chapter Forty
“So where exactly are we going?” Eric pulled onto the road heading southeast.
“Cyrus’ old workplace.” Casey wished she could have access to all of the files Death had scanned, but it seemed those were out of her reach now that she’d apparently become more okay with the idea of living. She was sure there would be information about Cyrus’ old workplace that she could use.
“I thought they went out of business, and that’s why Cyrus lost his job.”
“No, Wayne said he was laid off, but I don’t think it was because they closed down. Maybe they just couldn’t afford his services anymore. His expertise made him expensive.”
“So why wouldn’t he just lower his rates?”
“I don’t know. Made him feel taken advantage of?”
“This from a guy who wouldn’t accept charity? You’d think he’d be glad to have a job at all.”
“These were the nineties, remember. Not today, when folks will take anything they can get. But maybe it was something else. Supposedly, like people have told us, he just wanted to be his own boss and had trouble working for someone else. He wouldn’t be the first person fired for not playing well with others.”
Signs for Galveston Bay began decorating the side of the road, and Eric followed them across the flat, marshy land toward the coast. The GPS on Eric’s iPad took them south of the bay, as far as a marina, before saying they were at their destination.
“This is it?”
Casey understood Eric’s confusion. The Gulf sparkled under the sun, and extended as far as she could see, into the horizon. Beautiful. Amazing. But the marina itself, tucked into a marshy inlet, was not the hub of busyness they had expected. A floating dock bobbed on the water alongside several old fishing boats and a pontoon. One old houseboat was moored to a different, permanent dock, and looked like it had seen better days. Many of them. Casey didn’t see anyone out and about, except on the other side of the inlet, too far in the distance to recognize faces, or even genders.
A low but large building with two over-sized garage doors, made for accommodating boats, sat far enough off the water it wouldn’t get hit by incoming tides. Weeds had grown up around it, and all three of the visible windows were broken, with tell-tale holes in the panes where someone had thrown a rock or a heavy seashell. A sign hung crookedly on a post, one of its chains broken and trailing as the sign swung with the breeze. The sign said, “Harbor Houseboats,” although the paint was so faded it was hard to tell. No vehicles sat in the parking lot, which would have been a surprise at that point if there had been any. Casey ignored the sinking feeling in her stomach and got out of the car.
“Where are you going?” Eric came after her.
She picked her way across the weedy bank up onto the parking lot and peered through one of the busted windows. “I guess they’re out of business now. Let’s see if we can get in.”
The side door was easy to open, since the building had apparently been broken into long before they’d gotten there. Casey stepped into the muggy space, which had been the front office. An old metal desk sat in the middle of the room, along with an office chair that had been home to more than a receptionist in the past few years. The walls held faded photos of houseboats in spotted wooden frames, and a curling, yellowed calendar from 2007 hung to the left of the desk.
Eric worked at the top desk drawer to get it open. “Old envelopes, all empty, some letterhead, bunch of paperclips…” He went through the rest of the drawers, but found nothing more interesting than outdated phone books and a broken model of a houseboat.
Behind the desk was a doorway, and Casey stepped through it into a large workspace. She ducked as something flew down from the rafters, wings beating a hasty retreat.
“What was that?” Eric came in behind her.
“Bird of some kind. There’s nests all around.” Other things, too, by the look of it. Including people, although all that was left was the trash they left behind. Beer cans, food wrappers, probably syringes and who knew what else. Casey didn’t want to get any closer to find out.
The large room was fronted by the first of the two huge rolling doors. Hoists were attached to the ceiling, and workbenches, littered with refuse, lined the walls. The shell of a houseboat lay lopsided on the cement floor, as if someone had taken one of its legs out from under it. It was the flat style, so the windows to the house were at eye level. Casey walked around it, looking in the windows, hoping she wouldn’t find anything disgusting inside. There were newspapers and a couple of old blankets and cardboard boxes, but nothing that looked too hopeful. Or gross.
“I’m assuming this wouldn’t be Cyrus’ boat,” Eric said.
“Too small. Plus, we don’t know that it ever got built.” She walked quickly to the next room, which was another garage with the second huge door. Nothing was in there except trash and bird poop. Casey continued on to the final door. This one led to a small hallway with offices and a bathroom. The offices had been stripped of all furniture, and the utilities had obviously been turned off long ago. That didn’t stop people from using the restroom. Casey tried not to vomit, and beat a hasty retreat outside, where she stopped and stared out toward the ocean.
Eric followed. “What now?”
“We find someone who knows what happened to this place.”
***
That someone was Mr. Howard Thornville of the Whitley Chamber of Commerce, a jovial stick of a man nearing retirement age. His office fronted Main Street in Whitley, the closest town to the defunct shipyard. Main Street wasn’t as busy as you’d expect from being the central street, but then, the town itself was smaller than Casey had expected this close to the shore. Thornville was more excited about relating the story of Harbor Houseboats than Casey thought natural, but perhaps it was good that someone wanted his job.
“They went out of business in 2007,” he said, which Casey had already guessed from the aging calendar on the wall of the warehouse. “It was a sad thing, but people were losing their regular homes, and could hardly afford a second, vacation one.”
“But I thought people lived in the boats.”
“Sure, some did. Some still do. But the bulk of the houseboat business—at least this particular one—was made up of wealthy people who wanted a unique place for the winter. Harbor Houseboats prided themselves on their workmanship and their leaning toward luxury.”
“Do you know anything about the people who owned it?”
He indicated his computer screen, on which he had brought up their file. “Brothers. Three of them. Their last name was Pinkerton—”
“Like the detective agency?” Eric said.
Thornville smiled. “Just like that. Don’t know if they’re any relation. I heard a rumor that—”
“Anyway…” Casey said. “There were three brothers?” Her head began to buzz. The Three.
“Yes, of course, sorry. Their father had started the business long ago, in the seventies, and the brothers took it over when he retired. This was the oldest, Zeke. He was the boss once the dad left.”
Casey looked at image on the screen, but Zeke was no one she’d seen before. Her buzz began to fade. “And the others?”
Thornville clicked back to the home page. “The second brother, Dan, he was the most hands-on. Knew his stuff as far as boats.” He brought up a photo of him. Again, someone Casey didn’t recognize. So much for that theory.
“Zeke took care of most of the business end. The numbers, schmoozing the rich folks, all that. Dan pretty much ran the workshop. They employed eighteen people at one point, including themselves, but that number began dropping as early as 1995.” He brought up a photo of a group of people, mostly men, and enlarged it. “This was their staff before the lay-offs began.”
“There he is,” Eric said.
“Who?” Thornville asked.
“Cyrus Mann. He was a woodworker from Marshland.”
“Of course. He was one of the first lay-offs, I’m afraid. And,” he cleared his throat, “I hear he met his end not long after that.”
“That’s actually why we’re here.”
Thornville sat back. “Really? Has new information come to light about his murder?”
“Well, it’s his daughter,” Eric said.
“The poor girl who disappeared? Did they find her?”
Casey tuned them out and looked at the men on the photo. She picked out the older brother, Zeke, in the back row, wearing a suit. Dan, the garage foreman, stood on the end of the middle row in blue coveralls. There were a few women, most wearing office-type clothes, one in coveralls. Casey looked carefully across each row, studying the faces, until she stopped, her heart in her throat. “One of them’s here, Eric.”
Eric stopped talking and looked where she was pointing. “I see him.”
“Who?” Thornville angled the screen so he could see, too.
“This man. We have him on another photo. Do you know who he is? Is he still around?”
“Well, of course he is,” Thornville said, laughing. “He’s the youngest Pinkerton brother. He works right down the street at the police station.”