Murder at five finger light

by Sue Henry

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “WANT TO TAKE A LOOK AT THE ISLAND BEFORE WE GO TO work?” Laurie asked as they finished the last of the breakfast dishes the next morning.

  “Sure,” Jessie agreed, curious to see the southern end beyond the two acres of trees that grew tall in the patch of woods behind the lighthouse.

  She had been awake early, but not as early as Karen, whose bed had once again been empty. Heading for the bathroom, Jessie had found it locked and heard the shower running, but in a few minutes Karen had come out in clean clothes, her wet hair wrapped in a towel. Tucking the roll of clothes she had been wearing into her suitcase, she had left the room with a brush in her hand, evidently headed outside, though Jessie had found her helping Laurie with breakfast a little while later, when she had finished her own quick shower.

  The day was sunny, as predicted, and after eating, Sandra had gone up to the roof of the square building that supported the tower to finish the painting job started the day before, taking a CD player with headphones along for entertainment.

  “Music gets me into a painting rhythm,” she told Jessie as she headed for the stairs.

  Jim, Aaron, and Don—who had temporarily abandoned scraping the paint off windowsills—were removing old roofing on the boathouse in preparation for putting down the new materials Jim had picked up in Petersburg. Curt was once again tinkering with the huge generator. It had started that morning, but he evidently felt it still needed tweaking to operate to his satisfaction. Whitney and Karen were considering what to make for lunch, but Whitney gave that up to join Laurie and Jessie on their walk. Karen said she would stay to boil some eggs for a potato salad.

  Taking off the denim jacket she had been wearing in the morning chill, Jessie took it to the bedroom, tossed it on her sleeping bag, and picked up the daypack that held her camera gear. To lighten its weight, she took out some toilet items and slipped her wallet under her pillow.

  The three went down the stairs outside the north porch and crossed the broad concrete platform, waving a greeting to Curt through the large open doors of the lower operations room. Pointing down, Laurie called their attention to a round manhole cover in the cement pavement close to the doors. “That’s how you climb down to the tanks for water and fuel,” she told them.

  They went on across to a dogleg flight of wooden steps between the boathouse and the carpenter shop that was next to the lighthouse.

  “Playing tour leader again?” Jim asked Laurie, as they passed.

  “Jessie hasn’t seen the rest of the island,” Laurie reminded him. “And Whitney wants to take another look at the fossils in the rocks at the other end.”

  “Don’t get lost, or fall off the cliff,” Aaron called, with a grin. “There’s still work to be done.”

  “There’ll always be work to be done,” sighed Laurie.

  “Ah, but you love it, don’t you?”

  She had to admit that she did.

  From the top of the steps, single file, the three followed a trail that ran up across a grassy area and entered the woods. Once in the trees, the ground cover changed completely to lush ferns, shrubs, and a variety of underbrush that rose out of a deep bed of needles, sticks, and leaves fallen, for uncountable decades, from the trees of the small forest to join and sometimes bury the tangle created by branches and dead trees. It smelled damp and slightly moldy with decaying vegetation. But there were several kinds of berries on the bushes and a few flowers here and there where some space in the trees let enough sun through.

  Not long after they entered the woods, Whitney stopped Jessie by clutching her elbow. “You gotta see this,” she said, turning her around to face a tree they had passed beside the trail. Fastened to it was a roughly carved wooden mask with a face that resembled an artifact made by some coastal native Alaskan—but only resembled. Though unsmiling, the piece projected a sense of humor, as if it were amused at its own appearance. Three rain-bedraggled feathers had been stuck between it and the bark of the tree, adding to the insouciant attitude of parody.

  “Who made it?” Jessie asked.

  “A friend with a sense of humor,” Laurie told her. “But I couldn’t resist adding the feathers.”

  Amused, Jessie had them stand next to it while she took a picture.

  The narrow trail ran like a ribbon, up and down, twisting and twining around trees and stumps. To the left the ground fell steeply away to a wide jumble of huge rocks and tide pools between the forest and the shore. To the right, trees marched sharply up to the highest point on the island, where Laurie said the face of the cliff they had seen from the boat on arrival fell perhaps fifty feet straight down, onto fallen rock or into the sea.

  Stopping them on the trail a bit farther on, Laurie pointed up to an untidy heap of small branches and twigs that filled the top of one tall spruce.

  “There’s an eaglet in that nest,” she told Jessie, “but you won’t see it unless it climbs out on the edge and tries to flap its wings. It’s just learning to fly. We could see the mother when we get to the south end though. She fishes off the rocks just offshore and carries her catch back to her baby.”

  They walked on along the path and Jessie noticed that, especially in one place, several of the trees were festooned with gray green moss reminiscent of similar growth she had seen on trees in pictures of Southern plantation houses.

  “They look like very old men with beards,” she commented, eliciting a smile from Whitney.

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “Pretty ancient guys, aren’t they?”

  “Careful,” Laurie pointed out. “There’s a hole on your left.”

  Looking down, Jessie saw that under the large root of one tall tree the ground had fallen away to create a space large and deep enough to swallow a person up to the waist, completely if they crouched down. Cautiously, she stepped around it.

  The trail began to go steadily down and they eventually came to a bend that turned them right and steeply up again. At the top they came out on a point of rock and grassy ground clear of the trees, where they could not only see for miles over Frederick Sound, but down onto the rock that formed the foundation of the island. Out in the water beyond them was a narrow ridge of rocks that stood above the water and on which the eagle predictably perched, watching for unwary fish to feed her youngster. As they watched, she suddenly swept down, talons extended, to snatch her prey from beneath the waves. Wide wings flapping strongly, she bore it up until they watched her disappear into the trees toward the nest they had seen, taking lunch to the eaglet.

  Jessie turned back and stood looking out across the sound to the faraway hills on other islands that were so large they looked like mainland.

  “Is that the island that you can see across the harbor from Petersburg?” she asked Laurie.

  “Kupreanof Island—yes.”

  “Russian name.”

  “Well, the Russians owned it all until Seward insisted that we buy it, didn’t they? Sitka was their base for hunting seals and sea otters, and it isn’t far away. They probably gave everything in sight Russian names.”

  Jessie thought back to high school and remembered that sometime just after the Civil War the United States had bought the territory twice as large as Texas from Russia for just over two and a half cents an acre—a figure that had impressed her so she never forgot it.

  “That means that this island back then was worth seven and a half cents. Can you imagine?”

  “Let’s go down where the fossils are,” Whitney suggested, and led the way back down the trail a short distance to where it branched off to the right. When they had gone through a stand of tall brush and grass, she turned off to a rough wall where layers of rock flaked away to reveal dim plant fossils, and began to pry them apart. Laurie stopped to help.

  Jessie walked on out to an open space that sloped off into the ocean in long fingers of stone with a small amount of sand between. The tide was coming in, so not much of the area was visible, but as she stood looking down at the small stones and shel
ls left by the previous flood she noticed some distinct marks that looked as if something had been dragged along. Glancing around she saw nothing close at hand that could be responsible. The marks were quickly being erased by the incoming waves as she turned and called Laurie to come and see.

  “Any idea what made those?” she asked.

  Laurie examined what was left of the marks and shook her head. “No, but we do have an old sea lion that frequently hangs around at this end of the island. Maybe he crawled out here.”

  But the marks did not seem the kind to be made by an animal to Jessie. She thought they looked more likely to have been caused by the bow of a boat. She remembered the engine sound she had heard in the night and wondered about it as the last of the abrasions in the sand were eradicated by a particularly high-reaching wave.

  Laurie went back to fossil-picking with Whitney, leaving Jessie to her speculations. But when she turned to look back at them she saw that Karen had evidently decided to come after all and was standing, hands in jeans’ pockets, looking across at her. How long she had been monitoring her interaction with Laurie, Jessie had no idea, but Karen instantly shifted her attention to the fossil bed when she saw that Jessie was aware of her.

  “Hi,” Laurie greeted her. “Change your mind?”

  “Yeah. Left the eggs in cold water and decided it was too nice to be indoors, so I tagged along. This place is . . .” Her words trailed into silence and she stood up straight, looking out at the water beyond where Jessie was standing. “Hey,” she said. “Is that the sea lion?”

  Laurie and Whitney stood up to see and Jessie turned seaward, in the direction Karen was pointing.

  A few yards offshore a sea lion was swimming, with its reddish brown head above water, attentively watching the humans on the shore.

  “Hey, that’s cool,” Karen said, hopping quickly rock to rock to come down to the tide line.

  As this second human drew near, the sea lion turned and began to swim back around a high point of rock that had earlier hidden it from sight. Karen did more hopping till she reached that rock and began to climb it, clearly wanting to see more of the large animal. As she was high enough to see over, she suddenly sat down on the stone ridge that formed the crest.

  “Oh God,” she said in a strangled voice. “Oh—my—God.”

  “What?” Jessie asked, immediately starting after her, followed by Laurie, whose attention had also been attracted.

  But Karen only looked back at them wide-eyed, pointed toward the other side, and said nothing more as Jessie scrambled to the top and looked over.

  At the edge of the incoming tide, so close the feet moved gently in rhythm with the incoming waves, the body of a man lay facedown, half in the water, half out. Even from a distance they could see that the hair on the back of his head was soaked, like the shoulders of his gray jacket, with blood. The rocks on which he lay were splattered brownish crimson, but slowly, relentlessly, the eternal motion of the sea was washing them clean.

  Laurie reached the crest just behind Jessie and the three, speechless, stared down at the unexpected sight below for a long minute.

  “Jesus!” Laurie breathed.

  “Who is it?” Jessie asked her.

  “I have no idea,” she almost whispered, hoarsely.

  “What’s wrong?” Whitney called, looking up from below.

  “There’s a dead man down here,” Jessie told her, turning to look back.

  “A dead man? Did I hear you right?” Whitney started to come up to join them.

  “No.” Jessie waved her off. “Don’t come up. Go back to the lighthouse as fast as you can and bring the guys. Tell them to bring a tarp of some kind. The tide’s coming in, so we’ll stay and make sure he doesn’t float away.”

  “An accident? Did he fall?”

  “I don’t . . . know,” Jessie said, hesitantly. “Just hurry. We need help.”

  As Whitney headed for the path at a run, Laurie and Jessie climbed carefully down over the steep rocks and went across to where the body lay. There they stood looking down at the crushed carnage that had been the back of his skull, which appeared even more devastating up close than it had seemed from above.

  “I guess he could have floated in from somewhere,” Laurie said, frowning. “People do fall off boats sometimes, right? But what could have . . .”

  “It’s not likely he floated here,” Jessie told her. “This man hasn’t been dead long. Bodies don’t float at first; they sink and stay down until they decompose enough to rise. Besides, there wouldn’t be so much blood on him. It would have washed away if he’d been in water. And there wouldn’t be any splashed on the rocks like that.”

  “Do you think he could have fallen on the rocks?” Laurie asked, almost hopefully.

  Jessie shook her head, glancing up at them to where Karen was still silently looking down from the top with a blank expression. “If he had fallen and hit the back of his head, he would probably be lying faceup, don’t you think?”

  Laurie had to agree.

  “You think somebody could have . . . ?” She broke off what she had been about to say—what they were both thinking—and swallowed hard. “Who is he? How did he get here and who could have . . . ?”

  “Well, he clearly didn’t walk here.”

  “Maybe there was a boat that drifted away when the tide came in. You pointed out those marks in the sand.”

  “I did.” Jessie nodded. “But, unless there was someone else, wouldn’t the boat be floating somewhere in sight? The tide was just reaching those marks and it’s coming in, not going out, so that means they were made when it was lower, yes?”

  “That would depend on when this . . . happened . . . and how the tide was running through the sound, I think, don’t you? I think at certain times it could carry a boat quite a long ways and in unexpected directions.”

  But Jessie was unwilling to play guessing games, or reveal the ideas that were running through her mind. Crouching next to the body, she slipped two fingers onto the pulse point under the jaw to make absolutely sure it was a corpse, not someone injured and unconscious who just looked like one. There was no sign of life and the body was unpleasantly cold and stiff. She wished she could remember how long after a person died rigor mortis occurred. She decided to ask Alex the next time they talked.

  Karen groaned, slid weakly down on her side of the point, and threw up her breakfast on the rocks. There she remained, shivering and pale, clearly refusing to help, or even to look back again at what she had discovered.

  Fifteen minutes later, when Whitney brought Jim, Don, and Aaron back with her, Laurie and Jessie were still standing guard on the rocks near the body and Karen huddled miserably near where she had lost her breakfast. The water was now high enough to reach the bloody rocks and cause the lower half of the corpse to sway slightly in the rising tide.

  “Who is it? What the hell happened?” Jim asked, clambering carelessly over the rocks to reach them.

  “We don’t know,” Jessie told him. “Karen spotted him when she climbed up to see the sea lion.”

  “Did he die here, or float in?”

  She shrugged—then frowned. “I’d bet from the amount of blood on the rocks that he died here. There was quite a lot on the rocks, but it’s almost gone now—washed away. But it must have happened after high tide last night, or he might have floated off then, mightn’t he?” She hesitated, then, “There may have been a boat.”

  “How do you know?”

  “There were marks—over there.” She pointed to the area beyond the ridge of rock they had climbed over. “They’re gone now—washed off like his blood is washing away here.”

  “Who is it?” This question came from Aaron, who was carrying a blue plastic tarp under one arm.

  She shook her head. “We haven’t turned him over. Just didn’t want the tide to take him.”

  “Well, we’d better get him out before it does,” Jim said. “Find a place above the tide line and spread that tarp you’re carrying,
will you, Aaron?”

  Aaron and Don stepped up to help lift the body out of the water and lay it gently on the tarp, carefully rolling him over onto his back in the process. Jim looked up sharply as Jessie gasped.

  “You know him?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Well, not really know him. I met him on the plane from Juneau, then again later in Petersburg. His name is Tim . . . something Scandinavian. He’s the one I told you about—the one who said he’d come out to help—who had his own boat? He said he had a friend he was going to bring along with him. Remember?”

  “Yes. And he was coming today, right?”

  She nodded. “That’s what he said.”

  “Well—I doubt this is what he meant. We’d better call somebody—police, Coast Guard.”

  “I’ve seen him before too,” Whitney said, having given the dead man a careful look. “He was part of a rowdy fishing crew that was in the Triangle Bar in Juneau last Saturday night.”

  She turned and stepped away to look out over the sound, frowning thoughtfully.

  “Do we leave him here, or take him back to the lighthouse?” Aaron asked.

  “Someone will want to investigate, so I guess we’d better leave him here. But he’s got to be moved, so let’s wrap him in the tarp and take him farther away from the water. The tide is almost full, so it won’t come up much more, but we might as well be cautious.”

  They carried him up the slope to a narrow sandy space between two ridges of rock and laid him down where no tide could, or would, disturb him, except possibly during a storm and none were predicted. Weighting down the edges of the tarp with stones so it could not blow off if a wind came up, they left him there.

  It was a concerned, confused, and sober group that hiked back to the lighthouse to make the call, talking little, thinking much.

  As, white-faced, Karen stumbled clumsily along ahead of her on the trail, Jessie couldn’t help remembering how she had heard the sound of a distant engine and come wide awake in the night to find her missing from her bed.