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I came back to life slowly and unwillingly. Bathed in sweat, I was lying in the dark on a dirt floor with my wrists lashed together. My ankles were tied. When I moved my head and tried to sit up, galaxies of white stars appeared. Groaning, I waited until the stars faded. On my third attempt I managed to sit upright and began working on the ropes that bound my hands and feet, trying to loosen them.
The surrounding darkness was not quite absolute—faint slivers of vertical light showed here and there. After a while I heard a vehicle approaching, its engine labouring when the driver floored the accelerator in low gear, and as it came closer the vertical slivers of light grew brighter in the glare of its headlights. When the vehicle’s engine was cut, its lights went out, but by then I knew where I was—inside the longhouse on Donnelly’s Marsh. Another ten or fifteen minutes passed in silence before a man came in through the longhouse’s frog-door. He was carrying a flashlight, and he focused its beam on me. “So you’re still alive?”
I knew the voice. It was George Fox. I said nothing.
“Enjoy it while it lasts,” he said and walked toward the back of the longhouse. I heard him moving about for a while before he re-emerged from the darkness, stuck a dozen long wax candles in a circle on the floor and lit them. His back to the frog-door, he switched off his flashlight and sat cross-legged inside the circle of lights. I could see that he had got himself up in a cedar cape and a conical cedar hat, but what really caught my attention was the gun he held in his hands. It was my Glock.
“You’ve tied my wrists too tight, George,” I said. “I’ve lost all feeling in my hands. How about loosening them up for me?”
He laughed. “No chance, Seaweed. You’re a cunning fucker . . . That GPS cellphone stunt was very clever.”
“Not as clever as the tricks you’ve been pulling, George.” When he didn’t answer, I said, “So what are you up to here, Georgie? What’s this all about?”
“This place is sacred to me,” he announced in a strange high voice, “because it’s where I opened myself up to the Great Spirit. I denied myself everything, gave myself up to fasting and prayers and songs . . . and I was led here and felt the Creator’s presence . . . ”
“Oh come off it, Georgie! We’ve known all about your fake-Indian con game for weeks now so . . . ”
“I’m not a fake Indian!” he snarled. “I’m real!”
“No, Georgie, you’re only a half-Indian pretending to be a reincarnated witch. And that witch you’re pretending to be—that Filligan character—he got whacked in the end, you know,” I taunted him.
“I’ve learned from his mistakes.”
“Yeah, you pick on rich old ladies instead of other men’s wives. But let’s face it, that hokey longhouse up by Duncan had its limitations. You needed something better. Something more genuine and closer to town. And that’s where this place came in for you, didn’t it? And it would have been perfect if you could have made it work.” George’s teeth shone in the candlelight as he smiled. “Go on.”
“But I came looking for Marnie Paul and I ran into Hector Latour as he went hightailing it out of here. You’d been using your bear trick to frighten people like him and Marnie off the property. For you this land isn’t sacred, Georgie, so stop trying to kid me. Everything you’ve done has been for money. Everything.”
“But I scared the shit out of you, Seaweed!” he said. “You went running for your life!” And he laughed.
I said, “I’ll level with you, Georgie. That bear act of yours did scare me . . . until I did a bit of investigating.”
George couldn’t seem to stop laughing now. “You were scared shitless!” he chortled. “Scared shitless!”
At that moment the candles flickered as the door behind him opened briefly and closed again, as somebody came inside and moved silently to a place across the longhouse from me. George didn’t seem to notice.
“So, Georgie,” I said suddenly, “what did you do with the ten thousand dollars your sister gave you to pay off the blackmailer?”
George Fox’s smug grin vanished. In my best storytelling voice I began, “Hector Latour and Marnie Paul took the stuff they stole from Lawrence Trew’s office to Titus Silverman’s pawnshop and exchanged ’em for drugs. Among those items was a Sony tape recorder and some tapes, because Lawrence Trew taped his hypnotherapy sessions, and during one of his sessions with your sister, she confessed to a crime, a very serious crime. Unfortunately for Charlotte, when Silverman, presumably out of idle curiosity, played the tapes, he came across her confession, and he decided to squeeze her. When Charlotte ignored his blackmail letter, he phoned her. She told me that after she got his phone call, she got ten thousand dollars together, put it in an envelope, and took it—as per instructions—to Beacon Hill Park and dropped it into a garbage can.” I looked George in the eye and said, “How am I doing so far, Georgie?”
He shrugged and looked away.
“But your sister lied to me. She never went to the park. How do I know this? Well, first, you see, Charlotte gave me two different accounts of how that initial money transfer took place. Second, she was too afraid to help us with the second money drop. She said she couldn’t bring herself to go to an isolated place at night where there was a possibility she’d meet her persecutor face to face. So I knew she had never made the first drop either.”
The candle flames surrounding George flickered briefly again as the door behind him opened and closed again. Another person had entered the longhouse, but this one remained near the door.
I said, “I suspected from the beginning that she’d used an intermediary to do the job, but I didn’t figure out that it was you until a day or two ago. You went to Beacon Hill Park as directed, but instead of handing Charlotte’s money over to Titus Silverman, you killed him and took his body to Goldstream Park and buried it. But before you killed Silverman, you tortured him until he told you exactly how Charlotte had laid herself open to blackmail. Then you killed Lawrence Trew as well. We found a sample of the killer’s blood in Trew’s kitchen, sent it for DNA testing and got a very peculiar reading–that sample closely matched Charlotte’s DNA.”
Nearly a minute passed before George spoke. He said, “I didn’t bury his body right away. I was going to frighten Charlotte with it . . . ”
“Why, for God’s sake?”
“Why not?” he demanded, and then, without waiting for my answer, he sneered, “You don’t know the real Charlotte, because you’re infatuated with her like all the others. Charlotte is a ruthless, controlling bitch.” His voice had become unnaturally high and strained again.
I said, “But why kill Lawrence Trew? Killing Silverman makes sense in a way, but you had nothing against Trew. Why kill him?”
“To divert attention from myself, of course.”
It was a crazy answer. I said, “Do you expect to go free, George?”
“I’ve never been free,” George Fox said bitterly. “I’ve had to climb over walls all my life.” Then suddenly he laughed. “It’s funny, Seaweed. I’ve been waiting for you to ask me how Charlotte laid herself open to blackmail. Don’t you care?”
I shook my head. But George went on, “Charlotte’s a murderer, Seaweed. She killed my father. She overdosed him on sleeping pills, ground them into a powder and mixed it into his glass of scotch. When he still wouldn’t die, she held a pillow over his face.” He paused, apparently reliving the scene, then said, “He never left me a cent. He always said that Charlotte was going to get it all, and she did. He wanted me to beg for it but I wouldn’t.” Suddenly George got to his feet. Still standing in his circle of candles, he waved the gun at me. “But I’m on a roll now! I’ve got suckers lined up in droves. I’ll bring them here, do a little magic, show ’em a few tricks . . . ”
“It won’t work, Georgie.”
“I’ll make it work. Some of your people came out here a while back for a look around. I dressed myself up in deerskins, hung a few plastic skulls around my waist, scared ’em
shitless. They won’t come back in a hurry.”
“Face it, Georgie, the game’s up.”
“There you go again, pissing me off.” And he raised the gun, giving it the two-fisted grip you see on Crime Scene Miami—the one where the gunman stands with one foot ahead of the other, scowling fiercely.
But the shot that rang out didn’t come from the Glock. It came from a rifle. When Chief Alphonse stepped from the shadows after pulling its trigger, George was writhing on the ground, his right elbow shattered where the bullet had gone through it.
Chief Alphonse pointed his rifle at George’s head. “Think I should kill him now, Silas, or do we let him bleed to death?”
I didn’t answer.
Chief Alphonse picked up one of George’s candles and held it high so that we could see Charlotte Fox sitting with her back to the longhouse wall. She’d heard everything her brother had said.
After the chief cut me loose, I led Charlotte outside. My cellphone, the one with the embedded GPS chip, was lying on the driver’s seat of the Lexus. Charlotte sobbed softly as I used it to call headquarters.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The view of Victoria by night from the eighteenth-floor Parrot House is certainly worth seeing, and a few nights later Felicity and I and three waiters had the view all to ourselves.
I said, “Some of our old people think that because stars survey the whole world, they can empower their protégés to discover things. Things like lost vitality, for instance.”
“What do you mean, protégés?”
Instead of answering directly, I said, “About eighty years ago, when she was a young girl, one of our people went to Harling Point and built herself a wickiup on the rocks below the Chinese cemetery. One evening as she lay in the wickiup, something that made a noise like a mallard crashed inside and fell onto her bed. The girl killed it with a stick. But when she reached to throw the mallard outside the wickiup, the mallard turned itself into a two-headed snake, which bit the girl and wrapped itself around her body until morning. Later her people came and found her paralyzed and they took her home. They gathered medicines in the forest and collected the bark of a certain tree that they charred in a fire. A shaman smeared the girl’s face with this charred bark, and she recovered from her paralysis. Afterwards she was able to cure others with the same illness. She was the snake’s protégé.”
“Very interesting.” Felicity spooned some crème brûlée into her lovely mouth, and then added, “But I never know whether you’re pulling my leg.”
I leaned back in my chair and grinned at her.
She put her spoon down. “Why don’t you tell me about George Fox.”
“The whole thing was very cleverly done,” I said. “It started when George Fox came down to the Warrior Reserve very early one morning when it was blowing a gale and put a dugout canoe into the sea. The canoe contained a coffin. He then spread a rumour that there was man out in the bay, paddling a dugout canoe. The sea was wild, full of driftwood. Because people expected to see a paddler and were actually looking for a paddler, a paddler is what they saw.”
“Even though there was no paddler?”
I nodded. “It was an exercise in mass hysteria. So when the canoe drifted ashore with a porpoise and a young boy’s coffin inside it, the Filligan myth was reborn.”
“Was it always just a myth, or is there a grain of truth in it somewhere?”
“Some of us bought into the Filligan myth, but Chief Alphonse never did. He spent hours in ritual, trying to figure things out. Eventually he got to the truth.”
“Where did George Fox find that young boy’s skeleton?”
“We don’t know yet. George won’t tell us. He might have disinterred it from a graveyard—maybe a Coast Salish graveyard. Let’s hope so, because a Coast Salish graveyard is where his bones are resting now.”
“But what about that bear you saw and that shaman disappearing and reappearing?” Felicity asked. “That wasn’t a case of mass hysteria.”
“It took me a while to figure that one out,” I said. “It wasn’t until I saw a stilt walker in the park doing juggling tricks that it hit me. Dressed up in a bear costume, a man on stilts that make him twelve feet tall is pretty impressive. And dressed in a different sort of costume and on black stilts, a person can even appear to hover above the ground, disembodied. In the dark, that is. That kind of stunt couldn’t work in daylight.”
We were both silent as we looked out over the city. Then I said, “Nearly all of the people involved in this case were liars. Charlotte Fox especially, although initially I found her lies convincing, because she mixed in enough truth to make her stories plausible.”
“Did she really murder her father?” Felicity asked.
“He was dying of cancer and in constant pain, and he asked George to put him out of his misery. George hated his father and refused. He wanted to see him suffer as long as possible. The old man then appealed to Charlotte, and she gave him an overdose. When he didn’t die right away, she used a pillow to smother him. It was a mercy killing, but technically she’s a murderer.”
“Patricide.”
“Correct. If she were to be charged for it and found guilty, she’d get life.”
“Will she be charged?”
Instead of answering , I said, “When the deed began to weigh heavily on her conscience and she couldn’t sleep or eat, she ended up with Lawrence Trew. At some point she told Trew what she’d done. Her confession was a terrific cathartic release, and after months of sleeplessness and angst she could finally relax. Her peace of mind crumbled again after Trew asked her to lend him ten thousand dollars. She figured it was thinly veiled blackmail. But that’s when things started to get screwy. See, shortly afterwards, Hector and Marnie burgled Trew’s office—just a random, opportunistic break-in by a couple of addicts—but among the things they stole was the cassette tape of Charlotte’s hypnotherapy sessions.
“Titus Silverman listened to Trew’s tapes and decided to put the bite on her. Charlotte assumed Trew was the blackmailer. She was frightened, but she tried to ignore it. Then Silverman, disguising his voice, phoned and told her to hop to it. At this point Charlotte, frightened out of her wits, asked her brother to help. She gave him the money, he took it to Beacon Hill Park, confronted Silverman, killed him and took over the blackmail scheme himself.”
Felicity, shaking her head in disbelief, said, “But why on earth did George Fox kill Lawrence Trew?”
“To destroy every connection between his sister and the blackmailer.”
“What about this Hector character and what’s her name, Marnie?”
“Hector Latour and Marnie Paul? Hector cleared off and we’ve lost track of him. As for Marnie, Joe McNaught pulled some strings and got her into a private rehab clinic over in Vancouver.”I gazed at the empty glass in my hand, thinking about the little girl that I used to drive to ballet classes.
Felicity filled my glass, then reached across the table and held my hand. “But there’s a lot more to this, isn’t there? About Donnelly’s Marsh, I mean.”
“Oh yes, there’s more,” I said. “I’ll tell you all about it very soon. Right now, I have other plans for you.”
Instead of drinking the wine, I stood and helped Felicity to her feet. We left the restaurant and went out into the night.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
STANLEY EVANS’ is the author of two previous novels, Outlaw Gold, Snow-Coming Moon as well as the Silas Seaweed series, which includes: Seaweed on the Street, Seaweed on Ice, Seaweed under Water, Seaweed on the Rocks, and Seaweed in the Soup. Stanley and his family live in Victoria, BC.
Introducing the SILAS SEAWEED mystery series
From TouchWood Editions
"Makes great use of West Coast aboriginal mythology and religion . . . The voice of Silas Seaweed . . . is Evans’ own, and it works beautifully."
– The Globe and Mail
"The writing is wonderful native story telling. Characters are richly drawn . . . I enj
oyed this so much that I'm looking forward to others in the series."
– Hamilton Spectator
DISCOVER MORE GREAT MYSTERIES LIKE THE ONES HERE AT OUR WEBSITE, TOUCHWOODEDITIONS.COM
THE PAULA SAVARD MYSTERY SERIES BY SUSAN CALDER
Deadly Fall
THE CASEY HOLLAND MYSTERY SERIES BY DEBRA PURDY KONG
The Opposite of Dark
THE DANUTIA DRANCHUK MYSTERY SERIES BY KAY STEWART
Sitting Lady Sutra
THE HAL BANNATYNE MYSTERY SERIES BY RON CHUDLEY
Act of Evil
Act of Justice
THE LULU MALONE MYSTERY SERIES BY LINDA KUPECEK
Deadly Dues
THE ISLAND INVESTIGATIONS INTERNATIONAL MYSTERY SERIES BY SANDY FRANCES DUNCAN AND GEORGE SZANTO
Never Sleep with a Suspect on Gabriola Island
Always Kiss the Corpse on Whidbey Island
Never Hug a Mugger on Quadra Island
THE MARGARET SPENCER MYSTERY SERIES BY GWENDOLYN SOUTHIN
Death in a Family Way
In the Shadow of Death
Death on a Short Leash
Death as a Last Resort
THE SILAS SEAWEED MYSTERY SERIES BY STANLEY EVANS
Seaweed on the Street
Seaweed on Ice
Seaweed Under Water
Seaweed on the Rocks
Seaweed in the Soup
Copyright © 2008 by Stanley Evans
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, audio recording, or otherwise—without the written permission of the publisher or a photocopying licence from Access Copyright, Toronto, Canada.
Originally published by TouchWood Editions Publishing Co. Ltd. in 2008 in softcover
ISBN 978-1-894898-73-7
This electronic edition was released in 2011
Seaweed on the Rocks Page 20