Free Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene by Stuart Palmer Page B

highly combustible mixture of qualities, if I may say so. Perhaps what your precise relationship was is not important. What may be much more important is what someone thought it was. We’ll know in time. Now we’ve delayed long enough. We must act.”
    “Well, you seem to have taken charge. Tell me what to do.”
    Miss Withers was silent for a minute, thinking. She could hear, coming from the forward stateroom, an undulating drone of sound, voices rising and falling in talk and song, and she realized that the sound had been there all the time as a kind of background to the silence of this grim room, which seemed somehow unbroken even by the hushed and urgent words of the elderly woman and the young woman standing there in the presence of death. It was strange, Miss Withers thought. Strange that a man could die alone in an agony of convulsions a few short yards from company and help. Why hadn’t Captain Westering cried out or staggered into the passage? Had the poison that killed him, whatever it was, been too swift and deadly? Or had he, feeling the poison’s first effects, simply crawled into his berth unsuspecting, thinking they would pass and realizing too late that they would not?
    “On the dock,” Miss Withers said, “you will find a young man waiting for me. His name is Al Fister. Go and tell him to find a phone and call the police. Tell him to return as quickly as he can and to see that no one leaves this vessel before the police arrive. You will, of course, come back aboard to wait with the rest of us.”
    Lenore Gregory turned to go, and at that moment the stateroom door suddenly flew open without a sound to reveal against the background of the short passage one of the most startling male creatures that Miss Withers, fresh though she was from the haunts of hippies, had ever seen. Tall, perhaps six-six, and thin as a slat, he wore a soiled white robe that flapped around his thin shanks some eight inches above the ankles. On his feet, otherwise bare, were Jesus sandals bound on with leather thongs. His hair was long and grizzled and greasy, hanging to his shoulders, and a grizzled beard, growing like a thicket from most of his face, hung down his front as far as a length of hemp rope that girded his waist. From this encroaching coppice of hair, set tight on either side against a bulbous nose, were two glittering little eyes that glared over Miss Withers’ shoulder at the body of Captain Westering. He looked, Miss Withers thought, like an obscene caricature of Moses. His voice, when he spoke, had a curious hollow sound, as if he were talking into an empty barrel.
    “What are you doing here?” he said. “ What have you done to Captain Westering ?”

7.
    M ISS WITHERS, LIKE A solid Victorian period piece, stood grimly in a corner, removed slightly in space and immeasurably in spirit from the litter of human odds and ends that shared the stateroom with her. Besides her, there were seven people in the room. Flanking her on either side, casting covert glances of curiosity at each other across her spinsterish bosom, were Al Fister and Lenore Gregory. They had assumed their positions on Miss Withers’ flanks in a kind of mutual and unspoken commitment, prepared on one hand to defend her against all comers, and deriving from her nearness, on the other, a measure of comfort and confidence. By Lenore, as a matter of fact, Al was incited to even more elevated reactions. Her dark, ascetic loveliness had burst upon him like a revelation on the dark dock in salt-scented fog, and he had been feeling ever since all thumping heart and outsized hands and feet. Sensing at once, even before his sense was confirmed, that she was somehow threatened by events, he had begun to burst with Quixotic fancies.
    In another corner, sitting cross-legged on the floor with his thin shanks exposed, was the startling creature who had materialized earlier in the captain’s stateroom like a soiled avenging angel to catch Miss Withers and