Kat Richardson: Seawitch

Something splashed in the water and Solis and I both stiffened, looking for the cause. An otter poked its whiskered face out of the water nearby and stared at us a moment before snorting and diving away in a burst of bubbles. We exchanged a glance of relief and conferred quickly about what to do next. Solis took the log book back to his car—to be transported to the lab later—while I changed out of my wet shirt and jacket in a dockside restroom. Then we drove separately to the home of the late Castor and still-living Linda Starrett.

You don’t meet many people with a name like Castor—especially if they aren’t a twin—so background stories about him had been easy to find in the newspaper archives when I did my preliminary checks on the case. At the time he and his ship had vanished, most people in Seattle knew who Castor Starrett was and no one had to brief them, but in twenty-seven years he’d become obscure. He was the great-grandson of a lumberman who had made a lot of money chopping down Western Washington’s cedar and fir forests at the turn of the previous century. His grandfather had turned that pile into a recognizable fortune, and his mother had carried on the tradition by marrying well, investing better, and driving her husband into an early grave in time to rake in another, larger fortune in the postwar housing boom. Even before Castor had inherited the lot—including his grandfather’s custom-built fantail yacht—he seemed to like nothing better than being seen running with the most glamorous people passing through town. He didn’t work; he was just . . . rich. Filthy rich. There were lots of photos of Castor and his pretty blond debutante wife at social functions and even more of Castor with his high-profile friends, and yet there seemed to be so little substance beyond the pictures—just beautiful clothes, beautiful people, and beautiful smiles fronting lives as substantial as cotton candy.

Linda Russell Starrett lived beyond the end of a cliffside cul-de-sac street that, ironically, overlooked Shilshole Bay Marina and the moorage of the Seawitch . We had to park most of a block away and walk to the end of the street to find the narrow brick-and-stone driveway that wound between another house and the cliff edge to the Starretts’ house—a sort of mock-Tudor thing an English novel might have called a cottage that was more than twice as tall as it was wide and pointy with attics. It was cute and well maintained, as far as I could tell from the front in a waist-high bank of fog that spilled over the cliff to the marina below. A florist-shop odor hung in the air and made me frown at the incongruity.

Solis watched me a moment, then took a slow breath through his nose. “Flowers.”

“Yeah . . .” I agreed, but there was something more to the smell . . . something too sterile, as if the scent came out of a can. The view through the Grey looked much like the one seen through normal eyes—mist, mist, and more damned mist. I shrugged it off and we went up to the small brick porch with its arch-topped door.

It was still early and we hadn’t called ahead but that didn’t seem to matter. Mrs. Starrett was at home, though she wasn’t very welcoming and I was sure that had little to do with the time or the murky fog lurking around her cliffside yard like an incoming tide of trouble. Solis made the official knock, since most people will give way to a badge, but the widow Starrett wasn’t impressed. She gave us a sour look with narrowed eyes and pursed lips that made unattractive creases in her pale lipstick. She hadn’t looked her age until she frowned; now she looked every minute of fifty-six and then some, but at least her face hadn’t been Botoxed into immobility.

Linda Starrett, dressed in elegant white lounging pajamas swamped by an incongruous fluffy sweater that reached to her knees, was petite to the point of tiny—her twenty- to thirty-year-old photos hadn’t given an accurate idea of her stature. Cultivated blond, bobbed, and bitter, she heaved a sigh through her nose and stepped back to invite us in. “I suppose you think I know something about this boat business,” she said. “Which I categorically do not. But you might as well come in and relieve yourselves of the notion sooner rather than later.”

She waved us in and then led us, tiny heeled slippers clicking, to a glassed-in porch at the back of the house. It was a little chilly with the fog outside and the watery sunshine still blocked by the bulk of the house. “Have a seat,” she ordered, remaining on her feet beside the cluster of furniture. “I’ll be right back.”

She didn’t wait to see if we sat, but turned and went through another door that plainly led to the kitchen. I moved to watch her through the window in the door while Solis took a wicker chair that gave him a view of the backyard and its crop of mist if he turned a bit sideways. If she ducked out the front we might have a problem, but I figured we’d hear her if she made a break across the hardwood floor of the hallway. But she didn’t bolt. In a minute she returned to the glass porch with two clean coffee cups on saucers and placed them on the wicker table at the middle of the seating group, where a small coffee service was already set. She handled the new cups with care, turning them in the saucers so that their handles were neatly parallel to each other and pointed to her left.

Then she perched on the padded seat of the wicker sofa, her spine poker straight—and gave me another glare. “I said you could sit.” As if permission were the same as an order.

I ignored her tone and took the remaining seat on the sofa, which put me between her and Solis. I could have penned her in by taking the other chair, but that would have made the conversation awkward and she clearly wasn’t going to run away. I received a thin smile for my pains as Mrs. Starrett reached for the first clean coffee cup and turned her eyes on Solis.

She forced her smile a little wider, as if trying to apply herself to a job she had no heart for. “I never met a policeman who didn’t like coffee,” she said, pouring the black liquid from a large French press. She managed it very smoothly in spite of its obvious heft. This was a woman with old-school hostess training, and I wondered that she’d made such a lot of coffee for just one person. Maybe it was just a habit she’d never broken. . . .

Solis gave her a small nod. “It’s very kind of you,” he said like a guest at a fancy tea party. “I am quite fond of coffee. When I was a child there was always a pot of coffee on in the house.”

“Really? Your parents let a little boy drink coffee?” Mrs. Starrett asked, offering him the cup.

He took it gently. “It’s very common in Colombia. Everyone drinks coffee.”

“How do you ever sleep?”

Solis smiled. “We take more milk.”

I was having a hard time keeping a straight face. Was Solis—dour, quiet Solis—making a joke? Mrs. Starrett seemed confused, as if she didn’t know whether she should be charmed or insulted. Finally she settled on flustered and offered him the creamer and sugar bowl. I noticed he used quite a bit of each.

Mrs. Starrett glanced at me and her face got a little harder again. She poured my coffee—which I took black.

As she was topping up her own cup, Solis started to speak.

“Mrs. Starrett, I know this cannot be a pleasant topic—the reappearance of your husband’s boat—but I hope you’ll help us understand what happened.”

“It was his grandfather’s boat,” Linda Starrett replied in a sharp voice. “To Castor it wasn’t so much a boat as a . . . a floating Playboy Mansion with hot and cold running bimbos.”

Solis raised his eyebrows slightly. Mrs. Starrett blushed and bundled her sweater closer around herself before huddling over her coffee as if she were icy cold.