Sunset at [20 47]

by Peter Kingsmill

  “Please, call me anything but Mister Anderson. And yes, the police have other things on their minds today but – why do you need help? Why the police?”

  “I think I found a body in the water.”

  Anderson didn’t answer. He walked across to a cabinet beside the fridge, took out a small flask of brandy, took a small mug off its hook over the sink, poured in a couple of fingers from the flask, and filled the mug with the now-hot water from the kettle. This he delivered to his guest, who did not refuse it. “And what’s your name, may I ask?”

  “Marjorie. Marjorie Webster. My sister and I have a cottage on the little island off MacLean Point. And thank you; this will go down well.”

  “Ah... Now I know, exactly,” Anderson nodded. “You moved out there a couple of summers ago, and I’ve probably passed you on the lake, but we’ve never met.” He settled into a chair across from her and took a sip from his coffee cup. “I guess you should tell me what you think you have found, and where.”

  “I’m not really all that sure. I have a kayak, and less than an hour ago I was paddling slowly along the shore just east of town, watching the late afternoon birds come and go. Suddenly my paddle caught something – felt like a clump of weeds, but more solid. I didn’t think anything about it as I pulled my paddle away, but then I thought...” she shuddered visibly, “I though I saw a face in the water.”

  “Geez. That’d be a shock to the system!” Anderson tried to sound somewhere between comforting and practical: “Are you sure? Was it right at the surface? Did you see it again?” The questions poured out a little too fast – in spite of his better judgement he was being more practical than comforting.

  “No. I sort of looked around, not wanting to see it again but, well, you know. I had to try to focus a bit. All I was really able to do was paddle away a couple of hundred feet and try the phone. When that didn’t work, I paddled straight into the village. Pulled my kayak up on your dock and ran up here.”

  Anderson got up and topped up his coffee. From a drawer in the kitchen he took out a beat-up pack of cigarettes and some matches and walked back to the table. “Hope you don’t mind,” he said.

  “Not at all. Actually, could I have one too?”

  He lit her cigarette, then his, before sitting down. Time to get practical, he thought. “With this overcast, it’s going to be almost dark in less than an hour, and we should sort of retrace your route before you forget where you were when you saw... what you saw. Then we can try the police again with possibly better information. Is your sister home on the island?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you told her about this?”

  “No, her cell must be off. We only have one charger and mine had just been plugged in when I left the house.”

  “Okay,” said Anderson, carefully getting his thoughts organized. “We’ll finish our coffee (and hot water) and go down to my boat, load up your kayak, and run along the shore until we get to where you think you found something. I can mark the spot with a float, as well as on the marine GPS, then quickly run you home to the island before it gets dark. Make sense?”

  “Yes. Makes sense, and I would certainly appreciate the lift, and the company.”

  They sat in silence for a few moments. Anderson’s mind started to fill with thoughts: Just outside the village; Anita gone for as much as three days; gotta get in touch with the cops – tonight; have to assume there will be a water search, no matter what, but oh God, how do we handle it with Georgina, and Fred, and everyone else?

  “It’s going to be a long night, Marjorie, but I’ll try to keep the police from bothering you until tomorrow. If you’re done with that brandy, we’d best be going.”

  She nodded, and gulped down the last mouthful. Anderson dumped his coffee into a travel mug, grabbed a jacket for himself and a blanket for Marjorie, guided her out the door and walked with her quickly down to the dock.

  It didn’t take long to fire up the main diesel and the small diesel generator he had installed a couple of months before. He was proud of that little “genset”; it gave him lots of household current for tools and lights when he was working for clients out on the islands, and carried some of the load from the boat’s electronics. He checked the navigation lights and radar, loaded up the little kayak and strapped it down in the well deck with a couple of tarp straps. Within minutes he had cast off the mooring lines and was easing the boat out of the little harbour. He turned to his passenger: “Marjorie, there’s no point in my filing a sail plan tonight because there’s really nobody to receive it. However, I am going to call Arnold from the garage and tell him I’m out on the water and that I want to connect with him when I get back in. Okay?”

  She nodded. “If you can reach him from out here.”

  There was nothing very modern about Anderson: old boats, old house, old engines, old machinery, old pick-up trucks. However, perhaps because he worked and lived alone, Anderson did place a high value on communications technology, and he had equipped his boat with a cell-booster as well as good marine radio equipment and GPS. He had even installed an old citizen band two-way radio – even since the advent of cellphones, most of the island cottagers still used CB to talk together, especially with their sailing club. “No problem,” he told Marjorie. “I have a cell booster.”

  Which he used, catching Arnold at home. “Hi there! Sorry to bother you but I have Marjorie Webster with me from the little island off MacLean Point, along with her kayak, and I’m giving her a lift home. I’ll call you when I get back in; perhaps you could come by my place after. There’s stuff we need to talk about tonight.”

  “Okay. Don’t stay out there too long with those pretty ladies, Anderson. Dangerous ground!”

  Anderson glanced at Marjorie. The cell system was on speaker, and she was chuckling at him. Obviously he had neither heard her chuckle nor even seen a smile since their introductions half an hour earlier, and the smile was nice to see. And yes, she was pretty. “Sorry about my friends. And my speakerphone,” he added somewhat ruefully.

  It didn’t take the converted lobster boat long to retrace Marjorie’s kayak route. When she told him they were getting close to where she thought she had seen the body, Anderson cut the throttle away back to just steerage way, and edged in closer to shore. The depth sounder was reading about seven feet when she said ,“I wasn’t any closer to shore than this, I’m pretty sure. And you see that rock outcrop with the funny tree on top, over there? I was pretty close to that when I stopped to try to call for help.”

  “So, a couple of hundred feet beyond?”

  “Close as I remember. I was pretty spooked.”

  The lake bottom here was pretty rough, and the sounder was reading between five and eight feet. The launch drew two-and-a-half feet unloaded and flat, and bronze propellers do not get along well with granite; Anderson’s eyes hardly left the sonar screen’s bottom scan as they made a couple of passes. “This is pretty shallow; we’ll have to bring a skiff over here tomorrow,” he mused to himself. To Marjorie, he said, “I always keep a little red float with an anchor attached; I’ll turn and make one more pass, and when you think I’m close again I’ll stop and throw it over. Then we can take you home.”

  She nodded, and stared unhappily at the shore – and the water – as he made the turn. After a couple of minutes, she said – almost shouted – “Here”. Anderson took the transmission out of gear, stepped quickly out of the wheelhouse and threw the small anchor and the little red float – almost like a heavy balloon – overboard, anchor first. He returned to the wheel, carefully put the gearshift into forward, and edged offshore. He knew the lake well; once his depth sounder was registering about 12 feet he relaxed and pushed the throttle lever forward until the launch was making about eight knots.

  He swung her nose southeast, and headed for what he (and only he, perhaps) called Ship Island because against the sunrise the silhouetted trees on the island looked like the rigging on a far-off ancient sailing ship. The rest of the trip was si
lent, each of them with their own thoughts. Anderson was glad to have his launch back on open, deep water and obviously Marjorie was just glad to leave behind that piece of shoreline, including what it may contain. They would both have things to deal with tomorrow, but tonight was, thankfully, over.

  It didn’t take them long to reach the island. Anderson knew there was a little bay with a dock and a boat shed on the south side, and he swung east to go around to the bay. “I’m going to signal your sister,” he commented. “She can meet us at the dock. I trust it’s deep enough to get the bow of this old tub up to the dock, or do we have to get you back into your kayak?” He levered off two long blasts of the horn as he rounded the end of the island; by now his navigation lights were showing brightly in the late dusk, so he knew Marjorie’s sister would see them coming.

  “We have an outboard tied up on the left side as we’ll be coming in,” Marjorie responded. “There’s at least four feet of water halfway down the dock on the right, so you should be okay. I’m sure Wendy will be down at the dock to help us in.”

  “Thanks – perfect.” Anderson had already eased the throttle back and carefully approached the dock. Sure enough, he could see another person stepping up to meet them.

  Between the two ladies, mooring lines were passed and tied to the rickety wharf. Introductions were made. Understandably, the probably younger and slightly plumper Wendy had been worried, probably very worried, so Marjorie kept the explanation to a minimum, just something about the foggy evening near the village and losing her bearings. More would come later. Anderson quickly took his leave, after receiving a gentle squeeze on the arm from Marjorie and one last flood of thank-yous from her sister. They cast off the lines for him; he backed away from the dock, turned out of the bay and back around the island, heading northwest toward the barely-visible lights of Spirit River.

  ***

  Of course, he had known the night was not even close to being over. Anderson called Arnold when he was about fifteen minutes from the village, and suggested he warn Marion he was stealing him for a beer – at home, not at the pub.

  When he pulled into his berth, he could see truck lights at the dock. Arnold was there to take his lines and help him tie up. Anderson made some quick notes in the log before he shut down the genset and the main engine, and tonight he did not forget to lock the wheelhouse and even put the padlock on the heavy security chain he sometimes used when he was away. Tonight he felt uneasy – not a feeling he normally entertained.

  Arnold drove him up the block to the house. Once settled at the table with beers in hand, Anderson filled him in on his evening with the lady from the island, what she believed she had found, and what Anderson himself feared. “Somehow, I can’t believe that – if indeed it was Anita – she would have surfaced so soon, but it is possible. What have you heard in town, and especially from the cops?”

  “Almost nothing. Certainly nothing beyond speculation. I think pretty well everyone who knew her at all has been contacted, and at least informally questioned. With nothing to go on at all, and given the distances between where she was last seen and her home and friends around here, there is still no talk of a search.”

  “Well, what happened here tonight may well change everything.” Anderson went on to speculations of his own: “Of course, this may have been a case of a nice lady with a big imagination having a bad experience with a clump of weeds, but she’s awful level-headed, considering what she thinks she saw.”

  “Know what?” Arnold said slowly. “I think we need to reach the cops tonight, and get them going on a body search as soon as possible in the morning.”

  “How do we do that without lighting panic fires all over the place?”

  Arnold nodded. “That’s going to be tough, but we’d better start working on a plan, and doing it now. I know nothing at all about body searches but I bet they are tough enough to manage on land, let alone in the water.”

  “Okay,” said Anderson. “Let’s pull the trigger. It’s almost ten o’clock; why don’t you get the gendarmes on the phone... they always think I’m kinda weird (unless, of course they need to get out on the water when the weather’s bad). They work away better with you tow-truck jockeys!”

  Arnold sucked down a mouthful of beer and retrieved his phone from his jacket. “OPS” was on his speed-dial – there was no local police force and the Ontario Police Service served the communities in the area. A water search would probably wind up involving the Mounties and even perhaps the Coast Guard, but the OPS was where to start and he knew most of the officers and support staff anyway. Arnold and his tow-truck would likely be on their speed-dial too, and he hoped that at this time of night he would reach the local office and not be shunted off to a 911 dispatcher from lord-knows-where in the province.

  He got lucky: Sergeant John MacLeod from Maple Falls picked up immediately. “Evening John, it’s Arnold at Main Street Garage in Spirit River. I have some information that may tie in with the Antoine disappearance.”

  There was a pause. “Okay, I’ll wait.” Arnold looked up at Anderson and said, “he’s put me on hold. I hate that!”

  Anderson wandered over to the sink, cleaned out the coffee pot and started to brew a fresh pot while they waited. Just in case it would be a long wait, he popped open another couple of cans of “Blue” and brought them back to the table. “I thought this might be a long night. If we’re gonna meet with those guys tonight – which we should - they can come here; probably not a great idea to arrive at the cop shop with a couple of beers under our belts.”

  “Hello? Yes, John,” Arnold broke in. “I’m here at Frank Anderson’s – yes, the boat guy – and he thinks there may be a body in the water just outside of town. Huh? Yeah, his instincts are pretty good about that stuff, but in this case it’s from a third party. Why don’t you talk to him...” and he handed the phone across the table.

  “Hi Sergeant, Anderson here. Yeah, been a weird night so far. Yes, one of the cottagers was out kayaking around east of the village and thinks she snagged a body with her paddle. She paddled into town in a bit of a panic and wound up at my door. About 1900 hours. Panic? No, I probably shouldn’t have put it that way. Pretty calm actually – shock maybe. I gave her a warm brandy and water, then drove her out to where she thinks she saw this in my boat. Took her and her kayak back to her home after. Marked the spot with a buoy. Huh? Just a minute...”

  Anderson took the phone from his ear and asked Arnold, “Did Anita ever hang around the docks or the beach? I don’t think I ever saw her around there at all.”

  “Nah, I think she was more interested in fast cars and faster men. Even when she was a kid she never seemed much interested in the lake.”

  “Sarge – did you get that? Yeah, it seems unlikely but you never know. And it is also seems a little early for a body to rise. Huh? sure, okay. Come on by. You know where I live? Yup, that’s the place. See you in a few minutes.”

  Anderson clicked the phone off and handed it back to Arnold. “John’s at the edge of the village in the patrol car – the local office number was forwarded to his cell and he’s out driving around. He’ll be here right away.”

  They polished off the beer cans and Anderson put them in a box by the kitchen waste bin before grabbing three coffee mugs. He filled two, set them on the table, and took some paper and a couple of pens from the desk before he sat down.

  They didn’t have long to wait; they could see the headlights as the Sergeant swung his cruiser around to the door. Actually, it wasn’t a cop car at all – it was a nice new OPS-branded Escalade SUV. Arnold went to the door to welcome him in. “Nice ride, John. You’re gonna have to give me more than two bits to cover my share! You two know each other?”

  “You bet,” said the Sergeant, sticking out a huge paw to shake hands. He was a big man – classic middle-aged cop with a few extra pounds but still looking like he could hold his own in the corners. “We had you take us out to the Johnson place a couple of years ago. A break-in, as I recall.
And that was before I got my new stripes.”

  “I see the stripes, Sergeant John: congratulations!” Anderson took the paw and gave it a brief shake. “Coffee?”

  “Please. Black. And guess what, this cop brings his own donuts and some to share!” He put the Tim Hortons box he had been carrying on the table. “And Frank, this is a really nice place – like a man-cave without the hockey posters. A person would never guess by looking at the outside, (no offense, but with the workshop and all!) I could settle right into a place like this.”

  “Thanks – and thanks for the donuts – I could use one!” Anderson said as he poured the coffee. “Supper was more like breakfast and seems like almost as long ago.”

  Munching down a couple of glazed donuts and slurping more coffee, Anderson gave the two men a more detailed account of the events earlier in the evening, while the sergeant wrote at length in his notebook. “That’s about it,” Anderson said when he got to the part about dropping Marjorie back home with her sister. “I called in Arnold, and here we are.”

  John put down his notebook, took another mouthful of coffee and said, “Any bright ideas, gentlemen, about where to go from here? I do know we can pull in a cadaver dog from Sarnia, but I’d kinda like to take a more low-key look first. Do you have any high-techie stuff we could use right away – I mean, in the morning?”

  Anderson sat quiet for a moment. Then, “well, yes, I have a low-tech side scan sonar unit on the boat, but it really is pretty basic and I don’t really have the right transducer to get the most out of it. If we’re gonna go that route, there’s a guy in Kingston who has a really good piece of kit and specializes in this kind of stuff. He ain’t cheap, but he’s good.”

  He paused. “Actually, I have in mind a really really low-tech approach to start with. The wind has been almost non-existent this evening, and the forecast says it will likely stay that way until later in the day tomorrow, when it will start blowing from the northwest – and offshore, which will not be a help. But, a few folks with rowboats and canoes could cover that whole area right up to the shore; if that body is sitting at the surface, which seems likely from what that lady told us, we might just get lucky if we did it right after first light. That’s where I would start.”