“Trust me on this, Weldon.”
I have, I have, I thought. But I kept my own counsel. Rosita and I went to the galley to eat breakfast, depressed with our prospects, bored with the routine, anxious to get back on land. “I wonder what’s going on in the world,” she said.
I remembered the morning paper I had picked up from the lawn and stuck in my coat pocket. “I’ll be right back,” I said. I went to our cabin and returned to the galley, flipping open The Houston Post, glancing at the headlines above the fold. Then I sat down across from Rosita and flipped the paper over and looked at an article at the bottom of page one. Hershel had gone up to the doghouse.
“Weldon?” she said.
“What?”
“Your face is white.”
“Remember the man I went to see Sunday night?”
“What about him?”
“He was killed by a hit-and-run driver.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. He was a blackmailer.”
“He was trying to blackmail you?”
“The issue involved Hershel and Linda Gail. He also had two photos of my father. One showed my father just before he was kill
ed in an explosion down in a bell hole. Another showed his body right after the explosion. All these years Grandfather and my mother and I had no idea what happened to him. The man’s name was Harlan McFey. He was a detective. I had hoped to find out who he was working for.”
“Is that why you went to see Roy Wiseheart?”
“Yes, I thought maybe he’d hired McFey. He said McFey had worked for his father but was fired two years ago.”
“Go back to what you said about Hershel and Linda Gail.”
“She’s probably having an affair.”
“How do you know?”
“McFey had a photo of her in a compromising situation. Half of the photo was torn off. I don’t know who the man is. I thought it might be Roy Wiseheart. I talked to him about it. I believe what he told me. I don’t believe he’s romantically involved with her.”
“You have to leave this alone, Weldon.”
“Just walk away?”
“Linda Gail has the mind of a child. Nothing you can do will change that. She’s Hershel’s responsibility.”
“I need to find out the circumstances of my father’s death. I have to find out why he didn’t write or tell us where he was.”
“But you have to leave Linda Gail and Hershel’s marital problems out of it.”
“Okay, General Lowenstein.”
“You want a slap?”
I looked out the porthole and saw two strange phenomena occur in a sequence that made no sense. The wind dropped, and instead of capping, the waves slid through the rig’s pilings like rippling green silk. Then the surface quivered and wrinkled like the skin on a living creature. I unlatched the glass on the porthole and looked up at the roughneck on the monkey board. He had unhooked his safety belt and stepped out on the hoist, one hand locked on the steel cable, and was riding it down to the deck, rotating his arm in a circle, like a third-base coach telling his runners to haul freight for home plate.
“Oh, boy,” I said.
“What?” she asked.