The disappointed crew turned and began walking back toward the pub. As Stone stood in the cockpit, Allison climbed up the stern ladder into the cockpit and, soaking wet, slipped past him and down the companionway ladder.

“I don’t know if I can be ready by eight,” she said, laughing.

“You’d bloody well better be,” he muttered, refusing to look at her.

“If we hurry, we could get in a quickie before they come back,” she said, pulling the hair on his legs.

“Ouch! I’m getting back to my boat right now. You get yourself together.” He fled the yacht and went back to his own.

At eight o’clock sharp he emerged, dressed, to find the crew standing on the dock, waiting. “Just a minute,” he said, “I’ll see if she’s ready.

As he spoke, Allison climbed into her own cockpit, wearing a sleeveless cotton dress that showed off her tan, yet made her look like a high school senior. “Good morning!” she cried, delivering a dazzling smile. “I’m Allison; come aboard, all of you.”

As the crew climbed aboard, Stone took deep breaths and tried to get his pulse rate back down to normal.

Chapter
18

I must be crazy, Stone thought as the interview began. I’ve let this girl go on TV, before an audience of millions and at the mercy of a reporter on her first assignment who would kill for a success, which she might not define as I would, and with no preparation whatever. He watched from the pontoon as Chris Wheaton tossed Allison a few softball questions to relax her, then tensed as the real questioning began. Jim Forrester from The New Yorker had shown up and was sitting quietly beyond camera range, listening and taking notes.

“Allison,” Chris Wheaton said, sounding really interested, “when you and Paul left the Canary Islands and set sail for home, how much sailing experience had you, personally, had?”

“Well, I had sailed across the Atlantic and around Europe with Paul, but he had always done the sailing. The boat was rigged for singlehanding, so he took care of that, and I just kept house—or boat, I guess.”

“So how was it, after Paul’s death, that you managed to sail this very large yacht all the way across the Atlantic all by yourself?”

Allison launched into an explanation of how she had learned enough celestial navigation to find her latitude and how she had managed the sails by using only the main most of the time.