Seawitch

TWO

The hall ceiling above me was dry—or at least no wetter than any other part of the ceiling—yet I stood in a puddle of seawater. My head, face, and the front of my jacket had taken the brunt of the unseen wave—for that’s what it had felt like—while my back and lower body were mostly dry. Solis, usually dead-calm unflappable, was fully flapped and had taken a step away from me. I must have looked like something from a horror film, judging by his wide-eyed expression. I’d never imagined the quiet Colombian could be so shaken, but I suppose it’s one thing to imagine someone you know is a little on the weird side and a different thing entirely to have it thrust upon you in a hallway the size of a Volkswagen’s backseat.

I was just thinking the wave was a onetime thing when I felt it rushing upon me again as the liquid Grey pulled back, just like the ocean before a tsunami, making a tugging sensation in my chest. I wasn’t worried about Solis—it seemed to affect him not at all—but I wasn’t in the mood to be soaked to the skin by invisible waterspouts. I didn’t pause to worry about what he’d think as I threw myself into the Grey, deep into the churning tide of this strangest manifestation yet.

A current of green energy “water” tore at my legs and I crouched to make a smaller, denser target as I looked for the cause of the surge. The Grey looked strangely white here, like a day of unbroken, high, thin clouds reflecting the sun in directionless glare. The harsh whiteness felt wet and cold and rippling curves of colored light rose in waves ahead of me. At their core I saw flickers of amethyst light that stretched and receded as the waves grew and rushed toward me. I plunged forward, diving into the approaching wave, and gripped the violet light.

It slipped from my hand like a fish and rushed away with one final flick that sent me head over heels through the suddenly becalmed Grey. I fell toward the normal and tumbled backward over Solis.

He jumped aside with a yelp of alarm, one arm coming up as the other reached for one of my flailing hands and twisted it behind my back. I didn’t fight—even if it hadn’t been Solis, I was too dizzy from the spinning transition to catch my balance.

Solis pushed me toward the wall by force of habit as if he were going to snap the cuffs on me, then realized what he was doing and let go. I sagged forward, catching myself against the wall beside the door. I gasped for breath and turned, leaning back against the nearest firm, upright surface.

Solis faced me, braced, his hands slightly raised as if he expected me to lunge at him, but wasn’t sure I was actually dangerous as much as confused, like a holiday drunk. His eyes weren’t quite so wide, but his stance and expression were wary—no, alert, like a fighter waiting on the next move of an unpredictable opponent. That was interesting. . . . He wasn’t freaking out, though his aura was jumping wildly and the tension in his body spoke loudly of a willingness to meet his fears rather than run from them.

I caught my heaving breath and kept my hands where he could see them. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to fall over you like that,” I said.

“Fall?” he repeated. “Say more like flying, as if someone threw you. What . . . was that?”

I chewed on my words before I let them out. “I . . . sometimes have little disagreements with . . . um, with reality. And physics.” I offered a very thin, uncertain smile. As far as I could recall, Solis had never seen me interact with the Grey before—I usually kept that aspect of my job hidden and most especially from him, though I knew he thought I was strange and that strange things happened in my proximity. Once or twice he’d even come close to accusing me of criminality—or at least lying through my teeth to cover up an unpalatable truth.

“So I see.” He seemed to be mulling over a few difficult thoughts of his own, but he didn’t speak them. He straightened up, letting his hands drop to his sides but still keeping a jaundiced eye on me. Maybe he thought I was going to lunge at him again. Then he asked, “Are you all right now?” Which I interpreted as “Are you going to do anything else disturbing?”

I never plan to be disturbing. . . . “I’m fine,” I replied, trying to look innocuous and predictable. “Thanks.”

He turned his head a bit so he was looking at me from the corner of his eye—a posture I was familiar with from the many times I’d used it to peer deeper into the Grey without falling in. “How did you get past me?”

I shrugged. “I’m slippery.”

“Yes, and you are, as always, not telling me something.”

I pulled a rueful face. “Can I explain later? Right now I just want to get a look at the problem and get out of here so I can change into dry clothes.”

He nodded and opened the door, keeping one eye on me the whole time.

Nothing new came out, but the tide of Grey surged a bit, as if he’d opened a gate at the locks and let a gush of water through. I waited for it to calm before I stepped into the doorway, mentally bracing myself, and looked into the cabin.

The room was cramped and not very square—or at least it looked that way with the wall opposite me sloping and curving outward on one axis and inward on the other. This was obviously the boat’s hull near the bow, where things got narrow and pointy. The narrow bunk made me think this was a crew cabin, not guest accommodations. Judging by the slopes and angles, part of this room—as with all the rooms and corridors down here—was below the waterline. The smell was strong here but not identical to the stink above; this had the additional odor of burned driftwood and the harsh sting of iodine. The room itself seemed just a bit out of focus, as if the swirling liquid Grey clouded my eyes, and everything was filthy with decayed ocean flora as well as the same sort of black and green mold stains we’d seen upstairs. That was ugly enough, but the floor and the built-in bed must have been the things that caught the SPD’s attention.

A low moan seemed to issue nearby and I jumped little. Solis didn’t look quite as startled, but even he was unsettled by the sound. It took a moment for me to realize it wasn’t a ghost—it was a foghorn—before I could return my attention to the strange sight on the cabin floor.

A pattern of rust-colored arcs and markings started on the floor and carried on over the surface of the bed and back to the floor, incompletely enclosing a twelve-pointed star in a circle of intertwined curves that looked like cresting waves. Smeared letters or numbers had been sketched at each point of the star with barely enough room between the point and the circling, painted waves. In the middle of the star something had bled a lot and matching spatters crusted in mold marked the walls. Incongruous dots of luminous color and rainbow shimmer were scattered throughout the weird markings. One edge of the ring and some of the figures had been wiped out, creating a gap in the circle. I’d never seen this before yet it felt familiar in a way I couldn’t pin down. . . .

I crouched, keeping one hand on the doorframe to steady myself as I studied the circle of symbols. Something gritty rubbed against my palm. Resting my weight against the doorpost, I looked at my still-damp left hand. The dry substance from the wall made a bright red stain on my hand. I held it out to Solis.

“Is this blood?”

He nodded. “It’s human.”

“Crap,” I muttered, and I knew what had tripped my sense of the familiar: This was some kind of blood magic—not like what I’d seen before, but I recognized the general sensation and stink of it. Magic really wasn’t my strong suit; I’d have to wing this one on my own, since my friends the Danzigers were out of the country and I usually brought this sort of problem to them. “Any idea whose blood this is?”

Solis shook his head. “It’s hard to tell with samples so old and broken down, but it appears to be mixed with something else as well as the blood of more than one person. Who is not yet known.”

“And may not be if the bleeders have no match in the DNA database. Any suspects?”

“Everyone who was on board when the boat was reported missing.”

I stood up again and turned to face Solis directly. “You have a working theory?”

He gave a small shake of his head. “Empty speculation has no point. This is the only cabin with such markings, although there may be traces of blood in many others. Traces only.”

“May be? You’re not sure?”

“This is a low priority case for the SPD and the risk of false positives is too high in this environment for extensive use of the Luminol test. I’ve had to take test scrapings from the obvious stains and submit them to the lab.” He pointed to the small, numbered evidence-location tags stuck here and there in the cabin. “The results are not yet available and stains have not been easy to find or identify.”

“Do you think they were cleaned up or just . . . decayed beyond identification?” I asked.

“It’s the discovery that has been difficult, but if this stain survived, why not others? The whole boat has the dirt and mold so if this marking is a sign of crime, why only here? If the passengers and crew were killed, why isn’t there more blood elsewhere? What does this symbol mean? This is where my questions begin.”

I nodded. “Dirt. Blood . . . Where did the seaweed come from?”

Solis raised his eyebrows. “From the sea.”

I was still wet and the room was unnaturally cold, so I was distracted, scowling, and shivering a little, but not enough to miss that rare spark of sarcasm. Or was it rare? I’d never spent much time with Solis beyond a cumulative hour or two of mutual info swap and occasional interrogation. I’d assumed the taciturn detective didn’t have much of a sense of humor, but that wasn’t likely. Homicide investigation is one of those fields that demands an outlet for the purging of the disillusion and disgust that come with the territory. A lot of cops and forensic investigators tend toward a sense of humor as black and dry as gunpowder; others become callous and irreverent or just plain crass. Only those about to crack lose their ability to laugh, however gruesome and unfeeling that may sound. Rey Solis was apparently—though quietly—just as odd as any other cop and possibly more stable than most.

I felt I should ask him some insightful, buddy-bonding sort of question at this point, but I couldn’t think of one. Or have some clever comeback for his snarky quip—if he’d have been Quinton, I’d have called him a smart-ass at the very least—but that also seemed to come up blank for me. Instead I just gave the eye roll I awarded to most bad jokes and puns.

“You guys find anything like this in the rest of the boat?”

“Not guys. Only me. But there is nothing else quite like this. Other stains, other similar materials, but not arranged as so.” He made an indicative circle with his finger at the blood-painted symbols and their collection of muck.

I stood back as far as I could and still see the whole space. I gave the encircled star and its mess a sideways glance through the Grey; it writhed and wavered in liquid colors that circled the bloody star like the edges of a whirlpool. I couldn’t detect any sign of who had made the circle or what it was for, but I did see some holes in the pattern—just two or three. . . .

“Is this exactly as you found it?” I asked Solis.

“No. I removed one of the pebbles and some of those shiny flecks for testing. I believe the flecks are fish scales.”

“And the pebbles?”

He shrugged. “Very old glass that’s been sand-scoured.”

Beach glass, though they didn’t look much like any kind of glass from where I was standing. Dull surfaced, pitted, dirty, and partially smirched with filth and blood, they looked more like small, colorful river rocks or broken marbles of almost a dozen colors: cobalt, apple green, gold, cherry red, kelly, aqua, brown, violet, white, jade, and black with a rainbow sheen barely seen beneath the crud. They were irregular shapes that ranged in size from shards no bigger than my pinky fingernail to clods as long as my thumb; when you consider how large my hands are, that’s a good-sized chunk of junk. But even knowing what the material was, I still didn’t have any idea what had happened aboard the Seawitch.

I shook my head, disquieted and cold. “Let’s see the rest and get out of here.”

Solis raised an eyebrow at me—this was the second time I’d made a point of my desire to leave quickly when he knew me for a tenacious pain in the ass more likely to throw herself right in front of trouble than run from it. But I’d made a resolution not to get in Death’s face anymore; I was pretty sure I was no longer bulletproof, and I had someone else’s pain to consider now that I seemed to have an official significant other.

“C’mon. Do you really want to stay here any longer than you have to?” I asked.

He gave it only a moment’s thought. “No.”

I took a few reference photos using a small digital camera Quinton had lent me. Then Solis and I backed out of the cabin and I followed him through the rest of the boat. We looked into the other crew cabin, washroom, and storage area in the front part of the boat, finding more dirt and stains and a single, empty duffel bag abandoned at a random angle under a bunk and now glued to the floor by creeping black mold. Collectively, the boat had room for up to five crew members—providing they were very slim and not picky about privacy or claustrophobia. We also found a large compartment under the pointed bow where the stems of two large anchors poked into the hull through steel-lined sleeves, and a heap of chain and rotting rope sat to either side of a large electric winch so rusted that the chains would have to be cut free before the anchors were ever dropped again. I hoped we wouldn’t need to dig around in there for clues, though the twining, colored mist of the Grey that tangled in the chains gave me a sour feeling.

When we finished with the crew cabins, we went through the engine room, which connected to the crew area by a narrow door hidden in the wooden paneling at the aft end of the corridor. The twin engines were massive to my mind, the size of Smart Cars crouching in the middle of the boat, isolated from the rest by walls lined in foamed-lead sound insulation, according to the report. It looked like dirty cappuccino foam under a layer of aluminum foil. They, too, had a drapery of dried seaweed, but the engine room was not nearly as filthy as the room with the strange, bloody circle on the floor, in spite of having a patina of old oil and engine dirt on the floor and ceiling. I spotted a dense black coil of ghost energy roiling in one of the back corners, but with Solis present and my clothes still damp and itchy, I didn’t have time to investigate it thoroughly. Nothing as obvious as a face or figure presented itself in the time I was staring at it. I made a mental note to come back and take a closer look. . . .

We passed out of the engine room through another narrow door and into the aft, where the guest accommodations awaited us. Here the signs of something gone wrong were more present, if strangely inconsistent. In one cabin we found a collection of more of the pitted bits of glass and a few round white objects I thought might be either bones or pearls, but they were so crusted with dirt it was hard to tell and we were both unwilling to move them without gloves and evidence bags. Everywhere we found mildew, muck, and stains that ranged from green to rust-red to grainy black. Every room held the sense of disarray and hasty, unexpected departure—and the smell—and yet nothing seemed to be missing besides the people themselves. Personal possessions had been abandoned in situ—even duffel bags with clothes and supplies packed inside and a woman’s purse with its 1980s contents intact, as far as I could tell. The bed in the master suite at the back had been torn to shreds by something with claws and teeth. We finished with the cabins and moved to the stairs. Near the aft companionway, I saw a clump of shiny dark brown fur caught in a crack in the handrail.

I pointed at it. “Any idea what that came from?” I asked Solis.

He frowned. “No confirmation from the lab, but I thought, perhaps, a dog.”

“Doesn’t feel like dog fur,” I said, fingering a few strands. They were thick and soft like something torn from an expensive fur coat. “And there was no dog aboard. So . . . you’re thinking someone boarded the vessel and brought an attack dog of some kind to drive the passengers up on deck?”

“It is a possibility. Though I don’t like the theory.”

I humphed under my breath. Solis didn’t usually advance a theory he didn’t favor. Both of us were a little out of our depth here. I returned his frown and studied him in silence a moment, waiting to see if the creeping disquiet I felt was unsettling his nerves, too.

Finally he added, “There are no Somali pirates raiding shipping in Puget Sound.”

“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-adapted 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.