Seawitch

would be worth a bit more looking to see if Odile Carson’s death had any bearing on the boat’s disappearance.

“What happened to Odile?” I asked. I could look it up, and I would later, but I found Mrs. Starrett’s replies more illuminating than a recitation of mere facts on a computer screen.

Linda’s mouth puckered, holding back a sob with a frown until she had mastered the urge to cry and could speak calmly again. “An ‘accident.’ She was electrocuted or drowned . . . I’m not sure which they said. In the hot tub. Those converted wine-vat kind of tubs that were the rage then. Odile had trouble with her back—she had mild scoliosis of the spine and sometimes it hurt her quite a lot. She would go sit in the hot water and listen to the radio. I think she used to do it more than she needed just to get away from Les. Les hated the classical music she listened to.” Linda smiled a little. “Sometimes we’d go together, Odile and I, and drink some wine and listen to the music, and just float in the water in the tub, out on the little terrace that overlooked the cliff and the beach. . . . Nothing but birds and trees and the wind dancing in the branches over our heads . . .”

She let out a sudden gasp and began crying, tears streaking down her pale cheeks and leaving tracks in her face powder. “I miss her so much! Why couldn’t she come back instead of that horrible old boat? I hate it! I hate that boat. I hate it!”

“Do you believe the boat’s disappearance and your friend’s death were connected?” Solis asked.

“Don’t be stupid!” Mrs. Starrett snapped, but it seemed like she was protesting too much. “I used to think Les managed to kill her somehow—he was so jealous while he was being so selfish—but that’s not”—she gulped and continued—“that’s not how things work. Is it? Even if it ought to be. So, no, I don’t think the boat came back for some kind of magical revenge. But now that it’s here I can’t stop thinking about Odile and what happened to her. I miss Odile! I don’t want that horrible boat—I want Odile back!”

Now Solis did turn his head and look at me, the slight lift of his eyebrows asking me to step in.

“Linda,” I started in a low voice, “we can’t bring Odile back, but we’ll find out if what happened to her was connected to what happened to Seawitch. I know you don’t want the boat. You don’t have to worry about that—the insurance company will take responsibility for it now. We’ll find out what happened. Now, can you tell me who was on board besides Cas and Les Carson?”

She snuffled and gulped her way back to something like normal. “I don’t know. I—let me think. Who went with Cas . . . ?” She closed her eyes. “There were five all together. Cas, Les, some bimbo friend of Les’s . . . Ruth . . . Ireland, I think. One more woman—I remember it added up to two couples and the captain, but not Reeve that time. . . .”

“The captain?” I asked.

Linda opened her eyes and blinked at me, not sniffling in spite of her reddened nose and eyes. “Yes. Cas hired a professional captain—John Reeve—to manage the boat most of the time. Cas wasn’t really very good at handling her and he was too lazy to sit behind the wheel when he could be on deck, getting a tan or fishing or just drooling on his female guests. This was kind of a rushed trip, so the group was smaller than usual and Reeve didn’t go—it was usually seven to ten guests, plus Cas, Captain Reeve, and another hand or a cook.” She paused to dab at her eyes. “But not this time, which I suppose is why I . . . thought it was something it wasn’t.”

I looked at her expectantly.

She shook her head. “No cook or extra hand this time. The boat had been modernized and didn’t need as many crew as it did originally, so it could go out with just two as long as the passengers weren’t picky. The usual hand was booked, so Cas was doubling for the crew. Reeve wasn’t available, either, so they took his assistant, a guy named . . . Gary Fielding. Really young. I wasn’t sure he was competent, but I didn’t really care until the boat didn’t come back and then everyone was asking me about the crew. I didn’t know anything. I thought it was John Reeve who’d been with them until he turned up talking to the press. Reeve said this Gary kid had his license and had crossed the bar a dozen times as a pilot—whatever that means. It seemed to make a lot of people shut up, so I suppose it’s important, but I don’t know.”

She stopped, an odd look on her face. Then she said, “Janice. Janice Prince. That was the other woman they took. She was a boater. One of those floating trash that tramp from marina to marina, looking for a trip anywhere in exchange for crew work.” “And other things,” she implied with a lifted eyebrow and a cynical quirk to her mouth.

Starrett, Carson, Fielding, Ireland, and Prince . . . that matched the list the insurance company had given me. The messes in the cabins had left me with the impression of more, but maybe it was just the remains of whoever —or whatever—had invaded the boat and taken or driven the passengers and crew away. . . .

FOUR

There wasn’t a lot more we could get out of Linda Starrett. In spite of her own protests about its implausibility, she seemed to cling to the idea that the death of her friend was connected to Seawitch. Even a crazy idea can be comforting when you’re confused and upset, which she clearly was. She didn’t hold up much longer and soon asked us, her voice shaking, to go. Solis and I walked down the curving brick drive to the sound of her heavy wooden door thumping closed behind us like the seal of doom.

At least the fog had begun to thin a bit and returning to our cars was less of a passage through mystery than arriving had been.

“What do you make of it?” Solis asked as we neared the cars.

I shook my head. “The whole curse thing is ridiculous. I’ve got the paperwork and there’s nothing about questionable parts from another boat being used on Seawitch. Part of the boat’s value was that it was all vintage and intact—a lot of wooden boats that age aren’t. And Mrs. Starrett’s idea that her friend’s death was somehow connected to the boat seems more like the sort of hysterical fancy some people glom onto when they’re upset and can’t ever shed. I suppose we could ask for Odile Carson’s autopsy report, just to be sure. . . .”

“I also think it’s unlikely to be a homicide, but I’ll make the request. What of the rest?”

“I think we need to get that log book dried out and find out who was really on board. Those cabins didn’t look like accommodations for two couples and a single crewman. All four of the cabins had been occupied and more than one of the crew cabins looked used.”

Solis cocked his head. “Only one had the symbols in it.”

“But it wasn’t the only crew cabin that had been used, so it sounds like Mrs. Starrett was wrong about who was on board.”

“Gary Fielding would have used one. But, yes, that does leave the other. . . .”

“It seems to me,” I added, “that the insurance company has come to the late and erroneous conclusion that Mrs. Starrett and Mrs. Carson may have colluded to get rid of the boat with their husbands on board so they could enjoy their . . . friendship in peace. How they would even manage that, I don’t know.”

“It is also at odds with Mrs. Starrett’s statements about her friend and the timing of her death. I’m as disinclined to credit that as you are.”

“Agreed. Even without the complication of Odile’s death, a conspiracy to sink the boat would have required help from someone on board, which wouldn’t include either husband or the ladies they brought with them.”

“Leaving Fielding.”

I nodded. “But he’s apparently as dead as the rest, and what’s the profit in scuttling a ship if you drown in it?”

“Very small.” Solis agreed. “Perhaps we should talk to the original captain, Reeve, about his late protégé. . . .”

It shouldn’t have taken very long to find Reeve—I did have his address in the file—but it proved to be out-of- date and we had to look for him. Or, rather, I volunteered to do some computer work to find him while Solis took the log book to a documents expert the cops contracted with for this kind of problem.

We finally discovered John Reeve in a retirement village in Des Moines—a cliffside town on the Sound south of the airport but far enough north of Tacoma’s Poverty Bay to be free of the paper-mill stink of the mud flats at low tide. The locals pronounced the town’s name with the S at the end and sometimes in the middle, too. Des Moines sprawled along the shore in a wedge that was honed to a point by the westward swing of Interstate 5 near