Feast of Murder(41)
Gregor shot a quick look at Julie Anderwahl—still fuming, but no longer paying attention to him—and edged quickly behind the food table until he got to Bennis’s side. He looked back at Julie Anderwahl and saw that her rage had dissipated in a wave of seasickness. She was green and bleary-eyed and rocking back and forth on her heels. Gregor looked past Bennis at the unsteady older lady and blinked. She was staring at the food table in a peculiarly intense way, her eyes so wild they might have belonged to a starving cat.
“This is even worse than I expected,” Gregor whispered, leaning over to get close to Bennis’s ear. He was so used to her now, he sometimes forgot how very short she was. “There’s a woman over there, being seasick, and I just spent five minutes listening to her accuse me of—I don’t know what.”
“The woman on the other side of me is Jon Baird’s first wife,” Bennis whispered back. “She got me up near the stern about two minutes ago and accused me of being here just to sabotage her. I asked her what she was doing I was supposed to sabotage, and she said she knew all about you and she didn’t trust you an inch, and after that I couldn’t get anything out of her. Does this make any sense to you?”
“No.”
“It doesn’t make any sense to me, either. The world has changed, Gregor. When I was growing up, you never discussed private matters with strangers, never mind going right up to someone you’d never met and—what’s that?”
“That” was a tremor under their feet, growing stronger by the second. Gregor looked up and saw there was a man all the way forward in the bow now, pushing off against the pier with a long pole. It startled him, even though it made sense. They had no motor. They had to get out to sea somehow or other. He bent a little closer to Bennis’s ear and said, “He can’t pole like that all the way into the Atlantic Ocean. How do we get under way?”
“We’ve got a wind,” Bennis said. “As soon as we get out to reasonably open water, we’ll hoist the sails. This is a sailboat, Gregor.”
“I know.”
“How did you think a sailboat worked?”
Gregor was about to tell her that he hadn’t thought about how a sailboat worked—why should he have?—when the third thing happened. They had moved rapidly away from the pier and were now turned around, headed in the right direction. Men were yelling at each other and running back and forth, doing Gregor knew not what. High in the rigging, a sail opened and then another. Tony Baird, standing almost exactly midway between the bow and the food table, was raising his cup of coffee in the air.
“I took care of this boat the whole time Dad was—unavailable,” he was saying, “and you know what the hard part is? Getting the sails. I’m not making this up. Getting the sails made just the right size and just the way they used to be. Getting the sails will make you absolutely nuts.”
“Dealing with this boat in any way whatsoever makes me absolutely nuts,” Sheila Baird said. “I still don’t understand why we can’t just have an ordinary little yacht like everyone else.”
“I think I’ll buy an ordinary little yacht,” Bennis whispered in Gregor’s ear. “You know, something like the Cristina.”
“Don’t do it,” Gregor whispered back. “Tibor will have it filled with refugees before you ever get it out of dry dock.”
“We’re pitching,” Tony Baird said. “I can’t believe this. We’re not even out of the harbor and we’re rolling around like a marble.”
“Watch your step,” the man Gregor thought must be Calvin Baird said. “We’re always having accidents on this boat. It’s a damned menace.”
“I never have accidents on boats,” Tony Baird said. He put his coffee cup back on the table, watched it slide along the cloth for a moment, and then picked it up again. Then he shook his head and laughed. “I’ll bet they didn’t let passengers up near the bow when the original Mayflower sailed to Massachusetts. If they had, they’d have lost half the company to the sharks.”
“Watch out,” Calvin Baird said again.
Tony put the cup back in the plastic holder it had come out of and stepped back, grinning. Gregor had a sudden vision of him as a child, high in a tree and threatening to dive off, half-convinced he could really fly. Of course, the inevitable would have happened then, just as it happened now. It didn’t even constitute a crisis. The Pilgrimage Green swung around just another fraction of an arc. The ocean opened up ahead of them, untamed and unlimited. Tony Baird stretched his arms, shuddered, looked surprised, and hopped. A second later, his legs were bumping against the low side of the boat and buckling beneath him.