Panic flared in his chest. Boggs hadn’t been scared of much in his adult life, but the thought of being out here alone when the sun went down filled him with a terror so profound that for several long seconds he could not move. He had heard people talk about getting a chill, but had never felt anything like the sudden icy cold that enveloped him. For a few moments, he felt as though he’d been locked in a freezer.
When the chill passed, the panic remained.
They might not leave him behind, but Boggs knew he wasn’t their priority. They weren’t hurrying to get to him, and weren’t likely to reach him before nightfall. Keenly aware of the dark water below, he looked over at the fishing trawler and at the double-masted schooner that lay on its side. Gabe and Tori and the others were on the move now, looking for a way to cross to the schooner.
Boggs looked up. Above him and to the left, a thick tangle of netting and rope had been stretched from the bow of the cabin cruiser all the way to the broken mast of the schooner. In places, curtains of net hung down, but the central line was fairly taut. Even where it sagged in the middle, it must still have been at least thirty feet above the water.
He had known it was there, of course. They had all noticed it on the way in, and wondered at its use and origin. Mitchell had said it looked like some kid’s idea of a pirate tree house, the way some of the ships were tethered together. But Boggs wasn’t some circus tightrope walker. He had the strength to shimmy out along the rope and netting and hang on, but ninety feet? Could he make it that far? Once, maybe, when he was younger. But he was older now, and heavier, and as taut as it looked, there was no way of telling how well the rope had been tied off on either side, or how much the sun and salt might have rotted it.
Boggs closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and when he opened them, he gazed at the western horizon. How many hours before dark? Three? Four? Best not to count on four.
Which meant he had to get started.
The cabin cruiser sat, half-submerged, canted sideways in the water. The angle wasn’t so extreme that he couldn’t manage, but still he was really beneath the wheelhouse. He’d never be able to climb up to the bow from down there. One missed grip or a slip of the foot and he’d fall. It made a hell of a lot more sense to go up through the wheelhouse and get on top of the cruiser. Up there he could scale the port side railing like a jungle gym, all the way to the bow.
Boggs glanced at the Antoinette, sliding nearer to the reef of ruined ships, and then at the horizon one more time. The whole ship creaked and the breeze coming through the broken windows whistled softly. He slid down the inner wall of the wheelhouse to the V where the wall met the floor. On his hands and knees, he began to climb the slanted floor like Spider-Man, the toes of his shoes finding traction, hands giving him balance. Boggs picked his way across the wheelhouse, scaling the tilted floor, headed for the broken windows on the port side — the high side, now.
His left foot slipped and went out from under him. His knee slammed down, and he slid toward the water at the submerged rear of the wheelhouse. His heart raced as his hands scrabbled for purchase. He shoved his right foot out, flat on his belly, slowing down, turning sideways, slipping toward the water.
It’s not deep, he told himself. A couple of feet. If anything was there, I’d see it.
His left hand caught the upright balustrade fixed to the floor around the stairs that led down into the cabin below. Hope filled him, but momentum slid him farther, and first his left foot and then his right plunged into the water. His shoes struck the back wall of the wheelhouse, and he was in water up to his knees. The way the ship sat, tipped over in the water like that, the sun struck the roof, and only ambient daylight made it through the windows. Down there where the water had flooded in, all was in shadow.
“Please, no,” he gasped, tightening his grip on the balustrade and — now that his feet had purchase — pulling himself up to the stairs that led belowdecks. He straddled the top stair, which was a peak, of sorts, like the top of a roof. He thought of sitting on his roof back when he was a boy, up on hot tar shingles, drinking grape soda and waiting for his mother to come home from work.
The thought calmed him. The water that had collected at the rear of the wheelhouse was only that — water. And not very deep. The floor sloped down in front of him; the stairs did the same behind him. But the railings around the stairs would give him a good head start for climbing again, making his way up to the port side where it stuck out of the water. He just had to reach a broken window and get out of the wheelhouse on top, and then it would be easy climbing the outside of the ship.
He caught his breath, taking a moment. The sound of the sea lapping the sides of the ship — so close now that he was near the waterline — made him uneasy. And he could hear, down in the cabin belowdecks, the slosh of the water that had filled the sunken portion of the cruiser.
Bracing himself, he grabbed the railing — more like a ladder at this angle — and stood up on the peak of the top tilted stair. With his right hand he tugged on the balustrade, testing its strength.
Boggs paused, frowning, then cocked his head. He heard singing, like a far-off lullaby. Could that be Tori, all the way over on the trawler or the schooner? The sound comforted him, relaxing his thundering heart.
But then it grew louder, and he realized that it did not come from outside the cruiser, but from within. From below him, down those stairs, inside the flooded cabin.
An awful sorrow filled him — not fear, but profound sadness. As Boggs glanced down into the darkness of the cabin, he began to weep, as he had not done in the better part of thirty years.
Three sets of black eyes gazed up at him from the throat of the stairwell. A single hand slid upward, fingers wrapping around his ankle. He hung his head in surrender.
Only when they began to pull him down the stairs did Boggs begin, at last, to scream.
50
Tired but grateful to be home, Alena Boudreau unlocked the door to the brickfront row house on M Street. It had been her residence since 1975, when her father had passed away and she had taken the money from the sale of her parents’ house in New Hampshire, given up her apartment, and decided to make a permanent home for herself and her daughter in Washington, DC. A decade or so later, Marie had graduated college and had a child of her own, and the two women had raised the boy, David, together.
Marie lived in California now, where she worked for a green energy company, and she kept in touch only sporadically. When she did bother to call or e-mail, Marie always made sure to express her disapproval of David’s choice to work with his grandmother. Even as a teenager, she had never been able to accept that her education, her clothes, even her meals, had been paid for by money her mother earned in the employ of the U.S. government, and the idea that her son now used his brilliance toiling for the same paymasters got under Marie’s skin. Sometimes Alena thought his mother’s irritation was what kept David working for the DOD.
From the time Marie had been ten or eleven years old, Alena had understood that she and her daughter were wired differently, and she had spent years trying to find a common ground between them so that they could enjoy each other’s company instead of grating on each other’s nerves. Alena still hadn’t found that common ground, and it hurt her heart, but so much time had gone by that she tried her best not to think about it now.