09-Twelve Mile Limit Read Online Free PDF Page B

hug. I don’t believe in herbal cures or faith healing, but I have to admit that, lying between those two women, sandwiched by people whom I’ve come to respect and love, I felt better than I had since the end of our second day searching for Janet. Why? Because by the end of that long day, I was pretty certain that Janet was gone.
    The sense of respite didn’t last, though. The two ladies returned to their own beds a little after midnight, and I still couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t get the question What had it been like? out of my mind. It was a haunting question to consider.
    I am not an overly emotional person. Indeed, I believe that once a decision has been made, or an event has occurred, any investment in or concession to emotion is a waste of time and energy.
    Even so, Janet remained a lucent image, her private eyes staring into mine. There was a shyness in them, and a brand of kindness that comes only from deep pain. Finally, I realized that there was only one way to come close to understanding what she had experienced the night that she and the others were set adrift.
    I have an orderly mind that sometimes insists on factual, experiential input. So I threw off the blanket and walked to the boat’s transom. I was wearing running shorts, no shirt, and the deck was damp beneath my bare feet. Except for the wind and the creaking of wood and braided line, it was quiet now. Below, JoAnn and Rhonda were either asleep or trying to sleep.
    High in the sky was a quarter moon. It was all the light I needed. I rummaged through a stern storage hatch, tied a mooring line to a life ring, and tossed the line astern. Then I slipped over the transom into the sea.
    You might expect water that’s seventy-seven degrees to be warm, but it isn’t, and the sudden chill caused my lungs to spasm momentarily.
    I allowed my body to submerge, which seemed to warm it, then I held on to the line as breakers freighted me outward. Now, six days after the sinking of the Seminole Wind, conditions were still almost exactly as they had been the night that Janet and the other three were set adrift. The wind was fifteen to twenty knots out of the east-southeast, seas building.
    I felt my body contort rag doll-like as the first big wave flooded over me, then lifted me: big waves without rhythm on a windy night. I could feel them rolling past, lifting, suctioning, then tumbling me under. Even with the quarter moon, I couldn’t see the waves, but I could hear them coming—a keening sound, the sound of wind over ice—and their approach was felt as an expanding buoyancy.
    Janet’s first night out here was one day into a waxing moon. I’d checked the tide tables. On the previous Friday, the day her boat sunk, sunset was at 5:38 P.M.; the setting of the frail lunar crescent was exactly fifty-eight minutes later. Hers would have been a blacker night with stronger currents.
    Still drifting outward-bound on the line, I turned away from the Satin Doll. Miles to the east was a flashing light. It was the 160-foot-high navigation tower to which the lone survivor, Amelia Gardner, had swum after being separated from her companions, and where she’d been found by the Coast Guard chopper thirty-eight hours later. From the crests of waves, the light was an explosion of white; from the troughs, it was a milky concussion. Every four seconds, the light flared: a visual hypnotic that penetrated to the brain, oscillated the pupils, eroded equilibrium.
    If I stared at the light too long, I lost all depth perception. The tower might have been three miles away or it might have been a satellite flashing from outer space. When I forced myself to continue staring at the light, I began to feel a sickening sense of unreality. Where did the sky end and the sea begin? Was I looking up at the stars, or looking down from them in the midst of some disturbing dream?
    I have made many long swims in open water at night, yet it was unpleasant, even for me—the wallowing darkness of being in a wave’s