Seawitch (10 page)

We both shook off the offer politely and sat in the fishing chairs. Zantree pulled off his bandana and scratched his shaggy gray hair before shoving the piece of cloth into his back pocket. He still looked like a pirate from the neck down but his uncovered head definitely made him grandfatherly, in an exotic, eccentric fashion.

“Mr. Zantree,” Solis began, “we are seeking information about
Seawitch
and those aboard it before its disappearance. Your neighbors suggested that since you had been resident here for many years, you might be able to help us.”

He smiled and looked relieved. “Oh, the ’
Witch
was a fine old boat then. She used to be moored just down at the end of E dock in those days,” Zantree offered. The energy around him bloomed into a soft gold corona laced with thin blue threads. “Right across from here, in fact.”

“How long have you lived here, sir?”

Zantree grinned, his teeth showing a bit yellow. “Thirty-four years. I was just thirty and my wife and I couldn’t afford a house, but we both liked the water so we bought an old wooden boat—bit of a wreck, it was—and moved aboard. We fixed her up real nice—taught ourselves how—and lived on that old boat for about . . .” He glanced aside and nibbled his lip as he thought about it. “Six years. Had two of our three kids on that boat. When June got pregnant again, we bought this boat so we’d have room for the baby. We could have moved back up on the hard—we could afford it by then—but we just didn’t want to.” He paused in memory, his face clouding. “Or, really,
I
just didn’t want to . . .” he added. Then he shook off his mood as swiftly as it had come. “So we had moved up here with the big boats about a year and a half before
Seawitch
went missing. Back then there weren’t very many live-aboards but a lot more people just hung out around Charlie’s—that was the bar and restaurant in the lobby of the old harbormaster’s building. Had a big tower on it like an air-traffic-control tower so the harbormaster could look out and see the whole place. They tore all that down and redid the docks a couple years ago.”

“You’ve always been in this slip since you moved onto this boat?” Solis asked.

“Yep,” Zantree replied, nodding.

“And you could see
Seawitch
from here?”

“Oh yes! Such a pretty boat she was then. Old man Starrett had kept her up real well. The boy—Castor—he was a bit of a layabout but he had the smarts to hire himself a good captain and give him both the money and the time to keep the boat up for him.”

“So you knew John Reeve.”

“I surely did. Haven’t seen him around much in a while. He worked for a few other folks after that, but I always thought that losing the ’
Witch
took the heart out of him. He made a bunch of money in the stock market and retired. I hear he lost most of it again recently, but I always thought old John was a rubber-sole sort of guy: bounces right back.”

Solis adopted a thoughtful expression but said nothing more about Reeve. Instead he asked, “Did you also know his apprentice?”

“Gary? Oh yeah. Kind of an odd fellow, Gary. He always had a sort of mischievous air to him, but in that kind of desperate way, like he knew he was getting too old for that sort of shenanigans—not that he was old, but . . . you know.”

Solis nodded. “Mrs. Starrett indicated that the
Seawitch
occasionally used temporary crew. Did you know any of them?”

“Well, no, not really. Reeve had a couple of hands who’d usually show up to handle lines and so on when they’d cast off or come in. Didn’t really know the sort of people they hired on for parties and the like—caterer’s folks, mostly. Well, except for Shelly—everybody knew Shelly. She was sweet . . .” Zantree added, blushing.

“Shelly Knight?”

“Oh, she was a beauty. So mysterious and charming—like a Gypsy fortune-teller—and she could cook . . . mm-
hm
. Best crab boil you ever tasted.”

“Do you know where we could contact her now?”

“Well, no. She’s dead. She went off on
Seawitch
when it put out to sea for the last time. Gary took her along as the cook.”

“Another boat owner said he thought he had seen her here within the past year. Is it possible she’s still alive?”

“Shelly? Well, no. I don’t mind telling you I had a terrible crush on that girl. Terrible. I was brokenhearted when they declared the ’
Witch
lost at sea with all hands. I doubt I was the only one, either.”

“What of this other young woman in the marina now, staying aboard
Pleiades
? Her name is also Knight, isn’t it?”

The colors around Zantree’s head darkened for a moment to shades of grim green and brown, then brightened again in a sudden flash. “Here at the marina? The singing girl? Of course it couldn’t be her. Shelly’d have to be in her late forties or fifty by now and, besides, the hair’s completely different. And this girl sings. Shelly never sang, not even to herself.”

Solis and I asked disparate questions at the same time: “Are you certain you remember what Shelly Knight looked like?” he asked. And I asked, “What do you mean her hair was different?”

Zantree looked back and forth between us. Then he stood up. “I’ll tell you what. I have an old photo of some of the wharf rats from back in the day—I mean, I have pictures of the folks who used to hang out here all the time. Let me go get the photo. I’ll show you they can’t be the same. . . .”

He went into the boat, leaving the large sliding doors of the cabin open and moving as if dazed. I cocked my head and tried peering sideways through the Grey at him, but the difference in light and shadow inside made me unsure if I were truly seeing a thin pall of sickly color around him or if the dim electric bulbs just cast an unpleasant glow off the dark wooden wall. I could see him shuffling through a shelf of old-style photo albums until he found what he wanted. He hesitated, almost putting the big book back into the shelf before he tucked it under his arm and returned to us, flopping the volume open on top of the ice chest. He paged through it in a strained, mechanical way and finally pointed with a shaking finger to the second in a series of photos showing a group of people working on what looked like a parade float that had somehow run aground on the beach. The round-cornered photos had taken on that faded yellow-and-blue tinge that was typical of the one-hour-processed snapshots I remembered from my own youth.

“This was taken in 1980,” he started a little stiffly, almost defensively, “which was my first year as a Seafair pirate. My wife took a lot of pictures of me and the crew—she and the kids were so tickled. And this is all of us working on the pirate landing craft. That’s me,” he said, his voice and demeanor suddenly animated and his aura aglow in bright gold pleasure as he pointed at his younger self in plaid Bermuda shorts, white sport shirt, and a floppy straw hat much like Peter Black’s. He was in the middle of a pack of people dressed in similar clothes, who were pretending to push back the tide of pirates surging out of the painted-plywood sailing ship. The were all cheating over their shoulders and grinning, while the people dressed as pirates bared their teeth in mock fury and held aloft their plastic—and some not plastic—cutlasses and pistols.

Off to the side a laden picnic table poked into the frame, a handful of women and kids gathered around a huge boiling pot set on a portable burner about eighteen inches across. Zantree moved his finger to the woman who was stirring the pot and neither smiling nor looking up at the photographer. “That’s Shelly Knight—and about thirty Dungeness crabs.”

The focus was a little blurry on the group near the pot and Shelly’s face wasn’t as distinct as we might have liked, but the general idea was there: a slim young woman in a pink bikini top and a colorful sarong wrapped around her hips as a skirt, her long blond hair drawn back into a braid that flopped over her shoulder and down to her waist. Her hair was a pale apple green, but I thought that could have been caused by the shifting of the old photo’s color.

I looked up at Zantree and asked, “This other woman on the dock recently—how did she look different from Shelly?”

Zantree nodded a little mechanically. “Well . . . her hair’s red.”

“But otherwise . . . ?”

He struggled with the words. “Not much . . .”

“Not much different? Or not much the same?”

He quivered and shook his head, his mouth drawing tight in discomfort. I took a deep breath and shook my head, too. “Never mind. Don’t let it bother you.”

Zantree’s stiff shoulders softened and he looked at the photo again as if for the first time. Then he smiled at it. “She was so pretty. So charming. She’d tell our fortunes with cards and weave the most wonderful ghost stories over the bonfires on the beach at night. . . . Everybody loved Shelly.”

“And yet no one seems to know anything about her,” Solis muttered.

I gave him a sharp glare. He blinked back at me.

I pointed at the photo again. “Did Shelly really have green hair? It looks green in the photo, but in real life . . . ?”

“It was green, all right. A touch more yellow and paler than that photo shows, but definitely green. In the right light, it looked just a pale blond color, but up close in the sun, or under a fluorescent bulb like we had in the old marina building, it was actually green.”

“How do you remember that?”

“Who forgets a girl with green hair?”

Solis rejoined the conversation. “What about this redheaded woman from
Pleiades
? Have you spoken with her?” he asked.

Zantree shrugged. “Sure I have. Why?”

“What did you say? What were the circumstances?”

“Well . . . it was on the fuel dock . . . I was pumping out the holding tank. Smelly business. She was . . . she was just sitting on the dock. She was sort of singing to herself and dangling her feet in the water.”

“At the fuel dock? Kind of an odd place to do that, isn’t it?” I threw in.

Blue-green sparks circled around Zantree’s head in my Grey-adapted sight. “Oh. Well . . . I guess it is. Didn’t think of it at the time.”

“What’s her name?”

“Name? Well, I didn’t ask.”

Solis scowled. “You didn’t ask this woman her name when you introduced yourself? This woman who did not look different from your old crush?”

“Well . . .” Zantree started, and then he went quiet and looked very confused. Peering at him through the Grey, I could see a wisp of the same dirty green color I’d seen suffocating John Reeve stroking around Zantree’s head and then sliding away. “I guess I just don’t remember anymore,” he said in a flat voice. Then he shook himself and added, “Hah! Guess I really am getting old.”

Solis rolled his eyes as if giving up the fight. “Do you have any other photos of Shelly?” he asked.

Zantree blinked, hesitated, and then pointed to another picture lower on the next page. “Just this one. It’s not very good.”

“Not very good” was an understatement. The color was less faded on this photo, but the photographer hadn’t been trying to shoot Shelly, so her part of the picture was even more out of focus than the last—and she had been caught in the act of turning so her braid was twisting and flinging around like a whip, her face obscured and her upper body looking misshapen. But I could tell her hair was a silvery green, not the apple green it had looked in the earlier photo. It wouldn’t have been too outlandish a color now—in fact it would have been too subtle for a lot of people to bother taking note of—but in 1985, when the only people wearing Kool-Aid–colored hair were rock stars, it must have been much stranger. The idea popped into my head that Linda Starrett must never have met Shelly because, as people kept telling us, you didn’t forget a girl with hair like that.

“May we take these?” Solis asked Zantree.

“Let me copy them for you,” Zantree offered, picking up the album and walking it back inside. “I have a scanner on my computer in here—my son helped me with it a couple of Christmases ago. C’mon in and I’ll fix you right up.”

We trailed after Zantree into the dimly lit main cabin and then down a short set of steps to a galley. A laptop computer and multiuse printer sat on a pull-down shelf hanging over the hull side of the built-in dinette. Zantree hauled the machines down to tabletop level and carefully removed the photos from the album to press them onto the glass plate of the printer.

As it scanned and spat out the photos, Zantree said, “Terribly clever thing my son made, yeah? He’s an engineer. Works for Boeing now. The other two kids moved out of state during the bank failures a few years ago, so Hale and his wife and kids are the only family I have left up here now. I really miss my family, but . . . I have the boat and all my friends here, which is more than a lot of people have.”

I was hesitant but went ahead and asked, “What became of your wife?”

Zantree’s face fell. “Ah. She left me. Back when the kids were all off to college, June up and said she was tired of living on a boat and it was time for us to move into a house like ‘real people.’ I disagreed. I love the boat life. I don’t want to move back up on the hard like a bug crawling on a tabletop. I never even knew she was unhappy. I guess she told me, but I must not have listened. . . .” He looked more shaken and sad than I would have expected, even for such a revelation.

“Where is she now?” I asked in a soft voice.

“She died last year. Complications after surgery. She had cancer, but she didn’t tell me about it and she asked the kids not to, either, so I never knew till it was over. That’s why I like to spend as much time with the kids and grandkids now as possible; I don’t want to miss anything else.”

We took the copied photos and left behind a much sadder pirate than we had met.

NINE

P
leiades was impressive. It shone like its namesake; every inch of paint and trim gleamed. Even in the Grey the big blue sailboat had a sheen to it that exuded a low hum of self-satisfaction. We stood on the finger dock and admired it for a few moments before Solis tried knocking on the hull as he had with
Mambo Moon
. This time there was no answer except the tiniest of shivers in the Grey. The moment of waiting silence passed and he glanced at me.

I shrugged. “If she’s in there, she’s not going to come out.”

“And we may not board without permission. Do you believe Miss Knight is inside?”

“I don’t think so. But I think she’s probably got some kind of alarm system, so even with permission from the owners, we still wouldn’t catch up to her.”

“If we entered under a warrant, the alarm would be directed to the police. We would already know the situation and ignore the call.”

I shook my head. “That’s not the sort of alarm system I meant.”

He eyed me askance. “You imagine something . . . extra?”

“I’m not imagining anything. I can see it, remember? When you knocked, it sent out waves and I don’t mean in the water. There’s something not normal about that boat.”

Solis stood still and studied me a moment in silence. Then he turned away, saying, “What do you suggest now?”

“I suggest you leave,” answered a voice from the main dock, a strange harmonic vibrating under the tone.

We both looked up. A pretty young woman stood at the beginning of the finger dock with her arms crossed over her chest and glared at us belligerently. She was a dead ringer for Shelly Knight except that her hair was red. I’ve known blondes who dye their hair red to combat brassiness or a tendency to go green from chemicals in water, but this didn’t look like a bottle job: It looked like her hair was alive in some strange way I couldn’t put a finger on that turned it the vibrant red of oxygenated blood. I didn’t dare sink deeper into the Grey right in front of her and everyone who might be looking this way, but even restricting myself to a mere glance, I saw her energy corona as a huge, writhing, barbed tangle of green, blue, and red that stretched out to each side and down toward the dock and the water like a thirsty vine run amok, rustling with the sound of talons on glass.

She narrowed her eyes as Solis produced his badge and ID card and walked toward her. I kept a step behind, letting him partially hide me from her view; I didn’t like the cold, squirming sensation that her scrutiny brought and I’m not always sure how much a paranormal creature can tell about me from a glance, so I preferred she get as short a glance as possible. The fish didn’t seem to like her, either, raising a drumroll of splashes just out of sight. The corner of her mouth twitched in irritation at the sound but she didn’t turn her gaze from us.

“I beg your pardon for the intrusion,” Solis began, drawing closer. “We’re seeking Shelly Knight or any relatives or friends here who may have known her twenty-five to thirty years ago.”

“I don’t know her.”

“Is not your name Knight?”

He didn’t say anything else, just looked at her with that bland, inquiring glance that tricked people into talking just to fill the silence.

“
Jacque
Knight. Not Shelly.”

“Related?”

“She’s not my mother or whatever it is you imagine.” Her voice swooped like poetry.

“I do not imagine. I only ask, since you bear a striking resemblance.” Knight tossed her head and the coiling strands of her aura flexed and tightened like snakes constricting on prey, throwing off a cloud of gray-green mist. “How lucky for her. Now shove off.”

Solis shrugged and cocked his head slightly. I couldn’t see his expression, but I thought he’d probably raised his eyebrows in an expression that needed only a muttered “meh” to imply her anger was a meaningless inconvenience. He’d pulled it on me often enough. “I apologize for taking your time.” He stepped around her and I followed him, cutting only the swiftest peek at her as we passed. I caught a disconcerting glimpse of something only half-human with hair that reached and coiled the same way as her aura. . . . I shivered, my skin instantly clammy.

A chilly whisper song and an urge to move on and forget I’d ever met Jacque Knight blew over the raised hairs on my arms and neck but I refused to give in to it. And I could tell by his stern posture that Solis wouldn’t, either—which made me frown in thought, pushing the unnatural suggestion out of my mind.

“You feeling . . . disinclined to loiter?” I asked under my breath.

“Yes, but I won’t run.”

We walked along the dock toward the gate in silence and spoke only once we’d stepped out onto the public promenade. We both shivered a little and exchanged uncomfortable glances as the pushy sensation faded.

“You felt that,” I said. “That insistent ‘Get the hell out of here’ sensation.”

“Only the desire to put distance between myself and that young woman—who’s too young to be Shelly Knight,” Solis observed, continuing to stroll along the pavement at an easy stride no longer edged in restraint. So he’d felt it but he didn’t want to discuss it, at least not yet.

I took the hint. “But definitely related, in spite of what she said,” I added, staying on the case. Two women with such similar names couldn’t look so much alike and have no family in common—no matter how distant. But there was the small matter of her aura, which boiled with energy. I’d met plenty of magic users and strange creatures whose power let them live long beyond a single human lifetime—hell, I’d been told I probably would, too, and I would bet my abilities weren’t even a flickering match light compared to Jacque Knight’s, whatever she was. And that, of course, made me wonder more about Shelly. . . .

Solis paused on the walkway and turned to lean against the railing, his back to the docks. “I agree. I shall have to look into her records—and Shelly’s—once I’m back in the office. We’ll have to wait for the log pages so there is no point in pursuing that at this moment. I could put some time in on other cases. . . .”

“If you like. I’m actually slow right now, so this is the only big thing on my agenda; I’d still like to close it as soon as I can, though. So right now I want to take one more look at
Seawitch
. You don’t have to come along if you prefer to avoid my weirdness. Or, you know, you want to get back to those other cases.”

He turned his head and regarded me with that odd silent glance of his. Then he shrugged. “I
prefer
not to leave you alone in my crime scene. My other cases can wait a little longer.”

I caught myself starting to laugh at the absurdity of it but I didn’t let it slip out. “All right. Time for act two of the Harper Blaine Creep Show. I should have brought my tap shoes,” I muttered to myself.

Solis accompanied me to
Seawitch
without any further comment. He was back to inscrutable and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. On the one hand, it was normal for him; on the other, it was
so
normal, I wasn’t sure whether it was a sign of acceptance or rejection.

As we neared the boat I saw a man standing on the bow of the boat in the slip across from it. He had his hands on his hips as he faced
Seawitch
. With the sun lowering toward the water ahead of us, it was difficult to see anything but his shape: average height with ropy-looking limbs and a hard hemisphere of belly that defied gravity. The shape of his head in shadow was curiously elongated at the bottom and, as we got closer I saw he had a long ponytail tied low at his neck. It reminded me of Quinton’s now-cropped queue, which hadn’t yet regrown long enough to gather into a proper tail so it just stuck out awkwardly, revealing cowlicks neither of us had known he had. A touch of chill seemed to reach from
Seawitch
and I momentarily wished I was at home with Quinton, teasing him about those cowlicks, instead of here, walking toward a haunted ship.

The man on the near boat turned to watch us as we walked toward
Seawitch
’s boarding steps. I stopped and looked up at him and he returned my stare with a slightly out-of-focus gaze from eyes red rimmed and gummy due to lack of sleep. I remembered what the yard manager had said and called out, “Are you Stu Francis?”

He gave an affirmative grunt and nodded. “Who’re you?” His voice sounded rough, as if he’d been smoking unfiltered cigarettes since grade school.

“My name’s Harper Blaine. This is Detective Sergeant Solis. We’re investigating
Seawitch
.”

Another affirmative grunt and nod from Francis. “Wouldn’t want to be you guys. Damn thing’s spooked.”

“Spooked?”

“Got ghosts like a freighter’s got rats.” Several heavy splashes spattered water onto the end of the dock. “Damn fish! Crazy-ass salmon!” Francis shouted at the water. “Get the hell out of here!” Then he fixed his watery stare on me. “It’s this damned boat, I’ll betcha. Got the fish acting crazy. Saw two otters and a harbor seal in here, too.”

“Is that unusual?” I asked.

“You betcha. Salmon follow the water scent up the river; they don’t pause to rest until they clear the locks. They never come in here on the way up, only on the way down. But this year they’re in here like a swarm of cockroaches. Kept me up all night, banging on the hull, chattering.”

I must have looked skeptical because he added, “And don’t tell me fish don’t talk. They make all kinds of noise up against the hull. Sounds just like a bunch of teenagers whispering in class. ‘Blah, blah, blah, yak, yak, yak.’ Man can’t get any sleep! Talking about a shipwreck in Spain. What are salmon doing in Spain, anyway?”

Spain?
I thought, something tickling at my brain. I reconsidered the origin of his rheumy eyes—they might have resulted from consuming a considerable amount of alcohol regularly as well as from a handful of sleepless nights.

“Mr. Francis,” Solis interrupted. “Why do you believe the
Seawitch
is haunted?”

“Screams. Couple of nights ago she started screaming.”

“You heard screams from inside the boat?” Solis clarified.

Francis glared at him and shook his head adamantly. “No, sir. I said
she
screamed and I meant it. The noise inside came later. Boats make noises all the time—when the wind comes down off the point in winter and plays on the masts and rigging, it can sound like a chorus of wolves and lost souls. But this wasn’t the north wind. There wasn’t any wind! I never heard nothing like this before.” He jabbed a finger at
Seawitch
. “That thing screamed.”

Francis made a noise in his throat that could only be called a harrumph and swung on his heel to stomp away into his own boat. Somehow he managed to slam the hatch as he did.

Solis and I exchanged puzzled frowns, then turned around to face
Seawitch
.

The boat looked less inviting than ever, especially when contrasted with the boats we had just come from; it was neither shiny nor homey and I could not imagine anyone wanting to hang out with friends on the dock near it, either. In just a single day the boat had gone from sad and spooky to outright nasty, the coils of Grey that hung on it now churning and billowing like a nest of angry snakes. For a moment I thought of Jacque Knight’s grasping aura and shivered.

Solis watched me. “You have changed your mind?”

“No,” I answered. “But I think this is not going to be as much fun as the last time.”

“You have an odd idea of fun, Ms. Blaine.”

I don’t know why that torqued me, but it did. Maybe it was the malevolent energy bleeding off
Seawitch
, Francis’s weirdness affecting my thoughts, or just my own discomfort left over from the day before and Solis’s reserved silence on matters freaky, but I turned and glared at him. “I think you can drop the ‘Ms.’ now, since we’re stuck together on this. I don’t expect you to like or respect me—or even believe me—enough to be friends, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mock me.”

Solis raised his eyebrows and looked genuinely surprised. “I find you strange but I do not mock you. What would you have me call you?”

I bit my tongue; I was being unreasonable. I was good at my job and I’d helped him out plenty of times—sometimes more than he knew—but I was worried that my revelations about just how “strange” I was were straining the relationship when I wanted it to be smoother, not harder. So if I overreacted now, any breakage would be my own fault. I took a long, slow breath and replied more evenly, “I’m sorry. Just Blaine, or even Harper, will do. What do you call the cops you work with?”

“I call them by their last names—it’s written on their badges.”

I laughed. It just came over as amusing that he implied he couldn’t remember people’s names without a label on them. Solis flushed a little and looked aside. He cleared his throat and waited for me to wind down. When I stopped chuckling he glanced at me and then at the boat again.

“Shall we proceed, M—” he caught himself and restarted. “If you’re ready, shall we proceed, Blaine?”

I grinned at him. “Yes, we can, Mr. Solis.”

“I like ‘Sergeant Solis,’” he replied with the hint of a smile. “It makes me feel taller. Which, beside you, is a feat. And my wife likes it.”

“I didn’t know you were married,” I said. Apparently we had broken some serious ice.

Solis nodded. “
Sí
.”

I raised my eyebrows, but he didn’t volunteer any more. He only gestured toward the boat and waited for me to precede him.

We started up the stairs to
Seawitch
’s aft deck. On the third step I felt cold and the pressure in my lungs increased as if we were diving into deep waters. I made the last steps and paused, catching my breath with an effort. Solis watched me and started to raise his hand as if to take my arm, but I waved him off and headed for the interior. He followed wordlessly, a frown of curiosity on his face.

Just inside the salon I turned back to him. “This is where things get . . . weird,” I said. “You ready?”

He gave it a moment’s serious consideration—he wasn’t taking this lightly and I felt a wash of relief, pretty sure that before replying he was recalling what I’d shown and told him yesterday. I didn’t push him to find in my favor; he had to do it himself. He seemed to brace himself, then gave a tiny nod. “Yes.”