Black Cat Weekly #8

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 8Moving day

STEVE retrieved Linda’s paintbox from the ledges and fell into step beside her on the path across the Head. He was still tired and hot, and Linda’s question had done nothing to cool him under the collar. At least, he knew now what she thought of the place, and, presumably, of its inhabitants. If she wanted to paint from here on in, she could count on getting no interruptions from him. Linda, however, was too well insulated by her own excitement to notice his formal politeness. As long as he answered questions, he could have practiced ventriloquism without making a dent on her for awhile. They had left the Head behind and were well along the Juniper Point road before she even missed the usual easy friendliness in his voice.

But by the time they reached her doorstep she was distinctly annoyed. If Steve thought he could get away with giving her the treatment reserved for snooty tourists, he could think again. She accepted the paintbox he handed her with a “thank you” formal enough to match his manners, but she paused with her foot on the steps to express her opinion.

“If you do happen to know what you’re being redheaded about, you might let me in on it someday,” she said indignantly. “People always warn you that red-haired men as pigheaded and touchy. I guess I’ve been lucky not to know any before.” Then she sailed on into the house and up the stairs.

She had exactly fifteen minutes to shower and change for Dr. Sutton’s supper party, but she made it somehow. The Cobbs were the first aboard the Delight. When the Purchases appeared on deck, Linda was still in the middle of her account of the afternoon’s excitement. Orrin Wood was well represented in Dr. Sutton’s private collection, and his interest matched her own.

“I ought to be embarrassed to tears,” Linda admitted. “I made a complete i***t of myself tearing around like a first-aid squad. But all I can think of is that I actually talked to Orrin Wood. Here! My goodness, this isn’t Provincetown where you fall over people with palettes every six steps. If he had turned out to be Admiral Peary, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash.”

Steve could feel his ears getting red. He looked hastily over at Linda, but she was still concentrating on Dr. Sutton.

“I’d have expected a sailor myself,” the doctor agreed consolingly. “Artists seem to attract one another. At least, they certainly congregate in the art colonies.”

“But Orrin Wood’s not our only artist,” Mrs. Purchas said. “Elsbeth Rules and Etienne Rienet and Harold Waters are here every summer, too, now, and we already have an art show in August. We don’t let anybody forget that.”

From then on, Steve decided, the situation got more and more out of hand. He did some unobtrusive maneuvering to corner Linda a minute, but between his father’s yarns about Orrin Wood and his mother’s tales of art-show personalities, he never got to first base. And at supper, practically the entire length of the table managed somehow to get in his way. Short of strongarm tactics, there was nothing he could do about it at the moment. Just the same, he had no intention of spending the entire night in the doghouse.

This was the Delight’s last day in Purchas Basin, however, and Dr. Sutton’s guests lingered, chatting long after his crew had cleared away the table on the afterdeck. Captain Pel had finished the cruiser’s repairs, and tomorrow she would weigh anchor for Harpswell Harbor beside Graveyard Head.

“Waity claims I’ll need to pull my shades over there,” the doctor said, smiling.

“A bit populous after the Basin,” Captain Pel admitted. “Harpswell Harbor’s home port for the Merriconeag Yacht Club. Race days are busiest, of course, but you won’t get lonesome. Summer young people buzz around there day and night. It keeps the Coast Guard patrol boats nosing in and out with an eye to accidents.” He chuckled reminiscently. “Prohibition days, rum-runners avoided that harbor like poison.”

Steve thought the doctor looked somewhat taken aback by the prospect, but anyone who liked people as much as he did was bound to enjoy that anchorage. His crew, of course, would revel in it. With visiting cruisers putting in nights, there was always plenty of scuttle butt. It was no place to keep a secret.

Dr. Cobb, with a word of apology, looked at his watch and made a reluctant move to leave. “Don’t let me disturb the rest of you,” he said, “but I’ve got to run over to Augusta tomorrow and I still have some material to get ready.”

“And Pel and I are going to Popham for the-day.” Mrs. Purchas rose with him, nodding at her family. “It’s high time we were all ashore. We hate to have you leave us, though, Doctor. We’ll miss you on the Point.”

“You won’t even have a chance,” the doctor warned her cheerfully. “I’ll be on your doorsteps daily, wanting just as much advice as ever.”

They all strolled across to the boarding steps together, and Steve did not have to waste energy being subtle. He steered his mother and father firmly into the skiff with Dr. Cobb and stranded Linda in his own. Ignoring him, she turned a little to wave at Dr. Sutton as they headed for the landing, but there was still enough light to see her expression. Steve fixed his eyes on the curls around one ear.

“They’re not red,” he remarked hopefully. “She probably has a forgiving nature. Besides, I’ll sit up and beg if she’s got a dog biscuit handy.”

Linda laughed in spite of herself. “Not for my dog biscuit, you won’t,” she retorted. “You’re too unpredictable. You might growl the minute you got it.”

“Not even a ‘woof,’” Steve promised hastily. “I’m just a lap dog at heart!”

Watching the length of leg he was unfurling for a jump to the float, Linda chuckled. She had called him redheaded, and maybe touchy and pigheaded, too. She couldn’t remember exactly. But she still didn’t know what she had said or done to annoy him in the first place. Right now it didn’t seem to matter too much. Steve made the skiff fast, and they wandered along the wharf to the path. A young moon hung high in the sky. It was a night made for lingering, and he saw no sense in turning a conveniently narrow path into a race track. He smiled down at the girl close behind him.

“Whatever it was, I didn’t mean it, Steve,” she exclaimed.

“Next time I’ll be brilliant,” he assured her. “Just ask me what on earth Orrin Wood would be doing in a place like this and I’ll figure you’re talking about Admiral Peary. What could be simpler?”

Linda gasped. “Did I say that? No wonder you thought I was an insulting heel. Maybe I’d better beg for that dog biscuit!”

She curled both hands appealingly, and Steve marched her to her front door. “You’d better get in there quick,” he threatened, grinning. “You’re a ‘disturbin’ woman’ and I’m getting as unsettled as Shubael Farr.”

Linda tore through her breakfast dishes next morning as if cup handles grew back like crabs’ legs. All she had left to worry over was the chicken that Steve’s mother had showed her how to fix, and if she cooked that now, she’d only have to reheat it at suppertime. She did not even have to prepare lunch. Her father had already started for his appointment in Augusta, and the rest of the day was hers. Shedding tears furiously, she chopped up onions to add to her bowlful of seasoned bread crumbs and popped the stuffed bird into the oven. Eleven o’clock and you’ll be done, she thought with satisfaction. Then she settled down with the Sunday papers.

The chicken was cooked and cooling on the kitchen table, and she was about ready to consider a sandwich for herself when Steven banged at the back door. “Dinner?” he asked hopefully, but Linda promptly squashed that notion.

“Nothing doing,” she told him. “That’s Dad’s supper, and you needn’t try to work on my sympathies either. I saw what your mother left you.”

Steve looked reproachful. “Hardly more than this and that,” he told her. “It could stand supplementing. If they hadn’t eloped with the car, we’d go get a spoogie.”

“We can have western sandwiches. I saved some onions.” Linda hunted in the refrigerator for eggs and ham. “But what under the sun’s a spoogie?”

“A nice little Italian sandwich.” Steve stirred onions for her enthusiastically. “The roll’s a foot long and they stuff it. Onions and cheese and lettuce and meat and peppers and tomatoes doused with olive-oil dressing. I’ll buy you one the first time we go to Brunswick to the movies. How about tomorrow night?”

“I’d love it,” Linda said.

“Better have some indigestion pills along.” Dr. Sutton poked his head around the doorframe. “I’ve been knocking out there,” he explained, “but Steve was so busy itemizing that grocery list he calls a sandwich, nobody heard me.” He strolled in and joined them at the kitchen table, eying their westerns with appreciation. “I came to see whether you’d cruise around to the Head with me. I’ll bring you back overland in the covered wagon.”

The pair of them nodded eagerly. “We’ll come if you eat lunch with us,” Linda said, laughing. She got out slices of bread and broke more eggs and ham into the rest of the fried onions. “You certainly can’t stand being surrounded by us if you don’t.”

They went out in the Delight’s tender together and clambered aboard. Standing on deck, chatting with Dr. Sutton, Linda watched the preparations for departure, fascinated. It was an old story to Steve, of course, and he gave the crew a willing hand.

“Waity says all Purchases have salt water instead of blood in their veins,” the doctor told Linda. “Anyway, that young man has. I’ve been watching him from the deck here evenings. He spends hours on the ledges, studying the tide pools and the weed. They’re quite a family, Linda, all of them.”

The Delight began to cut through the blue waters of the Basin, heading for Potts Harbor and the long tip of Harpswell Neck, and the doctor relaxed comfortably beside his guests in a deck chair.

“Moving day’s no trouble if it merely means shifting anchor from one harbor to another,” he said. “The day’s perfect. Let’s enjoy it.”

“Sailing weather,” Steve called it, and he pointed to the sloops dotting the Bay in every direction. The cruiser saluted three or four in friendly fashion, giving them right of way, as she navigated the Gut off the Neck. Then she reached for the Sound, and Linda looked around her, enchanted.

“If a little sloop’s so lovely, no wonder people say a clipper was the most beautiful thing man ever created,” she exclaimed.

The Merriconeag waters bore a score of sails—big and little—yawls, sloops, ketches, even a catboat or two. Steve studied them interestedly.

“Half a dozen of them laid over after the inter-Bay race yesterday,” he explained. “They’re on their way home. Look at the designs on the pennants at their mastheads, Linda, if you want to know which ones belong to the same yacht club.” He indicated the sloop in the lead. “She’s one of Dad’s, and that’s a Small Pointer a boat’s length behind her. They’re good all right, but a Purchas-built sloop will show her heels to ’em.”

Dr. Sutton gave the Purchas sloop a keen scrutiny, but he obviously reserved his real enthusiasm for motor cruisers. He turned his binoculars with undisguised interest on every one they sighted.

“There are four or five handsome craft nearby,” he said finally. “Know any of them, Steve?”

The three of them turned to look astern, and Steve nodded.

“Two of them, sir. One’s an Orr’s Island boat and another’s out of South Freeport. I never saw any of the rest before, but the Bay’s always full of visitors in the summer, just cruising or putting in for tuna like that pulpit-rigged gray job farthest out. We get our quota nights in both harbors, Potts and Harpswell.”

He watched the sportsmen’s ship cut a buoy deliberately and shook his head. “Probably the kind of idiots who don’t use their charts either,” he said. “Waste of good Coast Guard fuel bothering to go out after them; they’re always hanging themselves up on some ledge.” Then he chuckled, pointing to the gray patrol boat slipping around the end of the Neck. “They’ll get an earful this time anyway. That’s the Coast Guard hailing them now.”

He dismissed the cruisers indifferently and smiled at Linda. “Let’s get a before-and-after look at the Head,” he suggested. “Next week you’ll be able to see why it got its name. I’m tackling the graveyard Saturday.”

“Then it’s my last chance to remind you to save the wild things for Loraney,” she said promptly. “You coming, too, Doctor?”

Their host shook his head. “Go on and be energetic if you have to,” he said lazily. “I’m much too comfortable to move.”

He picked up his binoculars again, and the other two made their way forward to settle in the bow where they could watch the features of Graveyard Head take shape.

“Why, it’s loveliest when you approach it from the water,” Linda exclaimed. “Oh, dear, do you suppose Dr. Sutton is even remembering to look?”

Steve glanced back along the deck. When he craned his neck, he could spot the doctor with the binoculars to his eyes, but they were still obviously trained on the other cruisers. “He doesn’t see a thing except those motor ships,” he reported, and Linda gave up.

“I guess owning anything as luxurious as the Delight is enough to make you motor-minded,” she admitted, “but I wouldn’t waste five minutes on those cruisers if there was a sail in sight!”

Why anyone would go cruising around on diesels when he could use sails was something Steve had never figured out either, and he nodded vigorous agreement.

“Oh, well,” he said, “a man’s got to have one quirk just to keep him human, and every other way, Dr. Sutton’s the best they come.”