Murder at five finger light (19 page)

Read Murder at five finger light Online

Authors: Sue Henry

Tags: #Mystery, #Alaska

BOOK: Murder at five finger light
3.12Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
But Jessie was unwilling to play guessing games, or reveal the ideas that were running through her mind. Crouching next to the body, she slipped two fingers onto the pulse point under the jaw to make absolutely sure it
was
a corpse, not someone injured and unconscious who just looked like one. There was no sign of life and the body was unpleasantly cold and stiff. She wished she could remember how long after a person died rigor mortis occurred. She decided to ask Alex the next time they talked.
Karen groaned, slid weakly down on her side of the point, and threw up her breakfast on the rocks. There she remained, shivering and pale, clearly refusing to help, or even to look back again at what she had discovered.
Fifteen minutes later, when Whitney brought Jim, Don, and Aaron back with her, Laurie and Jessie were still standing guard on the rocks near the body and Karen huddled miserably near where she had lost her breakfast. The water was now high enough to reach the bloody rocks and cause the lower half of the corpse to sway slightly in the rising tide.
“Who is it? What the hell happened?” Jim asked, clambering carelessly over the rocks to reach them.
“We don’t know,” Jessie told him. “Karen spotted him when she climbed up to see the sea lion.”
“Did he die here, or float in?”
She shrugged—then frowned. “I’d bet from the amount of blood on the rocks that he died here. There was quite a lot on the rocks, but it’s almost gone now—washed away. But it must have happened after high tide last night, or he might have floated off then, mightn’t he?” She hesitated, then, “There may have been a boat.”
“How do you know?”
“There were marks—over there.” She pointed to the area beyond the ridge of rock they had climbed over. “They’re gone now—washed off like his blood is washing away here.”
“Who is it?” This question came from Aaron, who was carrying a blue plastic tarp under one arm.
She shook her head. “We haven’t turned him over. Just didn’t want the tide to take him.”
“Well, we’d better get him out before it does,” Jim said. “Find a place above the tide line and spread that tarp you’re carrying, will you, Aaron?”
Aaron and Don stepped up to help lift the body out of the water and lay it gently on the tarp, carefully rolling him over onto his back in the process. Jim looked up sharply as Jessie gasped.
“You know him?”
“Yes,” she said. “Well, not really
know
him. I met him on the plane from Juneau, then again later in Petersburg. His name is Tim . . . something Scandinavian. He’s the one I told you about—the one who said he’d come out to help—who had his own boat? He said he had a friend he was going to bring along with him. Remember?”
“Yes. And he was coming today, right?”
She nodded. “That’s what he said.”
“Well—I doubt this is what he meant. We’d better call somebody—police, Coast Guard.”
“I’ve seen him before too,” Whitney said, having given the dead man a careful look. “He was part of a rowdy fishing crew that was in the Triangle Bar in Juneau last Saturday night.”
She turned and stepped away to look out over the sound, frowning thoughtfully.
“Do we leave him here, or take him back to the lighthouse?” Aaron asked.
“Someone will want to investigate, so I guess we’d better leave him here. But he’s got to be moved, so let’s wrap him in the tarp and take him farther away from the water. The tide is almost full, so it won’t come up much more, but we might as well be cautious.”
They carried him up the slope to a narrow sandy space between two ridges of rock and laid him down where no tide could, or would, disturb him, except possibly during a storm and none were predicted. Weighting down the edges of the tarp with stones so it could not blow off if a wind came up, they left him there.
It was a concerned, confused, and sober group that hiked back to the lighthouse to make the call, talking little, thinking much.
As, white-faced, Karen stumbled clumsily along ahead of her on the trail, Jessie couldn’t help remembering how she had heard the sound of a distant engine and come wide awake in the night to find her missing from her bed.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
 
 
 
 
JIM BEAL PICKED UP HIS CELL PHONE FROM THE DESK IN the common room and took it outside the lighthouse, where he could get a better signal, to call the Petersburg police.
Jessie watched as Karen, still pale and silent, made an abrupt right turn and left the group as they came through the kitchen door. She disappeared into her bedroom, closing the door behind her. Her state of shock seemed to Jessie to be somewhat out of proportion to the situation, so after a few minutes’ consultation with Laurie, who was also concerned, she went to see if she could find out what was going on.
She knocked softly on the door, but getting no response, opened it and went in anyway, closing it behind her.
Karen had curled herself into a fetal position on the bed and lay motionless, face to the wall.
“Karen?” Jessie said, walking across to sit down on the foot of the bed. “What’s going on, Karen? Talk to me. Did you know the man?”
“Go away.”
“I’m not going to do that. I’d like to help with—well—whatever’s upsetting you so badly. But I can’t do that unless you talk to me about it.”
Abruptly, Karen turned over and scooted up until she could lean against a pillow and the wall to glare balefully at Jessie.
“You
know
what it is,” she said heatedly. “It’s obvious that the son of a bitch has figured out where I am and is after me again. Now I have no place to go. I’m stuck here, on an island with no escape. Can’t you see that? It’s your fault.”
Obvious? My fault?
Jessie was speechless, astonished at the intensity of the statement and the animosity directed at
her
.
Isn’t anything ever
her
fault?
She stared at Karen for a few minutes in silence, an impression surfacing that had once or twice nibbled at her consciousness and either been ignored or dismissed. The woman had never laid out many details of
why
her stalker was so determined to catch up with her. Jessie had never seen him. Did he exist? Had Karen done something to justify his anger and resolve?
Nothing,
she claimed, was her fault. Karen simply, without saying so, refused responsibility by blaming everything on the man that she feared—and now she included Jessie. It couldn’t have been completely one-sided. Relationships never were.
And because of my own past experience, I’ve been willing to believe exactly what she told me and be helpful,
Jessie thought, frowning.
Well, what’s sauce for the goose can be sauce for—for me too. Sometimes a slap in the face gets faster results than a sympathetic pat.
Standing up, she leaned over Karen. She didn’t slap her, but released some anger of her own in giving her shoulder a hard shake.
“Look,”
she snapped. “I’ve had just about all I’m going to take of your histrionic pity party and bad habit of shifting responsibility to others. It’s not my fault that you’re here. You chose to come. At my suggestion? Yes. But you
chose
—waved us down from the beach after disappearing into the woodwork without so much as a word to let me know you were safe. To be honest, I had taken a deep breath of relief at being off the hook when you didn’t show up at the dock. I—”
“So you don’t want me here after all,” Karen interrupted in a shrill voice. “You and your so-called
friends!
” She spit out the last word as sneering accusation. “I should have known better than to trust you. I know better than to trust anybody.”
“Well,
that’s
becoming perfectly clear,” Jessie couldn’t keep from hurling back.
“Oh-h, I hate—”
The door opened behind Jessie and Laurie stepped into the room.
“Sorry,” she said. “Everyone in the common room can hear the two of you yelling. Can I help?”
Karen immediately turned over to once again face the wall in stubborn refusal. Jessie, uncomfortable with her own behavior, swung around to apologize, but Laurie held up a preventive hand. “No, it’s all right. But there’s something else.”
She glanced at Karen, who was ignoring them both, then back to Jessie with eyebrows raised in question.
Jessie shrugged and shook her head, defeated for the moment.
“What else, Laurie?”
“You have a cell phone, don’t you? Jim’s isn’t working and Aaron can’t find his.”
“Yes.” She checked her jeans’ pocket and then the daypack she had been carrying. No phone. Then she remembered she had put the phone in her jacket pocket. After promising Alex to keep it with her, in her rush to leave for the other end of the island she had unintentionally left it behind. Grabbing up the jacket, she searched each and every pocket, with no results. The cell phone was gone. Without it she wouldn’t be able to call Alex and he would think she was just having cell phone problems.
“I had it in this pocket,” she said, showing Laurie. “It was in there when I left to walk with you.”
Suspicion dawning, she swung around toward the bed and its stubbornly antisocial occupant, who had stayed behind.
“Karen, do you have my cell phone?” she demanded.
Silence.
“Karen!”
“Of course not,” the woman retorted in a childish whine, without moving. “Why would I want your stupid phone?”
Without another word, the two women left Karen to her angry sulking, closing the door behind them.
 
In the common room the rest had gathered around the table where Jim’s phone lay; he had taken it apart to see if he could find out why it didn’t work.
“You can see that someone’s messed with it and put it back together,” he growled in disgust. “Unrepairable.”
“So there’s no way to contact anyone?” Whitney asked. “What about the lighthouse radio?”
“It no longer works ship to shore, just ship to ship,” Jim explained. “With so many people using cell phones, they shut it down awhile back. Now it’s for marine use only.”
“But it works, right?”
“Yes—to a boat.”
“Couldn’t you call some boat that has a working cell phone and have them make the call?”
“Good idea,” Jim told her. “Hadn’t thought of that.”
He got up from a chair at the table and crossed to the small radio room that opened off the common room, where the whole group had assembled with work the last thing on their minds. In less than a minute they could hear him swear as he came back to stand in the doorway.
“Not functional. It’s been smashed with something heavy, and hard enough to trash it.”
There was a moment of astonished silence. Then Don Sawyer ventured, “You mean someone broke it on purpose?” He hesitated, considering the ramifications. “Why would—? Who the hell would—? When? But we’ve been in and out of here all morning.”
“It didn’t have to
be
this morning,” Laurie reminded him. “We mostly use the cell phone—so no one’s had a reason to check the radio at all this trip. It could even have been done before we got here.”
“So we have no way to contact the outside world at all?”
“That’s about the size of it,” Jim agreed. “Unless we find your cell phone, that is—or Jessie’s.”
“Jim,”
Laurie reminded him. “There’s a radio on the boat.”
“That’s
right.
” He smiled. “Problem solved. But first I want to see about our disappearing cell phones, if possible.”
He turned to Jessie, with a nod toward the room where Karen had retreated. “You think she’s got them? She was the only one in here after the other three of you left to go to the south end of the island. We were working on the new roof, Curt was in the basement, and Sandra was upstairs painting.”
“I really don’t know, Jim. It wouldn’t surprise me, but, on the other hand, I think finding the dead man put her on the verge of panic. She’s blaming everybody but herself for her situation. I’ve given up trying to second-guess her, but I have a lot of unanswered questions.”
“What do you mean—‘her situation’?” Curt, who had abandoned the generator and come upstairs to sit silently listening, asked suddenly.
“What happened to your eye?” Don asked, looking in his direction for the first time.
Everyone looked to see an angrily swollen mouse had partially closed Curt’s right eye.
“Nothing major,” he said, shaking his head in annoyance. “Clobbered myself when a wrench slipped and I didn’t have sense enough to duck.” With a lopsided, embarrassed grin he shifted the focus back to Karen. “You said ‘situation.’ Is there something we need to know about the woman?”
Jessie turned to Jim, in whom she had confided, asking the question with raised eyebrows.
“It’s a long story of personal stuff, Curt,” Jim told him. “Maybe later, okay? Let things ride for the time being about Karen’s situation while I think about it. But I
do
think we should search her things for both Aaron’s and Jessie’s phones. This thing of mine’s no good to us.” He tossed it across to land on the desk with a thump.

Other books

Sweetwater Seduction by Johnston, Joan
Caraliza by Joel Blaine Kirkpatrick
Undercurrents by Robert Buettner
A Mother's Courage by Dilly Court
King of the World by Celia Fremlin
Soul Siren by Aisha Duquesne
A Curse on Dostoevsky by Atiq Rahimi