Seawitch

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 heart 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.”

She paused and sipped noisily from her cup, her hands shaking with suppressed anger. “He was a pig!” she repeated. “A spendthrift fool who nearly bankrupted us. He was only saved from total disaster by selling the big house and moving down here.”

“You said ‘us,’” I observed. “Did Castor control your money, also?”

Her voice was bitter. “Most of it. Not all. It’s mostly my own money that keeps me in this so-luxurious style now,” she sneered.

I found the house rather nice, but I suppose if you’re used to cashmere and caviar, anything else seems like a fall from grace. “Why did you marry him?” I asked.

“Because I was stupid,” she spat. She rolled her eyes in self-deprecation and took a long, disgusted breath, settling herself back down. She sat back and took a steadier sip of her coffee before she went on. “Cas was six years my senior and I thought he was just kicking up his heels a bit—a sort of last hurrah—and would settle down a little once we were married. I thought we’d have fun. I didn’t understand that I wasn’t a person to Cas and certainly not a partner. I was a thing: a shield of respectability he could throw up when he needed it. I should have divorced him—it’s not like people didn’t do it all the time then—but I just couldn’t stand the idea of the failure it represented. I’d never failed at anything in my life and there I was, the only girl in my class whose marriage was as much of a wreck on the outside as it was on the inside. At least my friends had husbands who pretended to be respectable and hardworking. Cas didn’t even try. He was . . . a wastrel. That’s the word: ‘wastrel,’” she repeated with an angry hiss and bared teeth.

She raised her eyes suddenly and skewered me with her glare. “And you know the most insulting part of it? It made me look ripe for the taking. Cas treated me so badly that other men thought I’d just fall into their beds and be grateful. I wanted to kill him for that. I wanted to just kill him! I was never so happy as the day that damned boat didn’t come back.” Her eyes flicked toward the windows as if she could see the Seawitch right through the cliff and the fog. Then she looked back to me and to Solis—appealing to his chivalrous instincts, I imagined. “I was happy he was gone. But I never realized how awful it is to be a sea widow. To think someone’s dead and out of your life but to never really know. It was terrible. It was as bad as when he was here.”

Her face knotted into a hideous expression of pain and horror. “And then it came back.”

Solis and I were both taken aback by her outburst for a moment. “Do you know how it came back?” Solis asked.

Mrs. Starrett snorted. “How? Why would I? As far as I’m concerned it might as well have precipitated out of the fog.”

I found that an interesting choice of words since I’ve seen ghosts materialize in that very way—particles of mist gathering and assembling into a recognizable form.

Solis had no outward reaction to her phrase but I did see a spark of blue jolt from his aura. “Do you believe your husband had anything to do with the boat’s return?”

Mrs. Starrett scowled at him. “I do not. Castor’s dead and I don’t think he brought the boat back to harbor from beyond the grave—no matter what the sensation-mongers are saying about it being a ghost ship.”

“And yet its presence disturbs you. Why?”

At first she didn’t reply, and we let the fog-wrapped silence lean on her, exerting pressure to fill the void with words before something worse could enter. “I think . . . I’m afraid that there might be something to that curse folderol,” she whispered.

“Curse?” Solis asked. He didn’t shoot me a glance, but the rising tension in his body and the growing brightness of his aura stretching toward me was almost as good. “Tell me.”

Mrs. Starrett dropped her eyes and stared at the floor, unblinking. “At first the press didn’t have much to say except that it was a tragedy, but when the ship didn’t come back and Odile was already dead they made a big deal about the boat being cursed—which was a total fabrication. They claimed the boat was built with parts from another boat that went aground—not parts taken from the boat but parts meant for the boat that weren’t used—and they made up this wild tale about a curse that would take everyone who had anything to do with the boat. First the crew and passengers and then the family. They said I’d be next, but of course I wasn’t because there isn’t any curse, but . . . I wondered if there was something else, even at the time and . . . What if there is?”

“Who is Odile?” Solis asked.

“Odile? My—she was my best friend. Odile Carson. She was married to Leslie Carson.” She blinked at us, waiting for us to fill in the blank. I knew it but I wasn’t going to say where I’d seen the name before; it was more valuable to see how she filled in the blank herself. Solis also gave her a slightly owlish look and waited.

She took a long, deep breath and pressed her lips tight for a moment before answering. “Les was on the boat when it disappeared. Les and Odile were our social satellites. We did everything together, once upon a time. Odile and I were very close. The ‘boys,’ of course, did that man thing of pairing up by gender and going off to do manly things without the ‘girls.’ So, Odile and I . . . we spent a lot of time together.”

Solis sat back and nodded a little. “You were very close.”

Linda nodded again, not quite meeting either of our gazes. “Very,” she repeated. “More than sisters. But not—not below the line.”

That was the kind of phrase my mother would have used to mean lovers without actual sex—the line being the waist, below which one did not venture. Above it was OK, however, since it was acceptable for women to kiss and hug their female friends, even if those caresses were a bit more intimate and frequent than most people were comfortable with or would admit to.

I had new insight into the insurance company’s ideas about why Linda Starrett might have had something to do with the original disappearance of the Seawitch; they thought she and her female lover might have plotted the whole thing to get rid of inconvenient husbands. It still didn’t wash with me, but it would be worth a bit more looking to see if Odile Carson’s death had any bearing on the boat’s disappearance.

“What happened to Odile?” I asked. I could look it up, and I would later, but I found Mrs. Starrett’s replies more illuminating than a recitation of mere facts on a computer screen.

Linda’s mouth puckered, holding back a sob with a frown until she had mastered the urge to cry and could speak calmly again. “An ‘accident.’ She was electrocuted or drowned . . . I’m not sure which they said. In the hot tub. Those converted wine-vat kind of tubs that were the rage then. Odile had trouble with her back—she had mild scoliosis of the spine and sometimes it hurt her quite a lot. She would go sit in the hot water and listen to the radio. I think she used to do it more than she needed just to get away from Les. Les hated the classical music she listened to.” Linda smiled a little. “Sometimes we’d go together, Odile and I, and drink some wine and listen to the music, and just float in the water in the tub, out on the little terrace that overlooked the cliff and the beach. . . . Nothing but birds and trees and the wind dancing in the branches over our heads . . .”

She let out a sudden gasp and began crying, tears streaking down her pale cheeks and leaving tracks in her face powder. “I miss her so much! Why couldn’t she come back instead of that horrible old boat? I hate it! I hate that boat. I hate it!”

“Do you believe the boat’s disappearance and your friend’s death were connected?” Solis asked.

“Don’t be stupid!” Mrs. Starrett snapped, but it seemed like she was protesting too much. “I used to think Les managed to kill her somehow—he was so jealous while he was being so selfish—but that’s not”—she gulped and continued—“that’s not how things work. Is it? Even if it ought to be. So, no, I don’t think the boat came back for some kind of magical revenge. But now that it’s here I can’t stop thinking about Odile and what happened to her. I miss Odile! I don’t want that horrible boat—I want Odile back!”

Now Solis did turn his head and look at me, the slight lift of his eyebrows asking me to step in.

“Linda,” I started in a low voice, “we can’t bring Odile back, but we’ll find out if what happened to her was connected to what happened to Seawitch. I know you don’t want the boat. You don’t have to worry about that—the insurance company will take responsibility for it now. We’ll find out what happened. Now, can you tell me who was on board besides Cas and Les Carson?”

She snuffled and gulped her way back to something like normal. “I don’t know. I—let me think. Who went with Cas . . . ?” She closed her eyes. “There were five all together. Cas, Les, some bimbo friend of Les’s . . . Ruth . . . Ireland, I think. One more woman—I remember it added up to two couples and the captain, but not Reeve that time. . . .”

“The captain?” I asked.

Linda opened her eyes and blinked at me, not sniffling in spite of her reddened nose and eyes. “Yes. Cas hired a professional captain—John Reeve—to manage the boat most of the time. Cas wasn’t really very good at handling her and he was too lazy to sit behind the wheel when he could be on deck, getting a tan or fishing or just drooling on his female guests. This was kind of a rushed trip, so the group was smaller than usual and Reeve didn’t go—it was usually seven to ten guests, plus Cas, Captain Reeve, and another hand or a cook.” She paused to dab at her eyes. “But not this time, which I suppose is why I . . . thought it was something it wasn’t.”

I looked at her expectantly.

She shook her head. “No cook or extra hand this time. The boat had been modernized and didn’t need as many crew as it did originally, so it could go out with just two as long as the passengers weren’t picky. The usual hand was booked, so Cas was doubling for the crew. Reeve wasn’t available, either, so they took his assistant, a guy named . . . Gary Fielding. Really young. I wasn’t sure he was competent, but I didn’t really care until the boat didn’t come back and then everyone was asking me about the crew. I didn’t know anything. I thought it was John Reeve who’d been with them until he turned up talking to the press. Reeve said this Gary kid had his license and had crossed the bar a dozen times as a pilot—whatever that means. It seemed to make a lot of people shut up, so I suppose it’s important, but I don’t know.”

She stopped, an odd look on her face. Then she said, “Janice. Janice Prince. That was the other woman they took. She was a boater. One of those floating trash that tramp from marina to marina, looking for a trip anywhere in exchange for crew work.” “And other things,” she implied with a lifted eyebrow and a cynical quirk to her mouth.

Starrett, Carson, Fielding, Ireland, and Prince . . . that matched the list the insurance company had given me. The messes in the cabins had left me with the impression of more, but maybe it was just the remains of whoever—or whatever—had invaded the boat and taken or driven the passengers and crew away. . . .