And the Sea Will Tell

  Suddenly, there was a thud as their sailboat slipped on the trailer and tilted sharply to one side.

  “Jen, hold on!”

  Buck’s warning came too late. Losing her footing, Jennifer fell and nearly rolled off the deck to the concrete below. But Buck was there to save her, his powerful arms reaching up and helping her down.

  Out of inexperience, Buck had used nylon ropes to secure the boat to the trailer. They stretched, of course, so the hull slipped, causing the support blocks beneath it to topple. The wind cable had slipped only momentarily, but the boat had instantly lurched forward.

  Frightening as it was for Jennifer, the mishap should have caused only a minor delay in the launching. But when the boat tipped to the side, two steel support beams angling up from the trailer pierced the hull below the waterline. And there the Iola sat, skewered like a pig at a luau.

  Buck, livid at the disastrous sight before him, clenched his fists and spun furiously on the open-mouthed winch operator.

  For a moment, Jennifer was sure Buck would attack fat, red-faced Charlie, even though everyone standing there could see it hadn’t been his fault. But Buck didn’t completely lose it. He took a step or two toward the man, then shouted a curse and bolted for the parking lot and his old pickup, without even glancing toward Jennifer.

  She felt absurd standing before the stunned onlookers still holding the bottle of champagne, which somehow had not broken. “Baby, it’s okay,” she called to the man she loved. “We can patch the holes…” Her voice trailed off. Everyone was looking at her.

  She was struck, at that instant, with the thought that, for once, they should have heeded conventional wisdom. They should not have changed the boat’s name. Bad luck will follow us wherever we go.

  CHAPTER 2

  CALIFORNIA

  THAT SAME SPRING OF 1974, an eye-catchingly beautiful sailboat named the Sea Wind was docked more than two thousand miles away at a San Diego marina. This thirty-eight-foot two-masted ketch, obviously maintained with exquisite care, was the pride and joy of Malcolm “Mac” Graham III, at forty-three a man more at home on a boat than on any landlocked place he’d ever lived.

  Wiping his hands on an oily rag, Mac leaned over and flipped a switch. He jerked hard on a starter cord, and the generator’s motor started on the first try. The engine sounded like new again. The valve job had done the trick.

  As always on warm days aboard his boat, Mac was shirtless and barefoot, wearing nothing but swim trunks. In his weathered broad face, faint squint lines highlighted alert gray-blue eyes. Like his boat, Mac was sturdily constructed. Two inches shy of six feet, his squarish body was bronzed by years of working in the sun. He had a craftsman’s long, supple fingers but the short-cropped hair of a Marine drill instructor. Mac was not all rawhide, though. Quick to smile and offer a friendly handshake, he was basically the eternal optimist—cheery, hearty, always willing to lend a helping hand. Mac’s philosophy was that those who bring sunshine into the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves. Lots of folks in marinas around the globe were happy to count Mac Graham a friend.

  In the fourteen years he’d owned the Sea Wind, Mac had sanded and painted virtually every plank of its hull, deck, and cabin. Recently, he’d completed a major remodeling that began with his ripping off the top and sides of the cabin and gutting the interior. Typically, he drew his own plans and did all the work himself, because he didn’t trust anyone else to do as good a job. He bought only the finest materials and took his time, attentive to the most minute detail.

  Though he’d earned an 84 average in two years at General Motors Institute, a Flint, Michigan, engineering school operated by the automotive giant, Mac rebelled at a future of being cloistered in an office forty hours a week slaving over automotive designs, and he withdrew before graduating. Deciding in college that he wanted to be a sailor—not one of those beer-guzzling weekend hobbyists, but a real blue-water sailor capable of matching his skills against the untamed forces of the sea—he moved to the West Coast to be closer to his dream, and found work in the marinas that dot California’s shoreline. Mac seldom stayed long at any job, though in no time his employers came to appreciate his abilities as a naturally gifted “hands-on” engineer, intuitively creative and fascinated with all things mechanical. On a boat, you name it, Mac could do it. It was on land, caught up in the workaday world of landlubbers, that he seemed as out of place as a guest wearing sneakers at a society ball.

  The overhaul of the Sea Wind had taken two years. When finished, the new cabin was nearly ten feet longer than the original and gave the boat a unique silhouette. Mac had installed the latest gear, including a powerful shortwave transceiver radio and a state-of-the-art automatic pilot system. In the galley, he installed a battery-powered refrigerator with a small freezer section, a ship-board luxury rarely seen except in the priciest of yachts. In the forecastle, Mac had built a snug little workshop with an elaborate workbench. Also aboard was a Zodiac rubber dinghy with a nine-horsepower Evinrude, and a “hard” (wooden) dinghy which sported its own small Sea Gull motor. The Sea Wind was an enviably well-outfitted, one-of-a-kind cruising boat, distinctive in both looks and seagoing efficiency.

  Mac had survived several life-threatening experiences in tempestuous seas, but his passion for sailing remained undiminished. The sea had an almost hypnotic hold over him. Like the wise, aged fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea, Mac thought of the sea as a woman who could give or withhold great favors, and his romance with her was never dampened by any momentary ill disposition she might express. Meeting the challenge of the sea head-on could be hard and dangerous work, to be sure, but there was a thrill of accomplishment when he had survived the test. It was the joy of being alive. Mac did not always articulate his innermost thoughts, but he had memorized a poem that aptly summed up his feelings:

  They stood upon the dock

  as the ships went out to sea.

  The wind took their sails

  and left the land a memory.

  Leaving those on shore to wonder

  why the sailor goes.

  All to wonder, what the sailor knows.

  Mac had known he was born for the sea ever since he first sailed with his father off the coast of New England. The memories of those crisp, windswept mornings remained heartbreakingly clear. He would still picture his late father, tall at the helm, his patrician head with aquiline nose facing into the wind, fondly reminiscing about sailing with his own father. “Four generations of Grahams have owned boats, son. You probably will, too.” It isn’t often that a ten-year-old boy fully understands his destiny. But young Mac had.

  When Mac was twenty-eight, an uncle died, leaving him $100,000 in stocks and bonds—and an equal amount to Mac’s only sibling, a younger sister. There was money in the family tree; Mac’s paternal grandfather had been a successful Wall Street investor. With his inheritance in hand, Mac didn’t have to think twice. He began a long search, combing marinas for his ideal boat. He knew what he didn’t want. He loathed the new fiberglass construction that was sweeping the boat-building industry after World War II. Sure, it took less upkeep than a wooden-hulled boat. Plastic flowers are less trouble than real flowers, too. He found what he wanted in the Sea Wind, a pristine ketch with fore-and-aft rigging, and wooden, like his father’s boat. Built in 1947, the Sea Wind was so handsomely constructed, with closely spaced heavy oak framing and extra-thick inch-and-a-quarter planking on her hull, one admirer remarked that “she looked like she had been carved out of a single block of wood.” From the moment he saw the “For Sale” sign hanging on her in the San Diego marina one summer day back in 1960, Mac was hooked. The Sea Wind had an ineffable grace. He even liked the name, which suggested to him a life of sailing the high seas as free as the capricious wind. Under the bowsprit was a gilded figurehead of a woman, a guardian angel protectively leading the way for vessel and crew. He forked over $20,000 for the Sea Wind. He left most of the remainder of his inheritance (and later, the assets from a $1
20,000 trust set up by his late grandfather) in conservative investments that, coupled with odd jobs as the need arose, gave him the financial freedom to sail the world’s oceans whenever he had the urge.

  A woman appeared from below deck. “I thought this would taste good,” she said, handing Mac a cold beer.

  Mac thanked his wife and took a long swig.

  Thirteen years earlier, Mac had the Sea Wind docked at Underwood’s Marina in San Diego and was busy making modifications on the boat. He was something of a ladies’ man back then but had never been married or even engaged. One night coming out of a beachfront bar, he and a buddy came upon a car stalled in commuter traffic. The driver was Eleanor La Verne Edington, a single, tiny-waisted blonde with an hourglass figure and pinup good looks. Always the gentleman, Mac got her car going and invited her back to the bar for a drink. She was accustomed to getting her share of such offers from men, and usually she turned them down. But she liked what she saw in this outdoorsy-looking man with kind eyes, so she accepted. A steady relationship soon began. Before long, Mac was endearingly calling her Muffin, then simply Muff. A year later he proposed marriage to her, and once again she said yes.

  They weren’t married immediately because Mac had plans to sail the Sea Wind around the world. He dearly loved Muff and wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, but right then his main concern was celestial navigation, which he’d studied in a night class but had never actually put to use in the middle of the ocean. Getting himself lost was one thing, but he didn’t want to drag Muff along for what might be a frightening experience.

  Muff didn’t disagree, because she had never sailed for great distances and had her own trepidations about going to sea. Mac put an ad in the newspaper and recruited two fellows who were willing to crew for him and share expenses. His plan was for Muff to join him later. “If we make it to Tahiti,” he told her, “you can fly down and we’ll get married there. We’ll make the rest of the cruise our honeymoon.” Muff couldn’t figure out how the two crewmen would fit into a romantic vacation on a boat whose living space was about the size of an average kitchen. But she understood early on that to be part of Mac’s life meant that she would have to, want to, accept his way of life. When Mac was at the helm of the Sea Wind, facing a cleansing breeze and open sea, she could see he was as content as a young boy smiling through a dream. Watching from the dock with a flood of tears, she tried to remind herself of this as he sailed away on his great round-the-world adventure, leaving her behind.

  Two weeks later, Mac called from Mexico. They had hit a terrible storm off Baja that had sunk several boats. After taking a pounding at sea for eleven days and nights, a damaged Sea Wind limped into safe harbor. Mac couldn’t get his hands on some of the parts he needed to repair the boat, so he read Muff a list and asked her to bring them down from San Diego. By the time she arrived, Mac’s two crewmen had quit. After their close call in the storm, neither had the stomach for continuing the voyage. Mac signed on Muff as his crew of one. They were married in August 1961, in La Paz, at the foot of Baja California. Mac was thirty, Muff twenty-eight. “Little Muff and I are one,” Mac wrote to his parents. “Our marriage has made two people complete, and very happy.”

  Muff, who was fair-skinned, burned easily in the sun and was still self-conscious about the galaxy of freckles that covered her face in the summer. A shade over five feet tall, she was fine-boned, with delicate features. Rosy-red lipstick was the only makeup she wore on a regular basis. Her teeth were gleaming white. That a few were a tad awry did not mar an enchanting smile that caused her nose to wrinkle slightly. Her liquid brown eyes reflected happiness, love, hurt, or fear with vivid clarity. As a child, Muff found she could never get away with fibbing—her mother always read the truth in her eyes. More reserved than Mac, she didn’t take to strangers right away. Muff felt comfortable with people only after she came to know and trust them.

  Now forty-one, Muff was worried about the extra ten to fifteen pounds she carried around her hips these days. Mac had told her again and again to forget it—“I love every curve and every ounce”—but still she was always signing on for the latest fad diet to promise a svelter stern.

  Muff liked watching her husband putter around the boat, as he’d been doing for the better part of this Saturday morning. Those tasks made him a contented man. “Sounds a lot better,” she offered over the purring of the generator engine.

  “The valves were loaded with carbon and the bushings were shot.”

  He shut down the engine and began putting away his tools, carefully wiping each one with a clean cloth, then putting it in its proper place in his toolbox.

  “I’m going shopping,” she said, reaching for her handbag and rummaging inside. She pulled out a stack of coupons she’d clipped from the newspaper. “A market in Chula Vista is advertising green beans at twenty-five cents a can.”

  Muff’s job was to stock the Sea Wind’s pantry in preparation for their upcoming voyage to the tropics. It was no easy assignment, since Mac wanted to be gone for two years. Some goods she’d already purchased—canned vegetables, fruits, juices, and meats—were stored in the garage of her widowed mother’s home in an older section of San Diego. Also in the garage—kept in a chest freezer—were frozen roasts, chickens, and hams, to be moved to the Sea Wind’s own freezer just prior to departure. Items taken for granted at home could be impossible to find or outrageously expensive in remote parts of the world.

  Mac took another sip of beer and grinned teasingly. “You’re going to drive thirty miles round-trip to save a few bucks on green beans? You’ll almost burn that much in gas.”

  “We do have a Volkswagen.” Though she smiled back, there was an edge to her words.

  “You all right?”

  “I guess so.” She looked at him with heavy sadness.

  He sat down next to her on a bench seat in the cockpit of the boat.

  “You still don’t want to go.” It was a statement, not a question.

  Muff didn’t respond. Her silence—and those revealing eyes—said it all.

  He placed a consoling hand on her leg. “My offer stands. I mean that.”

  “I don’t want you to go without me.” She rested her head on his broad shoulder, warm from the sun. She was unable to look him in the face.

  “Muff, if you want to stay home, you should.”

  She smiled and shook her head. She knew she could not stay behind. Her place was to be with him.

  “I’d better go before they raise the price on the green beans.” She looked up perkily and planted a kiss on his cheek.

  Mac was not fooled. “Are you coming tonight?” he asked.

  “Where?”

  “Remember? With Marie and Jamie to Hal Horton’s house. He’s the guy who knows all about that island in the Pacific.”

  She tried not to let her disappointment show. She loved their good friends the Jamiesons. Marie was a real character, and Jamie was a sweetheart. They had met back in 1966 when they docked next to each other at Underwood’s Marina. The four of them always had so much fun together. Right now, though, the last thing Muff wanted to do was spend a night hearing about some deserted island Mac had ideas about visiting.

  “We have to leave by six.”

  “Okay. I’ll be back by then.” It would at least be fun to see Marie and Jamie, she had decided.

  Leaving the Sea Wind, Muff walked past boats being readied to shove off for an afternoon sail, the kind of recreational boating she secretly wished would satisfy her husband.

  When she reached the parking lot, she pulled out a bottle of yellow pills from her purse. Her doctor had promised they would help. She gulped one tranquilizer and willed it to work quickly.

  Alone in the car, Muff felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather.

  “I WAS BASED on Palmyra for almost two years. January ’42 to ’44.” Hal Horton, sipping his cocktail, pointed a beefy finger at the map of the Pacific spread out on the dining-room table and kept talking. ?
??It’s that little speck about a thousand miles south of Hawaii. I swear, it’s like one of those South Pacific movie islands. Right out in the middle of goddamn nowhere. And uninhabited. That is, except for a few ghosts, maybe.”

  The paunchy former Navy officer went on without missing a beat. “Once, one of our patrol planes went down near the island. We searched and searched but didn’t find so much as a bolt or piece of metal. It was weird. Like they’d dropped off the edge of the earth. Another time, a plane took off from the runway, climbed to a couple hundred feet, and turned in the wrong direction. They were supposed to go north and they went south instead. It was broad daylight. We never could figure it out. There were two men aboard that plane. We never saw them again. We had some very bad luck on the island. Old salts in the Pacific called it the Palmyra Curse.”

  Muff winced.

  Hal made another round of drinks at the wet bar.

  Fascinated, Mac flipped through one of his host’s old Navy photo albums. He learned there had been five thousand men and a few nurses stationed on Palmyra during World War II. The island had been a naval air facility, with several PBY seaplanes and a dozen or so SBD dive-bombers based there, primarily for long-range patrol. The single enemy action of the war occurred less than three weeks after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. A lone Japanese submarine surfaced three thousand yards offshore and began firing its deck guns at a dredge operating in the island’s lagoon. A five-inch-gun battery on the island chased off the would-be raider. After that, the Empire of the Rising Sun expressed no interest in the isolated atoll.

  “Pan Am had used it before the war for refueling its Clipper service to Samoa,” Hal went on. “Most of the structures went up after Pearl Harbor, though. We even built a hospital on one end of the island. It was a good location for an emergency airfield, because so many aircraft were heading south out of Hawaii to other island chains. Problem was, Palmyra—with its islets, lagoons, and reefs forming a perfect horseshoe—is very small. You can fly over it at ten thousand feet and not see it if there are a few clouds in the sky. Once we heard a plane overhead trying to find us, but he crashed in the drink before he could find the runway. We didn’t get to the poor guy fast enough. Sharks found him first.”