Scorpion Reef Read Free

“It’ll be fun watching you work.”
    I shrugged, and said nothing. I wondered a little irritably if she really wanted that gun back, or if this was just her idea of a lark. After all, if it was lost during duck season it had been lying there for six months now. Maybe she had so much money and was so bored that hiring a diver came under the heading of entertainment, like ordering a clown for a children’s party.
    Then I asked myself morosely why I was so intent on picking her to pieces. She hadn’t done anything, and so far as I knew there was no law against looking like a Norse goddess, even a slightly sexy one.
    Norse? With a name like Shannon? It was odd, though, because she did look like a Swede.
    I asked her to stop at the watchman’s shanty for a moment while I told him I’d be gone the rest of the day in case anybody called. The mill was abandoned now and the pier was seldom used for anything, but the place was still fenced and a bored watchman put in his hours reading in a little shack beside the gate.
    As soon as we were out the gate she fumbled in her bag for a cigarette. I lit one for her, and another for myself. She drove well in traffic, but seemed to do an unnecessary amount of winding around to get out on the right highway. She kept checking the rearview mirror, too, but I didn’t pay much attention to that. I did it myself when I was driving. You never knew when some eager type might try to climb over your bumper.
    When we were out on the highway at last she settled a little in the seat and unleashed a few more horses. We rolled smoothly along at 60. It was a fine machine, a 1954 hardtop convertible. I looked around the inside of it. She had beautiful legs. I looked back at the road.
    “Bill Manning, isn’t it?” she asked. “That wouldn’t be William Stacey Manning, by any chance?”
    I glanced quickly around. “How did you know?” Then I remembered. “Oh. You read that wheeze about me in the paper?”
    It had appeared a few days ago, one of those interesting-character-around-the-water front sort of things, written by a rather intense girl who oozed her dedication to capital-J journalism all over the pier and was determined to pump me up into a glamorous figure for at least a column if it killed her. It had started over the fact I’d won a couple of races out at the yacht club, handling a friend’s boat for him. I wasn’t even a member; he was. But it had come out I’d deck-handed a couple of times on that run down to Bermuda and was a sailing nut; hence the story. Then she made the fact I’d gone to M.I.T. for three years before the war sound as if I were a South Seas beachcomber with a title. I didn’t get it myself. Maybe she thought divers ate with their feet. It was a good thing I hadn’t said anything about the four or five stories I’d sold. I’d have been Somerset Maugham, with flippers.
    Then an odd thought struck me. I hadn’t used my middle name in that interview. I hadn’t used it, in fact, since I’d left New England.
    She nodded. “Yes. I read it. And I was sure you must be the same Manning who’d written those sea stories. Why haven’t you done any more?”
    “I wasn’t a very successful writer,” I said.
    “But I thought they were awfully good.”
    “Thank you.”
    She was looking ahead at the road. “Are you married?”
    “I was,” I said. “Divorced. Three years ago.”
    “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry. I mean, I didn’t intend to pry—”
    “It’s all right,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it.
    It was just a mess, but it was over and finished. A lot of it had been my fault, and knowing it didn’t help much. We’d fought until we wore it out, and it takes two to do that. I’d owned the boat before Catherine and I were married, and I insisted on hanging onto it in spite of the fact she cared nothing about sailing and the upkeep on it was too much for a married man on the salary I was making in the steamship office where I worked. She