style="font-size:15px;"> “What’s that?” I asked.
“I could see it in your face when we came aboard,” she said.
“I’m that transparent, am I?” I said. “All right, I’ll be honest with you. I don’t understand why you stay aboard this boat. I’d think the memories must be painful.”
“What can I do?” Reeny replied. “Pendragon isn’t mine to sell, and if I’m going to pay the bills, I may as well live on her. I can’t let her just sit here and rot.” She looked me in the eye. “There were some good memories too.”
“I take it you still haven’t heard from him?”
She shook her head, eyes downcast, a shadow of sadness falling cross her face. “No,” she said, voice barely audible. I felt like a proper bastard for asking.
It had been two years since Christopher Hastings, Reeny’s former lover and owner of record of Pendragon, had disappeared without a trace. One morning Reeny had awakened to find that Hastings had packed one small bag of clothing and personal belongings and left with nary a word. Thinking, perhaps wishfully, that he’d simply forgotten to tell her he was going away on a research trip, she’d waited a couple of weeks before filing a missing persons report. The police hadn’t been able to turn up anything, however, and as much as told her not to hold out much hope, that when a fifty-year-old man disappears as suddenly and as thoroughly as Chris Hastings had, it usually means he doesn’t want to be found.
Nor had Hastings been entirely unknown to the police, particularly the drug squad. His grandfather, who had owned a ball-bearing plant during the Second World War, had died a very wealthy man. Hastings’ father hadn’t worked a day in his life. Fortunately for Hastings, he’d died in a car crash before he’d been able to fritter away all of his son’s inheritance. He’d made a considerable dent in it, though. According to Constable Mabel Firth, who at my request had made a few discreet inquiries on Reeny’s behalf, the detectives on the drug squad suspected that Hastings had been augmenting the income from his small trust fund, and what little more he earned writing true crime documentaries for television, by dealing a little locally grown marijuana. Perhaps he’d pissed off the wrong people, they’d told Mabel, and was fertilizing a field of B.C. Bud somewhere.
I had my own theory.
I’d first met Hastings, and Reeny, while trying to track down Carla Bergman. Carla had crewed for him a few times, before he and Reeny had got together, and he’d bailed her out of at least one nasty mess she’d got herself into in Mexico. Hastings was a rangy and slightly ram-shackle man with a lot of sun-bleached greying brown hair and a battered, uneven nose. However, while he affected a laid back, aging hippie demeanour, there was a cold, almost feral watchfulness behind his steel blue eyes. Even then I wondered if he might not have been involved in the drug trade, a smuggler perhaps; Pendragon was a big old boat with plenty of odd places for secret compartments. He was likeable enough, though, and helpful, providing me with a lot more information about Carla and her boss and boyfriend, Vince Ryan, than I really wanted to know.
“Be careful around Carla,” he’d warned me.
Unfortunately, he hadn’t heeded his own advice and had let Carla hide out on Pendragon. The last time I spoke to him was the day after she’d been abducted and Hastings and Reeny had been left bound and gagged with duct tape in the master stateroom, where they likely would have perished if I hadn’t found them. Hastings wasn’t handling his failure to protect Reeny at all well. He looked as though he’d aged ten years in just a few hours, hair lank and tangled, chin bristly with grey stubble, eyes bleary and breath stale from too many cans of beer.
“It’s not your fault,” I told him. “But if you don’t get your act together and talk to her, you’re going to lose her.”
“Yeah, well, if that happens, it happens,” he said, pulling the tab on a can of beer.
“You’d be a bloody fool to let it,” I said.
“Get off my case, McCall.”
“See you around,” I said and left him sitting on the deck of his old boat, staring at the wisps of carbon dioxide vapour drifting from the hole in the top of his beer can.
I never did see him again, though. Despite, as I learned later, his umpteenth-degree black belt — he’d studied martial arts of one kind or another almost all his life — Carla’s abductors had handled him as though he’d been made of straw. His ego, perhaps his concept of manhood, had been irreparably damaged, and Reeny and his beloved Pendragon were constant reminders of it. So he’d taken the easy way out and abandoned both of them. If anyone had asked, I would have said both, especially Reeny, were better off without him. No one had, though.
“I’ve ruined what started out as a very pleasant evening, haven’t I?” Reeny said.
“It’s still a very pleasant evening,” I said.
“But?” she prompted.
“No ‘but,’” I said.
“I heard a ‘but’ in your voice. What is it?”
“Well, I do think maybe it’s time you got on with the rest of your life.”
“Just because I’m still living on Pendragon doesn’t mean I’m pining away waiting for the day Chris comes home.” She raised her eyebrows, which were just a couple of shades darker than her hair. “Or am I missing some deeper meaning here?”
“It was a stupid thing to say. Don’t pay any attention to that man behind the curtain.”
She smiled thinly at my attempt to lighten the mood. “Nor does my living on his boat mean that if Chris ever does come back, we’d just take up where we left off. You know that, don’t you?”
“I — I’m not sure I do,” I said.
She was silent for a long, awkward moment, then said, “I never told you this, Tom, but when I met Chris, I wasn’t in very good shape. It’s an old story, and not very interesting, so I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say, I owe Chris a lot. Maybe my life. I certainly wouldn’t have had the courage to resume my acting career if it hadn’t been for him. But I should have left well enough alone. I’m sorry. It’s just that, well, you’re a good friend, Tom, and…” She faltered and her voice faded.
I stared at her, wondering what she meant. Wrong ideas again?
She shook her head and laughed. “See, you’re not the only one who can say stupid things. I just meant — well, I’m not sure what I meant.”
“I understand. I think.” She smiled, then stifled another yawn. I stood. “I should be going. You look like you’re about ready to fall over.”
“I am tired.” She saw me to the gangway. “Thanks for the company,” she said. “And I’m sorry I ruined the evening.”
“You didn’t,” I said.
There was an awkward moment as we stood by the gangway, looking into each other’s eyes. Would it be all right to kiss her? I wondered. I never had before, but I was always ready for new experiences. While I dithered, she took the initiative, leaned close, and kissed me on the corner of my mouth.
“G’night,”
