Medusa

“We’ll be back in Washington by then,” Gamay said. “If there is any chance . . .”

“Well, after all, your generous contribution made you members of the Dobbs Society in good standing,” Rachael said. “Let’s go down to the basement.”

The basement of the Dobbs mansion was big and musty. They wove their way through antique odds and ends to a floor-to-ceiling cabinet that Rachael explained was an airtight, temperature-controlled walk-in safe. She opened the safe’s double doors to reveal metal shelves stacked with plastic boxes, each labeled. A cylinder-shaped object around six feet long, wrapped in plastic, filled the lowest shelf.

“This is the Nye diorama,” Rachael said. “I’m afraid that it’s a bit heavy, which is probably why no one has dragged it out to have a look at it.”

Paul squatted down and lifted one end of the cylinder up a couple of inches.

“It’s doable,” he said.

All through college, Paul had helped on his father’s fishing boat, and since then he’d spent hours at the gym keeping in shape for the physical demands of his job. Gamay was even more of a fitness nut, and although her long-legged figure could have come out of the pages of Vogue she was stronger than many men. Working together, the Trouts easily hefted the package and carried it upstairs.

At Rachael’s suggestion, they took the cylinder to the tent, where there was space to unwrap it. The Trouts removed the plastic and undid the ties wrapped around the diorama. It had been tightly coiled, with its blank brownish gray back side facing outward.

Carefully and slowly, they unrolled the diorama.

The first panel became visible. It was an oil painting around five feet high and six feet wide, depicting a whaling ship tied up at a dock. There was a caption under the picture:

JOURNEY’S END.

“We must be looking at the last section of the diorama,” Rachael said. “This shows a ship unloading its catch in New Bedford. See the barrels being rolled down a ramp to the dock?”

The colors of sea and sky were still bright, but the other colors were garish, in the style of a circus poster. The brushstrokes were bold, as if the paint had been applied in a hurry. The perspective was wrong, seen through the eyes of an untrained artist.

“Any idea who painted this?” Gamay asked. “The technique is rough, but the artist had a good eye for detail. You can even see the name of the ship on the hull: Princess.”

“You’re very discerning,” Rachael Dobbs said. “Seth Franklin was self-taught, and he sold paintings of ships to their owners or captains. Before he started painting, he was a ship’s carpenter. As I understand it, Nye stood in front of the diorama as it was unrolled from panel to panel and fleshed out the details with his own story. The lighting would have been dramatic, and maybe there were even sound effects. You know, someone behind the diorama shouting ‘Thar she blows!’ ”

The next panel showed the Princess rounding a point of land that the caption identified as THE TIP OF AFRICA. In another panel, the ship was at anchor against the backdrop of a lush volcanic island. Dark figures that could have been natives were standing on the deck, which was bathed in a blue glow. The caption read:

TROUBLE ISLAND-LAST PACIFIC LANDFALL.

The panel that followed showed another volcanic island, apparently much bigger, with a dozen or so ships at anchor in its harbor. The caption identified the setting as Pohnpei.

Paul continued unrolling the diorama. The next panels depicted, in reverse, the crew cutting up a sperm whale and boiling its blubber down for oil. Particularly interesting was what appeared to be a white-haired man lying on the deck over the caption:

MODERN-DAY JONAH.

“It’s the Ghost,” Rachael said. “This is marvelous! This shows Caleb Nye as he must have looked after he’d been cut out of the whale’s stomach.”

The stiff canvas of the diorama was becoming hard to handle, but with Paul unrolling it and Gamay rolling it back on its spindle, the whaling saga continued to unfold in reverse.

The panel before them was the classic depiction of a whaleboat-harpooned sperm whale in the lace-topped waves. Two legs were sticking out of the whale’s mouth. The caption identified the scene:

CALEB NYE-SWALLOWED BY A WHALE.

Rachael Dobbs could hardly contain her excitement. She started talking about a fund-raiser to restore the diorama and finding wall space to hang it. Paul and Gamay Trout found the diorama fascinating but of little help. Yet they kept going until they came to the last panel, almost a mirror image of the ship in the first panel, only returning from its long voyage. In this panel, there was a crowd of people on the dock, and the ship’s rigging was unfurled. The caption read SETTING SAIL.

Paul stood up to stretch his legs, but Gamay’s sharp eye noticed that there were a few more feet of canvas. She asked him to keep unrolling, expecting to see a title panel of some sort. Instead, they were looking at a map of the South Pacific. Lines had been drawn in a crooked pattern across the ocean. There were whales’ tails scattered across it. Each tail had a longitude-latitude position inked next to it.

“It’s a map of the 1848 voyage of the Princess,” Rachael said. “Those position notations show where the whales were caught. Captains often illustrated their logbooks to record good whaling areas. The map would have given Caleb’s audience an idea of the extent of the voyage and shown where his adventures had occurred.”

Gamay got down on her hands and knees and followed a line with her index finger from Pohnpei to a speck called Trouble Island. The island’s position had been noted next to it.

The Trouts jotted down the coordinates, rolled the diorama back up, and carried it into the kitchen. Despite Rachael’s protest, they gave her a substantial contribution to start the ball rolling on a place for the mural.

While Rachael Dobbs went to close up the museum, the Trouts went out into the garden.

“What do you think?” Gamay asked.

“I’m not sure whether this will help them find the lab,” Paul said, “but it’s all linked somehow: the present and the past, the blue medusa, the miraculous cure of the men aboard the Princess.”

“Don’t forget that somebody thought the log was important enough to kill Brimmer over,” Gamay said. “We should let Kurt and Joe know what we found.”

Paul already had his cell phone in hand, scrolling down to a number on his contact list.

CHAPTER 39

LIKE ANY GOOD DETECTIVE, JOE ZAVALA BEGAN HIS SEARCH for Davy Jones’s Locker at the crime scene. Using a one-person submersible borrowed from the NUMA ship, he dove to the ocean bottom and made a couple of passes over the circular depressions left by the lab’s footings. Seeing nothing new, he broke away from the site and started to explore the surrounding area. The submersible’s searchlights suddenly reflected off a piece of metal.

Working the controls of the submersible’s mechanical arms, Zavala scooped a twisted piece of steel from the bottom and examined it under the lights before depositing it in a basket slung beneath the submersible.

“I just picked up a chunk of the Proud Mary,” he called up to the ship’s bridge.

“You’re sure it’s not a piece of the lab?” asked Captain Campbell, skipper of the NUMA ship.

“Reasonably sure. The metal is twisted and melted, the way it would be from a missile strike. It doesn’t look at all like the structures I saw in the diagrams. What I’ve seen fits with our theory that the lab was lifted off its site and towed away.”