Mercury Rising (Tin Can Mysteries Book 1)

by Jerusha Jones

Again, Roxy’s black eyes settled on me, not rudely, but as though she was trying to penetrate through my outer layers. Then she shrugged. “Looks like you got yourself a shadow. But if she’s ever any trouble, or an annoyance, just let me know. I’ll put a stop to it.”

  I wasn’t quite sure how to respond. So I nodded again and turned to leave.

  “Willow says you’re looking for work,” Roxy said behind me.

  I turned back.

  She stabbed at a pile of junk mailers on the counter with her cigarette. The phony smile of a middle-aged white man with red check marks poised in boxes beside his head graced the top flier. “It’s election season. We have some biggies coming up in the state legislature and the scrabble for city of Portland positions is as contentious as it ever is—which is to say, a lot. The mudslinging’s already clogging the news, and it’s only September. If anybody ever needed a brand image improvement, it’s politicians. I know it’s the bottom of the barrel as far as decent work goes, but I figured you’d have to start somewhere.” She shrugged. “Anyway, it’s an idea.”

  “Thank you,” I managed. Actually, she was right. In my experience, desperate wanna-be politicians do tend to fling money around in an attempt to ease their pain, or inflict it on others.

  I had one foot over the threshold when Roxy’s voice halted me once more. “Heard you met our Vaughn last night.”

  I turned and cocked my head. I probably squinted too. “Your Vaughn?”

  “Bettina’s Vaughn,” Roxy amended. “But everybody around here’s been so involved in—or at least aware of—her attempts to set up the poor boy that it feels like he belongs to all of us.”

  “Ah.”

  “At one time, I thought he’d do for my daughter, Jody—Willow’s mother—but, well”—she flicked ashes into the wobbly half clamshell that served as her ashtray—“not exactly in the same bailiwick, those two, at least not now.”

  “You’re not going to…” I stuttered to a stop.

  Roxy cackled at my dismay. “Nope. Adults. Both of you. You’ll make your own decisions. But good luck.”

  The merriment in those dark eyes made me chuckle too. I might actually like this woman.

  CHAPTER 5

  Speaking of the rather hunky son of a desperate woman and the subject of so much speculation among the marina residents, he was standing on the A walkway—directly between me and my house. But he wasn’t alone.

  Closer to shore, a young couple was kneeling on the weather-beaten planks near a mound of flower bouquets in cellophane wrappers and homemade signs. Several Mylar balloons floated above the display, their ribbon ties anchored to the walkway. While I stared in shock, the young man flicked a lighter and lit a votive candle in a glass holder.

  Then they rose and shuffled past me, toward the gangplank. The girl was sniffling, and he wrapped an arm around her tightly, pulling her head into his shoulder.

  All the warnings about fire that Roxy had pounded into me during my orientation screeched through my head. I had thought it ironic at the time, the warnings coming from a near chain-smoker, but I understood the threat. Open fire and boats, including floating houses, are never, ever a good combination. Since the marina office was on dry land, safely ensconced at the edge of the gravel parking lot, Roxy’s position on the subject wasn’t hypocritical, and was, in fact, required by the marina’s insurance company.

  I cast a quick glance over my shoulder to make sure the young couple wouldn’t notice, then I pounced forward and extinguished the flame.

  “What is going on?” I muttered. People lighting fires on the walkway to my house? Of all the inane, irresponsible, selfish—

  “I’ll take care of it.” Vaughn must have heard my not-too-quiet complaint. His footsteps resounded on the walkway, and he joined me at the makeshift memorial at the A-7 slip.

  Because that’s what it was—the flowers, balloons, and farewell messages. RIP Ian. We love you. You’ll be missed forever, Ian. Happy trails. The notes were scrawled on torn pieces of cardboard and poster board. Some of them were crowded with signatures. Ian had been a popular guy.

  “But”—I glanced around and then pointed to the spot were Vaughn had been standing the moment before—“I thought—wasn’t he over there in slip A-11? I mean, it was dark, but I’m pretty sure…”

  “Yep. But they don’t know that,” Vaughn replied. There was a smile in his voice. “You have a good memory.”

  I squinted up at him. Up! How long had it been since I’d looked up at anyone? Well, except since last night? The observation re-stunned me for a moment. “I thought—you said—” My words got stuck on each other. “Um, have you made the announcement yet? How do they know? I mean, about here? And who?”

  Vaughn sighed. “We haven’t made the announcement yet because the ME’s still working on notifying relatives. But Mr. Thorpe had been missing for several days. People were on edge, waiting for news. It’s a situation where, once there are rumors, they travel like wildfire.” A little smirk lightened his brown eyes.

  I scowled. “Yeah, wildfire right up this wooden walkway to my house.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Vaughn repeated. “I’ll talk to Roxy about posting No Trespassing signs in the parking lot. If she does that, then we can station a uniformed officer up there to enforce a perimeter. People will still want—and need—to establish a memorial, but we’ll get them to do it in a safer place.”

  “Okay.” I felt incredibly callous. Of course the dead man’s friends would be grieving and need a way to express their feelings. “Thank you.” It came out as an afterthought, but I meant it. I peered up at Vaughn again, but he was staring at my legs.

  “You’re bleeding.”

  “What? Oh.” A quick glance down revealed a couple scratches on my right shin that had dribbled blood in thin trails down to my ankle and into my sock. Not to mention all the mud smeared on my clothing. The result of scrabbling up a riverbank in a hurry. “I’m fine.” I waved off the minor injuries with an attempt at nonchalance.

  Vaughn wasn’t buying it. At all. Those brown eyes turned starkly serious. “Was this your first dead body?”

  “Yes. Well, no. I mean yes, that I’ve seen. My mother died when I was young, but it was closed-casket, the funeral, because she crashed into a tree, so I never saw…um, yes.” I closed my eyes and just stood there in the warm sunshine, swaying slightly with the walkway’s rocking motion. Why was I suddenly a blithering idiot?

  “I thought so,” Vaughn said gently. His fingertips brushed my arm. “The urge to rearrange heavy furniture, impeccable hospitality and amazing coffee at a moment’s notice…and wallowing in mud.” His eyes examined me from shoulders to cross-trainers and back up again, finally settling on my face. “Yeah, you’re exhibiting all the classic signs of shock.” There it was again—the way the corners of his lips barely turned up.

  I couldn’t keep from bursting out laughing. Maybe it was from relief that my inexplicable emotional spasms—which I’d thought I’d kept pretty well internalized—might be normal. “If you say so.”

  Roxy hadn’t said a word about my disheveled appearance. But on the whole, I rather thought Roxy was adept at selectively not mentioning things. That whole dialogue in the office, and we’d never once alluded to the dead man, either. I wondered how Willow dealt with those gaping holes in communication, or if it was normal to her, one of the consequences of a broken home to which I could relate.

  “Why are you here?” I blurted rather rudely. Not that I was complaining, actually, but… “Isn’t the police work here finished?”

  “It’s good to look at a scene in daylight. Fresh perspective.” Vaughn’s face was angled upriver toward the few boats that were bobbing on the water, already anchored in place for a day of leisure.

  “How far did he—I mean, where do you think he fell in?” I asked. “Was he in the water the whole time he was missing? Did he know how to swim?” My stomach clenched in a fitful contraction just thinking about my little nieces who’d
delighted in the novel experience of trotting back and forth on the floating walkway. While they’d been wearing life jackets and had always been within sight of several adults, the prospect of one of them falling into the water sent a shiver through me. I was going to be even more hyper-vigilant whenever they came to visit.

  “The ME will give us an estimate of how long Ian was in the water after he’s done the autopsy. Drowning time of death can be hard to pinpoint because so much has to do with the temperature of the water and how submerged the body was and whether or not it encountered underwater obstacles. Ian was last seen Tuesday night at a meeting of the Friends of River Otters group where he was a featured speaker. He lingered for a while afterward to talk with people, then left on foot, presumably walked to his apartment a few blocks away, but we haven’t been able to confirm that. The clothes he was wearing last night, however, were not the same clothes he wore at that meeting.”

  I thought that maybe Vaughn was trying to distract me with technical details, to make the idea of a dead body more factual and less personal. But he’d also called the man by his first name this time. “Did you know him?” I asked.

  The small fraction of a smile was back. “I arrested him a few times. And donated to a couple of his causes too. Ian was”—Vaughn shook his head—“enigmatic. A real character.”

  How does a police detective grieve? I touched his arm. “I’m sorry.”

  Vaughn gazed at me for a long minute, his brown eyes thoughtful but also a little distant. His mind was clearly elsewhere. Finally, he inhaled deeply, breaking off the reverie. “I should go. Paperwork calls. See you around, Ms. Fairchild.” He stepped past me and continued on toward the gangplank with a long, unhurried stride.

  oOo

  Google. It’s an amazing service. It enables unprecedented degrees of busybody behavior, and better yet, nobody (other than the NSA and maybe the GCHQ—oh, and the advertisers who buy the aggregated search data which may or may not be personally identifying) even knows you were spying on your friends and neighbors and other people wholly unknown to you. People like Ian Thorpe, for example.

  I showered in record time and made a beeline for my new, thoroughly organized, and immaculate office in the loft. I couldn’t account for my curiosity. Except that maybe it was because Willow and I had found him. Or maybe—and I thought this was perhaps even more the case—it was because of Vaughn’s reaction to his death. I wouldn’t call Vaughn’s response moodiness exactly. Definitely not the grouchiness Bettina had mentioned. But there was something bothering him. So it bothered me too—whatever it was.

  Ian Thorpe’s name popped up all over the place—a whole slew of articles on the major local news websites plus a few on national news sites. He was on the board of at least eight environmental nonprofit organizations—only one of which, however, had already posted a sorrowful notification about Ian’s death on their home page. It appeared the rest of the organizations were following the proper protocol of waiting until after the official police announcement.

  I arranged the news articles in chronological order and started reading. Ian was 49 years old. From his early twenties he’d been a frequent and ardent environmental activist. He’d done everything from camping two hundred feet up in a Northern California redwood to keep it from being chopped down to suspending himself from the St. John’s bridge to prevent an icebreaker ship that had been in a Portland dry dock for repairs from heading to the Arctic for an oil-drilling operation. Consequently, along with a plethora of friends and supporters, he’d also developed a long list of powerful S&P 500-indexed corporations that hated his guts.

  I did a few tangential searches on the names of the public information officers for these corporations who were quoted in the articles. They provided an interesting maze of employment cross-pollination as many of the spokespersons had switched jobs, jumping from subsidiary to subsidiary of related companies—most of which were in the oil-and-gas and mineral exploration sectors. Those businesses run some of the most secretive ventures on the planet, and Ian Thorpe had been determined to reveal their intentions to anybody and everybody. There would be several executives in three-piece suits who would be figuratively dancing at Ian’s funeral.

  There were no mentions in the local news of Ian’s disappearance, no appeals to the public to help locate him. Based on the earlier articles about his activism, I assumed Ian had been fiercely independent and self-sufficient, which was probably why an organized search and rescue operation hadn’t yet been launched. Why waste public resources looking for a man who is known to be able to take care of himself?

  I’d forgotten to ask Vaughn about Ian’s family, but none of the news articles had mentioned a wife or children, so maybe there hadn’t been anybody at home to miss him immediately, to know that his schedule had been disrupted. Yet someone had reported him missing—maybe a friend or fellow activist.

  Apparently, the times when Vaughn had arrested Ian also hadn’t been newsworthy. I suspected the incidents had been for local protests that had turned into public nuisances or had blocked private property—and that what happened in Fidelity stayed in Fidelity because it was such a small town. Or maybe the arrests were for more personal reasons like DUI or shoplifting or something. Which was none of my business. Absolutely not.

  Disgusted with my voyeurism, I turned to home improvement websites. After two full days of residence in the house, I’d realized that, while the whole place was shabby, the exterior was the worst. With winter coming, it had to be my priority. I needed to find a place where I could rent a pressure washer and then an electric paint sprayer. And I would need to pick paint colors. So many decisions.

  I moved out to the rooftop deck with my laptop and a pile of pillows for comfortable seating—proper patio furniture would have to wait until I figured out how much the exterior improvements would cost—to enjoy the sunshine and the increased activity on the river.

  Speedboats towing water skiers in wet suits; sailboats tacking back and forth with taut white sails straining against the rigging; men wearing brightly colored life jackets and zipping around on all sorts of personal watercraft trying to impress the women in bikinis who were sunbathing on the decks of anchored yachts; and lowly kayakers near the shores, dipping their paddles in the sparkling water.

  The wakes from all the passing boats set my house to a gentle sloshing that I found mesmerizing—and so relaxing that my eyes may have closed for a few minutes. It was like being rocked in a cradle. Of course, the motion was accompanied by buzzing outboard motor noises and the creak and clank of the floating walkway adjusting to the water movement. But it was all remarkably peaceful.

  “Hey, Eva!” hollered a now familiar voice.

  I cracked open one eye and squinted through the deck railing.

  My favorite blue-haired kid waved frantically, as though I might somehow accidentally overlook her standing down below, just outside my front door.

  “Didn’t you hear me knocking?” she shouted.

  I trotted downstairs so we could converse at a more civilized volume.

  “I have great news,” she announced, squeezing past me when I opened the door and leading the way back up the stairs.

  “Come on in,” I muttered.

  Willow rearranged the pillows and proceeded to make herself quite comfortable. She sat cross-legged with her hands clasped in front of her, her gray eyes wide with anticipation. “Guess what?”

  I wasn’t in the mood for a quiz-show method of relaying information. “You’re going to have to tell me.”

  She whipped a small card out of her back pocket and thrust it at me. “Darren wants you to call him.”

  “Whoa.” I held out my hands, palms flat against Willow’s presumptuousness. “I thought I’d already made it abundantly clear that I do not need a boyfriend.”

  “No, silly. For a job. He owns Wicked Bean in the Pearl District where my writing group meets sometimes. He needs a graphic designer to develop promotional stuff for the new section of h
is shop—a sort of collective creative work space with evening art showcases and gallery exhibits. I told him all about you and he’s super excited.”

  “Right,” I groused, accepting the business card. Someone, presumably Darren Hunt, whose name and business information were printed on the front of the card, had also scrawled a couple more phone numbers and an additional email address on the back along with a Talk soon! message.

  “He said the space will be ready to open next week and he needs it to start paying for itself, but he’s terrible at marketing,” Willow continued. “Didn’t I do good? I got you your first job.” She was bouncing on the pillows now, her face alight with pleasure.

  I cracked a grin at her. “So maybe I owe you dinner. But seriously, Wicked Bean?”

  Willow laughed delightedly, rocking backward with her arms clasped around her knees to collapse on the pillows. Her response came out a little muffled. “I know. Awesome, right? It’s one of my favorite coffee shops. And Darren’s soooo nice.”

  Ah. Now the picture was coming together. Darren just might be the object of a teenage crush. “Well, I guess I can talk to the guy. And I need to put together a portfolio—something I haven’t done since college.”

  “Can I help?” Willow popped back up, her hair sticking out at static-y angles.

  “Nope. It has to be my own work, examples of what I could offer potential clients. However, you can help me pick a paint color for the house.” I held up a warning finger. “Something neutral.”

  oOo

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” Willow balanced the onion on her open palm.

  “Chop.” I pointed to the knife and cutting board I’d laid on the counter for her use.

  “How?” She must have seen the look on my face, because she added. “When I said Gran and I eat stuff only from cans and boxes, I meant it.” She picked at the onion’s dry root fringe and wrinkled her nose. “What is this? I don’t think I want to eat it.”