July 15, 1966

The Pacific Ocean

The girl shaded the sun from her brown eyes and stared at a large pelican glining above the ship's after cargo boom.

She admired the bird's soaring grace for a few minutes, then, growing bored, she rose to a sitting position, revealing evenly spaced red bars across her tanned back, etched there by the slats of an ancient steamer chair.

She looked around for signs of the deck crew, but they were nowhere in sight, so she shyly shifted her breasts to a more comfortable position inside the scoop-necked bra of her bikini.

Her body was hot and sweaty from the humin tropical air. She moved her hand across her firm stomach and felt the sweat rising through the skin. She sat back in the chair again, soothed and relaxed, the throbbing beat of the old freighter's engines and the heavy warmth of the sun coaxing her into drowsidess.

The fear that churned inside her when she came on board had faded.

She no longer lay awake to the pounding of her heart, or searched the crew's faces for expressions of suspicion, or waited for the captain to grimly inform her that she was under ship's arrest. She was slowly closing her mind to her crime and beginning to think about the future.

She was relieved to find that guilt was a fleeting emotion after all.

Out of the corner of her eye she caught the white jacket of the Oriental mess boy as he stepped from a companionway. He approached apprehensively, his eyes staring down at the deck, as if he was embarrassed to look at her nearly nude figure.

"Excuse me, Miss Wallace, he said. "Captain Masters respectfully requests you please dine with him and his officers tonight-if you are feeling better, that is."

Estelle Wallace was thankful her deepening tan covered her blush.

She had feigned illness since embarking in San Francisco and had taken all her meals alone in her stateroom to avoid any conversation with the ship's officers. She decided she couldn't remain a recluse forever.

The time had come to practice living a lie.

"Tell Captain Masters I feel much better. I'll be delighted to dine with him."

"He'll be glad to hear that," the mess boy said with a broad smile that revealed a large gap in the middle of his upper teeth. "I'll see the cook fixes you something special."

He turned and shuffled away with a gait that seemed to Estelle a trifle too obsequious, even for an Asian.

Secure in her decision, she inly stared up at the three-deck-high minship superstructure of the San Marino. The sky was remarkably blue above the black smoke curling from the single stack, contrasting starkly with the flaking white paint on the bulkheads.