Jayne’s ATV was sitting where I left it, minus a whole lot of air from one of the tires. As I got closer I could tell it had been slashed and I felt this creepy little chill go down my spine. What the hell was going on? It could be a case of mistaken identity. Whoever was after me might have thought I was Jayne. But why would anyone be after Jayne? I kicked the tire hard — it felt good to do something so useless — and then I headed back up in search of help. Sam and Darcy were gone but Trevor’s truck was still in front of the lighthouse. I could see him leaning against it, having a death-defying smoke.
“All out?” I asked.
“Yeah. But if it had been my call I would have let it burn.”
“But it’s a historic building,” I said.
“Exactly. People latch onto anything historical, throwing money and time at these albatrosses. They’re sieves for money that should go elsewhere. Look at the thing. It’s falling apart. It should be left to die a dignified death. Now it’s just a death trap.”
I looked at him quickly — could he have locked me in? — but he was idly contemplating his smelly cigarette.
“I need a ride back to the research station, if you can give me one.”
“Where’s your ride?”
“Flat tire.”
“Let’s have a look.”
He reached into the truck and pulled out a small bag. I led him back to Jayne’s ATV.
He let out a long, low whistle. “Jesus. Who did that?” he asked. He went up and kicked the tire. “Can’t fix this. You’ll need a whole new tire.” He stood back and looked at the tire as if that would fix it, then said, “Hey, this is Jayne’s vehicle.”
“She lent it to me this morning.” I watched him closely as he rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand.
“Why would anyone want to do that to her ATV?”
“Does Jayne have any enemies?”
“Yeah. Me. But I wasn’t anywhere near here.” At least he was honest.
It dawned on him that I might misconstrue his remarks, and he added hurriedly, “I’d never do something like that, not in a million years.”
What about two million, I thought uncharitably. Out loud I asked, “Why do you say you are Jayne’s enemy?”
“She’s a fucking enviro nut job. All living things are more important to her than humans. She’ll save the life of a single turtle even if it means sending a child to bed hungry.”
“And is that what she did?”
“What?”
“Send a child to bed hungry.”
“Damn right she did and the child was mine!” He flicked his cigarette on the ground and stomped on it.
“I’m a shrimper, or I was until Jayne and Stacey came along moaning about the poor little sea turtles. They’re the kind of bleeding hearts who were responsible for the TEDs and now the observers. It’s harder and harder to make a living and the rules just get more and more ridiculous. I was hoping my kids would take over the boat when I retire, but there’s nothing there for them.”
What do you say to a man whose livelihood is threatened by conservation? Go find another job? Take it on the chin for the rest of humanity? There are no easy answers, just easy scapegoats.
“Stacey and Jayne worked on sea turtles together?”
“It was the only thing they ever agreed on, as far as I know. Both gaga over the creatures. I tell you it is not healthy when grown women take the side of a marine animal over the livelihoods of shrimpers. It’s criminal.”
“How do you save them then?” I asked and immediately regretted it.
“You don’t,” he said. I thought about all the good arguments to save creatures like sea turtles, the diversity of life, the potential cures for diseases, the esthetics, but I knew he wouldn’t listen to me.
“What was their involvement?”
“Well, Jayne does research and both of them did letter-writing campaigns and things like that. Stacey went to bat for the observer program without ever asking shrimpers what it might be like to have landlubbers on their boats.”
“I understand Stacey is head of that program now?”
“She made our lives miserable, always pushing for more and more observers. That and her fucking brother, always trying to win me over to the cause. Spies, that’s all those observers are, and it makes us feel like scum to be treated like suspects. And Stacey was the worst, the most vocal, the most emotional, and the most vindictive in her dealings with us. Jayne was an angel compared to Stacey.”
“Sounds like she made a lot of enemies.”
“You’d better believe it.”
“Is a sea turtle worth dying for?”
“Stacey seemed to think it was.”
“And you?”
He smiled then and said, “If you are insinuating that I killed Stacey over a sea turtle then you are delusional.”
“And if you killed Stacey so your children would not go to bed hungry?”
He stared at me hard and then turned and walked away.
So much for my ride.
I decided to walk back along the beach and skirted the lighthouse to get there. It still looked the same but I caught the whiff of the dank, acrid smoke that had chased me up to the catwalk. I wondered if Trevor could hate Jayne enough to do such a thing.
Judging by the sun and the heat it was around noon. I walked through a series of undulating dunes, some the size of a small car and others the size of a tractor. This was the north end of the island where the wind wandered through the dunes with reckless abandon, shaping them, shifting them, and sometimes obliterating them. There was no time for a little grass seedling to take hold, so they were naked and highly vulnerable to erosion. This particular barrier island was being eaten by the wind at the north end and built up by the wind at the south end. An island in a constant state of flux — sort of like me.
I broke out of the dunes and the beach lay before me, a white band of sand. Below the high-tide mark was a black band of compact sand, as hard as a road and as wide as a four-lane highway on a bit of a tilt. The waves were pounding in and I wondered when it would ever let up. All that power crashing on the beach and dissipating. I wondered how many people had ever thought to harness the surf.
I hiked along the wave line for a while but there wasn’t much being kicked up. A few shells, a dead horseshoe crab, and a dead seagull were about it. I headed back up above the high-tide mark thinking there would be better pickings, when I heard a putt putt and turned to look behind me. The sun was in my eyes and it wasn’t until the Land Rover had come up alongside me that I realized it was Sam. I eyeballed the Land Rover — a series II — and realized it must be one of a very few trucks on the island. Most of the vehicles were ATVs.
Sam killed the motor but the sound of the surf had him yelling at me to be heard. “Trevor told me you needed a lift,” he said. I was surprised. I hadn’t expected that of Trevor. And where had Sam got himself another ride?
I accepted the ride because it was a chance to talk to Sam. He flapped his hand in the direction of the passenger seat and I clambered in as he moved some of his batting equipment out of the way.
We drove along the hard-packed sand, leaving barely a trace of our passage. Sam pointed at something up ahead. The tide was going out and the waves had withdrawn, leaving behind a dark object that rolled and tumbled with each passing wave. Sam drove up and circled it — a dead sea turtle. The shell was massive and was carved up by something sharp, the marks cutting across the shell seemingly at random. The enormous head was badly disfigured.
I looked up at Sam. He was shaking his head. When he saw me looking at him he said, “We are the single biggest predator of sea turtles.”
I waited for more but he bent down and freed one of the creature’s flippers from some seaweed. His hand gently touched a bright yellow tag attached to the flipper.
“One of ours,” he said and he got a pad of paper to write the number down. “God damn it.” He angrily stuffed the paper into his pocket and looked at me. “This is what happens when a loggerhead sea turtle meets the propeller blades of a boat. No competition. The turtle loses every time. They can’t win, what with the shrimping nets and the propeller blades, the odds are against them big time.”
Stacey, Jayne, now Sam on the one side. Trevor on the other. A lot of hot blood. Had any of it spilled over into Stacey’s death?
Sam didn’t say much as we drove down the beach, then headed up into the dunes and then down into the interior of the island. After the roar of the wind and the waves it was deathly quiet in the woods.
“I just have to check one of my roosts,” he said and swung the truck down a tiny trail that opened into a clearing. Sam pointed to an old wooden two-storey house. “The Amoses own this cottage and my bats roost in their attic. They want to exterminate them so I don’t have much longer to work with them.” He pointed off to my left. “That’s Stacey’s cottage.”
I turned to look through the woods at what looked like a tiny wooden cottage painted slate blue.
“Don’t know why she bought it,” he said as he got out of the Land Rover and pulled a backpack out of the back. “Except for the last five days she hardly ever used it. She was married to her job. Hated being away from it all. But then sometimes she’d drop everything and come to the cottage. Sort of like an escape, I guess, but a very expensive one.”
I looked up at the cottage, which was ninety percent window, and as I did someone came out of the front door. They were backlit and I had no idea who it was until Sam yelled, “Hey, Melanie! What are you doing here?” His voice was harsh and not at all friendly.
Just the question I would have asked. I kicked myself for not having secured the cottage as a secondary crime scene. But then, how could I have kept anyone away if they were really determined? Melanie came down the stairs, backpack over her shoulder, and said “Hi,” but I noticed she avoided answering Sam’s question.
“Can’t stay,” she said. “I’ve got a snake to follow.”
We watched as she walked down the pathway to Stacey’s cottage and out of sight.
“Where is her bike?” Sam asked.
Interesting question. Had she been sneaking about on foot, hoping to go unnoticed?
I looked back up at Stacey’s cottage and wondered what her last few days had been like. What had happened to her that had led to murder?
“What happened in Stacey’s last five days?” I said.
“Dunno.”
“I thought she had the flu.”
“That’s what she said she had, but there was some other reason why she wanted to disappear for a while.” He swung his backpack over one shoulder and had turned to go when I called him back.
I pulled his lab report out of my pocket and silently handed it to him.
“What were you analyzing when you got sugar?”
He took the piece of paper from me and scrutinized it for a long while, buying himself some time to respond.
“Just doodling around,” he said. “Wanted to know if I could still remember the diagram for sugar.”
Sam was a terrible liar. I snorted. He looked at me as if weighing his options.
“Okay. Okay,” he said. “Stacey asked me to analyze something for her and I did. That’s all.”
“And you had no idea what you were analyzing?”
Sam looked at me as if to size me up and then said, “Look, she wanted it kept secret. Asked me not to tell anyone.”
“But she is dead now. Surely she wouldn’t mind if you told me, especially if it catches her killer.”
Sam looked down at the ground and then back up at me. “It was Wyatt’s vaccine.” It took a bit of time to digest that.
“Wyatt’s vaccine is sugar?”
Sam was fiddling with the strap of his backpack. “It’s just a placebo. A useless fucking placebo.”