Survival Instinct

by Rachelle Mccalla

  “It was the end of the summer tourist season. We were going to lock up the keeper’s quarters in a couple of days. Already traffic to the island had slowed down considerably. Trevor was working for the Park Service, too, then. He was stationed on Rocky, but he came over to visit me quite a bit. One evening he called and said he wanted to come over. I cooked supper, but then he disappeared while I was cleaning up. That wasn’t unusual. He only washed dishes if he was trying to be extra-nice to gain something.”

  “That sounds like Trevor,” Tracie chimed in.

  Abby managed a faint smile. “I had seen him head up the trail toward the end of the island, so I went walking up that way. It was a beautiful evening, one of those late summer days when it’s not even cold out here. The water was gentle, and it was getting close to sunset.”

  As Abby closed her eyes and tried to remember the long-suppressed details, their radios buzzed.

  “Uh, Tracie? Mack here.”

  Tracie responded to Mack, and he continued.

  “We found the spot, and I’ll grant you, maybe the water does look a little reddish down there, but we can’t see a body anywhere.”

  John’s voice carried over the radio. “And Trevor was a big guy, so it’s not like he’d be easy to hide.”

  Tracie rolled her eyes. “The waves probably washed him under the rim of the bluffs or into a sea cave or something. We’ll check it out when we get over there with the boat.”

  “Fine. You want us to stick around?”

  “No. Search and Rescue takes precedence over body retrieval. Just keep your eyes open for that gunman, and let me know if you come across anything suspicious.”

  The guys signaled that they’d received her message.

  Abby took a deep breath. “Maybe we should just hurry to the boat. I can tell my story another time.”

  “No.” Tracie shook her head. “Your story is important. We’ll hurry to the boat, but please keep talking.”

  They trotted a few more yards and Abby continued. “So, where was I? I went walking down the trail, but when I got to the sea cliffs Trevor wasn’t there. I figured I must have missed him. Then I thought I heard voices.”

  “You thought you heard voices?” Tracie clarified.

  “It wasn’t very loud, nothing distinct. And obviously it wasn’t voices unless Trevor was talking to himself, because I stumbled upon that little rabbit run and followed it until I found him. He was alone.”

  Abby focused on her feet as they hurried down the road, avoiding any slick patches on the frozen clay. “He didn’t really look all that happy to see me, at first glance. It was funny, because my initial impression was that I’d interrupted him or something. He sometimes had a temper, so you never wanted to make him mad. But maybe I just got there before he was quite ready, or something. I started to ask him who he was talking to and the next thing I knew, he ran over to me, picked me up and gave me this big kiss. He swung me around in circles, and when he set me down, he pulled a diamond ring out of his pocket and proposed. Right there, just like that.”

  They hustled down the road in silence for a few moments. Then Scott asked, “So, do you think he was planning on proposing to you right then? He had the ring and everything, but that’s strange that he didn’t ask you to come out and meet him.”

  “You know,” Abby confessed, “I always thought it was a little odd. We hadn’t even been getting along very well at that point. We weren’t even technically dating, but he’d called me up and invited himself over for supper.”

  “That sounds like Trevor,” Tracie chimed in.

  Abby almost smiled as she continued. “And, well, it might sound silly, but I never felt the ring was the right choice for me.”

  “Why not?” Scott asked.

  “I’d always said I wanted my engagement ring to match my eyes. That’s foolish, I suppose, but I know I’d told Trevor that before. It seemed strange that he’d disregard it, like he either didn’t remember or didn’t care. I guess I just…” Abby paused. She wasn’t sure she wanted to share the next bit. “I felt it was odd, the whole proposal thing. It came out of the blue, and there was a moment, right after I told him yes, when Trevor looked almost…annoyed.” She shook her head. “But then, I suppose, if he was already working for the diamond smugglers…”

  They’d come out of the woods while Abby spoke, and now Tracie patted her shoulder. “Thank you for sharing that. It does seem odd, and it makes me wonder if there wasn’t more going on than we understand. We’ll talk about it, but right now, let’s get on the boat and hurry around to the other side of the island.”

  The three of them hopped back into the utility boat and Tracie rushed to start the engine. Then she turned to Scott and Abby. “If we’re going to use the kayaks in this weather, you two need wet suits, neoprene and Gore-Tex. There should be plenty of waterproof garments in the bags we loaded. Scott, can you help Abby find something that fits?”

  After they rustled up the proper cold-weather gear, Scott and Abby ducked into separate rooms in the boat’s small cabin. Then Scott took over the wheel while Tracie changed. By the time the boat reached the northern tip of the island, the three of them were snugly dressed for cold-weather kayaking.

  Tracie idled the motor, slowly trolling closer to the land and the few rocky outcroppings that extended beyond the sea caves. “I don’t see any sign of Trevor,” she murmured, her eyes scanning the rocky formations.

  “There’s the lighthouse.” Scott pointed. “We’d gone about two hundred yards southwest, so that puts us right about here.” He gestured to a spot just beyond them.

  Once Tracie killed the motor, the lapping of the relatively still waters did little to disturb the eerie silence. Abby stared at the sea caves, wondering how a boat of any size, much less a pirate ship, could have fit into any of them. The rocks were dangerous for any craft, especially in rough weather. Then she noticed a particularly large opening, and beside it, like lamb’s blood on a lintel, a splash of red.

  “Look at that, just beyond that large cave mouth.” Abby indicated the spot. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Tracie pulled out a camera and zoomed in on the spot. “Blood.” She snapped several photos.

  “Trevor’s blood?” Scott asked aloud.

  “Probably.” Tracie took a deep breath and put away her camera. “But if so, then he wasn’t standing on that ledge up there when he was shot. He would have been standing there.” She pointed to a low rocky outcropping that extended back toward the wide opening and the fresh bloodstain. “And he would have been shot from this direction, which would have meant a boat, at sea.” Skepticism showed on her face. “You didn’t see a boat?”

  Abby’s mouth fell open, and she looked around her at the open sea. There was no sign of any vessel anywhere.

  “No, I didn’t. I mean, I was pretty distracted by the dead body, but I can’t imagine missing seeing something as big as a boat. But then, you reached the ledge barely a minute later. Did you see anything?”

  The skeptical expression fled from Tracie’s features. “No, I didn’t. Good point. Maybe it wasn’t a boat. Maybe it was just a kayak, and they slipped away into the caves.”

  At the mention of the sea caves, all three of them peered at the wide dark opening, whose inky blackness could have concealed anyone, or anything…including the gunman. Abby felt a shiver run up her spine, and she had to fight off the instinct to duck. She nearly jumped when Scott wrapped one arm around her.

  “It’s okay,” he whispered, obviously having felt her jolt of surprise. “It’s just me.”

  While they stood blinking in incomprehension at the empty water, Tracie shoved supplies into the pockets of her parka, snapped on neoprene gloves and then grabbed a kayak and carried it to the edge of the boat. “I’m going to get a sample of that blood. Then I’m going into the cave. Are you two coming with me?”

  Abby nodded. There was something in that cave. There had to be. Marilyn could be in there. Or Trevor’s body. Or the gunm
an, waiting for them.

  TWELVE

  Though Scott had no experience launching kayaks, with Abby’s help they managed to get their vessels into the lake without taking on water. At Tracie’s instruction, they anchored the utility boat before slipping into their kayaks. By that time, Tracie had collected a sample from the blood on the brownstone and was ready to join them exploring the sea caves.

  Scott was glad for the headlamps mounted on each kayak, as well as the LED lights they each wore on a headband. But as they paddled the short distance to the gaping maw of the sea cave, he realized the powerful lights were feeble weapons against the pressing darkness. Shadows loomed in every corner, spilling out at odd angles as their lights drifted by, taunting them with the possibility of what could be hidden under the cloak of their darkness.

  Their crafts glided silently into the cave. Scott tried to maneuver his kayak so his light would pan across the back wall of the cave. As Abby had previously predicted, the cave ended a mere sixty or seventy feet from the spot where it opened to the sea. There was enough space to shelter a decent-size boat, yes, but the wide mouth of the cave offered no cover. The pirates in Burt’s story wouldn’t have lasted long hiding from the authorities in this wide-open space, and neither would the diamond smugglers. Any vessel sailing past the north side of the island would have seen them easily if they’d attempted to hide there.

  “I’m not seeing a body anywhere,” Tracie murmured, her words echoing against the brownstone walls and resonating dissonantly with the sounds of the lapping waves.

  “What if he sank?” Scott suggested, looking down into the clear water. “I wonder how deep the water is here.” Holding tight to one end of his paddle, he plunged the other end downward…and never felt bottom. As the force of the lapping water pressed against his paddle, it almost felt as though the lake was trying to pull it from his hands. He quickly pulled the paddle back up. “It’s at least six feet deep, and could be infinitely deeper,” he speculated.

  “Deep enough to hide a body,” Abby agreed. “But Trevor was pretty buoyant.”

  Scott smiled at the polite way Abby referred to her exfiancé’s extra girth. “What if he was weighed down by something? He could have been carrying heavy equipment in his pockets or on his person.”

  Tracie pointed out, “If he’d have been wearing a bulletproof vest, it might have been heavy enough to pull him under. But that’s why we Coasties rarely wear the vests, even though we have a crime-fighting role out here. The odds of ending up in the lake are much higher than the odds of being shot.” She paddled closer to the ledge that extended along one back corner of the cave. “And anyway, if he’d have been wearing a vest, there wouldn’t have been blood, and he probably wouldn’t have died.”

  “Good point,” Scott noted, but Tracie didn’t appear to be listening anymore. She was staring intently at something on the ledge.

  “What do you suppose?” she mused aloud, then pulled out her camera and snapped a few more pictures before panning her light farther along the wall. “Could one of you come hold my kayak?” she asked a moment later.

  Scott paddled over and held her craft steady while she climbed out onto the brownstone. He watched as she dabbed gauze at something smeared on the ledge, and then placed it in a plastic bag from her pocket. It wasn’t until she pulled out a marker and labeled the bag that Scott was sure what she’d swabbed up from the ledge.

  Blood-inside cave.

  “Trevor’s blood?” Scott asked quietly.

  Tracie shrugged and stuffed the baggie into her pocket. “It appears to be fresh, just like the spatter outside.”

  Abby had paddled over near them and was watching with interest. “But what would his blood be doing way back in here? It isn’t as though he’d have likely drifted up onto the ledge, and his body clearly isn’t here anymore.”

  Though they’d nearly ruled out the possibility already, Scott flashed his light downward into the deep clear waters below them. The pool appeared to have no bottom. From his vantage point close to the edge, Scott could see the brownstone drop away sharply, disappearing into the watery abyss below. It was a chilling sight, but there was still no sign of a body.

  “If he was shot from a boat or a kayak,” Tracie pondered aloud, “and then whoever shot him hid inside this cave, they probably heard us talking up above and decided to dispose of the evidence before we could recover anything incriminating.”

  Scott looked around warily, half expecting the gunman to suddenly appear in the mouth of the cave behind him. The hairs on his arms and neck stood on end.

  “But why would they pull the body onto the ledge?” Abby pressed.

  “Perhaps they heard John and Mack coming and got spooked. Or, I don’t know, maybe they wanted to search him. Maybe they thought he had something on him, something they wanted.”

  Cautiously, Scott paddled back the way they’d come, back into the daylight that made him squint with its sudden brightness. He stared at the low rock where Trevor had apparently been standing when he’d been shot. Then his eyes traveled farther back to where the shallow rocks cupped a still pool of water before giving way to the brownstone cliffs that rose upward to meet the sun.

  On a hunch, Scott beached his kayak on the small rocky spit where Tracie had left hers when she’d collected the sample earlier. But instead of inspecting the spatter, he stepped past it to the shallow pool that was protected from the action of the waves by the outcropping. There he crouched down, his eyes scanning the rock, until something caught his eye. He squinted, leaning closer for a better look, nearly missing the gray object hidden among the darker rocks.

  He shouted to the women, “Come take a look at this.”

  Abby arrived first, and he plucked up the ring, holding it out to her almost reverently. “Do you recognize this?”

  “Yes.” She met his eyes.

  “I was a groomsman at my mother’s second wedding. I still vividly remember Mitch showing this off to the guys before the wedding, boasting about what it was worth. I haven’t paid much attention to it since then, but I thought it looked familiar.”

  As he spoke, Tracie paddled around the rock. “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Mitch’s wedding ring. I found it right here.” He tapped the spot with his foot, and the shallow water splashed.

  “So Trevor still had the ring,” Abby muttered. “Whoever killed him must have figured he had it on him. They probably took his body in order to get the ring.”

  Scott looked at her and suddenly realized how difficult the situation must be, finding a wedding ring so close to the spot where the recently deceased had once proposed to her. But she seemed to be holding herself together just fine. “Do you think it may have been the same people who told him to get your ring back from you?” he asked her quietly.

  “I’d say almost certainly,” Abby agreed. “The two have got to be related.”

  “Wait.” Tracie steered her kayak around until she faced them both. “What are you guys talking about? Are what two related? Do you know something I don’t know? Because if so, now is the time to tell me.”

  “Remember how I told you earlier that Trevor proposed to me on that ledge?” Abby pointed upward. “Well, he showed up at my place a couple of nights ago and demanded I return the ring to him.”

  “Did you?”

  “Not yet.” Abby’s hand went around to the backside of her two-piece wetsuit. “In fact, I have it on me right now.” She pulled out a handful of diamond jewelry. “And Marilyn’s earrings, which I’ll hand over as evidence because I have no more use for them than I do for the ring. I’m not a jewelry person, but all of a sudden there seems to be a lot of diamond jewelry in my life. But apparently they aren’t even real.”

  Tracie paddled her kayak closer and gingerly accepted the jewels from Abby. She zippered them securely into a plastic bag and labeled it. Scott made sure she got Mitch’s ring in with the others before she tucked them into an interior pocket of her jacket.

 
Scott climbed back into his kayak. “Let’s not let ourselves get too distracted from our mission here,” he reminded them. “We came down here to retrieve a body. Right now we still have no idea where that body went.”

  Abby settled back into the seat of her kayak as well. “None of us saw a boat, and there’s too much wide-open lake for them to have gotten in and out without us spotting them.”

  “It seems to me, after we saw the body floating here, somebody dragged it onto that ledge inside the sea cave. But where did they take it from there?” As Scott talked, he paddled back into the deep darkness of the sea cave. The place still made him nervous, but the slow pace of their search was starting to irk him. His mother was still missing, and now so was Trevor’s body. They were getting further behind instead of closer to their goal.

  The women paddled up next to him as he shined his light on the still-visible smear of blood on the ledge.

  “Someone pulled the body onto that ledge. But from there, where could they possibly have gone?”

  “Perhaps they tied weights to him and sank him,” Abby suggested.

  Scott looked back down into the depths of the water and could see nothing but bottomless darkness. “I suppose that’s possible.”

  “Or,” Abby continued, “what about the back wall?” She shined her light back. “The ledge continues on for some distance.”

  “Yes,” Tracie acknowledged, “but it gets narrower back there, not wider. And those walls are smooth. There’s not the slightest nook or cranny where you could hide a little guy, let alone someone the size of Trevor.”

  Despite Tracie’s words of doubt, Scott wondered if Abby might be onto something. “Hold my kayak,” he requested, then scrambled up onto the ledge, taking care not to disturb the bloodstain. He carefully made his way along the stone shelf, his eyes searching, his mind replaying the moment when he’d spotted the ring in the pool, as though at any instant he might happen upon another important clue.

  “Shine some more light over here, could you?” he requested, squatting down to inspect a spot near his feet. As Tracie angled her headlight his way, Scott nodded. “Blood. They must have carried the body this way.”