The She

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The She Page 19

by Carol Plum-Ucci


  He moved toward me slowly, took both of my arms, and both Grey and Mr. Church moved up, too, like they didn't want to miss anything. I flinched even before he opened his mouth, my intuition rolling big time.

  "They spotted remains in a stateroom through a porthole. There was too much deterioration to say how many people it was, but it looked like enough bones to be five or six bodies. And one was tied to the helm, as if the driver was trying to ground himself while traversing a hurricane ... or herself. All that remained was a dark blue weather suit. Fish were swimming through it."

  Hungry fish. Both he and Mr. Church grabbed one of my arms like I might pass out, but I was done reacting to this stuff in usual ways. All I did was let out some noise, trying to bury what I couldn't help remembering. "Mommy, why are you wearing that out there tonight? You said the Coast Guard couldn't see you if you went in the water wearing blue."

  I jerked my arms, shaking them both off, and pretended I wasn't swallowing sludge. I couldn't remember her answer—if she had told me her yellow weather suit had been torn or something. But it just felt all goddamn wrong. Our parents were not on that yacht, Emmett, you pervert!

  A sturdy aluminum ladder glowed through the gloom, and I went over and put my forehead on it, letting the coolness seep through my head.

  Emmett's voice had started shaking. "Later the Coast Guard contacted family members of the crews from both the Sanskrit and—having heard loudly from the DEA—the Goliath. The families declined the cost of examining the wreck."

  I shut my eyes, putting my hands up, like stop. Opa would have declined to pay for the dive because his health was so poor. The wrong DNA evidence might make it worse, and his daughter and grandkids still needed him.

  This ladder trailed up and up, like Jack's beanstalk. Emmett started up it, then Grey, and I followed. Mr. Church spotted the rail at the bottom. Usually when you come back to childhood places as an older person, they seem smaller than you remembered them. I had never remembered the Goliath as being so massive.

  It was like walking on a pirate ghost ship. We came on board in the center and I stared down toward the stern and the pilothouse. It was as tall as a three-story building but looked taller without all the containers I'd always seen loaded on deck. The white paint was chipped and scratched, the windows were covered with dingy film, and there were a couple of thick brown lines scudding across the lower pilothouse wall like it had been scraped with a huge metal object. I moved toward the stern, and the wall glimmered under the extra rays of the fluorescent hanging lantern that Emmett must have kept handy. I wondered where the shipping containers were.

  Near the warehouse ceiling, the Goliath's four tall antennas looked to be broken off, falling forward onto the deck at odd angles. I stared at them because they looked very strange. It was the main thing on this deck that gave the impression that something may have gone terribly wrong. Mr. Church must have seen me staring, because suddenly he was beside me and pointing.

  "Were these broken off to fit the vessel in the dry dock?" he asked.

  Emmett flinched while shaking his head. "Actually, they were found like that, and the DEA says they were cut."

  "Cut with what? Why?"

  "With wire cutters, to give the appearance of having been through some violence, like a whirlpool."

  Mr. Church stayed quiet.

  "I kept the report," Emmett said. "It's either in the galley or Dad's office. They weren't completely dismissive of an accident sweeping the crew off the deck. But they wrote that if a great trauma like a rogue wave had come to the Goliath, the windows in the pilothouse would have been broken out, and they were intact. They also found that the starboard valves had been opened in the engine room ... below the waterline."

  "So the crew was trying to sink it, help it along a little," Mr. Church said, and my heart fell because I could hear him starting to buy into this.

  We followed dark, narrow stairs up into the galley, a huge kitchen with a very long wood table that was bolted to the floor. Emmett illuminated the walls, cabinets, floor and ceiling with the fluorescent hanging lanterns he'd picked up off the deck, and I took one. I thought I might be deluged with memories, but nothing came except gray doors.

  Six rows of five small cabinets were still clamped shut on the back wall, where everything had been kept—from paper plates to canned goods to the coffeemaket I yanked open a few cabinets, saw that things like fry pans were still in their spots, but that anything like salt and pepper and food had been removed, probably anything that would spoil. The room had always been kept spotless, with nothing out of place, because in rough seas Dad hadn't wanted anything to roll. It still looked basically the same, except everything, including the thick little portholes, was covered with a layer of grimy dust.

  "What did they do with the cargo?" Mr. Church asked.

  "The cargo in the hold was removed by the DEA," Emmett said.

  "What about the cargo on the deck? Were the containers filled also?"

  "The report says the containers had been loosened, the cargo pushed over by the crew."

  "Why? If they were trying to sink the boat, wouldn't the added weight be instrumental?"

  "Not in this case. There were decent winds, a hope for decent waves. The weight would have helped stabilize the Goliath rather than give it a list."

  "Interesting," was all he said.

  We went back into the crew's quarters, and I moved immediately to the upper bunk in the far right corner, The beds were actually still made in that squared-off, quarter-flipping style I remembered Dad having taught me, except the pillows were missing. They were all in a pile in the corner and when I picked one up, a terrible smell hit me. Most of the pillowcases had turned black with mold. I heard a thump and saw that Mr. Church had undamped a drawer and pulled it out.

  "The crew left their belongings," he muttered.

  "Yes," Emmett said. Mr. Church just looked at him until he added, "They left enough to make it look like an accident. We really don't know what they took with them, do we?"

  "No, we don't."

  Mr. Church's answer rang like a comeback line, though I couldn't follow anything. I had never liked being in this room. The bunk room was weird. It was ventilated with fans and had only two little portholes, so it had always been dark and stuffy. At the moment, I couldn't breathe because of the smell. I shot one last look to that back bunk. I knew I had slept there probably a hundred nights in my childhood, but again, it was a fact, not a memory of sights and sounds. I looked at it through a gray film in my head that seemed as immovable as steel. Finally, we took another flight of stairs and went into Dad's quarters.

  I thought I would get a decent breath of ait, because his office had windows on three sides. But the musty smell in here was overpowering, some combination of dust and mold and old papers.

  "What is that smell?" I finally asked, covering my nose with my hand.

  "Just mold," Emmett said, rubbing the back of my hair with his free hand. "It's particularly strong in here because of the files. The Goliath floated around in a rainstorm for almost twenty-four hours, and somebody had broken the starboard windows, which meant everything got soaked, including the bottom drawer of that file cabinet." He pointed from the cabinet to a mountain of paper in a corner that now looked to be all molded together by dried seawater. It must have been every paper that had been loose in the room, and someone had taken the time to either sweep them or kick them into that cornet The rug on the floor seemed to be the biggest culprit of the smell. I had remembered it being different shades of red and blue. Now it was completely black.

  "Somebody broke the windows?" Mr. Church asked, and I could detect an overly casual tone that Emmett also must have caught.

  "Yes, somebody. If the sea had done it, by pouring in and breaking the windows, there would have been glass all over the floot DEA says the windows were broken outward. It appears that somebody wasn't thinking through the details."

  Mr. Church rolled his eyes, and I couldn't tell
whether it was from having a different theory or frustration from not having another theory. I only saw that he did it as he turned away from Emmett, so Emmett wouldn't see it.

  I froze, catching sight of my dad's captain's prayer It was still bolted to the wall but had turned some horrid combination of pale green and black around the lettering. Hie lettering itself had been black, and it kind of branched outward into the pale green mold with little black mold fingers. The frame was rusted. It was disgusting, seeing the words of a good-luck charm hundreds of years old turned moldy and mutated, like some joke of the sea.

  My neck bobbed around to Mr. Church, to see what he was thinking about all of this. He was staring at the same thing, and when he saw me taking in his look of horror; his eyes shot to the floor.

  "Can we look in the engine room?" he asked softly, grabbing my arm, pulling me toward the door.

  Emmett shrugged and moved past us. "Sure. Just be advised that the smell down there is overpowering. It was found half flooded. I've only been down there once—four years ago when I found out about this."

  "You didn't know about this until four years ago?" I asked.

  "When I turned twenty-one and was considered a legal adult, I approached the DEA myself. I just wanted to know if they'd gotten together a file on Mom and Dad like they'd gotten on Connor Riley. They had things like backgrounds on the crew but no further theories, being that the case was closed when the Sanskrit foundered. But that's when I found out about the Goliath."

  I followed him down the narrow spiral staircases into the lowest level of the vessel. Grey was behind me, acting like the invisible person. I grabbed her hand, but her fingers fell limp between mine, and I didn't have a whole lot of strength to grip them with, to give her any sense of reassurance.

  Emmett held his lantern high, and so did Mr. Church. He walked down one set of plankings and back up the other looking at the valves, I guess.

  "So they only opened two valves. Why not all of them?"

  "I don't know."

  Church looked at Emmett, and this stare-off as he got closer made me think for some reason that Church was going to yell. But he got right up in Emmett's face and spoke kind of softly.

  "Emmett, we both know there are ways for valves to open other than by human hands. For one thing, they break under certain types of pressure—"

  "That's not the opinion of the experts."

  "We both know that when a ship undergoes a trauma, the pilothouse windows needn't break. If the DEA conversed a little better with the Coast Guard, they would also know that windows blow out if a ship is traumatized at its stern."

  Emmett smiled at his shoes, too smugly, too patiently, I thought.

  "We both know that crew members cutting down antennas is about as ridiculous as them hanging their underwear from the flagpole."

  "There is no other explanation!" Emmett hollered, finally. Somehow it made me feel good. Like maybe he was feeling threatened.

  This time Mr. Church smiled smugly, patiently.

  "Look!" Emmett pointed over his head. "The report is upstairs. Read it. There were no gale warnings that night! There was hardly any weather! There was nothing big enough to wipe the crew off the deck ... or blow out the windows in the captain's quarters!"

  "You're right," Church agreed. "There was only a little weather. To assume that some dark force seized the Goliath is ridiculous. To assume that a crew chose to cut antennas in a sleet storm, when they could have better spent their time opening valves below the waterline, is also ridiculous. Eeeny, meeny, miney, moe."

  "Church, there is no way you are ever ever going to find a reliable report, in this part of the world or any other of giant tentacles coming out of the water! The only tidal wave ever recorded on the Atlantic was in the Netherlands! You can check with the Coast Guard if you think I'm too close-minded! They don't have any such reports either!"

  "There are other facts that don't fit into our ideas these days, and so they've been conveniently altered to fit those ideas. And if you didn't know any better you'd have to admit they've been discarded because they would support the theory of a dark force existing over the water."

  "Church"—Emmett moved over to me, stuck a hand on my arm, as if to protect me from him—"you are one sick individual. I want you to stay away from my brother."

  The man must have developed some thick skin against being humiliated, I decided. He looked no more upset by Emmett than he had by me earlier that day.

  "Your opinion of my mental faculties is irrelevant," he said quietly, his finger spinning circles in the air as if he were thinking of something concerning the whole boat. "There is every possible indication, every bit of evidence, pointing to an alternative notion—broken antennas, blown-out portholes, broken valves, the smell of mold you'd hardly pick up from rain seepage—that this boat has been rolled."

  Rolled. I felt the hair stand straight up on my arms as it sunk in what the smell and the rust and the mold inside here actually meant. Rolled was a term that meant a boat did a complete three-sixty in the water coming to stand upright again.

  "You don't have to interject the story with a crew abandoning a boat and cutting down antennas with a butcher knife if you could allow yourself to believe in unsolved mysteries of the deep—"

  "I like evidence, Edwin. Can you forgive me for that?" Emmett snapped. "I've never seen a Coast Guard report of ... of a she-devil rising out of the water and trying to suck boats down, rolling huge ships. I'm sorry!"

  "Would you believe one even if you saw it?"

  Emmett just stood there staring.

  "Because I think you're engaged in a circular argument. You no longer believe in such things; therefore, they can't be true."

  "I know there are no sightings of anything the least bit weird off the coast of South Jersey—anything that could even be mistaken for a monster or a She. I checked with the Coast Guard. Their records go back to nineteen-eighteen."

  Church laughed. "No records? Why, there have been dozens of such reports."

  Emmett pushed me backward and stood between me and Church with his back to me, laughing. "You're talking about those childish sea-monster stories that Dad used to read Evan? Out of those cheesy, locally printed paperbacks?"

  "Yes! And I beg to differ about the cheesy paperbacks. They're not published by the University Press, but someone was taking the time to chronicle honest sightings by hardworking people—"

  "'Honest sightings'! You're talking about a bunch of rum-head old fishermen, with half their teeth gone out of their heads, talking about witches and dragons!"

  "Which is what it looked like to them! And who are you to call those people feeble! What in hell gives you the wherewithal to be so arrogant, you presumptuous brat! Did you have to sink your father's wisdom with his body?"

  "Whoa!" I jumped in the middle of them, a hand on each chest, and put on the same cool voice I used to get out of trouble in school, only with a lot more force. Nobody was getting slugged on my mom and dad's boat. "Stop it, now! Mr. Church, if you hit my brother I will have to defend him, which wouldn't make me too happy right now. Nobody is hitting anybody, nobody is calling names, not on this ship. We're going to figure this out."

  Mr. Church backed up. He spoke very softly again, almost from the doorway. "Emmett, in my early years I really wanted my PhD, to really know things, to be a doctor of something. Do you know why I kept quitting at the master's level?"

  "I would assume your methodology was the problem."

  "My methodology. I have never called anything a fact that was not. You people, you build your facts on theories, and whatever doesn't meet those particular theories is dismissed as nonfactual. Where do you get off? The DEA has a theory. You stack up the facts a certain way and some of them seem to fit—if you dismiss the ones that don't. I'm not saying your brother is completely correct about the Goliath being hit by a wave. I don't know. But I do know this. He never said to me that he saw the Goliath sink to the bottom when he had his second sight. He sai
d he saw it tossed. He never mentioned tonight anything about sensing the Goliath. I don't think any mention of the vessel ever came out of his mouth. I had the whole drive over here to remember correctly what he did say tonight. He said he sensed the presence of your parents."

  "So? You think some fang-bearing superwitch came along, swept my parents off the deck, and ate them? Spit out their bones as an afterthought? Is that it, Edwin?"

  "Don't be vulgar. It won't diminish the truth."

  "The truth?"

  "Yes. The truth is that this boat could have been rolled by either a giant wave or a force of nature that, for whatever reason, didn't quite suck it under and keep it there."

  "You have absolutely no way of proving anything so ... fantastic," Emmett said.

  "Prove I'm wrong," Mr. Church replied. "I mean, really, really prove I'm wrong. You know damn well you haven't done it yet. You can fool those little freshman undergraduates you teach, but you can't fool me."

  "How dare you."

  "How dare I?"

  I just rubbed my eyes with my fingers, muttering something like, "Jesus Christ. I'm going home to sleep. Come on, Grey."

  I pulled her along by the hand, back up four flights of stairs, all the while looking for the right images as to what kind of a force could roll a vessel this steely and this massive all the way around under the water, While I was walking from the bowels to the deck, images of waves and whirlpools got dim, then faded altogether; I could no longer conceive of anything on the Atlantic that massive. My imagination refused to budge. I tried once again to force my brain to my brother's way of perceiving what had happened, because, like he kept saying, the alternatives were clearly impossible.

  EIGHTEEN

  I showed Grey into one of the bigger guest rooms at Opa's, pulled the door closed behind her then stood for the longest time with my hand on the doorknob. She needed to sleep after this long day, and it was closing in on one-fifteen in the morning. But she had been so quiet on the way home, so empty of any emotion. I think that bothered me more than if I had seen her spiraling into depression.

 

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