I yanked a heavier sweater on over my still-damp head and found some thicker, drier socks to pull on before I resumed wearing my wet shoes. Then I tucked the gun I’d left on the bed earlier into a zippered interior pocket of my jacket and put that on, too, before I picked up the bell and carried it to the main cabin.
Solis, coming up from the galley, gave me a curious look. “The Valencia’s bell?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve been wondering how we’re going to get into the place Seawitch was held, since it remained hidden for twenty-seven years. So it’s a place that exists more in the paranormal than the normal, though it has a normal twin. You don’t just walk into that sort of location—or motor, as the case may be.”
“Indeed?”
“Take my word for it. The easy way in is to die. I don’t think any of us want to do that just to take a look around the merfolk’s living room. We need a door opener. And after thinking about Fielding’s last words, I think this is—literally—it.”
“How?”
“Well . . . not only is it connected to two of the boats and crews who’ve been trapped in the mystery cove we’re looking for, but it’s a bell.”
Solis looked puzzled and Quinton glancing down from the bridge hatch asked, “Why is that important?”
“What?” Zantree asked, out of sight.
“The bell,” Quinton explained.
“What are bells for?” I asked.
“To ring signals,” Zantree shouted down.
“And to ring for assistance. Or entry,” I responded. “Magic is sometimes ridiculously literal. In this case, the bell is . . . also a doorbell. I think.”
“What makes you think so?” asked Solis.
“I felt it. I flicked the edge of the bell with my fingernail and the ringing sent out a wave that I could feel passing in the paranormal fringes. Like a ripple on water. This bell is tied to the location it was hidden in, so ringing it causes a reaction there—in the paranormal ‘there,’ that is.”
“Some kind of magical entanglement, like electrons?” Quinton asked.
“If you say so,” I replied, carrying the bell up to the bridge station. Solis followed me. “Also I noticed that the merfolk made a noise as they retreated that sounded like something clanging in the distance. Or they were responding to the clanging—I’m not sure which. Either way, ringing or clanging, a bell is a bell and this one rings in the cove where Seawitch was kept for the past twenty-seven years. I’d bet my life on it.”
“That doesn’t mean it’ll open the front door for us,” Quinton said.
“No,” I agreed, “but the sea witch will if she wants it back, which I’m quite sure she does. We just have to find the cove.”
“That’s not going to be easy.”
“It can’t be very far away, since the merfolk could hear the recall bell when they attacked us. And there is a practical limit to how far even the most powerful wizard can cast an illusion spell like the sea witch used on us.”
“Sound travels easier and farther underwater since both air and water are liquids. Water is denser so the rate of energy loss is lower,” Quinton offered.
“But even so, I’ll bet it doesn’t travel around corners,” I said.
Quinton shook his head. “Only insofar as the sound waves fan out when they exit a restriction. The direction of travel from the source will be straight until the sound waves reflect off something, and the more they bounce around, the faster they decay.”
I nodded. “Look at the chart and see where the sound waves could travel from to reach us without violating the laws of physics. The cove will be in that area.”
“There’re a dozen little coves and bays between us and anywhere that noise could have come from,” Zantree objected, clutching the wheel and making a correction against the current and wind to take us farther into the safe center of the channel and away from the rocks at the edges.
“It would have to be farther from here than Lonesome Cove,” I said, thinking aloud, “because Fielding said he missed that opportunity. Just where is Lonesome Cove, anyhow?”
“It’s on the north side of San Juan on Spieden Channel,” Zantree replied.
I set the bell down on the chart table beside the steering station. “Fielding said he had to pass up the northern entrance to Roche Harbor and was heading for Lonesome, but when I asked if that was where the Seawitch had ended up, he said no. He didn’t get to say where the boat did finally come to rest, but it definitely wasn’t Lonesome Cove. Unless there’s another cove between Lonesome and Pearl Island . . .”
“Nothing you could hide a ninety-some-foot boat in,” Zantree said.
“What about beyond Lonesome Cove?”
“I can’t remember every blasted cove and bay in the islands! Quinton, take a look at that chart—page forty-six or so. Up and down Spieden Channel on the north end of San Juan Island, east of Vancouver Island.”
Quinton flipped over pages of a massive chart book, laying one of them flat on the folded-back book and running his fingers across the rough-edged, inverted-pear shapes of the big islands and the shapeless blobs of smaller ones until he found Spieden Island and the channel south of it. He guided his fingers along the outline of San Juan’s northern shore. “I see Davison Head . . . Lonesome Point . . . Lonesome Cove. . . . Maybe across the channel on Spieden, by Green Point? Or around the east side of San Juan into Rocky Bay?”
Zantree shook his head but kept his eyes on the view ahead. “With the wind he was describing, they couldn’t cut straight across to the lee of Green Point. Rocky Bay would have been too rough—they don’t call it Rocky for nothing. He said he’d tried for Davison Head, but he obviously didn’t make it or he’d have been home and dry, as long as he avoided the submerged pilings—and there’d have been a famous stink if he’d taken her aground on them. Look straight on down the channel.”
“There’s nothing down the channel. It opens up at the end of San Juan Island and there’s nothing else but Orcas unless you hook back over the top of Spieden Island.”
“Jones! It’s got to be Jones Island or I’m a gaffed marlin!”
“Why would it be Jones?” Solis asked.
“Because if what these two are saying about the sound traveling is right, Jones is the only landfall it could come from. It’s straight down the throat of Spieden Channel! That big rock before you reach Orcas.” He reached over and stabbed at the chart with his forefinger, mashing the page flat. “Right there.”
We leaned closer as he straightened up to keep both hands on the twitching wheel. Where he’d pressed the map lay a modest lump of an island with a nibble taken from the north and south shores. Jones Island. An unobstructed line drawn through Spieden Channel to Seawitch’s last known location cut right through the island’s northernmost point that guarded the nearly round little bite of North Cove.
TWENTY-THREE
It wasn’t tiny but on the map Jones Island wasn’t much more. There were smaller islands in the San Juans, but few as oddly alone as Jones. Smack in the middle of the confluence of several channels, the misshapen little island seemed isolated from its neighbors, though none of them was actually far away. The looming bulk of San Juan stood to its west and the long finger of Spieden pointed just over it to the massive curve of Orcas on the east. A few smaller islands stood below it like fallen crumbs and above it opened the passage to the northernmost islands, an empty stretch of churning water where the currents of the tidal race began their restless way through the riddles and gyres of the north Sound.
“North Cove’s a pretty place,” Zantree said, considering the chart, “but no one I know ever drops their hook there for long.”
“I imagine that the merfolk make sure it stays that way,” I said. Even if they aren’t entirely corporeal all the time, the denizens of the Grey have ways of making their presence known and driving off the unwanted attentions of normal people without showing their true nature: cold breezes, unpleasant smells, disquieting glimpses from the corner of your eye that are gone when you turn around, and the sense that—for no reason you can name—you need to leave. With all that deep cold water to play in, they probably had a whole host of tricks I’d never seen before, too, but I had no doubt I’d get familiar with them soon enough.