I found the house rather nice, but I suppose if you’re used to cashmere and caviar, anything else seems like a fall from grace. “Why did you marry him?” I asked.
“Because I was stupid,” she spat. She rolled her eyes in self-deprecation and took a long, disgusted breath, settling herself back down. She sat back and took a steadier sip of her coffee before she went on. “Cas was six years my senior and I thought he was just kicking up his heels a bit—a sort of last hurrah—and would settle down a little once we were married. I thought we’d have fun. I didn’t understand that I wasn’t a person to Cas and certainly not a partner. I was a thing: a shield of respectability he could throw up when he needed it. I should have divorced him—it’s not like people didn’t do it all the time then—but I just couldn’t stand the idea of the failure it represented. I’d never failed at anything in my life and there I was, the only girl in my class whose marriage was as much of a wreck on the outside as it was on the inside. At least my friends had husbands who pretended to be respectable and hardworking. Cas didn’t even try. He was . . . a wastrel. That’s the word: ‘wastrel,’” she repeated with an angry hiss and bared teeth.
She raised her eyes suddenly and skewered me with her glare. “And you know the most insulting part of it? It made me look ripe for the taking. Cas treated me so badly that other men thought I’d just fall into their beds and be grateful. I wanted to kill him for that. I wanted to just kill him! I was never so happy as the day that damned boat didn’t come back.” Her eyes flicked toward the windows as if she could see the Seawitch right through the cliff and the fog. Then she looked back to me and to Solis—appealing to his chivalrous instincts, I imagined. “I was happy he was gone. But I never realized how awful it is to be a sea widow. To think someone’s dead and out of your life but to never really know. It was terrible. It was as bad as when he was here.”
Her face knotted into a hideous expression of pain and horror. “And then it came back.”
Solis and I were both taken aback by her outburst for a moment. “Do you know how it came back?” Solis asked.
Mrs. Starrett snorted. “How? Why would I? As far as I’m concerned it might as well have precipitated out of the fog.”
I found that an interesting choice of words since I’ve seen ghosts materialize in that very way—particles of mist gathering and assembling into a recognizable form.
Solis had no outward reaction to her phrase but I did see a spark of blue jolt from his aura. “Do you believe your husband had anything to do with the boat’s return?”
Mrs. Starrett scowled at him. “I do not. Castor’s dead and I don’t think he brought the boat back to harbor from beyond the grave—no matter what the sensation-mongers are saying about it being a ghost ship.”
“And yet its presence disturbs you. Why?”
At first she didn’t reply, and we let the fog-wrapped silence lean on her, exerting pressure to fill the void with words before something worse could enter. “I think . . . I’m afraid that there might be something to that curse folderol,” she whispered.
“Curse?” Solis asked. He didn’t shoot me a glance, but the rising tension in his body and the growing brightness of his aura stretching toward me was almost as good. “Tell me.”
Mrs. Starrett dropped her eyes and stared at the floor, unblinking. “At first the press didn’t have much to say except that it was a tragedy, but when the ship didn’t come back and Odile was already dead they made a big deal about the boat being cursed—which was a total fabrication. They claimed the boat was built with parts from another boat that went aground—not parts taken from the boat but parts meant for the boat that weren’t used—and they made up this wild tale about a curse that would take everyone who had anything to do with the boat. First the crew and passengers and then the family. They said I’d be next, but of course I wasn’t because there isn’t any curse, but . . . I wondered if there was something else, even at the time and . . . What if there is?”
“Who is Odile?” Solis asked.
“Odile? My—she was my best friend. Odile Carson. She was married to Leslie Carson.” She blinked at us, waiting for us to fill in the blank. I knew it but I wasn’t going to say where I’d seen the name before; it was more valuable to see how she filled in the blank herself. Solis also gave her a slightly owlish look and waited.
She took a long, deep breath and pressed her lips tight for a moment before answering. “Les was on the boat when it disappeared. Les and Odile were our social satellites. We did everything together, once upon a time. Odile and I were very close. The ‘boys,’ of course, did that man thing of pairing up by gender and going off to do manly things without the ‘girls.’ So, Odile and I . . . we spent a lot of time together.”
Solis sat back and nodded a little. “You were very close.”
Linda nodded again, not quite meeting either of our gazes. “Very,” she repeated. “More than sisters. But not—not below the line.”
That was the kind of phrase my mother would have used to mean lovers without actual sex—the line being the waist, below which one did not venture. Above it was OK, however, since it was acceptable for women to kiss and hug their female friends, even if those caresses were a bit more intimate and frequent than most people were comfortable with or would admit to.
I had new insight into the insurance company’s ideas about why Linda Starrett might have had something to do with the original disappearance of the Seawitch; they thought she and her female lover might have plotted the whole thing to get rid of inconvenient husbands. It still didn’t wash with me, but it would be worth a bit more looking to see if Odile Carson’s death had any bearing on the boat’s disappearance.
“What happened to Odile?” I asked. I could look it up, and I would later, but I found Mrs. Starrett’s replies more illuminating than a recitation of mere facts on a computer screen.
Linda’s mouth puckered, holding back a sob with a frown until she had mastered the urge to cry and could speak calmly again. “An ‘accident.’ She was electrocuted or drowned . . . I’m not sure which they said. In the hot tub. Those converted wine-vat kind of tubs that were the rage then. Odile had trouble with her back—she had mild scoliosis of the spine and sometimes it hurt her quite a lot. She would go sit in the hot water and listen to the radio. I think she used to do it more than she needed just to get away from Les. Les hated the classical music she listened to.” Linda smiled a little. “Sometimes we’d go together, Odile and I, and drink some wine and listen to the music, and just float in the water in the tub, out on the little terrace that overlooked the cliff and the beach. . . . Nothing but birds and trees and the wind dancing in the branches over our heads . . .”
She let out a sudden gasp and began crying, tears streaking down her pale cheeks and leaving tracks in her face powder. “I miss her so much! Why couldn’t she come back instead of that horrible old boat? I hate it! I hate that boat. I hate it!”
“Do you believe the boat’s disappearance and your friend’s death were connected?” Solis asked.
“Don’t be stupid!” Mrs. Starrett snapped, but it seemed like she was protesting too much. “I used to think Les managed to kill her somehow—he was so jealous while he was being so selfish—but that’s not”—she gulped and continued—“that’s not how things work. Is it? Even if it ought to be. So, no, I don’t think the boat came back for some kind of magical revenge. But now that it’s here I can’t stop thinking about Odile and what happened to her. I miss Odile! I don’t want that horrible boat—I want Odile back!”
Now Solis did turn his head and look at me, the slight lift of his eyebrows asking me to step in.
“Linda,” I started in a low voice, “we can’t bring Odile back, but we’ll find out if what happened to her was connected to what happened to Seawitch. I know you don’t want the boat. You don’t have to worry about that—the insurance company will take responsibility for it now. We’ll find out what happened. Now, can you tell me who was on board besides Cas and Les Carson?”