The farther they drove, the paler Chipper looked. He took a hand off the wheel to rub his cheek. She noticed that he had left the music off. “Anything wrong?” Holly asked.
He shook his head like a wet dog. “Uh, I’ve never seen a body before.” He swallowed back his words as if to master a gag reflex. “Wish I hadn’t eaten such a big breakfast. Spicy food and stress don’t mix, but I couldn’t hurt Mom’s feelings.”
She smiled to herself. Even a few more years gave her the edge. It was the way of the force to pass on wisdom and experience. Not everyone made a good candidate. Ben Rogers, her old mentor, had been chosen for his intuition, coolness, talent for details and tact. He’d never use tasteless slang or refer to a victim as a “crispy critter” to draw a cheap laugh.
“There’s a first time for everyone,” Holly said. “Mine was pretty bad. The victim had been lying in a remote bush camp for a week in thirty degree Celsius temperatures. His wife sent us looking when he was days late returning from hunting. A pro told me to put Mentholatum in my nostrils.”
He reached into a storage compartment and pulled out a tube. “Cherry Lipsol. Do you think this will work?”
“It made me sneeze, and anyway, this girl...Angie just died.” She gave him a quick glance and sent a challenge she knew he couldn’t ignore. “You can stand to the side, Constable. No problem.” In public, Holly automatically reverted to rank instead of a first name, a tenet of professionalism. And calling civilians “you guys” was equally prohibited. “You’re not a waitress in a truck stop,” Ben had told her.
“No, Guv, I mean ma’am,” he said as his nostrils flared like a young stallion’s. “Count on me. I’ll be your right-hand man.”
A red hawk drifted on the thermals over the cliffs. She closed her eyes for a moment as the car streaked along at eighty kilometres per hour. A campfire last night, headed for a coffin in the morning. How large was the group, and how many other people were in the popular area, enjoying the scenery? Then she sent relaxation messages to her flexed stomach. It was an accident, nothing more. Over and out. Nervous this morning, she had breakfasted on only an apple. Now she felt slightly nauseous from the coffee.
“Careful: Winding Road,” the sign read. The island’s terrain was like an overlapping series of green, ribbed reptiles. Water flowed off the glaciated hills as quickly as it arrived. With only thirty more kilometres to Port Renfrew, the speed limit slowed to fifty on hairpin turns. Little opportunity to pass unless courting suicide. “Jeez,” Chipper said. “These bicycles.” They watched as five racers, their heads bent low, legs pumping like young locomotives, sped along in line. Technically they owned the lane, but sometimes they would shift over like a flock of birds if the berm was smooth. Holly wouldn’t have risked it. A small pebble under the skinny wheel might skew a rider under a tractor-trailer tire.
“Hit the siren and lights,” she said. “Polite isn’t cutting it.” He flicked switches with a grin. The teardrop-helmeted crew shot glances over their shoulders and moved aside smartly. Once past, the car moved in silence, Chipper with his strong hands at ten and two on the wheel.
Twenty minutes later, they reached the small town at the end of the line. There were only bush roads north to Fairy Lake, Lizard Lake, and massive Lake Cowichan from that point on. Fewer than two hundred white people lived here, with half as many First Nations members in the immediate area. Originally the Pacheedaht tribe had made their homes on the coast and throughout the San Juan Valley. Earliest contacts had been prickly between the locals and newcomers, starting in 1798, when the crew from HMS
Iphigenia
engaged the residents in a dispute. Though logging had waned and the railroad tracks had been replaced by a road, the old beach camp area was soon converted to houses. By lucky coincidence, Port Renfrew sat at the L-shaped confluence of the northerly West Coast Trail and the easterly Juan de Fuca Marine Trail, which ended at Botanical Beach. The beach had been recognized at the turn of the twentieth century as such a gold mine of tidal life that the University of Minnesota had set up a research station. Though that unit was long defunct, strict regulations applied to the pristine shoreline. PICO meant “pack in and carry out.”
Nor was the beach the only attraction. From her younger days camping and exploring, Holly knew that nearby a forest legend spread its roots, sucking up the twelve feet of rain. The largest Douglas fir tree in the world, the Red Creek fir, with a circumference of over forty-one feet, grew on the outskirts of town. Passing the tourist centre, modest restaurants, a motel and a quaint old inn, they took the turn for the beach. Minutes later, they reached the parking lot and pulled through the gate, guided by a man waving his arms. In his early sixties, in a tan park uniform with shorts and knee socks English style, he was probably retired and happy for the extra money in a part-time job. On a boom box in his battered camo-coloured Jeep, an oldies station was playing “Love Me Tender”. He sipped from a water bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as they got out of the car. Splotched cheeks testified to a long life of malt appreciation.
“I didn’t hear you guys coming. What happened to the siren?”
Holly shook her head. Expectations already. Around the lot were parked a dozen cars and an assortment of trucks, vans and campers, with visitors from Alberta, Saskatchewan and Washington. The pay-for-parking machine sold daily windshield tickets for three dollars. Sporadic attempts to break into the little coin banks were another reason for regular RCMP patrol, though it was nearly impossible to catch someone in the act.
She made the introductions. “Are the students camping here? It wasn’t allowed in my day.”
Tim Jones waved a gnarly hand. “No way. Botanical’s too fragile and rare for that kind of disturbance. There’s an RV park in town. ’Course, you can’t always stop it. Shut the gate, they find a way around. Nature of the beast to keep trying. I live nearby and take a final look-see with the wife at nine, then I’m outta here. Come nightfall, some hitchhike, get dropped off, slip into the bush. Kind of a dare. Can’t blame them. Harmless enough, romantic even.” He gave Chipper a “between us men” look.
Holly opened her notebook, freshly inked and dated. Day One of My New In-Charge Career. Ben had collected what looked like thousands, neatly lined up in cabinets at home, to consult as backup to his court appearances. “Where will we find Angie?” She hoped she’d never become so hardened that bodies lost their identities. It was too late to help the girl, but the least she could do was serve her in the formalities of death.
“Follow that path. Come out on the beach, then go right a couple hundred feet till you come to a big mother chunk of fir with roots halfway to the sky. I call it Butt.” As he read their faces, he gave a self-deprecating cough. “No offense. That’s a logging term for the bottom of the tree. Kids are always building driftwood shelters off old Butt. Just lay on boards or straight branches. They float out with each high tide. Butt’s dug in like a two-ton tick. It would take the mother of all storms to carry him away.”
After grabbing a roll of yellow tape from the trunk, Chipper assumed a straight and serious posture which made him even taller. “Should we secure the scene, Corporal?”
“Good idea. Last thing we want is to wade through a bunch of thrill seekers. A girl is dead here.” She told Tim to keep an eye out for Mason Boone, the coroner, though from Reg’s description, he would be hard to miss. Meanwhile, Tim folded his arms in vigilance as if he were participating in a crime show.
The bright sun and warm temperatures made the beach an ideal destination, especially on a less-crowded weekday. Knotty shore pines bent from the ocean blasts, and swooping cypress shaded the area beneath the massive trunks of Douglas firs spared from the axe. They marched down the path with a “beach” sign, the gravel from the lot quickly turning into sand and duff. Halfway, a nearly new mountain bike lay on its side, unlocked and ready for the taking.
“That’s a beauty, but the owner is an idiot,” Chipper said. “A camera was stolen from a car here last week.”
“We’d better tell Tim. Maybe he can keep the bike safe at the gate until the owner returns. A cheap lesson.”
In a cool, wet section heavy with deer fern and shiny, rampaging salal, Holly spotted a banana slug in the middle of the path. Seven inches long, it was a leopard, haute-couture cousin to the traditional army khaki model. She bent down and gently lifted the creature to safety. “I brake for detrivores,” she said.
Chipper watched with a nostalgic smile. “In my survival course, we had to eat one of those. The wusses cooked it first. Once the...guts are out, a pinch of curry makes the difference. Everyone laughed. Then they all wanted some.”
“You must carry an unusual kit.” With a disgusted moue, she inspected the slime on her hands. “I don’t know why I do this. Maybe I’m thinking I might be reincarnated as one, not that I’m a Buddhist, or is it Hindu?”
“Whatever, I think the idea is to move
up
the ladder.”
“Hey, except for being slow and gummy, they vacuum the earth with only one lung. What more heavenly duties can you ask of a creature?”
They traversed a grove of sumac with wild roses blooming and forming rose hips, faint perfume for a funeral, not a wedding. The deepening sand, holding hardy beach plants such as silverleaf and yellow verbena, was littered with footprints, rough going for their leather boots.
Some island beaches were Hollywood stretches of fine silica, but Botanical had no pleasures for the foot, only tidal pools carved from sandstone and interspersed with ridges of shale, quartz and black basalt. As they hit the rock-shelved shore and turned, she saw why Tim had christened the huge stump “Butt”. What great wind had toppled the tree, and what greater tide had ferried it here, she couldn’t imagine. A photographer’s dream, except for crude initials carved into its bulk, it lay on its side, and from a branched bare root, pieces of driftwood artfully arranged like planks made a whimsical but secure shelter. Sand underneath had been scooped out so that two people could crawl out of the wind. Closer to the water, they picked their way between glistening tidal pools etched by time, wind and creatures like sea anemones, which hollowed out round homes for their delicate filaments.
A small group had gathered behind the berm of logs and twig trash at the high-tide line. American sea rocket and gumweed, hardy survivors, brushed at Holly’s pants as she walked. By itself, away down the grey basalt shore, was a small bundle. Blinking in the bright light, Holly tipped back her cap and swore softly.
“Covered with a blanket. And twenty feet from the edge. These rocks could have given her fresh abrasions.”
Chipper shielded his face from the sun. “But the medical examiner can tell. No bleeding post mortem, right?”
“Perhaps if a bone is broken with no bruising, that would be the case.” The winds had been high last night, she recalled. Unable to sleep, she had heard waves crashing onto the shore at midnight.
The tide was still going out, but the turn would come. The wind had risen, and a small chop rode the waves. Plumes of spray crashed over the rocks and soaked her boots. She turned to the crowd and managed a friendly but serious smile. “I’m Corporal Martin, investigating the accident. In a few minutes, after we’ve looked around, I’d like to speak to some of you about what you might have seen, starting with the person who found Angie. If you have any information, please wait at the picnic table over there. And could the rest of you clear the beach until we’re finished? It would make our job easier.” She saw three or four children carrying foam snakes and plastic beach pails. “We’d appreciate your taking the young ones a long distance away.”
She heard a few mutterings, but her politeness seemed to work. Except for five or six people, the crowd dispersed. A man of about thirty in swim trunks checked his watch pointedly, then came forward. Lean, with knotty muscles, he sported a colourful tattoo of a dragon, its fiery tongue licking around one shoulder. His hairy legs were slightly bowed. A few knee scrapes testified to the unforgiving rocky shelves. A trickle of blood still flowed. “I saw her in the water. Bob Johnson. It’s getting late for me, so could we—”
Taking a deep breath, Holly met his eyes until he lowered them. “Did you move this girl, Mr. Johnson?”
His voice wavered, and he swiped a hand through his thinning blond hair. “Jesus. It...she was floating in the bay, trapped in the kelp bed. You know these riptides. Another minute, and she could have been dragged out to sea. Thought I was helping out, lady...officer.”
Holly glanced around. Chipper had roped off his fourth tree, hand on his slim hips, and was admiring his work. “I understand. As I said, we need to check the scene first. You’ll be first in line when we’re ready. That’s a promise, sir.”
He grunted and moved off, moving his arms in a “what can you do” expression.
After slipping on latex gloves, Chipper and Holly walked forward. Wind, waves, people running about. Already the scene was a circus. Whatever happened to death in a quiet room? Then she chastised herself, reaffirming the sobriety of the moment. She knelt by the form and gently withdrew the blanket, an old army-surplus model. Probably gathering every sort of material in a car trunk since Mulroney left office. The girl’s eyes stared up at her, revealing the milky sheen of death. The effect wasn’t as shocking as she’d thought, poignant instead. It reminded her of the bright red starfish she’d once brought home from French Beach and left outside to dry on the steps. Slowly it had faded to white, the elusive spark of life gone. Over weeks it disintegrated into calcifications, then blew away as if it had never existed.
Holly blinked, pulling herself back. No major damage was evident on Angie’s face, but scrapes and cuts from the rocks and the marine life would make the coroner’s job trickier. Crows passed raucous approval from the trees. Ever vigilant for food, a host of motley juvenile seagulls floated on the waves, scavenging sea creatures. One on shore pecked at a blue-black mussel shell. One creature’s bier was another’s smorgasbord.