Chapter Eight
THE MAN INTRODUCES himself but his name goes right over Ted’s head. He realizes he is in a bit of a daze, and he must be sharp. He tries to pull himself together.
‘We just need to get some details first,’ the man says. ‘Your name, sir?’ he asks. He has a laptop with him.
‘Ted Westcott. And this is my wife, Jill Westcott.’
He types it in. ‘Address?’
Ted gives their address and telephone numbers.
The man nods and enters the information. ‘Who else was on board?’
Ted answers, feigning anguish. ‘My brother, Greg Westcott. We called for help. They’re out there looking for him.
The sea got very rough. He lost his balance and fell overboard.
We couldn’t find him. We couldn’t see him in the waves.
He … he wasn’t wearing a life jacket –’ Ted breaks off in distress.
‘Okay,’ the Coast Guard officer says gently. ‘Who owns the boat?’
‘My brother.’
‘I’ll need his details.’ Ted provides them. ‘Okay, so tell me what happened. Take your time.’
Ted swallows. ‘Greg invited us out to go sailing today.’ He realizes how stilted he sounds.
‘We sometimes go sailing with him. We bring a picnic, make a day of it.’ He clears his throat.
‘It was a bit choppy, but Greg wanted to go out to open water. He likes it when conditions are challenging. He’s an experienced sailor – we both are. ’
‘And you say he wasn’t wearing a life jacket?’
‘No, neither of us were.’ He turns to Jill. ‘Jill was.’
‘And why’s that?’
Ted shakes his head. ‘We often don’t. We’ve done a lot of sailing together, we’re both strong swimmers and comfortable on the water. It didn’t look that bad when we set out.’ He hesitates and adds, ‘We’d had a couple of glasses of champagne.’
‘Not very smart,’ the other man says.
‘Like I said,’ Ted answers, ‘it wasn’t bad when we set off, but it got worse pretty quickly.’
‘If he’d been wearing a life jacket, you might have been able to save him,’ the man points out.
‘Don’t you think I know that?’ Ted explodes. He swallows and says, ‘Sorry. I’m upset.’
‘Understandable,’ the officer says.
Ted continues. ‘I was getting anxious. The waves were getting really high. I could tell Jill didn’t like it, so I told Greg we wanted to head back.’ He pauses, as if remembering.
‘And?’
‘And he didn’t want to. He said it was just starting to get fun.’ He adds, ‘That’s what he was like. He was enjoying himself.’
‘So how did he go overboard, exactly?’ the other man asks, watching him closely.
Ted says, ‘He’d just decided to turn the boat around, and I offered to take the wheel, which I did.
She pitched pretty wildly, and he must have lost his balance.
I had my back to him, but I heard him shout and I turned, but it was too late.
I saw him fall into the water behind the boat and watched for him to come up again. But I didn’t see him.’
The man asks, ‘You said he was turning the boat around? You mean to go back toward shore?’
‘Yes,’ Ted says.
‘But I thought you said he didn’t want to go back? That you wanted to and he refused.’
Ted looks back at the other man. Is he trying to trap him?
He must be careful. He clarifies. ‘Yes, at first, he didn’t want to go back, but when we insisted, he eventually agreed to turn the boat around.
By then the wind must have been thirty knots, we were under full sail, and when I took the wheel from him, the boat lurched, as I said. ’
‘I see,’ the man says, entering the information. Ted waits for him to catch up. He glances at Jill. She looks back at him, a level gaze.
The officer turns to Jill. ‘And where were you when he went overboard?’ he asks.
She says, ‘I was sitting in the companionway, near the middle of the boat, trying to stay out of the way.’ She adds, ‘I’m not much of a sailor.’
He nods. ‘And did you see it happen?’
Ted sees her swallow.
‘Yes. I saw him lose his balance and go overboard – the deck was wet, slippery – and I heard him shout, but I couldn’t do anything to stop it. It happened so fast.’ Her face crumples in an impressive display of anguish.
The man turns back to Ted. ‘And what happened then, after you saw him go over?’
Ted tries to concentrate. ‘I was at the back, holding the wheel, and Jill managed to make her way over to me. We both watched for him to surface.’
She nods, sniffling. ‘We didn’t see him.’
He adds, ‘I dropped the sails, turned the engine on, and circled the boat around the area where Greg went over. We both searched for him.’
‘And you didn’t see him at all?’ the man asks, turning to Jill.
She shakes her head. ‘No. He never surfaced. Not that I saw. The waves were so high, and there was a lot of white water. Ted kept the boat circling around where he went over, and I threw out flotation devices, marking the spot and hoping he’d surface.
I used the binoculars to look for him. But he never came up. ’
‘That’s odd, don’t you think?’ the officer says.
‘What do you mean?’ Ted asks, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice. He doesn’t like this man. He seems to think he’s Columbo.
‘I mean, he should have surfaced. You say he was a good swimmer.’
‘Maybe he took in a lot of water,’ Ted suggests. Maybe they shouldn’t have insisted that they didn’t see him surface. But if they had seen him, they should have been able to save him.
‘He didn’t hit his head at all?’
‘Not that I saw.’ Ted looks at Jill.
She shakes her head.
He adds, ‘Jill radioed for help. We stayed there until the Coast Guard arrived.’ He repeats, ‘We never saw him.’
The other man nods. ‘Okay. Thank you. I’ll just print this out and have you both read and sign it.’
When he returns, and they’ve signed the statement, he flips his laptop closed and says, ‘You’ll need to file a boating accident report.’ He clears his throat and says, ‘I’m so sorry.’ And then he rises and tells them that’s all he needs for now, that they’re free to go.