Murder at five finger light (27 page)

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Authors: Sue Henry

Tags: #Mystery, #Alaska

BOOK: Murder at five finger light
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“When I saw what it was—and I’ve seen it before, so I knew what it was—well, I didn’t know what to do. So I found some electrical tape in Curt’s toolbox and used it to fix what I’d torn. Then I put it back and went upstairs. On the way up I debated whether to say anything, or not. When you were busy talking to Jessie, I decided to just keep my mouth shut, that it was none of my business. So that’s what I did, except I told Don and we both thought it best to just keep still about it.
“I really didn’t mean to get into anything that belongs to you, Jim—honestly. I’m sorry.”
Jim’s voice was tense coming out of the dark.
“I didn’t know it was there. And it
doesn’t
belong to me or Laurie.
No way
.”
“What the hell did you think it was?” Aaron asked from a few feet away.
“Cocaine,” Jim and Sandra said together.
“A
lot
of cocaine,” Don added. “I went down and had a look, just to be sure, and there’s more than just for recreational use.”
Everyone was silent for a minute, considering the ramifications of that.
“How did you know I found it?” Sandra asked. “I put it back.”
“You spilled just a little on the floor in the cooler,” Jessie told her. “Probably when you took it out to look at it and fixed the wrapper. I found it later, when I went down for the salad, and showed it to Jim.”
“You know,” said Aaron, with a note of wicked humor in his voice, “you can tell us about it, if it
is
yours, Jim. We’re all friends here, right? But it sounds like a lot of stuff for two people to me.”
“Look, Aaron.” Jim’s voice was sharp with anger as he swung toward the younger man. “I don’t care if you believe me or not, but that stuff does not belong to me and I’m really pissed that someone was careless enough to bring it to our island.”
“Hey!”
Aaron said, hearing the implied accusation in his words. “You got no reason to think . . .”
“Hey yourselves—both of you.” Laurie broke in with an attempt at peacemaking. “There’s nothing we can do about any of this now. There’s nothing to show that anyone here had anything to do with it, so let’s let it go for now and concentrate on figuring out if there’s anything we can do about being down here, shall we? Any ideas?”
The silence that followed spoke louder to any practical solution to their confinement than the prior echoes of Jim’s angry voice.
In her search of the space, Jessie had stumbled over several pieces of junk metal on the floor, including a couple of pieces of rebar approximately six feet long.
“Any possibility we could use some of that stuff to pound or scrape a hole in the wall?” she asked to fill the dispirited stillness.
Jim’s laugh held no humor coming out of the blackness.
“That wall,” he told her, “is more than a foot of solid concrete. I don’t
think
so! Do you?”
Discouraged, head still throbbing, Jessie felt her way to one of the raised footings and, bugs or not, sat down and leaned back against a section of the wall, turning her face to one side so she didn’t strike the lump on her head against the rough concrete. Even damp and slimy, it was a cool against her cheek, the only relief she had; she longed for some of the Tylenol she carried in the daypack she had left in the hole in the trail.
She wished for water too. Damp as it was, there was nothing that was safe to drink and her mouth felt lined with cotton. It was absurd to be sitting next to a tank that was full of water they couldn’t drink without boiling.
She hoped Karen would stay hidden and not do something foolish like try to come and find her. It still seemed out of character that the woman had been so willing to hide under the body of a man she called her friend. She had more than half-expected Karen to refuse with revulsion and had been surprised when she had not only agreed to the hiding place, but had helped to create it.
And where was Whitney?
It was very quiet in the maintenance space between the tanks, one full, the other empty. The seven had gathered together near the overhead opening that they couldn’t even see, except for the small amount of light that filtered through a few drainage holes, and were barely visible. Jessie could place them by the sound of their voices and movement—Sandra huddled next to Don, Jim and Laurie together nearby. Aaron had stretched himself out on his back on top of the footing beyond Jessie’s feet, probably hoping the isopods would stay below it on the floor.
For a long time no one said anything. Then, out of the dark, came the singular and reverberating snore. Aaron, against odds, had dozed off and the evidence of this all but echoed off the unseen walls.
Sandra giggled, a slightly hysterical sound in the dark.
Laurie joined in.
And suddenly they were all laughing.
The unexpected noise of their mirth woke Aaron and his snoring stopped abruptly as he sat up.
“What’s going on?”
The question simply boosted their amusement into hilarity and made an answer impossible.
“What’s wrong with you people?” he asked.
Sandra, who had started it, finally regained enough self-control to sputter out, “You snore.”
“Yeah. So?”
“No,” Don told him, still chuckling. “She means you
really
snore. We thought there was a foghorn in here.”
There was a pause, while they waited.
Jessie heard him recline himself again before his response came through the dark, with a grin in it.
“Why do you think I’m still single—and have been sleeping upstairs?”
The incident relieved a little of the tension and brought them back together as a group, but it was clear that there was nothing to do but wait for—whatever. There was not a sound from above them, but the heavy layers of concrete were such effective sound blocks that Jessie doubted they could have heard anything that was not loud and directly overhead. Even then it would be questionable.
Leaning back against the wall again, she wondered how Aaron could possibly sleep. What about Karen? How was she faring at the other end of the island? Would she remain in her hiding place when so much time had passed? Could she really be part of what was happening to the rest of the work crew—one with the two men who had entombed them in the dark of these tanks? Where was Joe Cooper? She wondered, suddenly remembering their conversation. He seemed tough and agile enough to have escaped in his sprint for the south end, especially if they didn’t know he was on the island. But they might have heard him running. If they found him would he try to fight it out with would-be murderers? She recalled the gun that had been missing from the freezer upstairs, now probably in Curt’s hands, and hoped not. But, knowing where they were, maybe he would be of some assistance to those in the tank.
This small island seemed so odd a place for what had happened to them all. What
was
behind it? Somehow the cocaine must be involved. Could Cooper be this unknown person Don and Jim had referred to, the one who was helping Curt? If so, why would he have run away? Was this merely a way for him to finally catch up with Karen? It seemed extreme but he had been very determined about it. Still, getting the rest of them out of the way had to be factored in as a possibility. Could he have killed Tim Christiansen himself and, if so, why?
Her head throbbed and she gave up trying to figure it out. Once again she wished for water, achingly thirsty though surrounded by the huge amount of water that was Frederick Sound—undrinkable as well, but water nevertheless.
She thought about what it must have been like for the early keepers of the light, back when the area was much less settled than it was now. Some of them must have been odd ducks, willing to spend years of their lives out of touch with the rest of the world, in a sort of voluntary solitary confinement. But they hadn’t been alone, she remembered, thinking of the names of the last crew she had seen on the wall inside the lighthouse. At least they had had the opportunity to say
We were here
before they went away and left the place empty.
If the worst happened and their present captors went away and left the seven of them trapped where they were, there would be no record of their presence until, eventually, someone found their remains. Even if someone came, who would think to look in the tanks? They could shout, but odds were they would not be heard unless someone was standing almost on top of them, if then. They could die where they were. It was possible.
Knowing that in the dark and silence she was letting her imagination take over, it still suddenly seemed important to leave something identifying—some record of her own existence.
Feeling a little hysterical and foolish, she got up and felt her way back to where she had noticed the pieces of scrap metal. On her hands and knees, she blindly searched the floor in the dark for one of them to use as a tool. She found chunks of concrete, an isopod or two, a puddle of undrinkable water. Then her hand struck a piece of slightly curved metal with a sharp edge on one end. Getting to her feet, she found her way back to the wall near the rest of the group.
Slowly, by feel in the blackness, she began to scrape on the wall. J-E-S-S-I-E W-A-S H-E-R-E. Then she scratched out the W-A-S and above it carved I-S.
Under it she added the date and finished by running her fingers over what she had written as if she were reading Braille.
Then she sat back down and stared silently into the dark.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
 
 
 
 
ALEX WENT TO WORK ON THURSDAY MORNING GLAD TO have something to occupy his time, for Jessie did not call all morning. Before noon he had completed a report on his trip to Canada and the afternoon was spent clearing his desk of paperwork on several small cases now closed and ready for filing. One open burglary case he set aside until last, then called John Timmons, friend and assistant coroner at the crime lab in Anchorage, to see if he had a report on the evidence left at the scene—a small weekend cabin twenty miles out of Palmer that had been broken into and vandalized the week before.
“Still waiting the report on the latents,” Timmons told him. “The owner had a party the weekend before, so there’re prints up the yin-yang to be identified. We’re working our way through them, but slowly. By tomorrow—hopefully. Okay?”
 
Arriving at home, Alex spent a couple of hours outside in the shed splitting firewood for winter fires, with the kitchen window open so he could hear the phone if it rang. Throwing himself into his work, he burned excess energy with an axe to make stove-sized chunks out of the rounds of log and stack them neatly under a roof next to the shed, where they would stay dry. The swing of the axe felt good and he made a significant and satisfying inroad on the large pile. It had been a year since his last stint at wood splitting, however, so he was aware that the exercise would make itself felt the next day in his back and shoulder muscles. He decided that a long hot shower would not be a bad idea before reheating some of the previous night’s stew for dinner. Next year, for sure, they should acquire a splitter.
He was still drying himself off with a large towel when he heard the phone ring.
At last,
he thought. Quickly he wrapped the towel around his waist as he moved to the bedside phone and lifted the receiver.
“Jessie?”
“Not even close. Sorry to disappoint,” the voice of Ben Caswell, friend and pilot for the troopers, informed him. “But maybe I can make it up to you. Linda’s got enough meat loaf over here to feed the entire cast of
Cheaper by the Dozen.
Why don’t you bring some of that beer you’ve got going bad in your fridge with no one to drink it and come help us out?”
Any other time the invitation to dinner would have sent Alex straight out the door, for he knew that Linda Caswell made a killer meat loaf. Not having heard from Jessie the night before, however, he was reluctant to abandon the telephone when he was sure she would call the minute he left.
“You are surely hooked, old man,” Cas ribbed him. “But I’ll bring you a sandwich tomorrow for lunch anyway, just to remind you what you missed.”
After that, and stew for dinner, it was a frustrating evening as far as the telephone was concerned. In three hours there was only Caswell’s single call.
At eight o’clock, Alex tried to call Jessie, but got the same “unavailable” message as the night before. He tried again three times, with the same lack of response. Finally, he called the Petersburg police to ask if they were aware of any problem in reception for cell phones in the area of Frederick Sound.
The dispatcher assured him there was not. In fact, she reported, they had just had a cell phone call from a fisherman in the sound who was requesting emergency medical assistance for an injured deckhand. “Sometimes they have trouble getting a signal out there,” she told him, which he already knew. “Keep trying and eventually someone will answer.”
Alex hung up, wishing he had asked for Jim’s number and had another to try, but it was too late for that.

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