“You’ve always been in this slip since you moved onto this boat?” Solis asked.
“Yep,” Zantree replied, nodding.
“And you could see Seawitch from here?”
“Oh yes! Such a pretty boat she was then. Old man Starrett had kept her up real well. The boy—Castor—he was a bit of a layabout but he had the smarts to hire himself a good captain and give him both the money and the time to keep the boat up for him.”
“So you knew John Reeve.”
“I surely did. Haven’t seen him around much in a while. He worked for a few other folks after that, but I always thought that losing the ’Witch took the heart out of him. He made a bunch of money in the stock market and retired. I hear he lost most of it again recently, but I always thought old John was a rubber-sole sort of guy: bounces right back.”
Solis adopted a thoughtful expression but said nothing more about Reeve. Instead he asked, “Did you also know his apprentice?”
“Gary? Oh yeah. Kind of an odd fellow, Gary. He always had a sort of mischievous air to him, but in that kind of desperate way, like he knew he was getting too old for that sort of shenanigans—not that he was old, but . . . you know.”
Solis nodded. “Mrs. Starrett indicated that the Seawitch occasionally used temporary crew. Did you know any of them?”
“Well, no, not really. Reeve had a couple of hands who’d usually show up to handle lines and so on when they’d cast off or come in. Didn’t really know the sort of people they hired on for parties and the like—caterer’s folks, mostly. Well, except for Shelly—everybody knew Shelly. She was sweet . . .” Zantree added, blushing.
“Shelly Knight?”
“Oh, she was a beauty. So mysterious and charming—like a Gypsy fortune-teller—and she could cook . . . mm-hm. Best crab boil you ever tasted.”
“Do you know where we could contact her now?”
“Well, no. She’s dead. She went off on Seawitch when it put out to sea for the last time. Gary took her along as the cook.”
“Another boat owner said he thought he had seen her here within the past year. Is it possible she’s still alive?”
“Shelly? Well, no. I don’t mind telling you I had a terrible crush on that girl. Terrible. I was brokenhearted when they declared the ’Witch lost at sea with all hands. I doubt I was the only one, either.”
“What of this other young woman in the marina now, staying aboard Pleiades? Her name is also Knight, isn’t it?”
The colors around Zantree’s head darkened for a moment to shades of grim green and brown, then brightened again in a sudden flash. “Here at the marina? The singing girl? Of course it couldn’t be her. Shelly’d have to be in her late forties or fifty by now and, besides, the hair’s completely different. And this girl sings. Shelly never sang, not even to herself.”
Solis and I asked disparate questions at the same time: “Are you certain you remember what Shelly Knight looked like?” he asked. And I asked, “What do you mean her hair was different?”
Zantree looked back and forth between us. Then he stood up. “I’ll tell you what. I have an old photo of some of the wharf rats from back in the day—I mean, I have pictures of the folks who used to hang out here all the time. Let me go get the photo. I’ll show you they can’t be the same. . . .”
He went into the boat, leaving the large sliding doors of the cabin open and moving as if dazed. I cocked my head and tried peering sideways through the Grey at him, but the difference in light and shadow inside made me unsure if I were truly seeing a thin pall of sickly color around him or if the dim electric bulbs just cast an unpleasant glow off the dark wooden wall. I could see him shuffling through a shelf of old-style photo albums until he found what he wanted. He hesitated, almost putting the big book back into the shelf before he tucked it under his arm and returned to us, flopping the volume open on top of the ice chest. He paged through it in a strained, mechanical way and finally pointed with a shaking finger to the second in a series of photos showing a group of people working on what looked like a parade float that had somehow run aground on the beach. The round-cornered photos had taken on that faded yellow-and-blue tinge that was typical of the one-hour-processed snapshots I remembered from my own youth.
“This was taken in 1980,” he started a little stiffly, almost defensively, “which was my first year as a Seafair pirate. My wife took a lot of pictures of me and the crew—she and the kids were so tickled. And this is all of us working on the pirate landing craft. That’s me,” he said, his voice and demeanor suddenly animated and his aura aglow in bright gold pleasure as he pointed at his younger self in plaid Bermuda shorts, white sport shirt, and a floppy straw hat much like Peter Black’s. He was in the middle of a pack of people dressed in similar clothes, who were pretending to push back the tide of pirates surging out of the painted-plywood sailing ship. The were all cheating over their shoulders and grinning, while the people dressed as pirates bared their teeth in mock fury and held aloft their plastic—and some not plastic—cutlasses and pistols.
Off to the side a laden picnic table poked into the frame, a handful of women and kids gathered around a huge boiling pot set on a portable burner about eighteen inches across. Zantree moved his finger to the woman who was stirring the pot and neither smiling nor looking up at the photographer. “That’s Shelly Knight—and about thirty Dungeness crabs.”
The focus was a little blurry on the group near the pot and Shelly’s face wasn’t as distinct as we might have liked, but the general idea was there: a slim young woman in a pink bikini top and a colorful sarong wrapped around her hips as a skirt, her long blond hair drawn back into a braid that flopped over her shoulder and down to her waist. Her hair was a pale apple green, but I thought that could have been caused by the shifting of the old photo’s color.
I looked up at Zantree and asked, “This other woman on the dock recently—how did she look different from Shelly?”
Zantree nodded a little mechanically. “Well . . . her hair’s red.”
“But otherwise . . . ?”
He struggled with the words. “Not much . . .”
“Not much different? Or not much the same?”
He quivered and shook his head, his mouth drawing tight in discomfort. I took a deep breath and shook my head, too. “Never mind. Don’t let it bother you.”
Zantree’s stiff shoulders softened and he looked at the photo again as if for the first time. Then he smiled at it. “She was so pretty. So charming. She’d tell our fortunes with cards and weave the most wonderful ghost stories over the bonfires on the beach at night. . . . Everybody loved Shelly.”
“And yet no one seems to know anything about her,” Solis muttered.
I gave him a sharp glare. He blinked back at me.
I pointed at the photo again. “Did Shelly really have green hair? It looks green in the photo, but in real life . . . ?”
“It was green, all right. A touch more yellow and paler than that photo shows, but definitely green. In the right light, it looked just a pale blond color, but up close in the sun, or under a fluorescent bulb like we had in the old marina building, it was actually green.”
“How do you remember that?”
“Who forgets a girl with green hair?”
Solis rejoined the conversation. “What about this redheaded woman from Pleiades? Have you spoken with her?” he asked.