Seawitch

TWELVE

Dinner at the Solis house was served in the dining room under tension that seemed to have less to do with my presence than that of Ximena’s mother—whose name was the long and rolling Maria del Carmen Gomez Baranca de Moreno, but was shortened by everyone to Mama Gomez. Chatter was carefully regulated and dish passing was accomplished with a degree of solemnity I had rarely seen in a house full of subteen children. The table seemed a bit unbalanced with both me—in the uncomfortable middle—and Ximena’s mother on the same side and three of the four kids on the other. Ximena was at the foot of the table with the two youngest—Martha Carolina and Claudia Elena—seated on either side. Solis sat at the head with the oldest boy, Oscar Luis, on his left. Mama Gomez was on his right and I thought it wasn’t so much for any honor the place conferred as the ease with which Solis could keep an eye—and if necessary a hand—on her. Directly across from me sat the youngest boy, Mario Diego, who at seven years old was still a bit too small to manage his own plate and the serving bowls at the same time, which made the progress of dishes go backward: food started not with the head of the table, but with the youngest children and Ximena, then passed on to me and Mama Gomez, and finally to Solis, Oscar Luis, and Mario. This seemed to annoy Mama Gomez and she muttered continually while casting me black looks from the corner of her eye and eating mechanically.

The food was more a collection of meats and a few side dishes than a specific meal, but it was delicious. The amounts were ample and no one complained, though the feeling of something about to shatter hovered over us. Eventually Mama Gomez said something under her breath that brought a low-voiced reprimand from Solis and a giggle from Martha.

“She called you a witch,” Martha said, looking at me with big, sparkling eyes.

Solis pressed his lips together and seemed about to say something but I forestalled him with a wave.

“It’s all right,” I said, addressing the little girl. “I’ve been called a lot worse and I recognized the word, anyway.”

“Do you speak Spanish?” Martha asked. “Papa says it’s rude to say things the guests don’t understand in front of them, but if you speak Spanish, we can talk normal now.”

“No, I don’t really speak Spanish. I’m sorry. I know only a few words and they are mostly very impolite ones.”

Martha was crestfallen. “Oh.”

Mama Gomez grinned and repeated herself a little louder, staring at me as if issuing a challenge. I returned her stare with a bland face and didn’t use any of my precious store of profanity, waiting to see what she’d do now. I’d caught exactly three words of what she’d said: “silver,” “gold,” and “witch.” The rest meant nothing to me with my terrible Spanish.

Ximena gasped and looked taken aback.

Solis narrowed his eyes but it was the only outward sign of his irritation. “Apologize, Mama.”

Mama Gomez whipped her head around to face him. “Why should I?”

I’d already figured out that she understood English perfectly so I wasn’t surprised she spoke as well as her daughter did. I kept my face and body still: This showdown wasn’t really about me.

“Because you have insulted our guest,” Solis replied.

“I spoke only the truth,” she objected.

“Truth or not, you meant harm. When you do harm to my guest, you will apologize or you will leave. My house, my rules.”

From the corner of my eye I saw Ximena bite her lip. Both her daughters looked to her in confusion and she glanced back, shaking her head and laying her finger over her mouth.

Mama Gomez also turned to look at Ximena, but she didn’t like what she saw. “Ximena!” she demanded.

Ximena’s eyes were huge and her lip trembled but she replied quietly, “Apologize, Mama.”

Mama Gomez made a strangled noise and flew to her feet. She glared back and forth between her daughter and her son-in-law, eyes bulging and mouth pressed tight to suppress her rage that sent violent red shocks into the Grey. Finally she looked at me. Since I was sitting and she was tiny, her face was just about level with mine.

“I’m sorry you’re a witch!” she shouted, and wrenched herself around to rush from the room, knocking over her chair and lurching into the built-in sideboard as she went. The room seemed to shiver as she left it, some glimmering residue of anger dying out of the air.

The whole room seemed to draw a breath of relief. The children dove back into their food and it appeared normalcy would return.

“So,” I asked, “what did she say?” I glanced at Martha Carolina and added, “Aside from the witch part.”

“She said you have gold and silver in your . . . umm . . . Mama, what was that word?” Martha asked.

Ximena didn’t look up from helping Claudia Elena with her food. “Aura. It’s like a light some people have around them.”

“Like a halo? Like a saint?” Martha asked.

“Sort of . . .”

Martha looked at me again, grinning. “You have a halo! You must be very good!”

Solis made a quiet snort.

Now, here was a pickle: I’m not much of a kid person, so I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, but it felt incumbent upon me to do or say something. . . .

“Umm . . . no, I don’t think it’s a halo,” I started.

“Ms. Blaine hasn’t got that kind of goodness,” Solis said.

“Is she bad, then?” Martha asked, frowning.

“No. But not everyone who is good is a saint. That takes a holy kind of goodness all the time.”

“And I’m only good some of the time,” I added, hearing the obvious cue in his voice.

“Oh,” said Martha. Then she brightened and declared, “I’m good all the time!”

Ximena laughed and turned to her older daughter to smile and tap her lightly on the nose. “You only wish that were true, Martita. Now stop pestering our guest and eat your dinner.”

The boys giggled and elbowed each other until Solis frowned at them. They stopped immediately and the rest of the meal was civilly quiet.

As we rose afterward, Ximena sidled up to me, chivvying the three older children into the kitchen to bus their dishes, and whispered, “I’m sorry about my mother. Sometimes she . . . sees things. . . .”

“That’s all right. Sometimes I do, too,” I replied. Then I noticed Solis motioning for me to go with him.

Ximena gave me a trembling smile. “You do?”

I nodded and she nodded back, her smile strengthening. Then she said, “Go on. You and Rey have work to do. The kids will help me clean up.”

Feeling a little guilty, I went with Solis, heading back up the stairs to the office in the attic. On the final steps I asked, “What was that about with your mother-in-law?”

“I apologize. She’s very rude when she gets like this.”

“Like what?”

“She is taken with strange ideas, with visions. And as an artist she refuses to constrain her mind, and, to our frustration, her mouth as well.”

He paused to unlock the office door.

“That’s not quite what I meant. She may be a little nuts, but that wasn’t the crazy talking at dinner. She was trying to get a reaction out of you.”

“Her feelings about me are . . . unstable.” He opened the door and waved me inside, then shut the door behind us before he continued in a low, intense voice. “She knows how I love Ximena and our children, that I will do anything to keep them safe. Sometimes that means keeping them safe from her, which she doesn’t like. And sometimes she hates me for being blind to the world as she sees it—the world, perhaps, as you see it.”

I frowned at him. “As I see it?”

“Yes. I . . . have begun wondering if there is something I don’t see. For years I’ve thought Maria del Carmen was mad. And she is, but not all of her madness is lies. And Ximena . . . I fear she is becoming like her mother.”

“You’re afraid she’s going crazy?” I asked.

He nodded. “When we met I knew she was . . . fragile. I had no idea . . . what she might become. Now I see it in her mother and I know she will get worse. But”—he turned his face to me suddenly—“if there is something else—something that is true, even though it is hidden from the world—then perhaps she isn’t doomed to madness.”

“And that’s why you wanted to work with me. Because you think I’m like them and that gives you some kind of hope.”

“Yes. And you are not insane. I may not agree with all you say, I may find it hard to believe everything you’ve been telling me and even some of the things I experienced today—even in the face of proof, it can be difficult to change the”—his eyes darted around and he made a frustrated gesture, rolling his hands in the air as if trying to grasp something incorporeal—“the habit of mind. But if there are more things to see than I can see, then perhaps a way can be found to manage the difference between us and I . . . won’t lose her.”

I blinked at him and found I’d been holding my breath. I drew in a shaking lungful, but it didn’t help much. I still didn’t know what to say even when I had the breath to say it. “I—I’m not— That is, what we experience is not the same.”

“You and Maria del Carmen?”

“Me and . . . anyone. It’s different for each of us. What you experienced in the engine room on board Seawitch wasn’t the same as what I experienced—similar, related, but not the same. Even what Ximena and her mother both . . . see won’t be identical.”

“It is a matter of depth, then?”

“No. It’s not. Or not just that. It’s not all vision and it’s not all just a matter of what you see. There’s the intensity and kind of experience, what you can do with it or what you can’t do, and whether you can turn it off or not. . . .” I could tell he wasn’t quite getting it. “Look, I can see things and touch them, experience them pretty intensely, but I can’t do anything with them. Nothing significant. I can’t work magic—” I cut myself off as Solis made a sour face.

I sighed. “Now, don’t tell me you’re starting to believe in ghosts but you can’t make yourself believe in magic. What we saw in the lower cabin on Seawitch and what we saw in the fountain at Reeve’s house were spell circles. I don’t know what they did—”

“Why not? If you know they were magical, why don’t you know what magic they did? And why can’t you do it, too?”

“I just can’t. It’s a talent I don’t have. Like I can’t draw, or sing, or play an instrument, or . . . do high-level math functions in my head, but I can dance. It’s all different, even where they’re related. Like . . . circuit boards. I know one when I see one, but I can’t tell you what it does. The board for a microwave is not the same as the board for a blender, but I couldn’t tell you which one was which, just that they aren’t the same. Magic comes in a lot of specializations, and I can tell some from others but I can’t cast a spell or tell you what a spell circle was meant to do after it’s burned out.”

Solis scowled and walked to the desk to sit down. I could see the telltale glimmer of gold around him that I’d seen before; he was shifting mental gears, putting away the intimacy of his situation with his family to concentrate on the case, distancing himself from the personal discomfort of the discussion. “So . . . how are the two circles related?”

I crossed slowly to the desk myself. I wasn’t as ready to put aside the other subject as he was, but I knew it wouldn’t help my cause to pester him. “They’re the same . . . school of magic, I guess you’d say. But not drawn by the same person. The wave figures were the same symbol but the handwriting—for lack of a better word—was different. The big circle on the boat was complex, which implies a complicated or complex spell. The one at Reeve’s was small and pretty simple, so I’d say it was a specific and simple spell—which doesn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous.”

“Could the spell on board Seawitch have had anything to do with Odile Carson’s death? And I don’t say I believe it, but if the possibility exists . . .”

“You mean could she have been killed by magic? At that distance it’s not likely, especially since she killed herself.”

“Could she have been influenced to it?”

“Possible, but, again, not very likely. It’s hard to magically convince someone to do something they are mentally opposed to. If she’d already been suicidal, though . . . the possibility would be better. But it could explain how Les Carson knew his wife was dead before the cops called him.”

“What about the spell circle at Reeve’s?”

“I’d guess a rudimentary trap of some kind. If it were keyed to him personally it wouldn’t go off except when he was near it. And since he’s an old man with health problems it wouldn’t have to be a spell that could kill someone, just one that would cause a lot of distress.”

“Is it likely the person who drew the symbols at Reeve’s house would be completely unrelated to whoever drew the symbols on Seawitch?”

“No. That particular strain of magic is relatively rare—thank your lucky stars—and it tends to run in families, like a genetic disease. The only other person I’ve met who does that particular kind of magic doesn’t tolerate others of her kind nearby and she’s nasty enough to enforce the distance. So whoever drew those spell circles was either far enough away to be ignored or more dangerous than she is.”

“But who were these people, how are they related, and what is the connection to Seawitch?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Solis grunted to himself and turned his attention to the papers on the desk. “Perhaps there is more in the log. . . .”

We resumed our places, reading through all the available log pages. Solis started with the ones I’d already perused and printed while I looked at the newer ones on the screen, waiting for the printer to finish spitting them out on paper. The last page stopped me. It was blotched with red and brown stains and numerous small slashes and tears and a single rambling paragraph of poor penmanship:

. . . she cursed me and now this! I didn’t stop him from forcing himself on her, so I guess I’m just as guilty as he is. Now it’s too late to be sorry. She won’t stop. The storm is going to wreck us unless I can make the cove and even then I may have doomed us all. I think Starrett is dying—that’s my fault, too. When people say “hostile waters” they don’t know what that can mean. I do. Now I do. I don’t know how I’ll live if I survive. My skin feels like it’s on fire and this hair is everywhere. And the blood. My hands ache—

The words ended in a red-blotted scrawl, and a long location number and heading were written below, large and messy, as if drawn by a child with a leaky pen. I swung away from the monitor and waved Solis’s attention to it.

“Hey,” I said. “Read this. It’s the last entry in the log.”

Solis turned and took my place at the monitor as I stood up to pace.

“A strange thing to say,” he commented.

I stopped pacing and turned back. “What is?”

“The writer says ‘I don’t know how I’ll live if I survive.’ Not if he will survive or if he will live, but how he will live. As if there’s something beyond survival that is just as frightening as death.”

“Interesting. You focus on that. What jumps out at me is he says someone is guilty of forcing himself on a woman—and that Castor Starrett’s death is also his fault. Sounds like a rape and a homicide, though the writer almost seems confused by it all. He also mentions a cove. But where? Are the numbers and heading at the bottom an indication of where he was going or where he was at the time?”

Solis gave me a wry look. “I did not ignore the rest of the statement; I merely found the one sentence very odd. It should be telling, but what does it tell? I agree that the writer seems upset and confused. He almost seems to imply that the storm was caused by the lady in question. . . .”

“Which one of the three?” I asked, not wanting to think about the question Solis was really raising.

Solis made his half shrug. “Who knows?”

“What’s the statute of limitation on rape in Washington?” I asked.

“Ten years, but if a death results, none.”

“What if the rape victim survived the wreck?”

“Why would you imagine she did or that she would not reveal herself?”

“I’m just thinking . . . someone had to bring the boat back to port, someone who knew where it had been and what had happened on board, or they would have come forward. If the victim did it, maybe it’s because she knows her rapist also survived. But it’s been too long for her to file a legal complaint so . . . she plays dead and waits to see if the reappearance of Seawitch will bring her rapist—now apparently her murderer—to light.”

Solis shook his head. “It seems woefully complicated.”

I frowned. “Possibly, but regardless, the writer—probably Gary Fielding, since the handwriting looks about the same as the entry we know he wrote, even though it’s deteriorating here—says he’s taking the boat somewhere. If he made it, the odds are good the boat stayed there all this time.”

“The whole twenty-seven years?”

“You saw its condition. That boat didn’t move from the time it docked after whatever happened on board until the day it turned up at Shilshole. Nothing had been disturbed enough for the boat to have moved under its own power. No one’s started those engines in years.

“Maybe, if we can find the place where it’s been sitting all this time, we may be able to find a witness to say who brought it and kept it there, at least. They might even have information about what happened aboard, who survived, and who died. Because I’m still betting that whoever brought the boat back to Seattle was aboard it when it was lost.”

Solis looked thoughtful and started to say something but was interrupted by the bleating of his cell phone. He answered it and listened for a moment, then killed the connection with a bitter expression on his face. “John Reeve is dead and it may be a homicide.”