Mercury Rising (Tin Can Mysteries Book 1)

by Jerusha Jones

  With Cal blasting the outside of my house with water, I was able to work inside, finishing up a series of samples for Darren based on his feedback. I sent them as attachments to an email and then texted him to make sure he’d have a moment to check them over. Then I left a message with the event reporter at Portland’s alternative weekly newspaper, Willamette Week, about the soft grand opening of the Wicked Bean Annex on Saturday. Why pay for advertising when you can get a free write-up that also helps the reporter fill her allotted space?

  Willow came skipping down the walkway after school, just as Cal was reeling up the pressure washer hose. He was soaked to the skin, T-shirt and cargo shorts clinging to his lean body, but he didn’t seem to mind. I didn’t see a single goose bump on him.

  But he reminded me of a dog that’s had a bath, when its hairy fluff is exposed for just that and you can see the scrawny frame underneath. I’d known Cal was slender and wiry, but now his physique was particularly evident. Corded veins stood out in his forearms, and his calves were knots of muscle. The man’s body fat percentage was in the low, very low, single digits.

  “Hey, you bought Cal’s kayak,” Willow announced. The girl misses not one iota. Since the kayak was still on the rear deck, out of her immediate view, it’s also possible that she has X-ray vision.

  “Want to go for a trial run—or trial paddle?” I asked her. “I need a backup in case I tip over.”

  “You won’t.” Cal finished returning the pressure washer to a neater state than it had been in when I’d rented it. “That style of kayak is the most stable there is.”

  “Or get lost,” I amended.

  His blue eyes glinted. “Well, there is that.”

  “Thank you,” I called after him.

  He waved without turning as he padded, barefoot, along the walkway toward his slip.

  “You really want to?” Willow asked.

  “Yes. Unless you have homework—or something.”

  Willow snorted, the answer I’d been hoping to hear. “I’ll be right back.” Then she tore down the walkway at nowhere near the sedate pace Cal had employed.

  She returned ten minutes later via water. She held my kayak pressed against the edge of the deck with her paddle while I cautiously lowered myself into it. “Let’s head upriver first in case you poop out. That way it’ll be easier coming back.”

  I grinned at her. “A fount of wisdom.”

  Willow snorted. “Just the voice of experience which belies my age.”

  Which was true, unfortunately. I hated that she’d been put in a position where she had to grow up extra fast. But there was still a lot of young insecurity under that blue-haired exterior. I informed her that her next cooking lesson would be lasagna.

  “For Cal?” We were paddling side by side, and I was certain she was holding back her pace so I could keep up. Her face turned scrunchy for a moment—not from exertion—and then she asked. “Do you think he’s starving?”

  “Not if we can help it.”

  “He’s weird, you know.”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  Willow snorted again. “Word, sister.”

  I wasn’t entirely up on hip-hop lingo, but I knew what she meant. “Cal, though—what’s the scoop?” Since she’d told other people about me, then surely she could tell me about other people.

  The gentle swell of the water was relaxing, and while we weren’t going anywhere fast, the paddling was pretty easy too. The first lights along the banks were winking on in the dusk. Bird calls, a low motor noise in the distance. It felt like we were on the planet, but not of it—removed to a peaceful observation post accompanied by the rhythmic, soft splashes of dipping paddles. It was like being in a bubble or cocoon, and I was seriously enamored of kayaking already.

  “CIA,” Willow said, catching me off guard.

  I’d been so distracted that I hadn’t realized she was taking an unusually long time to answer. “What?” I blurted.

  “Former CIA, I guess. That’s the rumor, anyway. He never talks about himself, but he knows lots of stuff. Survival stuff, world politics stuff, travel stuff, bugs you can eat, how to do bizarre stuff that isn’t in anybody’s normal range of activities, you know?”

  I reminded myself that this assessment came from a girl who hadn’t known until two days ago that onions had to be peeled before they could be eaten.

  “Doc says Cal must have been in Southeast Asia for a long time. Probably got sick there. Maybe parasites. Maybe that’s why he’s like permanently tanned and so gaunt. He knows lots about boats and navigation, and he goes barefoot almost all the time, even in winter.”

  “He doesn’t get invited to social events?” I asked.

  “Bettina tried at first, but he always said no. He just stays in his boat and barely talks to anyone. I think he mostly goes out at night.” Willow shrugged. “He’s nice enough, I guess. Not creepy, but he’s basically a hermit.”

  I wanted to ask her why or how Vaughn knew that Cal would be able to identify Ian Thorpe’s kayak, but that reminded me that we were doing exactly the same thing Ian had been when he’d been killed—allegedly. Or not so allegedly since I really didn’t know. But there was no point in causing Willow to associate kayaking with death by bringing it up.

  I didn’t want to think about it myself. The river was entirely too peaceful for such macabre musings. I picked up my pace a notch. “Race you.”

  Which was a mistake. Willow whipped ahead, and I was soon panting in her wake.

  She stopped and let me catch up with her just off what appeared to be a new development on the east riverbank.

  “What is this?” I wheezed, and waved to indicate the huge concrete pumping booms that loomed over rebar cages and the hulking shapes of heavy equipment—dump trucks, backhoes, and other things I couldn’t identify in the gloom or didn’t know the names of.

  “Some kind of upscale, exclusive property. Condos, restaurants, some retail shops, I guess. They’re making a mess of the riverbank, had to get special permits to build a retaining wall to prevent erosion from undermining the buildings they’re going to put at the edge of the water.” Willow rested her paddle across her lap and drifted beside me. “Big brouhaha. A bunch of community meetings with people yelling at each other. Gran went to one. The company that owns the land has lots of money in it, so they want to get their investment back. But there are going to be a bunch of displaced river otters too. Not to mention increased traffic. Everybody has an opinion about it, so I try not to mention it.” I couldn’t tell for sure in the growing darkness, but I think she rolled her eyes in disgust at the inability of adults to get along with one other. Age doesn’t improve some things.

  “I haven’t seen a river otter yet. Are they cute?”

  “Yeah. They’re kind of a nuisance too. They tear apart the Styrofoam blocks that make the marina walkways float to line their dens. Gran’s always grumbling about it because those blocks are so expensive to replace. We even had a Fish & Wildlife guy come out to try to trap the otters that were destroying our blocks so they could be relocated. They have a sixth sense about it, though. No otters ever went in the traps even though he baited them with cat food and salmon and gummy bears. He only caught a few raccoons and one bedraggled cat that just about clawed his arm off when he let it out.”

  “Gummy bears?” I laughed.

  “What can I say?” Willow chuckled too. “Otters like sweets. At least, they’re supposed to. But not inside cages apparently.”

  We’d let the current carry us back downriver, past a couple parallel rows of broken pilings, relics from an abandoned set of docks, and now we were bobbing offshore from the wildlife refuge—a long, dark patch of tall trees and wet sand. It looked both forlorn and foreboding, a wild scraggle of woods surrounded by creeping urban sprawl. I wondered if the animals sheltered there for the night felt the encroachment on their territory.

  My phone rang, splitting the darkness with an incredibly obnoxious noise and flash of LED screen that was visible
through the fabric of my sweatshirt pocket.

  Willow groaned and flicked water at me with her paddle. “Way to ruin the setting.”

  “Sorry,” I whispered, then I raised my voice slightly to answer the phone, “Hello?”

  “Ms. Fairchild?” said a very pleasant, feminine voice. “I’m Lila Halton. I work for a real estate consulting and management firm, and I picked up one of your business cards at City Hall. I’m sorry to call so late, but we have a rather urgent matter to deal with, and we need more hands on deck. We need someone with your expertise.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Expertise? I started to laugh out loud, but managed to partially choke it back. Instead, my amusement came out like a gurgle.

  “Of course,” I replied after I’d taken a deep breath. But it was difficult to sound professional when Willow was smacking the flat side of her paddle on the water like a fretful beaver. I tried to shove her kayak with my own paddle but couldn’t reach. “Can I call you back in about fifteen minutes? I’ll have my laptop then and will be prepared to take notes.”

  That’s when I learned to paddle quickly. Willow gave me a few terse pointers and stayed abreast of me as I flailed away.

  “You really need the job, huh?” she asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  Once again, she held my kayak in position as I wriggled my fanny out of the seat and up onto the deck. “Thanks,” I muttered.

  She grunted, her face pale in the light cast by the lampposts on the walkway. I couldn’t tell if her sour expression was caused by my cutting our outing short or just general teenage moodiness. She swung the end of her kayak wide and paddled away without a word.

  I secured my kayak on the deck and darted inside. I grabbed a handful of necessary supplies and plugged in my laptop. For a moment, I squeezed my eyes closed and steadied my breathing so I could present the facade of calm, cool, and collected. Then I dialed Lila’s number.

  I needn’t have worried because what she required most urgently was a sympathetic ear, and I spent the next half hour listening. She did, indeed, have an extraordinary situation on her hands. There were a few things I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt her to say—like the fact that I was aware of a few more of the pertinent details than she was. In this particular matter, I actually did have some inside knowledge, if not expertise. Not that I’d wanted them, but the impressions in my memory were irrevocable now.

  Lila wasn’t panicking—yet—but she needed to hear that her responses were normal, that she wasn’t crazy, that her problem could be handled. I made reassuring noises and murmured soothingly. In the end, I understood why she wanted to hire an outsider without previous connection to her client—Cox and Associates—and I agreed to develop a communications strategy and write press releases as they became necessary. Because I was relying on the assumption that a company couldn’t or wouldn’t kill a man.

  According to the nightly news, people commit murder, usually individually or as part of a small scheme, but generally, collective entities don’t. Unless you’re talking about a manufacturing or mining pollution disaster with long-term catastrophic health effects on the local population. But that wasn’t the case here. Here, we were talking about Ian Thorpe.

  I was sitting on a barstool, staring off into space and pondering my new life as a publicist when a quiet tapping sounded on the door.

  Detective Vaughn Malloy appeared exceedingly long and oddly bulbous in the peephole.

  Just the man I’d wanted to see. Because if I wasn’t extremely careful with this mess, I’d be following in my father’s footsteps, and I was absolutely determined not to do that. I let him in.

  “Studying the scene again?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Had a few more questions for Cal. Saw your light was on.”

  Have I mentioned that he smells good? Spicy, like cloves—or really good carnations that haven’t been stripped of all their personality by over-breeding. But he certainly wasn’t a flowery sort of man. Maybe a little peppermint or eucalyptus in there somewhere. I resisted the urge to lean closer and sniff.

  Instead, I studied the long lines of his face. “You need more than coffee. When was the last time you ate?”

  Another shrug. “I seem to recall a bagel mid-morning.”

  I clucked and tugged him toward the kitchen. “Sit.” I pointed to the barstool I’d just vacated and tidied my notepapers and laptop into a pile. “I haven’t eaten yet either. So I’m not doing you a favor; I’d be cooking anyway. Twenty minutes.”

  I started by making coffee, just to tide him over, before I strapped an apron around my waist. Then I cubed new potatoes, sliced bacon, chopped green onion, and melted my favorite ingredient of all time—butter. When I gaged that the scent rising from the frying pan was too irresistible for him to flee, I launched into the monologue I’d been diagramming in my head.

  “I just got a job. Publicity, spin, damage control—whatever you want to call it. Three degrees of separation.” I ticked the sequence of relationship off on my fingers. “Ian Thorpe, environmental activist and sworn antagonist of Cox and Associates because of that mixed-use complex they’re building just south of the wildlife refuge; Cox and Associates, the real estate development company that hypothetically has an excellent reputation in the area, according to their lobbyist, because of their concern for the environment, the principal of which—Frank Cox—is a significant taxpayer, both personally and through his company, and a well-known consort to city council members and county commissioners; Lila Halton, lobbyist who looks after the political and business interests of Cox and Associates; me, newbie hired by Lila Halton to do the same but in the sphere of public opinion.”

  I took a deep breath. It had all made sense in my head, but now I felt like I needed some graph paper to chart out the relationships with little directional arrows. Some of the arrows would crisscross, because the whole thing was rather circular, mainly for the one reason both Vaughn and I knew about but I hadn’t yet mentioned in this particular context. So I added, “Also me, finder of Ian Thorpe’s body.”

  “Cal would have found him if you hadn’t. Just a matter of timing,” Vaughn said rationally. He stretched across the counter and spun the French press handle toward himself. He refilled his mug and slurped from it, apparently not feeling the need to say anything further.

  So I was left with stating the obvious. “Which means I now officially have a reason—beyond the personal one—for being exceedingly nosy about the case. You’re probably going to need to stay away from me.”

  “You think I can’t resist your charms—professionally, of course?” His smile was more than a tilt this time. I could actually see the hint of an even set of teeth behind the lips. Orthodontia at some point in his past—I’d be willing to bet on it.

  I scowled at him, barely resisting the type of snort Willow usually emits. That girl was rubbing off on me. “On the contrary. I just wanted to be completely up-front with you about my motives and goals.” I turned to the stove and gave the contents of the frying pan a stern jostle. This conversation was not going how I’d planned. My public relations skills definitely needed some work.

  Maybe if he knew…so I kept talking while cracking eggs into the hash. “My father’s a lobbyist too. He represents various big industry interests in D.C. Which means cronyism galore. I hate what he does, because he’s not so honest. Not exactly dishonest, technically, but there’s a lot of strategic omission in his line of work. I told myself I’d never be like him.” I sprinkled fresh spinach leaves over the conglomeration in the pan and slammed a lid on it.

  I turned to find Vaughn’s warm brown eyes following my every move. “Which is why I’m telling you,” I finished.

  Vaughn nodded slightly. “Fair enough.” He gestured with his coffee mug before finishing off the last gulp. “Technically, this could be considered bribery, then. Sounds like I’m walking a fine ethical edge just sitting on this stool drinking your coffee.”

  And then I did snort. I
couldn’t help it. “Better get out while you can.” I slid the hash onto two plates and waved one under his nose. “Because this is about to get really good.”

  He captured the plate, his hands wrapping over mine, and he carefully released it from my grip. “I’ll take my chances. My chief’s pretty lenient when it comes to nutrition.” The corners of his eyes crinkled up. And then his stomach growled—so loudly that we both laughed.

  I came around the bar and slid onto the stool next to him. We ate in silence for several minutes.

  Finally, I worked up the nerve to ask the question that had been blaring in my mind—the one I’d have to address in my first press release. “Did you know that Ian Thorpe hated Cox and Associates?”

  “I do now, and not because you told me.” Vaughn cast a sidelong glance at me before spearing several potatoes on his fork. “I searched his apartment today. Standard procedure in an investigation of this nature. So I’ve skimmed through his possessions and paperwork.”

  “Speaking of that—murder—” I took a moment to swallow so I wouldn’t gross him out. “How long have you known? And does the public know? I’m going to have to wait until you announce it, so when do you expect that to be? Lila didn’t know, and it was hard not telling her. It makes her client—my client—look even worse.”

  Vaughn’s brown eyes widened, just slightly, but enough. I’d been a dork to even ask. But I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t.

  He wiped his mouth with a napkin and regarded me thoughtfully. “Cal must have told you.” His eyes narrowed and he turned back to his plate. “No matter. That was why I stopped by tonight. You have a right—personally—to know. Tomorrow morning, nine o’clock. The announcement will come from the medical examiner at a police press conference. Short and to the point, no comment. And never, ever any speculation.”