Ghost Ship: A Port Chatham Mystery

by P. J. Alderman

  Though high clouds provided a pale gray cover, the temperature was mild, making for a pleasant walk to their favorite French restaurant. The prospect of a sinfully rich and filling breakfast, caffé breve, and a relaxed perusal of The New York Times struck her as the definition of pure bliss. She owed it to herself, she rationalized, to spend at least some time on those pleasurable pursuits before she cracked open Eleanor’s memoir, which she felt certain would make her want to pull her hair out.

  They walked to the corner of her block, passing Jase’s house, which immediately had her feeling guilty that she hadn’t yet thanked him for the roses. He was taking the day off to work with Bill and Tom on the library wall, and therefore certain to be in and out of Longren House. This gave her even more reason to vacate the premises, since she still hadn’t a clue what she wanted to do about him. The man definitely rang all her bells.

  Marietta, the plump, fiftyish café owner, who always made certain she had a special treat for Malachi, seated Jordan in the outside courtyard. “The usual on the espresso?” she asked Jordan cheerfully as she handed her a menu and the newspaper.

  “That would be marvelous,” Jordan replied with a grateful smile.

  Despite the early hour, a number of locals came and went, most stopping in to pick up coffee and one of the restaurant’s fabulous baked goods for their commute. A few lingered, however, taking the time to eat a leisurely breakfast.

  When Marietta returned with Jordan’s caffé breve, she ordered an omelet, then settled back in her chair, opening The New York Times to the national news page. Surely some politician’s imbroglio with his mistress would take her mind off whatever was bugging her about the night of the Henrietta Dale’s shipwreck. Something was nagging at her, something she’d originally read, or that Michael Seavey had told her …

  Six minutes later, after reading the same headline three times, she tossed down the paper in disgust. Until she figured out what was driving her crazy, she wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything else. Well, except the subjects she wanted to deny, such as the house remodel, the sexy guy currently remodeling it and revving her hormones …

  She blew out a breath, picked up Captain Williams’s diary pages, and started skimming. But other than a brief mention of his retirement the first week of September 1893, she found nothing of use. Resigned, she opened Eleanor’s memoir and prepared to read chapter after strident chapter of preachy text, to see if she could find even a hint of something useful.

  A third of the way into the small, leather-bound book, she did find a reference to opium smuggling. Jordan was certain it was a rehashing of her editorials, but she forced herself to read the passage.

  In hopes of convincing my fellow citizens of the inherent dangers of opium, I decided to one day visit such a den of iniquity, so that I might describe my experience to my readers, thus giving them a real sense of the depravity of the drug’s purveyors. However, even I was unprepared for what awaited me …

  In the middle of a bright, sunny day, I traveled down to the seedier section of Port Chatham’s waterfront, where houses of ill repute vie for space with Chinese “laundries” and saloons. Choosing a laundry at random, I entered and proceeded directly to the room in the back, where I felt certain I would discover an opium den.

  Immediately upon entering the room, I was assaulted by layer after layer of thick smoke undulating in strata, like waves in the ocean, its pungent odor intensifying as I walked to the center of the room. Though small lamps had been placed throughout the room for illumination, they did little to permeate the gloom.

  The room was lined with wooden bunks—pallets really—which were covered with the barest minimum of padding and small, filthy linens stuffed with straw, presumably functioning as a sort of crude pillow upon which the smoker could lay his head once he succumbed to the heinous effects of the drug.

  Although many have told me that the atmosphere of an opium den has its own alluring and sensuous qualities, I found the place to be utterly depraved. Men and women with sunken, bruised eyes, dressed in soiled clothing, emaciated from the pernicious effects of the drug, had lit pipes and were passing them amongst one another …

  “One omelet, plus an extra stack of whole-wheat toast to share with Malachi, as ordered,” Marietta announced brightly, placing a plate stacked high with food in front of Jordan, forcing her to set aside Eleanor’s memoir.

  “Looks fabulous,” she assured the owner, leaning over to breathe in the aroma of grilled veggies, farm-fresh eggs, and homemade hash browns. Forget dieting. She needed her strength to deal with the challenges of the next few days, right? She picked up a fork and dug in.

  The woman reached down and picked up the small book, studying it for a moment. “Heavy stuff,” she commented.

  Jordan couldn’t argue with her assessment. “I’m reading it to see if I can find more information about the 1893 wreck of the Henrietta Dale,” she explained.

  “Oh, that’s right! I heard a rumor yesterday that you had seen the ghost ship.” The woman cocked her head. “That must be quite the experience.”

  “Understatement of the year,” Jordan muttered.

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll put your new, expanded powers to good use for our community.”

  After she left, Jordan gave Malachi a slice of toast, took a moment to moan in appreciation over a forkful of potatoes, then picked up Eleanor’s memoir once more. She supposed she should be worried about getting food stains on it, but really, the world would be a better place if no one else ever had to read Eleanor’s drivel again.

  Rather than continuing to slog through the paragraphs about the waterfront opium dens, she flipped through pages, looking for something that would tie Eleanor to the rescue effort on August 5. She found what she was looking for in a chapter toward the end of the volume:

  Events of recent days, which have taken a terrible toll on my family and others in our beloved Port Chatham, have now brought to light the horrifying truth of plans that could have wrecked the entire social fabric of our town.

  My only son, Jesse, was lost to me long before the night he was crushed by a falling mast when the ship he was a passenger on, the Henrietta Dale, ran aground on Dungeness Spit. Though I tried in vain to rid Jesse of his addiction to the pestilent drug, opium, he continued to seek out the company of those who suffered from the same addiction.

  Many died the night that the Henrietta Dale ran aground, but I can only say, in retrospect, that someone was looking over us all. For if the notorious Michael Seavey had been able to put in place his plans to use the ship to import opium and provide a floating opium den for his customers, more of our citizens would have fallen prey to his greed.

  I hold Michael Seavey directly responsible for the death of my beloved son, but I can only be relieved by Seavey’s violent death just days later. Port Chatham remains an enviable place to live, based on that blessed turn of events.

  May Michael Seavey rot in hell for all eternity.

  Malachi whined, and without looking up from the page, Jordan held out another slice of toast. When he failed to take it from her hand, she dragged her attention back to the present.

  Sam Garrett pulled out the chair across from her and sat down.

  She dropped the toast and stumbled to her feet.

  “Sit down,” he said mildly, “before you draw attention to yourself.”

  She did as he ordered, taking a moment to glance around the small patio. No one seemed to notice her distress. Which, dammit, pissed her off. Garrett was interrupting what could have been a wonderfully peaceful, Zen-like breakfast. Well, aside from the garbage she was reading. But really, she was getting damn tired of being threatened, harassed …

  He leaned over to sniff her plate. “ ’Tis a pity ghosts can’t eat real food—I really miss it.” He sighed. “At least if I try hard enough, I can manage a faint whiff of the intoxicating aromas.”

  “What do you want?” she asked coldly.

  He raised an eyebrow. “I don’
t believe you will find it wise to take such a tone with me. I can reduce your mutt to a lifeless pile of fur in mere moments, should I become sufficiently displeased.”

  Jordan felt the blood drain from her face. “No!” she said quickly. Malachi growled, and she shushed him, placing a protective arm around his neck and keeping it there. “Please don’t hurt him—he’s just a dog.”

  Malachi gave her The Look, and she sent him a silent apology.

  “That’s better,” Garrett said, leaning back with a humorless smile. “Now, pray tell, why haven’t you told Seavey that I didn’t murder him?”

  “Things have been a little chaotic lately, and I just haven’t found the time—”

  “I’m not interested in hearing your excuses. I want it done. Today.”

  “Sure. Fine.” She nodded emphatically. “But …” she hesitated, then plunged ahead, hoping she didn’t increase his ire. “The thing is, I don’t actually know who killed Seavey. And until I do—”

  Garrett waved a hand. “That is neither here nor there. The only fact that is of import is that I didn’t murder him. Take all the time you want to discover the identity of the real killer—I have no interest in what you do with respect to your little investigation. But I want it immediately communicated to Seavey that I had no part in his death.”

  “So you’ll swear to me that you weren’t even in Port Chatham at the time Seavey was murdered?” she asked, not without some trepidation, tightening her hold on Malachi.

  “For what it’s worth, certainly. I was otherwise engaged.”

  “Doing what?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t see that it can hurt to divulge that part of my past life. The good Captain Williams and I were busy salvaging the opium from inside the hull of the Henrietta Dale.”

  Jordan gaped at him. “So the captain was in on it all along?”

  “Of course not. Think, woman! How could I have lured the ship onto the beach if Williams had known of my intentions? He approached me two days after the grounding and told me the story of how he’d discovered that Seavey had had secret compartments built into the hull for the transport of opium. He said that if I were to agree to assist him in retrieving the contraband, we could sell it and split the profits.”

  Jordan suddenly realized that this was what had been bugging her—the captain’s original account of the shipwreck that night, followed so closely by his retirement. He simply couldn’t have been that broken up over the loss of a ship he’d sailed for just a few hours. So the only explanation that made sense was the one Garrett had just given her, that Williams immediately realized that no one would be the wiser if he came back a few days later to retrieve the Henrietta Dale’s valuable cargo. Such a cargo would have also given him the funds he needed to retire.

  “Ah,” Garrett said now, accurately reading her expression. “I see that you realized the import of Williams’s behavior immediately following the shipwreck and, indeed, during the investigation of the cause of the grounding. By the time of the hearings into the grounding, Williams had carefully concealed enough money to retire comfortably, based on our salvage efforts. All he had to do was act broken up over the loss of his ship, making it look as if he were too grief-stricken to take the helm of another vessel any time in the near future.” Garrett smiled, his expression reminiscent. “I must say, the chap was a consummate actor.”

  “But I don’t understand,” Jordan said. “If you retrieved the opium within days of when the ship went down, what was Holt diving for?”

  “Unfortunately, Williams didn’t have knowledge of all the secret compartments. And a portion of the hull had sunk in deeper waters, making the effort to dive and break open the compartments far more difficult.”

  That made sense. After all, divers then wouldn’t have had the modern gear available today. She remembered now that the dive suit she’d seen Garrett wear that day on the spit had been odd looking. It probably represented what he knew of the dive suits from his own time on earth.

  “Okay, I believe you,” she said.

  “I’m greatly relieved.” His tone was wry. “However, I must insist that you make a point of notifying Seavey at once, and informing him of what you have learned. I grow weary from the inconvenience of avoiding him on the waterfront.”

  She suspected it was more than that, but she didn’t want to push him any more than she had. “All right. You have my word that I will inform him sometime later today.”

  Garrett shook his head. “Unfortunately, I don’t believe your word is sufficient. You see, I’ve always found that when threatened, people will do or say whatever they need to, to remain alive.” He stood, then placed his hands on the table, leaning over her. “You have twenty-four hours to do as I bid, or I will return to eliminate those you consider your friends, including this mutt. Do you understand?”

  She swallowed. “Yes, I understand.”

  He straightened, nodding. “Good. If you do as I request, this will be the last you see of me.”

  “Thank God for that,” she muttered as he turned to fade away. With shaking hands, she picked up her bill and pulled out money to cover it.

  “You’re as white as a sheet!” Marietta exclaimed as she came over to remove the plates. “Are you all right? My food didn’t give you indigestion, did it?”

  “No.” Jordan mustered a thin smile. “Your food was delicious as always. It was just something I read—it made me lose my appetite.”

  But as she walked back to Longren House, stopping frequently to kneel and hug Malachi, she suddenly realized her distress was partially caused by something she had read. Something that was even more shocking and horrifying than what she’d just endured.

  She had a strong hunch she knew who had killed Michael Seavey after all.

  Chapter 20

  AFTER leaving Malachi in the care of Jase and Tom, she got into the Prius and headed for the marina. She needed to find Charlotte and ask her some pointed questions, but they would have to wait—she was running late for her appointment with Bob.

  On the drive down, she was so distracted by her thoughts that she failed to take in any of the scenery. She did manage to avoid plowing through a couple of coach-and-fours, but otherwise, her mind was still focused on what she’d read and learned from Garrett over breakfast.

  Michael Seavey had, in all likelihood, been the unconscious man the crew had taken off the Henrietta Dale in the first moments after the ship’s grounding. So it stood to reason that he’d been transported back to Port Chatham for medical treatment, and that he wouldn’t have remembered the trip. It also followed that if he had suffered from any sort of concussion, he could have remained unconscious for days. But she didn’t believe he’d survived that long.

  Before leaving the house, she’d double-checked the date of the newspaper article in the library that Hattie had shown her that first night, the one recounting Seavey’s murder. The article had been dated just two days after the shipwreck, which in reality worked out to be little more than thirty-six hours after Seavey would have been brought back to town.

  The Henrietta Dale had run aground late on the night of August 5, 1893, which meant that by the time Seavey reached Port Chatham for treatment, it had to have been the morning of the sixth. Which, in turn, meant that the murderer could have killed Seavey and dumped his body amid the chaos. It wasn’t a stretch to believe that his body wouldn’t have been noticed until the morning of August 7. The timeline worked.

  And it would have been relatively simple to murder him, after all. The killer merely needed to be someone whose presence the rescue workers wouldn’t have questioned, who made it a point of being in charge of transporting the unconscious Seavey to a doctor’s infirmary. Once he had Seavey out of sight, it would have been easy to shoot him and dump his body under the wharf. All under the cover of darkness, if the killer had waited until that evening.

  She pulled up in front of the Wooden Boat Society headquarters and killed the engine. Following a chattering group of tourists
inside, she waited impatiently for them to move aside so that she could walk into Bob’s office. The sooner she got this call over with, the sooner she could go home and verify her suspicions with Charlotte.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said to Bob. “Has your friend called yet?”

  “Nope.” He looked up from what appeared to be a mock-up of a brochure about the upcoming boat festival. “You’re good. When you didn’t arrive right on time, I sent him a brief email, asking him to delay his call by fifteen minutes, just in case.”

  Jordan sat down across from him at the desk. “How do you want this to work? Do you want to put him on speaker, so that we can both talk to him?”

  “Why don’t we see what his preference is?” Bob replied. “I hear you had another visitor at your house last night.”

  “Yeah, Clive Walters.” She gave him a brief recap. “Darcy and I think he might have murdered Holt and broke into my house looking for the documents, because he was trying to keep Seavey around as a ghost to improve business.”

  Bob leaned back in his chair, raising both brows. “Really? That’s pretty crazy.”

  “Yeah, I thought so. We won’t know for certain until Darcy—” Her cellphone rang, cutting her off. “That’s probably her right now. Excuse me.”

  She stood up and walked a few feet away, pressing the screen with her thumb to answer the call. “Tell me he’s our guy,” she said without preamble.

  “I don’t know whether he is or not,” Darcy said, sounding tired and exasperated.

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “No. The ballistics on the gun match, but he’s lawyered up and not talking. Several guests also swear he never left the winetasting event that evening, and they would have no reason to lie for him. So if he slipped out, I can’t figure out how or when. And he’s definitely not confessing to the murder—only to wanting to stop you from getting hold of the documents you needed to solve Seavey’s murder. He’s claiming I’m protecting you and that you killed Holt.”