Dying for Murder

by Suzanne F. Kingsmill

“He’s got a dark past.”

  “What sort of dark past?”

  She hesitated and I got the feeling she wasn’t sure she should say anymore. But she did. “Just search Wyatt Thompson on the Internet and don’t ever tell him I said that.”

  “But his last name’s Sinclair.”

  “One of his many last names is Sinclair.”

  I asked her all the questions you could imagine I would want to ask her after that retort but she politely dodged them all. I made a mental note to surf the web as soon as it was back online.

  We were sitting side by side, munching cookies and muffins, when she jumped up with a squeal and said, “I forgot to put the ice cream back.” When I looked confused she said, “I was going to have ice cream but decided not to.”

  I watched her walking to the kitchen and wondered at how vulnerable she seemed. Could she have faked a beating? And if so, why would she do that? The only possible motive would be to make Wyatt look bad. Again, why would she want to do that? There was another little squeal from the kitchen and the sound of something falling. I got up and walked to the doorway. She was standing over a tub of ice cream that had fallen on the floor. The door to the walk-in cooler was open.

  “I forgot,” she moaned.

  I reached past her and shut the door, suppressing my own little shiver as I did so.

  She looked at me and shook her head “I know I wasn’t there or anything but I can’t get an image of her out of my head with her hands tied with slip knots and her legs tied to the chair too. And now this,” and she nodded her head in the direction of the walk-in fridge.

  “Did you know her well?” I asked, wondering why I suddenly felt ill at ease.

  “She was my friend,” said Rosemary.

  “Where did you meet her?”

  Rosemary looked momentarily confused. “She was at a vet conference and we shared a room.” When I looked puzzled she said, “When attendees don’t have enough money they have subsidized rooms, but you’ve got to share.”

  But that was not what I was looking puzzled about. “What was she doing at a vet conference?”

  “She was scouting around getting information on vaccinating horses.”

  “Is that how the islanders got Wyatt? Through you and Stacey?”

  She hesitated and stooped to pick up the ice cream. As she did so I caught a look of total panic on her face. She stood up, clutching the ice cream in her hands. But she didn’t meet my eye; instead she looked in the direction of the fridge and shuddered. “Gives me the creeps,” she said, as if no question lay unanswered between us. She went and replaced the ice cream in the right fridge and then left me alone to contemplate the contents of the wrong fridge and the rows of empty tables behind me. In the winter the tables would have been insufferably depressing to me but it was summer and my mind was clear and free of the darkness that always stalked it in the wintertime.

  I left the mess and moved out onto the verandah. I moved to the edge to take in the view and as I leaned on the wraparound railing I felt it give. I kicked out and jumped back, then moved forward again to cautiously look over the edge. It was a twenty-foot drop with death waiting at the bottom. My heart was beating like a jackhammer as I went back inside to look for some orange tape to flag it. As I headed for the store room I passed Jayne, sitting in a lab festooned with turtles — posters, coasters, sculptures, and paintings. They were everywhere.

  “Cordi!” She called out. “I wanted to talk to you.”

  I restrained myself from saying I wanted to talk to her too.

  “One of the turtle nests is due up tonight. I thought you and Martha might like to go and wait for it to come up. No guarantees, of course, but I know Martha really wants to get pictures of a nest erupting.”

  Erupting? That word seemed a bit extreme. I mean, how fast can turtles be?

  “It should happen anytime before dawn.”

  “Is it only ever at night?”

  “Yup. It’s the drop in temperature at night that activates them.” She paused and said, “Look, if a nest comes up — its number forty-two, on the stick in the middle, you’ll see — would you mind counting them and then releasing them to the sea?”

  I nodded and then asked her if she had any orange tape, but before she could answer I rushed in, “Stacey knew about you, didn’t she?”

  She stiffened at that and looked up at me. I took a reasoned guess. “You never got a Ph.D., did you?”

  She looked away and I thought she wasn’t going to answer me, but she did. “No,” she said, and I wondered how long she had sat on her secret.

  “How did Stacey find out?”

  “She wanted my job so she went searching for something to hold over me.”

  “And she found it.”

  “Yeah. She told me if I didn’t resign as director she’d tell the Island Association.”

  “That must have made you very angry. To have that hanging over your head. To lose your job,” I said.

  “What do you think? Of course it did.”

  “Enough to kill her?”

  She looked at me and sighed. “How very dramatic, Cordi, but you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  “Am I?” I said, but I was unsure of myself because she was so sure of herself.

  “It’s just a Ph.D. It’s not the end of my life.”

  “But it would be the end of your career, and I know how much you love your job.”

  She looked at me then and didn’t answer. Instead she opened a drawer and handed me a roll of scotch tape. “Bring it back when you’re done.” She made a point of going back to her work.

  I looked at the tape — fat lot of good it would do — and put it back on her desk mumbling something about how it wouldn’t work.

  I was beginning to feel like a pariah — alienating everyone. It is such a negative thing, investigating a murder when everybody is a suspect.

  There was only one killer so the other seven had a right to be angry with me.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon walking the beach, reading, and then taping birds. I must have been very tired because I fell asleep to the sounds of the surf pounding on the beach. When I woke up it was getting dark and the benzo had worn off. I was still thinking about Jayne as I made my way back to my cabin, itching and scratching so much that I must have looked like a marionette.

  Martha was snoring on the bed but woke up when the screen door banged shut.

  “Wake up. We’re going on the hunt.”

  She sat up so quickly I thought she might have given herself whiplash. “Who’s the suspect?” she asked eagerly.

  “Not that kind of hunt. We’re after turtle hatchlings.” And I told her what Jayne had told me.

  Martha spent the next fifteen minutes getting all her camera gear and binoculars ready. When I pointed out that we would be inches away from the nest she brushed it off by saying you never knew what might walk into your lens. She quickly showed me how to use the still camera so that she could film it with the night-vision scope. Then we both spent a lot of time dressing in long-sleeved shirts and long pants and tucking our pant legs into our socks. I wore a T-shirt underneath my long-sleeved shirt so that the punkies, if they broke through my first line of defence, would hit the T-shirt and be stymied. And I had slathered myself with benzo. When we were done, all that was exposed were our faces and Martha threw me a bottle of something called Skin so Soft to smear on my face — a perfume invented for attraction had become the arsenal for fending off biting insects. I remembered Sam on that first night and how I had thought he must have been a bit effeminate to be wearing it despite his enormous size. But ya do what ya gotta do to stymie the little devils.

  It was very dark when we mounted the trike and took off through the woods. I had been to the hatchery once before but I lost my way twice. If it hadn’t been for the moon I would have missed the turnoff to Hunter’s house. I led Martha down the narrow footpath to the clearing and heard her catch her breath. It was a full moon and the house stood in
stark black relief against the white sands of the dunes.

  The charred windows, like unseeing eyes, and the open mouth of the door made it look like a dark cartoon of a house, old and broken down and unwanted. It was eerie and creepy in its decay.

  Martha didn’t say a word as we made our way past the house and down into the dunes. And there it was — the hatchery, a twenty-by-twenty-foot enclosure nestled among the dunes on a flat section of the upper beach. Sturdy fencing enclosed it and inside were twelve circular fences that were about six inches tall with a diameter of about eighteen inches, each representing a nest. I went over to the main fence, put a hand on the metal post, and nearly screamed. The electric fence zapped me — the surprise was probably worse than the bite, but I couldn’t help wonder why Jayne hadn’t told me. Martha and I found the box with the switch, which fortunately wasn’t locked, and turned it off.

  “Why the hell would they electrify the fence?” asked Martha.

  “Probably to keep the predators out,” I said. “The feral pigs love to dig up these nests and feast on the eggs. So do the coons and the ghost crabs and the seagulls, once the young have hatched, and then all kinds of predators in the sea. They say only about one percent of sea turtle hatchlings ever make it to maturity.”

  “Poor little guys.”

  “Did you know there are only six species of sea turtle? These guys are loggerheads. Caretta caretta.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I did a paper once in high school.”

  We climbed the fence and found the marker for nest forty-two, a numbered stick planted right in the middle of the circular fencing. Martha wanted to remove the stick for better pictures but I said we’d better wait until we saw some action in case the nest didn’t come up and we had to put the stick back in and maybe do some damage. I sat down on the sand and eyeballed the nest while Martha got out her equipment. And then we just sat and talked and stared at that nest as clouds slowly obliterated the moon. We could hear thunder in the distance somewhere. I brought Martha up-to-date on all my discoveries.

  “I’m beginning to think more and more that Wyatt killed Stacey.”

  “Because she was blackmailing him?” said Martha.

  “That and the crickets.”

  “Crickets?”

  “There was a squashed cricket in the sole of his boot and Stacey was the only one at the station who used crickets as food for her pet snake.”

  “And?”

  “So the timeline, according to Darcy, has Stacey spilling her crickets all over her cabin just before 11:30 and killing them off,” I said. “Meaning Wyatt was in her cabin sometime after 11:30.”

  “But maybe it was a native cricket that he stepped on,” said Martha.

  “Could be, but how easy is it to step on a live cricket in the woods. They are pretty fast, you know.”

  “But he could have stepped on a dead one that Stacey left lying about. That’s more likely.” She had a point.

  “So he lied about his whereabouts?” asked Martha.

  “Wouldn’t you lie too? I mean, it puts him at the scene of the crime and with an okay motive. And why did he want Mel’s file?” I filled Martha in.

  “Maybe he knows they were mother and daughter?” said Martha.

  “But why would that change anything?”

  “Maybe he thought Stacey had confided in her daughter and that she would just continue the blackmail,” I said.

  “Sounds farfetched to me. Anyway, why would he want Rosemary’s file too?”

  “No way of knowing if we don’t know what’s in them.”

  We sat in silence as the storm gathered around us, and I thought about the little sea turtles lying somewhere beneath the sand. Hopefully they had already hatched out in their nest some eighteen inches beneath the surface, breaking the leathery egg with the little white pipping tooth on their snouts. If they were already out of their eggs the top layer of turtles would be scratching at the sand on the ceiling of the oval-shaped womb and the bottom layer would be trampling the loose sand as it sifted down from above. In this way the whole chamber would slowly rise to the surface where we were waiting.

  I think I dozed off for a second after that because next thing I knew Martha was yelling, “They’re coming, they’re coming,” and I had to shake my head to remember who was coming and that it wasn’t some sort of attacking force. I grabbed Martha’s camera and peered over at the nest as she removed the stick. There was a telltale dimpling of the sand and then, miraculously, the shape of a single tiny sand-covered head emerged. And then the nest erupted. With flippers flying and bodies squirming, the sand turned into a boiling mass of churning bodies, dozens upon dozens of them. Three hours of no-see-ums and mosquitoes and it was all over in less than a minute; more than a hundred little baby sea turtles thrashing around inside their little enclosure, frantically searching for the sea.

  Martha and I carefully counted the turtles into a bucket and then we walked out through the dunes and down to the sea. I slowly tipped the bucket over and watched as one hundred and two sea turtles tumbled out. Several fell on their backs and squirmed and twisted to right themselves. The vanguard made a beeline down the beach to the waves and the wild seas beyond. They were so strong and vigorous — the instinct to head to the sea overpowering all else. No wonder Jayne was such a turtle supporter. Just watching these little guys as they were washed back up the beach by waves many times stronger than they were gave real meaning to the word persistent.

  And then, out of nowhere, the skies erupted and the rain came down in torrents. We could see lighting strike down the beach and that had us heading back up into the dunes faster than the sea turtles. It was a wild, wicked storm and even though we both knew not to hide in the forest the open dunes seemed worse. We plummeted down a dune into the cover of the trees. I had my flashlight on and once we got down to the forest floor I turned it off for a second. I had the totally irrational thought that maybe with the flashlight off the lightning couldn’t see us. It somehow didn’t seem fair to get such a storm on the heels of a hurricane.

  We were soaking wet and enormously tired by the time we finally found our way back to the trike and then back home to the station and our snug little cabin.

  “Cordi, this has got to stop. All these attempts on your life,” said Martha out of the blue.

  “Oh c’mon, Martha. You can’t really call a bad storm an attempt on my life.”

  “I don’t mean the storm,” she said in exasperation. “Don’t you see? Someone is trying to scare you, not kill you. At least, I think that’s what it means, because they could have killed you if they really wanted to. But why?”

  “Maybe they’ve destroyed evidence I saw that the police would never know about if I got scared off.”

  And that’s when it hit me. What had been missing when we carried Stacey’s body up to the fridge: the ropes on her hands were gone.

  It was 3:00 in the morning when my head finally hit the pillow and even Martha’s snoring didn’t wake me up. I woke the next morning and lay in bed, my thoughts storming through my mind like last night’s lightning.

  Into this maelstrom came two words spoken loudly, “Holy shit.”

  Always nice to wake to that, I thought and rolled over on my elbow to find Martha sitting on her made bed, Stacey’s laptop open in front of her. She raised her eyes at me and said, “Bingo.” Silently, she handed me the laptop as I sat up.

  I took it on my lap and pushed the screen back so I could see.

  “MAN ARRESTED ON RAPE CHARGES” was the headline. It was a picture of a man trying to shield his face from the cameras and surrounded by police. I looked up at Martha, puzzled.

  “Look at his face,” she said. I saw it then, his face a lot younger and a little slimmer and his hair dark brown, but it was unmistakably Wyatt.

  “Look at the date of the rape,” said Martha.

  September 25, 1986.

  chapter twenty-two

  “Where did you find this
stuff?” I asked Martha as I scrolled through the news item.

  “It was in the locked file called Sinclair/Thompson,” she said. The same name Rosemary had told me to search.

  “But the password?”

  “I remembered what you said about Stacey loving sea turtles. And I remembered you called the hatchlings last night Caretta caretta.”

  “The Latin name for the loggerhead sea turtle,” I said.

  “So I tried Caretta2.”

  “September 25, 1986.” I scanned through the article and there it was: Stacey — she’d been eighteen at the time and home alone. It didn’t say much more than that and so we flipped through some of the other clippings, some of which dealt with a different case, to glean more information. I keyed in the name and more articles popped up. But there was very little detail on exactly what had happened. Then Martha had the brilliant idea of looking through Stacey’s autobiography. Half an hour later I had found the entry. I read it out loud to Martha.

  It was the trees that really bothered me. Their dark shadows spilled across the sidewalk and the branches blocked the streetlights. When I looked up, their shiny green leaves were dull, black and menacing. I began to walk faster — I was only a block away. A pebble scraped on the sidewalk and I whirled. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I saw a dark silhouette among the shadows of the trees. Just my imagination. I stepped off the curb onto the narrow suburban road where the streetlights lit me up and made me feel both vulnerable and safe. I tried to block out the images coalescing inside my brain like so many unwanted wasps. I started to run. Only a block away. As I stopped and listened I heard the braking footfall of someone behind me. I turned to look, scanning the sidewalk, but it was too dark to see. Was I hearing things? I began walking again, resisting the urge to flee hysterically into the night.

  My house was just past the Wilsons’ who were long since in bed. As my house came into view I stopped, momentarily confused. There were no lights on. None. The house stood dark, silent, and soulless. I shivered and looked behind me. No one. I approached the front door. Why had my parents not left the lights on? They had said they would. Promised they would. There was no car in the driveway either. Where were they? Had they forgotten I was coming home tonight? One year away at college and they’d forgotten me?