Dead Calm by Charles Williams

for it— She tensed. He was coming through the after cabin. She sat up and drew back on the bunk, waiting for the impact as he slammed into the door. Would it hold?
    Then she grabbed her temples and fought a collapse into hysteria. He’d knocked—a tentative and discreet rap of the knuckles—and said forlornly, “Mrs. Ingram?”
    You’re not mad, are you, Mama? I didn’t know it would hurt the cat. Stop it! she thought. You’re beginning to crack up yourself.
    He knocked again. “Mrs. Ingram? Please, I didn’t mean it! You’ve got to believe me! I—I just lost my head for a minute because I thought you were against me too. But you’re not, are you? You couldn’t be. You’re like Estelle. The first minute I saw you, I could feel you talking to me, the way she did. Mrs. Ingram, what’s your first name?”
    She could only feel of her throat and go on staring at the door.
    “Mrs. Ingram?”
    She couldn’t be sure, but she thought he was crying. Then in a minute he said petulantly, “Well, you were being unreasonable, you know. It was your own fault.”
    He turned the handle of the door and pushed, and when it failed to open he began to lunge at it in rage, like a child in a tantrum. She watched the bolt in horror, expecting to see it torn off, but it continued to hold. “You want to kill me too, don’t you?” he shouted.
    Then, as suddenly as it had commenced, the fury subsided. His footsteps went away.
    She heard him moving around in the after cabin, and after a while the sound of hammering. It was impossible to guess what he was doing, but at least he wasn’t trying to smash down the door. Would John have decided by now that Saracen was stopped? Maybe he was already heading for them in the dinghy. She looked at her watch. It was 9:35. He could probably row it in an hour, or maybe even a little less.
    But suppose something had happened to him back there when he’d tried to get back aboard? The last she’d seen of him, just before Warriner hit her, he’d been coming toward them as hard as he could row, directly in their path. No, you had to have something to hang onto or you’d go as mad as Warriner, and faith in John Ingram’s ability to cope with anything that could happen at sea was the one solid thing in sight. Even if he’d been run down, he would have got back aboard the other yacht, and he’d have the dinghy with him.
    And if the other yacht were sinking, he’d keep it afloat somehow—
    Her thoughts broke off and she looked around in wonder. It was the growl of the starter she’d heard. Hadn’t he even looked at the engine? Didn’t he know the distributor head was gone? The engine fired then and settled down to a steady rumble. She heard the clutch engage, and they began to move ahead.
    She slumped forward with her face in her hands and wanted to give up and cry. She’d never thought to look in the spare-parts box to see if there was another one. She should have known. John detested engines, but he always said that if you were going to carry the stinking things around they might as well be in working condition when you needed them.

7
    He’d acquired his first catboat at the age of twelve, and, except for two years at the University of Texas on the GI Bill just after World War II, he’d been around salt water and around boats ever since, most of his adult life as a professional. He’d captained a towboat in Mexico, worked on salvage jobs in half a dozen countries and three oceans, owned and skippered a charter yacht in the Bahamas, and up until eighteen months ago operated a shipyard in Puerto Rico. He’d been in an explosion and fire, and inevitably he’d seen bad weather and some that was worse, but at the moment he didn’t believe he’d ever been in a position quite as hopeless as this.
    It was 2:45 p.m. Wearing a diving mask, he was some ten feet below the surface on Orpheus’s port side, just in under the turn of her bilge, looking at her from below, and the view was a