Seaweed on the Rocks

by Stanley Evans

  Going outside for a breather, I stood beside a thunderbird totem for a few moments, but when a lightning bolt flashed high in the north and thunderclaps resounded from the Malahat Mountains, I moved away from the totem and began walking past the row of Warrior houses strung out in a line parallel to the beach. Suddenly I spotted something glittering on the ground. It was a large flake of mica and I picked it up. Our old people believe in Sisiutl, a monstrous, double-headed sea serpent with mica scales, and they tell us that such pieces of mica, shed when Sisiutl changes its skin, prove that he exists. The next bolt of lightning was closer, and I dropped the flake of mica and returned along the beach. If the serpent was still out there, I didn’t want to incur its wrath.

  When I returned to the longhouse half an hour later, two men from up Mowaht Mountain way were prancing around, beating deerskin drums and singing a mourning song nobody had heard before. I seated myself on a platform where I could easily see—and be seen by—Charlotte Fox and her companion, and I caught them staring at me once or twice.

  When Chief Alphonse’s speech finally ended, it was the Haida chief’s turn. During his speech, somebody decided to rehearse a bumblebee dance, normally the first dance a Coast Salish child participates in during Winter Ceremonial. In this simple dance, a mother and a father bumblebee lead progressively smaller baby bees one by one onto the dance floor, where they trip around flapping chintsy plastic wings. When the children are led into a “beehive” at the back of the house, one child is found to be missing. The father bee circles the dance floor four times, making buzzing sounds as he searches for the lost child until, at the height of the father’s agitation, the child is found hiding among the spectators and led home.

  It was about midnight when the speeches finally ended, and with a fresh outbreak of loud mourning, the lid was screwed down on the coffin. It was then placed on a wooden litter, picked up by four dancers and borne outside. Carrying flashlights or candles, hundreds of us followed the pallbearers up a trail that ends on the rocky hilltop studded with Garry oaks where the Warrior band’s cemetery is located. In daylight we would have seen salal, cascara, Oregon grape and amazing views of the Salish Sea. As it was, we had to watch our steps in the darkness. A grave had been dug near the foot of a red cedar mortuary pole, and the box was lifted off its litter and laid on the ground.

  Out at sea, something flashed like lightning and came towards the cemetery in zigzags. We could still see this lightning with our eyes closed, and it was accompanied by a cold wind that whistled in the trees, making sounds like crying children. Old Mary Cooke told us we were listening to a thunderbird wind. The lightning continued while the box was lowered into the earth and covered up. When the storm abated, Old Mary was asked what Thunderbird had been telling us. She said, “It was telling us about Filligan.”

  Afterwards, the original box in which the bones had been found was laid out on the beach and burned. Then all those who had touched the bones went through a purification ceremony in the longhouse, after which the air inside was swept with smouldering cedar boughs to exorcise the ghosts.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  On Monday the weather was hotter. I got out of bed and checked my laptop—Charlotte Fox’s Lexus had spent the night on Moss Street. I cleaned myself up, shaved and put on pressed jeans, a white, open-necked shirt, a lightweight sport coat and a pair of cheap Chinese loafers that had looked good in the store but hurt my feet if I walked more than fifty yards in them. The laptop lay open on the passenger seat beside me as I drove into town. Charlotte Fox’s Lexus was still parked on Moss Street when I went into Lou’s for breakfast.

  I was half-expecting to meet Bernie Tapp there but he—like most of Victoria’s cops—was probably searching for those missing Harris Green boys. Coincidentally or perhaps not, a diddler had just been released from William Head on mandatory parole. It was front-page news and the public was howling for blood, but Lou’s prescription for dealing with diddlers nearly put me off my sausage and eggs.

  On the way to my office I checked the laptop again; the Lexus was now stationary on Meares Street. I was at my desk by nine and, remembering Cynthia’s list of bad-date cars, ran a check and found that the licence plate on the BMW that had been parked across from Charlotte Fox’s house a few nights earlier matched a number on the list. Intrigued, I drove across town and parked on Meares Street near Charlotte’s Lexus. Under the chestnut trees the sidewalks were littered with bud-casings that stuck to the soles of my Chinese shoes. The Lexus was unoccupied, and I thought it likely that Charlotte was breakfasting somewhere nearby. Two upscale restaurants were within easy walking distance along with several blue-collar cafes of the greasy spoon variety. Charlotte was in the Stick In The Mud, sitting alone at a table for four. She had the Globe and Mail open in front of her and was immersed in the op-ed pages when I went in. I found an empty table and positioned myself where—if she wanted to—she’d be able to see me in profile, and I could watch her slyly while pretending not to notice. By the time a waitress had taken my order for a toasted English muffin, marmalade and an Americano, Charlotte had sent several long glances in my direction.

  A few tables from where I was seated, an old woman had finished her breakfast, and now she was painting her tight, wrinkled mouth with vivid red lipstick. Holding a compact mirror, perfectly oblivious to her surroundings, she sucked her lips in and out, eyed her own image from different angles and practised several unusual ways of smiling at herself.

  When my Americano came, I stared directly at Charlotte Fox, who appeared to be wearing no makeup at all on her beautiful, olive-skinned face. She looked exotic, enigmatic and possibly dangerous. She was wearing a white cotton jacket, a lacy yellow shirt, loose-fitting white trousers, and two-inch heels the same colour as her shirt. I drank some coffee, wiped my lips with a table napkin and went across to her table. When she condescended to look up and we made eye contact, I gave her my winningest smile and said, “Good morning, Ms. Fox.”

  Slowly she put down her fork. “How did you know my name?”

  “I made it my business to find out.”

  “As a policeman, I suppose, you have your ways and means,” she said, her eyes cool and unwelcoming. “I’m not sure that I like the idea of being followed.”

  “I’m not following you,” I lied. “Until a few days ago I don’t ever remember seeing you. Now I seem to run across you all the time.”

  “That’s an exaggeration, surely.”

  “Perhaps, but three times at least. Didn’t I see you driving a silver Lexus SUV through Metchosin a few days ago?”

  Instead of speaking, she picked up her knife and fork, cut a piece of bacon and put it into her very beautiful mouth. She was playing for time, but I didn’t mind because I liked Charlotte’s table manners and her general air of sexy self-assurance. “I do happen to own a silver Lexus SUV,” she said at last, “but I haven’t been out to Metchosin for ages.”

  “That’s weird. I could have sworn . . . perhaps my mind is playing tricks on me. Come to think of it, you might be on my Wanted list. Could that be the reason I find you so intriguing?”

  “Oh, you find me intriguing, too, do you? It’s not just my car that interests you?”

  “You’d be surprised. I’ll check up on you when I get back to the office in case you’re a fugitive or something.”

  “That’s a bit worrisome,” she said, her frosty manner now showing signs of a thaw. “Are you a detective?”

  “I used to be but now I’m a neighbourhood cop. If you don’t mind me joining you, I’ll tell you all about it.”

  She said lazily, “Sit down if you like. I’m leaving soon, but please yourself.”

  I sat down facing her across the table. She folded her newspaper and dropped it into her large Hermes bag.

  “Tell me,” she drawled, “what percentage of the time do you wear a uniform?”

  “About twenty per cent.”

  “You don’t look like a policeman,” she said thoughtfully. “Has anyb
ody ever told you that you look more like a ruffian?”

  “I have been told that and worse, but I have developed ways of compensating for cruel jibes. In my secret life, for example, I’m a debonair jewel thief.”

  “In your actual life, too, I shouldn’t wonder. People say that all cops are crooks . . . and liars.”

  “Okay, Ms. Fox, I’ll come clean. I do take bribes, only I don’t come cheap. Give me ten dollars under the table and I’ll take you to dinner at McDonald’s.”

  When she laughed, a couple of red spots burned on her cheeks, but before she could speak, my cellphone rang. Call display showed Nice Manners’ name, so I put the phone back in my pocket without answering it.

  “There’s no need to be excessively polite, Mr. Seaweed,” Charlotte murmured. “You’re on duty, I suppose, so I don’t mind if you answer your phone.”

  “It was one of my colleagues and I know what he wants.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “Two Harris Green kids have gone missing. He wants me to keep an eye open for them.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “Because a child molester has just been released from prison, and because at 8:30 this morning my boss’ car was parked outside city hall.”

  After processing that, she said, “That day I saw you in Larry Trew’s office—what were you doing?”

  “Following you.”

  “But you were there before I was.”

  “I like to keep one jump ahead of people.”

  Her mouth twisted wryly. “So you used to be a detective, and now you are a neighbourhood cop. Why?”

  “It’s a long sad story.”

  “I don’t like sad stories, especially long ones,” she said, not quite as serious now as she had been. “But if it isn’t too sad and telling it won’t take too long , perhaps you’d like to explain what neighbourhood cops do all day.”

  “Mostly they just talk to people.”

  “Like now, for instance? You get paid for chatting up women in restaurants?”

  “It’s not always this much fun. A couple of days ago, for instance, I broke up a bottle party in that little park at the foot of Yates Street. Four girls had been drinking all night. They were sloshed to the gills and the oldest among them was only seventeen or so. The youngest was about fourteen. But I was glad they were only drinking plonk instead of smoking crack.”

  “People are always talking about crack, but I don’t even know what it is.”

  “Most people don’t know what it is. You make crack by mixing cocaine powder with baking powder. You boil the mixture down in water until it crystallizes into breakable chunks, then you smoke it in a pipe and for a few minutes it’ll remove all your earthly cares. In Victoria the supply is up fifty per cent in the last couple of years so its price on the street has dropped accordingly. Right now, a chunk of crack the size of a breadcrumb costs five dollars. Then there’s crank, which is the street name for crystal meth. Like crack cocaine, it’s usually smoked in a pipe, but the trouble with crystal meth is that most of the people who experiment with it end up addicted.”

  Charlotte gave me a disbelieving look. “Why is that?” she asked.

  “Crank affects the part of the brain that governs inhibitions,” I explained. “People think, ‘Oh, I’ll try crank once just to see if I like it.’ Funnily enough, they do like it—everybody likes it. And when that first wonderful high fades, they think, ‘Well, that was nice, let’s do it again.’ The next thing they know they’re living in an alley with dogs and cats and doing crank every hour. The houses and cars that they used to own have been sold out from underneath them. They are addicts with no money, no future, no friends and no family. They’re covered with scabs and their teeth have rotted in their mouths. And all because they thought they’d like to try a little crank just once to see if they liked it.”

  “ You don’t have to shout.”

  “Did I raise my voice? Sorry.”

  “Those four girls you were telling me about, what will happen to them?”

  “They’re from Newfoundland, and I’m trying to persuade them to go home. They’ve already heard my lecture several times—the one that goes, ‘If you’re still on the street this time next year, you’ll probably be drug addicts and prostitutes’. ”

  “Can’t you just put them on a bus and send them back to their moms?”

  “I wish. Doing anything of the sort would infringe their Charter rights. If you get right down to it, I’m really just an old-fashioned, anti-crime beat cop with special responsibilities in cases that involve Native people. Come around and see me some time. I’ve an office near Chinatown.”

  “You mean Natives like me?”

  “Not unless that Hermes bag and those clothes you’re wearing came from Value Village.”

  “I’m impressed,” she said, laughing at last. “Most men don’t notice such trifles.” Then she added, “So you were walking your beat this morning and you just happened to run into me?”

  “Yes, and I’m glad because I’ve been wondering about you and your husband since I spotted you together a couple of days ago in the Warrior longhouse.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not married. The man that you saw me with is my brother, George.”

  “You don’t look alike.”

  “That’s because George is a boy,” she said, laughter in her eyes. “Our dad was White, a Calgary oilman. Mother was a Coast Salish from Washington State.”

  She fussed with her bag in preparation for leaving. To detain her I said, “That longhouse ceremony you and your brother witnessed—did somebody invite you?”

  Charlotte shrugged. “Maybe somebody invited George, because he dragged me along. I wasn’t keen to go at first, but now on the whole I’m glad I went. Your people worked some impressive stunts.”

  “Stunts?”

  “That sudden wind, the zigzag lightning at the cemetery. My brother would give his eye teeth to know how you did it.”

  I grinned. “You think we can fake lightning and winds?”

  Her eyes searched my face as she folded her newspaper and put it into her bag. “I have to be somewhere else in half an hour,” she said with sudden briskness. “This has been fun but I have to go now.” She stood up.

  “Give me another couple of minutes. I want to ask you about Lawrence Trew and hypnotherapy.”

  She said hesitantly, “Is it hypnotherapy that you’re interested in or Larry Trew?”

  “Hypnotherapy, I guess. I’ve seen a couple of stage hypnotists. They put on a good show although it’s hard to know where hypnotism ends and flim-flam begins.”

  My remark struck a nerve. Her face tightened and she leaned her long legs against the edge of the table, looking down at me. I stayed in my seat. She said, “The first time we met—in Larry’s office—I was rude to you and I’m sorry. You were only doing your job, and I was wrong to speak to you the way I did. But you can be quite obnoxious.”

  “Obnoxious? Moi?”

  “You seem to think I’m an easy mark. Someone easily taken in by hypnotherapists and smooth-talking street cops.”

  “If I offended you, it wasn’t intentional. Maybe we’ll meet again, make a new start. I’d like to see you again, really.”

  “For dinner, I suppose. Bannock and fried moose in your little waterfront cabin?”

  “I was thinking in terms of a brew pub, maybe Spinnaker’s. How about it?”

  For answer, she picked up her bag, walked elegantly across to the cashier’s desk and used a credit card to pay for her breakfast.

  I wondered how Charlotte Fox knew that I lived in a little waterfront cabin.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It was a few minutes before noon when I got back to Pandora Street and started looking for Nobby Sumner, the autocrat who manages the office building. He was on the roof pulling weeds. He has tomato plants, potatoes, pumpkins, raspberries and a crabapple tree up there along with flower beds and a ten-by-ten greenhouse built of recycled wind
ows where he grows orchids.

  “Any chance of getting a cat flap installed downstairs so PC can go in and out of my office when she pleases and save me a lot of bother?”

  Nobby snorted his amusement. “No chance whatsoever. I’m up to my yingyang as it is. See them flowers? Covered in mites. Besides, a heritage building like this, defacing a door would be strictly against regs.”

  “Nobby, this roof garden is against regs, to say nothing of that greenhouse.”

  “Yeah, but you’re a co-conspirator,” he returned. “You’re one of the guys who carried buckets of manure up the stairs to get me started.”

  “How about if I gave you fifty dollars?”

  “Oh, that’s entirely different,” Nobby said briskly. “Consider it done.”

  Money changed hands. I went downstairs.

  I was talking on my desk phone to a fraud-squad sergeant as Bernie Tapp came in. PC appeared from behind a filing cabinet where she had been goofing off. With her tail upright and quivering, she walked on silent feet across the room and rubbed herself against Bernie’s leg. Now Bernie was a bird man, not a cat man, and he was wearing very nice tan wool pants with a sharp crease that wouldn’t look good with black cat hair on them. Besides, he’d made the mistake of trying to stroke PC once. So chewing the stem of his unlit corncob pipe, he shooed her away and sat in the visitor’s chair.

  I said casually, “I just ran into Charlotte Fox . . . a Native woman, one of Lawrence Trew’s clients.”

  “And a looker, I guess.”

  “Yeah, she’s quite a looker.”

  Bernie scowled. “You just happened to run into her, hey?”

  “Yeah. I dropped into the Stick In The Mud for a cup of coffee, and there she was. She has a brother called George. The two of them showed up at a longhouse ceremony on Saturday on the Warrior reserve, so I’m kind of interested in them.”