Page 14

Chapter 14

Foundering

Calvin

A fucking mole. “You think someone sabotaged the ship? Why?” It doesn’t make sense. But then, I’ve been wracking my brain for weeks and none of it made sense then either. “Why?”

“Right. That I don’t know. But this? This I can hold in my hands.” He pulls a plastic zipper bag out of the cabinet behind his chair and hands it to me. “I put it in there. When we get back to civilization, maybe they can pull prints off it?” It’s a computer board, snapped in half.

I flick my eyes over to him. I’m still not confident that we’re going to get this ship working again. But maybe I can get communications back online. I eye a shortwave radio on the table beside his chair. My soldering iron is next to it. “All right, well, we know Candy was off her rocker. What if she came in here and pulled it out and snapped it?”

“No,” Zane said. “Haley went straight to get Candy and Rocky out. They were asleep. I mean, this would have been noticeable right away.” Zane pushes on the back of the table.

“It’s not just the motherboard. The ship’s radios were all sliced. And boards pulled, wires cut. The water tanks were out of balance, but these stickers were making them look like they were.” He flips through the captain’s log and points to two stickers.

“But we’d been having problems with the stabilizers all along, ever since we left the dockyard.” I can’t take my eyes off the destroyed electronics.

“Right. But we had a new crew on board.” Zane’s staring at it too.

“Yes, but they were on board. Making an entire boat abandon ship with yourself? That’s just crazy.” I hand the board back to Sam.

“Who’s stupid enough to do this and trap themselves on a raft just hoping for a rescue?” The words hang between us, charged with a mix of hope and disbelief.

“It makes no sense. Not with the cracked motherboard and the myriad of other issues you’ve discovered. This is beyond a mere stabilizer malfunction; it’s a shit show. It’s going to take months, and that’s if I had replacement parts. I haven’t even made it down to the engine room yet. If they spent this much time messing with the electrical, what have they done to the engines?” My stomach tightens.

“Look at this,” the captain urges as he guides us down the corridor, past his quarters, and into the “Grand Salon.” He’s peeled a panel from the wall to find wires dangling like loose vines in a jungle. That’s what we see: a nest of cables, some severed clean through. “Someone not only yanked on these but cut them, too, then put the panel back in place.”

“This didn’t just happen; it started back at the boatyard.” The sabotage is deeper than I ever imagined, reaching further than someone aboard. But someone on board finished it.

“I can only trust the two of you,” he confesses.

I instinctively cover my mouth, stepping back as Zane fixes him with a steady gaze.

“And Haley?” Zane’s question hangs there, fragile as a soap bubble.

“Yes, Haley.” He purses his lips. He’s playing it cool with Haley. We’ve got other things to worry about, and I understand. “I trust Haley, but there’s no need to bring her into this.” The captain’s assurance is solid, but his next words are for our ears only. “But this stays between us.” He snaps the panel back in place with a finality that echoes my pounding heart. “Understood?”

He looks at me; I nod. “Just us three,” I agree, my voice steadier than my nerves. I don’t like not telling Haley. I’ve given the captain my word, and I’m always a man of my word. But I might not be this time.

“What else do you need?” The captain’s practicality is a lifeline. “You’ve got about thirty, maybe forty minutes before darkness swallows us whole. I don’t want the reef ripping a hole in the tender during low tide.”

“Copy that,” I say.

“I’m going to check out the crew deck.” Zane glances to the back stairs.

“I’ll join you,” I add. I’m curious about the state of my own cabin.

The yacht is a fucking disaster. The cushions from the sofa are on the floor, but better yet, there’s not a horse in sight, not a pillow nor a painting—they’re all gone.

Down the stairs to the crew galley, there’s junk all the way. Bags, boxes. I kick a few to the side. The captain made a hasty search for provisions. I grab a scrub brush, dish rags, and some hand sanitizer and toss it in an empty grocery bag from the floor.

I make my way down the hall, all the way to the end, to where my cabin was—or I guess still is.

There, I look through my stuff. I grab my wets and my swimming shoes too. The captain brought us a couple of clean uniforms each, most likely pulled from the laundry room. I grab some of my own clothes—an old football sweatshirt from high school, threadbare in the sleeves, but it feels like home. My toiletries, toothbrush, toothpaste―I toss them in the bag. Then I duck into Haley’s cabin and do the same for her. On the desk, there’s a picture of her as a little girl with her mother. I wrap that in a plastic bag that I find on the floor and tuck it into my larger bag, as well as some slippers and her robe from behind the door. I grab a few things for Dante and a couple of boxes of biscuits that I know Zane has been talking about before I make my way up to Swimmer Boy’s room. Everything has slid around in his cabin, and most of the contents are pushed up against the wall. I walk into it and, before the door can wedge itself shut, I shove a fake plant between the door and the doorframe, holding it open.

I rummage around in his drawers, grab a few things: his swimsuit, a pair of sweatpants that say Team USA with the Olympic rings on it, and a sweatshirt. That should make Dante laugh. I add a couple of pairs of shoes—tennis shoes and a pair of comfy-looking boots. Going up the stairs, I now have three or four bags over my shoulder.

I haven’t run into Zane again, and I’ve yet to see Penny.

But on the back deck, I look at the big lounging cushions. “Fuck, those will be a lot better than a yoga mat,” I say to myself. “Zane!” I call at the top of my lungs. “Are you ready to go?”

“I’ll be right there,” he calls back from the sundeck.

“What are you doing?”

He has a large bundle under his arm. He was thinking the same thing as me.

“Did you even get any of your own stuff?”

“A few things. But this is way more important,” he replies. He has the big cushion from the top sundeck rolled up tight like a sleeping bag.

“Looks good. You ready to go?” I ask.

“Let’s do it,” he agrees.

Just as we’re getting things into the tender, the captain pokes his head out. “Somebody wants to say goodbye before you take off,” he says.

The dog comes racing down the stairs, flying at me. I barely have time to catch her, keeping her from knocking us into the ocean. She licks up one side of my face and down the other.

“Be a good girl,” I tell her. She actually looks a little fat, but it’s good to see her.

Zane loads up the rest of the tender.

I look up at the captain; Penny trots back up to him. “We’ll see you in the morning,” I say.

“Well, be here just after— Scratch that. High tide should be right around sunrise. Be back then. It should make going along the cliff easier,” he says.

“Sounds good,” I reply.

Dread fills me as we pull away. I can’t help but wonder. It just feels like the ship might disappear.

Zane has a large sheet of plastic from the toy hauler room off the swim platform. “It’s too bad we can’t get the Skidoos down without powering the crane. We could zip back and forth to the boat a lot easier.” He eyes them on the roof of the Rock Candy as we pull away.

“Yeah, that’s not happening. Hey, make sure that grocery bag stays dry.” I touch the one containing Haley’s picture with my toe.

He moves it closer to the cushion. “What’s in it?”

“I think it’s a picture of Haley and her mom.”

“Damn.” He rolls the top closed. “You should have said that to start with.” He scratches his head.

“You really think someone tried to sink us?”

“The evidence sure as hell looks that way.”

“What I do know is that there is no fucking way Haley, Dante, or Easton have anything to do with it.”

“I agree.”

“And are we going to tell them?” Zane looks up at me with his expressive eyes. The guy can make Haley do anything with the way he looks at her.

“Let’s give it a day. Let the captain come to his own conclusion that they’re innocent.”

Zane nods. “Copy that.”

We’re past the cliff in a relatively calm part of the ocean when Zane glares back at me.

I furrow my brow at him. “What?”

“You could have waited.”

I know instantly he’s talking about me telling Haley I fucking love her. “You could have said it too.”

“And look like I was just copying you.”

“Who cares what it looks like? She needed to know before Sam came and planted his flag on our beach.”

“You’re afraid of Sam?”

It’s a good question. Am I? Fuck yeah. I’d take Sam over the lot of us any day. “No,” I lie.

His scoff is loud even over the waves. “Right, well, you could have waited. Been more romantic about it.”

“I’m not the romantic one―that’s you.” I slow the tender a little. “She knows you love her. Just tell her.”

He nods.

It’s getting dark when we approach our beach, but Dante is sitting out by our old fire pit with a nice-sized fire going. He jogs over and helps us pull the tender ashore. “What did you bring?”

“An even better cushion from the top deck and some little stuff. More clothes, bathing suits.” I pass him a bag.

“I don’t need a bathing suit.”

“Yes, you do,” Zane and I say together. I’m tired of seeing his monster junk.

“Right.”

I dry the motor and tuck it up. Part of me wants to pull it all the way into the jungle to keep it out of sight.