Stryker's Wife. Dixie Browning
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hanging on to the ladder, her eyes wide, her face a little too pale. “Do you know the place where that plane went down a couple of years ago?” She had to raise her voice over the sound of the engines.
“Wreck Rock? Yeah, I know it,” he called over his shoulder.
“Is it very far?”
“About a thirty-minute run on a good day.”
“Is this a good day?”
Kurt was tempted to say it was looking better all the time, which surprised him, because he wasn’t into that sort of thing. “Yeah, this is a pretty good day if you don’t count the tropical depression that spun off the west coast of Africa a few days ago.”
“Africa?” She looked puzzled, faintly worried.
“Forget it. This late in the season, it’ll probably fizzle before it even hits the Leewards.”
She still looked puzzled, making him wish he’d kept his answer brief and to the point. “Oh. Well, could we go there? The plane crash site, I mean—not Africa.”
Ditzy.
Nice. Attractive in a quiet way, but definitely ditzy.
“Sure, but tell me first, are we talking dolphin, as in the fish? Dorado? Mahimahi? Or dolphin, as in the mammal? What we call porpoise. The bottle-nose. Because if it’s the fish you want, I can take you to a place where you’re more apt to find ’em. Wreck Rock’s too new. Takes time to build up a good feeding reef.”
“Oh, but—”
She was a distraction, but he couldn’t very well ignore her. Besides, she looked as if she could do with some distraction herself. She was beginning to turn a bit green about the gills.
The roll up on the bridge was more pronounced. He wanted to suggest that she go below and watch the wake, but she looked so…needy. It was the first word that popped into his mind. So he tried his hand at distraction. “Now, if it’s fish you’re interested in, there might be a few sheepshead around the place where that jerk from Virginia and his mistress went down. Not as much sport as billfish or big blues, but good eating. Real good eating. We might even run into a few tuna, too, speaking of good eating.”
Maybe speaking of eating wasn’t such a hot idea. She was looking sicker by the minute.
“I beg your pardon,” she said, just as if she weren’t fighting to hang on to her breakfast, “but the plane that went down happened to belong to a well-known businessman. The person traveling with him was his secretary, not his—”
He saw her swallow hard, saw a film of sweat break out on her upper lip. He was sympathetic, but never having been seasick, he couldn’t exactly share her misery. “If you say so. I didn’t know ’em personally, you understand—it happened before I moved to Swan Inlet, but folks around here knew ’em both. They used to fly in and hitch a ride out to their private love nest, according to—”
“She was his secretary,” the woman called Deke said firmly, then spoiled the effect by gulping and moaning softly.
Oh, man. He should’ve offered her a patch or a pill when she’d first come aboard. Most fishermen, if they needed an anti-motion potion, brought their own, but this lady didn’t look as if she’d ever set foot on a boat before.
“You want to go below and lie down?”
She took a deep breath, climbed up a couple more rungs, and to his own disgust, Kurt couldn’t help noticing that as small as she was, there were some modest but intriguing curves under that sweatshirt. “No, I’ll be just fine. Tell me about—oh, anything. Just talk to me, take my mind off my stomach and I’ll be all right.” She smiled, but it was a weak effort.
“Frog—he’s my mate—the kid who helped you aboard? He’s also my social director. I’m not much of one for talking.” He made a minor adjustment in their course and then set the squelch on his ship-toshore radio.
“Why did you call it Wreck Rock? I didn’t think there were any rocks along this part of the coast.”
Kurt shrugged. “There’s not, as far as I know. Just a name. Easier than calling it by the coordinates.”
For several minutes she engaged in deep breathing exercises. Kurt hoped it worked. It was too late for Dramamine, and verbal distraction—at least his brand—didn’t seem to be helping much. The wind was picking up, pushing an incoming tide. He quartered the seas as best he could without getting too far off course.
“I’m hoping to see the mammal, not the fish. I want to take a few pictures if we see any. And she was his secretary,” the woman said belligerently. “It said so in all the reports.”
That was fine with him. If she wanted to believe Noah had gone down with all hands and hooves aboard, it was no skin off his back. “Okay, Flipper the mammal it is, and she was his secretary. They spent all those weekends out at his private island, just the two of them, working on quarterly taxes.” He scanned the sky, adjusted the throttle and made another minor course correction.
When she didn’t argue, he cut her a sidelong glance and immediately wished he’d kept his mouth shut. He’d never been good at small talk, especially when his mind was on something else. And anyway, trying to talk a person out of being seasick was about as effective as trying to talk the tide into not rising.
What was going to come up was going to come up.
For a good-looking woman, she didn’t look so good. “You want to go below and lie down?” he offered again.
“Maybe I’d better. Just for a few minutes.”
Kurt set the controls and followed her below, hoping she could hold it down long enough to make it to the head. “Through the sliding door—watch the steps. Hang on and I’ll get you some fresh air.” That done, he deftly flipped down one of the convertible benches that served a dual purpose in the compact salon. “Head’s portside, forward. Uh, that is, it’s on the left, right over there. It’s kind of small, but you’ll find anything you need.” He handed her a plastic bucket, just in case.
She lowered herself carefully, one arm clutching the pale blue bucket. There was a bruised look about her that made him want to comfort her, only he didn’t know how. Wasn’t sure she’d appreciate it, even if he did. The collar of her black silk shirt was rucked up in back, so he smoothed it down and patted her shoulder once, but that didn’t seem like much comfort, not if she was feeling as lousy as she looked.
Kurt wondered whether to head back to port or keep going. His passenger didn’t look up to making the call, so he backed out of the salon and left her there. If it was Wreck Rock she wanted, it was Wreck Rock she would get. The customer was always right.
“Lie on your left side,” he called down from the open companionway. “They say it helps.”
He’d heard it somewhere but didn’t know if it was true or not. He did know that in a case like this, people needed to believe there was someone in charge who knew precisely what they were doing.
Dutifully, Deke turned onto her left side, which gave her a view of a shirt and a baseball cap hanging on a hook on the wall—or whatever the nautical equivalent was. It was swaying. And swaying, and swaying, and swaying.
Oh, mercy.
“‘All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full,’” she whispered. “Ecclesiastes one-seven. Onesix, one-five, one-four, one-three—” As a child, she’d been prone to stomach upsets. Granna Anne used to make her quote Bible verses to keep her mind off her stomach. It hadn’t worked very well. Counting back-ward didn’t work, either. She tried talking to herself. “It’s almost over, Debranne. In a little while you’ll have paid your proper respects to the past and be on your way home.”
Wherever home was. The Victorian house where she’d grown up was gone, the furniture being pawed over by a swarm of antique dealers. The run-down apartment building where she lived