ONE

The sea was running higher the next morning, but not yet threatening. Down at the harbor, Craig Soaras started the powerful engines of Elias Johnson’s workhorse boat—husky twins of 250 horsepower each. The Jessica could take any weather that might blow up sooner than expected.

Craig had asked Bonnie Taylor—and hastily included Elizabeth Carr in his invitation—to sail to Chatham with him, but both women said there was still too much mess to clean up at the lighthouse. Elizabeth, particularly, wanted to have the building spic and span before Wanda Lind­strom arrived.

Craig had no difficulty recognizing Dr. Lindstrom on the Chatham dock. Other women were in shorts and halters, tanned and informal. She was pale, and wearing an elegant tan linen dress, with her hair combed severely back over a sculptured face. She needed no rimmed glasses to appear the academic she was. Her no-nonsense, brisk air projected her total self-assurance.

After an impersonal greeting and some confusion with loading the laboratory crates, Craig headed the Jessica back to Yarkie Island. His own innate shyness matched the woman’s formal reserve. From the wheel, he watched the ramrod stiffness with which she stood holding the rail. He took her manner to discourage conversation. He felt like a schoolboy with a teacher; you didn’t speak until spoken to.

Dr. Wanda Lindstrom was a good sailor, though, he had to give her that. The boat was heading into the wind, and landlubbers could be forgiven if the spanking motion made their stomachs “bilgey,” as Cape Cod sailors put it.

Craig regarded the straight back with an open curiosity on his weather-­creased face. The wind was draping the woman’s dress closely around her body. She really was a looker, like the slim models in the magazines. Observing the biologist’s femininity, Craig realized he had been expecting someone like his old teachers on Yarkie, plain as grocery bags. There was a spice in this woman’s combination of academic frostiness and the looks of a movie star. He couldn’t put his finger on which actress she reminded him of—it was the one with the high cheekbones, straightforward eyes, and wide mouth that could show a charming smile as well as the slight frown with which Wanda Lindstrom was turning to him now.

The man could not know it, but he was accurately sensing the two aspects of the woman’s personality. She was of Polish descent on her mother’s side, which accounted for her given name and the intriguing modeling of her face. It also gave her a passionate nature hidden beneath the stern exterior, but quick to flare into either anger or love. She kept the latter well hidden under the constraints of her father’s blood. He was Swedish of the old school, class-conscious and stiff-­upper-­lip.

Whatever the combination, Craig thought, he preferred Bonnie Taylor’s sunny smile and her flowing good nature. His regret was that Bonnie was so deeply upset by Sharky’s end. He was sharply disturbed, himself. He could only hope, with the others, that Peter Hubbard and this woman scientist would come up with the answer quickly.

Last night on the beach with Bonnie, he had been the one to try to put Yarkie’s problem in perspective. Big fish eat little fish eat little fish eat little fish, down to the plankton—on Yarkie, something had gone wrong with the chain. It was reckless for men to forget that Nature was always a primal shark. She might seem to be swimming placidly, half-­asleep, but you always had to be wary. She could always turn and tear you to pieces, as the brewing storm might do in these waters later this very day.

“A little rough, isn’t it?” the Harvard woman was asking.

Craig Soaras smiled broadly at her, almost an apology, wanting her to know that he and the others on Yarkie appreciated her assistance and wanted to be friendly. “Not yet,” he said. “But it looks to be a bad one by tonight.”

Her small frown held. “How long to Yarkie?”

The bowler shape was already rising out of the sea to the east. “Ten minutes, about.” Craig asked anxiously, “You feeling all right, m’am?”

She surprised him with a light laugh. “No problem.” Then she added in an open, friendly tone, “Please don’t call me ‘m’am’.”

Craig Soaras’s mustache twitched amiably. “Okay, doctor.”

“Just Wanda does it,” she told him pleasantly. “I understand we’ll all be working together for a while, Mr. Soaras.”

He responded, “Just Craig will do,” and they laughed together.

With that, the man tied the wheel and went to stand at the rail. He noticed her hands. The left one was beautiful, with soft skin and long, sensitive fingers. The right hand shocked him. It was brute red, with crooked scar tissue in a leathery pattern. The woman saw his eyes. “A lab accident,” she explained. And stopped. No need to talk of the image in her head every time she looked at her crippled hand. The mishap had been over in a flash. An experimental mouse had squirmed away and leaped into the beaker of nitric acid. Her reflex act had been so stupid, so fruitless. The animal was dead before her plunging hand hit the acid. Yet she supposed she would do the same thing again. An instinct to save life? Sometimes she thought she ought to have been a medical doctor rather than a research biologist.

The husky boat rose and fell, bumped and kicked up spray in the rising sea. Craig returned to the wheel. Dr. Lindstrom watched his easy, sure motions, his handsome eyes alert on the compass. The woman wished she could free her lab-­cramped feelings, unfurl them to fly like the gulls to which the Yarkie sailor was pointing. The birds were wheeling over a roiling circle of sea to their left.

“School of blues over there,” he called from the wheel. “There’ll be a traffic jam here in five minutes.” He would have liked to slow and show her the fishing, but it was no time for side excursions.

The woman’s thoughts were elsewhere. Maybe if she could ever let her emotions show, Peter Hubbard would be less a stickler in their relationship. Thinking of her colleague brought her mind back to her business here. She moved over to Craig Soaras, steadying herself on the tilting deck with feet wide apart. The wind was blowing her hair out of its knot and she held her head tightly in her hands. “Craig, do you know the problem in the island? All Dr. Hubbard told me was the equipment he wanted to check on insecticides, something about rats and roaches behaving strangely . . .”

Soaras told her briefly everything he had seen himself and heard about from others.

Dr. Wanda Lindstrom said, “Well, it does sound like a mix-­up of poisons. Shouldn’t be too much trouble to correct.” Craig Soaras was elated to hear it.