THE GHOST SHIP

by Gerrie Ferris Finger

  CHAPTER NINE

  --

  The knocking woke Ann.

  She'd gone to bed early, exhausted with elation. Except for the beer at Rod's house, she hadn't another drop of alcohol. The bright day broke through along the borders of the white damask curtains. For a change, her head didn't hurt.

  The knocking quickened.

  “Who is it?” she called out.

  “It's Mrs. MacGregor.”

  Grabbing a robe, she said, “Just a minute.”

  Mrs. MacGregor? What reason did she have to knock on her door? Weren't the phones working? Was it time to clean the rooms already? She looked at the digital clock. Eight-thirty. Mrs. MacGregor was used to her being up and out by seven, so perhaps it was time to clean the place.

  Robed, she opened the door.

  Mrs. MacGregor was red in the face. “Miss. Miss. It's all about.”

  “What's all about?”

  “Your ghost ship ride.”

  “What?”

  Mrs. MacGregor was beside herself with glee. “The reporters are here.”

  “Here? Reporters? Here?” She rushed to the back window and pulled the chord on the curtains. They cracked, and Ann looked down to see the small crowd of adults milling over the parking lot.

  “Down in the lobby, too,” Mrs. MacGregor said. “They all want to talk to you.”

  “Why?”

  “They want to hear from your very mouth about the journey you took with Commander Curator.”

  “Where did they hear about that?”

  “Poblo Quitano.”

  Her mind clocked back to yesterday afternoon. All that research. All done under his eyes. All done with his questions – his probing. “Poblo told them?” Ann asked, disbelief punctuating the question.

  “Is it true?” Mrs. MacGregor asked eagerly.

  “What?” she said, her thoughts whirring as she watched the people below her.

  “What Poblo is saying about The Ghost Ship?”

  Spinning toward the woman, she snapped, “Poblo doesn't know what he's talking about.”

  “Then he'll be getting himself in a world of trouble, won't he?”

  Her thoughts flew to Rod, and she knew that she was in a world of trouble.

  Mrs. MacGregor asked, “What shall I tell the reporters?”

  “To go away. I have nothing to say.”

  “I can tell them. Don't mean they'll let you be.”

  “We'll ignore them.”

  “They can pester the life out of a body.”

  She went to a drawer and opened it. “Let them.” She jerked out underpants and a bra.

  Mrs. MacGregor went on, “Nobody loves a ghost story more than a Banker, and when the Bankers hear there's a new one in the works, well – I'm just saying they won't let it be.”

  Ann pulled a red wool sweater from another drawer and went to the closet for her trousers. “I've got to go.” She stopped short of telling Mrs. MacGregor that she had to get to Rod immediately.

  “You might think about leaving the Banks unless you want to be cooped up in this room all the time.”

  “I can't.” I've got to get to Rod.

  “I'll leave you be for the time. I'll bring you something to eat, how's that?”

  “I…” she started to say she wasn't hungry, but instead said, “That'll be good. Toast, coffee, juice. Nothing else.”

  Mrs. MacGregor left. Ann went to the window and peered through the curtains. The crowd in the parking lot had multiplied. She pulled the sweater over her head.

  A van with a television antennae pulled into the parking lot. There was, however, no sign of Rod's Jeep.

  --

  Twenty minutes later, Mrs. MacGregor knocked on the door. She held a large tray filled with plates of food. “I told them to go and mind their own business,” she said, placing the tray on a table.

  “Fat chance,” Ann said.

  “Spence would like to talk to you, and if it's all right, I'll bring him up the back way.”

  “Yes, it's all right. Anyone else wanting to speak with me?”

  “No, ma'am.”

  Rod, don't you leave me now.

  She nibbled on a piece of toast and watched the road, hoping that a Jeep would come round the bend, knowing she hoped in vain.

  There came a rap on the door. She pulled it open, and thought that Spence looked more uncertain than distressed, and he wasn't wearing his uniform. He stood stock still.

  She said, “Come in,” and shut the door. “This is awful.”

  “Yes, it is,” he said, running a hand through his hair and beginning to pace. “That weasel Poblo called the press yesterday after your visit to the museum.”

  “I didn't think Poblo would do something like that. It didn't enter my head.”

  “He told me this morning. He called The Islander, The Dare County Monitor and the Virginia Pilot. He thought they might be interested in hearing your theory on what happened to the Carroll A. Deering.”

  Spence waited for her to say something, maybe tell him what Poblo knew that he didn't know. She said, “Everyone knows the shipwreck had been investigated thoroughly, and many times over.”

  “Sure, but since the cause of the shipwreck and what happened to the crew was never solved, it's always been in the minds and hearts of us Bankers. So – sure we'll listen to a new theory.”

  “But he's playing up the ghostly aspect, isn't he?”

  “Yep, and they're loving it.”

  “Oh God,” she said, going to the window. “Rod must be …”

  “Rod is under siege just like you are.”

  “He must hate me.”

  “He's just as furious with Poblo.”

  Just as furious.

  She turned back to Spence. “I must talk to him.”

  “I've been to his cabin. The reporters started in on him when he walked out the door at dawn. He drove them off his property and called me. He wants you to leave here. He says he'll deal with the reporters once you've gone. I think he's right. I'm here to take you away.”

  “I don't want to leave.”

  “We've got to contain this, Ann. Once it's died down, we can go from there, but Rod doesn't want this going beyond the Banks.”

  “Nor do I. He can't think I had anything to do with what Poblo's gotten up to.”

  Spence clamped his jaw and went to the window. With an index finger, he parted a curtain further.

  She said, “I talked to Rod last night. I promised …”

  “He said you promised it wouldn't be in your magazine, but you didn't promise not to spread it all over the newspapers.”

  “He can't think that,” she said, the heartache nearly unbearable. “How can he?”

  Spence's hazel eyes had an odd look about them. “He's a stubborn cuss. I tried to tell him, Ann. I said you wouldn't do something like that, but he's – he's convinced you're out after publicity and a sensational story for your magazine.”

  “I am not a sensationalist. I thought he understood that last night.”

  “Let me take you out of here. We'll go by boat over Pamlico Sound. The reporters are all on the ocean side.”

  “I have to talk to Rod.”

  “Not now. He's angry. Nobody pushes him.”

  “I’m not pushing. I want to assure …”

  “Let it be, for now. Come back when it blows over. But, for God's sake, let's go now.”

  She looked through the curtain again. Rod. Rod. How can I make you believe if you won't even talk to me?

  The milling crowd looked like a circus was about to get under way. She spit, “Vultures. They can't go with a story that's one-sided.”

  “Think again. You're in the land of spooks and mystery. You even think 'ghost story' and it spreads like wildfire.”

  She took out the suitcases and threw her things into them. Spence watched out the window. He said irately, “Look at that little scum.”

  She stepped to the window. Poblo was circled by reporters. A camera focused on
his face.

  “What's in it for him?”

  “Attention,” Spence said, dropping the curtain. “And, more importantly, money to the museum. It's struggled since its beginnings when the cost overruns almost scuttled the whole project.”

  “He should have asked me if I wanted to go public. It's my story. It's my life, damn him.”

  “What would you have said?”

  “No. Emphatically no, It was a personal experience.”

  “Why did you share it with him?”

  Ann caught her breath. Why had she? Because the little bastard had lulled her into thinking that he could be trusted. He encouraged her with a ghost story of his own. Probably made up. She said, “I took him to be a serious academic, one who explores history, and myth, and the worlds we may not even be able to see.”

  “He fooled you,” Spence said. “He's never been anything more than a promoter, the likes of P. T. Barnum.”

  “Rod should know that, too.”

  “He does, but Rod has always questioned your being here.”

  “I thought last night …” She stopped and looked at Spence.

  He seemed to anticipate some sexy insight. When she didn't go on, he asked, “Did you and Rod finally make friends last night?”

  When she hesitated, he lifted his eyebrows and crossed his arms.

  She said, “He listened. I thought we understood each other.”

  Spence shrugged, “I'd say you two were in this thing together. It's really too early to see what's going to happen. If the press just gets Poblo's side of the story, then maybe we can make it seem that he's just out to use this – ah – speculation on the Deering's fate as a ploy to get donor money.”

  She doubted it would go that way, not with the knowledge that Poblo had gained from their research. Damn him for a – cad. The word echoed in her mind. Rod was a goddamned cad, too.

  She threw the last of her things in the case, grabbed her handbag. “Let's go.”

  --

  Spence proved to be an adept skipper as she knew he would be. His powered catamaran had a pilothouse on top of a deck house where two seats were side by side – one wide high seat for the captain in front of a bank of electronics, and a swivel for a passenger. Fiddling with the electronics, he said, “We got us a northeaster, a fresh breeze of maybe seventeen knots.”

  She looked at a line of boats heading away from them, making for some long frothy white horses riding on the wave crests. “Surely they're not going to sea on a day like this.”

  “They're after white marlin. Not a bad day for off-shore angling.”

  He goosed the thrust, and the boat’s twin hulls rose out of the light green water of Pamlico Sound.

  “How deep is the sound?” she shouted against the wind and diesel noise.

  “Not very in most places,” he said, keeping his eyes on the prow as it sliced through the swells. “It can get to twenty-five feet, but more like fifteen in most places. You got to be careful. It's treacherous, if you don't know what you're doing. You got to know the channels.”

  “Rod's wife drowned in these waters, didn't she?”

  “Not around here. They lived in Buxton. We'll be passing close by soon.”

  “What happened?”

  “They argued, as I understand it,” he said, not glancing at her. “That day, Rod went to check on some fisheries with the Coast Guard, and she took it in her mind to take out their boat. It was choppy that day, and she wasn't boat smart, so Rod told her not to take the boat out. If Rod told her it would be best if she didn't do something, you can bet By God that she was going to do it.”

  “Why did she want to take the boat out?”

  “You mean other than because Rod said she shouldn't?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She was bored. Carmen was always complaining about this dull, do-nothing place.”

  “What happened with her and the boat?”

  “It capsized.”

  She looked at the water spraying alongside the boat. White and playful.

  “Anybody see it happen?”

  “No. We went out to look for her and found the boat overturned in the marsh not far from their boathouse. It had floated back to the land. They eventually found her body farther out in the sound.”

  “When?”

  “The next day. In seven feet of water. That's probably where she flipped and went in. Had a bad cut on her head.”

  “Seven feet of water?”

  “Remember I told you: the sound is shallower than it seems.”

  “What could have happened?”

  “My guess is she over-throttled and the boat went out of control and flipped.”

  “Poor woman.”

  “Poor Rod.”

  Rod, the cad.

  Thoughts in her mind tumbled as Spence throttled down. “'Bout here,” he said. “See that buoy over there?”

  “Yes.”

  “That's about the place where she was. Now look up the coast. See the small boathouse?”

  She spied the little house poking out of a stand of live oaks.

  “Someone's on the dock,” she said.

  “Oh?” Spence said, and cut the engines. “There shouldn't be unless – maybe it's Rod. He goes there. It's like he's compelled.”

  “Why doesn't he sell the place?”

  “Don't know. Won't ask.”

  Spence chugged the cat as close to the boathouse as he could, and she caught the white flash of a boat stern in the small house. “Was the boat white?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Why?”

  “There's a white boat in the boathouse. It has a black outboard.”

  Frowning, Spence studied her for a moment. “You're seeing things. Rod took the boat out into the sea, poured concrete into it and sank it. A reef for his fishes.”

  When she scrutinized the opening to the gray house, the white boat faded. She said, “An optical illusion, I guess.” But her heart beat a little faster than normal.

  “Lots of illusions on the water,” he said. “Pamlico Sound is like a mirror. You get all these trees, and houses next to the shore, it can look like something's there when it's not. Or vice-versa, like something isn't there when it should be.”

  She looked at her hands. They shook.

  Spence glanced down at her hands, and she folded them together. He turned to the windshield. “As much as the sea and the sound is a way of death to us Bankers, it's always a shocker when someone dies in the water. We never get used to it.”

  “No one gets used to death.”

  “Except the one who's dead.”

  She looked at his profile. His face seemed gaunt, lined with anxiety.

  They made their way back to the channel and the cat's prow once again rose from the water. Ann found she couldn't take her eyes away from the spray that rose from the sides of the full-throttled boat. It wasn't playful any long, it was pitiless.

  Spence powered down the boat and pointed at the shore. “Used to be, up and down these islands, the woods were thick with live oak and cedar. In the eighteen-eighties they leveled the trees to build clipper ships. The trees never grew back. Here, and in Buxton, is about the only places you find forests. Good hunting for duck with the old ponds around. Good fishing, too. But if Rod has anything to say, there won't be duck hunting much longer. And the Islanders blame the Park Service for everything – from Acts of Congress to NOAA's whims.”

  The last thing she cared about now was the preserving the habitats act, but she didn't voice her thoughts, and she knew that Spence was trying to make conversation to take her mind off her misfortune.

  Spence cranked the twin diesels back to where they coughed dully and let the silver wheel turn smoothly in his hands, as they motored slowly through the no-wake zone to the wharf.

  “The town of Avon used to be named Kinnakeet,” he said. “That was before the government in its wisdom thought the ignorant inhabitants couldn't spell it correctly when the post office came to town.”

 
“Big Kinnekeet Lifesaving Station,” she said, bringing to mind a flash of surfmen manning a boat in the rough seas.

  “That's right,” he said. “This town is steeped in surfmen history. This town will be agog with that story of yours. You'll go down in legend for it.”

  Her look of utter disgust froze the whites around his hazel irises.

  Breaking contact, he said, “Sorry.”

  She said, “I promised Rod I wouldn't talk about it. I want you to promise me you won't either.”

  “I already promised Rod. But you know what? I don't even know what I'm promising about. I haven't been privy to any details. Where'd you go on this voyage? What'd you do?”

  She said simply, “No.”

  “Sorry.”

  Carrying luggage, they walked off the private dock and hiked from the pier to a sandy road that linked to Highway 12. Her feet were wet and sore and her hair was a tangled mess by the time they reached the car where Young Park waited in the post office parking lot.

  She dropped her luggage, and Spence put his arm around her. “Keep the upper lip stiff, girl. I got a feeling it's going to be all right.”

  “What's Rod's telephone number?”

  Spence let his eyes slide away. “Ann …”

  “Okay. Tell Rod that I will not – I repeat not – talk to anyone – the press or anyone – about the Deering. Or about him. Or anything connected to this …” She let the words trail away.

  “I'll tell him.”

  “Can I call you?”

  “Sure. I'm in the book.”

  “What's your last name?”

  “Reilly. Spencer Reilly.”

  She reached into her handbag and took out a card and a pen. Scratching her home and cell numbers, she said, “Call me, and give this to Rod, too.”

  “Glad to.”

  The drive to Kitty Hawk began in silence, but after settling in, Ann asked Young Park, “Where did Poblo come from?”

  “The museum in Virginia. I think they fired him because he was too ambitious.”

  “I wish you hadn't hired him.”

  “Me, too.”

  “When is the director due back?”

  “Next week, but I think he's coming home sooner with – all this.”

  Although she didn't think she could, Ann slept on the flight back to Atlanta. Rod's face kept appearing in her dreams, but it was the face of Cotton Mather and her face was that of Hester Prynne's.