Seawitch Read Online Free PDF Page B

hole lined with a plastic grommet pierced the wall just below it for something narrow to pass into the pilothouse—a thick bit of string, maybe. I frowned at the bracket and hole.
    “Solis,” I said, waving at the empty mount, “what do you suppose went here?”
    He returned up the steps and peered at my find. He cocked his head slightly, then looked up at the roof of the pilothouse and around the back wall. “Perhaps a bell? We haven’t seen one anywhere on board. Don’t ships usually have a bell?”
    I supposed some didn’t, but a boat like this, kept in its original vintage style except in the bridge and engine rooms, where no one but the captain would see it, should have had a bell—a big, clanging brass bell with the ship’s name on it and a string into the pilothouse so it could be rung without having to step outside. This was the place I’d expect it to be. But for the
Seawitch
’s bell, there was only an empty space.

THREE
    T he ship’s log would require some drying out before we could get a look at it without doing damage to the pages. I had a list of names for the missing passengers and crew, but since they were presumed dead, it didn’t seem worth our while to look them up. But the owner’s widow—presumed widow, at least—was still around. As the sole beneficiary of the insurance, she was the party my employers most suspected of fraud, so it made sense to me to go talk to her next and find out what she knew about the vanishing and reappearing
Seawitch
. Not that
I
suspected her of fraud now that I’d seen the boat and its cargo of weirdness for myself, but disgruntled spouses are known to speak impulsively and I am known to take advantage of that.
    We closed up and left the boat, stepping into fog that seemed to have thickened instead of burning off.
Seawitch
looked even less inviting than when we’d gone aboard, the ropes of colored energy writhing now like tentacles trying to crush the vessel in their grip. The low moan of the foghorn seemed more like the voice of ghosts than ever before.
    Something splashed in the water and Solis and I both stiffened, looking for the cause. An otter poked its whiskered face out of the water nearby and stared at us a moment before snorting and diving away in a burst of bubbles. We exchanged a glance of relief and conferred quickly about what to do next. Solis took the log book back to his car—to be transported to the lab later—while I changed out of my wet shirt and jacket in a dockside restroom. Then we drove separately to the home of the late Castor and still-living Linda Starrett.
    You don’t meet many people with a name like Castor—especially if they aren’t a twin—so background stories about him had been easy to find in the newspaper archives when I did my preliminary checks on the case. At the time he and his ship had vanished, most people in Seattle knew who Castor Starrett was and no one had to brief them, but in twenty-seven years he’d become obscure. He was the great-grandson of a lumberman who had made a lot of money chopping down Western Washington’s cedar and fir forests at the turn of the previous century. His grandfather had turned that pile into a recognizable fortune, and his mother had carried on the tradition by marrying well, investing better, and driving her husband into an early grave in time to rake in another, larger fortune in the postwar housing boom. Even before Castor had inherited the lot—including his grandfather’s custom-built fantail yacht—he seemed to like nothing better than being seen running with the most glamorous people passing through town. He didn’t work; he was just . . . rich. Filthy rich. There were lots of photos of Castor and his pretty blond debutante wife at social functions and even more of Castor with his high-profile friends, and yet there seemed to be so little substance beyond the pictures—just beautiful clothes, beautiful people, and beautiful smiles fronting lives as substantial