Seawitch

sounds that the human mind interprets as words.”

“In this case, I’m pretty sure. But the interesting thing I want you to consider is this: The mammalian blood and fur found on Seawitch may well have come from an otter—the fur certainly looked like otter fur—and now that we know it’s possible, the lab should be able to confirm it or rule it out easily. Also a large —make that huge—otter and a medium-sized dog aren’t that far apart in size or appearance if you’re not really paying attention and see it only in a moment of confusion. So the creature that was reported at the hospital might have been an unusually large otter. Or, more to the point, an otterlike thing.”

“A dobhar-chú, perhaps?”

“I hate to say yes, but yes. I tried to get some information on the name Reeve gave us, but since I wasn’t sure how it was spelled, I had to try a description. Wasn’t very helpful and all I got was a small number of Web pages about an Irish lake monster that killed a woman in the eighteenth century. None of them said anything about talking, and the only thing any of them agreed on was a certain phrase, ‘The Father of All Otters,’ and that the creatures are vicious and look like giant otters.”

“But they are mythical.”

Now I was a little annoyed with him. He said he wanted to understand this and he’d been opening up to it slowly during the past two days of the investigation, but now he was digging in his mental heels. He reminded me a bit too much of myself in the early days. How had Ben and Mara stood me? “Biologists used to think the fossa of Madagascar was mythical until they found one,” I snapped. “And what about this investigation rules out the possibility of monsters? You saw ghosts! You saw them. You heard them. You saw me fade from the normal world and come back—twice. You even went with me into whatever occupies that engine room now and found Valencia’s bell, under the direction of ghosts! On the one hand you say you want to believe—for your wife’s sake if not any other— and I’m endeavoring to help you. On the other you have a head as hard as a brick wall and start kicking up rough when believing is actually required. You can see there’s something strange here—you admit it—so why are you balking at the idea of one more bizarre thing in this case?” I demanded.

I shut up quickly; I may have gone too far but I hoped not. . . .

As he blinked at me, trying to form his reply, I kept my mouth shut over the one thing I wasn’t going to reveal to him, at least not yet: The Guardian Beast had bullied me about finding “the lost” and had also given the name Valencia. If the ghosts in the engine room of Seawitch were actually the remnants of the people who died on board the steamer Valencia, then I had, indeed, found “the lost” when we found the bell in Seawitch’s bilge. Lost souls . . . What had the ghosts said? “Our soul”? The Beast hadn’t pestered me since we’d found it, but it also hadn’t let me off the hook, so there was something more to it than just finding the bell. . . .

I scrambled around on my desk and realized I didn’t have the information I was looking for. “Solis, what’s Paul Zantree’s phone number? Did you get it?”

He shook himself. “What?”

“Paul Zantree—the pirate. Did you get his phone number?”

“I did.”

“Give it to me. I need to ask him something while you make up your mind about your position on the paranormal.”

He brought his notebook from the breast pocket of his suit and flipped it open, handing it to me at the appropriate page. I wrote the number on my desk pad and flipped the notebook closed before I returned it—I didn’t want Solis to think I was making an excuse to snoop in his official notes.

I grabbed the phone and dialed Zantree. Apparently old pirates still get up before noon and he answered after only three rings. I went through the usual identification and greeting before I said, “Tell me about ships’ bells.”

“What do you want to know about them? Usually cast bronze in the old days, mostly spun brass now.”

“Is there any superstition attached to them?”

“Oh, a few. Mostly portents of death or disaster when bells ring without human hands or if the bell is lost overboard.”

“What’s the significance of that—the bell going overboard?”

“Oh, well . . .” I could imagine him scrubbing at his hair as he thought about it. “The ship’s bell is considered the ship’s voice or soul, so if the ship loses its bell, obviously that’s a bad thing and disaster will follow—sailors think disaster will follow on the heels of a lot of stuff, so they have a ton of superstitions about how to avoid bad luck. There’s a bunch of odd little rituals you have to go through if you replace a ship’s bell. You’re not supposed to just swap one out without doing the right kind of magical hokey-pokey—you don’t want to piss off that old bastard with the trident down there. If you can make the new one from the old one, that’s best, but if that’s not possible, you’re supposed to smear a little of the captain’s blood on the new bell before you mount it to tie the boat’s soul back in place. These days we just make do with pouring some cheap cabernet on it and Poseidon doesn’t seem to mind. Lemme think . . . the bell is the last thing installed before a new boat is christened. Ideally you want whatever you christen the boat with to splash on the bell, too, but you can get away with just dribbling some on it before you set sail. Motorboats and the like aren’t quite as traditional so there’s a bunch of crazy stuff you never have to do with them, but the gist is the same. Poseidon’s not that picky, as long as he gets his due before you go wandering around his domain. Because if he doesn’t, he’ll come take it. Or, y’know, so they say. . . .”

“I see. Thank you, Mr. Zantree,” I added before hanging up.

I sat for a moment, thinking about what the Guardian Beast really wanted. . . .

Solis spoke up and jolted me out of my thoughts. “What did Mr. Zantree tell you?”

I shook myself and replied, “He said the ship’s bell is considered to be its soul. So . . . we found a lost soul aboard Seawitch—more than one, it seems to me—but what we’re supposed to do about it is still a mystery. Or what I’m supposed to do about it, since this sort of thing is not your venue.”

“Why would it be yours?”

“It kind of goes along with seeing these things: I—” I stopped myself before I blurted out too much that would probably overwhelm Solis’s shaky attempts to wrap his hard head around this stuff. “I just feel I should do something to set things right sometimes. If someone was murdered aboard Seawitch, that’s your venue. But if someone’s ghost is stuck there . . . that’s mine. Especially if the ghosts are causing some other problem.”

“What problem do you think they’re causing? Are you thinking that they’re the reason Seawitch disappeared?”

“I’m not sure which is the cause and which the effect. Seawitch had no history of problems until the last voyage. So . . . if the bell is the soul of Valencia, and if that’s the cause of the problem or a symptom of it, the precipitating event of this whole case occurred during the last voyage of Seawitch. Not before.”

“Did you not call the ritual in the lower cabin the precipitating event?”

“I’m not sure now. We don’t know what spell was cast, just that it was complex, and I’m guessing it’s how Les Carson knew his wife was dead before the cops called him. But I’m not sure if it’s a cause or an effect or where it lies in the course of whatever paranormal action occurred that made the boat and its people disappear.” I shook my head. “I keep coming back to those . . . bizarre log entries.”

“If we assume your speculation to date is correct and the information from the log is sufficient to support it,” Solis said, “then it would seem that the death of Odile Carson and the ritual in the lower cabin—in whichever order they occurred and however they are connected—set responses in action that sealed the boat’s fate.”

I started to break in but he waved me down. “As a policeman, whether I believe in the supernatural or not, it cannot be denied that someone aboard Seawitch did, and the ritual marks were either made by that person or made to control or frighten that person. And whether it worked or not, the result was the loss of the ship and all aboard. These events must have happened just before Fielding’s last log entry, since he alludes to them. And loss of the ship must have occurred very soon afterward at or in the vicinity of the cove he mentioned. We need to find that cove.”

“I think I said that last night.”