Seawitch g-7, Page 3

  “Not right now,” I agreed. Besides, pirates used guns, not dogs, and they didn’t worry about bloodstains—of which we’d found so few. We’d also found no bullet holes, and the boat was still intact and appeared to have been unused since the day the passengers and crew had vanished. Pirates don’t just let their prizes float off to be found later like bottles cast up on the shore.

  From the foot of the companionway I looked back into the aft corridor and its strangely empty rooms. “It looks like they left in a hurry—possibly under threat, considering the mess—but they didn’t take anything and the boat doesn’t appear to have been sinking. . . .”

  I frowned, wondering why they’d left and where they’d gone. The final report of the original loss investigator was that Seawitch must have had hit some bad weather near the Strait of Juan de Fuca and been wrecked, sinking with all hands on board and so swiftly no one had even seen her go down. It’s not unheard of for pleasure boats to be ill prepared for the kind of severe weather and adverse currents the strait can dish out. Even large commercial vessels with all the right equipment have come to grief in the upper Puget Sound and straits, and this was neither of those, just a hundred-year-old yacht with the sort of equipment current more than twenty-five years ago—which hadn’t included vessel tracking beacons, GPS chart plotters, or weather radar.

  From southern Vancouver Island in British Columbia down to Coos Bay in Oregon, the coast has rightfully earned its nickname the Graveyard of the Pacific. From what I’ve read, more than two thousand ships have been lost here since white men started plying the waters of the West Coast, and the ghosts of the seven hundred shipwrecked and drowned are thought to haunt the storm-wracked shore. Is it any wonder I don’t spend more time at the beach?

  “We shall have to return with proper collection equipment,” Solis said, interrupting my thoughts.

  I shook myself. “Huh?”

  “If we wish to know what happened to this boat and the people on board, we will need to examine what they left behind. Assuming your employer continues to be cooperative.”

  The insurance company technically owned the boat since they’d paid off the original loss claim, but the cops could kick up a fuss if they wanted over the possible crime scene and so could the Coast Guard—and the FBI, as their investigative representative—if they liked. The insurance company preferred to keep this simple and cordial and move it through to closure with all possible speed and silence. They weren’t pleased with the public notoriety of the ghost-ship story, so they weren’t yelping about anything yet, even though Solis’s involvement was in the gray zone between legal necessity and professional courtesy. He was maintaining a politic front and I thought I understood why he’d been assigned to this messy mystery in spite of his disgust for cases that read more like Agatha Christie novels than police files: He was thorough and quiet and didn’t ruffle feathers. And it didn’t hurt that he was now a sergeant.

  “The company already knows I plan to remove things for investigation,” I said. “They want this over with as quickly and quietly as possible. They won’t kick as long as everything is logged and returned when we’re done.”

  He nodded. “Have you seen all you care to down here?”

  I gave the clammy corridor one last look for now and replied, “Yeah. Let’s finish this up.”

  Going upstairs, we left the worst of the stink and damp behind and came back up into the main salon by a different staircase. Then we went toward the bow and up a couple of steps to investigate the galley and a kind of formal dining room/library sort of area that lay forward of the galley and main salon. These were not quite as filthy as the rest of the boat, but they, too, had been touched by mold and rot. In the galley we found mold-crusted dishes and cookware standing in a now-dry sink, waiting to be washed with water that had seeped away, leaving a crusty soap ring behind. A medical kit lay open on one of the galley counters, but the only things that seemed to be missing were some gauze pads and waterproof bandage tape. The big table in the shelf-lined dining salon supported a centerpiece of driftwood and shells and was set for a meal for four, but the dishes were slimy with mildew and the books were too swollen to move on their shelves. Twin doors led out of the dining room to the triangular foredeck and from there a quick turn and another narrow, open stairway led us up to the pilothouse and its accompanying deck stretching aft to shade the rounded stern.

  This topmost level was mostly an open area bounded by a railing that edged the roof of the deck below. A pair of dinghies sat on matching blocks to either side of a tall winch sort of thing. Obviously no one had escaped in the lifeboats. The canvas covers on the boats and around the railings had become tattered where they remained intact at all. A single wooden lounge chair lay collapsed on the grimy white paint of the deck, one of its broken legs wedged between two heavy metal stanchions that supported the safety rail. The control deck—or bridge house—lay forward of the boat winch, so the bridge crouched over the galley with part of the dining room roof sticking out in front of it and forming a little eyebrow over the empty foredeck, to protect the dining room windows from heavy seas or wind.

  The bridge was one of the least-damaged parts of Seawitch—merely musty and a bit mildewed with some muck tracked on the floor. It really did seem like a sort of bridge from one side of the boat to the other, since you could walk in the door on one side and out an identical door on the other, coming down another companionway to the opposite side of the dining room. I supposed it made sense to have easy access to the bridge from either side of the boat. Two cushy-looking chairs on fixed pedestals faced the front—one behind the wheel and the other off to the left in front of a chart table spread with a mildew-spotted map, a large book, and a heavy ruler. Against the rear wall there was a bench for the convenience of the nautical version of backseat drivers, I supposed. A row of pegs near the right—starboard—door held a collection of rotting foul-weather gear, but none appeared to be missing. A latched flare box and fire extinguisher were clipped into holders on the wall near the other door, both untouched. A pair of binoculars lay on the floor, apparently fallen from a rack on the right side of the steering station. Aside from the tumbled binoculars, there was no sign of violence here. Even the ceiling-mounted radio’s microphone still hung neatly from its clip, its spiral of rubber-covered cord sagging downward in an uneven, frozen squirm as the material had deteriorated.

  I moved to the chart table—navigation station, really, since it had its own array of tools and electronic instrument displays placed so either working position could see them without moving much. Screens marked LORAN, DEPTH SOUNDER, and RADAR were inset across an upright panel, as well as simpler displays for the boat’s speed, the wind speed and direction, and the more mundane issues of temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure. The instruments were no longer state-of-the-art and looked as if they’d been roughly treated, though they had been only a few years old when Seawitch went missing. The chart, with a clear plastic overlay marked up in grease pencil, had become bonded to both the table and cover by mildew and moisture. It was going to be a bitch to get it off that surface, so I took a picture of it as it was in case removal destroyed it.

  I picked up the large, flat book and looked it over. The leather cover was rotting and the pages inside had warped into a rippled mass from exposure to the damp. I held it up for Solis to see.

  “What do you think—ship’s log?”

  He considered the venerable book. “Most likely. Useful, perhaps.”

  “We’ll take it with us,” I said.

  He nodded and I laid the moldering volume on the bench to be carried off when we left.

  Under the chart table there was a series of shallow drawers meant for flat charts, and a grid of cubbyholes farther down for rolled charts. It was three-quarters full but the rolled charts had become too delicate to open without risking their dissolution into dust and useless fragments.

  There didn’t seem to be any other clues to pick up and even to my Grey-ada
pted sight there wasn’t much else to see. We stepped back out on the opposite side than we’d entered by and started down the other stairs. A brassy gleam caught my eye and I stopped, turning back, looking for whatever I hadn’t quite seen. Solis watched me from a step or two below.

  I turned back toward the bridge door, squinting in an errant shaft of sunlight that had cut momentarily through the fog. A bronze bracket was mounted to the back of the bridge roof, but nothing hung from it. A hole lined with a plastic grommet pierced the wall just below it for something narrow to pass into the pilothouse—a thick bit of string, maybe. I frowned at the bracket and hole.

  “Solis,” I said, waving at the empty mount, “what do you suppose went here?”

  He returned up the steps and peered at my find. He cocked his head slightly, then looked up at the roof of the pilothouse and around the back wall. “Perhaps a bell? We haven’t seen one anywhere on board. Don’t ships usually have a bell?”

  I supposed some didn’t, but a boat like this, kept in its original vintage style except in the bridge and engine rooms, where no one but the captain would see it, should have had a bell—a big, clanging brass bell with the ship’s name on it and a string into the pilothouse so it could be rung without having to step outside. This was the place I’d expect it to be. But for the Seawitch’s bell, there was only an empty space.

  THREE

  The ship’s log would require some drying out before we could get a look at it without doing damage to the pages. I had a list of names for the missing passengers and crew, but since they were presumed dead, it didn’t seem worth our while to look them up. But the owner’s widow—presumed widow, at least—was still around. As the sole beneficiary of the insurance, she was the party my employers most suspected of fraud, so it made sense to me to go talk to her next and find out what she knew about the vanishing and reappearing Seawitch. Not that I suspected her of fraud now that I’d seen the boat and its cargo of weirdness for myself, but disgruntled spouses are known to speak impulsively and I am known to take advantage of that.

  We closed up and left the boat, stepping into fog that seemed to have thickened instead of burning off. Seawitch looked even less inviting than when we’d gone aboard, the ropes of colored energy writhing now like tentacles trying to crush the vessel in their grip. The low moan of the foghorn seemed more like the voice of ghosts than ever before.

  Something splashed in the water and Solis and I both stiffened, looking for the cause. An otter poked its whiskered face out of the water nearby and stared at us a moment before snorting and diving away in a burst of bubbles. We exchanged a glance of relief and conferred quickly about what to do next. Solis took the log book back to his car—to be transported to the lab later—while I changed out of my wet shirt and jacket in a dockside restroom. Then we drove separately to the home of the late Castor and still-living Linda Starrett.

  You don’t meet many people with a name like Castor—especially if they aren’t a twin—so background stories about him had been easy to find in the newspaper archives when I did my preliminary checks on the case. At the time he and his ship had vanished, most people in Seattle knew who Castor Starrett was and no one had to brief them, but in twenty-seven years he’d become obscure. He was the great-grandson of a lumberman who had made a lot of money chopping down Western Washington’s cedar and fir forests at the turn of the previous century. His grandfather had turned that pile into a recognizable fortune, and his mother had carried on the tradition by marrying well, investing better, and driving her husband into an early grave in time to rake in another, larger fortune in the postwar housing boom. Even before Castor had inherited the lot—including his grandfather’s custom-built fantail yacht—he seemed to like nothing better than being seen running with the most glamorous people passing through town. He didn’t work; he was just . . . rich. Filthy rich. There were lots of photos of Castor and his pretty blond debutante wife at social functions and even more of Castor with his high-profile friends, and yet there seemed to be so little substance beyond the pictures—just beautiful clothes, beautiful people, and beautiful smiles fronting lives as substantial as cotton candy.

  Linda Russell Starrett lived beyond the end of a cliffside cul-de-sac street that, ironically, overlooked Shilshole Bay Marina and the moorage of the Seawitch. We had to park most of a block away and walk to the end of the street to find the narrow brick-and-stone driveway that wound between another house and the cliff edge to the Starretts’ house—a sort of mock-Tudor thing an English novel might have called a cottage that was more than twice as tall as it was wide and pointy with attics. It was cute and well maintained, as far as I could tell from the front in a waist-high bank of fog that spilled over the cliff to the marina below. A florist-shop odor hung in the air and made me frown at the incongruity.

  Solis watched me a moment, then took a slow breath through his nose. “Flowers.”

  “Yeah . . .” I agreed, but there was something more to the smell . . . something too sterile, as if the scent came out of a can. The view through the Grey looked much like the one seen through normal eyes—mist, mist, and more damned mist. I shrugged it off and we went up to the small brick porch with its arch-topped door.

  It was still early and we hadn’t called ahead but that didn’t seem to matter. Mrs. Starrett was at home, though she wasn’t very welcoming and I was sure that had little to do with the time or the murky fog lurking around her cliffside yard like an incoming tide of trouble. Solis made the official knock, since most people will give way to a badge, but the widow Starrett wasn’t impressed. She gave us a sour look with narrowed eyes and pursed lips that made unattractive creases in her pale lipstick. She hadn’t looked her age until she frowned; now she looked every minute of fifty-six and then some, but at least her face hadn’t been Botoxed into immobility.

  Linda Starrett, dressed in elegant white lounging pajamas swamped by an incongruous fluffy sweater that reached to her knees, was petite to the point of tiny—her twenty- to thirty-year-old photos hadn’t given an accurate idea of her stature. Cultivated blond, bobbed, and bitter, she heaved a sigh through her nose and stepped back to invite us in. “I suppose you think I know something about this boat business,” she said. “Which I categorically do not. But you might as well come in and relieve yourselves of the notion sooner rather than later.”

  She waved us in and then led us, tiny heeled slippers clicking, to a glassed-in porch at the back of the house. It was a little chilly with the fog outside and the watery sunshine still blocked by the bulk of the house. “Have a seat,” she ordered, remaining on her feet beside the cluster of furniture. “I’ll be right back.”

  She didn’t wait to see if we sat, but turned and went through another door that plainly led to the kitchen. I moved to watch her through the window in the door while Solis took a wicker chair that gave him a view of the backyard and its crop of mist if he turned a bit sideways. If she ducked out the front we might have a problem, but I figured we’d hear her if she made a break across the hardwood floor of the hallway. But she didn’t bolt. In a minute she returned to the glass porch with two clean coffee cups on saucers and placed them on the wicker table at the middle of the seating group, where a small coffee service was already set. She handled the new cups with care, turning them in the saucers so that their handles were neatly parallel to each other and pointed to her left.

  Then she perched on the padded seat of the wicker sofa, her spine poker straight—and gave me another glare. “I said you could sit.” As if permission were the same as an order.

  I ignored her tone and took the remaining seat on the sofa, which put me between her and Solis. I could have penned her in by taking the other chair, but that would have made the conversation awkward and she clearly wasn’t going to run away. I received a thin smile for my pains as Mrs. Starrett reached for the first clean coffee cup and turned her eyes on Solis.

  She forced her smile a little wider, as if trying to apply herself to a job she had no hear
t for. “I never met a policeman who didn’t like coffee,” she said, pouring the black liquid from a large French press. She managed it very smoothly in spite of its obvious heft. This was a woman with old-school hostess training, and I wondered that she’d made such a lot of coffee for just one person. Maybe it was just a habit she’d never broken. . . .

  Solis gave her a small nod. “It’s very kind of you,” he said like a guest at a fancy tea party. “I am quite fond of coffee. When I was a child there was always a pot of coffee on in the house.”

  “Really? Your parents let a little boy drink coffee?” Mrs. Starrett asked, offering him the cup.

  He took it gently. “It’s very common in Colombia. Everyone drinks coffee.”

  “How do you ever sleep?”

  Solis smiled. “We take more milk.”

  I was having a hard time keeping a straight face. Was Solis—dour, quiet Solis—making a joke? Mrs. Starrett seemed confused, as if she didn’t know whether she should be charmed or insulted. Finally she settled on flustered and offered him the creamer and sugar bowl. I noticed he used quite a bit of each.

  Mrs. Starrett glanced at me and her face got a little harder again. She poured my coffee—which I took black.

  As she was topping up her own cup, Solis started to speak.

  “Mrs. Starrett, I know this cannot be a pleasant topic—the reappearance of your husband’s boat—but I hope you’ll help us understand what happened.”

  “It was his grandfather’s boat,” Linda Starrett replied in a sharp voice. “To Castor it wasn’t so much a boat as a . . . a floating Playboy Mansion with hot and cold running bimbos.”

  Solis raised his eyebrows slightly. Mrs. Starrett blushed and bundled her sweater closer around herself before huddling over her coffee as if she were icy cold.

  “Joshua—Castor’s grandfather—just doted on him when he was little,” she said. “I doubt he ever really acknowledged what a pr—what a pig he was, even when it was obvious Castor didn’t give a damn about anything but his own pleasures.” Her voice grew sharper and the color eased out of her face as she went on. “Joshua died about a year after we were married and I often thought Cas married me to allay any qualms his grandfather had that he might not settle down. Of course he never did. I wasn’t so much a trophy wife as a token of respectability. Cas always made sure we were seen together in public, being ever so perfect, whenever he’d come too close to crossing the line with Joshua or his mother. He kept on using me as his . . . his totem of rectitude when he’d been made a fool of in the press or gotten in trouble with the law.”