COFFIN COVE a gripping murder mystery full of twists (Coffin Cove Mysteries Book 1)

by JACKIE ELLIOTT

  “It was,” Jim agreed. “But sadly, no conclusion. I handed all my files and notes to the police, but they hit a brick wall too. The case file is still open as far as I am aware, and I think Sarah’s mother meets one of the original investigators on every anniversary of Sarah’s death, but there hasn’t been any new information since the first investigation.”

  “What about forensics? DNA?” Andi had reported on several cold cases where new scientific methods had resulted in breakthroughs and eventual convictions.

  “No DNA. Sarah had been in the water for hours, there was no trace of DNA or helpful forensics by the time they found her on the beach. Her legs and hands were tied with hemp rope, which in those days was used by just about every fisherman on the coast — and anyone could have found some lying about on the docks, and the knots were common.”

  “So what linked her to Mason?” Andi asked. “Harry seemed totally convinced that Mason killed her.”

  “As did everyone in Coffin Cove,” Jim sighed. “I tried to be objective, but most people close to Sarah thought she was having some kind of affair with Mason, who they said had a—” Jim fumbled for a word — “predilection for younger girls.”

  “But why kill her?” Andi said, almost to herself. “Unless she changed her mind about their affair? Or found out something about Mason he didn’t want known?”

  “There was a theory.” Jim sat down behind his desk, and absent-mindedly began twirling a pencil in his fingers. “There was a theory that Sarah and Mason had staged her kidnapping to scare her father. Sarah and Joe had some serious arguments about the clear-cutting and what his business was doing to the environment. If she was mad at her dad and under Mason’s spell . . . well, it could have all gone wrong . . .” Jim left his words hanging.

  “Well . . .” Andi chose her words carefully. “If Joe and Sarah argued, is it possible . . . ?”

  “That Joe did it?” Jim voiced her question. He shook his head. “No, the evening she went missing, she and Joe argued, but other people said they saw her after that. And I know Joe, he does have a temper, but he adored Sarah. Her death devastated him. He sold the business and spends his days just sitting and drinking. Waiting to die.”

  Andi pulled out the first file and flipped it open. A photograph of a smiling girl with blonde hair spilling over her shoulders was stapled to the inside of the cover. Andi studied it. No makeup, no earrings — just one silver cross on a chain, she noticed. And although it was just a headshot, Andi could see that Sarah was wearing some kind of dress or top with a lace collar. Very . . . wholesome? And yet, there was something — something about her smile — that had just the hint of mockery about it.

  “Was this taken near to the time she died?” Andi asked. “She looks quite young, and a bit . . . old-fashioned? Unworldly?”

  “Sarah’s grandparents — her maternal grandparents — were very religious,” Jim answered. “Sarah was a regular churchgoer until her parents split, and then, I believe, she began to rebel. Sue, her mother, moved back in with her parents when she and Joe split up. They never liked Joe, and I got the impression that they encouraged Sarah to stay away from her father and his new ‘harlot’,” Jim continued. “It must have been confusing for Sarah.

  “If she was vulnerable, it would have been easy for a predator to befriend her,” Andi said. “If Mason was — or is — a predator,” she added.

  “Whatever he was back then, they cleared him of any involvement in Sarah’s death. And now he’s back in Coffin Cove, and that’s not the action of a guilty man, I suppose.” Jim rubbed his hand over his eyes. “He’s either innocent or stupid.”

  “Or arrogant? Or somebody made him an offer he couldn’t refuse?” Andi added, recalling Harry’s words.

  “Yes. It could just be that Mason’s been employed to cause a diversion, like last time.”

  Jim peered at Andi from behind the boxes of files. “Our job now is to report the story at hand. Who’s killing the sea lions? Why are the Black OPS and Mason here? What’s the impact on our fragile economy? These are the questions our readers want answered, Andi. The community mourned Sarah’s death and it really did scare people. But as time has gone on, her death to most people is more like a legend than reality.” Jim got up and walked around the desk. He took the file from Andi and replaced it in the box. “Look, you can review these files and see what you find, but I got a lot of heat from Mason’s lawyer last time around, so do not start running around town and asking questions and stirring up shit. Remember, it’s a small community and—”

  “Everyone knows everyone else’s business,” Andi finished for him. “Yes, I get that. But don’t you think we should at least visit Sarah’s parents to get their reaction to Mason’s return?”

  “Look, Andi,” Jim put up a hand, “I get that this is intriguing for you. Believe me, it’s not just work that’s in those boxes. It’s my heart and soul. I wanted to solve this for Joe and Sue, just so they could get some peace.” His voice cracked a little. “Nothing I could do would bring Sarah back. But knowing what happened might have helped a little.”

  Andi was silent a moment. She didn’t know why, but this story had awakened her imagination. Instead of sitting in the bar the previous night, she’d gone straight up to her apartment and made notes about possible angles of investigation. “Let me just do a little digging,” she pleaded. “Let me read the files. Who knows, a fresh set of eyes might turn up a new angle. And I do still have a few sources who will talk to me. I might find out who Mason is working for this time. I’ll be working on both stories at once . . .” She let Jim mull it over for a moment.

  “OK. But you do it in your own time, after you’ve finished the assignments you have at the moment. And by the way, you might have noticed—” he waved his hand, gesturing for Andi to look around the office — “I’m not flush with cash. I can’t afford a lawsuit. So let’s not forget that the most pressing story we have concerns dead sea lions.”

  Chapter Eight

  Half an hour later they were both in Jim’s truck on the way to Sue McIntosh’s home. Although Jim was outwardly reluctant to stir up all this shit again, Andi sensed that pulling out all the old files had awakened his investigative impulses. He was a journalist. He hated to leave a story with no ending. So it was easy for Andi to persuade him to take her out to meet Sarah’s mother, under the guise of letting her know that Mason was back in town.

  “Doesn’t seem right for her to just hear town gossip,” Andi said. “We should at least tell her officially. So it isn’t so much of a shock.”

  Jim didn’t seem convinced that Andi’s enthusiasm for a meeting with Sue was motivated by sympathy for the bereaved mother.

  “We’ll visit. And then we’ll concentrate on getting the real assignments finished, right?”

  Andi agreed, but already she was feeling a slight thrill of anticipation. It was a familiar feeling that started in the pit of her stomach. A literal gut reaction that Andi had learned to heed and ignored to her detriment.

  Jim refused to let Andi drive. He saw the old papers and coffee cups strewn over the seats of Andi’s beaten-up Toyota and said, “That’s disgusting. We’ll take my truck.”

  Now, Andi was sitting in the passenger seat without any coffee, as Jim had refused to stop at Hephzibah’s. He seemed overly concerned about spillage and Andi resisted the temptation to point out the contrast between the spotless interior of Jim’s truck and the grime and general disorganization of the Gazette’s office.

  Instead, she questioned Jim about Sue, Sarah and Joe.

  “She kept her married name,” Jim explained. “Although she and Joe divorced legally, Sue didn’t believe that they were divorced in God’s eyes, so she is still a McIntosh.”

  “What about Joe’s new wife?” Andi asked. “How does Sue rationalize that?”

  Jim sighed. “She basically believes that Tara is the devil.”

  “Seriously?” Andi was incredulous. “No wonder Sarah was confused.”

&nbs
p; “After the divorce, Sue would not take any financial settlement. She just moved back in with her parents. She was always a regular churchgoer, but she got . . . I suppose you would describe it as more fanatical. Sue’s father was a ‘hellfire and brimstone’ kind of religious zealot, and eventually none of the local churches were enough for him. And so . . . well, you’ll see when we get there.”

  “When did Joe and Sue divorce?” Andi asked. “A long time before Sarah’s death?

  “Oh yes. Years. Sarah was about eight or nine, I think. Until then, Joe hadn’t really paid a lot of attention to Sarah. Or to Sue, really. He was focused 100 per cent on his business.”

  “So what changed?” Andi pressed him to continue.

  “Well, Sue had put Sarah in her father’s church school.”

  “Wait,” Andi interrupted, “her father’s a teacher?”

  “Not really,” Jim answered. “He’s more of a pastor who also runs a school.”

  “So is it an official school or what?” Andi was having a hard time getting her head around the concept. “Is it part of the school district? Don’t they have rules about that?”

  “They do now,” Jim answered. “But back then, Fred, Sue’s father, ran an offshoot of the Pentecostal Church, and he had a private school. It was thriving for a while. So that’s where Sarah went, for a couple of years, anyway. It was more a gesture from Sue — an attempt to reconcile, I think. They hated Joe, they thought he was godless. I’m not certain, but I think Sue got pregnant on purpose to get away from her father. Joe and Sue weren’t even dating, really, and suddenly they got married. Probably doomed from the start.”

  “And then they split up because . . . ?”

  “Oh, Joe found out that Sarah couldn’t read. She could recite Bible passages, but apart from that, she was eight years old and couldn’t read or even write her own name. Joe pulled her out of the church school and put her in the Coffin Cove elementary with all the other kids. Fred was furious, and Sue left Joe in protest. Although Joe having an affair with Tara probably had more to do with it. They divorced, and Sue fought for sole custody of Sarah. Joe fought back, and for several years it was nasty.”

  “You don’t think the whole situation had anything to do with Sarah’s death?”

  “Oh no. Sarah was fifteen, going on sixteen, and she had been making her own choices about seeing her father for a while. She even got on quite well with Tara.” Jim hesitated for a moment. “Fred is an odd duck. There were rumours that he beat up his wife. Ruth — that’s Sue’s mother — often had a black eye, and no believable reasons for them. But I don’t think he ever laid a hand on Sue, and he was pretty broken up after Sarah’s death.”

  “How do you even start a church?” Andi mused. “Aren’t there rules about that either?”

  Jim laughed. “It’s like the Wild Wild West to you, isn’t it?”

  “Yes!”

  “It was a bit wild out here,” Jim conceded. “It wasn’t that many years ago Coffin Cove was just a logging camp and fishing dock. The town grew around that, and people made their own rules.”

  “And their own churches and schools?”

  “Yes. But thirty years ago, there were eleven pubs in Coffin Cove. So it didn’t hurt to have a few God-fearing men,” said Jim, a bit defensively. “Anyway, when Joe pulled Sarah out of the church school, Fred never forgave him. Because after that, other parents started questioning his teachings and taking their kids out, and finally the school folded.”

  As they chatted back and forth, Jim had driven out of Coffin Cove on the single winding, narrow road that climbed up away from the ocean and eventually joined the island highway. They passed over a narrow bridge that crossed a fast-flowing river, and before they reached the intersection with the main highway, Jim took a sharp right turn onto a gravel road. Trees obscured the entrance and Andi couldn’t see any signs. They seemed to immediately reverse their direction and head back towards Coffin Cove. The track descended at a steep angle and Andi was relieved they were in a truck, because the vehicle bounced through potholes and lost traction occasionally. Jim’s expert steering kept the truck on the road, although it seemed to Andi, as she braced her arm against the dashboard, they were only narrowly avoiding crashing into the undergrowth. Finally, the track flattened out, and they were driving parallel to the same swift-moving river they crossed earlier. Andi understood now why Jim didn’t want her to get coffee for the journey.

  “A few more weeks of rain, and this road will be impassable,” Jim said.

  “Is this the only way to Sue’s house?” Andi asked.

  Jim nodded. “Yes. We call this area the Valley. Quite a few people used to live out here, but after all the clear-cutting, the valley flooded every spring. Most people left. They’re cut off for weeks at a time,” he said. “But nobody could persuade the old man to leave, not even when their house was four feet underwater. He said it was God’s will if he lived or drowned, and he was staying exactly where he was. Now, it’s just Sue and Fred. Sue tried to get him to move into town when Ruth died, but he wasn’t having it.”

  Andi sat silently, processing this information and watching the scenery. The trees had thinned out and she could see now that they were surrounded by mountains. Andi tried to get her bearings and figure out where Coffin Cove was, but they had made so many turns that she was lost.

  “We’re going north,” Jim said. “OK, try this,” he added, noticing Andi’s blank expression. “The town is over that mountain to the right. Over the left-hand mountain is the main island highway. And this here—” he braked and slowed the truck so Andi could look around — “is what’s left of the valley community.”

  At first Andi didn’t see anything. Just spindly trees and mounds of bushes covered with swamp grass. But as she looked closely, she saw rusty contortions of metal, almost devoured by Mother Nature. Piles of rotting wood, some with the faded outlines of painted words, threw eerie jagged shadows as weak sunlight filtered through the grey clouds. On the banks of the river she could see the crumbling remains of concrete structures and what looked like large plastic tanks and abandoned huts behind a chain-link fence.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “The old hatchery,” Jim replied. “I’ll show you.”

  He parked the truck and they both got out. Andi shivered. It was raining heavily, and she could hear the river gushing behind the buildings.

  Jim pushed open a rusty gate and kicked aside a rotting sign.

  “The Valley Hatchery,” Andi read out loud, and looked at Jim questioningly, not knowing why they had stopped.

  “They built the hatchery to help conserve the wild salmon stocks,” Jim explained. “Salmon return to the rivers to spawn. But their eggs and juvenile salmon are vulnerable to all kinds of predators. So the idea of the hatchery is to have a safe place for the eggs to hatch and the salmon to grow before they swim out to the ocean. These over here—” he pointed at the crumbling plastic tanks — “are the holding tanks for the eggs to incubate. They’re transferred into spawning channels — offshoots from the river — before they’re released.” He smiled. “It’s a bit more complicated than that, but the basic idea is to give Mother Nature a helping hand.”

  “And does it work?” Andi asked.

  “More or less,” Jim said. “It’s not perfect, but stocks, at least, weren’t dropping while the hatchery was open.”

  “Why did it close?”

  “The flooding,” Jim said. “Every year in spring, the river floods. The clear-cutting meant that soil and gravel washed into the river and blocked up the spawning channels. The hatchery ran mainly on the efforts of volunteers and they just didn’t have the budget to keep it open — another reason the fishermen are pissed off. The government pours thousands of taxpayers’ dollars into enforcing the rules but gives no investment to enhance the fisheries. It’s wrong.”

  “I see. But maybe the environmentalists have a point?” Andi still wasn’t sure why they had toured the hatchery.

>   Jim ignored her. “Sarah spent a lot of time here. She volunteered. See that hut over there?” He pointed to a large battered Portakabin. “She helped organize fundraisers and open days for the public. She even had her own desk.”

  “It must have upset her when the hatchery closed.”

  “Devastated, according to Sue. Sarah blamed Joe for the clear-cutting. They argued about it a lot.”

  “It’s a plausible explanation for her getting involved with Mason, then?”

  Jim nodded. “Joe said that Sarah was punishing him. The thing is, Joe and Tara encouraged Sarah to go to college and study marine biology or something in that line. She had the grades. But she was adamant that she wouldn’t take their money because it came from logging.”

  “What a mess,” Andi said.

  “Yes. And I’m sure that Sue and Fred made it harder. They hated the forestry industry too. So they would have pulled Sarah in two directions.”

  “But they wouldn’t have approved of Mason, surely?” Andi asked.

  “Absolutely not. Sue, I’m sure, isn’t convinced that Mason wasn’t involved.”

  “Did they do any kind of investigating themselves? Or offer a reward?” Andi had previously worked on stories where parents had offered large sums of money for information.

  “They did, briefly. But the police advised against it after a while. Said they didn’t have the resources to chase after every lead that the crazies phoned in.”

  Andi nodded.

  They both got back into Jim’s truck. His face was set into a grim expression, preoccupied with the past, Andi thought, so she asked no more questions. They travelled in silence until Jim pointed ahead at a collection of dilapidated buildings. At first Andi thought they were more crumbled remains, but as they got nearer, she could see a thin wisp of smoke coming from a tin chimney on one of the structures.

  Jim brought the truck to a stop in front of three buildings. An old rusty truck was parked out front. The first building was larger and in better shape than the other two. A porch wrapped around three sides, but Andi couldn’t see windows or any other sign of human occupants. Andi wasn’t sure if it was a house or a barn. Steps at the side led up to the only entrance that Andi could see.