Free Dead in the Water by Nancy Holder

her but a pile of bedclothes. Those pajamas were in the cherrywood bureau back home. All his things were in their proper places, awaiting his return. The only missing items were the clothes he’d had on—white Windbreaker, the shirt with the boat blueprints on it, the white duck trousers. His dazzling white sneakers. His wallet and keys. She doubled her fists. He was substantial, somewhere out there in the world, not an old widow’s dream made of blankets. Damn it, she knew he was alive.
    She burst into tears, missing him so badly, so terribly. Doubling her fists, she pressed them into her midsection and bent over, weeping. He was alive.
    The boat rocked. It creaked. The shadows shifted.
    Something was awry. Out of kilter. She felt it. She stood perfectly still, moving only her eyes, as a thick dread crawled over her feet, up her legs, touched her fingertips.
    Suddenly a chill rippled up her spine. She straightened. A finger of ice on each vertebra, pressing in hard, someone testing how thick her body was. Goose bumps plucked at herscalp. Her heart started racing again. Unwillingly, she slid her glance to the bed. There was nothing there that shouldn’t be.
    Nothing there that should be.
    The dread covered her chest and shoulders, closed around her neck. She held her breath.
    There. On the lamp side of her bed, the closet door was open. It gaped like an unhappy, hungry mouth. Back home in Pomona, it was part of her bedtime ritual. Here, she’d forgotten to close it, and that had startled her when she’d come back into the room.
    That’s what it was, and—
    A chill fanned her shoulders like a shawl. She shivered once, violently. This was silly, worrying about a closet door. Not even she, the quintessential creature of habit, would be so jolted by a triviality like that. It was the dream that was frightening her. She had probably heard a noise and that had awakened her from her dream, and she was still a bit disoriented.
    Pursing her lips, she shook her head. Not disoriented, not a jot. She was frightened, as she had been in the dining room that afternoon.
    The ship rolled to the right. The closet door slid shut with a crack and Ruth jumped. It slid back open, cracked again. Roll, crack. Roll, crack.
    “Is someone there?” she asked in a firm voice, though not very loud. She didn’t want the van Burens to think she was a senile old woman, given to talking to herself. Then she realized that wasn’t the question she really wanted to ask.
    “Is someone
here
?” She licked her lips.
    A sense. A presence. A shadow in the corner, a dark spot on the ceiling. The dampness of the floor.
    A sense. A presence.
    Oh, God. Oh, could it be?
    Her heart hammered. She didn’t dare move again, or speak. It couldn’t be; she’d never believed any of it, the table-rapping and the automatic writing. Now she saw all that for what it had been, and how she’d been going through the paces because there was nothing left to do. The Coast Guardwas no longer looking for him, and no one else seemed to care.
    She hadn’t believed. Ever.
    But something was wrong.
    Yet if it were wrong, how could
he
be the source of it?
    A looming presence. Something that was walking closer; she could almost hear the footsteps on the clammy floor. Almost feel someone touch her hand with a finger like a frozen bone.
    “Stephen?” she rasped. “Are you … are you trying to reach me, darling?”
    Listening to herself, she flushed to her roots and stepped boldly to the foot of the bed.
    No presence. Nothing.
    Sat down hard on top of the cocoon. It deflated beneath her weight.
    Heavens, maybe she
was
a senile old lady. How unbelievably depressing.
    And yet, she had felt … something. She had been frightened for some reason.
    Was still frightened.
    On the other side of the wall, someone mumbled, stirred. Oh, no, she’d awakened the van Burens. She sat, poised, listening. It was stuffy in the cabin. The air hung in layers that were hard to draw in.
    She