The She (24 page)

I really thought I had him. His eyes widened and wandered up to Mr. Church in some sort of amazement. "That's not bad, Edwin. I have to hand it to you. It's nothing that hasn't happened to millions of other people under the power of hypnosis, but—"

"I wasn't hypnotized, Emmett! I was driving the boat! There wasn't time—"

"You were hypnotized by the water; Evan. You've got more Barrett in you than all the other Barretts put together; I think sometimes. I can just see you there on the water; seventeen, becoming a man. I'll bet it was like some sort of religious experience."

Mr. Church couldn't hold back a laugh. I guess he was remembering me trying to baptize myself in fifty-degree water.

"How'd you know?" I asked. The confirmation made Emmett look sad. He reached across the table, took my face in his hands, and pulled me toward him.

"I had one myself."

"You're kidding."

"No. I think it was more a Starn experience than a Barrett one, but hell, we've all got salt in our blood. I went out with Mom on Opa's forty-three-footer and refused to come back to shore until I had learned every last angle of every last computerized gadget on his dash. She sat up with me—we didn't sleep more than three hours. We came back because if we didn't, we'd have run out of fuel."

I rolled my head around a little, very impressed. "Wow. All I did was try to stick my face in the icy water."

He let go of me, but not with his eyes. I thought,
Damn it all. He is a great brother.
I got full of regret that we hadn't gotten closer when we were younger and under normal brothers' terms. We shouldn't have been living in Philly with him taking on some huge burden to protect me from more pain. We should have been living down here, with both parents, keeping the salt in our blood. We should have gone into business together; We should own a ship together; I couldn't say that now. Too much time had passed. There was too much history. But maybe I could still save some things.

"I'm going to talk to Opa." I shot a glance at Grey, who was starting to look stupor-tired. It had been a long day. "I think I can talk him into hiring a bubble drum to dive for the wreck. I want you to leave it alone. I want you to let me talk to him and stay out of it."

Emmett's eyes wandered to Mr. Church and they changed. They came back to me full of dread. "You asked why I erased those loran TDs. It wasn't because they didn't support a theory. It turns out they didn't support anything, didn't mean anything."

"How can you say that?"

"Evan, the
Goliath
never sank. It was found abandoned, by the Coast Guard and DEA nineteen hours after the disappearance. It's not in the canyon. It's in an old dry dock on the mainland still owned by Starn Industries. Would you like to see it?"

I was in such a state of shock that I didn't even ask where we were going as we piled into Opa's car which Emmett had borrowed. Emmett headed west over the three drawbridges. Once on the mainland, he immediately turned north toward Leeds Point, on the other side of Great Bay from Sassafras.

At that point, I finally found my voice. "Why didn't you tell me this before?"

I was sitting beside Emmett in the front seat, and I glanced over my shoulder. Mr. Church had asked if he could come, and he was sitting with his head back and his eyes shut. I thought he might be asleep. Grey just sat slumped with her head halfway down to her fingers, which she was picking at, and I thought how dejected she must feel. A dive that had given her a temporary lease on life would never happen now. I spun my head back to Emmett to see him rolling his eyes. I think he would have liked to show me all this and talk to me in private, but everyone had piled into the car.

"Because, Evan," he said, loud enough that I thought only I could hear it. "It just makes it all the more despicable, this ... plotting it out so well that you're deserting your own boat to
... hide
on a smaller less recognizable one. I was absolutely going to tell you, but I felt you had enough to digest for one weekend. The
Goliath
being here, being there, it doesn't make that much of a difference. They still made a break for it. That's the key issue. I just didn't want you to feel overwhelmed."

I had to laugh, though it felt hot coming up my throat. I didn't say anything else until we turned off Shore Road onto a little dirt road that twisted and twined for a couple of miles at least back toward Great Bay. At the end the headlights flashed on a sign that looked kind of familiar and said,
STARN INDUSTRIES: PRIVATE PROPERTY
." It was old and rusted.

"Besides, I didn't even know about this until I was twenty-one. Remember I told you Opa started hiring lawyers to protect us from further DEA questioning?"

"Yeah."

"Well, they questioned me the morning after the disappearance. The
Goliath
wasn't discovered until five o'clock, or I might have heard it from them. By their analysis, the ship had been intentionally deserted, not involved in some sort of accident. I guess Opa felt like we'd heard enough scandal."

We passed through a hurricane fence where the gate had caved in and came to the opening of a huge warehouse-looking building as high as the treetops. I then remembered Opa used to keep his first shipping vessel in there after he became a manufacturer: I guess it had been replaced with another one.

I got out of the car with so many questions, but I didn't want to ask any of them. Emmett had become like a vat of information. I hated it so badly that just being around him made me edgy about the next thing he would tell me.

We walked over to an enormous sliding door with a padlock on it. He had a key on his key ring, and he opened the lock, pushed hard on the huge door and it rumbled backward. I stood outside until he'd hit a switch and flooded the place with light. My final hope was that I'd see some boat other than the
Goliath
and this would all be a bad dream or stupid mistake on his part.

My hope welled up, seeing this monster: For one thing, I had never remembered the
Goliath
being this massive. The hull went up and up higher than a house, and I couldn't see the top, the part I knew, because the fluorescent lights up on the ceiling were huge and blinding. I almost said, "This isn't the
Goliath

But I remembered the only other time I'd seen the
Goliath
out of the water. I was eight, helping Dad's guys paint red below the waterline,
and he hands me a smaller brush dripping gray paint.

PHILLIP EVAN BARRETT WAS HERE.

It's faded and surrounded by paint chips and full of salt, but I leaned my head toward it. I couldn't believe this, and my voiced echoed loudly. "Mr. Church, did you know about
this?
"

I turned, and he was swallowing, finding a place on the concrete floor to stare at. "I'm afraid I didn't."

I thought of a great trip to the canyon, one of the most moving experiences of my life, going down the toilet. I was gripping the bottommost point on the bow of the
Goliath,
trying to find some way not to accept this.

"How do they know Mom and Dad and the crew didn't fall into the water somehow?"

Emmett smiled too sympathetically, and I realized how stupid that sounded. Captains and crew don't fall into the water not in a storm that doesn't even have gale warnings. I remembered some fading photo in my head of a wave. And I remembered pen-and-ink drawings of the The She in a book. I didn't know what to believe, but I was done crying over this shit.

"
Well?
" I asked loudly, which only made Emmett's soft-spoken reply sound better.

"Evan, when the Coast Guard finally got our Mayday, they sent a chopper immediately. They didn't spot the
Goliath,
probably because the crew had it under blackout conditions. But they spotted a smaller lit vessel, a pleasure yacht called the
Sanskrit,
half a mile off, heading south. They spoke to the owner and noted that in the log, but it didn't mean much to the Coast Guard, considering they weren't privy to the whole DEA investigation. It was probably three days later that the DEA called for the records on the chopper search and found a record of the
Sanskrit
heading south."

I didn't remember ever hearing the name of that boat and said so.

"I hadn't either. But the DEA had. The owners, a Mr. and Mrs. Diaz, from Miami, were first being investigated by the IRS because they had too many power toys to match their income—including the
Sanskrit.
When one suspicious power toy is a yacht that travels the Caribbean frequently, the IRS suspects there's been drug-related income and contacts the DEA. There was actually a Mayday sent from the
Sanskrit
after it hit Hurricane Marco. It foundered before the Coast Guard in South Florida could get to it. The Mayday said there were
eight
people on board. When the Coast Guard up here had made contact with the
Sanskrit,
Mt Diaz had said there were
two
people on board, himself and his wife. The truth was reported in a moment of severe panic. Mom, Dad, and four crew would have made six additional passengers."

"It was seen passing through this part of the Atlantic, and then it foundered off the coast of Florida," I muttered hazily.

"Yes. Right where they marked the X on the hurricane map in my notebook."

I blinked at the shadows. I couldn't work out the confusion in my head. "You're thinking the six passengers were Mom and Dad and the
Goliath
crew."

I glanced at Mr. Church, who stared straight up with his eyes narrowed, like he was trying to hear or see something. I was back to thinking he might be half nuts.

Emmett said, "The DEA won't pay to dive wrecks unless there are millions of dollars of evidence at stake, and in this case, there was only suspicion. The wreck is still down there. There has only been one dive. A bubble drum in search of a sunken government vessel spotted the
Sanskrit
about five years ago."

He moved toward me slowly, took both of my arms, and both Grey and Mr. Church moved up, too, like they didn't want to miss anything. I flinched even before he opened his mouth, my intuition rolling big time.

"They spotted remains in a stateroom through a porthole. There was too much deterioration to say how many people it was, but it looked like enough bones to be five or six bodies. And one was tied to the helm, as if the driver was trying to ground himself while traversing a hurricane ... or herself. All that remained was a dark blue weather suit. Fish were swimming through it."

Hungry fish.
Both he and Mr. Church grabbed one of my arms like I might pass out, but I was done reacting to this stuff in usual ways. All I did was let out some noise, trying to bury what I couldn't help remembering. "
Mommy, why are you wearing that out there tonight? You said the Coast Guard couldn't see you if you went in the water wearing blue.
"

I jerked my arms, shaking them both off, and pretended I wasn't swallowing sludge. I couldn't remember her answer—if she had told me her yellow weather suit had been torn or something.
But it just felt all goddamn wrong. Our parents were not on that yacht, Emmett, you pervert!

A sturdy aluminum ladder glowed through the gloom, and I went over and put my forehead on it, letting the coolness seep through my head.

Emmett's voice had started shaking. "Later the Coast Guard contacted family members of the crews from both the
Sanskrit
and—having heard loudly from the DEA—the
Goliath.
The families declined the cost of examining the wreck."

I shut my eyes, putting my hands up, like
stop.
Opa would have declined to pay for the dive because his health was so poor. The wrong DNA evidence might make it worse, and his daughter and grandkids still needed him.

This ladder trailed up and up, like Jack's beanstalk. Emmett started up it, then Grey, and I followed. Mr. Church spotted the rail at the bottom. Usually when you come back to childhood places as an older person, they seem smaller than you remembered them. I had never remembered the
Goliath
as being so massive.

It was like walking on a pirate ghost ship. We came on board in the center and I stared down toward the stern and the pilothouse. It was as tall as a three-story building but looked taller without all the containers I'd always seen loaded on deck. The white paint was chipped and scratched, the windows were covered with dingy film, and there were a couple of thick brown lines scudding across the lower pilothouse wall like it had been scraped with a huge metal object. I moved toward the stern, and the wall glimmered under the extra rays of the fluorescent hanging lantern that Emmett must have kept handy. I wondered where the shipping containers were.

Near the warehouse ceiling, the
Goliath's
four tall antennas looked to be broken off, falling forward onto the deck at odd angles. I stared at them because they looked very strange. It was the main thing on this deck that gave the impression that something may have gone terribly wrong. Mr. Church must have seen me staring, because suddenly he was beside me and pointing.

"Were these broken off to fit the vessel in the dry dock?" he asked.

Emmett flinched while shaking his head. "Actually, they were found like that, and the DEA says they were cut."

"Cut with what? Why?"

"With wire cutters, to give the appearance of having been through some violence, like a whirlpool."

Mr. Church stayed quiet.

"I kept the report," Emmett said. "It's either in the galley or Dad's office. They weren't completely dismissive of an accident sweeping the crew off the deck. But they wrote that if a great trauma like a rogue wave had come to the
Goliath,
the windows in the pilothouse would have been broken out, and they were intact. They also found that the starboard valves had been opened in the engine room ... below the waterline."

"So the crew was trying to sink it, help it along a little," Mr. Church said, and my heart fell because I could hear him starting to buy into this.