Seaweed on the Rocks

by Stanley Evans

  “Frankie, you have two options,” Bernie said. “You can stall us or you can let us in now. Either way we are going to have a look at Titus’ office.”

  Frankie sighed, shook her head, came out from behind her wicket, hung a CLOSED sign on the front door and led us through the back of the shop. She was wearing high-heeled shoes, and though she had become a bit thick-bodied, her legs were still gorgeous, and when she remembered to, she could still move like a thirty-year-old. I wondered what had happened to all the money she’d earned kicking poker chips off mantelpieces in Las Vegas.

  Titus Silverman’s office was small, dusty, windowless and cobwebby, and the roaches scurried for cover when Frankie switched the light on. She leaned in the doorway with her arms crossed while Bernie and I looked the place over. The walls were lined with cheap, pressboard bookcases entirely filled with paperback mysteries. By the light of a naked 60-watt light bulb dangling from a ceiling cord, I observed that the books were all filed in strict alphabetical order. Most dated back to the ’thirties. There appeared to be complete sets of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Carroll John Daly, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, and many others from crime writing’s golden age. Other than the bookshelves, the only other furniture was a leather recliner in one corner and beside it, an old-fashioned four-bulb pedestal lamp without a shade, a metal seven-drawer desk with an Underwood typewriter on it and a swivel chair behind it. The room’s green shag carpet looked as if muddy buffalos had trampled it. Bernie sat behind the desk to look in the drawers, while I opened a Peter Cheyney first edition at random and read about crime detection in Blitz-era London.

  Bernie brought an address book out a drawer and, after studying it for five minutes, laid it on top of the desk. I put Peter Cheyney back on the shelf and picked up the address book. A brief glance revealed a Who’s Who of Vancouver Island’s crooks, fixers and politicians, past and present. The desk’s bottom right-hand drawer was locked, but Frankie drew the line when Bernie asked her if she had a key.

  “Come back with your search warrant first,” Frankie told him.

  Bernie appeared to put the address book back in the drawer. He thanked Frankie for her cooperation. As we walked back to the car, I said, “Did you get it?”

  Bernie nodded—the address book was in his pocket.

  I said, “I suppose it’s possible that somebody broke into Trew’s office before Hector and Marnie got there. If so, it’s likely that the same person left the Matbro Building’s street door open as well.”

  “I wouldn’t believe anything that little punk Latour told me,” Bernie scoffed.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  White fawn lilies and ancient rhododendrons were in full bloom around the ivy-covered Donnelly house where on my previous visit I’d found Hector Latour and Marnie Paul. But this time it wasn’t the house I was interested in, and I drove my MG along the well-marked track that went past it, following it across waterlogged meadows and between the isolated ponds that lent a half-marine atmosphere to the scene. Even so, the sodden ground was drying out as the water levels beyond the dikes got lower. After a few hundred yards the track began a slight ascent and I came upon a newly painted sign: PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO VISITORS. A minute later I brought the MG to a standstill—a clear creek burbling with knee-deep water ran right across the track.

  I left the car beside the creek, took my boots off, rolled up my pants and waded across. I put my boots back on and started walking. The track wound around some high dunes, and terminated a few hundred yards farther on where the moss-covered ruins of a Coast Salish longhouse created a dead end. This is what I had come to see. Two cedar mortuary poles with mute, carved animal faces gaping out towered above the ancient site. The woodpecker crest figure perched atop one of the poles, a shaman’s memorial totem, seemed to be watching me. Halfway down, the pole had been notched to accommodate a wooden box. When the old shaman died, they folded his legs up close to his chest, with his arms between his legs, and put a blanket around him and sat him in the box with his rattles and medicine bag and strings of sea otter teeth and other regalia and put the lid on. He was still there in his box.

  Crows swooped and dipped among another half-dozen collapsed poles, their carvings now barely distinguishable, that lay mouldering upon the earth. A hundred years ago several poles and a thirty-foot dugout canoe were removed from this site and housed in Vancouver’s Anthropology Museum. I stood for a moment with hands in my pockets, looking at the longhouse. Fortunately, the Donnelly family had used it as a hay barn and had kept its roof tight, otherwise it would have collapsed long ago. Its roof sloped gently from front to back, with its front end facing the sea, and the roof planks overlapped like tiles. On the front, the ghostly image of a painted killer whale was still vaguely perceptible, and the entrance was in the form of a giant carved frog with a swinging door set between the frog’s green legs.

  Many years had passed since my first and only previous visit to this lonely house, haunted as it was by the ghosts of the past, and now, though the evening wasn’t cold, I found myself shivering. It was sheer nervousness compounded with wonderment and awe. People say they get the same feeling visiting ancient European cathedrals. My uneasiness increased when a ray of yellow light suddenly flashed upon a fallen pole. It appeared to emanate from behind the longhouse, but it wasn’t lightning—the ray was stationary. I went behind the longhouse for a closer look and saw that it was caused by the slanting rays of the sun reflecting off an SUV’s chrome front bumper. The SUV was Charlotte Fox’s Lexus.

  I was standing by the Lexus when a nebulous object materialized from the darkness of the forest beyond. It seemed to be an immense bear, standing upright on two very long legs. Black bears are common on Vancouver Island—they are often sighted inside the city limits. But this was no ordinary black bear. For one thing, it was twice as big. For another, it was the wrong colour—its fur was reddish brown, almost golden in the sunlight. I watched the apparition move silently across the ground before merging invisibly with the shadows thrown by the longhouse.

  I backed away and returned to the front of the longhouse. The hinges of the door between the frog’s legs had been recently oiled and didn’t make a sound when I pushed the door open and went inside. A faint odour of burnt sweetgrass, balsam and wood ash breathed from the interior, and light fell through narrow chinks in the planked walls, painting gold stripes across an area large enough to accommodate two small airplanes. More light came from the smoke hole that had been cut in the roof directly above a circle of fire-blackened stones. The place was almost exactly as I remembered it from the time Andrea Crandon had come here with me. We were just thirteen years old. She had been beautiful then, before she became sick with an illness that aged her prematurely, made her strange and finally killed her.

  Except for Andrea’s ghost reaching out across the years, I thought myself the building’s only occupant until suddenly the same immensely tall bear, rematerialised and faced me in the silence. My mouth went dry. Andrea receded into the past. I knew this was no earthly bear, although its woodsy smell was palpable enough. The creature—whatever it was—now wore a cedar-bark cloak and a strange hat. It had neither legs nor arms and appeared to float in mid-air. I didn’t move or speak, and after a few minutes the shape drifted silently towards me. It was within twenty feet of me when it made an abrupt 90-degree turn and faded completely into the planked wall.

  When I’d pulled myself together, I checked the section of wall through which the ghost had dematerialized. That wall was solid. Once or twice I heard heavy footsteps as the creature moved about unseen. Then a tiny flame appeared in the middle or close to the middle of the longhouse. The flame brightened, became larger, and I perceived that some thing was lighting a long wax torch. Holding the burning torch aloft, the dark shape moved towards me, did another abrupt turn and vanished through the wall in the same place as before. A minute later the front door opened for an instant and closed again. After waiting for a minute or two I went outside, walked
around to the back of the longhouse again and stood there looking at the SUV. The sun had set and the light was fading, but I glanced down and saw something white gleaming on the grass at my feet. Idly I picked it up. It was one of Lawrence Trew’s business cards.

  Suddenly some crows began cawing in the trees nearby, and sensing a presence behind my back, I dodged automatically and twisted around to face it. Standing there on its hind legs was the massive bear again. It was still wearing the strange hat, but now it had a square pig-like snout that was immensely wide and at least a yard long. When a huge paw swung towards my head in a downward arc, I jumped aside, and instead of crushing my skull, the blow continued on its downward swing and set the monster off-balance. I leapt across a fallen mortuary pole and ran into the forest. The ground was well drained here and thick with timber that blocked the light as effectively as a roof. I kept going until I ran straight into a barrier of loose jumbled rock. Now the animal was only a few feet behind and I started to climb. Ledges covered with evergreen huckleberries provided handholds, so that I was up some twenty feet before the bear came to a stop below me. I kept going. Reaching the top of the rocky barrier, I found myself overlooking a boulder-strewn beach. I was thinking that getting down would be trickier than getting up—on its seaboard side the rock face was pocked with barnacles and limpets and strewn with flat, slippery, green seaweed—when I realized that the bear hadn’t attempted to climb up after me. It had disappeared among the trees. For the time being, I was safe. I made myself comfortable on a bed of sea plantain and closed my eyes.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A skeleton was sitting on a carved wooden throne surrounded by his many wives, and in front of them eagle masks floated in a sea of red sparks. Abruptly I opened my eyes. While I’d been dozing on the rocks, night had fallen.

  As I scrambled down to level ground in the dark, the eagle masks and throned skeletons returned to dreamland. Moonlight silvered the ground except where the longhouse and its totem guardians threw their long shadows. I waited in the trees while I checked the clearing for bears, but the longhouse had an abandoned, empty look, and the Lexus had gone. I worked my way back to the MG and was surprised to find it undamaged. I got in the car, started the engine and leaned back in the seat. Besieged by memories of the past, I couldn’t think straight. I put the car in gear and headed back to town.

  A dozen sheep sleeping in the nearby field fled for cover when I pulled the MG up beside one of the barns at Felicity Exeter’s farm and switched the engine off. I sat for a while adjusting to the silence before getting out. While it was almost totally dark beside the barn, every light in Felicity’s house was on. I was walking in that direction when she emerged through the French doors arm in arm with a man I’d never seen before. They paused to kiss passionately, and then strolled down the sloping meadow together and disappeared into a stand of pines.

  I let myself into the house. The living room felt cold and empty, but I couldn’t help noticing an empty wine bottle on the coffee table, along with two unwashed glasses. Feeling like a lovesick kid or a middle-aged voyeur, I checked Felicity’s bedroom. Her bed was warm, and I smelt the slight musk of perspiration instead of her usual perfume.

  I drove away from the farm without turning on my headlights.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  When I woke on Friday morning, I felt the sun’s pleasant heat spilling through the window and onto my bed. But as soon as I opened my eyes, my head began to ache, and I blinked the way you do when you’re drunk and trying to clear your head in the hope, soon dashed, of diminishing the haze. Trying not to think about Felicity was going to be difficult.

  I booked the day off and decided to spruce up my cabin. As I don’t own a vacuum cleaner, what I had to work with was a five-gallon pail, soap, water, assorted rags and brushes. I began by cleaning the windows till they sparkled. I dragged all the rugs outside, gave them a good shaking and afterwards draped them to air across my backyard hedge. I removed all the crocks and pots from my kitchen cupboards, washed everything and wiped the shelves with bleach. Chief Alphonse came in while I was on my knees scrubbing the floor.

  “You look bushed,” the chief observed.

  “I was out on Donnelly’s Marsh last night poking around. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been. A grizzly wearing a strange hat damn near blindsided me.”

  The chief scratched his chin. “A grizzly wearing a strange hat?”

  “It was really strange . . . weird, you know? It was bigger than any ordinary bear but shapeless, almost as if it was made of smoke. Copper-coloured smoke.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve been out Donnelly’s Marsh way lately. Dark, was it?”

  “It was getting on towards dark. I was feeling nervous, to tell you the truth. Maybe I was overwrought. But this creature with the strange hat—I saw it the last time I was there, too.”

  “We don’t see grizzlies on Vancouver Island much, not since what’s his name came here, that Spaniard who showed up here in his galleon?”

  “Manuel Quimper?”

  “That’s the one,” Chief Alphonse said laconically. “Grizzlies are good swimmers, as good as polar bears. Matter of fact, polar bears and grizzlies interbreed sometimes. I guess maybe they’re the same species evolved to different colours. Once in a while a lone grizzly will island-hop this way from the mainland. He won’t stay long. Come mating season he wants the company of his own kind.”

  I thought about that. Southern Vancouver Island is separated from the BC mainland by the Strait of Georgia, which is twenty miles wide in many places. But north of Desolation Sound, the Strait is packed with islands, and a fit and determined outdoorsman could walk and swim his way down the whole coast to Vancouver if he really set his mind to it.

  The chief moved so I could scrub the floor where he was standing. “Donnelly’s Marsh is a very spooky place,” he said after a few minutes. “Maybe you seen things that aren’t there. Every think of that?”

  I nodded.

  He looked at me sideways. “Is the longhouse still standing up all right?”

  “Yes, and the roof is still tight. It’s dry inside.”

  “So you went inside? Then what?”

  “This weird shape—like a bear—appeared. It didn’t make any sound, and after a bit it vanished through the wall . . . the solid plank wall. A bit later I saw the thing again just briefly until it disappeared. There was something else funny as well—a Lexus SUV was parked behind the longhouse. It belongs to a Native woman named Charlotte Fox. After seeing that spook, I went back out to where the Lexus was parked. I was standing there looking at it when some crows started cawing at me, and I managed to duck before something tried to hit me.”

  “Could it have been Charlotte Fox?”

  “No, I think it was a real bear, a ten- or twelve-foot giant bear wearing a strange hat.”

  The chief grunted. “Grizzly bears were Coast Salish people before Transformer changed the world. That’s why an ordinary grizzly will never kill a Coast Salish. In fact, considering the amount of aggravation we put them to, it’s surprising that ordinary grizzly bears seldom kill anybody.” It was a minute or two before he continued, “So that thing you saw—it might have been a ghost. Real ghosts are foolish because they have very small brains and what brains they do have don’t work too well. But I never heard of a ghost that could blindside a human being. I’ll talk to Old Mary Cooke.” He spread his hands, his face calm, his eyes soberly appraising. “Maybe we’ll do some medicine, just in case.”

  I went back to scrubbing floors.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you, Silas. Why do people like Marnie Paul and Hector Latour do heroin and crack cocaine?”

  “They use heroin to make themselves feel normal. They smoke crack to get high.”

  The chief was giving me a hand to move my chesterfield away from a window so that I could wash the floor underneath when he said, “Hold it a minute.”

  The manila envelope Harvey Cheeke had given me had fallen from the windows
ill. I threw it on the table and went back to scrubbing the floor.

  Chief Alphonse kept looking at the envelope. Grinning slyly, he said, “I hope there’s nothing important in that letter.”

  “It’s just another of Harvey Cheeke’s pictures.”

  He looked at me questioningly. “Same-old, same-old buffalo painting?”

  “I guess. I haven’t looked at it yet.”

  My collection of carved wooden masks needed to be taken down from the walls one at a time and dusted. I have about thirty, the most valuable being an articulated Nootka mask with moveable eyes and jaws that I found washed up on a remote shore near Ucluelet. Arthur Gottlieb once offered me ten thousand dollars for it. While I dusted and cleaned them, the chief spent his time commenting on my masks and their genealogical history.

  When the job was nearly finished, I put the kettle on, and a half hour later we were in my backyard eating smoked salmon sandwiches, drinking Red Rose tea and watching the rufous hummingbirds feasting on insects and pinesap. After a while the crows that were doing house renovations in the trees were making such a mess that I had to raise a patio umbrella.

  The chief’s ritual fast had ended and now he was making up for lost time. As soon as we finished the first batch of sandwiches, he said, “I’ll take smoked salmon sandwiches over whale blubber any day.”

  I can take a hint. As I was returning to the cabin, he said, “When are you going to look at Harvey’s picture?”

  I made another plateful of sandwiches and took them back outside along with the manila envelope. “Here,” I said. “Open it and have a look. Tell me what you think.”

  Chief Alphonse reached for the envelope, changed his mind and said, “No, Silas, it’s yours. You’d better see it first.”

  Harvey Cheeke had spent a lot of time drawing this one. Instead of the usual stick figures, it was a realistic, carefully composed study of a child lying naked in the sun on a west coast beach. The sun’s rays, however, were reflecting from the child’s eyes. As a composition, it was a wholly unexpected surprise.