And On the Surface Die

by Lou Allin

  And on the

  Surface Die

  And on the

  Surface Die

  A Holly Martin Mystery

  by Lou Allin

  Text © 2008 by Lou Allin

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, digital, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher.

  Cover design by Vasiliki Lenis/Emma Dolan

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts

  for our publishing program.

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

  RendezVous Crime

  An imprint of Napoleon & Company

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  www.napoleonandcompany.com

  Printed in Canada on FSC standard recycled stock.

  12 11 10 09 08 5 4 3 2 1

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Allin, Lou, date-

  And on the surface die / Lou Allin.

  ISBN 978-1-894917-74-2

  I. Title.

  PS8551.L5564A64 2008 C813'.6 C2008-905620-5

  To Nikon, who saw his women safely to Vancouver

  Island before joining Freya at Rainbow Bridge.

  He was a prince among dogs,

  and his sense of ethics amazed us.

  The Kraken

  Below the thunders of the upper deep;

  Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,

  His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep

  The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee

  About his shadowy sides; above him swell

  Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;

  And far away into the sickly light;

  From many a wondrous grot and secret cell

  Unnumber’d and enormous polypi

  Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.

  There hath he lain for ages and will lie

  Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,

  Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;

  Then once by man and angels to be seen,

  In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

  -Alfred Tennyson

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  The sea spread satiny glass across the sheltered bay. Amid lazy undulations, a blue heron rode his kelp-bed carpet and peered for minnows. White meringue clouds watched their reflections, overweighted galleons on a cerulean mirror floating towards the Olympic Mountains of Washington State. Up poked the mustachioed face of an acrobatic seal, which flipped in a lazy pose to warm its belly in the September sun. Deep below, a red rock crab found something to its liking. Soft tissue gave way as it inched along propelled by large nippers, using smaller chelipads close to the head to urge meaty delicacies into its eager maw. Then a fickle current swept the meal away, and the hapless crab dropped over a shelf to the deeper sea floor, where it was seized by an opportune Dungeness cousin.

  Trailing a frothy cloud of bubbles, a snorkeler angled down for a peek at a host of purple sea urchins. Carrying an underwater camera, he feathered his fins through the heavy tendrils of bull kelp, bulbous at one end, fat whips which bobbed on the tides until tossed ashore. The man paused to admire a cluster of whelks and a nervous school of sculpins, then took a few grab shots of a sea cucumber. A forest of leathery brown rockweed, clinging to the slippy basalt with its disc-like holdfasts, drifted into his path, then the dark crimson blades of Turkish towel seaweed. Carefully he pushed it aside, startling a juvenile octopus, which had scuttled from a mollusk- mounded crevice. He checked his watch. Ten o’clock already. He should be getting back to the car. Monica was meeting him for brunch at Point No Point. With his appetite fueled by the cold water and exertion, he could almost taste their luscious cheese scones.

  Then something large glided into his peripheral vision, and he turned, moving his legs to stabilize himself. Whales were common around the island, but they didn’t usually come so close to shore...unless they were sick or injured. A mane of yellow hair and a chalk-pale face with vacant light-blue eyes searched his like a diffident lover. Hands clutched at him. He coughed out his mouthpiece and surged to the surface with a silent scream, choking as he yanked off his mask and thrashed his fins as if a killer shark rode his tail. When he scrabbled over the rocky shelf, his prize Canon fell onto the coral, cracking the lens.

  One

  You can’t go home again. As a tautology, it was both as true and false as the nostalgic snows of yesteryear. Here in body, here in spirit, but many grains of sand had fallen through the hourglass.

  Corporal Holly Martin opened the creaky door of the white clapboard house and saw a head turn at the reception desk and nod in pointed silence. No warm welcome on her first day in charge. Once the ice was broken with Ann Troy, she had confidence that the business of policing the small community would proceed. So far she felt like an interloper. They’d only been introduced a week ago, but how could you offend with a “hello”? Easy enough if that person had expected to have your job.

  The RCMP Fossil Bay Detachment, an hour west of Victoria, British Columbia, had seen its leader, Reg Wilkinson, take early retirement. A product of sausage-and-egg breakfasts, the tall, barrel-chested man had earned a triple bypass at fifty-two and was resigned to oatmeal, cholesterol medication, and half-an-hour a day on the treadmill at his cottage in Chemainus. In a cautionary tone during their interview in his office a month ago, he’d told Holly to expect a cool reception from Ann. “She’s a good officer. She’ll come around.” Had they been closer than colleagues? Reg was personable, a courtly charmer. Ann, a decade younger, was a single mother. At Holly’s raised eyebrow, Reg sat large and silent as the Sphinx. “None of my beeswax. You’ll find all you need to know in the staff bios.”

  “Morning, Ann,” Holly said, making a point of using the woman’s name. She poured a fresh cup from the coffee maker. Half empty already. How early had the woman come in? It was only seven twenty. Holly had imagined herself opening up on her first day, asserting command if only in a minor way. “Next pot’s on me. Do you like it strong?” Nothing but a shrug in response. “I brought banana bread. My dad baked it.”

  She placed the plate on the table and folded back the foil in unspoken invitation. Contrary to the romantic Rose Marie notions of red coats, a full-dress mode for special occasions, Holly wore a grey shirt, long-sleeved now in fall, with a dark blue tie, dark blue pants with gold strapping along with ankle boots spit-shined this morning, and a policeman’s style cap. Leaving on her protective vest, she hung her Gore-Tex jacket in the narrow closet, tucking her hat onto the shelf and relishing the new freedom of the mild climate. In The Pas, her first post, she had worn a parka eight months of the year. Southern Vancouver Island was Canada’s Caribbean. Little if any snow, but deluges of hail, sleet and rain all winter. Three sturdy umbrellas nestled in the corner.

  Corporal Ann Troy wore her uniform with pride, but at 5' 4", she carried one hundred and thirty-five pounds on two fewer inches than Holly. A latecomer to the force after raising her son into his teens, Ann had been posted to Fossil Bay, on track to take over. But her intervention at an armed robbery
at a convenience store had saved a young clerk’s life and changed hers forever. A crazed Victoria man had gone on a one-man crime wave, stealing car after car and crashing them as he sped west on the narrow coastal road. Ann had happened on the scene as he exited the store, waving a shotgun, people screaming behind him. A volleyball player in her youth, she had courted unaware the gradual onset of degenerative disk disease. The skeletal shock of tackling the large man had been the trigger that wore away the final lumbar cushion.

  The exams she’d passed with honours the week before the accident gave her the nominal rank of corporal, but after an unsuccessful rehabilitation failed to improve her chronic condition, under the “duty to accommodate” regulations, she was given a desk job consisting of paperwork, phone answering and supervision of the small volunteer staff. Disability offers had been snapped back in the face of the administration. She didn’t intend to sit at home and measure her life with coffee spoons. Ann lived for the law, her son Nick and her cat Bump. A framed picture of the apricot devil with its rhinestone collar sat on her desk in reception. Nick’s college graduation picture had equal pride of place. He was model material, but his mouth had a kind and innocent smile. Perhaps in her happier pain-free days, Ann had once shared that attractive quality. Minutes ticked by on the wall clock as Holly sipped coffee.

  “Seems quiet,” Holly said in an implied question, then realized how foolish she sounded. The overture had been made. Why grovel so much that she was annoying even herself? She moved to the front window, looking out on an empty gravel lot. “Where’s Chipper?”

  “He took the car for servicing at Tri-City,” Ann said as Holly startled at the resonant alto voice. She felt so tense from the atmosphere that blood was surfing in her ears.

  “We don’t have any stoplights, so nothing ever changes but the weather. Even the geese don’t leave,” Ann said with bitter punctuation, fixated by figures on her computer screen. She wore her lustrous dark brown hair in a short, no-nonsense style, trimmed tight around the ears.

  Tiny Fossil Bay, named for the hosts of Oligocene creatures, snails, mussels and clams, which over twenty-five million years ago had become trapped in the sandstone and conglomerate of rocky beaches, consisted of barely five hundred people in a dozen streets. The fateful store where Ann had seen her life change. A Petro-Canada station. To cater to tourists, a number of seasonal B and Bs and a fishing charter. Nan’s, a small restaurant, flirted with bankruptcy. The lone grade school was on the brink of closing when new housing developments at nearby Jordan River had made the board in Victoria reconsider. With unusual foresight, the RCMP detachment had been opened at the same time as the fabled Juan de Fuca and West Coast Trails had raised the number of visitors. The trio’s job was to take the heat off the larger Sooke post to the east.

  Holly watched the unappreciated pile of luscious banana bread. A sore back could make anyone crabby. Maybe the woman was trying to keep her weight down, too. Females could be cruelest to each other. She cursed herself for the unpolitic move. Unable to summon an appetite for a slice, she went into her office, one of four rooms in the former cottage.

  On the wall were framed university diplomas and her certificate from police college. At twenty-two, she had been finishing her degree in Botany at UBC when her mother had disappeared. Desperate to help but powerless as the futile search wound down with a whimper, she’d switched to Criminal Justice courses, then joined the RCMP. Initial training took place in Regina. She had passed the exams with nearly perfect scores, been mentored for six months and served at The Pas, Manitoba. When an opening on the north island at Port McNeill arose, she was happy to return west. RCMP members were expected to move to different posts after no more than four or five years, preventing the establishment of close ties to the locals. That made marriage difficult enough for men, but an impossible dream for women.

  Her final transfer, along with a bit of luck, brought her home to paradise, where roses sprouted in February. She liked the freedom of the rural and semi-wilderness setting with the amenities of nearby Victoria. Border living was another advantage. Seattle was a quick ferry ride.

  British Columbia, known as E Division, encompassing policing at most provincial, federal, and municipal levels, was the largest in Canada, with 126 detachments and over 6,000 employees, about one-third of the total RCMP enlistment. Only twelve municipalities in B.C. had their own forces, and on the island, only Victoria, the capital city. The island itself had only 850 officers spread across its wilderness, many hours away from back-up.

  At thirty-two, in a few more years, she could take the exam for sergeant, then staff-sergeant. At that level, she’d command a post with fourteen members, not including civilians, a comfortable number. Holly wanted to stay on the island, but moving any higher up the ranks would mean a transfer to a larger city with noise, crowding and major crimes. Call her unambitious, lover of Lalaland, but Holly had no desire to walk mean streets, even in Nanaimo, though she might entertain the idea if she could join a Canine Unit.

  With a proprietorial eye, she considered her new preserve and nosed stale cigarette smoke from the decades before the new laws. A coat of paint wouldn’t hurt. That she could do herself. And maybe an area rug. Then a few hardy plants and a picture of her German shepherds, now playing at Rainbow Bridge.

  She resigned herself to paperwork, reading the latest crime figures for the province. The Capital Region of Victoria had one of the lowest stats in the country for gun-related incidents, fewer than one per cent. Knives were more popular. Among the bulletins on emerging technologies for law enforcement, one report claimed that soon pistols would be personalized; only the owner could fire it. An officer shot with his or her own gun would be an ugly irony of the past. Another focused on robotic delivery of pepper spray in cases where the suspect couldn’t be approached. Every black-leather duty belt held OC, aka pepper spray, along with metal handcuffs, a 9 mm Military and Police Smith and Wesson, a collapsible asp baton, keys, and a radio. Only those who chose to take an orientation carried the controversial Taser. Recent deaths across the country and in the U.S. had raised serious questions about the excessive use of that defensive weapon. The Taser should be used as a last resort before the gun, not merely to subdue without breaking into a sweat.

  From the monthly statistics Ann had compiled, Holly pinpointed the petty efforts at crime that dogged the community. Reg had told her what to expect, and she’d had a taste in Port McNeill. Thefts, stolen vehicles, noise complaints, unruly dogs and unrulier drunks. Now and then a police car visited the many beach parks down the coast on open-container violations or to take a report on an auto break-in. French Beach, China, Mystic, Bear, all the way to Botanical, a necklace of rain-forest emeralds beckoned tourists from California to Calcutta.

  “Don’t discount penny-ante crime,” Ben Rogers, her mentor in The Pas, had told her. “Sometimes they’re part of a bigger picture, and it usually involves drugs. Why steal a CD player you can sell for only a twenty unless you need another fix?” But Ben had made his own fatal error. Their last month together, checking out a stolen car seen at a trailer park, he hadn’t expected the twelve-year-old deaf boy to be holding a rifle instead of an air gun. The frightened child fired, and Reg went down with a hole in his chest where his heart had been. Holly had secured the rifle, turned the boy over to a motherly bystander, then cradled Ben’s head in her lap until the ambulance came. When she’d cleaned his office to give personal items to his wife, the Classic Car calendar’s date read “Ninety-nine days to go!”

  Around eight fifteen, a bump of unidentifiable music sounded outside, a cheerful whistle came up the walk, and into the office came Constable Chirakumar “Chipper” Knox Singh. Though both his parents were Sikhs, his father had been raised in a Scottish Presbyterian orphanage in the Punjab and baptized with the name of Knox. Like many immigrants, Gopal Singh had worked menial jobs, living like a pauper, finally able to open a convenience store with an ethnic foods sideline in nearby Colwood. Transferred la
st year from his first post in the Prairies, twenty-eight-year-old Chipper wore a handsome light-blue turban, designed for the force, with a yellow patch to match the stripe down his pants. A trim light-brown beard set off his café-au-lait face. Earnest black eyebrows capped a handsome brow and fine features. At six-three, he towered over the women.

  He saw Holly and saluted. “Welcome, Corporal, or should I call you ‘Guv’?” he asked with a grin.

  “You’ve been watching the BBC too much.” Her cheeks pinked, and she wondered if Ann had heard the informal exchange.

  “Blame my mother. She never misses Coronation Street. Anyway, the car’s all set. That squeal was the fan belt. No big deal.

  Hoping to make an ally, she pointed to the banana bread. “Dig in.”

  The phone rang, and Ann answered. As she listened, a frown creased her freckled brow, and she wrote rapidly on a pad. “Calm down and tell me what happened. There’s no rush now, is there?” Her manner reminded Holly of her own mother, who could still troubled waters with a quiet assertiveness. Clearly here was one of Ann’s strengths.

  Holly and Chipper exchanged glances. His hand paused over a slice, then plunged in as if he might lose the opportunity. Holly felt her heart battery switch to recharge. Another impatient speeder trying to pass on deadly West Coast Road? The logging trucks were making the most of the dry weather. The last few summers had brought increasing drought. She hardly recalled the most recent rain, more the promise of a kiss. Relentless dust made washing her car a never-ending chore.

  “We’ll be right out. Half an hour, barring traffic.” Ann listened, taking a few notes and pausing for confirmation.

  “That long? Can’t be Bill Purdy beating up on his wife again.” An “old hand” after his first year at Fossil Bay, Chipper had memorized the names of the local troublemakers.