Monday morning I borrowed a car and went into the city to the main offices at Bay Street at Rawson Square. The size of the transaction made it something to be han-dled in a paneled office in the rear. I was given a receipt that gave the date and hour and minute of the deposit, gave the identification number of the bearer draft rather than the amount, and gave the number of the account maintained by Pearson rather than his name. The receipt was embossed with a heavy and ornate seal, and the bank officer scrawled indecipherable initials across it. I did not know then how good my timing had been.
Meyer and I caught a feeder flight back to Bimini in the early afternoon. The day was clear, bright, and cool. The Stream had flattened out, but even so, a two-and-a-half-hour trip was more comfortable than trying to match our time heading over.
The Likely Lady was all buttoned up when I walked around to D-109 to give Mick the receipt. The young couple aboard the big ketch parked next door said they had talked to Maureen, the elder daughter, at noon, and she had said that her father’s condition was critical.
I told Meyer and went over to the hospital. When finally I had a chance to talk to Helena, I could see that there was no point in trying to give her the bank receipt or talking about the money. The receipt would have meant as much to her at that moment as an old laundry list. She said with a white-lipped, trembling, ghastly smile that Mick was “holding his own.”
I remember that I found a nurse I knew and I remem-ber waiting while she went and checked his condition out with the floor nurses and the specials. I remember her little shrug and the way she said, “He’s breathing, but he’s dead, Trav. I found out they’ve got the room as-signed already to somebody coming in tomorrow for a spinal fusion.”
I remember helping Helena with the deadly details, so cumbersome at best, but complicated by dying in an alien place. He died at five minutes past one on Tuesday morn-ing. Had he died, officially, seventy minutes sooner, the whole bank thing would have been almost impossible to ever get straightened out. I remember the gentle persist-ence of the city police. But she told them repeatedly that the safe had been empty, that she could not imagine who had come aboard and given her husband the fatal blow on the head.
She and the girls packed their belongings, and I as-sured Helena that I would see to the boat, get the perish-ables off her, keep an eye on her. I offered to drive them across the state, but she said she could manage. She was keeping herself under rigid and obvious control. When I gave her the cash and the bank receipt, she thanked me politely. They left to go to the funeral home and, from there, follow the hearse across to Sarasota County. A very small caravan. Prim, forlorn, and quite brave.
Yes, I knew that Meyer was remembering her too. I knew he had probably guessed the rest of it, perhaps wondered about it, but would never ask.
The rain came down and Meyer cooked his famous specialty, never-twice-alike. We ate like weary contented wolves, and the yawning began early. Yet once I was in the big bed in the master stateroom, the other memories of Helena became so vivid they held me for a long time at the edge of sleep, unable to let go…
3
… THERE HAD been heavy rains drumming on the overhead deck of the Likely Lady in August of that year in that lonely and protected anchorage we found at Shroud Cay in the Exumas, and under the sound of the rain I had made love to the Widow Pearson in that broad, deep bunk she had shared with the man who, by that August, had been almost six months at rest in Florida soil.
She had come back to Lauderdale in July. She had dropped me a note ha June asking me to have someone put the Likely Lady in shape. I’d had her hauled, bot-tom scraped and repainted, all lines and rigging checked, power winches greased, blocks freed, both suits of sail checked, auxiliary generator and twin Swedish diesels tuned. She was less a motor sailer in the classic sense than she was a roomy, beamy powerboat rigged to carry a large sail area, so large in fact that she had a drop center-board operated by a toggle switch on the control panel, and a husky electric motor geared way, way down. There was maybe two tons of lead on that centerboard, so shaped that when, according to the dial next to the toggle switch, the centerboard was all the way up, sliding up into the divider partition in the belowdecks area, the lead fitted snugly into the hull shape. Mick had showed me all her gadgetry one day, from the automatic winching that made sail handling painless, to the surprising capacity of the fuel and water tanks, to the capacity of the air-condi-tioning system.