Seawitch: A Greywalker Novel Read online

  The first day at home I checked my computer for anything that really needed my attention before I stuck myself in the shower. In the backlog of weekend e-mail, I found a note from Mara and Ben Danziger. It was long and rambling, as Mara often was, and I found myself tearing up a bit over the familiar tone.

  On the subject of the dobhar-chú, I can’t say as I’m the best source. Although they’re of Irish origin I’ve never seen one and most folks say they’re long gone—by which I mean the beastly ones, not the common otter, as the term is now used. All tales agree that they are vicious and entirely animal in nature, having only the instinct and cunning of a beast and none of the reason of higher creatures. I do hope you haven’t had to tangle with them. Perhaps Ben and Brian will wish to go in search of them. . . .

  But it’s truly a pleasure to hear from you! We’ve been out in the English countryside with a circle of mad druids preparing for the summer solstice and entirely out of touch with the computer for weeks. It’s a pleasure all of its own, yet I’m missing my friends in Seattle terribly. I had not thought I would feel so much a foreigner, yet I often do—and I am no longer the cleverest witch in the room—which quite puts me back on my heels. But the news is that Ben has been offered another teaching position here in England now that the primary work on the book is done, so we are likely to remain a while longer on loan, so to speak. I shall certainly miss you and Quinton and now that the research is over, I suppose I shall pine for the excitement of investigating things. I know we had a rough patch before our parting, but that has not put an end to our friendship. I hope that in distance we may rediscover the value of compassionate friends. . . .

  If Mara meant me, I was afraid I didn’t really measure up, though I was trying. I was struck by the phrase “compassionate friends.” This was what the Guardian Beast was not and what I had been lucky enough to find in the people I was able to call friends: the Danzigers, Quinton, Solis—I found it strange to think of him as a friend, but that was surely what he was now—and Phoebe Mason, with whom I needed to do some fence mending. Friendship wasn’t always easy and I thought of Linda Starrett and her lost friend Odile and wished there was something I could have done to comfort that lonely woman. But there was nothing in my power. No amount of compassion in me would mend the hole in her life.

  It occurred to me that human compassion, as much as my ability in the Grey, was what had forced me into the role I had. I wasn’t very good at compassion—I tended more toward the hard-ass side of the line—but I had considerably more of it than the Guardian Beast. And I had friends who reminded me of the need for it. That was perhaps the real reason I was the one tasked with being the Hands of the Guardian. I’d met one other Greywalker in my life and he was not like me—a colder, harder man whose better impulses rarely broke past the shell of his bitterness. He felt little need for friends or to seek justice.

  Solis sought justice in the law, but in the end it was not the law to which we had turned in the matter of the Seawitch. We had agreed, with a pang of guilty conscience, to lay the legal blame on Gary Fielding—a negligent captain who’d been busy with his private relations with another of the crew and allowed his boat into dangerous waters on autopilot, where it had been taken up in the tidal race in the straits and swept out to sea with all aboard lost. We claimed the boat had drifted in and been returned to her berth by an odd stroke of luck and a sailor who was in the country illegally and had been deported the same day he’d dropped off the boat. Having laid the blame, we then let Fielding disappear in the fiction of an anonymous death rather than become a lab rat in a nightmare experiment—or be hounded to death by his own people. We were both a little surprised that the police and the insurance company bought the story, but in the end they did. I even got a bonus from the company for wrapping it up so quickly—which made me laugh all the way to the bank. Perhaps we would regret having tempered justice with compassion someday, but not today.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  First off, a note about the name of the marina: it really is called Shilshole Bay Marina and yes, I know how it gets mispronounced. Everyone who makes that joke thinks they’re the first to notice how easy it is to mistake that first L for a T. But in fact, it’s not a silly slip of the tongue; it’s a name the Duwamish people gave the area that means “threading a needle” and probably referred to getting your fishing canoe through the once-narrow opening between the bluffs and mudflats on the way to Salmon Bay, just east of the present-day Hiram M. Chittenden Locks. So, you can stop sniggering now and get on to the next bit.

  As always, I borrowed from real events and places as much as possible and faked it where I had to. I did my best on the Spanish for Solis’s family, but had to rely heavily on help from Spanish-speaking friends and my copy editor, who stepped in at the final stage and fixed my errors. Anything incorrect, stupid, bass-ackward, or outright wrong is all my fault. Now, on to the research!

  There are persistent tales that a ghost ship haunts the Strait of San Juan de Fuca, near the southwestern tip of Vancouver Island, and, of course, I couldn’t resist looking into them for this book. But I hadn’t really expected to find a real-life story behind them as chilling as the tale of the S.S. Valencia. Accounts of the sinking of the steamship vary in some details and can be a little contradictory and confusing but all agree it was a tragic and harrowing event. I actually played down some of the facts and historic descriptions, since the reality was so terrible as to seem surreal, with accounts of women and children freezing in the rigging and so on. The captain’s and navigator’s errors may account for some of what went wrong, but a lot was plain bad luck, fear, and bad timing—like the first landing party turning the wrong way and the crew making only one attempt to shoot a line onto the cliffs without recalibrating the gun sight and trying again. It’s true, however, that the only surviving lifeboat was lost for twenty-seven years and the big ship’s wreck remains at the foot of Pachena Point (sometimes referred to as Cape Beale or Beale’s Point in the historic records) to this day. The section of hiking trail that passes the ill-fated ship is sometimes referred to as Valencia Bluffs in honor of the wreck below. Memorials to the passengers and crew have been erected near the wreck site on Vancouver Island’s West Coast Trail and in Seattle’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery on Queen Anne Hill. You can learn more about the sinking of the Valencia online (HistoryLink.org being one of my favorite sites, though the article at Wikipedia is surprisingly good) and at the Maritime Museum of British Columbia in Victoria, B.C., where the nameplate from lifeboat number five is on display. But I’ll warn you: If you thought my descriptions went a bit too far, you may find some of the historic record stomach turning; those old-time reporters and sailors had some creepy turns of phrase.

  I didn’t make up the Graveyard of the Pacific, either. North America’s upper West Coast does, indeed, have a sinister history and there are plenty of rusting wrecks you can still visit up close or spot from a cliffside vantage point along the coasts of northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Most have less-horrifying tales attached than the Valencia, but a few are the stuff of nightmares. It’s also true that the mouth of the Columbia River is a place of danger where boats are damaged or capsized with frightening regularity. The United States Coast Guard maintains a lighthouse and rescue station on the Washington side of the river mouth at Cape Disappointment—aptly named—specifically to keep watch over the treacherous Columbia Bar. And, yes, you can see the silt plume from orbit. There’s a nice scientific explanation for why the area is so dangerous at Oregon State University’s Ocean and Air Magazine Web site (http://oceanandair.coas.oregonstate.edu/index.cfm?fuseaction=content.display&page ID=85) if you want to know more.

  All the locations mentioned in the book are real (even the obscure and tiny Neil Bay), including the islands, coves, harbors, and waterways Harper and her friends visit while aboard the Mambo Moon. The northern Puget Sound around the San Juan Islands is so well-known for its bizarre tidal currents that a special “curr
ent almanac” exists for the area that shows the directions and strength of the prevailing currents for any day or time you need. On boating trips around the islands, I’ve witnessed and been aboard light sailboats with full sail on and engine engaged standing still and even going backward in the grip of the adverse currents, which can move at greater than eight knots there. It’s a tricky place to travel by boat, but since there’s ferry service to only three of the islands, there’s no other choice if your destination lies on an island other than Vancouver, Orcas, or San Juan.Despite the perverse currents and twisting passages, the San Juans are a wonderful place to visit. Most of the area is protected as U.S. or Canadian parkland, and it’s breathtaking. The water is a deep clear blue, and small towns and villages among the islands offer delightful tourist opportunities, while the uninhabited islands are home to natural beauty and a haunting sense of isolation difficult to find so close to civilization. And there are other stories to be found in the San Juans, such as the true tale of the Pig War, how the area was discovered by a Greek sea captain but given a Spanish name, and a host of native myths and legends as well as tons of U.S. and Canadian history.

  The dobhar-chú are an Irish legend, although the word is now used, as Mara explains, to mean any ordinary river otter. I changed the beastie a bit to suit my purposes, with many apologies to the Irish. Although I’ve never seen it, I’ve been told that the tombstone attesting to the deadly attack of a dobhar-chú does exist in Conwal, in County Latrim. Anyone who can send me a verifiable photo of such a marker will have my undying thanks.

  I admit to playing fast and loose with the investigation of possible crimes in inland and international waters. The jurisdiction of such crimes is rather convoluted and arcane, so I simplified it and I hope the Coast Guard, FBI, International Maritime Organization, and everyone else involved will understand the necessity. As to the rest, I warped, snitched, borrowed, cribbed, and made things up where I couldn’t find what I wanted. And I always thought merfolk needed tentacles, so I gave them some.

  All the other characters, events, boats, crimes, and relationships included here are solely my invention and any resemblance to real stuff is unintentional.