The weight of water - Anita Shreve [83]
“Tom,” Rich calls, again using the boyhood nickname. “Take this line.”
Thomas makes his way to the stern, and takes the rope from Rich, and it is then that I notice that Thomas is shaking. Rich sees it too.
“Go inside,” Rich says to Thomas quietly. “Put on dry clothes and a sweater. The foul-weather gear is under the bunks in the forward cabin. You, too” he adds, looking at the quickly and then away. He ties the line in his hand to a cleat. “I’ll go down and listen to what NOAA has to say. How long ago did the other boat leave?”
“About fifteen minutes,” Thomas answers.
“Did she say where she was headed?”
“Little Harbor.”
As if in answer to Rich’s doubts, the Morgan shudders deep in her hull from the hard bang of a wave. I can feel the stern skid sideways in the water, like a car on ice. The rain is dark, and I can barely make out the shape of the islands around us. The sea is lead colored, but boisterous.
I go below to find Billie huddled in her berth. She has her face turned away. I touch her on the shoulder, and she snaps her head around, as though she were raw all over.
I lie down beside her. Gently, I rub her shoulder and her arm. “Daddy was right,” I say softly. “You have to put your life jacket on. It’s a law, Billie, and there isn’t anything we can do about it.”
Invoking parental helplessness before a higher authority has usually worked with Billie, as when I tell her that the police will stop me if she doesn’t put on her seat belt in a car. The door to the forward cabin is shut. Thomas knocks and enters simultaneously, a gesture that catches my breath. I can see a slim form lying on the left side of the V berth. A head rises. Thomas shuts the door.
My sneakers make squelching sounds on the teak floor grate. I kick them off, and they thwack against a galley cabinet. I strip off my sweatshirt and shorts and underwear and pull from my duffel bag a pair of jeans and a cotton sweater. Billie, hearing the unexpected bumps of the sneakers, rolls over in her berth and looks up at her naked and shivering mother.
“Can’t I wear an orange one?” she asks.
“No, those are for adults. Only yours will fit you.” I peer down at the life vest, with its Sesame Street motif, on the table.
Thomas opens the door of the forward cabin. I am struggling awkwardly with jeans on wet skin. Rich swings down from the deck. Instinctively, I turn my back.
Thomas drops a muddle of navy and yellow foul-weather gear onto the teak table. “There’s a small one here,” he says and holds it up. “I think it will fit Billie.”
“Oh, Daddy, can I have it?” Billie asks, holding out her arms.
I wrestle with my sweater. I bend to Thomas’s duffel bag and take out a dry shirt, a sweater, and a pair of khakis. I hold them out to him. I look at Thomas’s face, which has gone white and looks old.
As the trial, Mr. Yeaton for the prosecution asked “Mary S. Hontvet” how long she had known Louis Wagner. She answered that he had boarded with her for seven months the previous year, beginning in the spring.
“When did he leave, get through boarding with you?” Mr. Yeaton asked.
“He went into Portsmouth about November,” Maren answered.
“What room did he occupy in your house?”
“He had the easterly end of the house, he had a big room there.”
“Where did he keep his clothes?”
“He kept his clothes in a little bed-room there hanging up. He had oil skin hanging up in my entry, when he had been out fishing, he took his oil skin off and hung it up in the entry, entry coming into my kitchen.”
“Entry in your part?’
“Yes.”
Mr. Yeaton then asked what was in Louis Wagner’s room.
Maren answered: “He had his bed there, and one big trunk, which belonged to my sister Karen.”
“Do you know what was in that trunk?”
“She had clothes, some she wore in the winter time, and she put them in the trunk in the summer, and summer clothes she did not use she put in the trunk, and she had a feather-bed that she had at the time she came over in