Amanda had packed for the day trip quickly, eager to get an early start to Flores Island once again. She knew the police would be back there as soon as it was light, because in a death investigation, time was always of the essence. Evidence decayed and witnesses forgot. The Ident team would be at the site of Richie’s body, and the detective would be planning interviews with hikers, kayakers, and locals who might have witnessed anything relevant about either the accident or the beach party earlier. And someone, perhaps even the detective, would be going up the mountain to interview Luke. Almost certainly accompanied by some brawn.
She was alone in the breakfast room and had barely sat down when Keener slumped out of the kitchen, bleary-eyed and unshaven. While he poured her coffee with a slightly unsteady hand, she scrutinized him. Was it just a lack of sleep after his night off, or was he hungover? The faint smell of weed wafted around him.
She refrained from comment and kept her voice cheerful. “Any fresh fish today?”
He looked bewildered. “Fish?”
“Helen said you went fishing yesterday.”
“Oh. No, no luck.” He shrugged. “Too rough. What’ll it be?”
Not trusting him to manage anything beyond frying an egg, she chose eggs and toast. When he returned with her plate, he looked marginally revived, so she smiled as she thanked him. “Did you hear about the man who drowned off Flores Island yesterday?”
He flinched as he nodded. “It’s all over town. That kind of news always is.”
“What are the rumours?”
“Drunk? Stupid?” His eyes narrowed. “I hear you found him.”
“I did. It was a shock. Does anyone know who he is?”
“Not that I heard. A tourist, probably. A cop came by earlier, asked Helen if we knew him or if he was staying here. They’re asking all over. Not just about him but about his buddies.”
“I guess they’ll identify him sooner or later. They have a first name — Richie.”
“Helen told the cop they should probably check out the campgrounds at Chesterman Beach. Lots of surfers stay there.”
Amanda nodded, resisting the urge to probe further. I’m not getting involved, she chided herself. “The police can probably track down his boat too. The rental company will have records.”
“Not many boat rental companies out here, at least official ones. The ocean is too dangerous to risk inexperienced yahoos going out there and cracking up. Case in point.”
“But unofficial ones?”
Keener shrugged, probably reluctant to give up any of his friends. “Where are you off to today?”
“Back up to Flores Island. You remember that artist I asked you about? He’s doing a painting for me, and I want to check how it’s coming along.”
Keener busied himself pouring her a second coffee, gripping the pot hard to steady his hand. Just then a couple entered the dining room, and he straightened, put on his professional face, and mumbled a final, curious comment.
“Watch yourself.”
It was a glorious day. After its earlier rage, the ocean slumbered peacefully in the sun and the breeze was so gentle it barely stirred the trees. As Amanda walked down toward the docks, however, her heart began to race. Sweat slicked her palms, and she gripped Kaylee’s leash tightly. Was she up for this? Did she really want to revisit the images of yesterday? The sprawled, twisted body, the mangled head …
You won’t be going anywhere near the site of the death, she told herself firmly. Pim will take us up the quieter inside channel.
When she’d raised the idea with him the night before, Pim had not been eager to take her anywhere. He’d assured her that he and the other villagers would check on Luke to make sure he was prepared for the police visit. As she neared the docks now, she spotted him by his boat, talking to the young female officer from yesterday. Janine Somebody. Neither of them had seen her, so Amanda slipped behind a nearby boat shed and strained to hear. The waves and the growl of motorboats snatched away much of the conversation, but she heard the phrases “crack shot,” “wilderness survivor,” and “into custody for assessment.”
The officer looked more worried than angry as she turned to go. “Leave it to us, please, Pim,” were her final words. Amanda waited another minute to see what Pim might do, but he turned to check his motor. When she approached, he eyed her levelly.
“I don’t think you should go. Don’t get in the middle of this.”
She suppressed her own qualms. “Pim, I value your judgment and knowledge, and I want you to come with me. But I understand if you’d rather not. I’ll figure out something.”
He eyed her suspiciously. “Do you even know how to handle a boat?”
“I’ve driven every kind of ramshackle contraption in the Far East, most of them barely afloat. These are luxury yachts.”
Grudgingly, he grinned and reached out to help her into the boat. Kaylee shrank back, no longer a fan of bouncing waves on the open ocean. Effortlessly, Pim lifted her aboard, where she stood sulking as Amanda strapped her into her life jacket. Amanda suspected she was thinking that no self-respecting Toller needed a life jacket. Suck it up, princess. This is the frigid ocean.
The trip up the inside channel past Meares Island and along the inside shore of Flores was uneventful. She spotted the police boat at the entrance to Ahousaht Harbour, but there was no sign of the drama no doubt unfolding on the other side of the island. They passed a group of kayakers and exchanged greetings, but otherwise the channel was empty.
As was the little landing cove for Luke’s cabin. Luke’s boat was gone. Pim paused to study the ground. A jumble of footprints, including their own, was visible on the pebble beach, but it was impossible to discern any pattern. Had the cops come and gone? Or had Luke fled at the first hint of them?
“Well, that’s that,” Pim said. “Let’s go.”
Amanda had an uneasy feeling. “We should check to see if he’s there. Make sure he’s all right.” Seeing the skepticism on his face, she pressed on. “One man is dead, Pim! We don’t know what’s happened to Luke.”
“Maybe he doesn’t want us to know.”
She turned toward the path. “Please, Pim. We’re here.”
He sighed. “We should leave this to the police,” he muttered, even as he tied up his boat and turned to follow.
They said little as they made the trek through lush bogs and dense stands of towering trees, clambered over fallen logs and scrambled up steep slopes, finally nearing the summit before stopping to catch their breath and take a drink. They stood in the small clearing overlooking the forest and distant ocean. Amanda knew they’d be visible from Luke’s tower if he were keeping watch. She suspected he’d designed the path with the clearing so he could see danger approaching.
She started to speak, but Pim held up a hand to silence her. For a few moments he stood motionless, listening, before shaking his head.
“He is being very quiet,” he said. “I smell no fire.”
“Does he always light a fire?”
Pim’s face was pinched with worry, but now he grinned. “He likes his coffee.”
“Should we make noise? Let him know we’re coming?”
“He knows. He has four solar-powered trail cams in the woods. One at the cove, one by his cabin, one down the trail, and one …” He nodded to a tall fir at the edge of the clearing. “Right there.”
“Trail cams! Luke?” she exclaimed incredulously.
Pim’s grin widened. “Yep, motion-activated. Nancy set him up with them this spring when he started getting upset about the tourists coming. He’d never seen technology like that, and he was like a little kid when he first got them. He watched every animal that went by at night.”
Amanda thought back to the second time she’d visited. Luke had met her at the top of the escarpment, as if he’d known she was coming. She glanced at Kaylee, looking for signs of excitement. The dog’s head was raised, and her ears were forward. Her tail wagged slowly, but Amanda sensed uncertainty. Puzzlement. Was there something else in the woods?
Pim had already started forward. To avoid unpleasant surprises, Amanda kept a tight grip on Kaylee’s leash as she fell in behind. Soon they crested the hill and stood at the edge of the compound. Other than the hens wandering around their enclosure, the place was empty. Even the goat was gone. Amanda felt a prickle of alarm.
Pim called out. No answer except a flurry of clucks from the hens.
A peek through the window of the main cabin revealed that it was empty too. Everything looked normal, from the folded blankets to the clothing hanging over the stove, but Luke was nowhere to be seen. They headed for the House of Horrors, as she’d come to think of his studio. The door was unlocked, and she opened it gingerly, still haunted by the images inside. Beside the door, the wall was empty.
“The shotgun is gone,” she whispered.
Pim nodded, his face grim. “He would take it if he was going into the interior.”
“I thought you said he never killed anything.”
“Everyone kills, if they have to.”
Amanda shivered, remembering the moment in Newfoundland when she had stared down the barrel of a rifle and felt the trigger beneath her finger. How close she had come. She shut her eyes. That’s over. Come back to the present.
Inside, the room was bathed in midday sunlight. The walls still screamed of his torment, but it was the painting in the centre of the room, still on the easel, that caught her attention. It had not been there before.
It was a painting of a field on fire, the wind whipping tongues of orange and red through the grass. A woman filled the foreground, her arms outstretched, her long honey-blond hair streaming out behind her as she ran. In the distance, running toward her with her own arms outstretched, was a little girl with the same long, honey-coloured hair and an expression Amanda couldn’t decipher. Not quite terror, not quite rapture. Was it hope?
A lump rose in Amanda’s throat.
Footsteps sounded behind her. “He’s gone,” Pim said.
Amanda nodded. “This is what he painted for me.”
Back outside, Amanda stood in the middle of the compound, trying to recover her composure. “Do you think the cops have already been here and arrested him?”
He looked doubtful. “They wouldn’t have risked the trip in the dark last night, and they’d have had to leave pretty early to get here ahead of us. They would leave more prints on the shore. I didn’t see anything. No one was on that beach after high tide, which was at five thirty this morning.”
“Should we go look for him?”
Pim shook his head. “If he’s hiding, we won’t find him. Luke knows this island better than anyone. If he doesn’t want to be found, no one will find him.”
She thought about the resources police search teams had at their disposal: K9 units, heat-sensing helicopters, night-vision goggles, and more. They would grid the island and search it section by section. The noise of the helicopters alone might trigger his panic.
Pim was studying her as if debating how much to tell her. “Luke knows a few things about hiding,” he said finally. “He spent two weeks in the jungle in Vietnam, trying to get back to his unit. Nothing but his M16 for company, he said. Sometimes, when he’s scared, he’s right back in the jungle, hugging his rifle.”
She took a deep breath. “And now he has his shotgun.”
They both stood in silence, reflecting on what that meant. That if the cops did find him, the end might not be pretty.
“Do you know where he is, Pim?”
“Nope. He draws a line. There’s a lot of Luke that’s off limits. But there’s a big, empty wilderness out there, not just on this island, but across Millar Channel on the mainland. The cops would have to bring the entire RCMP force to search it all. Why would they spend that much effort? They’ll concentrate on the accident scene and try to piece together what happened. They’ll look at the storm, the currents, and the tide to come up with the best theory.”
She frowned. “Do they always do that? I mean, isn’t it obvious what happened? He got caught in the storm, he was inexperienced, and the boat was too small. The boat either capsized or cracked up on the rocks. Either way, he didn’t stand a chance.”
Pim wandered over to let the hens out to roam. He watched in silence as they strutted about, happy to be free. Kaylee eyed them curiously but made no move to chase them. The stick at her feet was far more interesting.
“There’s a few things they have to figure out,” Pim said finally. “Why was the guy’s boat on one headland and his body on another? The body was just above the high-water mark. That means it was washed ashore around high tide, either around five o’clock yesterday afternoon, about when you and Gilligan found him, or four thirty the morning before.”
Amanda thought back to that afternoon. “I wonder why his friends didn’t report him missing.”
“Maybe they weren’t real friends, or they left before him.”
“Even so, they must have known he might have trouble in that boat,” she said. “You’d think they’d check on him.”
“Maybe they did. Maybe the cops have a whole lot of answers by now.”
She was replaying the scenario in her head, trying to imagine whether Richie drowned out at sea or whether he’d been trying to swim to shore and been battered on the rocks. A head wound would have produced a lot of blood, but there was none on the rocks, suggesting he’d died before washing ashore. If so, what had he cracked his head on?
Something about the scenario puzzled her. “You said he was just above high tide?”
“Looked that way from the water marks. The cops will be checking that this morning.”
“How could a body get above the high-tide mark?”
“Sometimes there’s a rogue wave. And during the storm, the waves surge higher.”
“That means he likely went into the water before or during the storm.”
Pim looked unconvinced. “He could’ve been in the water a long time before he was washed up.”
“What time did you say high tide was yesterday?”
“About five o’clock. The tables will say exactly. I’m sure the cops will figure all that out.”
“And the previous high tide? The one that happened during the storm?”
“About four thirty in the morning? Still pitch black. Sunrise isn’t for another hour.”
“No one with any sense would be out on the water then.”
“Like I said, he could have gone in the water earlier.”
She scoured her memory of that afternoon when she and Pim had seen him. There had been no one on the beach except the surfers, and farther down in Cow Bay, some kayakers. But there had been a couple of boats out in the bay, mostly whale-watching tours. And with all those witnesses in the whale boats, surely someone would have seen his boat foundering on the rocks and reported it. Or had he stayed on shore alone, trying to wait out the storm, and ventured out in the early hours, too drunk or stoned to judge the danger?
There were a lot of questions for the cops to answer. But the question that haunted her most was what did Luke’s disappearance have to do with it?