Flight to the Lonesome Place Read online

  “No,” he interrupted. “The captain had the same idea. Only, I don’t believe I’d better.”

  “But you’d be safe—”

  “Maybe. Though I think I’ll be just as safe in that beach cottage he got from your father.”

  “Oh, no!” she said instantly. “Don’t go there!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s the wrong place to hide. I know! It was the first place I thought of, because it’s so near Papa’s old villa, where Bernardo lives. And of course I wanted you there, for now you’re my third friend, and I’d feel so much better knowing you were near. But I was just being selfish. You must not go there.”

  He looked at her curiously. His main reason for deciding to go to the beach cottage was so he would be near enough to help her. For surely, if the captain was right, she was going to need all the help she could get.

  “I don’t understand, camarada,” he said finally. “What’s wrong with it?”

  Her dark eyes grew round and fearful. “Boy Blue, every time I think of you going to the cottage, your trouble sign turns almost black. That means something terrible will happen.”

  He looked grimly at the vessel’s wake, flowing into the distance. “Then I’d better stay away,” he muttered. “Only, I don’t want to go to a school—”

  “Oh, but you don’t have to,” she hastened to say. “I’ve another plan, just in case. You must find Black Luis.”

  “Black Luis?” he repeated, startled.

  “Yes. That’s what I am going to do if I have to run away from Bernardo.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I—I don’t know exactly,” she admitted. “But he can always be found by the right person—someone like you or me, or Captain Anders. You see, he’s had to go underground since Papa died.”

  “Underground? You mean he’s hiding?”

  “Of course he’s hiding, silly. If Bernardo finds him, he’ll be sent back to Santo Domingo, which would be awful. Papa gave him a little piece of land for helping me, and he’s hiding on it with someone named Marlowe. I think that greedy Bernardo wants the land back. Just why, I don’t know. It—it’s been so hard for Black Luis and me to keep in touch with each other. To get a letter to him I have to send it to Nicky Robles, who works at the beach near Córcega. Then Nicky has to take it around the point and put it in the hollow of an old sea grape tree. The only trouble is, well—”

  She turned and looked at him uncertainly, her lower lip caught between her small white teeth. “It’s the stamps,” she said. “Black Luis doesn’t have money to buy them, so I would always send him some when I could. But we haven’t been able to write to each other for a long time because Bernardo cut off my allowance.”

  “Cut off your allowance! But why?”

  “Because he’s a stinker. Someday, if he isn’t careful, I’ll wish him warts, and he’ll break out all over with them. Millions of warts.”

  Ronnie eyed her in disbelief. “You can’t really do that, can you?”

  Her chin came up. “Certainly I can! I haven’t tried it yet, because it’s such an awful thing to do to anyone. It should be kept for emergencies. But I’ve been tempted. Oh, it was so embarrassing to be without a penny, so that I couldn’t even pay back favors I owed the other girls. And how I wanted some pralines! Imagine going to school in New Orleans and being too poor to buy a single praline!”

  It was mainly a growing amazement that made Ronnie shake his head. Suddenly he asked, “Do you really like pralines so well?”

  “Oh, I love them. They’re my favorite sweet.”

  “Then wait till I get back. I’ve a whole box of them in my bag.”

  He hastened around the deck, and went inside to his stateroom. The door, which he had left unlocked but closed, was open now, and he entered so quickly that the cabin steward was taken momentarily by surprise.

  Josip was standing between the bunks, absorbed in the precious copy of Time and Duality. The steward looked up, and his thin lips parted briefly. But almost instantly the lips closed and twisted into a smile.

  “You must pardon me, young sir, but I am a great reader, and I simply cannot resist a book when I see one lying around. This one seems very interesting. Very interesting indeed.” Josip closed it, placed it on the bunk, then picked up a bundle of soiled towels and started out. On the threshold he paused briefly and said, “I will bring you some ice water later, young sir.”

  Ronnie said nothing. His swift anger had given way to a feeling of sickness in his stomach. Before going to lunch, he had carefully put the copy of Time and Duality away in his zipper bag.

  Josip had deliberately opened the bag—obviously to search for something that would prove what he already suspected. And Josip had found it.

  The book had been of interest to him for one reason only. The name “Ronnie Cleveland” was written on the flyleaf.

  5

  THE LAST BEEHIVE

  IT WAS UPSETTING ENOUGH to realize that Josip knew his secret and probably would try and profit from it, but with it went the growing fear of what would be waiting for him when he reached San Juan. To these concerns, as the vessel plowed steadily southeastward, there was added a physical discomfort that threatened to become serious. It was his wig.

  He had never been forced to wear it for long in a tropical climate. It had been designed merely to hide his own hair, which was thick and curly, and he had seldom minded its tightness in air-conditioned buildings. But here at sea it was becoming a torture to keep it on for more than an hour at a time.

  On the second day out, when his furiously hot and itching scalp had twice driven him to his stateroom to plunge his head into a basin of cool water, Ana María Rosalita offered a solution.

  “If you’ll let me trim your hair a little,” she said, “maybe it will feel better under the wig. You’ve just got to keep it hidden till you find Black Luis. Then he and Marlowe can do something about it. They’re awfully clever about all sorts of things.”

  She brought scissors and a comb to his stateroom and started to work. But as the first blue curl fell to the floor, she wailed tearfully, “Oh, I just can’t cut them. They’re so beautiful!”

  “Beautiful my eye,” he muttered. “I’m sick of ’em! Whack ’em off!”

  After that she surprised him by giving him an expert trim, which relieved the discomfort of the wig without making it too loose. When she had finished, she studied him critically a moment, then suddenly giggled.

  “So I’m funny,” he grumbled. “What is it?”

  “I’m not laughing at you, silly. I’m laughing at us.”

  “Well, I guess we are a sort of funny pair, camarada.”

  “Funny! ¡Madre mía! Here we are, just a couple of little kids, people would say—people that don’t know us. Because we’re smaller than we should be, and look younger than we are. And we act like kids most of the time. But we’re not, really. Not inside.”

  “No,” he admitted. “We’re not.”

  “Inside,” she said, “you’re grown-up and know more than lots of the smartest people. And me, I’m old, old, old inside, and know things you’ll never know. And why? I’ll tell you a secret: I really did have an Irish grandmother. She was a daughter of the Shee.”

  Ronnie, carefully picking up blue curls and putting them into a bag to be thrown overboard, jerked his head up at the word. The tiny girl said, “I don’t know how it’s spelled, but that’s how it’s pronounced. Have you ever heard of them?”

  “Sure, I’ve read about ’em,” he said.” The name was spelled S-i-d-h-e in the book, but pronounced ‘Shee.’ They are sort of mythical Celtic beings who were supposed to have all kinds of special powers.”

  “My grandmother had special powers, and she wasn’t mythical,” the girl retorted. “I inherited what I have from her. And I really can make people have warts.”

  “I didn’t say you couldn’t,” he told her.

  “No, but you thought it, and that’s practically the same as saying it.
”

  “Okay. Let’s say you have special powers. Then why can’t you use them to keep people like Bernardo from hurting you and sending you away?”

  “Because I’m too little,” she said. “I can’t get up enough—what’s the word?”

  “Steam?” he suggested.

  She giggled. “That’s good enough. Steam. When I grow bigger I’ll have more steam, and I’ll be able to flatten Bernardo, though of course I wouldn’t hurt him, even though I hate him. My grandmother said I must never use my power to really hurt or take advantage of someone, or I’ll lose it. Though of course it’s all right to help others. Last year, when Marlowe and Black Luis were trying to get me out of Santo Domingo, I practically wore myself to a frazzle—”

  “Wait a minute. You say Marlowe was with you?”

  “Of course he was with us. Without his help we couldn’t possibly have managed!”

  Ronnie scowled at her. “That’s funny. The captain didn’t mention him when he told me about how you escaped.”

  “The captain has never even seen Marlowe. That’s why.”

  “Oh. What’s he like? What sort of person is he?”

  “He—he’s not exactly a person, Boy Blue, though I think of him as that. I mean,” she added hesitantly, “he’s more of a—a personage.”

  Ronnie stared at her. “Are you trying to tell me he’s not real?”

  “Of course he’s real, silly! But, well, instead of my trying to—to explain him to you, maybe it would be better to wait till you meet him.”

  Ronnie sighed. He still didn’t know how to take Ana María Rosalita. She was so full of surprises and contradictions. Likely as not Marlowe would turn out to be entirely imaginary.

  “Okay,” he said. “But how do I find Black Luis’ place? You said it was somewhere below the Córcega beach, and that there was an old sea grape tree near it. But that doesn’t help too much, especially if I’m trying to find someone who’s hiding. How far is it from the captain’s cottage?”

  “Oh, dear.” She shook her small head. “I—I can’t even guess about distances. It’s probably miles and miles.” Suddenly she brightened. “I know! It’s at the last beehive.”

  “Huh? What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you know what a beehive is, silly?”

  He grinned. “Could it be something bees live in?”

  “Oh, Madre mía, I don’t mean that kind of a beehive. Maybe I should have said haystack. That’s what most people call them—the haystack hills. Only they look more like beehives to me. They are those funny little mountains that stretch all along the coast and down almost to Mayagüez.”

  “Oh, those!” He had caught only a brief and distant glimpse of them when he had flown to San Juan, but it had been enough to whet his imagination. The haystack hills were geological curiosities. Formed of eroded limestone, they stood out against the high mountains behind them like hundreds of giant green cones.

  “When Papa offered Black Luis some land,” she said, “he chose that piece with the last beehive on it. It’s right on the beach, and you can almost see it from the captain’s place. So you shouldn’t have any trouble finding it.”

  “But what about Black Luis? If he’s hiding out—”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. Marlowe will take you to him.”

  “But how do I find Marlowe?”

  She giggled. “You can’t. Not if you looked a thousand years. Just go there, and he’ll find you.”

  The Dry Tortugas were abeam that evening, and old Fort Jefferson, that incredible monster of the Gulf, was a grim gray ghost on the horizon. The next morning Ronnie could make out the mountains of Cuba off to starboard. The mountains were visible all day, becoming higher and nearer as the vessel moved steadily down the Old Bahama Channel, which separates the big island from the Bahamas. Schools of flying fish erupted constantly from the blue water like little silver birds, and dolphins raced them on either side.

  Late that afternoon the trade wind began to blow. It boomed all night, and it was still strong the next morning. For the first time the Señora did not appear at breakfast, nor did she come out and take her accustomed place in the deck chair afterward.

  “She’s mareada,” Ana María Rosalita reported happily. “Seasick. Am I glad! Now I don’t have to keep putting the eye on her.”

  “ ‘Putting the eye …,’ ” Ronnie repeated. “What in the name of the seven saints are you talking about?”

  “Oh, dear. Won’t you ever understand about me?” the tiny girl said. “The Señora hates me—”

  “I know she hates you. She called you a little monster that first night when I came aboard.”

  “She hates me because she’s afraid of me, and when I’m not watching she tries to beat me. Do you understand, Boy Blue?”

  “Not quite.”

  “But it’s so simple. She knows I have powers, and that makes her afraid, and naturally when you’re afraid of something so small you get angry and want to hit it—especially when it’s Bernardo’s half sister that you’d rather see drowned. Therefore—”

  “Therefore what?”

  “Therefore I am forced to put the eye on her to protect myself. Before we came aboard, she hit me twice when I wasn’t watching, and my head still has a buzzing in it. But when I use what power I have and put the eye on her, she cannot raise her hand. At night, of course, I am safe, for I lock myself in my stateroom. But during the day I must be on guard all the time, and it is such a strain. Now she is seasick, gracias a Dios, and I pray she remains that way.”

  “I see,” Ronnie said, his brain spinning.

  “And now I can enjoy everything,” she went on gaily. “The flying fish, the beautiful sea, talking to you … Oh, I wish we could sail on and on like this, for days and days and days. Wouldn’t it be wonderful?”

  It would indeed be wonderful, Ronnie thought, if only there was some way to escape from things …

  “But this is the fourth day,” she added suddenly, and now there was a break in her voice. “Tomorrow it will be over, for we will reach San Juan. And by tomorrow night I will be in Bernardo’s house, which is practically the same as saying that I will be in jail.”

  Ronnie chilled. He hadn’t wanted to think of San Juan. But soon he must face the moment when the ship would reach her dock, and he would be forced to get off.

  The thought of what might be waiting for him filled him with dread.

  Later that morning, soon after lifeboat drill, the high peaks of Haiti were abeam. The mountains continued, wrapped in mist, and became Santo Domingo in the afternoon. It was a wild and mysterious expanse of coast, and at any other time Ronnie would have been fascinated by it. But there was something sinister about it that repelled him, and it only added to the foreboding that had been growing in him.

  That night he awoke from a dream of terror so real that he leaped trembling from his bunk before he realized he was still safely aboard the Cristobal Colón.

  In the dream the vessel had already reached San Juan. Ana María Rosalita and the other passengers had gone ashore, and he was waiting for the captain to return from the steamship office on the other side of the dock building. “Stay aboard,” the captain had ordered, “and keep out of sight. I’ve a little business to take care of, but it won’t take me ten minutes. When I come back I’ll bring a cab, and we’ll leave the dock area together.”

  It had seemed like a good plan. But the captain was hardly out of sight when, peering from his hiding place in the deck shelter, Ronnie glimpsed the same two men who had stepped from the elevator back in New Orleans. They were standing in the shadow of one of the doorways, where they could see everyone who came ashore. That was shock enough. But a worse shock followed when a third man—a man he recognized in spite of a changed appearance—stepped quickly across the dock and started up the accommodation ladder.

  He was trapped on the ship. The only way off was down the ladder. If he escaped the man coming aboard, he would be at the mercy of the two watching
for him on the dock.

  That was only half the dream. The rest of it was the bad part, and Ronnie tried to block it from his mind by doing over an equation from Time and Duality. Last night he thought he’d found a mistake in Dr. Prynne’s mathematics, and he’d been anxious to recheck it.

  But for the first time since getting the book, Dr. Prynne’s fantastic theory failed to hold him. The dream was too horribly real. He kept seeing himself running through the ship, frightened, desperate … seeing Josip blocking the way, demanding money to hide him … then suddenly hitting the steward, and racing forward on the next deck where the stevedores were beginning to unload.…

  There was the moment of uncertainty when he thrust a handful of bills upon a startled winch operator … and the greater uncertainty when he was hoisted over the ship’s side in a cargo net—only to discover that he had been sighted, and that one of the watching men had drawn a weapon and was pointing it at him.…

  He awoke before he reached the dock. And that, in a way, was the worst part of it. Had he dreamed what was really going to happen tomorrow, and was he going to be killed?

  When he met Ana María Rosalita on deck in the morning, the ship was crossing Mona Passage and the blue-green mountains of Puerto Rico were rising ahead.

  The tiny girl said, “You hardly spoke at breakfast. What’s wrong, Boy Blue?”

  Reluctantly he told her about his dream.

  “Oh, dear!” Her eyes widened. “And it was real? I mean, real real?”

  “The realest thing ever,” he muttered. “That’s why it—it sort of shook me.”

  Her brow puckered. “My grandmother told me that a real real dream is supposed to happen just exactly as it’s dreamed, and that it should be looked upon as—as—”

  “As a warning?”

  “Not entirely. I mean, it should be used as a guide, so that you’ll know what to do when—”

  “Guide nothing! That dirty rat with a pistol was out to get me—and if there’s any truth in the dream, he will.”