Kat Richardson: Seawitch

I shook my head, disquieted and cold. “Let’s see the rest and get out of here.”

Solis raised an eyebrow at me—this was the second time I’d made a point of my desire to leave quickly when he knew me for a tenacious pain in the ass more likely to throw herself right in front of trouble than run from it. But I’d made a resolution not to get in Death’s face anymore; I was pretty sure I was no longer bulletproof, and I had someone else’s pain to consider now that I seemed to have an official significant other.

“C’mon. Do you really want to stay here any longer than you have to?” I asked.

He gave it only a moment’s thought. “No.”

I took a few reference photos using a small digital camera Quinton had lent me. Then Solis and I backed out of the cabin and I followed him through the rest of the boat. We looked into the other crew cabin, washroom, and storage area in the front part of the boat, finding more dirt and stains and a single, empty duffel bag abandoned at a random angle under a bunk and now glued to the floor by creeping black mold. Collectively, the boat had room for up to five crew members—providing they were very slim and not picky about privacy or claustrophobia. We also found a large compartment under the pointed bow where the stems of two large anchors poked into the hull through steel-lined sleeves, and a heap of chain and rotting rope sat to either side of a large electric winch so rusted that the chains would have to be cut free before the anchors were ever dropped again. I hoped we wouldn’t need to dig around in there for clues, though the twining, colored mist of the Grey that tangled in the chains gave me a sour feeling.

When we finished with the crew cabins, we went through the engine room, which connected to the crew area by a narrow door hidden in the wooden paneling at the aft end of the corridor. The twin engines were massive to my mind, the size of Smart Cars crouching in the middle of the boat, isolated from the rest by walls lined in foamed-lead sound insulation, according to the report. It looked like dirty cappuccino foam under a layer of aluminum foil. They, too, had a drapery of dried seaweed, but the engine room was not nearly as filthy as the room with the strange, bloody circle on the floor, in spite of having a patina of old oil and engine dirt on the floor and ceiling. I spotted a dense black coil of ghost energy roiling in one of the back corners, but with Solis present and my clothes still damp and itchy, I didn’t have time to investigate it thoroughly. Nothing as obvious as a face or figure presented itself in the time I was staring at it. I made a mental note to come back and take a closer look. . . .

We passed out of the engine room through another narrow door and into the aft, where the guest accommodations awaited us. Here the signs of something gone wrong were more present, if strangely inconsistent. In one cabin we found a collection of more of the pitted bits of glass and a few round white objects I thought might be either bones or pearls, but they were so crusted with dirt it was hard to tell and we were both unwilling to move them without gloves and evidence bags. Everywhere we found mildew, muck, and stains that ranged from green to rust-red to grainy black. Every room held the sense of disarray and hasty, unexpected departure—and the smell—and yet nothing seemed to be missing besides the people themselves. Personal possessions had been abandoned in situ—even duffel bags with clothes and supplies packed inside and a woman’s purse with its 1980s contents intact, as far as I could tell. The bed in the master suite at the back had been torn to shreds by something with claws and teeth. We finished with the cabins and moved to the stairs. Near the aft companionway, I saw a clump of shiny dark brown fur caught in a crack in the handrail.

I pointed at it. “Any idea what that came from?” I asked Solis.

He frowned. “No confirmation from the lab, but I thought, perhaps, a dog.”

“Doesn’t feel like dog fur,” I said, fingering a few strands. They were thick and soft like something torn from an expensive fur coat. “And there was no dog aboard. So . . . you’re thinking someone boarded the vessel and brought an attack dog of some kind to drive the passengers up on deck?”

“It is a possibility. Though I don’t like the theory.”

I humphed under my breath. Solis didn’t usually advance a theory he didn’t favor. Both of us were a little out of our depth here. I returned his frown and studied him in silence a moment, waiting to see if the creeping disquiet I felt was unsettling his nerves, too.

Finally he added, “There are no Somali pirates raiding shipping in Puget Sound.”

“Not right now,” I agreed. Besides, pirates used guns, not dogs, and they didn’t worry about bloodstains—of which we’d found so few. We’d also found no bullet holes, and the boat was still intact and appeared to have been unused since the day the passengers and crew had vanished. Pirates don’t just let their prizes float off to be found later like bottles cast up on the shore.

From the foot of the companionway I looked back into the aft corridor and its strangely empty rooms. “It looks like they left in a hurry—possibly under threat, considering the mess—but they didn’t take anything and the boat doesn’t appear to have been sinking. . . .”

I frowned, wondering why they’d left and where they’d gone. The final report of the original loss investigator was that Seawitch must have had hit some bad weather near the Strait of Juan de Fuca and been wrecked, sinking with all hands on board and so swiftly no one had even seen her go down. It’s not unheard of for pleasure boats to be ill prepared for the kind of severe weather and adverse currents the strait can dish out. Even large commercial vessels with all the right equipment have come to grief in the upper Puget Sound and straits, and this was neither of those, just a hundred-year-old yacht with the sort of equipment current more than twenty-five years ago—which hadn’t included vessel tracking beacons, GPS chart plotters, or weather radar.

From southern Vancouver Island in British Columbia down to Coos Bay in Oregon, the coast has rightfully earned its nickname the Graveyard of the Pacific. From what I’ve read, more than two thousand ships have been lost here since white men started plying the waters of the West Coast, and the ghosts of the seven hundred shipwrecked and drowned are thought to haunt the storm-wracked shore. Is it any wonder I don’t spend more time at the beach?

“We shall have to return with proper collection equipment,” Solis said, interrupting my thoughts.

I shook myself. “Huh?”

“If we wish to know what happened to this boat and the people on board, we will need to examine what they left behind. Assuming your employer continues to be cooperative.”

The insurance company technically owned the boat since they’d paid off the original loss claim, but the cops could kick up a fuss if they wanted over the possible crime scene and so could the Coast Guard—and the FBI, as their investigative representative—if they liked. The insurance company preferred to keep this simple and cordial and move it through to closure with all possible speed and silence. They weren’t pleased with the public notoriety of the ghost-ship story, so they weren’t yelping about anything yet, even though Solis’s involvement was in the gray zone between legal necessity and professional courtesy. He was maintaining a politic front and I thought I understood why he’d been assigned to this messy mystery in spite of his disgust for cases that read more like Agatha Christie novels than police files: He was thorough and quiet and didn’t ruffle feathers. And it didn’t hurt that he was now a sergeant.