Beyond Sunrise (19 page)

"He told me."

The wind kicked up stronger, swelling the waves and setting the dark fronds of the coconut palms to dancing back and forth above them. India came to sink back down on the log, her gaze caught by the squalid outline of Johnny Amok's storeroom, all but lost now in the thick, hot night. She thought about the man who lay there, alone in the darkness, and her heart ached for him. "Does he know?" she asked at last. "Does Jack Ryder know about the epidemic on Rakaia?"

"He does now." The English captain's face was tight, shuttered.

Dear God, thought India.
Dear God.

Granger glanced toward the beach, where the lazy surf of the lagoon whispered gently in and out over sand bathed in white moonlight. The jolly boat had long since returned for him, its seamen lounging at ease, only the occasional restless clunking of an oar against the boat's wooden sides ringing out in the warm tropical evening. "He asked me to take him there, to Rakaia. Before we sail for London."

India swung to fix a steady stare on the man who sat beside her. "Will you?"

"What would be the point?"

"But if the charts and logs are there—"

Granger shook his head. "If they ever were on that island, they obviously aren't there anymore."

"If? You don't believe him?"

A wry smile tightened the captain's lips. "There are some people in this world who simply don't believe in playing by the rules, and Jack's one of them."

"You think he's trying to trick you?"

"I think Jack would do anything, say anything to keep from hanging—and to get back to that island and see what happened to his little girl."

"Don't you think he should be allowed to find out for certain? Before you carry him off to London?"

"I have my orders, Miss McKnight. And they don't call for using a royal corvette to escort a Colonial renegade halfway across the South Pacific in a quest to discover the whereabouts of his abandoned half-native offspring."

"But the
Lady Juliana's
charts—"

Simon Granger stood abruptly. "Were lost ten years ago."

"You don't know that," India said, almost pleading with him. "A man's life is at stake."

Granger glanced back at his ship, his voice crisp, hard. "I have my orders."

"Yes, of course," India said. "Your orders."

He left soon after that, standing stiff and upright in the prow of the jolly boat as the seamen from the
Barracuda
leaned into their oars and the dark water curled away from the boat's sides in twin phosphorescent waves that washed out in an ever-widening V across the smooth surface of the lagoon. But India stayed where she was, her head falling back as she stared up at the waving fronds of the coconut palms silhouetted black against the purple, starlit sky. The night was full of the sounds of the sea and the scents of strange flowers and a throbbing, aching kind of sadness that seemed to emanate from the island itself.

After a time, she heard again the splash of oars and looked out over the lagoon to see a small dinghy pulling away from the darkened hull of the
Sea Hawk.
She stood then, and walked down to the beach, her boots sinking into the soft sand until she reached the wave-darkened, hardened verge where the lagoon lapped against the shore and Patu ran his boat up beside her.

Chapter Twenty-three

He heard the whispers first.

Jack was lying on his back, blood trickling down from a cut on his cheek to seep into the mattress below, when he heard a low-voiced murmur. He tensed, wondering how many more nocturnal
visits
he was going to have to endure. Then he heard India's hushed but unmistakable Scots accent, coming up the path toward the storeroom, and relief mingled with confusion and a surge of powerful, contradictory emotions he didn't want and couldn't even afford to contemplate.

Lifting his head, Jack squinted toward the door. He thought about trying to stand up, because he really didn't want her finding him like this. But it all seemed more trouble than it was worth, and so he simply lay there in the
close
darkness and listened to Johnny Amok's key grate in the rusty old lock.

The door swung inward, admitting a flood of moonlight that fell on his face. "Oh my goodness," exclaimed India. She paused for a moment, her statuesque shape silhouetted against the moonlight in a way he would have appreciated if his ribs hadn't been aching like a sonofabitch. Then she came across the dusty flag floor in a rush and fell to her knees beside his filthy mattress, her hands hovering over him, but not quite touching him. "What happened? Who did this?"

He gave her a crooked smile that pulled painfully at his cut lip. "Did what?"

It was Johnny Amok who answered her. "The commissioner paid him a visit. Along with three of his gendarmes." Two to hold Jack up, his arms tied behind his back, and one to hit him. Again. And again.

She twisted around to stare at the trader. "And you let him?" Her voice quavered with a sense of outrage and betrayal, as if Amok could somehow have stopped the French commissioner from beating up one of his prisoners. "You let them do this?"

"It's not as bad as it looks," Jack said, struggling to sit up, although actually, the reverse was true: the damage to his face had been peripheral, almost accidental. With the British navy taking him in the morning, Poirot hadn't wanted to mark Jack up too badly. The French were very good at making a man hurt in ways that wouldn't necessarily show.

She touched her fingertips to his cheek, but jerked her hand back when he winced. "Can you walk?"

Instead of answering, he looked from her to Amok, and back. "What are you doing here? What time is it?"

"Just after midnight."

Through the open door, Jack saw only dark shadows and a distant moonlit sliver of the sea. He was aware, suddenly, of the hush of the settlement around them, a stillness that spoke of closed doors and deep sleep, and he realized he must have passed out after Poirot and his boys had finished with him. "Where's the guard?"

The lenses of Amok's glasses flashed in the night as he went to sit on an upturned barrel near the far wall. "One of the village women is—" He glanced at India, and seemed to reconsider what he'd been about to say. "—entertaining him."

"She'll tell on you."

"No, she won't. I've promised her two new Mother Hubbards, a silk shawl, and a case of corned beef every year, for as long as she keeps her mouth shut."

Jack grunted. "That will cost you plenty."

Amok smiled softly into the night. "I reckon you're good for it, mate."

Jack laughed, then regretted it when a red-hot pain curled around his side to take his breath away.

"Can you walk?" India asked again.

"Walk, yes." By gritting his teeth, Jack managed to struggle to his feet. "But run... I don't think so."

India stood beside him. "You only need to make it as far as the lagoon. Patu says there's another passage through the reef, on the northeast end of the island. He's arranged for you to borrow one of the natives' outriggers. The owner is a man named Savo, and he's on the
Sea Hawk
right now. He'll help Patu navigate through the main channel out of the bay, then paddle himself back to shore when we meet you outside the windward passage on the far side of the island."

Jack stared at her. "The
windward
passage?"

"Yes. Patu says it will be difficult, but he's confident in your ability to navigate it."

Something about the way her gaze skittered away provoked Jack into asking, "What else did Patu say?"

Her brows drew together in a worried frown as she brought her gaze back to his. "He said that given a choice between drowning and hanging, he thought you'd prefer to drown."

"Well, he's right about that."

She touched her hand, gently, to his cheek, and he knew, from the sorrow in her face, what she was going to say before she said it. "Captain Granger told me about... about Rakaia. I am so sorry."

Jack looked away from her, out the open door, to the moonwashed sea. "My daughter's not dead." He said it fiercely, firmly, because it must be so. Surely he would have known it if it wasn't so? Surely he would have
felt
it, deep down in the soul of him? For ten long years he had gone through the motions of his life, laughing, drinking, sailing into the sun with a sea breeze fresh in his face. Ten long years of living. Yet always, always, a part of him had belonged to that little blue-eyed, dark-haired girl who was a mingling of him and the woman he had loved and lost.

Sometimes, when the trades were blowing wild and free from out of the east, he would stare off across the ocean and try to imagine what she looked like, what she was doing at that moment. Ulani laughing in the sun. Ulani, her lashes long and dark against her cheeks as she drifted off to sleep. He had to keep reminding himself that as the years passed for him, they were passing for her, too. And so he would be careful to try to picture what she must look like. Ulani at four. Ulani at eight. Ulani, now almost twelve. And it would scare him, and sadden him, to realize that she would soon be a woman grown. All those growing-up years, lived without him.

But always, always, the certainty that she was alive glowed warm and true within him. And so he said it again. "I know she's not dead."

India nodded, although whether in agreement, or simply in sympathy, he couldn't have said. He took an awkward step toward the door, but had to stop and suck in his breath when the movement jarred his sore ribs and set his insides on fire. Her arm came around his waist, catching his weight as he wavered, his vision blurring, the storeroom whirling giddily around him.

"You
are hurt."

He didn't want to lean on her, but he was afraid that if he didn't, he might topple over backward. "Why are you doing this?" he finally managed to say, his hand gripping her shoulder as he twisted his head to meet her gaze.

She was so tall, her eyes were nearly level with his, which he figured was probably a good thing, seeing as how his weight would have crushed a smaller woman. "Because it's the right thing to do," she said simply, her gaze holding his steadily.

He shook his head. "I can't ask this of you. I can't run away and leave you and Amok to face the British and the French in my place."

"No worries, mate," said Amok, settling more comfortably on his barrel. "I'm the victim here. First I'm assaulted in my bed and threatened with all sorts of bodily mayhem if I don't hand over the storeroom key to your friends, and then what do the ruffians do but lock me in my own storeroom." He shook his head sadly. "It's shocking, the breakdown of law and order in the islands these days."

Jack smiled at his old friend. "Huh. So what's your excuse going to be for not having set up a shout once these 'ruffians' had gone?"

His glasses winking in the moonlight, Amok extracted a small porcelain bottle from his sleeve, and held it up. "Given a choice between getting a bloody bump on the head and surrendering to the sweetly scented dreams of opium, what alternative did I have?" Unstopping the bottle, he tilted back his head to down the contents, then looked at them and grinned. "Don't forget to lock the door on your way out."

Jack shifted his gaze to the tall, determined woman beside him. "He might get away with it, but you won't. They'll know you helped me."

Urging him none too gently out the door, she turned the key behind them, then swung to fix him with a
steady
stare. "Why is it that you credit me with absolutely no intelligence, simply because I'm a woman?"

Jack felt the earth shifting dangerously beneath his feet, and it had nothing to do with his concussed head or cracked ribs. "What the hell kind of question is that?"

"Shhh," she hissed, her arm tightening around his waist as she steered their steps
down
the shadowy
path to
the lagoon. "Keep your voice down. We've planted evidence to suggest that you took to the jungles again, and the men Captain Granger has
watching the Sea Hawk will
be able to
report that
Patu and I sailed alone. No one will suspect me."

"Simon Granger is letting the
Sea Hawk go?"

"The navy has nothing against Patu. He
told Captain
Granger the
Sea Hawk
is partially his."

The path they followed ran through the line of pandanus and coconut palms that edged the lagoon, heading out toward the northeastern end of the village. Away down the beach, he could see the shadowy silhouette of an outrigger canoe, drawn up on the sand just beyond the water's reach. Jack frowned
into the moonlit darkness.
"Then who the hell is supposed to have helped me escape?"

"Your business partners," she said, her head
half
turned away from him, her eyes narrowing as she squinted at the long stretch of white sand bathed in moonlight and washed by the gentle swish of the dark, foam-flecked surf.

"My business partners?" They left the shadowy shelter of the trees, and Jack stumbled in the soft sand and would have fallen if her arm hadn't still been around his waist. The resulting jerk seared his insides with white hot pain and took his breath, so that he was still gasping when he said, "What business partners?"

She swung her head to meet his gaze. The moonlight fell full on her face, illuminating the smooth planes of her cheeks and showing him her smile. The smile he liked. The one that caught at his gut and squeezed his heart and threatened to steal his soul.

"Why, the cannibals, of course," she said, the smile widening into something at once naughty and delicious. "Who else?"

As they neared the canoe, a shadow separated from the dark line of the outrigger and stepped forward.

"Holy moly," said Patu, the whites of his eyes shining wide in the moonlight as he stared at Jack. "What did they do to you?"

"I'm fine," said Jack.

Detaching himself from India's side, he went to brace his arms against the outrigger and, leaning over, proceeded to be violently, noisily sick. "Oh, Jesus," he groaned, hanging on tight to the poles, his forehead pressed against the smooth wood. It felt as if he'd vomited up his ribs, and that they'd torn apart his insides on the way. For one hideous moment, his sight dimmed, and all he could hear was the sucking, hollow rhythm of the sea. Then, from an unfathomable distance, came the sound of India's voice.

"This afternoon, I thought he had a concussion," she was saying, her Scot's accent curt and crisp with censor, as if his broken head was all his own bloody fault or something. "Now I think he's added a couple of cracked ribs."

There was a long pause, then he heard Patu expel his breath in one of his hard, worried sighs. "That windward passage," he said, "it makes the channel through the reef at Futapu Bay look like nothing. The cross tides are deadly. If he gets sick or passes out at the wrong moment..."

Patu's voice trailed off, but his words seemed to hang in the air, the implications of what hadn't been said weighing down on them. "Then I'll have to go with him," India said calmly.

Swallowing the rebellious heavings of his stomach, Jack roared,
"Are you out of your bloody mind?"
and swung around so fast the stars and the moonlit swells of the sea and the shadowy waving fronds of the line of palm trees blurred into one spinning mass that spiraled down to a pinprick of light, and went out.

When he finally came to, he and Patu both argued with her. But in the end they had to acknowledge that India was right.

He would make it no other way.