Gili knew. She said with a sullen look that they were quartered with the seamen of the Magnolia.

  “Still at liberty, then,” said Josh Morgan.

  “Yes,” said Mickey. “I suppose so. I asked Captain Svendsen about them. It seemed to me that one of them must have killed Castiogne. He said he did not have proof of motive or means.”

  “He’s trying to be fair,” said Josh Morgan. “He was a common seaman himself once; he told me. He came up the hard way. He’s not going to railroad them for murder until he’s pretty damned sure.”

  “It was the Cates woman,” said Gili sullenly. “It was the Cates woman. She’s as strong as a man. She did it.”

  Josh Morgan started toward the door. “We’d better all go to bed,” he said coolly. “It’s very late. As to the Cates couple—I don’t know. There may be some mistake. Let’s wait.”

  “I agree,” said Mickey. “We’ll keep it to ourselves and no harm done.”

  “And be murdered in our beds,” flashed Gili. She did not, however, actually look frightened now. Her skin had lost that sudden look of dampness, her eyes their flat, bright look of fright. She seemed, indeed, rather pleased and complacent. It was a singular small change, yet perceptible, so it puzzled Marcia. She could not, however, try to solve it, if there were any real solution beyond Gili’s childish and yet nevertheless cunning and devious instincts. She rose and Mickey rose too, and put his arm lightly around her. “I feel sure you are right about Luther and Daisy Belle,” he said. “Besides, anything you say is right with me.”

  Gili gave a short, hard little sound very much like a snort and flounced out of the cabin. Josh Morgan said: “Good night, Messac. By the way, doesn’t Cates share this cabin with you?”

  “Yes,” said Mickey. “I don’t know where he is. I suppose he’ll be along soon.”

  Josh said slowly: “It’s odd, rather, that he is not here. I mean—the decks were searched. He wasn’t in the officers’ lounge when I was there just now.”

  “Oh, he’s somewhere around,” said Mickey. “We’ve all got a Cates bee in our bonnets.”

  “Maybe,” said Josh. “But there aren’t really many places to go on a ship.”

  Mickey shrugged. “There are hundreds of places! He’ll be along any minute. And I’m not afraid of him, if that’s what you mean. I can’t exactly see him rising out of his bunk to murder me.”

  That, of course, thought Marcia suddenly, was the trouble. Perhaps it was always impossible to say to one’s self, and believe it: this face I know is that of a murderer; these eyes have seen and approved a frightful thing; this hand has entered a dread conspiracy.

  Mickey bent his blond head over Marcia’s hand and kissed it, and then smiled at her, wearily but comfortingly. “Things will come out all right,” he said. “You’ve been telling me that. Good night, darling.”

  Josh Morgan, at the door, said rather dryly: “I’ll just stroll down to your cabin with you, Miss Colfax. I’m going that way.”

  He wasn’t of course. His stateroom was almost certainly in quite another section of the ship. But he had found her, as Mickey had not found her, there on the black and foggy deck. He was at least partially convinced, as Mickey was not, that someone had been there, that someone had meant to murder her. “If anybody tried to kill you tonight, he’ll try it again.”

  She said good night to Mickey and, because there was nothing else to do, really, went along with Josh Morgan’s tall, crimson-clad figure.

  She heard Mickey’s door close. Gili had gone on ahead. The skirt of her curiously incongruous uniform flounced swiftly around the end of the passage. Already probably she knew the ship from stem to stern. Why had she been in Mickey’s cabin?

  Obviously to talk to him. As obviously as when Josh Morgan, an attractive and somehow very masculine man had entered, Gili had instantly, instinctively, made room for him at her side, leaned near him. Again it was childish and simple and, in its way, cunning. How long, though, had she been there? Had Mickey or someone else told her what had happened in that dark band of shadow on deck?

  And where, actually, was Luther? And Daisy Belle?

  They reached the central passage and a bell sounded clearly yet very far away, somehow, as if striking against the curtain of fog. Josh Morgan said: “One o'clock. It seemed later....”

  Again the capped head of a nurse peeked at them from the lighted ward office. A corpsman in white passed them on the stairs. He was whistling softly between his teeth and gave them a curious glance, and then, appearing to recognize the Colonel, stood aside respectfully to let them pass.

  When they reached the deck below, Gili had disappeared. The typewriter was still ticking busily away in some office along the farther corridor. Josh Morgan said, low: “Who shares your cabin? The luscious blonde? Anyone else?”

  “Mrs. Cates.”

  “Oh.” They crossed the main passage and entered the narrow one. This time she counted and recognized her own door. He paused just before they reached it. “Look here,” he said, and put his hand lightly on her arm, his eyes very direct and intent. “You’re going to be okay, you know. Only remember what I said. If anything, anything at all, seems to you wrong or out of place or—oh, the least bit odd—run. Run and yell like hell.” The flicker of a grin touched his mouth. His eyes remained, however, very grave and intent. “Will you? There are always people around.”

  “Yes. But there’ll be the three of us. And it was a seaman. It must be one of the seamen.”

  He understood her, of course. He had suggested it himself, but he replied obliquely: “Captain Svendsen knows what he’s about. He’s an able man. By the way, you and Messac are to be married. Is that right?” He hesitated and added quickly: “I hope you don’t mind my asking. I only thought...” He stopped and did not say what he thought.

  Marcia said, rather stiffly, with an odd sense of crossing some boundary, of making a decision that, certainly, was ready made and had been made for a very long time: “Yes. We...That’s why we were going home.”

  The line of his jaw stood out squarely and firmly. “By way of Buenos Aires?”

  Again she said: “Yes. We could get passage; otherwise we’d have had to wait.”

  “Of course,” he said, after a moment. “I see. Well, here we are.” They reached the door to the cabin. He said good night, pleasantly and impersonally, and turned rather quickly away.

  She wished, for an illogical and unreasonable moment, that he had stayed. Then she opened the door.

  The cabin was still lighted. Daisy Belie Cates, in gray pajamas, lay in the upper bunk, smoking thoughtfully. Her thin, red-gray hair was done up in little tight wads of curls and tied with a piece of white gauze dressing. Any other, woman would have looked ugly and grotesque; Daisy Belle even then had an irresistible air of elegance and dignity. Gili was in a corner, undressing furiously, flinging off her clothes, her face sulky and angry.

  Both women looked at her—Gili sullenly, Daisy Belle coolly and pleasantly, yet with a sort of observation. (Daisy Belle a Nazi! With her proud, old, American name, her niceness, her civilized, forgiving decency. Impossible!) Daisy Belle said: “Oh, there you are. I was beginning to worry. I turned in ages ago, right after I talked to you. Did my hair and went straight to sleep.” She yawned. “I don’t think I’ll ever quite catch up with sleep.”

  Gili gave her a hidden, venomous look from behind a swinging lock of bright yellow hair.

  Marcia thought with a kind of sick stab, but you weren’t here, Daisy Belle; you weren’t here and you weren’t asleep and you’re lying. Why?

  She could not just then question her. It was Gili who, hurling out the words jerkily, told Daisy Belle what had happened.

  But in the telling, Gili, either intentionally or unintentionally, gave an account of her own actions during the two or three hours just past.

  “I was in the nurses’ lounge,” she said. “I was there all evening. That is”—she bent to strip off a stocking—“for an hour or so. Then I strolled around to André’s cabin. He wasn’t there and I waited. I didn’t know anything about it until he came with his head bandaged. It was terrible.” She shivered and stripped off the other stocking, and Daisy Belle, sitting up, her face shocked, cried: “Marcia! I can’t believe it! Are you sure it really was somebody? I mean, well, not just nerves and imagination?”

  She said, yes, she was sure. Marcia turned to hang up her coat beside Daisy Belle’s, hanging in the shallow closet, and Daisy Belle’s coat was damp and dark around the shoulders, as if wet with fog.

  Yet they had searched the decks; they had found no one.

  They did not talk much after that. Daisy Belle, her fine face troubled, lighted another cigarette and smoked it with quick nervous puffs.

  Gili crawled into pajamas, muttering about their discomfort, and then into the bunk opposite Marcia. Marcia undressed quickly, too, and turned out the lights. In the silence of the cabin, again, the ship herself came to life, sighing, throbbing, steadily forging ahead, as if she knew the precious cargo she carried.

  Marcia, staring into darkness that presently became faintly less dark, so she could see the grayish round outlines of the open ports, thought again of the sinister, unwelcome and unwanted cargo that they had added to the ship.

  Suppose it had been Daisy Belle? Suppose it was Gili herself?

  Queer to be sleeping in that small, tidy cabin with, possibly, a murderess.

  Again the feeling of incredulity overwhelmed her, and this time gave her what she knew might be a false security but, nevertheless, was for the moment security.

  But why had Daisy Belle offered a gratuitous, flat lie?

  It seemed to Marcia that weeks had passed since the storm had begun, as if she had been on the Magnolia for a long time and as if she had known that deep throb and steady rush of water intimately and familiarly.

  Just before she went to sleep, a memory of the night, a small thing, unnoticed at the time, came floating out into her consciousness. When Josh Morgan had found her, there in the fog, he had called her Marcia. “Do you hear me?” he had asked, and held her...”Do you hear me, Marcia?”

  It was as if he had known her, somewhere, for a long time. It was as if the sense of security in his arms was an old and familiar one, too.

  But that, she thought suddenly and sharply, was like disloyalty to Mickey. She loved Mickey; she was to marry Mickey, not Josh Morgan. And not that there was anything at all that required even a denial!

  She turned on her side and suddenly fell into a deep sleep. The fog was thicker now. It lay all round the Magnolia. It was an impenetrable yet yielding wall, surrounding her, setting her off from the rest of the world. Quietly the night life of the ship went on. Somewhere a man turned in his bunk and dreamed of home; another lay awake planning and mapping a war-free life; another, in pain, moved restlessly and a nurse observed it and came to lean over the bunk and rub his back.

  Up in the chart room Captain Svendsen drank more hot coffee from the thermos beside him, and peered ahead through the window and could see nothing. Beams of light were struck back upon themselves by that thick, black veil. Staring into the fog, he decided to take decisive steps in the morning about the boatload of survivors he’d picked up from the Portuguese vessel. He wasn’t sure just what had happened that night on deck; it was his first business to get his ship and his patients safely through that fog and home. But if the passengers from the storm-wrecked Lerida were going to make trouble, he’d stop it if he had to put them all in irons.

  He’d better question the two seamen again; he’d better question them all again. In view of what Colonel Wells had told him, he’d have to question practically everybody on the ship.

  Then he thought of the body of Alfred Castiogne as he had seen it, with the ugly, gaping knife wound in the back. It was so vivid a picture that it almost seemed to float there, against the fog ahead. Captain Svendsen was not afraid of anything; but he didn’t like that picture against the thick, wet night.

  9

  The fog entered the ship.

  It was kept out of the sick wards; lights and warmth and activity kept it at bay. That morning was, so far as the sick wards were concerned, exactly like any other. The nurses in their neat, beige-and-white-striped uniforms—slacks instead of skirts, to facilitate the constant running up and down stairways and perching on the edges of the upper bunks to care for patients there as well as those in the lower tier of bunks—went briskly and quickly about their prescribed routine. Breakfast trays, which hooked neatly onto the sides of the bunks; charts, baths, the doctors’ rounds; warmth and jokes and inexhaustible good spirits on the part of the patients. Which was not surprising at all; which was natural and real because these men were soldiers.

  But the rest of the ship was at the mercy of the fog.

  It crept into the main passageways, it darkened the day, it permeated everything. The decks were gray and slick with moisture. The Magnolia proceeded slowly and very carefully, nursed along through a gray wall which ever yielded and yet ever enclosed. That morning the foghorn began to sound at long intervals. They were not on a heavy shipping lane. The Transportation Corps officer knew the exact location of every ship within miles of them. But a fog like that was a hazard, just the same; visibility was cut down to feet; the raucous blast of the foghorn seemed the only thing able to penetrate that thick gray wall and even it was flung back in diffused multiple echoes upon the ship.

  The sound of it woke Marcia.

  It was late. Daisy Belle and Gili had already apparently dressed, quietly, and left the cabin. The ports were gray with fog and all the metal latches and bolts had a faintly misted look, as if some invisible presence had breathed upon them.

  Marcia’s long, heavy sleep, the daylight look of the cabin, the secure feeling of being on an American ship, all of it was like a mantel of common-sense protecting her from things that were not sensible, that were outrageously out of place. By the time she’d had a hot shower with all the fragrant soap she wanted and had dressed in clothes that were faintly damp from fog but incredibly fresh and new and attractive in contrast to the nondescript odds and ends of clothing that she’d taken aboard the Lerida, she was ready to deny everything. If Castiogne were murdered, one of the seamen had done it and, by then perhaps, had confessed. Daisy Belle Cates was no more a Nazi than she was a man-eating tigress. The hand that had silently turned that now faintly blurred doorknob had been merely a hand, somebody mistaking that cabin for another. Gili had been in Mickey’s cabin simply because she was Gili and she’d wanted to talk to Mickey and had done so. Why not? Everything, that day, would be straightened out and restored to the normal order of events.

  She was even ready to accept Mickey’s accident as an accident, and nothing more. And if the attack upon her had been what it seemed, then it was obviously one of the seamen, afraid for some unfathomable reason that she had seen him kill Alfred Castiogne.

  One of the nurses had placed a little horde of toilet articles beside Marcia’s bunk—a comb, toothbrush and powder, lipstick. She combed her dark hair back to a smooth roll, low on her neck; she put on lipstick. There was a small, feminine satisfaction in the fact that it was a gay soft red; her blue eyes seemed more deeply blue. She caught up the nurse’s coat again and the lining almost matched her red, half-smiling lips. Everything was going to be all right.

  She went down to breakfast, passing wards and through passages and stopping at the door of what proved to be the nurses’ lounge—a large, comfortable room with deeply cushioned chairs and sofas, a piano and card tables and a gay mural of the skyline of New York painted on the walls. A nurse, sitting under an electric hair dryer and reading, looked up pleasantly and directed her to the nurses’ mess, one deck down.

  This, too, was a large, low-ceilinged pleasant room—white walls, white ceiling and red chairs. The nurses ate at two long tables at one end, the officers at two round tables at the other end, so a mess boy told her. And then he brought her orange juice and pancakes with butter and all the milk and coffee she wanted.

  She was finishing when Major Williams, the young officer who had been present when the Captain first interviewed her, came into the room, saw her and came forward. The Captain, he said, would like to see her again. But she must finish her breakfast, he added politely, and he hoped she had had a good rest and was no worse for her experience in the lifeboat.

  The sense of well-being, of being restored, somehow, to the right world (her world the little sensible and normal world that Marcia Colfax had known before the war), still held good. She smiled at the young Major and finished her coffee and went with him. They walked through passages that were now beginning to seem familiar, past wards, with their atmosphere of comfort and home, past the equally busy and active transportation offices and eventually to the Captain’s quarters.

  He was waiting for them and he looked tired. His ruddy face had a grayish tinge; there were deep pockets around his eyes. A thermos bottle of coffee stood on the table before him. He turned at their entrance. “Oh, there you are, Miss Colfax. Come in. Bring in the two men, Major.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The young Major vanished again. Captain Svendsen turned back to his desk and busied himself with some papers. After a moment, he said, over his shoulder, “Sit down, Miss Colfax.”

  The arms of the red chair felt slightly moist. The fog was everywhere, even here. The foghorn sounded again, long and slow and hoarse. When it died away Major Williams returned, ushering in two men.

  They were small, dark, active-looking. They were wearing obviously borrowed clothes gathered up from the Magnolia seamen. They looked about them with suspicious eyes under heavy black eyebrows. One was thin and wizened, like an elderly monkey; the other very short, thick and sturdy. It was he, she thought, remembering the lifeboat, who had tried to revive Castiogne. Their swarthy faces were faintly familiar to her, but only that. She stared and they stared. Major Williams said cheerfully: “Here they are, sir,” and Captain Svendsen shifted his solid big body about and looked at the two men and looked at her.

 

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