Seawitch

I frowned at him. “As I see it?”

“Yes. I . . . have begun wondering if there is something I don’t see. For years I’ve thought Maria del Carmen was mad. And she is, but not all of her madness is lies. And Ximena . . . I fear she is becoming like her mother.”

“You’re afraid she’s going crazy?” I asked.

He nodded. “When we met I knew she was . . . fragile. I had no idea . . . what she might become. Now I see it in her mother and I know she will get worse. But”—he turned his face to me suddenly—“if there is something else—something that is true, even though it is hidden from the world—then perhaps she isn’t doomed to madness.”

“And that’s why you wanted to work with me. Because you think I’m like them and that gives you some kind of hope.”

“Yes. And you are not insane. I may not agree with all you say, I may find it hard to believe everything you’ve been telling me and even some of the things I experienced today—even in the face of proof, it can be difficult to change the”—his eyes darted around and he made a frustrated gesture, rolling his hands in the air as if trying to grasp something incorporeal—“the habit of mind. But if there are more things to see than I can see, then perhaps a way can be found to manage the difference between us and I . . . won’t lose her.”

I blinked at him and found I’d been holding my breath. I drew in a shaking lungful, but it didn’t help much. I still didn’t know what to say even when I had the breath to say it. “I—I’m not— That is, what we experience is not the same.”

“You and Maria del Carmen?”

“Me and . . . anyone. It’s different for each of us. What you experienced in the engine room on board Seawitch wasn’t the same as what I experienced—similar, related, but not the same. Even what Ximena and her mother both . . . see won’t be identical.”

“It is a matter of depth, then?”

“No. It’s not. Or not just that. It’s not all vision and it’s not all just a matter of what you see. There’s the intensity and kind of experience, what you can do with it or what you can’t do, and whether you can turn it off or not. . . .” I could tell he wasn’t quite getting it. “Look, I can see things and touch them, experience them pretty intensely, but I can’t do anything with them. Nothing significant. I can’t work magic—” I cut myself off as Solis made a sour face.

I sighed. “Now, don’t tell me you’re starting to believe in ghosts but you can’t make yourself believe in magic. What we saw in the lower cabin on Seawitch and what we saw in the fountain at Reeve’s house were spell circles. I don’t know what they did—”

“Why not? If you know they were magical, why don’t you know what magic they did? And why can’t you do it, too?”

“I just can’t. It’s a talent I don’t have. Like I can’t draw, or sing, or play an instrument, or . . . do high-level math functions in my head, but I can dance. It’s all different, even where they’re related. Like . . . circuit boards. I know one when I see one, but I can’t tell you what it does. The board for a microwave is not the same as the board for a blender, but I couldn’t tell you which one was which, just that they aren’t the same. Magic comes in a lot of specializations, and I can tell some from others but I can’t cast a spell or tell you what a spell circle was meant to do after it’s burned out.”

Solis scowled and walked to the desk to sit down. I could see the telltale glimmer of gold around him that I’d seen before; he was shifting mental gears, putting away the intimacy of his situation with his family to concentrate on the case, distancing himself from the personal discomfort of the discussion. “So . . . how are the two circles related?”

I crossed slowly to the desk myself. I wasn’t as ready to put aside the other subject as he was, but I knew it wouldn’t help my cause to pester him. “They’re the same . . . school of magic, I guess you’d say. But not drawn by the same person. The wave figures were the same symbol but the handwriting—for lack of a better word—was different. The big circle on the boat was complex, which implies a complicated or complex spell. The one at Reeve’s was small and pretty simple, so I’d say it was a specific and simple spell—which doesn’t mean it wasn’t dangerous.”

“Could the spell on board Seawitch have had anything to do with Odile Carson’s death? And I don’t say I believe it, but if the possibility exists . . .”

“You mean could she have been killed by magic? At that distance it’s not likely, especially since she killed herself.”

“Could she have been influenced to it?”

“Possible, but, again, not very likely. It’s hard to magically convince someone to do something they are mentally opposed to. If she’d already been suicidal, though . . . the possibility would be better. But it could explain how Les Carson knew his wife was dead before the cops called him.”

“What about the spell circle at Reeve’s?”

“I’d guess a rudimentary trap of some kind. If it were keyed to him personally it wouldn’t go off except when he was near it. And since he’s an old man with health problems it wouldn’t have to be a spell that could kill someone, just one that would cause a lot of distress.”

“Is it likely the person who drew the symbols at Reeve’s house would be completely unrelated to whoever drew the symbols on Seawitch?”

“No. That particular strain of magic is relatively rare—thank your lucky stars—and it tends to run in families, like a genetic disease. The only other person I’ve met who does that particular kind of magic doesn’t tolerate others of her kind nearby and she’s nasty enough to enforce the distance. So whoever drew those spell circles was either far enough away to be ignored or more dangerous than she is.”

“But who were these people, how are they related, and what is the connection to Seawitch?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Solis grunted to himself and turned his attention to the papers on the desk. “Perhaps there is more in the log. . . .”

We resumed our places, reading through all the available log pages. Solis started with the ones I’d already perused and printed while I looked at the newer ones on the screen, waiting for the printer to finish spitting them out on paper. The last page stopped me. It was blotched with red and brown stains and numerous small slashes and tears and a single rambling paragraph of poor penmanship:

. . . she cursed me and now this! I didn’t stop him from forcing himself on her, so I guess I’m just as guilty as he is. Now it’s too late to be sorry. She won’t stop. The storm is going to wreck us unless I can make the cove and even then I may have doomed us all. I think Starrett is dying—that’s my fault, too. When people say “hostile waters” they don’t know what that can mean. I do. Now I do. I don’t know how I’ll live if I survive. My skin feels like it’s on fire and this hair is everywhere. And the blood. My hands ache—

The words ended in a red-blotted scrawl, and a long location number and heading were written below, large and messy, as if drawn by a child with a leaky pen. I swung away from the monitor and waved Solis’s attention to it.

“Hey,” I said. “Read this. It’s the last entry in the log.”

Solis turned and took my place at the monitor as I stood up to pace.

“A strange thing to say,” he commented.

I stopped pacing and turned back. “What is?”

“The writer says ‘I don’t know how I’ll live if I survive.’ Not if he will survive or if he will live, but how he will live. As if there’s something beyond survival that is just as frightening as death.”

“Interesting. You focus on that. What jumps out at me is he says someone is guilty of forcing himself on a woman—and that Castor Starrett’s death is also his fault. Sounds like a rape and a homicide, though the writer almost seems confused by it all. He also mentions a cove. But where? Are the numbers and heading at the bottom an indication of where he was going or where he was at the time?”

Solis gave me a wry look. “I did not ignore the rest of the statement; I merely found the one sentence very