Virgin Cay Read online

  Basil Heatter

  Virgin Cay

  CHAPTER ONE

  The big sea twisted under him, turned and tossed him like a ball. The light on the beach vanished. Black water rolled over him and he went under but the life jacket pulled him up again. He tried to keep his head up long enough to let a little air seep down the raw passage of his throat but another great crest came hissing down on him in clouds of ghostly phosphorescence, thrusting something felt but unseen, some spiny sea creature against his side, so that he jerked away in instinctive revulsion. But when he surfaced again the light was closer and he thought that by God he might yet make it. He was being carried into the beach now and all around him was the booming of the surf and the drag of the undertow. He was in among breakers crashing on coral. Any one of these great seas could bash his head in or leave him skinned alive.

  When he first saw the light he had hoped that by aiming for it he might find a clear spot of sand. On an island like Spanish Cay people didn’t usually build their houses on the coral bluffs. So, despite the apparent hopelessness of it all, he had struggled on toward the light. It was solely his body that struggled now, not his mind. His mind seemed half dead. For with Charee gone what was there left to struggle for? The ketch was lying in thirty fathoms with the sea surging through her and it seemed that all his future lay there with her. His body fought to survive but the reason for the struggle escaped him.

  Something dug painfully at his foot. He was into the coral now and a great wave coming up behind rolled him over and under, sucking him down and then spewing him out onto the beach. He staggered forward in water that was only up to his waist now, water that still gripped him and tried to suck him back and at last reluctantly let him go.

  He sprawled on the sand, ribs heaving, lungs pumping. A string of purple rockets seemed to soar before his eyes and then to explode and die. Ten or fifteen minutes went by before he could begin to breathe comfortably and push himself upright.

  He raised his arm and tried to read the dial of his wrist-watch by the light of the moon. The waterproof watch was still running. It was the one thing of value he had salvaged from the wreck. The watch read five minutes before midnight, which meant that he had been in the water for a full five hours. He wondered why he was subject to this slavish devotion to time. What difference did it make? Why is it that in moments of crisis—when, for instance, the hotel is burning down and we are summoned from sleep by what perhaps will be the last alarm bell we will ever hear—do we glance instinctively at the time?

  The wind nipped at his sea-wrinkled flesh. Force Five, his sailor’s mind registered automatically, but swinging a point easterly. By tomorrow she will probably have slacked off. Tomorrow the seas will be down and there will be only the long purple swells heaving in toward Spanish Cay. If the damned hose clamp had held a few hours longer he might have saved the ketch.

  He unsnapped the buckles of the life jacket and shrugged out of it and held it loosely in one hand as he walked toward the light. Approaching the house, he was aware of a great deal of glass and a flat modern roof and walls white as bone in the moonlight. The light that had saved his life was still shining behind a great expanse of glass that was one wall of a bedroom. A filmy curtain was drawn across the glass but it concealed nothing. People lived like goldfish in these modern beach houses, but then they hardly expected waterlogged sailors to come strolling up out of the sea at midnight.

  As he stood there, the dripping life jacket still clutched in his hand, a small blonde woman came into his range of vision. She was wearing a tightly belted yellow silk dressing gown. She removed the gown and tossed it carelessly across a chaise. Beneath the gown she wore a nightdress that was made of some material as diaphanous as that of the window curtains. Weak as Robinson was from his long battle with the sea, he was not too far gone to admire the curves of her rather full breasts and the rosy hint of nipples.

  She pulled back the pink sheet and got into bed and took a cigarette from a pack on the table. Robinson, exhaustion still numbing his brain, stood there watching her. It seemed probable that a man would enter the room. It was a big bed and she did not look like the kind of woman who slept alone.

  She had picked up a woman’s fashion magazine with a shiny cover showing a model in a full-length evening gown and was leafing slowly through it. Robinson, weary of his role as a peeping Tom, moved away from the window toward a terrace and a clump of white furniture and a door with a brass knocker. He let the knocker fall twice and heard it echo throughout the stone-floored house. In his mind he could picture the woman sitting up in bed and wondering who would be knocking at this hour. He waited for what seemed like several minutes and was about to knock again when he heard the click of heels on the floor and then a floodlight was switched on suddenly, bathing him in its white glare. A curtain in a window beside the door was drawn back and the woman peered out at him.

  Her hesitation was obvious and he could hardly blame her. I must be some sight, he thought. If I were in her place I’d be damned if I’d open. Well to hell with it; I’ll just go and flake out on the beach somewhere. But to his surprise the door swung back on a short length of chain and she said, “Yes? What is it?”

  He was so bone-weary now that he could hardly speak. The wind drowned his voice when he answered, “I’ve been in an accident. I could use some help.”

  His bedraggled appearance, sodden life jacket, face gaunt under the light, must have been somehow reassuring because he heard the chain released and the door swung back and she said, “All right. Come in.”

  “I don’t want to mess up your floor.”

  She looked down at his bare feet and the blood still welling out of the deep cut and said, “Then perhaps you’d better come around to the back. I’ll bring a towel.”

  He nodded and stumbled across the sand past an open carport housing a small English car and stood waiting at the back door. When it clicked open and a shaft of yellow light sprang out at him, he saw that she had put on the yellow silk dressing gown and high-heeled mules with white puffs. Despite his exhaustion he was able to note also, with a sort of thin amusement, that she had taken the time and trouble to touch up her lipstick. She thrust an oversize bath towel at him and he mopped his face and hair and then his feet.

  “Come in,” she said.

  He followed her in, a big-boned, sun-browned man with a wild shock of black hair. He stood awkwardly on squares of black and white kitchen linoleum, the blood still welling from his coral-gashed foot.

  “We’d better do something about that cut,” she said.

  “I’m sorry about your floor.”

  “Don’t be silly. Sit down over there and I’ll be right back.” He sat numbly in the shining kitchen world of chrome and aluminum until she came back with gauze and iodine and tape. “I’ll do it,” he said holding out his hand. “I’m used to doctoring myself,”

  He poured the iodine over the wound, mildly grateful for the fact that his flesh was still too waterlogged to feel pain, and then wrapped the gauze bandage several times around his instep and covered it all with a wide strip of tape.

  She waited until he had finished with the bandage before asking in a businesslike voice, “What happened to you?”

  “My boat sank.” It was the first time he had spoken the words aloud and they left a bitter taste in his mouth.

  “Were you alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where were you?”

  “About ten miles off shore.”

  “Well you certainly picked a fine night to go sailing. It’s blowing a gale out there.”

  “I’ve sailed in worse,” he answered, his vanity still capable of being piqued.

  “How long were you in the water?”

  “I’m not sure but it must ha
ve been at least five or six hours.”

  Her voice was a little softer when she said, “Oh my, you really have been in trouble, haven’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m sure you could do with some food and hot coffee,” she said.

  “I could, but if you have a little rum or whiskey first I’d be grateful.”

  “I’ll get it.” At the door she turned back and said, “You’d better get out of those wet pants while I see if I can find you something to wear.”

  He stripped off the sodden khaki and wrapped the towel around his waist. When she returned she was carrying some clothes over her arm and a bottle of dark Barbados rum in her hand. She took a glass out of the kitchen cabinet and poured it half full of rum and handed it to him. He tossed the liquor down his throat. The rum made a pool of warmth in his belly. He stopped shivering and said, “That helped.” She held up a rather loud man’s sport shirt and a pair of flannel trousers and said, “You can try these on but I don’t think we have any shoes that will fit over that bandage.”

  He looked down at his strong, tanned feet and said, “I’m used to going barefoot.”

  “Would you like a shower while I fix something to eat?”

  “I would indeed.”

  “How do you feel about scrambled eggs?”

  “Anything at all will be fine.”

  “Well you’ll find a bedroom through there and the shower is just beyond.”

  Carrying the clothes she had given him, he went through a small guest room and found a bathroom with a stall shower. He dropped the towel and stepped inside and let scalding water wash away the salt and the weariness. When he came out he toweled himself briskly and put on the clothes which, as he had suspected, were too small across the shoulders and too big in the waist. With the lifelong habit of tidiness acquired in small boats he folded the towel carefully and placed it on the rack. His strength was returning and with it a surge of hunger that clawed at him like a wild animal. He pushed open the swinging door to the kitchen and said, “By the way, my name is Gus Robinson.”

  “I’m Clare Loomis,” she said putting a frying pan on the stove and turning a low flame under it. When she turned back to look at him she smiled for the first time since he had entered the house and said, “Who’s your tailor, Mr. Robinson?”

  “Not the Duke of Windsor’s,” he acknowledged, “but I’m certainly not complaining. Regardless of the way the pants look they feel damned good. Whose are they? Your husband’s?”

  “I have no husband,” she said, “nor is this really my house. The owner lent me the place while he went off to Vermont to try to break his pudgy neck skiing. Those are his pants you’re wearing.”

  “Then you’re all alone?”

  “The maid has the night out. She’ll be back in the morning.”

  She mixed the eggs and poured them into the frying pan and set out bread and butter and a cup and saucer for the coffee. He watched her as she moved around the room. She moved well. She was not young—perhaps thirty-five or thirty-eight—but she walked gracefully with the carefully controlled sexy motion of the hips that is often found in rather small women. Her figure, if perhaps a shade too lush, was still exceptionally good. In a few years she might begin to have a serious weight problem but at the moment she was certainly a fine-looking woman. The yellow silk gown was open low in front and did little to conceal her full bosom. He remembered the rosy hint of nipples he had seen when she had taken off the robe in the bedroom and the thought brought a slow stirring of desire.

  “I suppose you could do with another drink,” she said.

  “It may knock me flat.”

  “I doubt it. You look rugged enough.”

  She handed him the bottle and the glass. He took a smaller drink this time and let it go down slowly. By the time he had finished it she had the food on the table.

  “Don’t stand on ceremony,” she said. “Go to it.”

  He wolfed down the food and then went through a second cup of coffee.

  “Feeling better?” she asked.

  “You’re looking at a new man.”

  “Does the foot hurt much?”

  “Nothing hurts now.”

  She lit a cigarette and puffed the smoke out reflectively and said, “Why were you sailing alone?”

  “I like it that way.”

  “Where were you bound for?”

  “Miami.”

  “From where?”

  “Aruba.”

  “You mean that island in the Dutch West Indies?”

  “Yes.”

  “But that’s a thousand miles or more from here.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Mr. Robinson, you must be quite a man. Do you often do this sort of thing?”

  “I’ve been living that way for the past ten years.”

  “But this time you apparently guessed wrong. What happened?”

  “Unless you’re familiar with boats it’s a little hard to believe. Now that I look back on it I can hardly believe it myself. Anyway, there’s a piece of rubber tubing eight inches long and two inches wide that is the water inlet for the toilet. The water comes up through there and is held by a check valve. The tubing is clamped to the toilet pipe by a stainless steel clamp. As a rule I make it my business to check the clamp every so often but this time I apparently got a little careless. The best way I can reconstruct it is that sometime during the evening the clamp worked loose and the tubing slipped off the pipe. After that she just quietly filled with water. I was dozing in the cockpit and by the time I realized that she was answering sluggishly to the helm she already had two feet of water in the bilges. Even then I still could have pumped her out easily enough but it was beginning to blow fairly hard. While I was down below trying to plug the pipe a big following sea caught us and because she was so heavy and low in the water she broached on top of the wave and took the next one straight over the side and filled and went down like a stone. I just barely had time to grab a life jacket and fight my way through the hatch. When I was in the water I saw your light and started swimming for it.”

  “Then you hadn’t intended to put in to Spanish Cay at all?”

  “No.”

  “So no one knows you’re here.”

  “No one but you.”

  She had fitted her cigarette into a long ivory holder and the smoke curled before her eyes like a fine blue veil. She said, “Tell me, Mr. Robinson, what do you do for a living?”

  “A man alone on a boat doesn’t have to make much of what you call a living. To me living and sailing are the same thing and when you’re out at sea there’s no place to spend money even if you have it, which I don’t.”

  “But when you come ashore you must have certain expenses. You need money for food, gas, whiskey, paint, canvas, all that sort of thing, don’t you?”

  “Now and then, but not much.”

  “Well what do you do for the now and then? Do you have some kind of an income?”

  “Not a sou. Occasionally I make a little money lecturing but when there’s no chance of that I take a temporary job of some sort in a boatyard.”

  “And what will you do now without your boat?”

  Her eyes, he saw, were rather strange. Cat’s eyes. Longer and more pointed at the corners than most and with small dark pupils. “I don’t know,” he answered bleakly. “Take a job somewhere and try to save up for another boat.”

  “Poor Mr. Robinson.” Her voice was soft. She was beginning to flirt with him. The gown had opened even further and as she leaned forward to refill his coffee cup the soft white cleavage between her breasts was fully exposed. “How much would a good boat cost?” she asked.

  “That would depend on the size of the boat and the state of the market at the time. But a good boat, capable of transoceanic passages, would certainly run around ten or fifteen thousand.”

  “It will take you a long time to save up that kind of money.”

  “Just the rest of my life.”

  “I’
m sorry,” she said leaning forward and touching his cheek with the tips of her fingers. Her hands were tiny and soft and smelled faintly of some expensive cream. “Do you know something, Mr. Robinson? You look like a real pirate. You ought to be wearing a sash around your waist and a gold ring through one ear.”

  “I usually do.”

  “What would you do for twenty thousand dollars in a lump sum, Mr. Robinson?”

  “Anything short of murder,” he said, and then added lightly, “and I’m not so sure I’d stop at that.”

  She smiled and said, “You must be terribly tired.”

  “The mention of twenty thousand dollars brought me wide awake.”

  “Why don’t you rest for a while?”

  She had gotten up from her chair and moved around behind him. She put her arms around his neck and drew his head back again her bosom. Robinson remained that way for a moment and then turned to face her. She took his hand and led him toward the bedroom. As they passed through the doorway she switched off the bedroom light. He heard the rustle of silk and saw the dressing gown slip to the floor. The nightgown followed it. Her nude body looked white as snow in the moonlight.

  “I ought to shave,” he said thickly.

  “Why?”

  “I’ll scratch you.”

  “Please scratch me, Mr. Robinson.”

  In his nightmare he was back on Charee, struggling to save her as she went down. The moment of the full broach, relived in the dream, was fearfully real. He felt the little ship sway, stumble, fall off the crest and swing sideways. In all his years of sailing on many oceans he had never lost a ship but he had known instantly, when she had failed to bring her head up, that Charee was gone. She hesitated, hung painfully on to life, and then surrendered to the vast weight of the sea and went over. Black water poured over him. He cried out…

  The hand shook him into wakefulness. He lay quietly readjusting to reality. Moonlight on ceiling. Perfume. Soft bedding. Faint, musky odor of the woman’s body. Twenty thousand dollars. There was an Alden-designed yawl in Miami, Senegal. Thirty-eight feet. Built along the lines of Malabar. He had seen her once under sail and had studied pictures of her in various yachting magazines. A lovely ship. Mahogany and teak and lines as crisp and functional as those of a gull. She was built to last a lifetime, to reach out for a thousand and one horizons. Very likely she could be picked up for seventeen thousand. A wire to his old friend Caldwell at Florida Yacht Sales would confirm it…