Seawitch

with gentle swells that sparkled sunlight into our eyes, punctuated by the shadow of salmon. The boat was completely unlike Seawitch: half the length and made of white fiberglass that had been recently cleaned and waxed to a shine. With its flying bridge on top and almost a dozen canlike fishing-rod holders attached to the stainless-steel railings at the rear of the two open decks, Mambo Moon looked like a boat meant for long, lazy fishing trips in ridiculous comfort.

We walked down the finger dock beside the boat, looking it over and trying to figure out where the thing that passed for a door was. Most of the living space must have been contained within the hull, and the cabin that rose out of the main deck looked like an iceberg waiting for Titanic. The rear of the main deck had a sort of built-in ice chest the size of a double-wide coffin with two big lift-off covers. I guessed it was meant for storing the catch of the day on one side and in the other any bait or drinks that might be needed for a long day of fishing from the built-in chairs on posts that faced the aft rails. An extension from the floor of the flying bridge deck made a small roof over the lower deck that was further shaded by a canvas cover stretched from the edge of the roof’s lip to a pair of upright poles that folded out of the railings. Despite our having been told that the owner probably wasn’t in, noises were coming from inside the boat.

We stopped beside a set of molded plastic steps that led up to an opening in the rails that stood at about Solis’s head height. This was the front door, for lack of a better description. I felt odd about stepping aboard a boat onto which I had not been invited, so I glanced at Solis for ideas. He shrugged and reached out to knock on the hull. The noises stopped. Solis knocked again and called out, “Mr. Zantree?”

“Are we supposed to say ‘ahoy’ or something?” I asked.

Solis started to reply but was cut off by a pirate coming around the edge of the cabin from the rear. The buccaneer was a dark, grizzled man with a broad chest showing a few gray hairs through the opening of his billowing cotton shirt. His hair was covered in a red bandana that sported a skull and crossbones on the front, but a few bits that stuck out were as gray as the rest and matched the scruffy whiskers on his jaw that weren’t quite long enough to be called a beard and were too pronounced to be a five o’clock shadow. Black trousers bloused into knee-length brown boots and a bright red sash tied around his waist completed the bizarre outfit. The man himself was just as odd, his brown skin and mixed-up features defying racial typing.

“Avast! What be the cause o’ this bangin’ and hallooin’?” the pirate demanded, squinting at us with a snarl.

“We’re looking for Paul Zantree,” Solis replied, flipping open his ID.

The pirate straightened up and blinked, his entire demeanor going from aggressive to passive in a heartbeat. “Oh,” he said in a perfectly normal voice and let out a small nervous laugh. “Well, that’s me. I—I was trying on my pirate outfit for Seafair. I hope I didn’t startle you—thought you were my neighbors. Am I in trouble for something? And, gosh, I hope so—it’s been such a long time since I was in trouble.”

“No, sir,” Solis answered. “We merely have some questions about the past we hoped you could answer for us. Your neighbors were kind enough to refer us to you.”

“Which neighbors?”

“The Hineses and Peter Black.”

“Oh. Well, then, you’d better come aboard.” He unclipped a chain that barred the way through the railing at the top of the steps and waved us up. We followed him on deck and back to the fishing area at the rear.

He flipped a couple of the chairs around so they faced in rather than out and settled himself on the edge of the built-in ice chest, shoving to the deck a decorative belt and scabbard from which protruded the worn steel hilt of an old navy cutlass. It fell with a clatter and he winced, but didn’t stoop to touch it again. “Have a seat,” Zantree said. “Can I get you a drink?”

We both shook off the offer politely and sat in the fishing chairs. Zantree pulled off his bandana and scratched his shaggy gray hair before shoving the piece of cloth into his back pocket. He still looked like a pirate from the neck down but his uncovered head definitely made him grandfatherly, in an exotic, eccentric fashion.

“Mr. Zantree,” Solis began, “we are seeking information about Seawitch and those aboard it before its disappearance. Your neighbors suggested that since you had been resident here for many years, you might be able to help us.”

He smiled and looked relieved. “Oh, the ’Witch was a fine old boat then. She used to be moored just down at the end of E dock in those days,” Zantree offered. The energy around him bloomed into a soft gold corona laced with thin blue threads. “Right across from here, in fact.”

“How long have you lived here, sir?”

Zantree grinned, his teeth showing a bit yellow. “Thirty-four years. I was just thirty and my wife and I couldn’t afford a house, but we both liked the water so we bought an old wooden boat—bit of a wreck, it was—and moved aboard. We fixed her up real nice—taught ourselves how—and lived on that old boat for about . . .” He glanced aside and nibbled his lip as he thought about it. “Six years. Had two of our three kids on that boat. When June got pregnant again, we bought this boat so we’d have room for the baby. We could have moved back up on the hard—we could afford it by then—but we just didn’t want to.” He paused in memory, his face clouding. “Or, really, I just didn’t want to . . .” he added. Then he shook off his mood as swiftly as it had come. “So we had moved up here with the big boats about a year and a half before Seawitch went missing. Back then there weren’t very many live-aboards but a lot more people just hung out around Charlie’s—that was the bar and restaurant in the lobby of the old harbormaster’s building. Had a big tower on it like an air-traffic-control tower so the harbormaster could look out and see the whole place. They tore all that down and redid the docks a couple years ago.”

“You’ve always been in this slip since you moved onto this boat?” Solis asked.

“Yep,” Zantree replied, nodding.

“And you could see Seawitch from here?”

“Oh yes! Such a pretty boat she was then. Old man Starrett had kept her up real well. The boy—Castor—he was a bit of a layabout but he had the smarts to hire himself a good captain and give him both the money and the time to keep the boat up for him.”

“So you knew John Reeve.”

“I surely did. Haven’t seen him around much in a while. He worked for a few other folks after that, but I always thought that losing the ’Witch took the heart out of him. He made a bunch of money in the stock market and retired. I hear he lost most of it again recently, but I always thought old John was a rubber-sole sort of guy: bounces right back.”

Solis adopted a thoughtful expression but said nothing more about Reeve. Instead he asked, “Did you also know his apprentice?”

“Gary? Oh yeah. Kind of an odd fellow, Gary. He always had a sort of mischievous air to him, but in that kind of desperate way, like he knew he was getting too old for that sort of shenanigans—not that he was old, but . . . you know.”

Solis nodded. “Mrs. Starrett indicated that the Seawitch occasionally used temporary crew. Did you know any of them?”

“Well, no, not really. Reeve had a couple of hands who’d usually show up to handle lines and so on when they’d cast off or come in. Didn’t really know the sort of people they hired on for parties and the like—caterer’s folks, mostly. Well, except for Shelly—everybody knew Shelly. She was sweet . . .” Zantree added, blushing.

“Shelly Knight?”

“Oh, she was a beauty. So mysterious and charming—like a Gypsy fortune-teller—and she could cook . . . mm-hm. Best crab boil you ever tasted.”

“Do you know where we could contact her now?”

“Well, no. She’s dead. She went off on Seawitch when it put out to sea for the last time. Gary took her along as the cook.”

“Another boat owner said he thought he had seen her here within the past year. Is it possible she’s still alive?”

“Shelly? Well, no. I don’t mind telling you I had a terrible crush on that girl. Terrible. I was brokenhearted when they declared the ’Witch lost at sea with all hands. I doubt I was the only one, either.”

“What of this other young woman in the marina now, staying aboard Pleiades? Her name is also Knight, isn’t it?”