Dead Calm Read Online Free PDF Page B

her head. They both looked seaward and in a moment heard Warriner sit down again. The whole thing hadn’t lasted more than a few seconds. Probably doesn’t know we even saw it, Ingram reflected. But what was it? Terror? Terror of what? For some reason he was thinking of the way Warriner had come aboard, the trancelike stare, the convulsive lunge onto the deck, and the way his fingers had flattened themselves around the handrail.
    “Breeze coming!” Rae called out suddenly. “Anybody for Papeete?”
    Off to the south the surface of the sea was beginning to darken under the riffles of an advancing cat’s-paw of wind. Ingram sprang on deck and began casting the gaskets off the mainsail. Rae had run forward and was breaking out the jib. Long months of practice had made them a smoothly functioning team, and by the time they could feel the faint movement of air against their faces a cloud of billowing white Orion was mounting against the sky. Rae came aft to take the wheel. The mainsail filled. Saracen began to move, almost imperceptibly at first, and when she had gathered enough way to come about Ingram looked around and nodded. Rae brought the wheel hard over; she came up into the wind, hung for an instant, and fell off on the port tack, toward the southwest and Tahiti.
    For a moment he had forgotten Warriner, but when he turned from setting up the mainsheet to trim the jib, he found the other already hauling on it. Warriner threw it on the cleat and straightened. “How about the mizzen?”
    Ingram nodded and began taking off the gaskets. “Might as well get everything on her; the breeze might last for a while. But you go ahead and turn in.”
    * * *
    Warriner smiled. “I think I will, as soon as we get this up.” He seemed to have recovered completely from the horror of a few minutes ago. They hoisted the mizzen and trimmed the sheet. Ingram leaned over to look in the binnacle. “Can we make 235?” he asked Rae.
    “Easy,” she replied. “We’re to windward of that now.” She came right a little. “Here we are—230 … 233 … 235.”
    Ingram glanced aloft at the strands of ribbon on the shrouds and started the mainsheet a little. Saracen heeled slightly under a puff and began to gather way. He turned to Warriner. “We’re going to have to cast your dinghy adrift. No room to stow it.”
    Warriner nodded. “Yes. Of course.”
    Ingram loosed the painter from the lifeline stanchion, coiled it, dropped it into the dinghy, and gave the boat a push away from the side. It drifted back and began to fall behind in the wake, riding like a cork over the broad undulations of the swell. Warriner had turned and was staring toward the other yacht, which was off the starboard quarter now that they had come about. The dinghy was a hundred yards astern, growing smaller and looking lost and forlorn in the immensity of the sea.
    “Well, if it’s all right with you, I guess I’ll turn in,” he said at last. “If the breeze holds, I can take over tonight.”
    “Don’t worry about it,” Rae said. “You’d better rest for a couple of days. There’ll be something for you to eat when you wake up.”
    “It’ll be pretty hot down there,” Ingram added, “but if you leave the door open you’ll get a little circulation of air from the ventilator.”
    Warriner nodded and went down the ladder. He paused once to turn for a last look at the other boat before his head disappeared below the level of the hatch. When Ingram looked around at Rae, her eyes were misted with tears. He leaned forward and peered down the hatch. Warriner was going through the passage into the forward compartment. He couldn’t hear them if they spoke in normal tones.
    He slid back close beside her. “What do you make of it?”
    “That thing about the bottle?”
    “Yes.”
    She shook her head. “I don’t know. But grief does strange things—grief and complete isolation.”
    “But just a sinking bottle—”
    “Obviously it wasn’t a bottle he was