Solis spoke up and jolted me out of my thoughts. “What did Mr. Zantree tell you?”
I shook myself and replied, “He said the ship’s bell is considered to be its soul. So . . . we found a lost soul aboard Seawitch—more than one, it seems to me—but what we’re supposed to do about it is still a mystery. Or what I’m supposed to do about it, since this sort of thing is not your venue.”
“Why would it be yours?”
“It kind of goes along with seeing these things: I—” I stopped myself before I blurted out too much that would probably overwhelm Solis’s shaky attempts to wrap his hard head around this stuff. “I just feel I should do something to set things right sometimes. If someone was murdered aboard Seawitch, that’s your venue. But if someone’s ghost is stuck there . . . that’s mine. Especially if the ghosts are causing some other problem.”
“What problem do you think they’re causing? Are you thinking that they’re the reason Seawitch disappeared?”
“I’m not sure which is the cause and which the effect. Seawitch had no history of problems until the last voyage. So . . . if the bell is the soul of Valencia, and if that’s the cause of the problem or a symptom of it, the precipitating event of this whole case occurred during the last voyage of Seawitch. Not before.”
“Did you not call the ritual in the lower cabin the precipitating event?”
“I’m not sure now. We don’t know what spell was cast, just that it was complex, and I’m guessing it’s how Les Carson knew his wife was dead before the cops called him. But I’m not sure if it’s a cause or an effect or where it lies in the course of whatever paranormal action occurred that made the boat and its people disappear.” I shook my head. “I keep coming back to those . . . bizarre log entries.”
“If we assume your speculation to date is correct and the information from the log is sufficient to support it,” Solis said, “then it would seem that the death of Odile Carson and the ritual in the lower cabin—in whichever order they occurred and however they are connected—set responses in action that sealed the boat’s fate.”
I started to break in but he waved me down. “As a policeman, whether I believe in the supernatural or not, it cannot be denied that someone aboard Seawitch did, and the ritual marks were either made by that person or made to control or frighten that person. And whether it worked or not, the result was the loss of the ship and all aboard. These events must have happened just before Fielding’s last log entry, since he alludes to them. And loss of the ship must have occurred very soon afterward at or in the vicinity of the cove he mentioned. We need to find that cove.”
“I think I said that last night.”
“Yes, and I agreed then. I agree now and I . . . think—I do not yet believe—that something extraordinary did take place. And that it is connected to the ghosts aboard Seawitch.”
I stared at him. I did not ask how he was sure or if his ability to see what he had was anything more than the occasional moments of clarity that hunch-playing cops get or just an effect visited on those who consort with people like me and his mother-in-law. I said only, “We’ll need a boat. And a talk with the only available witnesses.”
“What witnesses?”
“The ghosts of Valencia. If we take the bell, I think we’ll find them in Seawitch’s engine room.”
“Why must we take the bell there?”
“I don’t know if they’re bound to the bell or the boat at this point—the bell seems more logical, but I don’t want to take any chances. Ghosts like this are unpredictable. If we re-create the conditions under which we found them last time, we have a better chance of finding them this time.”
FIFTEEN
“Are not ghosts more active at night?” Solis asked as we walked down B dock once again toward Seawitch, with the bell in its canvas bag swinging from my arms.
I smiled. “You sound nervous about this.” We’d eaten lunch on the way to the marina and I was feeling human enough to have something at least approaching a sense of humor.
“I am not nervous. I’m afraid.”
“Of ghosts?”
“For my reputation.”
I shook my head, amused and remembering what a dreadful hardhead I’d been about the whole thing once, myself. “Trust me, no one will ever know except me and obviously I won’t tell. Well, I might tell Quinton.” Solis’s aura flushed an odd bilious yellow. What was that? Embarrassment? Fear? I turned to look at him, serious and as calm as I could manage, considering we were on our way to interview ghosts, a process that doesn’t always go well. “I’m teasing you. I won’t say a word to anyone—including Q.”
He looked relieved. “Thank you.”
I wondered why he would care. Yet he did so I did, too. Enough to keep it to myself unless I had to do otherwise. I turned back and resumed walking and Solis fell in beside me. It was strange to be the lead on this. Yes, the insurance company was the big dog in this case, but I wasn’t used to having a superior position to Solis’s. Parallel or sneaking around him in one way or another, yes, but equal? No. And certainly not the lead dog. As we walked toward Seawitch I noted that the colors and activity near it were brighter and stronger, smoky coils and chains of sparks writhing around the vessel and occasionally reaching out toward the water and other boats, only to be snapped back. I didn’t like it any better than I had the night before. Pleiades appeared dark and empty in my Grey-seeing eyes and I wondered where the energy, or its owner, had gone. Had all the local activity moved to Seawitch? I pointed at the boat. “There’s a lot of energetic activity around Seawitch today. Last night Pleiades was the busy one—some kind of sentry feeler took a poke at the . . . creature that came to talk to me and drove it off. Then it backlashed and almost hit me, but the charge was fading out and the activity was way down by the time I left.”
“I can’t detect such activity,” he replied, peering at Seawitch.
“You’ll have to take my word for it. Something’s happening but I’m not sure what. And I don’t know what happened to the creature that tried to talk to me, though that energy tendril seemed fairly dangerous as long as it was charged up.”
“Do they, then, discharge?”
“Well, this one did. Magic has power limits. You have to have sources to draw on and channels to feed it through, and there’s only so much energy a magic user or spell can pass before it shuts down or burns out, unless they have something to stabilize or store energy. Magic is not immune to the basic laws of physics.” It felt strange to be repeating the things Quinton had explained to me long ago when I’d been the one who was thrashing around blind.
“But . . . it’s magic.”
I cast him a sideways glance, trying to decide if he were making fun of me or not, but his expression was only puzzled, not sly. “Energy is still just energy, even if it’s paranormal,” I said.
Maybe it was having thought of dogs or maybe it was coincidence, but as we walked onto the dock beside Seawitch, something was there. Something like a large dog.
Solis twitched and stopped moving. “What is . . . that?”
Dripping, it padded toward us with a strange, waddling walk on legs too short for its body. A thick tail touched the ground, leaving a wet, serpentine trail behind it.
“That, I think, is the Father of All Otters,” I whispered. “But not the one I met last night . . .” I wondered if the previous one had survived whatever had happened with the magic that had emanated from Pleiades, but I didn’t want to ask this one. I didn’t know if it was as friendly as the other or was more like the woman-eating monster I’d read about the night before. I watched it warily as it approached. No magic seemed to trail from it or reach toward it, though, like many magical things, it had a glow to it that, in this case, appeared as a thin sheen of amethyst and blue, like oil on its pelt.