All the way

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I was talking sailfish with some man from Ohio when I noticed her. I’d just lit a cigarette and had turned to drop the lighter back in the pocket of the terry-cloth robe beside me. She was off to the right and a little behind us, sitting cross-legged on a large beach towel with her face lowered slightly over the book spread open between her knees. At the moment she registered merely as a pair of nice legs and a sleek dark head, but after I’d looked away something about her began to bother me.

“I thought I’d go nuts,” the Ohio man was saying. “This damn sail must have trailed us a hundred yards. He’d come up behind the bait and follow it like a kitten after a ball of yarn—”

“They’ll do that sometimes,” I said. “Did the skipper try slowing down, and speeding up?”

“Sure. Tried everything. But we never could coax a strike out of him. Finally went down.”

I frowned, thinking of the girl, and turned to shoot another glance at her. Somehow she seemed vaguely familiar, but that still wasn’t it exactly. What the devil was it? Then I began to catch on. The pose was phony. She wasn’t reading that book; she was listening.

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