The Otter of Death

by Betty Webb

  “You’re talking about the increase in deaths, then? That’s what’s weird?” I shook my head. “Numbers can fluctuate from year, especially since the toxo…”

  “Teddy! Didn’t you notice who I left out?”

  “Booth’s count of ill and deceased otters. What were they?”

  After taking another sip of her margarita, she blew a raspberry at the seagull, who only ruffled his feathers to make himself look bigger and meaner. “For two years running Booth never counted so much as one sick otter, much less a dead one.”

  I frowned. “That sounds…”

  “Fishy. Sure you don’t want a margarita? Otherwise, I’m going to throw the rest out. I don’t know what I was thinking, drinking this early in the day.” She glared daggers at the sea gull, which finally flew off. “And I’m certainly not going to let the damned avian wildlife have it.”

  “It’s too early for me, too, so no thanks. Ah, the Stuart Booth thing. Sounds like you suspect he was fudging the numbers.”

  “Sure looks that way. Otherwise, any otter who ever died in Booth’s sector sank immediately to Davy Jones Locker, was eaten by a great white who could swim in two feet of water, or was carried away by pterodactyls. Seen any of them flying around lately?”

  Given the rhetorical nature of the question, I didn’t answer, just explored the reasons why Booth’s count didn’t jibe with the others’. During the silence, a small white object entered my field of vision. It crept slowly toward Darleene, ready to pounce.

  “You’re about to get another visitor,” I warned.

  She looked around. “Oh. Him. He’s been hanging around all day. Come to Mama, sweetness.”

  It was Toby, the orphaned cat who considered all the live-aboarders his family. Needing no more encouragement, he leapt into her lap, turned around several times, then tucked his tail around his nose and went to sleep.

  “Precious, isn’t he?” Darleene asked, idly stroking the cat.

  “But fickle. Bonz used to think he belonged to us.”

  “How is Bonz, by the way? I heard he got pretty beat up.”

  “One splintered rib and a couple of cracked ones, but he’s home with us now. Got his spirits back, too. Loves the kids.”

  “‘Home’ meaning Sheriff Joe’s house?”

  “Until all this is over.”

  “Have you given any thought to what’s going to happen to the Merilee once you two get married?”

  “We’ve talked about it.” I didn’t mention that our “talks” always ended in an argument.

  Feeling suddenly bereft, I looked down the pier and over to the slip where the Merilee rocked gently in the incoming tide.

  What would happen to her? During the entire length of our engagement Joe and I had been at odds over her fate. In the beginning I hadn’t taken his suggestion to sell her seriously, but as he continued his demand, I’d dug in. It was time to tell him the truth.

  Selling the Merilee would be like selling my soul.

  On my way to my pickup, I passed Lila Conyers’ rickety houseboat. She wasn’t on deck, but Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” floated out the open door. The song, about a teenager committing suicide, seemed an unwise musical choice for a woman who suffered from depression. I stood there for a moment, wondering if I should pay her a visit, then thought better of it. Instead, I called Preston Morrell and reminded him of Lila’s interest in Blue Seas’ job opening.

  As before, he was noncommittal.

  Overwhelmed by worry, I made the trip back to San Sebastian. Not a safe way to drive, but at least I could congratulate myself on having turned down a daylight margarita.

  My gloom lifted when Tonio, Bridie, and Bonz met me at the door.

  “Where’d you go?” Bridie.

  “Did you solve the murders?” Tonio.

  “Arf! Arf!” Bonz.

  “I drove down to the harbor to see how the Merilee’s doing, Bridie, and no, Tonio, I didn’t solve the murders because that’s not my job.” Lying to children. I’ll probably go to Hell for that. “Hey, where’s your grandma?”

  “In the bathroom.” Bridie. “She’s…”

  “Too much information.”

  Colleen, the wife of one sheriff and the mother of another, always kept a pot of coffee brewing. Desperate for a cup, I left the welcoming committee and headed to the kitchen. Passing the office nook on the way to the stove, I noticed that Colleen’s laptop was still running. Curious as to what recipe she might be working on now, I bent over to take a look.

  And was immediately sorry I had.

  On the screen were detailed instructions for cleaning gunshot residue off your hands.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Three years earlier Joe’s first wife, Sonia, a San Sebastian assistant prosecuting attorney, had been found slumped over the steering wheel of her car in the emergency lane of the I-5, shot in the head.

  Just like my attacker had threatened to shoot me.

  Her killer had never been caught.

  After a few moments of panic I forced myself to think things through. From everything I had heard, Sonia and Colleen had gotten along well. At first, the two had shopped together, attended church together, and occasionally even attended spiritual retreats together. But when the children came along, their relationship had changed. With two children and a full-time law career, Sonia had been squeezed for time, and Colleen had been elected Babysitter-In-Chief. Not the best situation in a small house. There were times when Colleen must have felt desperate to have a few hours to herself, yet from what Joe had told me, the subject of a separate granny cottage never came up.

  So why did Joe suddenly think that a separation between a new wife and his mother was necessary? Had there been a rising tension between Sonia and Colleen he had never told me about and wanted to avoid this time around?

  I knew that Joe locked his service Glock in the master bedroom’s wall safe, but I had no idea where Colleen kept the firearm she so obviously owned. Come to think of it, wouldn’t her gun—if it had originally belonged to Joe’s deceased father—be registered, and its ballistics a matter of record? The fact that Joe had either not noticed or…

  Suddenly feeling wobbly, I grabbed the nearest coffee mug and stuck it under the coffeemaker’s spout.

  “Watch yourself.” Colleen said behind me.

  Mug half-filled, I turned too quickly and sloshed coffee all over the kitchen floor.

  “I didn’t realize you were still so shook up, Teddy. Why, look at you! Your hands are trembling.” Colleen’s face radiated concern. Or maybe she was a good actress.

  I glanced past her toward the laptop. It now showed a babbling brook running through a green glade. She had hit the Escape key.

  “I, uh, I, uh…I’d better clean that up.” I reached out for the dishrag hanging over the faucet.

  My future mother-in-law grabbed my wrist. Her grip was surprisingly strong. “Don’t be silly, I’ll do it. Why don’t you go lie down for a while? I’ve been suspecting you were doing too much for someone who’s been through what you have, and now it looks like I was right.”

  I thought getting away from her might be a good idea, too, so I fled into the bedroom and breathed deeply until the shaking stopped.

  Dinner was a strained affair.

  The children kept quarreling over something called a FuzzBot, Joe seemed to be a million miles away, and every time I looked up from my plate, I found Colleen staring at me. Even Bonz, who usually hid under the table hoping for scraps, stayed slumped against the sofa in the living room.

  I halfway expected Joe to invite me down to the Merilee again for some romance, but it didn’t happen, so out of disappointment I turned in early.

  Colleen was right about one thing.

  I had definitely been doing too much.

  The next morning Colleen insisted I take the leftover cranberry-apricot scones to the zoo, where my arrival was greeted with celebration.

  “Man, these are killer!” enthused Robin Chase, while crumbs fell
onto her khaki uniform.

  Wishing the big cat keeper had chosen a different metaphor, I gave her a weak smile, then hurried off to accomplish whatever I could on another half-shift. There would be no helper today, the careless Janet Hewitt having been temporarily reassigned to office work. The buzz in the staff lounge was that Aster Edwina took our safety concerns seriously, and that Janet’s brief tenure at the Gunn was nearing the end.

  On my way to Down Under to care for the marsupials, I detoured past Quarantine to visit Clarabelle, the female Japanese macaque who had just arrived from the National Zoo. As soon as she proved free of health problems she would be introduced to Kabuki, whom we all hoped would replace her former lost love.

  Clarabelle was a petite monkey, as attractive as Kabuki in her way, with brown-gray fur and a red face. Intelligent eyes gazed deeply into mine when I cooed, “Is Clarabelle excited about meeting her new boyfriend?”

  She cooed back. “Oooo!”

  “So glad you feel that way. I’m certain Myra Sebrowski, your new keeper, has told you how handsome Kabuki is.”

  “Oooo.”

  “I’m sure she’s also told you how naughty he’s been behaving, too, what with all that nasty poop-flinging.”

  Clarabelle pursed her lips. “Oooo.”

  “Right. I don’t approve of it, either, but we here at the Gunn Zoo believe you’ll have a calming effect on him and demonstrate the proper way to behave in public. In fact, I hear from your keeper at the National that your own conduct has always been above reproach.”

  “Oooo!”

  We conversed for several more minutes until Myra came in and ran me off. As I drove my cart down the hill, my concerns about Colleen’s gun cropped up again. Something was wrong there.

  Dangerously wrong.

  That night, I got little more than two hours’ sleep—no good when you’re trying to recuperate from an injury. Every time I drifted off, dreams of gunshots and crying dogs jolted me back into consciousness.

  At three a.m., awake and staring up at the ceiling again, I realized that my situation was untenable. I had to get out of this house.

  But how could I do that without offending both Colleen and Joe?

  At Down Under the next morning, the koalas were awake for once, and their constant scrabbling for affection kept my mind off the Colleen situation. Cleaning their enclosure was a joy, even though Wanchu kept wrapping herself around my leg, forcing me to hobble while I pushed the rake around.

  The day was a beautiful one, with a cloudless sky and a freshening breeze blowing in from the Pacific. The fact that the breeze also carried the scent of animal offal made no difference to my lightened mood. I had come to enjoy the differing odors. For instance, koala poop had a faint medicinal scent, whereas tiger poop was gamey.

  “You’re a sweet-smelling girl, aren’t you, Wanchu?” I asked the still-clinging koala.

  “Arrr.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  I hated to remove her from my leg, but I was needed elsewhere, so I lifted her into her tree. Instead of being upset about that, she fell asleep.

  All was peace and light with the wallabies, wombats, and echidnas, too, which helped me relax further. In truth, my zoo world seemed so rosy it made me question my paranoia about Colleen.

  My future mother-in-law had always behaved warmly toward me, and from all accounts, had behaved the same way with Sonia. If I had seen a questionable website on her laptop, it didn’t mean she was a serial killer. Hadn’t I ever mistakenly found myself on an offensive website simply because I’d inverted two letters in a search engine?

  Besides, Colleen didn’t even know Stuart Booth. Or Amberlyn Lofland.

  Joe was right. I needed to start minding my own business.

  That determination lasted only as long as my half day at the zoo. Upon leaving, by unconscious habit I turned southwest on Old Bentley Road toward the harbor, instead of northeast to San Sebastian. By the time I caught myself, I was already nearing the parking lot at Gunn Landing Harbor. My mistake turned out to be fortunate, because when I started to make a U-turn, I saw Lila Conyers’ 2012 Ford Focus being hauled away by a tow truck. Shrieking, she ran after it while a small group of liveaboarders looked on unhappily.

  “What happened?” I asked, braking next to her.

  Tears streamed down her face. “I was three months behind on the payments. Now even if I get a job, I won’t be able to commute ’cause there aren’t any buses around here. It’s no use, no use. I don’t know why I even try.”

  She turned to go back to her houseboat, but concerned about her distressed state, I exited the truck and caught her by the arm. “Here’s what we’re going to do, and don’t you dare argue about it.”

  It took several hours and myriad phone calls before the towing company released Lila’s car. The irony in all this came when I called her finance company to make the past-due payments, along with several other fees accumulated by the repossession. There had been only four payments left before the car would have been paid off. Furious at such financial heartlessness, I made those payments, too, so that when Lila finally drove the Focus out of the Castroville impound lot, she owned it free and clear.

  “I’ll repay you as soon as I get a job,” she insisted, giving me such a strong hug that it made my shoulder throb. I had followed her to the harbor to make sure she arrived safely.

  “No hurry, Lila. Take your time.”

  After waving her off to her houseboat, I walked down the dock to check on the Merilee. My boat looked fine. No dry rot, no graffiti, not even any barnacles I could spot through the murky harbor water.

  “You don’t look like you missed me,” I said, caressing her gunwale.

  She didn’t answer, just bobbed in the wake of the twenty-seven-foot SeaRay Sundancer purring by.

  Someone else spoke to me, though.

  Maureen.

  Upon spotting me, the otter swam up to the Merilee’s stern, chattering for a handout. Not wanting to incur her wrath, I went into the cabin and found a tin of sardines packed in oil. I washed off the oil as best as I could, then took the tin on deck and dropped one fish to her.

  She caught it, but after a couple of sniffs, gave me a less than friendly look. You can’t do any better than this?

  “Sorry, Maureen, I’ve been busy trying to stay alive.”

  “Did you ever find out who shot you?”

  Not believing in talking otters—besides, Maureen was female and the voice was male—I turned around to see Kenny Norgaard, half-sloshed as usual, holding a martini glass. His clothes smelled none-too-clean and there was a faint tremor in his hand.

  “Nope,” I answered. “Whoever shot me is still on the loose.”

  “Permission to come aboard, dear heart?”

  I waved him aboard and unfolded a deck chair. As for me, the gunwale made a fine perch. Below, Maureen—still irked—swam away, leaving the rejected sardine to float down to its watery grave.

  “Re you getting shot the other night,” Kenny said. “Surely someone must have seen something.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  He took a sip of his martini and smacked his lips. “Because you know how gossipy this place is. Can’t get by with anything without someone getting all googly-eyed over it.”

  “Unfortunately, no one seems to have gotten all googly-eyed that night. I was the only person in the park. Besides the shooter, that is. At least until my rescuers showed up.”

  Another sip. “Untrue. The park was crawling with people.”

  “Are you talking about the Montinis and Ariel Gonzales?”

  “Them, too.”

  “Too?” I frowned. “Are you saying you saw someone else out there around the time I was shot?”

  “Ruth Donohue and Dee Dee, for starters.”

  “For starters?!”

  “Calm down, dear heart. I’m sure it was all innocent fun.”

  I didn’t know whether to strangle Kenny or hit him over the head with the sardin
e tin. Because of the state of my shoulder, I did neither. “Perhaps you’d be good enough to explain. In detail, and not one sentence at a time.”

  He downed the rest of his martini. “You remember how foggy it was that night? And cold?”

  “Skip the weather report.”

  “But it’s pertinent, because that’s why Ruth and Dee Dee were out there.” Maybe it was my imagination but I thought I detected a note of malice in his voice.

  “Explain.”

  “Dee Dee got the idea when everyone was playing that ridiculous Pokémon Go game, you know, rushing around trying to find some silly pocket monster and get points or some such. They were both into it, but Dee Dee decided to create a game of her own.” He looked at me as if waiting to be praised.

  “Kenny…”

  “You can be so impatient, dear heart. Ah, you wouldn’t happen to have any gin below deck, would you?”

  “No. Are you going to tell me what you said you would tell me or are you just going to babble?” I stood up, too irritated to remain sitting.

  Perhaps Kenny thought I was getting ready to throw him overboard, because he delivered the rest of his tell-all in a rush.

  “Okay, okay. Dee Dee designed this new game called Find Susie Seagull, and it takes place in a marina that’s something like ours. According to the game, Susie could be anywhere, on the pier, on a boat, in one of the restaurants, on shore, in a park, in a car, out in the hills, wherever. She and Ruth had been waiting for a foggy night to give it a dry run, so to speak. Dee Dee didn’t want it to be easy, because Find Susie Seagull was designed for mid-level gamers, not beginners, a combination of Pokémon Go and geocaching, that thing where you hide a box full of stuff and the gamer who finds it takes one thing and puts another thing in the…”

  “I know what geocaching is. So what you’re telling me is that Ruth and Dee Dee were both in the park when I was shot? But if they were out there, why didn’t they say so when the police questioned them? Or did they?”

  He shrugged. “Haven’t the faintest, dear heart. Um, I wouldn’t mind vodka. Or tequila. Or even wine, if that’s all you have.”