I called Duncan’s name but the wind just sucked it up before it even had a chance to leave my mouth. When I got closer I could see that the tree had fallen across one end of the building from front to rear, buckling it. A set of stairs wound their way up to the house like miniature switchbacks. I looked at them carefully. They didn’t seem to have tilted or swayed out of true so I cautiously began to climb them, calling Duncan’s name, more out of the need to be useful than for the good it would do.
For some reason I started counting the number of steps as I climbed them, the rain clouding my goggles and the wind slashing at my face in fits and starts. At one point I heard the tree groan and shift and thought I heard someone cry out. When I finally reached the top the house looked untouched from where I stood, the front door snug in its frame, the windows unharmed. I opened the door and walked in. It smelled like hamburgers and French fries, which made me feel quite desperate, and I called out his name again. His cottage was a bungalow, long and lean, and the tree had taken out the living-room wall and whatever lay beyond it. It had also knocked over a large corner cupboard that was now partially held up by a corner of the sofa. As I moved into his living room I could see the tree, its wet, glistening bark making it look like some monstrous creature, its limbs so incongruous inside the house. I called his name again.
“Get me the god damned hell out of here.” His gruff, muffled, and angry voice came from somewhere behind the sofa and to me, in that moment, it sounded like a symphony. I moved quickly, rounded the sofa and there he was, sprawled on the floor, both his legs pinned by the weight of the corner cupboard. It had fallen sideways across him and as I came around to help him he said, “You’re going to have to get my car jack down in the garage. You’ll never be able to lift it yourself. It’s solid oak.”
“Are they broken?”
“My legs? No, I don’t think so. The sofa broke the fall, not my legs.”
I left then. On the way back up with the jack I counted more stairs than I had the first time.
I positioned the jack at the top and middle of the cupboard and started ratcheting it up. I went slowly, afraid I was going to hurt him, but Duncan told me to speed things up, so I did. Once his legs were free he insisted upon extricating himself without my help and plopping down into his sofa with a huge sigh.
“What took you so long?” he said and smiled.
“How long?” I said.
“How long what?” but I knew he knew what I meant.
“Two hours, give or take, and don’t go telling me I should have evacuated because unless my eyes are deceiving me you haven’t evacuated either.”
“Lucky for you.” It came out sounding sarcastic but it was anything but. “You could have died here,” I said. “It could have been a week before anyone found you.”
“Not with friends like you, Cordi.”
“But I wasn’t around those other times you didn’t evacuate.”
“And I didn’t get pinned by a tree.”
“You’re incorrigible, Duncan.” I gave him a hug.
He started gingerly rubbing the circulation back into his legs. “Nothing broken,” he said, “but they’re going to be awfully sore for a while.” He shifted his weight on the sofa and turned to look at me.
“Why did you come?” he asked.
“How well do you know Stacey?”
“Not well. We say hello when we meet on the beach, but that’s about it. Why?”
“I found her dead in her cabin early this morning.”
He sighed. “Too bad, but she really didn’t look very well this visit. I suppose that’s why you’re here. You want me to come and tell you how she died since the police won’t be coming out in this weather.”
“Oh, we already know how she died, Duncan.”
He raised his hairy eyebrows at me.
“She was murdered.”
The eyebrows plummeted into a scowl. “Oh c’mon, Cordi. Not again.”
I thought about my last murder investigation, onboard an Arctic cruise ship, and how Duncan and Martha hadn’t believed me when I cried murder. This time it was more cut and dried though.
“It’s the real thing, Duncan. She was suffocated.” I filled him in on all the details of the crime scene as he slowly got to his feet and tried out his legs.
“So you’re saying someone comes to her cabin and knocks her out with gauze soaked presumably in chloroform. They then tie her arms to the chair and duct tape her mouth and nose shut. Jesus. Why would someone do that?”
“That’s what we have to find out.”
“We?”
“Well, I’ve been appointed the person in charge of the investigation until the police come and we need a TOD before we move her into a refrigerator.”
“How on earth is she going to fit into a refrigerator?” asked Duncan.
“It’s a walk-in,” I said, and he grimaced. “Will you come?”
He looked around at the wreck of his cottage and sighed. “Well, I can’t stay here,” he said, and as if to accent his observation the tree shifted again and his once cozy little cottage shuddered in sympathy.
It took me awhile to find Duncan’s medical bag — he wouldn’t leave without it — and it took Duncan a long time to get down all those stairs. Getting his leg up and over my bike to straddle it left us both sweating but he did it, and we made it back to the station as the wind strengthened. I wondered how much stronger it would get and decided that that line of thinking was counterproductive. I led Duncan straight to Stacey’s cabin but it took me awhile to key in the combo since the rain kept getting in my eyes. I had left my goggles at Duncan’s.
Duncan was getting impatient by the time I finally got it. “Dear Cordi, that lock wouldn’t stop a feather.”
This time I had a response to that observation. “It’s the authority it represents that counts,” I said. I left him there with his medical bag to go and get help with Stacey and find out where Duncan could sleep for the night. Outside was a howling madhouse and getting worse by the second as I braced myself against the wind and staggered to the stairs. It must have been 6:00 in the afternoon — dinnertime — but it felt more like 10:00 because it was so dark.
I struggled up the stairs and into the dining room, shutting the door on the hurricane with relief. The room was full. Everyone seemed to have congregated here rather than be alone in their cabins, or maybe they were just waiting for dinner. Darcy caught sight of me, and extricated himself from a conversation with Sam, and came to join me.
“Duncan’s down with Stacey,” I said. “We need help carrying her up.” I scanned the room. This was not the time for women’s lib — this was the time for male strength. Wyatt and Darcy were there and so were David and Trevor.
“People,” Darcy’s voice rang out and the rumble of conversation ceased. “The coroner’s here and he’s looking at Stacey right now. We need a contingent to help carry her up to the fridge. I’m in. Who else is?”
David put up his hand. I looked over at Trevor, who shrugged and said, “Bad back. Sorry.” I wondered if a shrimper could shrimp with a bad back. I looked at Wyatt, who just stared at Darcy as if he was a particularly interesting species of cockroach.
Darcy stared him down and said, “Wyatt?”
Wyatt dragged a hand down his face. “In the interests of all our backs, not to mention crime-scene protocol, I think she should stay where she is until the police come.”
Darcy hesitated and then regrouped. “In the interests of dignity, she needs to be brought up here.”
“Has anyone called the police on this one?” retorted Wyatt.
Darcy inclined his head at me and I had one of those moments of panic when you are not sure what to say. I had forgotten to try after that first attempt.
Darcy coughed and turned back to Wyatt, after giving me a wild glance. “There’s no cellphone service,” he said.
“Rather convenient, isn’t it?” asked Wyatt.
“I’m not sure what you are getting at.”
“Maybe you murdered Stacey or Ms Cordi O’Callaghan did and destroying the crime scene will destroy any evidence against you.”
Darcy stood with his jaw resting on his chest and I leapt in. “Every inch of Stacey’s cabin and Stacey herself has now been systematically photographed and the pathologist is looking at Stacey right now. We will only be moving her — the rest of the crime scene will be intact.”
“Don’t get your knickers in such a knot,” said Wyatt with a smile, which of course just made me more defensive. “Let’s get on with it or we’ll miss dinner,” he said. I looked over at David to see his reaction to all this but he had turned his back to us and was peering out the rain-soaked window.
“Whoever helps with Stacey is excused from helping to make dinner tonight,” said Darcy. I raised an eyebrow at him. It seemed a rather insensitive thing to say, given the circumstances. He misconstrued my raised eyebrow and said, “The cooks left on the last boat.”
That meant we’d all have to pitch in to feed ourselves. I wondered for a moment what sort of meals these disparate people were capable of making. Food has its own fingerprints, its own life, and it could reveal a lot about a person. Meat and potatoes: conservative, doesn’t like surprises; spicy food: a traveller, adventurous; raw squid and goat’s blood: an extreme eater. But on second thought maybe it was less like fingerprints and more like astrology.
“Time to go get Stacey,” said Darcy and headed for the door. As I stepped outside after him it was as if nature lay coiled like a snake waiting to strike, her ragtag band of wind and rain and clouds all waiting in the shadows, ready. Someone gripped my shoulder hard and said, “Stairs are for walking down.” I turned and caught a glimpse of Wyatt behind me before I headed down the stairs.
I caught up to Darcy at the bottom of the stairs as he tried to skirt the large puddle that had sprouted there. “Why haven’t you called the police?” he asked, trying to keep his voice flat and cold but failing miserably. He was just too friendly a guy to hold grudges.
“There really was no cell service,” I said lamely. “And then I forgot.”
“How can you forget something as momentous as murder, unless perhaps you wanted to.” He pinned me with his accusing eyes.
“Jesus. You think I killed her?” I squawked. His face softened as he looked at me and shrugged, but he didn’t retract the question and I didn’t deign to answer.
Duncan was sitting on Stacey’s bed, writing in a notebook, when Darcy opened the door and we both walked in, leaving the rest of our contingent standing in the doorway — there wasn’t enough room for them to come in. I introduced them all to Duncan, who nodded his head in acknowledgement and said, “She was suffocated.”
Wyatt snorted and loudly whispered, “We knew that already.”
Duncan looked up and stared at him. Even an iron rod would have withered under that look, but Wyatt was unfazed and just snorted again.
“As I was saying,” Duncan continued, “she was suffocated. Probably around 3:00 a.m., judging by her core body temperature.”
He looked at me. “Looks like we have another murder, Cordi.”
“Another?” asked Wyatt in a startled voice.
“He doesn’t mean another one here on the island,” Darcy said defensively.
“God, no,” said Duncan as he eyeballed Wyatt. “Cordi here has two solved murders under her belt. I was referring to those.”
Wyatt made a point of looking at my belt, but he kept quiet. I looked at them all standing there and wondered if any of them was about to help carry up the body of the woman they had murdered. It sent a jolt through me to realize we were trapped on a deserted barrier island with a murderer roaming free. Darcy cleared his throat and said, “Let’s move her.”
She was in full rigor. The four of us each took a leg or a shoulder, but she was stiff and unwieldy and very heavy. As I struggled with my side of her we exited the cabin and headed for the stairs. Duncan had tried to take my place but I had vetoed him — not only was he terribly unfit with a heart condition but he had just sustained a blow to his legs and his ego, both of which must have been painful. He contented himself with directing us up the stairs, which were suddenly way narrower than I remembered. We carried Stacey, frozen into position as if sitting in a chair, which of course she had once been, and made it up the stairs without a stop — not that we could have stopped even if we had wanted to. Putting her down on the stairs would have meant picking her up again.
We arrived in the dining room, hot, dishevelled, and out of breath. We sat her down in a chair and stood back to catch our breath. She sat there with her chin on her chest as if she had dozed off. She was wearing very feminine pink rose pajamas, and I wondered with sadness if she had ever worn them for someone else or were they just for herself, or for the memory of someone long gone, or someone long lost? I could see her raw, bare wrists and the MedicAlert necklace grasped in her hand. Her feet were bare. Had she been awakened to her death or had she already been awake to confront her murderer? Had she struggled? I thought back to the cabin before we mucked it up. It hadn’t looked as if a struggle had taken place. That might have been because of the chloroform.
“Let’s get this done, folks,” said Darcy, interrupting my line of thought.
Someone had cleaned out the cooler and it was pretty straightforward moving her in there. I wondered how many times she had come to this very cooler for a pop or a sandwich and if she had ever had even an inkling that she would end up here, beside the cheese and the Diet Pepsi. It was somewhat anticlimactic afterward, when we gathered outside the cooler. We all had a drink together but everybody was guarded because the one topic we all wanted to talk about was fraught with fear and guilt. We each drifted off and I wandered down the hall to call the police in privacy. I’d put it off for long enough, and I wondered if Darcy really believed I had killed her based on the fact that I hadn’t called the police.
I poked my nose into an empty lab and sat down at a desk full of papers. I picked up the phone. I was actually surprised to get a dial tone and nearly hung up, but I resisted the urge — after all, the phone call had to be made. When I said I had a murder to report I was put through to a Detective Kennedy. While I was waiting I scanned the desk I was sitting at. There was a paper poking out from inside a medical textbook. I tugged on it, glanced about guiltily, and then looked at it. It was a lab report with Sam’s signature, detailing the makeup of some substance that was foreign to me. And a second sheet with a diagram of a chemical formula. The results looked benign and I lost interest as Detective Kennedy came on the line.
“Tell me everything,” he said, and I could hear the soft tap-tap sound of a computer keyboard as he inputted my somewhat creatively edited story. He interrupted me a number of times to clarify some things and then said, “It’s anarchy here on the mainland. I won’t be able to send a team out for at least three days. We’re too busy rescuing the injured to do anything about the dead.”
“Three days?” I asked, thinking about Stacey in the cooler.
“You’ll need to secure the crime scene. Don’t touch anything, or move anything until we get there.”
Okay. So I forgot to tell him everything, I thought, wondering what to say now. I thought about Stacey and blurted out — “What about Stacey?”
“Who’s Stacey?”
“The murder victim,” I said impatiently.
“The alleged murder victim,” he said, and I made a face at the phone. “Don’t touch her.”
“But it’s forty degrees Celcius outside,” I pleaded.
Before I could say anything more he begged off saying he had an important call coming through and he had to take it.
I hung up and stared at my cell, thinking about Stacey and the cooler. And what the cops would say when they heard the truth.