Seawitch

Jen wiped her eyes, smearing a bit of eyeliner on the back of her hand and sniffling around a wobbling smile. “Oh, Dad. Silly old Dad. Maybe we’d better put him to bed. . . .”

Jon stood up, unfolding to a comfortable six feet and stretching his arms a bit. “All right. Let’s do it. You get the door; I’ll drive.”

They paused and glanced at us. “Umm . . .” Jen said.

I stood up and Solis followed suit. “We’d better be going,” I said. “You’ve been very helpful. Thanks. If you think of anything else about Ruthie’s friends or the trip, you’ll let us know, right?” I added, holding out my card.

“Oh. Sure.” Jen took my card and another from Solis and tucked them into the back pocket of her jeans. “I hope you find out what happened to her. We—we all really miss her.”

“We will let you know,” Solis offered.

Jen nodded and we let ourselves out as the Ireland kids put their father to bed.

Outside, Solis glanced at his cell phone and poked it a few times. Then he held it out to me.

I took it, not sure what I was going to see. On the big screen there was a photograph of a sheet of paper that was stained with green and black marks and yellowed unevenly all over. I couldn’t see more than that and started to hand back the phone, scowling in confusion. Solis reached over my arm and made the picture suddenly zoom larger.

“Oh,” I said in surprise, looking down at the photo of a page from the log book floating in a shallow tank of water. “Oh . . . my.” It was the passenger and crew manifest for the last voyage of the Seawitch. For the crew, two positions were listed: a captain/navigator and a cook.

Solis looked over my arm at the photo, then up at me. “Do you suppose the cook listed there could be Shelly Knight?”

“I’m not sure it could be anyone else. But if it was Shelly . . . who did Walter Ireland see on the dock last year?”

“Perhaps Shelly Knight.”

“Then why hasn’t she come forward before this?” I asked, mostly to get the question into the air, since I was sure we were both thinking it.

“We should see if we can find this woman.”

“Marina?” I asked.

Solis nodded.

SEVEN

As we returned to the marina, I remembered what the Guardian Beast had told me: “Find the lost.” Was Shelly Knight one of the lost or was she something else? Had she really been on board Seawitch at all? And if she had been, was the woman Walter Ireland had seen really her or someone who merely looked like her in the memory of an old, sick man? How many women with pale green hair were there in the area? There were plenty of places to go swimming around Seattle so any number of blond women with swimming-pool hair might have been mistaken for her, and we had no picture to go by. We’d have to find someone at the marina who could remember her. If we were very lucky they might have an old photo or we might get an ID photo or a hit on the Internet, though the chances weren’t good for a woman of no notoriety who may have vanished for twenty-seven years. And I hoped Solis’s magical technician was able to salvage more useful information from the log book to confirm or deny the presence of Shelly Knight on the fateful final voyage of Seawitch; if she were still alive it would be our first real break.

The marina had just thrown off its morning coat of fog and the pavement and docks still gleamed with moisture when we arrived. Sailors are a ridiculously early lot, I noticed. But I suppose when you plan your voyage by tide tables, you don’t waste time sleeping in when the tide is in your favor. There wasn’t a throng of people, but the place was far from deserted. It would be a busy place in a few weeks, when school was out, but for now the residents, workers, and boat folk were up and about in scattered groups and singles, going about their business. The boat-repair yard at the south end was already busy and we could hear the hooting of the travel lift backing away from the edge of the dock as it trundled into the yard with a midsized sailboat hanging from slings between its chunky metal trusses. The boat must have been thirty feet long or more and it looked like a toy in the blue-painted arms of the massive lift.

Seaview Boatyard was a busy little place with nearly every available space in the yard filled with boats getting fixed or cleaned up for summer—every kind of boat you could imagine, from old classics built of wood to high-tech racing sailboats, from fiberglass motor yachts to charter fishing boats built of steel. But in spite of the number of boats in the yard, the activity was laconic.

I took point on this one, being a female and therefore not in danger of losing my street cred by showing some ignorance of boats. We followed various directions from the staff until we found the boatyard manager, a curly- haired, rough-skinned man in his mid-fifties named O’Keefe—called Keefer, naturally. I asked why the packed yard was so sparsely busy.

He rocked back and forth from toe to heel as he spoke, as if the ground were too still for his taste. “Well, it’s midweek and a lot of these boats are in for yard work—that is, we’re doing the work, not the owners—so they have to wait their turn, since we only have so many crew here. A few have their own contract crew in—shipwrights and specialists who come in on contract to the owner—and we’re fine with that. So only a couple are being worked on by the owners themselves, and a few by my guys, a couple more by contractors. It’ll be about twice as busy on the weekend when people come in to do their finish-up work and splash the boat.”

“Splash?” I asked.

“Put it back in the water. Not a tricky thing with steel or fiberglass, but you have to be a little delicate with wood since they can dry out if they’re standing on the hard—up on dry land, that is—for a protracted time. Three or four days is no big deal for a large boat, and with the fog we’ve been having, that’s like putting a nice, wet blanket on ’em every night. But when it’s hotter, old woodies can dry out pretty thoroughly in a week or two and the wood shrinks up. Then you have to lower ’em back in slowly and sometimes leave ’em in the slings overnight to swell up and seal all their seams again. That takes a little patience.”

“I imagine so. How long have you been working here?”

“Here? Only a couple of years.” My heart sank. “I’ve been in the business near thirty, but I was at the old yard on the canal until last year when they closed up and moved out here.”

“Would you have met a woman named Shelly Knight? She was some kind of cook or deckhand for hire out here between twenty-five and thirty years ago. Blond. We heard she was back in the area.”

“Well . . . maybe. Boat people get around, y’know. You always run across people you knew from some marina you moored up in five years ago or some regatta you went to or something like that. Can’t say the name rings a bell, though.” Keefer shrugged. “But it’s not like itinerant crew are running around with name tags on their chests, either. Sometimes you only know these guys by first name—or, worse, just a nickname—and pay ’em in cash or kind and never see ’em again.”

“What do you know about Seawitch? The boat that came in a few days ago, abandoned.”

“Oh, our ghost ship?” He let out a short laugh. “She’s a legend, that one. Custom built out at the old Lake Union Shipyard back in the twenties. Port Orford cedar on white oak frames to a Ted Geary design. Steel keel shoe and bow protectors. Twin engines—upgraded to diesel in the fifties. All hand-fitted mahogany and such inside. Nice boat. Well kept up until she went missing. Nicely fitted out, too, I hear. Pity what’s become of her.”

“What’s the rumor mill say about it?”

“About Seawitch? That she’s haunted. You know how sailors are. One old dog says she was doomed from the start—that she was built with parts from a wrecked ship, which is patently not true. Another fella on the dock claimed he heard sounds from her the other night, like someone was tearing the boat apart, but he says there was no sign of anything amiss when he went to take a look.”

“What was he doing out there?” I asked. “I thought B was the legal-status dock.”

“Nah. It’s all mixed up. He lives out there—Stu Francis his name is. Out at B Thirty. The marina wouldn’t