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out. Even large commercial vessels with all the right equipment have come to grief in the upper Puget Sound and straits, and this was neither of those, just a hundred-year-old yacht with the sort of equipment current more than twenty-five years ago—which hadn’t included vessel tracking beacons, GPS chart plotters, or weather radar.
    From southern Vancouver Island in British Columbia down to Coos Bay in Oregon, the coast has rightfully earned its nickname the Graveyard of the Pacific. From what I’ve read, more than two thousand ships have been lost here since white men started plying the waters of the West Coast, and the ghosts of the seven hundred shipwrecked and drowned are thought to haunt the storm-wracked shore. Is it any wonder I don’t spend more time at the beach?
    “We shall have to return with proper collection equipment,” Solis said, interrupting my thoughts.
    I shook myself. “Huh?”
    “If we wish to know what happened to this boat and the people on board, we will need to examine what they left behind. Assuming your employer continues to be cooperative.”
    The insurance company technically owned the boat since they’d paid off the original loss claim, but the cops could kick up a fuss if they wanted over the possible crime scene and so could the Coast Guard—and the FBI, as their investigative representative—if they liked. The insurance company preferred to keep this simple and cordial and move it through to closure with all possible speed and silence. They weren’t pleased with the public notoriety of the ghost-ship story, so they weren’t yelping about anything yet, even though Solis’s involvement was in the gray zone between legal necessity and professional courtesy. He was maintaining a politic front and I thought I understood why he’d been assigned to this messy mystery in spite of his disgust for cases that read more like Agatha Christie novels than police files: He was thorough and quiet and didn’t ruffle feathers. And it didn’t hurt that he was now a sergeant.
    “The company already knows I plan to remove things for investigation,” I said. “They want this over with as quickly and quietly as possible. They won’t kick as long as everything is logged and returned when we’re done.”
    He nodded. “Have you seen all you care to down here?”
    I gave the clammy corridor one last look for now and replied, “Yeah. Let’s finish this up.”
    Going upstairs, we left the worst of the stink and damp behind and came back up into the main salon by a different staircase. Then we went toward the bow and up a couple of steps to investigate the galley and a kind of formal dining room/library sort of area that lay forward of the galley and main salon. These were not quite as filthy as the rest of the boat, but they, too, had been touched by mold and rot. In the galley we found mold-crusted dishes and cookware standing in a now-dry sink, waiting to be washed with water that had seeped away, leaving a crusty soap ring behind. A medical kit lay open on one of the galley counters, but the only things that seemed to be missing were some gauze pads and waterproof bandage tape. The big table in the shelf-lined dining salon supported a centerpiece of driftwood and shells and was set for a meal for four, but the dishes were slimy with mildew and the books were too swollen to move on their shelves. Twin doors led out of the dining room to the triangular foredeck and from there a quick turn and another narrow, open stairway led us up to the pilothouse and its accompanying deck stretching aft to shade the rounded stern.
    This topmost level was mostly an open area bounded by a railing that edged the roof of the deck below. A pair of dinghies sat on matching blocks to either side of a tall winch sort of thing. Obviously no one had escaped in the lifeboats. The canvas covers on the boats and around the railings had become tattered where they remained intact at all. A single wooden lounge chair lay