White waves shooting up like dancing ghosts in the Moon-sketched,
spray-swept dark were Jack's first beacon of the island and brought a
sense of physical danger, breaking the trancelike yet frantic mood he
had felt ever since he had spoken with Mrs. Kesserich.
Coming around farther into the wind, he scudded past the end of the
island into the choppy sea on the landward side. A little later he let
down the reefed sail in the cove of the sea urchins, where the water
was barely moving, although the air was shaken by the pounding of the
surf on the spine between the two islands.
After making fast, he paused a moment for a scrap of cloud to pass the
moon. The thought of the spiny creatures in the black fathoms under the
_Annie O._ sent an odd quiver of terror through him.
The Moon came out and he started across the glistening rocks of the
spine. But he had forgotten the rising tide. Midway, a wave clamped
around his ankles, tried to carry him off, almost made him drop the
heavy object he was carrying. Sprawling and drenched, he clung to the
rough rock until the surge was past.
Making it finally up to the fence, he snipped a wide gate with the
wire-cutters.
The windows of the house were alight. Hardly aware of his shivering,
he crossed the lawn, slipping from one clump of shrubbery to another,
until he reached one just across the drive from the doorway. At that
moment he heard the approaching _chuff_ of the Essex, the door of the
cottage opened, and Mary Alice Pope stepped out, closely followed by
Hani or Hilda.
Jack shrank close to the shrubbery. Mary looked pale and blank-faced,
as if she had retreated within herself. He was acutely conscious of
the inadequacy of his screen as the ghostly headlights of the Essex
began to probe through the leaves.
But then he sensed that something more was about to happen than just
the car arriving. It was a change in the expression of the face behind
Mary that gave him the cue--a widening and side-wise flickering of the
cold eyes, the puckered lips thinning into a cruel smile.
The Essex shifted into second and, without any warning, accelerated.
Simultaneously, the woman behind Mary gave her a violent shove. But
at almost exactly the same instant, Jack ran. He caught Mary as she
sprawled toward the gravel, and lunged ahead without checking. The
Essex bore down upon them, a square-snouted, roaring monster. It
swerved viciously, missed them by inches, threw up gravel in a skid,
and rocked to a stop, stalled.
* * * * *
The first, incredulous voice that broke the pulsing silence, Jack
recognized as Martin Kesserich's. It came from the car, which was
slewed around so that it almost faced Jack and Mary.
"Hani, you tried to kill her! You and Hilda tried to kill her again!"
The woman slumped over the wheel slowly lifted her head. In the
indistinct light, she looked the twin of the woman behind Jack and
Mary.
"Did you really think we wouldn't?" she asked in a voice that spat with
passion. "Did you actually believe that Hilda and I would serve this
eighteen years' penance just to watch you go off with her?" She began
to laugh wildly. "You've never understood your sisters at all!"
Suddenly she broke off, stiffly stepped down from the car. Lifting her
skirts a little, she strode past Jack and Mary.
Martin Kesserich followed her. In passing, he said, "Thanks, Barr." It
occurred to Jack that Kesserich made no more question of his appearance
on the island than of his presence in the laboratory. Like Mrs.
Kesserich, the great biologist took him for granted.
Kesserich stopped a few feet short of Hani and Hilda. Without shrinking
from him, the sisters drew closer together. They looked like two gaunt
hawks.
"But you waited eighteen years," he said. "You could have killed her
at any time, yet you chose to throw away so much of your lives just to
have this moment."
"How do you know we didn't like waiting eighteen years?" Hani answered
him. "Why shouldn't we want to make as strong an impression on you as
anyone? And as for throwing our lives away, that was your doing. Oh,
Martin, you'll never know anything about how your sisters feel!"
He raised his hands baffledly. "Even assuming that you hate me--" at
the word "hate" both Hani and Hilda laughed softly--"and that you were
prepared to strike at both my love and my work, still, that you should
have waited...."
Hani and Hilda said nothing.
Kesserich shrugged. "Very well," he said in a voice that had lost all
its tension. "You've wasted a third of a lifetime looking forward to
an irrational revenge. And you've failed. That should be sufficient
punishment."
Very slowly, he turned around and for the first time looked at Mary.
His face was clearly revealed by the twin beams from the stalled car.
Jack grew cold. He fought against accepting the feelings of wonder, of
poignant triumph, of love, of renewed youth he saw entering the face in
the headlights. But most of all he fought against the sense that Martin
Kesserich was successfully drawing them all back into the past, to 1933
and another accident. There was a distant hoot and Jack shook. For a
moment he had thought it a railway whistle and not a ship's horn.