The colors around Zantree’s head darkened for a moment to shades of grim green and brown, then brightened again in a sudden flash. “Here at the marina? The singing girl? Of course it couldn’t be her. Shelly’d have to be in her late forties or fifty by now and, besides, the hair’s completely different. And this girl sings. Shelly never sang, not even to herself.”
Solis and I asked disparate questions at the same time: “Are you certain you remember what Shelly Knight looked like?” he asked. And I asked, “What do you mean her hair was different?”
Zantree looked back and forth between us. Then he stood up. “I’ll tell you what. I have an old photo of some of the wharf rats from back in the day—I mean, I have pictures of the folks who used to hang out here all the time. Let me go get the photo. I’ll show you they can’t be the same. . . .”
He went into the boat, leaving the large sliding doors of the cabin open and moving as if dazed. I cocked my head and tried peering sideways through the Grey at him, but the difference in light and shadow inside made me unsure if I were truly seeing a thin pall of sickly color around him or if the dim electric bulbs just cast an unpleasant glow off the dark wooden wall. I could see him shuffling through a shelf of old-style photo albums until he found what he wanted. He hesitated, almost putting the big book back into the shelf before he tucked it under his arm and returned to us, flopping the volume open on top of the ice chest. He paged through it in a strained, mechanical way and finally pointed with a shaking finger to the second in a series of photos showing a group of people working on what looked like a parade float that had somehow run aground on the beach. The round-cornered photos had taken on that faded yellow-and-blue tinge that was typical of the one-hour-processed snapshots I remembered from my own youth.
“This was taken in 1980,” he started a little stiffly, almost defensively, “which was my first year as a Seafair pirate. My wife took a lot of pictures of me and the crew—she and the kids were so tickled. And this is all of us working on the pirate landing craft. That’s me,” he said, his voice and demeanor suddenly animated and his aura aglow in bright gold pleasure as he pointed at his younger self in plaid Bermuda shorts, white sport shirt, and a floppy straw hat much like Peter Black’s. He was in the middle of a pack of people dressed in similar clothes, who were pretending to push back the tide of pirates surging out of the painted-plywood sailing ship. The were all cheating over their shoulders and grinning, while the people dressed as pirates bared their teeth in mock fury and held aloft their plastic—and some not plastic—cutlasses and pistols.
Off to the side a laden picnic table poked into the frame, a handful of women and kids gathered around a huge boiling pot set on a portable burner about eighteen inches across. Zantree moved his finger to the woman who was stirring the pot and neither smiling nor looking up at the photographer. “That’s Shelly Knight—and about thirty Dungeness crabs.”
The focus was a little blurry on the group near the pot and Shelly’s face wasn’t as distinct as we might have liked, but the general idea was there: a slim young woman in a pink bikini top and a colorful sarong wrapped around her hips as a skirt, her long blond hair drawn back into a braid that flopped over her shoulder and down to her waist. Her hair was a pale apple green, but I thought that could have been caused by the shifting of the old photo’s color.
I looked up at Zantree and asked, “This other woman on the dock recently—how did she look different from Shelly?”
Zantree nodded a little mechanically. “Well . . . her hair’s red.”
“But otherwise . . . ?”
He struggled with the words. “Not much . . .”
“Not much different? Or not much the same?”
He quivered and shook his head, his mouth drawing tight in discomfort. I took a deep breath and shook my head, too. “Never mind. Don’t let it bother you.”
Zantree’s stiff shoulders softened and he looked at the photo again as if for the first time. Then he smiled at it. “She was so pretty. So charming. She’d tell our fortunes with cards and weave the most wonderful ghost stories over the bonfires on the beach at night. . . . Everybody loved Shelly.”
“And yet no one seems to know anything about her,” Solis muttered.
I gave him a sharp glare. He blinked back at me.
I pointed at the photo again. “Did Shelly really have green hair? It looks green in the photo, but in real life . . . ?”
“It was green, all right. A touch more yellow and paler than that photo shows, but definitely green. In the right light, it looked just a pale blond color, but up close in the sun, or under a fluorescent bulb like we had in the old marina building, it was actually green.”
“How do you remember that?”
“Who forgets a girl with green hair?”
Solis rejoined the conversation. “What about this redheaded woman from
Zantree shrugged. “Sure I have. Why?”
“What did you say? What were the circumstances?”
“Well . . . it was on the fuel dock . . . I was pumping out the holding tank. Smelly business. She was . . . she was just sitting on the dock. She was sort of singing to herself and dangling her feet in the water.”
“At the fuel dock? Kind of an odd place to do that, isn’t it?” I threw in.
Blue-green sparks circled around Zantree’s head in my Grey-adapted sight. “Oh. Well . . . I guess it is. Didn’t think of it at the time.”
“What’s her name?”
“Name? Well, I didn’t ask.”
Solis scowled. “You didn’t ask this woman her name when you introduced yourself? This woman who did not look different from your old crush?”
“Well . . .” Zantree started, and then he went quiet and looked very confused. Peering at him through the Grey, I could see a wisp of the same dirty green color I’d seen suffocating John Reeve stroking around Zantree’s head and then sliding away. “I guess I just don’t remember anymore,” he said in a flat voice. Then he shook himself and added, “Hah! Guess I really am getting old.”
Solis rolled his eyes as if giving up the fight. “Do you have any other photos of Shelly?” he asked.
Zantree blinked, hesitated, and then pointed to another picture lower on the next page. “Just this one. It’s not very good.”
“Not very good” was an understatement. The color was less faded on this photo, but the photographer hadn’t been trying to shoot Shelly, so her part of the picture was even more out of focus than the last—and she had been caught in the act of turning so her braid was twisting and flinging around like a whip, her face obscured and her upper body looking misshapen. But I could tell her hair was a silvery green, not the apple green it had looked in the earlier photo. It wouldn’t have been too outlandish a color now—in fact it would have been too subtle for a lot of people to bother taking note of—but in 1985, when the only people wearing Kool-Aid–colored hair were rock stars, it must have been much stranger. The idea popped into my head that Linda Starrett must never have met Shelly because, as people kept telling us, you didn’t forget a girl with hair like that.
“May we take these?” Solis asked Zantree.
“Let me copy them for you,” Zantree offered, picking up the album and walking it back inside. “I have a scanner on my computer in here—my son helped me with it a couple of Christmases ago. C’mon in and I’ll fix you right up.”
We trailed after Zantree into the dimly lit main cabin and then down a short set of steps to a galley. A laptop computer and multiuse printer sat on a pull-down shelf hanging over the hull side of the built-in dinette. Zantree hauled the machines down to tabletop level and carefully removed the photos from the album to press them onto the glass plate of the printer.
As it scanned and spat out the photos, Zantree said, “Terribly clever thing my son made, yeah? He’s an engineer. Works for Boeing now. The other two kids moved out of state during the bank failures a few years ago, so Hale and his wife and kids are the only family I have left up here now. I really miss my family, but . . . I have the boat and all my friends here, which is more than a lot of people have.”
I was hesitant but went ahead and asked, “What became of your wife?”
Zantree’s face fell. “Ah. She left me. Back when the kids were all off to college, June up and said she was tired of living on a boat and it was time for us to move into a house like ‘real people.’ I disagreed. I love the boat
