Page 61 of No One Aboard
Nico flew across the deck, head low to avoid the boom. Rylan huddled below the cockpit bench, and Alejandro turned the wheel, hand over hand, back to the left.
It was agonizingly slow, but the sails quieted as the wind caught them in just the right place.The Old Eileensettled back in her heading. One hundred and ten degrees.
Nico returned to the cockpit, having secured the boom and shortened one of the sails. Alejandro handed the helm off to him wordlessly and faced Tia.
“That was a crash jibe. They are incredibly, incredibly dangerous. You could have hurt someone. Or everyone.”
Tia’s face burned. She had been so confident a moment before. “I’m sorry, I—”
“And you.” Alejandro cuffed Nico on the back of the head. Rylan flinched as if he’d been the one hit. “Giving the helm to a landlubber? The helm of your employer’s yacht, no less? You know better than that, sobrino.”
“Lo siento,” Nico muttered. Tia had never heard him sound so serious. Or so small.
At her side, Tia’s fingers curled into fists. But she couldn’t reveal to Alejandro that they knew about the island, or he would make it harder for them to end the trip. Maybe she could guilt him instead. “It wouldn’t have happened if you’d let us radio into land the moment you found MJ’s body. We were trying to do the right thing.”
Alejandro put a hand on his hip, the other massaging his temple. “And when you couldn’t radio, you thought you’d turn the whole boat round and chart your own damn course, hmm? Was that the plan?”
Tia squared her shoulders. “I saw the radio cord. That didn’t happen innocently, did it? Couldn’t have been an accident. So yeah, I decided to try and get help another way.”
“MJ is dead,” Alejandro replied. “There isn’t anyone on earth who can help her now.” He looked at Rylan, who was now huddled on the bench with the radio in his lap, kneading the severed cord between his thumb and forefinger.
“Why did you cut the cord, then?” One of them must have come to the chart house and cut it after MJ died, afraid her death would derail the trip they were so hell-bent on completing.
“I know how it looks,” Alejandro said, and he sat down on the bench, fight drained out of him. Or maybe it was for show. “It looks like we cut the cord in order to hurt someone.”
We...
“Did you?” Tia asked in a whisper.
Alejandro shook his head, elbows on his knees. “We cut that cord to protect someone.”
Rylan reached for Tia’s hand. He was shaking. Tia lowered herself beside him and let him cling to her.
“Protect who?” Tia asked.
Alejandro’s tongue flickered across his lips, and he drew in a great breath through his nose. “Ourselves. It wasn’t cut to prevent reporting MJ’s death. Because... well... it’s been cut since the beginning.”
Chapter 30
Jerry Baugh
Jerry startled himself awake with his own snoring as morning light spilled in through the portholes ofThe Old Eileen’s salon. He had been zonked out on the couch, his blanket long kicked aside. As he sat up, he felt a rumbling weight on his belly. It was the cat, pleased as pudding and curled up over Jerry’s navel.
“Stupid cat,” he mumbled, but he lifted the creature, careful not to wake it, and set it on a stray couch cushion.
Madden had left the night before when the storm started clearing up. Her empty gin bottle rolled on the ground past Jerry’s feet. Lainey was still asleep, tucked behind a galley counter.
The forty-eight hours of the hurricane ran together in Jerry’s mind. The drinking, crying, TV dinners, reheated fish for breakfast. It had been a storm unlike any he’d experienced in thirty years, because this time he hadn’t been alone.
Jerry stooped to grab his discarded blanket and, on second thought, draped it over Lainey. The two of them had hardly gotten a wink of sleep last night after Madden left, too busy drunk and raving about dead brothers and whale songs. Jerry couldn’t remember the half of it. He picked his way over the empty beer cans and crumpled paper towels tothe companionway. The hatch had been spattered with rainwater that rushed to flow on deck when he pushed it open.
He blinked in the sunlight.The Old Eileen, always so pristine and pearly white, was littered with broken palm fronds and trash. Beside her,Sheila 2.0had borne the brunt of the storm, her already-battered hull showing new scars from bumping up against the dock. The loose dock line floated in the water like a dead fish.
“Hell’s bells,” Jerry sighed. He shuffled below deck to find a broom and returned up top to start cleaning.
Around him, the world emerged from its hibernation to do the same. The few ship owners who had stayed aboard their vessels during Ida’s wrath were hosing down the decks and carrying loads of blown-around garbage to the dumpster. Jerry worked in silence, sweeping and hosing and dragging loads of wet fronds and plastic bags untilThe Old Eileenbegan to shine again. Outside the bars of the marina, shop owners drove up to their stores and unnailed the boarded-up windows. A stop sign arched in a permanent backbend.
Jerry fished the dock line from the water and wrung it out. He wondered if Madden was back at the station, drying the rainwater from the carpet or getting straight back to work.
