And On the Surface Die

by Lou Allin

  Chipper stared at her. “Wow. You made the right choice and lucked out.”

  “It’s not always that easy.” She checked her watch. “We’d better get a move on.”

  “More interviews?”

  “Just one. The boys from Port Renfrew. Maybe I can combine it with a speed check in the French Beach area. Sun’s back out. Good travelling weather.”

  “French Beach. Good idea. The locals have been complaining to Ann.” He looked at her uncertainly. “But the boys. By yourself? Do you want—”

  She shot him a cool, sideways glance, and he backed off. “I’ve made a preliminary call.” She explained that Billy’s mother had sounded worried, until Holly had insisted that they were talking to everyone who’d been around the park that night in hopes of finding someone who’d seen Angie riding the bike.

  They took the bill to the counter in the adjoining bakery where she picked up an apple pie and a loaf of seven-grain bread. “Routine. Do people still believe that? It’s such a cliché on television and in movies,” Chipper said.

  “Even if it turns out that they were on the beach, we can’t haul them in like felons unless we have a good reason. And don’t forget that relations between the races have been prickly lately.” In Sooke, a native man had been seen sleeping on a cardboard mat. Since he was in a bushy area with makeshift shelters where the homeless crashed behind the dumpsters at the Evergreen Mall, he was ignored. By the time he was discovered to be in a diabetic coma instead of drunk, he came close to dying. A tragedy borne of neglect. Good Samaritans were vanishing in a fog of perceived danger or possible lawsuits.

  “That sounds like a double standard. We already brought in the two students from the high school.”

  She cleared her throat. “Because they were directly involved that night...or part of an alibi.”

  Back at the office, Chipper began reading the latest bulletins. Ann was under a pile of paperwork, requisitions for stationery and equipment. “It’s so quiet here that I heard a hummingbird outside,” she said. “Guess they didn’t all head for California.”

  Just as Holly was leaving with the radar equipment and ticket pad, Ann answered the phone. A few tsks erupted while the other party talked in a voice nearly loud enough for all to hear. “We’ll send someone right out,” she said and hung up. “More theft from a construction site in Shirley. Six new strata homes with ocean views. Big money. But it’s remote, so no one’s minding the store at night. Broke into a metal storage shed. This time it’s a generator, nail gun, a small table saw and a houseful of exotic hardwood flooring.” Shirley was a small community formerly known as Sheringham Point after the picture-perfect lighthouse on the bluffs. When it had got its own post office, the name was too long for a stamp.

  Holly whistled. “And they’d need a truck to haul that equipment.” She turned to Chipper. “Take the Suburban and canvass the nearest neighbours. Ask the guys at the volunteer fire station. A few of them sit out front around lunch time. See if you can get any latents in the place where they broke into the shed.” Thanks to his bush postings in Saskatchewan, Chipper had SOCO training.

  He rubbed his neck. “A construction site? Fifty people have had their hands on things, not to mention deliveries.”

  She shook her head. “I know, but we could get lucky running them through CPIC. They should haul out an on-site trailer and hire a guard. A junkyard dog’s no use if the place isn’t fenced.” The Canadian Police Information Centre catalogued the names of anyone currently accused, cases pending, probation and criminal records.

  She headed back down West Coast Road, the window open, enjoying the warm breeze and the bright sun. In the summer droughts, when they held their breath that forest fires wouldn’t start in the bone-dry duff, even logging was halted in the sere woods. Then the fall and winter brought exponential rains. Finally the precipitation slowed as March brought daffodils. Or so it had gone. Global warming was causing new weather patterns, and they weren’t pretty. Her father had told her of a rare storm last April. One hundred millimetres of rain in a day. Some blamed the clouds of pollution from coal-power generation in burgeoning China.

  Still uncomfortable from stuffing at the trough and feeling dangerously like a snooze, Holly settled in about five kilometres east of Fossil Bay. She cozied the car behind a rickety fence once belonging to a farm hacked out of the wilderness and now reclaimed by brambles and salal. Big city units had the new Stalker LIDAR laser guns, better suited to dense traffic areas. She used the old Basic Handheld K Band Radar, heavy but reliable. Some alert drivers saw her in time and braked quickly, slipping under the radar. Others must have been gawking at the stunning oceanfront or listening to music. Along with several gentle warnings, two of the three tickets went to tourists, one in a rented Mustang and the other in a Buick. The most satisfying citation tagged a yee-haw roofer flying low-level at 110 kmh in a battered Ford pickup. Like a primitive telegraph, the message would be received from other drivers, who observed the ticketing, that speeding in this area was unwise today.

  Finishing the paperwork in a moment of pristine quiet, she recalled an article about the life of an average American officer in an urban department. “Twenty-five recently-dead bodies, fourteen decaying corpses, ten sexually assaulted children, and serious personal injury at least once on the job.” Having refilled the government coffers and made the road safer, she closed down the unit and headed west for forty-five minutes. She was two kilometres short when she was flagged down near a shiny Toyota Sienna van. A balding man dressed in baggy shorts and a Yankees sweatshirt braced himself against the vehicle, while a woman of a similar age sat crying in the passenger seat. By the side of the road, a small deer lay still in a pool of blood. “Didn’t mean to hit it. The poor thing came out of nowhere.”

  This year’s fawn, all legs and hardly as large as a dog. As she bent over to look, the only living thing was her figure reflected in its glazed eyes. A brief candle snuffed out. At least no one was hurt. Roosevelt elk exacted a higher price. She glanced at the dented hood. “Happens all the time. I can help with your insurance claim.” She gave him her card, grateful that the animal was out of its misery. Standard procedure in critical cases was to use the shotgun.

  “We’re from New York City. Zoo’s the place we see deer. What should we do with it? Are you going to send for the SCPA or whatever you call...”

  “Since we’re out of the town limits, it’ll remain where it is, as long as it’s off the road. Even dead seals on beaches are left for the tides.” She noticed that he looked disgusted. “Tell you what. Help me haul it deeper into the woods. Cougar or bear will probably come shopping.”

  His voice skyrocketed as he looked around. “Bear? Cougar?”

  The disposal didn’t take long. Holly pulled some towelettes from the console, and they cleaned up.

  Billy Jenkins lived at the end of a long rutted road a few miles east of Port Renfrew. A homemade plywood sign at the turn advertised “Woodworking. Native carvings. Fishing Charters” with an arrow. Holly took care not to let the ruts damage her undercarriage but winced at the occasional thump. In a bigleaf maple tree festooned with lacy strands of witch’s hair, a barred owl greeted her, usually a night bird but at home in the luminous curly hynum moss which coated the tree like a bayou beauty. A brown hare hopped to safety.

  At last she came to a small clearing. Large firs had been trimmed or topped to prevent damage in a windstorm. In the yard, a circus of carvings caught her eye with their skill and majesty. Several rampant bears pawed the air. Despite the fact that totem poles had a more northerly origin, artful sculptures of all heights surveyed the quiet kingdom. Smiling in admiration, she discovered an eagle, a raven and a turtle on the posts. Two carved chests would make ideal storage for sheets and blankets. An artist coaxing buyers down this road probably did a good business in the summer.

  The cabin with add-ons was painted a bright blue, a complement to the green moss which coated its cedar-shake roof. A huge woodpile was tarped
beside it. On the shady side, sword fern nestled against the clapboard. A sizable garden wired against deer, in a common Stalag 17 effect, bore salad vegetables and potato plants. In a grassy patch, two mountain bikes lay on their sides. The recently-built deck had potted begonias in red, white and salmon. Showy burgundy dahlias, which lasted into the fall, added a cheery look.

  “I’m Janet Jenkins. Come in,” Billy’s mother said, opening the screen door. She wore loose jeans and a red flannel logging shirt. “The boys will be back at three. They’re helping my husband Tom with the firewood.” Mike was staying with them because his mother was in Victoria getting radiation for breast cancer. His father had gone north to earn money at a fly-in, fly-out mine in Yukon, she explained.

  The house opened into a living room, kitchen at the side. A small television sat on a crowded bookshelf. The number of other doors indicated two more bedrooms and a bathroom.

  “They aren’t in any trouble, are they? You said this was routine,” Janet said as she took a blue enamel pot of coffee from the stove. She added a can of condensed milk and a sugar bowl, urging them forward on the circular pine table.

  Holly had a slight stomach ache from the pizza overload, but she couldn’t refuse the hospitality. Her duty belt needed a bottle of Maalox. “Apparently they were on the beach at Botanical the night when a girl drowned. I need to know what they saw, if anything.”

  The woman’s pleasant tan face shrank as she smoothed a crease on the freshly-ironed tablecloth. Rich black hair was pulled into a bun with an attractive shell holder, and her glowing, unwrinkled skin belied her forty-plus years. “My brother drowned. It’s a bad way to go. His fishing boat filled up with a rogue wave, and he never made it to shore.” She made a small fist, her hand worn from work, then reached for a tin of hand cream on the table. “Damn marine reports were wrong.”

  Holly nodded, managing a smile to ease the woman along. “That’s so true. Weather changes by the hour around the lower island.”

  “And we’re cut off out here. No cell coverage. Damn phone lines go down once a winter. Can’t even call an ambulance.” Janet finished anointing her hands and picked up her coffee. “Still, I prefer it to Victoria. It’s freer, you know? Not as many rules, and we help each other.”

  A few minutes later, Holly heard voices outside. Through the calico-curtained window she watched two young men walking toward the house, followed by a mixed breed, German shepherd and collie at a glance. The dog lacked one front leg but handled its mobility without complaint. One boy had an axe over his shoulder, the other carried steel splitting wedges and a maul.

  Janet said, “There they are now. Do you want me—”

  “Please stay here. I’ll talk to them outside. Thanks for your hospitality.”

  She excused herself and met the boys on the deck, explaining her visit. The dog was friendly if muddy. She gave its head a rub but steered it away from her pants. “I’d like to talk to you separately, if that’s all right. Maybe you could come back in a few minutes, Mike.” She saw them give each other odd looks. Mike pulled out a pack of bargain-priced Canadian brand cigarettes, lit up, and strolled off, his short legs slightly bowed like a sailor’s. Chances were that after all this time, they’d rehearsed their stories. She should have been out here earlier, from the minute they’d learned the results of the tox scan.

  The taller at well over six feet, Billy wore green workpants and a hoodie. His clothes were covered in fir debris and the occasional oil stain. One temple bore a scar, the kind fashionable for nineteenth-century dueling Europeans. His nose was blunt but strong, and his hands could rip phone books in half.

  She smiled to put him at his ease, but his eyes cut to her notebook. “The ranger says that he believes you and Mike camped in Botanical the night Angie Didrickson died.”

  “Angie?” he repeated. “Mom said something, but I—”

  “Angie drowned that night.” Surely news would have travelled fast. What was wrong here?

  “Oh yeah, I heard about that. I was sorry.” A nuance of emotion passed over his face, raising a dimple in one cheek. Juvenile or ingenuous or both? Oddly enough, his voice cracked from time to time, mild as a girl’s.

  “Did you know her?” He attended Edward Milne, but they could have met at twenty teen haunts. The video stores, Willie Blues Snack Shop, the A and W, Sooke Pizza and Wink’s, which nailed the student lunch trade. Aside from school, the Port Renfrew teens got to Sooke from time to time, hitched a ride, stayed with friends or relatives. Rock concerts in Victoria would pull them farther east. K-Os was playing at the Save-On-Foods Memorial Centre.

  “Not really.”

  What did that mean? “You did or you didn’t?” His hesitance made her suspicious, but the ambiguous teenspeak often meant “yes, but I’m afraid to admit it.”

  He looked off to where Mike was tossing sticks for the dog.

  “I might have seen her in Sooke...but we never talked.”

  “She was beautiful. I imagine you’d remember her.”

  “Yeah.” He blinked but didn’t meet her gaze. To some that spelled guilt, but the gesture was inborn in his people. It was disrespectful to lock eyes, especially a youth to an elder. Did he seem nervous? “What did you do that night in the park?”

  Her begging-the-question technique worked. Instead of denying being there, he seemed to search his memory. “Made a fire. Cooked hot dogs. Went for a swim. We built a fort of driftwood.” Common practice for beachcombers. More shelter from the wind than rain. But she didn’t remember any food debris. Maybe here were two teenaged environmentalists.

  “Can you give me a timeline? Start with dinner.”

  “Uh, six, seven. I dunno. Before dark. We just hung out and talked.”

  If she recalled correctly, dark came about eight o’clock.

  “About what?” The devil was in the details, Roy had taught her. Once a suspect makes one mistake, he makes others. The cascade effect.

  “Stuff. I mean girls, movies, school. Nothing important. The sunset was awesome. And we saw a couple of cruise ships. My cousin works on one. It’d be sweet to go to Alaska.”

  “Then what happened? See anyone else?”

  “Uh-uh.” He spread out his hands. One leaking blood blister dominated a finger, the price of working with wood. “Went to bed, I guess. Ten maybe. On the beach. We had sleeping bags.”

  “By the big butt stump of driftwood? Was that your camp?”

  Suddenly a wary look crossed his face, as if he knew he might have said the wrong thing, placed himself in the wrong spot. Innocence and experience collided. “Maybe down a kilometre from that. The shelter wasn’t anything special, more dug out in the sand. The main logs were already there.”

  Why was he trying to minimize the fort now? Distance himself from where the girl had died? The sun flickered behind a cloud, but she felt the heat coming. “All right, Billy,” she said, and relief flooded his square face.

  Mike took his turn next. The habit of reclusiveness wasn’t as strong for him. His eyes weren’t as intelligent as Billy’s, more crafty like a fox, though those animals were oddly absent on the island. Mike confirmed much of what Billy had said. Perhaps they had practiced their stories. A total consistency often spelled collusion. “So you went to bed around—”

  “Moonrise. Eleven-fifteen.”

  Strange that he named an exact time. Moonrise could be checked. “And you saw no one?”

  “Guess we wouldn’t.” He toed his workboot over a knot in a board. “You’re not allowed to camp on the beach. But we were here in the time long ago. It’s really all ours.” That he stopped without making derogatory remarks about whites spoke for his self-control, but perhaps he didn’t want to antagonize the police.

  “I don’t disagree.” She looked at her watch as if she were growing short of time and wanted to wrap up the interview. “That was a pretty cool shelter you made on the big fir root. Gotta hand it to you.”

  He seemed flattered, rubbing a hand through his thick ha
ir. “I’m pretty good at it. Get the pieces to fit just right. Don’t need no nails at all. Nice and tight. The wind gets up at night.”

  She excused him. So there was a discrepancy in their description of where they had camped and the time they went to bed. But both denied seeing anyone on the beach.

  Before leaving, she dropped one more penny onto the table as Billy rejoined them. “I need your fingerprints.”

  They both tensed and looked at each other for a brief moment. Beads of moisture freckled Mike’s forehead. Billy cleared his throat. “We didn’t touch anything....not that there was anything to touch. Are you gonna check the driftwood?”

  He gave a childish laugh, then coughed into his hand.

  For once, a lie came in handy. On a beach, with winds and tide, not many pieces of forensics would remain, and not for long. “Of course not. But a car was broken into in the parking lot that week. A couple of prints showed up. This will eliminate you.”

  Was that a visible relaxation in their muscular shoulders?

  “Sure, why not?” Billy said.

  Normally the print kit wasn’t carried in cars, but with distances making time a premium, Holly had changed the protocol. She took them to the Impala, opened the trunk and set up the equipment on a picnic table, offering them a wet towelette at the end of the process. Her real intention was to check against the prints on the condom package. Teenaged boys sure as hell didn’t use them in a same-sex encounter. But as ubiquitous as condoms were, often given out free, one might have lingered in their wallets or backpacks. And if so, that might break their story. Had one of them, or both, had sex with Angie?

  Holly pulled in to the detachment as Ann was closing up. “How did it go?” the woman asked.

  “They seem like good boys, but something is going on,” she said, explaining her procedures.

  Ann gave a sign of approval at the fingerprint idea. “Why not? It’s not impossible that they were involved with those thefts. Clearly, it’s a local.”