Seawitch

SIX

I got back to my condo about six thirty. The trip had been short once traffic cleared and there hadn’t been any point in lingering or stopping elsewhere. I’d type up my notes for the insurance company later; I’d been on the job for only twenty-four hours officially and they didn’t require a report so soon.

I didn’t see any sign of Quinton when I came in so I assumed he was busy elsewhere. We’re a couple but we don’t spend every free moment together, not least because we both have strange jobs, dangerous associates, and eccentric habits. Two born loners living—mostly—together requires a degree of laissez-faire most people haven’t got. I took off my boots and hid them in the hall closet to save them from possible predation by the ferret. Then I flipped on the TV to the first channel I found running a nature documentary and let Chaos out of her cage for a romp around the living room. Chaos loves nature shows, except for any part of Shark Week, which I think demonstrates a lot more common sense than I’d normally credit to a furry mammal the size of a sneaker who looks like an animated kneesock with teeth.

I was staring into the fridge and wondering why I never seem to have any food in the place when I got a whiff of an unpleasant odor that wasn’t coming from the icebox. A cold feeling ran down the back of my neck and I turned around slowly.

My kitchen and living room had vanished behind a wall of Grey mist and a gleaming doorway shape awaited my attention. I hadn’t seen this phenomenon in years—not since I’d first been introduced to the Grey. I’d seen it only once since then and none of these occasions had been pleasant. Apparently the Guardian Beast wanted to see me and was sending a formal invitation, for once. Usually it just showed up and beat me into doing what it wanted—not the most articulate of monsters, it tended toward violent demonstration more than discussion. Since it is, effectively, my boss in the Grey, when it shows up, I pay attention, especially since I’m pretty sure it could take me out permanently if it wanted to. I sighed and gave up on dinner.

“All right, I’m coming,” I muttered, and stepped toward the glowing portal of ghost-stuff, sinking out of the normal world and fully into the realm of shadows and magic.

The Guardian resolved from the boiling fog of the Grey, a long, sinuous, and coiling shape of silver reflection and ghostlight. The unpleasantly dragonlike head swooped down to my own eye level and looked me over, breathing cold and the odor of forgotten crypts on my face. Cold wisps of Grey mist suggested the imminent shapes of sharp horns and fangs.

I pushed the head back with the flat of my hand. “What do you want?” I asked. I would have demanded, but where’s the point in that?

“Seawitch,” the Grey sighed around me, silver-mist faces momentarily evolving from the cold steam of the world between worlds to give voice to the Guardian’s thoughts.

“I’m already on it, but I don’t have much to go on yet. You have to be patient.”

“Valencia,” the voices whispered.

“What?” I had no idea what the Guardian was alluding to. A city in Spain? An orange?

“Find . . . the lost.”

Not helpful, that. “That was on my to-do list already. If you have a more articulate or specific clue, I’d really appreciate it. I think I liked you better when you couldn’t speak at all.”

It laughed at me, the Grey rippling and rolling with its amusement. Then it coiled around me, wrapping its snakelike length up my body in cold loops that sent a metallic shock over my skin like touching the live contacts of a small battery. This time it didn’t pull me up and drop me down again, as it had once, but spun me round and round, the Beast uncoiling into a dark panorama before my dizzy gaze.

I reeled out of its clutches and stared at the scene it had composed of the Grey. A dark place with two large humped shapes and a black stain that thickened the air in one corner. . . . I’d been there, but it hadn’t looked quite like this. . . . Where was it?

As I looked, the dark clot of something widened and became more solid, spreading out to form an impossible crowd of black human shapes that couldn’t really fit in the confined space, yet they did—all contained as if warped into the area by some freak of black-hole physics. I thought there must have been a hundred or more, trapped behind the large, cold iron shapes of engines. . . . Yes, that’s what they were: engines. The space was Seawitch’s engine room. Not as I’d seen it last, but as it might look from within the Grey.

I pulled back from the Guardian and its vision with an effort. “OK, I see it. The engine room. I’ll go there tomorrow and take another look. Is that what you want?”

The Grey made a hissing noise that slowly faded to a chuckle as the mist drained away, leaving me flat-footed in the arch between my kitchen and the living room. “Wait,” I cried. “What sort of creature—” But it was too late and I couldn’t call the Guardian Beast back. I felt cold and my skin was damp and stiff. “Thanks,” I muttered. “Next time I’ll bring a towel.”

“Don’t you always know where your towel is?” Quinton asked. “What sort of Hitchhiker are you?”

I whipped around to glare in the direction of the front door from which his voice was coming.

Quinton was smiling at me from just inside the closed door. “Hi. Sorry if I startled you. I didn’t realize you were . . . here/not here.”

“Just having a little conference call with the Beast and its Greek chorus.”

“And this leads to towels . . . how?”

I shook my hands out, flinging salty water at him. “I’m wet. This case revolves around a boat that was lost at sea and has now returned like a bad penny—a very wet bad penny. So I got drenched. The new Guardian has what passes for a sense of humor. Mostly on the verge of nasty.”

He looked at the puddle developing around my feet, which had now attracted the ferret, who darted in to take a taste and then backed off, making a face that clearly said the water was vile and she disapproved of it intensely. “You need a towel. Luckily, like a good Hitchhiker, I know where they are.”

“What is with the hitchhiker reference?” I asked, grabbing a dish towel off the drain board to wipe the worst of the moisture off my face and hair.

Quinton ducked into the linen closet in the hall and brought back a large bath towel. “You might want to change out of your clothes here, where the floor’s easier to mop up. And haven’t you read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?”

I took the towel and rubbed some more water out of my hair before I started to disrobe. “Nope,” I replied. “If it isn’t shelved in the mystery section, I haven’t read it.”

He heaved an exaggerated sigh and scooped up the ferret as she rampaged past. “One of the guiding principles of intergalactic hitchhiking is ‘Always know where your towel is.’”

I gave him a blank stare.

“I guess you had to be there,” he replied.

“I guess,” I echoed, taking off the last of my damp clothes. “This is the second time I’ve been soaked today by water that wasn’t there. Maybe I should be taking a towel with me.”

“The point isn’t that you have the towel with you—although that is implied—but that you know where it is.”

“Huh,” I grunted from under the terry cloth. “That almost makes sense.”

“How did you end up soaked with invisible water the first time?”

“Something on the boat we’re investigating doused me.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” he asked.

“Rey Solis—of all people to get stuck with a cold case that’s straight out of the Twilight Zone.”

“How’s he taking it?” Quinton asked, as I popped back out from under the towel.

“Better than he could have but not as well as I’d like. I think he’s actually taking in the idea that I’m not normal in a way that goes beyond his usual experience. We had the Chat.”

“The I-talk-to-ghosts chat?”

“Yup. And then I had to show him.”

Quinton snorted. “I’ll bet he loved that.”

“About as much as you’d expect.” I peeled off the last of my wet clothes and wrapped the towel around myself.

“Hey, you don’t have to cover up for my sake,” Quinton objected, smiling.

“I’m cold.”

His smile widened into a wicked grin. “I can tell.” He walked over and wrapped his arms around me, putting the ferret on my shoulder as he started to kiss and nibble at my opposite ear. “I can warm you up. . . .”

I laughed and tried to wiggle loose. “Silly man. Dinner first.”

Suddenly Quinton twitched backward. “Ugh! Ferret tastes disgusting!”

Chaos made a leap for the kitchen counter as I started laughing. “You’re the one who put her there!”

“I hadn’t considered that she’d stick her tail in my mouth,” he added, making a face and turning toward the sink in search of water to rinse from his mouth the taste of ferret fur.

I chuckled and caught the fuzzy miscreant so I could return her to the floor where she belonged. Not that I hadn’t enjoyed the kissing, but I was still wound up from the long day and once we got to the sexual gymnastics I wanted to do more with Quinton than rush through a quickie on the kitchen counter. I took his distraction as an opportunity to slip away to a quick shower and some dry sweats.

When I returned, Quinton was pulling things out of the fridge. Neither of us was much of a cook, but Quinton at least had the skill of recognizing what bits and pieces might go well together. I’m strictly a prepackaged dinner girl and if I tried to put a dish together from leftovers, we’d end up dining on something like cream of beet on toast. I like food well enough; I’m just lousy at making it. On the other hand, I have never put things in the microwave that don’t really belong there.

Later, when we were sitting on the couch with dinner in front of us and Chaos was occupied with reorganizing her stash of toys, I recapped my day to Quinton at his request. I told him about the Seawitch and her missing passengers, my first soaking of the day, Linda Starrett, and then our conversation with Captain John Reeve.

“What worries me,” I said, “is that I don’t know if whatever was watching was there to begin with or if it was summoned in some way.”

“You mean because of the spell thing in the fountain or because he called it in some way?”

I gave a half shrug. “I’m not quite sure. That is, I’m not sure about the connection or if there is one or if he somehow conjured the thing into existence.”

“I’m not quite following you. . . .”

“First, I’m not sure what it was that I saw. It could have been what he was describing—a large doglike thing—or it may just have been something that size and I filled in the idea of a dog thing myself.”

“Does it actually matter?” Quinton asked.

“It may. If I could figure out what the creature was, I might be able to get a line on what powers are involved here and if it’s one of those creatures that is attracted by its name or if it’s something that can be tethered or . . . what. Most of what I’ve seen so far is pretty foreign to me except for basic principles. It all seems to be about water, which I haven’t had much experience with up till now.”

“Except for up at the lake last year.”

“Yes, but that was freshwater and it didn’t feel like this. The water was just a carrier of magic in that case, but here . . . it’s like the seawater or the sea itself is a power of its own. And I’m not ignoring the fact that there’s blood magic involved and that blood is also salty. I’m not quite getting a handle on this.”

“Well, you are dealing with sailors and boats and there’s a lot of tradition and superstition there. If, as you’ve said, this stuff is influenced by the things people close to it think and feel and fear . . . then that’s a lot of influence and shaping over a very long period of time. And not all of it will be homogenous. You could have more than one tradition in the mix on this coast. I mean, we have everything from English legends to the local Indian lore and the Viking myths that came over with Leif Eriksson.”

I gave that a moment’s thought and nodded. “True. Could very well be any or all of them. Or maybe I’m just a little thrown off by working with Solis. He’s kind of hard to read. Even when he’s freaked-out.”

“That’s what makes him a good cop. You’re not easy to read, either, you know. Most people find you a little . . . aloof.”

I raised an eyebrow and looked askance at him, feeling a bit prickly. “Aloof? Doesn’t that imply dislike?”

“Not from me, but you can understand how your tendency to keep your distance may look like distaste or disdain to some people. I know it’s part of the job—you need to keep your thoughts to yourself and not become a factor of your cases—but it does put you in the position of disinterested observer and that unsettles some people. They don’t separate their observations from their emotions and they don’t really understand someone who does.”

“Do you speak from experience, O Wise Sage?”

“Yup. My dad’s one of those guys.” His aura gave a brief, panicked flash of red before he shut his emotion back down, but I still felt it. “He makes you look like a passionately impetuous mayfly. I don’t think I ever saw him smile spontaneously in my life. Now, that is aloof.”

“I can honestly say Solis is not that chilly. I might be able to like him if he’d just crack the ice a little. . . .”

Quinton snorted. I cut him a narrow look as he said, “Oh yes, Ms. Pot. Meet Detective Kettle.”

“All right,” I said on an aggravated sigh. “I admit I’m a hard shell. But I did try to let him in.”

“Yeah, but what you let him in on is not an easy thing to get your brain around. Give him some time. You guys have to work together on this and he’ll either get it or he won’t. You can’t force him.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I groused, dismissing the problem for the moment, though I knew it was going to come back on me later.

Quinton just gave me a doe-eyed look and raised his eyebrows. I frowned back at him. I could feel something wasn’t right. The strange and tenuous magical connection between us vibrated like a drawn string and I didn’t know what he was concealing from me, but there was something. . . . I’m curious by nature and I wanted to pick and poke at this hidden thing until he told me what it was, but my better instinct said I shouldn’t.

I took a long breath and decided to redirect the subject back to the problem of whatever I’d seen in the Grey at Reeve’s house. “Maybe I should drop an e-mail to the Danzigers and see if they know what Reeve was talking about and if what I saw is the same thing.”

Quinton shook his head. “Mara and Ben are in Europe, working on his book,” he reminded me with a small frown of annoyance. “They’re not exactly glued to the Internet, waiting for you to cry for help.”

“I’m not crying for help,” I objected.

“Yes, you are, and you need to stop that.”

“Excuse me?”

He sighed. “Harper, I know you don’t want to hear this, but you’ve gotten lazy about doing your own research—which is ironic, considering that’s essentially what you get paid to do. They’ve been gone most of a year already and you still send queries to Ben and Mara as if they have nothing better to do than answer your questions about magic. And, yes, yes, I do know they’re a great resource,” he added, putting his hands up to stop my objections. “And there’s no one out here half as useful, but that’s just the problem: You can’t use your friends that way.”

I gaped at him. “I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. And most of the time it’s all right—we don’t mind. But you said it yourself: You have to stop taking your friends for granted. I know you can manage to get through this stuff without treating people like resources.”

I felt stung and didn’t know what to say to that; at the same time I had the feeling there was more behind Quinton’s concern than he was saying. It was true that I tended to rely on my small circle of friends too much and, frankly, to put them in situations that weren’t always safe or comfortable because I needed something and I hadn’t weighed the possibility that they wouldn’t want to or might get hurt by helping me. And because I have an unnatural gift for persuasion, they didn’t tell me no when they probably should have. I looked down, suddenly uncomfortable. “I guess I’m a hard friend to have,” I muttered. “Or maybe . . . I just don’t know how to be a friend.”

Quinton wrapped one arm around my shoulders and pulled me tight against his side. “That is not true and I’m not trying to make you feel bad. I’m just reminding you—as you’ve said you wanted—that you need to think about these things before you presume on friendships. Ben and Mara and I would all walk across burning coals for you, but you shouldn’t assume that we don’t mind.”

I bit my lip hard. I didn’t like being reminded of all the ways I’d abused my friends, but while Quinton was only doing as I’d asked—kicking me in the conscience where I tended to have a blind spot—it was pissing me off. I can be a jerk—I’m not saying I can’t—but I wasn’t thrilled by being reminded of it. Especially when I had the increasingly strong feeling there was something he didn’t want to tell me and this conversation was at least partially a dodge to avoid it.

I took a few more long slow breaths and unlocked my jaw. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t remind me how to be a better friend, but maybe we should put further discussion of this off for now,” I suggested.

He looked hard at me, as if he were searching for a sign in my face that I apparently wasn’t giving. “All right,” he said at last. “But I don’t want to leave it like this.”

I shook my head in confusion. “Leave what?”

“No. I mean ‘leave’ as in actually go away: I have to go back out. I just wanted to . . . see you before I did.”

I frowned at him. “What’s wrong? Where do you have to go?”

“It’s just more work stuff. I have to do it.”

“Work stuff? Like with the three-letter acronyms?”

He made an uncomfortable shrug.

“I thought you were done with that.”

“Me, too,” he said, his voice rueful as he glanced away from me.

I wanted to ask a half-a-hundred questions, but I stifled them and we spent the next quarter hour trying to pretend we both weren’t uncomfortable and lying about it.

Finally I gave up. “Does this have an end?” I asked.

He squeezed his eyes shut and gave a tiny shake of his head. “I don’t know.” He stood up and took the plates out to the kitchen to keep the ferret from helping herself and, I guessed, to avoid making more of a reply.

I caught him before he could slip out the door. “Are you coming back?”

“Yeah. Just trust me.”

“I do.” I wanted to ask why he didn’t trust me, but I knew that would be a big, fat mistake. So I shut my mouth, which made our parting kiss a cold, narrow, and unsatisfying thing.

As soon as the door was closed behind him I wanted to scream in frustration. I was trying to be a better friend, even to my lover, to give as well as take, and here was something I could do nothing about. I couldn’t complain, I couldn’t remonstrate, I couldn’t even be sure what the problem was, though I’d have put money on the chance it was something to do with his mysterious family, since he’d been more forthcoming about having worked for the government than he was about them.

I growled and threw the nearest object: a coffee mug that shattered against the doorframe.

Broken ceramic showered down onto the floor and the ferret scampered to it, hopping in fury.

I watched her a moment, fuming, until her antics worked past my annoyance and left me shaking my head in self-disgust.

“That was a stupid thing to do,” I chided myself, fetching the dustpan and broom from the kitchen.

I went to clean up the mess, having to field the ferret away from the sharp bits of former mug. And afterward I sent an e-mail to Mara and Ben, anyhow.

There are few things more emotionally terrible than interviewing family members of missing persons presumed dead for twenty-seven years. When someone’s been missing for a short time, the family usually has strong ideas about whether they are dead or alive and what may have happened to them. They will even argue with one another and with the interviewer about it. But when someone’s been gone without word or trace for so long, the sadness and confusion settles in and some of these people who can otherwise manage their daily lives become painfully disconnected when they talk about the missing. Time seems to flutter around them, shifting the phase of their reference from now to then to . . . some strange, unspecified time that is neither future nor past.

Gary Fielding’s family was in Portland, so Solis and I had chosen to leave them aside unless necessary and started with the family of Janice Prince—one of the two women who’d been listed with the passengers. But we hadn’t made a lot of headway with the Princes. Janice’s mother, now in her early seventies, kept breaking into tears. Her father was stony, glowering at us and offering nothing but negative comments such as, “I always knew it. I knew she was a bad one,” which threw Mrs. Prince into fits of crying and arguing against him. Mrs. Prince countered with, “No, Janice wasn’t bad! She was confused, poor thing. She just—she just didn’t fit in!” and similar statements, when she could make one at all between bouts of upset and tears.

The conversation went in circles of blame and recrimination that broke down into Mrs. Prince sobbing about what a good girl her daughter had tried to be while her husband just shook his head in judgment.

“She couldn’t help falling in with that fast crowd down at the marina,” Mrs. Prince cried to me. “They were so—they seemed so charmed.”

“Boat trash,” her husband muttered.

Mrs. Prince gave him a pleading look. “They were so glamorous. Even the ones without any money always seemed to be going wonderful places and doing exciting things! How could a little girl like our Janice not fall for that? There weren’t bad people. They weren’t! They were just—”

“Trash!” Mr. Prince spat.

“No, they weren’t. Besides, Janice worked there. How could she avoid them?”

“Excuse me, Mrs. Prince,” I interrupted. “Your daughter worked at the marina?”

She turned her reddened eyes to me. “Yes . . .”

“What did she do there?”

“She . . . she worked in the convenience store at the end of the fuel dock.”

“So she knew a lot of the regulars?”

“Oh yes! Janice would have such interesting stories when she came home! Who was going to Mexico or Alaska or out to the islands or taking their boat out for repairs. It was like all of them were her personal friends!”

“Was she particular friends with anyone?”

“Oh . . . I don’t know. I suppose. I don’t remember names now. . . .”

“Did she have other friends around the marina—other workers or anything like that?”

“Well, she and Ruthie Ireland spent a lot of time together. . . .”

“How did she know Ruthie?”

“Just from the marina.”

“More trash,” Mr. Prince declared. “Loose!”

“Now, dear, that’s not fair.”

“Sluts, the both of them,” Mr. Prince declared. “Better off dead and gone.”

Mrs. Prince broke into wailing sobs for the third or fourth time. I eyed Solis and wondered if we could just call this one done and go on to the next sad family on the list. He glanced back and shook his head in resignation. Then he got to his feet.

“Mrs. Prince, Mr. Prince,” he started. “We apologize for bringing up such painful memories. You’ve been very helpful.”

Mrs. Prince grabbed for his hand and turned her face up to his. She hiccupped and gulped as she asked, “Will you be able to tell us what happened to our little girl?”

“We hope so, Mrs. Prince.”

She let go of his hand reluctantly and covered her face with the tear-soaked handkerchief she clutched in her hands.

Mr. Prince saw us out, still hard, still disapproving. He opened the door and held it for us, scowling. He didn’t say anything as we left.

I walked behind Solis to his car—a blue Honda sedan so bland it would disappear in a bowl of oatmeal. Beside the car, Solis reached into his jacket and brought out his cell phone. It was one of those big-screened smartphones blinking with little messages and clever applications. He poked it a few times and smiled. “Our manuscript technician has had some luck. He should have some legible pages photographed for us within an hour,” he announced, looking back at me. A momentary frown flitted across his face, as if he was unsure of me, but it vanished almost too fast to see.

I supposed he hadn’t really forgotten our strained conversation from the day before, even though he’d put on a good show of it. I played along. “I hope they’re useful,” I said. The chances of the pages holding anything but chart headings and maintenance information were slim, but I still hoped for a break from the “normal” side of this damned investigation.

“I asked him to concentrate on the pages near the end, where the most recent entries were. We’ll see. . . .”

And in the meantime Solis and I would pretend strange things hadn’t happened yesterday and carry on to the home of Walter Ireland to find out what he had to say about his missing daughter.

Ireland, like the Princes, was elderly, and a widower besides. We got lucky in that he was one of those guys whose family was helping out rather than dumping him into a retirement home. His two remaining children were at the house when we arrived, and it appeared we’d interrupted a lively game of poker—the dining room table was spread with cards, chips, and snacks, and the elder Ireland was comfortably parked at one end in a wheelchair that was slightly ratty but lovingly padded with a crazy collection of brocade pillows and clashing blankets.

We’d been met at the door by a woman in her late thirties with black-walnut hair that was unashamedly straight out of a bottle. She introduced herself as Jen and her older brother as Jon and waved at her father as we drew near, saying, “Hey, Dad, what you been up to? The cops are here! Have you been drag racing again?”

Walter Ireland’s laugh was a weak, wheezing thing that shook his chest like an earthquake nonetheless. Judging by his thin, olive green aura, the oxygen bottle strapped to the back of his chair, and the way the riot of pillows propped him up, we’d get more of our answers from his kids, not because he was going to hold out on us, but because he simply didn’t have the breath to speak for long.

We introduced ourselves to Walter and he gestured to us to sit down with the family. The table had enough mismatched chairs to seat eight, so we picked one on each side near the poker party. I sat on the side next to Jon—a tall man in his early fifties with receding hair the color of dust and a mustache stolen straight off a cowboy in a cigarette commercial. Solis took the seat next to what must have been Jen’s currently empty chair, judging by the cards facedown on the table.

“You want anything?” Jen asked, still standing between the table and the doorway and glancing around at everyone. “Dad is going to have his go juice.”

Walter shook his head and made a face.

“Oh yeah, you are,” Jen replied. “It’s after noon and the doctor says you have to drink it twice a day. I know it’s gross, but, hey, it could be worse—it could be blendered liver powder and wheatgrass like Dotty drinks. Num num!”

Walter’s mouth turned down and he coughed out, “All right. Nasty gunk.”

“I want some of that red stuff,” Jon said. “We’ve still got red stuff, right?”

“You mean red-red or pinky-red?” Jen asked.

“Red-red. Pinky-red is that dragon-fruit goop. Pfah!”

She looked at us. “We have Vitamin Water in whatever color you like and soda and plain, old-fashioned tap water. Or I can make some tea if you want.”

“Water is fine,” I said.

Solis nodded to indicate the same.

Jen raised her eyebrows at us. “Ooo . . . living on the edge—drinking tap water.”

“I hear fish fart in it,” Jon said with a wink at me.

Jen hustled around the open-plan kitchen that adjoined the dining area and fetched the drinks. She brought her father a small plastic bottle of some thick orange liquid and plopped down a bottle of purple Vitamin Water next to it before she sat down beside him and pried the lid off the orange goop. She pushed it into Walter’s hand, saying, “There y’go, Dad. Slug that crap down and then you can have the good stuff to wash away the taste.” She shot a look over her shoulder at me and Solis. “Acai and blueberry. I think it’s horrible, but Dad likes the stuff.”

“Better’n this,” Walter mumbled, lifting the small bottle in a shaking hand.

“My theory is that the combined tastes must be much better than the individual ones,” Jon added, “because that acai berry stuff is kind of weird.”

Walter started to offer him his orange glop. “Wanna find out?” It came out as a near whisper.

Jon waved him off. “Nope. You drink it, Dad. You’re a better man than I am.”

Walter wheezed another laugh, then guzzled his drink with a downturned mouth and a scowl.

“OK, so . . . what’s the question of the day?” Jen asked, turning to us as her father reached for the bottle of purple liquid.

“We have some questions about your sister, Ruth,” Solis replied.

Jen blinked and Jon scowled. Walter looked stunned.

“Ruthie?” Jen asked. “She’s been gone a long time. What kind of questions could you have? Have you found her?”

“No. But the boat on which she disappeared has been found and we wish to know more about the passengers.”

Jen blinked a little, her mouth working like a fish’s, and couldn’t quite form a reply.

Jon leaned forward, helping his father with the lid on the bottle of Vitamin Water, but keeping his focus on us. “What sort of thing do you want to know?”

“Did she talk about the trip?”

“Not a lot that I remember,” Jon replied. “But I wasn’t around much then. I suppose she would have been excited, though.”

Jen snorted and Walter shook his head.

“So she wasn’t looking forward to the trip?” Solis asked.

“She wanted it like fire,” Walter mumbled, wheezing.

Jon reached over the wheelchair and adjusted the valve on his father’s oxygen bottle. “Ruthie was boat crazy, so if she was going to go out with those high-roller types, of course she was excited. She loved that stuff.”

“Well, she liked her friends, too. I don’t think she’d have been as excited about it if they weren’t going along,” Jen added.

“Which friends, specifically? Do you remember?”

“Oh, Janice, of course—they were BFFs.” She looked at her brother. “What was that other girl’s name? The crazy one.”

“Which one? Half of Ruthie’s friends were crazy.”

“The one with the funny hair.” She turned her gaze back to me and Solis. “One of those blondes whose hair goes all green in the swimming pool. You know. Kooky. She was like a deckhand or something.” She looked back to Jon. “What was her name?”

“Sally?”

“Nooo . . .” Jen said, shaking her head. “That’s not right.”

Walter coughed around a word. Jen and Jon both leaned close to hear.

“What, Dad?” Jen asked.

I could barely hear the whispering of his breath as he repeated the word.

Jen looked up again. “Shelly. Dad says her name was Shelly.” She looked at her brother. “Does that sound right to you?”

Jon nodded. “Oh yeah. Now I do remember her. Shelly Knight. Which I remember because Janice didn’t like her as much as Ruthie did and she called her One-Night Shelly. They used to argue whether Shelly was a friend or a floozy.”

“Like I would remember that. I was, what, twelve?”

“Well, you might if you’d paid attention.”

“What came to my attention was the way you mooned around after Janice Prince.”

“Mooned around? I never moon—unless I drop my pants first.”

Solis cut into their developing argument. “Do you believe Shelly Knight was on the boat when it left?”

“I’d be really surprised if she wasn’t,” Jon said.

Jen nodded. Walter seemed to nod, too, but it could just have been that he was tired, since the energy around his head and body was very low. “Shelly,” he whispered, a slight scowl on his face. He motioned to his children and Jon leaned in to listen before Jen could turn around from looking at us.

Jon nodded for a few seconds at what his father was saying, then raised his head, frowning. “I think Dad’s really tired and he’s not making sense. He says he saw Shelly the last time we were down at the marina. But that couldn’t be right.”

“Why not?” I asked. “When was he last at the marina?”

“About a year ago. Before he went into the hospital this last time. We went down with the broker to finalize the sale of Dad’s fishing boat—nothing fancy, but he wasn’t going to use it and we kind of needed the money for the medical bills. But, anyway. He’s sure he saw Shelly sitting on the dock when we were there. I don’t remember that but he says he did. I think he’s imagining things, myself.”

Jen smacked him on the arm. “Don’t say that. Dad’s not senile.”

“I didn’t say he was. I just don’t think he’s remembering quite right. It was a year ago. A lot’s happened since then.”

“How could you misremember a girl with green hair?”

“These days there’s a lot of them I’d like to misremember. Ecch. Green hair.”

Jen made a face at him. “Bigot.”

“I don’t make fun of you for dyeing your hair.”

“That’s because I look good.”

“That’s because you dye it a nice color, not green. You look like a femme fatale from an old movie.”

Jen beamed at him. “Thank you!”

Solis’s cell phone vibrated and made a rattling sound against the chair where his pocket touched the seat. He reached down and silenced it without looking. “So,” he started, “your sister didn’t have any fear about this trip?”

“Oh, heck, no!” Jen said. “It sounded like a great adventure. I wish it—I wish it hadn’t been. I wish she’d stayed home.” Her face went suddenly and deeply sad.

Jon put his hand over hers on the tabletop. “It’s all right, honey. We all miss Ruthie.”

“I just wish I’d been nicer to her. I wish I hadn’t been such a brat to her.”

“You were a brat; you were twelve.”

“I said some mean things to her before she left. I guess I was jealous, but I wish I could take them back. And I can’t.”

Jen teetered on the verge of tears until her father interrupted with a soft snore. Both adult children jumped a bit and looked at their father. Walter had fallen asleep in his chair.

Jen wiped her eyes, smearing a bit of eyeliner on the back of her hand and sniffling around a wobbling smile. “Oh, Dad. Silly old Dad. Maybe we’d better put him to bed. . . .”

Jon stood up, unfolding to a comfortable six feet and stretching his arms a bit. “All right. Let’s do it. You get the door; I’ll drive.”

They paused and glanced at us. “Umm . . .” Jen said.

I stood up and Solis followed suit. “We’d better be going,” I said. “You’ve been very helpful. Thanks. If you think of anything else about Ruthie’s friends or the trip, you’ll let us know, right?” I added, holding out my card.

“Oh. Sure.” Jen took my card and another from Solis and tucked them into the back pocket of her jeans. “I hope you find out what happened to her. We—we all really miss her.”

“We will let you know,” Solis offered.

Jen nodded and we let ourselves out as the Ireland kids put their father to bed.

Outside, Solis glanced at his cell phone and poked it a few times. Then he held it out to me.

I took it, not sure what I was going to see. On the big screen there was a photograph of a sheet of paper that was stained with green and black marks and yellowed unevenly all over. I couldn’t see more than that and started to hand back the phone, scowling in confusion. Solis reached over my arm and made the picture suddenly zoom larger.

“Oh,” I said in surprise, looking down at the photo of a page from the log book floating in a shallow tank of water. “Oh . . . my.” It was the passenger and crew manifest for the last voyage of the Seawitch. For the crew, two positions were listed: a captain/navigator and a cook.

Solis looked over my arm at the photo, then up at me. “Do you suppose the cook listed there could be Shelly Knight?”

“I’m not sure it could be anyone else. But if it was Shelly . . . who did Walter Ireland see on the dock last year?”

“Perhaps Shelly Knight.”

“Then why hasn’t she come forward before this?” I asked, mostly to get the question into the air, since I was sure we were both thinking it.

“We should see if we can find this woman.”

“Marina?” I asked.

Solis nodded.