Ghost Sea: A Novel (Dugger/Nello Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

August sun, resting at every chance along the waterfront. At the Great Northern docks they were loading lumber bound for Mexico onto steamers. In an outside berth lay the last of the four-masted schooners pointing her proud bowsprit at the land; but she was old. Her crew toiled with care among her shrouds, decking the enormous weights gingerly. Her ends sagged, her sheer had lost its sweep; across her once-white planking, each fastener eked tears of rust, and with her patched hull and wavy bulwarks, she looked too infirm ever to leave port again.
    At Hastings Mills the great saws screamed. Perched on a thousand pilings, shrouded by smoke and steam, were sheds, rickety cranes, and tar-seamed water towers; skids, horse carts, and gas trucks; dry-docked scows and dry-rotted boathouses, and a heap of steam-donkeys condemned to rust in the mud. And in that infernal din, weary, noise-silenced men loaded, sorted, tugged, and hauled, awaiting the salvation of the beer parlor. I was at the stinking cannery, where turbaned Sikhs on scows stood knee-deep in dead fish, when I saw her.
    A blindingly varnished launch swung into view below me. She was sitting on the coamings in a plain white dress, hair glowing—she was the only one outside that day without a hat—sitting next to somber-suited men studying a map. She gazed detached at the smooth wake of the launch, then looked beyond toward the open sea.
     
     
    I ASKED ABOUT her around town: the docks, beer parlors; asked Mr. Chow in Chinatown, who was kept current on everything, asked at the ship terminal where all the steamers disembarked, and the Hotel Vancouver where I knew the concierge because I took him and his mistress on a cruise once overnight. Nothing. Little by little I pushed her from my mind.
    I busied myself with a load of gears and spare parts for steam-donkeys up the coast, when early one evening a rowing skiff, perfect as a violin, pulled up alongside the ketch and hailed. It was a deckhand all in white, asking politely if I would consider a small job for the captain of a motor yacht. The man pointed to a gleaming eighty-footer anchored near the woods up the bay. The owner had bought a sailing dinghy for his wife, and there was no one aboard who knew how to rig it. Would I be interested? Those days I would have eaten a boulder for a dime.
    The yacht—up close—was even more perfect than its skiff. The captain, a kind-faced man with life-worn eyes, greeted me as we climbed the ladder. He complimented me on the ketch, and how well she maneuvered in light airs in tight quarters; he had seen me these past weeks.
    The dinghy was on the aft deck, its rigging coiled, blocks, cleats, and turnbuckles scattered about. I laid everything out close to the final placement, stepped the mast to find the angles for the shrouds—they hadn’t even mounted chain plates—and was just checking the leads for angles, when I saw her.
    I had backed down the side deck to sight the rake for the mast, and looked through the windows into the main salon, where the long, gleaming table, with its silver and crystal, reflected the red glow from the sky. She sat at one end of the table, listening to a man at the other end with his back to me. I shuddered. Felt hot or cold, I can’t remember which. The decks were unlit, the sun just gone, so she could not have seen me on the dark side in the dusk. The cabin boy brushed by us, lighting gimbaled lanterns on the cabinside as he went.
    With the deck now lit, my movement caught her eye. She looked up. She continued to speak to her companion but her gaze rested on me, and I swear I saw her blush. Her eyes stayed riveted on me, with the urgent look of a fellow conspirator.
    “Cotton,” I said hoarsely to the captain. “Cotton line for sheets. This hemp will be too rough on her hands.” I couldn’t think of another excuse to stay. They said they would return for me tomorrow.
    In the morning, I felt as if I’d been drinking all night. I scrubbed,