She snuffled and gulped her way back to something like normal. “I don’t know. I—let me think. Who went with Cas . . . ?” She closed her eyes. “There were five all together. Cas, Les, some bimbo friend of Les’s . . . Ruth . . . Ireland, I think. One more woman—I remember it added up to two couples and the captain, but not Reeve that time. . . .”
“The captain?” I asked.
Linda opened her eyes and blinked at me, not sniffling in spite of her reddened nose and eyes. “Yes. Cas hired a professional captain—John Reeve—to manage the boat most of the time. Cas wasn’t really very good at handling her and he was too lazy to sit behind the wheel when he could be on deck, getting a tan or fishing or just drooling on his female guests. This was kind of a rushed trip, so the group was smaller than usual and Reeve didn’t go—it was usually seven to ten guests, plus Cas, Captain Reeve, and another hand or a cook.” She paused to dab at her eyes. “But not this time, which I suppose is why I . . . thought it was something it wasn’t.”
I looked at her expectantly.
She shook her head. “No cook or extra hand this time. The boat had been modernized and didn’t need as many crew as it did originally, so it could go out with just two as long as the passengers weren’t picky. The usual hand was booked, so Cas was doubling for the crew. Reeve wasn’t available, either, so they took his assistant, a guy named . . . Gary Fielding. Really young. I wasn’t sure he was competent, but I didn’t really care until the boat didn’t come back and then everyone was asking me about the crew. I didn’t know anything. I thought it was John Reeve who’d been with them until he turned up talking to the press. Reeve said this Gary kid had his license and had crossed the bar a dozen times as a pilot—whatever that means. It seemed to make a lot of people shut up, so I suppose it’s important, but I don’t know.”
She stopped, an odd look on her face. Then she said, “Janice. Janice Prince. That was the other woman they took. She was a boater. One of those floating trash that tramp from marina to marina, looking for a trip anywhere in exchange for crew work.” “And other things,” she implied with a lifted eyebrow and a cynical quirk to her mouth.
Starrett, Carson, Fielding, Ireland, and Prince . . . that matched the list the insurance company had given me. The messes in the cabins had left me with the impression of more, but maybe it was just the remains of whoever—or whatever—had invaded the boat and taken or driven the passengers and crew away. . . .
FOUR
There wasn’t a lot more we could get out of Linda Starrett. In spite of her own protests about its implausibility, she seemed to cling to the idea that the death of her friend was connected to Seawitch. Even a crazy idea can be comforting when you’re confused and upset, which she clearly was. She didn’t hold up much longer and soon asked us, her voice shaking, to go. Solis and I walked down the curving brick drive to the sound of her heavy wooden door thumping closed behind us like the seal of doom.
At least the fog had begun to thin a bit and returning to our cars was less of a passage through mystery than arriving had been.
“What do you make of it?” Solis asked as we neared the cars.
I shook my head. “The whole curse thing is ridiculous. I’ve got the paperwork and there’s nothing about questionable parts from another boat being used on Seawitch. Part of the boat’s value was that it was all vintage and intact—a lot of wooden boats that age aren’t. And Mrs. Starrett’s idea that her friend’s death was somehow connected to the boat seems more like the sort of hysterical fancy some people glom onto when they’re upset and can’t ever shed. I suppose we could ask for Odile Carson’s autopsy report, just to be sure. . . .”
“I also think it’s unlikely to be a homicide, but I’ll make the request. What of the rest?”
“I think we need to get that log book dried out and find out who was really on board. Those cabins didn’t look like accommodations for two couples and a single crewman. All four of the cabins had been occupied and more than one of the crew cabins looked used.”
Solis cocked his head. “Only one had the symbols in it.”
“But it wasn’t the only crew cabin that had been used, so it sounds like Mrs. Starrett was wrong about who was on board.”
“Gary Fielding would have used one. But, yes, that does leave the other. . . .”
“It seems to me,” I added, “that the insurance company has come to the late and erroneous conclusion that Mrs. Starrett and Mrs. Carson may have colluded to get rid of the boat with their husbands on board so they could enjoy their . . . friendship in peace. How they would even manage that, I don’t know.”
“It is also at odds with Mrs. Starrett’s statements about her friend and the timing of her death. I’m as disinclined to credit that as you are.”
“Agreed. Even without the complication of Odile’s death, a conspiracy to sink the boat would have required help from someone on board, which wouldn’t include either husband or the ladies they brought with them.”
“Leaving Fielding.”
I nodded. “But he’s apparently as dead as the rest, and what’s the profit in scuttling a ship if you drown in it?”
“Very small.” Solis agreed. “Perhaps we should talk to the original captain, Reeve, about his late protégé. . . .”
It shouldn’t have taken very long to find Reeve—I did have his address in the file—but it proved to be out-of-date and we had to look for him. Or, rather, I volunteered to do some computer work to find him while Solis took the log book to a documents expert the cops contracted with for this kind of problem.
We finally discovered John Reeve in a retirement village in Des Moines—a cliffside town on the Sound south of the airport but far enough north of Tacoma’s Poverty Bay to be free of the paper-mill stink of the mud flats at low tide. The locals pronounced the town’s name with the S at the end and sometimes in the middle, too. Des Moines sprawled along the shore in a wedge that was honed to a point by the westward swing of Interstate 5 near Saltwater State Park on the south end of the bluffs. On Zenith—the tallest ridge overlooking the sea and right in the middle of Des Moines—stood a shining edifice called Landmark; it looked like a grand country estate from an English period film, but in fact it was a fancy Masonic retirement home. John Reeve had lived there for a while, but he had moved when the market crashed and now lived in a humble one-story duplex in a seniors’ complex of identical duplexes on looping private streets on the north side of town, within walking distance from the beach and the Des Moines marina.
The seaside town wasn’t pretentiously quaint yet, but it was working on it, keeping the buildings short and widening the sidewalks near the boardwalk and municipal marina to encourage foot traffic to the little commercial district along Marine View Drive. The east side, near the freeway, was nowhere near as picturesque as the west side. Reeve’s home was kind of the same: cute on the outside and much less charming inside.
It was just after three o’clock as we pulled up in front of the building. I thought it looked like the suburban equivalent of a hobbit’s house: low and rambling with arched window frames and doorframes and green stucco that blended into the landscaping. The plants in the yard were just a little wild and seemed to have been miniaturized in some fashion, not to bonsai tiny, but to Kincaid-cottage cute. Straight cement walkways to each door slightly ruined the effect, but I thought it was probably a concession to canes, walkers, and wheelchairs. There was no front stoop in front of Reeve’s door; the porch was just a slightly sloped cement rectangle. A cast-concrete figure of a semireclining mermaid sat on one corner of the pad, patchy remnants of sparkly blue paint making her supporting tail look leprous, while the red color that had adorned her hair had flaked and gone gray-brown. A scatter of shells and a wisp of sea grass circled the base. Just beyond the porch I saw tiny white and blue sparks in the Grey that darted through the foliage near the house and danced fleetingly across the mermaid with a sudden blush of emerald light that faded as quickly as it had come. Other than that the building was magically dull.