Dying for Murder

by Suzanne F. Kingsmill

  By the time I got there the horses were long gone. Wyatt hefted the rifle over his shoulder and I said, “Is that how you do it? You just shoot the vaccine into the horse?”

  “It’s a dart,” he said impatiently. “You dart the animal and the dart injects the vaccine and no more little foals.” He laughed. “One down, one to go,” he said as he patted the rifle.

  “There are only two mares on the entire island?” I asked incredulously. I had just assumed that these three horses were a breakaway pod from the main herd.

  “Yup. Seems a bit like overkill doesn’t it?”

  Was it my imagination or was there a tinge of derision in those words?

  I left Wyatt and Rosemary and meandered my way back through the dunes toward my equipment and then to my trike. I turned one last time to look at the sea and saw a man, his back to me, looking out across the vast expanse of ocean. There was something about him that seemed familiar. I grappled for my binoculars, brought them up to my eyes, and scanned the beach looking for him. He leapt into the centre of my lenses, suddenly far bigger than he had been, and I smiled. Duncan. He had said he was going to come down while we were here but he had been very vague about when. He had turned and was starting to walk away down the beach so I ran and yelled into the wind, the sand clawing at my feet and making the going slow. Finally my voice must have pierced through the wind and I watched him stop and then turn to face me. When I drew alongside him in the swirling wind the sun was shining in my eyes and I had to bring my hand up as a guard to see his face clearly, so he beat me to it and gave me a big bear hug. I was in danger of suffocating before he let me go, saying “Pretty nice, eh?”

  I looked at the blond windswept beach and the flock of pelicans just skimming the water so that one little riffle of the wind might touch their wings and send them cartwheeling through the surf, and I looked at the sea, still resolutely determined not to let the sun make it shine, and I nodded. There really wasn’t anything I could say that could describe it.

  “Well, my dear girl, I’ve seen that look before.”

  I looked at him quizzically.

  “It means you’re stricken, afflicted, besotted, bedeviled, smitten, enamoured, moonstruck, captivated, gaga …” and he waved his hand to encompass the island.

  “Don’t worry,” he added. “It’s a common affliction.”

  “And the antidote is?”

  “Why, to buy a place on the island, of course.” He chuckled.

  “And get involved in island politics?”

  “That, I admit, is not idyllic, but it is worth the price.” Duncan turned and started walking down the beach. I followed.

  “What do you know about this vaccination fiasco?” I asked as I caught up to him.

  “Good word for it. It heated up into a really messy situation with both sides trying to strong-arm the membership to vote their way.” Duncan stooped and picked up a small moon shell that had been rubbed raw and left dull and lifeless by the sand. He pocketed it. To each to their own, I thought.

  “It was pretty ugly, actually,” he continued. “A lot of strong words, best left unsaid, have been said. It’s split the membership in two.”

  “But it’s just two mares and a stallion,” I said, trying not to sound too astounded.

  “C’mon, Cordi. You’re the zoologist. These horses have only just arrived here from the other island. The herd grows one foal at a time. One mare at a time. Eventually the herd will be big enough to harm the island because of the horses’ grazing.”

  “I take it you’re for the vaccination?”

  “Damn right. How could you think otherwise? But it’s caused a lot of bad blood and people are pretty fired up over it. Not sure how it’s going to end, but I hope sanity prevails.”

  We walked along the beach for a little while, the wet sand dark and glistening against the dazzling white of the dry sand. The wind had picked up considerably and we were having a hard time hearing each other. Duncan pointed off to my left and yelled in my ear. “My cabin is just behind the third dune on the left — if you come by the main road it’s the first left after Hunter’s — you and Martha will have to come for supper one night.”

  I yelled back into his ear — I had to stand on tiptoes to reach it — “We may have been evacuated by then.”

  Duncan laughed and waved his hand dismissively. I didn’t catch what he said.

  “You mean we won’t be evacuated?” I guessed.

  He shook his head again. “No, I mean I won’t be evacuated.”

  “You mean the authorities won’t evacuate you for some reason or you won’t evacuate when ordered.”

  “The latter,” he said it as if it made eminent sense.

  “But the island could be annihilated. It is a barrier island after all.”

  He laughed again. “I’ve been under evacuation orders five times since I bought my cabin and not once have I left.” He sounded proud of it.

  I was about to say “isn’t that stupid?” but caught myself in time. Instead I said, “Do you think that is a wise idea?”

  He chose to pretend he didn’t hear and shortly after that we parted ways and I headed back toward my trike. I had to use the GPS because all the dunes looked the same. I found the trail out to the beach where I had stowed my stuff and headed down it to find my trike, amazed at how the oaks and the dunes and the palmetto silenced the sounds of the sea and blocked the sun. The sun was low in the sky and my growling stomach made me wonder what happened if you missed dinner at the station. Most biology stations had a system for latecomers — they had to. Biologists are notorious for queer working hours — you had to work the shifts of the animals you were studying, day or night. At any given time at a research station a handful of researchers would sleep through the day, their clocks at odds with everyone else.

  I was hot, dirty, sweaty, and tired when I got back to the cabin. Martha had set up her printer on my bed and had printed out a slew of photos. A lot of them were taken last night and were remarkably clear, although the green tinge from the night-vision technology was unfortunate. The screen door screeched open and in she walked, carrying a humungous sandwich and a can of pop, both of which she handed to me.

  “Latecomers’ leftovers,” she said. “How did it go?”

  “Two buntings.” I patted the recorder.

  “Sure they’re both buntings?” She was never going to let me live down my colossal mistake when I first started recording birds. I had recorded fifteen individual birds over a week, but when I got the recordings back to the lab and printed out the sonograms it turned out that half the birds were of a different species entirely from the one I was supposed to be studying. In my defence, I never claimed I had a good ear.

  I waved my arm at her photos to change the subject. “I see you got some pictures last night.”

  “It’s actually a video, but you can take stills from it.”

  She picked up one of the photos of a blurry little blob that looked like an owl in a tree and said, “I have to try and get a better picture of this little guy. My hand must have jerked.” She sighed and dropped the photo back on my bed, the one I wanted to go to sleep on. “Don’t worry, Cordi. When you need me I’ll be around.” It took me a minute to realize what she was saying.

  It sounded vaguely accusatory and I rose to my own defence. “I’ll be needing you for some of the analysis, but the field work is solitary. You know that, Martha.” Martha was an inveterate talker and the only time I had ever taken her with me to record birds she hadn’t been able to keep quiet, and keeping quiet is an essential tool in a biologist’s arsenal.

  “I’ll get you sonograms of these two birds then. There’s a machine in the lab.” She still sounded hurt but there was nothing I could do about it.

  “They have a sonogram machine? That would be great. By the way, Stacey is taking me out turtling tonight. Would you like to come?” My little salvo of reconciliation.

  She hesitated. “Sam is going to take me batting tonight. He�
�s doing a quick and dirty experiment. We’re going to mist net ten bats and fit them with tiny capsules full of phosphorescent and let them go.” Martha’s face was lighting up like the phosphorescent capsules and I marvelled at how fast she could change and at Sam’s total failure to communicate to me what sounded like a great research project. All he had said was that he was going mist netting. Anyway, I’d accepted Stacey’s invitation.

  “Everyone will be stationed near a place called Hunter’s,” she said, oblivious to my envy, “with walkie- talkies, and we’ll call in our observations on where the bats are, if they’re flying high or low, east or west. If you don’t go turtling you should come with us.”

  No one can ever say that biology isn’t interesting, even amusing sometimes. I had pictures of phosphorescent bats zooming around at canopy level, below canopy level, palmetto level, and every level in between, with people hidden at strategic places spying on them. Were biologists the animal kingdom’s version of a private eye?

  I watched Martha cleaning up the photos from my bed. When she was finished I sat down and said, “You’ll never guess who I saw on the beach.”

  “Duncan,” she said, without hesitation. Not even a little bit to make me think she didn’t know. No surprises for Martha.

  “He dropped by here while you were out birding. The only person coming to the island when everyone else is leaving.”

  “He told me that if an evacuation order came down he would not be leaving.”

  Martha chuckled. “Stubborn old bastard.”

  “I could think of a better word.”

  “Yeah, he’s probably a little bit crazy too, but he told me his cabin is on the highest ground on the island next to the lighthouse.”

  “The lighthouse?” I remembered the sign I had seen when I was taping birds and wondered how close I had been to it.

  “You haven’t seen the lighthouse? You’ve got to be kidding me. It’s huge and the tallest thing by far on the island. You can see it for miles. How did you miss it?”

  “I guess I wasn’t looking the right way.”

  “I climbed to the very top today and you can see the whole beach and the next island over too. There’s even a catwalk at the top, but it looked kind of dicey.”

  By the time Martha had packed herself up in preparation for batting she looked like a walking advertisement for MEC. She was wearing long crimson pants tucked into her white socks and a long-sleeved green button-down shirt with every button buttoned up. In final preparation she took out a bottle of bug dope and rubbed it on her face, neck, and hands. Then she fastened a bandana on her head and covered it with a big mosquito and no-see-um-proof bug hat. By the time she left I had more or less fallen asleep and awoke with a start five minutes from being late for my 10:00 meeting with Stacey.

  The wind was pretty impressive. Even in the shelter of the dunes the great oaks were thrashing and writhing about when I left my cabin and walked into the clearing. Stacey was leaning over a four wheeler equipped with an open cargo area at the back, parked under the one light illuminating the clearing. She acknowledged me with a grunt. She was futzing around with some of the guts of the vehicle, but her great girth was giving her trouble. Biologists the world over have to become good at jury-rigging various pieces of mechanical and electrical equipment. Either that or see their research stall for lack of an electrician or a mechanic in the far flung parts of the earth where they find themselves.

  Stacey finally finished what she was doing and sat down behind the handlebars, but she took up the entire seat and I had to ride in the trunk at the back.

  The night was overcast, and the forest was inky dark. We bounced and jangled down through the tunnel of trees and around a corner into the blinding glare of headlights. They seemed to have come from nowhere. Stacey swore and swerved the bike viciously to the right. A half-ton truck went left in a spray of sand and grinding gears.

  We’d barely come to a standstill when Stacey started yelling. “You idiot,” she shouted, as Trevor opened the door of the truck, jammed a baseball cap on his head, and stepped out.

  “Why the hell were you going so fast? You could have killed us. Or was that the intent?” Trevor smiled that sickly sort of smile that signals contempt, derision, and agreement, which made me wonder why he might want to kill us, or rather, Stacey.

  “No harm done, now is there?” he said slowly.

  Stacey glared at him and he touched his cap at her and turned back to his car. “Sayonara,” he said, but his smile said something else.

  chapter eight

  We didn’t talk on the way out to the beach. I think we were both pretty riled up, or at least I was. Besides, yelling in her ear was not an attractive option. When we broke out of the forest into the first row of dunes the sky was seething with clouds and the sea’s swells were giving way to waves crashing upon the shoreline, the broken bits a startling white in contrast to the monochromatic swells.

  Stacey leaned over and yelled above the wind and the waves. “Unlikely to find any females in this weather,” she said, and I found I was really disappointed. I had never seen a sea turtle lay eggs. I had never seen a sea turtle period, except on TV. The drill was to drive the full six-kilometre length of the beach once an hour until dawn, searching for females who only laid their eggs at night. The turtle patrol did this every night, dusk to dawn, during nesting season from May to August. Stacey, it seemed, was filling in for a few days while the guys who usually did it went to a wedding on the mainland. I wondered why she couldn’t have found someone else, since she didn’t seem to have recovered from her flu bug yet and she was director, after all. But then maybe she was like so many biologists the world over — just powering through their own adversities for the sake of the research.

  It only took us half an hour to make the drive, so we had a fifteen-minute break at each end before setting out again.

  There were no no-see-ums in this weather — it was way too windy — so we pulled over for one of our breaks and she brought out a thermos and a couple of hunks of bread and cheese and offered me some.

  “I love this job and I hate it,” she said, to the cascade of stars overhead and to me, it would seem, though why she felt the need to tell me I didn’t know. I looked up. The stars were trying valiantly to poke through the massing clouds and the wind was whipping sand in our faces.

  I looked at her and she sighed.

  “Oh, I don’t always like turtle patrol. It can get pretty monotonous, but I don’t have to do it very often. What I love is identifying a problem that needs to be solved and figuring out how to solve it. There’s nothing like the thrill of research. It’s got everything, mystery, intrigue, challenge, even fear and the adrenaline rush you get when your data supports your theory or when you see a sea turtle nesting for the first time.”

  I couldn’t have said it better, even though I’d often tried. I took a swig from the thermos and handed it back to her. “You’ve been director for five years?”

  My bald question put paid to our shared moment of camaraderie and she had a guarded look on her face as she said, “Yes.”

  When she didn’t follow it up with anything I said, “You said you hate the job too.”

  “Everyone hates a part of their jobs. It’s human nature,” she said evasively. But she seemed sad and at the same time angry. She went quiet then and took the thermos and swabbed it down with the towel before packing it away.

  “Sorry we haven’t found a nesting turtle for you. Next time.” She turned on the bike and the engine roared to life.

  I looked at my watch. It was only 10:45 and she had told me that the turtle patrol went until dawn. She noticed me looking at my watch and said, “I don’t like the look of the weather. If we are going to evacuate the island it will be at dawn. I need to get back in time in case there is an alert.” She patted her walkie-talkie and said, “These don’t always work.”

  At first I thought it was a huge boulder in the distance, sitting on the edge of the sea, but then i
t moved. I squeezed Stacey’s shoulder, but she had already seen it. We drove up off the beach and Stacey shut off the vehicle’s lights.

  “Light will scare her back into the surf,” she said as we sat and waited. The sea turtle was about the size of a truck’s tire and she emerged from the sea with all the grace of a ponderous tank. Like an invalid she hauled herself painfully (or at least painful to watch) up the beach, each movement of her front flippers plowing through the sand making her whole body shudder. She left a trail of flipper marks behind her, each mark nearly touching the one in front. Like walking heel to toe. A completely graceless animal on land and yet in the sea she was as graceful as a soaring bird. She finally stopped above the high-tide mark and we could just make out her hind flippers scooping sand and sending it flying as she dug her nest. Stacey turned the bike back on and we drove up close. I was worried we were going to scare her. Any other animal would have turned tail at the ATV bearing down on them.

  “Once she starts laying her eggs she is impervious to everything,” said Stacey. We sat and watched as she labor-iously scooped out a hole the size of a basketball and the shape of a flask. The eggs were white and leathery and looked like ping pong balls, but were about the size of a golf ball and were covered in stringy mucous. I was being anthropomorphic but it seemed as though it was taking a lot out of her — her eyes were welling up with tears and she was breathing erratically. But sea turtles had been doing this for millions of years so it obviously worked. And then it was done and she began filling in the hole with her hind flippers. When she was satisfied she thumped the top of the nest four or five times with her whole body — essentially doing pushups and then letting her body fall. She then threw a lot of sand around to disguise the nest. And then she was gone, making her way back to the sea, leaving a lonely trail of flipper prints behind her to show she had been there. We didn’t talk the whole way home. Stacey seemed subdued and I was just plain tired. When we got back the clearing was deserted. “Doesn’t look as though anything’s happening here,” said Stacey in a voice that sounded sorry.