by Anne Argula
I envied him his short hair. All he had to do was wet it and run his fingers through it. My own was a mess and there wasn’t a lot I could do with it. The Shenandoah solution, a babuska, was not available, so I pulled it back and tied it up. I looked like general hell, but could care less.
“I’ll tell you when we get there, I don’t want to look like an idiot.”
“A little late for that,” he said, and I laughed.
Gwen handed us each a cup of coffee and we blew on it.
“Remember, sitting in James’ four-by...how you knew something was wrong?
“Yeah...”
“Something was wrong.”
“What?”
“That’s what we’re gonna find out, if we’re lucky.”
It was not easy going back to the tribal police headquarters and Chief Shining Pony. I was prepared to do a little groveling.
The second Robert was on duty and I gave him a dour good-morning, which he took warily and returned a grunt that I took as a greeting between enemies. He probably heard from the first Robert all about the ruckus last night, including the screaming match I had with his boss, the kind of match I never lose, by the way.
“Know where the chief is?” I asked.
“Hmm-hmm.”
“Like, where?”
“In his office.”
I belayed my usual cop’s rap, and tapped like a timid doormouse.
We went inside. To say the chief was a bigger man than I gave him credit for would not be accurate, because I had always given him that credit. He understood that my shrewish behavior the previous night was borne on a cop’s need for justice and her outrage that it had been denied for so long. I didn’t tell him it was all multiplied by a factor of...whatever, by the hormonal desert maelstrom inside my body.
He reassured us that for the past thirty-three years he had wanted nothing more than to bring Jeannie’s killer to justice. Apologies tendered and accepted, I asked him about the autopsy report.
“The county has all that, why didn’t you go to them?”
“Because early this morning the county came to us. And ordered us out of Dodge.”
“Nascine?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s an old hardass. When he was young, he was a young hardass.”
“Yeah, well, I thought, I don’t know, if I were Chief Shining Pony, I’d have copies.”
Of course he did, but he was reluctant to show them, probably because to do same, in his mind, would add to Jeannie’s humiliation.
“Quinn is onto something, Chief,” said Odd. “I don’t know what, but, please...let us see what you have.”
He unhooked a ring of keys from his belt, found a small brass one, and opened a file drawer in his desk. He took out a folder and spread the pictures before us without looking at them himself. I could see why. She was naked on a slab, front and back, under bright florescent light. Above the neck, you wouldn’t know she was human.
I glanced at the pictures then looked up at Odd. His expression as he studied them was unnervingly familiar to me. I tried to place it, and then it came to me: television news coverage of families returning to their homes after a vicious hurricane, only to see a pile of trash. A look of benumbed detachment. He, like them, was looking at a former home, now utterly destroyed by a force of evil.
While Odd was transfixed and the chief looked away, I scanned the report.
“There was semen in her,” I said.
“Yes,” said the chief. “They were sexually active.”
“Without protection?”
“It was the sixties.”
“Even in the sixties, high school girls did not want to get pregnant, and high school boys did not want to make them that way.”
I quickly sorted the pictures, putting one atop the other, stacking them, until at the end there was one on top of all the others. It was the one I was looking for. I asked them to look.
She was lying on her stomach. I picked up a pencil from the desk and pointed to the back of Jeannie’s knee. The bruise there was a perfect match to Odd’s port wine birthmark.
For all of his life he had thought it was an inconspicuous flaw of the skin. Now, for the first time, he saw it had a purpose.
“Her head...” said the chief, and he faltered, “...well, you can see that... The bruise on her leg was the only other mark on her. The murder book doesn’t draw any conclusions.”
“I’m gonna draw a conclusion of my own,” I said. “That’s a policeman’s baton, that’s what made that mark.”
The chief looked at it more closely.
“I’ll tell you something else,” I said. “A cop is trained to pick up his spent shells. That’s why there weren’t any at the murder scene.”
“What is Deputy Nascine’s middle name?” Odd asked the chief.
“Bob Nascine? Not sure I know.” He dug another file out of his desk drawer. “Should be here in the county roster...” He ran his finger down a list of names and stopped. “Oschel,” he said. “Must be a family name.”
“Robert Oschel Nascine,” said I. “R.O.N.”
“Ron,” said Odd.
“She was out of the truck,” I said. “She was running away. He hit her on the back of her knee with his baton, swung it hard, brought her down.”
17.
We counted backwards, and as hard as it was for the chief to imagine, Robert Nascine was only twenty-eight at the time of the murders. He had always seemed old to Seth Shining Pony.
Nascine came to the island from Bellingham, where he had been a legendary high school basketball player, having led his team to a state championship, in the days when five-ten was not short on the court. A few college recruiters came to call, but Nascine had already decided on a career, and, in those days, college was not a benefit to his choice: law enforcement. Everyone works for power, through money or position, but with a badge power is bestowed upon you. At least this is how the chief saw Nascine’s motivation, after years of first distant, then close, observation. For his own part, the badge was a burden, and the power it gave Seth Shining Pony was false and uncomfortable. Like now, for instance, upon wondering if a man known and feared for most of his life was responsible for the murder of the girl he idolized.
Scenes were now replaying for Odd, and it was powerful testimony, but from an eye-witness who would never be allowed to take the stand. It was evidence still incomplete at best and legally useless. He remembered Nascine, Deputy Bob, coming to Jeannie’s school and making a scare presentation on the evils of marijuana.
“It was stupid. Even he couldn’t pretend that he believed all that crap. All the kids giggled through most of it. But he was young, younger than the teachers, and handsome in his tan uniform. Some of the girls had serious crushes on him. Later, he came back.”
When Deputy Bob returned to present a cautionary lesson on the consequences of drinking and driving, complete with gruesome audio and visual aids, a session for which he could find far more enthusiasm, and to which the students responded with far more horror, Jeannie made her move. The deputy, she decided, would guide her through that awkward, embarrassing, and dangerous passage into womanhood. She knew her own power and was sure he would not refuse her.
“It happened in his cabin...he was renting a bachelor’s cabin, inland from Point Sinister...”
“I know the place,” said Seth Shining Pony.
“They were toking on some weed he’d confiscated from somebody, and Jeannie got over her jitters, and everything he said was soothing...and so funny...and then her clothes were off...and it wasn’t all that painful, and she was okay with looking at him after. For a few days, then, she thought she must be in love with him. She wrote his initials all over her notebook...since she was underage and he was a cop she was afraid to write his name...but her girlfriend caught her at it, and she had to tell her everything.”
“Who was this girlfriend?” I asked. “What was her name?”
Odd shook his head. “I can see her...she
’s shorter than I, straight dark hair...dark complexion...”
“Tribal?” asked the chief.
“Yes! She’s an Indian girl.”
The one thing Jeannie hadn’t anticipated was that Deputy Bob would fall in love with her. She was sure he was well experienced, and in fact he was, having had his reasonable share of high school beauties. But that was when he was in high school himself. Ten years later, all the cheering was over, and those girls disappeared into other lives. It was Jeannie who took dominion over his heart and mind.
“That’s when the trouble started...the anger...the jealousy when Jeannie started going out with James,” said Odd, and then he had to sit down. He was exhausted and could no longer follow the thread to its inevitable end.
“So Stacey was right,” I said. “Jeannie had to tell somebody. She told her friend. You have to remember that friend’s name, Odd.”
He tried, but nothing was coming.
The chief remembered. He said, “Camilia Two Trees.”
“Yes! It was Cammy! How could I forget her? We were best friends.”
“Is she still around?” I asked the chief, “Is she still on the island?”
“Yes, she’s still on the island. She’s married to Bob Nascine.”
That 9:45 ferry to “America,” as Deputy Nascine had so quaintly put it, had once again chugged off without us. We were having breakfast at the cafe, where old man Drinkwater was still holding down a stool at the counter and where all looked over their long stacks and bacon when we came in. They were looking at Odd. I recognized their expressions. Once in Spokane we had this transgender, girl to guy. He was built like a dumpster, with a hairy chest and a bushy beard and everyone who knew about the change would look at him and think: that man, that man used to be a woman.
The accommodating waitress, the young recovering alcoholic fry-cook, Drinkwater and his Indian chums, all the assorted palefaces, everybody knew by now, whether they believed it or not, that Jeannie, that fabled tragic beauty of thirty-three years ago, slain on our shores, was back, in the form of a big Swede cop from Spokane. And everyone knew why.
As we drank our coffee and waited for our pancakes, I leaned toward Odd and said, “Putting aside what we got waiting back in the Honeymoon Cottage, and what we got waiting back in Spokane, as I see it here, we got two possibilities.”
“Both long shots, I’m guessing,” he said.
“Camilia Two Trees Nascine knows everything and is so weary of the burden and so sick of a lifetime with Deputy Bob that she’ll be willing to spill the beans, and he’ll do us the great favor of eating his service revolver...”
“Or?”
“Or you do a face-off with Nascine. That is, Jeannie does a face-off with Nascine. Scare the wits out of him until he confesses.”
“He doesn’t scare easy.”
“Hell he doesn’t. He was scared when he came to the cottage this morning. He kept looking at you like at a ghost.”
“Is that what I am, Quinn?”
Ghostly stuff was about him, for sure.
“No, you’re flesh and bones, kid, the physical part of you is.”
“The physical part?”
“The other stuff...I’m still sorting it out. It’s like candles.”
“What’s like candles?”
I was looking for something that made sense, something that we could grasp.
“When a candle burns down, and you pass the flame to a new one, you get a new candle, but what about the flame? It’s the same flame that used to be on the old candle, ain’t? And that flame can pass from candle to candle, thousands of times, as many times as you have candles. Size of the candle doesn’t matter, nor the color, whether it’s a beautiful candle or a cheesy one...one dying candle lights two new ones, ain’t? Two from one. Ten from one.”
That’s how I finally did the math on this thing.
“I guess so.”
“That’s the way I’m sorting it out. That’s something I can understand, a flame, passed from one candle to another, forever.”
“That’s nice, Quinn.”
“Look, we’re cops, okay? We’re gathering evidence. I don’t care where it’s coming from if it nails the perp. We can work all that out later.”
“Right.”
“You’re you and only you, but your light goes way back, and that last glow of light wants to make itself known. I mean, maybe that’s the reason you were born, in Spokane...”
“I always hated Spokane.”
“That don’t matter. You were born there, to become a cop, to chase after Houser, the pedophile, to this island where the person you used to be lived and was murdered, so that person can face her murderer and bring him down.”
“So what are you doing here?”
“Me? I got the mouth. Left to yourself, you wouldn’t say boo.”
“Maybe that candle lit both of us.”
“Yeah, it’s a pretty thought, kid, but my light is sixteen years older than yours. If I did have a past life, it was probably as a peasant running away from some Cossack with a hard-on.”
The door opened and once again everyone turned. It was Chief Shining Pony and under his arm was tucked a white leatherette yearbook, Class of 1967. He slid into the booth next to Odd and ordered a cup of coffee.
He put the yearbook on the table but didn’t open it. Odd couldn’t take his eyes off it.
“I put out the word,” the chief said, “that you’re still here doing something for me.”
“So the heat’s off, as far as the county is concerned?” I said.
“You wish. Nascine always feels that if anybody’s gonna do something for me it ought to be him. He’ll still harrass you, but get yourself to tribal land if he does, that’ll give you some protection.”
“Nascine did it,” I said. “I’ll bet the farm on that. Ain’t, Odd?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Even if he did,” said the chief, “the only evidence we have is that bruise on Jeannie’s leg that may or may not match a police baton. It might match the barrel of the shotgun.”
“Wait a minute...if Jeannie ran from the car...and Nascine brought her down with a baton to the back of the knee...and shot her...and then put her back in the car...why in the hell would he do that?...but that’s not my point.”
“What is your point?”
“My point is he came into physical contact with her when he picked her up and put her into the car again, which opens the possibility to his leaving on her what didn’t exist back then...DNA.”
“Nascine was the officer who discovered the bodies. He may have made the mistake of touching them.”
“Nascine discovered the bodies?”
“Yeah.”
“Of course he did,” I said, disgusted.
It was amazing how little we knew about the case, and yet we had the possibility of knowing it all.
Odd wasn’t even listening. He had opened the yearbook.
I looked at the dedication page. Even upside-down I could see it was a blown-up snap of Jeannie and James, in a rain forest, covered with slickers, arms around each other, in a thick growth of ferns dripping with moisture.
“Anyhow,” said the chief. “Jeannie’s body was cremated. So was James, for that matter.”
“Shit, piss, and corruption.”
“I never met a woman like you, and I don’t think that’s a compliment.”
Odd paged through the yearbook, and I could see in his face the recognition of old friends, the reliving of school activities from someone else’s life. He stopped at one page and put his finger on a picture.
“Cammy!” he said, smiling.
I turned the book around and looked at the picture. Camilia Two Trees: Chorus, Stitch ‘n Rip Club, Library Volunteer, Cheerleaders, Homecoming Princess. She had deep dark eyes and high cheek bones, a Mona Lisa smile.
“We were friends from the first grade,” said Odd, “right up until...”
Together they must have made a formi
dable pair, the fair and the dark, beauties, both.
“I hope things turned out well for her,” said Odd.
“You can see for yourself,” said the chief. “She’s helping out during the season at Rocketman’s.”
Rocketman’s was at a T-intersection in the main perimeter road, set back in an acre of crushed rock where by state law purchasers of fireworks were required to set off same, and occasionally someone actually did, mostly as a test before committing to a trunkload.