Seawitch

around and scooted it to face his computer, a boxy old desktop machine that squatted like an electronic gargoyle on the corner where the two tables met. He clacked away with his ancient keyboard and mouse and the printer made some grunting noises. “I’ll start printing the other case files while we search for Valencia,” he said, barely glancing up.

He didn’t touch-type comfortably, looking down several times even though his fingers were hitting the right keys most of the time. In a minute or so the browser coughed up a Google search; all the visible listings related to a steamship named Valencia that had been wrecked in 1906. We read through the top six articles, including a Wikipedia entry and one from HistoryLink.org that revealed a grim story:

On January 20, 1906, the passenger steamer Valencia had left San Francisco heading for Seattle. It was standing in for another ship that had been dry-docked for repairs, but though the Valencia was a little older and of a less-hardy design, it was thought to be up to the task. On the night of January 22, Valencia attempted to enter the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the teeth of a storm that quickly proved to be more than the ship could weather and the steamer’s hull was gashed open on unseen rocks. Water gushed into the interior compartments—most of which were not watertight—and the boat was in danger of sinking. The captain tried to turn and beach the ship safely, but the stern ran up, not on soft sand but on a rocky reef along the southwest coast of Vancouver Island. Valencia was trapped on the rocks below a cliff twenty miles north of the strait and unable to move in any direction or safely put out the lifeboats—of which there weren’t enough to save everyone, anyhow.

The fierce storm beat at the ship without mercy and began to tear into the structure. Abandoning everything in the cabins and holds below, everyone on board—most still clad in their nightclothes—huddled on deck or in the stern cabins that were still dry and whole. At the first break in the storm the captain attempted to put the women and children ashore in six of the seven lifeboats, with two men per boat to row, but as the men left on board watched in horror, the tiny wooden boats were capsized by waves or crushed on the rocks, killing all aboard them, save nine of the men, who made landfall alive. The nine climbed to the cliff tops, but in the slashing rain they turned the wrong way and wandered away from the lighthouse that could have saved them. On the ship the remaining men climbed into what still stood of the rigging, trying to keep out of the raging surf that battered the crumbling vessel to pieces.

The last lifeboat was finally put down with just three men aboard, under instructions to reach the cliff top and drop a line to the boat so the remaining passengers and crew might climb to safety. This time the boat reached land and the men found a sign directing them to the lighthouse. Abandoning their instructions, they walked for two and a half hours to the lighthouse, where they were finally able to call for aid to save Valencia’s surviving men. But even when help arrived, many of the boats were unable to safely draw close enough to the sinking steamer to remove anyone and had to turn away. Some of the remaining men of the Valencia were rescued by the responding boats, but not all, and when another party arrived on the cliff with ropes to haul the last ones up, the ship broke apart and sank before their eyes, taking several dozen men, who clung to the rigging, to their deaths. They had weathered two days in the storm, watching their fellow passengers and crew die and their ship tear away and sink in pieces beneath them, seen others rescued, but not them. . . . Of the men, women, and children who had been aboard when Valencia left San Francisco, only thirty-seven men survived.

The stories differed as to how many people perished in the tragedy—maybe 117, possibly 136 or 181, since records didn’t include children or late-arriving passengers who paid when they boarded—but of the unknown total who boarded, not a single child or woman had survived. Twenty-seven years later the Valencia’s lifeboat number 5 was found adrift in a cove nearby. The nameplate was preserved in a museum, but the rest of the ill-fated steamer was left to her grave on the rocks below Pachena Point.

The wrecking of the Valencia was later dubbed America’s Titanic and was accounted to be the worst peacetime shipping disaster in North American history. And we had found its bell hidden in the engine room of another ill-fated boat.

Solis leaned back in his chair and tapped his lower lip with his right index finger. “What connects them?” he murmured, capturing my own thoughts as well. “How did the bell from one come to be in the engine room of the other?”

“I can’t imagine. Seawitch wasn’t a salvage vessel and there’s no record of any diving equipment on board, so they didn’t go out to explore the wreck. Almost eighty years apart, totally different types of vessels coming from opposite directions . . .”

“Both were in or near the Strait of Juan de Fuca when they were last seen.”

“That’s not much to start with,” I said. “Seawitch was heading up to the San Juan Islands, but it’s a big area inside the strait and we don’t know for certain that the boat ever made it out of the south sound.”

“Perhaps the pages from the log will say,” Solis suggested.

I didn’t turn to watch him, taken by a stray thought. “Did you notice that the last lifeboat was found twenty- seven years after Valencia sank?”

“I had not, but it is an odd coincidence that the Seawitch also returned after twenty-seven years lost. Do you have any suggestions about what that means?”

I had to shake my head. “No.”

Solis looked unhappy and turned to pick up the sheets that had been spilling out of the old printer while we’d been reading about the wreck of the Valencia.

The first document he picked up was nothing but text and he started to put it aside. I took it from his hand and looked it over.

“Odile Carson’s death reports. I’d almost forgotten about her.”

“I thought it best to be certain of what happened. It seems unlikely, but if hers was not an accident, it would link the Seawitch definitively to a homicide—which is my area of investigation.”

“That would keep you on the case.”

He nodded. “For a while.”

“But if not, then would you be able to close the case at your end?”

“No. There would still be the matter of the blood and the condition of the boat’s interior. If there is a link in that to a major crime, the case will remain with me.”

“Unless there’s something in the log pages to give us a clue, the only lead we have on the condition of the Seawitch may be this bell,” I said. “The connection to the Valencia—if we can figure it out—is unlikely to be admissible evidence of a major crime. I mean, there is something going on, but it might not be . . . solid enough to force you to remain on this case.”

Solis cocked his head. “Force?”

“Yes. I think you can wiggle off this hook pretty easily as long as Odile Carson’s death wasn’t a homicide.” I reached again for the report.

Solis put his hand over mine, holding it down on top of the pages. “One moment, Blaine. You believe I’ve been forced onto this case and want to ‘wiggle’ out of it?”

“Well, I assumed so.”

“Why?”

I drew away to sit back in my chair and shrugged at him. “You hate mysteries and you especially hate this sort of case full of coincidence, unexplainable circumstances, and, frankly, the weird crap that lands on my desk.”

“I requested the case.”

That stopped me cold and I blinked at him, puzzled and frowning.

Solis graced me with a tiny smile. “My captain made the same expression.”

“I imagine so,” I replied. And though it sounded incredibly stupid, I added, “But why?”

“I have heard,” Solis said, looking down at his hands, “that a definition of insanity is continuing to do as you have always done while expecting a different result. Here I saw a case that could not help but fall into your hands and I thought I might learn something if I observed it from within—if I approached the mystery from a new angle: yours. I don’t find myself liking the sensation—I don’t believe I ever shall—but am finding