“Well,” said Milly, “at least, in your line of business, you’d be able to identify it.”
Jeremy Ash felt Milly’s eyes on him, and knew she’d wink at him if he looked back, so he didn’t. He wheeled to the top of the stairs, with his hostess in tow. “Go down and see if you can find Otis, would you?” he said over his shoulder. “Should be easy to spot. Big brown fellow covered with vegetation and bruises.”
That night, Jeremy Ash made a phone call.
“There was a driver’s license in her purse,” he said as Albert listened. “And a nurse’s badge. Other stuff with her name on it. Patricia Hogan.”
“But she calls herself Elizabeth?”
“Elsbet,” said Jeremy Ash. “Probably a nickname for Elizabeth.”
“And she’s been coming to the island for two years?”
“That's what she said. . Regular as clockwork, Milly says.”
Albert thought a moment, and Jeremy Ash let him. “That’s when Mrs. Sweetman died. She was the first.”
“And you don’t think it’s a coincidence?”
“No.”
“What do you think?”
Albert wasn’t sure, yet, what he thought. “You need to find out why she’s there.”
“Good idea, A, if by ‘you’, you don’t mean me.”
That’s exactly who Albert meant. Sensing this, Jeremy Ash said, “The wheelchair, A. It’s a little conspicuous—especially with Otis pushing it.”
“Otis?”
“Wendell.”
“Oh.” Albert had an idea. “Maybe he could do it alone.”
“First of all,” said Jeremy Ash, “I want you to picture this: a 250 pound Maori trying to climb out a second story bedroom window, and getting his foot caught in the curtain, then falling twenty feet through two trees.”
“Wendell?”
“The same.”
“Is he all right?”
“A few bruises and a sprained toe. Which is more than can be said for the trees.”
Albert checked both Wendell and Jeremy Ash off his mental list of potential sleuths, leaving him to wonder who, among the island’s native population, could be trusted implicitly. Three people came to mind: Frenchie, Woolie-One, and Snake. He scanned his impressions of the trio. Frenchie? There was just too much of her, too loud, too free with her thoughts, too bombastic.
Leaving Woolie-One and Snake.
Woolie-One was still grieving and, truth be told, didn’t strike Albert as possession the kind of subtlety the job would require.
Which left him with one option, and he said it out loud. “Snake.”
“Snake?” said Jeremy Ash. “You want me to get him to do it?”
“Yes.”
“You think he can be trusted?”
Of course he could. He rode a motorcycle. Fellowship of the road. “Yes.”
“What should I tell him?”
Albert knew exactly the turn of phrase. “Tell him I’ll give him a thousand dollars to find out what . . . the woman . . . ”
“Patricia Hogan?”
“Patricia Hogan. Yes. Find out what she’s doing.” Then Albert thought of a security clause. “But if she finds out, he won’t get the money.”
“Finds out what? That he’s following her?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. How about you? Come up with anything?”
Albert brought him up-to-date on their discoveries and actions, and Jeremy Ash listened intently. “What are you gonna do about it?”
“About what?”
“The colonel. I mean, he killed his wife.”
“What should I do?”
“You’re asking me? How should I know? You’re the one he told. Mercy killing is still killing.”
“But she wanted him to.”
Jeremy Ash shook his head. “No good, A. That’s the law. Most everybody hits a point in life they just want to end it. You don’t think I have? What if as soon as somebody hits a rough patch, they go knock ’emselves off? No A. We gotta sail where the wind takes us, either to the other shore or straight to the bottom.”
“You think I should tell?”
“You haveta, A. Otherwise you’re an accomplice after the fact. You could go to jail.”
Albert wondered what kind of piano they had in jail.
“You know, A,” Jeremy Ash said after a thought-filled silence, “I think we’re getting into pretty deep waters here.”
Albert had been in deep water several times recently.
“I mean, we’re dealing with dangerous people,” Jeremy Ash clarified. “And I don’t mean Colonel Rivens. I mean the kind of people who get even more dangerous when they’re cornered. The kind of people who kill people.”
“Kill people,” Albert echoed, contemplating the ash of his cigarette. “Yes.”
Jeremy Ash sensed a resolve in Albert that, unlike those who didn’t know him as well, he didn’t discount or underestimate.
Chapter TwentyFive
In their brief acquaintance, Snake had taken a liking to Albert and was, therefore, not averse to a little spying on his behalf. In fact, the notion had twofold appeal: first, shearing season had ended and he was at loose ends until the cray started running, which usually meant a thirty-day bender, of which he had two a year, one after each income-earning season.
“Two months a year, flushed down the toilet of time, never to be remembered,” he ruminated in his beer. He was now sixty-three. He’d been following the same schedule—work like a demon, drink like a fish, smoke like a chimney, swear like a sailor, and be sick as hell most of the time—since he was fifteen.
Forty eight years, two months a year, ninety-six months in total; seven years and four months of his life during which he wasn’t there. None of his marriages had lasted that long.
He shook off his drunken melancholy long enough to remember the second reason he’d not mind sleuthing; during their first meeting at a community dance two years earlier, Elsbet had called him a Neanderthal. The word niggled, especially since, in his dress sweatshirt and jeans, he’d fancied himself cutting quite a dashing figure. He’d not lose much sleep to the knowledge that he’d been instrumental in taking her down a peg or two.
Of course, the prospect of a thousand U.S. dollars did nothing to diminish the appeal of the assignment.
“I’ll be like a ghost,” he assured Jeremy Ash. “A passing zephyr. Nothing more than a troubling of the air in the corner of her eye. She won’t have a clue.”
Even with his imagination, Jeremy Ash, surveying the sheep-shearing biker—every inch of him, including his face, adorned with tattoos, the theme of which seemed to be activities that would have brought a blush to those inhabiting Dantes’ ninth circle of hell—had difficulty picturing anything less conspicuous.
When, after breakfast the next morning, Elsbet asked Milly to call Frenchie to come take her to Waitangi Wharf, where she kept her boat on the eastern side of the island, Snake rose from the table. “Me and Medusa are off that way. I’ll take you.”
“The last time I rode that contraption, my colon ceased to function for a week,” said Elsbet.
Snake noted that his offer hadn’t been refused outright, which is what he’d expected—especially in recollection of that last ride. “Aw, come on, El. You just need to learn to relax. Trust me,” he said, with a wink at Jeremy Ash. “Been ages since I’ve gone off any cliff more than six or eight feet high.”
“Don’t call me that,” said Elsbet, thawing to the notion. “You’re sober? Let me smell your breath.”
Obligingly, Snake drew his face within inches of hers, opened his mouth, and exhaled. The blood drained from her face, and she fell away from him. “Good Lord, Snake, have you been eating road kill?”
Snake looked innocently at Milly. “I don’t think so. That was bacon, wasn’t it Mil? From a pig?”
Milly threw a tea towel over her shoulder, turned, and left the room. “No,” said Snake, his attention turning to his prospective passenger. “No road
kill on the menu this morning. You ready?”
“I suppose,” said Elsbet. “No one lives forever.”
Snake held the door for her and, as she passed onto the porch, he cast a glance over his shoulder at Jeremy Ash, tapped the side of his nose and said, “Like a zephyr.”
Twenty minutes later, Snake was sitting with a cup of coffee on the picnic table outside the Fisherman’s Friend. The steam from the coffee combined with that of his breath to form a cloud through which he watched Eslbet, massaging those parts of her that had been offended by the sixteen-kilometer ride on Medusa, walk down the ramp—a steep pitch at low tide—and made her boat ready for its customary trip to Pitt Island, where, it was said, she studied the sex life of barnacles or whatever it was marine biologists got up to.
But she never smelled of fish when she got back.
“Queer, that,” Snake said to himself.
“Queer?” said an echo in another person’s voice. A woman’s voice. Frenchie sat down beside him. “Who, her? You think so?”
“What?”
“You think she’s queer?”
“Who?”
Frenchie nodded at Elsbet. “Handles that boat like a man.”
A pithy monograph was embodied in the look Snake gave his table companion, but she didn’t seem to notice. She, too, was watching Elsbet prepare her launch. “I wonder if anyone’ll ever read it.”
“Read what?”
“The book she’s writing.”
“She’s writing a book?”
“‘Course she is. What else you think brings her out to Pitt in all weathers? She’s writing a book about the Pitt Shag.”
“Phalacrocorax featherstoni,” said Snake. It was Frenchie’s turn to look askance. “I’m not just a pretty face, you know.”
“You have a gift for understatement.”
They watched Elsbet’s New Zealand Wildlife and Fisheries launch pull away from the dock and head southeast toward Pitt Island. Snake had an idea. “Woolie gone out yet?”
“Nah, just finished his third cuppa before you got here. I heard him say he was pickin’ up new line.”
Snake went down to the dock, sat on the gunwale of the Mermaid’s Tale, and rolled himself a cigarette. He hadn’t lit it yet when Woolie hove into view at the top of the gangway, a coil of white nylon rope slung over his left shoulder.
“Don’t get them tats all over my boat,” he said.
“If they ain’t come off by now, they never will,” Snake replied.
Woolie dropped his burden on deck. “You look like someone who wants something.”
Snake told Woolie what he wanted.
“He wants her followed?”
“Seems so.”
“Have anything to do with my boy?”
Snake shrugged. “Don’t know.”
It didn’t really matter. Recent events had conspired to elevate Albert to lofty heights in the somewhat fractured and fluid landscape of Woolie’s esteem. He removed a pair of WWII issue ANZAC binoculars from a worn leather case by which they hung under the console, and raised them to his eyes.
“She’s headed southeast,” he said.
“I’d say so.”
“Then we’ll go round the backside. Hop in.”
The “backside”, relative to Pitt, meant that side of the island buffeted by wind and wave sweeping in over seven hundred kilometers of open ocean, the only exception being Mangere Island, just offshore, a comma in that vast, unpunctuated paragraph of storm and fury to the west. For that reason, the coast south and west of Flower Pot Bay—the most common landing place—was generally avoided by seamen.
Though born and raise on Chatham, Snake was not an avid mariner. True, he would be out with the rest of the fleet when crayfish season came ’round. But that activity was generally carried out on the sheltered eastern side of the island, not too far from shore, and usually early in the day, in order to be home before the seas kicked up.
As the Mermaid’s Tale pounded its way south and west across the open bay, and then through the contrary currents swirling between Mangere and the crags and bluffs of Pitt’s western headlands, Snake was not at his jovial best. Constantly showered with freezing spray and spume ,which targeted him wherever he situated himself, he was miserable and, therefore, almost joyful when, after two solid, bone-jarring hours, they rounded the southern tip of the island, and turned up into the relative shelter and calm of the lee side.
Woolie turned north, hugging the coast close enough to see any boat; in fact, any unconcealed person, sheep, or structure of any kind. In thirty minutes they’d arrived at the northern tip of the island.
“She must have put in at Flower Pot,” said Woolie. “Should’ve checked there first, I suppose.”
“You think?” said Snake morosely.
It took only a further ten minutes to round to the Bay, where there was no sign of Elsbet’s launch, and a hasty interview with Minda Trinket, the island’s de facto postmistress, verified that she hadn’t been there.
Woolie and Snake were back in the boat. “Where could she have got to, then?” said Snake.
Woolie was thinking. “Only one place,” he said and, without further explanation, turned east at full throttle.
“Where are we going?” Snake yelled over the roar of the engine.
“Southeast,” Woolie called over his shoulder.
“I see that,” said Snake. “But where?”
“Not southeast. South East. South East Island. There’s a nice little harbor on the eastern shore!”
“Any Pitt shag there?”
Woolie shook his head.
“Then if she is there,” Snake said to himself, “it’s got nothing to do with any book.”
The Mermaid’s Tale was born for water, and she cleaved a perfect wake for six miles through the slowly undulating seas until, just off the northeast coast of South East Island, Woolie suddenly yanked back the throttle. “Well, would you look at that!”
Snake, who had been staring back off the stern, contemplating the zipper-like neatness of the wake, turned, looked, and there, its bulk concealed by a crooked finger of land jutting into the ocean, was the superstructure of a freighter. As the outflowing current and what remained of forward momentum carried the Mermaid’s Tale further eastward, revealing more of the ship—a foot at a time—Snake was able to read the remains of the lettering on its side. “Venice Regent,” he said.
“Not much longer,” Woolie said. He was watching through his binoculars as two men, standing on a scaffolding suspended from a winch on deck, were busily painting over the lettering. “Look.”
He handed the glasses to Snake.
“They’re changing her name.”
He let the binoculars drift along the hull, and found what he was looking for. “There she is!” He quickly handed the glasses back to Woolie who, looking through them and following Snake’s finger, saw Elsbet’s New Zealand Wildlife and Fisheries boat tied off on the stairs leading to the ship’s deck.
“What do you suppose they’re up to?”
“And what’s that woman got to do with it?” Woolie wanted to know. “What do we do now?”
“We go ’round to the western shore, outta sight. Then comes on dark we’ll do a little spyin’.”
“Spyin’? How?” said Woolie. He put the engine in reverse and idled out of the ship’s line-of-sight. “You think we’re gonna sneak up on ’em in this thing? I mean, granted she ain’t the Queen Mary, but she’s no punt.”
“Leave that to me,” said Snake.
In the end, no safe anchorage was found on the western side of the island, so, after a near-circumnavigation, Woolie settled on tying up to a rock ledge that made an island of its own within a stone’s throw southeast of South East, and nearly within hailing distance of the former Venice Regent. For the rest of the day they took turns watching from atop their little granite outpost as the ship’s metamorphosed to the Polaris, of Panamanian registry.
“Look!” said Woolie, whose turn it
was with the glasses. “They’re headed ashore.”
“Who?”
“Elsbet and some other bloke.”
“Where are they going?”
“Going? What do you mean ‘where are they going?’. There’s no where to go on South East. Not so much as a sheep path.”
“This could be interesting”, said Snake. “Let me see those.”
Woolie handed him the binoculars.
“They’ve tied off,” said Snake. “They’re gettin’ out. Walkin’. Walkin’ and talkin’. They’re walkin’ this way!” He thrust the binoculars back at Woolie. “Get me over to the shore!” He slipped down the rock toward the line mooring the boat and untied it, Woolie followed close behind. “What are you gonna do?”
“Find out what they’re talkin’ about.”
“How?”
Snake grinned. “Just gonna blend into the scenery.”
“The only place you’d blend into the scenery,” Woolie said, “is a carnival sideshow.”
Snake, to whom this kind of observation was, apparently, not unfamiliar, was unruffled. “You just watch me.”
The round trip from the rock, to South East Island, and back to the rock took Woolie about four minutes. From his vantage, with the glasses, he followed Snake’s progress across a parched meadow to the meager coverage of scrub bushes, none of which stood more than five feet high, though there was a lot of it between him and the walkers, who were just entering the same bonzai forest from the north, walking leisurely, clearly consumed in conversation. “Would be nice to know what they’re sayin’,” he said to himself.
When he swung the glasses back to where Snake had been, he was no longer there, nor did a quick sweep of the vicinity reveal his whereabouts. “Damn!” said Woolie. “He did it.”
The walkers came to the sloping ledge of granite forming the southern coast of the little harbor in which the freighter was anchored. They sat down, and seemed to be surveying the progress of the ship’s transformation. Now and then they put their heads together, not in the manner of lovers, but of those sharing a secret so deep that, even on this little uninhabited wart of wilderness at the bottom of the world, it must be done in whispers.
Fortunately, however it may have seemed from Woolie’s perspective, that was not the case. Snake, in keeping with his sobriquet, had slithered within earshot of the couple, his progress through the brush masked by the similar sibilance of the waves lapping the rock, and what he heard made it difficult to sit still and wait for them to get up and go back to the ship. In time, however, they did get up, brush themselves off and leave the way they’d come. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, Elsbet turned and looked south at the precise moment an errant beam of the soon-to-be-setting sun hit the lens of Woolie’s binoculars.
Improvisato Page 31
