“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Yes. Of course. Get yourself a drink, I mean it.”

“No, thanks.”

“Accept my hospitality! Have a drink! What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I don’t want a drink, Jim.”

He glanced quickly toward the fantail. “The least you could do is sit down. Jesus, you’re giving me a stiff neck. Over there, where I can see you.” Brennan waved a hand toward the settee and steered the wheelchair to the bar. On the wall was a panel of switches and rheostats. Reaching up, Brennan lit the room brightly. Eyes bulging with effort and anger, he used the bar to pull himself out of the chair. It took him a moment to square his shoulders and straighten his back. He was two inches shorter and thirty pounds lighter than he had been fifteen years ago. His teeth were clenched in triumph.

“There,” he said. “Rheumatoid arthritis. I live with pain every day of my life. If you won’t have a drink, I will. I’m not supposed to, but fuck it. I’ll see what Charlotte wants.” He started toward the glass doors leading to the fantail, walking slowly but not shuffling. The reflections on the glass from inside the room made the statue look ghostly. He stopped and turned around, and pointed to the chair with a surprisingly shaky hand. “You see, I do need the wheelchair. A woman who this week stopped being a member of this family once accused me of feeling sorry for myself. The fucking bitch was dead wrong. I despise self-pity.”

There was a rush of air as Brennan slid the glass door open and stepped out. “Charlotte!” he called loudly. “What do you want to drink?” He left the door open, and the room began to warm up. He went around the hot tub, into the shadow, to one of the high-backed deck chairs facing the statue. “I said, ‘What do you want to drink?’”

As Brennan leaned over the chair, Devlin looked away. His parents had shown him enough of old couples’ wrangling, and he didn’t want to have to deal with Charlotte unless he had to. At the forward end of the salon was a graceful white pedestal dining table with twelve delicate chairs upholstered in the blue silk that covered the settee. Whatever the dining set was made of, it gleamed like polished marble. One of the new Italian jobs, the police launch crewman had called it. It was like being in the twenty-first century, but so what? Devlin got up to take another look around. If it wasn’t fixed in place, the table was worthless in a real sea. The chairs would bounce around like dice in a cup.…

“Bolted to a crossmember,” Brennan said, closing the door. He glanced back to the fantail. “The table’s part of the ship. The chairs are fixed to the deck.”

“What do you get out of this?”