Kat Richardson: Seawitch

“The company already knows I plan to remove things for investigation,” I said. “They want this over with as quickly and quietly as possible. They won’t kick as long as everything is logged and returned when we’re done.”

He nodded. “Have you seen all you care to down here?”

I gave the clammy corridor one last look for now and replied, “Yeah. Let’s finish this up.”

Going upstairs, we left the worst of the stink and damp behind and came back up into the main salon by a different staircase. Then we went toward the bow and up a couple of steps to investigate the galley and a kind of formal dining room/library sort of area that lay forward of the galley and main salon. These were not quite as filthy as the rest of the boat, but they, too, had been touched by mold and rot. In the galley we found mold-crusted dishes and cookware standing in a now-dry sink, waiting to be washed with water that had seeped away, leaving a crusty soap ring behind. A medical kit lay open on one of the galley counters, but the only things that seemed to be missing were some gauze pads and waterproof bandage tape. The big table in the shelf-lined dining salon supported a centerpiece of driftwood and shells and was set for a meal for four, but the dishes were slimy with mildew and the books were too swollen to move on their shelves. Twin doors led out of the dining room to the triangular foredeck and from there a quick turn and another narrow, open stairway led us up to the pilothouse and its accompanying deck stretching aft to shade the rounded stern.

This topmost level was mostly an open area bounded by a railing that edged the roof of the deck below. A pair of dinghies sat on matching blocks to either side of a tall winch sort of thing. Obviously no one had escaped in the lifeboats. The canvas covers on the boats and around the railings had become tattered where they remained intact at all. A single wooden lounge chair lay collapsed on the grimy white paint of the deck, one of its broken legs wedged between two heavy metal stanchions that supported the safety rail. The control deck—or bridge house—lay forward of the boat winch, so the bridge crouched over the galley with part of the dining room roof sticking out in front of it and forming a little eyebrow over the empty foredeck, to protect the dining room windows from heavy seas or wind.

The bridge was one of the least-damaged parts of Seawitch— merely musty and a bit mildewed with some muck tracked on the floor. It really did seem like a sort of bridge from one side of the boat to the other, since you could walk in the door on one side and out an identical door on the other, coming down another companionway to the opposite side of the dining room. I supposed it made sense to have easy access to the bridge from either side of the boat. Two cushy-looking chairs on fixed pedestals faced the front—one behind the wheel and the other off to the left in front of a chart table spread with a mildew-spotted map, a large book, and a heavy ruler. Against the rear wall there was a bench for the convenience of the nautical version of backseat drivers, I supposed. A row of pegs near the right—starboard—door held a collection of rotting foul-weather gear, but none appeared to be missing. A latched flare box and fire extinguisher were clipped into holders on the wall near the other door, both untouched. A pair of binoculars lay on the floor, apparently fallen from a rack on the right side of the steering station. Aside from the tumbled binoculars, there was no sign of violence here. Even the ceiling-mounted radio’s microphone still hung neatly from its clip, its spiral of rubber-covered cord sagging downward in an uneven, frozen squirm as the material had deteriorated.

I moved to the chart table—navigation station, really, since it had its own array of tools and electronic instrument displays placed so either working position could see them without moving much. Screens marked LORAN, DEPTH SOUNDER, and RADAR were inset across an upright panel, as well as simpler displays for the boat’s speed, the wind speed and direction, and the more mundane issues of temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure. The instruments were no longer state-of-the-art and looked as if they’d been roughly treated, though they had been only a few years old when Seawitch went missing. The chart, with a clear plastic overlay marked up in grease pencil, had become bonded to both the table and cover by mildew and moisture. It was going to be a bitch to get it off that surface, so I took a picture of it as it was in case removal destroyed it.

I picked up the large, flat book and looked it over. The leather cover was rotting and the pages inside had warped into a rippled mass from exposure to the damp. I held it up for Solis to see.

“What do you think—ship’s log?”

He considered the venerable book. “Most likely. Useful, perhaps.”

“We’ll take it with us,” I said.

He nodded and I laid the moldering volume on the bench to be carried off when we left.

Under the chart table there was a series of shallow drawers meant for flat charts, and a grid of cubbyholes farther down for rolled charts. It was three-quarters full but the rolled charts had become too delicate to open without risking their dissolution into dust and useless fragments.

There didn’t seem to be any other clues to pick up and even to my Grey-adapted sight there wasn’t much else to see. We stepped back out on the opposite side than we’d entered by and started down the other stairs. A brassy gleam caught my eye and I stopped, turning back, looking for whatever I hadn’t quite seen. Solis watched me from a step or two below.

I turned back toward the bridge door, squinting in an errant shaft of sunlight that had cut momentarily through the fog. A bronze bracket was mounted to the back of the bridge roof, but nothing hung from it. A hole lined with a plastic grommet pierced the wall just below it for something narrow to pass into the pilothouse—a thick bit of string, maybe. I frowned at the bracket and hole.

“Solis,” I said, waving at the empty mount, “what do you suppose went here?”

He returned up the steps and peered at my find. He cocked his head slightly, then looked up at the roof of the pilothouse and around the back wall. “Perhaps a bell? We haven’t seen one anywhere on board. Don’t ships usually have a bell?”

I supposed some didn’t, but a boat like this, kept in its original vintage style except in the bridge and engine rooms, where no one but the captain would see it, should have had a bell—a big, clanging brass bell with the ship’s name on it and a string into the pilothouse so it could be rung without having to step outside. This was the place I’d expect it to be. But for the Seawitch ’s bell, there was only an empty space.

The ship’s log would require some drying out before we could get a look at it without doing damage to the pages. I had a list of names for the missing passengers and crew, but since they were presumed dead, it didn’t seem worth our while to look them up. But the owner’s widow—presumed widow, at least—was still around. As the sole beneficiary of the insurance, she was the party my employers most suspected of fraud, so it made sense to me to go talk to her next and find out what she knew about the vanishing and reappearing Seawitch . Not that I suspected her of fraud now that I’d seen the boat and its cargo of weirdness for myself, but disgruntled spouses are known to speak impulsively and I am known to take advantage of that.

We closed up and left the boat, stepping into fog that seemed to have thickened instead of burning off. Seawitch looked even less inviting than when we’d gone aboard, the ropes of colored energy writhing now like tentacles trying to crush the vessel in their grip. The low moan of the foghorn seemed more like the voice of ghosts than ever before.