Seven Days Dead (28 page)

“Friend.”

“I’m not saying he was a good one. Dad needled him and Simon took it as a cross to bear in life. They were like that since day one. But they tolerated each other’s company. They could get philosophical without the reverend feeling he had to stick to the company line, if you know what I mean. As for my dad, ladies came and went in his life, but male pals were rare. Men either worked for him or were in competition with him or they plain didn’t like him. I thought he had no friends except for Simon, until this week.”

“What changed this week?” Émile asks.

“The skipper who brought me over here? Sticky—that’s the name he goes by—Sticky McCarran, he and my dad were close, in a way. Friends? Maybe not. An employer/hired-hand relationship, but he actually thought my dad was an okay guy. Just misunderstood.” She did a pantomime of rolling her eyes while saying this, as if even now the idea is too ludicrous to be entertained. “Anyway, they got along. My dad bullied the minister. He probably controlled Sticky, but I doubt if he’s a man who can be bullied.”

“I’d like to speak to him.”

“Sticky? I can give you his number. He lives in Blacks. He tells me he’s usually fishing. Best to get him at night, I think.”

Later the women convene to discuss the funeral arrangements which are not to be in Reverend Lescavage’s church anymore. The elders there haven’t been able to scrounge up a replacement, temporary or otherwise, and worshipers plan to fan out to various second choices among the island’s multiple denominations. A difficulty lies in divining how many people might show up for the funeral. Refreshments afterward seem appropriate. Potentially, the island’s entire population will be interested, yet some people might think a boycott an appropriate gesture. Hard to gauge, as Maddy isn’t in touch with the locals. “I used to have friends here. No more. Like me, they had the good sense to leave.”

“You say that, and yet to me, this island is paradise,” Sandra mentions.

“Yeah, it’s a great place to visit. I own it now. I ought to know.”

The statement, Sandra knows, is far more bitter than boastful.

As the women chat, Émile sits in Alfred Orrock’s bedroom and listens to the walls speak. If only they were more articulate and didn’t mumble so. He thinks what the room’s few visitors before him have already asked themselves: Why would any man require so much space to sleep in? Empty space, too. If he himself ever slept in such a room, he’d add a writing desk, a comfortable chair or two, a library. Heck, as a rich man, he’d put in a pool table, then a bowling lane. To sleep in this vast surround confounds him, although he supposes that it’s somewhat like sleeping under the stars, without the requisite mosquitoes or any threat of rain. If he lived in such a room, Cinq-Mars decides, he’d invite a few cows in to create an atmosphere around the campfire, then install a campfire.

While his initial impressions are idle, Émile does try to confront the psyche of this man. So much space, just to dream in. He might have been claustrophobic. He lived on a tightly knit island where he was disdained, yet had a sky and a sea to gaze out upon, and obviously he enjoyed the view, confirmed by the plethora of large windows. Gazing out over the dark bay, Orrock would have seen bountiful stars on a clear night. And the airliners out of New York bound for Europe which typically trace a flight path straight up the Bay of Fundy.

Orrock bullied the Reverend Lescavage, but the latter nurtured an interest in the universe and its origins—might Alfred Orrock have shared that passion, or been jealous that such a pursuit found favor in another man? A man he bullied and dismissed? Yet he needed the more timid man in his life, this foil, his only friend. To Orrock, all men must have appeared to him as pipsqueaks, their interests ridiculed, with the possible exception of members of the Irving family, who own virtually the whole province. Most people, Émile concludes, struck Orrock as trivial. They slept in small bedrooms. Hence his lack of companions. The parish minister in his humble abode had impressed him in some other way, as did the fisherman he permitted himself to befriend for no other reason, perhaps, than he lived off the island. The fisherman brought him out upon the vast blue sea. The minister—from what Maddy said, they were old and familiar disputants on philosophical matters—took him for a ride upon the vast array of the unknown.

Émile speculates on whether the restricted geography of the island did not contrast sharply with the man’s yen for distance, for the infinite, that in being stretched between the two realms he found no comfort, no happiness in life.

Cinq-Mars entertains a notion that perhaps Orrock bullied the minister not only because he could, but that he also hated his need for another’s company, for discourse, for a friend. Lescavage may have permitted the dynamic because he recognized Orrock’s motivation. If so, then the deceased minister was indeed someone willing to live his faith, or his non-faith, in that that he was willing to be punished in order to lend his abuser a measure of kindness.

Still, Cinq-Mars can’t figure out who killed Orrock, or summon a reason why. Did Lescavage do it? Why not allow a dying man to die naturally? Why help him along?

The question is no sooner asked than a curious and compelling answer arises, a new possibility. That the bullied man had had enough and killed his oppressor may be a likelihood. Certainly it’s feasible, although such a shift in a long-standing dynamic is rare in the world. Or Lescavage could have killed Orrock because he was bullied into doing so. That fit their customary dynamic. Given Orrock’s pleasure in power, his control over his island world, his penchant for vast spaces, the sea, the sky, he might have wanted out from his circumstances, from the tedious, painful, prolonged business of dying. He may have wanted to be off to the infinite unknown.

He who controlled his world may have chosen to control his own death.

Suffocation killed him. Not an easy thing to do, mentally, and difficult enough morally, but simple to accomplish physically. The killer wouldn’t need to even look at the victim. All he had to do was place a pillow over the man’s face and lie on it.

Cinq-Mars holds the pillow in his hand, the probable murder weapon. Fluffy. Down-filled. The housekeeper could have done it. The minister had opportunity. In theory, so did the daughter. Orrock was sick enough, frail enough, that any stranger seeking shelter from a storm, or anyone who wanted to move in the dark while the storm rendered him or her invisible, could have done it. Which made everyone on the island a suspect. And whether the minister did it or not, or if he merely discovered that the man was dead, the question remains: what happened to the Reverend Lescavage?

Standing in the vacuous emptiness of the patriarch’s room, Cinq-Mars reflects that the answer lies neither in how nor even by whom, but in why. Find out why someone wanted a good man dead, he believes, and the case is solved.

He has more people to talk to. More knowledge to gain.

*   *   *

Émile Cinq-Mars is up at the crack. A habitual early riser, Sandra stays under the covers. Outside, woodland birds and seabirds make their presence evident, yet they seem less than raucous, perhaps in deference to the idyllic beginning to the day. Soft light casts a warm radiance upon the shoreline cliffs, the rocky beach, and the swaying grasses close by the cottage.

Coffee and a bite of toast and he’s out the door.

Before retiring the previous night, Émile put in an overdue call to Sticky McCarran. What he learned interests him, although how the mystifying tidbit he gleaned fits into the overall jigsaw puzzle of this case is beyond him. Sticky was out on the water the night of the murders, ferrying Maddy Orrock across to the island. Cinq-Mars wanted to know if he had seen or heard anything unusual while crossing the bay. He didn’t want to lead him in any one direction, and purposefully chose not to mention that he was interested in radio communications, exchanges among boats that night, or ship-to-shore messages or vice versa, or anything that came across as odd or inexplicable over the airwaves. He planned to ask the Coast Guard the same question, and listen to any recordings that might have been made, if they let him, but someone familiar with the usual chatter on that radio frequency and familiar as well with the principals at sea might be a superior resource.

On that account, he was correct.

“A fish boat was anchored below Orrock’s house,” Sticky brought up.

“Was that unusual?”

“Any day or night, it’s a bit weird. It’s not a smart place to anchor off. The current is strong, harbor traffic is frequent, you might not be seen, and the waves can be lumpy even on a calm day, not to mention the obvious.”

“Please,” Cinq-Mars said, as he didn’t know, “mention the obvious.”

“That shore’s a shipwreck waiting to crush you.”

“Weird, then,” Émile summed up over the phone, the receiver cocked between his ear and shoulder while he scribbled notes, “but not totally out of the question. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Nope. Not saying that.”

“Okay, what are you saying?”

“In a storm, it’s beyond ridiculous to anchor there. Hell, you’re only a short hop from the harbor. If you don’t want to risk going in, and I admit, it’s not easy in those conditions, like a camel through the eye of a needle, then stand farther off, you know? Or go around to the lee. Or get inside Whale Cove. The last thing a skipper should do if his brains aren’t up his arse is anchor off close to that shore. If your anchor drags in those waves, you’re on the rocks before you can react. Totally out of the question is what I’m saying, but somebody was there anyway.”

“We don’t know who,” Cinq-Mars presumed.

“Sure we do. It was Pete Briscoe.”

Cinq-Mars listened to the silent air over the telephone a moment.

“You got close enough to identify his boat?”

“He didn’t have enough sense to stand off elsewhere, but he had enough sense to reduce the chance of a collision in the dark. He left on his AIS.”

“Sorry. What’s that?”

“AIS. Automatic identification system. More of us keep them on board these days. AIS is a device that transmits your boat name, type, speed, and position to other vessels or shoreside and receives the same data back. I never saw Pete’s boat, not in that downpour. The radar was fuzzy, at best, but the AIS let me know it was him and showed he wasn’t moving. Except for the wave action. Otherwise he wasn’t moving.”

Suspicious enough. “He was below the Orrock house. Did you hear from him, maybe over the radio?” He wasn’t leading him before, but was leading him now.

“Later. Yeah. Normally, I would’ve hailed him, but I was making harbor. That took all my concentration. Yeah, now that you mention it, I did hear him over the horn later on. Not that I paid much attention. By then I was moored in North Head, trying to catch a little shut-eye. A bad night, so the radio stays on, you know, in case there’s trouble and you need to pitch in. I heard Pete having difficulty, nothing life-threatening. Not for him, anyway. Dog overboard. Yeah, that was weird enough. This was more weird: he said he was conning the shoreline for his pooch.”

“Why, Sticky?” He wanted to say his name at least once, and did so. “What’s so weird about that?”

“Because he still wasn’t moving. I checked. I had him lined up on my AIS.”

“Couldn’t the others see that he wasn’t moving?”

“It’s a relatively new device. Fairly expensive. More of us have one, but it’s not the first device put on a working boat. With those who had one, some had troubles of their own. Others weren’t paying attention, or didn’t give a hoot. I was safe in the harbor. Easy for me to listen in.”

“So Briscoe wasn’t moving but more or less saying he was.”

“Exactly what he was saying. That didn’t sound like the truth to me. You know, no skin off my nose particularly. He sounded drunk anyway.”

When he was ready to sign off from the conversation, Émile offered up a mild platitude. “Good of you to talk to me, Sticky. And good of you to help Miss Orrock to cross over to the island that night.”

“You know how it goes. She pays well. Anyhow, I got to drive her Porsche onto the ferry after that. Took it for a swing around town first. That made the trip worthwhile by itself. I didn’t take her across because it was a good thing. I don’t deserve the compliment for that.”

“Okay, so you did it for the money. And the chance to drive a Porsche. Still, not everybody would’ve bothered.”

“I didn’t do it for the money, although I got paid. Well paid.”

“What, then?”

“I didn’t, one hundred percent, absolutely for sure, know that Alfred Orrock was going to die. If he didn’t, if he survived the night even, I didn’t want to face him in the morning after turning down his daughter the night before. I’m not that big a fool. That’s one thing.”

“Sounds like there’s another thing.”

“You bet. If Alfred dies, who replaces him? I’m thinking to myself, the daughter, no? I didn’t want to be in the bad books of somebody who generates most of the extra work for a man like me on Grand Manan. It was just good politics to do what she wanted, that’s all I’m saying. Just good business. Nothing to do with kindness. I billed her to make sure she knows that, while she can count on me, I don’t come cheap.”

Cinq-Mars accepted that. He understood. He doubted that even Maddy was aware of the power now at her fingertips. “Thanks, Sticky,” he said, and signed off.

This morning, he’s off to see a man on the island who, if he doesn’t actually have power—and Cinq-Mars is convinced that he does—challenges the power of others. He drives across island through the hilly woods to Dark Harbour.

Having checked the tide tables, he’s arriving early. When he turns down the steep rocky road to that strange hillside habitation, men and women are out in the shallow waters, at the edges of sandbars, bent over and working. He spies them from a great height. The road grows only more bumpy and becomes rockier and increasingly narrow, virtually daring any novice to proceed. Soon it appears impassable to Cinq-Mars. He’s glad to be in a Jeep but doesn’t want to wreck the undercarriage either. Émile parks, partially pulling up an embankment, and sets out down the hill to the sea on foot. Twice he almost stumbles over himself on the descent. The trail turns into a virtual donkey path wet from hillside streams. He passes by ramshackle huts where dark-eyed kids peer out at him through the doors’ ripped screens. Not much color distinguishes the shacks, although a large number brandish junkyard artifacts on their mossy porches, usually for the sake of an artistic impression. Flies buzz and mosquitoes pester, and Cinq-Mars makes his way down onto the beach, where he finds relief.