“I suggest a lot more than that: I suggest she first collected the souls of the passengers and crew aboard Valencia. That she and her merfolk caused or aided the conditions that wrecked the steamer on the rocks to begin with and they then killed everyone who hit the water.”
TWENTY
“Could they do that?” Solis asked. “Lure a ship to its destruction?”
“According to legend, that’s their stock-in-trade,” I replied. “I’ve discovered that there’s often more than just a kernel of truth to that sort of story. And what happened to the Valencia is almost too bizarre to be true—everything went wrong, seasoned officers and crewmen made horrendous errors, and when the storm finally died down long enough to launch the lifeboats, they still couldn’t get to shore and all the women and children died in the water. Truth really is stranger than fiction, because if that were a book or a movie, people would reject it as over-the-top.”
“But why take Seawitch?” Solis asked, apparently having decided to throw his wavering disbelief on the junk heap for the sake of puzzling out a killer’s motive; it didn’t matter what he believed as long as he could understand what the killer believed. “If she had the souls of Valencia, why go to the trouble for a mere four more?”
“Aside from simple opportunity, there’s the racial-feud angle and—if anything Fielding said on this point is true—possibly a bit of overzealous payback for messing with her daughter. If Starrett actually harmed Shelly and Fielding didn’t stop him, then they’d just compromised the sea witch’s heir. There may have been nothing to it, but the appearance or accusation could have been enough since, for a lot of high-level paranormals, successful breeding is tricky and frequently fatal for someone. On top of that they’re usually long-lived, which means slow to mature and slower to age. Even if she had more than one daughter or if Shelly wasn’t harmed, the sea witch would not be happy to see her heir compromised or threatened. That’s possibly dynasty-ending, and with paranormals that can mean the end of a species or at the least the total wipe of a local population. There are fewer of them than us, so they take that kind of threat very seriously. And she would be even less happy if she thought her clan’s racial enemy—a royal dobhar-chú—had anything to do with it.”
Solis nodded slowly, scowling. “It has all the twisted logic of a gang war. So . . . although he wasn’t even aboard when the crime occurred, the sea witch would attack Reeve . . . to lure Fielding out of hiding.”
“That’s what I’m thinking, too. The sea witch would go after any of his remaining friends and family who might help him once he escaped from her—as he obviously did. And did we ever find Fielding’s family?”
“No. There was no reply from his father’s last known address and no forwarding address or phone number.”
“Maybe we should find out if he’s dead. . . .”
Quinton made a disgusted face at me. “How morbid.”
“But if he is it would support the idea that the sea witch and her merfolk are wiping out all traces of the Fieldings and anyone who might have helped Gary. I suspect that if we could ask we’d find out that his mother is dead and has been for a while.”
“Then if Shelly Knight was the sea witch’s daughter, who is the sea witch?”
“Maybe she is, now. We don’t know her status as virgin or nonvirgin or even if it’s truly relevant. Shelly and Jacque could be the same creature with only a bottle of hair dye to separate them. What if . . .” I said, my speech slowing as I thought out loud. “What if losing the Valencia’s soul—the bell—also lost the sea witch her power, or limited it severely? She hasn’t been very aggressive in attacking us and she must know by now that we’re coming. And what if . . . it wasn’t the mother that took the souls of Seawitch, but the daughter? Then she’d have quite a bit of power, while her mother had little or none. So Seawitch may have been just a pawn in a power grab.”
“It is a very elaborate plan,” Solis objected. “Not robust or simple enough to work.”
I admit I’d been speculating rather wildly, feeling the press of time and the need for some kind of answers before we were face-to-face with the sea witch. “True. Simple is usually better. But what if it wasn’t a plan but just opportunity seized? That might explain what Shelly was doing hanging around the marina for a few years: She was looking for chances to accrue her own power and topple her mother.”
Solis wasn’t quite convinced, if his scowl was any indication. “She comes to the marina to look for opportunities to wreck ships and steal souls, then accidentally meets the son of her family’s enemy. So she watches him and gets close. Then things go wrong and she . . . what? Cries for help with the spell we discovered in her cabin?”
“Why not? No . . . wait. It was a complex spell—not something you’d cast in a hurry to get help—and the spell circle was broken. So whatever that spell was, it wasn’t functioning when Seawitch was taken. I wish I knew what the spell was for. . . . But it might be enough to know who broke it. Because that’s when the situation went to hell, according to Fielding—assuming he’s not lying on that point, once again.” I tried to talk the pieces of this puzzle into place. “If Shelly broke it herself, then that act brought down the merfolk. If someone is going to show up as soon as you break a spell . . . they’d have to be looking for you in the first place. So the spell has to have been some kind of . . . disguise or protection for the boat; she’d just use an amulet or a gris-gris if it were for herself alone. So . . . she breaks it deliberately to . . . get out of a bad situation with Starrett, wreak revenge on the dobhar-chú—or Fielding, as the case may be. But that doesn’t make sense. You don’t cast a complex spell just so you can break it later—that’s a waste of resources.”
“What if Starrett broke it when he . . . paid her a visit?” Solis suggested.
I felt myself smiling as I thought about it. “The result is still the same but the emphasis is different: The merfolk descend like hungry wolves, but now . . . all that bloodletting and crazy stuff Fielding described isn’t Shelly attacking them . . . it’s Shelly trying to repair her spell in a panic. A spell that was keeping Seawitch hidden from the merfolk or her mother. And it would take a complex spell to hide a moving object that weighed more than sixteen tons. Why she was hiding it, I don’t know, but when things start to fall apart, first she panics, then she gets mad and curses Fielding, and, last, she tries to salvage what she can—and in the process she creates enough havoc that it’s easy to snatch a few souls in the affray.”
“Affray?” Quinton asked with a laugh. “You’ve been reading Agatha Christie again.”
“Marsh. I wanted a break from the noir—my life’s noir enough.”
Solis sighed. “You who work with the darkest things do not find mystery novels . . . ridiculous and artificial?”
“Of course I do—that sort at least. Good triumphs over evil and the world is restored to order without a lot of angst and grotesquerie. That’s why I like them: They are as far from my life as I can get without reading historical romances.”
“Why do you not, then? Read romances.”
“They depress me.”
Solis looked puzzled. “My wife says the same thing.”
“I like her more and more,” I said, teasing a little but mostly serious.
Solis smiled—a real smile that actually moved his cheeks and creased the corners of his eyes. Then he glanced around as if looking for something mislaid. “Oh, Zantree says that it’s Quinton’s turn at the wheel—his watch, rather.”
“Already?” I asked.
“Yes. Two-hour shifts. He sees no reason for you or me to take the wheel with such a short distance left to go.”