I was sitting at the desk digesting this information when I heard someone starting up the outside stairs. I craned my neck to see who it was as Martha’s curly mop of a head came into view. After several false starts she finally found me.
“Wheelchair heaven this is not,” she said. “Do you realize I have not been to a single dwelling on this island that has fewer than seventy-five stairs?”
“Our cabins,” I said, thinking what a nice warm feeling it is when someone else independently does the same thing as you; in this case counting stairs.
“Our cabins what?” she asked.
“Our cabins only have two stairs.”
She rolled her eyes at me and asked what progress I was making.
“You remember when Darcy overheard Stacey and David arguing over a baseball player?”
Martha nodded.
“Well, it wasn’t a baseball player. Well, actually it was, but it was also a baseball player’s disease. Stacey had Lou Gehrig’s disease.”
Martha looked blank.
“It’s a neurodegenerative disease — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — that the baseball player Lou Gehrig had.”
“Cripes. The one where you lose everything but your mind?”
“Yeah, that one.”
“Her limp?”
“Would have been a symptom.”
“How long did she have?”
“Her doctor said maybe two years at most, but miracles do happen. Look at Stephen Hawking.”
“So her murderer could have just waited a few years and saved themself the trouble.”
“You could look at it that way,” I said as something on the edge of my mind pulsed dimly and was gone.
“So anyone who knew about the disease is unlikely to be the murderer.”
“Unless they murdered for money.”
“Was she wealthy?” asked Martha.
“I don’t know. Doesn’t look like it.” I glanced around the room and saw nothing of luxury, of expense, of overactive spending habits, except for the desk chair. This was the cottage of a woman who wasn’t showing much of herself in her belongings other than what their absence said. Except for the photographs, of course.
Martha hung around for a while longer before she confessed to having a date with Duncan. When she told me she had a ride I handed her the files I had set aside and gave her Stacey’s laptop to take back to the station. Since the cottage was already monumentally compromised I figured it would do no harm. After she left I booted up one of the two desktop computers Stacey had. After half an hour I was exhausted. There were so many files on so many different subjects with so many different names I was getting eye strain. It seemed to contain her entire life and I wondered what was on her laptop.
I was booting up her second computer when I heard a footfall upstairs, soft but unmistakable. I looked out the window at the snaking stairs wondering how I could have missed someone entering the cottage. There must be another entrance. I soft-shoed myself to the door and listened. There was no sound at all, not even a ticking clock. And then there it was again, a soft tread on the stair. I looked around wildly for some kind of weapon and blessed Stacey for being a romantic when I spied a five-pronged candelabra. I grabbed it with my right hand and raised it over my head as I stood behind the door. I listened to the footsteps padding slowly down the stairs and hitting the bare linoleum. Definitely a man, I thought as I gripped the candelabra more tightly. The footsteps turned away from me but some minutes later headed my way again. I stilled myself and as he came into view I tensed, ready to wallop him with my weapon. I was on a hair-trigger and just as I realized it was David my arm had started its downward trajectory onto his circlet of white hair. He yelped as he saw it coming and I managed to swing the candelabra clear of his head, but not before all the candles had tumbled down on top of him.
He had hit the floor in the classic arm over head pose of someone fending off a candelabra. I felt foolish until I realized that just because I knew him did not exclude him from my list of stalker suspects, so I kept a grip on the candelabra.
He looked up at me in astonishment. “What the hell was that all about?”
“I thought you were an intruder.”
“Mother of God. You are the intruder. This is my sister’s cottage. That candelabra should be in my hands. What are you doing here?”
I figured that if I told him I was looking for clues he’d freak out so I said, “I’m here to secure Stacey’s office as a crime scene.”
“As if anyone is going to be rifling through her things,” he said dismissively.
“You’re wrong there.”
“Meaning?”
“Several people have already rifled through her things.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Whatever for? There is nothing of value here.”
I shrugged. “You sure of that?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I assume you are Stacey’s next of kin?” I said.
He nodded and then it dawned on him what I was getting at and he frowned. “Are you trying to imply that because I inherit from Stacey I am the murderer?”
Bingo! “All I am saying is that if Stacey was worth a lot of money you would definitely have a motive.”
I couldn’t read the look on his face — it was the face of a man just succeeding in hiding some powerful emotion.
“Are you named in her will?”
“She was my kid sister. I would never kill my sister.” He spat it out in anger and I kept my silence. “She left what she had to me. I was all she had.”
He turned to go but I called him back. “I found a medical letter in her belongings telling her she had Lou Gehrig’s.”
David stared at me and a little nerve twitched above his right eye. “What gives you the right to look through my sister’s things?”
“Well, technically speaking, you did, among others.”
“You take yourself too seriously, Cordi. You’re not the police, you know.”
“Don’t you want to find out who killed your sister?”
“Of course I do.” He rubbed his forehead with his hand and turned to look me in the eye. “Look, they gave her two years to live — two years of slowly losing everything. The cruelty of it is that the mind is left intact to witness the awful deterioration of the body.”
“Couldn’t have been easy for her.”
David laughed. “My but you have a way with words. Of course it wasn’t easy, the tentative diagnosis came last month but they had to do tests to be sure. That letter you read was just confirming the worst. From the moment she knew, she hid it, maybe even from herself, but I wouldn’t know because she wouldn’t talk to me.”
“You weren’t close.” I stated it as a fact not a question.
“We were once —” he started, then stopped abruptly.
“What happened?” I asked.
He looked at me through narrowed eyes again and said, “You ask too many personal questions, Cordi. Most people don’t like that.” Said that way it sent a shiver down my spine.
“When I first met you, you called the biologists here dedicated,” I said. He glanced up as if wondering where I was going. “You also said they weren’t harmless. Care to elaborate?”
He laughed an empty laugh. “If you’re looking for demons, most of them are guilty of one thing. They just couldn’t accept how big she was. She was a decided anomaly among biologists the world over. They never let her fit in.”
“Maybe she didn’t want to fit in?”
“Really, Cordi. Can you name one person who doesn’t want to fit in and be part of things?” The question lingered between us for a while. “She wasn’t always fat you know.”
I waited.
“When she was eighteen she just started eating and eating and she couldn’t seem to stop.”
“What happened to her?” I held my breath.
We were still standing over the upended candelabra when he suddenly walked toward the desk and began searching for something, my question discarded like a used match.
In my most authoritative voice I said, “This is a crime scene. You can’t do that.”
“Where’s her laptop?” he asked, ignoring my demand.
“It’s been impounded,” I said.
“Impounded where?” He rubbed his eyes with his hand. He was getting impatient and I didn’t know why. “For god’s sake there’s nowhere on this island to impound anything. May I remind you once again that you are not the police?”
“I sent her computer back to the station so that nobody could surf through it.”
“What’s wrong with leaving it here?”
I hesitated. Had he forgotten? “Because several people have been here before you, looking for I know not what. I just thought it wise to secure her laptop.”
“Who’s been here?” he asked.
I ignored him and said, “What do you want with her laptop?”
“I have to make funeral arrangements. She kept that sort of stuff on her laptop.”
“You mean her will.”
“Well, actually you don’t usually put your funeral requests in your will, but a copy of it would be there too.” He stiffened, as if he’d said too much, and then he bent over and picked up the candelabra. “After all these years the fool kept this,” he said under his breath and traced a hand along a dent in one of the arms. Then he caught himself and turned to look at me. “She had a hard life.” With that he walked out the door.
I hung around a little while longer but I was keen on getting back and looking at Jayne’s file folder and Stacey’s laptop. Something told me that they would give me more pieces to the puzzle.
The sun was still high in the sky when I sealed Stacey’s door with masking tape — kind of useless — and headed down the stairs. I decided to bushwhack through the live oak and palmetto to the beach. It was tough slogging, the palmetto kept grabbing at my clothes and the bugs were really bad. I smelled the sea before I saw it, that pungent aroma of seaweed and salt, sun and wet sand. I hadn’t taken more than a step toward the dunes when someone yelled, “Stop! Don’t move!” The voice was loud and insistent. I stopped.
The voice came from somewhere behind me and to my right. “Do not move a muscle,” it said.
“What’s wrong?” I asked in alarm.
“There is a rattlesnake two feet from your right foot. Don’t look! I’m going to approach it from behind and use some tongs to capture it. Stay put.”
I watched as Melanie slowly came into my line of vision as she skirted me and came in behind the rattler. She was carrying a long metal rod with tongs on one end and a handle to control them on the other. She moved very slowly into position and I was dying of an itchy nose. The rattler was coiled in a lovely cone with the tip of its tail poking up next to its unblinking eyes. Surely I was far enough away to just make a dive for it but Melanie was in charge. I watched as she grasped the snake behind its neck as it lashed out. I itched my nose and backed away. She disappeared behind a dune and when she didn’t return after two minutes I started toward it. She had all her gear spread out and I realized with dismay that I had interrupted her research.
“Sorry,” I said.
She looked up at me. She was wearing mosquito netting and I couldn’t really see her face. “It’s okay, I guess. Just frustrating. I’ve just spent three hours watching this particular snake — I don’t have the money for transmitters and the snakes are not easy to find.”
I said sorry again. I had just blithely broken both of Stacey’s cardinal rules. Melanie stood up and took off her mosquito hat. I must have looked dumbfounded because she took a step backwards and said, “What’s wrong?”
I wasn’t quite sure how to put it. A thousand thoughts were chasing through my mind as I put two and two together and actually got four.
“I just saw a picture of Stacey when she was a young girl.”
Melanie breathed in.
“She looks exactly like you.”
Melanie didn’t say anything. She just stared at me.
I took a chance. “When did you know?” I asked.
“Know what?” said Melanie. She had regained some of her composure, but she was on the defensive — like a boxer just barely holding her ground, waiting.
“That you have to be Stacey’s daughter.”
Melanie coughed and flicked the blue hair out of eyes that looked hunted, haunted, and trapped. “What business is that of yours?” she said defiantly.
I didn’t say anything and the silence grew. Finally I said, “You know you can’t hide it. I already know your secret. So when did you find out?”
I watched as her eyes found a way out of their trap and she made her decision. “About two months ago, shortly after I applied for the research position.”
“And Stacey hired you.”
She hesitated, still grappling with some inner demons. “That’s right,” she finally said. “The Island Association wanted someone to do some research on rattlesnakes and copperheads. It was pretty fierce competition so I was really excited when I got it. I was so proud of myself. I actually thought I got the position with no pull.” She looked at me then, a forced smile on her face and her eyes blank.
“But Stacey saw your application photograph …” I gently prodded.
“Yeah. She saw my photograph and realized I was her daughter.” Melanie sighed and stood up. “I was on the island a month before she told me.”
“What did she tell you?”
“That she got pregnant when she was eighteen years old and gave me up for adoption. The usual story, isn’t it? Get loved. Get laid. Get rid of baby.” The bitterness in her voice was palpable.
“I take it you didn’t exactly get along.”
“Not at first. I mean, would you? She just abandoned me.” She said it as if by rote, or perhaps she was simply disassociating herself from the trauma in some way.
“Maybe she had her reasons.”
“Yeah, that’s what they all say.” She pitched her voice mockingly high and angry and said, “I was too young and I couldn’t take care of you. I had no choice. You’re better off with someone else. Did she ever stop to think that the someone else might be worse?” Challenging words that she had obviously spoken before. Melanie stared at me, daring me to speak, waiting for an answer I could not give.
She shrugged, her voice softening. “Water under the bridge now.”
She was about to continue when she looked over my shoulder and slowly began to smile. I turned to look and saw Duncan skirting the dune like a man on reconnaissance.
“It’s okay, Duncan,” Melanie called out. “I’m not doing any studies.” Which made me feel guilty as hell, having literally blundered into her study site. Stacey would not have been amused.
I watched Duncan morph back into an ordinary man as he came to join us. He clamped his large hand on Melanie’s shoulder like an old friend and I looked at him quizzically.
“Mel and I are old friends,” he said. “We go back two whole months.”
Mel smiled. “Duncan found a rattler in his cottage shed and came to find ‘the new snake girl.’ I’ve since logged many hours on that snake. Duncan helped me tag him with a nonpermanent marker.”
The three of us stood there shuffling our feet until Duncan said, “Was I interrupting something?”
Melanie looked at me quickly with an almost imperceptible shake of the head.
“No, no were just talking snakes,” I said. It was awkward, not really knowing what Melanie wanted, so I added, “Let me know if you ever find a copperhead. I’d really like to see one,” and I left them conversing about Sebastien — presumably the snake in Duncan’s garage. I broke out of the dunes onto the beach and strolled along the water’s edge. There wasn’t a soul in sight. I took my running shoes off and walked through the surf, the wind chasing my hair all over my face. I was lost in thought when, from somewhere behind me, I heard my name called. Duncan.
I turned and watched him labouring toward me. He’s a big man and the loose sand just seemed to hold him back at every step. He finally changed course so that he was walking on the wet sand that the tide had fashioned into something as hard as tarmac. In fact, I had been told that at low tide planes could land on the beach.
We walked companionably in silence until Duncan turned and said, “How goes the investigation?”
I grimaced. “It’s all over the map. There are so many loose ends that I’m not sure there are any attached ends.”
“I was just talking to Martha. She says you nearly had another very serious accident.”
“Yeah. Well …” was all I could say.
“You think it was Darcy? Martha said he was the first on the scene.”
“It could have been Darcy but then why would he do such a thing?”
“He doesn’t want you to continue the investigation for some reason?”
“He’s certainly made no bones about that. But he says it’s because of my safety.”
“And maybe it is. Who else was there?”
“Wyatt, Sam, Trevor — they all came together except Sam. Any of them could have done it.”
“Someone feels threatened, and since you didn’t know any of these people until you came here two days ago it has to have something to do with your investigation.” We walked some more in silence.
“I am no closer to finding out who did it. I haven’t even been able to eliminate anybody.” Duncan gave a snide little snort and I laughed. “Not that kind of elimination,” I said.
“Surely my little Melanie is no murderer,” said Duncan with a smile that faded quickly once he saw the look on my face. “What? What is it?”
Melanie hadn’t specifically asked me not to tell and I needed a sounding board so I said, “Stacey was Melanie’s mother.”
Duncan stopped dead in his tracks and grabbed me by the shoulders. “What? You have got to be kidding.”
I shook my head and he let go of my shoulders.
“Melanie is Stacey’s daughter. They hid it well.”
We began to walk again and after half a football field of silence I said, “Melanie only found out about it once she got to the island. She was very bitter. Felt she’d been abandoned by a selfish teenager.”
“A selfish and lost teenager.”
“She doesn’t see it that way. At least, I don’t think she does. Do you know anything about Melanie’s life?”
“Only that she was in and out of foster homes and is a sort of miracle child for making something of her life.”
“There was real anger there Duncan.”
“I hear you, Cordi, but I don’t want to believe she is capable of murder.”
“She blames her mother for a lousy childhood. It’s a motive.”
“But there are others who could have done it too, right?”
“Yeah, Sam has a wishy-washy motive. He and Stacey could have argued over the vaccine. And Trevor could have done it because of her stance on conservation. I haven’t been able to come up with any motives for the rest yet, but I’m working on it.”
“That’s what worries me. You’re maybe working on it too hard. What if whoever it is succeeds next time?”
“Well, I’m not about to make a public announcement that I’m quitting. I’m not a quitter.”
“Even with your life at stake? You could pretend to quit.”
“Listen to yourself, Duncan. How do I pretend to quit and then continue to investigate? The first person I question would blow the whistle. I’ll just have to be careful, that’s all.”
More silence and then, “What’s this about Lou Gehrig’s disease?”
“Pretty awful, isn’t it? She was so alone with such an awful prognosis.”
“It may be an awful thing to say but perhaps there was some luck in her murder. She’d be spared all that agony.”
“Is death ever preferable to life?” I asked.
“Sometimes it is, Cordi. Sometimes it is.”