Suddenly she was in a screaming, thrashing tantrum. She shrieked and shouted, blew her whistle and waved, finally came to her senses only when she sank below the surface and swallowed water, which she vomited.

Even then, she took a few instinctive strokes after the boat. Then she lay back, cradling the jug and staring up at the cobalt sky. Her anger cooled. She had a great thirst. And she was very tired and very frightened.

Chapter 9

CHAPTER 9

They parked in bright California sunlight outside a wooden fence: COX’S BOATYARD. HAUL-OUT AND REPAIR. ALL TERMS CASH BEFORE LAUNCHING.

The tiny yard lay next to a vast fiberglass boat-factory in the backwaters of Richardson Bay. It was tidal-flat, shipyard country, smelling of sewage, mud, resin, and sawdust. The flats were lined with houseboats, some flamboyant, garish, others stagnant and rotting.

They passed into the yard through a door slatting in a breeze from the flats. An enormous wooden loft stood inside. A marine railway slid from the building’s mouth like a rusting tongue, lapping the shallow water alongside a dock. The yard must need high tides to haul out a deep-draft boat, thought Mitch; it probably accounted for its anonymity. He’d had no idea the place was even here.

The ways were almost empty. He guessed that the yard was on the edge of bankruptcy. A battered old schooner, for some reason chained to her scaffolding, towered outside the building. A bearded youth with a headband and earring was sanding her planks. An ancient Italian tapped calking into a fishing-boat hull. A pale, discouraged fat man was prying rot from a ketch-rigged motor-sailer that Mitch would not have tried to take across San Francisco Bay.

And at the end of the wharf lay his dream. In an outgoing tide which must barely have floated her, she strained against her lines. She was even prettier in white than red. Her varnished rails and hatches glittered in the sun. Carved on teak sideboards below the taffrail were gilded letters: LORELEI, and below them, SAN FRANCISCO. Her bowsprit was pointed toward the entrance of Richardson Bay and the Golden Gate beyond. To Mitch she seemed impatient. Lindy was watching him curiously.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” he asked.

"You’re beautiful.” She squeezed his hand. “Yes, Mitch, she’s lovely, you were right. How do we see her?”

There seemed no one aboard. A power saw was screaming inside the building, so they wandered in. They sniffed hemp and seasoned wood. The bone structure of a half-finished sloop loomed inside, her massive keel leading back into shadows. Her ribs rose high above them. Mitch saw from the layer of dust on her oaken stem that work on her had stopped some years before.