Page 21 of No One Aboard
“That’s the spirit, Jerry. I’ll be in touch.” Madden turned to head up the companionway.
“Wait!” Jerry called. He should say something to her. He should acknowledge this whole situation they were caught up in, acknowledge the past somehow, right? He rummaged for words for a full thirty seconds as Madden stared him down.
“I, um... I’m sorry. About Ida,” Jerry said at last, because he was sorry. He wondered how Ida had died.
Madden didn’t say a word. She gave him a curt nod, then took the steps of the companionway two at a time. Something buzzed in her pocket when she reached the top, and she fished it out.
Jerry stepped up after her. “H-hold on, now. That’s it?”
Madden glanced back. “I’ve got roughly ten billion more things that need doing today.” She waved her ringing phone in the air. “Thanks for all of your help. Oh, and there’s cat food in the galley.”
“Hold on!” Jerry repeated, reaching the deck. “Y-you can’t just... I don’t know how to... I mean, it’s not like I want him put down or nothing, but... Detective Madden?”
Madden stopped dead, and Jerry nearly plowed into her. She turned to face him.
“Look, Jerry. We’re on a major time crunch with this case.We’re looking for a nine-by-five-foot orange life raft in a search radius that spans over three hundred nautical miles, and we sure as hell better find it before hurricane season is in full force, so if you could just keep the cat alive until then, it’d be very much appreciated.”
Jerry opened his mouth, then shut it again. He scratched his neck and looked down at his feet. “How... how long have they been out there?”
Madden blew air out from between her lips. “You located the boat just after midnight on June ninth, yes?”
Jerry still remembered the fleck of blood on the face of his watch from the sailfish. “Nine minutes after, I spotted it, yep.”
“Well, the last boat check we have is dated at twenty-three thirty, just over ninety-six hours before your sighting.”
Jerry worked to do the math in his head, keenly aware how his pulse beat in his own throat. “So... that means...”
“It means that half an hour before June fifth,” Madden finished for him, her umber face grim, “at least one person onThe Old Eileenwas still alive.”
The Tal ’n’ Tea Tattler
Lila Logan and Francis Cameron Welcome Twins!
Dayna Goshup
The glamorous couple has welcomed fraternal-twin newborns, Francis Rylan and Taliea Indigo. The babies were born the first hour of June 5 after what Lila describes as a “harrowing” pregnancy. Lila explained their son, Francis Rylan, was named after his father in every way except for a single letter in Rylan (as opposed to Francis’s middle name, Ryan). “TheLwas my own little touch,” said Lila, whose hair-care beauty brand is represented by the graphic design of a cursiveLthat loops into a woman’s profile. Lila was given free rein by her husband, however, to name their daughter, Taliea, which means “dew from heaven.” (Rylan means “little king.”) Do twins run in the family? Apparently so! Lila revealed in an exclusive interview withTheSerrylianthat her own twin sister, Elaina, was stillborn.
“I see my children as a part of the sister I never knew,” said Lila, who grew up as the only child of a Catholic-school principal and a stay-at-home mom in Goleta, California. Lila’s career, which started early with child beauty pageants and teen modeling, begsthe question if she will pursue a similar life for her own daughter. “While I am immensely grateful for the way my life has ended up,” Lila toldTheSerrylian, “I do not see myself using dental veneers and eyelash curlers on Taliea. If she decides to be an actress, I hope she’ll discover that love in a school play or community theater, as children should.” Lila leaned in to joke, “Besides, I am all the star that my family can handle.”
Chapter 10
Tia Cameron
Call sign: Thimble
Day 1 at Sea
When the last smudge of land had dissolved on the horizon and no more orange buoys or gleaming catamarans were left, Tia let her face tilt toward the sun and embraced her new home at sea. She could have been anywhere in the world, anywhere even in history. The water she sailed on at this moment had, at one point, been locked in polar glaciers or sliding through brackish streams. It had circumnavigated the globe with more completion than Magellan, and who knew if the molecules of water that now pushed up againstThe Old Eileenhad once met the tallowed oak of Viking warships or the birchbark of Indigenous canoes. Here, Tia experienced insignificance with sanctity. She felt as though her understanding meant something, not in relation to the water but in concert with it.
“Nothing like it, huh?”
MJ Tuckett lumbered up beside Tia, hands clasped behind her back and shoulders set. MJ was a six-foot-tall Southern woman with spires of smoke-like gray hair and an expression lined like a rock face.
“No. There really isn’t.” Tia straightened her own posture. “It doesn’t get old for you?”
“What?” MJ smirked at her, Carolinian drawl honeying her words. “Even as I get old, you mean?”
Tia laughed. “Pretty much.”
