MURDEROUS MORNING: A heart-stopping crime novel with a stunning end.

by Bernadette Calonego

  Cliff dragged his massive body with the help of a hiking stick through thorny bushes and heaved it with difficulty over dead trees lying in his way. He still hadn’t said a word, probably because he was too shy or afraid that he would say the wrong thing. She wanted to break the ice and shouted over to him: “I’m really impressed that you’re helping us out here, Cliff. Our family appreciates the support.”

  “Oh, there’s no need to thank me.” Cliff brushed the comment off and came closer. “Everybody is totally shocked. We really can’t believe that something like this could happen in Whatou Lake.”

  “What are people saying in Whatou Lake?”

  “Not much. Other than . . .” He seemed to be a bit out of breath. “I think a lot of people find it dangerous to live so far out in the bush. I mean . . . you don’t have any neighbors or nothing.”

  Tessa was tempted to point out to him that there were many more murders in Vancouver, although people lived right next to each other and almost all people had neighbors. But she didn’t want to make Cliff feel uncertain.

  “So that’s what people in Whatou Lake found remarkable?” she repeated, using the same questioning technique she often used as a lawyer. “Don’t a lot of people out here have a hut in the wilderness in order to get out of town and away from other people?”

  “Unfortunately, I don’t have one,” Cliff admitted.

  “But, for instance, Lionel and Cindy do.”

  “Yes, they’re renovating it right now, and I’m helping them with it.”

  Tessa had heard about it. Lionel had been out there in his hut on the day of the murders, along with Cindy and Cliff. Lionel tortured himself with the thought that on that day he had been in the wilderness and couldn’t be reached by anyone. He tearfully admitted to Martha Griffins that it was possible that Hank or maybe Fran had tried in vain to reach him. Tessa sensed that this guilty feeling would follow him as long as he lived. Although most likely it didn’t make any difference where he had been at the time.

  She and Cliff stopped and let their eyes wander over the surrounding area. Lionel and Savannah had progressed more quickly, their voices reaching them from some distance off. Tessa picked up the thread again. “Have people found anything else remarkable?”

  Cliff cleared his throat. His face was red due to his exhausting efforts.

  “Fran was . . . I mean, it’s just that I’ve heard such things . . . She was against almost everything—against the mine, against the oil pipelines and all that stuff.”

  They climbed over a crumbling tree trunk that had become as soft as a sponge because of the endless high humidity. Tessa slid down and landed on her bum. She got up and rubbed away the dirt from her North Face pants. “That certainly wouldn’t have impressed many people,” she said carefully.

  Cliff nodded. “The people here have to make their living somehow. It’s already hard enough the way it is. You never know how long you’ll have a job.”

  “But you don’t really have any reason to worry about that. I assume that you’re a really good electrician if Lionel hired you.”

  Cliff smiled, but it wasn’t really a strong smile. “If there is no work anymore, even the best have to go.”

  “As long as the mines are running, business must certainly be good,” Tessa said while scouring the ground.

  “The big companies bring in their own electricians,” he explained between loud panting. “They don’t want us.”

  “Is there enough work for you in Whatou Lake?”

  Cliff didn’t want to answer that. It seemed to Tessa that it was a good idea to let it go. He had maybe already told her more than he wanted to. They worked their way through the woods slowly but steadily. All they could hear from Lionel and Savannah was a quiet murmuring from far off. After a while Tessa reached for her water bottle. Cliff had a Coke in his hands.

  Up till now they hadn’t found anything at all, not even a beer can or a chocolate bar wrapper. Very few people used this trail; most townspeople traveled on the dirt road with their ATVs and pickups to Whitesand Bay. There was also no real reason to disappear into the bush, not even to take a dump. It was easier to take care of that right next to the trail. But Lionel wanted to search the dirt road only after they had returned from the bush.

  Suddenly Cliff spoke up. “Melanie Pleeke is an odd character. She wanted to bring along a soothsayer.”

  “Melanie who?” Tessa wiped off her face with a handkerchief.

  “Melanie Pleeke.”

  “I don’t know her.”

  “Rob Pleeke’s wife.”

  “Aha.”

  She remembered: the director of the funeral home, where Fran had looked at coffins.

  Cliff leaned over and supported himself on his hiking stick. “Melanie believes in spirits and séances and communicating with the afterworld. That’s her specialty.”

  “She thinks she’s a medium?”

  At that moment they heard loud shouting through the bush. Tessa couldn’t understand any words. Then she heard a whistle. Cliff stood straight up and braced himself with his pole.

  “What the hell . . .”

  A shot rang out through the forest.

  22

  Silence. Then bloodcurdling howling. Tessa sprinted off immediately in the direction of the noise. It was only after she reached the trail that she realized she had to wait for Cliff. She didn’t have a gun. Cliff came from behind, panting after trying to keep up with her.

  “Lionel! Lionel! Where are you?” she yelled.

  “Here!” It was Savannah’s voice. “We’re over here!”

  They couldn’t be far away.

  The trail snaked its way past giant cedar trees, and suddenly a group of several people appeared in front of them: Lionel, squatting grimly on the ground, Savannah, crouching over his leg, and two young men with war paint on their faces, who stared at them. Two young Sitklat’l. Tessa saw right away that they were not the ones who had fired the shot, since they didn’t have any weapons with them.

  “What’s going on here?” she called out even before she reached the group.

  Savannah looked up and said, “Lionel shot himself in the foot.”

  “What?” Tessa dropped immediately to her knees and looked over his wound, which was bleeding profusely. She grabbed the first aid kit, which lay on the ground, took out a sterile bandage, and started to clean the wound. “Looks like the shot grazed you,” she said. “We’ll put some pressure on it.”

  Savannah helped her dress the foot. They worked fluidly, since each was already familiar with the way it was done. After all, they had grown up together in a doctor’s household. Lionel complained bitterly. Tessa gave him a strong painkiller.

  “Watch out when you’re fooling around with these shitty guns, man.” The warning came from one of the young Sitklat’l and was aimed at Cliff Bight. “Otherwise another accident like that is going to happen.”

  “Man, how’s that possible?” Cliff asked.

  “Whiteys don’t know how to use guns.”

  Tessa could hear the disdain in the young Sitklat’l’s voice.

  Lionel reacted immediately to the provocation. “It’s not my weapon, goddammit. It’s my father’s.”

  Tessa looked over at Savannah to see how she was reacting to all this, and saw her looking concerned while shaking her head. “He heard something in the bush and quickly released the safety latch on the gun. Then these two guys broke through the undergrowth,” she added with an almost invisible nod of her head in the direction of where the two young men stood, “and Lionel stumbled, and that’s when the shot went off.”

  Tessa looked on, disgruntled. “That’s just what we didn’t need.”

  Savannah finished with the bandaging. “You can say that again.”

  Tessa got up and looked over at the two young men. “I’m Tessa. Kenneth Griffins, the local doctor, is my father. These people here are Savannah Cutter, Lionel Miller, and Cliff Bight. Who are you guys?”

  The two gave their
names in the Sitklat’l language. The only word she understood was Xhah, meaning eagle, a word Tsaytis Chelin had taught her.

  “And what are your English names?”

  “That’s none of your business,” one of them said.

  “Maybe it is. What are you doing here?” She had a good idea what the answer was. A group of rebellious young Sitklat’l had been patrolling the area for some time, in order to enhance their land claims on the territory of their ancestors.

  The two Sitklat’l looked at her provocatively. “What are you whiteys doing here?”

  “We’re searching for Fran Miller, who has been missing for three days,” Tessa quietly replied. “Her three children and her husband, Hank Miller, were shot dead on their farm on Tuesday morning. You must have heard about this. Have you seen anything suspicious?”

  “Yes, too many cops around Whitesand Bay, near sacred gravesites of our people. Nobody should be searching there.”

  “I know about the sacred gravesites of your ancestors. But somebody found Fran’s bloodstained jacket at Jenny Dole’s memorial cross. That’s why the police are there. And that’s why we’re here. So you haven’t found anything?”

  They avoided looking her in the eye. She had the impression that they were beginning to understand the gravity of the situation.

  Lionel tried to get up with Savannah’s help, but sank down again with a pitiful groan. “I can’t walk.”

  “We’ll support you,” Cliff said.

  Lionel shook his head. “I can’t put any weight on my foot.”

  “Shit,” Savannah said, and Tessa could have said exactly the same thing. “We’re at least an hour away from the car.”

  For a few seconds, they all just stood there, and nobody said anything.

  Finally one of the Sitklat’l spoke up: “We’re going to build a stretcher. We’ll carry you back.”

  “Lionel’s heavy,” Savannah protested.

  The young men grinned. “We’re not weaklings like the whiteys.”

  It took them only twenty minutes to make a stretcher of branches and lianas with their bush knives. Then, with Cliff’s and Savannah’s help, they laid Lionel on the stretcher.

  “Tessa, you run ahead to see if you can get some help,” Lionel ordered. “You’re the fastest of us.”

  Before she could answer, Savannah insisted: “I’m going with you.”

  Tessa shook her head. “In an emergency, it’s always better to stick together and not separate.”

  Lionel was insistent. “Not in our situation.”

  “We don’t have a gun.”

  “You can have mine,” Lionel replied. “I guarantee that it’s working fine.”

  Nobody dared to laugh.

  Lionel passed the rifle to Savannah and gave her some instructions on how it worked.

  She nodded. “I understand. Let’s go.” Tessa stopped resisting and let Savannah take the lead. She wanted to keep an eye on the gun. Savannah set a remarkable pace for a nonathletic person, but that didn’t stop her from talking. At first Tessa had trouble understanding her from behind, and it took a while for her to realize that she was talking about Lionel.

  “If you ask me, Lionel shouldn’t be carrying a gun.” Savannah snorted audibly. “He’s at the end of his rope. He’s seeing the dead children and Hank, who has a bullet in his body, and he’s ready to explode. He’s close to a nervous breakdown.”

  “Lionel has not seen the children or Hank’s bodies, as far as I know.”

  “Man, I only mean he sees it in his . . . imagination. It’s doing him in.”

  “It’s doing us all in. Maybe not you, though?”

  Savannah stopped and looked at her in a strange way, as if Tessa had taken her by surprise.

  Then she went on: “We can go home and howl, and he can’t do that. Cindy wouldn’t stand for it.” She started walking fast again, but this time Tessa stayed at her side so that she could hear her better. Savannah’s dramatic speech provoked her.

  “You don’t say. Do you really know Cindy that well? Do you have some kind of secret access to Lionel’s married life?”

  “For God’s sake, Tessa. Stop playing the role of a big-city big shot. You weren’t born with the silver spoon of wisdom on your plate.”

  “I’m really happy that you were born with it. Please explain to me what has escaped my brain because of my ignorance.”

  “Open your bloody eyes, woman. You just don’t see what’s happening.”

  At that moment Savannah tripped over a root, and Tessa caught her in time to stop her from falling. If the situation had been different, they could have laughed at this. They looked at each other, and Tessa asked, shaking her head: “You do have the gun locked, right?”

  Savannah rolled her eyes. “Of course. How dumb do you think I am?” She turned around and marched ahead again.

  Tessa decided not to reply, but Savannah’s words went through her head for quite a while. She felt sorry for Lionel. He really couldn’t cry in front of his parents, now that he was the only son. Tessa had to admit that she at least had Savannah’s help, since she was taking care of her mother and father. And the cats and dogs.

  But she had noticed something. She found it strange that Savannah didn’t seem particularly disturbed or shattered by the murders and Fran’s disappearance. This thought suddenly took hold of her like a virus. She stared at Savannah’s back and her colorful leggings. An ancient feeling of anger crept up in her and opened its jaws. Tessa couldn’t keep it under control.

  “Are you really sorry about all that’s happened? Or are you happy Fran is no longer in the running?”

  Savannah stopped so suddenly that Tessa almost bumped into her. “What? What did you just say?” She stood there with her mouth wide open, as her red lips formed an angry circle. Like a fish out of water and struggling for air. When Tessa didn’t say anything, she yelled: “You must be crazy! You don’t know what you’re saying.” She took a step backward. “You have no idea. Fran didn’t want to have anything to do with Mom and Dad anymore. That’s the way it was. You should talk with Mom about it. But your time is too valuable for that, right? You’d rather be the great lawyer and talk to your equals. We’re just not highbred enough.” She took a deep breath, and her face got even redder. “Fran isn’t dead; maybe you would like to see her dead. She took away handsome Hank; you probably still haven’t digested that with an ego like yours.”

  Now it was Tessa’s turn to silently glower at her foster sister. Then she raised her hand, gave her a slap in the face, and ran off. She hopped across the uneven forest floor as if it were a minefield. She concentrated only on keeping her feet on the trail ahead of her. She wasn’t afraid of bears or wolves. She was completely fueled by anger.

  After she had run a ways, she came back to her senses. She was ashamed. How could she let herself be so provoked by Savannah? How could she let such stuff play any kind of role when she was faced with the unimaginable tragedy threatening to tear apart her family? Could the murderer have also done what he did out of an uncontrollable impulse, like the one that led her to strike Savannah? Had the murderer gotten so mad for some reason that he started shooting? She thought about the children and abandoned the idea. Whoever shot the children did it with a plan. The killer ambushed them in the house, one after the other.

  She pushed her way forward. Tessa, don’t give up. This is not the time to give up.

  It couldn’t be much farther to the trailhead where they had started out more than an hour earlier. She stopped and checked to see whether she had cell phone reception. Nothing.

  She couldn’t just let Savannah carry on alone. So she turned around and started back. She called out Savannah’s name over and over. When she heard her voice, she stopped.

  All of a sudden, she saw something on the ground. A colorful stripe. Pink and glittery. She bent down and picked the thing up. She couldn’t believe what she held in her hand.

  Right then, Savannah popped up.

  “Look what
I just found,” Tessa called out.

  Savannah stopped in front of her. “You don’t have the latex gloves on.”

  “What?” Tessa emerged from a dreamlike state.

  “The latex gloves. Because of the fingerprints.”

  Shit.

  Under other circumstances, she might have gotten mad that Savannah had recognized something she had missed. But now, with her discovery right in front of her eyes, she could only reply: “You’re right.”

  Tessa took the gloves and a plastic bag out of her fanny pack and dropped the pink band into the bag.

  “A cat collar.”

  Savannah wrinkled her brow. “So?”

  “It belongs to one of Fran’s cats,” Tessa exclaimed. “You’ve seen the collars of the other cats? One is bright green, the other is yellow. And this one is pink. Don’t you see? Here!” She turned the plastic bag over. On the back side of the collar, dark stains could be seen. And a name written in ink: ROSIE.

  “Rosie wasn’t in the storeroom of Fran’s house. We couldn’t find her anywhere when we were there. And now this shows up out here!”

  “Holy mackerel. How the hell did it get out here?”

  “I have no idea. First Fran’s jacket and now this,” Tessa said. “The dark stains. I’m sure that’s blood . . .”

  “For God’s sake, Tessa. Fran would never have taken a cat way out here.”

  Tessa didn’t say anything. She had asked Fran for a sign. And then she found this collar. She didn’t know what to think. Maybe Fran had had the collar with her by chance and let it fall, as a clue for people searching for her? Was Fran somewhere nearby? Tessa put the plastic bag with the collar in her fanny pack and closed the zipper. “We’ve got to get back to the car as fast as possible.”