Dying for Murder

by Suzanne F. Kingsmill

  I lay there until I started to get cold and then I ran back to the station to try and warm up and banish the shark-infested demons of my mind. Fortunately Martha wasn’t in the cabin so I was able to change out of my wet clothes without her haranguing me. As she had a right to do, I thought. Whoever had been driving that ATV would have had a good view of me. No mistaken identity here. I went and took a shower because the itching was so bad I couldn’t stop. In the shower I looked aghast at the welts all over my lower legs and around the area of my waistband and crotch. This was no laundry detergent. This had to be an insect or something. The only thing that came close on the scale of itch factor was spider bites that itch and itch and linger and linger. But there were way too many bites for even multiple spiders and I couldn’t see anything crawling on me.

  My stomach was growling up a storm and I went in search of something to feed it. There was no one in the clearing. I climbed the steps to the mess, walked in, and went to the kitchen, snuffling around the fridge to see if there was anything edible at all.

  I was reaching for an apple when I heard a man cry out, “God damn it. You owe me big time. How many people know it’s fake?”

  “Settle down. Settle down. We can’t talk here.”

  “Dammed right we can talk here.” Trevor was pale faced and shaking.

  The other person was out of sight but I was pretty sure I knew the voice. Wyatt.

  “We had a deal. You blew it. You owe me,” said Trevor.

  “Extenuating circumstances. How was I to know that she would interfere and screw it all up?”

  “We had a deal. I want my money back.” Trevor slammed his hand on one of the tables. “I won’t let you off this island before you pay me.”

  “Don’t make empty threats. There are others who know how to drive a boat, you idiot.”

  “Just watch me,” said Trevor and he turned and walked out the door, slamming it behind him.

  My hand was still reaching for the apple when I heard a sharp intake of breath. I turned and there was Wyatt, staring at me, sort of like the snake had hours earlier.

  “How long have you been here?” His voice was sharp, gruff, and angry.

  “Long enough.”

  He didn’t say anything and looked unsure of himself, which must have been an anathema to him.

  “You got paid to doctor the vaccine,” I said.

  He just stared at me.

  “But the islanders voted for a real vaccine.”

  “You can’t always get what you want.” He sang the words in a rich bass voice that sounded nothing like his real voice and took me off guard. I’m a sucker for a bass voice.

  I recollected myself and said, “You got paid twice.”

  He laughed. “You didn’t hear it from me.”

  “I guess not. It would not be in your interests to broadcast your behaviour, would it?”

  When he didn’t answer I said, “You’ll lose your licence. Your livelihood.”

  He snorted. “You think there aren’t other fish in the sea? This is just one of many stops along my route. I couldn’t give a damn.”

  But just in case he could give a damn and acted on it I said, “Your secret’s out. I’m not the only one who knows it.”

  He smiled then, a slow Cheshire cat kind of smile that gave me the creeps. “You’re very transparent, O’Callaghan, and repetitive I might add. Do you really think I’d try to kill you to preserve my secret?”

  I didn’t want to answer that so instead I sent another salvo over his bow. “Why do you beat Rosemary?” I wanted to startle him out of his side of the story.

  “I don’t,” he said, before he caught himself. “What business is it of yours whether I do or not?”

  “It should be everybody’s business if you are beating her, but if you aren’t why is she saying you are?”

  He glared at me. “Because she’s a bitch.” That was not very enlightening.

  “Are you sleeping with her?”

  “She’s my assistant, for god’s sake. Why would I stoop so low as to sleep with my assistant?”

  “Oh, come on. A pretty young girl.”

  “She’s not my type,” he said harshly.

  “That sounds like it means she has some kind of power over you.”

  “You have a pretty poor opinion of me if you think I just jump every woman I meet. You hardly know me. Where is this coming from?”

  “You’re good-looking and in a position of power. She’s pretty. It’s hard to believe you’re not sleeping together.”

  “You have a pretty poor opinion of her too. She’s a big girl. Whatever happened to freewill and feminism? I’m not her master.”

  “So she said no to you?”

  He stared at me, unblinking.

  “She knew about the vaccine.”

  He just kept staring.

  “She was blackmailing you.”

  How can a man not blink for so long? It was unnerving.

  “Was Stacey blackmailing you too?”

  “This conversation is over,” he said and turned on his heel, leaving me standing there, wondering.

  chapter nineteen

  I made sure Wyatt was long gone before I went snooping through the research station. Unlike the dining room, which was homey and decorated with art and nice furniture, the rest of the station was by-the-book research labs and offices, all basically the same layout — a rectangle. What was in them made them unique. The first one was full of glass jars filled with formaldehyde and various creatures of myriad description lining an entire wall. I slowly scanned each bottle as I walked the length of the room. There were bottled baby sea turtles in different stages of growth, fish of various sorts, and even a baby feral pig. I turned away from this litany of horrors and looked at the rest of the room. There were two desks, one neat, one messy, a couple of bookshelves, and three aquaria. I headed over to take a better look and jumped back as something in one of the terraria jumped out at me. Fortunately the glass was in the way, and I looked with interest at a young and very poisonous copperhead snake. It was slithering along the ground of the terrarium and the sun streaming through the window caught and held the corn-coloured head and black mask. But it was the eyes that were mesmerizing. Golden with a jet-black vertical slit of a pupil. I could understand why such eyes might freeze prey. And why the term snakelike had such bad connotations. Still, it was quite beautiful and I wondered if I would still think it beautiful minus the danger it posed. Perhaps the danger heightened the beauty?

  A cricket chirruped nearby and I looked around for the source — a small box with a holey lid. When I peered inside I could see about three-dozen crickets milling about. Food for the snake, I figured.

  I was checking out the anoles in one of the other two terraria when Sam walked in and stopped uncertainly when he saw me.

  “I was just looking for Mel,” he said in a voice that made me think otherwise.

  “So this is Mel’s lab?” I asked, trying not to scratch.

  “Yeah, Mel and Charlie.”

  “Who is Charlie?”

  “Her supervisor. But he’s hardly ever here. He gets Mel to do all the work.”

  “Are you and Mel back together again?” I asked, as an itch surfaced in agonizing fashion and had to be scratched.

  He was hovering near the door looking very uncomfortable and I got the impression he just wanted to turn tail and leave. But he didn’t.

  “No,” he said, showing no emotion at all.

  I didn’t say anything, hoping he’d traipse through his own silence. And he did. “She has some of my lab gear that I want back,” he said. He looked over at what was presumably her desk — the messy one — and I saw a pained look cross his face as he brushed his eyes with his hand.

  “Did she leave you?”

  He jumped as if I’d hit him. Nope.

  Next thought. “Why did you leave her?”

  He squared up his considerable shoulders and said, “What would make you think that?”

 
“Because of something that you intimated to me: that Melanie was not what she seemed.”

  A look of surprise and anger flitted through his face. “I don’t see that that’s any of your business,” he said, but there was no bite to his words.

  “You know, don’t you?”

  “Know what?”

  “That Melanie was Stacey’s daughter.”

  Sam stood stock-still and I could hear the crickets chirruping as he weighed this information. There was no surprise on his face but there was indecision and maybe a little bit of fear.

  Finally he nodded and said, “She told me, but she made me promise not to tell anyone. She and Stacey wanted their privacy. I respected that.”

  “And that’s why you broke off with her?”

  Sam abruptly moved over to Mel’s desk and began rummaging around. “She said my compass was here somewhere.” His voice trailed off. He sounded like a lost little boy and I wondered why he felt lost if he was the one to break it off. But he wasn’t saying.

  I couldn’t stand it any longer and when I thought his back was to me I itched my legs, my stomach, my crotch in a mad dash effort to kill the itches.

  “I see you’ve got chiggers,” he said, obviously having a hard time not smiling.

  “Chiggers?”

  “Have you been bushwhacking?”

  I nodded, remembering my wade through the palmetto.

  “Yup. Chiggers.”

  “Which are?”

  “You haven’t heard of them?” he said incredulously. “Must be just a southern thing.”

  “So what are they?” I asked impatiently.

  “They belong to the spider family and are related to mites. It’s the larval form that does all the damage.”

  “But I have dozens of bites and I haven’t seen a single one.”

  “And you won’t. They are microscopic.”

  “Oh my God. Like no-see-ums.” And I suddenly felt them scrambling all over me and resisted the very strong urge to run screaming from the room.

  Early the next morning I was getting station fever and the itching wasn’t helping. I needed a break so I went and revved up my trike, with two fresh new tires, and did a wheelie out of the clearing as I veered to avoid someone racing in. I slowed down enough to catch a glimpse of Darcy and the hand he waved at me.

  The back roads were peaceful and all the hectic details of the investigation just slipped away as I drove through that tunnel of trees with the Spanish moss weighing down the branches. I stopped for a while to let an armadillo cross the needle-covered road and then just let the trike take me where it felt like going. After half an hour of wandering the pathways I found myself at the compound where the ferry left for the mainland. This was Trevor’s territory.

  I got off the trike and began exploring, hoping to find Trevor somewhere among all the buildings. Actually there were just three — two large tin semicircles and one square tin — all remarkably ugly. In fact, the whole compound was as ugly as I remembered it, with all manner of vehicles in various stages of repair strewn around, along with building materials, boats, and cement blocks. I wandered down toward the water and, for the first time, noticed a house tucked into a grove of trees so that it was almost completely hidden. I looked more closely, saw Trevor’s truck pulled up outside, and realized this was where he must live.

  I put my hand on the hood of the truck — still warm, so he had only just come home. In an instant I made up my mind and strode down the stone walkway to the house and rang the bell. I had a moment of the heebie-jeebies as I realized how deserted this place was, but he answered the door immediately and I had to think of something to say. Which I couldn’t — Hi, I was just in the neighbourhood and stopped to say hello just didn’t sound right so we stood and looked at each other for a while until he said, “Hello, Cordi. What can I do for you?”

  “I just wanted to ask you some questions. It won’t take long.”

  He opened the door wider. “You’d better come in then. I’ve got something on the stove.”

  Inside was a huge and very dark living room and every inch of every wall was filled with a clock of some description — many of them cuckoo clocks that made me wonder how he slept at night. Did they all keep exactly the same time and go off altogether or were they staggered so that every hour the chiming lasted five minutes or more. I tore my eyes from his clocks and saw that despite the darkness there was a large bay window overlooking a deck and beyond that the tidal creek.

  He disappeared into what was presumably the kitchen and I heard him rummaging around. I walked over to a pine sideboard that appeared to be homemade and looked at some of the pictures. One stood out. It was a family photo of Trevor and what must have been his wife and their blond curly headed daughter, looking through the mesh of a shrimp net. Trevor had both his arms wrapped around his wife and daughter and his smile was infectious.

  “That was taken on my shrimp boat.”

  I jumped and turned to face him.

  “Cindy, my wife, thought it would be a neat picture if we stood looking out through a shrimp net.”

  He handed me a glass of lemonade without even asking and I said thank you.

  “It was taken when times were good,” he said and took a swig of something more powerful than lemonade.

  I looked around the living room. Every surface was covered with clothes or tools or papers. There was no indication that it was a room to live in. He watched me as I scanned the room but he didn’t say anything.

  “Where are your wife and daughter?”

  “On the mainland. Cindy’s working at a hotel and Stephanie is going to school there. We need dual incomes.”

  “Must be tough.”

  He laughed and took another swig. “Something tells me this isn’t what you want to talk to me about.”

  “I overheard you and Wyatt talking.”

  I watched as the blood drained from his face. He remained silent.

  “You paid him to give a fake vaccine to the horses.”

  He just stood there staring at me.

  “Why would you do that?”

  He didn’t say anything for a very long time and I could see him struggling with himself.

  “Revenge,” he finally said.

  “Revenge on whom?”

  He took another swig and slammed the bottle down on the sideboard. “Stacey.” The name came out covered in hatred. “She screwed up my life. I thought I could screw up hers a bit. Just a bit of a lark, you know? I just wanted to see her face when that first foal was born.”

  “So you thought she was for the vaccinations.”

  “What do you mean thought? I knew she was for them.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Because she as much as told me.”

  “Did you know she was a devout Catholic?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Maybe it would be hard for a Catholic to support birth control.”

  “Jesus, are you nuts? They’re just horses,” he said, but he looked unsure of himself.

  “Maybe you just used the vaccine as a red herring. Or maybe she caught you paying Wyatt.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? I was just trying to screw up her life a bit, that’s all.”

  “Maybe you permanently screwed up her life.” That put me out his front door faster than I could have run.

  I headed back to the research station on the trike. The sun was still low in the sky and lit up the branches of the live oaks with a golden wash. It was a weird sensation. I could feel the quiet of the forest even though I could not hear it above the noise of the trike. Endless pathways with no trace of civilization, other than the scuffmarks of the ATVs on the forest floor. Hard to believe that hundreds of cottages lay just out of sight. How could such an island have bred a killer? For all my rantings about the destructive attributes of ATVs I found myself loving the whip of the wind on my face and the sun cascading down through the trees. What is it about wind in our
hair that makes us, as a species, want to fling up our arms in the air and yell for the sheer joy of it? I barrelled along the pathways, taking the puddles too fast and getting drenched for my troubles. I wheeled into the clearing like a pro and headed for my cabin and a clean set of clothes. Martha was sitting on her bed hunched over a computer as I breezed in.

  “Cripes. What happened to you?”

  I looked down at my mud-splattered clothes and resisted the urge to tell her three masked men had chased me clear across the island. When she heard my mundane explanation and looked disappointed I was rather sorry I hadn’t lied. But she didn’t let any moss grow on my words.

  “I found something,” she said. And then didn’t say anything, just looked at me expectantly with a little twitchy smile on her face.

  “On the computer?” I asked.

  “On the computer and in the file.”

  “Okay. What is it?” I asked.

  She remained annoyingly silent. If this was an Aha moment she was dragging it out for all it was worth.

  Finally she said, “Okay. I was looking over Jayne’s file and decided to surf the Nebraska State University website, hoping to find some mention of her. No luck. So I searched her name and, aside from all the papers she has written, and they are quite impressive, there was no personal information about her at all.”

  I started to take off my soaking pants and Martha continued, “So I phoned the university and pretended to be Jayne asking for a copy of her degree.”

  I was balanced on one leg when Martha let drop the next bit of information. “They had no record of any Gertrude Jayne ever attending Nebraska State University.”

  I sat down on my bed and stared at Martha. “But what about the degree?”

  “It has to be a fake.”