The yacht was eighty-seven feet long and had been built in 1962 for a shipping magnate who had died before the maiden voyage and whose estate had sold it at a loss to a Texas oilman who had died before the second voyage and whose estate had sold it at a further loss to a series of owners whose luck had not improved with ownership. By the time Catherine Bell acquired it, in a bankruptcy proceeding she had attended more for the entertainment than the opportunity, the yacht had a reputation in marine insurance circles that was roughly analogous to the reputation of a house that has had three fires: insurable, but only at a price that reflected the statistical likelihood of further misfortune.

Catherine did not care about the reputation. She cared about the price, which was seven hundred thousand dollars, and the fact that it was being sold as-is, which meant that whatever was wrong with it — and she knew, having spent thirty years in maritime acquisitions, that something was always wrong with vessels that sold at bankruptcy prices — would be her problem to solve or to live with, at her discretion.

The first surveyor she hired declined to complete the inspection. This was unusual — surveyors declined to inspect vessels for reasons of safety or for lack of credentials, not for reasons of personal preference. The surveyor, a man named Paul who had worked for her on six previous acquisitions and who had never declined any job, told her over the phone that he would send her the deposit check back and that she should not ask him why. She asked him why. He hung up.

The second surveyor completed the inspection and submitted a report that ran to forty-seven pages. Thirty-nine of those pages described the vessel’s systems in exhaustive and largely positive detail. The remaining eight pages, which were flagged in the report’s index as “Section F: Anomalous Observations,” described three things that the surveyor had found and could not explain. The first was a sound — a low humming, at a frequency just below the threshold of human hearing — that emanated from somewhere in the forward hull and that could not be sourced to any mechanical system. The second was a smell — not mold, not seawater, not the usual suspects — that appeared in the forward cabin at irregular intervals and that the surveyor described as “reminiscent of an unfamiliar floral arrangement, possibly artificial, possibly not.” The third was a scratch — approximately six inches long, very shallow, located on the interior of the hull plating in the forward hold — that the surveyor noted was “not consistent with any tool or material used in the vessel’s construction or maintenance.”

Catherine read the report three times. Then she hired a marine architect to examine the scratch, a acoustic engineer to analyze the sound, and a florist — she was not sure why she hired a florist, except that she trusted the report’s index and the florist was the logical counterpart to the smell — to smell the forward cabin directly and describe what was there. The marine architect confirmed what the surveyor had written. The acoustic engineer confirmed the sound’s existence and added that it was not, in his professional opinion, produced by any known mechanical system. The florist walked into the forward cabin, smelled the air, and walked out, and told Catherine’s assistant that she would not be billing for the visit and that Catherine should sell the yacht immediately.

Catherine did not sell the yacht. She did not know why she did not sell it, except that the reason she had bought it — the entertainment value, the satisfaction of having acquired something at bankruptcy prices that others were afraid of — had not changed, and the anomalies described in the surveyor’s report were, however strange, not disqualifying. She commissioned repairs to the vessel’s systems, which were extensive and expensive. She hired a crew, which was difficult, because word had spread in marine circles about the eighty-seven-foot yacht that surveyors declined to inspect and florists declined to bill. She set a launch date.

The launch went normally, which was itself a kind of anomaly for a vessel with the Verity’s history. Catherine stood on the dock and watched the yacht being towed to its mooring and she felt, for the first time since the bankruptcy proceeding, that she had made an acquisition that was proceeding like an acquisition rather than like a slow-motion disaster. She was wrong, of course. She had been wrong about the Verity from the beginning, in ways that would take her another eighteen months to understand.

The first sign of what she had gotten wrong appeared three weeks after the launch, when a manila envelope arrived at her office addressed to her in handwriting she did not recognize. The envelope contained a single photograph: the Verity, photographed from the water at night, with all lights extinguished, and with something standing on the foredeck that was not the crew member who was supposed to be on the foredeck at that hour. The something was not identifiable as human or otherwise. It was simply a shape, darker than the darkness around it, standing in the position a person would stand if a person were standing on the foredeck and watching the dock.

The photograph was taken, based on the angle and the position of the Verity in relation to the shore, from the rocks at the end of the harbor. Catherine went to the rocks. She stood where the photographer had stood. She looked at the Verity at the same time of night that the photograph had been taken. She saw nothing on the foredeck. She saw the crew member who was supposed to be there, standing exactly where the crew member was supposed to stand, doing the tasks the crew member was supposed to do. She went home. She did not sleep well. She did not, for reasons she could not explain, send the photograph to anyone or file it anywhere or tell anyone about it, and she understood, in the way that she understood things that she did not fully believe, that the reason she did not tell anyone was not that she thought no one would believe her. It was that she thought everyone would believe her, and that believing her would cost something, and that the something it would cost was the thing she had bought the yacht to gain: the satisfaction of having something that others were afraid of.

The yacht was worth, in the end, exactly what she had paid for it, which was to say nothing, because it was not the kind of thing that had a value that could be measured in money, and the people who had owned it before her had understood this, in the way that people understand things about objects that have been passed through enough hands to acquire a history, and the history was not the story of the shipping magnate or the Texas oilman or the bankruptcy proceeding or the surveyors who would not inspect it or the florist who would not bill her. The history was the story of the thing itself, and the thing itself was not a yacht. It was an agreement between the vessel and whatever had come to inhabit it, and the agreement was that it would continue to exist in exchange for being allowed to continue to exist, and Catherine had bought the agreement along with the hull, and the agreement was not transferable, and it was not negotiable, and it did not expire.