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

idea.”
    “Who was he?”
    “He’s just a man I used to know. His name’s Patrick Ives. That is, if all these guesses are right.”
    “Did he know anything about sailing?”
    “A little, I think. I know he’s sailed small boats.”
    “Do you think he could have handled the Dragoon —with help, I mean? She’s a little out of the plaything class.”
    “That I couldn’t judge; I don’t know enough about it myself. He did know navigation, though; he was a B-17 navigator during the Second World War.”
    “He was just asking for trouble if he didn’t know how to handle a boat that size.”
    “Well, he seems to have found it, judging from where the Dragoon is now. Do you really think he’s dead?”
    Ingram nodded. “Naturally, there’s no way to be sure, but I think he drowned.”
    She looked down at her glass. “I suppose so.”
    “Was he a doctor?” he asked.
    “No,” she said, without looking up. “He was a phony. He liked to pass himself off as a doctor when he was cashing rubber checks.”
    He nodded. “That sounds like him. I’ve got one of his checks.”
    “Well, it’s no collector’s item.”
    “You don’t have any idea at all why he would steal the boat?”
    “None whatever, as I told you once before. Would you like me to have that statement notarized, Captain?”
    Well, Ingram reflected, he could tell her to take her schooner and go to hell—there was always the easy way out, if you wanted to quit. But it would be an admission of defeat in just as real a sense as any other failure to finish the job. And there was no use getting hacked at a drunk; that was stupid. If she is drunk, he thought. He’d given up trying to guess that one.
    He went back to his room and lay staring up at the dark for a long time before he went to sleep. The whole thing was murkier than ever. Assuming she was correct, and Hollister’s real name was Patrick Ives, you still didn’t know anything. Why was she so concerned with catching up with him, and whether he was dead or not? And why in God’s name would a con man and rubber-check artist want to steal a schooner which was of utterly no value to him and which he probably couldn’t even sail in the first place? That was about as sensible as trying to carry off a paved street.
    He awoke drenched with sweat and tangled in the sheet, with the feeling that he had cried out in his sleep. When he turned on the light and looked at his watch, it was a little after two. Well, he wasn’t dreaming about it as often now, and eventually the picture would fade; it wasn’t as if there were any feeling of guilt, as though he’d panicked and left Barney there to flame like a demented and screaming torch. He’d got him out and over the side of the shattered boat with his own clothes aflame and Barney’s flesh coming off on his gloves. It was too late, and Barney was already dead, but nobody could have saved him. It wasn’t that. It was horror. It was the fear afterward, and wondering if he would ever be able to smell gasoline in a boat again without being sick with it.
    It wasn’t a very big boat that had killed Barney and burned the yard down back to the office and the gate. Her name was Nickels ‘n Dimes, and she was a beat-up old thirty-foot auxiliary sloop in for a number of minor jobs, including some engine overhaul and the installation of a new radiotelephone and a better ground plate on the outside of her hull. They had put on the copper strip when she was on the ways, and the bolt through the hull for the radio connection. She went back in the water Friday afternoon. The separate ingredients for disaster were a long week end, a slow leak somewhere in her fuel system, poor ventilation, and the fact that Barney—who had a poor nose anyway—had a cold on Monday morning. The catalyst was a torch. Barney had the radio ground cable connected to the through-bolt and was preparing to silver-solder it when Ingram came down the hatch and smelled the gas. He yelled, and at