“Electricity. You mean I didn’t have to bring an extra battery for my laptop after all?”
“Wait, you brought your laptop? I thought we agreed there would be no work done on this vacation.”
“I wasn’t going to work really, well sort of, but nothing urgent, you know. Some odds and ends I thought I could work on when you were taking a nap.”
“Me, a nap? When have you ever seen me take a nap?”
“I thought you might want to start. Is it ready?”
“Let’s see. Plug that lamp into this first outlet and I’ll open the gas line and start it up.”
The little generator he’d bought in an RV outlet store huffed to life and the lamp lit.
“Gimme that coffee pot.”
Chapter Eleven
Tom Stone, whose tenure as a Hancock County deputy sheriff totaled six months the previous week, wandered down to the Bass Harbor pier looking for one of the Scone Island captains. He would be taking the launch to Scone shortly, but he thought he might get lucky and find a Gott or a LaFranc in port. Sheriff Harvey Breckinridge told him he believed it would be a good idea for Tom to “mix and mingle.”
Tom looked confused. “Mix and mingle? Sorry, I…”
“Okay, Tommy, it’s like this. You’re new here, fresh, well almost fresh, from the police academy. The way law enforcement works here, and everywhere else for that matter, is when the guys who have to enforce it become part of the community in which they work. You need to get out and talk to people, and Scone Island is yours for the time being.”
“Okay, I can see that. What do I talk about?”
“Right. You need a reason. So, I’m looking at the coroner’s report on that accident out on Scone, and something smells a little off, you know. Like lunch meat that has been in the meat keeper a tad too long. Suspicious, but not a health hazard yet.”
“Something’s not right?”
“Well, maybe. That’s not important. It’s a reason to talk, see?” Harvey picked up a manila folder. “A fall of sixty feet onto rocks,” it says here, “doesn’t leave much in the way of bruises that can’t be explained as resulting from the fall, but—” Harvey looked up with raised eyebrows. The but caught Tommy’s attention. A but could mean a lot of things. Did the coroner have some doubts? Or was there too much tissue damage to tell anything, but the lab tests were inconclusive for alcohol in spite of what the man who retrieved the body said and maybe there was a thing or two needing a look out there? No thoughts about changing the investigation’s outcome, of course, but asking a few questions couldn’t hurt. Whatever the cause, substance abuse or stupidity, it would stay on the books as an accident. Unless the but converted into hard evidence to the contrary.
“But what? Did he see something that shouldn’t be there?”
“Maybe. The description we were given of the body’s position suggests…”
“What?”
“Patience, son. It’s a long shot, but the report said this guy, Staley, was lying face down on the rocks. If he didn’t hit anything on the way down, then there is a really bad contusion on the back of his head that has to be accounted for, that’s all.”
“On the back of his head. Not front? So the doc is saying that the victim might have been sapped from the rear and dropped over the cliff. That a killer might have assumed the fall to the rocks below would cover any wounds he might have received beforehand?”
“He’s not saying, Tommy, but that was my thought. We can’t possibly support a conclusion outside of accidental death without more evidence.”
“What kind of evidence?”
“The coroner says the wound on the back of Mr. Staley’s head looks like it could have been made with a pipe or round, heavy metal object.”
“A pry bar, tire iron?”
“Possibly. I’d rule out tire iron. No cars on the island, not likely there’d be a tire iron.”
“So you want me to what? Look for a blunt instrument…investigate?”
“No, not really. I think you should keep your ears open, naturally, and a hypothetical knock on the head is enough to give you an excuse to slip out there and talk to the locals, you see? Maine folk are not given to idle chit-chat, as you know, but if you have a reason…”
“Right, chat with the locals, get the feel for the place and who knows, something might turn up.”
“Talk to Miss Smithwick. She found the body. Maybe she will remember something we didn’t pick up on before.”
“Boss, for the record, do you think it wasn’t an accident?”
“Didn’t say that, son, but you need to think like that. Otherwise you will appear to be wasting taxpayer’s time and money. These folks are quick to pick up on someone who isn’t telling the truth.”
“So I need to believe it wasn’t an accident.”
“Classic police work, Tommy. Always assume there is something else until the case is cold. And even then, keep an open mind. You’d be surprised at the stuff that pops up sometimes years after we’ve closed a file. Oh, one more thing. There is an out-of-town cop out there. You might drop by and introduce yourself. His name is Ike Schwartz. I gather he’s worth knowing.”
“How so?”
“I called his office and then Googled him.”
“You Googled a cop?”
“Yep. Interesting guy if the crap on the Internet is halfway right. And he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s out there. A cop has enough trouble taking a vacation as you will soon discover. So, off you go.”
The police launch, its twin Chrysler marine engines throbbing, gentled to the pier. The exhaust made a small dent in the chronic smell of fish that harked back to the town’s packing days. It was mostly tourist now, but the lobstermen and fishing boats still worked from the little seaport on Mt. Desert Island. High tide made the approach easy.
***
Tom Stone spent the better part of the morning in Henry Potter’s Store, the one-room combination mail-drop, bait shop, and necessaries—Potter’s term for the odds and ends he carried for people who forgot to order groceries on time. The array of goods available in that category assumed people could survive on packages of peanut butter crackers, stale potato chips, and Spam. He also had coffee in plain brown packages and three kinds of beer. All of his goods were priced anywhere from 80 to 120 percent above the same goods in Bass Harbor which, in turn, were significantly higher than nearly anywhere else. All this was true except for the coffee. Since it had no label, comparisons could not be made.
Tom discovered that Potter had some very decided views about the death of Harmon Staley. He thought that Staley might have been part of a secret organization at one time, he said.
“A secret organization? What kind? You don’t think he was running a terrorist cell or anything, do you?” Tom wondered why he even asked. Terrorist cell?
“Naw, nothing like that, Deputy. See, when I went out there after Miz Smithwick told me about him taking a nose dive off the cliff, like, I am pretty sure I saw a big old radio antenna out behind the little house and—”
“Little house?”
“Oh, yeah. He had two houses out there. The big house is all gone to rack and ruin, but the little one, it was a guest house in the old days, is where he was living while he worked on the repairs on the big one. ’Course never happen, then or now.”
“What would never happen?”
“Fixing the big one up. He said as how he was into making it into a bed and breakfast or something like that. Never happen. Who’d come out here and pay to stay in an old broke-down house with no electricity, telephone, and such?”
“You live here.”
“But I ain’t no tourist, neither. No sir, the summer folks come here exactly because they like the no phone and electricity thing. No accounting for taste, they say. But you think some New York fella’ll come up here for a stay like that. Don’t seem likely.”
“You said you saw an antenna?”
“Oh yeah. I did. Then yesterday, I was up that way to ch
eck on some of the empty places, the Dankos and the Banks and them, and I took a stroll out to the end of the point and, bingo, no antenna. So what does that mean?”
“Wind knocked it over?”
“No, sir, some of his people came and cleaned up the mess.”
“You think?”
Potter laid a finger on one side of his nose. “Not for nothing the Island was used by the Army intelligence in World War II.”
“It was?”
“Yawp. Not everybody knows it, but it were.”
Tom left Potter and his conspiracy theories and after getting directions from the old man, set out to find the sheriff from Virginia that his boss had Googled.
Chapter Twelve
Al Jackson credited the United States Army for turning his life around. He insisted on that point in spite of the fact that during his tenure in the uniformed service he’d narrowly missed being blown apart by an IED in Iraq, received a nasty thigh wound from friendly fire in a place in South America he was not allowed to talk about and to which the DoD denied ever having deployed troops, and there was an incident with a drill sergeant early on that landed him in the stockade for six days before his talents were recognized and he was passed along to a group that knew how to use them. He liked that life even better.
All this started inauspiciously enough. He’d flunked out of Morgan State University after one semester and seemed on the verge of being absorbed into the west Baltimore gang culture when a judge offered him a wholly illegal choice, but the judge was an old-fashioned man and also not up for re-election. “Go to jail or join the Army,” he’d said. Since Al had no priors, the Army was available. He took the deal and reported for basic training a week later. The judge was able to expedite that as well. The Army trained him in skills he’d never dreamed existed. Special Forces, sniper school, jump school, and in the midst of that and the action it engendered, he discovered he had a facility for languages. That led him to more schools, some deep JSOC initiated covert action, and eventually all the way into covert ops with the CIA.
To anyone who asked, he’d say he was muscle. Operatives, field agents, they had the brains and they ran the ops. Al’s job hinged on how much shooting and explosive work needed to be done—at what range and what order of magnitude respectively. He found his new life, played out in the dark and violent world of covert operations, exactly what he seemed best suited for and he hoped he’d live forever or, failing that, cash in his chips while on some exotic operation in a hail of bullets. He was a romantic that way, you could say.
The SEALS got the Osama gig, a fact which annoyed him immensely, and now, as business seemed slow with the new Administration in Washington, he’d been told to stand down. He knew that being placed on extended leave meant either going slightly crazy or getting into trouble. For anyone else, leave with pay would be considered a soft berth. Not for Al. He feared getting rusty. Yet in his line of work, there were not many opportunities for him to practice his skill set outside the confines of the Company. Organized crime could use him and the gangbangers he knew as a youth could too, but he did not see either as a healthy option. Then there were a dozen petty despots around the world desperate to hold onto power at any cost, another possibility, but Uncle Sam still paid his bills and as long as that was so, he would not stray—not far, at least. If the conditions of his employment were to change, however…Anyway, he worried he might have lost a step. Maybe he was not as quick as he should be. And maybe that is why he ended up very dead in Pig Town one Saturday night.
He’d taken in a twi-night doubleheader at Camden yards—Chicago White Sox and the Orioles, and had left during the fifth inning of the second game. May nights, irrespective of the hype from Major League baseball, were not warm enough to play night games, at least not in Baltimore. He was cold, and his team had already nose dived into its expected position at the bottom of the American League East. He, as well as a dwindling fan base in the city, blamed that fact on the “Lawyer.” The man had bought a team that in the old days regularly went to the playoffs and the World Series and he’d turned it into a mediocrity. He mourned for his Birds.
He’d parked some ten blocks away from the ballpark, thinking the exercise would keep him sharp, and had been walking back to his car when he was gunned down. The police only knew Al as an ex-GI with gang connections going back a few years. He had no visible means of support, albeit he had money in his pocket when they found him in a pool of blood in Traci Adkins Park near Ramsay Street. They ran a sweep of the neighborhood, talked to the two witnesses who came forward, and classified the case as another drive-by, probably gang-related, and figured they’d never find the shooter.
It was the weekend and Al’s control had been caught in a ten-car pile-up on the New Jersey Turnpike. He was one of a half-dozen people sent to local hospitals for treatment of minor injuries and whiplash. It is the sad consequence of a life that requires you to be invisible that you tend to remain that way even after you die. Al Jackson would remain unknown and un-mourned for three days, until his control finally tracked him down in the Baltimore city morgue wearing a toe tag that could have belonged to anybody. This lapse would prove critical, but not the way one would expect.
***
Eden Saint Clare had room service deliver a bagel and cream cheese, orange juice, and coffee to her room. She sat, nibbled, and sipped by the room’s only window and contemplated Lake Michigan. She shivered. The mere act of looking at the lake could give you a chill, especially in the fall and early spring. In the winter, when the ice piled up on the breakwaters, the experience shifted from chilling, to cold, to arctic. She’d not spent enough time in Chicago during the summer to know if a lake view ever felt anything but gelid. After this last trip, she would probably never have a reason to find out. She pulled her robe tighter around her shoulders and turned her attention to her complimentary copy of USA Today. If anything big and important was in the news, it would be in the paper, she thought, and maybe then she could figure out if Charlie’s call was merely social or carried the scent of danger. She smiled—scent of danger. A nice turn of phrase, she thought. An editor might disagree.
The paper, as usual, had all the same-o, same-o stories she’d read in one version or another for the last decade or so; trouble in the Mideast, economic woes, the myriad shootings here and there across the nation, political guesswork by people who denied they were guessing but who in fact were. Pundits. The trouble with USA Today, she believed, was that it did not carry the comics. A crossword puzzle it had, and Sudoku, but no easy relief from the dreariness brought on by the contents in the remainder of the paper. At least the Chicago Tribune had funnies. Years spent trolling the slightly Marxist halls of academe had biased her against the Trib, naturally. In fairness to it and papers like it, she believed one could make a case for the editorial page being a sort of an auxiliary to the comics. Her Tea Partying sister-in-law had become quite angry when she’d said as much at their last meeting.
Her husband’s body was a heartbeat away from following his mind to wherever it had gone years before. Heaven or hell, she didn’t know. Religion did not play importantly in her married life before, and now it did not offer the comfort it might have, had she been open to it. For a brief moment she wondered if maybe that had been a mistake. Lawyers, hairdressers, and piano bars provided poor sources of solace. She brushed aside these too-deep-for-nine-in-the-morning thoughts, set aside the cup and bagel ends. It was time to dress and head to the lawyer’s office to meet the sister-in-law. Why couldn’t people just die and be buried? Why must the surviving relatives fight over everything from who gets the rose medallion bowl to the burial allotment from the Social Security Administration?
She had the bellman call her a cab and waited inside the revolving doors and out of the chill until it drove up and the doorman signaled to her. Had she turned around and glanced at the desk, she might have noticed the tallish man in the blue suit inquiring after her at the desk. But she didn’t turn and didn’t see him.
Chapter Thirteen
“Now that we have settled into almost livable domesticity and have the promise of uninterrupted time, maybe we can take some of it and plan what happens next. This summer we could—”
Ruth put her coffee cup down with a loud click—the sort of gesture that signaled she wanted the floor, and looked up from the papers in her lap.
“I’ve been reading this book I found in Aunt Margaret’s desk. It’s something the residents put together years ago and—”
“Did I hear a change of subject?” Ike had been careful about using the “W” word while Ruth healed and waged war with her barons, his name for the department chairpersons and deans who vied for space, money, and attention from the Queen, that is to say, Ruth. Now, as he floated plans for a wedding they, like the proverbial trial balloon made of lead, sank.
“Okay, okay, Ike, I promise, when we get back to Picketsville, we’ll have a serious talk, weddings I mean. But we’re here on this little island recuperating. We are alone, well mostly so. We have no responsibilities, no one knocking on the door, no cops with problems, no academics with complaints, no students with roommate issues.”
“No cops in sight, true, no student or faculty either, but it’s you who’s recuperating. I’m along for the ride and the pleasure of your company, of course.”
“Baloney. You had a bad patch of your own to go through only yours was political while mine was—”
“All of the above. But do not forget that the political took a back seat to a friend in a hospital bed.”
“Sorry, you’re right. Were you really so strung out?”
“Me? Hah.”
“Right, my man of steely nerves and true grit. Did I ever thank you for being that for me?”
“How could you? You were asleep, remember?”
“You can’t remember being asleep. Only going there and waking up.”
“No dreams?”
“Many, but none remembered or worth repeating. We’ll talk later, Ike, okay?”
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