Close Reach Read Online Free

boat.”
    “Radar track showed it coming right out of Adelaide,” Dean said. “So if it was fishing, it was doing it on the Antarctic shelf. That’s illegal.”
    The Antarctic Treaty System allowed commercial fishing near the continent but not directly over the shelf, and so the boat out there had several strikes against it in Kelly’s mind. Itwas following them. Its track led back to the same area from which Lena’s desperate last broadcast had come. It probably was violating international law. That last part bothered her the most. On the high seas, international law was good only if everyone followed it. There was no one to enforce it, no help to call.
    Dean was standing next to her now, taking the binoculars from her gloved hand.
    “See if I can get a look at her,” he said.
    Kelly stepped deeper into the pilothouse to give him space to brace himself where she’d been. She watched him, feeling a catch in her chest and a tenderness when she saw him slip and stop himself by using the overhead grab rail, and she thought how well it had worked, this cruise of his. Their boat had been piercing through weather systems and island chains and years, and though she hadn’t realized it at first, from the start Freefall had pulled a thread behind that had sutured them together.
    As Dean had said it would.
    They’d been bleeding when they started, and then for a year they’d still been raw and red, but now, more than three years in, they were healed. Only the tiniest scars remained. She hadn’t credited him with many good ideas four years ago, when he’d started fitting out the boat. But she’d agreed to the trip because she hardly had a choice. He made it seem like there was an alternative, but she’d known that there was none, that the narrowing of options was a thing of her own doing. So she took it, knowing it was the only thing to take.
    A year in, when they were sailing across the Pacific, with Panama two hundred miles off their stern, she’d woken to a morning of calm trade wind sailing. Schools of flying fish, startled loose from the bow wave, were skittering over the sea’s surface like flashes of shattered blue glass. Dean had handed her a cup of coffee and a bowl of fresh fruit, kissing her before going below. Just like that, easy. In that kiss was a taste of something she didn’t recognize until an hour into her morning watch, when she finally placed it. It was forgiveness.
    That morning was the first stitch. The hundreds that followed did the rest to staunch the flow, but the first stitch was when she knew it would work, and she had been happy again since that morning.
    Until the transmission.
    Dean put down the binoculars and carefully went back to the chair at the helm station.
    “You see it?” she asked.
    “Yeah. You’re right. Workboat of some kind. Looks like a crabber, those lights across the bridge deck. I might’ve seen traps on the aft deck, but I don’t know.”
    “It’s fast,” she said. Most of the big crab boats like the one following them couldn’t go much faster than fifteen knots in big seas. This one was pushing past twenty.
    “If it’s going that fast, it’s probably empty,” Dean said. “The holds, I mean.”
    “So they weren’t down there fishing?” she asked without looking at Dean. She was looking at the cockpit locker where they kept the fishing gear. There was a knife in there. A big one. But she wasn’t sure if she should take it out, at least not yet. Maybe the ship was nothing.
    “Probably not fishing,” Dean said.
    “I don’t like this,” Kelly said.
    She was relieved to have finally said it after more than a day of hiding the thought. She had no patience for people who knew there was a problem but didn’t do anything until it was too late, people who blundered into danger because they were embarrassed to admit something was wrong. The girl who accepts a ride from a stranger on a snowy night, never mind the driver’s vacant face or the coil of baling