Seawitch

turned her eyes on Solis.

She forced her smile a little wider, as if trying to apply herself to a job she had no heart for. “I never met a policeman who didn’t like coffee,” she said, pouring the black liquid from a large French press. She managed it very smoothly in spite of its obvious heft. This was a woman with old-school hostess training, and I wondered that she’d made such a lot of coffee for just one person. Maybe it was just a habit she’d never broken. . . .

Solis gave her a small nod. “It’s very kind of you,” he said like a guest at a fancy tea party. “I am quite fond of coffee. When I was a child there was always a pot of coffee on in the house.”

“Really? Your parents let a little boy drink coffee?” Mrs. Starrett asked, offering him the cup.

He took it gently. “It’s very common in Colombia. Everyone drinks coffee.”

“How do you ever sleep?”

Solis smiled. “We take more milk.”

I was having a hard time keeping a straight face. Was Solis—dour, quiet Solis—making a joke? Mrs. Starrett seemed confused, as if she didn’t know whether she should be charmed or insulted. Finally she settled on flustered and offered him the creamer and sugar bowl. I noticed he used quite a bit of each.

Mrs. Starrett glanced at me and her face got a little harder again. She poured my coffee—which I took black.

As she was topping up her own cup, Solis started to speak.

“Mrs. Starrett, I know this cannot be a pleasant topic—the reappearance of your husband’s boat—but I hope you’ll help us understand what happened.”

“It was his grandfather’s boat,” Linda Starrett replied in a sharp voice. “To Castor it wasn’t so much a boat as a . . . a floating Playboy Mansion with hot and cold running bimbos.”

Solis raised his eyebrows slightly. Mrs. Starrett blushed and bundled her sweater closer around herself before huddling over her coffee as if she were icy cold.

“Joshua—Castor’s grandfather—just doted on him when he was little,” she said. “I doubt he ever really acknowledged what a pr—what a pig he was, even when it was obvious Castor didn’t give a damn about anything but his own pleasures.” Her voice grew sharper and the color eased out of her face as she went on. “Joshua died about a year after we were married and I often thought Cas married me to allay any qualms his grandfather had that he might not settle down. Of course he never did. I wasn’t so much a trophy wife as a token of respectability. Cas always made sure we were seen together in public, being ever so perfect, whenever he’d come too close to crossing the line with Joshua or his mother. He kept on using me as his . . . his totem of rectitude when he’d been made a fool of in the press or gotten in trouble with the law.”

She paused and sipped noisily from her cup, her hands shaking with suppressed anger. “He was a pig!” she repeated. “A spendthrift fool who nearly bankrupted us. He was only saved from total disaster by selling the big house and moving down here.”

“You said ‘us,’” I observed. “Did Castor control your money, also?”

Her voice was bitter. “Most of it. Not all. It’s mostly my own money that keeps me in this so-luxurious style now,” she sneered.

I found the house rather nice, but I suppose if you’re used to cashmere and caviar, anything else seems like a fall from grace. “Why did you marry him?” I asked.

“Because I was stupid,” she spat. She rolled her eyes in self-deprecation and took a long, disgusted breath, settling herself back down. She sat back and took a steadier sip of her coffee before she went on. “Cas was six years my senior and I thought he was just kicking up his heels a bit—a sort of last hurrah—and would settle down a little once we were married. I thought we’d have fun. I didn’t understand that I wasn’t a person to Cas and certainly not a partner. I was a thing: a shield of respectability he could throw up when he needed it. I should have divorced him—it’s not like people didn’t do it all the time then—but I just couldn’t stand the idea of the failure it represented. I’d never failed at anything in my life and there I was, the only girl in my class whose marriage was as much of a wreck on the outside as it was on the inside. At least my friends had husbands who pretended to be respectable and hardworking. Cas didn’t even try. He was . . . a wastrel. That’s the word: ‘wastrel,’” she repeated with an angry hiss and bared teeth.

She raised her eyes suddenly and skewered me with her glare. “And you know the most insulting part of it? It made me look ripe for the taking. Cas treated me so badly that other men thought I’d just fall into their beds and be grateful. I wanted to kill him for that. I wanted to just kill him! I was never so happy as the day that damned boat didn’t come back.” Her eyes flicked toward the windows as if she could see the Seawitch right through the cliff and the fog. Then she looked back to me and to Solis—appealing to his chivalrous instincts, I imagined. “I was happy he was gone. But I never realized how awful it is to be a sea widow. To think someone’s dead and out of your life but to never really know. It was terrible. It was as bad as when he was here.”

Her face knotted into a hideous expression of pain and horror. “And then it came back.”

Solis and I were both taken aback by her outburst for a moment. “Do you know how it came back?” Solis asked.

Mrs. Starrett snorted. “How? Why would I? As far as I’m concerned it might as well have precipitated out of the fog.”

I found that an interesting choice of words since I’ve seen ghosts materialize in that very way—particles of mist gathering and assembling into a recognizable form.

Solis had no outward reaction to her phrase but I did see a spark of blue jolt from his aura. “Do you believe your husband had anything to do with the boat’s return?”

Mrs. Starrett scowled at him. “I do not. Castor’s dead and I don’t think he brought the boat back to harbor from beyond the grave—no matter what the sensation-mongers are saying about it being a ghost ship.”

“And yet its presence disturbs you. Why?”

At first she didn’t reply, and we let the fog-wrapped silence lean on her, exerting pressure to fill the void with words before something worse could enter. “I think . . . I’m afraid that there might be something to that curse folderol,” she whispered.

“Curse?” Solis asked. He didn’t shoot me a glance, but the rising tension in his body and the growing brightness of his aura stretching toward me was almost as good. “Tell me.”

Mrs. Starrett dropped her eyes and stared at the floor, unblinking. “At first the press didn’t have much to say except that it was a tragedy, but when the ship didn’t come back and Odile was already dead they made a big deal about the boat being cursed—which was a total fabrication. They claimed the boat was built with parts from another boat that went aground—not parts taken from the boat but parts meant for the boat that weren’t used— and they made up this wild tale about a curse that would take everyone who had anything to do with the boat. First the crew and passengers and then the family. They said I’d be next, but of course I wasn’t because there isn’t any curse, but . . . I wondered if there was something else, even at the time and . . . What if there is?”

“Who is Odile?” Solis asked.

“Odile? My—she was my best friend. Odile Carson. She was married to Leslie Carson.” She blinked at us, waiting for us to fill in the blank. I knew it but I wasn’t going to say where I’d seen the name before; it was more valuable to see how she filled in the blank herself. Solis also gave her a slightly owlish look and waited.

She took a long, deep breath and pressed her lips tight for a moment before answering. “Les was on the boat when it disappeared. Les and Odile were our social satellites. We did everything together, once upon a time. Odile and I were very close. The ‘boys,’ of course, did that man thing of pairing up by gender and going off to do manly things without the ‘girls.’ So, Odile and I . . . we spent a lot of time together.”

Solis sat back and nodded a little. “You were very close.”

Linda nodded again, not quite meeting either of our gazes. “Very,” she repeated. “More than sisters. But not—not below the line.”

That was the kind of phrase my mother would have used to mean lovers without actual sex—the line being the waist, below which one did not venture. Above it was OK, however, since it was acceptable for women to kiss and hug their female friends, even if those caresses were a bit more intimate and frequent than most people were comfortable with or would admit to.

I had new insight into the insurance company’s ideas about why Linda Starrett might have had something to do with the original disappearance of the Seawitch; they thought she and her female lover might have plotted the whole thing to get rid of inconvenient husbands. It still didn’t wash with me, but it