The Turquoise Lament by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page B

hold, or carrying lepers."
    Again he was sidestepping the obligation to be specific about Pidge. I waited him out. Finally he got to it. At Frederiksted, on St. Croix, two blond girls wanted a ride down to Montserrat, where one of them had an older sister married to a lawyer in Plymouth. They'd been traveling with a boy who'd had to return to the States because of some kind of family trouble. Joy Harris and Celia Fox. They had the crew bunks forward available to loan the girls if they chose. The girls couldn't afford to pay for the passage or the extra supplies, but they said they would work, really work, any kind of work aboard. They were tanned and pretty and young, trail toughened to a watchful and skeptical wisdom.
    Pidge and Howie had talked it over and decided the girls were all right, and when they came back they would be invited aboard for the trip. Pidge made some jokes about exclusivity and about becoming one of the three Brindle women.
    But only one girl returned. The Harris girl, the smaller and prettier of the two. She said that she and Celia had decided not to travel together any more. She said she thought Celia was going back to the States, but actually she could not care less what Celia did, or how she did it.
    "We talked it over and it was still okay with me, but Pidge had a lot of second thoughts. She said two girls were okay, but one was something else. If it was one girl, she would be with us all the time, and dependent on us. Four was company, three was a crowd. I didn't see it exactly that way. There were enough chores to keep three people busy. I told her she was being silly about it. She said she happened to own the boat. That wasn't like her, to say something like that to me. I shrugged it off. Hell, if it meant that much to her, so be it. So we sailed without the girl. We didn't even let her know we'd decided not to take her."
    I frowned at him. "I don't see anything especially weird about her reaction."
    "I haven't come to it. She was very quiet for three days. I thought it was on account of the quarrel. Not really a quarrel, but close to it. Enough to shake me up. So that night at midnight she came and woke me up and I went up to the wheelhouse to take over. She was on pilot, rumbling along on the diesels. There was enough breeze to go onto canvas, and the direction was good, but it wasn't steady enough to count on and it seemed a lot of trouble. She leaned against the bulkhead, right beside me, in the darkness. There were the instrument lights and some light from our running lights. I said that the stars were nice, and she said I was a cheap, dirty, sick bastard and then she went on from there, all of it in a low voice. I didn't know what was wrong with her. I didn't know what she was getting at. I kept asking her what her problem was. Finally she said, 'Stop trying to kid me, Howard. How did you expect to get, away with it? You smuggled that blond ass, Joy Harris, aboard, and she's forward and keeps the door locked and the hatch dogged down. I know about the food you sneak to her, and I know about you balling her, and I've heard you two whispering and giggling and groaning.' Those aren't the exact words, but that's what she said. So I asked her if she meant Joy was on board that minute, and she said I knew damned well she was. The way she said it, the back of my neck got all cold and prickly. We were so damned… alone! You know how it is. And we weren't even going to Montserrat, where the girls wanted to go. I should have used reason, I guess."
    "What did you do?"
    "It scalded me. It really did. It hurt to have her think I could do a jerk thing like that. So I told her she was absolutely right and I was going to keep an extra piece stashed aboard wherever we went. So she went below. She was crying. Right away I was sorry I'd been smart-ass about it. I stayed on watch right on into the sunrise and past it. It was hot and calm. I'd figured out how I should handle it. I cut the power off and in