Free The Man Who Was Left Behind by Rachel Ingalls Page B

day we saw it there again and barrelled down to the jetty to get on board. My God, it was somebody’s private yacht. Nobody on board but the English mate. The real boat was a rowboat.”
    “Then we got into the rowboat and this girl who was staying on the island climbed in too, and dropped a paperback she’d been carrying, and Hank handed it back to her——”
    “Fanny Hill. No kidding. Sort of broke her up. She’d been reading it with the cover held back.”
    “The rooms out there were gorgeous, weren’t they? If we’d known you could stay on it, we’d have booked in there.”
    “That boat was a beauty,” Whitlow had said. “Some big wheel owned it and chartered her out for the season. The mate said it was built in Holland.”
    “Never mind,” Sally Whitlow had said. “One day we’ll have one.”
    “Diamond-studded,” her husband had agreed, and they had shaken hands on it.
    “Did you get to Delphi?” John had asked them. The Whitlows had been all through the Peloponnese and driven up to Delphi from Athens. They had really wanted to go all the way up into Macedonia too, but there was only so much time. This was the fifth and last week of their honeymoon. The Larsens had missed Delphi, which they regretted, but they had hired a car and driven through some of the Peloponnesian cities. The Fischers had seen Athens, taken a day’s excursion to Hydra and Aegina, and that had been all.
    The boat they were on had stopped at Mykonos, with a side trip to Delos, and at Crete. Mrs. Fischer had liked Mykonos best.
    “Well, I know it’s supposed to be a photographer’s paradise,” John had said, “but that whitewash and bougainvillea and arts and crafts just leave me cold. I think you either like Mykonos or Delos.”
    “And you liked Delos,” Mrs. Fischer had said, smiling at him.
    “Yes, maybe the best of all. What I’d really like to do is go back there and stay a couple of days.”
    “But there isn’t any hotel.”
    “Yes, there is. At that tourist pavilion, they’ve got about four rooms they can rent out. I asked them about it. Friends of ours stayed there last year.”
    “They loved it,” Amy had said.
    “They said that at ten o’clock the caique from Mykonos pulled in with all the sightseers who spent a few hoursscrambling over everything and climbing up the hill, and when the boat pulled out again the island was covered in shoeprints and sneaker marks. Then it took about an hour, and when you looked after that, all you could see on the ground were lizard prints.”
    “And the starlight is bright enough to see by even when the moon isn’t out,” Amy had said.
    John had touched her hair and told her that they would go back there some day.
    But now the boat was docking at Rhodes, and they had their luggage ready, because they were leaving the group in order to be able to spend two days on the island. Then they would fly back to Athens, and from there would take a plane home. The tour leaders had allowed them to reclaim a small part of their tickets. They had even given the Larsens the name of a good, cheap hotel they could recommend. But the Larsens would be joining the group again for lunch at the luxury hotel and might go along on the guided tour of the city in the afternoon, since that had all been paid for and couldn’t be refunded. Only the morning would be different. In the morning the other passengers were going to take buses to Lindos and then visit the monastery of Philerimos. The Larsens were to visit both places the following day when they would be able to take their time. Amy had liked the cruise, but John was beginning to tire of constantly being hustled along from one thing to the next.
    The boat was almost at a standstill.
    “There’s that creep again,” Sally Whitlow said to her husband.
    One of the passengers, who had started off the tour standing with the German-speaking guide and had changed to standing with the English-speaking guide because of Mrs. Whitlow, shuffled