Seawitch g-7

by Kat Richardson

  “Avast! What be the cause o’ this bangin’ and hallooin’?” the pirate demanded, squinting at us with a snarl.

  “We’re looking for Paul Zantree,” Solis replied, flipping open his ID.

  The pirate straightened up and blinked, his entire demeanor going from aggressive to passive in a heartbeat. “Oh,” he said in a perfectly normal voice and let out a small nervous laugh. “Well, that’s me. I—I was trying on my pirate outfit for Seafair. I hope I didn’t startle you—thought you were my neighbors. Am I in trouble for something? And, gosh, I hope so—it’s been such a long time since I was in trouble.”

  “No, sir,” Solis answered. “We merely have some questions about the past we hoped you could answer for us. Your neighbors were kind enough to refer us to you.”

  “Which neighbors?”

  “The Hineses and Peter Black.”

  “Oh. Well, then, you’d better come aboard.” He unclipped a chain that barred the way through the railing at the top of the steps and waved us up. We followed him on deck and back to the fishing area at the rear.

  He flipped a couple of the chairs around so they faced in rather than out and settled himself on the edge of the built-in ice chest, shoving to the deck a decorative belt and scabbard from which protruded the worn steel hilt of an old navy cutlass. It fell with a clatter and he winced, but didn’t stoop to touch it again. “Have a seat,” Zantree said. “Can I get you a drink?”

  We both shook off the offer politely and sat in the fishing chairs. Zantree pulled off his bandana and scratched his shaggy gray hair before shoving the piece of cloth into his back pocket. He still looked like a pirate from the neck down but his uncovered head definitely made him grandfatherly, in an exotic, eccentric fashion.

  “Mr. Zantree,” Solis began, “we are seeking information about Seawitch and those aboard it before its disappearance. Your neighbors suggested that since you had been resident here for many years, you might be able to help us.”

  He smiled and looked relieved. “Oh, the ’Witch was a fine old boat then. She used to be moored just down at the end of E dock in those days,” Zantree offered. The energy around him bloomed into a soft gold corona laced with thin blue threads. “Right across from here, in fact.”

  “How long have you lived here, sir?”

  Zantree grinned, his teeth showing a bit yellow. “Thirty-four years. I was just thirty and my wife and I couldn’t afford a house, but we both liked the water so we bought an old wooden boat—bit of a wreck, it was—and moved aboard. We fixed her up real nice—taught ourselves how—and lived on that old boat for about . . .” He glanced aside and nibbled his lip as he thought about it. “Six years. Had two of our three kids on that boat. When June got pregnant again, we bought this boat so we’d have room for the baby. We could have moved back up on the hard—we could afford it by then—but we just didn’t want to.” He paused in memory, his face clouding. “Or, really, I just didn’t want to . . .” he added. Then he shook off his mood as swiftly as it had come. “So we had moved up here with the big boats about a year and a half before Seawitch went missing. Back then there weren’t very many live-aboards but a lot more people just hung out around Charlie’s—that was the bar and restaurant in the lobby of the old harbormaster’s building. Had a big tower on it like an air-traffic-control tower so the harbormaster could look out and see the whole place. They tore all that down and redid the docks a couple years ago.”

  “You’ve always been in this slip since you moved onto this boat?” Solis asked.

  “Yep,” Zantree replied, nodding.

  “And you could see Seawitch from here?”

  “Oh yes! Such a pretty boat she was then. Old man Starrett had kept her up real well. The boy—Castor—he was a bit of a layabout but he had the smarts to hire himself a good captain and give him both the money and the time to keep the boat up for him.”

  “So you knew John Reeve.”

  “I surely did. Haven’t seen him around much in a while. He worked for a few other folks after that, but I always thought that losing the ’Witch took the heart out of him. He made a bunch of money in the stock market and retired. I hear he lost most of it again recently, but I always thought old John was a rubber-sole sort of guy: bounces right back.”

  Solis adopted a thoughtful expression but said nothing more about Reeve. Instead he asked, “Did you also know his apprentice?”

  “Gary? Oh yeah. Kind of an odd fellow, Gary. He always had a sort of mischievous air to him, but in that kind of desperate way, like he knew he was getting too old for that sort of shenanigans—not that he was old, but . . . you know.”

  Solis nodded. “Mrs. Starrett indicated that the Seawitch occasionally used temporary crew. Did you know any of them?”

  “Well, no, not really. Reeve had a couple of hands who’d usually show up to handle lines and so on when they’d cast off or come in. Didn’t really know the sort of people they hired on for parties and the like—caterer’s folks, mostly. Well, except for Shelly—everybody knew Shelly. She was sweet . . .” Zantree added, blushing.

  “Shelly Knight?”

  “Oh, she was a beauty. So mysterious and charming—like a Gypsy fortune-teller—and she could cook . . . mm-hm. Best crab boil you ever tasted.”

  “Do you know where we could contact her now?”

  “Well, no. She’s dead. She went off on Seawitch when it put out to sea for the last time. Gary took her along as the cook.”

  “Another boat owner said he thought he had seen her here within the past year. Is it possible she’s still alive?”

  “Shelly? Well, no. I don’t mind telling you I had a terrible crush on that girl. Terrible. I was brokenhearted when they declared the ’Witch lost at sea with all hands. I doubt I was the only one, either.”

  “What of this other young woman in the marina now, staying aboard Pleiades? Her name is also Knight, isn’t it?”

  The colors around Zantree’s head darkened for a moment to shades of grim green and brown, then brightened again in a sudden flash. “Here at the marina? The singing girl? Of course it couldn’t be her. Shelly’d have to be in her late forties or fifty by now and, besides, the hair’s completely different. And this girl sings. Shelly never sang, not even to herself.”

  Solis and I asked disparate questions at the same time: “Are you certain you remember what Shelly Knight looked like?” he asked. And I asked, “What do you mean her hair was different?”

  Zantree looked back and forth between us. Then he stood up. “I’ll tell you what. I have an old photo of some of the wharf rats from back in the day—I mean, I have pictures of the folks who used to hang out here all the time. Let me go get the photo. I’ll show you they can’t be the same. . . .”

  He went into the boat, leaving the large sliding doors of the cabin open and moving as if dazed. I cocked my head and tried peering sideways through the Grey at him, but the difference in light and shadow inside made me unsure if I were truly seeing a thin pall of sickly color around him or if the dim electric bulbs just cast an unpleasant glow off the dark wooden wall. I could see him shuffling through a shelf of old-style photo albums until he found what he wanted. He hesitated, almost putting the big book back into the shelf before he tucked it under his arm and returned to us, flopping the volume open on top of the ice chest. He paged through it in a strained, mechanical way and finally pointed with a shaking finger to the second in a series of photos showing a group of people working on what looked like a parade float that had somehow run aground on the beach. The round-cornered photos had taken on that faded yellow-and-blue tinge that was typical of the one-hour-processed snapshots I remembered from my own youth.

  “This was taken in 1980,” he started a little stiffly, almost defensively, “which was my first year as a Seafair pirate. My wife took a lot of pictures of me and the crew—she and the kids were so tickled. And this is all of us working on the pirate landing craft. That’s me,” he said, his voice and demeanor suddenly animated and his
aura aglow in bright gold pleasure as he pointed at his younger self in plaid Bermuda shorts, white sport shirt, and a floppy straw hat much like Peter Black’s. He was in the middle of a pack of people dressed in similar clothes, who were pretending to push back the tide of pirates surging out of the painted-plywood sailing ship. The were all cheating over their shoulders and grinning, while the people dressed as pirates bared their teeth in mock fury and held aloft their plastic—and some not plastic—cutlasses and pistols.

  Off to the side a laden picnic table poked into the frame, a handful of women and kids gathered around a huge boiling pot set on a portable burner about eighteen inches across. Zantree moved his finger to the woman who was stirring the pot and neither smiling nor looking up at the photographer. “That’s Shelly Knight—and about thirty Dungeness crabs.”

  The focus was a little blurry on the group near the pot and Shelly’s face wasn’t as distinct as we might have liked, but the general idea was there: a slim young woman in a pink bikini top and a colorful sarong wrapped around her hips as a skirt, her long blond hair drawn back into a braid that flopped over her shoulder and down to her waist. Her hair was a pale apple green, but I thought that could have been caused by the shifting of the old photo’s color.

  I looked up at Zantree and asked, “This other woman on the dock recently—how did she look different from Shelly?”

  Zantree nodded a little mechanically. “Well . . . her hair’s red.”

  “But otherwise . . . ?”

  He struggled with the words. “Not much . . .”

  “Not much different? Or not much the same?”

  He quivered and shook his head, his mouth drawing tight in discomfort. I took a deep breath and shook my head, too. “Never mind. Don’t let it bother you.”

  Zantree’s stiff shoulders softened and he looked at the photo again as if for the first time. Then he smiled at it. “She was so pretty. So charming. She’d tell our fortunes with cards and weave the most wonderful ghost stories over the bonfires on the beach at night. . . . Everybody loved Shelly.”

  “And yet no one seems to know anything about her,” Solis muttered.

  I gave him a sharp glare. He blinked back at me.

  I pointed at the photo again. “Did Shelly really have green hair? It looks green in the photo, but in real life . . . ?”

  “It was green, all right. A touch more yellow and paler than that photo shows, but definitely green. In the right light, it looked just a pale blond color, but up close in the sun, or under a fluorescent bulb like we had in the old marina building, it was actually green.”

  “How do you remember that?”

  “Who forgets a girl with green hair?”

  Solis rejoined the conversation. “What about this redheaded woman from Pleiades? Have you spoken with her?” he asked.

  Zantree shrugged. “Sure I have. Why?”

  “What did you say? What were the circumstances?”

  “Well . . . it was on the fuel dock . . . I was pumping out the holding tank. Smelly business. She was . . . she was just sitting on the dock. She was sort of singing to herself and dangling her feet in the water.”

  “At the fuel dock? Kind of an odd place to do that, isn’t it?” I threw in.

  Blue-green sparks circled around Zantree’s head in my Grey-adapted sight. “Oh. Well . . . I guess it is. Didn’t think of it at the time.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Name? Well, I didn’t ask.”

  Solis scowled. “You didn’t ask this woman her name when you introduced yourself? This woman who did not look different from your old crush?”

  “Well . . .” Zantree started, and then he went quiet and looked very confused. Peering at him through the Grey, I could see a wisp of the same dirty green color I’d seen suffocating John Reeve stroking around Zantree’s head and then sliding away. “I guess I just don’t remember anymore,” he said in a flat voice. Then he shook himself and added, “Hah! Guess I really am getting old.”

  Solis rolled his eyes as if giving up the fight. “Do you have any other photos of Shelly?” he asked.

  Zantree blinked, hesitated, and then pointed to another picture lower on the next page. “Just this one. It’s not very good.”

  “Not very good” was an understatement. The color was less faded on this photo, but the photographer hadn’t been trying to shoot Shelly, so her part of the picture was even more out of focus than the last—and she had been caught in the act of turning so her braid was twisting and flinging around like a whip, her face obscured and her upper body looking misshapen. But I could tell her hair was a silvery green, not the apple green it had looked in the earlier photo. It wouldn’t have been too outlandish a color now—in fact it would have been too subtle for a lot of people to bother taking note of—but in 1985, when the only people wearing Kool-Aid–colored hair were rock stars, it must have been much stranger. The idea popped into my head that Linda Starrett must never have met Shelly because, as people kept telling us, you didn’t forget a girl with hair like that.

  “May we take these?” Solis asked Zantree.

  “Let me copy them for you,” Zantree offered, picking up the album and walking it back inside. “I have a scanner on my computer in here—my son helped me with it a couple of Christmases ago. C’mon in and I’ll fix you right up.”

  We trailed after Zantree into the dimly lit main cabin and then down a short set of steps to a galley. A laptop computer and multiuse printer sat on a pull-down shelf hanging over the hull side of the built-in dinette. Zantree hauled the machines down to tabletop level and carefully removed the photos from the album to press them onto the glass plate of the printer.

  As it scanned and spat out the photos, Zantree said, “Terribly clever thing my son made, yeah? He’s an engineer. Works for Boeing now. The other two kids moved out of state during the bank failures a few years ago, so Hale and his wife and kids are the only family I have left up here now. I really miss my family, but . . . I have the boat and all my friends here, which is more than a lot of people have.”

  I was hesitant but went ahead and asked, “What became of your wife?”

  Zantree’s face fell. “Ah. She left me. Back when the kids were all off to college, June up and said she was tired of living on a boat and it was time for us to move into a house like ‘real people.’ I disagreed. I love the boat life. I don’t want to move back up on the hard like a bug crawling on a tabletop. I never even knew she was unhappy. I guess she told me, but I must not have listened. . . .” He looked more shaken and sad than I would have expected, even for such a revelation.

  “Where is she now?” I asked in a soft voice.

  “She died last year. Complications after surgery. She had cancer, but she didn’t tell me about it and she asked the kids not to, either, so I never knew till it was over. That’s why I like to spend as much time with the kids and grandkids now as possible; I don’t want to miss anything else.”

  We took the copied photos and left behind a much sadder pirate than we had met.

  NINE

  Pleiades was impressive. It shone like its namesake; every inch of paint and trim gleamed. Even in the Grey the big blue sailboat had a sheen to it that exuded a low hum of self-satisfaction. We stood on the finger dock and admired it for a few moments before Solis tried knocking on the hull as he had with Mambo Moon. This time there was no answer except the tiniest of shivers in the Grey. The moment of waiting silence passed and he glanced at me.

  I shrugged. “If she’s in there, she’s not going to come out.”

  “And we may not board without permission. Do you believe Miss Knight is inside?”

  “I don’t think so. But I think she’s probably got some kind of alarm system, so even with permission from the owners, we still wouldn’t catch up to her.”

  “If we entered under a warrant, the alarm would be directed to the police. We would already know the situation and ignore the call.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not
the sort of alarm system I meant.”

  He eyed me askance. “You imagine something . . . extra?”

  “I’m not imagining anything. I can see it, remember? When you knocked, it sent out waves and I don’t mean in the water. There’s something not normal about that boat.”

  Solis stood still and studied me a moment in silence. Then he turned away, saying, “What do you suggest now?”

  “I suggest you leave,” answered a voice from the main dock, a strange harmonic vibrating under the tone.

  We both looked up. A pretty young woman stood at the beginning of the finger dock with her arms crossed over her chest and glared at us belligerently. She was a dead ringer for Shelly Knight except that her hair was red. I’ve known blondes who dye their hair red to combat brassiness or a tendency to go green from chemicals in water, but this didn’t look like a bottle job: It looked like her hair was alive in some strange way I couldn’t put a finger on that turned it the vibrant red of oxygenated blood. I didn’t dare sink deeper into the Grey right in front of her and everyone who might be looking this way, but even restricting myself to a mere glance, I saw her energy corona as a huge, writhing, barbed tangle of green, blue, and red that stretched out to each side and down toward the dock and the water like a thirsty vine run amok, rustling with the sound of talons on glass.

  She narrowed her eyes as Solis produced his badge and ID card and walked toward her. I kept a step behind, letting him partially hide me from her view; I didn’t like the cold, squirming sensation that her scrutiny brought and I’m not always sure how much a paranormal creature can tell about me from a glance, so I preferred she get as short a glance as possible. The fish didn’t seem to like her, either, raising a drumroll of splashes just out of sight. The corner of her mouth twitched in irritation at the sound but she didn’t turn her gaze from us.

  “I beg your pardon for the intrusion,” Solis began, drawing closer. “We’re seeking Shelly Knight or any relatives or friends here who may have known her twenty-five to thirty years ago.”