by John Farrow
She would not care to survive a winter here, but for the next two weeks, if she’s not quite in heaven, she’s exactly where she wants to be.
“Like living in a Wyeth painting fifty years ago” is how she puts it.
Sandra has brought basic supplies from home: sugar and tea, coffee, a variety of spices, even a large jar of flour in the event that she succumbs to an urge to bake, which she might. The scent of cookies in this old house should be especially tantalizing. Bulk items that she’s not likely to repurchase have been brought along, and she wants to set up her kitchen right away and have that done. Émile prefers to explore, shop later. Their compromise is to stroll on a beaten path through the tall grasses to the shore of Whale Cove, breathe the salt air, relax, then get to work. Exploration of the island will come later.
The trip back into town is also peaceful. The pickup remains in the ditch, and just as they are entering North Head, a police car at full speed swishes past them, cherries flashing. Émile can’t help following the vehicle in his rearview mirror.
“Émile,” Sandra gently warns him.
He tries his best to keep his eyes on the road.
They don’t know where to shop, and while the first store they drop into has a disappointing inventory and high prices, it makes up for that with a convivial air. Lots of laughter and chat among customers and employees. They feel themselves in a different place. After the groceries, Émile stops at the liquor store. He can hardly believe the stockpile of beer, and buys a case, even though he entered for vodka and whiskey. Sandra remarks on his loot as he comes back out.
“Do I put in a call to AA now or when we get home?”
They duck into a bakery, and while Sandra purchases bread, the place triggers a few of Émile’s fonder vices. He comes away with a cake, a pie, and a variety of doughnuts. Sandra thinks that perhaps she’ll put her summer baking plans on hold, or her husband might return from Whale Cove the size of one.
“Did you overhear what they were talking about?” Émile asks.
“Was I eavesdropping on other people’s conversations? Categorically, no,” she teases. But she’s curious. “What was it?”
“Grocery store, liquor store, bakery, people are laughing. They seem happy. And yet, somewhere in the conversation, a dead man gets mentioned.”
“Really?”
“In each place.”
“Did he fall out of a tree?”
After lunch, they set out to explore the island. At Whistle Road Émile wants to turn right. Sandra insists they go left. “I know which way the cop cars went, Émile. We’ll explore the opposite direction.”
He laughs. He’s less keen to investigate the unknown fuss than she thinks. He’s really more curious about the island, and off they go. Some twenty years ago, a young journalist helped Émile with a case. The island was the writer’s ancestral home. When later the detective needed to sequester a young woman from the bad guys, he arranged with the journalist to hide her away on Grand Manan. A ploy that worked. Ever since, he’s been interested in visiting the place, a time that’s come.
On this opening foray, they’re keen on getting to know the lay of the land. Amazing, to drive down to the lower, southern portion of the island and encounter fog, while the sky is as clear as a bell at North Head. South is less hilly and less high. There’s a park with a sand beach and fishing villages to which no picture postcard can do justice. They visit a general store in the town of Castalia that’s a throwback to another century, and except for the familiarity of the canned goods and other supplies, they’ve tumbled not only into another world but into another time. The storefront and the first section fail to indicate the size of the place, but once through there they enter into an expansive space. Here they can purchase steaks or the freezer to put them in, a bolt of cloth or electrical wire, penny candies on one side of the aisle, socks on the other, and beyond that shirts, pants, party dresses, and bicycles. A workingman’s steel-toed boots over here, toys over there, and, in between, computers and cereal. This is where they will shop in the future, Sandra determines, falling in love with the ambience while appreciating the prices, too. She listens for talk of a dead man, but here the employees are stationed too far apart from one another for idle banter to flourish.
Back on the road, she reads out the names of places they will investigate later: the Castalia Marsh, Woodwards Cove, the Thoroughfare, which is a crossing to Ross Island, underwater at high tide, the villages of Anchorage in Long Pond Bay, and Seal Cove, and Jack Tar’s Cove, Deep Cove, and Flock of Sheep. Just south of Flock of Sheep Sandra’s eye catches what appears to be the tip of a staircase on a cliff. Nothing looks private, there are no signs, there’s room to park, so she suggests an excursion. Émile turns around, and soon they are descending a steep stairway to what looks like a secret, small, and remarkably pretty beach in a wee cove below.
They spy sand on the shore sheltered by rock face on three sides. If this is a public spot where they are free to picnic and swim, nap or read a book, then they have truly landed in paradise.
The little cove is exactly that. A special place that could never be accessed without a stairway. Big boulders shelter the sand from the sea, the waves bursting on them first, then running gently up and minding their manners ashore. The couple is about to make the steep ascent back to the car, determined to return in their swimsuits one day with a stocked hamper and wine, when Émile steps past a boulder and is saddened by what lies at his feet. A dog, a magnificent black Lab, dead on the sand. Flies have alighted, but not many, nor have they been intrusive, so the body washed up in a recent hour, the dog, in all probability, having drowned.
Seeing him bent over, Sandra comes up behind her husband.
“Oh dear,” she says.
“Oh dear,” he repeats, and straightens.
“What should we do with him?”
“She’s a female. Maybe not full-grown, but still about fifty pounds.”
“No, Émile, you can’t carry it. More like sixty pounds. Your back.”
“We can’t leave it here. I’m not going to bury it in the sand. It’ll be unearthed in the next storm.”
They stare at the poor animal awhile. No collar.
“We can alert the authorities,” she suggests.
“I bet they have better things to do. In any case, if we leave her for even a little while, the flies and rodents, not to mention the birds, will have at her.”
They share a glance, then gaze at the dog again.
“Okay,” Sandra says. “I can help. Take it slowly. We’ll rest on the way up.”
“I was planning on doing that even without carrying a dog.”
He has to dig in the sand to get his forearms under the Lab, but soon enough he makes it to his feet, adjusts the dog’s weight, and proceeds. Sandra tries to take some of the weight off by putting her hand under the body where it sags between Émile’s arms, but in the end he’s on his own, and they commence their climb. He doesn’t let on that for all his inherent strength, somewhat diminished by his sixty-six years and lower-back issues, the task will probably kill him.
He keeps that prospect to himself as he staggers up the stairs.
* * *
The Mounties arriving by aircraft brought in a dog, a German shepherd. A forensics team, also from the mainland, detailed and scrupulously photographed the site, and the detective from Saint John asked Aaron Roadcap to drop by the local station for questioning. Roadcap politely declined, saying not unless he was fed first. Not having the budget to offer the man breakfast, they drove him home to feed himself and arranged to pick him up later in the afternoon for a talk. The detective agrees with Corporal Wade Louwagie that Roadcap is a curious fellow, although he does not seem to be behaving with criminal intent, guilt, or apprehension. He strikes them both as a peculiar person who is more or less an upright citizen.
“If you believe in the myth of the upright citizen. I don’t, personally. But just because his old man’s a convicted murderer doesn’t
make him a killer, too,” the city detective quips.
His partner from the city whose name is Jack Hopple reminds him that “Bad apples don’t fall far from the rotted-out tree trunk.”
“That’s not how the saying goes,” the detective tries to correct him.
“No matter how you say it, still true.”
“You’re too class-conscious, Jack,” the superior admonishes the other detective, although playfully. “Clouds your view of the big picture.”
“We had a chat earlier,” Louwagie mentions. “Roadcap and me. When we were out here alone. He doesn’t believe his father was guilty of that murder.”
“Just convicted of it. Sounds guilty to me. Doesn’t it to you? Is he out yet?”
Detective Marshall Isler may have been thinking the same thought that Louwagie had entertained at the outset of all this.
“Sorry, sir. He’s dead. Died in prison,” Louwagie tells him. “Roadcap was a kid at the time.” He doesn’t know why, he just feels he should stick up for the guy.
A rotund man in his early fifties, with thin gray hair and a thick mustache, Isler jots down a note in a red book slim enough to slip in and out of his shirt pocket. “What can you tell me about our dearly departed reverend? What was he into, besides ‘Jesus loves me, this I know’?”
Louwagie’s knowledge is limited. He’s bumped into him at public events, and has heard nothing untoward about the man. “A bachelor.”
“That’s suspicious right there,” the city detective points out. A bachelor himself, Louwagie fails to agree. The man inscribes a notation in his red book, then inquires, “What else?”
Louwagie says that the pastor’s congregation, Presbyterian, seems to be one of the saner groups on the island. He does not mean to suggest that they’re all batty, only that a few come across as off-the-wall. Every congregation preaches against alcohol, and perhaps Lescavage did, too, despite being known to take a nip himself.
“Falling down drunk type thing?” Isler asks him and Louwagie says no.
“Let’s say that he could drink a lot at times but still hold it. I administered a Breathalyzer once. He barely passed, still, the physical tests he passed with flying colors. Walked a straight line like a train on rails.”
“Why did you test him? Random stop or did he give you cause?”
“Zigged when he should’ve zagged. Said he was reaching into his glove box for something.”
“For what exactly?”
The detective, in Louwagie’s opinion, is overreaching. He comes across as a man who asks questions to make people think he has an idea, when nothing at all is floating through his head.
“We’re going back a couple of years, sir. I’m not sure. Can’t remember. I think he said he was reaching in the glove box for his gloves.”
“Nobody does that,” the detective replies. “Puts gloves in a glove box.”
Louwagie doesn’t think that that’s as profound as the detective apparently believes, but he keeps his peace. He wanders off on his own to sit on a boulder while the detectives do whatever it is they’re so brilliant at. While awaiting their report, he reviews for himself what’s transpired.
Eventually, the forensic folks concede the obvious, that the open air after a vicious storm doesn’t leave much to go on. Much of the blood and ooze washed away. They don’t seem terribly anxious to stir the muck and body slime more than is necessary. They will pick up the pieces, and Louwagie is so relieved that this job doesn’t fall to him, he believes he can French-kiss each one of them and the snoop dog twice. He knows better than to say so and remains nonchalant about this terrific news. He might not recover if he’s required to bag the man’s gooey intestines or separate out his organs. The Mountie has already explained that the desiccated vomit on the cairn is his own, not the perpetrator’s or the victim’s. He’s grateful that the other cops seem to understand and not think badly of him.
Then comes the matter of getting the bagged body out. The undertakers nearly killed themselves coming in when one turned his ankle in a small crevice and came close to stumbling right over a ledge. All he was carrying at the time was a light stretcher. They’re nervous about trying their luck a second time while lugging the dead man along the edge of a cliff. They can also take routes through the forest, where they are liable to get lost. Lescavage was not a heavy man yet his remains make for an awkward weight. To take the longer path in the opposite direction from the way they came in is infinitely safer, and Louwagie makes that decision and hires two local men to spell them along the trail. Miles with a body between them will be cumbersome and tiring otherwise, and pulling it behind an ATV over rough terrain too damaging to the corpse. The undertaker’s van can meet them where they emerge from the trail close to North Head, so that Lescavage, discreetly packed into a body bag, his innards in another, will not be subject to a public viewing just yet.
All are agreed, and Louwagie arranges with his own partner upon his arrival, and the two city detectives, to escort the corpse and its entourage down from high ground. He will do for him in death what he was unable to do in life—protect him.
As he departs with his grim brigade, he notices that Detective Isler is trying to see if the dog can pick up a trail of a different kind, but if the animal has nothing to go on he doubts that the men will learn a thing. In terms of solving the crime, it’s reasonable to suppose that if the killer keeps his mouth shut and doesn’t wave the murder weapon around in a bar, and if he hasn’t conveniently parked his DNA on a signpost, then he has a chance of being home free. Unless someone has openly been threatening the man or was seen coming up here with him—in a storm, in the pitch-black—they’ll have no leads to pursue. They will have absolutely nothing to go on. Likely, that will only focus pressure on Aaron Roadcap, for finding the body while out in a gale at night—two strikes against him—and they’ll have to find the mysterious people he says camped out in the storm, if they even exist.
At least, Louwagie is thinking, as he trails the procession across the lovely mountain meadow, that that would be how he would handle the investigation if it was left up to him.
* * *
The dog lying dead in the open back end of his Jeep is visible as Émile Cinq-Mars asks a pedestrian where City Hall might be located. Fortunately, the old-timer doesn’t glance in the rear. The man with a wizened complexion and a long, crooked, bony finger that he uses as a pointer needs to think twice. In the end he provides simple directions. Driving off, Émile finds the building straight away. Above the door the sign is carved in stone: CITY HALL. He discovers the entry firmly locked. Odd, this being the middle of the day.
“Maybe they take early lunches,” he gripes as he straps his seat belt back on.
“Their lights are on,” Sandra notices. So they are. The side of the building has a bank of windows well off the ground, all showing the interior lit up by ceiling lights hung from chains, the bulbs covered by stout metallic shades.
“Maybe they don’t use the front door for some bonkers reason,” Émile grumbles.
He tries the back entrance then, up a short flight of stairs. Again, the door’s locked, but this time he hears sounds inside, a muffled clamor, nothing he can figure out, so he knocks. When no one answers he puts an ear to the wood and listens. More rambunctious thumping, like a gathering of boxers working out on heavy bags. Still, listening with his ear to the crack, it’s more thunderous than that, yet strangely muffled. He has no clue what’s going on at City Hall to create the noise, and his curiosity is piqued.
He believes he’s in the village of Castalia. He’s not positive of that, either, and no sign is posted to help him out. He strolls around to the far side of the building, out of sight of the parking lot now and no longer visible to Sandra, who’s holding down the fort in the Jeep. He’s glad she talked him out of his original idea, to carry the dog through the front door and drop it on the first desk in sight. He’s done enough lifting for the day without lugging the dead animal around and around this building. T
he far side does yield an advantage. A window suffers a broken corner, a hole through both panes of glass, likely caused by an errant baseball or a rock. While the windows are too high off the ground for him to gaze inside, here he might better interpret the strange sounds emanating from the room.
This time, he hears a rhythmic grunting to go along with the repetitive thumping. Drolly, he wonders if City Hall hasn’t been transformed into a daytime brothel. One keeping a hectic schedule. Curiosity now has the better of him, but there’s no way into this edifice. Coming full circle to the front door again, he mounts the stairs. He spots his wife leaning forward in her seat to see what on earth he’s up to as he begins to pound, very heavily, on the big wooden door. He bangs it with the side of his fist as hard as he can, even though he knows that the pounding going on inside is much louder. He stops to listen from time to time, then pounds again, less interested in the dog’s carcass now or in contacting an owner than he is in uncovering the origins of the noise. About the fifth time that he stops his banging to listen, he hears something. Or rather, nothing. A change. He hears silence. He assumes from this that his pounding has perked up the ears of those indoors. So he goes at it again, harder than ever, both fists this time, a furious citizen demanding a voice at City Hall.
Finally, the door is unlocked and creaks open a crack. “What?” a high-pitched male voice asks. He can see a portion of the man. Cinq-Mars is over six two when he stretches, while this man is taller.
Forgetting, perhaps, that he no longer carries a badge, he speaks with an authority that sounds official. “What’s going on in there?” And thinks to add, Group sex? before he censors himself.
The door opens a wider sliver, still too narrow for anyone to enter through, although he might make an exception for the man inside, who’s as thin as he is tall, about the width of a fishing pole.
“I believe the operative phrase to be,” the man lets him know, “that that’s none of your concern. Not in this lifetime, nor the next.” Good point, and the visitor agrees, but the fact that the other man talks with the door barely ajar, his face in shadow, undermines his perspective, to Émile’s mind. He’s not inclined to leave just yet.
