Sing It to Her Bones

17

Connie flew down the dock ahead of me, her shirt a strobe in the darkness, reflecting white from each dock light as she raced by. I sprinted after her thinking, thank God I’d worn sensible shoes. I had no clue what Connie had in mind. Was she planning to call for help on the ship’s radio? Was she hoping to make a getaway on the boat? Was she trying to reach the flare gun or another weapon so we could even up the odds? In a minute I would know.

Gasping for breath and still running flat out, I sneaked a glance over my shoulder. Liz had reached the dock and was clattering toward me in her high heels with Hal just a few feet behind. I couldn’t tell whether Hal was chasing us or trying to catch up with Liz, who was charging down the dock, still dressed for success, bellowing like an enraged bull. I decided not to hang around and find out. If Hal turned out to be a friend, rather than a foe, maybe we could all have a good laugh about it later.

About halfway down the dock I clipped my thigh on something solid, a wheeled cart left there by a thoughtless boater after he’d schlepped his supplies out to his vessel. Silently blessing the guy, whoever he was, I paused just long enough to drag it into the center of the dock, hoping it wouldn’t be visible there in the dark between dock lights. Three slips farther down I did the same with a coil of hose.

I didn’t have to turn around to know I’d hit the mark. Liz shrieked in pain as she collided heavily with the cart. I heard a thud and felt the vibration under my feet as her body hit the floating dock, followed by, mercifully, the skitter of her gun along the wooden planks. “Shit, shit, shit!” Her voice pierced the night air, whiny and shrill.

“What’d you do with the damn gun?” Hal seemed utterly calm as if he were asking what she’d done with the car keys. Something big splashed into the water. I hoped it was Liz. But when I heard her voice again, complaining to Hal about his inability to maintain a decently lit marina, I figured one of them must have shoved the push cart into the drink.

“It’s here somewhere, you moron. It didn’t fall in the water. I would have heard it.”

“Which direction did it go? I can’t see a damn thing with your big butt in the way.”

“Never mind. I’ve got it,” Liz crowed.

I would have known this in any case because the dock resumed its pitching and rolling.

The minute I reached Sea Song, I stooped to untie the line holding her to the dock. Connie crouched in Sea Song’s cockpit, trying to start the engine. “Never mind that, Hannah! Get up on the bow. Untie the lines from there!” The engine roared to life, drowning her next words, so when I didn’t move right away, Connie screamed, “Get the bow lines!”

I scrambled aboard and gained valuable seconds when pained howls told me Hal had rendezvoused with the coiled hose. The port line came easily undone, and I had turned to work, thumb-handed, on the starboard line when Hal leaped aboard. The line was jammed under the anchor chain, and as I struggled to free it, he grabbed me around the waist from behind, yanked me close, and with his mouth touching my ear growled, “You can forget about it, Hannah!”

This instantly erased all doubt about whose side he was on.

We scuffled and I kicked backward, but when Hal stood to his full height, carrying me with him, my feet lost contact with the deck and flailed ineffectually in the air. “Put me down!”

Connie leaped to my rescue, brandishing a propane gas canister, and was preparing to make a sizable dent in Hal’s skull. But Liz, panting and near exhaustion, had reached the boat. “Hold it right there.” Caught in the circle of light from the dock, I could see Liz had found the gun. The business end was aimed directly at Connie.

Connie froze with one foot in the cockpit and the other raised as she prepared to step up on the seat. “Get back behind the wheel and stay there,” Liz ordered.

With Connie’s threat defused, Hal eased me to the deck, released his hold on my waist, then twisted my right arm cruelly behind me. A wrenching pain radiated from my chest around my back, and I cried out, tears in my eyes. “Hal, please don’t! You’re hurting me.”

“Is that your bad side? Sorry.” The pressure relaxed as he released my arm but was replaced almost immediately by an equally firm grip on my left as he bent it behind my back and marched me ahead of him toward the stern.

Hal instructed Liz to remain in the cockpit. There she could keep on eye on Connie, standing behind the wheel, and on me, tossed, like so much dirty laundry, on the cockpit floor.

He spun the dial on the combination lock that secured the main hatch, yanked the padlock open with a single jerk, removed it, and slid the hatch cover forward. I observed this performance with growing dread, thinking, We’re screwed. There isn’t a thing Hal doesn’t know about this boat. I watched as he slid the slatted boards one by one from the hatch opening and thought briefly about pushing him into the cabin below, but Liz and the occasional flashes of light I saw glinting off her gun made me reconsider.

“Stand up.” Hal was speaking to me.

I staggered to my feet on legs limp as overcooked spaghetti. “What are you going to do?”

He pointed. “Get down below.”

“Hal, please! Think about it. We know you didn’t shoot anybody. Let us go.”

He studied my face in the semidarkness and seemed to be considering what I’d said, until Liz’s unpleasant laugh shattered the silence. “He’s the one who’ll go away, and for a long, long time, too. How has our Hal broken the law? Let me count the ways.”

“I certainly wasn’t involved in Katie’s death,” Hal said.

“Not involved? You’ve got a selective memory, old boy. Who was it who stuffed my sister’s body into an old sail bag and got rid of it? The tooth fairy?”

“Shut up, Liz!” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a pair of cotton working gloves. “Don’t touch anything.” He handed the gloves to Liz. “Here, put these on.”

“What about you?”

“I work on this boat. My prints are supposed to be all over it.”

Connie shot a glance in my direction. If they were already worried about fingerprints, we both knew that our proverbial goose had been cooked.

Hal relieved Liz of the pistol and held it on us while Liz slipped into his gloves. “They’re too big for me.” She held her hands out for inspection.

Hal returned the gun. “Can you fit your finger through the trigger?”

Liz demonstrated that she could, pointing the gun at him for emphasis.

Hal had pulled me up next to him again. “Then I wouldn’t worry about it. Keep an eye on her”-he jerked his head at Connie-“while I take care of Hannah.”

As I stood there, pressed up against him, feeling the heat of his body, smelling his soap and nervous perspiration, I was petrified. What did he intend to do with me? Take me below? Shoot me? Strangle me? Throw me overboard? I closed my eyes and prayed as he pulled the remaining slat out of the hatchway with one hand and gripped me securely with the other. “There’s not room for both of us on the ladder, Hannah, so I want you to go down first. Don’t make me push you.”

I didn’t have a choice. I grabbed the handrail and obediently climbed down the steep wooden steps-one, two, three, four-into the cavelike darkness of the main cabin, with Hal behind me. In the few seconds it took him to reach my side, I tried to visualize the cabin, tried to remember where everything was. I thought Connie kept the flare gun in the cabinets over the settee on the port side, but I couldn’t see the settee, let alone the cabinets, in the dark. I had a mad vision of shooting Liz with this gun, the flare hitting her chest, lighting up her surprised face like a Roman candle on the Fourth of July. Behind me, there was a rustling and clicking as Hal fumbled with something. I wanted to run and hide, but there was no place to go. Besides the main cabin where we stood, Sea Song boasted only a small cabin in the bow containing a V-berth the size of a double bed, and the head, a bathroom no bigger than a telephone booth. It was hopeless.

Hal flipped the master battery switch and toggled on the cabin lights. A light came on over the U-shaped galley to my right. Connie’s stainless steel sink gleamed; the Formica counters shone. Everything would be put away, of course, including the knives in their neat little compartmentalized drawer over the sink. I frantically surveyed the cabin, looking for possible weapons while Hal rummaged about in the navigation station. He opened a bottom drawer, stuck his hand in, and came out with a fistful of sail ties.

“Forward.” His voice was calm, but seeing the sail ties heartened me. He was only going to tie me up, not kill me. At least not right away. Where there’s life, there’s hope. Well-meaning visitors used to comfort me with such drivel when I was struggling with my recovery in the hospital. What a twist of fate this was.

“Let’s get this show on the road!” Liz yelled from above. “Drive this thing out of here.” We had been idling in the slip, untied, for only minutes, but it seemed like hours to me. I heard the pitch of the engine change as Connie shifted into reverse and began backing Sea Song out of her slip.

I was uncooperative, twisting my body away from him, while Hal secured my hands behind my back. His frustrated grunts gave me satisfaction.

He ordered me to sit on the floor of the forward cabin, a space about three feet square. He tried to secure the cabin door, but space was so limited, he couldn’t close it with me sitting there. He could have ordered me to stand up, of course, but then he’d have to contend with the faulty catch. Connie had knotted string around it to hold the door open so it wouldn’t bang about while we were under way. Hal must have decided it was too much trouble. “Stay here. Don’t move and you won’t get hurt.”

“Sure, Hal. Like I believe that. I’d be curious to know what you plan to do with us. I think you owe me that much.”

He was standing, towering over me, filling the door of the tiny cabin as snugly as a cork. I was aware of everything about him from the Dock-Siders on his feet to his bare knees and khaki shorts, from his leather belt to his plaid cotton shirt. Our eyes met, and even in the dim light from the forty-watt bulb behind me, I thought I saw something there. A flicker. Hesitancy?

Hal knelt in front of me. I squirmed as far from him as I could against the bottom of the V-berth, where I could feel the gentle vibration of the engine against my back. Hal smiled and touched my cheek with his fingertips, dragged his fingers down slowly to touch my chin, then my lips. I turned my face aside, wishing I could move away from him. His face loomed large in front of me, and suddenly his hand tightened on my chin, turned my face to him, and his mouth was on mine, pressing my head back against the berth. I couldn’t breathe. When the kiss was over, I wanted to wipe my mouth, but I couldn’t do it.

“I’ve been wanting to do that ever since I met you, Hannah.”

I wasn’t aware that I was crying until I felt the wetness on my cheeks. Hal brushed my tears away with the gentleness of a lover. “I was hoping I’d have a chance with you. I really was.”

I briefly considered playing along with him but figured he would see through my act in a minute. “Cut out the crap, Hal. If you cared for me at all, you’d get yourself out of this mess. Talk to Dennis. Tell the truth. Take your lumps.” I remembered when I said it that Hal didn’t know we had discovered Pegasus’s secret compartment. If we could just get word to Dennis, Hal would pay for that stolen kiss with many, many years behind bars. Right now, though, neither possibility seemed very likely.

Hal rocked back on his heels. “I worried when you started asking questions all over town. Particularly when you started talking with Chip. I just wanted to discourage you, is all. Thought a little swim in the bay might convince you to go home.”

“So you tripped me? Why would falling overboard make me want to go home?”

He shrugged.

“And were you responsible for running me off the road, too?”

“No. That was Liz’s bright idea. I never thought your life would be in jeopardy. Liz said they’d just frighten you a little, but I should have known.” He searched my face, as if looking for understanding. “I really cared about you.”

I noticed Hal’s use of the past tense and shivered.

“I’m only sorry I didn’t meet you earlier. There’s chemistry between us, Hannah. You feel it, I can tell. This kind of chemistry doesn’t come along very often.”

With difficulty, I kept my face impassive, thinking, The only chemistry between you and me right now, buster, is saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur, and the last time I looked, that spelled gunpowder. I remembered Hal had said he’d had only one serious relationship since Vietnam. Could it have been with Katie?

Hal had stood and turned to go.

“Hal, tell me something.” He looked back at me over his shoulder. “Why did you pay for Katie’s abortion?”

In the dim light he looked confused, like a little lost boy. “She didn’t want the baby.”

“You were the father of that child!”

He squatted down in front of me again, tracing a finger almost absentmindedly along my slack-clad knee. “Yes, but she wasn’t really interested in me, Hannah, an old, broken-down Vietnam vet. She wanted to marry that young Bible thumper. She didn’t even tell me about the baby until after Chip turned her down.” His voice was almost a whisper.

“Turned her down? You mean he wouldn’t marry her?”

“No. He wouldn’t sleep with her.” Hal knelt before me, head down, staring at his hands.

So that had been her plan! Katie thought she could trick Chip into marrying her, but when he refused to sleep with her, she would never have been able to pass the child off as his.

“I’d have married her. Been a good father, too. But she was only interested in me for-”

I thought I could fill in the blank. “For drugs?”

Hal’s eyebrows shot up. “How’d you know?”

“Bill Taylor told me.”

“Bill! It figures. He was sweet on Katie, too.” Hal’s knees popped as he stood up. “Well, it doesn’t matter now. None of it matters. When she called me an old man and made it clear that she’d never really loved me, there didn’t seem to be any point in pretending anymore.” He shrugged. “So I gave her the money.”

“Hal, it’s not too late. Tell Connie to turn the boat around. Let’s go home.” I toyed again with the idea of coming on to him, of making him think there might be a chance of something between us, but something had died in his eyes.

“I don’t think so, Hannah. It’s too late now. Too late for everything.”

As he left the cabin, he flipped off the lights, plunging the V-berth into darkness, leaving me alone, struggling to free my hands. Knowing I had to come up with a plan.