Ghost Ship: A Port Chatham Mystery by P. J. Alderman Read Free Book Online Page B

“There’ve been stacks of books written about famous phantom ships down through history. Trust me, you’re in good company.”
    She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, the ‘good’ company of the whack jobs who write those kinds of books.”
    “ ‘Whack jobs’ being, of course, another term reviled by the psychiatric community?” Darcy wondered out loud.
    Jordan shot her a dirty look.
    “At least it doesn’t sound as if the ship had it in for you—some of them can be pretty malevolent,” Bob said.
    “Gee, that’s nice to know.” Jordan seized the bottle of Cuervo Gold from Jase, poured herself a shot, chugged it, then started coughing.
    “Careful there.” Jase pounded a fist between her shoulder blades. “What, exactly, did you see?”
    “An old-fashioned sailing ship, dammit!” she croaked, then paused. “Okay, maybe I didn’t see a lot of crew, but I heard them singing. And the light was a little weird, but I’m sure that was just because of the fog, right? You can’t convince me she wasn’t real .”
    Everyone looked amused.
    Jordan turned back to Bob. “All kinds of tall ships are supposedly sailing into port right now, because of the Wooden Boat Festival, right? Rationally speaking , it could’ve been one of those.”
    “Actually, only a few have shown up so far—we’re over a month out from the festival. And a lot of the boats that enter the festival are small craft.”
    “Okay, okay.” She paced back and forth in the six square feet of space she had behind the bar. “Wait—we’ve established that the gardener saw the ship, too.”
    “Which stands to reason, since she’s the ghost of one of the rescue party that night back in 1893,” Tom said.
    “ If she’s a ghost,” Jordan corrected him stubbornly. “And why the hell do you think it makes sense that a ghost would see a ghost ship ?”
    “Why do ghosts see other ghosts?” Jase asked, maddeningly logical.
    Jordan glared.
    “Plus,” Tom said, “even if I go with your theory that the gardener isn’t a ghost—which I don’t, by the way—a lot of the sightings of phantom ships throughout history have been by more than one person, sometimes entire groups of people.”
    Jordan resumed her pacing. “I suppose it’s possible I have a brain tumor.” She halted. “Yes, that’s it! I really am imagining all of this. There are all kinds of weird stories about people believing in entire alternate universes because of pressure on parts of their brains from a growing malignant brain tumor. Now that works for me.”
    “If a tumor was to blame, what you see would have no correlation to actual historical events,” Darcy pointed out pragmatically.
    “She’s right,” Jase said. “You see things, then you do the research and find out they existed.”
    But Jordan refused to concede the point. “Maybe I’m overhearing a few historically accurate tidbits, then my tumor embellishes what I heard, then I do the research.”
    “You can’t seriously tell me you would prefer to have a brain tumor rather than see ghosts and ghost ships.” Darcy said it carefully.
    “A girl can dream.”
    Darcy shook her head. “Sarcasm.”
    “You aren’t alone in this, you know,” Bob assured Jordan. “There have been dozens of sightings of ghost ships.”
    “But why me?”
    They all looked at her as if the answer was obvious.
    “I meant, why me, why now ? If there have been dozens of these sightings, why hasn’t anyone else sighted this ship over the years?”
    “Maybe you’re supposed to investigate what happened that night?” Tom speculated.
    “No, wait—she does have a point,” Jase said. “The timing of the sighting appears to be unexplained. How would any spectral entities know that she’d be hiking today, or that she’d put two and two together, for that matter?”
    “Oh, I don’t know,” Darcy mused. “I’d assume that along with Jordan’s powers comes some kind of connection with the spectral entities, such that they’d know