Aground by Charles Williams; Franklin W. Dixon Read Free Book Online

two memories are eleven years apart and somehow they’ve shoved a whole war, several other countries, and a good deal of the western Pacific in between. And Nassau . . .
    That had been the good time. Seven years of it, with Frances and the Canción . He’d met Frances in 1948 when she’d been one of a party of five Miami schoolteachers who’d chartered the Canción for a week’s trip to Eleuthera. They were married that same year, and lived aboard the ketch as skipper and mate in a very special and private world of their own happiness while carrying charters along the New England coast in summer and around the Bahamas in winter—until 1955. She’d flown home to Seattle to visit her mother, and was going to drive back to Chicago with friends to take the plane down to Miami. Everything had seemed to run down and stop then, on that endless bright November afternoon in the Berry Islands with the wind blowing blue and clean from the north, when he got the word by radio. She’d been killed in an automobile accident at a place called Manhattan, Montana. While he stood there holding the handset of the radiotelephone in his hand waiting for the numbness to wear off and the thing to begin to get to him wherever it was going to start, it seemed the only thing he could think of was that if he could only isolate it and pin it down there must be a question in here somewhere for the boys who could always explain everything. After all the places he’d been in the world, the only thing he’d ever been handed that he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to handle had happened to him in a place he’d never even heard of.
    You’ve had too much beer, he thought, or you think too much when you drink. He left the bar and walked back, and it was after eleven when he came into the lobby of the Pilot House. The girl at the desk said Mrs. Osborne had tried to call him several times in the past hour. “Thank you,” he said. He went on up to his room, looked at the telephone, and shrugged. The hell with Mrs. Osborne; he was going to bed. While he was unbuttoning his shirt, the telephone rang. He ignored it until the third ring, when it occurred to him the girl would have told her he was in now. He picked it up.
    “I want to talk to you,” she said. Her voice sounded blurred, and the words tended to run together. “I was just going to bed.”
    “At eleven o’clock? Do you get a merit badge or something?”
    “Can’t it wait till morning?”
    “No. Come over to my room. Or I’ll come over there.”
    Stoned, he thought. He’d better humor her, or she’d be banging on the door. “All right.” He put the instrument back on the cradle and went down the hall.

4
    The door was ajar. When he knocked, she called out, “Come on in.” He stepped inside. She had on a blue dressing gown and was sitting on the studio couch with her stockinged feet stretched out on the coffee table in front of it. Beside her feet there were a bottle of Bacardi about two-thirds full, two or three opened bottles of Coca-Cola, a pitcher of ice, and a paperback mystery novel. She had a glass in her hand.
    She regarded him solemnly, and sniffed. “It’s all right to close the door. You can always scream.”
    He was aware for the first time that she had a definite southern accent. Perhaps he’d heard it before but it just hadn’t registered; he was a Texan too, and, although he’d been away so long that he’d lost all trace of it himself, he didn’t always notice it in others when he heard it. She didn’t appear to be outstandingly drunk, aside from the solemnity. The flamboyant mop of tawny hair was all in place, and her mouth nicely made up. But you never knew. There might possibly be other things in the world more unpredictable than a woman with too much to drink, but he’d never run into any of them. He wondered, without caring particularly, if she hit it this hard all the time. It’d be a shame. She was still a fine figure of a woman, but she must