She shrugged, her voice softening. “Water under the bridge now.”
She was about to continue when she looked over my shoulder and slowly began to smile. I turned to look and saw Duncan skirting the dune like a man on reconnaissance.
“It’s okay, Duncan,” Melanie called out. “I’m not doing any studies.” Which made me feel guilty as hell, having literally blundered into her study site. Stacey would not have been amused.
I watched Duncan morph back into an ordinary man as he came to join us. He clamped his large hand on Melanie’s shoulder like an old friend and I looked at him quizzically.
“Mel and I are old friends,” he said. “We go back two whole months.”
Mel smiled. “Duncan found a rattler in his cottage shed and came to find ‘the new snake girl.’ I’ve since logged many hours on that snake. Duncan helped me tag him with a nonpermanent marker.”
The three of us stood there shuffling our feet until Duncan said, “Was I interrupting something?”
Melanie looked at me quickly with an almost imperceptible shake of the head.
“No, no were just talking snakes,” I said. It was awkward, not really knowing what Melanie wanted, so I added, “Let me know if you ever find a copperhead. I’d really like to see one,” and I left them conversing about Sebastien — presumably the snake in Duncan’s garage. I broke out of the dunes onto the beach and strolled along the water’s edge. There wasn’t a soul in sight. I took my running shoes off and walked through the surf, the wind chasing my hair all over my face. I was lost in thought when, from somewhere behind me, I heard my name called. Duncan.
I turned and watched him labouring toward me. He’s a big man and the loose sand just seemed to hold him back at every step. He finally changed course so that he was walking on the wet sand that the tide had fashioned into something as hard as tarmac. In fact, I had been told that at low tide planes could land on the beach.
We walked companionably in silence until Duncan turned and said, “How goes the investigation?”
I grimaced. “It’s all over the map. There are so many loose ends that I’m not sure there are any attached ends.”
“I was just talking to Martha. She says you nearly had another very serious accident.”
“Yeah. Well …” was all I could say.
“You think it was Darcy? Martha said he was the first on the scene.”
“It could have been Darcy but then why would he do such a thing?”
“He doesn’t want you to continue the investigation for some reason?”
“He’s certainly made no bones about that. But he says it’s because of my safety.”
“And maybe it is. Who else was there?”
“Wyatt, Sam, Trevor — they all came together except Sam. Any of them could have done it.”
“Someone feels threatened, and since you didn’t know any of these people until you came here two days ago it has to have something to do with your investigation.” We walked some more in silence.
“I am no closer to finding out who did it. I haven’t even been able to eliminate anybody.” Duncan gave a snide little snort and I laughed. “Not that kind of elimination,” I said.
“Surely my little Melanie is no murderer,” said Duncan with a smile that faded quickly once he saw the look on my face. “What? What is it?”
Melanie hadn’t specifically asked me not to tell and I needed a sounding board so I said, “Stacey was Melanie’s mother.”
Duncan stopped dead in his tracks and grabbed me by the shoulders. “What? You have got to be kidding.”
I shook my head and he let go of my shoulders.
“Melanie is Stacey’s daughter. They hid it well.”
We began to walk again and after half a football field of silence I said, “Melanie only found out about it once she got to the island. She was very bitter. Felt she’d been abandoned by a selfish teenager.”
“A selfish and lost teenager.”
“She doesn’t see it that way. At least, I don’t think she does. Do you know anything about Melanie’s life?”
“Only that she was in and out of foster homes and is a sort of miracle child for making something of her life.”
“There was real anger there Duncan.”
“I hear you, Cordi, but I don’t want to believe she is capable of murder.”
“She blames her mother for a lousy childhood. It’s a motive.”
“But there are others who could have done it too, right?”
“Yeah, Sam has a wishy-washy motive. He and Stacey could have argued over the vaccine. And Trevor could have done it because of her stance on conservation. I haven’t been able to come up with any motives for the rest yet, but I’m working on it.”
“That’s what worries me. You’re maybe working on it too hard. What if whoever it is succeeds next time?”
“Well, I’m not about to make a public announcement that I’m quitting. I’m not a quitter.”
“Even with your life at stake? You could pretend to quit.”
“Listen to yourself, Duncan. How do I pretend to quit and then continue to investigate? The first person I question would blow the whistle. I’ll just have to be careful, that’s all.”
More silence and then, “What’s this about Lou Gehrig’s disease?”
“Pretty awful, isn’t it? She was so alone with such an awful prognosis.”
“It may be an awful thing to say but perhaps there was some luck in her murder. She’d be spared all that agony.”
“Is death ever preferable to life?” I asked.
“Sometimes it is, Cordi. Sometimes it is.”
chapter eighteen
I finally made it back to my cabin. There was no sign of Martha but Stacey’s laptop was plunked down on top of my bed. I pushed it aside and rummaged around the sheets for the file folders. I pulled them out and Mel’s folder slipped and sprawled all over the floor. I picked up the colour photo of her and then looked more carefully at the older black-and-white one. Had I been thinking I would have recognized that it was old, way older than Melanie. The resemblance really was quite striking and I marvelled at how often the puzzle of life threw parents offspring who were their spitting image. Of all the combinations and permutations of DNA, eggs, and sperm, that happened more often than one would expect. I thought about Duncan and his gargantuan nose and I wondered if all his children would have been so cursed, had he had kids. And then I wondered if that was why he hadn’t had kids.
I dropped Melanie’s folder on the floor and picked up Sam’s. Last name Jamieson. He was a Georgia boy, born, raised, and educated in Athens. Not much else in his file. I turned to Jayne’s. The mandatory picture and application form stared up at me and I looked at it in surprise. Gertrude Jayne. Gertrude. No wonder she had clung to Jayne. I picked up Sam’s folder again. Someone had obviously misfiled her folder into Jamieson. Maybe Melanie hadn’t even known it was there and maybe that’s what Jayne had been looking for. Jayne had been director for seven years and, according to her file, they had all been good until her last six months when the paper trail ended.
She had a Ph.D. from a small Midwestern university, and by the looks of it had published a lot of papers on sea turtles. Nothing here, I thought, and was about to close the folder when a piece of paper caught my eye. It was stuck to the last sheet in the folder and I slowly pried it free. It was a photocopy of Jayne’s Ph.D. degree that had been faxed to the recipient, whoever that was. Stuck to the degree was a little stickum with the email address for Nebraska State University. The degree said she had graduated in 1990 summa cum laude. I chewed that over for a while, wondering why I was paying it much attention, until I heard a commotion in the next cabin over. I unashamedly moved to the open window and eavesdropped.
I could see Rosemary through the open window in the other cabin. She was holding her head and telling someone to leave her alone.
“How can I leave you alone?” Wyatt came into view, walked up behind her, and put his hands on h
er shoulders. She flinched. I had the flight-or-fight reaction to that. Would I have to go to her rescue? But what he said next stopped me in my tracks.
“You’re telling people I’m beating you,” he said, his voice dangerously level. “Why would you do that?”
I held my breath.
“You scare me.”
“I thought we were colleagues. Friends.”
“We were friends. We are friends. And I didn’t really tell anyone. They just jumped to conclusions. I have no control over that.”
“Well la-di-da. No control, eh? You could do the decent thing and deny it.”
“I did. I have.”
“Not bloody hard enough.” He hesitated and then said, “You’re fired, my friend, so get the hell off this island before I do something you’ll regret.” He moved out of sight to appear on the front porch. He paused there a moment, as if he was going to go back in, but he didn’t. Instead he slammed the door and left.
An hour later and I was deeply immersed in Stacey’s laptop, which was a treasure trove of everything I didn’t really need to know, until I located a folder buried inside a folder. It was labelled News Clippings. There were twenty-five to thirty files. I started with the first one and by the time I got to nineteen I was practically comatose from all the random clippings. I fervently hoped I would not have to do this all again on her desktop at the cottage. Then I opened number twenty and nearly dropped dead.
It was a picture of an ecstatic Stacey, her smile threatening to obliterate her face. She was holding an enormous cheque and my heart stopped when I read the amount: forty-one million dollars. Canada’s newest lottery winner. I checked the day. Five years ago. I was sitting there, thinking about all the implications, when Martha arrived with a thump of the door and a deep sigh.
I looked up.
“Don’t ask,” she said and then she told me anyway. “I went swimming in the tidal creek between the two islands but nobody told me there’s one hell of a riptide when the tide’s going out. Anyway it ripped off my bathing suit and there I was in my altogethers trying to figure out how to get my towel without anyone seeing me.”
I tried not to smile.
“I had to crawl out and along the beach. I felt like a regular G.I. Joe.”
I lost the battle and started to laugh. “God, Martha, didn’t you remember about the spaniel? What made you decide to go swimming at all? The seas are still horrendous.”
“I was hot and the creek looked benign. What can I say?”
She plunked herself down on the bed and eyeballed the laptop. “So?” she said.
I looked at her and smiled, relishing what I was going to say next. “Stacey is worth more than forty-one million dollars.”
Martha’s jaw dropped. “Jesus. I never saw that coming.”
“Neither did I.”
“So who gets it all?”
“David says he does,” I said.
“But you are not so sure?”
“No. I mean how does he know? Did she tell him? They weren’t exactly talking to each other.”
“With that kind of money there’s got to be a will. What about the laptop? Maybe there’s a copy there.”
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of that myself. I picked up the laptop and keyed in the search term will. A lot of garbage items came up, with the word will somewhere in them. Three looked promising but I came up empty handed. Two were templates for wills and the third was a diet labelled Willpower.
“Try testament,” said Martha.
“Oh come on, who would use that antiquated term?”
“Someone wanting to hide it without resorting to a password.”
“I’ll be damned,” I said.
There were two, one dated a month ago the other a year ago. I chose the will with the latest date and opened it. Martha came over, stationed herself behind my left shoulder, and we began to read it together.
“Jesus, Cordi, stop itching.”
I hadn’t realized I had been itching but once she brought my attention to it the itches suddenly came into stark relief. All over my lower legs and up to my waist. Must be the laundry detergent I’m using here, I thought, and tried to shove it out of my mind.
“Looks like David doesn’t get it all,” muttered Martha as she brought me back to the business at hand. “But why would Melanie get forty-seven percent? By all accounts they hardly knew each other.”
I realized that Martha didn’t know — I was losing track of whom I’d told and whom I hadn’t.
“They may not have known each other but they were blood relatives,” I said.
Martha looked stunned.
“She was Stacey’s daughter.” I must say it felt good imparting such startling news and I watched Martha’s face as it roller coastered through her emotions, from initial disinterest to stunned disbelief to a realization of what the information meant.
“Forty-seven percent of forty-one million dollars is a multimillion dollar motive,” she said.
“And fifty percent isn’t a bad take on David’s part either,” I said. “Money that big can kill multiple times.”
“And Darcy gets three percent, well over a million dollars, which seems paltry in the rarefied company of Melanie and Wyatt.”
“Yeah, but it’s enough to give a young man a good motive,” I said as I used extraordinary willpower to stop from scratching my legs.
“What’s the old will say?” asked Martha.
I opened the document and we glanced through the will. David had been right a year ago. He got it all then.
“So Melanie wasn’t on Stacey’s radar a year ago,” I said.
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“We have Melanie, Darcy, and David with a money motive, Sam who we think disagreed with Stacey over the vaccine, Trevor whose kids went hungry because of all the rules to conserve the turtles.”
“What about Wyatt?” said Martha. “He stood to lose his reputation and his vet practice if Stacey had exposed him.”
“So he kills her because of the fake vaccine?”
“Or maybe she was blackmailing him and he’d had enough.” I started itching again. It felt as though I was being tickled by a thousand feathers.
“And then there’s Jayne,” I said, trying to ignore the itches. “I don’t know why but there’s something there.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s hiding something. I just know it,” I said, as I finally gave in to my itches full throttle.
“Jesus, Cordi. What’s with the itching? You’re driving me crazy.”
I could have said the same about the itching.
“What about Rosemary?” asked Martha.
“I don’t know about Rosemary. She’s an enigma.”
I told Martha what I had overheard between Rosemary and Wyatt.
“Why would she want to let us jump to conclusions?” asked Martha.
“More to the point, why did she say she had denied it when she definitely hadn’t? At least not to me. Makes you wonder what else she might be lying about.”
Martha looked at me, threw her arms up in the air and said, “Everybody has a motive. Nobody has an alibi. Somebody is a murderer.”
The sun was heading toward the horizon when I took a break from all the newspaper clippings and lottery winnings and left Martha poring over Stacey’s computer. The itching was driving me as crazy as Martha had implied it was driving her. Only she didn’t have to wrestle with the little stabbing pinpricks the way I did. I was beginning to wonder if any allergy to detergent could cause such intense itching. I needed to clear my head so I walked down to the beach and watched the sun set amidst some angry swirling clouds. I walked a long time, as night fell. There was no moon and the only light was the cresting waves in the tattered starlight. I walked along the hard-packed sand of the beach toward the tidal creek, the warm wind from the sea washing over me, as timeless as it was constant. This place really had me thinking of eternity, I guess because it reeked of remnants of a d
istant age.
I was thinking about turning around and heading back for something to eat when I heard the roar of an ATV. I turned and saw its headlights coming closer and closer to me. I waited, expecting it to slow down, but it quickly gained speed and was heading right for me. I waved my arms and yelled but it didn’t stop and I started running, zigging and zagging my way across the beach. It couldn’t turn on a dime the way I could, but whoever was driving it was good. I sprinted toward the tidal creek and hesitated only a fraction of a second before doing a shallow racing dive into the water. It was strangely warm and enveloping and I treaded water as I looked back to see the ATV poised on the bank, its headlights blinding me to who was driving. Then the headlights turned and the ATV disappeared and I was left behind in the darkness. Suddenly I felt the strength of the current take me, like a punch in the gut, and haul me out to sea. I tried to swim ashore but it was too strong. I finally remembered the spaniel and the sandbar he had ended up on with the young boy. Should I stop fighting the current and trust that I’d be deposited on the sandbar or did I continue to fight to get ashore? But my attempts were futile and I realized if the sandbar wasn’t there, there was nothing between me and the open sea.
The current carried me for what felt like ten hours but must have only been a couple of minutes before my right leg brushed against what I sure hoped was sand. The sandbar was just above sea level, but it was there, and I crawled up on it and rested. I was there a long time, long enough for the tide to turn and start coming in, nibbling away at my sandbar as it did so. I stood up and surveyed my situation. Although it was dark I could still see the main beach and the water in between. The sandbar was about one hundred yards out from the beach, the water between me and shore looked calm, and the tide was with me this time. I was just about to wade in when something broke the surface of the water, its triangular fin glistening in the starlight. I tried to remember my porpoise and shark fins but there was no way for me to identify the owner of the fin. I stood there paralyzed as the water swirled in around me, obliterating my sandbar. I had no choice. I had to swim for shore. I psyched myself up, then dived in and swam like a maniac, agonizingly aware that sharks feed on frenzy, dreading the serrated teeth on my leg, my stomach, my head, forcing myself to swim through the dread until, miraculously, my hand hit shore and I scrambled up the beach, a roiling mass of nerves, to lie prostrate on the cold wet sands of safety.
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