68 Knots (4 page)

“. . . orders . . . I have a job to do . . . I'll be DAMNED if I'll let someone . . . you can go to hell . . . .”

After a few more exchanges, the air turned silent once again. Arthur looked across the deck. Most of the campers were asleep, but Crystal was looking back at him. She rolled her eyes.

Arthur must have fallen asleep soon after. It seemed like just a few minutes later when he woke to a scraping sound on the deck nearby. The night was still dark, but he could see three people hauling bags to the side of the ship.

The counselors. They carried their luggage to the ladder on the starboard side, climbed down, and shoved off in the
Dreadnought
's wooden dinghy. A moment later they were gone—and Arthur guessed they weren't coming back. He
pulled his sleeping bag over his shoulders and wondered how much McKinley really knew about sailing a tall ship.

The next morning, McKinley was strangely pleasant. He asked two campers to cook a large breakfast for everyone—anything they wanted—and at the table, he gave a quiet speech about how leadership means getting the job done even when people you counted on let you down. It would not be easy, he said with a soft smile, but together they could make it work. The campers exchanged suspicious and worried glances. Arthur seized the opportunity to flash a reassuring smile at the stunning Marietta.

The day, June 14, was clear and bright, and a stiff wind blew steadily from the southwest. The campers hoisted the mainsail, and the
Dreadnought
inched toward shore until she was close to land. Then Jesse, responding to McKinley's polite request, jumped into the ocean and retrieved the dinghy, which was tied up at a small dock. McKinley set a course southeastward toward open ocean. He steered the ship past the last of the small islands hugging the coast, then he asked Arthur to take the wheel.

“Just keep the compass heading at roughly 140,” McKinley said with a grandfatherly smile. “Two campers are on bow watch, so listen in case they see any rocks or lobster floats. Keep this heading until I ask you to change it, okay? Thanks.”

He patted Arthur warmly on the shoulder, and then he squeezed down the hatch and headed below. A moment later, Arthur could hear the door to the captain's quarters lock with an audible click.

With the steady wind and easy sailing, the campers had little to do. Arthur held the course, and some of the others cleaned up the sleeping bags and mats. Mostly, though, the campers lay about the deck, talking and enjoying the morning, which seemed warmer and more pleasant without McKinley nearby.

“Boy, this is totally the life, isn't it?” asked Logan “Marshmallow” McPhee. He was pudgy and pale from long afternoons of video games and bottles of vodka smuggled into his bedroom, but the warm Maine sun was making him feel upbeat. He was talking to no one in particular. “Don't you ever wish you were rich? I mean, really rich. You know—just decide one day to go for a sail, so you call up your personal secretary, and by lunchtime she has everything arranged. The boat's been chartered, the food's been catered, the bartender's been hired, the company's been invited, and the weather's been dusted off and polished to perfection. The next thing you know, BOOM!, you're sailing the North Atlantic. You look at a map, totally choose a destination at random, and set out. If the trip takes too long for some of your guests, you just fly 'em home from the next port. When you get tired of sailing, you hop a jet back home and hire someone to sail the boat back for you. Wouldn't that be
great
?”

“It might be great at times, but I wouldn't want to be trapped in that life,” said Dawn FitzWilliam.

“What do you mean?” Logan asked.

Dawn shrugged. She wore her light brown hair in a ponytail she pulled through the space in the back of a red baseball cap, and she had a pleasant smile that could turn quickly into a pensive, distant look. “These ‘guests' on your boat—why are
they there? Because they like you personally, or because they like the boat, and the drinks, and the money, and the travel? This secretary—does she do things for you because she believes in you, because she cares about you—or because you pay her? This destination you decided to sail to—is it exotic? Mysterious? Or just the same old country-club stuff you can get anywhere? Remember, karma works in powerful ways. The way you treat the universe is reflected in the way the universe treats you.”

Logan shrugged and flicked his red hair out of his face. “Wouldn't matter to me, noooooway!” he said with a grin.

They sailed on toward the sea's horizon, passing the time with easy conversation. It was nearly three o'clock when Marietta sat on the rail next to Arthur. He was happy to have the chance to talk to her at last.

“I don't know about you,” she said, “but I'm getting hungry.”

“So am I,” Arthur said, correcting the ship's course just a little bit to keep the compass at 140 degrees. “Why don't you see if McKinley wants us to start cooking.”

Marietta looked at Arthur with a flirtatious smile. “I was hoping you would do that,” she said.

“Sure,” Arthur answered. “Take the wheel for a minute.”

Arthur went below and knocked on the door separating the main cabin from the forward section that contained the captain's quarters. There was no sound. He knocked again, more loudly.

“Commodore?” he called. “Could I talk to you?”

There was no answer. Arthur knew that if McKinley were asleep in his cabin, he might not hear the knocking. He knocked again, waited, then tried the rusty knob. It was locked, so he jiggled and twisted it until something moved.
He would tell McKinley that the door opened “accidentally.” He forced it open and entered the galley.

Rum. The galley reeked of cheap rum. The smell was stronger near the captain's quarters in the bow, and Arthur hesitated a moment. Then he knocked on the captain's door anyway.

There was no answer.

“Commodore? Are you all right?” he shouted.

Silence.

This door was locked, too, and Arthur began to feel worried. He pushed against the door and twisted the knob. No luck. No sound from inside.

“Commodore? Mr. McKinley? Hello?”

This is getting scary, Arthur thought. He raised his right foot, took a deep breath, and kicked the door with all his strength. It burst open, and Arthur leapt inside.

Three empty rum bottles lay on the table, along with two large bottles of prescription pills and several stacks of documents. The air stank of rum and vomit. McKinley lay on the bunk. He wasn't moving. Arthur slapped his face. Shouted at him. Tried to lift him up.

It was no use.

McKinley was dead.

“He left a note,” Arthur said grimly. The campers were sitting around the dining table, a large thick slab of wood drenched in heavy layers of polyurethane. The polyurethane was yellow and cracked in places, and it was peeling off one end. The scrawny fifteen-year-old named Bill Fiona—“Squinty”—fidgeted with one of the peeling strips as Arthur read the letter out loud:

To whoever finds me,

It's all over. Everything. It's over. There's nothing left for me to do.

My Leadership Cruise was the greatest idea of this century. It should have worked. It would have worked, except that people were against me from the start, like they always are. They were jealous of my success. The shipwrights. They ripped me off and damn near ended it all before it began. And the people who sold me the charts and the other stuff. They overcharged me—I have proof of it—and so I had to piece things together without the right gear.

And the campers are worse than I expected. They are selfish, lazy, and stupid. Without my
guidance, they might all die—and it would serve them right. They wouldn't know leadership if it kicked them in the ass.

But the worst of all were the counselors. I chose them myself—they were supposed to be like my children. But instead loyalty, they repaid my devotion with disrespect. With rudeness. With muniny. They should all be court-martled and fed to the sharks. Damn them all! They killed me. They might well have poured the pillls down my throat

They're working now. The pills. They're working. I can feell them working. In just few minutes, Ill be gone and noone willl be able to find me and they won't be able to say bad things about me or ripme off or shit like that. All thatshit. Just don't let them get me. Bury me at sea like a sailor. I was in the Navy you kno. Not hardware store. Shit. Fuck you all.

Howard McKinley Commodore

The crew was silent for a long time. Joy was praying, reciting, “Our Father, Who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name,” alternating between English and Spanish. Arthur was ashen and silent. Marietta twirled her blond-streaked hair and looked bored.

“If it meant so much to him,” Marietta said at last, “why did he work so hard to screw it up? I mean, he yelled at everybody. He made everybody miserable. He didn't care about anybody except himself. Personally, I'm glad he's gone. Let's radio the stupid Coast Guard, go home, and have a normal summer for a change.”

“I think he screwed it up because he wasn't very good at things like this,” Arthur said. “I also found a bunch of files on his desk. He had them all laid out, like he was looking at them before he died.”

“What were they?” Dawn asked.

“Each file was about a business that McKinley started in the past,” Arthur said. “He had a desk job in the Navy for a while, but he left that and started some kind of restaurant in Savannah, Georgia.”

“Oh, I'm sure that was a lovely place to dine,” Marietta said sarcastically.

“Yeah,” Arthur said. “It closed after a couple of years when the chef suddenly quit. Then McKinley started a magazine in Norfolk, Virginia, that published nine times and then died. Then it was a public-relations company in Connecticut, which I think closed after a year or so. And then he bought the
Dreadnought
and started this Leadership Cruise thing.”

“The guy was that much of a loser, and he wanted to teach people about leadership?” Marietta said. “Give me a break.”

Arthur nodded. “So when the counselors left, he must have known that this job wasn't going to work out for him, either. So he decided not to try anymore.”

The teens were silent around the table. Then Bill Fiona spoke up. “I'm glad he left a note,” he said, pushing his glasses up his nose. “We have to make sure no one thinks we killed him. I don't want anyone to think we killed him. 'Cause of course we didn't kill him. We didn't kill him at all. Arthur, did you touch anything in the room? I hope no one thinks we killed him.”

Arthur took a slow breath. “Of course I touched things,” he said. “I kicked in the door, I looked at the pill bottles, I grabbed McKinley, and I slapped him over and over again.”

There was a gap of silence.

“That must've felt good,” Logan said with a goofy grin. “Can I have a turn?”

Arthur smiled tightly. “Get your own Commodore,” he said.

The others laughed nervously. Then another pause.

“So what do we do now?” Joy asked. Several of the teens talked at once, but Arthur tuned them out. He looked carefully around the table.

There are eight of us, he thought. Four guys, four girls. Most of us are in decent shape—he couldn't help glancing at Logan's pudgy belly—and we've done pretty well during the last few days. With some training, we could have made a good crew. It's too bad McKinley had to die before we could pull it all together. This could have been great . . .

Marietta was talking. “So we use the radio in McKinley's room, we call the police or the Coast Guard or something, and we hand him over. To hell with this burial at sea crap. I say we hand over the body. No one is going to think we killed him—what are they going to say, that we
forced
him to take a bizillion pills and drink three bottles of rum?”

Logan nodded. “We totally won't be blamed for this,” he said. “The guy was obviously wacko, you know? Cooooooo-kooooo!”

This could have worked out
really
well, Arthur thought. The problem was McKinley. If it weren't for him, we would have done just fine. . . .