Dying for Murder

by Suzanne F. Kingsmill

  “Where did you get this?” he asked.

  Before I could answer Sam came out of the next office and swept us down the hall to dinner, but not before I snatched the paper back from Darcy just as it was about to disappear into his pocket. He glanced at me, flustered, but he let me take the paper. I thought we were done then, but he hung back and said, “I don’t think you need to try and solve this crime, Cordi. All I meant was for you to liaise with the police and oversee the sealing of the crime scene.” And he smiled then, a smile so fast and fleeting that I barely saw it before he walked down the hall, his hands clenched at his sides.

  I still didn’t feel like dinner so I bailed out and headed back to my cabin, where I lay down and thought about Stacey until I fell asleep.

  A humungous snort from Martha woke me up at about 5:00 in the morning and I couldn’t get back to sleep, even though I wanted to. The sky was just beginning to lighten and the wind was now just a dull moan through the trees. It seemed that the hurricane had veered and missed us almost completely, but the mainland had not been so lucky. I looked over at Martha, who was sleeping with wild abandon, her arms flung out above her head and her dark curly hair sprawled all over the pillow. I wondered how I had managed to sleep through her coming home last night. It occurred to me that if I could sleep through that then probably anyone with a roommate could conceivably sleep through it too. Doubly so if they were heavy sleepers.

  It took me all of two minutes to get dressed and snag a long-sleeved jacket — more for the bugs than the temperature — and exit the cabin, holding the screen door as I shut it so it wouldn’t bang. I was headed toward the stairs to the mess when movement caught my eye. Someone was sneaking between two cabins, slowly, as though they didn’t want to be caught. I stopped and squinted through the brush but I couldn’t make out who it was and they had stopped moving, like a deer on the alert. I almost turned away, but something prompted me to move in the direction of whoever it was and say good morning in a loud whisper. The figure remained still for some five seconds and then slowly walked out of the shadows toward me. It was Rosemary. The dawn caught her red hair, burnishing it like fire and lighting up the lemon yellow of the jacket she had draped around her neck.

  She nodded at me. “Hello, Cordi,” she said in a voice that made it sound as though she wished she were anywhere but with me. She was wearing a pair of enormous sunglasses but even they could not hide the new purple welt under her left eye. Involuntarily I gasped and she seemed to shrink to an even smaller size than she already was.

  “Who did this to you?” I asked.

  “No one,” she said defiantly.

  “Another cabin door?” It was mean, but I felt I had to say it. When she didn’t answer I said, “You don’t have to go through this alone, you know. There are people who can help you.”

  She looked at me then with a faraway gaze that made me realize I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. She was trapped by something that I could only fathom.

  I tried another tack. “How long has this been going on?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know what you are talking about.” But I could tell by her eyes that she knew exactly what I was saying.

  “You don’t have to live like this.”

  “Live like what? I’m just a klutz, that’s all.”

  “A klutz who gets beaten on a regular basis.”

  She suppressed a sob and looked at me with some desperation. Time ticked by and I thought I heard a Painted Bunting somewhere in the distance and realized I should be in the field.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she abruptly said as she reached her hand up under her glasses and wiped her eye. “Wyatt doesn’t mean to …” She put her hand over her mouth as if she had said too much.

  I wondered what sort of man could do this to such a vulnerable young woman, what kind of man would think it all right to beat the hell out of her.

  “You have choices,” I said, wondering if I should hug her or something.

  “You don’t understand,” she cried out in a wailing moan. “I have no choices.”

  “You always have choices,” I said.

  “Not when I love him.” She turned and started running toward her cabin, her lemon yellow jacket flapping in the breeze, making her look like the sad and sorry apparition that she was.

  I sat down on the bottom steps up to the mess and gazed across at the live oaks, their leaves shattering the newborn sunlight into a hundred thousand shards. It was odd not to hear the roaring of the wind, and I wondered what the seas were like and when the police would come.

  “Penny for your thoughts?”

  I looked up to find David standing over me.

  “You’re up early,” I said.

  “I could say the same for you.”

  I went for the jugular. “Was your sister ill?”

  I saw him clench his jaw as he opened his hands in an all-encompassing gesture, saying, “Not that I know of — I mean other than the flu.”

  “It’s just that I saw some medical textbooks under her bed — not the sort of thing a botanist would keep, don’t you think?”

  “She had a lot of interests. What can I say?”

  “That she was a whole hell of a lot sicker than anyone knew. You were her brother. You of all people would know.” I wondered why I was pushing so hard, why it was important but all I could see was that pasty white complexion and the dull eyes of someone very ill. My grandmother had looked like that in the months before she died.

  David gave a little snort and smoothed back his white circlet of hair. “I don’t really see what Stacey’s health, ill or otherwise, has to do with her death. She was suffocated.”

  I must say I actually shared David’s sentiments, but if I have learned anything in the investigation of a murder it’s that anything goes and any question could lead to the solving of the crime. So I up and said, “Was she depressed?”

  David looked at me with a puzzled look that melted into patient resignation. “No more than usual. She’s carried her depression around with her half her life, almost like a trophy sometimes.”

  I bristled at that — anyone who has ever suffered from depression would never call it a trophy, an albatross maybe but never a trophy. I was beginning to see why brother and sister did not see eye to eye.

  “Where are you going with this anyway?” he asked.

  “Just trying to get as many facts as I can and hope that some of them turn out to be relevant.”

  “I don’t know why you’re even bothering. The police will be here in a few days. Leave it to them.”

  He turned to go but I said, “Where were you when your sister was murdered?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. You think I killed my sister?”

  “I’m just trying to rule you out.”

  “Well, good luck doing that with me or anyone else for that matter. We were all in bed asleep.”

  “Do you have a roommate?”

  “No, as a matter of fact I don’t.”

  “Too bad,” I said. “They might have given you an alibi. What were you talking about to Stacey when you first arrived on the island?”

  “Regular nosey-parker aren’t you?” he said.

  “She seemed shocked by whatever you were telling her.”

  “And whatever I was telling her will remain between her and me.” He turned then to go up the stairs and I let him go.

  I suddenly didn’t feel like going up to the mess so I headed back to the cabin.

  “Lord love a duck, Cordi, what are you doing up already? Even the birds aren’t chirping yet.” A robin gurgled somewhere right outside our cabin and she shrugged.

  I sat down on my bed — there was nowhere else to sit — and looked out the window, wondering why I felt so flat. Martha turned on the light and sat down on her bed facing me. She was just about to say something when a voice came out of nowhere, catapulting my heart against my chest like a battering ram. I really was keyed up and could only guess that I
was still in some kind of shock after seeing Stacey.

  “Cordi, Martha, it’s me.” The voice was whispery.

  Who the hell was me? I wondered, as the whisperer answered my question. “Duncan.” What the hell was he doing up so early? Everyone seemed to be awake and I just wanted to go back to sleep.

  Martha got up and let him in. “Couldn’t sleep,” he said. He did not look much better than I felt, and his gargantuan nose was peeling from sunburn. It looked like a potato shedding its skin. I looked at the two of them sitting side by side so comfortably and wondered if they would ever marry, or maybe it worked precisely because it was a long-distance relationship with Martha in Ottawa and Duncan an hour’s drive away. I thought about the man I thought had loved me, whose job took him away to England. It seemed unbearably sad that we had been unable to make it work, when there had been so much promise.

  “Paging Cordi. Come in, Cordi.” Duncan’s voice brought me back and I marvelled at how easily the mind can take you down dark, treacherous roads, unmarked and best untravelled. Dangerous place, the mind.

  “Okay, Cordi,” said Duncan, “unlike our other cases this one was definitely not made to look like an accident. Hands and feet tied, mouth and nose plastered in duct tape.”

  “What about her wrists? They were chafed,” I said.

  “Only what you would expect from someone struggling for her life.” He paused and then said, “She was a sentimental woman.”

  “How so?”

  “She wore a locket around her neck.”

  I remembered the locket.

  “Guess what was in it?”

  “A picture of Leonard Cohen?” said Martha.

  Duncan grimaced. “A lock of hair,” he said.

  I wondered about that.

  “Probably her own,” said Martha.

  “Why would you say that? She doesn’t strike me as being a woman who would wear her own hair around her neck,” I said.

  Duncan chuckled.

  “Okay, okay, except when it’s attached to her head.”

  “Well, whoever’s hair it is, it’s baby hair,” observed Duncan.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I can’t know for sure, but it’s thin and very soft, not like adult hair at all.”

  At that we lapsed into silence until Martha blurted out, “Okay, so Duncan says she died at 3:00 in the morning when everyone was asleep. Why didn’t anyone know sooner than 4:00 when Cordi stumbled on her?”

  Duncan and I blinked at Martha and waited politely for her to explain herself.

  “She’s the head of the station. The evacuation alert would have gone through her first. That was the time she died — around 3:00 because we evacuated at 4:00. Presumably when they couldn’t raise her they would have phoned someone else, my bet’s Darcy, who surely would have gone to see why she hadn’t responded to an emergency phone call.”

  “She texted him.”

  “She texted him?”

  “Darcy was surprised at that too but he just did what he was told.”

  “You know what that means don’t you?” said Duncan.

  “That we can’t know for sure that the message came from Stacey.”

  “You mean the murderer could have sent it? Why would they do that?”

  “To buy time,” I said. “If the evacuation had gone as planned and Stacey had stayed behind it would have been days before she was found. Darcy says she texted him that she was not evacuating and to go without her.”

  Martha slapped her knee in frustration. “And hardly anybody is going to have an alibi for this murder. It was the middle of the night and everyone was asleep.”

  She had a point. We probably wouldn’t be able to eliminate anybody, but I’d still have to ask just in case.

  “So why would anyone want to kill her?” asked Duncan. “I mean, what do we know about her?”

  “Pretty much nothing at this point. It’s all questions,” said Martha.

  “She didn’t seem like someone who would have people wanting to kill her. Actually, she just seemed sick,” I said.

  “She was sick,” said Martha. “Darcy told me she’d been sick for the last five days with some kind of stomach flu and that she only surfaced when we arrived.”

  I knew that already but I remembered the medical texts under her bed and wondered if she’d been consulting them over her flu bug. Had she been a hypochondriac? And was that even pertinent?

  “So that’s why she hadn’t met Wyatt, even though he’d been on the island for two days?”

  “Yeah, that did seem strange, the manner of their meeting.” She made it sound so ominous that I started laughing.

  “How can you laugh, Cordi? You are probably the last one to have seen her alive.”

  I stopped laughing as I realized, with an acrobatic leap of my stomach, that she was likely right.

  “Besides the killer,” I corrected her while trying to marshal my thoughts.

  “Jesus, Cordi, you don’t think that I think you killed her?” said Martha in consternation.

  I shook my head. “No. But others might. You have to admit it doesn’t look good. I arrive back with Stacey at about 11:15, at 11:30 she calls Darcy about the crickets, and by 3:00 she is dead, having just texted Darcy — or her killer having done so.”

  “That’s still a lot of hours unaccounted for,” said Martha.

  Duncan shuffled his feet and stood up. “Looks like the two of you have your work cut out for you.”

  He was almost out the door when I remembered the chemical formula. I hauled it out of my pocket, smoothed it out, and handed it to Duncan. “What is it?” I asked as he peered at it closely.

  He took his own sweet time before answering. “Sugar,” he said. “Simple unadulterated sugar.”

  chapter twelve

  Martha actually crawled back into bed — 6:00 on the clock — but I was too wide awake so opted for an early morning stroll along the bike trails with my recording equipment. The forest was sopping wet from the torrential downpour and there were large puddles and newly minted miniature lakes across the trail and in the woods. But the air had been washed clean and was lazing around drying itself off as I skirted the water. The birds had already started to sing and I was recording a bunting when I heard the distant putt of an ATV. Having witnessed Trevor’s wild careen around a blind corner I moved to one side of the path and kept walking as the vehicle moved alongside me. I glanced over and saw Jayne yelling over the noise of her machine. I recoiled, thinking she was going to say something nasty to me.

  “Want a lift?” It seemed like such an anticlimactic thing to say. But she looked so friendly. She was wearing her curly hair tied back in a bouncy ponytail and looked like she’d be at home on a movie set where she was the star.

  “Where are you headed?”

  “I’m heading out with my turtles to do some experiments. Want to come?”

  I figured I could do two birds with one stone, my research on buntings and my research on Jayne, so I said yes. I loaded my stuff into the back of her trailer. I did wonder why she was being friendly after making it known that she did not want me taking care of Stacey, but she seemed genuine enough.

  “Can you do your experiments in this kind of weather?” I said.

  “It’s just the sea that’s a mess now and the hatchlings come up no matter the weather — it just has to be warm enough to get them moving. There was a nest that came up last night and they have to be released as soon as I have finished with them, sea or no sea.”

  I shrugged, said “Sure,” and clambered on her bike, carefully avoiding the little cooler strapped to the back.

  “Bit early for a walk, isn’t it? Or were you doing research?”

  “Trying to find buntings,” I said.

  “I hope you have better luck than your hit-and-miss shenanigans with murder.”

  I chose to ignore the dig and said instead, “How well did you know Stacey?”

  “I knew her history, of course. That she studie
d at both Dalhousie and McGill,” she said. I looked at her then, curious at the undertone in her voice, one that was at the same time matter-of-fact but highly strained, as if both universities were subpar, or maybe she was signalling that Stacey was subpar, or maybe I was reading altogether too much into it.

  “As a botanist?” I said.

  “Yeah. She was Canadian. I guess that’s why she went to McGill, but she never seemed like one cut out for academe. She was a loner and very hard to get to know. Rumour has it that something happened to her in her teens that soured her outlook on life.”

  I hate it when people drop a bomb like that and then don’t follow up. They seem to derive great pleasure in forcing you to ask the big question.

  “What happened to her?”

  For a moment Jayne looked as though she was going to say something, but she changed her mind and merely shrugged her shoulders so I said, “Did you have a hand in hiring your replacement?”

  Jayne shot me a startled look that was quickly hidden by derision. “Stacey’d been coming here for two years — my last two years as director — and the islanders made an executive decision to get rid of me and replace me with her.”

  “But I understand you’d burned out.”

  Jayne bit her upper lip and let out a long drawn-out sigh. “If that’s what you want to call it,” she said almost bitterly, as she swerved us down a small lane. We were barrelling down the path toward the south end of the island, careening through puddles and small lakes so that by the time we got to where Jayne was going I was sopped. The sun was still brand new on the horizon as I followed her down a trail toward the sea. She was carrying a little cooler carefully under one arm and was squirting something smelly on herself with the other. She turned and offered me some.

  “The punkies hate it,” she said.

  I hesitated and then took some, remembering how ferocious the punkies were. The stuff smelled like a perfume factory.

  When we broke out onto the beach the sea was a roiling mass of spume and splash and spindrift and spray, but the area of the beach where Jayne led me was sheltered from the wind. I watched as she walked over to a giant circle of canvas that had a grid marked on it in Magic Marker, partially hidden by sand. She had her broom with her and carefully swept the sand, deposited by the hurricane, off the canvas. Then I watched as she took a squirming hatchling from the cooler, its elongated front flippers flailing wildly and its smaller rounded rear flippers oaring the air like little rudders. I suppressed the urge to laugh as she gently placed a tiny goggle over one of its eyes, then walked out and placed it in the centre of the grid. She came back and recorded on matching grid paper the exact trail the little hatchling took as it moved off the canvas.