FORTY-SIX

 

 

Miles and Floyd caught the first steamer to Friday Harbor the next morning—which that day happened to be a vessel called the SS Rhododendron, running an irregular route that included stops at Langley and Coupeville on Whidbey Island. It was a longer ride, but would still get them to Friday Harbor a full hour before the later-departing Bangor. As always, Floyd sat facing an inner wall and tried to imagine that he was somewhere else.

They made good time as far as Coupeville. But their luck ran out with the steamer entering a dense fogbank as it skirted Swinomish tribal waters and began its turn westward toward the Juan de Fuca Strait. A sudden softening of the engine noise got both men's attention as the captain slowed the vessel down.

"Fog," Floyd muttered, having allowed himself a brief and fearful glance over his shoulder and out the window. "Holy hell."

It was the worst possible spot to hit fog, as they were approaching Deception Pass—a treacherous, narrow channel in which countless vessels had wrecked throughout the years. So named by the great British explorer George Vancouver himself, it was barely 400 feet wide, lined on both sides with jagged cliffs and submerged reefs. The ever-dark, ever-cold ebb and flood tides raced through it with such speed that there were visible rapids, roiling eddies, and whirlpools one might expect to see on a wild river pouring out of the Cascade Mountains. In short, Deception Pass could be a challenge to navigate even on a clear day.

Miles's wounded skull still throbbed with a pain made worse by the deep vibrations of the ship's engines. He was still light-headed, and his mind whirled with dark and anxious thoughts of the two young Chinese girls whose corpses awaited their examination, of who might have sent the men who'd attacked them in Seattle, of the imminent danger of a foggy passage through Deception Pass, and of Marion's looming departure to New York. His heart suddenly pounding, he felt an overwhelming need for fresh air. He rose, slow and ponderous, to his feet, then made his way to the nearest door to the outside deck, leaving a visibly terrified Floyd doubled over on a bench with his hands clasped over the back of his head, no doubt praying for a swift end to their predicament.

The steamer had slowed to a crawl, with crewmen taking up lookout positions on either side of the bow and flying bridge. The captain began to sound the ship's whistle every twenty or thirty seconds. Miles knew that in doing so, a captain who was familiar with the route could, in theory, determine his position through echolocation. He also knew that, in general, Puget Sound steamship captains were renowned for their great skill in navigating blind. But echolocation wasn't an exact science—given variations in how echoes bounced off cliffs, low shorelines, trees, and whatnot—and ships trying to navigate by it were wrecked in the Pacific Northwest every year.

The whistle blew and Miles counted in his head—one, two, three—knowing that sound travelled at just over 1,000 feet per second at sea level, so that an echo that took two seconds to return meant the shore was roughly 1,000 feet away. So far, so good—the echo took over three seconds to bounce back. But as they steamed on, the echoes came back fast and faster. Two seconds. A second and a half. Miles strained his eyes to see through the dense fog, but couldn't make out a thing through the wall of white. That meant the crewmen couldn't either.

All at once, Miles realized that he'd completely lost his bearings. The vessel could be heading north, south, east, or west—toward a beach, a reef, or open water. He had no idea. It was an unnerving sensation, and he realized, with a surge of despondency, that it more or less mirrored how he felt about the investigation. It seemed everything that happened—every witness interview they conducted, every scrap of evidence they found, every bit of news they received—brought confusion instead of clarity. No answers. Only more questions.

In a brief telephone conversation with Bill that morning, he'd come to learn that the two dead Chinese girls had washed ashore at Hanbury Point, near Roche Harbor and just across Haro Strait from D'Arcy Island. According to Bill, Dr. Boren's initial examination of the bodies indicated that they'd been in the water for several days. Each had been shot in the chest and had their bellies slashed open with some sort of blade.

So now they had three men and a mentally deranged child gone missing, as well as three bodies washed ashore, all in the span of a single week. It was beyond unprecedented in Miles's knowledge of San Juan Island history. It was freakish.

His focus was shattered by indecipherable shouting between an officer on the flying bridge and the port side bow lookout. The Rhododendron's whistle rang out once more, and was this time answered by an echo barely half a second later. More shouting. Louder shouting. And the vessel turned hard to starboard.

"Holy cow," Miles said out loud, grabbing for the deck railing to steady himself as the ship listed with the turn. He stared and stared, expecting to see a massive rock formation looming in the fog. A reef that might tear the hull open and sink the ship. Might end his life. Might send his remains to the cold, dark bottom to slowly decompose or serve as food for Dungeness crab. Then, as suddenly as they'd seemed destined for disaster, the ship emerged from the fogbank and into the clear air of a sunny autumn day. A small rocky island stood a couple hundred feet off the port side. And the chasm of Deception Pass itself loomed maybe half a mile off their bow. The tide was slack. The water calm. The ship's engines rumbled as she resumed her normal speed.

Realizing he'd live to see another day, Miles took a deep and satisfying breath of the crisp marine air and returned to the passenger cabin where he found Floyd still doubled over on his bench.

"Floyd, you doing alright there, buddy?"

"Yuh."

"See that little island off the port side? That Seattle-Bellingham boat, SS Kulshan, ran aground there about ten or twelve years ago. Remember? What a mess that was."

His story drew a miserable glare from Floyd.

"For that matter, you ever heard of Ben Ure or Pirate Kelly?" Miles asked.

"Nuh."

"Years ago, Ure and Kelly used that island as a base for their notorious smuggling operation. They made a fortune bringing in illegal Chinese laborers."

Miles recalled that Ure, in particular, was known to be a cold-hearted son of a bitch who would tie the Chinese up in burlap sacks, claiming it was to hide them in case they were boarded by the Coast Guard. But in truth, if pursued, Ure would just toss the bags overboard to get rid of the evidence. A few days later, the drowned Chinese, still in their burlap sacks, would start washing up on the nearby islands.

Miles gazed out the windows at Deception Pass. "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."

"Whuh?" Floyd mumbled.

"It's an expression I learned in France during the war. 'The more things change, the more they stay the same.'"