Slack tide (2 page)

"You like this racket?" he asked.

"What racket?"

"Boats. . . . This yachting kick?"

"You're new at it, aren't you?" MacLaren said.

"Hah!" said Nick. "Maiden voyage."

"You could get to Hke it pretty easy if you studied a bit."

"Maybe," Nick said. "But I can think of other things I'd rather study. . . . Well, thanks," he said. "You fixed me up real neat."

MacLaren said Nick could have a clean bandage in the morning if he wanted to stop in and then he put the first-aid box back into the file and closed the office door behind him. When he returned to the dock, Nick was aheady boarding the Annabelle III and Larry Keats was sweeping the sawdust and the odd lengths of wood which had been used in enlarging the icehouse into a neat pile. Again, Mac-Laren's glance moved across the inlet to the house and the corner room, and this time he decided to explore the idea that had come to him a few minutes earlier. Telling Larry he'd be back in ten or fifteen minutes, he started toward the house which stood on the hill overlooking the boatyard less than two hundred yards away.

IT WAS POSSIBLE for one to pick his way along the upstream docks and reach the MacLaren house by staying close to the shore, but it was simpler to use the road which

started from the black-top parking-space behind the office. MacLaren took this route and three minutes later he was approaching the compact, gray-shingled, Cape Cod house his father had built thirty years before.

Two years ago an arthritic condition had forced his father to give up the management of the boatyard, and since then his parents had hved in Florida from the first of October until mid-June. At the time of the move there had been no pressure on MacLaren to take over the management of the yard. He had a good job in the office of a New York firm of marine architects, but even then, in the back of his mind, was the idea that one day he would come to Surrey to hve and put the city behind him.

Now, standing on the front porch and looking down across the silent yard and the river beyond, he was very glad that he had come. For he had grown up in this yard, had worked here summers during high-school and college vacations. He had seen it expand and prosper and he knew he was lucky to be able to make a good fiving doing what he wanted to in the surroundings he liked best.

For another few seconds his mind moved on in the same philosophical vein and then, inevitably, his thoughts fixed again on the corner room of the white house on the island. This room had three windows, two at the rear and visible from where he stood, and one at the side which faced the boatyard office. He knew that Kingsley's cruiser had arrived nearly three weeks earlier, but it had docked in the darkness of evening and he was never sure who had been aboard.

He did know that a week prior to Kingsley's arrival all

the windows in the house had been shuttered. A Fihpino couple took care of the house and during that week Mac-Laren had seen the man take the shutters down one by one, all except that corner room. Once he had used a pair of binoculars to bring the window into sharper focus, and at the time he wondered if he had seen something move behind those shutters.

Now, stepping to the end of the porch and looking up at the small cottage which stood shghtly above and behind the house, his common sense told him that this was none of his business. Part of his mind told him that the basis of his curiosity was his very real antipathy for Ohver Kingsley, but having started, he crossed the back yard, slipped through a gap in the hedge, and came presently to stand beneath a second-floor window which stood partly open.

"Sam," he called. "You up there?"

"Hell, yes, I'm up here. Where'd you think I'd be?"

The front door gave directly onto the hving-room and, when MacLaren had wiped his feet, he went across this to a narrow stairway which led to the floor above. The room he entered was cluttered and untidy. Its lone occupant sat in an easy chair by the window, his right leg supported by another chair. There was a small cast on that foot, not the heavy one the doctor had appMed when Sam tangled with a roller box some weeks earlier and snapped his ankle, but a hghter and more comfortable cast.

"When are you going to stop malingering and get back to work?" MacLaren asked.

Sam Wilhs glared at him, a thing he did very well and

with no effort because he had a disposition to match. Although he was not yet sixty, he was the oldest employee in the yard, a spare-framed, gaunt-faced man with a long nose, watery blue eyes, and not much hair. He was dogmatic, irascible, opinionated, and argumentative. He was also grasping and tight-fisted; a notoriously shrewd man with a dollar or an idea, who gave nothing away, not even words if he could help it. For all of this he was a craftsman who could handle any job in the yard. He could fill in as a rigger, fitter, carpenter, painter, or mechanic, and, perhaps because he was a confirmed bachelor, he had taken time to give bits and pieces of this knowledge to Mac-Laren, a process of indoctrination which had started when MacLaren was a very small boy.

More recently, an outsider hstening to the two of them talk could not have known that beneath the caustic comments there was an odd bond of affection. They understood each other, and because of past favors MacLaren had always leaned over backward to be fair. In this instance, Willis had been drawing compensation since the accident, but from the very first day MacLaren had made up the difference between this compensation and the man's normal salary. It was this to which he referred when he said:

"I made a mistake."

"You've made plenty of mistakes."

"If I'd let you sweat this out on compensation payments you'd have been back to work long ago."

"Yah," said Willis derisively, "what about my pain

and suffering? I should have had full salary plus compensation."

MacLaren's gaze had been moving as he spoke, noting the .22 rifle which stood against the wall within Willis's reach, the crutch, the table on the other side of the chair which was littered with magazines and paper-backed novels. There were two binoculars, one of which was a Zeiss 7 X 50 that WiUis had bought cheaply after the war from a Navy reservist. There was also a box of snuff, a habit Willis had acquired over the years because smoking had been prohibited in many parts of the yard. A wire-mesh wastebasket contained three empty beer cans, and the Scotch cooler on the floor provided a receptacle for the cans which were cold but as yet unopened.

MacLaren, who had moved beyond the foot of the bed to the window at the side of the room, looked down at the island from an angle. Seeing it from this perspective, he was reminded of the fact that there was a time when the island was not an island. The original builder of the house which Kingsley now occupied had made a causeway perhaps thirty or forty feet long which connected the island to the mainland. Over the years the action of the water and weather had washed away all but the largest of the rocks which made the causeway's foundation. Mud had coated them and filled the crevices, but it was still possible to make the crossing for a period of an hour or two at low tide provided one didn't mind getting a bit of mud on his shoes. At the moment there was no sign that such a causeway had ever existed and, turning back to

Willis, MacLaren approached the subject that had brought him here.

"Did you see Kingsley's cruiser when it came up from New York, Sam?"

"I saw it. I also saw those two idiots who came in this morning," he said by way of digression.

"What two idiots?"

"The two that brought that black scow in. Annabelle III, wasn't she? Must have been forty years old if she's a day. Fools hke that shouldn't be allowed afloat," he added, warming to his subject. "Ain't a week goes by you don't read about the Coast Guard towing in a half dozen of them —if they don't founder and drown themselves."

MacLaren agreed that this was true but at the moment he was not interested in Wilhs's views on such subjects as the Annabelle III and her odd crew. He told Sam not to change the subject. He said they had been talking about Kingsley's cruiser.

"How many were aboard when she came in?"

"How would I know how many were aboard? Danaher docked her at night."

MacLaren picked up the Zeiss binoculars and turned them over in his hand. "This is a pretty nice pair of glasses."

"Damned right they're good glasses."

"Wonderful for night work. Plenty good enough to see that boat turn in from the river and dock."

"That don't mean I can see faces."

"But you could tell how many were aboard."

The tight withdrawn expression on Sam Willis's gaunt

face was familiar to MacLaren. Willis liked to argue but he did not like to be pushed. He hated to admit he was wrong but this time he surprised MacLaren. With a faint shrug he said: "Four. At least that's aU I saw."

"Men or women?"

"Two of each."

"You said you saw Danaher."

"No such thing," WiUis snapped. "But Danaher's the captain, ain't he? Whoever docked her knew how it should be done. Anyhow, what difference does it make?"

"Danaher and another man," MacLaren said idly, ignoring the question, "and two women. One of them must have been Carla Lewis. I wonder who the other was." He put the binoculars down and said, more to himself than Willis: "Neil Ackerman drove the Mercedes up the next day and Earl Harwell got here about a half hour later in the station wagon."

"Harwell? Is he the one who's out there on the island painting pictures every day?"

"Yes," MacLaren said. "And who else have you seen over there?"

"Lots of people," Willis said. "Kingsley's had a half dozen guests the last couple weeks."

MacLaren, knowing this was true, digressed. "Did you ever wonder about that comer room? The one with the shutters on it?"

"Some."

"What do you make of it?"

"Don't make nothin'. I got other things to do."

"Nuts," said MacLaren. "You sit here every day from

eight in the morning until ten at night. Maybe later. You have two binoculars and you use them. I'll bet there isn't a thing that goes on within a half mile of here that you don't know about."

This statement brought a sly grin. "That could be, but that don't mean I can see through them shutters. Why are you so all-fired interested anyway?"

"I don't know," MacLaren said and reahzed that this was the truth. "Just curious, I guess," he said, and changed the subject.

Sam Willis hved with a widowed sister who served as his housekeeper in her spare time. Right now she was working as a waitress at the Surrey Inn during lunch and the dinner hour, which usually lasted until nearly ten o'clock. Now, to give Wilhs one more needle before he left, MacLaren said:

"Why don't you keep Esther here to take care of you instead of putting her to work at the Inn?"

"Who puts her to work?" Willis said indignantly.

"You do," said MacLaren, trying to hold back a grin.

WiUis, who seemed about ready to give forth with an explosive answer, apparently changed his mind. A sly look came again, and he half closed one eye as he looked around at MacLaren.

"If you paid me what was rightly mine," he said, "she wouldn't have to work."

"All right," MacLaren said, letting his grin come. "You win, Sam."

When he got back to the boatyard, he told Larry Keats he could shove oflf, and said he would see him tomorrow

afternoon. There was no one else around so he entered the building, locking the door behind him, crossed the showroom, and climbed the stairs to the apartment above.

This consisted of a good-sized hving-room that overlooked the inlet, a bedroom and bath with a view of the river, and a modem kitchen that faced the parking-lot. This was MacLaren's second home and he occupied it much of the time from May i to September 15. For the most part the furnishings were comfortably masculine, but there were feminine touches here and there, particularly in the bedroom, and there was a good reason for this.

For the remodeling had been done with an eye on possible income, and the tenant from September 15 to May 1 was a schoolteacher whose home was in another city, and who had only recently moved to the Inn for the remaining weeks of school. The kitchen had been designed with a woman in mind. Also, there was an outside stairway that led to the parking-lot, so that the tenant could have her own entrance and the privacy this entailed.

Now, as MacLaren shed his clothes, he moved to the kitchen and made a very strong Old Fashioned which was his own formula and held no fruit but the peel of a lemon. Taking this to the bedroom, he swallowed a mouthful and put the glass aside while he took a shower. A half hour later, revived and dressed in slacks and a blue flannel jacket, he rinsed the glass and started for the Surrey Inn which stood on the opposite side of the town's main street perhaps an eighth of a mile away.

DON MacLAREN saw the girl shortly before nine o'clock, but he did not know she was a girl at first because it was dark at the time. All he knew was that this was someone from Kingsley's island.

It had been about eight thirty when he returned from the Inn, and he substituted a sweater for his jacket before walking to the dock and taking his accustomed seat on the bench that was backed up to the front of the building. Light from a single bulb in the showroom filtered faintly across the dock but he did not bother to turn on the floodlights as he would have done had the season started. He took his time filling his pipe and, when it had been fighted to his satisfaction, he kept it burning slowly to enjoy the taste and fragrance of the tobacco.

On his right, the line of cruisers was dark—the owners would begin to arrive on Friday—with the exception of the black-hulled Annabelle III—and the night was quiet enough for him to hear something of what was being said by the occupants. Paying httle attention at first, he gradually became aware of certain words as the voices rose, and it was a flat and unequivocal statement that finally tuned him in.

"I don't give a damn whether you come or not." It was the hoarse, grating voice of the httle man. "I'm going fishing."