by Rachel Lee
“What?”
He motioned her over. She came reluctantly, as if sensing she was being asked to do something she knew nothing about.
“Keep the wheel turned to the starboard,” he said. “To the right, just about this much.”
Her expression was dubious, but she nodded. “Okay. Why?”
“We need to be facing the waves. She’ll roll until we do. Now, when you see we’re facing directly into the waves, bring the wheel back to here. Got it?”
She nodded. He didn’t wait to see if she had any further questions.
Just then, he felt the sea anchor catch, slowing them down. The boat started to turn more swiftly. As it did so, the waves began to rock the Mandolin more wildly.
On deck, he waved to Tam, and between them they started to lower the sails. It was as he’d told Veronica earlier: there was no reason to take unnecessary chances. He’d have more control over the boat with the motor and less exposure to random wind gusts with his sails furled.
The storm wasn’t that bad, but it was bad enough to pay attention to. The boat still hadn’t fully turned into the waves, and when some waves hit them broadside there were a couple of moments when he was afraid he was going to lose his footing on the deck. But the sea anchor kept drawing them around, and finally they were nosing into the waves.
The Mandolin steadied. Apparently Veronica had understood what he wanted her to do. And Dugan felt enormous relief, because they’d just executed a tricky maneuver in one piece. Another one of those rogue waves might have capsized them, if it had hit them broadside. The gods were smiling, he decided.
But not for long, because then the rain hit, and it was heavy. He was almost drenched by the time he made it back to the cockpit and took over the helm.
Visibility was reduced to next to nothing, and he found himself relying on the sea anchor more than he would have liked to keep them pointing in the right direction, especially since it wasn’t infallible.
But they seemed to be in the worst of it now, he thought. It was bad, but nothing the boat shouldn’t be able to handle with proper seamanship, and it didn’t seem to be getting any worse. There were a couple of bad moments when he felt the stern come out of the water, giving him no rudder control at all, but the sea anchor held them.
It was a hell of a good ride.
The rain let up suddenly, as if by magic. He could see the sea again, and the gray-green underbelly of the clouds. Lightning forked across the sky, pink and white. Dazzling. A few strokes streaked downward to the water. Man, it was beautiful.
He glanced over to see if Veronica was still enjoying herself, but she was gone. He hadn’t seen her go below, and his heart clutched for an instant. What had happened to her?
Twisting, he saw her on the aft deck. She was standing there, looking upward into the clouds, her hands lifted in a pose that made him think of an ecstatic trance. Was she crazy? There was lightning.
He called to her, but she didn’t hear him. She just stood there with her black hair whipping wildly around her, laughing into the teeth of the storm. Well, it looked like she was laughing, but he couldn’t hear her over the noise of the waves and the thunder.
She was going to get herself killed.
“Tam! Tam, get up here.”
After a few seconds, Tam’s head appeared in the hatch. “What’s up?”
“Take the wheel, will you?”
“Sure. Why not. But I was at a great part in the book . . .” His voice trailed off as he came up the ladder and saw Veronica. “What the hell is she doing?”
“She’s crazy.”
“That still doesn’t explain what she’s doing.” He slammed the hatch shut and reached for the wheel. “I got it. But you better get her quick.”
Dugan turned and saw what Tam meant. Some kind of strange aura seemed to be glowing around Veronica, a pale bluish haze. He’d seen that before, on masts of ships at sea in storms.
He instinctively glanced upward at the masts, to see if it was there, too. But it wasn’t.
Oh, God, she was going to get hit by lightning. He could think of no other explanation. The possibility of it galvanized him, sending him at a dead run, out of the cockpit and across the wet deck. Spray stung him, but he ignored it, focused on only one thing.
In the instant before he grabbed Veronica, he wondered if he was going to get a shock. Even close to her he could see the blue shimmering, an electric light that would have prevented him from touching anything else on the planet.
But he couldn’t leave Veronica to her fate. Grabbing her, he caught a glimpse of her startled face in the instant before he lifted her off her feet and swept her to the cockpit.
“What the hell are you doing?” she demanded, when he set her on her feet.
“Saving your life. You were glowing blue! Lightning was probably going to strike you.”
She shook her head, looking angry and upset. “The storm won’t hurt me.” Then she turned, yanked open the hatch, and descended the ladder below.
Dugan looked at Tam, who shook his head and made a circle with his index finger by his head. “Crazy,” Tam said. “She’s crazy.”
No, thought Dugan. He was the one who was crazy. Every damn time he tried to do the right thing, he got into trouble. The angry thought brought memories of Jana floating to the surface and with it a pain so old he was surprised to discover it could still feel fresh.
He turned from Tam, not wanting the other man to read his face, and stared into the waves and clouds ahead of him. He ought to know better by now, he thought bitterly. He ought to know that people didn’t want to be rescued, that they didn’t respect you for doing what was right.
Jana had taught him that. He’d rescued her, too, from virtual poverty. An orphan, she’d been supporting herself waiting tables in a coffee shop across from Port Authority, getting paid less than minimum wage and picking up nickels and dimes in tips. She’d had dreams of going to school, but even with loans and financial aid she couldn’t see how she could do it and still manage to live.
Well, he’d married her, after a courtship over the counter that had begun when he’d taken his ex-girlfriend to the terminal to catch a bus. He’d married her and paid her way through school and had evidently given her a taste for the finer things in life. Things she wasn’t prepared to give up simply because he wasn’t going to risk the funds of a lot of little investors who were counting on him to make their retirements happy. She hadn’t even felt grateful enough to avoid getting in bed with his best friend.
The two of them had married, and now she was a stay-at-home wife with a Ferrari and a summer house in the Hamptons. No kids, but that somehow didn’t surprise him. Neither Jana nor Mel had struck him as people who could make room in their lives for a child. In retrospect, he wondered now why he’d been so blind then. He’d been living in some kind of fool’s paradise, envisioning kids and all the rest of it when Jana finished school. Hah!
But he was a wiser man now. Although apparently not as wise as he had thought. Like a fool he’d dashed out to save Veronica from the lightning, and all he’d gotten for it was her anger. In fact, this whole damn association of theirs was born of some misguided notion that he had to protect her. As if it were his responsibility.
Frowning at himself, he wondered when he was ever going to get his head straight. People were happiest when left to muck up their own lives without interference from well-meaning parties. He ought to know that by now.
Sighing, he tried to let go of his pain and anger, and focus on the storm. Tam and the sea anchor were keeping them bow into the waves, and the Mandolin was riding them like a trouper. In the distance he could see gray veils of rain, but they seemed to be sweeping to the east. He wondered how long they were going to have to ride this out.
He wondered just how angry Veronica was with him, and then he wondered why he should even care.
But he did, fool that he was. He turned to Tam. “I’m going below for a minute.”
“No prob,
skipper. And while you’re down there, tell her she’s a jerk. Being deaf ain’t no excuse for being stupid.”
Of course it wasn’t, Dugan thought as he opened the hatch and descended the ladder. Of course it wasn’t. But somehow he didn’t think Veronica’s action was simply stupid. Not when he remembered the look on her face as she stood out there, as if she were embracing the goddamn storm.
So, maybe he was losing his mind at last. The tropical sun had fried too many of his brain cells. Embracing the storm? Get real, man.
He half expected to find that Veronica had disappeared into her cabin. Well, his cabin. Another white-knight impulse. He should have kept his own cabin and let her share the V berths with Tam. That would have taught her a thing or two. Which thing or two he wasn’t certain. But maybe it would have made her less likely to want to hang out here for three months.
Instead, she was sitting at the table in the galley, staring fixedly at her computer screen, which was full of wiggly lines that he supposed were the readouts from the magnetometer. The boat was still rocking quite a bit, so he passed on the possibility of coffee and settled for a plastic mugful of water. Then he sat across from her.
“Anything interesting?” he asked.
She wasn’t looking at him, so she didn’t hear exactly what he said, but he’d figured speaking would make her look at him. It didn’t. She kept her gaze firmly fixed on her computer screen.
For somebody who hadn’t been deaf all that long, he found himself thinking, she’d sure figured out how to use it as a weapon. He could have reached out and used touching her as a way to demand that she look at him, but he wasn’t ready to sink that low.
Two could play at this game, he decided. He spoke again. “I didn’t think so,” he said, keeping his tone casual. “I doubt you’d have missed anything before.”
He waited, but curiosity still hadn’t gotten the better of her. He cast about for something else to say, hoping that if he talked long enough, eventually she’d have to give in and look at him.
Then he realized she’d taken out her hearing aids. Well, son of a bitch. How the hell was he supposed to get around that?
He sat looking at her, sipping his water, part of him paying attention to the Mandolin’s movements, part of him puzzling the mystery of the woman who sat across from him deliberately cloaked in silence.
And yet another part of him wondering why he gave a damn. He ought to just get up right now, head topside, and consign her to the devil. Why did he have this overwhelming feeling that he had to make this right somehow? Especially when she had so plainly blocked him out by taking out her hearing aids.
She wasn’t his problem, so why was he acting like she was? It was that damned white-knight impulse again, that was what. He couldn’t just let her be mad at him. He had to make things right. And he couldn’t just accept that she’d had every right to get struck by lightning if she wanted to.
That last thought was so absurd it almost startled a laugh out of him. No, she didn’t want to get struck by lightning. That wasn’t what she’d been doing. Somehow, some way, she’d been feeling invincible.
He closed his eyes a minute, turning in to the boat, feeling her sink and then fly on the waves, listening to her slightest sound. Everything was okay. At least with the boat.
Then he recalled Veronica standing on the deck a few minutes earlier, arms raised as if to embrace the sky. Remembered the happy look on her face, the transported expression. Remembered the blue glow that had surrounded her.
Forgetting his resolutions, he reached over and tapped her arm. She looked at him, her gaze wary. “Tell me more about this mask.”
“I can’t hear you.”
He nodded and pointed to his ear.
She sighed, hesitated, then finally picked up the case from the seat beside her and put in her hearing aids. He supposed he should have looked away, to give her privacy, but he didn’t. Her blue eyes stared back at him defiantly.
“What?” she said, now that she could hear again.
“What were you doing out there?” He tried to keep any accusatory note from his voice, and thought he succeeded.
She shrugged. “I was feeling the storm.”
“Feeling the storm?”
She nodded.
“Do you know why I grabbed you like that?”
She shook her head.
“Because you were glowing blue. I figured you were going to get hit by lightning any instant.”
She didn’t answer immediately, but looked down at her computer. He waited, restraining his impatience, wondering if she was going to shut him out again.
“I wasn’t going to get hit,” she said finally. “The storm wouldn’t do that.”
He gaped at her. “My God, you’re crazy!”
“No, I’m not.”
“No, you’re right. I’m the one who’s crazy. I ran out there, risking getting hit myself, to grab a woman who was glowing blue from the charge building up in her, and all the thanks I get is being told that the storm wouldn’t hurt her and I shouldn’t have done that? No, it’s me who’s crazy.”
He didn’t know how much of his diatribe she understood, but those blue eyes were looking at him again, wide-eyed and . . . haunted. They looked haunted.
She surprised him by reaching out to grip his forearm. “You don’t understand,” she said. “The storm was . . . it was . . . I could feel it. I was part of it.”
“Yep, you sure were. The blue part of it. The lightning part of it.”
“No.” She sighed, and her face took on the frustrated expression he saw there entirely too often. It was beginning to irritate him, but not because he was getting impatient with her inability to understand. Because he was getting impatient that the two of them didn’t seem to be able to communicate effectively. It wasn’t just her hearing. They might have originated on two entirely different planets.
She spoke, still gripping his forearm. “It was . . . Oh Dugan, it was wonderful. I could feel the storm. Feel the power. It was like . . . like . . .” After a moment she gave up, shaking her head. Then an idea struck her. “I think maybe it’s like what you feel sailing this boat.”
That silenced him, because he knew what she meant. It just surprised him that she was astute enough to have picked up on it.
This boat was almost a part of him, of his soul. Considering how rarely he managed to get out and sail her, it was amazing to realize that he never felt quite as alive as when he and the Mandolin were skipping over waves with the sails full of the breath of the wind. The humming of the sails and the creak of the rigging were almost a second heartbeat for him. It was as if, when he stood at the helm, he melded with the boat into one being.
Veronica had apparently picked up on that somehow, and he gave her high marks for being perceptive. But she had said she had felt the same way about the storm.
“You felt like you were part of the storm?”
She nodded, then gave an almost shy smile. “I had the feeling I could have clutched handfuls of thunderbolts.”
“You almost did.”
He was losing this argument, he realized. If it had been an argument. But when she put it in those terms, he felt kind of stupid for grabbing her. In those terms it made about as much sense as someone yanking him out of the boat’s cockpit.
After a moment, he said, “I still think you could have been hurt.”
“You could be hurt sailing this boat.”
“It’s not exactly the same thing as a thunderstorm, though.”
“No?” She looked away from him, staring into the distance, giving him the feeling that she saw something he never would.
“Did I tell you I’m a direct descendant of the high priestess who went down on the Alcantara?”
His heart skipped a beat. This, he decided, was beginning to get spooky. He tapped her hand, making her look at him. “What are you trying to tell me?”
“Just what I said.” She shrugged her shoulder. “Standing out there in the storm, it fel
t like I was . . . well, I felt more at peace than I’ve felt in a long time. I felt . . . at home. Connected.”
This was getting too creepy to be believed. And it sounded crazy enough to merit a commitment order.
On the other hand . . . “So how did your ancestor survive?”
“The conquistador I told you about was her father. He saved her and carried her with him to St. Augustine. I’m a direct descendant of the female line.”
He didn’t know what to say to that. Finally, he said the only thing that occurred to him. “So I guess if this tribe had survived, you’d be the high priestess now.”
She shrugged again. “I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. But I’m wondering if maybe . . . maybe there isn’t something in my bloodline that makes me feel a connection with storms.”
“Have you always gotten . . . well, for lack of a better word—high during storms?”
“I wouldn’t exactly call it a high. I’ve always loved them. They make me feel . . . good.”
“Hmm.”
Her expression became surprisingly shy. “I know it sounds crazy.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“Maybe I just love storms. Maybe there isn’t any connection at all.”
“Maybe not.” But something atavistic inside him kind of believed that there might be. “Is this why you’re so hot to find that mask?”
“Partly. But mostly because my mother spent her life looking for it. It’s something I need to do.”
“I can understand that, I guess. But just do me a favor.”
“What’s that?”
“No more communing with storms from the deck of my boat. My insurance company would have a fit.”
And much to his amazement, she laughed.
Okay, so maybe she wasn’t that crazy after all. He could live with it.
But only for a couple of months.
Chapter 10
Tam was the first person off the Mandolin when they docked. Luis watched him leap off the boat with his duffel and set straight out for Old Town on foot, despite the rain and the darkening of the evening.
Luis, who was across the street inside a bookstore, watching the marina while he pretended to be perusing books, decided he might offer the man a ride.
