Denver Is Missing

by D. F. Jones

  There was a whole heap of work to do, but we all managed to find some reason to be on deck as we got clear, staring back at the lagoon. One way and another, an awful lot had happened there…. Bill broke it up.

  “Right—let’s get at it! Bette, get that crate below, will you? Mitch—halliards; Karen, set the jib!”

  We were back in the old, familiar routine, Mayfly heading south: but now we were free of that tension that had haunted us since that first fateful weekend. Had it not been for Karen’s obvious moodiness, we would have been happy. We had problems: the water situation, our exact position, but these were, now, nothing.

  Below decks, the situation was anything but familiar. Once clear of the atoll, Bill turned the boat over to Bette, and we three went below to clear up the mess in the sleeping cabin. Taking that bunk apart had been one thing; putting it together was another. Three hours, sweating and cursing, passed before we were finished. Very thankfully, Bill and I retired, leaving the bedmaking and final touches to Karen.

  We were reorganizing the saloon when Bette called us on deck. “There’s something over there.” She pointed away to the east. “I’ve only caught glimpses; looks like something white. I don’t think it’s a sail, and for sure it’s not land.”

  Bill went up forrard with the binoculars and soon returned, frowning thoughtfully. “You’re right, it’s not a sail. I think it’s a lifeboat. We’d better check. Put her round and call me when you get within half a mile.”

  He did not speculate on what we might find; it was not necessary. That distant white blob reminded us that we were not the only ones to encounter the waves. .

  When Bette called, the blob had resolved into a white hulled lifeboat. Bill was studying it through the glasses, and I was waiting for my turn, when Karen poked her head through the hatch.

  “Mitch, give me a hand, will you?”

  I went below, and she motioned me to follow her into the sleeping cabin. There she turned, her face set, her breasts heaving with emotion. “Mitch, look in the ashtray on the far side of the bunk.” I climbed up, looked, and got down again.

  “Well?” I said.

  “That’s Bill’s pipe.”

  “That’s one of Bill’s pipes,” I amended. “So?”

  “You fool, Mitch! Don’t you get it?” She pointed a shaking hand toward the bunk. “That pipe wasn’t there when we went ashore last night! Now do you get it?” She laughed bitterly. “What goddam fools we were, wasting last night—no one else did!”

  I had nothing to say. She went on, placing the weight firmly upon me. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “Do? There’s nothing to do. If you’re right, okay, we’ve lost out—but if you’re wrong…. Don’t forget, we’ve still got to get this boat somewhere, we can’t just walk away.”

  “And that’s all you can say?” She was all set to vent her anger on me.

  “Yes.” I too felt angry with Bill and Bette—and Karen.

  I grabbed her shoulders. “And you’ll keep quiet, too! This can wait—it has to!”

  Bill was calling, and I turned to leave. “Don’t forget, you could just be wrong!” All the same, I didn’t think she was. I’d forgotten her earlier suspicions in the sheer joy of being alive, but now they all came pouring back into my mind. Oddly enough, I didn’t really feel sore with Bill, but Bette….

  On deck I found Bill closely examining the lifeboat, now only fifty yards off. The white paint was in good condition, and it certainly hadn’t been drifting around in the tropical sun for very long. It appeared to be empty, its derelict air emphasized by a tangle of rope hanging over the side. It had no mast.

  Bill pulled thoughtfully at his nose. “I’ll bring Mayfly up into wind. You hop over and have a look, Mitch.”

  We came up neatly, sails flapping, and I jumped across as Mayfly began to drift astern. Bill was not risking more damage to his yacht if he could help it.

  Most of the boat was certainly empty, but one end was untidily draped with what looked like a boat cover; the space below it was in deep shadow. I stared at this gap uncertainly, for something under there moved.

  A thin, wedged-shaped face, surrounded by long straggly hair, peered out at me. Incredibly, the face seemed devoid of expression, but the eyes were bright, watchful. This was no heat-crazed madman. Madman?

  “ ’Lo.”

  The rather narrow-set eyes regarded me as if I was the TV repairman.

  “Hi!” I said, unsure of my script. “Are you alone?”

  The head nodded. A hand appeared briefly to push the hair back. No further information was volunteered.

  “Are you all right?” It was a crazy thing to say, but I couldn’t think of anything better.

  My question was considered carefully. “I’m oreful hungry.”

  “Well, come on out, and we’ll fix you up.”

  Rather reluctantly she emerged; a skinny girl of seventeen or eighteen. Her unimpressive breasts were enclosed in a grubby pink bra, and her lower half was clad in bedraggled bell-bottomed cotton trousers. She stood up, frowning and blinking in the fierce sunlight, and caught sight of Mayfly backing and filling about fifty yards off.

  “Yew come from that?” The scorn in her voice was staggering.

  “Sure—why not?” I’ve never claimed to be much of a conversationalist, but I’d have defied anyone to make much of a showing with this girl.

  “Titchy thing, ain’t it? Not much bigger’n this.”

  I decided I did not like her very much, and her voice didn’t help. It had a heavily adenoidal, flat accent that was new to me.

  “It’s good enough to save your life!” I retorted sharply. “Have you got anything you want to take with you?”

  “No. I ain’t got nuthin’.” She showed slight signs of emotion. “I lorst me ma and pa an’ orl me cloves. New they were, tew.”

  Mayfly was moving up in response to my wave, Bette in the bows, hand on the forestay, hair streaming in the breeze. “Bill says check if there is any water or stores.”

  I helped the girl up onto a thwart, but although she looked very frail, she was remarkably agile. She jumped lightly across, and greeted Bette with that same massive self-assurance. “ ’Lo.”

  I smiled to myself at Bette’s expression, and wished I could watch her reaction to our little charmer’s follow-through, but Bill would not thank me for keeping him waiting.

  There were two stout plastic containers full of water lashed to the thwarts. Another empty container had evidently been used by the girl, and there was a box of canned provisions which she had also opened. We got all of this transferred to the yacht, and left the lifeboat to its lonely fate. Bette had taken the girl below.

  “Well,” observed Bill with a wry smile, “we’re certainly getting well stocked with females!”

  “You can say that again! And we’ve sure got ourselves a screwy specimen this time!”

  Bette came on deck, angry, yet half-laughing. “Mitch, you’ve found a real cracker! I’ve checked her, and she’s in amazingly good shape; I guess she spent most of the time under that canvas cover. No signs of dehydration or sunburn. As far as I can gather she just curled up and waited to be picked up. She’s highly critical of the time we took to find her! In fact, she’s highly critical, period.” Bette laughed. “Karen’s feeding her right now, and I got the impression our Sandra doesn’t care for corned beef, but she’s getting by with our last can of fruit salad.”

  “Sandra?”

  “Yes, Sandra Bates, a compatriot of yours, Bill.”

  Bill was not pleased at this news, and nothing that followed changed his mind, least of all her story.

  Later Karen brought her on deck, gave Bill a thoroughly baffled look, and went below again. Sandra was now dressed in a shirt and shorts, both several sizes too big for her. Bill asked for her story, and she gave it in her off-hand, casual way. It was a terrible story, but her manner of telling it was even more appalling.

  It amounted to this: her parents had won a
lot of money on some lottery back in Britain, and gone on a world cruise. Sandra, whose bright, bird-like eyes missed nothing that interested her, was fantastically vague on the things that interested us. No, she didn’t remember the ship’s name, but there was a young man—“with one cord on his sleeve”—whom she was prepared to describe with great exactitude. Constantly she came back to him and his advancement of her education, undertaken at remarkably frequent intervals in a convenient lifeboat. But even there, she only knew his name as “Jim.” It summed up her philosophy: either a thing mattered to her personally or it did not, in which case it ceased to exist for her. It had been enough to know her young man’s name was Jim. What he was, or did when not giving her his all in the lifeboat, was totally irrelevant to her. So her account was far from satisfactory.

  Even the description of the ship was vague. There were several “floors,” and she admitted that she frequently got lost, although she knew her way to Jim’s lifeboat pretty well. We also learned there was a “dancehall with a crummy band” and “some shops.” Where the ship had been, or where it was going, she did not know.

  Her story of the tidal waves was equally sketchy. At the time she was, she admitted with characteristic frankness, enjoying her favorite pastime with Jim in their usual place when the alarm was given, and so she had a head start. Jim had left in a considerable hurry. She got out of the lifeboat, there were “a lot of people running about” and then the ship was overwhelmed, and she found herself in the water, clutching “a raft or something.” From this she transferred later to the lifeboat, and, as far as she was concerned, that was that. She did not see anyone else in the water, nor did she bother to look, not even for Jim. She was, she explained, wet and tired. She was totally unmoved by the disaster, except that she lost her parents, and all her clothes. Particularly her clothes.

  As soon as he could, Bill packed her off below, and summed up for all of us. “Well, for sheer selfish ignorance, I think that’s unbeatable! It really makes you wonder about Providence; she could well be the only survivor— that little horror!”

  With a stranger aboard, we would have to rearrange the sleeping plans. Sandra would have to have the single bunk, and neither Bill nor I fancied turning in the double bunk with that sharp-eyed number three feet away. There was no other solution; the sleeping cabin had to be given over to the women. I cannot say how the others felt, but I was distinctly aggrieved. On the credit side, with Karen in her abrasive mood, it certainly saved us from friction and discord, and all our potential for argument and recrimination was swiftly transferred to the newcomer.

  Not that we were that much better than she; with the passing of the waves we had lost interest in the outside world to a marked degree. We still wanted to know, but there was so much else to do which was more important.

  Sandra’s arrival, and her bored recital of the loss of the liner reminded us of this outer, stricken world, and we took in the midday newscast from Sydney.

  It was a horrific tale of destruction and unnumbered dead clear across the Pacific. The number of missing ships had “now risen to twenty-three.” Communications had been lost with so many islands; nothing was known of their fate. Aerial reconnaissance reported enormous damage in Papua, through the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomons. This chain of islands had virtually saved northeast and north Australia, and what they did not absorb was taken by the Great Barrier Reef. Only New Zealand still hung in the balance, and that would soon be resolved….

  A very secondary item was the news that the terminal gas cloud over the States had now crossed most of the East Coast, and was drifting into the Atlantic. Where it had touched there had been death, awful choking death for all animal life…. Europe was now in a state of alarm. A Russo-Anglo-French emergency committee was considering the use of kiloton nuclear bombs, set to detonate beneath the cloud, to disperse it, accepting the fall-out of contaminated water as the lesser evil. Other countries further south and less threatened by the cloud were protesting….

  With night watches ahead, we planned some sleeping for the afternoon. Sandra, who had lapsed into a watchful silence, said she too would sleep, which was reasonable, for that lifeboat could not have been very comfortable; but this news effectively blocked my idea of sneaking in with Bette for a couple of hours. Karen was busy in the galley, Bette retired to the sleeping cabin, and I got down on the cushions in the saloon. Sandra remained sitting on the Other side, working on her nails.

  “Say—I thought you were going to hit the sack!”

  “Gimme time—I will!” She giggled, and gave me a very knowing look. She stopped filing her nails and jerked her head toward the sleeping cabin. “She’s yer girl, ain’t she?”

  “Doctor Jakobsen belongs to no one except herself,” I said loftily.

  “Garn! Yew can’t kid me—yew can’t take yer eyes orf ’er!” She giggled again. “Go on, why dontcha go in wiv ’er? I won’t look—promise!”

  I stared at her, speechless. She must have some good points, but what, and where were they?

  My lack of reaction bored her, and she resumed her manicure. Her hands were small, well formed, pink, and heightened her rat-like image.

  She tossed the nailfile carelessly on the shelf behind her head, and looked around critically, well aware that my eyes were no better than half-shut. “Ain’t there any picture mags?” Again the knowing grin. “Still, I suppose yew’ve all ’ad better ways of passing the time!”

  I made no attempt to conceal my dislike. “Look, Sandra —get this firmly fixed in your head, once and for all: this is not a cruise liner. No stewards, no mags, and,” I added unfairly, “no Jim, either.”

  At once she flashed back. “Don’t I know it! Jest yew and ’im up there! He’s too bleedin’ old, and yew’re too bleedin’ slow!”

  Bill had managed to get a moderately accurate fix which placed us over one hundred and fifty miles further east than our dead reckoning position. This made a difference, and after supper Bill explained his plans.

  “In view of events—” He did not look at Sandra, but she was one of them—“I’ve changed my mind about our immediate destination. Instead of aiming for the Phoenix Group for water—they’re too far westward for us now—I propose running down to Pago Pago, here.” He pointed it out on the chart.

  “Why not Fiji, that looks a lot closer?”

  “Several reasons. There’s not a lot in it for distance, but if you look carefully, you’ll see that practically every damned port or harbor in this part of the world faces north northeast or east, and you can guess what that means, now. Pago Pago, which is—or was—a US Navy base in American Samoa, faces south, has a fine harbor which, like Grant’s Island, is an old volcano, but a lot larger. There we can be sure of—of help.”

  “How far is it, Bill?” asked Bette.

  “Roughly seven hundred miles.”

  “So we might do it in a week?”

  “We might, but I plan on taking ten days. Karen has checked the food situation. With what we took from the lifeboat, she says there is plenty for at least a month. Bit monotonous, but no problem. That leaves the water situation. We got an extra four gallons from the lifeboat, but now there are five of us. We must maintain a reserve against unforeseen contingencies, so from now we cut to a pint and a half each per twenty-four hours. That totals seven and a half pints. The header tank holds two gallons, so we’ll pump that up every other day. The odd half pint each day goes t© Karen for cooking. Of course, she’ll want more than that for making tea or coffee, but I leave that to her to arrange. So if you take a drink, don’t forget to measure it, and tell her. Right?”

  We nodded. The header was a small tank placed high up under the deckhead of the galley. There was a small hand-pump built in the supply pipe from the main water tanks in the bilges. Faucets in the galley and over the washbasin in the head were gravity-fed from this tank.

  Bill turned his attention to Sandra. “I expect you’ll want to do something to pass the time, and I’d be glad if y
ou gave Karen a hand in the galley. That would be a great help. Of course, you will not keep a watch.”

  “Me—help?” She sounded alarmed. “I don’t know nuthin’ about cooking!”

  Bill’s expression hardened. “Don’t worry on that score. Karen needs no help from anyone at the stove. You can bear a hand with the washing-up, spud peeling, and making yourself generally useful.”

  “Me mum never made me peel spuds!” Incredibly, she was pouting like a sulky kid.

  Bill’s voice was soft, almost caressing. “Well, now’s your chance to learn!”

  She looked away from his cold hard stare.

  The wind freshened during the night, and backed to the northeast. By dawn there was a lot of cloud, the sea was getting up, and we were cracking along. Bill dug out the spare jib, and spread and secured it to the shrouds, ready to collect rain, if it came.

  Karen’s head appeared in the hatch. “Bill, I thought you said you had filled the header tank?”

  “Correct. I did it just before supper last night.”

  “Well, there’s nothing in it now.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure!”

  He raised an eyebrow at me.

  “Search me, Bill!”

  “Bette d’you know anything about it?”

  Bette stopped work on the jib and gazed steadily at Bill. “No—but I’ve a mighty fine theory if you’d like to hear it!”

  Bill looked blankly at her, then his expression altered. “Oh, Christ—no! Karen, send that girl up, will you?” There was quite a delay before she appeared. Since Bill had leaned on her the night before she had become very withdrawn, sulky, and morose.

  “Yes, wotcha want?”

  “Karen says the water tank’s empty. D’you know anything about it?”

  “No—corse not! Anyway, why pick on me? Could be anyone!”