B.B. Cantwell - Portland Bookmobile 02 - Corpse of Discovery

by B. B. Cantwell

  Carmichael paused to scan her to-do list, looking like a perky camp counselor, and then looked up with a grin.

  “Remember we asked each of you for your shirt size when you were picked for this trip? Well, first thing I’d like everyone to do is go through one of the totes that Linda is unloading from the van over there – ” Linda Dimple waved as she hefted another box to the ground “ – and find the T-shirt with your name on it. Because we’re all part of a team today, tackling a challenging trip, we’re going to dress like a team.”

  At this, Candy unzipped her hoody and pulled it open to show off the bright red T-shirt she wore, bearing the message “WE’RE BOOKIN’ for the Portland City Library.”

  A mixture of oohs, aahs and muffled groans came from the onlookers as a line formed by the totes.

  “And I’ve been saving this little surprise,” Candy continued. “I told you that you wouldn’t need to worry about meals. Well, that’s because the entire day will be catered by Portland’s beloved Wiener Dog Restaurant!”

  Just as she finished speaking, a boop-boop-a-doop honk drew everyone’s attention and heads turned to the driveway just outside the barn’s open bay doors.

  Hester gasped as a vehicle shaped like a giant hot dog rolled to a stop. “Oh my gosh, isn’t that – the thing that’s in TV commercials? Do we get whistles?”

  Pim howled with delight.

  “No! It used to be. The Wiener Dog family bought it surplus a couple years ago, painted the wiener to look more like a bratwurst and added that dachshund hood ornament. Now it’s the Portland Wiener Wagen! I saw it last fall at the Clackamas County Fair!”

  As she spoke, Gerhard Gerbils, in his lederhosen today, hopped from the driver seat and waved to the assemblage, raising from his bald head a little blue alpine cap with a pink feather on one side.

  From the other door came Tony Pucci, the Wiener Dog’s lucky, medallion-finding chef, in his kitchen whites and tall toque hat.

  “My goodness, I can’t believe Mr. Gerbils himself is in on this!” Hester marveled privately to Pim. “I would have thought he’d be in his law office on a Monday.”

  “Oh, I’m not surprised, Hester. He loves that restaurant, and he knows this is good exposure!”

  A half-hour later, the library vans, followed by the magenta bookmobile topped by two dugout canoes, and the garish Wiener Wagen, with puffs of smoke trailing from a little chimney, made a conspicuous caravan as they headed northwest on Highway 30 out of the city.

  Nate Darrow and Harry Harrington waved at the entourage as they passed in the fast lane. Darrow craned his neck and a curious look crossed his face as he observed the Wiener Wagen and spied Gerbils and the now-famous cook through its front windows.

  A half-mile further on, Harry turned the blue Caprice to take the bridge to Sauvie Island, with a KSNZ news van in hot pursuit.

  Chapter 28

  “This is Misty Day with another KSNZ exclusive, reporting live from the Rajneeshees’ Downward Dog Farm on Sauvie Island, where we’ve followed Portland detectives ready to finally make a bust in the long, drawn-out investigation of the Pieter van Dyke murder,” the reporter intoned quietly into her microphone as a live camera followed her to the door of a barn painted with colorful daisies and smiley faces.

  Just then the door swung wide and Nate Darrow and Harry Harrington stepped briskly out. Surprised by the TV camera with its red light shining, a murderous look flashed across Darrow’s face, quickly replaced by a sinister smile.

  “Detective, is it true you’ve come to arrest Ma Anand Carla, the mastermind behind the Dalles salad-bar poisonings? Is she Pieter van Dyke’s killer?” the reporter blurted before Darrow could speak.

  The off-kilter smile stayed pasted on the detective’s face.

  “Misty, why don’t you come inside and question Carla yourself?” he asked, taking her by the elbow and forcefully ushering her into the barn before she could respond.

  The camera feed continued on screens of KSNZ viewers all over Portland, with the electric banner “Live police bust on Sauvie Island,” as the image jogged and bumped into a hay-filled stable.

  At the edge of a stall, a man with mutton-chop sideburns and a wary-eyed, dark-haired woman with a ferret-like face and denim coveralls looked up curiously from where they sat on bales of hay next to a little horse and two tiny colts that bore a striking resemblance to Jack Russell terriers.

  “Detective, what on earth?” asked Dr. Nigel Hartley, the veterinarian Nate and Harry had met on their last visit to the island.

  “Sorry for this intrusion again, Doctor Hartley, but after the little demonstration you and Carla just gave, I happened to run into my reporter friend and I thought she’d want to show her viewers how you folks are teaching these clever little horses to be service animals.”

  “Oh, yes, it’s really quite amazing what smart creatures these are,” the vet said. “Carla, why don’t you continue the exercise?”

  Ma Anand Carla knelt in the hay, gazed into the little mare’s big brown eyes and asked, “Rainbow, can you count to three? THREE, Rainbow?”

  Carla knocked her knuckles on the wooden floor of the barn three times, knock-knock-knock. As if in reply, the little chestnut horse raised her own hoof and repeated the rapping, KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK.

  “Good girl, Rainbow!” cried Carla, offering a handful of alfalfa to the horse, whose tiny colts now cavorted at her heels.

  Darrow spoke up, turning his head to be sure the camera would catch his words.

  “So, Doctor, I understand that Carla suggested this training the night she spent with you and her fellow farmhands when these colts were born – the same unfortunate night that Pieter van Dyke died?”

  “Yes, Detective, Carla said she could sense Rainbow’s natural intelligence and urged that we consider enrolling the horse in the service-animal field for which she developed a passion during her unfortunate incarceration.”

  “And these little horses even get outfitted with special little tennis shoes and wear harnesses just like a seeing-eye dog!” piped up Harry Harrington, who had thought the whole idea ludicrous at first but was newly won over.

  Misty Day, ever the stage-wise professional, now elbowed her way back in front of the live camera.

  “And there you have it, Thad and Marilu,” she purred to the News Break anchors watching from the downtown studio. “A tale of misguided suspicion on the part of the police turned to a heartwarming conclusion – a story of rehabilitation and hope. Live from Sauvie Island, this is Misty Day.”

  In the background, car doors slammed. Nate Darrow and Harry Harrington were already back in the Caprice, headed for the city.

  Chapter 29

  After crossing the Lewis and Clark Bridge to Longview, Washington, the library caravan followed Highway 4 downriver, through the little burg of Skamokawa to the launch site at Vista Park, where Steamboat Slough and Skamokawa Creek branched off from the Columbia River.

  The community’s main buildings were a riverfront inn, the last remaining authentic steamboat landing on the Columbia, now on the national historic register, and Redmen Hall, an old fraternal lodge with a politically incorrect name that was now a museum.

  For breakfast, Gerhard Gerbils distributed a Kielbasa-on-a-Stick to each of the crew, and while sitting on a gray drift log next to the launching ramp Pim managed to spray her red T-shirt with yellow mustard.

  All was proceeding normally.

  “This isn’t quite what the real Corps of Discovery had to eat,” announced Sage, the page, in his high, nasal voice, as he sat in the lotus position atop a riverbank stump surrounded by weedy willow trees. Sage, a painfully thin, goateed Reed College dropout of about 19 with jet-black hair to his waist and a single emerald stud piercing his nose, fancied himself a critic, be it of food, theater, literature or life. For this trip, his hair was in two long braids, which he thought suggestive of a Chinook brave. Others saw him differently.

  “It’s like he’s a tall, dark Pippi Longstocking,�
�� Pim whispered to Hester.

  While Sage’s comment was nothing more than a bored dig at the world, it was taken as a challenge by three Reference Line workers perched together on a nearby boulder who had been answering Lewis and Clark trivia questions ever since Rose Festival opened.

  “Actually, a sausage encased in buffalo intestine was a favorite preparation of their guide, Toussaint Charbonneau, who called it boudin blanc,” said Jeannette Nelson, a tall and lean woman with salt-and-pepper shoulder-length hair and a perennial scowl.

  “But on this stretch of the river they’d have almost certainly have been eating wapato, a starchy potato-like root that was a staple of the Chinook tribe,” chirped Debbie Wilkes, whose mousy-brown pixie haircut framed a cherry-cheeked face.

  “That is, of course, if they hadn’t traded for a fresh dog from one of the tribal villages,” added Eva Temple, a Hillary Clinton look-alike, giving a smug, self-satisfied look over the top of her tiger-striped reading glasses as she paused from reading a slim volume of Baudelaire. “In fact, dog was a coveted staple for the Corps of Discovery by this late juncture in their hardscrabble voyage across an unforgiving wilderness.”

  At this pronouncement, several of the group paused to look skeptically at their half-eaten kielbasas.

  “Well, they do often call this sort of thing a hot dog,” Linda Dimple said with a gulp.

  “Oh, don’t worry, they only make the best German sausage at the Wiener Dog!” Pim reassured her.

  “Sorry, did you not want a historical précis on the Corps of Discovery diet?” Jeannette asked, pointing her thin nose at Sage, who was yawning widely. “Maybe you were just making idle conversation.”

  Sage gave a nervous chuckle and pointed his forefinger at his nose to affirm the latter.

  At this juncture, Candy Carmichael strode over from where she had completed supervising the unloading of the canoes with the help of Bob Newall, the maintenance man, who had ridden along and would drive the bookmobile down Highway 4 and across the four-mile-long Astoria-Megler Bridge to meet them in Astoria.

  “OK, listen up everyone!” Candy shouted, straining to be heard over a breeze that had come up out of the west. “We’ll need to average about 5 miles per hour in order to get to our destination in time for the picnic the Wiener Dog will provide for us and other library guests in Astoria. And that will be a special treat! Thanks to some strings pulled by our own Ethel Pimala, we’ve obtained an old family recipe from a gentleman who is a direct descendant of Toussaint Charbonneau, an actual member of the Corps of Discovery. So our picnic dinner will be…” Here she stopped to study a clipboard “ – a special sausage called boudin blanc, with a side dish of wapato, which I’m told is like a Native American potato!”

  All around, the group shared stunned looks.

  Linda Dimple finally broke the silence in a small voice. “Do you think they’ll use real buffalo intestine?”

  “I thought it was a salmon barbecue!” whined Jeannette Nelson.

  “At least it’s not roast rack of spaniel,” Sage wisecracked.

  Hester, taking comfort in knowing of a few good restaurants in Astoria, quietly sang,

  “You say to-MAY-to, I say to-MAH-to,

  You say po-TAY-to, I say wa-PAH-to…”

  She stopped when Pim gave her the stink eye.

  Candy, oblivious of the rumblings in the ranks, continued down her list of announcements.

  “And as you might know, we have the benefit of some leadership today by Vance Boylston, from the accounting office, who grew up on Lake Oswego and has paddled a canoe there since he was in diapers, to hear Vance tell it. Please give him your full attention as he tells a little about our route today and goes over some safety tips.”

  Boylston, a fair-skinned, carrot-topped lump of a man who wore his official Assistant Scoutmaster shirt from Troop 72, demonstrated how to put on life vests and spoke for five minutes about paddling technique, how to balance the canoe and strategies for a man-overboard rescue.

  “And I think our best route today will be to cross the river immediately, over to some of the protected sloughs on the far side, out of this weather that seems to be blowing up. The main thing is to get well out of the ship channel!” he bellowed, trying to be heard over the rush of wind that continued to build.

  “What did he say?” Hester asked Pim, who was preoccupied with cinching a drawstring to keep her woven pandanus hat from blowing away.

  “Something about how we should get well out in the ship channel!” Pim said distractedly.

  Hester mulled this advice. “Oh, I guess that’s how we catch the best current. That makes sense.”

  Boylston concluded by passing out a folded paper to the designated lead paddlers for each canoe. For Hester and Pim’s canoe, this was Sage, the page, who had won the honor because of his long arms. Pim had already privately nicknamed him Wilt the Stilt.

  “I’m proud of saving the library some money on this endeavor,” Boylston explained smugly. “I was in Astoria for a conference last week and my favorite restaurant, the Pig ‘n’ Pancake, had this map of the Lower Columbia on their paper place mats. After my group finished breakfast, I collected all the place mats! I know it doesn’t have a lot of detail, but it ought to get us there.”

  Hester looked at him in alarm.

  “Well, let’s hope no killer reefs or giant whirlpools are covered by a gravy stain or a blot of jelly, Captain Cook!” she said under her breath.

  Chapter 30

  “Pull! Pull! Pull!”

  Sage’s nasally voice didn’t exactly inspire a Gold Medal performance, Hester thought as she dipped her paddle into the cold and murky green water of the Columbia.

  She and Pim were in the last boat of the lineup heading out from the entrance of Steamboat Slough into the wide waters of the main river at 10:20 that morning.

  Hester felt a sense of foreboding as they rounded a point of mossy rocks and suddenly got a full view of the mighty river. It quickly widened from what reasonably looked like a river to a four- or five-mile-wide windswept tideland pocked by sandbars and edged by coastal hills and wild, undeveloped shore. Not far downstream, a thick band of fog split the river midstream. It looked like it was blowing their way.

  And while the whole idea of these dugout canoes, each created from a single log of Western red cedar and with a carved wolf head at the prow, was excitingly historical, Hester could already tell the thin neoprene pad they’d each been given to kneel on in the rough-hewed vessels wasn’t going to stop her from being bruised like a bad banana tomorrow.

  As they left the slough’s entrance and headed out into the river, choppy waves acted like a tractor beam, slowing the canoes.

  Pim, just in front of Hester in her canoe’s lineup, was immediately struggling.

  Hester noted that the short and stout bookmobile driver was having trouble holding the paddle as they’d been instructed, with one hand on the top of the shank and the other just above the blade. Her arms just didn’t reach. Without proper positioning she wasn’t getting leverage on the paddle, which kept glancing off the water’s surface instead of digging deep as they’d been instructed. At one point, Pim almost lost her grip on it entirely. Hester could see Pim’s frustration quickly mounting.

  And an additional problem soon became apparent. Not only were Pim’s efforts for naught, but several of the dugout’s strongest paddlers were paddling on the opposite side from her. As a result of the imbalance, their canoe had soon veered sharply to starboard, pointing downstream toward a prominent landmark a few miles off called Pillar Rock, which poked up out of the river some 100 feet offshore.

  Sage, whose lucky beret had slipped down over his eyes, seemed oblivious. Hester saw it was time to take charge.

  “Does anybody see where we’re going?”

  “Pull! Pull!” Sage’s coaching was sounding more and more like some sort of mewling waterfowl.

  “I think we might need to balance out our paddlers,” Hester called, craning her n
eck to try to catch Sage’s attention.

  Her word of caution was drowned out by an ongoing travelogue by the three women from Reference Line, who sat between Sage and Pim.

  “Did everybody know that Pillar Rock was originally some 75 feet higher before it was altered and flattened to position a navigational marker at its top?” Jeannette Nelson announced as if emceeing a pageant.

  “And that Lewis and Clark camped onshore within sight of the rock twice on their journey?” Debbie Wilkes added.

  “In fact, that it was from that campsite that Clark penned the giddy and famously wrong pronouncement, ‘Ocian in View!’ because the river became so wide and wild, even though they were still some 20 miles from the sea?” Eva Temple concluded in authoritative triumph.

  “OK, thank you, Noble Oracles! Now STOP PADDLING!” Hester shrilled.

  Suddenly it was quiet and still. Necks craning, all eyes turned her way.

  “It’s just that – look, the others are going that way, and we’re veering back toward shore,” she explained, nodding toward the other canoes, already some distance off and making quick progress toward the middle of the river.

  There was some debate over simply reassigning paddling sides, but Jeannette Nelson complained that she couldn’t switch because she was very strongly left-handed and that she had faced discrimination and bullying over it all her life.

  Candy Carmichael, sitting in the rear, agreed to trade sides with Linda Dimple, but while Eva Temple insisted she was ambidextrous and would swap sides whenever needed, she reserved the right to take frequent breaks because her bursitis was flaring up again.

  To be sure the balance was right, Sage decided, he would stand in the bow and look back to observe as they all took their best strong paddle stroke.

  And, of course, when the canoe suddenly thrust forward, he fell overboard.

  It was to their credit that the ladies figured out how to counterbalance the narrow canoe while Jeannette and Debbie, who regularly spent their lunch hours power lifting at the downtown Y, hauled him back aboard.