And the Sea Will Tell (3 page)

“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.”

“Oh, my God,” Muff said, making eye contact with Marie.

“This Palmyra doesn’t sound like such a wonderful place to me,” Marie said loyally.

“How deep is the channel?” Mac asked, ignoring the women.

“Fifteen feet,” Hal answered. “Plenty big enough for a sailboat. We used to get medium-sized cargo ships inside the lagoon. We built a loading dock for them. The West Lagoon, which is the main lagoon, is over three quarters of a mile long and over a half mile wide.”

“I bet there’re lots of places to explore,” Mac said with boyish anticipation.

“Oh, yeah,” Hal agreed. “Machine-gun bunkers, underground tunnels and storage areas—the works. I heard that the Navy left a lot of stuff behind when they pulled up stakes after the war. It was cheaper than shipping it all back. You’d find all kinds of relics, I bet.”

“Sounds like it’s worth spending some time there,” Mac said.

“There’s nothing there anymore in the way of docking facilities or usable equipment, I’m sure,” Hal cautioned. “You’ll have to bring everything with you.”

“Our boat is very well-equipped,” Mac said.

“Best-equipped I’ve ever seen,” Jamie concurred.

Mac and Muff left that night with a stack of material on Palmyra, including a letter from an Army officer to a college professor planning a trip to Palmyra. “I can assure you it will be an experience that you will long remember,” the military man wrote in 1963. “You will have plenty of animal, insect, fish, and bird companions, and after a while you become very friendly with them.” Attached to the letter was a detailed three-page list of items to take to Palmyra, from “partner” and “well-equipped first-aid kit” to “pistol and ammunition.” The letter concluded: “It’s a place where you can remove yourself from the many problems of the world.”

That was exactly what Mac wanted to hear. Although San Diego was more unspoiled and picturesque than most large cities, it still suffered from increasing traffic and crime. Reports of violent muggings, rapes, and shootings were alarmingly more frequent. Smog, a harbinger of urban blight, was becoming a concern, too. He sensed that his world lay somewhere out
there
, on the vast windswept bowl of the ocean, not here in a mushrooming city of half a million people jostling for space.

Muff, by contrast, would have loved life in a rambling, ranch-style home, complete with backyard pool, in this coastal city with its clean beaches and bustling shopping malls. She would have liked to have children, too. But even though Mac talked often in the earlier years of their marriage about raising a family, sailing had always stood in the way. Muff was reconciled to the inevitable. Was any life perfect?

She doubted she was capable of loving a man more than she loved Mac. She found him dashing and intelligent, and he seemed to love her deeply. She was still committed to the decision she’d made early in their marriage in accepting Mac’s way of life. There was that rapt, yearning gaze that appeared in his eyes only when he talked about sailing. She had never asked him to choose between her and his other love. He deserved both. And anyway, she wasn’t entirely sure which he would choose.

A few weeks after the visit to Horton’s, Mac finished his Pacific itinerary. The
Sea Wind
would depart San Diego for Hawaii, dock there a month or so, and then set sail for Palmyra. If the island was everything Mac fantasized it to be, he intended to stay from six months to a year. Then they would continue on to Tahiti and other fabled islands throughout the South Pacific.

Mac gave notice to his employer, Triple A South, a ship repair business at Underwood’s Marina. Recommended for the job by Jamie Jamieson, Mac had so delighted the owner with his mechanical prowess that he’d been promoted to a supervisory position within weeks. That had been almost a year ago, and now Mac had succumbed to that familiar longing to leave job and hearth behind, and set sail.

As their departure date approached, Muff felt increasingly apprehensive about the voyage. Internalizing her fears, she suffered from insomnia, heart palpitations, and stomach pains. Her doctor didn’t find these symptoms disturbing—just indications of a bad case of nerves.

She did not have Mac’s good memories of the sea. On their nearly six-year round-the-world honeymoon cruise a decade earlier, they had endured a horrendous typhoon in the South Pacific, a perilous journey through the Red Sea, and a close call with a marauding pirate ship in the Mediterranean. Living with the constant fear of bad weather and high seas, they had been drained by the tension that comes with sailing a small boat in a very big, very unpredictable ocean. She did not want to go through any of it again. But if something happened to Mac sailing alone, she would never be able to forgive herself for not being at his side.

“This trip will be easier than the world cruise,” Mac assured her. “We’ll only be gone two years. We can take it slow and easy. Honey, we’ll have a great time.”

“I hope so,” Muff said, forcing a smile. “I don’t know why I have such a funny feeling about this trip.”

H
ONOLULU

A
CAR CRUISED SLOWLY THROUGH
the parking lot at Keehi Lagoon harbor, adjacent to Honolulu International Airport. Hundreds of pleasure boats bobbed gently alongside long rows of docks. Catamarans and trimarans, ketches and schooners, cutters and sloops, playthings of the young and old, the rich and not-so-rich, the adventurous and the lazy. For some, a boat was a way of life. For others, a brief weekend escape. For the owners of one boat temporarily moored here, Buck and Jennifer, an escape of an altogether different kind was planned.

The rental car braked to a halt and a man of medium height, thirtyish, jumped out from the driver’s side. He wore a sober button-down dress shirt and plain suit slacks. From the breast pocket of his shirt, he drew a crinkled snapshot of a sailboat. He glanced at it, double-checking, then set off at a run toward a line of moored boats. “Stay here,” he called back over his shoulder.

Inside the car, the older woman didn’t know what her son had seen that made him move so quickly. It was probably another wild-goose chase. They’d had plenty of them these past few days. A number of people thought they recognized the
Iola
from the snapshot, but none had known or admitted where it or Jennifer might be now. Sarah “Sunny” Jenkins pondered whether she and her son, Ted, would find her daughter in time.

Arriving from California four days earlier, they had started their search on the Big Island at Jennifer’s last address, the ramshackle cabin in the volcanic mountains outside Hilo. They found someone who told them Jennifer and her boyfriend had moved to Maui to restore and refit an old sailboat they had bought there. Sunny and Ted immediately caught a flight to Maui, and after a two-day search, they learned from a long-haired fellow working on a boat at Maalaea Bay that the couple from the
Iola
had finally managed to get their boat launched and had sailed over to Oahu. Undeterred, Sunny and Ted headed there, but as their flight circled Honolulu, Sunny’s heart sank at the myriad small boats that jammed the waterways and harbors as far as she could see. How in the world were they ever going to find
one
boat in that horde? She stiffened her resolve. They had absolutely no choice but to try. After Jennifer’s last letter, Sunny had relayed the unnerving news to Ted, and they had agreed that Jennifer must be talked out of this insane notion of sailing off with Buck Walker.

Sunny, her thick, chestnut hair shot with gray, was a handsome and self-possessed woman. Almost always, she showed the world a brightly sunny disposition—true to her nickname. Right now, though, she allowed herself to look worried and downcast. The
Iola
could have sailed days before.

Ted approached the car, his shirt wet through at the armpits and plastered to his chest. Runnels of sweat ran down his face.

Sunny rolled her window down, and a humid, hot breeze invaded the air-conditioned comfort of the car.

“I found her, Mom.”

“Oh, Teddy, thank God.” Sunny could hardly catch her breath.

“She’ll be right up. It was pure luck. I saw just enough of the boat to see this thing sticking out”—Ted pointed to the picture of the boat and a bowsprit that was visible—“and I remembered the guy on Maui saying not many boats had it.”

“How does she look?”

“Fine. She couldn’t believe we were here.” A look of concern crossed his face. “Mom, let’s keep in mind what we talked about. Okay?”

Sunny nodded grimly. She just prayed their plan would work.

W
HEN EVERYONE
met for dinner that night at a waterfront restaurant, Sunny covertly inspected her daughter’s boyfriend from across the table. She was struck by the length of his sandy hair, worn in shaggy hippie style. His large luminous eyes met hers unhesitatingly, and he carried himself with confidence and laid-back macho poise. Big and muscular, he exuded a natural élan. Sunny could see Jennifer falling for him. At the moment, Jennifer seemed content to do the talking for them both.

“So, Buck patched up the holes in the hull and we finally got her in the water,” Jennifer was explaining between bites, “about, what—” She looked at Buck.

“Three, four weeks ago,” he said.

“And I quit my job and we sailed over from Maui,” Jennifer continued. “We were going to buy a ship-to-shore radio with the money you sent, Mom, but we decided against it. We needed to store up on stuff like sugar and flour. I’ll be baking a lot. And we’ll be catching lots of fish.”

“You don’t have a radio?” Sunny asked with deceptive calm.

Jennifer blithely shook her head.

“Two-way radios are expensive,” Buck said, then smiled easily. “Besides, there’s no one on shore we want to talk to that badly.”

Did he mean to give offense, Sunny wondered, or was he just thoughtless?

You silly, stupid kids
. The words were on the tip of Sunny’s tongue.
How can you think of sailing out into the middle of the ocean without a radio? What happens if you need help?
But she kept quiet; she and Ted had agreed that confrontations and recriminations with Jennifer would be counterproductive.

Jennifer had been easy to raise as a child. They had lived in a third-floor walkup apartment in the Washington Heights section of New York City. Jennifer, a good-natured and animated youngster, made friends easily. Sunny divorced Jennifer’s father when the little girl was ten. With Ted off to school at Syracuse University in upstate New York, mother and daughter moved to Toronto, and that was where the trouble had started. By her third year of high school, Jennifer was cutting class to shoot pool with some friends. Her game improved; her grades went downhill. Sunny could do nothing with her. Eventually, there was an ultimatum from the principal: Jennifer could drop out voluntarily or carry the stigma of being flunked. “People in our family do not quit school,” her Uncle Buddy told her. “Dropping out would be the worst decision of your life,” her brother warned. But drop out she did, promising everyone she would re-enroll the following fall. That summer, mother and daughter moved to Los Angeles, and true to her word, Jennifer was back in school that September. She took things more seriously the second time around, earning As and Bs while working as a night clerk at a discount department store. After graduating the following June, she enrolled in junior college, majoring in psychology. A year later, she moved into her own apartment in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles, but Sunny continued to see her regularly. Then, shortly after earning her junior college degree, Jennifer moved to Hawaii in 1969 to help Uncle Buddy run his Oahu resort, Ulu Ma Village, an authentic sixteenth-century Hawaiian village he had bought in Honolulu, taken down board by board, trucked across the island to Kaneohe Bay, and reassembled on seashore land he owned there. It was a bar and restaurant, and after Uncle Buddy made arrangements for tour buses to stop, business took off. Jennifer worked tables and handled bookkeeping and accounting.

After all these years on the islands, Jennifer’s suntan was darker, her hair shorter and lighter, but to Sunny everything else about her seemed much the same. Still, she couldn’t be sure she really knew her daughter these days. A few visits scattered over half a decade had revealed little of what was actually going on in her daughter’s life. Take this drug-charge business—was Jennifer, like so many young people, heavily involved in drugs? She had long defended her regular use of marijuana (she was convicted in Hawaii in 1970 for illegal possession) as no different from a businessman’s downing his daily martini after a hard day at the office. In her last letter, Jennifer had dismissed the drug charges against Buck and her as “trumped-up.”

After dinner, Ted asked for the check and looked squarely at Buck. “Jenny wrote us about your legal problems. Is there anything we can do to help?”

“I don’t think so,” Buck said in a low voice.

Ted waited for more.

Jennifer broke the silence. “Buck was arrested on a charge of selling MDA. It’s a drug, Mom, but it’s not like heroin. More like grass. Anyway, I’d gone into town with Buck. He was arrested in the parking lot of Penney’s. I was a few blocks away at a Laundromat, doing the wash. But they still ended up filing a charge against me for selling MDA, too. It isn’t fair. None of it.” (While Jennifer had had no problem telling her mother and brother about her earlier run-in with the law over marijuana—she was indignant rather than ashamed—she had
not
told them of her arrests and subsequent petty theft convictions in Hawaii in 1969 and 1973 for shoplifting.
Those
types of things one did not tell Mom.)

Jennifer honestly believed that Buck had been entrapped, and told her mother and brother so. But she left out certain facts that others would find damaging. She didn’t mention that Buck was packing a powerful handgun (a 9mm pistol) at the time of his arrest—necessary protection, he subsequently explained to Jennifer, against being ripped off by another dealer. In addition, before these aborted MDA sales there had been Buck’s attempts at growing marijuana—hundreds of plants out behind their cabin.

Jennifer had told Buck at the time that he was crazy to grow so much marijuana. Yes, she
liked
grass, liked the heady, warm sensation, liked the kind of cosmic euphoria she felt, liked listening to the Stones when she was loaded and hearing notes and harmonies she’d never noticed before, liked making love while suspended in a totally sensual dimension. It was a loving, accepting high, not destructive in any way, never a downer, and there were no hangovers. (She also liked Quaaludes enough to trade grass for the tablets whenever possible. “Ludes” caused her to tingle all over and feel very sensual.) She’d have been happy for him to grow just enough grass for their own use, but Buck wanted the heavy bread that came from dealing.

He’d gone whole hog, and they’d been ripped off just before harvest time—every single plant uprooted one night and taken away. Infuriated and hungry for revenge, Buck replanted, put out booby traps (some loaded with live rounds), and started keeping a loaded shotgun and revolver nearby. They’d had a huge argument about the firearms. When Jennifer insisted that he not bring them in the cabin, he’d finally relented, stowing them just outside the door.

“Buck has a court hearing tomorrow, but he’s not going,” Jennifer continued. “But the lawyer says that if Buck goes and pleads guilty to one count of selling MDA, they’ll drop the other charge against him and the phony charge they have against me.”

“Buck’s going to jump bail?” Ted asked.

Jennifer nodded cheerfully.

Ted’s thoughts raced. “Buck, did I hear correctly? If you show up in court tomorrow and plead guilty to one count, the charges against Jennifer will be dropped?”

“That’s what the lawyer says,” Buck answered flatly.

“Will you be taken into custody?”

“No. They’ll give me a sentencing date for the drug charge,” Buck said, giving no more than he was asked.

“Our lawyer says they’ll let him remain out on bail until he’s sentenced,” Jennifer added. “But after he does his federal time on the MDA charge, California will extradite him and revoke his parole from San Quentin. I don’t want him to go back there. That place turns people into
animals
.”

She couldn’t possibly share with them all the horror stories Buck had told her about the notorious prison. He had witnessed stabbings, beatings, stompings, shootings, and stranglings. An inmate could get killed for not paying back a pack of cigarettes. A guy had to be mean and tough twenty-four hours a day in order to survive. “If you gave in to them,” Buck had told her, “they’d make a punk out of you.” He explained explicitly what that meant. Buck said that he’d rather die than go back to San Quentin. The terror in his eyes whenever he recalled his time there finally convinced Jennifer that they had no choice but to flee from Hawaii and the MDA charge.

“Buck paid for his mistake,” Jennifer told her mother and brother. “He was only a teenager and the gun wasn’t even loaded, but they called it armed robbery and sent him to San Quentin.”

Jennifer still remembered the first time Buck told her about his prison record—they had just started living together. When she asked him what he had done and he answered, “Armed robbery,” she’d been shocked. She’d despised guns and violence of any kind, even in movies or on television. She hadn’t known what to say to him. Despite his tenderness with her, did he harbor a hidden streak of violence? Buck had kept quiet for a moment, as if he understood her feelings. When he finally added that the gun wasn’t loaded, that somehow helped. “I just hung out with the wrong people at an impressionable age,” he explained. Since she had already fallen deeply in love with Buck, she dismissed his somewhat shady past with the thought that everyone is entitled to a mistake or two. She’d certainly made a few herself, and had fudged the line on some laws she didn’t respect.

Ted wanted to keep the logic clear and irrefutable in what he was about to say. “Buck, if just by showing up in court tomorrow and pleading guilty to one of the charges you’ll get Jennifer cleared, why don’t you do it? I’ll go with you.”

Walker didn’t take long thinking about it. “Okay. This is my problem anyway.”

“It’s
our
problem,” Jennifer said resolutely, as if affirming where her first allegiance lay at this table.

After Sunny and Ted returned to their hotel and Jennifer and Buck went back to the
Iola
, Ted began to think that he was making the best of a bad situation. He would go to court with Walker to ensure that the charge against his sister would be dropped. That settled, he and his mother would get Jennifer alone and try their damnedest to talk her out of running away with Buck.

Ted found it difficult to understand his sister’s behavior. Actually, they had so little in common and so many years separated them that each might as well have been raised an only child. He was eight years old when his baby sister was born. When their mother and father divorced, it had been more traumatic for Jennifer than for Ted, who had cut himself off emotionally from his troubled father years earlier. Jack Jenkins, a warehouseman on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, never beat his children, but he cruelly neglected them; he would come home too drunk to do anything but pass out in his chair in the living room. Ted had lost all respect for his father and, in college, had chosen the path taken by his mother’s brother, Uncle Buddy, who had made a sizable fortune in sales before going into the resort business. The month Ted graduated from Syracuse with a business degree, he married his college sweetheart, Donna, and they moved to the West Coast, where he began his own sales career. Within ten years, Ted was running his own educational book sales firm, and he and his wife were raising six children in their suburban home thirty miles from San Francisco.