"Besides," he added, "the Avilda needed a deckhand pronto, and the board couldn't stall off Gault forever, not with so many wanna-be deckhands in Dutch. There wasn't time to brief you."
"There's time now," she pointed out.
He eyed the bunk, and her on it. "I was kind of hoping we could try out that bunk first." He waggled his eyebrows. "It's going to be tough, justifying it on my expense account. I want to make sure I'm getting my money's worth."
She bit back a smile and said sternly, "Get on with it."
He gave a mournful sigh and dug into his pack, producing a tattered, bulging file folder with sheets of paper sliding out in every direction. "I assumed when I flew into the Park last week that you had heard of the two crewmen who were lost last March."
"Don't assume anything of the kind. The Park's not on a paper route, I don't have a satellite dish, or a television, for that matter, and I only listen to National Public Radio. Or I do when the skip is right, which isn't often, and Bob Edwards doesn't talk a lot about Alaska anyway. And besides, you and I were busy with other matters last spring." Unconsciously, Kate rubbed at her right shoulder, feeling again the kick of the shotgun as she faced down a man with ten bodies, two of them children, littering the Park behind him. Lottie she refused to think about at all.
"True." Jack's voice was without inflection, but he took care not to look at her.
"Start from the beginning, and don't worry about repeating yourself. I want to hear it all this time."
"All right." He made a stab at shaking the mass of paperwork in his lap into some kind of order, and gave it up as a lost cause. Tilting his chair back against the bulkhead, he closed his eyes and recited from memory.
"The Avilda is one of a fleet of deep-sea fishing boats owned by a consortium of fishing families from Freetown, Oregon, called Alaska Ventures, Inc. They've been smart and successful, and they've built up quite a sizable fleet over the last forty years." He pawed through the folder and by a miracle found what he was looking for near the top of the file. "There's the Avilda, your boat. There's the Lady Killigrew, the Madame Ching, the-"
Kate sat up, and he looked at her. "What?"
The names triggered a memory somewhere, but she couldn't immediately track it down. She shook her head.
"Nothing. Never mind."
He looked at her for a moment longer, decided it wasn't worth the effort and returned to his list. "There's the Mary Read, the Anne Bonney and a sixth on the ways at Marco, the-"
Kate's memory clicked in and a wide grin spread across her face. "Let me guess. The Grace O'Malley."
He examined his list again. "No, the Mary Lovell."
Kate laughed out loud. "What?"
She was still chuckling, but she shook her head. "Nothing.
Never mind. It's not important."
Jack mistrusted the smug expression on her face but shrugged his shoulders and looked back down at his list. "The fleet spends summers in Freetown, refitting, maintenance and repairs, upgrading equipment, that kind of thing. Winters, they spend fishing in Alaska, out of Kodiak or Dutch Harbor, always for crab, opilio, bairdi, red and blue king. Lately there's been some talk of refitting a few of the vessels for bottom fishing, but Alaska Ventures' board of directors seems to feel that bottom fishing is going to be severely curtailed in the near future."
"They are smart," Kate observed. "A lot of marine biologists blame bottom fishing for the drop in king crab stocks in the mid-eighties, and they lobby hard in Juneau and Washington. They've got the tree huggers on their side, too. Hard to buck. What's any of this got to do with the Case of the Disappearing Crewmen?"
"I'm getting to that. As you know, the Avilda is skippered by Harry Gault. During the tail end of last season, Gault used the Avilda to haul a barge from Kodiak to Dutch Harbor. The barge belonged to the processor Alaska Ventures delivers to, so he was doing them a favor. Not much of one, as it turned out."
"What happened?"
"It is generally agreed, if not said right out loud, that through bad weather and bad seamanship Gault lost the barge."
"Lost the barge?"
Jack nodded. "The line parted twice before he finally lost it for good the third time. They spent a lot of time going around in circles trying to find it. No luck. In the meantime, they ran out of water."
"Ran out of water?"
Jack nodded. "Ran out of water." When Kate would have said more he held up one hand and cautioned,
"Remember, the deck boss and the remaining deckhand backed him up on this."
"Ned Nordhoff and Seth Skinner."
Jack nodded again. "So he drove the boat over to the nearest island, anchored, and the other crew members"Jack fumbled impatiently with the pile of paper in his lap-"doggone it, okay, here it is-their names were Christopher Alcala and Stuart Brown-went ashore to look for water."
The faces of the two young crewmen appeared again before Kate's eyes. "Went ashore where?"
"Ah, what, the island's name was Anua."
"Got a map?"
Jack fished around in his daypack and tossed a folded piece of paper over to her. She flattened it on the bunk and found the little island halfway down the chain, ringed in a circle of black Marksalot she had no difficulty in identifying as Jack's handiwork. Jack had always leaned toward black Marksalot for notes, arrows and marginal balloons on any piece of evidence that was write-onable, to the vocal disgust of the district attorneys who had then to introduce the evidence into the trial record. "What's on it? On Anua, I mean?"
"An airstrip dating back to World War 11, an active volcano. That's about it. Pretty standard for an Aleutian island."
Kate measured the air miles between Dutch Harbor and Anua, her brows puckered. "Mmm."
He waited, but that was all she said. "Alcala and Brown left the Avilda at about four in the afternoon, in the skiff. They had a flashlight and a bunch of jerry cans."
"That all?"
"Uh-huh."
"No survival gear? No tent, no sleeping bags, not even matches?"
"According to Gault, they weren't anticipating spending the night."
"This was March?"
"Yeah."
"In the Aleutians?"
"Yeah."
Kate lay back down on the bunk. "Kind of gives new meaning to the word 'dumb,' don't it. What happened?"
"What you might expect, and remember this was the first trip north for both of them."
"First and last."
'Yeah. Anyway, according to Gault, Skinner and Nordhoff the skiff made it into shore, and then it started snowing. The crew on the boat lost sight of the island and the skiff. It socked in overnight. The next morning there were two inches of snow on the ground and no sight of skiff or crew."
"Did they go ashore to check?"
Jack shook his head. "No."
" What?
"No, they didn't. They said they had no way to get there. The skiff was already ashore."
Still disbelieving, Kate demanded, "I presume they had a life raft?"
"Two of them." Jack grinned at her. "Gault says he didn't want to use them, in case he ran into trouble later on."
Kate stared at him. "And this is the good ship Lollipop you signed me onto? Thanks a whole bunch, Jack. So what happened next?"
"Gault called the Coast Guard."
Something in his voice made Kate say sharply, "How soon?"
"From the Coast Guard logs it was noon the day of the disappearance before Gault got around to calling them."
He looked up with a bland expression. "He ran the Avilda up and down and around the island, looking for signs of life through the binoculars. When he couldn't find any, he pulled the hook and set course for Dutch."
Kate was speechless. Jack's smile was bland. "It gets better. When the Coast Guard fired up a chopper and took a run out there, it seems that Gault had given them the wrong coordinates, so they searched the wrong part of the island."
When Kate found her voice it was only for a very weak, "You're kidding me."