Seawitch

FOURTEEN

Morning comes too soon when it starts with excited phone calls from cops. Especially when I’ve been in bed only a few hours, and not asleep for most.

“What?” I mumbled at my phone.

“The lab has forwarded their report on the samples from Seawitch,” Solis repeated. “Also, I can find no records for Jacque Knight nor for Shelly Knight.”

“Mysteries on enigmas,” I said, which made more sense when it started out of my mouth than by the time I’d finished. “What do the labs say?”

“I would like you to see the reports for yourself.”

I grunted and dragged myself upright. “Where? When?”

“I am in my office. Where are you?”

“In bed. I went back to Seawitch last night and stayed up too late. Don’t yell at me; I didn’t go aboard. I just wanted to look at Pleiades from a different angle,” I explained, staggering toward my closet with half-closed eyes. I hate morning on my best days and this wasn’t starting out to be one of those. I had that persistently groggy and startled feeling that comes from being rudely forced awake in the midst of a dream.

Solis paused before he asked, “And what did you see?”

“Something creepy and very interesting—but you’ll have to take my word for it, unless I can track down the otter.”

“Otter?”

“I’ll explain when I see you. Which won’t be for an hour or you’ll be embarrassed to be seen with me.”

“I will meet you at your office in an hour.” He hung up without further ado.

I turned my head and glanced at Quinton, who was still mummified in the bedding—the rat. “Why can’t breakthroughs happen after coffee?” I asked his shape.

“Because they wouldn’t seem as interesting if you were fully awake,” the lump replied.

“You don’t think this is interesting?”

“What? The only interesting thing I heard was the part about being in bed.”

I threw a pillow at him. “Sex fiend.”

“Ah! There’s my girl, casting aspersions.”

“Next time I’ll cast a shoe.”

He let out a muffled chuckle but didn’t emerge from under the pillow. I was tempted to let the ferret sneak in and nibble on his toes, just for spite, but I restrained myself.

I managed to shower and get dressed with my eyelids still at half-mast, and get out of the condo looking more like a human than I felt. I stopped for coffee and still managed to get into my office before Solis knocked on the door. I hadn’t checked my watch, so I don’t know if he arrived late or if I was just moving faster than I thought. I suspected the former.

I let him in and returned to my chair behind the desk, picking up the coffee cup as I sat down. “So . . . what was in these reports?” I asked.

Solis handed me an envelope with a few pages in it and removed his coat while I read them. He sat down and waited for me to finish, which didn’t take long since the report was pretty short.

“So . . . there was human blood, but also something from a nonhuman mammal—specific genetic tests on that haven’t been completed yet so we don’t know what animal we’re looking for. But since we didn’t find animal remains at the scene, whatever it was probably didn’t die there. Still, it looked like a lot of blood. . . .”

“Less-than-life-threatening amounts if there was more than one donor.”

I nodded, my eyes feeling loose and gritty in my skull even under the influence of coffee. “With an animal in the mix it’s even less blood per . . . donor. And the rest of this . . . fish scales, mammal fur,” I read, “and nematocysts from some variety of jellyfish, all of these species unknown.” I looked up. “Does that mean they haven’t yet determined the species or they can’t identify it at all?”

“I believe they have been unable to identify them yet,” Solis replied.

“OK. And what’s a nematocyst?”

“I also asked that. It is the part of a jellyfish that stings.”

“So jellyfish stingers. But no jellyfish or remains of them. What sort of Frankenstein’s otter are we dealing with here?” I wondered aloud.

“Again you mention otters. Why?”

I drank more coffee and hoped I wasn’t just about to shoot the infant trust between us in the head. “I had a few interesting words with one last night at the marina.”

Solis scowled. “Words? With a large aquatic mammal.”

“It sounds crazy, but that’s kind of what you get with me.”

“I know.”

“Let me start at the beginning rather than giving it to you in pieces. Remember I said I saw something at Reeve’s house and again at the hospital?”

“This green mist you mentioned and the dog.”

“No, we didn’t see the dog for ourselves at the hospital. It was only hearsay. But the mist, yes. It’s some kind of energetic residue that was present at the hospital, but it was a more active thing at Reeve’s and I saw it wrapped around his chest like a snake that was constricting his ribs.”

Solis frowned, but his expression was less skeptical than in the past. “I still don’t understand what this is that you see.”

“I can’t be sure, as I said, but it’s related to what I suspect your mother-in-law sees—and that’s why she said what she did about me. She probably believes this is mystical in nature, that she’s crazy or ‘touched by God’ because she can see it, and she’s got preconceived notions about what sort of people have certain types of energy signatures. But I’m getting off the point. This paranormal energy is visible as light, or a reflection of light, under the right circumstances. In my case—and Maria del Carmen’s and probably Ximena’s, too—some energy that you can’t see is still visible to me and I perceive it as having color and radiance, even substance in some cases. Sometimes it just looks like light—like neon or a laser show. Sometimes it looks more like colored smoke, steam, or light reflecting through clouds and mist. In this case what I saw was a sort of dirty green smoke with brighter pinpoints of red light—like sparks—inside it. That’s what I saw wrapped around Reeve and squeezing his chest when he had his heart attack. The dog—or whatever it was—was at the other end of the smoke, but I don’t know if it was generating the stuff or trying to tear it away, now that I think of it. Because it was on the receiving end last night. . . .”

I shook my head. “I’m getting ahead of myself again. Anyhow. I saw remnants of the same gray-green stuff around the bed where Reeve died. So my guess was the stuff came from the dog or—”

“Or whatever it was,” Solis finished for me. He wasn’t comfortable with the discussion and his energy corona was flickering through several colors and fluctuating in size and shape, surrounding him with spikes of color one moment, then pulling in and blazing in fast-flickering hues the next. I guessed it was an indication of a more intellectual distress than I’d seen in most people, but he was trying to take it in or the energy wouldn’t have been so manic. Positive progress, but it must have been exhausting.

“Right. Or whatever it was. And I’ll get to that in a moment. At any rate, I thought I’d like to get another look at Pleiades and see if any of the indications I saw before were similar when observed longer and from a better position, since I had no time to examine the boat earlier. So I went back to the marina and I walked around on B dock until I found a good position from which to observe Pleiades and I took a look there—I didn’t go on board or even near Seawitch. And the same sort of smoky energy I saw with Reeve was all around the sailboat. It was thick and very active.”

I watched him for a moment, gauging his reaction, before I went on. “While I was there I heard some more splashing like we’d heard before. I thought is was just fish, but then something touched my foot and I looked down. A very large otter—and I mean a huge, mutant sort of thing—was in the water, looking up at me. Then it heaved itself partially onto the dock and it barked my name.”

“Are you quite sure?” he asked. “Many people imagine their pets talk to them, but they do not; it’s only sounds that the human mind interprets as words.”

“In this case, I’m pretty sure. But the interesting thing I want you to consider is this: The mammalian blood and fur found on Seawitch may well have come from an otter—the fur certainly looked like otter fur—and now that we know it’s possible, the lab should be able to confirm it or rule it out easily. Also a large—make that huge—otter and a medium-sized dog aren’t that far apart in size or appearance if you’re not really paying attention and see it only in a moment of confusion. So the creature that was reported at the hospital might have been an unusually large otter. Or, more to the point, an otterlike thing.”

“A dobhar-chú, perhaps?”

“I hate to say yes, but yes. I tried to get some information on the name Reeve gave us, but since I wasn’t sure how it was spelled, I had to try a description. Wasn’t very helpful and all I got was a small number of Web pages about an Irish lake monster that killed a woman in the eighteenth century. None of them said anything about talking, and the only thing any of them agreed on was a certain phrase, ‘The Father of All Otters,’ and that the creatures are vicious and look like giant otters.”

“But they are mythical.”

Now I was a little annoyed with him. He said he wanted to understand this and he’d been opening up to it slowly during the past two days of the investigation, but now he was digging in his mental heels. He reminded me a bit too much of myself in the early days. How had Ben and Mara stood me? “Biologists used to think the fossa of Madagascar was mythical until they found one,” I snapped. “And what about this investigation rules out the possibility of monsters? You saw ghosts! You saw them. You heard them. You saw me fade from the normal world and come back—twice. You even went with me into whatever occupies that engine room now and found Valencia’s bell, under the direction of ghosts! On the one hand you say you want to believe—for your wife’s sake if not any other—and I’m endeavoring to help you. On the other you have a head as hard as a brick wall and start kicking up rough when believing is actually required. You can see there’s something strange here—you admit it—so why are you balking at the idea of one more bizarre thing in this case?” I demanded.

I shut up quickly; I may have gone too far but I hoped not. . . .

As he blinked at me, trying to form his reply, I kept my mouth shut over the one thing I wasn’t going to reveal to him, at least not yet: The Guardian Beast had bullied me about finding “the lost” and had also given the name Valencia. If the ghosts in the engine room of Seawitch were actually the remnants of the people who died on board the steamer Valencia, then I had, indeed, found “the lost” when we found the bell in Seawitch’s bilge. Lost souls . . . What had the ghosts said? “Our soul”? The Beast hadn’t pestered me since we’d found it, but it also hadn’t let me off the hook, so there was something more to it than just finding the bell. . . .

I scrambled around on my desk and realized I didn’t have the information I was looking for. “Solis, what’s Paul Zantree’s phone number? Did you get it?”

He shook himself. “What?”

“Paul Zantree—the pirate. Did you get his phone number?”

“I did.”

“Give it to me. I need to ask him something while you make up your mind about your position on the paranormal.”

He brought his notebook from the breast pocket of his suit and flipped it open, handing it to me at the appropriate page. I wrote the number on my desk pad and flipped the notebook closed before I returned it—I didn’t want Solis to think I was making an excuse to snoop in his official notes.

I grabbed the phone and dialed Zantree. Apparently old pirates still get up before noon and he answered after only three rings. I went through the usual identification and greeting before I said, “Tell me about ships’ bells.”

“What do you want to know about them? Usually cast bronze in the old days, mostly spun brass now.”

“Is there any superstition attached to them?”

“Oh, a few. Mostly portents of death or disaster when bells ring without human hands or if the bell is lost overboard.”

“What’s the significance of that—the bell going overboard?”

“Oh, well . . .” I could imagine him scrubbing at his hair as he thought about it. “The ship’s bell is considered the ship’s voice or soul, so if the ship loses its bell, obviously that’s a bad thing and disaster will follow—sailors think disaster will follow on the heels of a lot of stuff, so they have a ton of superstitions about how to avoid bad luck. There’s a bunch of odd little rituals you have to go through if you replace a ship’s bell. You’re not supposed to just swap one out without doing the right kind of magical hokey-pokey—you don’t want to piss off that old bastard with the trident down there. If you can make the new one from the old one, that’s best, but if that’s not possible, you’re supposed to smear a little of the captain’s blood on the new bell before you mount it to tie the boat’s soul back in place. These days we just make do with pouring some cheap cabernet on it and Poseidon doesn’t seem to mind. Lemme think . . . the bell is the last thing installed before a new boat is christened. Ideally you want whatever you christen the boat with to splash on the bell, too, but you can get away with just dribbling some on it before you set sail. Motorboats and the like aren’t quite as traditional so there’s a bunch of crazy stuff you never have to do with them, but the gist is the same. Poseidon’s not that picky, as long as he gets his due before you go wandering around his domain. Because if he doesn’t, he’ll come take it. Or, y’know, so they say. . . .”

“I see. Thank you, Mr. Zantree,” I added before hanging up.

I sat for a moment, thinking about what the Guardian Beast really wanted. . . .

Solis spoke up and jolted me out of my thoughts. “What did Mr. Zantree tell you?”

I shook myself and replied, “He said the ship’s bell is considered to be its soul. So . . . we found a lost soul aboard Seawitch—more than one, it seems to me—but what we’re supposed to do about it is still a mystery. Or what I’m supposed to do about it, since this sort of thing is not your venue.”

“Why would it be yours?”

“It kind of goes along with seeing these things: I—” I stopped myself before I blurted out too much that would probably overwhelm Solis’s shaky attempts to wrap his hard head around this stuff. “I just feel I should do something to set things right sometimes. If someone was murdered aboard Seawitch, that’s your venue. But if someone’s ghost is stuck there . . . that’s mine. Especially if the ghosts are causing some other problem.”

“What problem do you think they’re causing? Are you thinking that they’re the reason Seawitch disappeared?”

“I’m not sure which is the cause and which the effect. Seawitch had no history of problems until the last voyage. So . . . if the bell is the soul of Valencia, and if that’s the cause of the problem or a symptom of it, the precipitating event of this whole case occurred during the last voyage of Seawitch. Not before.”

“Did you not call the ritual in the lower cabin the precipitating event?”

“I’m not sure now. We don’t know what spell was cast, just that it was complex, and I’m guessing it’s how Les Carson knew his wife was dead before the cops called him. But I’m not sure if it’s a cause or an effect or where it lies in the course of whatever paranormal action occurred that made the boat and its people disappear.” I shook my head. “I keep coming back to those . . . bizarre log entries.”

“If we assume your speculation to date is correct and the information from the log is sufficient to support it,” Solis said, “then it would seem that the death of Odile Carson and the ritual in the lower cabin—in whichever order they occurred and however they are connected—set responses in action that sealed the boat’s fate.”

I started to break in but he waved me down. “As a policeman, whether I believe in the supernatural or not, it cannot be denied that someone aboard Seawitch did, and the ritual marks were either made by that person or made to control or frighten that person. And whether it worked or not, the result was the loss of the ship and all aboard. These events must have happened just before Fielding’s last log entry, since he alludes to them. And loss of the ship must have occurred very soon afterward at or in the vicinity of the cove he mentioned. We need to find that cove.”

“I think I said that last night.”

“Yes, and I agreed then. I agree now and I . . . think—I do not yet believe—that something extraordinary did take place. And that it is connected to the ghosts aboard Seawitch.”

I stared at him. I did not ask how he was sure or if his ability to see what he had was anything more than the occasional moments of clarity that hunch-playing cops get or just an effect visited on those who consort with people like me and his mother-in-law. I said only, “We’ll need a boat. And a talk with the only available witnesses.”

“What witnesses?”

“The ghosts of Valencia. If we take the bell, I think we’ll find them in Seawitch’s engine room.”

“Why must we take the bell there?”

“I don’t know if they’re bound to the bell or the boat at this point—the bell seems more logical, but I don’t want to take any chances. Ghosts like this are unpredictable. If we re-create the conditions under which we found them last time, we have a better chance of finding them this time.”