by Lou Allin
At their feet was a coil of rope fastened to a cleat. A wooden-handled boning knife was stuck next to it in a cork buoy. He could have been operating all over the island, picking up strays. Young women were suckers for a nice boat. Having a partner gave him an advantage of an extra pair of hands and an alibi.
Time had slowed to a slug’s pace as the boat fought the rising wind. On any given day, from her house she could see three cruise ships or freighters in the shipping lanes. Not now, when she might need one.
Rudy bent his face to check his watch. Quickly she searched around the deck, weighing her deteriorating odds, then flexing her hands. The wet rope had given a half inch. Ellen was occupied at the wheel in very tricky seas. Another wave pounded them, and the old boat’s timbers creaked. At least she wasn’t facing a handgun. Rudy probably didn’t even own a firearm.
As the boat crashed down, making little headway in the gusts, Rudy jostled to one side, scrabbling to his feet and bracing against a handrail. He wore slippery moccasins, a bad choice. A wave broke over the side and soaked his jeans. “Ellie, what the hell’s happening up there? Do you want to swamp us? Do like I showed you once and keep her into the wind. Grab a brain. The troughs are going to bury us. Once it’s calm again, we’ll head up to Tofino for a few days. You always wanted to stay at the Wickaninnish Inn.”
Over the roar of the motors and the howl of the wind, it was hard to hear anything else, but Holly cocked her head at what she thought was the stutter of a helicopter motor. They couldn’t see back into the harbour anymore, but from around the point, flying low, came an angel of mercy. The red, white, and blue colours of a search-and-rescue helicopter.
Rudy looked up, and at that moment Holly shoved him towards the rail, throwing her shoulders into the effort, then dropping to the deck. Flailing, he hit his head as his foot tangled in the rope pile. Over the side he went, roiling in the waves as his hat floated off. As the boat moved on, he dangled like a fish, barely able to keep his head above the dark water. He’d have been left behind had one end of the rope not been secured. A bullhorn sounded over the chaos as the helicopter blades kicked up chop in all directions. “Hello, the boat. Officer Martin. Are you all right down there?”
Holly crawled on her elbows to the knife, held it with her feet, and sawed her bonds, taking a nasty cut on her forearm without even feeling it. When her legs were free, she stood shakily and braced herself, still holding onto the knife.
Holly waved acknowledgement and an okay sign to the hovering craft. Ellen lurched down the stairs, off balance with the boat’s heaving. “Jesus, where’s Rudy?” She ran to the side, looked back and screamed.
From above, a voice boomed. “There’s a police boat coming out. I’m sending a man down. Hang tight. We don’t want you in the water now. If anyone has a weapon down there, drop it now. You have been warned. Our sights are on you. Someone will be down to bring the boat in.”
With undisguised satisfaction, Holly looked toward the wake, where Rudy was churning in the whitecaps as he coughed and yelled. She would have preferred letting him drown, but that was outside the letter and spirit of the law. With no capital punishment, he’d still rot in jail. He could apply for parole every five years until the next millennium. Being labelled a dangerous offender was the fail-safe answer in Canada.
“It’s all over for you both. Follow my directions, Ellen,” she said. “Keep the engines running at low speed and turn back to land, or we’ll be swamped on the rocks.” They were still hundreds of yards from shore, but the marker buoys bobbed out a warning about tricky rock shelves in the channel. The last thing they needed was to open up a hole in the hull and take on more water.
Her hands sore and aching, Holly pulled at the rope until she had him close to the boat. Rudy was spluttering, and the image of a drowned rat came to her mind. But rats were far more moral. Now he was as helpless as the women he had attacked or killed. No way was she hauling him in. He wouldn’t die in five minutes, even thirty, though the water was cold. But even now, she didn’t trust him.
“Get me out of here, you bitch!” he yelled.
“That will be your official name before long,” she said. “Killers like you have a special place among the inmates, even in civilized Canadian prisons.”
She couldn’t resist a smirk. If he’d had his way, she’d have been on the wrong end of the food chain. As for Ellen, if her lawyer was smart, he’d get her to cop a plea and assure a conviction against Rudy, especially given the disappearances of the girls in Manitoba. Closure for the families would be hastened if their bodies were recovered. A bizarre sense of place for their crimes left many killers with an amazing mental map. Where else might Rudy have plied his trade?
With a smart defence lawyer in this high-profile case, Ellen would probably become the “used and abused” girlfriend, threatened so that she would help him in his ugly work. Forming a passion for her assailant. Sadly, perhaps like the infamous Karla Homolka, complicit wife of the killer Paul Bernardo, she’d be walking the streets again with a new identity in ten years … even less. It wasn’t beyond possibility that Ellen might find another man with a similar dangerous hobby. Some girls couldn’t resist bad boys.
With the precision of a SWAT team, an officer was lowered toward the deck. Like a black angel, he descended, slowly twisting on his line, then dropping in front of her and detaching the harness so that another officer could follow. The boat was close to stalling and a huge seventh wave nearly swept Rudy back out to sea. Then they turned slowly and headed toward the shore. Ellen had gotten the message. She didn’t want to die either.
“Al Skidmore,” the officer said in a loud voice over the din, extending a meaty hand and flashing the widest grin she’d seen in years. His trim red moustache added a British touch. “That’s a strange fish you’ve hooked. What did you use for bait?”
“Myself. I’d prefer throwing him back, but I think too much of the strait,” she said as another man landed. His name was Dale. It was getting crowded on deck, just the way she liked it.
Al helped her haul Rudy on board, cuffing him hand and foot and setting him against the side of the boat. Ellen sat on the stairs, crying to herself. The boat started to wallow, and Holly didn’t like the way successive waves were beginning to pound the deck. “I’d better get up there and zigzag back to shore. That’s why they sent me,” Dale said.
“How did you find me?” she asked Al, still amazed at the miracle of her rescue.
“Constable Packke,” he said. “She was in Rennie. Saw your car and came onto the docks about the same time the boat started up. She watched Rudy hop on board and head out like the hounds of hell were on his tail. She called Fossil Bay, and they made connections with us and one of the West Coast Marine units. You’re damn lucky one of ours was in the vicinity on manoeuvres with the Coast Guard. Normally they’re based in Nanaimo. Any more cutbacks and we’ll be paddling kayaks.”
From around the peninsula, a large police boat was charging toward them like a one-man cavalry. In the lashing rain, she squinted into the distance. Turning to Al, she said, “Is that …”
“Yes, ma’am. Not bad for a rookie, if you get my drift.” He looked at the blood dripping from her arm onto her pants. “Say, do you know how bad you’re hurt?”
In the prow was Ashley, waving for all she was worth. A small tear formed in Holly’s eye and she swiped at it, beginning to feel the sting of her cuts. Had the constable really wanted to see Avatar Grove, or had that been merely pretence to befriend her? Whatever the case, Holly owed her a life.
She turned to Al, whose face was getting darker, like everything around her. “Down in the hold, get the jewellery.…”
EPILOGUE
Sore head and seven stitches in her forearm, Holly was back to normal. Knowing that the next day she’d be at the detachment with her staff gave her more of a lift than the shot of Demerol she’d been given after a concussion was ruled out.
She’d been on a razor edge climbing onto that
boat without a warrant, night-vision goggles or not. The first thing that Ashley told her when they met en route to the hospital was that she was prepared to say that she had witnessed Holly being grabbed by the toxic pair and taken aboard. When Ellen fell apart in the first rounds of questioning and turned against Rudy to save herself, Ashley’s little lie became a moot point. Holly was still mulling over the ethics of her constable’s means-to-an-end philosophy.
Her father had outdone himself: pot roast and Yorkshire pudding with pureed parsnips flavoured with maple syrup, canned corn, and fresh sweet-potato pie with a flaky lard crust. “Don’t ever put yourself into that kind of a situation again,” he told her, shaking his finger for emphasis. He still wore a touch of flour on his temple. “If I lost you, I …” His voice trailed off, and to distract them both, he poured more Canadian champagne, a rare treat.
She hadn’t told him what she’d found out about the Hamilton brothers and the flights her mother arranged. The strange harp image. Sometimes she needed to digest the information before reopening his wounds. As she finished her pie and cut another piece, she chose her words carefully. Her brain was still fogged from a night at the hospital and a nap at home until an hour ago.
He looked at her without blinking, his sky-blue eyes bright with interest. “But as you say, Bonnie never took the flight. She was home that weekend with us. So who did?”
“One of the many women she helped, I guess. If we can only find her. What could that harp mean? I’ve free-associated as far as I can.”
He looked at her down his aquiline nose. “It rings no bells with me. One of us is going to have to go to the mainland,” he said. “To Williams Lake. So much time has passed. If only I’d known some of this.” The private detective he had engaged in the beginning had come up empty-handed. Every year Norman put a search ad in the paper and was usually approached by con men out to make a quick buck.
“I managed to talk to Bob Filman this morning,” she said. “He remembered when the tote bag appeared because it was his wife’s sixtieth birthday and he thought he might take it for her if it wasn’t claimed. They had sheps. The date was a year after Mom disappeared.”
“And that could mean?”
He wanted her to tell him that Bonnie could still be alive. But she couldn’t. “I don’t know, Dad. She was never without it.” It’s misdirection, she thought. It has to be. Either that or it was stolen from her before that last ….
Fog was rolling its slow thighs over Otter Point to the east as dusk fell. How alive the strait was. One minute all was hidden, and the next, the bank blown to the U.S. side, the sun would come out and all would be revealed. Step by slow step, she hoped that she was approaching the answer to her mother’s disappearance, but the adult in her said that sometimes, the answer did not arrive in a person’s lifetime.
“I have a week’s vacation coming up.”
The CD player started up “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” with Mary Martin singing her heart out. Shogun snored in his dog bed. She’d come too close to dying this time. Meeting her mother in the world beyond was not the current plan. “I’m going to find her and bring her home.”
Other Holly Martin Mysteries
She Felt No Pain
A Holly Martin Mystery
9781926607078
$16.95
The verdant lushness of Vancouver Island is not without its dangers.... Summer on Vancouver Island gets off to a rocky start with the discovery of the body of a homeless man. RCMP Corporal Holly Martin notices drug paraphernalia nearby, and the autopsy reveals death from a combination of heroin and a synthetic opiate. Information leads Holly to believe that he had hidden something of value at the site of his death. As Holly struggles to connect the dots, a record drought heats up the vacation paradise, and one match could send Canada’s Caribbean into flames.
And on the Surface Die
A Holly Martin Mystery
9781894917742
$15.95
In this new series by the acclaimed author of the Belle Palmer mysteries, RCMP Corporal Holly Martin takes charge of her first post, a detachment in tiny Fossil Bay on the wild south coast of Vancouver Island. Drunk drivers, speeders, and the occasional theft from tourist cars lead the crime roster, but her first day starts with a distress call. A scuba diver has found the body of a girl in the surf. A tragic drowning caused by a fall? The late arrival of tox-scan results for crystal meth, the most recent plague to hit the island, raises ugly questions. Just before Holly makes an arrest, a record-setting typhoon roars in, empowered to destroy everything in its path. As the wind howls and trees crash around her, Holly struggles to survive and to bring a murderer to justice.
Visit us at: Dundurn.com
Definingcanada.ca
@dundurnpress
Facebook.com/dundurnpress
Copyright © Lou Allin, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
Editor: Jennifer McKnight
Design: Jesse Hooper
Epub Design: Carmen Giraudy
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Allin, Lou, 1945-
Twilight is not good for maidens [electronic resource] / by Lou Allin.
(A Holly Martin mystery)
Electronic monograph.
Issued also in print format.
ISBN 978-1-4597-0603-3
I. Title. II. Series: Allin, Lou, 1945- . Holly Martin mystery.
PS8551.L5564T85 2013 C813’.6 C2012-904645-0
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and Livres Canada Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President
Visit us at: Dundurn.com
Definingcanada.ca
@dundurnpress
Facebook.com/dundurnpress
