Martha actually crawled back into bed — 6:00 on the clock — but I was too wide awake so opted for an early morning stroll along the bike trails with my recording equipment. The forest was sopping wet from the torrential downpour and there were large puddles and newly minted miniature lakes across the trail and in the woods. But the air had been washed clean and was lazing around drying itself off as I skirted the water. The birds had already started to sing and I was recording a bunting when I heard the distant putt of an ATV. Having witnessed Trevor’s wild careen around a blind corner I moved to one side of the path and kept walking as the vehicle moved alongside me. I glanced over and saw Jayne yelling over the noise of her machine. I recoiled, thinking she was going to say something nasty to me.
“Want a lift?” It seemed like such an anticlimactic thing to say. But she looked so friendly. She was wearing her curly hair tied back in a bouncy ponytail and looked like she’d be at home on a movie set where she was the star.
“Where are you headed?”
“I’m heading out with my turtles to do some experiments. Want to come?”
I figured I could do two birds with one stone, my research on buntings and my research on Jayne, so I said yes. I loaded my stuff into the back of her trailer. I did wonder why she was being friendly after making it known that she did not want me taking care of Stacey, but she seemed genuine enough.
“Can you do your experiments in this kind of weather?” I said.
“It’s just the sea that’s a mess now and the hatchlings come up no matter the weather — it just has to be warm enough to get them moving. There was a nest that came up last night and they have to be released as soon as I have finished with them, sea or no sea.”
I shrugged, said “Sure,” and clambered on her bike, carefully avoiding the little cooler strapped to the back.
“Bit early for a walk, isn’t it? Or were you doing research?”
“Trying to find buntings,” I said.
“I hope you have better luck than your hit-and-miss shenanigans with murder.”
I chose to ignore the dig and said instead, “How well did you know Stacey?”
“I knew her history, of course. That she studied at both Dalhousie and McGill,” she said. I looked at her then, curious at the undertone in her voice, one that was at the same time matter-of-fact but highly strained, as if both universities were subpar, or maybe she was signalling that Stacey was subpar, or maybe I was reading altogether too much into it.
“As a botanist?” I said.
“Yeah. She was Canadian. I guess that’s why she went to McGill, but she never seemed like one cut out for academe. She was a loner and very hard to get to know. Rumour has it that something happened to her in her teens that soured her outlook on life.”
I hate it when people drop a bomb like that and then don’t follow up. They seem to derive great pleasure in forcing you to ask the big question.
“What happened to her?”
For a moment Jayne looked as though she was going to say something, but she changed her mind and merely shrugged her shoulders so I said, “Did you have a hand in hiring your replacement?”
Jayne shot me a startled look that was quickly hidden by derision. “Stacey’d been coming here for two years — my last two years as director — and the islanders made an executive decision to get rid of me and replace me with her.”
“But I understand you’d burned out.”
Jayne bit her upper lip and let out a long drawn-out sigh. “If that’s what you want to call it,” she said almost bitterly, as she swerved us down a small lane. We were barrelling down the path toward the south end of the island, careening through puddles and small lakes so that by the time we got to where Jayne was going I was sopped. The sun was still brand new on the horizon as I followed her down a trail toward the sea. She was carrying a little cooler carefully under one arm and was squirting something smelly on herself with the other. She turned and offered me some.
“The punkies hate it,” she said.
I hesitated and then took some, remembering how ferocious the punkies were. The stuff smelled like a perfume factory.
When we broke out onto the beach the sea was a roiling mass of spume and splash and spindrift and spray, but the area of the beach where Jayne led me was sheltered from the wind. I watched as she walked over to a giant circle of canvas that had a grid marked on it in Magic Marker, partially hidden by sand. She had her broom with her and carefully swept the sand, deposited by the hurricane, off the canvas. Then I watched as she took a squirming hatchling from the cooler, its elongated front flippers flailing wildly and its smaller rounded rear flippers oaring the air like little rudders. I suppressed the urge to laugh as she gently placed a tiny goggle over one of its eyes, then walked out and placed it in the centre of the grid. She came back and recorded on matching grid paper the exact trail the little hatchling took as it moved off the canvas.
“This little guy has just one goggle so he can’t see out of one eye. See how he is circling, trying to compensate. Turtles without goggles head straight for the sea.”
It was obvious by the intensity of her concentration and the care with which she treated her study subjects just how much the research life meant to her. I looked out to sea and she followed my gaze.
“One good thing about a hurricane: it keeps the shrimp boats from going out,” she said.
“Why are you so against them?” I asked.
“Because they kill my turtles. Collateral damage. They get scooped up in the nets and drown because they can’t get to the surface to breathe.”
“But I thought they had some kind of device to prevent that from happening.”
“Turtle excluder devices, also know as TEDS. Yeah, the shrimpers hate them. They say it decreases their catch and lots of them don’t use them. If they get caught they pay the fine.”
“How would they ever get caught?”
“Luck or an honest observer.”
“Observer?”
“Yeah. They put people on the boats to observe. To make sure any turtles that are caught are given time to get their breath before being put overboard. The shrimpers hate them too. Stacey could have told you a story or two.” She let another little hatchling go and I watched it struggling to get its bearings.
“Stacey?”
“Yeah. She was just put in charge of the observers in this area last year.”
“What sort of stories?”
“Oh, the usual. Bullying tactics, cold shoulders, even sexual harassment. I mean, most shrimpers are good guys, but not all of them.”
“Like Trevor?”
Jayne laughed, but it was a hollow laugh. Without looking at me she took another hatchling and placed it in the centre of the grid. I waited for her to come back to me and I thought she had forgotten what we were talking about but suddenly she said, “Trevor’s like all of them. Out to get a buck even if it means overfishing or causing collateral damage.” She practically spit out the last two words in disdain.
“Did he and Stacey get on?”
“Are you kidding? They hated each other. Despised is more like it.
“Enough to murder Stacey?”
She slowly turned and looked at me.
“Lesser motives have killed better women than Stacey.”
Jayne offered me her ATV to go to the north end and see the lighthouse. I took her up on it, and when I said I’d come back and pick her up she said not to bother, she’d stash her stuff in the hatchery and walk back by the beach, which she assured me was a much shorter route than our jouncy journey through the forest. Every ATV has its own special quirks and it took me awhile to realize I had to jiggle the key and coddle the throttle to get the thing going. It roared to life, shattering the quiet stillness of the morning. It was still early — only 7:00 as I puttered down the leaf-covered trail toward the lighthouse. Once I thought I heard another ATV, but above the noise of my own it could have been my imagination or my own ride playing games on me. Too bad ATVs were so noisy, I thought as I drove under the canopy of live oaks and all the birds that must have been there but I couldn’t hear. I got lost among the warren of roads snaking in and around the lighthouse, but finally spied the sign of a miniature lighthouse with an arrow pointing down yet another identical-looking road. I parked the ATV in a little lay by and heard a bunting so I scrambled around for my equipment and my recorder. I spent the next half hour taping the little guy as he flew in and out of the live oaks right behind the lighthouse.
When I was done I followed a well-trodden path to a clearing and there it was, soaring above the beach and the rolling dunes like the grand old sentinel it was. But it was a sentinel that had seen better days. Its white paint was blistering as the morning sun reflected off it, showcasing all its blemishes. The red stripe that wound itself around the top had faded into a pinkish brown and the catwalk looked like something once sturdy but that you now wouldn’t want to touch, let alone walk on. Part of the lighthouse was covered in a robust-looking vine that twined its way from the bottom to the very top of the structure. I wondered when the lighthouse had been retired and what they do with old and potentially dangerous lighthouses nobody wants anymore.
Just as I was heading for the door I thought I heard an ATV somewhere in the distance, but when I scanned the horizon with my ears I came up empty. The door was a huge solid wood affair, three inches thick, with an opened padlock on it that looked older than the lighthouse. I pushed open the heavy door and peered inside. There was some light streaking in from an out-of-sight second-floor window and I could see the telltale concrete spiral staircase curling up out of sight. There was a huge barrel just inside that seemed to be full of wood and other garbage. I pushed the door open further for the benefit of the light and then started up the staircase. I expected to find it swimming in dust and other debris, but evidently many islanders came here and someone obviously had taken a broom to the stairs quite recently because I could see the strokes. I climbed up to the first window and peered out through the three-foot recessed window ledge. The brilliant white sands of Spaniel Island were so bright in the summer sun that they hurt my eyes. Dunes covered in waving sea grass swept north, where they petered out at high-tide mark. The beach was shallow and the waves had plenty of time to gather speed and energy as they roared down on the sand.
I continued climbing up and was about to place my hand on the sun-filled second window when I found myself looking into the eyes of a rattlesnake, its pupils vertical slits. It was coiled in the sun and staring at me. I wasn’t sure what the striking distance of a rattlesnake was but I was taking no chances. I backed down the stairs, crossed over to the far side, and gingerly made my way up. I tried to picture the snake manoeuvring up the stairs and couldn’t do it. I wondered if it had become lost and then something had frightened it, inspiring it to climb all those stairs. But then, it seemed perfectly content basking in the sun. I reached the second floor, which once must have been the keeper’s living and dining areas — now totally devoid of human life except for me. When I finally reached the top there was a gaping hole where the lamp used to be, but the sun shone in on the bank of windows that encircled the space. It was quite a view of sun and sand and sea and surf and sea grass — so exotic and ageless.
And then I really did hear an ATV coming my way. Had I been in the big city all alone in a deserted lighthouse I would have been on my guard, but this was Spaniel Island; what could happen here? Then I remembered Stacey…. The ATV grew silent and so did I. There was a long scraping noise, followed by the bang of a closing door. The lighthouse door.
I went to the window and looked out. I couldn’t see anyone but I yelled out to let them know I was in the lighthouse. No one stepped back to look up at me. I heard an ATV cough to life. Why would anyone come to the lighthouse for the sole purpose of closing the door? I stood and scanned the area and saw nothing. Curious, I headed back down the stairs, thinking I smelled smoke. And then my heart went in my throat as I thought about the rusty lock and whether it worked or not. But I figured I was getting ahead of myself, as I always seem to do, so I ignored all my inner negative voices and continued down the stairs. The smell of smoke was getting stronger, and by the time I reached the door it was getting hard to breathe. The barrel was on fire, exuding a thick, black, choking smoke. I skirted the fire and went for the door, wary all the time of the rattlesnake. I grabbed the handle and pulled. Nothing. I tried using both hands. Nothing. I checked the state of the hinges. Desperately I looked around for something to fight the fire with — a fire extinguisher would have been good — but there was nothing. I was trapped.
I went back up to the top of the lighthouse to look for would-be rescuers but there was no one. I was on my own. And that’s when I remembered the vine. How hard would that be? I peered out the bank of windows at the catwalk and decided that thinking about it was not going to do me any good. So I wrestled the little door to the catwalk open and gingerly stepped out. Pieces of the floor were missing and I could look right down to the ground, one hundred feet away. It was a dizzying distance but I blocked it out and kept walking, testing my footing at each step, to the place where the vine was. When I reached it it looked kind of puny, but I could see fire shooting out from the door off to my left. The vine had travelled up the lighthouse and wended its way around and out of sight. I took the vine in my hand and tested it. It was thick, about the size of a tennis racquet handle, and it seemed pretty solid. I knew if I thought anymore about it I would lose my nerve. I grabbed the vine in both hands and lowered myself off the ledge. I inched my way over and down, never once looking where I was going. I got into a rhythm, a Zen-like state where the only things that existed were me, the vine, and the lighthouse. And my aching arms. And then it happened. The vine let go; in slow motion it peeled itself and me from the side of the lighthouse and gently descended to earth so that I landed with the same force as a parachutist, rolling to blunt the fall. I lay there on the ground for a while, wondering who had locked me in and why. A loud yell made me look up to see Darcy and Sam on top of what looked like an improvised fire truck — a pickup with a giant water container. Trevor was at the wheel and I watched him manoeuvre the truck close to the lighthouse. I didn’t feel much like helping and they didn’t know I had almost been killed. I figured I’d keep it that way.
It took them awhile to put out the fire but they managed it, in part because there wasn’t any wood inside except for what was in the barrel and the door. It seemed a shame that the door had been destroyed. For all I knew it was the original.
They asked me what had happened but I said I didn’t know. They didn’t press and I left to find my ATV and go back to the relative safety of the research station. I was unnerved by what had just happened to me — could it have been an accident? Not a chance.