Lady Afraid (8 page)

She needed a man like Most. He would be a reassurance; it would be a solidness to stand beside him. Being a woman, she placed a great value on these emotional comforts. Men, she suspected, were perhaps more able to coldly weigh, measure, and pass judgment on the basis of physical actions. Women followed their hearts, always. Even if their hearts frequently led them to act the role of idiots.

As to her one great motive—wanting to have Jonnie, her son—she felt strongly in the right. Nature was fundamentally involved—a mother should have her child. She was following more than her heart there; it was the way of all womankind, intense, compelling. But in the matter of Most she was not sure what was involved exactly. She might well stand aware, incidentally.

She parked the car and walked to Pier Four and threw open the small wooden gate that had
PRIVATE FOR YACHTSMEN, KEEP OUT
on it. She walked out toward the boats. Pier Four was for yachts, a pleasant place with overhead wooden canopy, water lines, telephone connections. To lie there was not expensive, and Pier Four was popular with the more practical owners.

She quickly located Most’s boat from his description—a black bugeye schooner lying in a slip well out on the pier. Drawing near, she could see that the little vessel was all black, even to sail covers.

Moonlight, touching her and lathering the bay and piers with pale silver, had a hard, friendless quality. Nothing was soft for her now, and nothing calm. The surprise and shock had subsided dully in her, was no longer a padding for her fears. Without this anesthetic, her mind was clear and her terrors had sharp claws.

Narrow catwalks extended out from the pier at each alternate slip, and Sarah moved on one of these until it brought her to the side of the black ship. Originally the name bugeye derived from the godawful symbols the Chesapeake oystermen put on the bows of their shoal-craft vessels. This was no craft born in a yacht-building yard. It was genuine, a five-log bugeye, the bottom made of logs drifted together with Swedish-iron rods. A centerboard boat, about thirty-six feet on the water line, schooner-rigged and with the typical raked-back masts. Sarah, with no room for interest in these things, noted them anyway because sailboats were her profession.

A one-man ship, this bugeye was rigged for single-handing. All sheet lines, even the halliards and anchor lines, were brought back to the cockpit so that one man could sail her. While she was noticing these meaningful things about Most’s home, the shadows in the little cabin companionway stirred, and she realized the man himself waited there.

“Good evening, Mrs. Lineyack,” Most said, and his voice was unusually grave and formal.

“May I come aboard?”

“Certainly. Why not?” Most moved slowly and in a rather bumbling way to assist her. But Sarah was at home on boats and she quickly stood on the deck of edge-laid teak-wood.

“I had to talk to you,” she explained quickly.

“Yes, I gathered that,” he replied carefully. “Won’t you be seated?” And when she had found a place in the cockpit, he treated her a bow that was as dignified as it was unnecessary, adding, “At your service, Mrs. Lineyack.”

Sarah looked at him sharply. She realized now that he had been drinking, and that this probably explained his reluctance to see her.

Most saw that she understood he was a bit crocked. He moved his shoulders some, as if shame had touched him. He sat down opposite her and said, “I didn’t expect you tonight, you know.”

“Are you alone aboard?” Sarah asked.

He nodded. “Yes, very much alone.” Then he pressed his lips together as if the statement was something from nearer his heart than he had intended. When he continued, it was more to himself than to her. “I think you’re upset,” he said.

“I’m in terrible trouble.” Sarah gave him the story in a grim chain of sentences, telling how Brill had approached her with the news that she was legally entitled to have custody of her son, and then of Brill’s plan for her to get the little boy. She put it all in—her phone call to Arbogast to confirm Brill’s reliability, the abduction, the false policeman, then Yellow-shoes, then the disappearance of Jonnie from her apartment. The vanishing of Brill’s office furniture. Arbogast’s statement that he did not recall any phone conversation about Brill. And to the end of it all she tacked: “You’re working for Arbogast, and so I thought I had better consult you.”

To this Most had listened without interrupting her, but now his head came up and he frowned, put a hand hard against the nape of his neck. “You’re still driving that rented car? Where did you park it?”

She told him.

He arose at once, frowning. “I’ll move it. The police might find it and give their attention to this neighborhood. Where did you rent the car?”

Sarah told him that too.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll take it back to them so there won’t be any trouble about it.” And then he smiled wryly and gave the true reason for his interest in the car, saying, “This will give my head a chance to clear.”

“I didn’t come to you about myself,” Sarah said desperately. “It’s Jonnie I’m worried over, my little boy.”

“Why, I see that, Sarah,” he replied gently. “But there appears to be an elaborate thing here. You have been used, if you ask me.”

“Yes,” Sarah said bitterly. “Yes, I have been used.”

Most sprang onto the pier and left. He walked steadily enough, Sarah noted, and she imagined that his condition might in part be self-consciousness. Most would be a man who would regard his own weaknesses with no favor, but neither was he likely to apologize for them.

Sarah went below. The bugeye cabin had an atmosphere which she would have enjoyed if less beset. She always got pleasure out of seeing a boat kept by one who had a feeling for boats. She could always tell by many small things—the stowing of charts in racks against the cabin carlings, the clean sparkle of kerosene gimbal lamps that were museum pieces, the whipping on a sheath-knife lanyard—that here was a vessel kept by a careful, knowing hand. To Sarah this wasn’t trivial. These were things she understood, and they showed the bent of a man’s ways.

When Most returned, as he did in something like twenty minutes, he sprang aboard lightly for a man of his size. He dropped swiftly into the cabin, and only then did his haste leave him, so that she knew he’d had some doubt that she would still be here.

“I drove past Brill’s building,” Most said. “The police were there.” He let this stand as a sufficient explanation of his anxieties, and he put a coffeepot on the alcohol stove.

Sarah said thinly, “The police are looking for me, I suppose.”

“I’d guess so.” He threw a stream of water into the coffeepot with the galley pump—four strokes—and replaced the pot on the stove, then changed his mind and pumped four more strokes into the pot. He was a man who made his own coffee, the same methodical amount each time, and the extra four strokes were for Sarah. Finally he said, “The police must have the notes you left at the Lineyack place.”

“Why, yes, if they’re looking for Brill, they must have it,” Sarah agreed. “I’m the victim of something strange, aren’t I?”

He did not deny it and measured brown grains of coffee into the pot, and when the pot was heating he took a seat opposite her. She felt that he had been speculating about her. This was correct, because he said finally, “It was a tricky thing. Queer business. Have you any idea what’s behind it?”

Sarah shook her head. “I can’t imagine. I haven’t any idea at all.” She tied her fingers tightly together, troubled by the loose wild feeling of flying nerve ends around her heart. “Is Jonnie safe?” she gasped. “That’s what I’ve got to know!”

“Sarah…” Most got up and laid a hand on her arm.

“Don’t! Leave me alone!” This was hysteria talking.

He said, “Look, the boy may be fine. But if he isn’t, you won’t help a bit by blowing up.” Then he gripped her arm for a moment and took his hand away.

“But I—I’m so frightened!”

“Sure you are,” Most replied. “But there’s sense in it somewhere. Let’s pick it apart. All we have to do is find the right thread and start unraveling. We’ll be led to something, no doubt.”

“Mr. Arbogast… why did he say I hadn’t telephoned concerning Brill?” Sarah cried desperately.

“We’ll look into that, Sarah.”

Sarah shuddered. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Captain.” She made a discouraged gesture and added, “You know how it is to be sailing wing-and-wing and get caught like a fool by a wind so hard you can’t get canvas down and don’t dare jibe about? That’s the way I am now.” And then suddenly she asked, “Will you help me, Captain Most?”

“Help you? Certainly I’ll help you.” He seemed surprised at the question. “What do you think I’m—Well, anyway, I will. But I’d like to know more than I do now.”

“So would I,” Sarah said bitterly.

“I mean the things you can tell me.”

“For instance?”

“Oh… background,” he said. “Let’s go back some. Say back to when you met Paul Lineyack, the man you married.”

“Why,” said Sarah, shaking her head, “I do not think that would show anything. It was more than four years ago that I met Paul, and nearly two years since he was killed.”

“The motive for this is buried somewhere. It may be back there.”

“But… this connected with Paul? But how could it be?”

“Tell me about him anyway,” Most said.

Sarah, closing her eyes, moved a hand slowly against a cheek. Most was, she felt, taking advantage of her. He was curious. He merely wished to know what kind of a man she had married. That, she thought grimly, was like another man.

“Oh, all right,” she said. “I met Paul conventionally…. It was, I suppose, about the only conventional thing that happened to us. It was at Larchmont. I had won a race in the Interclub class, using a borrowed boat. Paul made the cup-awarding speech and was miserable doing it. Miserable because his father had donated the cup.” She hesitated, frowning, then added, “The cup, and five hundred dollars first-prize money…. Money prizes aren’t usual in sailboat racing. The money was why I had entered. They laughed at the idea of the money prize—ridiculed old Lineyack for putting up a money prize—the real sail people did that, I mean. But I entered for the money. I needed it.”

Most asked with interest, “Did the ridicule embarrass old Lineyack?”

“Certainly not!… Oh, I doubt if he knew about the mirth, but if he had, it wouldn’t.”

“And Paul was unhappy?”

“Yes.”

“Paul and his father weren’t congenial, you mean?”

Sarah looked sharply at Most. “Don’t pry at it like that,” she said. “I’ll tell you… I’ll tell you now about Paul. He was a year younger than I, twenty-two.” Sarah examined Most thoughtfully. “Not as tall as you, but tall—and yes, thinner than you. Dark hair and a face that was quite handsome, but sulky, and haunted too. A rather wild way with words, as if he were throwing his words against something that was always around him, unseen and walling him in.”

Most arose and examined the coffee, and she wondered if this was so she wouldn’t see whether he was affected by a description of a man she had married.

She continued deliberately. “This manner of wanting to break out of an unseen prison was a strong thing about Paul. And I soon found out why. He was utterly a lost soul. He had an arrogant, domineering, cruel tyrant for a father, and for a mother a kind of inward angel who had no power to do the good an angel is supposed to do, or didn’t try…. Paul wasn’t weak. If he had been weak, he would have given in, or abandoned his parents in disgust. He wasn’t. But neither was he as strong as the forces hemming him in.”

Most made the blue flames of the alcohol stove a bit longer under the coffeepot and returned and seated himself. “Go ahead,” he said.

Sarah studied his face. “What sort have I described to you? A spoiled rich man’s son?”

“That’s about it,” he confessed after hesitating.

The answer was ill-mannered, and about what she had expected it to be. She was not dissatisfied, though. Most had some firmness himself.

“Then the rest will seem conventional to you—poor girl marries rich boy over his parents’ objections,” she said with an edge on the words.

Most cast his glance at her in a wry way. “Need you plant your own imaginings in my mind, then snatch them out angrily?”

A good enough answer. He was a man who could hold against a woman’s quick moods, too.

Sarah said, “But that’s the pattern…. I can’t truthfully say that the Lineyacks were opposed to me because they had another match, one in his class, in mind for their son. They didn’t, not that I know of. They just plain didn’t like me, nor I them,”

Most kept silent, waiting out her petulance. Presently Sarah asked, “Do I have to say I’m sorry again?”

He grinned a little and said, “Go ahead with the story.”

“I’d had a rather different upbringing—always around boats—I was a tomboy. I suppose I wasn’t too feminine, and I was independent as anything those days…. Paul liked that. Call it one of those psychological things—seeing in me a projection of the personality he wanted to be himself. I imagine it was just that. Anyway, I wasn’t cowed by his parents or their neurotic differences or their dollars.”

He asked, “The Lineyacks are really wealthy, then?”

“Ivan is in the importing business—he likes to say. Actually he has two large wholesale fruit companies and some truck lines—three truck lines at that time. But I think he has more now, a national network. I read in a newspaper that he had worked a reorganization and expansion about a year ago…. I remember one of the first things Ivan Lineyack told me. It was: ‘I hope for Paul to join me in the importing business.’ I remember what I said, too. I said: ‘Paul would be happy as a truck driver.’ It must have sounded rather awful, but I really meant it… You see, by that time I already knew Paul well enough to realize that the thing he hungered for, knowingly or not, was to go out in the world and overcome a few obstacles and see if he could do it all by himself—normally. I knew that Paul was afraid he might be an odd one himself. He feared what heredity might have done…. Perhaps he was coldhearted, venal, and a money magnet like his father. Perhaps he was a helpless introvert like his mother. Each possibility terrified Paul. He had looked in himself since he was a kid, probably, hunting for signs of either extremity. And when you look for anything that hard, you begin imagining you see it…. Anyway, to get back to my first meeting with Ivan. When I said that, and saw the look on old Lineyack’s face—he was like a dignified tiger that had had garbage thrown on him—I tried to explain what I meant. But I was already in dutch. He didn’t get it, and probably didn’t want to get it. I had associated trucks with the importing business, and I was cooked.”