Tahoe Ghost Boat (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller) (32 page)

Some wax had pooled at the bottom of the lantern. It broke through an opening and ran out onto the table in a thick pool.

I used my fingernail to shape it into something like a fir tree. Then I picked up Gertie’s burnt toothpick and drew some branches on it.

“Some kids make fun of the way I look,” she said, finally getting to the reason she brought up the subject.

“Then those kids are either immature or stupid or both. The appropriate response is to ignore them and remind yourself that you are far beyond them in terms of ambition, drive, self-education, and so forth. Look at all you’ve learned about Noir movies while they learned about makeup or pickup trucks.”

“But I’ll never have the opportunities that the beautiful kids have.”

“No, you won’t. But I think you’re ultimately better off as a result.”

“That’s ridiculous. What could possibly be better about being homely and having a cleft lip?”

“Several things.”

Gertie scoffed.

“Hear me out. First, beautiful people get so much handed to them that they never learn as many valuable skills as other people learn, skills that help you make it through life. Then, in the middle of life, when their youthful beauty begins to fade, the attention and the advantages fade, too. Without attention, they often flounder and sometimes collapse. Without skills, they sometimes find they have no way to earn a good living anymore. Of course, many former beauties cope. People are adaptable. But other former beauties feel like dried up flowers, left alone and passed over for the next crop of beauties. Many Hollywood celebrity actors stop getting job offers when they turn forty. Models stop getting job offers at thirty or thirty-five. Just when people start to really know something, their beauty advantage goes away, and they suffer. Meanwhile, directors are just getting warmed up. And, as you must know from looking at directors, no one cares what they look like.

“The second advantage to not being beautiful is that you get to operate under the radar. You get the gift of privacy. If you were beautiful and tried to make a movie, you’d be scrutinized intensely just when you really wanted to be left alone and out of the spotlight while you developed your chops. If the first movie of a beautiful director was bad or even embarrassing, everyone would gossip about it and write bad reviews of it. The scrutiny would be excruciating. Whereas, the non-beautiful director doesn’t get much attention for her failures. She will be comfortably overlooked until she creates a hit.

“But maybe the best part of not being beautiful is that you get credit for your accomplishments. When a beauty succeeds at something, the world says that she got her acclaim for her beauty as much as anything she accomplished. People remark that anyone can be successful when they’re beautiful, and the hard-won accomplishment is dismissed. And if the beauty fails, the condemnation is more severe because people will say, ‘How could a person fail when they have so many advantages?’ By comparison, the accolades bestowed on the accomplishments of people with ordinary looks are sincere.

“Gertie, when the day comes that you direct a good film, you will get genuine praise and admiration. No one will take away your accomplishment and say that you really don’t have ability and that you only succeeded because of your beauty.”

Gertie was still bent over the table. She made a slow nod without looking up.

She said, “You said that there are lots of kinds of beauty and that physical beauty is the one kind that doesn’t matter. What are the kinds that do matter?”

“Well, I haven’t thought about it much, but there are many. Passion, desire, interest, hunger for ideas, charity, attention, focus, kindness, and skills that you acquire through practice and hard work. Like your softball pitching. No one is born knowing how to do that. You learned that through constant practice. Your pitching is the kind of beauty I’m impressed with. These are all the things you have control over. These are the kinds of things that can make you beautiful in ways that are a thousand times more important than how you look.”

We sat in silence for a bit.

“I want to tell you one more thing,” I said, “but I worry that it will weaken my earlier point, so please keep those things in mind.”

Another slow nod. “What is it?”

“My hobby is studying art. I’m no expert, but I like art. I’m kind of like a little kid with a picture book. I like to look at the pictures that people make. I have a bunch of books on art, and in some of them, the artists talk about what makes something art. Of course, I’m pretty naive about this stuff, so don’t take me as an expert. But anyway, one of the categories of picture art is portraits. I’ve looked at a lot of them over the years. And I’ve learned something interesting. When it comes to portraits, those of beautiful people are almost never as interesting as those of people who aren’t beautiful. Physical beauty in people, for all of its pleasantness, doesn’t make you think or wonder as much as when you look at interesting-looking people.

“So here’s where I’m going with all of this. You don’t think you’re beautiful. But I think you have a very interesting face, and I’m hoping you agree with that. And talking to someone with an interesting face is more interesting than talking to someone who has a perfect, pretty face.”

“But do artists do much of that?” Gertie said. “Paint people who aren’t beautiful?”

“Absolutely. In fact, some of the most famous portrait artists today are Lucian Freud and Chuck Close and my favorite, David Hockney. The portraits they make are captivating. Fascinating. And to my knowledge, none of them ever did a portrait of a beautiful person. They only paint people who have intriguing faces. For them, beauty is nothing compared to intrigue.”

“You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”

“No. It’s what I care about. Maybe someday you’ll meet my girlfriend. Her name is Street Casey. I think she’s wonderful, and to me, she’s beautiful. She has a fascinating face. But it’s not what other people would think of as beautiful. She’s all angles and has acne scars.”

“But you think she’s beautiful.”

“Yeah. It’s all those other kinds of beauty that I mentioned. I like looking at her face because it intrigues me. It has character. Someday, if not already, people will think that about you, too.”

Gertie looked down at my wax tree. She seemed pensive to a greater degree.

“What is that?” she said.

“My name is Irish, Scottish, and Welsh, which all have Celtic origins. This is a fir tree, an important symbol for the Celtic people.” I turned the wax tree over and used the toothpick to scratch an F, H, R, and S into the wax. “The Celts said that the fir represents Friendship, Honesty, Resilience, and Strength. These are real characteristics of beauty, and I think you have them.”

I picked up the wax tree and handed it to Gertie. “This is for you.”

She took it and stared at it.

“My name’s O’Leary,” she said, “so I have a Celtic background, too.”

I smiled, and we sat in silence for a bit.

I’d said enough, so I went into the forward stateroom and spread out a couple of the sleeping bags for her. I came back and handed her the flashlight.

Gertie carefully closed her hand around the wax fir tree and went to the front of the boat. I folded and lowered the dining table to be level with the settee base. Then I pulled out the settee cushions and blew out the hurricane lantern.

It was a very comfortable bed, which, even though I slept diagonally, was still six inches too short.

My feet hung out, and Gertie was troubled, and there were still men out there who wanted to kill both of us.

But we were safe for now.

FORTY-FIVE

I couldn’t sleep. All night long I heard thumps and bumps and possible voices. Waves that seemed too big splashed up against the sailboat’s hull. Once, I thought I heard the hum of another ghost boat. Each time I got concerned, I opened the companionway door and went up topside, stood in the dark, snowflakes still falling, and listened. The noises that I’d heard below were not there. Back down in the cabin, I remembered that sound travels underwater like it travels through steel. It might well be possible to hear the hum of a far-off engine through the sailboat’s hull and have it be impossible to hear through the air.

By the time morning came, I was more exhausted than I’d been before. But Gertie was still asleep and safe. I didn’t know if the onboard water was potable, so I dipped water out of the lake to make coffee, finding some old instant coffee powder in a jar. There was a teakettle to heat water on the propane stove top.

I took my coffee topside and drank it while I brushed three inches of fresh snow off the boat and its rigging.

I was on my second cup when Gertie came out of the head and said, “What’s for breakfast?” She had a smile on her face. It was obviously good to have put some hours between her and her would-be killers.

“We have more cranberries. Or you can eat anything you want once we get this crate down to the South Shore of the lake and stop at the Red Hut Café.”

“What is it, a drive-in restaurant for boats?”

“No. But it’s just across from the Ski Run Marina where we’ll dock and call for help.”

“How long will it take?”

“It’s a long way, maybe ten miles. The wind has shifted out of the north, and it’s a pretty good breeze. It stopped snowing, and the cloud ceiling has moved up to over ten thousand feet. So all the mountains are visible and navigation will be easy. It’ll be a straight shot on a broad reach. If we average six or seven knots, we’ll be there in an hour and a half, give or take.”

“You’re saying we have to sail ten miles before we can even eat breakfast.” She put her hands on her hips in mock critique.

“Yup. I also have to get the boat rigged and sails hoisted. But it’s worth it to avoid those men who are after us. And if you help, that’ll speed things up.”

“How can I help?”

I opened the narrow closet where I’d found the foul weather gear. I pulled out the smaller waterproof jacket, flotation vest, and waterproof gloves and handed them to Gertie. There was a green scarf and a red kerchief hanging in the closet. I stretched the kerchief out, long and flat. While I was still bent into the closet and out of Gertie’s view, I tied it around my head so it covered one of my eyes.

I turned around, squinted at Gertie with my other eye, and said, “Aye, me hearty lass, get ye topside, and I’ll show ye how to be hoistin’ me colors.”

Gertie laughed, saluted me, and said, “Aye, matey.”

“Well shiver me timbers, we got us a pirate,” I said.

I put on the other, larger, waterproof jacket and flotation vest, and with Gertie’s help, I pulled the sail bags out of the storage lockers in the cockpit. We sorted the mainsail from the jib, threaded it onto the boom and started sliding it into the base of the mast track. With the halyard line hooked on, it was ready to hoist.

The jib sail was next. Gertie did most of the work rigging the jib as I explained the process.

I was checking the rudder wheel, the compass, and other gear when I noticed that the boom wouldn’t clear the kayak. So I untied the kayak, shifted it farther forward, and secured it again.

When we were ready, I said, “Avast me hearty, prepare the cannons fer a blast o’er the blue, and we be off.”

I pointed to the cockpit and Gertie, giggling, sat down on the cockpit bench.

I remembered the green scarf in the closet below decks and went down to fetch it.

I climbed out to the bow, lay down, and leaned out to reach the mooring buoy. I tied the green scarf to the buoy to mark which one belonged to the sailboat, then unhooked the bow line. We began to drift away. I hoisted the jib. The wind caught it and turned the boat downwind. We began moving at slow speed toward the South Shore. I moved back to the cockpit and set the rudder wheel where I wanted it.

Gertie watched with great attention when I showed her how the boom swung back and forth, and I mimed how it could hit me on the head. She nodded understanding. As I hoisted the halyard, the mainsail rose and filled with wind. The boom swung out to starboard and strained at the sheet line, and the boat sped up by a factor of four or five.

Gertie laughed and bounced on her seat. The wind made the sails crackle as they stretched out long-pressed wrinkles and folds. I had her stand behind the wheel, and I showed her how to steer.

“Me enemy scallywag buccaneers took me doubloons to hide at the Ski Run Marina,” I said. “Yer steering target be that mountain thar.” I pointed at ten thousand-foot Heavenly, 15 miles distant.

Gertie kept a steady course southeast. We came out of the lee of the Meeks Bay Point to the north and moved into an area where our tailwind increased to a strong steady breeze of maybe fifteen miles per hour. The wind shifted to northwest. We went from a broad reach to running downwind.

Time to check the spinnaker.

Gertie was a focused skipper as I got out the spinnaker sail in its sock. The spinnaker is something you can only use when you’re sailing on a downwind course. A striking contrast to the triangular mainsail and jib, the spinnaker is as huge and bulbous as a hot-air balloon. And like a balloon, it is usually made of brilliant colors. Looking into the sock, I saw that this one was yellow, orange, and red panels. Spinnakers can explode in too much wind, but this one appeared to be heavy enough to handle the current breeze, and it looked in good shape.

On many sailboats, when you use the spinnaker, you don’t use the jib, so I dropped the jib and rigged the spinnaker lines.

When the sock, with the spinnaker inside it, was in place and ready, I shouted, “Arr, me hearty, raise yer grog fer toastin’ and be tight on yer lines. This gale ain’t fer the lily-livered!”

I raised the sock. The spinnaker came out. The wind rushed into the spinnaker, and the sail blew open and formed a huge, hot-colored balloon out in front of the boat. It snapped into place with a thunderous clap. The sailboat immediately accelerated to high speed.

Still wearing the red kerchief over one eye, I put my shoulder against the headstay, the front-most cable that runs to the top of the mast. Braced against it, I leaned forward over the bow, and raised my arms out wide like a conquering pirate flying into the wind. Back in the cockpit, Gertie whooped and shrieked with excitement.