I finally made it back to my cabin. There was no sign of Martha but Stacey’s laptop was plunked down on top of my bed. I pushed it aside and rummaged around the sheets for the file folders. I pulled them out and Mel’s folder slipped and sprawled all over the floor. I picked up the colour photo of her and then looked more carefully at the older black-and-white one. Had I been thinking I would have recognized that it was old, way older than Melanie. The resemblance really was quite striking and I marvelled at how often the puzzle of life threw parents offspring who were their spitting image. Of all the combinations and permutations of DNA, eggs, and sperm, that happened more often than one would expect. I thought about Duncan and his gargantuan nose and I wondered if all his children would have been so cursed, had he had kids. And then I wondered if that was why he hadn’t had kids.
I dropped Melanie’s folder on the floor and picked up Sam’s. Last name Jamieson. He was a Georgia boy, born, raised, and educated in Athens. Not much else in his file. I turned to Jayne’s. The mandatory picture and application form stared up at me and I looked at it in surprise. Gertrude Jayne. Gertrude. No wonder she had clung to Jayne. I picked up Sam’s folder again. Someone had obviously misfiled her folder into Jamieson. Maybe Melanie hadn’t even known it was there and maybe that’s what Jayne had been looking for. Jayne had been director for seven years and, according to her file, they had all been good until her last six months when the paper trail ended.
She had a Ph.D. from a small Midwestern university, and by the looks of it had published a lot of papers on sea turtles. Nothing here, I thought, and was about to close the folder when a piece of paper caught my eye. It was stuck to the last sheet in the folder and I slowly pried it free. It was a photocopy of Jayne’s Ph.D. degree that had been faxed to the recipient, whoever that was. Stuck to the degree was a little stickum with the email address for Nebraska State University. The degree said she had graduated in 1990 summa cum laude. I chewed that over for a while, wondering why I was paying it much attention, until I heard a commotion in the next cabin over. I unashamedly moved to the open window and eavesdropped.
I could see Rosemary through the open window in the other cabin. She was holding her head and telling someone to leave her alone.
“How can I leave you alone?” Wyatt came into view, walked up behind her, and put his hands on her shoulders. She flinched. I had the flight-or-fight reaction to that. Would I have to go to her rescue? But what he said next stopped me in my tracks.
“You’re telling people I’m beating you,” he said, his voice dangerously level. “Why would you do that?”
I held my breath.
“You scare me.”
“I thought we were colleagues. Friends.”
“We were friends. We are friends. And I didn’t really tell anyone. They just jumped to conclusions. I have no control over that.”
“Well la-di-da. No control, eh? You could do the decent thing and deny it.”
“I did. I have.”
“Not bloody hard enough.” He hesitated and then said, “You’re fired, my friend, so get the hell off this island before I do something you’ll regret.” He moved out of sight to appear on the front porch. He paused there a moment, as if he was going to go back in, but he didn’t. Instead he slammed the door and left.
An hour later and I was deeply immersed in Stacey’s laptop, which was a treasure trove of everything I didn’t really need to know, until I located a folder buried inside a folder. It was labelled News Clippings. There were twenty-five to thirty files. I started with the first one and by the time I got to nineteen I was practically comatose from all the random clippings. I fervently hoped I would not have to do this all again on her desktop at the cottage. Then I opened number twenty and nearly dropped dead.
It was a picture of an ecstatic Stacey, her smile threatening to obliterate her face. She was holding an enormous cheque and my heart stopped when I read the amount: forty-one million dollars. Canada’s newest lottery winner. I checked the day. Five years ago. I was sitting there, thinking about all the implications, when Martha arrived with a thump of the door and a deep sigh.
I looked up.
“Don’t ask,” she said and then she told me anyway. “I went swimming in the tidal creek between the two islands but nobody told me there’s one hell of a riptide when the tide’s going out. Anyway it ripped off my bathing suit and there I was in my altogethers trying to figure out how to get my towel without anyone seeing me.”
I tried not to smile.
“I had to crawl out and along the beach. I felt like a regular G.I. Joe.”
I lost the battle and started to laugh. “God, Martha, didn’t you remember about the spaniel? What made you decide to go swimming at all? The seas are still horrendous.”
“I was hot and the creek looked benign. What can I say?”
She plunked herself down on the bed and eyeballed the laptop. “So?” she said.
I looked at her and smiled, relishing what I was going to say next. “Stacey is worth more than forty-one million dollars.”
Martha’s jaw dropped. “Jesus. I never saw that coming.”
“Neither did I.”
“So who gets it all?”
“David says he does,” I said.
“But you are not so sure?”
“No. I mean how does he know? Did she tell him? They weren’t exactly talking to each other.”
“With that kind of money there’s got to be a will. What about the laptop? Maybe there’s a copy there.”
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of that myself. I picked up the laptop and keyed in the search term will. A lot of garbage items came up, with the word will somewhere in them. Three looked promising but I came up empty handed. Two were templates for wills and the third was a diet labelled Willpower.
“Try testament,” said Martha.
“Oh come on, who would use that antiquated term?”
“Someone wanting to hide it without resorting to a password.”
“I’ll be damned,” I said.
There were two, one dated a month ago the other a year ago. I chose the will with the latest date and opened it. Martha came over, stationed herself behind my left shoulder, and we began to read it together.
“Jesus, Cordi, stop itching.”
I hadn’t realized I had been itching but once she brought my attention to it the itches suddenly came into stark relief. All over my lower legs and up to my waist. Must be the laundry detergent I’m using here, I thought, and tried to shove it out of my mind.
“Looks like David doesn’t get it all,” muttered Martha as she brought me back to the business at hand. “But why would Melanie get forty-seven percent? By all accounts they hardly knew each other.”
I realized that Martha didn’t know — I was losing track of whom I’d told and whom I hadn’t.
“They may not have known each other but they were blood relatives,” I said.
Martha looked stunned.
“She was Stacey’s daughter.” I must say it felt good imparting such startling news and I watched Martha’s face as it roller coastered through her emotions, from initial disinterest to stunned disbelief to a realization of what the information meant.
“Forty-seven percent of forty-one million dollars is a multimillion dollar motive,” she said.
“And fifty percent isn’t a bad take on David’s part either,” I said. “Money that big can kill multiple times.”
“And Darcy gets three percent, well over a million dollars, which seems paltry in the rarefied company of Melanie and Wyatt.”
“Yeah, but it’s enough to give a young man a good motive,” I said as I used extraordinary willpower to stop from scratching my legs.
“What’s the old will say?” asked Martha.
I opened the document and we glanced through the will. David had been right a year ago. He got it all then.
“So Melanie wasn’t on Stacey’s radar a year ago,” I said.
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“We have Melanie, Darcy, and David with a money motive, Sam who we think disagreed with Stacey over the vaccine, Trevor whose kids went hungry because of all the rules to conserve the turtles.”
“What about Wyatt?” said Martha. “He stood to lose his reputation and his vet practice if Stacey had exposed him.”
“So he kills her because of the fake vaccine?”
“Or maybe she was blackmailing him and he’d had enough.” I started itching again. It felt as though I was being tickled by a thousand feathers.
“And then there’s Jayne,” I said, trying to ignore the itches. “I don’t know why but there’s something there.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s hiding something. I just know it,” I said, as I finally gave in to my itches full throttle.
“Jesus, Cordi. What’s with the itching? You’re driving me crazy.”
I could have said the same about the itching.
“What about Rosemary?” asked Martha.
“I don’t know about Rosemary. She’s an enigma.”
I told Martha what I had overheard between Rosemary and Wyatt.
“Why would she want to let us jump to conclusions?” asked Martha.
“More to the point, why did she say she had denied it when she definitely hadn’t? At least not to me. Makes you wonder what else she might be lying about.”
Martha looked at me, threw her arms up in the air and said, “Everybody has a motive. Nobody has an alibi. Somebody is a murderer.”
The sun was heading toward the horizon when I took a break from all the newspaper clippings and lottery winnings and left Martha poring over Stacey’s computer. The itching was driving me as crazy as Martha had implied it was driving her. Only she didn’t have to wrestle with the little stabbing pinpricks the way I did. I was beginning to wonder if any allergy to detergent could cause such intense itching. I needed to clear my head so I walked down to the beach and watched the sun set amidst some angry swirling clouds. I walked a long time, as night fell. There was no moon and the only light was the cresting waves in the tattered starlight. I walked along the hard-packed sand of the beach toward the tidal creek, the warm wind from the sea washing over me, as timeless as it was constant. This place really had me thinking of eternity, I guess because it reeked of remnants of a distant age.
I was thinking about turning around and heading back for something to eat when I heard the roar of an ATV. I turned and saw its headlights coming closer and closer to me. I waited, expecting it to slow down, but it quickly gained speed and was heading right for me. I waved my arms and yelled but it didn’t stop and I started running, zigging and zagging my way across the beach. It couldn’t turn on a dime the way I could, but whoever was driving it was good. I sprinted toward the tidal creek and hesitated only a fraction of a second before doing a shallow racing dive into the water. It was strangely warm and enveloping and I treaded water as I looked back to see the ATV poised on the bank, its headlights blinding me to who was driving. Then the headlights turned and the ATV disappeared and I was left behind in the darkness. Suddenly I felt the strength of the current take me, like a punch in the gut, and haul me out to sea. I tried to swim ashore but it was too strong. I finally remembered the spaniel and the sandbar he had ended up on with the young boy. Should I stop fighting the current and trust that I’d be deposited on the sandbar or did I continue to fight to get ashore? But my attempts were futile and I realized if the sandbar wasn’t there, there was nothing between me and the open sea.
The current carried me for what felt like ten hours but must have only been a couple of minutes before my right leg brushed against what I sure hoped was sand. The sandbar was just above sea level, but it was there, and I crawled up on it and rested. I was there a long time, long enough for the tide to turn and start coming in, nibbling away at my sandbar as it did so. I stood up and surveyed my situation. Although it was dark I could still see the main beach and the water in between. The sandbar was about one hundred yards out from the beach, the water between me and shore looked calm, and the tide was with me this time. I was just about to wade in when something broke the surface of the water, its triangular fin glistening in the starlight. I tried to remember my porpoise and shark fins but there was no way for me to identify the owner of the fin. I stood there paralyzed as the water swirled in around me, obliterating my sandbar. I had no choice. I had to swim for shore. I psyched myself up, then dived in and swam like a maniac, agonizingly aware that sharks feed on frenzy, dreading the serrated teeth on my leg, my stomach, my head, forcing myself to swim through the dread until, miraculously, my hand hit shore and I scrambled up the beach, a roiling mass of nerves, to lie prostrate on the cold wet sands of safety.
I lay there until I started to get cold and then I ran back to the station to try and warm up and banish the shark-infested demons of my mind. Fortunately Martha wasn’t in the cabin so I was able to change out of my wet clothes without her haranguing me. As she had a right to do, I thought. Whoever had been driving that ATV would have had a good view of me. No mistaken identity here. I went and took a shower because the itching was so bad I couldn’t stop. In the shower I looked aghast at the welts all over my lower legs and around the area of my waistband and crotch. This was no laundry detergent. This had to be an insect or something. The only thing that came close on the scale of itch factor was spider bites that itch and itch and linger and linger. But there were way too many bites for even multiple spiders and I couldn’t see anything crawling on me.
My stomach was growling up a storm and I went in search of something to feed it. There was no one in the clearing. I climbed the steps to the mess, walked in, and went to the kitchen, snuffling around the fridge to see if there was anything edible at all.
I was reaching for an apple when I heard a man cry out, “God damn it. You owe me big time. How many people know it’s fake?”
“Settle down. Settle down. We can’t talk here.”
“Dammed right we can talk here.” Trevor was pale faced and shaking.
The other person was out of sight but I was pretty sure I knew the voice. Wyatt.
“We had a deal. You blew it. You owe me,” said Trevor.
“Extenuating circumstances. How was I to know that she would interfere and screw it all up?”
“We had a deal. I want my money back.” Trevor slammed his hand on one of the tables. “I won’t let you off this island before you pay me.”
“Don’t make empty threats. There are others who know how to drive a boat, you idiot.”
“Just watch me,” said Trevor and he turned and walked out the door, slamming it behind him.
My hand was still reaching for the apple when I heard a sharp intake of breath. I turned and there was Wyatt, staring at me, sort of like the snake had hours earlier.
“How long have you been here?” His voice was sharp, gruff, and angry.
“Long enough.”
He didn’t say anything and looked unsure of himself, which must have been an anathema to him.
“You got paid to doctor the vaccine,” I said.
He just stared at me.
“But the islanders voted for a real vaccine.”
“You can’t always get what you want.” He sang the words in a rich bass voice that sounded nothing like his real voice and took me off guard. I’m a sucker for a bass voice.
I recollected myself and said, “You got paid twice.”
He laughed. “You didn’t hear it from me.”
“I guess not. It would not be in your interests to broadcast your behaviour, would it?”
When he didn’t answer I said, “You’ll lose your licence. Your livelihood.”
He snorted. “You think there aren’t other fish in the sea? This is just one of many stops along my route. I couldn’t give a damn.”
But just in case he could give a damn and acted on it I said, “Your secret’s out. I’m not the only one who knows it.”
He smiled then, a slow Cheshire cat kind of smile that gave me the creeps. “You’re very transparent, O’Callaghan, and repetitive I might add. Do you really think I’d try to kill you to preserve my secret?”
I didn’t want to answer that so instead I sent another salvo over his bow. “Why do you beat Rosemary?” I wanted to startle him out of his side of the story.
“I don’t,” he said, before he caught himself. “What business is it of yours whether I do or not?”
“It should be everybody’s business if you are beating her, but if you aren’t why is she saying you are?”
He glared at me. “Because she’s a bitch.” That was not very enlightening.
“Are you sleeping with her?”
“She’s my assistant, for god’s sake. Why would I stoop so low as to sleep with my assistant?”
“Oh, come on. A pretty young girl.”
“She’s not my type,” he said harshly.
“That sounds like it means she has some kind of power over you.”
“You have a pretty poor opinion of me if you think I just jump every woman I meet. You hardly know me. Where is this coming from?”
“You’re good-looking and in a position of power. She’s pretty. It’s hard to believe you’re not sleeping together.”
“You have a pretty poor opinion of her too. She’s a big girl. Whatever happened to freewill and feminism? I’m not her master.”
“So she said no to you?”
He stared at me, unblinking.
“She knew about the vaccine.”
He just kept staring.
“She was blackmailing you.”
How can a man not blink for so long? It was unnerving.
“Was Stacey blackmailing you too?”
“This conversation is over,” he said and turned on his heel, leaving me standing there, wondering.