Scone Island

by Frederick Ramsay

  “You think he came back and threw the weapon over the cliff?” Ruth was now completely absorbed by the puzzle and, she would deny it later, enjoying it as well.

  “Would you? No, I think whoever did this was feeling pretty cocky about having pulled off the perfect murder. He retraced his steps, picked up the bar and tossed it into the bushes.” Ike faced the house, pretended to lean over and pick something up. He swept his arm in an arc and pointed. “If he’s right-handed it’ll be over there and if he’s a lefty,” he pointed in the opposite direction, “it’s that way.”

  Stone stepped into the underbrush to Ike’s right. “I’m going with the percentages and say he’s right-handed.” After a few minutes he bent over and, using his handkerchief in lieu of gloves, held up a rusty iron bar.

  “It would appear, Deputy, that you have an active murder case on your hands. I expect you will want to go back and report this good news to your sheriff. Come on, Ruth, as promised we are done here. We need to get back to the house and rest up if we are going on that picnic.”

  The three made their way back to West Road. In front of Ruth’s cottage, Ike turned to the deputy.

  “As a matter of curiosity, Deputy, do you know how old Staley was?”

  “In his sixties, I think. Thereabout, anyway; his bio wasn’t very extensive. We were still looking for information when we closed the case as an accident. Why?”

  “No reason. I was wondering how many people could have pulled off that leg sweep, and of that number, how many could do it at age sixty?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  At eleven-thirty that morning, Ruth and Ike stopped by Potter’s Store and helped themselves to some chips and sunscreen. They left what they hoped would be enough money to cover the costs. Ruth couldn’t remember what the sales tax was, if any, so they added an extra dollar and headed out to Pine Tree Island. The tide had not cleared the interval between Southport and the little island standing to the south and a little west.

  “Now we can wait for the tide to go all the way out and then walk, or we can wade on over, it doesn’t look too deep.”

  “You’re sure about this tide business? That water looks pretty menacing to me.”

  “You’re one of them good ol’ suth-ren boys, Ike. Now us New Englanders know about tides. Whaling stock and all that.”

  “Okay, Ahab, we wade. If you disappear beneath the surface, remember it was me that said ‘I told you so.’”

  “You didn’t though.”

  “I’m doing it now. I told you so.”

  “Shut up and follow me and hold the cooler up high. I don’t want soggy sandwiches.”

  The water was colder and deeper than either expected but they managed to reach the island and clamber up its bank. The dry land formed a low mound with a cleared flattened area at its center. Evidence of old camp fires dotted the space. Ruth dropped her bag and blanket next to the largest of them.

  “We could have a fire and toast marshmallows.”

  “We don’t have any marshmallows. We could heat up our sandwiches but I can’t imagine why. My feet are freezing and my slacks are wet practically to my waist. How about we heat them up.”

  “You go find us some firewood and kindling and we can both dry off and so on.”

  “And so on?”

  “Do you need a map? Go.”

  Ike went in search of firewood. He found some pieces of driftwood along the shore where a higher than average tide had deposited them. There were plenty of pine needles for kindling and, true to the nature of pine trees in general, enough dry branches were scattered about on the ground and clinging to the trees to make a nice fire. Ike got it blazing. Ruth sat on one side, her bare feet extended toward the flames.

  “It’s really too cold to sunbathe.” She sounded disappointed.

  “Don’t let that stop you. The view from here is certainly nice, but you in full sunbathing mode would be nicer still.”

  “You are a dirty old man.”

  “Yes, I’m proud to admit, I am, but you’re right, I don’t think you should risk pneumonia for the privilege of inducing early skin cancer. Let’s eat. Maybe it will warm up if this breeze dies down, and then you can be my dessert.”

  They unpacked their sandwiches and Ruth uncorked the wine. “What’s so important about a sixty-year-old guy doing the leg thing?”

  “That is an excellent question that I hope the young man asks as well. I knew there was a reason I made you a deputy.”

  “You made me a deputy last year to cover your ass from too much pillow talk.”

  “There was the CYA motive for sure, but mostly I needed your first-class brain to talk to every now and again and besides, it gives me an excuse to talk shop off duty.”

  “So, it’s my brains you find attractive, sailor?”

  “Oh, indeed. Maybe the sun will warm up and you can tan your ‘brains’ after all.”

  Ruth unbuttoned the two top buttons of her sweater and sang, slightly off key, “Dah-de-dah… boom…dah-de dah…”

  “As I said, pure genius. Pass me a sandwich and pour me another dollop of that almost drinkable wine, please.”

  ***

  Ruth lay sprawled on a black and red Hudson’s Bay blanket. Ike wondered how she could manage that. His remembrance of Hudson’s Bay blankets, at least the ones he grew up with, was that they were wool and very scratchy. Since another manufacturer now made them under license, he didn’t know if it was still true. But wool is wool even under the best of circumstances. Ike turned the pages of Scone Island Stories.

  “Here’s an interesting bit,” he said. “Here, take a look at the list of names your aunt or someone penciled in the back.” He handed her the book opened to the back. “Check out the captain of the Coast Guard Station.”

  “Gustave Staehle. Do you think his pals called him Gus?”

  “Can’t say. That’s not part of the name I find interesting.”

  “No ? Why?”

  “Come on deputy, I am counting on you to help me here.”

  “No dice, copper. We’re on vacation, remember?”

  Ike glanced at the sky. “Shouldn’t we be moving back to the mainland? The tide will be coming in soon and it looks like rain.”

  “No rain. I already told you, not going to happen.”

  “You know that, or you hope that?”

  “It’s the silver maples. When it’s going to rain, they turn their leaves over so the silvery side shows. See, they’re not doing it; ergo no rain.”

  “It’s good to know you are grounded in all things natural and botanical.”

  “Go see for yourself. We have plenty of time.”

  Ike walked back to the embankment where they’d climbed out earlier. The water swirled near the topmost edge. Ruth was pulling on her sweater and gathering the picnic materials when he returned. The fire was out, the air had turned chilly, and the sky dark.

  “Let me see that tide table of yours.”

  “What? Okay, here.” She handed him the narrow booklet. “It’s open to today’s date.”

  Ike studied the pages. A frown creased his forehead. “Did you notice that the times are printed in both italics and standard type face?”

  “I did. I wondered about that.”

  “Umm… not enough, I’m afraid, oh ye of olde, spelled with an extra e, whaling stock. The type face is important.”

  “Really?” She walked over to him and stood so that she could read over his shoulder. She smelled like pine needles. “What’s so important?”

  “The italicized times are AM and the regular are PM.”

  “Oops.”

  “We need more firewood, we’re here for another five hours, maybe more.”

  “Well, at least we have an almost full bottle of wine. Let’s drink it and then put a note in the bottle, ‘Help, stranded on a remote island. Send more wine.’ What do you think?”

  “For someone who is usually a type A compulsive, you are taking this remarkably well.”

  “Yes,
I am. I keep telling myself, it’s the new me. But I am cold. Firewood first, then the wine. Thank God for these blankets. They are really itchy, though. You should see my back.”

  “I’ll take a rain check on that, thank you. Speaking of rain, is it getting darker?”

  “I told you, no rain,”

  “Right, silver maples. Is that bit of information stored in the same place as your how to read a tide table?”

  “Lighten up, Schwartz. Do you have an important meeting to attend? Build us a nice fire and we’ll cuddle and sing camp songs.”

  “Firewood. Be right back.”

  When he returned, he encouraged the remaining coals to flare up and soon had a reasonably decent fire blazing. He turned and headed out again.

  “Now where are you going?”

  “I break out in a rash when people sing camp songs, and you need to finish drying out. The temperature is dropping and you do not need to add pneumonia to your list of medical problems.”

  “No cuddling either?”

  “Ah, as to that. Warm up and dry off. I won’t be long. We will need more wood soon and while I am gathering it, I’m going exploring. This island can’t be more than thirty yards across. Let’s see what the natives left. Maybe I’ll stumble across your Indian Romeo and Juliet.”

  “Maybe we will both freeze to death and they’ll find us in the morning entwined in each other’s arms like them.”

  “It’s May, for crying out loud. You’re not going to freeze.”

  “I’m going to stay here by the fire. I don’t think my leg is up to exploring. Bring back lots of wood when you’re done playing Nimrod.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Charlie finally reached Neil Bernstein’s girl friend, Krissie Johansen, a second time. Things were becoming tight. She told him she still had not heard from Neil since he left a week earlier. She hoped she would have by now, but guessed she really didn’t expect to. She didn’t sound so sure about that part.

  “He didn’t call you when he traveled out there to climb? I would think climbing solo is dangerous enough but to not check in would be foolhardy.”

  “Where he goes, you know, out there in the mountains, there’s not much in the way of a signal for a cell phone. So I don’t always expect calls. Most of the time, when he’s by himself, he’ll walk around and sooner or later he finds a few bars and calls me. Not always when he arrives, though, but maybe later.”

  “He hasn’t called at all so far?”

  “No. So, like I said, it’s not unusual, only it’s not like him either. Like, it’s been a week.” Charlie heard the worry in her voice.

  “So where exactly does he do this climbing, Miss Johansen?”

  “He calls it his ‘special place.’ It’s not like it’s really his, you know. Other people go there, too, but he likes to think of it as, you know, sort of his. I can’t tell you exactly. The times I went there we usually stopped at that little town I told you about before to gas up and get sodas and stuff before we turned into the mountains. Do you think something’s happened to him, Mr. Garland?”

  “I called out there earlier and they had no news. I guess I should try again. Anyway, let’s hope he’s okay.” Charlie thanked her, hung up, and Googled Barratt, Colorado, and studied its website for a few minutes. There wasn’t much to be learned. He called the police department a second time and again asked if they had any new information on a Neil Bernstein. The local cops wanted to know who was asking. Charlie hesitated. He was unwilling to tip his hand yet and the caller’s voice on the other end sounded distant, like this call was not one the Barratt PD either wanted or expected. Charlie lied and said he was calling for Bernstein’s employer. It wasn’t entirely untrue. But in any case, it didn’t seem to work. The cop on the other end said they had no information to offer about any accident or disappearance of a Neil Bernstein and hung up.

  “That,” a very frustrated Charlie said to the wall, “has all the characteristics of tuna salad left too long in the sun.”

  He was on the verge of calling out a special unit and tasking it to drop in on the cops in Barratt when his phone rang. Al Jackson’s control. They talked for ten minutes. It was not good news. Charlie made another call to another police department. The Baltimore PD, unlike the one in Colorado, was more than happy to talk to a fed who would assume responsibility for one of their murder books. Charlie promised that someone would be over to clean up for them.

  Where the hell was Ike?

  ***

  It didn’t take long for Ike to circumnavigate the island. It didn’t offer much in the way of excitement, though. Not even any interesting flotsam in on the tide. Except for a square concrete box-like structure near the southernmost edge, there was nothing to see. He might not have seen it either because of the dense foliage and honeysuckle which grew around and over it. He caught sight of a corner which peeked out. Had he not paused in the path and looked around to get his bearings, he would have missed it. He studied the box. It appeared to have been constructed from poured concrete. It had a coffin-like lid attached by two massive hasps with corroded brass locks at either end of the rectangular box on which it rested. Some lettering had been painted on one side at one time which was now nearly indecipherable.

  What the heck, he thought, why not? He wrestled the lid back, not without considerable effort and couldn’t have moved it at all except the padlocks that held two hasps in place at either end had been so corroded by decades of sea salt air that they fell away when he banged on them with a rock. Enough light remained for him to see that he had opened a concrete enclosure that appeared to line a pit at least five feet deep. He also saw in its depths, green, crusted, and corroded copper plates to which the leads from a three-stranded cable had been connected. He stood and sighted toward the west and then pivoted and looked the other way. It could be. If he guessed correctly this cable had to lead to the ocean floor and thence…where?

  He replaced the lid, repositioned the broken locks so that at a casual glance they looked intact, and shoved the underbrush back in place. He stepped back and squinted at the results. Exactly as it was before. Good. As he turned to start back he barked his shin on a stump. Not a stump. A pole about a foot in diameter had once been sunk in the ground next to the construction and then apparently sawn off a foot above ground level. He pushed back some nearby brush and thought he saw what could have been footers two or three feet distant from the enclosure’s four corners. They might have been intended to anchor a small building. Something had been planned for this spot. He saw no evidence that any construction had actually been done. Whatever someone in the past had intended for the site had been abandoned a long time ago. He gathered an armful of firewood on his way back to rejoin a shivering and somewhat distraught Ruth.

  “I wonder…” He dropped the wood into a untidy pile.

  “You wonder what?”

  “Nothing. Well, maybe something. I wonder if what Barstow was pestering Staley about was out here on this island, not at Cliffside.”

  “I don’t think I want an answer for that very cryptic remark right now. Come over here. Help me drink this wine and then keep me warm until the tide turns.”

  It started to rain.

  ***

  “I am soaked to the waist and freezing, Ike.”

  “That’s what you get for putting your trust in maple trees. Oaks I could understand, but maples?”

  “The leaves turned. You saw them.”

  “They did, after the rain started. That’s a confirmation, not a warning, and it was coming down hard enough to make the confirmation superfluous. Besides, here’s something for you to consider later at your leisure. Those were sugar maples, not silver.”

  “A maple is a maple.”

  “Yeah, yeah. A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, Juliet, but a tea rose is not a wild rose on any day of the week. Besides, I offered to carry you across the rising tide, but you put on your women’s equality armor and, bad leg and neck notwithstanding, refused my of
fer. So I will not feel sorry for you. You need to go upstairs and see if you can get your hose-shower to produce enough hot water to warm you up.”

  “What about you? Aren’t you freezing too?”

  “Some, but I have a higher waist. I will towel off and put on dry duds. Besides I had the foresight to carry antifreeze with me on this trip.”

  “Antifreeze as in…”

  “A bottle of moderately expensive sour mash bourbon. I will pour me a few fingers, add some of this marvelous spring water, and warm myself from the inside out.”

  “Good. All the more hot water for me.”

  “Which is not saying very much, as it happens. Meanwhile, I will light a fire, allow myself to become very mellow, and with any luck will not be late for dinner.”

  “There’s dinner? Where?”

  “If there is to be a meal, and that will depend on my relative sobriety, there is a can of Spam in the pantry, four more-or-less fresh eggs, and enough bread to make a pile of toast which, with butter and jam should hold us until breakfast. What we will do about that is another question.”

  “A trip to Mister Potter’s store.”

  “And pay a king’s ransom for some for pancake mix and powdered milk? The man is a thief. Here,” he handed her a half filled glass of bourbon. “You can get a head start with this, and be careful in that tub. The floor is linoleum and slippery when wet.”

  “I didn’t know they still made linoleum, or do they?”

  “I think it went out with Ipana tooth paste. While you are soaking and boozing I want you to think about buying the island from which we narrowly escaped.”

  “Whatever happened to Bucky Beaver anyway?”

  “Bucky retired about the time Ipana disappeared from the shelves. I don’t know which came first. Maybe he developed a cavity, which would be very bad for business.”

  “Tough luck for Bucky. As for me, booze and a warm bath. What could be better?”

  “A double tub and endless hot water?”

  “Not on this island, Bunky. If you wanted bath time erotica, you should have opted for Plan B. Face it, Scone Island is lost in time, a nineteenth-century idea of adventurous living. All very Edith Whartony.”