if plucking that key from his fingers would change everything, that she’d be cast out into the perilous unknown. The end of innocence. The end of everything she knew and the start of a journey she might not complete.
The rising tide of fear was swallowed by the image of Natalie holding out an ice-cream cone to Chris. Chris had been fourteen and Natalie four. “Share!” Natalie had shouted and laughed, tossing her dark, curly hair.
Leave everything she knew behind? Risk her boat and her life to save her sister?
So be it.
She took the key from Smith’s hand and shoved it deep in her shorts pocket. “Thanks.”
“My partner doesn’t like the idea of your captaining us.” Smith stepped farther into the salon, abruptly losing his godlike demeanor as he glanced around, seemingly taking everything in at once.
“You told him I won’t take no for an answer.”
“Yes.” He paused. “For what it’s worth, I’m in your corner on this.”
Surprised, she glanced at him. His face showed nothing but the certainty of a man who knew what he wanted to do. “I appreciate that,” she said. “Where is your partner?”
“Busy. He’ll show on Monday.” He flashed a quick and charming smile. “Call me Smitty.”
She relaxed a little. Funny how nicknames knocked people down to size or elevated them into legend. Thank God his nickname hadn’t been something like Nine-Fingered Sam or Chainsaw Larry. “Smitty” was a guy you could trust. Like “Gus.”
Then she asked the sixty-four-dollar question. “How much boating experience do you have?”
“I’ve done a little Coastie work up the eastern seaboard.”
“Coast Guard, huh?” she shot back, surprised. “What’d you do?”
He shrugged, wandering past her to the aft deck’s sliding door. “A little search and rescue, a little cruise ship escort, stuff like that. Nothing too exciting.”
“Not exciting?”
Smitty chuckled. “If I never see another drunken offshore fisherman with a bad bilge pump, it’ll be too soon. Can I have a tour or are you in the middle of something?”
“No, I’ve got time. You’ve seen the aft deck there.”
“Yeah, it’s a great space.” Smitty’s gaze automatically moved from the port cleat to the storage compartment marked LIFE JACKETS to the round life ring and its attached line. His priorities fit hers, she noted with approval.
“She was under a shed and neglected for almost twenty years,” Chris said. “I’m surprised she even floats.”
“Old girl like this? She’ll never sink. That your distribution panel?” he asked, hooking a thumb at the sliding wooden door in the salon wall.
“Yes.”
She slid open the panel’s door to let him study the shore power switches, generator start-and-stop mechanism, the breaker switches for all the boat’s electrics.
“Nice setup. You wire all this up?”
She nodded. “The electrical wiring on the old panel was so frayed I’m surprised she didn’t burn to the waterline when the surveyor switched on the shore power.” She watched him close up the panel as she said, “I still have some wiring to check. There’s a light switch here in the salon that doesn’t work.”
He stood again and his gaze traced the probable route from the distribution panel to the light switch on the other side of the salon. “Take half a day to track down, probably.”
“Low priority,” she replied. “Come on down below. I’ll show you the engine rooms.”
Smitty might turn out okay, she thought as she led the way down the spiral staircase to the lower passageway. He seemed to know his stuff and appeared comfortable with the fact this was her vessel. Even Dave had wanted to jump in and fix things for her rather than wait for her to ask for help. But Smitty just put his idea out there—half a day to fix the light switch wiring—and left the decision up to her.
She opened the starboard engine room door and squinted against the door’s piercing screech. Note to self: Oil the hinges. She flicked on the overhead light and the starboard engine’s massive bulk sprang to life.
“A Detroit!” Smitty said, clearly pleased. “Twelve-vee-ninety-six?”
“Yep. Naturally aspirated, no turbocharging. One thing I wanted to do was paint the engine room floor here before the shakedown cruise so the leaks would show. I overhauled both Hortense and Claire, but—”
“Excuse me?” Smitty asked, turning from his examination of the engine’s coolant, collection tank cap in hand.
“Claire’s the starboard engine. Hortense is the port, just across the hall in her own engine room.”
His grin split his mobile face. “Claire and Hortense. Named after…?”
“Great-aunts on my father’s side.” Chris smiled, faintly remembering lemon squares and tatted doilies and sunshine on a back porch surrounded by maple trees. No faces anymore, but feelings of warmth and contentment. Happiness.
“Nice to meet you, Claire.” Smitty patted the engine’s solid block, then turned back to Chris. “I’ll paint in here for you.”
Chris looked around the engine room’s still stout flooring, at the little worktable sitting below the pegboard she’d organized just last month, at the tool cabinet and hatch leading to the bilge compartment, all smeared with grease and ages-old dirt. “Nasty piece of work.”
“That I am,” he said with a grin, “but I’ll do my best.”
Friday evening, Chris eased her pickup onto the Galveston-Port Bolivar ferry and parked where she was directed by a bored ferryman. After an afternoon spent poking through Old Man Templeton’s salvaged spares, she was ready to get home and snag a late dinner. She’d found several items she could use, including a fuel pump to replace Hortense’s aging one. But she hadn’t found a propeller. The starboard prop was so gouged and chipped that the shaft had started vibrating. A few hours of that and Claire, the starboard engine, would shake to pieces.
Leaving the pickup’s windows rolled down and her wallet and cell phone under the seat, she slammed the door, then headed toward the bow where a small contingent of hardy souls braved the still-warm breeze. In a few minutes the last car came aboard and the ferry cast off.
The ferry’s bow wave arced below her as she leaned over the rail. Texas City refineries plumed white smoke into darkening sky. Laughing gulls shrieked as they careened toward her, then banked and slipped back to the wake to fish for minnows stunned by the ferry’s engines.
She turned to watch the birds. That’s when she saw him, leaning casually against the shoulder of a dark blue Buick, watching her. He wore a white T-shirt, jeans and black biker boots, his clothes a size too big for his rail-thin frame. His thin blond hair lifted in the wind. One hand rested on the Buick’s hood; the other fingered a cigarette. He could have been anyone.
Only she’d seen him before.
She pivoted slightly as though looking back toward Port Bolivar, not moving from the rail. He raised his head and looked at her, squinting against the ferry’s bright house lights. His thin lips stretched over his gaunt face in that same grimace of fear she’d seen as his out-of-control powerboat veered toward her. Except she’d changed her sailboat’s direction, and his powerboat should have kept going the way it was headed.
But it hadn’t. It had changed direction, too.
She looked again. The grimace wasn’t a grimace.
He was smiling.
Eugene Falks, she thought. The name on the police report