Ghost Ship: A Port Chatham Mystery

by P. J. Alderman

  “We were eager to see what’s in the safe,” Jordan explained apologetically, avoiding mention of the hole in the parlor wall.

  Tom and Jase looked at the space beside Jordan, their expressions curious. “So we have company?” Jase asked Jordan.

  “He’s the company,” Charlotte sniffed as she materialized on Hattie’s other side. In no better state of dress than her sister, she peered sleepily at Jordan. “I trust the hole in the upstairs parlor wall is necessary, and that you will have it fixed prior to the wedding,” she said archly.

  Damn. “Of course,” Jordan said, hoping that was true. Truthfully, she hoped the wedding would simply cease to be an issue, and the sooner, the better. She shuddered to think about the logistics of such an affair. The house would have to be fixed up as much as possible, but no humans could attend or, rather, it didn’t make any sense for them to attend.

  “Would you happen to remember the combination to the safe after all these years?” she asked Hattie.

  “Ten to the right, twenty-three to the left with an extra revolution, then six to the right,” Hattie replied promptly. “I memorized it.”

  Jordan rubbed damp hands on her cotton sweats, then walked over to the safe. She raised her hand to the old dial, then hesitated. “You know,” she said, turning back to the ghosts, “this really isn’t my money—it belongs to you.”

  “We want you to have it for the renovations,” Hattie insisted.

  “Halt right there,” Frank ordered as he materialized. “If you open that safe, you are exposing yourself to great risk. Seavey will go to any lengths to get his hands on that much cash.”

  Hattie gave Frank a cool look. “Michael has no use for the money, nor would he steal it from me. You are mistaken in that regard.” She turned back to Jordan. “We want you to have it. You can put it to good use, making Longren House into a comfortable home for yourself.”

  “I think it should be used for the wedding,” Charlotte insisted stubbornly. “It’s extremely important to ensure that the ceremony and reception are lavish, as befits Hattie’s station in society prior to her death. We simply must not scrimp on the preparations.”

  “I really don’t feel comfortable accepting a forty-thousand-dollar gift,” Jordan repeated. “From anyone.”

  “Nonsense,” Hattie said. “You should feel perfectly comfortable accepting the money.”

  “Do you have any idea what’s going on?” Tom asked Jase. Both men had been watching Jordan intently.

  “I’m getting the gist. I think.”

  “We’re discussing who gets the money,” Jordan explained to them. “Frankly, until we have that issue decided, I don’t want to open the safe. Once the money is real to us, making any kind of ethical decision regarding it becomes much harder.”

  “Precisely my point,” Frank stated. “When faced with the reality of that amount of cash, Seavey simply would not be able to help himself.”

  “You don’t know Michael at all!” Charlotte cried. “He’s a wonderful man!”

  “Now, Charlotte …” Hattie began.

  “Pragmatically speaking,” Jase pointed out, talking over Hattie because he couldn’t hear her, “your discussion is moot if the money isn’t there.”

  “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Hattie scoffed. “The money exists. I removed only a small portion the night I paid the ransom to Seavey for the return of Charlotte. The rest has remained untouched all these years.”

  “Please, Jordan!” Charlotte cried. “Open the safe.”

  “I beg you to reconsider,” Frank importuned, earning a wrathful glance from Hattie. “If Seavey finds out about that money, no one will be secure in this house.”

  “Oh, for …” Jordan threw up her hands. “If the money is in there, it’s yours to do with as you wish. Agreed?”

  “And I will wish that you use it for the renovation,” Hattie replied, refusing to budge.

  Using the combination Hattie had recited, Jordan spun the dial. With an audible click, the safe door swung open in her hand. Everyone crowded around, peering inside.

  Hattie gasped.

  The safe was empty.

  * * *

  “I don’t understand.” Hattie paced the library, wringing her hands. “I was so certain it would still be there. Whatever could have happened to it?”

  Now that the excitement was over, Jase had left to deal with suppliers at the pub, and Tom had returned to the framing, accompanied by Malachi, who seemed to want no part of any further discussion with the ghosts.

  “Was the safe combination written down anywhere?” Jordan asked. “Could someone have had access to it and found the money before you came back as a ghost?”

  “No. Before I had Sara hire the carpenter, I asked her to open the safe and verify that the money was in there.”

  “When was that?”

  “Well, let’s see.” Hattie turned to Charlotte. “You died in 1895, correct?”

  Charlotte bit her lip and nodded.

  “So that would make it the winter of 1896 that I contacted Sara with my plan.” Hattie gave Charlotte a look filled with sadness. “You see, I had planned to make the money available for you. But by the time I was able to return, you were already lost to us all.”

  Charlotte hugged her. “It’s all right. Mona took good care of me for as long as she could. I was young and reckless and … We all knew back then that prostitutes had short life spans. It was only a matter of time.”

  “So the money was in the safe after Charlotte’s death,” Jordan repeated, bringing them back to the subject at hand. “Was the house vacant in the winter of 1896?”

  “Yes,” Hattie replied. “It wasn’t sold at auction until a year after that.”

  “Who knew of the money besides you?”

  “No one except Frank, and he only knew of the recorded income; he never saw the actual cash,” Hattie said. She looked in Frank’s direction. “Frank knew that my late husband, Charles, had been engaging in illegal smuggling on his ships. We reviewed a list of payments Charles had recorded in a small ledger. But I never told Frank about the cash. And regardless, he was dead by then.”

  “So Sara knew, and Frank, but he was gone,” Jordan concluded.

  “I trust that Sara would not have taken it.” Hattie paced a bit, obviously lost in thought. She halted. “Mona Starr knew that I had access to enough cash to pay for Frank’s medical bills and for the ransom for Charlotte. She could have deduced from that, possibly, that there might be money hidden somewhere in Longren House.”

  “Mona would never have stolen the money!” Charlotte protested. “Why, she had no need—she was very rich.”

  “That’s true,” Hattie admitted. “I would have to agree with Charlotte. Mona had no reason to come looking for the money, and I would be stunned to discover that she engaged in that kind of theft. If so, I greatly misread her character.”

  “The truth is that anyone could have taken the money at any time over the intervening years,” Jordan said glumly. “I doubt we’ll ever know.”

  “But we kept an eye on all the owners,” Charlotte insisted.

  “Every minute of every day, for over a hundred years?” Jordan asked. “That’s impossible. Anyone could have hired a locksmith, or a safecracker, for that matter, to open it. Who knows? Perhaps they even sensed, on some instinctive level, that they had to hide their activities from whoever was haunting their home. There’s nothing we can do about it—the money’s gone.”

  Hattie nodded dejectedly. “Nevertheless, I had hoped that I had the solution to your financial troubles.”

  “I’ll figure something out,” Jordan assured her. She paused, then carefully asked, “Charlotte, did you know of Seavey’s murder? And of Jesse’s death on board the Henrietta Dale?”

  Charlotte gave Hattie a nervous glance.

  “Whatever you have to say,” Hattie assured her, “I won’t judge you harshly.”

  Charlotte shook her head. “It’s more that I worry you�
��ll judge Michael harshly, and he doesn’t deserve it, truly he doesn’t. He saved me, you know. And Jesse—dear Jesse—was the one who managed to get me to Seavey’s hotel suite and convince Seavey we needed his protection. After Jesse died in the shipwreck, well …” She paused to swipe at a tear. “It was just so hard to continue on, don’t you see? Michael was gone, and Jesse, and so were you, Hattie. It seemed like all around me, people were dying.”

  So Garrett had acted as Seavey had feared, Jordan thought. “Why don’t you tell us about it?” she said gently.

  Charlotte trembled, eyes brimming, and shook her head. “I just can’t! If you want to know what really happened back then, you need to read Eleanor Canby’s memoir. The wretched woman was responsible for so much of what went wrong, you see! And of course she wrote about all of it in that disgusting memoir of hers. She thought she was so virtuous, and yet she destroyed the people who came into contact with her. She ruined you, Hattie!”

  Hattie put her arm around Charlotte. “I think that’s enough for today,” she told Jordan softly, then turned to Charlotte. “Jordan will read Eleanor’s memoir, and she can ask Michael to fill in the blanks of what she doesn’t know. What’s important is that we find out who murdered Michael, but I doubt we need your help to do that.”

  “Absolutely,” Jordan agreed. “I’ve got some time between now and this evening’s plans, so I can spend some of it reading the memoir, which I brought home yesterday. Charlotte, was there ever a formal investigation into the wreck of the Henrietta Dale? I’m asking because it seems there would have been. Do you remember hearing about something like that?”

  Charlotte dabbed her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief. “Yes, of course. Mona followed the investigation with great interest and told me all about it. The ship’s captain—I can’t remember his name …”

  “Nathaniel Williams,” Jordan supplied.

  “Yes, that’s it. Captain Williams testified that his calculations were accurate that night, that never before in his career had he ever made such a grievous error. He claimed that someone had to have deliberately lured the ship off course.”

  “Did the lightkeeper testify?”

  Charlotte nodded. “The New Dungeness light had been turned off for maintenance. The keeper claimed he had discovered something wrong that needed to be repaired.” She wrinkled her nose. “Of course, I didn’t pay any attention to the mechanical details of what the man described. But he swore the captain couldn’t have used the New Dungeness light in his calculations.”

  “And yet the captain claimed he triangulated off two lights, is that correct?”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  Frank spoke up. “I have some knowledge of these things from my time at sea. It seems reasonable to assume that if the captain claimed he used two lights for triangulation, then indeed, a second light was shining that night. I suspect someone with nefarious motives placed a light farther along the shoreline, perhaps even at the base of the bluffs along the headlands.”

  “Would that have caused the captain to correct his heading enough to run aground in the location of the shipwreck?” Jordan asked him.

  “Yes, absolutely,” Frank replied. “The strategy has been used by pirates for centuries, and it is relatively foolproof. The real question, in my opinion, is who would have had a reason to do so?”

  “Yes, that is the question, isn’t it?” Jordan murmured.

  * * *

  AN hour later, she had taken a shower, grabbed some breakfast, and hauled Eleanor Canby’s memoir, along with Seavey’s stack of personal papers, out to the front porch. She settled onto the sunny end of the porch swing with Malachi lying underneath.

  She had several hours before she’d planned to meet up with Darcy at the pub—a concentrated block of time when she could read, then try to piece together everything she had learned. What with the attacks, missing papers, missing money, and last night’s break-in, her brain was a jumble. She needed to make sense of everything before she could help Hattie come to any meaningful conclusions about Seavey’s murder. And if she could just keep her mind off the sawing and hammering, she stood a good chance of figuring out what might have happened that deadly night in August 1893.

  Balancing a cup of tea precariously on one of the swing’s broad arms, she decided to start with—or rather, to finish—reading Michael Seavey’s papers, then move on to Eleanor’s memoir.

  Unacceptable Risk

  Union Wharf

  July 23, 1893

  THOUGH there was a crisp breeze coming off the water, the sun shone on the newly painted decking of the Henrietta Dale. Michael stood on the poop deck with his recently hired captain, Nathaniel Williams, and the ship’s carpenter, Grady MacDonough. Below them, people streamed across the docks, preparing to board a large passenger steamer bound for San Francisco.

  Neck craned, Williams gazed overhead at the rigging, hands clasped at his back, a pleased smile on his weathered face. “A beautiful ship indeed, Mr. Seavey. The sailcloth is of the finest quality! It will be a pleasure to sail her.”

  “I’m hoping to take her out on her maiden voyage on August 5,” Michael replied, gratified by his reaction. The man had years of experience; his judgment was quite sound in these matters. “Do you think you can have crew hired and be ready to sail by that date?”

  Williams frowned, as if considering. “Barring a shortage of available experienced sailors, I believe we should be quite ready by then.”

  “I can procure most for you, though I suspect you’ll wish to hire the officers yourself.”

  “Yes, indeed. I always pick my seconds-in-command quite cautiously. One doesn’t need to discover after they’re at sea that his first mate can’t follow orders.”

  “No, I imagine not,” Michael said wryly. Turning to MacDonough, he asked, “I trust the renovations will be complete by then?”

  “Yessir! We’ve only the skylights to install, then I’ll be putting the finishing touches on the trim in the great cabin.” He hesitated, glancing at Williams before lowering his voice. “That other matter we discussed is taken care of, Mr. Seavey.”

  “Excellent.” Unusually restless, Michael stared out at the water for a moment, lost in thought. Such smooth preparations should have him excited over the upcoming voyage, yet he found himself oddly unmoved. He sighed. “Then I’ll leave you gentlemen to your chores.”

  “Seavey!” The shout came from below.

  Michael walked to the taffrail and looked down at the crowded dock. Customs Inspector Yardley stood below, his expression grim, his manner agitated as he paced to and fro the length of the Henrietta Dale. “I must speak to you at once, man!”

  “Inspector,” Michael acknowledged, taking hold of the rope ladder and climbing down. He stepped onto the dock, brushing off a bit of sawdust that clung to his morning coat. “To what do I owe the honor of a second visit in so short a time?”

  “Two of my men did not return to port last night as planned,” Yardley stated. He returned to his pacing.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Michael replied, not revealing the alarm he felt over the news. “Was the weather inclement? I don’t recall.”

  Yardley slashed a hand through the air. “You know damn well it wasn’t!”

  Michael raised a brow. “Actually, no, I don’t. I was at yet another interminable fund-raiser, this time held by one of our esteemed town councilmen. I spent most of the night indoors.”

  “My men were again patrolling an area just off North Beach,” Yardley stated, seeming not to have heard Michael’s explanation. “They didn’t return to port at the designated time. I suspect they may have had an altercation with Sam Garrett. Was he scheduled to be at that location last night?”

  Michael tsked. “I believe we’ve already had this discussion, Yardley. I am not in business with Sam Garrett, nor do I have any idea where he might have been last night.”

  “Then you claim to have no information about what may have happened to my men.”

 
Michael chose his words carefully. “Though I’m certainly concerned as you are for their welfare, I know of nothing that would assist you in your efforts to find them.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Michael shrugged, drawing on his cigar.

  Yardley’s face mottled with rage. “You smug son of a bitch!” he growled softly. “The entire waterfront knows you and Garrett have an agreement with suppliers out of Victoria to bring in opium. I’ll be damned if I’ll stand here and let you lie to my face, when two of my men may have been murdered by your partner!”

  “Do you have evidence to back up your wild accusations?” Michael asked calmly.

  “You know I don’t! And unless the bodies of my men wash ashore, I doubt I’ll find any.”

  “Then I believe this conversation is over, Yardley.”

  Yardley’s fists clenched. “If I find out you’ve had anything to do with my men’s deaths, Seavey, by God, I’ll—”

  “You’ll do nothing,” Michael interrupted, “unless you want me to reveal your latest side business to your superiors. Do not threaten me, Yardley—you will be the loser in that battle.”

  Yardley laughed harshly. “Everyone knows you’ve lost your stomach for violence, Seavey. Your threats are empty.”

  “If you want to put that rumor to the test, just say the word, and I’ll be happy to oblige.” He arced his cigar into the water. “I’ve other business to attend.”

  Yardley stood for a moment, his harsh breathing audible over the background hum of freight loading on the wharf. Turning on his heel, he stalked away.

  Michael looked at Remy, who had appeared silently at his side. “Bring Garrett,” he ordered softly. “If the fool resists, employ force.”

  Chapter 13

  A particularly deafening crash brought Jordan out of 1893 and back to the present. Loud swearing ensued, followed by more crashes. Dust floated down from the porch ceiling, and a film of brown stuff settled on the surface of her tea.