Murder at five finger light

by Sue Henry

  He smiled, recalling that Jessie’s assessment of personal space was usually We’re not joined at the hip, after all.

  But there were tentative spaces in their togetherness that he noticed and that had nothing to do with habits or patterns, but rather with the trust that had been a bit bruised in their separation. She would call tonight, he remembered, and their conversation could add another block of confidence to their togetherness. At least it pleased him to think so.

  Now, he decided, tossing back the covers and swinging his long legs out of bed, it was time to let the coffee mumble itself into the pot while he showered. Then he had some bacon and eggs planned for the empty spot under his ribs.

  He kept himself busy all day. The rain stopped mid-morning, Billy showed up, and they worked together in the dog yard until close to noon. In the afternoon, though he wasn’t on duty, he stopped by his office to let his commander know how well the meeting in Whitehorse had gone and the cooperation they could expect from the RCMP. As he walked back to his pickup after their conversation, he thought how much it satisfied him to be back and working in Alaska, even with winter about to show up on the doorstep. Coming back had allowed him to realize that he actually felt more at home in the Far North than he did in Idaho, where he had been born and raised. It was another thing that pleased him.

  From there he made another stop at the grocery store for general supplies he had not wanted to take the time to purchase the night before on his way home. Wandering through the aisles, he collected a cart full of items just because they appealed to him: crackers, cheese, smoked oysters, some apple-flavored sausage that he liked for breakfast, a couple of cans of stew—which he returned to the shelf upon deciding he could make a better stew of his own and picking up the meat and vegetables to do so. In the bakery section, he tossed in a loaf of his favorite sourdough bread that he had not been able to find during his time in Idaho, then went to the deli for some chopped green and black olives to mix with cream cheese. He went happily up and down the aisles and had almost a full cart when he finally decided he was ready to go through checkout. Slipping into the liquor store on his way out, he renewed Jessie’s flagging supply of Killian’s lager before pushing the cart with his purchases to the truck, through the rain that had started again, and setting out for home.

  Home. The sound of the word—the very taste of it—pleased him as well.

  Back at home, he brought Tank into the house for company while he browned the beef and chopped vegetables for his stew, then set it to simmering on the back of the stove, planning a late dinner complete with the sourdough bread he would heat in the oven. He turned on the six o’clock news and settled with a cold Killian’s to watch it. Tank padded across to lie down with his muzzle companionably on one of Alex’s stockinged feet, closed his eyes in contentment when the man rubbed his ears, then raised his head so he could have his chin scratched as well.

  “You are spoiled,” Alex told him. “You should be out breaking trail somewhere, not lying around here. But you can stay in until Jessie calls. Okay?”

  By nine, when he had eaten dinner, cleaned up the kitchen, and watched a movie on HBO that he had seen before, she still hadn’t called.

  Flipping through the channels, he found nothing that caught his interest, so he turned on some music instead and found a book he hadn’t read. By the end of the second chapter he realized that he had no idea which name belonged to which character, threw the book aside, turned off the music, and went to stand at the front window and stare out into the darkness that surrounded the house. A car went by on Knik Road, its headlights illuminating the pavement and making silhouettes of the trees at the end of the driveway.

  She isn’t going to call tonight, he thought suddenly.

  Perhaps he should follow that car down the road to Oscar’s Other Place, a hangout for local residents, many of them mushers. I could have a brew or two and scare up a game of pool.

  But the idea didn’t appeal enough to make the effort.

  “Damn! Why doesn’t she call?”

  Tank raised his head to give Alex an inquiring look.

  “No, not you.”

  Irritated with himself and a little with Jessie, he made up his mind, crossed the room, and dialed the number of her cell phone. It did little for his frustration level when an automated voice informed him that the party he was attempting to reach was unavailable—but he could leave a message.

  “Leave a message!” he grumbled, putting the phone down more forcefully than necessary. “I don’t think so!”

  Tank jumped, startled by the sound, sat up and gave him another questioning look.

  Then, suddenly, the humor of his behavior occurred to him and he found himself chuckling ruefully. You’re acting like an adolescent schoolboy, he told himself.

  There could be any number of reasons Jessie hadn’t—or couldn’t have—called him. She had said the signal was iffy inside the lighthouse. Maybe it was raining in Frederick Sound, as it was here. If it was, who would want to stand around outside to talk on the phone? She couldn’t know—and wouldn’t, if he could help it—that he was being entirely unreasonable about a phone call.

  “And you,” he told Tank, “are to keep your mouth shut about my fit of juvenile nonsense. Right?”

  Turning the television back on, he found that Comes a Horseman, a movie with Jane Fonda, James Caan, and Richard Farnsworth—an actor he particularly liked—was just starting. Making himself a cup of tea and retrieving a package of Double Stuf Oreos—an item obtained in the afternoon shopping expedition—he settled to enjoy all three.

  When the movie was over at eleven o’clock, he took Tank back to the dog yard, went upstairs to bed and quickly to sleep.

  “What the hell is happening here?” Don Sawyer asked, when Jim had stopped swearing and climbed down over the rocks to the level of the cove, where he sat, furious and silent, staring into the water at his sunken boat.

  For a long minute no one answered. They all stood looking down in astonishment and a sense of reality suspended.

  Aaron sat down on the edge of the concrete platform with his legs dangling into space over the cove and shook his head, but said nothing.

  “Why did it sink?” Whitney asked finally. “Did something get left open that should have been closed?”

  Jim looked up from where he was squatting on the rocks to peer into the water. “A sea cock, you mean,” he said. “I don’t see any structural damage from here, so that’s what it looks like. I checked everything before we left Juneau, so someone was on the boat after we left it and opened one or more on purpose—meaning this was no accident. Someone wanted it to go down and took measures to ensure that it happened, damn him—or her.” He glared up toward the helipad next to the lighthouse above them, where they had left Karen stubbornly sitting.

  “But why? And when?”

  Jessie was asking herself the same question. At between ten and twenty feet below the concrete platform the boat, nestled into the small cove, would have been out of sight from the lighthouse unless you went right to the edge and looked down.

  “I would guess it was done sometime in the night,” she said thoughtfully. “During the day there would be the risk of being seen coming or going down there. Anybody got any other ideas about when or, particularly, why? ”

  There was another long minute of silence as they took that in.

  “To me, the only thing that makes any sense of this, and the cell phones, is to make sure we can’t leave the island—or get in touch with anyone who could take us off,” Jessie continued. “I have no idea why—or who—but I’d be willing to bet that, whatever the reason, it’s not pleasant, and that it may be somehow connected to the dead man we found this morning.”

  What she didn’t say, though it crossed her mind, was that if there was one dead person there just might be two. And a sunken boat would be a very handy place to hide another body, namely Sandra’s.

  “Whatever caused all this,” she continued, ignoring t
he shocked and puzzled looks on the faces around her, as the others absorbed her ideas, “I think it’s definitely time to make a thorough search for Sandra and call her name often and loudly. She could have fallen somewhere and hurt herself, you know, so we need to look everywhere, not just call out.”

  Jim stood up and began to climb back to the platform, casting a last disgusted glance at his submerged boat.

  “There could be some connection, I guess, Jessie. But you are right that Sandra might be hurt somewhere we haven’t looked. The one thing we can do is make a serious effort to find her. There’s not much we can do about the Seawolf. It’s not going anywhere.

  “Let’s split up into two groups. Jessie, you, Whitney, and Don take the east shore this time and look in every tide pool and between all the big rocks out there. Aaron and Curt can come with me through the woods and look in the brush on both sides of the trail. Laurie, why don’t you stay and keep an eye on Karen, but search the lighthouse again thoroughly—every cupboard and hidey-hole in the basement too. And there’s the sheds and boathouse.”

  “Sure,” Laurie agreed. “I can do that. The lighthouse first, then the outbuildings, and, when I’m through with those, I’ll look through the brush under the helipad and over the rocks beyond it, okay?”

  “That’s a lot for one person to do,” Curt suggested. “Especially the north end rocks and brush that’ll take some climbing around to do well. How about if I search the lighthouse and Laurie does the helipad and the north end? If Sandra shows up on her own she’ll wonder where everyone’s gone. So it might be good to have one of us here, yes?”

  Jim nodded. “Good idea. Thanks. Whitney, you come with Aaron and me. It’s going to be more time-consuming to search the woods. Jessie and Don can take the rocks and pools. If she’s out there, we’ll find her, Don.”

  “And if she’s not?” Don asked in a tense voice that held a deep note of apprehension.

  “She has to be.” Whitney attempted to reassure him.

  The silence of the group implied that they had their doubts. Jim took a deep breath and broke it with an honest assessment.

  “Then at least we’ll know it, Don. But she could have fallen somewhere and be lying unconscious, you know. Let’s do this and do it right before we get ahead of ourselves. If any of you find her, yell, so the rest of us know it, okay?”

  Don nodded glumly and glanced at Jessie as he turned toward the rocky east shore.

  “Wait a second,” she told him and trotted up the stairs, through the kitchen and into the bedroom, where she collected her jacket and the daypack that held her camera gear and a first aid kit, just in case.

  When she went back through the kitchen to join Don, Curt was already at work, opening storage cupboards in the hallway.

  “Good hunting,” he told her, and she nodded as she passed.

  “You, too,” she called back, hurrying to where Don fidgeted, waiting anxiously to get started. Remembering the condition of the handgun, it crossed her mind that if they found Sandra they might not find her alive.

  “I guess we leave the dead man where he is?” Aaron asked, as he and Jim started up the stairs to the wooded area for their part of the search.

  Jim nodded. “For the time being at least. He’s not going anywhere any more than the Seawolf and he’s okay where he is for now.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  IT WAS A SILENT AND CONCERNED GROUP THAT RETURNED to the lighthouse early that afternoon. Tired and dirty from climbing through overgrown brush and fallen logs, possessed of a few scrapes and bruises from clambering over slippery rocks, wet from splashing into tide pools, they had all trooped up the stairs and into the common room where, except for Don, they collapsed dejectedly into chairs, confused and dispirited at their lack of success. Don paced the floor, unable to sit still, but just as unable to think of anywhere else to look for the missing Sandra. Without a word they had passed Karen, still sitting on the helipad, but some resentful looks were cast in her direction as they went in the door.

  Almost everyone was hungry, so Laurie and Aaron organized the ingredients for sandwiches and heated some canned soup, while Jessie set the table and took orders for drinks.

  “Beer,” Jim growled, twisting his mustache in a parody of some pirate captain. “Grog for me men, wench,” he demanded, in an attempt to lighten the somber mood around the table. But it fell flat and he gave up and slumped back into his chair.

  “Jessie,” he said to her as she handed him a bottle of the Killian’s she had brought along, “while we eat I think you should share with the group what you told me last night about Karen.”

  “Yes,” Don agreed, turning suddenly to take a chair at the table. “We haven’t asked her if she knows anything about Sandra and she was here for a while after you left to go to the south end this morning—before you found that guy. I’d be willing to bet she’s got something to do with Sandra being missing, dammit.”

  Jessie nodded. “Sure. I can tell you. But I really doubt that Karen’s in any way responsible for Sandra’s disappearance. What possible reason would she have? You can’t jump to conclusions without proof, Don. She’s upset with all of us right now, you know? And she may not have done anything but let her panic get away with her.”

  “And I’ll believe that when I have proof of it,” he stated grudgingly.

  It could be true, she thought, but wasn’t at all sure about any of it.

  Neither were the others, when she finished telling them about her meeting with Karen in Petersburg, the stalker the woman claimed was after her, and everything else that had taken place since. They said little, but it was clear they held little trust or sympathy for Karen as a result of her behavior.

  Don insisted on going back out to renew the search.

  “There may be somewhere we missed,” he argued stubbornly. “I’ll just go and have another look around by myself.”

  With nothing else to do that afternoon and no way to solve their communication and transportation problems, the rest went back to work, keeping an eye out for any vessel that passed close enough to signal, but none did. Aaron and Curt, who volunteered to leave his precious generator for the time being, climbed back up to finish stripping the old roofing material off the boathouse. Jessie, Whitney, and Laurie attacked more of the old paint Don had been scraping from the window frames.

  Jim focused on trying to think of a way to raise the Seawolf from its watery bed in the cove, using a crane on the edge of the platform with which they had retrieved the new roofing materials. It soon proved unworkable, so he moved on to other ideas, all of which came to nothing at the end of the day.

  “The blasted thing is down there for good. Well—at least for the time being, I guess,” Jim said in frustration and regret, giving up at last. “I’ll have to get someone with a barge and a lot more power out here from Petersburg. And the Seawolf’s practically a brand-new boat, confound it all. I can just imagine the damage seawater’s doing to those engines.”

  Sometime during the afternoon, with their attention elsewhere, Karen slipped back into the bedroom where she closed the door and once again curled up on the bed facing the wall. She had not touched the sandwich Jessie had taken out to her, nor would she talk to anyone, but she took a bottle of water with her from the refrigerator.

  They left her alone.

  They did not bring the body of the dead man back from the other end of the island, though Don checked on it in the course of his search, made sure it was safe, and came back as it was growing dark, looking even more glum and distracted. There were speculations of various kinds among the members of the group about Sandra’s disappearance, but with little to go on nothing led to answers or solutions, just to more questions.

  “I simply don’t understand how she could just be gone,” Laurie said quietly to Jessie, as they prepared dinner for the rest of the group. “Without a boat, there’s no way she could have left the island.”

  “Unless someone took her, or unless . . .” Jessie began
, and swallowed the rest of that thought. “I can’t help thinking of that guy we found. Someone was responsible, Laurie.”

  “That crossed my mind too. But why Sandra, and how . . . ?”

  “And more important, who?”

  They let it go for the moment.

  “There’s leftover salad from last night downstairs. Would you bring it up, Jessie?”

  “Shall I bring some more lettuce and stuff to add to it?”

  “Not if you think there’s enough. Nobody’s very hungry. There’re a couple of kinds of dressing down there too. Be careful on the stairs. It’ll be dark down there, but there’s a light switch outside the storeroom.”

  Finding light switches for the stairs and the basement workspace at the bottom of the stairway, Jessie stopped and took a long look around the large room. Besides Curt’s favorite generator, it was full of a collection of tanks, pumps, gears, and dials—large machines that in the past had kept electricity, heat, and water running in the lighthouse—many of which were now obsolete. There were tools of all kinds and storage materials necessary to the renovation. On the south side stood a washer and dryer, and an assortment of odds and ends, from paint buckets to sawhorses. Curt’s sleeping bag was rolled up in one corner on a narrow mattress, pillow on top, reminding her of how dedicated he was to getting that generator into tip-top condition. With a smile, she remembered Alex’s approval of an engineer on another boat trip through this same area. He had called the man one of the true “sons of Martha,” and quoted parts of a Kipling poem of that name about men who work with machines:

  . . . it is their care that the gear engages; it is their care that the switches lock . . . it is their care that the wheels run truly . . .

  Curt, with his mechanical focus, was certainly another of Martha’s sons.

  Turning, she made her way into the back of the basement and found the light switch Laurie had mentioned. The cement foundation of the lighthouse had been solidly built onto the living rock of the island. That base of stone could be seen sloping upward toward the west at a steep angle, and to the right in front of it was a narrow storeroom that Laurie and Jim had claimed as a cooler for drinks, vegetables, eggs, cheese, cured meats, anything that would keep without freezing. Halfway along it, next to a set of shelves, lay a large cardboard box of lettuce, carrots, onions, celery, and other vegetables. Half crooked, as if it had been dropped on top of it, was the large plastic bowl half full of salad from the night before and covered with plastic wrap.