“Something wrong!” Viola said. “Then that explains why I had goose pimples. I thought it was just because I was around men!”
CHAPTER FIVE
WE WENT UP to the dining room.
It was dark now, and there was a stiff breeze into the dimly lighted dining room. We moored Patsy in a high-chair with a napkin about her middle. When I went to order, I was sorry I’d asked Dorothy and Viola to eat with me. I was too hungry to be polite or attentive to them.
I ordered the largest meal they served, and then sat there with my mouth watering and my stomach churning until the waiter brought our hot soup. The first mouthful was so good and hot, my eyes watered, for a second, I thought I was going to be sick.
When I looked up across the table, Dorothy was looking at me with a little frown between her eyes.
Viola, too, was looking at me. “You know, it seems to me, I’ve seen you somewhere before, Henderson. Have you ever been in the second grade at Pits, Pennsylvania?”
“It would have to have been in the last three years,” Dorothy said. “Viola teaches the second grade back home. She gets the kids after they’ve done everything they can to me.”
“School teachers,” I said over my soup.
Viola laughed. “You mean you haven’t guessed?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t guess.”
“The whole bunch,” Viola said. “Ten of us. Pennsylvania school teachers on a vacation cruise. See sunny Ha-va-ee. See Hula Skirts, and pineapples on the hoof. Ten little school teachers, out to see the world, and find themselves a man — ”
“Viola!” Dorothy said.
“What?”
“That’s not true at all.” Dorothy’s face was red again.
“No? Speak for yourself, Dottie. I know why I’m here. I know why the rest of them are here, although they’ll deny it all over this pretty little boat.”
Dorothy attacked her salad in silence. It was pretty easy to see she was angered. Viola only laughed at her.
The waiter came then with the main course. Dorothy was very quiet while the waiter placed the steaming dishes before us. I was too hungry to pay much attention to her and Viola went on chattering easily.
“You see,” Viola said. “You don’t get to meet men in class-rooms. Some of the little devils in the second grade are cute, but they’re too damned young, no matter how desperate you get. Then Spring comes, blessed spring with the bees and the flowers and the sap running in the trees, and school is out. You look around, and there aren’t even any unattached males in your whole town. So you go off to a summer camp, with beautiful mosquitoes, and snakes and sand in your sheets, and one man to every twenty starved females. Or you go to college somewhere for a refresher course. You end up wishing to heaven you were dead. So then some girl gets a bright idea one summer. Why not a cruise somewhere? Nobody mentions men. They talk about sea air, and pineapples and hula skirts, and natives, and not one word about men. But you can see the girls drooling — ”
“That’s enough, Viola,” Dorothy said. “I’ve heard enough. And I’m sure you’re boring Mr. Henderson.”
My mouth was crammed with steak. It was slightly rare, I wished it had been cooked a little more, but it was good. “No,” I managed to say. “No. I’m not bored.”
“That’s because you’ve never been a school teacher,” Viola said.
“You said you were an ex-cop, Mr. Henderson,” Dorothy said. “What business are you in now?”
I looked at her. They actually hadn’t hooked me up with the murder of Connice Nelson in Honolulu. What would they do when they did realize they were eating with a man who’d been in jail? What would my sheltered school teachers say then? I went on eating. I knew I had to tell them some polite, plausible lie that they could believe. You don’t tell people the truth. The truth might upset them.
“I’m not doing anything just now,” I said. “Uh, I’m taking the baby home so her folks can see her.”
“She’s beautiful,” Dorothy said. “They should be proud of her.”
“Your wife?” Viola said. “She couldn’t come.”
“I have no wife,” I said. I was looking at Dorothy. I saw her face flush a little. “She — she divorced me — ”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Dorothy said.
Viola laughed. “Dorothy will run now. She thought you were some safely married man, or she’d never have spoken to you. She’s so afraid that someone might think she’s trying to find a husband, she goes out of her way to keep from speaking to single men.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Dorothy snapped. “Be hush, will you?”
Viola only laughed. I must have smiled too, because when Dorothy looked at me, her eyes flashed, and her head went up.
We ate in silence for a few moments. “If you like,” Dorothy offered, “after we’ve eaten, Vi and I will help you put your baby to bed. If you’d appreciate the woman’s touch, that is.”
When we’d had dessert and coffee, I began to feel like a member of the human race again. I think it was then I actually looked at Dorothy for the first time. She had soft, delicate skin, and she blushed easily. She had a look of gentleness about her, and I suppose the little boys in her first grade class must have thought she looked like an angel with her smoothly waved blonde hair. I suppose she did look like an angel, but angels aren’t my type. Especially not girls as tiny as she was, because I hadn’t realized until then that she was very little more than five feet tall. She looked even smaller beside her raw-boned friend, Viola Keeley. The dames I went for were larger and heavier, because I always told them I liked plenty to hang on to. This Dorothy had a cute shape, but if she weighed three pounds over a hundred, I’m a liar, and she looked like she’d break if you were rough with her. And I was rough.
I was willing to say goodnight to them at the doorway of the dining room, and forget them. But when we got that far, Viola said, with a malicious smile, “Well, I promised some of the girls I’d go to the movie with them. But there’s no reason you can’t help Mr. Henderson, Dorothy. Anyway, I know you’d be a bigger help than I would. I don’t like kids until they get in the second grade, and then I hate ‘em.”
Dorothy looked panic stricken. She clutched at Viola, but the tall girl moved quickly away with an airy little salute.
“You don’t have to,” I said. “We’ll be quite all right.”
Dorothy dragged in a deep breath. “Of course I’ll help you,” she said. “I promised.”
She walked down the ladder and along the corridor beside me like a person in a trance. I grinned to myself.
“Are you afraid of me?” I said when we got to 18-B.
“Of course not,” she said. “I’ll be glad to help.”
I looked at her and then I unlocked the door. I stepped inside and held my hand on the knob, awaiting her.
She looked up at me.
“We might as well — leave the door open,” she said. “It might look better — to people.”
I smiled and nodded. The door wouldn’t stay open. I was putting Patsy on the bed and Dorothy was just behind me when the door slammed. She practically ran back to it and opened it wide again.
The rolling motion of the ship slammed it. She stood there looking at it.
“Forget it,” I said roughly. “The walls are thin. You can scream if anything happens to you.”
She looked at me. “You must think I’m a fool, acting like this.”
“I’ve never met many school teachers,” I said.
“Viola had no right, doing this to us.”
“Doing what?” I said. “If you feel any sense of duty in staying here, please forget it. I can handle the baby all right. I have been, and I expect to, until I get to Tampa. It’s been nice knowing you, Dorothy. Good night.”
She came over to the bed.
“Where are her night clothes?” she said. Then she saw the towel. “Haven’t you any diapers?”
“No clean ones,” I said.
“I’ll wash out some bef
ore I go,” she offered.
“Never mind, they must have a laundry on this ship.”
“No. I’d like to.”
She tried to put Patsy’s pajamas on the baby, but she was pretty helpless. I had to take over. While I was putting Patsy in the bed against the bulkhead, Dorothy was gathering up the diapers and taking them in to the lavatory in the bathroom.
Patsy went off to sleep and I sat in a chair to wait for Dorothy. When she came back into the room, her face was flushed and her hair was damp with perspiration. She’d pushed her sleeves up and her hands were pink.
“You’ll get wash tub hands,” I said. “What will the kids in the first grade say?”
She smiled. “I really should go,” she said uncertainly.
I nodded and stood up. “All right,” I said. “Good night.”
She looked at me. “You think I’m silly, don’t you?”
“How old are you?” I said.
She frowned. “I’m twenty-five.”
“Then there’s no reason for you to be afraid of me.”
“I don’t mean to seem afraid. I’m — just not used to all this.”
“You came on this trip to get away from the things you’re used to, didn’t you?”
“I suppose so. But I guess we take our own world with us, no matter where we go. I know I do. I’m afraid I acted in Honolulu just about as I do at home. Except I spent a lot of money for silly souvenirs that I’ll show to people at home who don’t even want to see them.”
“Haven’t you had fun?”
“I didn’t go along to have fun.”
“Why did you go?”
She spread her hands. “Because Viola wanted me to. Because people thought I should. Because I had nothing else to do. I’m a very dull person, I’m afraid.”
“Haven’t you ever done anything you wanted to do, just for the hell of it?”
She shook her head slowly, and then she said. “Yes. Once. Once I was in love with a boy. His name was Fred. I thought he was the most wonderful thing in the world. I did everything he wanted me to do — just for — for the hell of it. I — I remember I had just started teaching school the year he came home from school. I had a car, and I sold it just because he needed some money. I gave it all to him. And he took it, too.” She looked at me and laughed.
“Fred sounds like a real nice character,” I said.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “I was crazy about him. He was wonderful. He was beautiful. There wasn’t anything he wanted that I could deny him. He was all I lived for — for two whole years. People thought I was crazy, but it was the only time in my life I never cared what people thought. He used to be waiting for me after school. I had to teach Sunday School on Sundays, and he would sit outside the church and wait for me.”
“I can’t stand the suspense,” I said. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” she said. “He joined the army. And when the war ended and we both came home — you see, I joined the WAVES because I couldn’t stand it at home with Fred gone. I couldn’t get him out of my mind all the time I was in the WAVES, and I saw a million other men. All I could think was that I wanted to get back home to Fred.”
“How faithful.”
“Oh, I was faithful,” she said bitterly. “For the main thing, I never met another man who could make me forget Fred for an instant.”
“I’ve read about such men,” I said, “but I never met one.”
“He just happened to be the one I wanted,” she said. “It does happen, you know.”
“Does it?”
She looked at me. “Well, what about your wife?”
I’d almost forgotten I’d told her I had a wife. “She divorced me,” I said. “Remember?”
“I’m not talking about how she felt about you,” she reminded me. “Something has made you bitter. The first time I saw you, I thought you were the unhappiest man I had ever seen.”
“Tell me about you,” I said without smiling. “What happened to Fred?”
“Why he got m-married,” she said. She tried to say it lightly, but I could see it had hit her hard and she hadn’t gotten over it yet. Her face was pale, and her soft blue eyes looked hollow when she spoke. “He just came to see me one night and told me he wouldn’t be seeing me again. He said he was marrying a nice girl.”
The way she said it, you could see what the shock had done to her when she learned what her Fred really thought of her. I stared at her a moment and then I laughed.
“I’m pleased you are amused,” she said coldly.
“You should be too, lady,” I said. “You were lucky to be rid of him. He probably thought that you’d been sleeping with half the Navy all the time you pined for him in the WAVES.”
She nodded. “Yes. I guess he did. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what he thought, does it?”
“Try to tell yourself that,” I dared her.
She smiled and shook her head. “It’s no use,” she said. “I was really in love with him.”
She went to the door and stood there with her hand on the knob. “I’m sorry I talked about myself so much,” she said. “When I got started, I didn’t know when to stop.”
“I didn’t mind,” I said.
I came over to her. Her head went up and her eyes widened as I came nearer. Her lips parted. She pulled on the knob of the door. When she found it locked, fright flooded her blue eyes, and a scream crawled up in her throat. I clamped my hand down hard across her mouth.
I put my other arm about her and pulled her close.
She tried to wriggle free, but I held her tightly, pulled up on the tips of her toes.
At last she subsided and stopped fighting. But I could see she was terribly afraid of me. I took my hand from her mouth.
“Why’d you do it?” she said. “Why did you lock the door?”
I smiled bitterly. My locking the door as soon as she stepped into the bathroom had had nothing to do with her. It was fear, cold fear in my guts that had made me do it. But I knew I couldn’t tell her that. And besides, she wanted to believe that I had locked her in like the villain in an old fashioned movie. And maybe, after the way her Fred had treated her, she needed to believe something like that.
I said, “I didn’t want you to run away, honey. Before you thought it over.”
Her voice was breathless. “I’ve thought it over now,” she said.
She was still tight against me. I could feel the thud of her heart, the firm outline of her high, full breasts.
“And you’ve decided?” I said.
“Let me go,” she said.
I nodded and stepped away from her. I think that surprised her. I watched her nervous fingers work at the lock.
“I’ll walk to your stateroom with you,” I said.
“The baby may need you,” she protested.
“She’s asleep,” I said. “I’ll lock her in. Anyway, it isn’t but a little more than three hundred feet from one end of this craft to the other.”
She nodded. As we walked along the corridor, she said thoughtfully, “I guess I asked for it, coming to your room like that.”
I wanted to laugh at her. If a kiss was that important to her, no wonder her Fred had married a “nice” girl!
“You’re all right,” I teased. “No broken bones.”
“You’ve been very nice, very gentlemanly,” she said stiffly.
“Nicer than you hoped?” I inquired.
She flushed angrily. “I don’t know what kind of a girl you are used to, Mr. Henderson.”
“Dames,” I replied. “Dames that know what they want. And know how to get it.”
She bit her lip. “This is my stateroom,” she said. She put out her hand. “Goodnight, Mr. Henderson.”
She leaned against her door and looked up at me. Her face was flushed. I pulled her against me. She didn’t resist, and fitted in just as she had in my room.
Her head went back, and her wide eyes stared up into mine. I laughed and released her. “If I ki
ssed you, baby, I’d have to marry you. I haven’t time for it. Life’s too short.”
Her eyes flashed, and her mouth moved, but she was speechless. I knew she stood there staring after me as I went up the ladder and out on the starboard deck.
I went into the purser’s office and found an assistant. “I’d like to locate an old friend of mine,” I told Mm. “A Mr. Michael Rafferty. Could you tell me the number of his stateroom?”
He studied his chart, and turned it so I could see. “I’m sorry,” he said. “There’s no Mr. Rafferty on this ship, sir.”
“All right,” I said. I felt all gone in my middle. “I guess I was mistaken.”
• • •
EVEN IF I couldn’t find Mike Rafferty’s name listed among the Hilotania’s passengers, I knew he was aboard, and I knew he meant to kill me.
I walked back to 18-B with an ache the size of a silver dollar in the middle of my back. In my imagination, I could feel Mike Rafferty behind me.
I had known Rafferty a long time. In thirteen years I had seen him in a lot of moods. I knew that now he was dead serious. I didn’t know why he wanted to kill me. But if I’d been able to learn his cabin number, I meant to surprise him, and make him talk. The need to know why after all these years of friendship, he’d turned on me, and hated me badly enough to follow me four thousand miles to kill me, when he could have paid to have it done, nagged at me, and kept me almost as jittery inside as the fear that he was going to jump me from the darkness.
Well, I couldn’t find him. There was nothing to do but sweat it out until he found me again.
Somehow I had to be ready for him. I couldn’t go on hiding behind Dorothy Gould’s inadequate skirts for the next four days.
When I got to 18-B, I hesitated at the door. You know the feeling you get when you are sure someone unseen is watching you?
I had that feeling. I stood there with the key in the lock, wanting to turn around. Both ways at once. But wasn’t that what he wanted? He wanted me to look around. If he thought I suspected he was there, he would shoot then, wouldn’t he?
He had been in the cabin when I got there before. I unlocked it stealthily, and slid my hand inside until I found the wall switch.
Slay Ride for a Lady Page 7
