Seawitch by Kat Richardson Read Free Book Online Page B

and find out who was really on board. Those cabins didn’t look like accommodations for two couples and a single crewman. All four of the cabins had been occupied and more than one of the crew cabins looked used.”
    Solis cocked his head. “Only one had the symbols in it.”
    “But it wasn’t the only crew cabin that had been used, so it sounds like Mrs. Starrett was wrong about who was on board.”
    “Gary Fielding would have used one. But, yes, that does leave the other. . . .”
    “It seems to me,” I added, “that the insurance company has come to the late and erroneous conclusion that Mrs. Starrett and Mrs. Carson may have colluded to get rid of the boat with their husbands on board so they could enjoy their . . . friendship in peace. How they would even manage that, I don’t know.”
    “It is also at odds with Mrs. Starrett’s statements about her friend and the timing of her death. I’m as disinclined to credit that as you are.”
    “Agreed. Even without the complication of Odile’s death, a conspiracy to sink the boat would have required help from someone on board, which wouldn’t include either husband or the ladies they brought with them.”
    “Leaving Fielding.”
    I nodded. “But he’s apparently as dead as the rest, and what’s the profit in scuttling a ship if you drown in it?”
    “Very small.” Solis agreed. “Perhaps we should talk to the original captain, Reeve, about his late protégé. . . .”
    It shouldn’t have taken very long to find Reeve—I did have his address in the file—but it proved to be out-of-date and we had to look for him. Or, rather, I volunteered to do some computer work to find him while Solis took the log book to a documents expert the cops contracted with for this kind of problem.
    We finally discovered John Reeve in a retirement village in Des Moines—a cliffside town on the Sound south of the airport but far enough north of Tacoma’s Poverty Bay to be free of the paper-mill stink of the mud flats at low tide. The locals pronounced the town’s name with the S at the end and sometimes in the middle, too. Des Moines sprawled along the shore in a wedge that was honed to a point by the westward swing of Interstate 5 near Saltwater State Park on the south end of the bluffs. On Zenith—the tallest ridge overlooking the sea and right in the middle of Des Moines—stood a shining edifice called Landmark; it looked like a grand country estate from an English period film, but in fact it was a fancy Masonic retirement home. John Reeve had lived there for a while, but he had moved when the market crashed and now lived in a humble one-story duplex in a seniors’ complex of identical duplexes on looping private streets on the north side of town, within walking distance from the beach and the Des Moines marina.
    The seaside town wasn’t pretentiously quaint yet, but it was working on it, keeping the buildings short and widening the sidewalks near the boardwalk and municipal marina to encourage foot traffic to the little commercial district along Marine View Drive. The east side, near the freeway, was nowhere near as picturesque as the west side. Reeve’s home was kind of the same: cute on the outside and much less charming inside.
    It was just after three o’clock as we pulled up in front of the building. I thought it looked like the suburban equivalent of a hobbit’s house: low and rambling with arched window frames and doorframes and green stucco that blended into the landscaping. The plants in the yard were just a little wild and seemed to have been miniaturized in some fashion, not to bonsai tiny, but to Kincaid-cottage cute. Straight cement walkways to each door slightly ruined the effect, but I thought it was probably a concession to canes, walkers, and wheelchairs. There was no front stoop in front of Reeve’s door; the porch was just a slightly sloped cement rectangle. A cast-concrete figure of a semireclining mermaid sat on one corner of the pad,