Ghost Ship (NUMA Files 12)

“If they abandoned ship,” Gamay said, “they’d have had to leave their steamer trunks behind. But strands of pearls and diamond-studded bracelets are easier to carry.”

“I’d bring mine,” Elena agreed. “But why leave a ship that was obviously not sinking?”

“No idea,” Gamay admitted as they made their way back to the main stairwell.

“Should we go down one more level?” Elena asked.

Gamay nodded. “At the risk of sounding like my husband, let’s keep going until we get to the bottom of this.”

Down they went, checking the smaller cabins that lay on the next deck.

“Crew stations,” Elena noted, studying the cramped cabin arrangements.

“Or steerage,” Gamay said. “The Waratah was designed to carry a lot of immigrant passengers. Fortunately, she wasn’t loaded to the gills when she left Durban.”

They searched persistently. But beyond the everyday items from another century that would generate great historical interest, there was little to explain what might have happened.

That began to change when Gamay forced open the next door.

The space was larger but no less cramped. Gamay offered a guess, based on the look of the beds and storage cabinets. “Ship’s infirmary.”

She stepped into the compartment and went right. Elena fanned out to the left. They’d gone several paces when Elena let out a gasp.

Gamay spun around and found Elena aiming her light at a skull with desiccated skin stretched across it, a tangle of wispy gray hair on top and the bristles of what had once been a thick handlebar mustache on the upper lip. Another body rested beside it.

Gamay crouched beside them for a closer look. The man wore a uniform. “He’s a crewman,” she said. “Or at least he was.”

A small badge seemed to indicate he might have been a foreman in the engine room, perhaps in charge of keeping the boilers stoked. A hole in his shirt led to a hole in the torn and dried skin. Gamay began to get a sick feeling. The same feeling she’d had upon discovering the body on the Ethernet.

She checked the other body. It was shirtless and the skin was more decayed. She couldn’t tell what had happened to this man, but as she stepped away her foot hit a stainless steel tin resting beside him. Something clinked.

Gamay picked up the tin, pried off the top, and dumped the objects out onto the palm of her hand. The first was flattened and mushroomed out at one end. The second was in relatively good shape.

“Bullets,” Elena said.

Gamay nodded. “Taken from these men, I’d bet, either to try and save them or after they died.”

Without speaking another word, they finished their survey of the infirmary, discovering three additional bodies in the rear section, one of which was strapped to a bed. A clipboard with ancient yellowed paper still attached to it had fallen from the peg on the footboard. Gamay picked it up. She couldn’t make out anything on the top sheet. The second page was in better shape. And as the light hit the paper at just the right angle, one small notation became readable.

“ ‘Time of death,’ ” she said. The hour was obscured, but the date next to it was legible. “ ‘August 1, 1909.’”

The significance dawned on Elena quickly. “Five days after the Waratah went missing.”

Gamay nodded. They’d found their first real clue. “We need to go tell Paul.”

Paul was busy with the deck crew when Gamay and Elena came up to him.

“We’ve found something,” Gamay told him breathlessly.

Paul put his shovel aside as she began to explain, handing the mushroomed lead slugs to Paul as she finished.

“No passengers, no lifeboats, no logbooks,” Paul whispered, going over the facts, “but several crewmen dead in the sick bay and at least one recovering from bullet wounds several days after the ship vanished.”

“Could there h

ave possibly been a mutiny?” Elena asked.

“This isn’t the HMS Bounty,” Gamay said. “It was a cruise ship. No one here had been press-ganged into work. The sailors were professionals. Working on her was a fairly coveted job.”