Ghost Ship: A Port Chatham Mystery (14 page)

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 the
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?”

*   *   *

M
INUTES
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

T
HE
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 convenient.” 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.”

“What did the car look like?”

“Dark. A sedan. I don’t know what kind.”

“Color? License plate number?” When she drew a blank, Darcy looked disgusted. “You mean you can’t tell me
anything
about it, other than it was dark?”

“Well it’s not like I drove up thinking, ‘Hey, that looks like a villain’s car, so I’m going to write down the license number and commit its description to memory,’ ” she grumbled. “It was either blue or black, maybe midsized, and it might have had four doors.”

Taking a careful step into the grass, she tried to bend over to pick up some of Seavey’s papers that had landed there, but her head wasn’t having any of it. She must have hit it fairly hard.

Darcy made a rude noise and started picking up papers and handing them to her. “Unbelievable. Holt Stilwell was just murdered, and you thought it was safe to come waltzing out to his house all by yourself?”

“I do not
waltz
. I told you, I figured his relatives might be here.” Jordan flipped pages this way and that, trying to arrange them into some semblance of order. “You know, packing up his stuff, figuring out what he had that would be part of his estate. I didn’t feel right hanging onto family papers, and I had no idea there weren’t any other Stilwells around. How could I?”

“You still should have thought before coming out here alone,” Darcy retorted, holding out more crumpled pages. “What if the person you ran into was the murderer?”

“It’s the middle of the day. And Holt was murdered miles from here,” Jordan reasoned.

“You don’t know that for certain.”

“Besides, what kind of murderer—or burglar—breaks into a house in broad daylight, leaving his car parked in plain sight in the driveway?”

“Hmmph.”

“Honestly, it never occurred to me that I would be in danger. I planned to drop off the papers, then head home. If someone had answered the door when I knocked, I wouldn’t have even tried to go inside.”

“So you can’t describe the car
or
your assailant. What about general height and build? Clothing? Even a fleeting impression?”

“If I go by how strong he was, since he pushed me hard enough to make me fly backward, whoever it was participates regularly in pro wrestling.”

“Right.” Darcy said it sourly.

Jordan stopped straightening pages and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to conjure up an image of who she’d seen. “A few inches taller than me, so maybe just under six feet? He was moving fast, and I didn’t have any contact with his body, just his hands, which seemed big but not overly so.”

“He pushed you?”

“Yeah.”

“We’ll get one of the techs to use UV light on you to see if they can raise the beginning of any bruises. You may have handprints on you.”

“That sounds slightly kinky.”

Darcy rolled her eyes. “Okay, what else? Clothes? Hair? Coloring?”

“Jeans and a hoodie—black, I think. I couldn’t see either hair or coloring, though I remember a pale glimpse of his face.”

“So we’ve got an assailant of unknown build and weight, average height, unknown coloring, and wearing a hoodie and jeans. Just great.” Darcy shook her head. “Real helpful.”

Jordan had a thought. “Check Malachi—I heard him barking right after I fell; he might have gotten in a bite. And if he did, there might be bits of fabric, or even DNA, caught between his teeth, right?”

Darcy yelled for a technician. It took him several minutes to convince Malachi to let a stranger look inside his mouth. Nothing.

Jordan fed him a treat for the indignity he had to suffer, then cocked her head in the direction of the house. She could see the other crime-scene techs inside, processing the living room. “So do you think my attacker was burglarizing the place?”

Darcy shrugged. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to tell. It was always a filthy mess; now, it’s just messier.”

“Actually, I was here fairly recently—I might remember a few items.”

“Are your prints in the system? Did Drake ever fingerprint you during the investigation down in California?” Darcy asked, referring to the LAPD detective who’d been convinced Jordan was guilty of her husband’s murder.

“No, why?”

“Because if I let you inside, I’ll need to take your prints for elimination purposes. I don’t necessarily have to put them in the system, but there’s always a chance they’d end up there. Are you okay with that?”

Jordan shrugged. “Sure. I touched the handle and the front panel of the door, so you probably should take my prints anyway.”

“Just be careful not to touch anything unnecessarily, okay?”

Together, they climbed the front steps and walked into the living room. Furniture had been tossed, tables overturned. But a flat-panel television still hung on the wall over the fireplace, which was filled with empty beer cans and looked as if it hadn’t been used in decades.

Jordan nodded in the direction of the television. “I’d say that’s a pretty good indication that the person’s motive wasn’t robbery. Aren’t those worth over a thousand?”

“Yeah,” Darcy replied, studying the room. “Look around—was it this messy the last time you were here?”

Jordan frowned. “No. There were a few pizza boxes piled up on the coffee table with some empty beer bottles, and of course there was dust everywhere, but this mess looks more … 
methodical
. Like someone went through the room and flipped every cushion, moved every picture, opened every drawer. And it looks like he was in a real hurry, since nothing was properly replaced.”

“Yeah, I agree.” Darcy was silent while she looked the room over a second time. “Or else, he didn’t care if he straightened up behind himself.”

Jordan glanced around, hoping to spy the papers Holt had lifted from the hotel. She caught Darcy watching her with one eyebrow raised. Avoiding her gaze, Jordan headed for the bedroom and its adjacent bathroom.

The bed was unmade, the sheets half pulled off. The closet doors stood ajar, hanging clothes shoved to one end of the rack. No papers on the nightstand, either.

Toiletries sat haphazardly on the bathroom counter, along with substances Jordan didn’t want to examine too closely, and the medicine cabinet door hung open. The toilet seat was up and smelled of urine. Struck by a thought, she headed over to look inside the closet to confirm her suspicions. “It doesn’t look like a woman has been living here, right? No clothes in the closet except a man’s, no women’s shampoo, makeup, et cetera, in the bathroom.”

“Maybe he always went to her house,” Darcy suggested. “Women typically like to spend the night at their place, not at a guy’s.”

She was right. Jordan had gotten as far as thinking about the
possibility
of spending the night with Jase, but she’d always been stopped—at least, partially—by the lack of privacy at her home. And whenever she thought about going to his place instead, she hadn’t been ready to take a step that big. It seemed somehow like more of a commitment, and she was betting any woman who was picking up subliminally on Holt’s lack of respect would have instinctively felt the same way.

“Well, whoever came through here, he was looking for something,” she concluded.

“I wonder what?” Darcy mused, still studying the room.

Jordan had an idea or two, but she figured it would be better to mention them after she’d poured a couple of glasses of wine down Darcy’s throat at the pub. “So if it wasn’t a burglar and it wasn’t an ex-girlfriend picking up her belongings, …”

“It was probably the same person who murdered Holt,” Darcy confirmed bluntly, finishing Jordan’s thought.

How pleasant—she’d probably just been assaulted by a killer. It was a good thing Malachi had been with her to scare him off. From now on, the dog could have as much organic food as he wanted.

*   *   *

A
FTER
making a plan with Darcy to meet later at the pub, Jordan dropped by home to see if she could catch up with Charlotte. She needed to ask her some questions about her relationship with Jesse Canby. Now that Jordan had thought about it, she was fairly certain Charlotte had started to say something the night before about what Michael Seavey had been up to in 1893.

Parking at the curb in front of Longren House, she let Malachi out of the back of the Prius and crossed the front lawn to climb the porch steps. Inside the door, a tall vase crammed with a jumble of long-stemmed, red roses sat on a small side table. Roses? She searched her brain. Jase, perhaps? It certainly didn’t seem like something he’d do out of the blue, but what girl didn’t go all instantly mushy at the sight of red roses? Feeling a thrill of pleasure at the unexpected gift, Jordan crossed the entry and leaned over to sniff them while she looked for the florist’s card. Petals dropped onto the table in a shower; evidently the flowers had been bruised during transport by a careless delivery person.

“The roses are from Michael,” Hattie said from behind her. “Wasn’t it a nice gesture?”

Jordan stopped hunting for the card, noting Hattie’s blush. Okay, so
not
from Jase, but from a ghost. That explained the slight damage and messy arrangement. She straightened some of the stems, allowing herself a moment to swallow her disappointment.

“You don’t happen to know which florist he ripped off, do you?” she asked, trying not to sound cranky. “So that I can go by and pay them for the flowers?”

“Ripped off?”

Jordan rephrased. “Which florist he stole the roses from.”

“It’s the thought that counts,” Hattie said loyally.

“For the shop owner trying to run a profitable business, not so much.” Jordan paused, making a connection from her reading earlier. “Do you have a middle name?”

“Why, yes,” Hattie replied, looking perplexed by the question. “Dale.”

“Flowers!” Charlotte floated down the hallway from the kitchen. “Oh, Hattie!”

Frank appeared in the library doorway. “The man has hidden motives.” His expression was grim.

“Oh, I don’t think this one is very hidden,” Jordan replied before Hattie could protest.

“Certainly not!” Charlotte agreed. “He really loves Hattie!”

Frank folded his arms. “I have no doubt Seavey wants more from Hattie than her affections. He must suspect she still has assets he can get hold of, or that perhaps she can provide him a certain social legitimacy with others in our community.” He shrugged. “Sending flowers is a brazen attempt to manipulate her affections.”

Wishing to avoid another ghostly squabble, Jordan headed down the hall to the kitchen. “You might want to rethink that strategy,” she hinted at him as she passed. “Women love flowers.”

Frank merely snorted.

She heard simultaneous gasps from behind her and turned back. Hattie and Charlotte were clutching each other, their mouths agape, their expressions full of fear. “What?” she asked them.

“Your clothing is torn, and smeared with dirt and debris,” Hattie said faintly.

“And your hair has
blood
in it!” Charlotte cried. She circled the stairwell twice at ceiling height, then vanished in a puff of particles.