B.B. Cantwell - Portland Bookmobile 02 - Corpse of Discovery

by B. B. Cantwell

  He was quickly shivering in the cool breeze, and low scudding clouds gave no promise of a warming day. Hester handed Sage a Haystack Rock souvenir beach towel she’d stashed in a dry bag, and he wrapped himself up in it, looking surprisingly like Sacajawea with his braids protruding as he settled back in his paddling position at the bow and looked out to find the other canoes.

  Where the other canoes had last been seen a half-mile off, a giant ship, riding low in the water from the weight of thousands of raw logs stacked high on its deck, plowed a four-foot bow wave as it headed downstream en route to Japan.

  Once the ship passed, that snaking band of fog – the “smoke on the water” for which Skamokawa was named – now obliterated their view of anything beyond.

  They were as alone as Lewis and Clark felt 200 years earlier.

  Chapter 31

  “So, Nate, can you picture some blind guy in line at Safeway with My Little Pony clomping its hoof on the linoleum 46 times to tell him how many cents he should be getting from the change machine?” Harry Harrington asked with a howl as they sipped cappuccinos during a break at Jitters Coffee Co.’s Northwest Portland café.

  Darrow was shaking his head with a wry smile when a buzzing like an angry hive of bees sounded from the pocket of his houndstooth-checked jacket.

  “Yikes, I keep experimenting with different rings on this phone but I’m not sure that’s the one yet,” Darrow exclaimed as he dug for the gadget.

  Fiddling to raise the antenna and peering to punch the right button, he finally yelped into the mouthpiece: “Nate Darrow!”

  Leaning close to the earpiece, Harry could hear the caller identify himself as Ranger John Vouri from Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. Then came a few exchanges of more muffled conversation that included several comments from Darrow such as “Really?” and “You’re sure?”

  When Darrow signed off, he picked up his coffee and sipped at it with a distant look in his eyes while Harry stared at him like a cat waiting for a canary to fly his way.

  “So?!” Harry finally cajoled.

  Darrow responded by looking vacantly Harrington’s way, then picking up a little wooden stirring stick that sat in a small pool of brown liquid next to his cup and rapidly stirring his drink until all the foam dissolved into the coffee.

  “Earth to Nate! Earth to Nate!” Harrington heckled.

  “Oh. Harry.” Finally his eyes focused on his partner. “That was the ranger from Fort Vancouver, the one who had been to his father’s funeral.”

  Harrington nodded expectantly.

  “Um, well, it seems he’s back now.”

  Harrington threw himself back against his chair and groaned. “Yes, I got that much, Nate. So what did he say?”

  “Hmm, I’m trying to figure out what it means.”

  “Nate! Give!” Harrington spoke in clipped syllables, like a trainer instructing a show dog.

  Darrow looked at him from heavy-lidded eyes. “Well, it seems the old French pistol was returned to the library on time, according to arrangements this Vouri fellow made by phone from Ohio with one of his assistants.”

  Harry jutted his chin out while he thought about this for a moment.

  “So that confirms that van Dyke, not Charbonneau, had easier access to the weapon!”

  Darrow nodded.

  “But there’s something else. Vouri also says that because of the potential for accidents, he’s absolutely meticulous in tracking which of the re-enactment replicas is loaded with blanks for use in skirmishes and which is loaded with live ammunition to be used in target shooting.”

  Harrington was turning red now. “Yeah? And?”

  “Well, apparently this pistol was loaded for target practice but wasn’t fired before Vouri got the emergency call about his father. In fact, he’s quite worried now that in all the confusion the pistol was returned to the library without proper ‘decommissioning,’ as he describes it.” Darrow pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head as he concluded.

  Harry looked like a gasping salmon that had just been pulled off the gaff hook. Then the significance of what Darrow said dawned in his eyes.

  “Nate, you don’t mean…”

  Darrow still pinching between his eyes, nodded now.

  “Whether Pieter van Dyke knew it or not, that antique pistol he took to the park was likely loaded and ready to fire.”

  Chapter 32

  “So Charbonneau may be telling the truth and the pistol could have been fired without any help from him,” Harry Harrington speculated as he and Nate Darrow walked down 23rd Avenue past the late breakfast crowd gobbling Eggs Benedict in the window at Papa Haydn’s Cafe.

  “It sounds that way, though my buddy Pomp is far from guilt-free in all this.”

  Hunched against the morning’s unexpectedly cool wind, Darrow jangled change in his trouser pocket as they waited for a light to change, then spoke again as he and Harry crossed Kearney Street toward the parked Caprice.

  “But if Pomp is to be believed, someone else happened upon van Dyke after Charbonneau had left him, removed the Rose Medallion that Pomp had left on a ribbon around his neck, then fired the pistol into van Dyke’s heart. Then whoever the killer was apparently threw the pistol into the creek – to be found by a fisherman – and the medallion into the bushes, to be found by a sausage-loving dachshund.”

  “A sausage-loving dachshund owned by the victim’s law partner and escorted by his soon-to-be son-in-law,” Harry pointed out as he unlocked the driver’s door of the car, parked in a “police only” slot by the red-brick façade of Good Samaritan Hospital, at 23rd and Lovejoy.

  “Yeah, that’s a coincidence I don’t like at all,” Darrow sighed, folding himself into the passenger seat of the car just as a horde of angry bees drowned out his words.

  “Darrow!” he shouted, after a few moments of scrambling to pull out his phone.

  This time he didn’t keep Harry guessing at the end of the phone call.

  “That was the lab. We might have hit pay-dirt on my wild hunch about the sausage grease on the Rose Medallion. It will take a few days for DNA testing to be positive, but Don Finkle says he can state with 75 percent certainty that the grease found on the medallion came from the kitchen of the Wiener Dog!”

  Harrington gave a long, low whistle.

  “Way to go with the hunches, Nate, even though I thought Harriet was going to have my cojones with brown mustard on a kaiser roll yesterday!”

  Darrow was back in remote mode, staring vacantly at the front veranda of a new-age bookstore across the street in front of which two of the youngest Rajneeshees from Sauvie Island were passing out carnations to passers-by.

  When Nate spoke again it was as if snapping out of a trance.

  “So, Harry, that day when the Rajneeshees were in the park feeding squirrels and Schnitzel the wonder dog supposedly chased a squirrel into the bushes and came back with the medallion, maybe it wasn’t such a surprise to Tony the cook.”

  Harrington was struggling to keep up with the thought process.

  “You mean because…”

  “Exactly. Because Tony the cook had smeared sausage grease on the medallion before hiding it in those bushes so everyone would watch Schnitzel find it, steering suspicion away from him by making an adorable animal story out of what had been a grim murder investigation!”

  Behind his glasses, Harry’s eyes opened wide.

  “And thanks to the reward money Tony is now partners in his restaurant, not just the flunky boiling bratwurst! Nate, we gotta talk to this guy!”

  Harry turned the ignition and wheeled the Caprice into traffic as he reached for the mike on his police radio and started to report their destination as the restaurant at Jantzen Beach.

  “Hold on, Harry, hold on. He’s not there today.”

  “Not there? How do you…”

  “No, apparently he’s down on the Lower Columbia somewhere – feeding hot dogs to Hester and her library friends, if I’m not mistaken,” said Da
rrow, recalling that morning’s colorful caravan on Highway 30.

  Darrow pulled out his phone.

  “Let me find out just where they went, and while I do that, you get us headed toward Astoria!”

  Chapter 33

  “Where did they g-g-go?” asked Sage, the page, his teeth chattering from the cold wind on his dripping braids as he scanned the wide and misty river for the other canoes.

  “Oh, goodness, they were just there! Just before that ship passed,” Candy Carmichael spoke up from the rear of the dugout. “But hold on, that’s why we brought the walkie-talkies! In case we got separated!”

  In the interest of cultural authenticity and self-reliance, Carmichael had forbidden the paddlers from bringing cellular phones on the trip. But some type of communication was needed in case of trouble. She pulled a palm-sized radio from a jacket pocket, peered at it and twisted a knob to turn it on. It gave a beep. Poking at a button, she spoke.

  “Canoe Three to Canoe One, Canoe Three to Canoe One, come in Canoe One!”

  All they heard was static.

  “This is some new gadget Vance picked up at Radio Shack. Does anybody know anything about these things?” Candy asked in disgust.

  The Three Oracles, as Hester had come to think of them, tended to take such questions too literally.

  “The Federal Communications Commission authorized the new Family Radio Service as an improved walkie-talkie radio system using channelized frequencies around 462 and 467 megahertz in the ultra high frequency band,” responded Jeanette Nelson.

  “It does not suffer the interference found on citizen’s band radio at 27 megahertz, or on the 49 megahertz band also used by cordless phones, toys and baby monitors,” added Debbie Wilkes.

  “FRS radios function on 14 channels, and individual handsets must be tuned to the same channel in order to communicate,” Eva Temple chimed in, turning to give Candy a skeptical glance over the top rim of her glasses. “I don’t suppose you and the other geniuses agreed on a channel before leaving the shore?”

  Candy gave her a dirty look, frowned and punched some more buttons. The radio beeped and squawked.

  Pim, never one to suffer fools gladly, groaned. “Why don’t we just paddle the goldurn boat? That Vince guy said we should stay in the shipping channel – to catch the current or something.”

  “Yes,” Hester piped up. “I vote we follow that ship! We’re bound to see the others when the fog lifts!”

  So they paddled. To the good, the exercise helped warm them up. Pim soon grew more accustomed to the regular strokes. Eva’s bursitis seemed to ease. Sage’s teeth stopped chattering.

  So when they finally passed Pillar Rock, he showed his good spirits by bolting to a crouch in the bow of the dugout, emoting with a hand shading his brow, gazing into the distance and shouting, “Ocian in view!”

  And then he fell overboard again.

  The spirit of re-enactment paled quickly after the second man-overboard drill, just about the same time the sky grew darker and whitecaps started roiling the water. The paddlers labored on silently, still looking for the other canoes ahead, while taking turns digging out jackets and sweatshirts in an effort to stave off goosepimples caused by the rapidly dropping temperature. Hester finally spoke up again.

  “Does anybody know what it means when the waves start breaking on top like that? And is it just me or does it seem like we’re not moving ahead anymore?”

  “On the Beaufort scale, whitecaps generally begin when the wind reaches a velocity of 10 to 12 knots,” Jeanette answered.

  “And small-craft navigation on the Lower Columbia is often complicated by tidal action during a flood tide that actually reverses the river’s flow as far as 25 miles inland from the mouth,” Debbie declared.

  “OK, STOP!” Hester commanded. “I mean…” She took a deep breath. “Thank you, ladies.”

  She rested her paddle and watched the droplets of water stream off its end into the river, an inky green now that the sky had become gloomier overhead. Then Hester raised her head, turned back to the organizer of the day’s voyage and spoke in a calm voice that belied her thoughts.

  “And Candy, might I ask how carefully we consulted the tide tables before setting out today?”

  Candy Carmichael’s face twitched three times before she answered.

  “I…I went up to Science and Business and asked about currents and they came up with some equation and said something like the currents ‘would really be in our favor when they were in our favor,’ which I took to just be some kind of librarian doublespeak. I mean, of course, the current would be in our favor. We’re going downstream! It’s a river!”

  The seven other paddlers returned dark stares in her direction.

  At the same time, the wind began to gust, sending salty spray in their faces and rendering further conversation pointless. Without prompting, everyone in the canoe started paddling, just to help steady out their craft in the bouncing water.

  It soon became evident they weren’t going to make it to Astoria. With the rolling fog and wind-whipped water, it was hard to see where they were going. But the winds and currents were obviously deciding their course for them. Paddling toward the river’s center, toward Oregon, their progress quickly stalled and their paddles thrashed the water with little result. Paddling for the Washington shore, they drew steadily closer to a high banked beach.

  Onshore, trees were beginning to sway. It occurred to Hester, and the realization seemed reflected on the grim faces of her weary crewmates: With the weather deteriorating, they could be battling for their lives if they didn’t soon reach the beach.

  Time condensed. Muscles ached and hands grew numb, but finally their bow crunched against the pebbly shore. They dragged themselves out of the dugout, now filled with puddles of water, and staggered to safety. Hester and Pim gave a hand to Sage, who was shivering and pale, and they all plopped down on a bleached gray drift log against a high bank covered with amber-colored sea grass.

  Eva Temple, who’d replaced her Baudelaire with a small digest of William Clark’s journals before leaving shore, pulled the volume from a fanny pack and studied it wordlessly while the others looked on in exhausted silence, their arms clasped around themselves against the cold. She unfolded a map and wrestled with it as it flapped in the wind. She peered downriver, toward a mist-shrouded bridge about a mile away, and then spoke with conviction to her seven companions.

  “When Lewis and Clark hit this stretch of river the Corps of Discovery ran into weather much like this. And much like we just experienced, their canoes were driven ashore. They were trapped for six miserable days by winds and waves at a spot that Clark in his journal called a ‘dismal little nitch.’ ”

  She paused, as if for dramatic effect, once again gazing around her with weary eyes.

  “Well, ladies – and gentleman – we’re having one hell of a re-enactment. From what I read and what I see on this map, I’m pretty certain this is the place. Welcome to Dismal Nitch!”

  Chapter 34

  In November 1805, Clark in his journal described Dismal Nitch as little more than jagged rocks and a steep hillside that prevented the Corps’ escape from a narrow strip of beach. Wind-driven waves pummeled the beached canoes and endless rain punished the explorers, whose leather clothing by this time in their journey was rotting on their backs.

  The good news for the band of weary librarians: Two centuries had transformed the landscape, pretty much leveling the high bluff and turning Dismal Nitch into a minor historical site, complete with a highway rest area and a fishermen-tramped path that led down to the beach.

  “Oh saints be praised, look up there, do I see restrooms?” Hester called, rallying the morale of the windblown crew just as big raindrops started to splatter on their foreheads.

  “I got first dibs on the electric hand dryer,” Linda Dimple shouted, showing a burst of speed up the path that Hester wouldn’t have thought possible in a children’s librarian little taller than the average atten
dee of her Saturday morning story hour.

  Pim, always practical, recruited the Three Oracles to help her pull the canoe up the beach and tie its bow line to a log. Seeing the walkie-talkie Candy Carmichael had left on her seat, she popped it into a pocket for safekeeping. Then they all trooped up the path and took shelter in the public restrooms, gathering curious looks from a carload of tourists from Boise.

  Candy Carmichael, reasserting her authority, spied a pay phone next to an information kiosk, collected spare dimes from her cohorts and was soon on the line with Bob Newall, one of the few library employees who had been issued a cellular phone.

  Bob had taken the bookmobile to the waterfront park in Astoria where the Wiener Wagen was setting up for the afternoon picnic. The other two canoes had arrived safely a short time earlier, he said.

  “They caught the counter-current through the sloughs on the Oregon side and made fantastic progress – they hardly had to paddle at all!” Newall said. “In fact, I heard one of them say it was like having a little outboard motor on their transom!”

  Carmichael, deciding not to pass this latter news on to her paddling colleagues, soon convinced Newall that the Canoe No. 3 crew needed rescuing.

  “I can get someone to bring one of the vans for the crew, but that darn Lars Simpson was driving the van with the trailer and he took a load of library folk out to Seaside to ride the bumper cars,” Newall said. “I think there was some kinda challenge between the Periodicals Department and Government Documents.”

  “Bob, I don’t care if the whole bleeding staff has gone off to Cannon Beach for pony rides, we just need some help over here!”

  “But I’ll have to bring your canoe back, too, don’t you see?” Newall spluttered. “Those are valuable artifacts and my friend Lester Fishhawk from the Chinook tribe will skin me if anything happens to that canoe! I guess I’ll have to bring the bookmobile over and we can hoist it on top.”