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collapsed on the grimy white paint of the deck, one of its broken legs wedged between two heavy metal stanchions that supported the safety rail. The control deck—or bridge house—lay forward of the boat winch, so the bridge crouched over the galley with part of the dining room roof sticking out in front of it and forming a little eyebrow over the empty foredeck, to protect the dining room windows from heavy seas or wind.
    The bridge was one of the least-damaged parts of
Seawitch—
merely musty and a bit mildewed with some muck tracked on the floor. It really did seem like a sort of bridge from one side of the boat to the other, since you could walk in the door on one side and out an identical door on the other, coming down another companionway to the opposite side of the dining room. I supposed it made sense to have easy access to the bridge from either side of the boat. Two cushy-looking chairs on fixed pedestals faced the front—one behind the wheel and the other off to the left in front of a chart table spread with a mildew-spotted map, a large book, and a heavy ruler. Against the rear wall there was a bench for the convenience of the nautical version of backseat drivers, I supposed. A row of pegs near the right—starboard—door held a collection of rotting foul-weather gear, but none appeared to be missing. A latched flare box and fire extinguisher were clipped into holders on the wall near the other door, both untouched. A pair of binoculars lay on the floor, apparently fallen from a rack on the right side of the steering station. Aside from the tumbled binoculars, there was no sign of violence here. Even the ceiling-mounted radio’s microphone still hung neatly from its clip, its spiral of rubber-covered cord sagging downward in an uneven, frozen squirm as the material had deteriorated.
    I moved to the chart table—navigation station, really, since it had its own array of tools and electronic instrument displays placed so either working position could see them without moving much. Screens marked LORAN, DEPTH SOUNDER, and RADAR were inset across an upright panel, as well as simpler displays for the boat’s speed, the wind speed and direction, and the more mundane issues of temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure. The instruments were no longer state-of-the-art and looked as if they’d been roughly treated, though they had been only a few years old when
Seawitch
went missing. The chart, with a clear plastic overlay marked up in grease pencil, had become bonded to both the table and cover by mildew and moisture. It was going to be a bitch to get it off that surface, so I took a picture of it as it was in case removal destroyed it.
    I picked up the large, flat book and looked it over. The leather cover was rotting and the pages inside had warped into a rippled mass from exposure to the damp. I held it up for Solis to see.
    “What do you think—ship’s log?”
    He considered the venerable book. “Most likely. Useful, perhaps.”
    “We’ll take it with us,” I said.
    He nodded and I laid the moldering volume on the bench to be carried off when we left.
    Under the chart table there was a series of shallow drawers meant for flat charts, and a grid of cubbyholes farther down for rolled charts. It was three-quarters full but the rolled charts had become too delicate to open without risking their dissolution into dust and useless fragments.
    There didn’t seem to be any other clues to pick up and even to my Grey-adapted sight there wasn’t much else to see. We stepped back out on the opposite side than we’d entered by and started down the other stairs. A brassy gleam caught my eye and I stopped, turning back, looking for whatever I hadn’t quite seen. Solis watched me from a step or two below.
    I turned back toward the bridge door, squinting in an errant shaft of sunlight that had cut momentarily through the fog. A bronze bracket was mounted to the back of the bridge roof, but nothing hung from it. A