I was lost in thought and not trying very hard to get found when I heard someone clear their throat. I looked up to see Wyatt leaning up against the door jamb. I wondered how long he had been there. Instinctively I picked up the lab report and then realized I couldn’t exactly put it back where I found it with him standing there staring at me.
“Do you always snoop around other people’s desks?” He smiled at me, slow, easy, and nasty.
“Do you always sneak up on people unannounced?” I retorted.
“Always,” he said, the smile now reaching his eyes.
“And is that what you were doing when you sneaked up on Stacey and murdered her?” I surprised myself by saying that. I had no evidence to justify the question, especially framed in that way.
I could see the muscles of his cheek start to vibrate as he clenched his jaw. “I was nowhere near her when she died,” he said, his voice low and even. He stared at me. “You have your fucking nerve to accuse me of murder,” he added, his anger barely under control.
“Where were you when she died?”
He suddenly laughed. “Depends on when she died.”
“About three in the morning.”
I could see the contempt in his eyes as he decided whether to answer me or not.
“Three in the morning.” He laughed again. “Where the hell do you think I was at that hour?”
He was digging in his heels for some reason so I took another tack. “Who hired you to come and do the vaccinations?”
He was taken off guard by my change of topic and bit his lip, either in exasperation or annoyance. “The Island Association. They were given a mandate to get the horses vaccinated so they wouldn’t get pregnant. I complied.” He raised his hands and shrugged at the same time, the anger gone like a water drop in fire.
“I understand there were a lot of islanders against the vaccinations.”
“So?”
“So maybe Stacey was against the vaccinations and you didn’t like that.”
He looked at me and laughed. “What sort of godforsaken motive is that?” He laughed again, pushed off from the doorframe, and held out his hand at me. I frowned. “Could you hand me the medical text, please?”
I glanced down at it. It was a book on neurodegenerative diseases and Stacey had stuck her address label on it. I took a deep breath. So this was Stacey’s desk and here was Wyatt wanting something from it before I had had a chance to search it, or at least before the police had.
“I’m no expert but I think it had better just stay where it is until the police come.”
He slowly dropped his hand and then raised it in a salute. “Your wish is my command,” he said, but something stirred behind his eyes like a monster shifting in its sleep, and I watched with some misgiving as he vanished into the hallway, half expecting him to come back and harangue me some more.
I reached for the medical text, wondering why he was so interested. Or perhaps it was because of what was in it — the lab report with the chemical formula. It occurred to me that maybe Stacey had hidden it for some reason. I pulled out the sheet again and looked at it, but my organic chemistry wasn’t up to it. I looked at Stacey’s computer and realized I couldn’t even search the Internet for the formula because it was a diagram. On impulse I folded and pocketed it. I glanced outside. The wind had died down and the rain had stopped. It was dinnertime, but I didn’t feel like eating after seeing Stacey dumped in the cooler so I closed her door and then couldn’t figure out how to seal the room from intruders.
“Just about everyone has access to all these doors.” Darcy was walking down the corridor toward me and doing a good job of reading my mind again.
As he approached he pulled out a hasp lock like the one we had used on Stacey’s cabin, and began screwing it into place.
“It seems ridiculous to do this,” he said, “but I guess with Stacey’s killer still out there it’s for the best.” He put the screwdriver back in his pocket and fished out another pint-sized lock with two keys. He handed one key to me, hesitated a moment, and then handed the other one to me as well.
“Best you keep them both,” he said. “I don’t want anyone accusing me of tampering with the evidence and you are pretty much in the clear for this murder.”
“That’s not what you said earlier,” I pointed out.
He sighed. “Sorry about that. I was kind of traumatized. In hindsight it’s pretty hard to believe that you would kill a complete stranger and have no motive, unless of course you are a contract killer?”
I laughed. But I had the strange feeling that he was half in jest and all in earnest.
I changed the subject. “Can you walk me through the evacuation protocol?”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Who gets the call to evacuate?”
“We’ve already been through this.”
“Humour me.”
“Stacey gets the call and then she alerts me and I’m supposed to organize everybody.”
“So what happened the other night? How did she sound?”
I saw a look of puzzlement and then something else flit across his face before he said, “She texted me.”
“She texted you? Something as important as that and she texted you? Why didn’t you say that earlier?”
“Yeah, it does seem odd now that you mention it, but she knows I carry my cellphone everywhere I go and that I wouldn’t miss a call. My beeper sounds like a turbo jet at that hour of the morning. She just told me to take care of the evacuation, that she was going to stay and take care of the station.”
“Why did you ask me to go and get her then?”
“I was hoping she’d change her mind.”
He shrugged and started to turn away.
“What was the last text message from her besides the evacuation alert?”
“Why would you want to know that?”
“Because maybe we can pinpoint the time of death better.”
“She didn’t text me but she did call me around 11:30.” He laughed.
“She said she had spilled her box of crickets all over the floor and they were driving her crazy. She wanted to know if I had any useful ideas of how to get them all.”
“And did you?”
“No. I just told her she’d have to stomp on them. I couldn’t stop laughing though. Those crickets are as loud as hell.”
“What was she doing with a whole bunch of crickets?”
“They were Roger’s food,” he said unhelpfully. When I looked puzzled he said, “Her snake.”
“I never saw a snake in her cabin,” I said.
“I let Mel take it.”
I wondered what else he’d let people take before I’d secured the scene, but I dropped it and said, “Do you know if she had any enemies, anyone who would want to kill her?”
He looked at me strangely, and I thought maybe he hadn’t heard, but he sighed and said, “She had people who didn’t like her, but no one who would have wanted to kill her. I mean, that is kind of drastic, isn’t it?” He pinned me with his moss green eyes and then looked away. “I’ve got to go.”
I touched his arm and he turned back to me, struggling to control his impatience.
I pulled out the little diagram and carefully unfolded it. “Do you have any idea what this means?” I handed it to him and was surprised by the furtive look on his face as he took it from me.
“Where did you get this?” he asked.
Before I could answer Sam came out of the next office and swept us down the hall to dinner, but not before I snatched the paper back from Darcy just as it was about to disappear into his pocket. He glanced at me, flustered, but he let me take the paper. I thought we were done then, but he hung back and said, “I don’t think you need to try and solve this crime, Cordi. All I meant was for you to liaise with the police and oversee the sealing of the crime scene.” And he smiled then, a smile so fast and fleeting that I barely saw it before he walked down the hall, his hands clenched at his sides.
I still didn’t feel like dinner so I bailed out and headed back to my cabin, where I lay down and thought about Stacey until I fell asleep.
A humungous snort from Martha woke me up at about 5:00 in the morning and I couldn’t get back to sleep, even though I wanted to. The sky was just beginning to lighten and the wind was now just a dull moan through the trees. It seemed that the hurricane had veered and missed us almost completely, but the mainland had not been so lucky. I looked over at Martha, who was sleeping with wild abandon, her arms flung out above her head and her dark curly hair sprawled all over the pillow. I wondered how I had managed to sleep through her coming home last night. It occurred to me that if I could sleep through that then probably anyone with a roommate could conceivably sleep through it too. Doubly so if they were heavy sleepers.
It took me all of two minutes to get dressed and snag a long-sleeved jacket — more for the bugs than the temperature — and exit the cabin, holding the screen door as I shut it so it wouldn’t bang. I was headed toward the stairs to the mess when movement caught my eye. Someone was sneaking between two cabins, slowly, as though they didn’t want to be caught. I stopped and squinted through the brush but I couldn’t make out who it was and they had stopped moving, like a deer on the alert. I almost turned away, but something prompted me to move in the direction of whoever it was and say good morning in a loud whisper. The figure remained still for some five seconds and then slowly walked out of the shadows toward me. It was Rosemary. The dawn caught her red hair, burnishing it like fire and lighting up the lemon yellow of the jacket she had draped around her neck.
She nodded at me. “Hello, Cordi,” she said in a voice that made it sound as though she wished she were anywhere but with me. She was wearing a pair of enormous sunglasses but even they could not hide the new purple welt under her left eye. Involuntarily I gasped and she seemed to shrink to an even smaller size than she already was.
“Who did this to you?” I asked.
“No one,” she said defiantly.
“Another cabin door?” It was mean, but I felt I had to say it. When she didn’t answer I said, “You don’t have to go through this alone, you know. There are people who can help you.”
She looked at me then with a faraway gaze that made me realize I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. She was trapped by something that I could only fathom.
I tried another tack. “How long has this been going on?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what you are talking about.” But I could tell by her eyes that she knew exactly what I was saying.
“You don’t have to live like this.”
“Live like what? I’m just a klutz, that’s all.”
“A klutz who gets beaten on a regular basis.”
She suppressed a sob and looked at me with some desperation. Time ticked by and I thought I heard a Painted Bunting somewhere in the distance and realized I should be in the field.
“I don’t know what to do,” she abruptly said as she reached her hand up under her glasses and wiped her eye. “Wyatt doesn’t mean to …” She put her hand over her mouth as if she had said too much.
I wondered what sort of man could do this to such a vulnerable young woman, what kind of man would think it all right to beat the hell out of her.
“You have choices,” I said, wondering if I should hug her or something.
“You don’t understand,” she cried out in a wailing moan. “I have no choices.”
“You always have choices,” I said.
“Not when I love him.” She turned and started running toward her cabin, her lemon yellow jacket flapping in the breeze, making her look like the sad and sorry apparition that she was.
I sat down on the bottom steps up to the mess and gazed across at the live oaks, their leaves shattering the newborn sunlight into a hundred thousand shards. It was odd not to hear the roaring of the wind, and I wondered what the seas were like and when the police would come.
“Penny for your thoughts?”
I looked up to find David standing over me.
“You’re up early,” I said.
“I could say the same for you.”
I went for the jugular. “Was your sister ill?”
I saw him clench his jaw as he opened his hands in an all-encompassing gesture, saying, “Not that I know of — I mean other than the flu.”
“It’s just that I saw some medical textbooks under her bed — not the sort of thing a botanist would keep, don’t you think?”
“She had a lot of interests. What can I say?”
“That she was a whole hell of a lot sicker than anyone knew. You were her brother. You of all people would know.” I wondered why I was pushing so hard, why it was important but all I could see was that pasty white complexion and the dull eyes of someone very ill. My grandmother had looked like that in the months before she died.
David gave a little snort and smoothed back his white circlet of hair. “I don’t really see what Stacey’s health, ill or otherwise, has to do with her death. She was suffocated.”
I must say I actually shared David’s sentiments, but if I have learned anything in the investigation of a murder it’s that anything goes and any question could lead to the solving of the crime. So I up and said, “Was she depressed?”
David looked at me with a puzzled look that melted into patient resignation. “No more than usual. She’s carried her depression around with her half her life, almost like a trophy sometimes.”
I bristled at that — anyone who has ever suffered from depression would never call it a trophy, an albatross maybe but never a trophy. I was beginning to see why brother and sister did not see eye to eye.
“Where are you going with this anyway?” he asked.
“Just trying to get as many facts as I can and hope that some of them turn out to be relevant.”
“I don’t know why you’re even bothering. The police will be here in a few days. Leave it to them.”
He turned to go but I said, “Where were you when your sister was murdered?”
“You’ve got to be kidding. You think I killed my sister?”
“I’m just trying to rule you out.”
“Well, good luck doing that with me or anyone else for that matter. We were all in bed asleep.”
“Do you have a roommate?”
“No, as a matter of fact I don’t.”
“Too bad,” I said. “They might have given you an alibi. What were you talking about to Stacey when you first arrived on the island?”
“Regular nosey-parker aren’t you?” he said.
“She seemed shocked by whatever you were telling her.”
“And whatever I was telling her will remain between her and me.” He turned then to go up the stairs and I let him go.
I suddenly didn’t feel like going up to the mess so I headed back to the cabin.
“Lord love a duck, Cordi, what are you doing up already? Even the birds aren’t chirping yet.” A robin gurgled somewhere right outside our cabin and she shrugged.
I sat down on my bed — there was nowhere else to sit — and looked out the window, wondering why I felt so flat. Martha turned on the light and sat down on her bed facing me. She was just about to say something when a voice came out of nowhere, catapulting my heart against my chest like a battering ram. I really was keyed up and could only guess that I was still in some kind of shock after seeing Stacey.
“Cordi, Martha, it’s me.” The voice was whispery.
Who the hell was me? I wondered, as the whisperer answered my question. “Duncan.” What the hell was he doing up so early? Everyone seemed to be awake and I just wanted to go back to sleep.
Martha got up and let him in. “Couldn’t sleep,” he said. He did not look much better than I felt, and his gargantuan nose was peeling from sunburn. It looked like a potato shedding its skin. I looked at the two of them sitting side by side so comfortably and wondered if they would ever marry, or maybe it worked precisely because it was a long-distance relationship with Martha in Ottawa and Duncan an hour’s drive away. I thought about the man I thought had loved me, whose job took him away to England. It seemed unbearably sad that we had been unable to make it work, when there had been so much promise.
“Paging Cordi. Come in, Cordi.” Duncan’s voice brought me back and I marvelled at how easily the mind can take you down dark, treacherous roads, unmarked and best untravelled. Dangerous place, the mind.
“Okay, Cordi,” said Duncan, “unlike our other cases this one was definitely not made to look like an accident. Hands and feet tied, mouth and nose plastered in duct tape.”
“What about her wrists? They were chafed,” I said.
“Only what you would expect from someone struggling for her life.” He paused and then said, “She was a sentimental woman.”
“How so?”
“She wore a locket around her neck.”
I remembered the locket.
“Guess what was in it?”
“A picture of Leonard Cohen?” said Martha.
Duncan grimaced. “A lock of hair,” he said.
I wondered about that.
“Probably her own,” said Martha.
“Why would you say that? She doesn’t strike me as being a woman who would wear her own hair around her neck,” I said.
Duncan chuckled.
“Okay, okay, except when it’s attached to her head.”
“Well, whoever’s hair it is, it’s baby hair,” observed Duncan.
“How do you know that?”
“I can’t know for sure, but it’s thin and very soft, not like adult hair at all.”
At that we lapsed into silence until Martha blurted out, “Okay, so Duncan says she died at 3:00 in the morning when everyone was asleep. Why didn’t anyone know sooner than 4:00 when Cordi stumbled on her?”
Duncan and I blinked at Martha and waited politely for her to explain herself.
“She’s the head of the station. The evacuation alert would have gone through her first. That was the time she died — around 3:00 because we evacuated at 4:00. Presumably when they couldn’t raise her they would have phoned someone else, my bet’s Darcy, who surely would have gone to see why she hadn’t responded to an emergency phone call.”
“She texted him.”
“She texted him?”
“Darcy was surprised at that too but he just did what he was told.”
“You know what that means don’t you?” said Duncan.
“That we can’t know for sure that the message came from Stacey.”
“You mean the murderer could have sent it? Why would they do that?”
“To buy time,” I said. “If the evacuation had gone as planned and Stacey had stayed behind it would have been days before she was found. Darcy says she texted him that she was not evacuating and to go without her.”
Martha slapped her knee in frustration. “And hardly anybody is going to have an alibi for this murder. It was the middle of the night and everyone was asleep.”
She had a point. We probably wouldn’t be able to eliminate anybody, but I’d still have to ask just in case.
“So why would anyone want to kill her?” asked Duncan. “I mean, what do we know about her?”
“Pretty much nothing at this point. It’s all questions,” said Martha.
“She didn’t seem like someone who would have people wanting to kill her. Actually, she just seemed sick,” I said.
“She was sick,” said Martha. “Darcy told me she’d been sick for the last five days with some kind of stomach flu and that she only surfaced when we arrived.”
I knew that already but I remembered the medical texts under her bed and wondered if she’d been consulting them over her flu bug. Had she been a hypochondriac? And was that even pertinent?
“So that’s why she hadn’t met Wyatt, even though he’d been on the island for two days?”
“Yeah, that did seem strange, the manner of their meeting.” She made it sound so ominous that I started laughing.
“How can you laugh, Cordi? You are probably the last one to have seen her alive.”
I stopped laughing as I realized, with an acrobatic leap of my stomach, that she was likely right.
“Besides the killer,” I corrected her while trying to marshal my thoughts.
“Jesus, Cordi, you don’t think that I think you killed her?” said Martha in consternation.
I shook my head. “No. But others might. You have to admit it doesn’t look good. I arrive back with Stacey at about 11:15, at 11:30 she calls Darcy about the crickets, and by 3:00 she is dead, having just texted Darcy — or her killer having done so.”
“That’s still a lot of hours unaccounted for,” said Martha.
Duncan shuffled his feet and stood up. “Looks like the two of you have your work cut out for you.”
He was almost out the door when I remembered the chemical formula. I hauled it out of my pocket, smoothed it out, and handed it to Duncan. “What is it?” I asked as he peered at it closely.
He took his own sweet time before answering. “Sugar,” he said. “Simple unadulterated sugar.”