Demon Spirit, Devil Sea
Published by Charlene D’Avanzo
Copyright 2017 Charlene D’Avanzo
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Additional praise for
Demon Spirit, Devil Sea
Jam-packed with fascinating science, this suspenseful novel delivers as an entertaining and enlightening read. Our endangered earth is in good hands with Charlene D’Avanzo.
—Meg Little Reilly, author of We Are Unprepared
Oceanographer Mara Tusconi takes you into the rough waters of Haida Gwaii where the turbulence on the water isn’t the only challenge she faces.
—Emily Jackson, cofounder of Jackson Kayaks, two-time world champion freestyle kayaker
Also by Charlene D’Avanzo
Cold Blood, Hot Sea | A Mara Tusconi Mystery
(Foreword INDIES 2016 Finalist)
Praise for
Cold Blood, Hot Sea
Sleuths will have to figure out who done it, but the real crime is the backdrop here: the endless heating of a fragile planet.
—Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth
Artfully mixing scientific detail with her characters’ personal struggles, D’Avanzo creates a tense story that makes it clear: When profits are favored over the health of the planet, we are all at risk.
—JoeAnn Hart, author of Float
…an intriguing whodunit, plenty of tension, and a compelling story that kept me glued to the book for two evenings…I especially loved some of her real Maine characters.
—George Smith, author of A Life Lived Outdoors and George’s Outdoor News
A great read that gives us more to think about than just the plot twists.
—Gary Lawless, co-owner of Gulf of Maine Books
A page-turner set in Maine’s picturesque working waterfront where lobsters aren’t the only ones feeling the heat.
—Kay Henry, cofounder, Northern Forest Canoe Trail and Mad River Canoe
Paddlers will love this book’s hero—an oceanographer who uses her kayak to thwart climate change deniers.
—Lee Bumsted, registered Maine Sea Kayak Guide and author of Hot Showers! Maine Coast Lodging for Sea Kayakers and Sailors
This series is dedicated to scientists struggling to understand the extraordinary complex phenomena associated with climate change.
Author’s Note
This fictional story is based on an actual event. With the Haida Nation’s consent, in 2012 U.S. entrepreneur Russ George dumped a hundred tons of iron sulfate into waters off the Haida Gwaii archipelago fifty miles west of British Columbia. George promised that resulting plankton blooms would enhance salmon numbers and provide money from carbon credits. Neither happened. While many oceanographers decried George’s experiment as a violation of international treaties on ocean pollution and a moratorium on geoengineering, no United Nations science team from Maine visited the Haida Nation to investigate the event.
1
A cocktail of fear and fury bubbled up from my belly and coated my tongue—taste of cold metal. I slammed a neoprene-gloved hand against the jammed lever at my hip. Did it again. Glanced back.
The offending rudder sat limp and useless on top of the kayak’s stern.
“Worthless piece of junk!”
Like a racehorse, the kayak found the riptide and leapt ahead. My head snapped back, ponytail whacked my neck. I jerked to attention, gasped as icy wind fingers grazed windblown cheeks. Ahead and sixty degrees off starboard on Augustine Island’s tip, waves smashed into boulders, spray leapt skyward.
Augustine, our campsite for the night. I could not—absolutely would not—fly right by.
The situation was dire. Without a working rudder on a long, skinny kayak, I was helpless against Haida Gwaii’s relentless current and wind. At lightning speed, the angry, unfeeling sea would sweep me from safety and away from any living soul.
I am a woman alone in a cockpit inches from deadly cold water three thousand feet below.
North Pacific Ocean. Vast. Frigid. Deep.
I’d kayaked Maine’s coast for years, but New England offshore didn’t hold a paddle to the misleadingly named Pacific.
The boat hit an eddy, wobbled, and slowed. I patted the deck like it was a horse and whooshed out the breath I’d been holding. Vigilant about tipping over, I used the paddle as an outrigger to position the boat sideways to the current, and squinted at the backs of five kayakers. Bouncing on waves, paddles seesawing from side to side, they were tiny against the blue-black sea. Harvey Allison was easy to spot in her banana-yellow boat. I should be right there—stroking alongside my fellow oceanographer and best friend. I’d worry about the ton of fieldwork we faced. She’d joke about my lists and schedules. I’d pretend to be indignant.
But the Haida watchman we’d hired to motor us from Kinuk Island to Augustine had gotten stuck god knew where with a broken outboard. Pacing Kinuk’s beach, I’d jumped on plan number two. We’d join a couple of women on their Kinuk-to-Augustine kayak tour. Easy two-mile paddle, I said. We’d have plenty of time to sample fish in Augustine’s Eagle River.
A runaway kayak fifty miles off the coast of British Columbia was categorically not part of my plan.
I willed Harvey to look at me. She twisted in my direction. Her kayak jiggled. She flapped her paddle.
“Sorry, girl,” I said.
Like mamma duck, the kayak guide led his little pod away from me. I glared at his back and tried the turnaround ploy on him.
It didn’t work. The metal taste in my mouth turned hot. A half-hour into our expedition, this Bart character guide leaves me—in his piece-of-junk defective kayak? Harvey must have pleaded with him to get me. But he couldn’t leave four novice kayakers scared and paddling poorly. Maybe he figured I was an experienced kayaker who wanted to go off on her own.
If he did, it was Davy Jones’ locker for me.
My kayak hit a row of waves and nearly threw me over. I leaned toward them and slapped the paddle flat on the sea surface to brace. In forty-five-degree water, hypothermia could paralyze me in minutes. In the too-big outfitter’s wetsuit, I’d be dead in fifteen.
Drowned.
Suddenly, I could not breathe. Lungs on fire, bands tightened around my chest. Drowning, my greatest terror. I shook my head, grunted like a wrestler, sucked in air, willed fear away.
Squaring my body against the foot supports, I dipped the paddle into the water. Hard right, pull. Left, keep ’er stable.
Hit Augustine Island. My god, just hit the blessed island.
Hard right, pull.
Augustine’s tip was still ahead on my starboard side, but the speeding kayak would come up on it fast.
I clawed at the water. “Right. Come on. Right, right.”
No good. At high tide, the current carried me at racing speed—in the wrong direction. Worse, the kayak banged up and down against building waves, making rudderless steering a joke.
Fear bubbled up again like vomit. I spat it out.
“Get a grip, Tusconi,” I said. “Figure out how to fix the friggin’ rudder.”
I pictured the mechanism. Stainless steel cable ran from the rudder to foot braces inside the cockpit. The lift-line cable at my hip allowed paddlers to raise and lower the rudder. What could go wrong?
Lots. Lift lines jammed. Cables broke. Rudder brackets twisted. Things I could repair on dry land. But out here in the cockpit there was absolutely nothing to d
o but try like hell to reach that island.
Hard right, pull. Left, keep ’er stable.
At five knots, the kayak surged straight ahead—not one bit to starboard. And I knew why.
Back at the Maine Oceanographic Institute, I’d studied Haida Gwaii’s currents. Longer than wide, Augustine Island protected Kinuk’s inner bay from the Pacific’s ravages. The outer bay, where I happened to be seated, was a very different story. A paddler dumb enough to venture out there’d be trapped in current that raced past the island’s tip.
If I zipped past Augustine, the jig would be up. The big ocean’s crashing waves twice the length of my boat, icy water, sharks—I’d be at the mercy of all of it.
What suddenly lay ahead erased all thoughts of currents and sharks. I squinted, squeezed my eyes shut, popped them open. The Maine kayaker’s nightmare.
Fog.
The clammy murk smothered me in an instant. Splashing waves, sky, light. Vanished. Replaced by a wet, woolly gray. My heart beat fast against layers of fleece, paddling jacket, and life vest. Breathing fast and hard, I swiveled and squinted in every direction. The vapor was so dense there was no telling where miasma ended and sea began. Waves booming against rocks said the island was tantalizingly close, but dead blind in fog, I couldn’t see a thing.
The scientist in me kicked in again. Water and air warmed by July’s sun met frigid open ocean. That meant fog. But for once, science couldn’t help me at all.
The kayak raced on through the gloom. Too soon, the booms were muted. I’d just slipped past my refuge. My fate was certain—I would drift out onto vast ocean in a seventeen-by-two foot boat.
Panicked, I hyperventilated. My gasps echoed back in the murk.
I shoved the useless paddle into deck bungees, closed my eyes, and tried to slow my breath. In. This could not happen. Out. I would not drowned in the element I devoted my life to and loved. In. There’d be no headline—“Maine scientist dead in sea kayak off Haida Gwaii, the Queen Charlotte Islands”—in my hometown’s Spruce Harbor Gazette. Out. I’d never leave Angelo, my godfather and only family, alone.
I blinked and frowned at a bizarre notion. Did this occur for a reason? Had the Raven—the native Haida’s trickster—set me up to drown? I shook my head. Spiteful spirits did not exist. If someone wanted me dead, the trickster had to be human.
A half-mile behind my stern at Augustine Island’s tip, ghosts of boulders emerged through wispy fog. I faced my ocean fate, raised my paddle overhead, and shrieked at the Haida spirits, Jesus, any damn thing that might hear me.
2
The call, high and piercing, answered from behind. I twisted toward the screech and nearly fell out of my boat. Close on my port side, a streak—long, sleek, and blood-red—flew by. Behind it an oval eye, black as liquid night, stared and morphed into a glowing sphere. The rest was a black blur longer than my kayak. Stranger still, the thing radiated a warm glow that evaporated an envelope of fog around it.
In an instant, it was gone. I blinked. Only fog to port. I craned my neck to starboard and behind as far as I dared. Nothing.
Fog and fear had messed with my mind. Red and black fog-zapping creatures decidedly did not exist except in fairy tales.
Using my paddle as an outrigger again, I struggled against waves that smacked the boat, the impossible I’d witnessed, fear racing through my veins. A distant sound wormed its way into my consciousness. I jerked to attention and strained to hear it over sloshes and smacks.
The friendly drone of a motor.
Any Maine boater knows that fog amplified sound—especially low-frequency, long-wavelength tones like foghorns.
And boat motors.
I closed my eyes, slowed my breathing, and focused every synapse on the possibility of a distant low rumble. Nothing but the slap of my damn boat against the water.
Heard it again.
An unmistakable drone grew louder. I tried to turn toward it and came close to tipping the boat. The beat-up dinghy pushed through the fog and slid alongside, motor sputtering. A strapping man, hair blue-black as a raven’s—but very much human—sat in the stern, one hand on the outboard’s handle. With the other, he swung a paint-chipped oar over his gunwale. I grabbed my end and our boats touched.
From peril to human contact in a flash—that was fast, even for me.
I gasped and managed, “Goddamn.”
Silent, my rescuer studied my face.
“Who are you?”
His voice, deep and deliberate, carried a Canadian lilt. “William. Kinuk Island Watchman. I was supposed to motor you to Augustine.” He tipped his head toward his stern. “Got stuck in Rose Harbor with a dead outboard. I’m so very sorry.”
The young man’s dark, gentle eyes searched mine. Warmth flowed through me.
“Um, ah…hey, marine motors take a beating. Thank god you’re here now.”
Grayish bilge water sloshed over William’s cracked rubber boots. Generations of peeling paint colored the dinghy’s interior green, white, and blue. Of course, my tub was no prize either. I pointed a thumb over my shoulder. “Rudder’s jammed.”
William pushed my boat forward. The kayak wobbled as he fiddled with the rudder. From the mumbles, I guessed the thing was good and jammed. Finally, he called out “beauty!” as he yanked the offending appendage down into the water, and let go. I positioned my left foot on the brace, swept my paddle across the water’s surface, and grinned as the kayak swung to the right and faced him.
“I’m Mara. You saved my life, um…”
William held up his hand—and as if he rescued floating maidens every day—acknowledged my gratitude with a slight nod. “Mara, head back to the bay. I’ll follow ‘til you’re out of the fog and on your way to the campsite.”
In front of the puttering dinghy, I paddled hard and plowed through three-footers with ease. When we reached the calmer waters of Kinuk Bay, William motored alongside.
“You okay now?”
I grinned and hand-pumped my paddle overhead.
“Great. See you on Augustine. I’m helping Bart with the kayak group.” William cranked his motor. The dingy wallowed. He sped off with a roar.
I followed his wake. Alive, in control, and feeling strong, I drank in the seascape as the kayak slid through blue-green ripples tipped in silver that reached the western horizon. I let loose my hair and whooped as the salty breeze whipped it behind. To glide through this maze of islands and bays completely beyond the reach of man-made noise like traffic or neon, halogen, and every other kind of artificial light—this was a sea kayaker’s dream.
I could turn my back, for now, on the dangerous, indifferent sea.
To port, a flank of moss-draped cedars hid the rest of Augustine’s dripping rainforest. Gusts of wind bathed me in rich, earthy perfume. I stopped paddling, closed my eyes, and filled my lungs with the manna of life and time.
My kayak slid up the rocky shingle beside the other boats. Harvey ran over, grabbed the forward loop, pulled me higher onto dry land, and sat on the bow to steady the boat. I climbed out.
Harvey scaled the cobbles in two strides. I pulled her tight into a bear hug, inhaled her favorite shampoo. Maine’s Burt’s Bees, of course.
I’m not the bear-hug type. Harvey stepped back and scanned to check for damaged body parts. Satisfied, she placed her hands on my shoulders. Her gray eyes searched mine. “Mara. You vanished. I was so worried. What—?”
I gestured toward William’s dinghy. He’d dragged it above the waterline. “William. Saved my butt.”
Harvey glanced at the banged-up dinghy, back at me. She tipped her head. “Striking guy.”
“Come on. He’s twenty years younger than you.”
Even though she looked my age, Harvey had just celebrated her fortieth birthday.
She tossed her expertly shaped bob. “Thanks for the reminder. I’ll remember it when you blow out nine more candles.”
“Seriously, Harve, really, really sorry to worry you.” I walked to my kayak’s s
tern. “Rudder got stuck.” On both knees, I moved the thing up and down. “Don’t see what’s wrong.” I opened my mouth to tell Harvey about the mirage, but closed it. The time wasn’t right.
Harvey jiggled my kayak with her foot. “Your rudder didn’t work. So, what happened?”
The aroma of grilled fish wafted our way. Down the beach, a little clutch of women stood around a campfire, sandwiches in hand. My stomach reminded me it was lunchtime.
“Remember the current we talked about where Kinuk Bay meets the Pacific? Twenty-plus knots? I got caught in it.” I stood and wiped gritty hands on my thighs. “The tide raced out. Took my rudderless kayak with it.”
Harvey’s eyebrows shot up. “What—”
“Tell you more later. Okay? We’ve got to figure out what we’re doing, and I need something warm to eat.”
We picked our way across smooth cobbles that covered the shingle beach. Harvey rested her hand on my shoulder like she was worried she’d lose me again.
“Same plan?” I asked
“Yes. I was worried—besides about you, of course—because Bart knows slightly more than zero about counting fish, even though he said he did. Incredible. How can people exaggerate like that? So I cornered William right after he pulled up. Thank God he’s done salmon counts and can explain the Haida’s methods. Now you’re here, we can motor around to the river, review their techniques, look at data. Get this show on the road.”
Harvey was a get-the-show-on-the-road kind of gal.
“Point number two for William,” I said.
We reached the campfire. Three women introduced themselves to me.
One of them, Gwen, licked her fingers before she spoke. “Sounds like you folks have work to do. Bart’s taking us for a hike.”
William handed me a plate. “Have a salmon burger. Are you all right now, Mara?”
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