Feast of Murder(93)

He got the corpse up to the main deck without incident, and then into the bow. He came to rest for a second against a spool of line that had been pushed into the center of the triangle by someone who should have known better. Even if you’ve never been on a boat before, it had to be obvious that it was dangerous to leave a spool like that where it could smash back and forth in the first rough sea. Then Tony stood up again, and flexed his legs, and wondered how Charlie Shay had ever gotten so heavy. There was still not a single person around.

“Am I going to get away with this?” he asked himself.

The answer was no. There was already activity on the deck. He would have picked it up if he hadn’t been so tired. Instead, just as he lifted Charlie Shay’s body into the air, someone behind him shouted, “Hey! What are you doing?” and someone else started to scream. The screaming was definitely coming from his mother, who could scream longer and louder than anyone else on earth. Tony shut all the sounds out and pitched the body as far into the sea as he could. It landed much too close to the boat with a large splash.

“Man overboard,” Julie Anderwahl yelled.

Out in the water, Charlie Baird’s body sank, quickly and inexorably. It took only seconds before it was completely out of sight.

“There,” Tony said to the assembled company. “Housekeeping completed. No need to get all worked up about wandering all over the ocean with a corpse.”

It was a stupid thing to say, of course. He hadn’t expected applause. He hadn’t expected anything. He knew when he went to work on this project that if he completed it this morning he’d get caught, and there he was, caught, and so what? So what?

What he hadn’t expected was Sheila, marching out of the crowd at him, so furious she could hardly breathe.

“You asshole,” she screamed into his face. “I can’t believe you let him do this to you.”





Two


1


THERE WAS A WARM thick wind blowing up from the south, creating a steady pressure against the masts and the lines and the little pennant that was Jon Baird’s version of an official flag for the Pilgrimage Green. The crew was up in the rigging unfurling the sails. Gregor Demarkian stepped out onto the main deck and looked up to watch them, heedless of the fact that Bennis was behind him and in a hurry. He wasn’t holding her up, exactly. She could have gone by him at any time. He knew she didn’t want to go by him, because she wanted to be on the spot when whatever he did got done. Gregor went on looking at the crew in the rigging anyway. He didn’t know enough about boats to know if they had truly been becalmed over the last few hours. He’d always had the impression that it was the sort of thing that happened only in deep water. Truly becalmed or manipulated into immobility, it didn’t matter. It was over now. As soon as the crew got the sails into place, the Pilgrimage Green would be on her way to Candle Island and the state of Massachusetts.

Bennis tapped him on the shoulder.

“Are we going to go do something?” she demanded. “Or are you going to stand here watching the sails go up all day?”

“At least one of the sails is coming down,” Gregor said, because it was true. The sail on the mast in the middle—he was going to have to learn what to call these things someday; not knowing got to be frustrating—unfurled from the top like a kitchen shade. Bennis made a face at it.

“If you turn just a little to your left,” she said, “you can see Calvin Baird’s back. I wish I understood you, Gregor.”

“You understood me fine. I just wanted—there we go.”

“What?”

“The last of the sails are unraveled.”

“So?”

“So there will no be no plausible way to get this boat to stop moving without saying that what you’re doing is stopping this boat from moving. Mr. Jonathan Edgewick Baird can keep us here in the middle of nothing and on our way to nowhere, but he can’t do it without letting us know he’s doing it. Do you see what I mean?”

“No.”

“Come on.”

Gregor took Bennis by the wrist and began to lead her gently toward the bow. With the sails up, the boat had begun to rock again, although without the force or eccentricity of the night before. He rolled easily into it, as if he’d been walking on boats all his life. It was incredible how fast it had begun to seem natural. On the other hand, he was glad he didn’t have to test it against something really violent, like a storm. The bow was only a little way up from where they had been standing, although not in the direction Bennis had indicated when she’d pointed out the body of Calvin Baird. Calvin was standing next to the piled up tables and chairs and equipment that blocked passage from the rest of the deck to the bow on the port side. They had to go through the narrow space on the starboard side, as they had been since that first morning.