Savage Bride

Chapter Seventeen

In the house up in Maryland, Cotter came back from the door with an opened telegram in his hand, and its contents already on his face. “Here’s the answer from the Associated Fruit Line’s San Francisco office. Their ship the Santa Emilia just docked there.”

Fredericks took it and read.

They looked at each other. Long and forebodingly, as they had that day at the steamship office in Baltimore.

“It could happen,” Cotter tried to suggest uncertainly.

“It’s a little too much of a coincidence. Why should it be at just that one particular port of call? It wasn’t Havana. It wasn’t Christóbal. No, it was Puerto Santo. You and I have both seen that place. There’s not enough there to take up half an hour of anyone’s time, much less make them overstay a shore leave. Something happened.”

“You mean—?”

Fredericks nodded curtly. “Yes, I mean. Now the thing is, what’re we going to do about it?”

Cotter eyed him in silence, waiting for him to give the answer himself.

“Just one more thing, to make sure. We’ll communicate direct with the authorities in Puerto Santo. If they’re still accounted for down there, if they’re in full view waiting for the next ship, all right. If they’re not, then we’ll know. I’ll send a radiogram right now.”

The answer came back in seventy-two hours. “It’s in Spanish,” Cotter said when he brought it in. “You better tackle it.”

Fredericks roughed out a running translation on a piece of scratch paper as he read it through.

All Fredericks said, when he’d turned it over to him, was: “Now we know.”

Cotter glanced up and saw him strip the phone with a decisive tweak. “What’re you going to do?”

“Make two reservations on the first plane that we can get to take us anywhere near there.”