Seawitch (12 page)

She nodded. “Yes. Did you see him?”

“He met us in the foyer. Your husband calmed him down and sent him upstairs. He didn’t seem badly burned—just a little red on his arm.”

Ximena looked stricken, her aura going an unattractive green for a moment, and she seemed to buckle at the knees before she caught herself and stiffened her spine with the help of a loud, long inhale. “He stumbled against the stove trying to get away from Mama and he caught his sleeve on fire.”

She must have noticed my raised eyebrows; her face tightened and she shook her head. “It’s not what you think. We don’t abuse our kids. Once in a while Mama just goes crazy in the head and then things always get bad. She’s locked herself in her room now and she won’t come out until morning, probably.”

“Really.”

“Yes!”

“Do you think it’s safe for her to be upstairs with the kids at all?”

Ximena growled under her breath. “She isn’t upstairs. She has the bedroom down here.” She pointed to one of the doors leading off the kitchen. “I’m not stupid enough to let my lunatic mother sleep near my kids. I’m not sure I should let her sleep near the stove or the food, either, but she’s my mama and I can’t put her in a home. Rey is kind enough to let her stay.” She stopped suddenly and looked at the floor.

I glanced over my shoulder, thinking Solis must have returned, but he hadn’t. It was just us girls.

“Don’t you both worry?”

Mrs. Solis sniffed and said, “She’s not like this very often. When she’s all right she’s a lot of help and she loves the kids. But when she’s bad . . .” She glanced back up at me as if my understanding was a prize she coveted.

“She’s horrid?”

Ximena didn’t get the quote and just nodded. “She is . . . delicate. My parents were both artists. Papa died when I was very young and then Mama fled Colombia for the United States with me and my brother—”

“Fled?” I asked.

“Yes. Papa was killed in an accident and that was when Mama started to go a little crazy. She said he’d been murdered by the police in Cali—we lived in an artists’ colony in the foothills and she thought of Cali as a wicked and filthy city, so of course Papa couldn’t just die in a bus accident there; he had to have been assassinated over his art,” she explained with a touch of eye rolling and hand waving. “She was sure someone would come to our door one day and kill us all. She had family who had come here and they said they could get her a job and so we ran away in the night like criminals.”

“Did you believe it was true?”

She shut herself down with a shrug and glanced away. “Sometimes. I stopped when I was in high school, but”—her eyes swung back to mine from under her lowered brow and falling hair—“the first time I met Rey and he said his father was a policeman in Cali . . . for just a moment . . . I thought that maybe it wasn’t just one of my crazy mother’s crazy stories.”

“She thought I had come to kill her,” Solis added from the doorway behind me.

I turned my head toward him. “Ximena or her mother?”

“Ximena,” he replied. He walked across the room and snuggled one arm around his wife. “Didn’t you?”

Ximena nodded, biting her lip. “It’s so stupid of me, but . . . you know. . . .”

He kissed the top of her head, which forced him up on his toes since Ximena was only an inch or so shorter than Solis. “I know.” He whispered in her ear and kissed her cheek.

She made a shy smile at the floor.

“So,” Solis started, giving his wife a little squeeze. “Pizza?”

Ximena giggled and finally looked up at him. “I don’t want to feed a guest pizza!”

Solis shrugged. “As you like,
mi reina
. But Blaine is not a guest.” He raised his eyes to mine and a momentary desperation flashed in his glance and sent a shower of anxious olive sparks into the Grey. “Are you?”

“Nope,” I agreed. “Just here to make the sergeant’s life harder.”

“Then you should go upstairs and get started,” Ximena suggested, stepping out of her husband’s arms. She made comic shooing motions at us both. “
Marchaos
. I can clean this up myself.”

Solis caught her nearest hand, his expression serious. “You are certain?”

“Of course,” she replied, but her voice was a touch brittle. “I’ll be fine. I’ll call you when dinner is ready.”

“And Mama?”

“I can manage Mama. I’ll pull the curtain over the door.”

Solis seemed reluctant, but he squeezed her hand a little before letting go and shrugged. “All right.”

He motioned for me to come along and headed out of the kitchen. I picked up the bag full of bell and followed, glancing back at Ximena for only a moment as I went. She stood at the sink with her back mostly turned to us and her hands covering her face. She wasn’t crying, but she seemed very close to it. I had the urge to turn back, but I didn’t because Solis didn’t and I know that the comfort of strangers is rarely appropriate when teetering between tears and rage.

ELEVEN

S
olis led me back to the foyer with its polished wooden floor and up the stairs. He stopped at the top and glanced toward the back of the house. “The children are in the boys’ room. They should be all right until dinner. My office is in the attic; we’ll hear them if they misbehave.” I wasn’t sure he was talking to me as much as reassuring himself.

In a moment he opened the door to what I’d thought was a closet and started up a steep, narrow staircase to the attic.

The space under the roof was roughly divided by a partially finished wall that cut across near the back of the house. The much larger area in the front was plainly an artist’s studio with easels and drawing tables arranged to take maximum advantage of the light through the large dormer windows on three sides. Work in various stages of completion hung or leaned everywhere there was room. There was even a covered lump on a half pillar that I guessed was a small sculpture in progress—progress that had stopped long ago, judging by the accumulation of dust on everything. The floor was dusty, too, except for a trail leading to a door in the rough wall.

Solis unlocked the door with the ease of habit and waved me through as he stepped aside to fetch a chair from the studio.

His office was wide but shallow, taking up the whole width of the house at the back, but only eight feet or so of the depth. Unlike the studio, his office had only one dormer window and that was partially shaded by a huge old tree in the backyard. His desk—a pair of cheap folding banquet tables set at a right angle—took up the area under the large dormer. Piles of cardboard and plastic file boxes and a few battered two-drawer steel filing cabinets took up some of the remaining space on the floor at each side, but most of the area was empty. The walls, on the other hand, were covered with papers and photos so numerous it was difficult to see the surface on which they were pinned. I even saw scraps of fabric and small objects in plastic bags pinned, clamped, or tied among the pages. Various lamps stood here and there or were fixed to the table edges and exposed joists. I stared at it all, turning slowly, with the bell in its canvas sack swinging gently against my knees.

Where my office was carefully buttoned up—all files and notes put away and hidden from clients’ eyes—Solis’s private space was like a murder board for a serial-killer investigation. It looked as if every case he’d ever worked haunted the walls with paper ghosts.

He watched me until I stopped to blink at him, amazed and stunned. He gave a half shrug and quirked one corner of his mouth. “My wife’s family has their madness. I have mine.” He removed his coat and suit jacket and hung them on a hook at the back of the door before holding his hand out for my own coat. I gave it to him and he placed it on top of his. Then he turned back into the room and his close-hugging energy corona flushed a bright gold color as he seemed to brace himself or change mental gears. “Now let us take another look at the bell,” he added, dragging the spare chair up to the desk.

I followed him and he removed a small pile of file folders to a box on the floor to make room for our prize. I put the bag on the table and pulled out the bell, keeping it over the bag to contain any glop we’d missed earlier. Solis pulled one of the lights down closer and drew up the desk chair beside the other one. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket—I didn’t think anyone actually carried them anymore—and wiped the bell with care, clearing water and the last of the embedded goop off the engraving.

The bell was made of bronze all through as far as we could see, but nothing new was revealed by the wiping, except a small loop on the top for a lanyard to be threaded through. The lettering still read
S.S. VALENCIA
and nothing more.

Solis frowned in thought, murmuring, “
Valencia
. So, whatever the neighbor, Mr. Francis, thought he heard, it most likely was not about shipwrecks in Spain,” he added, shooting me a sly look from the corner of his eyes.

“Maybe the wreck of
Valencia
,” I suggested.

Solis nodded his head a bit, but I wasn’t sure he was conscious of it. “Ghosts . . .” he muttered, keeping his eyes on the bell. His aura pulled down to a thin line of cold blue for a moment. Then he abruptly swung the chair around and scooted it to face his computer, a boxy old desktop machine that squatted like an electronic gargoyle on the corner where the two tables met. He clacked away with his ancient keyboard and mouse and the printer made some grunting noises. “I’ll start printing the other case files while we search for
Valencia
,” he said, barely glancing up.

He didn’t touch-type comfortably, looking down several times even though his fingers were hitting the right keys most of the time. In a minute or so the browser coughed up a Google search; all the visible listings related to a steamship named
Valencia
that had been wrecked in 1906. We read through the top six articles, including a Wikipedia entry and one from HistoryLink.org that revealed a grim story:

On January 20, 1906, the passenger steamer
Valencia
had left San Francisco heading for Seattle. It was standing in for another ship that had been dry-docked for repairs, but though the
Valencia
was a little older and of a less-hardy design, it was thought to be up to the task. On the night of January 22,
Valencia
attempted to enter the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the teeth of a storm that quickly proved to be more than the ship could weather and the steamer’s hull was gashed open on unseen rocks. Water gushed into the interior compartments—most of which were not watertight—and the boat was in danger of sinking. The captain tried to turn and beach the ship safely, but the stern ran up, not on soft sand but on a rocky reef along the southwest coast of Vancouver Island.
Valencia
was trapped on the rocks below a cliff twenty miles north of the strait and unable to move in any direction or safely put out the lifeboats—of which there weren’t enough to save everyone, anyhow.

The fierce storm beat at the ship without mercy and began to tear into the structure. Abandoning everything in the cabins and holds below, everyone on board—most still clad in their nightclothes—huddled on deck or in the stern cabins that were still dry and whole. At the first break in the storm the captain attempted to put the women and children ashore in six of the seven lifeboats, with two men per boat to row, but as the men left on board watched in horror, the tiny wooden boats were capsized by waves or crushed on the rocks, killing all aboard them, save nine of the men, who made landfall alive. The nine climbed to the cliff tops, but in the slashing rain they turned the wrong way and wandered away from the lighthouse that could have saved them. On the ship the remaining men climbed into what still stood of the rigging, trying to keep out of the raging surf that battered the crumbling vessel to pieces.

The last lifeboat was finally put down with just three men aboard, under instructions to reach the cliff top and drop a line to the boat so the remaining passengers and crew might climb to safety. This time the boat reached land and the men found a sign directing them to the lighthouse. Abandoning their instructions, they walked for two and a half hours to the lighthouse, where they were finally able to call for aid to save
Valencia
’s surviving men. But even when help arrived, many of the boats were unable to safely draw close enough to the sinking steamer to remove anyone and had to turn away. Some of the remaining men of the
Valencia
were rescued by the responding boats, but not all, and when another party arrived on the cliff with ropes to haul the last ones up, the ship broke apart and sank before their eyes, taking several dozen men, who clung to the rigging, to their deaths. They had weathered two days in the storm, watching their fellow passengers and crew die and their ship tear away and sink in pieces beneath them, seen others rescued, but not them. . . . Of the men, women, and children who had been aboard when
Valencia
left San Francisco, only thirty-seven men survived.

The stories differed as to how many people perished in the tragedy—maybe 117, possibly 136 or 181, since records didn’t include children or late-arriving passengers who paid when they boarded—but of the unknown total who boarded, not a single child or woman had survived. Twenty-seven years later the
Valencia
’s lifeboat number 5 was found adrift in a cove nearby. The nameplate was preserved in a museum, but the rest of the ill-fated steamer was left to her grave on the rocks below Pachena Point.

The wrecking of the
Valencia
was later dubbed America’s
Titanic
and was accounted to be the worst peacetime shipping disaster in North American history. And we had found its bell hidden in the engine room of another ill-fated boat.

Solis leaned back in his chair and tapped his lower lip with his right index finger. “What connects them?” he murmured, capturing my own thoughts as well. “How did the bell from one come to be in the engine room of the other?”

“I can’t imagine.
Seawitch
wasn’t a salvage vessel and there’s no record of any diving equipment on board, so they didn’t go out to explore the wreck. Almost eighty years apart, totally different types of vessels coming from opposite directions . . .”

“Both were in or near the Strait of Juan de Fuca when they were last seen.”

“That’s not much to start with,” I said. “
Seawitch
was heading up to the San Juan Islands, but it’s a big area inside the strait and we don’t know for certain that the boat ever made it out of the south sound.”

“Perhaps the pages from the log will say,” Solis suggested.

I didn’t turn to watch him, taken by a stray thought. “Did you notice that the last lifeboat was found twenty-seven years after
Valencia
sank?”

“I had not, but it is an odd coincidence that the
Seawitch
also returned after twenty-seven years lost. Do you have any suggestions about what that means?”

I had to shake my head. “No.”

Solis looked unhappy and turned to pick up the sheets that had been spilling out of the old printer while we’d been reading about the wreck of the
Valencia
.

The first document he picked up was nothing but text and he started to put it aside. I took it from his hand and looked it over.

“Odile Carson’s death reports. I’d almost forgotten about her.”

“I thought it best to be certain of what happened. It seems unlikely, but if hers was not an accident, it would link the
Seawitch
definitively to a homicide—which is my area of investigation.”

“That would keep you on the case.”

He nodded. “For a while.”

“But if not, then would you be able to close the case at your end?”

“No. There would still be the matter of the blood and the condition of the boat’s interior. If there is a link in that to a major crime, the case will remain with me.”

“Unless there’s something in the log pages to give us a clue, the only lead we have on the condition of the
Seawitch
may be this bell,” I said. “The connection to the
Valencia
—
if
we can figure it out—is unlikely to be admissible evidence of a major crime. I mean, there
is
something going on, but it might not be . . . solid enough to force you to remain on this case.”

Solis cocked his head. “Force?”

“Yes. I think you can wiggle off this hook pretty easily as long as Odile Carson’s death wasn’t a homicide.” I reached again for the report.

Solis put his hand over mine, holding it down on top of the pages. “One moment, Blaine. You believe I’ve been forced onto this case and want to ‘wiggle’ out of it?”

“Well, I assumed so.”

“Why?”

I drew away to sit back in my chair and shrugged at him. “You hate mysteries and you especially hate this sort of case full of coincidence, unexplainable circumstances, and, frankly, the weird crap that lands on my desk.”

“I requested the case.”

That stopped me cold and I blinked at him, puzzled and frowning.

Solis graced me with a tiny smile. “My captain made the same expression.”

“I imagine so,” I replied. And though it sounded incredibly stupid, I added, “But why?”

“I have heard,” Solis said, looking down at his hands, “that a definition of insanity is continuing to do as you have always done while expecting a different result. Here I saw a case that could not help but fall into your hands and I thought I might learn something if I observed it from within—if I approached the mystery from a new angle: yours. I don’t find myself liking the sensation—I don’t believe I ever shall—but
am
finding it . . . illuminating.” He glanced up and I could’ve sworn his eyes sparkled. “And why should I inflict your . . . affinity for the bizarre on some innocent policeman?”

I snorted and started to reply, but found myself lurching forward and gasping as a spurt of fight-or-flight adrenaline shot through me. My chest felt hollow and battered as my heart rate accelerated like a sprinter from a standing start. This wasn’t my emotion. . . .

Solis reached for me in concern and I shook him off, forcing myself up to my feet, trembling as I fought off the sensation with long breaths. “I’m fine,” I gasped at him. “I’m fine.” I fumbled in my pocket and clutched my cell phone.

I brought out the suddenly slippery thing, turning it on as I did, and started poking in a message as fast as my shaking fingers could manage. Damn Quinton’s security paranoia that favored dumb pagers over smartphones. I tapped one last key and sent the “Call me
now
” code and wished we had established one for “What the hell was that?”

“Are you certain?” Solis asked, and for a moment I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I nodded, confirming that I was all right.

“Yeah.” I offered no explanation and he continued to watch me, niggling threads of curious yellow and anxious green leaking into the Grey around him. “Let’s just . . . get back to the case in hand,” I suggested, putting my phone on the desk as I sat back down. My heart rate was sliding back to normal already, but I’d be happier once I heard from Quinton.