“Oh man, oh man—man, oh man,” she moaned and rolled onto her back with her knees up, cradling the tub on her belly. “Oh man.”
I leaned over her and brushed her hair away from her face. “Yeah, it was a man. I have to go back out there, Willow. You stay right here. I mean it. Unless you need the bathroom, which is just off the kitchen.” I clicked on a few lights for Willow, snatched the flashlight I’d tucked on the top shelf in the coat closet, and grabbed my phone off the kitchen counter.
Oh man, oh man, oh man—my thoughts echoed Willow’s as my feet pounded on the sturdy boards of the walkway.
He was still there, three-quarters submerged and face down. I didn’t know how Willow and I both recognized it was a man. There must have been intuitive clues we’d picked up on, but I was in no condition to be able to articulate them at the moment. The best I could do was listen to the subtle buzzing as my call to 911 rang and the monotone voice of a dispatcher answered.
What was my emergency? The lady on the line wanted to know.
“Uh, there’s a man,” I croaked. “In the water. At Marten’s Marina.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to picture the map I’d followed across the country to the little corner in the upper left portion of Oregon, to my new home. The names of the surrounding small towns, the street address for the marina—all were elusive at the moment. Couldn’t 911 triangulate the location of a cell phone call?
“Northwest of Portland proper, on the Willamette River, close to the Columbia. Do you know where I mean?” My mouth was gluey, as though my tongue was working around gobs of rubber cement.
The operator recited an address to me. It sounded familiar.
“They don’t need to hurry,” I added. “He’s dead.”
That part I probably could articulate—a complete checklist of reasons why there was no urgency about pulling the man out of the water, no reason for me to apply my rusty knowledge of CPR—but the 911 operator didn’t stick around for the particulars. Once she’d confirmed that I would stay at the scene and was in decent health myself, she told me a police officer would be in touch and clicked off.
Which was probably a good thing, because now my brain was babbling, clamoring all over itself, even though my vocal cords and lips hadn’t engaged yet. And per usual, they wouldn’t. The panicky terror was restricted to inside my head, where it belonged.
I played the shaky flashlight beam over the sodden mass of clothing in the water. The man’s jacket had billowed up across his back and shoulders, and the confined gasses were what seemed to be making him float. His head hung so low that I could only see the tips of his hair—of indistinct color in the greenish-brackish water—waving in the current below the surface. The white, bloated fingers of his left hand dimpled in the light, giving me my first indicator of why I’d known it was a man.
His knuckles. Even though his skin was waterlogged, the puffiness couldn’t mask the fact that his knuckles were man-sized, enlarged from hard work and maybe the beginnings of arthritis. No wedding ring.
Blobs of Willow’s vomit floated around him, and I had a sudden urge to hose off the walkway so the evidence of her distress wouldn’t be obvious to the responding officers. But I’d watched enough cop shows on television to know not to disturb the scene any more than it already had been. Although it was clear the man hadn’t died here. The algae-covered pilings and blocks of Styrofoam that supported the walkway were just his washed-up final resting location.
And then I got cold. Bone-marrow-cringing cold. My teeth rattled in my head. I drew up my limbs just as Willow had, and sat rocking on the walkway, wrapped into the tiniest ball I could manage.
Red and blue flashing lights arrived in the parking lot. A car door slammed, and the gangplank clanged with hurried footsteps behind a sweeping flashlight beam.
He found me quickly. It probably helped that my party-appropriate sundress was a cheerful yellow floral print. I must have stood out like a bright beacon hunkered halfway down the A row boardwalk.
A pair of scuffed black boots thumped to a stop beside me. Then a heavy, warm hand on my shoulder and a mellow male voice. “You call this in?”
I tried to nod.
“How you doing?”
“Okay,” I squeaked.
His hand shifted to my elbow, and he helped me stand. As I unfolded, I knew he was eyeing my legs even though he was trying not to. They were covered in goose bumps, just like the rest of my body. My dress ran short, as all dresses do on me. Unfortunately, there was quite a bit of leg available for viewing at the moment. Right next to a corpse.
“You live here?” he asked.
I managed an honest-to-goodness, qualified nod this time and tried to smile into his serious blue eyes, which fell about an inch below mine. He was resplendent in equipment—radio clipped to his shoulder, badge, stuff bulging all his pockets, and a belt that was so laden with a gun and other gadgets that it hung low on his hips. His name tag said Webber.
“I need to secure the area, and then we’ll have to wait until a whole bunch of people get here. Do you have a comfortable place to bide the time?” He’d barely even glanced at the dead guy. Maybe he was worried about having another type of emergency on his hands.
“My house.” I waved vaguely behind me.
He escorted me along the walkway and poked his head in through the front door opening, quickly scanning my living room. “You’ll stay here until someone can talk to you?”
“Sure.”
“It’d be a good idea to drink something. Not alcohol though,” he offered. “Put your feet up.” He gave me a conspiratorial wink—nothing like the leering affront Doc had perpetrated earlier—then was gone just as quickly, leaving me feeling much warmer and immeasurably relieved. The poor floater was now someone else’s responsibility.
Willow was nowhere to be seen, but the plastic tub was resting, empty, in her former spot on the sofa. I checked the bathroom—empty too. And then I heard bumps overhead.
I slowly climbed the stairs to the loft, halting when my head just cleared the top step. There she was, pacing carefully, heel to toe, with her hands perched on her hips.
“What are you doing?”
“This is nuts.” She didn’t even look in my direction. “You have this whole amazing space up here, and you’re not using it?”
“I just moved in.” My excuse immediately rang as lame in my own ears as it must have sounded to her. The truth was that I’d been intimidated by the loft, as though any attempt I might make to turn it into a habitat would spoil it. It really was that amazing.
Hardwood floors, just like on the main level, but the walls were entirely glass, affording a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view—basically a glass hut perched atop one of the cargo containers which comprised the main floor. Up here, I could see everything, but everything could also see me, which gave me an uncomfortable case of prickles.
“Hanging curtains,” Willow announced. “That’s what you need. With a racking system on the ceiling. You could create smaller pods with them based on function. Your bed should go here.” She aligned her arms in a sweeping motion like the ground crew who direct arriving aircraft to their designated gates at the terminal.
There was a dead man just a few steps from my front door, and Willow wanted to talk about interior design? Apparently she’d recovered from the trauma of seeing him and nearly touching him. Or she was desperately seeking a distraction from the grisly memory.
“I was thinking maybe an office,” I murmured.
Willow fixed me with a scowl. “There’s tons of room. You have to sleep up here too. Come on.” She pushed past me on the stairs. “I’ll show you.”
I straggled after her into the bedroom. She was already on her knees, peering at the underside of the bed frame. “Do you have a Phillips screwdriver? It would take just a few minutes to get these legs off.”
I knew that, because I’d screwed the legs onto the frame the day before. “Seriously? You want to move furnitur
e right now?”
“Can you think of anything better to do?”
The child was taking over my life. But she had a point.
The bed frame was actually the easy part. We flopped the foam mattress to the side—sheets, duvet, and my pile of feather Euro pillows included—and tackled the gazillion screws holding the thing together. Willow did have one character trait that could easily be plunked on a résumé—she was an incredibly diligent worker when she set her mind to something. She left me panting in her wake.
Once the frame was reassembled upstairs, we took a short break out at the end of the rooftop deck that ran the full length of the loft atop the other adjoined cargo container. The height of the deck afforded us an excellent view back toward land and of the hubbub on the walkway midway there.
For some reason, the quiet and efficient concentration of the official people below, many of whom knelt or squatted at the edge of the walkway—still investigating, probing, measuring, and photographing without having moved the body yet—reminded me of the importance of adult supervision. “Do you need to let your grandmother know where you are? That you’re okay? That you—you know—”
“That I’m emotionally scarred?” Willow snorted and propped her elbow on the railing next to me.
“Well, that goes without saying,” I fired back. “Just like everybody else. I meant, will she worry about you?”
“Nah. I think she knows.”
I followed the direction of Willow’s pointing finger to an even bigger cluster of people on shore, packed into the lighted area just outside the door to the marina office. Willow’s grandmother’s raven-black beehive hairdo stood out from the rest like the bearskin hat of a Buckingham Palace guard.
Bettina’s orange bob was in the mix too. The spectators were keeping a surprising distance from the yellow police tape that blocked off the entrance to the south gangplank, but I realized that the evening’s newest development might have outstripped Bettina’s welcome party as the social occasion of the season. It appeared as though all the marina’s residents and then some were on hand for the morbid activities.
The idea turned my stomach. So I punched Willow lightly on the arm. “How are your muscles?”
“Puny. Why?”
“Because the mattress weighs ten times more than the bed frame, and we can’t disassemble it.”
I might have exaggerated the mattress’s weight, but it more than made up for my overestimation with its unwieldiness. We tried folding it like a taco, but it insisted on slumping open. Willow was at the top of the staircase, tugging. I was at the bottom, shoving. But the king-size foam molded around the balusters and sagged between the risers and refused to budge more than an inch at a time.
“Freezing buckets of mothballs,” I grunted. I love my bed—I really do—when I’m in it.
Willow was too short of breath to snort, but she gave me an expressive eye-roll down the long length of immovable, gel-bead-infused, therapeutic foam.
“This was your idea,” I reminded her and bent to scoop my arms under the bottom edge of the mattress for another heave.
“Ms. Fairchild?” a rich baritone called from the open front door.
Once again, I was caught with my ass in the air. While wearing a party-appropriate frock that fell a little shy of mid-thigh under the best of circumstances. “Just a moment,” I answered sweetly. Or not so sweetly—more like wheezily, and quite possibly, grumpily.
“I need to take your statement.” He’d come over to the staircase, and was glaring at me through the balusters while my hair hung in my face and I hyperventilated from the strain.
I straightened and returned the glare. “One condition.”
His brows arched over a pair of the yummiest warm and inquisitive brown eyes into an expression so annoying it made me want to reach over and snatch the smirk right off his face.
Instead, I clenched my hands into fists, released one fist to point at the mattress, and said, “This. Upstairs. Then I’ll talk all you want.”
I hate it when men find me amusing. But, to his credit, this stranger who had just waltzed into my house and must be some kind of police officer set his leather-bound folder on my coffee table and joined me on the stairs. He, uh, smelled good—not at all what you’d expect of someone who gets called out at night to investigate dead bodies—and I found it difficult to look him in those luscious eyes, which were rather above mine, I noticed, even though we were now standing on the same step.
“How about if you help from the top?” he said.
I kicked off my ballet flats and performed a horrible crab-like crawl up the mattress, digging my toes in wherever I could, painfully aware of my creeping hemline. Willow reached for my arm and helped pull me the last couple feet until I was squeezed in beside her. She had a look of indecipherable satisfaction on her scrunchy little face but graciously refrained from offering snide comments.
“Ready?” Mr. Brown Eyes asked.
Somehow, he rolled in the edges of the mattress with his long arms, curved the bulky thing into submission, and lifted it patiently, one step at a time, while Willow and I scrabbled backward and upward, guiding and hoisting, but in no way bearing our fair share of the weight.
Once in the loft, it was easier—a straight shot to the prepared bed frame set at a diagonal in the corner.
Willow did a belly-flop onto the mattress the moment it was in place. “Never again,” she groaned into the foam. Then she sprang over onto her back and bounced up to a sitting position, her feet dangling off the edge, her youthful energy instantly restored. “The puke’s mine.”
My mouth fell open, and I blinked at her.
But the strong stranger nodded somberly. “Good to know.”
“Coffee.” The word came out startlingly clear and a little too loud. They both swiveled to stare at me, but I spun and marched toward the stairs. No reason we couldn’t be civilized about this. Besides, I thought it best to get Mr. Brown Eyes out of proximity to my bed as soon as possible. I didn’t want him getting any ideas.
I knew I’d end up rearranging my kitchen once I started using it in earnest, but for now all my tools and supplies were tucked neatly into cupboards. I pulled out the French press, a grinder, and a bag of Stumptown coffee beans Sloane had insisted I try. Within minutes, I had a kettle heating water on the stove, cream in a little ceramic pitcher, and brown sugar in my favorite hand blown glass bowl along with napkins and spoons set out on the bar-height counter that separated the kitchen from the living room.
Willow had perched on a stool across the counter and was watching me closely as though she was mentally recording the proper steps to coffee service. Mr. Brown Eyes had retrieved his folder and straddled a stool beside her. He, too, seemed very interested in the coffee-making process. So I hovered near the stove and examined the air just above the kettle spout for any sign of a steam disturbance.
Mr. Brown Eyes cleared his throat, lifted a cheek, pulled a wallet from his back jeans pocket, opened it, and produced a card which he placed face-up on the counter and pushed in my direction. “Detective Vaughn Malloy,” he said, even though I could easily read his name on the card from where I was standing. It also said ‘Fidelity Police Department’ with a couple phone numbers and a snazzy logo in blue ink.
Fidelity was the name of the closest town I’d been trying to remember when I’d dialed 911. In fact, the marina’s address was in the Fidelity zip code. I probably should have been able to recall such an honorable moniker, but staring at a dead guy had vaporized all the pertinent details from my mind.
“I’d be happy if you just called me Vaughn,” he added.
Willow had a wolfish grin on her face and was making googly eyes at me. No doubt the kid was suffering from low blood sugar given her empty stomach and recent weight-lifting workout. I reached into a cupboard for a package of granola and plunked it in front of her along with a bowl. “Use the cream.”
A piercing whistle started, and I jumped to pour the hot water into th
e French press. When we were all plied with the necessary nourishment, I fixed Vaughn with what I hoped was a steady gaze. “What do you need to know?”
It has to be difficult to talk with people about the dead bodies they’ve found. Not exactly in the realm of normal social pleasantries. He asked for a time line of the evening’s events, which I supplied, augmented by Willow’s more colorful remarks. He took copious notes on the letter-size pad in his folder. Big hands, scratchy writing. I couldn’t decipher the words upside down.
“You don’t have an accent,” Vaughn said, catching me off guard. “Didn’t you just move here from the East Coast?”
I frowned. My history had nothing to do with the flurry of police activity on the walkway outside. “It was never that pronounced, and four years of college in California cured me completely.”
“Huh.” His brown eyes narrowed. “You’re out here at the end of the A row all by yourself.”
It sounded like an accusation.
I shrugged, but didn’t give him the benefit of a scowl. “It’s where the house was already moored and hooked up to utilities. Easiest to keep it in place rather than relocate it.”
“Gran gave her a move-in special on the lease,” Willow volunteered, “since she’s so low-maintenance.”
Her grammar was a little loose. I wasn’t sure if she meant that her grandmother was low-maintenance or that I was. But given the amounts of hair spray and eye shadow Roxy Sperry applied daily, I was certain I’d win the low-maintenance contest, if anyone was measuring.
Vaughn was, although I couldn’t tell what criteria he was using. But he was definitely sizing me up. Silently.
Well, I can out-silent just about anyone. I bit my lip and lifted the French press in a noiseless offer of more coffee. He accepted by sliding his mug closer.
His dark brown hair, which had a sprinkling of silver mixed in, was just long enough to reveal that his follicles tended to have minds of their own. If he let his hair grow more than a couple inches, it would become a curly mop. Definitely a magnet for a woman’s hands.
Mercury Rising (Tin Can Mysteries Book 1) Page 3
