The She (25 page)

We followed dark, narrow stairs up into the galley, a huge kitchen with a very long wood table that was bolted to the floor. Emmett illuminated the walls, cabinets, floor and ceiling with the fluorescent hanging lanterns he'd picked up off the deck, and I took one. I thought I might be deluged with memories, but nothing came except gray doors.

Six rows of five small cabinets were still clamped shut on the back wall, where everything had been kept—from paper plates to canned goods to the coffeemaket I yanked open a few cabinets, saw that things like fry pans were still in their spots, but that anything like salt and pepper and food had been removed, probably anything that would spoil. The room had always been kept spotless, with nothing out of place, because in rough seas Dad hadn't wanted anything to roll. It still looked basically the same, except everything, including the thick little portholes, was covered with a layer of grimy dust.

"What did they do with the cargo?" Mr. Church asked.

"The cargo in the hold was removed by the DEA," Emmett said.

"What about the cargo on the deck? Were the containers filled also?"

"The report says the containers had been loosened, the cargo pushed over by the crew."

"Why? If they were trying to sink the boat, wouldn't the added weight be instrumental?"

"Not in this case. There were decent winds, a hope for decent waves. The weight would have helped stabilize the
Goliath
rather than give it a list."

"Interesting," was all he said.

We went back into the crew's quarters, and I moved immediately to the upper bunk in the far right corner, The beds were actually still made in that squared-off, quarter-flipping style I remembered Dad having taught me, except the pillows were missing. They were all in a pile in the corner and when I picked one up, a terrible smell hit me. Most of the pillowcases had turned black with mold. I heard a thump and saw that Mr. Church had undamped a drawer and pulled it out.

"The crew left their belongings," he muttered.

"Yes," Emmett said. Mr. Church just looked at him until he added, "They left enough to make it look like an accident. We really don't know what they took with them, do we?"

"No, we don't."

Mr. Church's answer rang like a comeback line, though I couldn't follow anything. I had never liked being in this room. The bunk room was weird. It was ventilated with fans and had only two little portholes, so it had always been dark and stuffy. At the moment, I couldn't breathe because of the smell. I shot one last look to that back bunk. I knew I had slept there probably a hundred nights in my childhood, but again, it was a fact, not a memory of sights and sounds. I looked at it through a gray film in my head that seemed as immovable as steel. Finally, we took another flight of stairs and went into Dad's quarters.

I thought I would get a decent breath of
ait,
because his office had windows on three sides. But the musty smell in here was overpowering, some combination of dust and mold and old papers.

"What
is
that smell?" I finally asked, covering my nose with my hand.

"Just mold," Emmett said, rubbing the back of my hair with his free hand. "It's particularly strong in here because of the files. The
Goliath
floated around in a rainstorm for almost twenty-four hours, and somebody had broken the starboard windows, which meant everything got soaked, including the bottom drawer of that file cabinet." He pointed from the cabinet to a mountain of paper in a corner that now looked to be all molded together by dried seawater. It must have been every paper that had been loose in the room, and someone had taken the time to either sweep them or kick them into that cornet The rug on the floor seemed to be the biggest culprit of the smell. I had remembered it being different shades of red and blue. Now it was completely black.

"Somebody broke the windows?" Mr. Church asked, and I could detect an overly casual tone that Emmett also must have caught.

"Yes,
somebody.
If the sea had done it, by pouring
in
and breaking the windows, there would have been glass all over the floot DEA says the windows were broken
outward.
It appears that somebody wasn't thinking through the details."

Mr. Church rolled his eyes, and I couldn't tell whether it was from having a different theory or frustration from
not
having another theory. I only saw that he did it as he turned away from Emmett, so Emmett wouldn't see it.

I froze, catching sight of my dad's captain's prayer It was still bolted to the wall but had turned some horrid combination of pale green and black around the lettering. Hie lettering itself had been black, and it kind of branched outward into the pale green mold with little black mold fingers. The frame was rusted. It was disgusting, seeing the words of a good-luck charm hundreds of years old turned moldy and mutated, like some joke of the sea.

My neck bobbed around to Mr. Church, to see what he was thinking about all of this. He was staring at the same thing, and when he saw me taking in his look of horror; his eyes shot to the floor.

"Can we look in the engine room?" he asked softly, grabbing my arm, pulling me toward the door.

Emmett shrugged and moved past us. "Sure. Just be advised that the smell down there is overpowering. It was found half flooded. I've only been down there once—four years ago when I found out about this."

"You didn't know about this until four years ago?" I asked.

"When I turned twenty-one and was considered a legal adult, I approached the DEA myself. I just wanted to know if they'd gotten together a file on Mom and Dad like they'd gotten on Connor Riley. They had things like backgrounds on the crew but no further theories, being that the case was closed when the
Sanskrit
foundered. But that's when I found out about the
Goliath.
"

I followed him down the narrow spiral staircases into the lowest level of the vessel. Grey was behind me, acting like the invisible person. I grabbed her hand, but her fingers fell limp between mine, and I didn't have a whole lot of strength to grip them with, to give her any sense of reassurance.

Emmett held his lantern high, and so did Mr. Church. He walked down one set of plankings and back up the other looking at the valves, I guess.

"So they only opened two valves. Why not all of them?"

"I don't know."

Church looked at Emmett, and this stare-off as he got closer made me think for some reason that Church was going to yell. But he got right up in Emmett's face and spoke kind of softly.

"Emmett, we both know there are ways for valves to open other than by human hands. For one thing, they break under certain types of pressure—"

"That's not the opinion of the experts."

"We both know that when a ship undergoes a trauma, the pilothouse windows needn't break. If the DEA conversed a little better with the Coast Guard, they would also know that windows blow
out
if a ship is traumatized at its stern."

Emmett smiled at his shoes, too smugly, too patiently, I thought.

"We both know that crew members cutting down antennas is about as ridiculous as them hanging their underwear from the flagpole."

"There is no other explanation!" Emmett hollered, finally. Somehow it made me feel good. Like maybe he was feeling threatened.

This time Mr. Church smiled smugly, patiently.

"Look!" Emmett pointed over his head. "The report is upstairs. Read it. There were no gale warnings that night! There was hardly any weather! There was nothing big enough to wipe the crew off the deck ... or blow
out
the windows in the captain's quarters!"

"You're right," Church agreed. "There was only a little weather. To assume that some dark force seized the
Goliath
is ridiculous. To assume that a crew chose to cut antennas in a sleet storm, when they could have better spent their time opening valves below the waterline, is also ridiculous. Eeeny, meeny, miney, moe."

"Church, there is no way you are ever ever going to find a reliable report, in this part of the world or any other of giant tentacles coming out of the water! The only tidal wave ever recorded on the Atlantic was in the Netherlands! You can check with the Coast Guard if you think I'm too close-minded! They don't have any such reports either!"

"There are other facts that don't fit into our ideas these days, and so they've been conveniently altered to fit those ideas. And if you didn't know any better you'd have to admit they've been discarded because they would support the theory of a dark force existing over the water."

"Church"—Emmett moved over to me, stuck a hand on my arm, as if to protect me from him—"you are one sick individual. I want you to stay away from my brother."

The man must have developed some thick skin against being humiliated, I decided. He looked no more upset by Emmett than he had by me earlier that day.

"Your opinion of my mental faculties is irrelevant," he said quietly, his finger spinning circles in the air as if he were thinking of something concerning the whole boat. "There is every possible indication, every bit of evidence, pointing to an alternative notion—broken antennas, blown-out portholes, broken valves, the smell of mold you'd hardly pick up from rain seepage—that this boat has been rolled."

Rolled.
I felt the hair stand straight up on my arms as it sunk in what the smell and the rust and the mold inside here actually meant.
Rolled
was a term that meant a boat did a complete three-sixty in the water coming to stand upright again.

"You don't have to interject the story with a crew abandoning a boat and cutting down antennas with a butcher knife if you could allow yourself to believe in unsolved mysteries of the deep—"

"I like evidence, Edwin. Can you forgive me for that?" Emmett snapped. "I've never seen a Coast Guard report of ... of a she-devil rising out of the water and trying to suck boats down, rolling huge ships. I'm sorry!"

"Would you believe one even if you saw it?"

Emmett just stood there staring.

"Because I think you're engaged in a circular argument. You no longer believe in such things; therefore, they can't be true."

"I
know
there are no sightings of anything the least bit weird off the coast of South Jersey—anything that could even be mistaken for a monster or a She. I checked with the Coast Guard. Their records go back to nineteen-eighteen."

Church laughed. "No records? Why, there have been dozens of such reports."

Emmett pushed me backward and stood between me and Church with his back to me, laughing. "You're talking about those childish sea-monster stories that Dad used to read Evan? Out of those cheesy, locally printed paperbacks?"

"Yes! And I beg to differ about the cheesy paperbacks. They're not published by the University Press, but someone was taking the time to chronicle honest sightings by hardworking people—"

"'Honest sightings'! You're talking about a bunch of rum-head old fishermen, with half their teeth gone out of their heads, talking about witches and dragons!"

"Which is what it looked like to them! And who are you to call those people feeble! What in hell gives you the wherewithal to be so arrogant, you presumptuous brat! Did you have to sink your father's wisdom with his body?"

"Whoa!" I jumped in the middle of them, a hand on each chest, and put on the same cool voice I used to get out of trouble in school, only with a lot more force. Nobody was getting slugged on my mom and dad's boat. "Stop it, now! Mr. Church, if you hit my brother I will have to defend him, which wouldn't make me too happy right now. Nobody is hitting anybody, nobody is calling names, not on this ship. We're going to figure this out."

Mr. Church backed up. He spoke very softly again, almost from the doorway. "Emmett, in my early years I really wanted my PhD, to really know things, to be a doctor of something. Do you know why I kept quitting at the master's level?"

"I would assume your methodology was the problem."

"
My
methodology. I have never called anything a fact that was not. You people, you build your facts on theories, and whatever doesn't meet
those particular
theories is dismissed as nonfactual. Where do you get off? The DEA has a theory. You stack up the facts a certain way and some of them seem to fit—if you dismiss the ones that don't. I'm not saying your brother is completely correct about the
Goliath
being hit by a wave.
I don't know.
But I do know this. He never said to me that he saw the
Goliath
sink to the bottom when he had his second sight. He said he saw it tossed. He never mentioned tonight anything about sensing the
Goliath.
I don't think any mention of the vessel ever came out of his mouth. I had the whole drive over here to remember correctly what he did say tonight. He
said
he sensed the presence of your parents."

"So? You think some fang-bearing superwitch came along, swept my parents off the deck, and ate them? Spit out their bones as an afterthought? Is that it, Edwin?"

"Don't be vulgar. It won't diminish the truth."

"The
truth?
"

"Yes. The truth is that this boat could have been
rolled
by either a giant wave or a force of nature that, for whatever reason, didn't quite suck it under and keep it there."

"You have absolutely no way of proving anything so ... fantastic," Emmett said.

"Prove I'm wrong," Mr. Church replied. "I mean, really, really
prove
I'm wrong. You know damn well you haven't done it yet. You can fool those little freshman undergraduates you teach, but you can't fool me."

"How
dare
you."

"How dare
I
?"

I just rubbed my eyes with my fingers, muttering something like, "Jesus Christ. I'm going home to sleep. Come on, Grey."

I pulled her along by the hand, back up four flights of stairs, all the while looking for the right images as to what kind of a force could roll a vessel this steely and this massive all the way around under the water, While I was walking from the bowels to the deck, images of waves and whirlpools got dim, then faded altogether; I could no longer conceive of anything on the Atlantic that massive. My imagination refused to budge. I tried once again to force my brain to my brother's way of perceiving what had happened, because, like he kept saying, the alternatives were clearly impossible.