Chapter 8: The Crossing
The tunnel emptied into the boathouse—a cavernous cedar structure suspended over the crashing waves of the Atlantic.
Outside, a late-autumn gale was lashing the Maine coast, driving sheets of freezing rain against the high salt-streaked windows. Inside the wet slip, a thirty-eight-foot custom aluminum cabin cruiser bobbed against heavy braided nylon bumpers, its twin diesel engines already idling in a low, resonant rumble.
Julian carried Arthur aboard, laying him gently on the padded leather banquette inside the heated wheelhouse.
Clara followed, clutching her splinted wrist, her lips blue from the sudden exposure to the sea wind. She knelt beside the old man immediately, pulling an emergency medical kit from beneath the navigation bench.
"His pupils are pinpoint, Julian," Clara shouted over the roar of the engines and the wind rattling the boathouse siding. "The potassium chloride is causing severe hyperkalemia. His heart rhythm is irregular. If we don't get intravenous calcium gluconate into him within thirty minutes, he will go into cardiac arrest."
"Hold on to the rails," Julian commanded, dropping into the captain's chair.
He did not look back at the shoreline. He threw the heavy bronze throttle levers forward.
The twin turbo-diesels roared to life, churning the black water of the slip into frothing white foam. The vessel surged out through the open boathouse doors, plunging into the dark, violent swell of the open bay.
A eight-foot wave smashed over the bow, sending a wall of green water cascading across the safety-glass windshield. The wipers thrashed wildly against the downpour.
Julian gripped the wooden wheel with iron hands, his knuckles raw from the fight in the cellar. He had sailed these treacherous waters since he was a boy, memorizing every submerged granite reef and shifting sandbar between their private headland and the municipal harbor at Camden.
"Clara!" Julian called out without turning his eyes from the storm-tossed darkness ahead. "How is he?"
"His pulse is slowing!" she called back, her uninjured hand pressed against Arthur's chest, her body braced against the violent rolling of the hull. "Arthur, look at me. Stay with me, Arthur. Look at the light."
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The old man’s eyes fluttered, fixed upon the young woman whose wrist was broken because she had refused to leave his side.
Through the roaring squall ahead, a single, pulsating red beacon pierced the darkness—the outer breakwater of Camden Harbor.
