A Killer in King's Cove

by Iona Whishaw

  “You bitch!” he said. “You’re all the same, aren’t you?”

  Well, if that’s how you approach women, probably, she thought angrily. With a flood of relief, she saw that he did not seem inclined to come at her again, but had seized the basket and was marching to the edge of the lake, where the boat bobbed gently.

  THE CAR STOPPED at the top of the driveway. He said nothing as she got out. She’d held the picnic basket on her lap on the drive back, and she had kept her eyes straight ahead as they climbed the narrow curving road from the lake to the main road and then driven up into King’s Cove. The day was now hot and still and they’d met no one on the road, but he had talked. About how he’d been watching her and knew what she wanted. Just another Brit coming out to get a man, he told her. Silent during his tirade, she wondered if the country was flooded with these desperate girls he conjured up. She was a fool. “You wait,” he’d told her, “I will be like a god to you.” At this she noted with relief that he was slowing the car at the top of her drive, because clearly he was barking mad, and she didn’t want to go wherever it was he might decide to take her. “You have no idea,” he’d said, “what I will do to get what I want.” He stopped the car and sat for a moment staring out the front window. Perhaps he was taking in her barn and through the trees, her house, adding them mentally to some empire he was building.

  Safe in her house, she heard him peel angrily on to the road. In the kitchen, she dropped the basket on a chair and looked at it with distaste, as though it had conspired in the events of the day. She would empty it later and then put it away. She would take the next picnic in her French shopping bag and she would be accompanied by a book. Or Angela and her mad boys, but no man. She had gone on this trip because . . . why? Because she had felt sorry for him? Or worse, was curious? She could not tell when a man was dangerous. She was not good at men. Angus didn’t count. He had been older and had somehow taken her over. You could not learn from an experience like that how to handle the whole business of men. She threw open the doors onto the veranda and sat heavily in a deck chair that was resting with its companion in the shade of the overhanging roof. She’d put out two deck chairs with a little table for drinks and a book in between, as if there might one day be someone for the second one. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself—even in the heat of the afternoon she found she could not quite stop shivering.

  The landscape before her was defiantly and richly beautiful, unconcerned with tribulations of any creatures living upon it. She was one woman, alone, far from anyone who could help or comfort—and, truth be told, she had been in shock before. You do not run messages behind enemy lines for the duration of a war without having memories to cope with. She told herself these things to remind herself that she had been here before and would survive until it passed. The first time it happened was when she had returned safely from a drop, and the plane had limped back to the base and nearly crash-landed after being damaged by enemy fire. Angus had been there then, the first time, and talked her through it, his arms around her. She had not been able to tell him what had really happened, had made up a motorcar accident. She had been horribly unnerved by her own fragility then and had tried to see it as a sort of human and predictable response. She was no more responsible for this mental and physical torment than she would be if she had cut her finger with a knife and it bled. It is what the human body does.

  Amazingly, that night she slept a sound and almost dreamless sleep. At one point, she had the impression of a car in the distance and a sense that it was passing along a far road from where she stood in a French field. She woke with the curtains fluttering in a fresh and lovely stream of sun. She lay for a moment, staring at the white ceiling and remembering yesterday. It was as if sleep had washed away all traces but a fleeting memory of it, and a mental reminder to avoid his company whenever possible. She dressed, instead of lounging about in her pyjamas through coffee and toast as she usually did. There were things to do to get the place in hand. This would start with watering the garden before the sun got too hot.

  CHAPTER SIX

  LANE HADN’T PUT IN MUCH time with the garden, having decided, out of respect, to see what came up on its own, but what there were of Lady Armstrong’s phlox and lupines could use some weeding and a drink. The post office first, she decided. She looked nervously at the bushes near the path just to be sure that Sandy was not lurking. All clear.

  SHE’D FORGOTTEN IT was Sunday. No sense of time anymore, without the job marking off the days of the week for her. Days of the week seemed to be something she’d left behind in England. Eleanor had been in the garden, and sent her off with some early tomatoes. She had been quite understanding about the mix-up about Sunday. This was the Sunday that the vicar would not be doing a service at St. Joseph’s, so quite easy to forget, my dear.

  Lane put the tomatoes on the kitchen table and then realized that a slight feeling of letdown had returned with her from the Armstrongs’. She wanted a letter from her grandmother in Peebles, chiding her in the old familiar way. It would be a scent of home. What was it about grannies that allowed them to feel carte blanche to be disapproving? It was in the nature of the love they offered you. You couldn’t get their unconditional love. That would be excessive, wasteful. It must come tempered with advice to return home and stop this nonsense. But of course, this was Lane’s home. She mustn’t engage in nostalgia. Perhaps tomorrow there would be a letter. No. Of course not. Eleanor had told her that July first was Dominion Day. There would be nothing then either. Thinking that a letter from Yvonne would also be nice, she set off to the side of the house where the hose was rolled neatly onto a wooden wheel. It wouldn’t, she thought sadly, be neat when she finished with it. She’d love to think of France returned to normal. Perhaps Yvonne was planning a trip to the south in August as they used to do. Perhaps she’d met someone.

  The hose, an ancient affair of a heavy, rubbery substance but too good to throw away, was difficult to pull out. It hadn’t been used since Kenny, she presumed, had watered before she arrived. She blushed to think that was nearly a month ago. No wonder the beds looked so bedraggled compared to those of her industrious neighbours. She dragged the hose far enough to water the beds directly under the porch, set it down, and walked back to the tap, which was tight and needed oiling. She would get around to it one of these days. There was so much that wanted getting around to. She’d imagined vast swaths of time when she moved out here. She would establish a routine of writing until noon, have a lunch with bread she’d baked and tomatoes from her own garden, and then write for a few more hours in the afternoon.

  She turned the tap full on and was dismayed to see nothing was coming out. Now what? The creek was not dried up. She thought she could hear it gurgling exasperatingly in the distance. She ran upstairs to the kitchen and turned the tap. There was a loud, damp, coughing sound, and then waterless silence. She would have to see if Kenny Armstrong had any ideas. The thought of being without water in this heat was daunting.

  Just as she was leaving the house, the phone rang. It had a harsh clang that reminded her of the phones of her childhood in the ’20s. Two longs and a short. Hers. She lifted the earpiece off the hook and said into the horn, “King’s Cove 431.”

  “Lane, sweetie, is that you?”

  “Yes, Angela. How are you?” Who but Americans would call you sweetie? she wondered with a smile. Dave had been right. Their “newness” to King’s Cove did give them common cause and the locals had, as Angela had predicted, accepted Lane much more readily for her Englishness than they had Angela and Dave.

  “Well, not that great. Something happened to Harris’s water and he phoned and stormed at us that it was all our fault. Dave is furious. He was supposed to be spending the day composing and now this has happened. It’s put him right off. You’d think Harris’d stop going on about us. It’s been three years. It almost makes me want to go back to the States.”

  “Harris is a bad-tempered git. You know that! But I have no w
ater either, which is a nuisance. The flowers are gasping, and I imagine I’ll be wanting a cup of tea at some point.”

  “You and your bloody tea in the hot weather. If you don’t get water back, why don’t you come over here and have some down-home iced tea. Now that’s a drink. The kids are ecstatic. They see me making iced tea and they think we’re going to go camp on the beach for the rest of the summer.”

  Lane had wondered if the boys were, unwittingly, part of the offence offered by the arrival of this American family. Eleanor had told her there had once been children at King’s Cove, enough to fill the small one-room school that still stood up the hill with an overgrown driveway leading to the door. That was before the first war. They had grown up and left to start up lives in cities, or die in the two wars, and now the absence of children was a kind of hollow echo in the long afternoons.

  “I’m not sure I can,” Lane said. “I think I’ll have to tackle this water problem, though I haven’t a clue. I’d better phone Harris.”

  Lane heard a muffled conversation between Angela and someone in her house and then Angela: “Dave will go see what he can do. He’ll go help Harris. Let them cope. We’ve had this sort of thing before . . . I’m sure it’s some sort of plugging up of the pipes.”

  It was thus decided. Lane was relieved. She didn’t feel she could manage making the water work, though she never would have admitted it, because she had quite enough of people asking her how a young woman was coping out here on her own, as if she were homesteading in a sod hut in Saskatchewan instead of living in a fully plumbed and elegant, if slightly overwrought, Victorian house with a harmless, fresh-air-loving ghost.

  Lane took her bathing suit off the porch railing, where she’d tossed it to dry after her last swim, and collected a towel. What could she bring? She was about to look in her fridge when she heard a sharp bang on the door.

  “You were quick!” she called. “Come on in.” When she came around the corner from the kitchen, she nearly jumped out of her skin. It wasn’t Angela in her hallway; it was Harris who stood glowering in the shadows. “Mr. Harris! You gave me the fright of my life. I’m just off with Angela and the boys. I didn’t expect you. In fact, I was just going to phone you.” She realized too late it wasn’t a very welcoming speech, but he didn’t look in the mood for a welcome.

  “What have you done to the water?” he demanded. She knew he’d been in the first war on the Somme. Had he been an officer? He still had the power to command attention; a power that seemed intensified by his years. What did he mean, what had she done to the water?

  “What do you mean? I haven’t any water myself. That’s why I was going to phone, to offer to help. I thought Dave was going to help you. I assumed you and Dave were going to investigate.” She felt guilty about this, seeing Harris. Of course she couldn’t go anywhere. She’d have to help.

  “Dave. Pah! He doesn’t know his arse from his elbow. You’ve done something at your end here, where the creek runs down to my place. No bloody idea how to live in the country, that’s the trouble,” Harris was complaining.

  “I’ve done nothing. I had nothing to do anything with. I got my hose out and turned the tap and nothing but a gasp came out. I hardly think you can say I’ve done something.”

  “We’ve got to go up to the creek. You’ve obviously balled it up.”

  “Honestly, Mr. Harris, the agent checked it before I moved in, and I’ve not been near it since.”

  “Bloody stupid fellows, the lot of them.” He seemed peevish now, and uncertain what to do.

  “I’ll call Angela and tell her I’ll meet her later. We can go across and have a look if you like.”

  They crossed the back garden and took the driveway past her outbuilding. On the road, they made their way to where a path cut into the woods and up a sharp incline, through a copse of birch trees that, contrary to their usual habit of rustling gently in the slightest movement of air, were completely still in this early mid-morning heat. As they descended, the air cooled slightly, and Lane could smell the water they were approaching. They came to a halt at the creek’s edge in a tiny shaded vale. They ought, by rights, to be hearing the creek making a more rushing sound, but it was evident the minute they arrived that something was blocking it and it was overflowing its banks.

  Harris whacked irritably at a vast, yellow-green leaf of skunk cabbage, unleashing a strong odour of skunk. A shame, really, Lane thought, as they were beautiful. Being the younger and more light on her feet, she went past him and picked her way down the slippery bank toward the small wooden trough. “It must be full of twigs or something. Or someone’s built a nest here. Is the water usually this high? It seems to have turned into a pond.”

  She suddenly felt a tingle of apprehension. She was surprised at the return of this old, not always welcome companion, and then she told herself that the strong rot smell of the plants was probably making her imagine things.

  She’d never given any thought to how the water arrived in her taps, and she was surprised by the simplicity of the arrangement. Above the diversion, the creek flowed in its own natural banks, and here a wooden trough had been constructed into a simple system that diverted the creek into a second channel. There was a natural pool where the water collected just before it poured into the Y-shaped trough. One of the channels going to her, she presumed, and the other to Harris. The water was high, and looked as though it was flooding over what had been grass. She had to lean quite far over to look at where the water ought to be pouring through into the wooden diversion, and pulled back again with a gasp. “Make that someone. Harris, who on earth is this?” she said, keeping her mouth nearly closed in an effort not to breathe. For there, indeed, was an arm encased in a brown tweed jacket, hanging down from where the rest of the body must have been jammed, the water disturbing the arm as it pushed against it, and creating the backup into the pond.

  The shock that had left Lane momentarily frozen now spurred her forward in a panic into the water to see if he was alive. Though she could not see his face as it was turned away, water was pouring over his head in a way that could not allow for survival. “He’s dead. He’s been crammed there by someone.” Her instinct to shout at Harris to come help her pull the man out of his watery coffin was nearly overwhelming, but he had been pushed in there. They needed to leave him and call the police. She turned and looked at where Harris stood, and where they had come down the path. What evidence had they destroyed?

  She stood for some moments, watching the water swirling the man’s sandy, nearly ginger-coloured hair and tried to be perfectly still, to tell memories to stay where they were. Not like she’d never seen a corpse. But still, she battled a dangerous twinge of nausea. She looked up and tried to take in the forest that surrounded them. Who could die here, in this way? It was impossible. How did he get here? His hair moved with the water pouring over it, and she had a momentary and illogical thought that he was alive after all. She felt her ability to act subdued by this confusion.

  Into this silence Harris blundered, saying furiously, “What? What? Get out of the way, woman!” He strode brusquely past her and leaned, as she had, and, with perhaps more force than she had done, drew back.

  “Bloody hell!” he said. “Bloody hell! This!” As he said “this,” his voice rose in a high emphasis, as if this were yet another appalling setback designed to make his life a misery. Lane thought he looked slightly green, but that might have been the green reflection of the great, stinking leaves of skunk cabbage in the mid-morning sunlight.

  Back in her kitchen, they sat with glasses of brandy, tea being out of the question. At her insistence they’d phoned the Nelson police and could not expect anyone to be there in anything under an hour, maybe longer, as it was Sunday. She was puzzled by Harris’s reluctance to call them and wondered if it was some misplaced sense of independence in longtime dwellers in the country. After all, who else was going to deal with it? He seemed finally to agree with bad grace. Perhaps it was just that he wanted to be
in charge of anything that happened.

  “Did you recognize him at all?” asked Lane, when they had sat in silence for some minutes.

  “No, I bloody well did not! Why do you say that? This is what happens when foreigners start taking over the place.” He looked at her darkly, as if she might know who the body had been.

  “I rather wish we’d not trampled the place up like we did. It will make it harder for the police.”

  “Why don’t we leave all the thinking to the police, eh?”

  Lane thought he must be on the verge of saying “my girl.” I should tell him what I did in the war, she thought. That would fix him, self-satisfied old bugger! “I’m sure you’re right,” she said instead.

  She heard the door opening and Dave Bertolli calling in, “Hello? You in here?”

  “Come through to the kitchen. We’re waiting for the police,” Lane called.

  Dave tromped in wearing the boots he’d thought he’d need to help with whatever the problem was. He’d gone down to Harris’s and, not finding them there, had now made his way to Lane’s. “Waiting for the police? Why?” he asked.

  “There’s a bloody body in the bloody exchange and it’s blocked the bloody pipes.” Harris’s temper seemed to be fortified by the arrival of Dave, whom he consigned to the category of useless Yank who didn’t know a Pippin from a Red Delicious and had no business in King’s Cove at all. “Had this sort of thing to deal with in the war, of course. Mind you, I thought you pretty plucky with that body. Most women wouldn’t have handled that.” His sudden concession surprised Lane, though not his continuing to talk as if Dave hadn’t arrived.

  “Can I get you some brandy, Dave? It’s what we’re having. For the shock, don’t you know.” She held up the bottle. For her own self-respect, she was relieved to observe that her hand had stopped shaking.