Mitch seemed amused. He never broke under the drip of the boy’s patter. He showed more patience with Louie in three days than he had with Tony in twenty years. The fourth day Louie spent at Mitch’s elbow, trying to get him to turn back to search for Tahiti. When Mitch escaped for a nap forward, Lindy raised the crags of Moorea, rising majestically off their starboard bow, on schedule. In a few moments the peaks of Tahiti showed, dead ahead. She did not bother to point them out to Louie, preferring to let him make a further ass of himself.

It was all wasted on Louie. When he spotted Tahiti a half-hour later, he yelled triumphantly, waking Mitch. So it was Louie who had got them there.

For hours, he swaggered around the deck, peering over the side to study nonexistent currents, squinting professionally at the sun’s elevation, nodding importantly when they felt the swell of approaching land.

She thought she knew what the peaks off their bow meant to Mitch. He had done it his way, sailed his boat to some misty dream of glens and dells and fictional waterfalls, of brown-skinned girls, probably, and garlands by Loti’s Pool. She could smell the flowers already, twenty miles at sea.

Tahiti, after sixty days of sweat from San Francisco, should have meant just as much to her.

What it really meant was a fresh-water shower and getting rid of Louie.

Chapter 9

CHAPTER 9

She moved through the water slowly, using a languorous scissor-kick until that would become too tiring, then shifting to her back and letting her legs stream, then trying a feeble breast-stroke, then simply floating.

She kept the lopsided moon to her left, heading for the Southern Cross and the rhythmic flash.

The deep, visceral attacks of shivering had become more frequent and violent; she imagined that the water was cooling more rapidly, perhaps because dawn was approaching.

She envisioned the sun over the eastern horizon, sweeping toward her. Daylight slid across the earth at 900, almost 1,000 miles an hour, Mitch had told her. It could be leaving San Francisco now, speeding to warm her. Or perhaps it was all the way to the Marquesas or Papeete, lighting the central market and kissing the spire of the Cathedral. It could be here any moment.

The seas, now that the squall had moved on, were calmer. If dawn found the seas smooth, and Mitch still in the area, he might find her very quickly.

Her right thigh muscle knotted suddenly. She grunted in pain. She ducked face-down, floating like a jellyfish, grabbed the leg, and began to knead the muscle frantically. She tried to straighten it and only made it worse. She hugged her knee to her stomach, her face underwater, and dug harder at the flesh. When she threw back her head for a breath she took a mouthful of water and gagged.