“This is becoming a most bizarre adventure.”
“I’m not sure I’d call it an adventure,” I started.
“What else can it be? It’s no longer a case, per se. I cannot report most of what’s occurred today without running the risk of being accused of . . . flights of fancy.”
“You mean being crazy,” I corrected.
He shrugged with a small bow of his head and half-raised shoulder. “That, too. I am finding it quite . . . eye- opening.”
“If by ‘eye-opening’ you mean, ‘staring in terror,’ yeah, it is that,” Quinton said. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going up with Zantree to take a look at the charts and nav and try to figure out where we’re going and how to spot it before it’s my turn at the wheel.” He gave me a significant look—including a half-raised eyebrow—and turned to head up the steep steps to the bridge.
When he was out of earshot, I turned my attention back to Solis. “I’m sorry—” I started.
“For what?”
“For getting you into this mess and getting you half-drowned.”
“You did not get me into any mess. This came with the case—which I requested—and while I find it uncomfortable, it is necessary. I would not be diligent if I didn’t pursue this, however strange it becomes. I’m not of a delicate mind that cannot stand a challenge,” he added, leveling a finger at me as if I’d implied any such thing.
“I never said so,” I objected.
“But you think me inflexible.”
“I find you . . . rather traditional.”
He snorted. “Hidebound.”
“No. Just somewhat . . . by the book.”
“It depends on which book. . . .”
I laughed. “I suppose it does. Which book do you favor?”
“I no longer know. But . . . I am not what you think I am.”
I raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything to stop whatever admission he held, trembling on the verge of words.
He took several slow breaths, glancing around as if he were gauging the room’s ability to absorb what he was about to say without mutating into something even stranger than the creature that had snatched him from the deck. “I must be honest: I have looked into your background, Blaine. I . . . wanted to know if you were, perhaps . . .”
“Dangerous? Crazy?” I offered.
“Untrustworthy.”
“Personally or professionally?” I asked. I wasn’t offended; I would have checked up on him, too, if I’d had questions about the reliability of his information or person. And he’d had occasion to question mine once or twice, since I’m such a source of strange cases and freakish accidents. That was understandable and it didn’t bother me . . . anymore.
“They’re the same, in most cases. As you know.”
I nodded. I’d done enough background investigation and legal discovery to know that people who aren’t on the up-and-up in one aspect of their lives usually don’t meet a higher standard in any of the others. Unless they’re a particular variety of sociopath.
He spoke haltingly and without letting his eyes rest on mine for more than a second or two at a time. “But I found nothing of that sort, in spite of your . . . penchant for the unsettling. I have found you frustrating in the past —and still do—but I trust you.”
I think I let a tiny smile sneak onto my face at that admission; it would have been inappropriate to grin. I just murmured, “Thank you.”
“What we are heading into may require more than that. We may be stepping into the land of nightmares—my nightmares, at least. You seem to take such waking horrors in your stride, but I . . . When that creature pulled me over the railing, I fought because I did not want to die and I thought I might break free. But in the water where I was blind and couldn’t draw breath, my old nightmare returned.”
I sat still and breathed as quietly as my aching ribs would allow, letting him say what he needed to. He inhaled and exhaled slowly and went on, gazing directly at me for a moment as he asked, “You recall after we found the bell aboard
“That was the song of the sea witch, not your dream.”
“It was more than that. It was everything I fear. It is why I wanted this case, why I joined the police, why I found and married Ximena. . . . The dream is an allegory my mind torments me with: my inability to stop something horrible from happening, my inability to make it right—to retrieve the moment the evil became inevitable—because I have already lived through it and it will never be right. As a young man—a boy—I helped my mother hide from my father the bodies of three men she had killed in our kitchen. I had watched her kill them. I did not help her—I was too afraid—and I did not save her.
“My mother had been frightened, too, but it did not stop her. When they lay dead, she cried. She sat on the floor and wailed as if they had injured her, and she was so covered in blood I thought they had—you could not even see the pattern on her dress through the gore—so I came out from my hiding place and I tried to comfort her. At first she seemed not to know I was there. After a while she noticed and she got up. Now it seems almost humorous that she tried to straighten her dress and her hair, but that’s the woman she was—very concerned for things to be proper. Perhaps even more so because the situation was so very improper. She put her arm around me and said we must clean up so my father wouldn’t know what had happened. I did not question that. My father was a policeman. Such a thing—such a mess—in his house would not do. Now that so many years are past, I cannot recall how we did it, but we carried the men away and we buried them and then we returned and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed. . . . My mother burned her dress and we never told a soul. I never felt I had a choice as we did it. It seemed my life had led inevitably to that unforgivable moment where one evil piled upon another and I could never take it back. When I left Colombia, I hoped for something better—for a cleaner justice—than what we had done. For the ability to make things right.”
I was confused. “I can understand why you’d help your mother, but why did she kill them?”
Solis blinked and shook his head as if he had been sleepwalking and was now awakening. “They had come to rape her. The drug cartels were at war—Medellín and Cali—and she was the wife of a Cali policeman who would not take their payoffs to turn a blind eye. They thought they could destroy him by hurting her, by . . . making her worthless. You understand the culture of the place and time would have condemned her as much as the men who raped her. It would have reflected badly on my father to be married to a woman who was . . . soiled in that way. They told her what they wanted and she fought them. They tore her clothes and held her down, but they didn’t know how fierce my mother was. She killed two of them with a kitchen knife and the last with a shotgun my father kept at the back door.”
“And she didn’t want your father to know.”
He shook his head. “It would have embarrassed him. I told you she was a very proper woman.”
“How old were you?”
He thought a moment before he answered, “Twelve.”
“Your father never found out? Not even when the bodies were discovered?”
“They never were that I know of. Santiago de Cali lies in a fertile valley and there are places a body will simply melt into the ground. If picked bones were found some year after a cane burn, few people would ask where they came from.”
My stomach lurched a little at the image that rose in my mind of blackened skeletons and remnant flesh gnawed by the rats and other things that might run through the tangled growth of sugarcane fields. I’m still a wuss about that sort of thing, no matter how many times I’ve seen death memories or dead bodies, or died myself, and I hope I never become inured to it. “It didn’t bother you at the time?”
He blinked at me. “At the time I could not think at all—I only acted. But I have never forgotten the horror of
