Seawitch

EIGHT

A massive shoal of salmon had come into the marina and the water was restless with their endless circling and sudden leaps as they rested before heading to the fish ladder at the locks a mile or so up the passage to the east. Their splashing made occasional punctuation to conversations drifting from the decks and portholes of the boats along the floating sections of F dock.

About two-thirds of the way to the end of the quarter-mile-long dock, we found a group of five people sitting in camp chairs or standing on either side of the floating walkway upwind of a large propane barbecue on a cart. There were chairs set out for more people and a few bowls of chips and salsa sitting on top of the nearest dock box. A few cans of cheap beer and plastic glasses of wine were in evidence, but the party was obviously only getting started.

A tall, dark-haired man in his early sixties, sporting a luxuriant mustache, was tending some beef ribs on the barbecue. He looked up as we drew near. “Hi, there! Hope we’re not in your way,” he added, trying to step aside to let us pass without falling in the water or sending his ribs to feed migrating salmon.

Solis glanced at me and raised his eyebrows. Apparently he wanted me to take this one. “Not in the way at all,” I said. “You’re actually the people we were searching for.”

They all looked at us in surprise, and we were no longer the strangers passing by but a focus of piqued attention. I introduced myself and Solis, who flashed his badge, just to make it official. “We were told there might be some residents on this dock who were here twenty-seven years ago when the Seawitch was regularly moored here,” I said.

“Seawitch?” asked a seated man wearing a floppy sea grass hat to shield his bearded face from the sun. “Which one is that?”

A short woman with cropped, dyed-brown hair pointed south across the docks with her free hand; the other held a sweating plastic stem glass half-full of white wine. “The ghost ship. You know.” She turned her attention back to me and Solis, smiling a little as if she didn’t want to seem unfriendly but wasn’t going to just give up the information without knowing more. “Why are you looking?”

“We hope to find anyone who might have information about who was on board the day the boat left here on its last trip,” Solis replied to her. “We also hope to discover if a woman named Shelly Knight has been seen in the marina recently.”

“Is she associated with the ghost ship?” the man in the hat asked. A salmon leapt nearby, sending a patter of water drops onto the dock.

“She may be,” Solis replied with care.

“Huh,” the hat wearer grunted. “Imagine that.” He looked at the short-haired woman. “Isn’t that young lady on Pleiades named Knight? The one who sings all the time. . . . Something Knight—can’t remember her first name.”

“The woman we’re looking for would have to be approaching or past fifty,” I said.

“Then this couldn’t be her. Our Miss Knight is much younger than that,” Hat Man replied.

I glanced at Solis before saying, “She may be a relative, though. Where is Pleiades?”

The man in the hat looked over his shoulder and pointed south. “Over on D dock. The big blue ketch on the far side. Oh, and it’s a beauty, too! They just refinished the masts and all the brightwork on the sheer and up the sprit—”

The short-haired woman shook her head a little in amusement. “Silly, she doesn’t know what a ketch is.” She looked at me and Solis. “It’s a two-master. Shorter mast in the back. The hull’s dark blue with varnished woodwork, gold trim and lettering, and it’s got matching blue covers on the sails. She’s a really pretty boat.”

Solis looked at the man in the hat and the woman who’d spoken before saying, “The office did not have a record of anyone named Knight keeping a boat here.”

“Oh, she’s just boat-sitting and prepping her,” the woman replied. “The owners are back East and they haven’t gotten out here for the season yet.”

“When did she arrive? Miss Knight, that is.”

The woman looked around at her companions, seeking consensus. “Oh . . . back in March, I guess. . . . Does that sound right to you guys?”

The rest muttered among themselves and nodded in general agreement.

“All right, then. March. Which would have been when the boat came out of the maintenance yard. They did the hull and bottom paint and reset the masts after winter storage so she’d be ready for opening day, and then the owners couldn’t get back in time. Isn’t that sad? Anyhow, Miss Knight must have come with the money or Keefer wouldn’t have let the boat out of the yard. A lot of people don’t keep boats in the water year round like they used to, but once you’ve got a nice boat like that in, you have to keep her up every minute, so hiring a reliable caretaker is a good idea.”

“How would you know they were reliable?” I asked.

“Oh, mostly references from other boaters, or if they have a bond posted or come from a company that does moving and service stuff.”

Solis didn’t look at me, but I saw his aura flare up for a moment in bright gold sparks. He was very interested in Miss Knight, but he only nodded and thanked them all while making a quick note on his cell phone. A few more salmon plashed around, making a slapping sound on the surface of the water.

“I see,” I said, redirecting the conversation before the momentum dropped off. “What can you tell us about residents who might have been here in the mid-eighties?”

The crowd looked at one another and muttered names to one another. Then they turned back to us and the guy in the hat said, “It’s a pity the old restaurant is gone, because you could have found a lot of the old hands just hanging out there, but try Paul Zantree. I think he moved here in the seventies. He’s out at the end of the dock here on Mambo Moon—it’s a big old motorboat—but he might not be home yet. I haven’t seen him, at least. Any of you seen Paul today?”

“Not since this morning,” said the man at the grill, turning the ribs again and brushing sauce on the meaty side. “He volunteers at the library a couple days a week now, but he should be back soon to finish up that trim work while the sun’s still out.” He looked up from his cooking and caught my eye. “He’s a feisty old coot. Trying to get his boat all fixed up to take the grandkids out fishing this summer. The little one’s about eight and loves to hang a line in the water with Grandpa.”

The short-haired woman walked up beside him and elbowed him lightly in the side. “You’re a feisty old coot yourself.”

The cook laughed and gave her a one-armed hug. “Well, I don’t know about the ‘coot’ part—what is a coot, anyway?” he called to the rest of the group.

A slim woman in shorts, who’d been silent up till now, raised her head and said, “I think it’s some kind of badger.”

The man in the hat objected, “It’s a bird. Isn’t it?”

The last man in the group fished a couple of beers out of a cooler and brought one over to the cook. “It’s an old guy who won’t admit he’s old. That’s what a coot is. I, personally, am a young coot and I intend to stay that way by drinking this beer. You better join me, Rick.”

“Well, I think that I shall,” Rick, the cook, replied, letting go of the woman and accepting the beer. Then he turned back to us. “Oh, I’m Rick Hines and this is my wife, Rhonda, by the way,” he added, slipping his arm around the short-haired woman’s waist again. “This is Phil Rhineman”—he indicated the beer bringer—“and his wife, Laura. Peter Black is the fella with the hat over there. Would you like to sit down and wait for Paul here? We’re always glad to have more people. . . .”

It was a generous offer, but I was pretty sure our continued presence would put a damper on the party—and on the gossip, which would be a mixed blessing. More talk might generate more memories, but it might also warn off the mysterious Miss Knight, if she was related to the woman we were seeking. Still, I really had no interest in sitting with strangers when I could be getting more of this business nailed down. Solis seemed to feel the same way.

“Very kind of you to ask, but we need to continue with our work,” he replied. “Thank you for your help. If you think of anyone else who might have been here in the mid-eighties, please let us know.” He offered his card to Rick Hines and I followed suit. Then Laura Rhineman and Peter Black asked for cards as well and we handed them out quickly with a few more thank-yous before we made our way past the barbecue and farther out the dock toward Mambo Moon.

“Friendly,” I commented once we were well past.

“Chatty. I hope word will not travel too quickly to Miss Knight. I would like to talk to that young woman without her being warned of our interest. . . .”

I was glad to hear Solis was as wary of the gossip grapevine as I was. “Do you want to split up? I can take Miss Knight if you like—she might prefer to talk to a woman unofficially rather than on the record to a policeman.”

“I prefer we stay together as much as possible. This case is too complex for me to wish to divide our attention.” A few odd sparks glittered in his aura as he said it, but I wasn’t sure what they meant. Solis may have been coming to trust me . . . but that trust only went so far, as long as he was undecided on the point of my paranormality. “And if we do discover a prosecutable crime,” he continued, “I will not want to have undermined any witness statements.”

Ah, thinking like a cop. I sometimes forget that my priorities aren’t like those of most investigators. I nodded. “All right. I can work with that.”

“Can you?” he asked, giving me a sharp look.

I frowned at him. “Of course. Do you think I’m not aware of the necessities of police procedure?”

“I think you are not a cop and that you . . . take all advantage of the flexibility that offers you.”

I was perversely amused and my smile quirked a little as I raised an eyebrow to him. “I see. I’ll bear that in mind.”

He nodded and turned his head to watch his step along the dock until we reached Paul Zantree’s boat.

Mambo Moon was one slip from the end of the dock, bobbing comfortably as a larger boat swept by in the channel beyond. Small waves reflected off the breakwater to move the floating dock with gentle swells that sparkled sunlight into our eyes, punctuated by the shadow of salmon. The boat was completely unlike Seawitch: half the length and made of white fiberglass that had been recently cleaned and waxed to a shine. With its flying bridge on top and almost a dozen canlike fishing-rod holders attached to the stainless-steel railings at the rear of the two open decks, Mambo Moon looked like a boat meant for long, lazy fishing trips in ridiculous comfort.

We walked down the finger dock beside the boat, looking it over and trying to figure out where the thing that passed for a door was. Most of the living space must have been contained within the hull, and the cabin that rose out of the main deck looked like an iceberg waiting for Titanic. The rear of the main deck had a sort of built-in ice chest the size of a double-wide coffin with two big lift-off covers. I guessed it was meant for storing the catch of the day on one side and in the other any bait or drinks that might be needed for a long day of fishing from the built-in chairs on posts that faced the aft rails. An extension from the floor of the flying bridge deck made a small roof over the lower deck that was further shaded by a canvas cover stretched from the edge of the roof’s lip to a pair of upright poles that folded out of the railings. Despite our having been told that the owner probably wasn’t in, noises were coming from inside the boat.

We stopped beside a set of molded plastic steps that led up to an opening in the rails that stood at about Solis’s head height. This was the front door, for lack of a better description. I felt odd about stepping aboard a boat onto which I had not been invited, so I glanced at Solis for ideas. He shrugged and reached out to knock on the hull. The noises stopped. Solis knocked again and called out, “Mr. Zantree?”

“Are we supposed to say ‘ahoy’ or something?” I asked.

Solis started to reply but was cut off by a pirate coming around the edge of the cabin from the rear. The buccaneer was a dark, grizzled man with a broad chest showing a few gray hairs through the opening of his billowing cotton shirt. His hair was covered in a red bandana that sported a skull and crossbones on the front, but a few bits that stuck out were as gray as the rest and matched the scruffy whiskers on his jaw that weren’t quite long enough to be called a beard and were too pronounced to be a five o’clock shadow. Black trousers bloused into knee-length brown boots and a bright red sash tied around his waist completed the bizarre outfit. The man himself was just as odd, his brown skin and mixed-up features defying racial typing.

“Avast! What be the cause o’ this bangin’ and hallooin’?” the pirate demanded, squinting at us with a snarl.

“We’re looking for Paul Zantree,” Solis replied, flipping open his ID.

The pirate straightened up and blinked, his entire demeanor going from aggressive to passive in a heartbeat. “Oh,” he said in a perfectly normal voice and let out a small nervous laugh. “Well, that’s me. I—I was trying on my pirate outfit for Seafair. I hope I didn’t startle you—thought you were my neighbors. Am I in trouble for something? And, gosh, I hope so—it’s been such a long time since I was in trouble.”

“No, sir,” Solis answered. “We merely have some questions about the past we hoped you could answer for us. Your neighbors were kind enough to refer us to you.”

“Which neighbors?”

“The Hineses and Peter Black.”

“Oh. Well, then, you’d better come aboard.” He unclipped a chain that barred the way through the railing at the top of the steps and waved us up. We followed him on deck and back to the fishing area at the rear.

He flipped a couple of the chairs around so they faced in rather than out and settled himself on the edge of the built-in ice chest, shoving to the deck a decorative belt and scabbard from which protruded the worn steel hilt of an old navy cutlass. It fell with a clatter and he winced, but didn’t stoop to touch it again. “Have a seat,” Zantree said. “Can I get you a drink?”

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.