Murder at five finger light

by Sue Henry

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  JIM BEAL PICKED UP HIS CELL PHONE FROM THE DESK IN the common room and took it outside the lighthouse, where he could get a better signal, to call the Petersburg police.

  Jessie watched as Karen, still pale and silent, made an abrupt right turn and left the group as they came through the kitchen door. She disappeared into her bedroom, closing the door behind her. Her state of shock seemed to Jessie to be somewhat out of proportion to the situation, so after a few minutes’ consultation with Laurie, who was also concerned, she went to see if she could find out what was going on.

  She knocked softly on the door, but getting no response, opened it and went in anyway, closing it behind her.

  Karen had curled herself into a fetal position on the bed and lay motionless, face to the wall.

  “Karen?” Jessie said, walking across to sit down on the foot of the bed. “What’s going on, Karen? Talk to me. Did you know the man?”

  “Go away.”

  “I’m not going to do that. I’d like to help with—well—whatever’s upsetting you so badly. But I can’t do that unless you talk to me about it.”

  Abruptly, Karen turned over and scooted up until she could lean against a pillow and the wall to glare balefully at Jessie.

  “You know what it is,” she said heatedly. “It’s obvious that the son of a bitch has figured out where I am and is after me again. Now I have no place to go. I’m stuck here, on an island with no escape. Can’t you see that? It’s your fault.”

  Obvious? My fault? Jessie was speechless, astonished at the intensity of the statement and the animosity directed at her. Isn’t anything ever her fault?

  She stared at Karen for a few minutes in silence, an impression surfacing that had once or twice nibbled at her consciousness and either been ignored or dismissed. The woman had never laid out many details of why her stalker was so determined to catch up with her. Jessie had never seen him. Did he exist? Had Karen done something to justify his anger and resolve? Nothing, she claimed, was her fault. Karen simply, without saying so, refused responsibility by blaming everything on the man that she feared—and now she included Jessie. It couldn’t have been completely one-sided. Relationships never were.

  And because of my own past experience, I’ve been willing to believe exactly what she told me and be helpful, Jessie thought, frowning. Well, what’s sauce for the goose can be sauce for—for me too. Sometimes a slap in the face gets faster results than a sympathetic pat.

  Standing up, she leaned over Karen. She didn’t slap her, but released some anger of her own in giving her shoulder a hard shake.

  “Look,” she snapped. “I’ve had just about all I’m going to take of your histrionic pity party and bad habit of shifting responsibility to others. It’s not my fault that you’re here. You chose to come. At my suggestion? Yes. But you chose—waved us down from the beach after disappearing into the woodwork without so much as a word to let me know you were safe. To be honest, I had taken a deep breath of relief at being off the hook when you didn’t show up at the dock. I—”

  “So you don’t want me here after all,” Karen interrupted in a shrill voice. “You and your so-called friends! ” She spit out the last word as sneering accusation. “I should have known better than to trust you. I know better than to trust anybody.”

  “Well, that’s becoming perfectly clear,” Jessie couldn’t keep from hurling back.

  “Oh-h, I hate—”

  The door opened behind Jessie and Laurie stepped into the room.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Everyone in the common room can hear the two of you yelling. Can I help?”

  Karen immediately turned over to once again face the wall in stubborn refusal. Jessie, uncomfortable with her own behavior, swung around to apologize, but Laurie held up a preventive hand. “No, it’s all right. But there’s something else.”

  She glanced at Karen, who was ignoring them both, then back to Jessie with eyebrows raised in question.

  Jessie shrugged and shook her head, defeated for the moment.

  “What else, Laurie?”

  “You have a cell phone, don’t you? Jim’s isn’t working and Aaron can’t find his.”

  “Yes.” She checked her jeans’ pocket and then the daypack she had been carrying. No phone. Then she remembered she had put the phone in her jacket pocket. After promising Alex to keep it with her, in her rush to leave for the other end of the island she had unintentionally left it behind. Grabbing up the jacket, she searched each and every pocket, with no results. The cell phone was gone. Without it she wouldn’t be able to call Alex and he would think she was just having cell phone problems.

  “I had it in this pocket,” she said, showing Laurie. “It was in there when I left to walk with you.”

  Suspicion dawning, she swung around toward the bed and its stubbornly antisocial occupant, who had stayed behind.

  “Karen, do you have my cell phone?” she demanded.

  Silence.

  “Karen!”

  “Of course not,” the woman retorted in a childish whine, without moving. “Why would I want your stupid phone?”

  Without another word, the two women left Karen to her angry sulking, closing the door behind them.

  In the common room the rest had gathered around the table where Jim’s phone lay; he had taken it apart to see if he could find out why it didn’t work.

  “You can see that someone’s messed with it and put it back together,” he growled in disgust. “Unrepairable.”

  “So there’s no way to contact anyone?” Whitney asked. “What about the lighthouse radio?”

  “It no longer works ship to shore, just ship to ship,” Jim explained. “With so many people using cell phones, they shut it down awhile back. Now it’s for marine use only.”

  “But it works, right?”

  “Yes—to a boat.”

  “Couldn’t you call some boat that has a working cell phone and have them make the call?”

  “Good idea,” Jim told her. “Hadn’t thought of that.”

  He got up from a chair at the table and crossed to the small radio room that opened off the common room, where the whole group had assembled with work the last thing on their minds. In less than a minute they could hear him swear as he came back to stand in the doorway.

  “Not functional. It’s been smashed with something heavy, and hard enough to trash it.”

  There was a moment of astonished silence. Then Don Sawyer ventured, “You mean someone broke it on purpose?” He hesitated, considering the ramifications. “Why would—? Who the hell would—? When? But we’ve been in and out of here all morning.”

  “It didn’t have to be this morning,” Laurie reminded him. “We mostly use the cell phone—so no one’s had a reason to check the radio at all this trip. It could even have been done before we got here.”

  “So we have no way to contact the outside world at all?”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Jim agreed. “Unless we find your cell phone, that is—or Jessie’s.”

  “Jim,” Laurie reminded him. “There’s a radio on the boat.”

  “That’s right.” He smiled. “Problem solved. But first I want to see about our disappearing cell phones, if possible.”

  He turned to Jessie, with a nod toward the room where Karen had retreated. “You think she’s got them? She was the only one in here after the other three of you left to go to the south end of the island. We were working on the new roof, Curt was in the basement, and Sandra was upstairs painting.”

  “I really don’t know, Jim. It wouldn’t surprise me, but, on the other hand, I think finding the dead man put her on the verge of panic. She’s blaming everybody but herself for her situation. I’ve given up trying to second-guess her, but I have a lot of unanswered questions.”

  “What do you mean—‘her situation’?” Curt, who had abandoned the generator and come upstairs to sit silently listening, asked suddenly.

  “What happened to your eye
?” Don asked, looking in his direction for the first time.

  Everyone looked to see an angrily swollen mouse had partially closed Curt’s right eye.

  “Nothing major,” he said, shaking his head in annoyance. “Clobbered myself when a wrench slipped and I didn’t have sense enough to duck.” With a lopsided, embarrassed grin he shifted the focus back to Karen. “You said ‘situation.’ Is there something we need to know about the woman?”

  Jessie turned to Jim, in whom she had confided, asking the question with raised eyebrows.

  “It’s a long story of personal stuff, Curt,” Jim told him. “Maybe later, okay? Let things ride for the time being about Karen’s situation while I think about it. But I do think we should search her things for both Aaron’s and Jessie’s phones. This thing of mine’s no good to us.” He tossed it across to land on the desk with a thump.

  There was a long silence as everyone considered the situation in which they found themselves. It was obvious that no one relished the idea of rummaging around in Karen’s belongings.

  “Okay,” said Aaron, at last, standing up, “I’ll help. But what are we going to do about—the dead man?”

  “He’s okay where he is for the time being,” Don said. “We don’t want to bring him back here—do we?”

  “It seems kind of wrong to leave him clear down at the other end of the island somehow, doesn’t it? We could put him in the carpenter shed,” Aaron suggested. He glanced around the room and frowned uneasily. “I’m sorry, but what we’re all thinking might as well be said. It looks like someone on this island hit him with something heavy—probably a rock. We don’t know who that someone was, do we? But whoever it is might just go back and shove him on out into the sound—get rid of him.”

  There was a moment of awed, motionless silence as they all stared at him in astonishment.

  Then Whitney, lips stiff with indignation, stepped forward and slapped a hand on the tabletop. “Hey now. What the hell makes you think one of us killed him? You’ve got no right to make that kind of assumption. It could just as well have been you as any of us. I won’t be . . .”

  “Whoa, Whitney,” Jim broke in. “Aaron’s not accusing you—or anyone else directly.”

  “The hell he’s not!”

  “No, he’s not. Think about it. You may have slept soundly all night last night. But I’m sure some of us didn’t. I woke up enough to hear one person moving and, later, the voices of at least two people outside during the night.”

  Jessie was tempted to tell him who those two had been, remembering finding Karen on the helipad and their conversation, but kept her own counsel and filed the information for later. Everyone in the room did not need to know everything. But it was interesting that someone besides Karen had also been up in the night—unless it was Karen going out that Jim had heard.

  Jim continued. “We didn’t all sleep close together, you know. Aaron was alone on the roof. Curt slept in the basement. I have no idea if any of the rest of us were up, but someone could have been. The toilet was flushed twice. Did you hear it?”

  Whitney shrugged and shook her head.

  “I thought not. And you were sleeping closest to the bathroom. So let’s don’t any of us get crazy about this, okay? Let’s do what we can and let law enforcement take care of investigating when they get here.”

  “I still think we should bring that guy back here to the carpenter shop,” Aaron said.

  “I think so too,” Jim agreed. “We’ll do it after we search Karen’s stuff for the cell phones, or make a call from the boat if we have to. Come on, Aaron. Might as well get it over with. Laurie, will you and Jessie see if you can get Karen out of there? It would make it easier.”

  Much against Karen’s wishes, they did—insisting that she come out on her own, or be carried out. It did not win them any confidence points with her, but she seemed to have managed to regain some self-control and dignity. She marched stoically out of the lighthouse and up onto the helipad, where she sat, as Jessie had found her the night before, facing west, with her legs hanging over the low rail, and refused to speak to anyone.

  As soon as she had vacated the room, Jim and Aaron went in to make their search, while the rest waited in the common room. It was very quiet for a few minutes. Then Don stood up suddenly.

  “Sandra must still be painting the roof. With those headphones on, she won’t have heard a thing, but she’s been up there a long time and I’d better go bring her down.”

  He disappeared toward the stairs that went up from the second hallway and they heard his footsteps as he hurriedly climbed them.

  Jim and Aaron came back shaking their heads at not having found either of the two missing cell phones among Karen’s possessions. What they did find made Jim not only glad, but also relieved that he had insisted on making the search. He came out—Aaron trailing behind with a worried expression—and called Laurie and Jessie back into the common room from where they had been keeping busy in the kitchen. Lifting the bottom of the blue Five Finger Lighthouse sweatshirt he was wearing, he removed a pistol from the waistband of his jeans and laid it down on the table without a word.

  “Da-amn!” said Curt, sitting up straight in his chair on the far side of the room. “That’s an interesting item. But no cell phones?”

  “What would she have that for?” Whitney asked, eyes wide.

  Jim shook his head. “I don’t know, but it’s loaded. You have any idea, Jessie?”

  “No. I didn’t know she had it.” Curious, but she found that Karen’s having a gun came as no real surprise. Would anything Karen did astound her? She wondered apprehensively. Shouldn’t take people for granted, she told herself, and thought about calling Alex for advice before remembering that she now had no way of calling him at all.

  Taking the revolver from the table, she noticed there were only four rounds left in the cylinder, and a quick sniff rewarded her with the acrid smell of cordite. This gun had been fired recently.

  The heavy silence from those watching lasted for a long moment that was broken by the sound of Don’s steps on the stairs. He came frowning into the room as Jessie laid the gun down again without revealing what she had learned.

  “Sandra’s not up there,” he told them. “Anybody know where she is?”

  No one did.

  “Where the hell’d that come from?” he demanded in concern, spotting the handgun on the table.

  Jim told him.

  “Damn!” he said, spinning toward the kitchen door, obviously on his way to wring a few answers from Karen. “Well, I’m going to get some information.”

  Jim caught him by the arm and swung him back.

  “Hey, Don. Wait a minute and think about it. This thing was in Karen’s suitcase, not her hand. What could it have to do with Sandra? She probably finished on the roof and went off to the south end looking for the rest of us. We must have missed her on our way back.”

  “How could we have missed her?”

  “Pretty easily if she climbed the hill to look at the eagle’s nest, or went around the rocky east side. Nobody was saying much. We could have passed without her hearing. Let’s go around in the boat—make that call to the authorities on the way—and look for her before you start on Karen. If we don’t find her going over, we’ll make a careful search on the way back. We’ll find her. Okay? Where’s she gonna go on three acres anyway?”

  “Okay,” Don agreed, after a moment’s hesitation. “We can collect that poor guy from the south end—get that over with at the same time.”

  “Right.”

  Jim took the handgun and, as they passed through the kitchen, raised the lid of a small freezer next to a closet and dropped it in. Then they all went out and down the stairs to the lower platform. Several glanced in the direction of the helipad, where Karen still sat, mutely staring west into Frederick Sound, but she didn’t even turn her head, ignoring them completely.

  They walked across to the edge of the platform that overlooked the small cove protecting
Jim’s powerboat.

  Where is the boat? Jessie wondered, looking down, for the sheltered space where she had last seen it tied up was empty.

  Then Jim began to swear—long and concentrated curses that included words even the dog mushers she knew seldom incorporated into their vocabulary.

  Peering carefully into the water, she was just able to make out the shape of the Seawolf—resting on the bottom of the small cove.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ALEX JENSEN WOKE EARLY ON WEDNESDAY MORNING AND rolled over sleepily in the big brass bed toward the east window that filled with sunshine—when there was sunshine. On this particular morning he could see that the light filtering in between the half-drawn curtains was pale gray, which, combined with the sound of water dripping from the roof outside, signaled a rainy day. He could also see that he was alone in the big brass bed high in the loft bedroom of Jessie Arnold’s new log house on Knik Road and remembered that she had gone off to work on the lighthouse.

  In no hurry to leave the just-right morning warmth of the bed, he rolled onto his back, laced his fingers behind his head, and stared upward at the sloped ceiling, considering what he should do with this day off from his job with the Alaska State Troopers. Billy Steward, who helped Jessie care for her dogs, would be along soon. They had planned to spend the morning cleaning boxes for the few dogs left in the kennel but, not being a job for wet weather, that would only happen if the rain stopped. There were several errands to run and a pile of wood that needed splitting and stacking for winter fires in the potbellied stove downstairs. Soon, however, his mind wandered off to other things, specifically how familiar, yet different, it seemed to be back in Alaska in this new house. This replacement for Jessie’s cabin that had burned had been constructed in the old footprint—new and better, but a little strange in its dissimilarities, and he was still getting used to it.

  His relationship with Jessie was different too. In the last month they had fallen quite easily into old, comfortable habits and patterns of living in the same space, sharing many activities, but leaving each other plenty of room when appropriate.