Jordan watched her stalk out, stunned. She opened her mouth to ask Darcy more about her, but stopped when she got a good look at her friend’s face. She was alarmingly pale, her eyes dull with pain. Her movements, when she picked up her beer mug to take a sip, were sluggish.
“I’m dead on my feet,” Jordan told Jase, cocking her head slightly in Darcy’s direction, silently telegraphing her concern. “You okay with me heading out?”
“Go ahead,” he told her. “Bill and I can manage.”
“Can you give me a lift?” she asked Darcy.
“Sure. I need to be up early, anyway.”
“All right if I come by in the morning to chat about the work on the house?” Tom asked Jordan.
Damn. She sighed, then nodded.
“I’d like to drop by your offices at the wharf tomorrow, if that’s okay with you,” she told Bob. “Ask more questions about the Henrietta Dale.”
She could have sworn he hesitated before shooting her a grin. “Caught your fancy, has she?”
“She’s a beautiful ship,” Jordan admitted.
Bob’s smile slid a little. “Pardon?”
“I said, she’s a gorgeous ship. Whoever refurbished her did a wonderful job. I’d love to take a tour of her.”
Bob exchanged a look with Tom.
“What?” Jordan demanded.
“The Henrietta Dale broke up in the surf that night in 1893,” Bob carefully explained, “which is why so many people died. There’s no way anyone could have refurbished her.”
“That can’t be right.” Jordan frowned. “Unless the gardener was mistaken, she identified the ship by that name.”
“You saw the gardener?” Darcy asked, perking up.
“You owe me twenty bucks,” Jase informed her. “Three o’clock, on the nose.”
“Crap.” Darcy pulled out the bill and slapped it onto the bar. “Jordan, the gardener was living out there at the time of the wreck. So I’d believe her if she said it was the Henrietta Dale.”
“Well, I couldn’t have seen a ship that no longer exists.” Jordan wondered if Darcy was so tired she was no longer lucid.
“Oh, now, that’s not necessarily true …” Bob murmured.
“Where did you see the ship?” Tom asked.
“She sailed toward the spit, then at the last minute, turned and went to the north past the lighthouse.” Jordan’s exasperation with them was growing.
He nodded sagely. “That makes sense, since that’s roughly where she went down. The course she would’ve taken if she hadn’t run aground—in other words, if she’d succeeded in turning and avoiding the rocks—is exactly as you described.”
Jordan stared at them, chilled.
Tom merely grinned, then turned to address the room at large. “Hey, folks? Looks like we’ve got ourselves the first confirmed sighting of a Pacific Northwest ghost ship.”
Amid widespread applause and cheers, Darcy told Jordan, “Seriously cool. Your powers are expanding.”
Chapter 4
JORDAN gripped the edge of the bar sink. “You mean to tell me that instead of just the occasional ghost here and there, I’m now seeing entire ghost ships?”
“Looks like,” Bob replied cheerfully. “What’s the problem? It’s not as if sightings like yours haven’t been fairly common—just not so much in these waters.”
“Why is she out there?”
“She’s probably repeating her voyage at the time of the shipwreck.”
Jordan conjured up an image of what she’d seen. “So your supposition is that the ghost of a wrecked ship forever sails the waters, running the same course over and over, but as a spectral … whatever, gets to avoid running onto the rocks?”
“Depends on the ghost ship. Some are seen sailing the waters successfully, righting the old wrong; others are doomed to forever repeat their captain’s mistakes.”
Jordan concentrated on what was becoming her favorite pastime—breathing.
“Ever heard of the Flying Dutchman? Or the Mary Celeste?” Tom asked her. “There’ve been stacks of books written about famous phantom ships down through history. Trust me, you’re in good company.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, the ‘good’ company of the whack jobs who write those kinds of books.”
“ ‘Whack jobs’ being, of course, another term reviled by the psychiatric community?” Darcy wondered out loud.
Jordan shot her a dirty look.
“At least it doesn’t sound as if the ship had it in for you—some of them can be pretty malevolent,” Bob said.
“Gee, that’s nice to know.” Jordan seized the bottle of Cuervo Gold from Jase, poured herself a shot, chugged it, then started coughing.
“Careful there.” Jase pounded a fist between her shoulder blades. “What, exactly, did you see?”
“An old-fashioned sailing ship, dammit!” she croaked, then paused. “Okay, maybe I didn’t see a lot of crew, but I heard them singing. And the light was a little weird, but I’m sure that was just because of the fog, right? You can’t convince me she wasn’t real.”
Everyone looked amused.
Jordan turned back to Bob. “All kinds of tall ships are supposedly sailing into port right now, because of the Wooden Boat Festival, right? Rationally speaking, it could’ve been one of those.”
“Actually, only a few have shown up so far—we’re over a month out from the festival. And a lot of the boats that enter the festival are small craft.”
“Okay, okay.” She paced back and forth in the six square feet of space she had behind the bar. “Wait—we’ve established that the gardener saw the ship, too.”
“Which stands to reason, since she’s the ghost of one of the rescue party that night back in 1893,” Tom said.
“If she’s a ghost,” Jordan corrected him stubbornly. “And why the hell do you think it makes sense that a ghost would see a ghost ship?”
“Why do ghosts see other ghosts?” Jase asked, maddeningly logical.
Jordan glared.
“Plus,” Tom said, “even if I go with your theory that the gardener isn’t a ghost—which I don’t, by the way—a lot of the sightings of phantom ships throughout history have been by more than one person, sometimes entire groups of people.”
Jordan resumed her pacing. “I suppose it’s possible I have a brain tumor.” She halted. “Yes, that’s it! I really am imagining all of this. There are all kinds of weird stories about people believing in entire alternate universes because of pressure on parts of their brains from a growing malignant brain tumor. Now that works for me.”
“If a tumor was to blame, what you see would have no correlation to actual historical events,” Darcy pointed out pragmatically.
“She’s right,” Jase said. “You see things, then you do the research and find out they existed.”
But Jordan refused to concede the point. “Maybe I’m overhearing a few historically accurate tidbits, then my tumor embellishes what I heard, then I do the research.”
“You can’t seriously tell me you would prefer to have a brain tumor rather than see ghosts and ghost ships.” Darcy said it carefully.
“A girl can dream.”