TEN
The penetrating chill of Seawitch’s engine room was too uncomfortable to encourage any further investigation once we had the bell in hand, so Solis and I agreed to head topside and catch the light and warmth before discussing what had just happened. The sun was still up, even though it was definitely heading for the western horizon, but at this latitude and so close to the solstice the light would linger until nearly eleven at night. We carried the slippery bell down to the dock and rinsed the worst of the slime off it. Solis kept a wary eye on me throughout the move and cleanup.
“I did warn you things were going to get weird,” I said, not looking up from the bell.
“You did. I had not expected quite what happened.”
“What did happen?” I asked, glancing at him as I brushed off the worst of the muck from the bell.
He gave me a puzzled frown in return. “You were there. . . .”
“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure that what I experience isn’t the same as what you do. So what was it like?”
Solis sat on his heels and thought about it. “Cold. Like a nightmare I used to have in my youth: darkness like sharp black lines that crowd in from the edges of vision, thicker as they draw together until I can only see straight ahead. Yet things continue to be there in the corners of my vision, stabbing at my eyes. I could see you—shining silver but dim, as if light barely touched you. Your arm was cold and hard to hold on to—insubstantial. There was sound, whispering that sometimes rose to sharp words and then quieted again, like people arguing when they don’t want to be heard but can’t stop themselves. And then the reflection of light off this bell was like . . . a distant star, so small and yellow. It shone where it could not have. It was under the floor but I saw the light. And then . . . just cold. But I felt as if someone watched us from concealment.”
“Huh,” I grunted, taking it in. It wasn’t so far away from parts of what I’d experienced, just less intense. It was his admission of nightmares that was most interesting, since the Grey tends to reflect and produce what the people in an area impress on it. This was the first time I’d had any proof that the experience of the Grey was individually tailored. It also made me wonder what other odd things had happened in Solis’s life to let him get that close—because even pulled into it by me, a pragmatic hard case like him shouldn’t have experienced that depth.
Solis shook off the mood he’d created and turned his gaze back to the bell. “Valencia. Not Seawitch . . .”
“It’s obviously been there for quite a while.”
“Perhaps it was taken from another boat for service on board Seawitch.”
“Are you giving credence to the idea of a curse brought on by mounting parts from a doomed ship?”
“No . . .”
His voice wavered a little and I guessed he didn’t actually believe it was true but he was unsettled enough at the moment to let the idea slink into the back of his mind. I stuck a pin in that trial balloon. “It’s too big for the bracket we saw on board Seawitch. This bell never hung on that boat. Someone hid it in the engine room. I admit, I’d like to know why, and how it got there in the first place.”
“Do you wish to continue tomorrow? It’s after five now. . . .”
I hesitated. I wanted more answers and I wasn’t ready to stop for the night just yet, but I didn’t want to presume he had nothing better to do—he was married, after all, and I assumed from the way he’d mentioned his wife that his was not one of those barely functioning misery marriages that are too common among cops.
He echoed my own thoughts. “I would like some answers rather than endless questions. If you’re willing to bring the bell to my house, perhaps we can find some.” He raised his eyebrows, issuing a silent invitation.
“All right. I think there’s still a lot to talk about, too.”
He nodded and got to his feet, letting me take possession of the bell. “Agreed.”
Technically the bell was part of the boat’s inventory and therefore mine to oversee, so I appreciated the courtesy, but the damned thing was still pretty heavy and awkward to carry. Still, we could look at the bell in better light and more comfort at Solis’s house than Seawitch offered, and the other reports and photos would be available through his computer. So I wrestled the bell into the back of my Rover and followed Solis to his place.
Solis’s house sat on a moderate lot near the middle of the block on a street that wasn’t quite in trendy, yuppified Madrona and hadn’t quite bootstrapped itself out of gritty, poor, crime-ridden Central District. With its old foursquare houses straight out of a Sears catalog from the first quarter of the twentieth century, the neighborhood was mostly in the process of gentrifying. A couple of the neighbors hadn’t gotten that memo and their homes were still paint-peeling, weed-yarded hovels from which the sounds of TV and gangsta rap blared forth while packs of angry-looking young black or Hispanic men sat on the stoops and wandered in and out of the open doors, drinking beer, smoking, and conversing loudly. One of them hoisted a sarcastic salute at Solis as we drove past.
As he parked and got out of his car, Solis gave the boy and his seedy residence a narrow glare but he didn’t say or do anything more. Carrying the bell in a small canvas duffel I’d had in the back of my truck, I followed him up a short flight of concrete steps to his own neat, fenced yard and onto the raised wooden porch of the big, square two-story house. We opened the door on an old-fashioned foyer and an uproar.
A boy about ten years old raced from one doorway to another, hollering like a pig outracing a butcher. Solis reached out and caught the boy by the shoulder, turning him around with a firm curl of his arm. An irritated frizzle of orange sparks erupted around him in the Grey. The boy came to an abrupt halt, his eyes flashing wide and his own glimmering golden aura falling to a narrow band around his form as he stared at Solis and caught his breath with hastily compressed lips, smothering his shouts instantly.
Solis looked down and lifted one eyebrow, then shook his head, flinging a few sparks into the ghostlight while wearing an expression of severe disappointment. The little boy seemed to shrink, his shoulders slumping as he glanced at the floor. Solis relented, scooping the boy into a hug, followed by a whisper in his ear and a swift kiss on the cheek. Then he put the boy down again and asked him a question in Spanish. The boy pointed back toward the doorway he’d come from, his energy rising to a more normal range as he whispered something too low to make out and patted at what looked like a scorch mark on his sleeve. Solis nodded as if satisfied, examined and then kissed the reddened skin exposed by the burned sleeve, and shooed the boy away. The kid scampered off with a relieved smile up the staircase to our right.
A more distant ruckus continued farther back in the building. Solis glowered a second, his energy corona sparking orange and red. Then he reined in his temper with a visible effort and waved me on. We went under an arch and down a narrow passageway toward the noise, passing a large closet and a small bathroom tucked in under the staircase. Then we walked through a dining room with built-in cabinets that were partially refinished, making a low half wall between the dining room and a large, disarrayed living room on the left. We continued ahead through a scarred swinging door that was painted yellow on one side and white on the other.
We emerged in the yellow kitchen, where a petite woman in her thirties—his wife, I assumed—was trying to tear herself away from a flaming pan to go to the rescue of three very young children being herded into the rear utility room by a tiny, elderly woman in a white house dress and an aura so chaotic it looked like a furiously animated scribble of olive and red drawn by a deranged child. The children seemed to be objecting to the older woman’s harrying while Mrs. Solis—her own energy a harried orange shade flashing with tiny lightning bolts—snatched up a lid and slammed it over her pan, smothering the flames. Then she turned to intervene in the child herding, to which she seemed to object, judging by the way she flung her hands in the air and tried to separate the kids from their shepherd, muttering in Spanish as she did.