Ghost Ship pcm-2

by P. J. Alderman

  She followed him as he floated across a small gravel lot around to the back of the building. He stopped by a set of rusty iron stairs, bowed, and swept a hand upward to indicate that she should precede him. She eyed the steps critically, wondering how safe they were.

  “I assure you they are quite solid.”

  She continued to hesitate. “How would you know? It’s not like you weigh anything.”

  “Good Christ, woman! Try not to be so obstreperous! I’ve seen the workers use them time and again.”

  “Oh. Right.” She started up the stairs, then turned back to see if he was following. His gaze lifted to her face, and not particularly quickly. “Were you just checking out my butt?” she demanded, incredulous.

  He merely looked amused. “I’d have to be dead, crossed over, and have lost all powers of perception—which I assure you I have not—to fail to notice a pleasing female form.”

  “Your ogling being a benefit of the modern clothing you insist is in such poor taste?” she said drily.

  “Of course. I’m a discerning man, and I might prefer that you show off your assets in a manner that leaves more to the imagination, thus providing an air of alluring mystery. But I am not stupid.”

  Shaking her head, she continued up the stairs.

  * * *

  LESS than a half hour later, she and Malachi were on their way to Point Hudson east and slightly north of the downtown waterfront district. She had more information, though not the documents she’d hoped for. Holt’s workers had been quite talkative, answering all her questions as well as those prompted by the ghost lurking at her side.

  Holt had found Seavey’s ledger and files approximately a week ago. Apparently, he’d become excited after reading about the Henrietta Dale but had acted secretive about the details of what he’d learned. The next day, he’d left work early on the excuse that he had a scuba diving lesson. Every day after that, he’d disappeared by midafternoon, indifferent in the face of the owner’s complaints that he was slacking off. When Jordan had asked what Holt had done with the original documents, though, no one could tell her. And a hasty search of the suite turned up nothing.

  She needed to verify that the location of the shipwreck matched where she’d found Holt’s body. If she could nail down that detail, none of the skeptics in the pub could ignore the strong possibility that Holt had been murdered because of his interest in salvaging the Henrietta Dale. But who had told Holt about the shipwreck in the first place? He couldn’t have found out about it from Seavey’s papers, and neither of his workers had known about it. He must have mentioned the Henrietta Dale to someone who told him about the 1893 shipwreck. But who? Was the history of the shipwreck well known around town?

  She parked in front of the Wooden Boat Society at Point Hudson. Each time Jordan had glanced at the marina on her trips downtown, she’d been intrigued by the quaint, bungalow-style building that sat adjacent to the docks. She’d assumed it housed some type of business associated with the marina. In fact, it was the home of a society dedicated to restoring and building wooden boats—evidently one of only a few such societies in the United States.

  Out on the inlet, a sailboat, its spinnaker taking advantage of the breeze rippling the water, came within feet of an anchored tall ship. Jordan took a moment to study the tableau stretched out before her.

  Now that she thought about it, she realized she had an unconscious expectation that objects from another dimension would at least be a little faded, sort of like the sepia-toned prints one saw in history books. But everything, real and spectral, appeared to her in full Technicolor. Some of the ships might have a slight variation in the quality of the air surrounding them, but that was the only difference she could detect. And with so many refurbished historic ships sailing the local waters, she couldn’t count on the design of the boat as a reliable clue. Though of course there was the fact that the real ones could sail right through the unreal ones.

  Shaking her head, she walked up the sidewalk to the front door. Inside, she found the space divided in half, the right side organized into a small shop offering books on wooden boat building, souvenirs, and marine maps of the area’s waters. The left contained a library jam-packed with crowded bookshelves and a beat-up but sturdy-looking oak desk.

  From behind the desk, Bob glanced up from the book he was reading, grinning when he spied her. “Couldn’t help yourself, could you? Hey, I got hold of the guy who wrote one of the more respected books on phantom ship sightings. He wants to interview you over the phone.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  Her sarcasm seemed to sail right over his head. “And I’ve got the sketch artist lined up. If you agree, I’ll have her come to the pub tonight to see if she can draw something reasonably accurate.”

  Jordan knew if she refused, she’d be hounded until she agreed. “Go for it,” she said, resigned.

  He looked pleased. “In that case, I’d like to talk to you about giving a short speech during the Wooden Boat Festival. It’d be a real crowd pleaser, if you could just describe what you saw, then let me talk about the original shipwreck and the questionable circumstances around the grounding.”

  Jordan frowned. “Oh, well, I don’t know—”

  “Something real casual. You don’t have to prepare a speech or anything,” he quickly assured her. “Just show up and chat with folks. You’d be surprised at the number of people who have refurbished old ships, who also believe their ships are haunted. They’ll eat this stuff up.”

  “I’ll think about it,” she promised him, then changed the subject. “I verified that in all likelihood Holt really was diving for salvage. He found documents while he was renovating the hotel suite that mentioned the cargo of the Henrietta Dale. There was opium concealed in her hull. And your ancestor was the one who built the secret compartments.”

  “You mean old Grady MacDonough?” Bob frowned. “That can’t be right, or I would have known about it.”

  “I’m fairly certain—Michael Seavey said as much in his personal papers.”

  “If you can trust that Seavey wrote the truth. The man was a criminal.”

  “It should be easy enough to verify. Did your great-great-grandfather leave behind any kind of papers or diary?”

  Bob leaned back, linking his hands behind his head, regarding her thoughtfully. “Unfortunately, no. I have only the stories passed down through family members. But it’s always been the legend everyone in the family talks about—the fact that Grady MacDonough was the ship’s carpenter on the famous clipper ship that ran aground on her maiden voyage. According to family members, the old guy took it really hard. He’d given almost a year of his life working on that ship. I suspect he was as fond of it as its owner was—maybe even more so. Trust me, there’s never been any mention of secret compartments.”

  She didn’t point out that family legends tended to be glamorized and edited as they passed through each generation. “If I can pinpoint the exact location of the shipwreck, I might be able to convince Darcy that Holt’s murder had something to do with his dives.”

  “Hmm.” Bob swiveled around in his desk chair to stare at the crammed bookshelf behind him. Standing, he pulled a thin brown leather volume with a cracked binding from between two larger books on the topmost shelf.

  He thumbed through it. “This is a replica of Lloyd’s of London’s list of all shipwrecks for the nineteenth century.”

  “They tracked shipwrecks clear out here?” Jordan asked, surprised.

  “Yeah. They were the major insurer of ships and their cargoes back then. And they kept an official record of all shipwrecks, worldwide.” He paused to skim down one page, then flipped to the next. “Okay, here we go.”

  He placed the book, open to that page, on the desk so that they could both look at it. “According to Lloyd’s, the Henrietta Dale ran aground on August 5, 1893.” He pointed with his finger. “Here are the coordinates for the shipwreck.”

  Jordan frowned. “Did Holt ever talk to you about t
he Henrietta Dale’s wreckage or ask you for these coordinates?”

  “Nope.”

  Damn. “Did he have any other way of finding them?”

  “Something close to the same coordinates would have been noted by the captain in the ship’s logbook. The only copy, though, is out at the lighthouse.”

  “But Holt could have taken the coordinates and used them with some kind of GPS device to locate the wreckage, correct?”

  “Sure. All smart cellphones have GPS tracking these days. He wouldn’t have needed any special equipment.”

  She reached for a notepad on the desk, tore off a sheet, and used Bob’s pen to write down the coordinates. “How do I go about figuring out if these coordinates match the location where we found Holt’s body?”

  “I’ve got just the thing.” Bob rummaged through a jumble of rolled-up charts propped in the corner behind the desk. “Ha! Here it is …” He pulled off the rubber bands and unrolled a navigational chart, using a stapler and an antique brass sextant to keep the chart spread open. Leaning over, he plotted the coordinates on the chart, pointing to a location just off the edge of the west side of the spit. “Definitely in the ballpark,” he concluded. “Sand shifts over time, so we can’t expect an exact match, but that spit tends to shift in one direction each winter, then back during the other seasons. I’d say you found Holt within a few hundred yards of the old coordinates.”

  Bob cocked his head at her. “So are you serious about looking into the shipwreck? Trying to verify that she was lured onto the rocks?”

  Jordan shrugged. “Not certain yet. I’m looking into the murder of Michael Seavey, her owner. I ran across a newspaper article in my library dated from right around the time of the shipwreck. It mentioned that Seavey had been found shot dead, floating under Union Wharf. Which doesn’t jibe with the assumption that he went down with his ship.”

  “I didn’t realize anyone thought that.”

  It occurred to her that the only person who did think that was his ghost. “I’d heard a rumor to that effect,” she answered vaguely. “I went out to the Historical Society this afternoon and checked for more articles around July and August 1893, to see if I could find a list of victims or survivors from the shipwreck. I found two articles about the Henrietta Dale running aground, plus a list of six survivors—the captain, three crew members, Seavey, and a woman.” She paused. “Lloyd’s didn’t list survivors in their records, did they? It would be nice to corroborate the locally generated list.”

  “Sometimes, but their lists were notoriously incomplete, as you might imagine,” Bob replied. He pulled the book out from under the marine map and checked. “Nope—nothing.” He returned it to the shelf. “So how are you going to go about figuring out if Holt had the coordinates of the shipwreck?”

  She thought about it, then sighed. “I can always ask the gardener. She might have seen him out at the lighthouse.”

  Bob gave her a slight smile. “Well, damn. Why didn’t I think of that?”

  * * *

  MINUTES later, she was back on the road and headed for Holt’s house on the south side of town. If she remembered correctly, he lived ten minutes outside of the city limits in an area of modest homes on larger, partially wooded lots. According to Darcy, the area was more reasonably priced in comparison to other Port Chatham real estate because of its being located downwind from the local paper pulp mill. Jordan had caught a whiff of the fumes a few times as she drove around town, and they reminded her of rather potent rotten eggs. Darcy assured her that after living in town for a while, she’d become used to the odor, but Jordan wasn’t yet convinced.

  A few weeks ago, when she’d needed answers to solve Hattie’s murder, Jase had driven her out to Holt’s house so that she could ask about family papers. Holt had let them rummage through the boxes in his attic—a grim task, given the state of his housekeeping—to find what she needed. With any luck, she could still remember that trip well enough to find his house.

  After a couple of wrong turns and subsequent backtracking, she spied the driveway to his run-down rambler among the trees and turned in. Holt’s pickup was absent, probably still parked wherever he’d left it the night of his murder, but a dark-colored sedan sat in the driveway. Good. As she’d hoped, one of Holt’s relatives was at the house, probably packing up the dead man’s belongings. She’d just drop off the papers with a quick explanation, advise the person to have them assessed by the Historical Society or an archivist to determine their value, then be on her way. And if she happened to see what looked like Seavey’s ledger and files sitting around in plain sight, she might take a peek at them … If they weren’t in the hotel suite, Holt had to have done something with them. The question was, what?

  She pulled alongside the sedan and turned off the Prius. Grabbing the packet of original documents, she climbed out of the car, letting Malachi out for a romp in the adjacent woods. Since her last visit, Holt hadn’t seen fit to fix any of the house’s maintenance problems—the roof was still covered with moss and tree detritus, the cement steps leading to the porch were still cracked. The front door was closed—a feat, since it was warped from moisture. She couldn’t hear any sounds coming from inside. Climbing the three uneven cement steps, she gingerly crossed rotten porch boards, looking for a doorbell. Finding none, she rapped on the door.

  No one responded.

  Frowning, she jumped off the porch and climbed through the shrubbery along the foundation to peer in the living room window, but she couldn’t see anyone.

  Well, damn. She couldn’t very well leave the papers propped up against the front door in the hope that someone would eventually find them. They were historical documents, and as such, precious and fragile. Too much humidity, which the Pacific Northwest had in abundance, would ruin the old pages within hours.

  She walked back up the steps and tried the front doorknob. It turned freely; the door swung inward. Putting her hand on it, she called, “Anyone home? Hello?”

  Silence.

  The living room looked even messier than the last time she’d seen it, and that was saying something. Shaking her head, she shoved the door open and was crossing the threshold when it slammed back into her. Thinking the wind had somehow caught it, she put up a hand to keep it from hitting her in the face.

  The door kept coming, and she realized someone had to be pushing it from behind.

  “Hey!” she said crankily, shoving back with her shoulder. “What—”

  The door flew open and a figure wearing a dark hoodie rushed right at her, slamming into her with both hands. In an instant, she and the documents were airborne, flying backward. She landed hard on her back, sliding down the cement steps. The back of her skull connected with something equally immovable.

  The intruder leapt over her, landing in the gravel walkway behind her. She heard the sound of running footsteps, then the roar of a car engine and Malachi’s frantic barking.

  Chapter 8

  THE jerk—whoever he was—had knocked the breath out of her.

  Malachi whined and licked her face. “It’s okay, boy. I’m all right,” she whispered, trying to drag air into her lungs.

  She lay without moving, listening for any sound that someone might still be lurking. After a couple of minutes, she realized that if he had been, Malachi would still be going crazy. “Did you scare him off, boy?”

  “Raaaaooo.”

  “Good. I hope you also took a very big chunk out of him.”

  He growled his agreement, then anxiously nudged her with his nose.

  It took her a moment to figure out that most of her skewed perspective came not from brain damage, but from the fact that she was lying almost upside down, angled down the steps. She reached into her jeans pocket for her cellphone and held it up to her face so that she could punch buttons on the display.

  “Where are you?” she asked when Darcy answered.

  “Just coming up to Holt’s place with the crime-scene technicians.”

  “How convenie
nt.” The phone went silent long enough that Jordan wondered if she’d lost the connection. Then she heard the crunch of gravel as vehicles turned into the driveway.

  “Do I want to know?” Darcy asked finally.

  “Probably not. Did a dark sedan come flying past you just now?”

  “No, why?”

  Malachi started barking directly above Jordan’s head. “Arrrgh!” Jordan dropped the phone and clapped her hands over her ears. She couldn’t decide which hurt worse, the loud noise or the movement caused by touching her skull.

  A car door slammed, unhurried footsteps crunched the gravel, then Darcy knelt by her head. Upside down, they gazed at each other. “Am I to assume you aren’t in this position on purpose?” Darcy asked tartly.

  “Someone was inside the house,” Jordan explained. She managed to scrunch around, rolling sideways down the steps.

  Darcy gripped her under her arms and hauled her to her feet, then helped her brush dirt and leaves off her clothes. “I’m guessing whoever it was, wasn’t thrilled to see you. What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Returning the family documents. You know, Seavey’s papers that I borrowed from Holt and never got back to him? They’re part of the estate, and I thought Holt’s relatives would want them right away.” Jordan winced as she gingerly felt the back of her skull, her hand encountering something wet and sticky.

  Darcy brushed her fingers aside and looked for herself. “Yuck. A smashed slug”—she pulled it out of Jordan’s hair—“a scratch and a nice goose egg. Most of the sticky stuff is blood. Head wounds bleed a lot, but it’s already stopped. You’ll live,” she pronounced. She waved the crime-scene techs inside, then turned back to Jordan. “Holt doesn’t have any relatives in the area. In fact, we haven’t been able to locate any at all yet. Did you get a good look at your assailant?”

  Jordan shook her head, then instantly regretted it. “He shoved me backward down the steps, then drove away in the car.” She frowned. “I must have hit my head when I fell.”