P.J. Alderman - Ghost Ship

Jordan frowned. “Oh, well, I don’t know—”

“Something real casual. You don’t have to prepare a speech or anything,” he quickly assured her. “Just show up and chat with folks. You’d be surprised at the number of people who have refurbished old ships, who also believe their ships are haunted. They’ll eat this stuff up.”

“I’ll think about it,” she promised him, then changed the subject. “I verified that in all likelihood Holt really was diving for salvage. He found documents while he was renovating the hotel suite that mentioned the cargo of the Henrietta Dale . There was opium concealed in her hull. And your ancestor was the one who built the secret compartments.”

“You mean old Grady MacDonough?” Bob frowned. “That can’t be right, or I would have known about it.”

“I’m fairly certain—Michael Seavey said as much in his personal papers.”

“If you can trust that Seavey wrote the truth. The man was a criminal.”

“It should be easy enough to verify. Did your great-great-grandfather leave behind any kind of papers or diary?”

Bob leaned back, linking his hands behind his head, regarding her thoughtfully. “Unfortunately, no. I have only the stories passed down through family members. But it’s always been the legend everyone in the family talks about—the fact that Grady MacDonough was the ship’s carpenter on the famous clipper ship that ran aground on her maiden voyage. According to family members, the old guy took it really hard. He’d given almost a year of his life working on that ship. I suspect he was as fond of it as its owner was—maybe even more so. Trust me, there’s never been any mention of secret compartments.”

She didn’t point out that family legends tended to be glamorized and edited as they passed through each generation. “If I can pinpoint the exact location of the shipwreck, I might be able to convince Darcy that Holt’s murder had something to do with his dives.”

“Hmm.” Bob swiveled around in his desk chair to stare at the crammed bookshelf behind him. Standing, he pulled a thin brown leather volume with a cracked binding from between two larger books on the topmost shelf.

He thumbed through it. “This is a replica of Lloyd’s of London’s list of all shipwrecks for the nineteenth century.”

“They tracked shipwrecks clear out here?” Jordan asked, surprised.

“Yeah. They were the major insurer of ships and their cargoes back then. And they kept an official record of all shipwrecks, worldwide.” He paused to skim down one page, then flipped to the next. “Okay, here we go.”

He placed the book, open to that page, on the desk so that they could both look at it. “According to Lloyd’s, the Henrietta Dale ran aground on August 5, 1893.” He pointed with his finger. “Here are the coordinates for the shipwreck.”

Jordan frowned. “Did Holt ever talk to you about the Henrietta Dale ’s wreckage or ask you for these coordinates?”

“Nope.”

Damn . “Did he have any other way of finding them?”

“Something close to the same coordinates would have been noted by the captain in the ship’s logbook. The only copy, though, is out at the lighthouse.”

“But Holt could have taken the coordinates and used them with some kind of GPS device to locate the wreckage, correct?”

“Sure. All smart cellphones have GPS tracking these days. He wouldn’t have needed any special equipment.”

She reached for a notepad on the desk, tore off a sheet, and used Bob’s pen to write down the coordinates. “How do I go about figuring out if these coordinates match the location where we found Holt’s body?”

“I’ve got just the thing.” Bob rummaged through a jumble of rolled-up charts propped in the corner behind the desk. “Ha! Here it is …” He pulled off the rubber bands and unrolled a navigational chart, using a stapler and an antique brass sextant to keep the chart spread open. Leaning over, he plotted the coordinates on the chart, pointing to a location just off the edge of the west side of the spit. “Definitely in the ballpark,” he concluded. “Sand shifts over time, so we can’t expect an exact match, but that spit tends to shift in one direction each winter, then back during the other seasons. I’d say you found Holt within a few hundred yards of the old coordinates.”

Bob cocked his head at her. “So are you serious about looking into the shipwreck? Trying to verify that she was lured onto the rocks?”

Jordan shrugged. “Not certain yet. I’m looking into the murder of Michael Seavey, her owner. I ran across a newspaper article in my library dated from right around the time of the shipwreck. It mentioned that Seavey had been found shot dead, floating under Union Wharf. Which doesn’t jibe with the assumption that he went down with his ship.”

“I didn’t realize anyone thought that.”

It occurred to her that the only person who did think that was his ghost. “I’d heard a rumor to that effect,” she answered vaguely. “I went out to the Historical Society this afternoon and checked for more articles around July and August 1893, to see if I could find a list of victims or survivors from the shipwreck. I found two articles about the Henrietta Dale running aground, plus a list of six survivors—the captain, three crew members, Seavey, and a woman.” She paused. “Lloyd’s didn’t list survivors in their records, did they? It would be nice to corroborate the locally generated list.”

“Sometimes, but their lists were notoriously incomplete, as you might imagine,” Bob replied. He pulled the book out from under the marine map and checked. “Nope—nothing.” He returned it to the shelf. “So how are you going to go about figuring out if Holt had the coordinates of the shipwreck?”

She thought about it, then sighed. “I can always ask the gardener. She might have seen him out at the lighthouse.”

Bob gave her a slight smile. “Well, damn. Why didn’t I think of that?”

MINUTES later, she was back on the road and headed for Holt’s house on the south side of town. If she remembered correctly, he lived ten minutes outside of the city limits in an area of modest homes on larger, partially wooded lots. According to Darcy, the area was more reasonably priced in comparison to other Port Chatham real estate because of its being located downwind from the local paper pulp mill. Jordan had caught a whiff of the fumes a few times as she drove around town, and they reminded her of rather potent rotten eggs. Darcy assured her that after living in town for a while, she’d become used to the odor, but Jordan wasn’t yet convinced.

A few weeks ago, when she’d needed answers to solve Hattie’s murder, Jase had driven her out to Holt’s house so that she could ask about family papers. Holt had let them rummage through the boxes in his attic—a grim task, given the state of his housekeeping—to find what she needed. With any luck, she could still remember that trip well enough to find his house.

After a couple of wrong turns and subsequent backtracking, she spied the driveway to his run-down rambler among the trees and turned in. Holt’s pickup was absent, probably still parked wherever he’d left it the night of his murder, but a dark-colored sedan sat in the driveway. Good. As she’d hoped, one of Holt’s relatives was at the house, probably packing up the dead man’s belongings. She’d just drop off the papers with a quick explanation, advise the person to have them assessed by the Historical Society or an archivist to determine their value, then be on her way. And if she happened to see what looked like Seavey’s ledger and files sitting around in plain sight, she might take a peek at them … If they weren’t in the hotel suite, Holt had to have done something with them. The question was, what?