John D. MacDonald

Bimini Kill

First published in “The Yacht,” April 1987

“I don’t like it, Vince,” Nan was saying. “I don’t like any part of it. It scares me, sort of. But he actually begged me, for old times’ sake, and the lawyer said I ought to give him a last chance before I start the divorce thing.”

It was a Sunday afternoon in Lauderdale in the off-season, a hot and lazy day, and I had been aboard my joy and my mortgaged burden, my three-year-old Bertram 54 sport fisherman, the Faraway Gal, when Nan Brogan had come out onto the big dock and stepped aboard.

I was just back from a long charter, and I had been putting the lines and the gear back in first class shape. I was reassembling one of the big marlin reels when Nan appeared. Now she sat on the transom in the sunlight and touched the opened can of cold beer to her cheek and looked at me in a wry way and said, “So I guess I’m asking you for old times’ sake too, Vince.”

It is a sour thing to endure when your girl marries someone else, particularly when you know in your heart she is making a mistake. The cruel ones said she married Yates Brogan for his money, but I knew that wasn’t true. She thought she loved him, I know. And it was partly my fault for having taken her too much for granted before Yates came along, and then, out of injured pride, putting up no fight at all when I saw her being attracted to him. But the worst part of it was watching how the two years of marriage had slowly changed her, had taken the sweet high edge off her spirits, had saddened her dark blue eyes.

“I’ll do it,” I said. “I won’t like it any better than you will, Nan. But I’ll do it. And I can use the five hundred bucks I’ll charge him for the transportation.”

It was exactly the sort of twisted, tension-laden situation you would expect a man like Yates Brogan to cook up. He knew Nan was my girl before he came into her life. The only good thing I can find to say about him is that he is a superb sailor. His custom motorsailer, the Reefcomber, is a jewel to take your breath away, and he has taken her to most of the fine waters of the world. He has inherited money and has never done one day’s work in his life. He has always had a bottle problem and a woman problem, and marriage to my Nan had not lessened either of them. After they were married, Brogan based the Reefcomber in Lauderdale so Nan could be near her folks. They lived aboard and took extended cruises out of Lauderdale, usually with some of Brogan’s hard-living friends aboard. I had seen her after those cruises, looking more dispirited each time they returned.

The final ugliness had taken place in Nassau a month ago, and she had left him there and flown home to begin divorce proceedings. Apparently he hadn’t believed her serious until the first legal documents had caught up with him at Bimini. Then last week he had left the Reefcomber there and flown back to talk her out of it.

“It’s just his dam pride,” Nan said. “I’m not after a penny of his money. We don’t love each other any more. I’m just sort of a possession, somebody a little bit decorative who can handle the lines and chart a course and take a wheel shift. Nothing is going to change my mind, Vince. But, in all decency, I guess I have to give him a chance to speak his piece.”

Yates Brogan had found out I was running over to Bimini on Monday to pick up a charter there, and he wanted me to run him and Nan over so he could bring Nan back on the Reefcomber.

“Why doesn’t he just ask you to fly over with him?” I asked her.

She sighed and shrugged. “I don’t know. Yates likes everything as complicated as possible. I guess he thinks it gives him an advantage or something. He thrives on confusion. But he’s acting very strange. Maybe it’s a silly thing to say, but I have the feeling he might do some strange, violent thing. Anyway, I know I’ll feel safer with you nearby.”

“I won’t be nearby aboard the Reefcomber, Nan.”

“By then I’ll either be over this scary feeling about him or I won’t. He wants to bring her back across the stream on Wednesday. Your charter starts Tuesday morning, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And because of Chet being in the hospital, you’re going to pick up a Bahamian to crew for you after you get into Bimini, aren’t you?”

I was puzzled, wondering what she was driving at. “That’s right.”

Her blush darkened her deep-water tan. “So... to sort of add injury to insult, Vince, could... Johnny Welch crew for you on the way across? Then he’d be there in Bimini if I decided not to come back with Yates, and Yates tried to force me to come with him.”

Maybe it could be a good thing to watch your girl’s marriage going sour if you had the comfortable knowledge you were going to be there to pick up the pieces. And I would have been glad to. I’ve never loved anybody else, and I never will. But I had been off on a long charter at the wrong time, and Johnny Welch had been there to field the rebound.

“Crew for me!” I said with disgust.

She knew what I meant. Johnny is a big hearty young man, a local realtor with various land development interests. A few times in the past I had taken him and some of his hot prospects out to fish the stream. Few men have ever been as inept aboard a small boat. That was one world he could not share — a world that Yates Brogan, Nan, and I belonged in, a world of boats and the sea, the textures of wind and weather.

“Not for pay,” Nan said, “but Yates wouldn’t have to know that. Actually, it was Johnny’s idea. He’s terribly nervous about this whole idea. He wants to be near me. And I guess I would... like to have him near me. I know Johnny is an idiot about boats; he can’t pick up a line without getting it all wound around his ankles. But... I’m not as intolerant of the lubbers as I used to be, Vince. Yates has given me a new kind of... sickness of the sea. Maybe it won’t ever be the same for me again.”

Just as I thought the tears might start, she moved neatly and swiftly to collect my empty beer can and climb up onto the dock to drop it and hers into the white trash bin. She dropped lightly back onto the broad transom, a smallish girl in blue shorts and a white blouse, with frayed old topsiders, a sea tan, cropped black hair that I knew would smell fresh as ocean winds if I could but hold her in my arms as I had done long ago and could never do again. This was a sea girl, a small-boat girl, moving with the sureness that could but accentuate the lurching clumsiness of powerful Johnny Welch.

“You don’t really mean that,” I told her.

“I guess not. But it will take a while. I won’t give you a play by play. I’ll spare you that. But it’s been... grim. I tried to make it work, Vince. I keep telling myself that. I really tried. What about Johnny?”

I shrugged. “He can come along. Makes a cozy little group, huh?”

She knew what I meant and had the grace to blush. The old boyfriend — dating from way back when she had been a scrawny sun-blackened twelve-year-old who’d helped me sail my first boat — and the man she shouldn’t have married and the new boyfriend, the one who had been there for her to lean on at just the right time.

“Things work out in such stupid ways,” she said. “I’m very sorry about the way things have worked out, Vince. You’re the most...”

“Don’t tell me now. How will Johnny react to your coming back on the Reefcomber with Brogan?”

“Maybe I’m hoping he just won’t let me. And maybe I’m making things just a little more complicated than Yates figured on. And I don’t catch him off balance very often. So I’m taking a nasty feline pleasure in that. What time tomorrow, Vince?”

“Miami Marine says the wind will pick up in the afternoon, so let’s roll it by seven.”

When she left I watched her walk shoreward along the dock and saw her wave a couple of times to friends who called to her. I finished putting the reel back together, cursing Yates Brogan and Johnny Welch and that stupid restraint of mine that had at last landed me in the hopeless category of treasured friend to the woman I love.

I visited Chet in the hospital at eight o’clock that evening. The crisp white pillow made his chunky face look as red as old bricks. They were going to take out his appendix in the morning. We’d hoped to be able to wait until we were between charters, but this last time it had acted up just enough to alarm both of us a little.

“By Thursday,” he said, “I fly over and go to work.”

“So a marlin is a little green when it comes to gaff, and you pop open.”

“So I run the Gal and you handle the fish.”

“It would confuse the charter, boy. I’m the skill and you’re the muscle.”

“Skill? Who was it busted the piling at Frazier’s Hog Key?”

I got off that painful subject by telling him about the passengers I’d have the next day. Chet whistled through his broken tooth. “Don’t get too far from a marlin spike, Cap. Keep your mind on where the shark rifle is stowed. Brogan is a nut, and he’s mean. Why’d you let yourself in for a deal like that?”

“For laughs,” I said.

He looked at me, and I knew he knew why I’d agreed. He knew there was nothing Nan couldn’t ask of me. “Sure,” he said. “For laughs.” He grinned. “Lash Johnny to a cleat so as he don’t fall overboard before you clear the sea buoy.”

After I’d wished him luck he let me get as far as the door before he asked sternly, “You take that number three reel down?”

“Yes.”

“The drag is smooth now?”

“Seems to be.”

“Find some fish, Vince.”

“I’ll be looking.”

“And... don’t let her bother you too much, hear?”

“I’m just running the boat.”

Yates Brogan was first aboard Monday morning. I had the coffee on, and I’d just finished making up my bunk. He tossed his duffle bag in onto the bunk. He’s tall and hard, but the liquor has started to blur the hawk-lines of his face. I could smell the drink on him, and his eyes weren’t quite in focus, but he was steady on his feet.

“Good morning, Vincent,” he said in his mocking way. “You should be very happy to help such a deserving couple find their way back to bliss.”

“I’m going to Bimini. You’re paying for the ride.”

“Surly in the early? I’ve paid for it, lad,” he said, tucking ten fifties into my shirt pocket. “I thought you had a sentimental interest in the lady.”

“Knock it off, Brogan.”

“Nan just gets a little too impulsive sometimes. And then it doesn’t do a bit of good to knock her around. You have to reason with her and talk soft and sweet.”

As I was wondering if I could knock him all the way up onto the dock or if he’d drop between the boat and the pilings of the finger slip, he looked beyond me and the grin slid off his face.

“What the hell,” he said softly.

I turned and saw Nan and Johnny coming toward us. Johnny looked flushed, indignant and uncomfortable. Nan said good morning with icy formality. I took her gear. Johnny tried to come aboard with his after Nan was aboard and managed to hook a toe in my spring line and narrowly avoided landing flat on his face in the cockpit. As he recovered his balance, Brogan said, “Upsy daisy, pal. Back on the dock. The passenger list is complete.”

“Welch isn’t a passenger,” I said. “He’s crewing for me.”

Brogan turned and looked at me, and then he looked at Nan. He made a short ugly laughing sound and said, “Nice! Very cute, dear wife. Very conspiratorial. But what good will it do you?”

“Listen to me, Brogan!” Johnny said bravely.

“Please, dear boy. Not on an empty stomach.”

As Brogan turned away from him, Welch started to follow him, his big freckled fists clenched. “Get the lines, Welch,” I told him, and swung up to the flying bridge and kicked the two big GM 1271 TIs into rumbling life. I peered down and saw Welch making ineffectual motions while Nan was deftly taking in the lines. Brogan was pouring himself some coffee and looking amused. Welch’s next error was to try to shove us off, a type of assistance I do not need when I’m at the dual throttles of the Faraway Gal. I slid the stem away from the pilings just as he started to push, and if he hadn’t caught the base of an outrigger, he’d have gone over the side then and there. Brogan laughed at him, too long and too loud.

We left the big marina, went down the waterway and under the bridge and out through the pass into the Atlantic. As soon as I’d cleared the tide chop just outside the pass, Nan came up with coffee for me.

“Lovely morning,” she said with no conviction.

“Lovely people.” Brogan had moved forward along the boat deck as soon as we had begun to run dry beyond the chop, and he sat on the bow hatch looking forward, sipping his coffee. Johnny Welch sat slumped, gloomy, inert in the port fighting chair staring back toward the mainland. Neither of them could hear what we were saying.

“Yates is furious,” Nan said. “Maybe he thought he could really talk me into changing my mind. But as soon as he saw Johnny, he knew it wouldn’t work.”

“Take it a minute,” I said. I left my coffee there and went down and estimated how much to allow for the movement of the stream and the southeast wind in relation to cruising speed, and kicked it into automatic pilot. It held just where I wanted it the first time. I moved the starboard engine up a few revolutions to put it in better sync, and the course still held true. Then I went back up to my coffee and my ex-girl and the dazzle of the morning sun and the incredible indigo of the Gulf Stream, the skitter of flying fish, the long swells, the limber flex of the outriggers — all the components of my world, which on this day gave me no pleasure.

I ran at the most economical cruising speed, which would give us Bimini in four hours. Nan went down to the galley and fixed breakfast. I ate only because she had fixed it. Johnny Welch ate hugely. Nan nibbled. Yates Brogan refused food. He took more coffee, spiking it with black rum from a bottle out of his duffle bag, giving me a white meaningless smile as he did so. After Nan had cleaned up, Yates took her up on the bow. I sat on the transom splicing a new loop into one of my dock lines to replace one that had become frayed. I could hear little wisps of the angry discussion, fragmented words blown past me by the wind, muffled by the engine drone. I knew Johnny could hear it too. We avoided each other’s eyes.

Yates came back to the cockpit, unsmiling. As he went to pour more coffee and rum I stood up and looked forward. She sat up there, her back to me, and I could tell from her posture that she was crying. I sat down and continued working on the splice.

“Stop bullying her, Yates,” Johnny Welch said.

Yates came to stand near me and stare at Welch. “You touch my heart, boy. That woman is my wife.”

“Not for long.”

“And you’re standing by? You’re next in line? Johnny boy, are you sure she’s worth what I could do to you?”

Welch stared at him with a kind of dull wonder. Johnny is almost an all-American boy, except perhaps a shade too meaty, and with promise of becoming bald too soon. “What kind of an idea is that?”

“I might get cross with you, Johnny. I’ve looked you up. I could buy up some paper from people who’d be glad to sell. I could squeeze you, and it wouldn’t take much of a squeeze, would it?”

“You can’t scare me, Brogan.”

“I can’t? I’ve made you look highly nervous.” He turned to me. “Skipper, can I ride in your tuna tower?”

“Please don’t slip and fall, Brogan.”

He went up nimbly, a man accustomed to masts, rigging, and the swing and dip of the sea. He sat up there and we could hear him singing.

“I don’t care what he tries to do to me,” Johnny said. “I don’t want him to hurt Nan. I think he’s crazy. I think he could do anything. I don’t think he knows what he’s going to do next. Nobody ever walked out on him before.”

“Whatever happens, you be good to her, Johnny.”

He stared at me, a decent, somewhat bovine young man. “Sure, Vince. You know I will. Sure.”

At a little after eleven we went in over the bar and into Bimini harbor. The upcoming tuna tournament had packed the place with sport fishermen. I moved the length of the harbor at dead slow and tucked it into my dock reservation, made my mooring and went to the office to check on my charter. There was a message for me saying my people wouldn’t arrive until noon of the next day. When I went back to the Faraway Gal, my three passengers were gone. I was hosing the salt off her when Brogan appeared.

“Where’d they go?” he demanded.

“Nan and Johnny? I haven’t the faintest idea.”

He gave me a long ugly look, then turned on his heel and walked away. I watched him walk to the next dock, and I recognized the Reefcomber in the second slip. He hopped aboard and disappeared.

Friends of mine started coming over to say hello and exchange gossip and trade news, but I was alone and eating a cheese sandwich when Yates Brogan came back, a little bit unsteady on his feet this time.

“You seen ’em yet?”

“No.”

“Their gear still aboard?”

“Yes.”

“Hand me up her stuff. I’ll take it aboard the Reefcomber.”

“That would be up to her.”

“Hand it up here, or I’m coming aboard and get it”

“You’ve got no permission to come aboard, Brogan. You hired a ride and the ride’s over. Come aboard, and I’ll heave you over the side.”

He looked so indecisive, I half turned away from him. I saw the movement out of the comer of my eye as he launched himself into the air, and I turned back in time to get such a monstrous thump in the mouth it spun the sky, blinded my eyes, and dropped me belly-down across the starboard rail. By the time I had rejoined reality, he was clambering up onto the dock with Nan’s kit I lurched and caught him by the ankle. He pulled free but fell sprawling. It gave me time to get up onto the dock as he came to his feet, and I settled into the business of knocking him loose from that white grin.

We attracted a large noisy audience, appreciative of this special entertainment. He hit me well a few times, enough to loosen my knees, but I shook the mists out of my head and kept my arms going and soon felt the sweet solidity of impact from knuckles to elbow. He went down with the grin and came up with the grin, and went down without it and came up without it, and then went sprawling back wildly and off the dock, missing the stem of the Faraway Gal as he went into that harbor water, so clear that you can read every word on the labels of the more recently jettisoned cans, nine feet deep. I saw him start to swim slowly toward a dock ladder. I sat on the edge of the dock and leaned forward to drip the random blood into the water, exploring damage with the tip of my tongue, gasping for air.

Nan was kneeling beside me, her hand sweet on my shoulder, her voice tender in my ear, “Oh, Vince. Vince, dear, he hurt you!”

“Wanted your gear,” I said thickly. “Tried to take it. Bring me the hose.”

She brought the nozzle and turned it on. I ran the water over my head. She brought me a towel from my boat, and I left some pink smears on it when I swabbed my face, but the bleeding was about over. I looked over and saw Brogan, sopping wet, boarding the Reefcomber. He didn’t hop aboard. He went aboard like an old old man, and I took a certain satisfaction in that.

Our audience dispersed. I stood up. Nan stood as tall as she could, and her eyes were that brighter blue that happens when she is angry. “This was the dumbest thing I ever did! I’m going to tell him right now, right this minute, that I wouldn’t go back to him if he... if he only had one more hour to live. And the only thing I want from him is to be left alone.”

She started marching toward the Reefcomber. Johnny started after her. I caught him by the arm.

“But he might hurt her!”

“Let her do it her way.”

“Don’t you give a damn, Vince?”

“Stay out of it, Johnny.”

“But this isn’t the way to do it. She should make him understand. People can... separate in a reasonable way.”

“Brogan isn’t a very reasonable guy.”

I think she was in the cabin of the Reefcomber for fifteen minutes, and I don’t think Johnny or I took our eyes off that boat for more than ten seconds at a time. I heard Johnny’s sigh when she reappeared and came walking back to us at a much slower pace.

She did not speak or focus on either of us as I helped her aboard. She sat and looked at nothing and said in a small voice, “This time he believed me.”

“About time,” I said.

“He took it very badly. He said I would be very very sorry, and Johnny would be very very sorry for doing this to him. His face is all banged up.”

I looked at my puffed fists. I was not surprised.

She looked up at me. “I will not run from him. We won’t take a plane back until tomorrow, Johnny. He’s started drinking already. He’ll either pass out or do something foolish. Johnny, you find a place ashore. I’ll stay aboard if I may, Vince.”

“Now wait a minute!” Johnny said.

“It’s okay with me. Nan. You can lock the cabin. I can use the forward hatch to the crew quarters. If that makes you nervous, Welch, you can bunk in with me.”

He looked uneasy. “No. No, that’s okay.”

Brogan didn’t appear again. Johnny found a place ashore and came back. The three of us had drinks aboard, and then in the blue Bimini dusk we walked down the narrow main street and had dinner at the Big Game Fishing Club. We were all trying to make the effort to be festive, but it didn’t quite come off. Johnny laughed too loudly at nothing. Nan seemed distracted. I kept wondering if it was worse to lose a girl the second time than the first time. I knew that after the tensions and cruelties of the relationship with Brogan, she felt she needed the quiet devotion of a Johnny Welch.

Johnny walked back to the dock with us. All the boats were in, and most of them were lighted. We heard the laughter of women, heard some amateur guitar, some slightly drunken harmony, and music from several radios. We had a nightcap beer under the stars and pointedly avoided mentioning Brogan. His motorsailer was dark. Nan said good night to us and closed herself into the cabin. Shortly after her lights went out, Johnny said good night and left. I sat with my dreary thoughts and outworn dreams for a little while, then went forward and lowered myself into the crew compartment. After I was in the bunk I was all too aware of her presence on the other side of the bulkhead, with her head perhaps ten inches from mine and her heart ten thousand miles from mine. As I was moving closer to sleep I heard the wind freshen and felt the increased motion of the boat and heard the creak of lines and chafing gear. It was out of the east and would grow stronger.

I could not guess how many people were awakened by her first scream. But by the third she must have had one hundred percent attention. I got to her a moment after the third spine-chilling scream. I was convinced Brogan had gotten to her and was killing her. I yanked on a pair of shorts, grabbed my sheath knife, and tried the intercabin door. It was locked on her side. I went up through the hatch so fast I gouged a piece of meat out of my shoulder. I erupted into a cool gray world that paled the dock lights. The sky was pink in the east. The screams had started roosters crowing, dogs barking.

She was in the cockpit, staring toward the Reefcomber, her fists against her throat, her eyes bulging with shock and hysteria. She wore slacks and a cotton coolie jacket. I looked where she was looking, and I did not take the time to cuff the hysteria out of her. I went up onto the dock and toward the Reefcomber at a dead run, and the closer I got to him, the more unpleasant he looked. The Reefcomber moved in the east wind, and he swayed with each movement, swayed at the end of the short length of nylon line. I went up on the trunk cabin, clasped one arm around his thighs, severed the line with one slash, caught his full weight, and brought him down to the deck. As I was doing it, I kept wondering why I could not force myself to move more slowly, more clumsily.

The half-inch nylon had bitten deeply into the flesh of his throat. I worked the slipknot loose and pulled the loop off over his head. I rolled him onto his back and began artificial respiration, but I knew from the feel of the body of Yates Brogan that he was irrevocably dead. Hoarse questions were shouted. People gathered around. A fat man in pink pajamas identified himself as a doctor and immediately confirmed the fact of death.

I went back to my boat. It was getting lighter every minute. I heard Nan sobbing. I looked in on her. She was face down on the bunk. I went below and sat next to her. She turned and looked up at me. “He’s dead.” It was more statement than question.

“Yes.”

“I... I woke up and I couldn’t go back to sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about... everything. So I came out to watch... the sun come up. The first time I glanced over there, I didn’t see him. I just got the feeling something was wrong. I looked again and then I saw... what it was.”

“There’s a doctor there. He says it happened maybe a couple of hours ago.”

“What a mess! What a dreadful mess!”

I shrugged. “It simplifies a lot of things, doesn’t it?”

“Don’t be so callous, Vince.”

“I’m being honest. He wasn’t one of my favorite people. I won’t miss him a bit.”

She sat on the edge of the bunk, frowning. “I thought he’d do some crazy thing. But I didn’t think it would be that.”

“So instead of a divorcée, you’re a widow. And pretty well off.”

“I won’t touch it! Not a dime of it!” She looked speculatively at me. “I suppose he left some vile note of farewell.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t look.”

“I’m sorry I went to pieces. But...”

“You don’t have to explain or apologize. Nan. You know that.”

Johnny appeared at eight o’clock. When he heard what had happened he turned pale and sweaty and sat down abruptly, his mouth sagging.

The Bahamian officials appeared a little after nine. Three men, two of them young, two of them in uniform. They questioned us together and separately. Brogan had left no suicide note. They seemed most curious about the fact of the public brawl I’d had with Brogan. The spelling out of the relationship between Brogan, Nan, and Johnny seemed to pain them. And they acted very weary, as though they could see an endless wilderness of forms, red tape, and complex documents ahead of them. Suicide is incorrect and troublesome.

We were told more investigators would fly in from Nassau, and we could expect a visitation of reporters from Nassau as well as the States. Nan and Johnny were politely requested to remain in Bimini until officially released. By then perhaps Mrs. Brogan could arrange to have the Reefcomber taken back to Lauderdale, its port of registry.

Suicide is troublesome, but in Bimini tuna is king. I would be permitted to fulfill my charter.

After the questioning I lined up a good boy to crew for me and set him to work acquiring the bait fish we would need. Nan and Johnny had gone off into town. I felt restless. I looked over at the Reefcomber. For once there was no one standing on the dock staring at where a man had died. I sauntered over and stood and figured out how he had done it. He had stood atop the trunk cabin and put the noose around his neck, and reached as high as he could to tie the other end of the line to a stay and then had stepped off.

The line still hung where I had slashed it apart, and the breeze had unraveled the end of it into an Irish pennant.

I stared at that clean white line.

Suddenly the world had a entirely different look. In the midmorning silence I heard Nan’s voice. I turned and saw her with Johnny. He went into the dockmaster’s office. She came walking toward me.

She came up to me. “Vince... you have such a strange look.” I could not speak. I pointed at the end of the line. “What do you mean, Vince. What am I supposed to... Oh!”

It took her as long to see it as it had me. Her fingers closed convulsively around my wrist. The color went out of her face so that her tan looked yellowish and sickly. She moistened her lips. “Even... even when Yates was so drunk you couldn’t understand a word he said, he would never never...”

“I know. It would be the same with you or with me.”

Then she said in a very small voice, “Johnny has been telling me it would be childish not to accept the money.”

“What’s going on?” Johnny Welch asked, cheerfully enough. We both turned and stared at him. He was alien, a creature of the land, whereas we were of both the land and the sea, with skills he would never know. Johnny’s face changed. “What’s the matter with you two?”

In a voice that did not seem like my own, I said, “Was he so drunk he wasn’t any problem, or did you have to hit him? You could safely hit him. I left enough marks on him so one more wouldn’t be noticed.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Vince?”

“About murder. For love and money. Maybe mostly money. You aren’t in very good shape, are you?”

“Are you accusing me of killing him?”

“You came back in the night, after everybody had settled down for the night. You hoisted him up onto that trunk cabin. Then I think you made the line fast, made a loop in the other end, lifted him up, worked the noose around his neck, and let him fall free.”

“Nan, he’s talking nonsense! Why are you looking at me like that!”

I took a small gamble. “Somebody saw you do it, Johnny. Those Bimini cops are on their way back here, looking for you.”

For a moment he smiled. Then his face went blank. He turned away and began to run, with a frantic, ludicrous, hopeless haste, like an overweight kid being chased across a schoolyard. We watched him run over the grass, past the swimming pool, and out through the open gate into the road and disappear. There was no need to follow him. Bimini is a small island.

Nan sagged heavily against me for a girl so small. I put my arm around her. I took her slowly back to the Faraway Gal.

I had them call the officials back. I took them to the Reefcomber and showed them the frayed line. I told them how Johnny had run when I had tricked him. They nodded. They accepted the evidence of the line because they were men who lived close to the sea and knew boats and lines, and they came to the same conclusion as Nan and I had. The line was the evidence, and his flight was the confession.

When a child is learning to tie a square knot and makes the second loop the wrong way, the result is an awkward, untrustworthy knot, one that is a symbol of scorn among seafaring people. And a seaman like Yates Brogan, no matter how fumbling drunk he might have been, how depressed or how suicidal, would never have made the hangman rope fast with a granny knot.

Every ending is, of course, a beginning. They caught him, and he confessed and was convicted and sentenced. I had good charters and killed big fish and kept up the payments on the Faraway Gal. Each time we came back to our home dock, I called on Nan. It took a time of mending and forgetting, but one time, at last, she was waiting for me, and I knew from her eyes the big wheel had turned all the way around, all the way back to our beginning, so that now the only regret we have is for the time we lost, and that is only a faint regret nowadays because life is as rich as the sea itself, and she has come back to the sea with a sound heart, love in her eyes, and a sweetness of lips.

Content

John D. MacDonald
Bimini Kill