His voice trailed off. He looked indescribably sad. Lindy reached across the table and took his hand. “You’ll still race, Dad.”

The old man did not answer. Lips clamped, he stared stubbornly ahead. They finished dinner and left him playing dominoes at the bar.

Crossing the Bridge, Lindy sat distantly by the window. Mitch saw that her cheeks were wet.

“It isn’t his racing he’s worried about,” he pointed out. “He’s afraid I’ll sail off with his little girl.”

“Then why won’t he say it?” she murmured. “Mitch?”

“Um?”

“Why doesn’t anybody ever say it?”

“’I love you?’” He thought for a moment. “I say it, all the time.”

“When you mean ‘thank you.’ Why not when you mean ‘I love you.’”

He squeezed her hand. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

“Watch it, Romeo, there’s a cop.” He slowed.

He had sounded tinny as a worn-out tape, and he didn’t have the slightest idea why.

Chapter 8

CHAPTER 8

He clung aloft. A searing sun soared and fell with every roll. Earlier, he had been teased with shade from the mainsail. Now the sun had risen above the sail and there was no relief.

She had shaved his head at Bora Bora to see how he would look, bald. It was baking now like a potato. A stupid, childish error in the tropics. He visualized his brains at a slow simmer in a pan under the bare skull. He ached for the cool of the cabin.

He needed water badly but he was afraid to leave the mast too soon.

He was still plowing seas he had not yet searched by daylight, nearing the southern limit of his patrol. He was almost back at the spot where he had discovered her gone. In these waters, six hours before, he had tossed in the strobe light and buoy and man-overboard flag. He had an unreasoning hope that he would see them again, once he surmounted the wave ahead.

She, nestling in the horseshoe buoy, holding aloft the strobe, which she had swum to during the night...

He climbed the swell. Nothing. The vision fled.

Far below he heard three bells from the cabin. Nine-thirty. He glanced windward, toward the sun. It was high enough for a morning shot. With that and his dead-reckoning track, he would have an estimated position to transmit to Tahiti, if he ever raised them on the radio. He could brew coffee to awaken himself, shoot the sun, work it out, try Tahiti again, and be back on his perch in fifteen minutes.