We didn’t talk on the way out to the beach. I think we were both pretty riled up, or at least I was. Besides, yelling in her ear was not an attractive option. When we broke out of the forest into the first row of dunes the sky was seething with clouds and the sea’s swells were giving way to waves crashing upon the shoreline, the broken bits a startling white in contrast to the monochromatic swells.
Stacey leaned over and yelled above the wind and the waves. “Unlikely to find any females in this weather,” she said, and I found I was really disappointed. I had never seen a sea turtle lay eggs. I had never seen a sea turtle period, except on TV. The drill was to drive the full six-kilometre length of the beach once an hour until dawn, searching for females who only laid their eggs at night. The turtle patrol did this every night, dusk to dawn, during nesting season from May to August. Stacey, it seemed, was filling in for a few days while the guys who usually did it went to a wedding on the mainland. I wondered why she couldn’t have found someone else, since she didn’t seem to have recovered from her flu bug yet and she was director, after all. But then maybe she was like so many biologists the world over — just powering through their own adversities for the sake of the research.
It only took us half an hour to make the drive, so we had a fifteen-minute break at each end before setting out again.
There were no no-see-ums in this weather — it was way too windy — so we pulled over for one of our breaks and she brought out a thermos and a couple of hunks of bread and cheese and offered me some.
“I love this job and I hate it,” she said, to the cascade of stars overhead and to me, it would seem, though why she felt the need to tell me I didn’t know. I looked up. The stars were trying valiantly to poke through the massing clouds and the wind was whipping sand in our faces.
I looked at her and she sighed.
“Oh, I don’t always like turtle patrol. It can get pretty monotonous, but I don’t have to do it very often. What I love is identifying a problem that needs to be solved and figuring out how to solve it. There’s nothing like the thrill of research. It’s got everything, mystery, intrigue, challenge, even fear and the adrenaline rush you get when your data supports your theory or when you see a sea turtle nesting for the first time.”
I couldn’t have said it better, even though I’d often tried. I took a swig from the thermos and handed it back to her. “You’ve been director for five years?”
My bald question put paid to our shared moment of camaraderie and she had a guarded look on her face as she said, “Yes.”
When she didn’t follow it up with anything I said, “You said you hate the job too.”
“Everyone hates a part of their jobs. It’s human nature,” she said evasively. But she seemed sad and at the same time angry. She went quiet then and took the thermos and swabbed it down with the towel before packing it away.
“Sorry we haven’t found a nesting turtle for you. Next time.” She turned on the bike and the engine roared to life.
I looked at my watch. It was only 10:45 and she had told me that the turtle patrol went until dawn. She noticed me looking at my watch and said, “I don’t like the look of the weather. If we are going to evacuate the island it will be at dawn. I need to get back in time in case there is an alert.” She patted her walkie-talkie and said, “These don’t always work.”
At first I thought it was a huge boulder in the distance, sitting on the edge of the sea, but then it moved. I squeezed Stacey’s shoulder, but she had already seen it. We drove up off the beach and Stacey shut off the vehicle’s lights.
“Light will scare her back into the surf,” she said as we sat and waited. The sea turtle was about the size of a truck’s tire and she emerged from the sea with all the grace of a ponderous tank. Like an invalid she hauled herself painfully (or at least painful to watch) up the beach, each movement of her front flippers plowing through the sand making her whole body shudder. She left a trail of flipper marks behind her, each mark nearly touching the one in front. Like walking heel to toe. A completely graceless animal on land and yet in the sea she was as graceful as a soaring bird. She finally stopped above the high-tide mark and we could just make out her hind flippers scooping sand and sending it flying as she dug her nest. Stacey turned the bike back on and we drove up close. I was worried we were going to scare her. Any other animal would have turned tail at the ATV bearing down on them.
“Once she starts laying her eggs she is impervious to everything,” said Stacey. We sat and watched as she labor-iously scooped out a hole the size of a basketball and the shape of a flask. The eggs were white and leathery and looked like ping pong balls, but were about the size of a golf ball and were covered in stringy mucous. I was being anthropomorphic but it seemed as though it was taking a lot out of her — her eyes were welling up with tears and she was breathing erratically. But sea turtles had been doing this for millions of years so it obviously worked. And then it was done and she began filling in the hole with her hind flippers. When she was satisfied she thumped the top of the nest four or five times with her whole body — essentially doing pushups and then letting her body fall. She then threw a lot of sand around to disguise the nest. And then she was gone, making her way back to the sea, leaving a lonely trail of flipper prints behind her to show she had been there. We didn’t talk the whole way home. Stacey seemed subdued and I was just plain tired. When we got back the clearing was deserted. “Doesn’t look as though anything’s happening here,” said Stacey in a voice that sounded sorry.
The station was in almost total darkness, except for a nightlight in the main building and a light in the clearing where we stood. The live oaks were being pummelled by the wind overhead and somewhere something was making a rhythmic clanking noise.
“Guess there’s no evacuation.” We said good night and I headed off to my cabin. Martha wasn’t back yet from batting and I couldn’t sleep so I was reading when she burst into the cabin about three hours later and said, “I just bumped into Darcy. We’re to be evacuated in forty minutes.” Since I didn’t have much to pack I was ready in five minutes, but Martha couldn’t decide what to take in the little bag that Darcy had said each of us could take — valuables only and one change of clothes. We’d already been briefed on where to meet. Trevor was already there and so were Wyatt and Rosemary when we arrived. The others straggled in. Darcy gave us a refresher talk and we loaded into Trevor’s van, which sat twelve uncomfortably. I was the last one in and that’s when Darcy asked where Stacey was. Nobody said anything and Darcy, who was jammed between two people, looked at me beseechingly and said, “Can you check her cabin please?” I nodded and loped down the path leading to Stacey’s cabin.
There was a light on the porch but the cabin was in darkness. I took the two steps in one bound, called her name through the darkened screen door, and stood listening as the wind screamed overhead. It had started to rain again and I could hear it pinging on her metal roof. When she didn’t reply I figured she was sleeping and I called louder. When she still didn’t respond I opened the door and walked inside. There was a strange sweet smell to the air and I tried to remember if Stacey wore perfume. It was too dark to make out anything but big dark shapes and I fished around for a light. I found it by the door and switched it on. I saw her sitting on a chair with her back to me, her head rolled forward on her chest, sleeping. I called her name again but again there was no response. The thought occurred to me that maybe she was ill. I walked quickly around the chair so I could see her face — and wished I hadn’t. Someone had tied her legs to the chair and each of her hands to an arm, but what made me gag was the duct tape silencing her mouth and another strip blocking her nose. I stood there and stared while my mind imagined her horrible end. So lost in her tragedy was I that I didn’t hear Darcy until he was beside me.
“Jesus,” was all he said. We stood there unable to get out of the moment that imprisoned us. If it hadn’t been for the branch of a tree crashing down on the roof we might have stayed there staring at her forever. But it jolted us out of our shock. I grabbed a corner of the duct tape and peeled it from her nose and then did the same with her mouth. Then I leaned forward and felt for a pulse, feeling guilty that I hadn’t done so right away. But there was nothing. No telltale throbbing indicating a life was still there.
“Help me get her on the ground,” I said. “We may still be able to save her. She’s still warm.” I saw the hope creep into his face and it gave me some courage.
I started undoing her left wrist, which was rubbed raw by the rope while Darcy took the right. They were tight slip knots and it took some loosening but we got her on the ground and began CPR.
“Cordi, what’s wrong? What’s happened?” I looked up to see Martha standing dripping in the doorway, her lifejacket deflated around her neck, ready and waiting for a disaster on the trip to the mainland, and her camera dangling from her shoulder. How long had she been there? Long enough to see the duct tape? In that moment she looked so human, so frail, so full of hopes and dreams, just like the life I was trying to save. But Stacey’s life had run out. She was gone. It was 3:30 a.m.
Martha had moved into the room and was standing beside me.
“They sent me to find out what was taking you so long,” she said, her face betraying the calmness of her voice and the banality of her question in the face of what lay before us.
“What do we do now?” asked Darcy, the hope in his face now supplanted by disbelief and something else I couldn’t quite place.
“We evacuate,” I said.
“But what about Stacey?”
“Nothing we can do for her now. We’ll notify the police as soon as we get to the mainland.”
“But she’ll, you know, in this heat.” His voice stuttered to a halt as he looked down at Stacey, now sprawled on the floor. He looked up and visibly squared his shoulders as he said; “We have to get her up to the walk-in refrigerator in the main building.” He looked from me to Martha to Stacey and added, “I’ll come with you to the compound and then Trevor and I can come back and get her up.”
“But Trevor says it’s the last boat out,” said Martha.
Darcy looked through her. “I can’t just leave her here all alone. It’s the least I can do for Stacey. But please don’t tell anybody. We’ll just say she’s like the captain of a sinking ship. She won’t leave.”
Darcy moved toward the door but Martha stood transfixed and I gently took her by the arm. But she shrugged me off and said, as she unslung her camera, “This is a crime scene, Cordi, and there’s no one here to process it. I should take some pictures for the police before Darcy moves the body.”
It hadn’t even occurred to me what a mess we’d made of this crime scene until Martha said that. “There’s no time for that,” I said, but she fired off a few shots anyway.
We left then, shutting the screen door and the storm door tightly behind us.
Everyone was packed into the truck like sardines and getting pretty pissed off. Our explanation didn’t allay that frustration much. They just turned it on Stacey, saying how selfish she was, and I felt badly that we were letting them make ill of the dead when they didn’t know that she was dead. But then again, somebody other than Darcy, Martha, and I knew she was dead. We squeezed into the truck and headed through the forest to the compound. Twice we had to stop and clear branches from the trail, the rain pelting us relentlessly. One of the branches was so big that Trevor had to chainsaw it in two places. It was dark in the woods but as we reached the compound we could see that dawn had come and almost gone. We were an hour late.
We all tumbled out of the truck and followed Trevor up to the wharf. It was hard to see in the rain because the wind was picking up and throwing itself at us horizontally, but it was pretty easy to see that there was no boat at the wharf. Someone had taken it, I thought. Trevor waved us over to one of the metal outbuildings. Once we were inside he took out his cellphone and punched in a number. We all huddled around him, waiting. I was amazed that he got through in these conditions. As he clicked his cell shut it was obvious by the glum look on his face that all was not well.
“Some islanders took the boat when we didn’t show up. They can’t come back for us,” he said. “They had a hell of a trip and no one is willing to risk it. We’re on our own.”
Everybody began talking at once.
“We’ll drown if we stay on the island.” Rosemary.
“Cool.” Sam.
“My snakes!” Melanie.
“Who’s going to be in charge?” Darcy.
“God damnit, I’ve got court cases I can’t miss.” David.
“Christ. Some working holiday this turned out to be.” Wyatt.
“Oh my god. My study site.” Jayne.
We were a bedraggled bunch, our clothes soaked through and our hair plastered to our heads, when Trevor got us all back into the truck and we headed back the way we came through the wildly flailing branches of the trees overhead and the torrential rains. The windshield wipers weren’t fast enough to put a dent in the rain slamming against the windshield and to the swirling thoughts in my head. I couldn’t get the vision of Stacey out of my mind, her face covered in duct tape, her hands tied. Less than five hours before we had watched a sea turtle together on the beach and had connected with each other on some weird level. Who could have done such a thing and why? I looked around at my seatmates, the thought eating into me that one of them could have done it, must have done it. Or maybe one of the islanders did it.
We all made it back in one piece physically — emotionally I wasn’t going to hazard a guess. Before we got out of the truck into the deaf-making madness of the storm, Darcy asked us all to meet in the dining room in half an hour to discuss strategy. He then got out of the truck and headed in the direction of Stacey’s cabin.
Martha and I made our way to our cabin. The ground was soaked and squishy and was beginning to puddle. There were twigs everywhere and I began to wonder how safe it was to stay here. We hadn’t had time to change out of our wet clothes when Darcy knocked on the door and invited himself in. It was a small cabin with three very wet people streaming water onto the floor. All I wanted to do was to get into some dry clothes and I told Darcy as much. But he didn’t seem to be listening and I got the feeling he was rehearsing what he wanted to say to us. To me, it turned out.
“Stacey told me a bit about you,” he said.
I looked suitably perplexed.
“As director she has certain responsibilities and she had to vet you to make sure you were a bona fide researcher.” He laughed through his nose. “She was kind of paranoid about that.”
When I didn’t respond — how could I? — he continued. “I’m out of my league here. I don’t know how to handle Stacey’s death — murder, I guess. Normally I’d just call the police and have them handle it but I guess that is out of the question, for the time being anyway.” He pushed some wet hair off his cheek. The cabin light flickered.
“You’ve been involved with at least two murder investigations up in Canada, according to Stacey. I was hoping you could help me out here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What do I do about Stacey?”
“Call the police,” I said, knowing what was coming next.
“I will but they can’t come over to the island until the hurricane is over. What do we do? Do we tell everybody or do we keep it a secret?”
I wondered how carrying Stacey up the stairs to the refrigerator could be kept a secret.
“I think we have to tell everyone,” I said.
“They know she is here on the island,” said Martha, “and I don’t think we can keep her death a secret. And why should we?”
“To avoid panic,” said Darcy.
“But we don’t have to tell people she was murdered,” I said.
Before I could say anything more he said, “I would like to ask you if you would tell people what happened and reassure them that everything is okay and to deal with the police.”
I started to protest but he raised his hand to stop me. “You have more authority on the subject of murder than any one of us and we need someone like you right now.”
How could I say no to that?