Feast of Murder(91)

“Of course not.” Tony was contemptuous. “Mark. He caught me tossing the damned radio overboard. I thought you were going to keep them down here while I got done what I had to do upstairs.”

“I didn’t count on your taking three quarters of an hour to find the radio. Did it work?”

“It did when we were closer to shore. I don’t think it would have this far out. Better safe than sorry.”

“Exactly,” Jon Baird said.

Tony looked up the passage, but not all the way up. He didn’t scrunch around or twist his back to get a better view. He let his line of sight be stopped by the wall. “What about the other thing?” he said. “Can I do it now? They’re all wandering around in knots, muttering at each other and getting in the way.”

“I’ve been thinking about that.” Jon Baird nodded. “There are other ways between decks than just those staircases. There are the trap doors, for one thing.”

“Trap doors?”

“Not really. Convenience openings to stuff food through and lines and other things you might need that would be kept in the hold and hard to get to in an emergency. I’ve been wondering if they’d been too small for you to fit through.”

“They sound like they’d be too much of a problem if I didn’t have any help. Don’t things like that usually require one person below and one person above to work right?”

“Yes, they do.”

“Well, then.”

“Don’t get upset.” Jon pulled the towel more tightly around his waist. He hated talking to people when he was undressed, even women in bed. It made him feel off balance. “I was just thinking these things through,” he said. “I suppose you will have to go up the stairs. Do you think you can do it without being stopped?”

“I’d like to do it without being seen.”

“And make a big mystery about it?” Jon said. “No, I don’t think so. We have too many mysteries around here as it is. Let it be perfectly straightforward with a perfectly straightforward explanation.”

“I could get arrested.”

“For what?”

Tony rocked back on his heels. He was so tall, it was difficult for Jon to see his eyes. That gave Jon an anxious moment, but only a moment. It was soon clear enough that Tony was not angry or worried, but amused. Why had he never really gotten to know this boy before? He’d thought Tony would turn out to be like his mother. Instead, he was nothing like his mother at all. Jon leaned over and checked the rest of the passage again.

“All clear,” he said.

“I’ve got an idea,” Tony said.

“What?”

Tony shook his head and went back down the passage, to the door of the cabin where Charlie Baird’s body lay. He took out a skeleton key and let himself in. It was one of four skeleton keys on the boat, any one of which would have opened every door except the one to Jon Baird’s private safe. That was new, not “authentic” at all, and had a combination lock. That, Jon thought, was the problem with bush league celebrities like Gregor Demarkian. They never could teach themselves to think one step ahead.

He had gone down the passage himself, past the door behind which Tony was still contemplating his “idea,” and had started up the staircase to the deck above when he met Calvin coming down. Calvin was flushed and indignant and a little breathless, the way he got when someone in the office suggested he was much too fussy about where his pens were kept. It took Calvin time to work himself into a state like that. Jon wondered what had happened to upset him now.

The staircase was too narrow for two people to pass each other on it. Calvin and Jon ended up stuck facing each other and immobile. It did not seem to occur to Calvin that he had no other purpose in coming down the stairs than to find Jon.

“Go back up,” Jon urged him. “I want to get into my clothes.”

“You’ve got to hurry,” Calvin said. “Mark Anderwahl is making homemade flares, and he’s going to call the Coast Guard.”

Jon pushed at Calvin’s side, gently at first, and then harder, pressing until he got Calvin to move up the stairs. Jon followed without haste, shivering in the cool draft but not otherwise in a hurry.

“It’ll take hours for Mark to make a flare,” he said. “There’s time for me to get into my pants.”

“He was looking for baking powder,” Calvin said ominously. “Or maybe it was baking soda. I don’t remember. But I think he knows how to do this thing.”

“I’m sure he does. I paid his way to Outward Bound myself, and it wasn’t cheap.” Jon had now managed to get Calvin all the way up onto the deck above. He pushed Calvin back along the passage—that was Gregor Demarkian going into his own cabin—and then climbed up into the passage himself. “It’s all right,” he insisted. “I really do have time to get dressed.”