One Dangerous Lady

by Jane Stanton Hitchcock

  “I love it,” Rankin said. “We’re over the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean right now . . . the Puerto Rican Trench. Ten thousand feet straight down. Sink here and you’re really sunk. They’ll never find you.”

  “I find sailing at night a little frightening somehow,” I told him.

  “Night’s my favorite time on a boat. You can really feel the sea.”

  “That’s just it. You feel how puny and insignificant you are.”

  “Don’t worry. The Lady’s a good old gal. Very seaworthy. Still, I can’t say I’ll be sad when this trip is over.”

  Famous last words.

  After an hour or so, I grew drowsy and left Rankin and the first mate on the bridge to go back to bed. I went down the two flights of stairs and walked out on deck for one last breath of air before returning to my room. I gripped the railing hard as a strong wind whipped the hair around my face. There were no stars in the sky, just scattered clouds and a hazy ring around the moon. Suddenly, I heard what sounded like a cry above the hum of the engines. I turned toward the sound and listened. After a moment or two, I could have sworn I heard a shot and splash, but it was very difficult to tell. The engines were loud. I walked up to the foredeck to investigate, but there was no one there. I looked out at the sea rushing past. Nothing. Just wavy currents of sparkling, black water lit by the night lights on the lower sides of the boat.

  I suddenly had a very bad feeling. My first instinct was to go and check on Russell. I was still out on deck, heading toward my cabin, when I saw Carla, fully dressed in jeans and a windbreaker, coming out of the automatic sliding doors of the grand salon. It was dark and she didn’t see me. I followed her as she walked up the narrow side deck toward the outside stairway leading to the bridge.

  I heard her calling out softly, “Jasper . . . ? Jasper . . . ? Where are you?”

  Jasper Jenks! Was he on board?

  I kept out of sight, my heart racing.

  Was it possible that Jenks hadn’t flown to Miami? Had he flown to Puerto Rico instead and slipped onto the boat during the refueling in San Juan? Was that what he and Carla had planned before he left the boat in St. Maarten? I recalled the conversation the two of them had in the hall. As Russell himself had proven, it was easy enough to sneak on a vessel of that size, particularly if you knew its workings. As the former captain, Jenks certainly knew the yacht well enough to get himself aboard and then to hide out in the secret passages. It would be relatively easy for him to get rid of Russell and keep out of sight until we reached the shore, where he could sneak off again when we reached port, with no one the wiser.

  The thought occurred to me: Was Carla preparing the way for it to look like Russell had committed suicide by throwing himself overboard?

  We were in the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean. The odds were that a body would never be found. I was beginning to think that the cry, shot, and splash I’d heard earlier were not figments of my imagination, but the real end of Russell Cole.

  But if Jenks was aboard, that meant I was in danger, too. I knew way too much.

  As Carla stood waiting out in the night, I ducked into the grand salon and grabbed one of the perfectly hideous reproduction stone rain god statuettes from its secure niche in the bookshelf. I went back outside where Carla was still standing, softly calling out Jasper’s name with more urgency.

  After a few moments, a shadowy figure stepped in front of her.

  “Jasper!” I heard her say with evident relief.

  I gripped the statue harder and backed away instinctively, thinking that if Jenks had killed Russell and they knew I was nearby, I was almost certainly next. But then I heard raised voices. Something was wrong. I drew closer to listen to what they were saying. A shard of light from the interior of the boat hit their faces. The shadowy figure wasn’t Jenks. It was Russell. He was holding a gun to Carla’s head. I assumed it was the .22 from the safe room. He was in a fury, shouting that Carla had sent Jenks to kill him. She denied it, of course, sobbing that she didn’t even know Jenks was on board.

  “Well, he’s not on board anymore!” Russell said with a maniacal laugh.

  Carla was pleading with Russell not to hurt her when, suddenly, Russell caught sight of me. And there it was: that sharp, murderous sparkle in his eye. His face was a jumble of glee, hurt, and confusion—the very picture of a madman.

  “Jo!” he called out. “You were right! You were right!”

  “Jo! Help! Auitami! He’s mad! È pazzo! . . . Don’t let him hurt me!”

  “She thought I was Jenks,” Russell said. “She called his name. She wanted Jenks to kill me so she can marry Max. . . . Just like you said, Jo . . . just like you said. . . .”

  He turned back to Carla and raised the gun, pointing it directly at her heart. The roar of the engines muted her cries. Russell’s hand was shaking. I was sure he was going to shoot her.

  “Do it!” I urged him. “It’s your only chance!”

  The night, the wind, and the sound of the engines stopped time. Russell raised the gun higher, pointing it at her face. He winced as if in great pain. His hand was shaking so badly now, I feared he would drop the gun. He either couldn’t or wouldn’t decide what to do. After a few tense and interminable seconds, he lowered the gun and stalked off. Not everyone is a killer.

  Carla turned to me. A sly smile of satisfaction crept over her face. The shadow play made her look demonic. With that, she lunged at me. I was so startled, I dropped the statue I’d been clutching. She was fit and young and strong, and she had me pinned backward over the railing before I could stop her. I managed to grab her by the hair and pull her sideways, but still she had me up against the rail. As we struggled, she must have stepped on the little statue because she suddenly pitched forward with a strangled cry. She was off-balance. A vision of Monique on the balcony flared up in my head.

  This has happened to me before.

  This is familiar.

  I don’t want to do this, but . . .

  As in New York, nothing counts until after the “but.”

  Larry’s face materialized in my mind’s eye, egging me on, making me realize that unless I seized the moment, it would never come again. I dropped down, grabbed her knees, and lifted her over the side of the boat, simply helping her complete her forward trajectory. She fell into the sea. I watched her disappear into the churning foam of the hydro engines. When I looked back at the wake, there was no sign of her.

  Shaken and exhausted, I just stood there, looking down at the water for God knows how long. Carla was dead. Larry was avenged. Yet, oddly, it didn’t feel like a victory. It felt vaguely sickening, and I threw up over the side of the boat. After a time, I started walking back down to my cabin to find Russell. I, too, nearly tripped on the little rain god statue. I picked it up and threw it into the water, feeling sure that the hideous reproduction, along with Carla Cole, would not be missed.

  Disasters happen in slow motion, and my recollection of this one is just like the recollection of a dream, filled with disjointed shapes and images. As I wandered around searching for Russell, I noticed that the boat felt different somehow, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Then suddenly all the lights went out. Seconds later, chaos erupted. The first mate, holding a flashlight, hurtled past me on the deck.

  “What’s happening?!” I cried.

  “I think we’re sinking,” he yelled back. “Get up to the sun deck!” He kept running.

  Rankin was on the bridge sending out SOS calls and also talking to the first mate with a handheld radio. I heard Rankin say, “Who is it?” to which the mate’s staticky voice replied, “The engineer, sir. Jesus, he’s been shot . . . he’s bleeding . . .”

  Rankin wheeled the beam of his flashlight on my face. “Get up to the sun deck, Mrs. Slater,” he said. “Nancy’s up there.”

  “Mr. Cole’s got a gun,” I told him.

  Rank
in rubbed his forehead. “Listen, Steve, be careful, will you? Mr. Cole’s got a gun. If you see him, just get away . . . Christ . . . Mrs. Slater, please go up top!” he ordered me.

  I climbed up to the sun deck, where Nancy was unhooking the lifeboats from their cannisters.

  “Nancy!” I cried.

  She shone her flashlight in my direction. “Mrs. Slater—thank God! Grab a life jacket!”

  I pulled out a life jacket from the the large chest container and put it on, strapping it tight.

  “Are we sinking?” I asked.

  “Feels like it. Mike sent the first mate down to the engine room to check it out.”

  I helped her unhook the lifeboats. We got the first one done. It rolled off the side of the boat and hit the water, inflating into a big, orange raft tethered to the yacht by a cord. We were working on the others when one by one, the crewmembers, startled out of their sleep, made their way up to the sun deck wearing their life jackets and holding flashlights, looking a little dazed and confused.

  Nearly the whole crew was up top, including the first mate, who had carried the wounded engineer up on his back. The wounded man told us that he had tried to stop Mr. Cole, but that Russell had shot him in the arm, then disabled the bilge alarm, and opened the sea cocks. The engineer had managed to escape, but Russell was still down there.

  “The engine room’s completely flooded! We’re going down!” he cried.

  Nancy ran down to see her husband on the bridge and came back shortly with more news.

  “Mike says we’re definitely gonna have to abandon ship,” she cried out. “We’re sinking too fast to go from the main deck, so he says prepare to jump off from up here.”

  “Oh, wonderful,” I said, thinking that I was about to find out just how Monique de Passy and Carla Cole felt hurtling to their deaths. There was such a thing as poetic justice and this was it.

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. Slater, you’ll be fine,” Nancy assured me, sensing my anxiety.

  “When do we go?” I asked.

  “We’ll wait for Mike. He’s just gone down to see if he can find Mr. Cole.”

  I was amazed at how calm everyone seemed under the circumstances.

  “Nancy, Mr. Cole is insane . . . Mike could be in danger!”

  “You don’t know my husband,” she said. “He’s got to try and find him!”

  We were listing badly now. All the lifeboats were in the water and there was talk about getting the tenders off when the boat sank as there was no power to launch them from their cranes. Most of the crew was assembled up top. No one said much. We were all too nervous to talk. People held their flashlights and huddled together for warmth and comfort. I could just imagine what we looked like with our pathetic little circles of light pricking the darkness of that vast, watery universe.

  Finally, Mike came up on the deck.

  “All right, everyone . . . prepare to abandon ship!” he cried. “When you hit water, swim for a lifeboat, and when the boat’s loaded, get as far away from the yacht as possible!”

  I asked Mike, “Did you find Mr. Cole?”

  “No . . . Go!” he ordered me.

  I held my breath, then jumped into my greatest fear.

  Chapter 45

  It was dawn when the Coast Guard found us drifting in our orange rafts. I now knew how survivors of the Titanic must have felt—floating in small lifeboats on a vast sea, trying to comprehend the enormity of what had just taken place. Everyone was silent as we drifted on dark water. We had all retreated into our own little worlds. I replayed the moment on the deck when Carla had lunged for me. If I had not had “prior experience,” as they say, perhaps I would have been the one to perish.

  For days after that, we were all questioned about what exactly had happened. It was Rankin’s theory that the first time Carla and Jenks tried to kill Russell in Barbados, something had gone seriously wrong. He believed that during “the game,” they thought they had suffocated him, when, in fact, they had not. Apparently, it’s possible to appear dead, like a cataleptic, then come to. Rankin surmised that they put Russell into that little room with intention of “chopping him up for fish food at a later date.” But Russell came to and somehow managed to escape. The trauma most likely triggered one of his famous episodes.

  Whether Russell got into the scull himself and tried to row ashore, or whether Carla and Jenks launched the scull in order to stage his disappearance, we will never know. In fact, we’ll never know if that morning when they both came looking for him at King’s Fort they really thought he was missing. It may have all been an act and they may have only discovered he was gone much later, when they went to check on him in the little room. In any case, it must have been quite a shock to Carla when Russell turned up again after so many months. When Russell refused to accompany her back on the plane, she set another plan in motion. Like myself, Rankin was sure that Jenks had sneaked aboard the yacht in San Juan in order to kill Russell Cole—again—and make it look like he’d thrown himself overboard.

  But Russell managed to shoot Jenks instead. That became clear when they recovered Jenks’s body (he was wearing a life jacket) and found he’d been shot with a .22. Jenks then either fell or was tossed overboard by Russell. Rankin assumed that Russell figured out what Carla had done. Her betrayal was too much for him and, in a mad frenzy, he had killed her, opened the sea cocks, and sunk the yacht.

  Parts of this theory were undoubtedly true. Other parts were not. I believed that Carla intended to kill Russell and dispose of his body so he would never be found and so she could be free to steal his fortune. I also believed that when she found out he was alive, she arranged it so Jenks would dispose of him—permanently, this time. I’d heard the shot that either killed or wounded Jenks, and heard the splash when he went overboard. I’d also overheard Russell telling Carla he’d thwarted Jenks’s attempt to kill him. However, I kept that to myself, along with so much else. As for the other part of the captain’s theory—the part where Russell Cole supposedly killed Carla in a mad frenzy—well, needless to say, I didn’t offer an opinion on that, either. I just nodded, agreeing with the explanation Rankin had put forth.

  “I guess he just didn’t want anyone else to have either of his ladies,” Rankin said, referring to both Carla and The Lady C.

  When questioned by investigators from the Coast Guard who were dissecting the disaster, I said, “Captain Rankin’s theory makes perfect sense to me. I heard a shot and then a splash and then I saw Russell Cole running frantically along the deck with a gun in his hand. I didn’t see Carla Cole, though, but I assumed he was after her. What a tragedy it all is.”

  What I didn’t tell them was what I really knew: Russell couldn’t bring himself to kill Carla face-to-face. But he knew she had to die. And if she died, so would he. That’s why he sank the boat. He couldn’t live without her and he was just too far gone to care if the rest of us went with them.

  Chapter 46

  In social life, it’s always best to give a party for someone or something. Society loves a theme. We also love it when one of our own successfully comes through a terrible ordeal. We want to be around survivors, especially if they come through it with their fortune pretty much intact. By that light, Trish Bromire’s dinner dance in honor of Dick’s release from prison was the hottest invitation in town. Dick’s reputation had been slightly tarnished by his conviction and incarceration, but it was nothing that a couple of billion dollars couldn’t polish up again in fairly short order. Society has a short memory. It has to.

  Betty wondered if Trish had meant the hand-delivered, calligraphed invitation to be intentionally funny, or if she was oblivious to the meaning of the very English wording, which read,

  Trish Bromire

  At Home

  Taunton Hall

  “At home in her dreams,” Betty said.

  Dick Bromire had rented Taunton Hall to celebrat
e his release. He was flying friends to London from all around the world. He had booked the whole of Claridges for the occasion so that all his out-of-town guests could stay there together, ready to board the private buses that would convey them to Oxfordshire, where the magnificent house and grounds stood as a monument to bygone grandeur.

  It had been almost a year since that horrific night aboard The Lady C. A thousand different versions of the story had circulated a thousand different times at a thousand different luncheon and dinner parties. Frankly, I was weary of the whole subject, juicy as it was, mainly because I could never tell the truth about what I knew. It’s tiring telling lies, which is one of the main reasons social life is so exhausting a lot of the time. What really happened on board the yacht that night would die with me. However, there still was one big piece of the puzzle that I was anxious to drop into place. And that big piece resided at Taunton Hall.

  In the past year, Max Vermilion had all but disappeared from view. He was rumored to be depressed about Carla Cole’s death, as they had been seen in each other’s company so much before she died, enough to warrant speculation that he had found true love—again. And as that love had not had time to sour, as all his other loves had done, he was in seclusion, holed up in his beloved house. I figured that a visit to “The Hall” might somehow satisfy my own curiosity on the subject.

  “Everyone’s going, Jo!” June Kahn chirped to me over the telephone. “It’ll be such great fun!”

  June was seriously debating whether or not to wear a tiara for the occasion, an idea Betty found endearingly ludicrous.

  “Just call her June, Queen of Scots,” Betty said.

  June had completely recovered from her accident, and was in an especially bubbly mood now that Carla was gone. She and Charlie were talking about buying Carla’s apartment, which Courtney Cole had put on the market at a bargain basement price, just to get rid of it and its forty-thousand-dollar-a-month maintenance. Carla had either forgotten or not bothered to change her will, which left everything to Russell. Carla was judged to have died first, which meant that Russell inherited the fortune Carla had stolen from him. His daughter, in turn, inherited her father’s fortune. In a byzantine stroke of justice, Courtney Cole had finally received her birthright.