the surf on the shoal, and the sun were all in one straight line.”

She looked around suddenly at me. “I remember now, you asked me that, didn’t you, Bill? Whether he could see surf from the raft. And I’d forgotten.”

I nodded. It would make a difference, all right; but you still had to find the reef. It was hopeless.

Barclay dropped the rest of the sandwich over the side and cupped his hands to light a cigarette. “Very well. Now, what was the position?”

“Fifty miles north-northeast of Scorpion Reef.”

He stared coldly. “And why did you say it was to the westward when I asked you last night?”

“I’m sure I didn’t,” she replied.

“The fact remains, you did. Make up our minds, shall we?”

“It’s north-northeast.”

“Very well,” he said crisply. “George, run down and bring up that chart. And the parallel rulers and dividers.”

Barfield brought them up and the two of them crouched over the chart in the bottom of the cockpit. She drew her knees to one side and continued to regard them as if they were some kind of vermin. Barclay’s face was thoughtful. “‘North-northeast—”

“Make it twenty-two degrees,” I said. “Get it off the compass rose and slide the rulers over.” I knew what he would find, and waited, a little tensely.

He had the line, and picked up the dividers. He looked over at me, his eyes questioning. “Edge of the chart, isn’t it? Mean latitude, or something?”

“Yes,” I said. “Sixty nautical miles to the degree.”

He picked the distance off and set the dividers along the line. Then he turned his head and stared bleakly at Shannon Macaulay. “Perhaps you would like to try again.”

“You asked me what he told me,” she said indifferently. “I have just repeated it, word for word. What else would you like me to do?”

“Tell the truth, for one thing.”

“I am telling the truth.”

He sighed. “I see. Then we are to assume the chart-maker was lying. The nearest sounding shown here is forty-five fathoms. A practical joke, no doubt.”

“And why do you think I would lie about it?”

“Really? For a paltry three quarters of a million?”

There was Irish in her, all right, and it flared now, the second time I had seen it. “Why, you idiotic vermin! I wouldn’t stoop to pick up your damned, filthy diamonds if I stumbled over them in the dark. I don’t want them. I wouldn’t have them. I have no interest in them whatever. If I had them here in my lap, I’d give them to you, and be glad to get rid of them. But there’s no way you can understand that, is there? I’d be wasting my breath trying to explain it to you.”

“Excellent scene,” he said. “More effective, as a rule, however, if you throw something. Now, shall we start over?” He paused, and nodded to Barfield. “George.”

Barfield turned, still on his knees, and caught her left wrist. He started to twist it, slowly at first.

I pulled my feet under me, and crouched, still holding the tiller. “Call him off,” I said.

Barclay slipped the gun out of his right-hand jacket pocket and pointed it carelessly in my direction. “As you were, Manning.”

“Call him off!”

Barfield had stopped to watch us, but he continued to hold her arm. Her lips were tightly compressed, and I knew it was already hurting.

I was too wild to be scared. “Listen, Barclay. This whole thing is going to come unzipped. If he hurts her, it’s you I’m coming for, and you’re going to have to use that gun to stop me. If you think you can find that reef without my help, go ahead.”

It hung poised, ready to go either way. I tried to take a breath through the tightness in my throat. “Don’t be a damned fool,” I went on. “If she were going to lie, would she give you a stupid position like that? Maybe there is a shoal there, or somewhere within fifteen miles or so. All that area hasn’t been sounded. Macaulay could have been off in his reckoning. The only thing to do is go there and see, and you’ll never get there unless I take you. You name it. Now.”