by Matt Forbeck
By the time Lucy had come looking for him on the Shelter Deck, dinner must have come and gone. The air had grown chilly again, but the lifeboat's hull had offered some protection from the salty breeze at least. Quin's stomach had growled at him, but he'd resolved to ignore it. The ache in his heart trumped anything the rest of his body might have put up against it.
"Dammit, Quin," Lucy said. "Where are you?"
Quin couldn't help but laugh. Lucy often liked to act scandalized when someone would swear in the presence of a lady, but he knew better. When it came to it, she swore as often and as well as anyone he knew. Still, the seriousness of her tone against the coarseness of her language brought a giggle to his lips.
"Quin?" Lucy said. "Is that you? Where are you?"
Quin flashed back to a moment from their childhood when they'd been playing Hide and Seek in the grounds around her family's home back in Whitby. She'd been unable to find him hiding in the bushes under a window until he'd started laughing at her pleas for him to show himself. He'd been unable to stop himself then either, and he had to come to one conclusion about that. He'd always wanted her to find him.
Quin poked his head around the edge of the lifeboat and waved up at Lucy with a smile. She started in surprise when she spotted him, and a laugh escaped from her red lips too. It changed from that into an angry scowl though.
"Do you have any idea how long I've been looking for you?" she said. "I've been over nearly every inch of this ship."
"I can guess. I spent most of the morning doing the same thing, looking for you."
"It's hardly the same." Lucy bent down on one knee to peer around the lifeboat's gunwale. "Is there room under here for two?"
"If we press in." Quin scooted over to give Lucy some room, and she filled it.
"Why, there's plenty of room under here," Lucy said, looking down the length of the boat. "If Abe kicks you out of your cabin, you could stay here quite comfortably, I'd think."
Quin nodded. "It does have the best view on the entire ship. No other quarters feature such panoramic vistas."
Lucy laughed at this, her voice full of warmth and fun, and for a moment Quin could pretend that he'd said nothing at all to her earlier in the day. He wondered if he would want for it to be that way, to be able to take back his confession of his affections for her. Then he looked up into her eyes and realized that he wanted to tell her about it all over again.
"So," he said.
"So." Lucy grimaced, and Quin feared the worst. She would try to let him down easy, of course, but it would make him feel like perhaps it would have been better to go down with the Titanic. At least once they got to New York they could say goodbye and he might never have to see her again.
That thought both offered him hope and tortured him. He couldn't bear the idea of life without her, but at the same time he didn't know if he could stand being around her after she'd rejected him. He braced himself for the fact that he would have to find out.
"I'm still working through my feelings for you, Quin."
His heart leaped at these words. He'd been so sure she'd put him down that anything else felt like a victory.
She stared at him. "And that makes you smile?"
"No!" He put his hand on her shoulder to reassure her.
"Well, it does, but only because I'd been so afraid that I'd be weeping at this point."
"Quin Harker," she said, "I don't think I've ever seen you cry, not since you were in short trousers."
He gave her a wistful smile and took her hand in his. It felt warm, dry, and wonderful. Her fingers intertwined with his in perfect sync, like the most natural thing in the world. "I don't much, but I'd be willing to make an exception over you."
She lowered her eyes at that, and Quin's heart sank as he wondered what she might have to say. They stayed quiet like that for a long moment, neither one of them willing to break the silence. Quin hoped they might be able to stay like that forever.
Something landed on the deck behind them, hard. The impact shook the floorboards. A soft grunt accompanied it.
Lucy opened her mouth to speak, but Quin held a finger up to his lips. He didn't want anyone finding them back here. They might ask them to leave, and then Lucy and he would have to find someplace else just as private to have their talk.
Quin moved away from Lucy and peered around his end of the overturned lifeboat. At first he thought the deck to be abandoned, just as he'd hoped. Then he spotted someone – a man dressed in black and heading aft.
He had another man slung over his shoulder.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
"What is it?" Lucy whispered.
Quin waved her off, but her curiosity would not be denied. She got up on her knees and leaned right over the back of him, a sensation that Quin would have reveled in had he not been so astonished by what he'd seen. "Let me see," she said.
He hushed her again, and the two of them watched in silence as the man with the body over his arm strolled toward the ship's aft rail. He carried his load as if it weighed nothing, like a father giving a small child a piggyback ride, yet he swung his eyes about, taking care to make sure that no one was watching him. Quin wondered if the man might be able to see Lucy and him in the shadow of the overturned lifeboat. He hoped they wouldn't have to find out what the man might do if he could spot them.
The man walked straight up to the aft rail and tossed his unconscious burden over it without the slightest bit of ceremony.
The shock of witnessing this terrible act brought the moment into high relief. Quin could feel the engines thrumming through the ship beneath him as he listened for the victim to say something, but not a scream or word passed his lips as he flopped over the railing like a rag doll and disappeared. He must have landed and disappeared in the ship's wake, but Quin couldn't even hear a splash over the ship's ambient noise.
Lucy screamed.
The sound brought Quin back to himself, and he launched himself forward, squeezing out from under the overturned lifeboat. "Hey!" he shouted at the man who still stood at the railing, looking down over the edge at his handiwork. "See here!"
The man spun about and glared at Quin, his eyes glinting with feral rage. They seemed to glow red in the darkness. He came toward Quin and into the ship's lights, and Quin saw that he wore dark, shabby clothing, his white shirt stained and grimy under a fresh splash of bright crimson that ran from his neck down his chest.
Quin had no doubt the man had mayhem on his mind. As a trained attorney, his brain spun, searching for some likely explanations of what he'd just seen. Try as he might to come up with something reasonable, all signs kept pointing to murder.
He spread his arms wide to protect Lucy and keep her behind him, but she would have nothing to do with it. She pressed past him and stared at the oncoming man in horror.
The man hauled up short when he spotted Lucy moving around Quin. She did the same as she got a good, clear look at him. Then she screamed again, louder than before, and Quin heard footsteps pounding along the deck from somewhere behind them.
Quin grabbed Lucy by the arm and pulled himself in front of her, between her and the man. He had never been much of a scrapper, but he wasn't about to let this man threaten Lucy, not even for an instant. "Back off!" he said to the man in the most commanding tone he could muster.
The man snarled at Quin and Lucy, then glanced up behind them to see a handful of sailors stomping their way, coming to see what had given rise to all the screaming. He uttered a curse, then spun on his heel and marched toward the aft rail.
"We saw what you did!" Lucy said. She pressed her way around Quin, but this time she stood next to him rather than shoving past.
"There's nowhere to run," Quin said. He crept forward, Lucy on his arm. "Give yourself up!"
"You got me there, boyo," the man said in an Irish accent. He slung his arms around the railing and leaned there as if he were waiting for a date. "But I'm not quite done yet."
"Brody?" Lucy gasped. "Brody Murtagh?"
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Brody's face cracked into a wry grin. "Ah, Miss Seward, is it?" He shook his head. "It's a damned pity we had to meet again like this. I'd hoped for better circumstances."
Quin goggled at Lucy. "You know him?"
Lucy kept staring at Brody. "I hauled him out of the water. He was next to dead."
Brody winked at her. "True enough, lass. You did me a fine service that morning."
"What did you do?" Lucy said.
Brody cocked an ear at her as if he hadn't heard her properly.
"To that man," Lucy said, pointing a thin finger past him, over the railing and toward the open ocean beyond. "What did you do to him?"
Men shouted from behind Quin and Lucy. Quin risked a glance back to see a number of sailors coming their way.
"As a favor to you, I'll spare you the grisly details, Miss Seward." Brody turned and climbed up onto the railing behind him, using it like a ladder until he reached the top rung. He grabbed a vertical pole there to steady himself as he teetered on the slippery metal tube.
"Did you kill him?" Lucy moved forward, and Quin followed her. He could feel her muscles tensing, and he knew she planned to leap forward and grab the mysterious man if she could. He prepared himself to grab onto her. Should she succeed, he didn't want the much larger man to haul her overboard as he fell.
Brody looked down into the Carpathia's wake. "If he wasn't dead before he hit the water, I'm sure he is by now."
"Hold it right there!" a sailor shouted from behind as he came tromping up the deck.
"That's the one thing I'm afraid I can't do." Brody's voice was tinged with regret. "My apologies to you for ruining your evening, Miss Seward. I hope our next meeting will be under kinder circumstances."
With that, he gave Lucy a little salute and then leaped from the railing.
"Wait!" Lucy charged forward and hit the railing at full speed. Her fingers brushed the man's leg, but that was as close as she got to him before he plummeted away.
Quin chased right after Lucy and grabbed her shoulder before her momentum could take her over the railing. He stared down into the darkness beneath the ship's decks with her and saw the white waters of the ship's churning wake spreading out behind them.
"Where did he go?" Lucy gaped at the water below. "We should be able to see him! Where did he go?"
Quin couldn't answer that question. He'd hoped to see the man bobbing along in the water, perhaps to throw him a lifebuoy, but nothing disturbed their pristine wake.
Lucy turned to Quin then and wrapped her arms around him. He responded in kind. As the sailors brought them back into the ship's warm and well-lit interior, he reflected that he'd hoped to wind up in Lucy's arms before the end of the night – but not like this.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
"What do you mean, sir?" Quin gaped at Captain Rostron and wrapped his arm around Lucy a little tighter. It was warm on the Carpathia's bridge, far more so than it had been out on the Shelter Deck, but Lucy continued to shudder.
"Just what I said, Mr Harker," Rostron said. "I'm afraid this isn't the first such report I've received since we came to the rescue of the Titanic."
"Is this normal?" Lucy said. "For survivors of a great shipwreck to hurl themselves to their deaths?"
The captain gave Lucy a grim shrug. "I've been on the sea a long time, miss, but it's passing rare to see a disaster like this. I've never seen anything as bad as what happened to the Titanic. It's possible, perhaps, that the minds of the survivors snapped. Or perhaps they simply lost the will to live."
"But to have fought so hard to survive in those icy waters and then to take your own life?" Lucy shook her head. "It just doesn't make any sense at all."
Doctor Griffiths piped up then. He'd come to check on Quin and Lucy and had already declared them to be in respectable health. Quin even seemed to be recovering from his frostbite symptoms well. "Survivor's guilt can be a devastating thing. The thought that it should have been you who died instead of those who did can eat away at a man's psyche until there's little left to use in your own defense."
"But to go from guilt to suicide?"
Quin held her tighter. He could tell she couldn't believe this explanation, and he wasn't sure how much sense it made to him either. They'd had such a surreal voyage to this point that anything seemed possible.
"The guilt comes from the feeling that your survival was a fluke of fate, some kind of horrible mistake. You believe that good people should have lived instead of you, and it destroys your sense of self-worth. It's not surprising then that those who suffer horrible cases of it might decide to rectify that mistake by finishing the job that fate failed to complete."
"That seems like madness," Quin said.
"And so it is." Doctor Griffiths affirmed this with a nod of his head. "I've had a number of chats with Mr Dragomir about this over the past couple days, and he concurs."
"Dushko?" Lucy said, surprised.
"Yes. He's a bit of an amateur psychologist, or so he claims. I find his arguments to be intriguing."
"Do you have any other explanations?" the captain asked.
The doctor shrugged. "None that come to mind. If the loss of the Titanic teaches us anything, it's that we live in a senseless world."
"You're right, in that none of this makes any real sense," said Lucy. "I helped pull Brody Murtagh from the water myself. He was not a man who wanted to die."
"That's another matter we should discuss," the captain said. He waved one of his officers forward, a man with sharp, black glasses and a neatly trimmed beard. "Mr Blum? Were you able to find this Murtagh on the Titanic's manifest?"
"I'm afraid not, sir. There's no record of him."
Lucy leaned forward, concerned. "But that's impossible."
"What does that mean, sir?" Quin asked the captain. "Are you trying to say this man just popped out of nowhere in the middle of the North Atlantic?"
Captain Rostron raised his eyebrows at that. "Of course, not. There are a number of possible explanations for this."
"And they are?"
The captain ticked off the ideas on his fingers as he spoke them. "He could have been a stowaway. He could have given a false name. He could have been a last-second addition to the staff. He could have entered the ship under someone else's name, either using their ticket or assuming their position on the ship's staff."
"Perhaps he was a time traveler who'd decided to bear witness to the sinking of the ship." All eyes turned to focus withering glares at one of the other officers, a broad man with a sharp Van Dyck beard, standing in a corner of the bridge, a tattered book in his hand. He cringed at their attention.
"Mr Shubert, I don't think you're treating this situation with the gravity it deserves," Captain Rostron said. "You need to put away that HG Wells trash I've seen you reading, at least until we reach port. It's coloring your imagination."
"Yes, sir." Shubert stuffed the book onto a nearby shelf, next to several rolled charts, and sealed his lips.
"But what about the gentleman who Mr Murtagh threw over the railing?" Quin said. "Do we have no way to find out who he was?"
The captain shook his head. "That we might be able to do. Mr Shubert over there will put his spare time to better use by overseeing a full headcount of the passengers and crew aboard this ship. By a process of elimination, we'll figure out who's missing. From there, we can hope to have a good chance to learn exactly what happened."
"Thank you, captain." Lucy's shoulders slumped with relief. "It's all just so…"
"Overwhelming?"
Lucy threw up her hands. "Insane! I can barely believe it."
"You've had enough happen in the past few days to last anyone a lifetime," Doctor Griffiths said with a sage nod. "I suggest you get some rest. In the morning, this may all seem like a bad dream."
"Yes." Quin stood up and helped Lucy to her feet. "I think that sounds like an excellent idea."
The captain looked over them both with kind eyes. "Very good, then. With any luck, we'll ha
ve some more answers to your questions by breakfast. If you can stop by the bridge afterward, I'll be happy to bring you up to speed."
"You're too kind, sir," said Lucy.
The captain smiled kindly. "Given the circumstances, it's the least I can do."
CHAPTER THIRTY
