A Shroud of Tattered Sails: An Oregon Coast Mystery (Garrison Gage Series Book 4)

by Scott William Carter

  "What did you do now?" Quinn asked.

  The chief, who usually dressed like an undertaker after a long day, in frumpy white dress shirts and thin wrinkled ties, had tossed his gray trench coat over a ratty blue t-shirt, a packet of cigarettes bulging in the shirt's front pocket. Grease stained his hands and he had a bruise on his forehead almost as dark as his thick eyebrows. His wispy gray hair batted about in the wind.

  "Went for a walk," Gage explained.

  "Well, you should stop doing that. It always seems to lead to something bad."

  "Like talking to you?"

  Quinn had his own special brand of smirk he seemed to reserve only for Gage, one heavy with both impatience and burden, and he employed it now. The state trooper who'd been first on the scene caught the chief up with what they knew, which wasn't much, then the whole bunch of them descended on the boat. Charity Case was written on the side in stylish black script. Unusual name. Gage wondered about the meaning behind it. Quinn pointed to the license number on the side and asked one of his cops to call it in and get the registration info.

  While he was talking, Quinn noticed the cell phone in the water. He picked it up.

  "That's mine," Gage said.

  Quinn raised those expressive eyebrows. "You have a phone?"

  "Zoe got it for me."

  "And, what, out of spite you tossed it in the ocean?"

  "I dropped it in the ocean. On accident."

  "Maybe you were being passive aggressive. On accident."

  Quinn, clearly suppressing a grin, opened the phone, found it dead, and handed it to Gage with a shrug. Gage shoved the stupid thing into his jacket pocket. Meanwhile, the female cop climbed onto the boat on the starboard side and, using the rail for support, made her way to the stern. Her partner, another young male cop, joined her, and the two of them ducked into the cabin. Gage, Quinn, and the state trooper first on the scene waited and watched what remained of the sails flutter in the quickening breeze. Up close, Gage saw how thick the algae was on the hulls, how weathered and beaten the wood trim. He wondered if it was the big storm a couple weeks earlier that had crippled the ship.

  The state trooper on the phone clicked off and stepped over to Quinn. "It's registered to a Marcus Koura out of San Jose, California."

  "Reported missing?" Quinn asked.

  "No, sir," the cop said.

  "Hmm. I wonder where Mr. Koura is now."

  "I have no idea, sir," the cop said.

  "It was a rhetorical question, son," Quinn said.

  It may have been rhetorical, but Gage could see where Quinn was going with the line of thought, and it made him uneasy. That he felt uneasy made Gage even more uneasy. He could already see that he was rooting for this woman, that he had some kind of blind spot forming, and he didn't like that at all. When the young male cop poked his head out of the cabin, Gage tensed. He was tall, dark-haired, and athletic, the perfect mold for a police officer, but with a baby-faced innocence that didn't fit—the kind that only reflected back what was good and decent in the world, like a mirror that only revealed your best features and hid the rest. Naturally, Gage feared the worst.

  "Nobody else in here," the cop said.

  "Men's clothes?" Quinn asked.

  He ducked back inside. He returned a few minutes later with the female cop, both of them shaking their heads.

  "No clothes at all," the male cop said.

  "None?"

  "No, sir. Not unless they're stowed somewhere else. I can't find a bag or anything. No food or water or anything either. Not even wrappers and stuff. Weird."

  "Weird indeed," Quinn said. He looked at Gage. "Woman shows up in a man's boat, but man isn't in it. She claims to have no memory, but she yells out that someone is after her. What's your brilliant deduction, Mr. Detective?"

  "Don't have one," Gage said.

  "Really? I figured you'd have it solved by now, being the famous private investigator that you are."

  When the male cop on the boat started back inside, Gage spoke up. "You know, you guys might want to hold off on that. Maybe you should think about getting a warrant first."

  The cop stopped and looked at the chief questioningly, who, in turn, looked at Gage with a similar expression.

  "Really?" Quinn said. "You're going to play this one that way? For a woman you don't even know?"

  "You've already determined that there is no one else on the ship," Gage said. "Do you really have enough probable cause to think foul play is involved? I'm just looking out for you here."

  "How thoughtful," Quinn said.

  "Sir?" the cop on the boat said, still poised at the hatch. "You want me to keep looking or not?"

  Quinn's scowl appeared to deepen, but it may have just been the fading light, the shadows accentuating all the many grooves on his face. Behind him, the boat was losing its detail, becoming a solid black silhouette, the sky and the ocean merging together in the gloom. The breeze had died, the air still enough that he smelled the pungent kelp at their feet, quiet enough that he heard the excited murmur of the onlookers on the bluff. Gage didn't glance at them. He kept looking at Quinn instead, waiting for his response to the cop's question.

  Finally it came, a slight shake of the head. The cops took it as an answer, climbing down from the boat, but Gage could see that the real shake of the head was aimed at him.

  "There could be a logical explanation," Gage said.

  "Let's hope," Quinn said.

  Chapter 2

  Laughter was the last thing Gage expected when he opened the door and stepped into the hospital room, but that's what he heard—and not just from the woman, but from Zoe too.

  They already had the woman changed into a blue gown, resting comfortably in a bed, and hooked up to IV fluids. Her hair was still a tangled mess of red vines, but he marveled at how much just a clean face had transformed her from a wasted thing that had washed up on the beach into a young, vibrant woman who might have been in the hospital because she'd fallen asleep by the pool and gotten a bit too much sun.

  The curtains on the other side of the room were open, the parking lot lights shining on the tops of the firs bordering the parking lot. The room was small, furnished with a big metal bed, soothing taupe walls, and a couple of wooden chairs with thin green cushions. Zoe perched in a chair next to the bed, her own hair showing hints of red that Gage hadn't noticed before but seemed obvious with the woman's hair nearby. They both looked his way, smiling.

  "Well, now," he said, leaning his cane against the wall next to the door. "I wasn't expecting such bright spirits. What're you two laughing about?"

  "You," Zoe said, with a bit of a mischievous twinkle in her eyes.

  "Me? What did I do?"

  "Oh, you shouldn't be so hard on him," the woman said. She flashed a smile before she tucked it away, self-conscious, but it was enough for Gage to see how powerfully disarming it was. "This is my man in shining armor. I don't want him mad at me."

  Her voice still retained some roughness, but it was already much improved. He also thought he caught a touch of an accent, just a hint in the way she carried her R's, but it was faint and inconsistent. Boston, maybe? It was hard to say.

  "Him?" Zoe said. "I was there, too. Without me, we couldn't have even called the ambulance."

  "My two knights," the woman said. To Gage, she added, "She was just telling me about your cell phone."

  "Oh, that," Gage said.

  "I'm going to get him another one," Zoe said.

  "You'll do no such thing."

  "If anyone gets him a replacement," the woman said, "it'll be me. I'm the reason he dropped it in the water. I just, um, I don't have any money right now." She laughed a little, but her face also darkened. "Or even know how to get it, I guess."

  "So you don't remember anything yet?" Gage asked.

  "No. I'm sorry."

  "Does the name Marcus Koura ring a bell?"

  Her forehead, more pink than tan, wrinkled. Those thin eyebrows dropped. She pondered it for
quite a while, and the pondering seemed authentic to Gage. But then, good acting would seem authentic, wouldn't it? He wanted to believe her, though. That was obvious to him already, and it troubled him, how quickly he was willing to drop his objectivity. Was it just because she was beautiful? My God, she was beautiful, like some rare bird who'd crashed onto his doorstep. Or was it the knight in shining armor bit? He knew he was a sucker for damsels in distress.

  "No," she said. "Why? Is that somebody I should know?"

  "Apparently he owns the boat."

  "Oh. And he … he wasn't in it?"

  "No. You don't remember anything at all?"

  "I'm sorry," she said.

  "Even your childhood?"

  "I just ... I remember waking up on that boat."

  "On the beach, you said, 'He'll find me.' What did you mean by that?"

  "I did?"

  "You don't remember that either?"

  She rubbed her temples with both hands, hard enough to make the skin around her fingers turn white. "No ... No, there's nothing there. It's just all dark right now. Fuzzy. I wish I could. I know this must all seem very silly—girl shows up on the beach, has amnesia. I'm sorry. Really, I am."

  "Let's make a deal," Gage said. "No more apologies. You've been through a lot and we're just trying to help you. You get some rest, get some fluids in you, it'll probably start coming back to you in the morning."

  "Okay. I appreciate it. I really do—both of you, helping me. If I was in your shoes, I don't know if I would believe me."

  "You've given me no reason to doubt you."

  Zoe snorted. They both looked at her, and her expression, at first bemused, turned sheepish. "Sorry," she said. "It's just, that's so like you. The way you put it."

  "And how did I put it?" Gage asked.

  "You know."

  "No. I don't. Enlighten me."

  Instead of answering Gage, Zoe turned to the woman. "Garrison is a private investigator. The best. I mean, he's even been on TV and stuff. If anybody can help you, he can."

  "Oh," the woman said.

  "He also doesn't ever really turn that part of himself off."

  "I see," the woman said. Gage couldn't tell if she sounded pleased or unhappy about this information. "It's almost like fate then, right? I just wish I had some money to pay you. It's not like you should work for free."

  "I wouldn't take it even if you had it," Gage said. "Listen, we need to let you get some rest. The cops are going to show up in the morning."

  The fear he'd seen in her eyes on the beach flared up again. He watched as her fingers, ever so slightly, clenched the bedspread.

  "They are?" she said.

  "Not until ten. I asked the chief to give you at least until then to recover. It'll probably all come back to you by then anyway. And in the meantime, they'll do some checking on this Marcus Koura, see what they can find. Maybe he's your husband. Or a friend. Maybe you borrowed the boat and got caught in that bad storm a couple weeks ago, got hit in the head by the mast or something. By tomorrow night, we'll probably have you on a plane headed home."

  The woman contemplated her left hand. "No wedding ring," she said. "You'd think I'd remember a husband."

  "Give it time," Gage said.

  "Will you be here? Tomorrow?"

  "I will."

  The woman looked at Zoe. "And you?"

  "I'll come by later," Zoe said. "I'm working at the Turret House, and, well, I don't like cops very much."

  "Who does?" Gage said. "They have no sense of humor, they can't dance, and they give out way too many traffic tickets."

  The woman laughed. Something also changed briefly, in her face, a glimmer of awareness.

  "What is it?" Gage asked.

  "The traffic ticket," she said. "It made me ... I thought I remembered something. Getting a ticket. Or somebody with me getting a ticket. There was a nice car, some ... some big buildings ... Oh, God. It's gone. I thought I had something there. It's like, the more I try to reach for it, the more it pushes away."

  The door opened. A woman in a white coat entered brusquely, a pretty blonde focused intently on the iPad in her hand. Gage recognized her. He had seen her at the little market near his house a couple times over the last year, often late, another night owl. They'd exchanged glances, the kind that bordered on flirtation without quite being so. Then, like now, she wore her beauty like an uncomfortable set of clothes, as if she had bought a manual on how to look good as a woman, mastered it merely as a necessity, then moved on to more worthy challenges. Luxurious curls with a golden sheen, just a touch of green eye shadow, a certain kind of compact voluptuousness that could only be gained from just the right series of machines at the gym—it all added up to a well-put-together modern woman.

  She looked up, sweeping her gaze across them, a gaze that lingered on Gage an extra second, before she turned her attention to the woman in the bed. A tiny gold pendant with the letters C and K with tiny diamonds hung around her neck. No wedding ring—not that an absence of a ring seemed to mean much these days. He wondered who CK was. Or what it was.

  "Hello, I'm Dr. Brunner," she said. There was an accent there. Russian, maybe, faint but still strong enough that he doubted she was born in the United States. "You saw me in the ER, but things were a little hectic. I hope, now that you are not so dehydrated, that you are starting to feel better?"

  "Yes," said the woman in the bed. "I am. Thank you. I'm just so ... I really appreciate everyone helping me."

  "No memory, though?"

  "No."

  "Well, don't worry about it too much," Dr. Brunner said. Her accent, a little soft on the W's, a slight rolling of the R's, seemed to drift in and out like a faint radio signal. Most of the time it wasn't there at all. "Let us see how you feel in the morning. You have no obvious signs of concussion, but we can do some tests tomorrow if you still don't remember." She looked at Gage and Zoe. "And you two, who are you?"

  "I'm a candy striper," Gage said. "Can't you tell by my outfit?"

  The doctor did not smile, not even a smirk, so Gage did not expect her response. "Where are the balloons?" she asked, deadpan.

  "These are my friends," said the woman in the bed. "They found me on the beach. Garrison Gage. He's a private investigator. And his daughter Zoe ... or am I wrong? I know I'm assuming. You did call him Garrison, not Dad, so …"

  "It's complicated," Zoe said, "but, yeah, I sort of think of him as my dad."

  "And I think I'm pretty darn lucky," Gage said, "to be in this room with three beautiful women."

  Their reactions to the compliment were all unique, an eye roll from Zoe, a blush from the woman in the bed, and a narrowing of the eyes from Dr. Brunner, a look that might have meant she was pleased, perturbed, or anything in between.

  "Interesting," she said. "Does this sort of general flattery usually work for you?"

  "Define work," Gage said.

  "Hmm. Well, in any case, I think we need to let our patient rest." She smiled at the woman in the bed, and the gesture was like her clothes, practiced, even genuine, but a little too perfect to be completely natural. "Hopefully, I can put something other than 'Jane Doe' in your file tomorrow."

  "Doctor," Gage said, "one other thing …"

  "Another random compliment?"

  "Maybe later. It's about the 'Jane Doe' thing. Her story has quite a human interest element. I know how these things work. When this gets out, we're going to have some press around here wanting to talk to her. Do you think you could ..."

  "I will make sure she has no visitors," Dr. Brunner said.

  "Thank you," Gage said.

  "Other than these two!" the woman in the bed said.

  "Of course," Dr. Brunner said. She tapped a few times on her tablet, all business, so again her response surprised him. "We always make exceptions for candy stripers and their sort-of daughters around here."

  * * *

  The next morning, Gage arrived at Books and Oddities a little after eight. The store did not offic
ially open until nine on a Thursday, but Gage was not surprised to find Alex's green Toyota van in the gravel parking lot, the first car there, nor that he had turned on the neon orange open sign.

  None of the other dozen shops in the funky Horseshoe Mall bothered to open before ten, even if the owners did show up early, as the tourist crowd that was the lifeblood of the Barnacle Bluffs economy, such as it was, barely ever crawled out of their hotel rooms before then. But the bookstore was more than a job to Gage's longtime friend. Alex may have spent the vast majority of his working life in the FBI—racking up his share of successes along the way—but he'd spent most of those days dreaming of opening a bookshop and a B&B in a quaint coastal town. He would have turned on the open sign even in a monsoon.

  There was no monsoon today, the sky a flawless cobalt blue, though it had drizzled briefly during the night as it often did. The rickety boardwalk that connected the stores shimmered with moisture. The United States flag outside the stamp shop billowed in the slight breeze, the air chill enough that Gage kept his chin down until he was safely within the warmth of the bookstore.

  Pine bookshelves, buzzing fluorescent lights, and the smell of old books—none of it may have been Gage's dream, but he still loved bookstores, and this one felt like a second home. Something sloughed away whenever he entered, a second skin of stress and worry. The feeling never lasted long, but it was always welcome. A wall of cardboard boxes lined the glass counter, tall enough that Gage could only see the top of his friend's mostly bald head, a shiny scalp visible through thinning gray hair. The swivel chair squeaked.

  "That you, Garrison?" Alex said.

  Rather than answer, Gage put the white paper sack on the mountain of boxes.

  "Chocolate with sprinkles?" Alex said.

  "Would I disappoint you?" Gage asked.

  "You really want me to answer that?"

  Gage stepped past the spinner rack of antique greeting cards to the other side of the counter, where a lighted glass case contained a number of first editions and other rarities—a Civil War era pistol, Indian arrowheads, some baseball cards in Mylar wrappers. Alex, slumped at the computer desk, peered at him over the tops of his reading glasses like a hermit sticking his head out of his hovel. He did not have a mouth so much as a mustache, a thick gray one, and the perpetual bags under his eyes would have seemed darker if not for his already dark complexion. His week cruising in the Mediterranean had made that complexion even darker.