Still Water (18 page)

“I’m not asking as her lawyer by the way. Ella kind of fired me.”

Baxter raised his eyebrows. “If you’re not her lawyer, what are you?” he asked.

“A friend.”

“She know you’re here?”

Matt shook his head. “I don’t know what she’d say if she did.”

“Well,” Baxter said after a while. “I’ll answer your question. I don’t think Ella would kill anybody in any kind of premeditated way. She’s got a temper, and she’s pretty tough when she has to be. I guess she’d never get by doing what she does otherwise. But she’s a good person.”

Matt waited, guessing there was more.

“I’ve been thinking about this a lot,” Baxter went on. “It could be whatever happened to Bryan was an accident. Him and Ella didn’t exactly get on, we know that much. And we know they had a fight that night. We also know that Ella went out on her boat not long afterwards. Let’s say that she was fishing around the cove, and for some reason she went in there and went ashore. There’s plenty of places around the point she could tie up. Maybe she found some of her traps cut or stripped that night and she figured it was Bryan who did it. They get in another fight, and somehow or other Bryan ends up getting shot. I don’t know how. An accident, who knows? Ella panics, and she gets his body on to her boat and takes him out to the channel and weighs him down and puts him over the side.”

As Matt had listened he’d admitted to himself that he’d imagined a similar scenario himself. But after Ben Harper had said it was Kate Little he’d seen in the cove that morning he’d started to wonder what other possibilities there might be. What had Sally Brewster said, about Ella needing to get in line if she’d planned to kill Bryan? It had been a flippant remark, but perhaps behind it lay a grain of truth. And now, as Baxter had laid out his ideas, Matt started to think that certain pieces didn’t fit.

“Ella told me Bryan had been intimidating her, is that possible?”

“I’d say so. Bryan liked to think he had a way with women. He was a good talker if he wanted to be, and I suppose he was the sort of guy some women seem to like. But he had another side. A pretty nasty side.”

“How nasty?” Matt asked, thinking about Ella’s story of phone calls and footsteps following her at night.

“Bryan and Jake, they’ve never minded taking food from somebody’s mouth if it got them what they wanted,” Baxter said. The pair of them ran foul of a few people over the years, and got in some pretty ugly fights now and then. That’s how Ella started having run-ins with them, when they fished her spots, or fouled her gear. But I guess this election made things a lot worse. If Ella went into the cove that night I could see Bryan doing something stupid like pulling a rifle on her. Maybe to get her back for doing the same thing to him earlier. Howard’s marina means there’s a lot more at stake than just a few lobsters.”

“Which is what bothers me. It doesn’t make sense for Ella to deliberately go into the cove and pick another fight with Bryan. She’s not stupid, and she knows what he can be like. I just can’t see her doing that,” Matt reasoned, and he could see Baxter was thinking about that. “But okay, let’s suppose she did, and there was some kind of shooting. How did she get his body back to her boat? How much did he weigh do you think?”

“Maybe two twenty or so.”

“Big guy. No way could Ella move him alone. But even if somehow she managed that, so what then? She went back and cleaned up the house, got rid of any evidence of a fight, or that she was there? But the only print you found wasn’t hers. Doesn’t mean anything one way or the other. But it’s an inconsistency. Then there’s the gun. Ella says she lost her rifle, but Bryan’s gun is missing as well. That doesn’t add up. I guess she didn’t shoot him with both of them. You see what I mean? Too many things that don’t make sense. But most of all it comes back to what you said to begin with. You don’t believe Ella could kill anybody in a deliberate, premeditated way. And for her to have gone into that cove, I think that’s exactly what she would have had to have had in her mind.” Matt shook his head. “I don’t buy it.”

Matt didn’t add that despite all that he’d just said, he felt that Ella knew more than she had admitted.

Baxter tapped his pencil a few more times, then pointed it towards Matt. “There’s still the question of what Ella was doing that night. She says she was fishing, but I don’t buy that either. I talked to Tom Spencer about sending a diver down where Carl Johnson saw her that night.”

Tom Spencer, Matt knew, was the harbour master “And?”

Baxter shrugged. “There’s a channel runs off the island. According to Tom it’s way too deep for any diver. Only thing that’d do it would be a submersible, but my budget doesn’t run to that kind of thing. But let’s say that you’re right. If Ella didn’t kill Bryan, whether she meant to or not, what the hell happened to him?”

“Maybe I can help you there.”

Baxter’s eyes widened. “How?”

“For the moment let’s assume that Bryan was killed, but Ella had nothing to do with it. So somebody else did, right?”

“Okay,” Baxter said cautiously.

“Who else might have had a reason for wanting Bryan dead? Motive, it’s always the first place to start looking for a suspect.”

“That doesn’t help a lot. Plenty of people might not have liked Bryan too much, but that doesn’t mean they had a reason to kill him.”

“Most murder victims are killed by people who know them well,” Matt said. “It’s a fact. Often it’s the result of a domestic dispute between husband and wife. Or a guy and his girlfriend. Who was Bryan seeing lately? You said he liked women.”

“Last I recall he was seeing Jill Peterson. They were going around for three or four months I guess. But that was in the winter.”

“Maybe you should start with her.”

Baxter shook his head. “She left the island a couple of months back. Got a job in Portland I think. Far as I know she hasn’t been back.”

“Anybody else you can think of?”

“Not right now. I could ask around.”

“How about if he was seeing somebody he didn’t want people to know about. Somebody who was married?”

“It’s possible,” Baxter said. He gazed at Matt, his eyes narrowing a fraction as he thought. He picked up the pencil again and started tapping his chin. “How come I get the feeling all this is leading somewhere?”

“Okay, I have a possibility,” Matt admitted. “It isn’t based on much right now, except a hunch, but sometimes that’s as good a place to start as anywhere.” He outlined what Ben Harper had told him about seeing a woman in the cove early Tuesday morning. “Does the name Kate Little mean anything to you?”

Baxter stopped tapping with the pencil, and it remained poised in mid-air. After a moment he said cautiously, “What about her?”

“She could’ve known Bryan. She lives above the cove. When I asked her she claimed she didn’t, but I don’t know, I felt she wasn’t telling me everything.”

“You talked to her?”

“This afternoon. I get the feeling she and her husband aren’t exactly close, and she’s a good-looking woman. The kind married women don’t like as much as their husbands do. That’s the impression I got when I mentioned her name a couple of times around town.”

Belatedly Matt saw that Baxter’s attitude had changed. He leaned across his desk and suddenly he sounded a little pissed off. “You ought to know better than to listen to people talk, and you had no reason to go bothering them. There’s no evidence to connect Kate Little to this thing.”

“Well, maybe not. But there was no harm talking to them. They might have remembered something they heard the night Bryan disappeared. I could be on the wrong track with Kate Little, but what I’m saying is if you think somebody killed Bryan you should be looking at other people besides Ella.”

“Yeah, well I’ll look into it.” Baxter rose to his feet. The thing we ought to get straight here though, is I don’t want you going around questioning people that we’ve already talked to. I had some officers call at all the houses on the point. Nobody heard a thing because they were all asleep. I could have told you that.”

Baxter went around his desk and opened his office door and Matt took the hint.

“I think it would be a good idea if you let me do the investigating around here from now on,” Baxter said, his expression unreadable. This really doesn’t concern you now anyway, does it?”

Matt started to comment that Baxter apparently hadn’t thought so ten minutes ago, but he decided that maybe he should just let it go. As he left he could feel Baxter watching him all the way across the reception office and out through the doors, and it wasn’t an entirely comfortable sensation.

The Santorini rode a slight swell four miles east of St. George. Overhead the sun shimmered and burned, and poured heat upon a breathless day. On the horizon a thin line of dark grey cloud that appeared frayed at its edge warned of a front coming in from the Atlantic. The humidity was high, the atmosphere close and thick. Ella shielded her eyes and watched a boat move across their bow a mile away. She wiped away a trickle of perspiration that ran from her forehead to the corner of her eye.

“Any luck?” she said.

Gordon stood in the engine compartment below the wheel-house, stripped to the waist. “You were right. I think it’s the fuel pump.” He had a smear of grease across his cheek, and his back and chest were pale, mottled with freckles. There were distinct bands around his neck and upper arms that marked the lines of the T-shirt he normally wore.

Ella wiped oil from her hands with a rag. When the engine had spluttered and died on them an hour and a half earlier she’d opened the hatch and climbed down to try and figure out what the problem was. She’d checked the electrical connections and tested the plugs, then turned her attention to the pump, which had given her problems before. After a while Gordon had offered to take a look.

“Bloody hell,” she muttered to herself, more out of frustration than anything else. It seemed like she couldn’t get a break right now. “Can you do anything?”

“I’m not sure.”

With the pump out of action, Ella thought, she would have to try and raise someone on the radio. The best she could hope for was a tow back to harbour, which meant losing a day’s work. They were still half a mile from where they had set the trap string.

Gordon examined a part from the dismantled pump. His brow furrowed. “Maybe I could fix something up.”

“See what you can do,” Ella said. She was no slouch herself when it came to getting her hands dirty. The Santorini was an old boat, and she knew every inch of it, but Gordon was a natural when it came to coaxing life from seemingly defunct machinery. She watched him as he worked, his brow furrowed in concentration, his fingers nimble. Between the two of them they had patched and mended just about every piece of equipment on the boat.

He hadn’t mentioned his dad, though he was quieter than normal and she guessed he had things on his mind. The more she considered the possibility of losing him, the less Ella liked the idea. During the past year that he’d worked for her he had changed, growing from the boy she’d hired to the young man he was now. She didn’t want to be the cause of a rift between him and his dad, but she figured Gordon had to make his own mind up about her.

She left him working and went back along the deck, where it was a little cooler in the breeze. The boat rose and fell on the swell, and as Ella stood at the bow she peered through her glasses across the water, looking for her buoys. They had set a couple of strings out here in deeper water hoping to find some lobsters. Fifty traps to a string, with a marker buoy at each end. She fixed on a seiner that had earlier crossed her bow and was now three quarters of a mile away, and watched for a while as the men on deck hauled in a net. The catch appeared to be small.

She lowered her glasses. The last six months had been tough. After her father had died she’d discovered his finances weren’t in good shape. The house, which Ella’s mother had believed long since paid off, had been re-mortgaged, while his insurances had been allowed to lapse. Ella had kept this from her mother, and somehow she’d managed to keep up the mortgage payments as well as meeting the loan on the Santorini. Slowly, inexorably it seemed that matters were improving, despite the almost constant niggling problems of fouled gear and lost traps that were pretty much attributable to the Rodericks. However, since she’d decided to run against Howard, things had gotten worse. If she had to ask herself honestly if she could keep on going over the winter, she wouldn’t be certain of the answer. Her credit was stretched so tight it kept her awake at night with worry. But then that was the least of her worries now.

She wondered how the island would look in a few years’ time if Howard got his way. She guessed the islanders themselves would become oil to the machinery of a new economy. Boutiques selling trinkets and designer labels would take over the shopping area in town, and the traditional stores like the market and the bakery and the clothing stores on Independence, the chandlers and outfitters along the waterfront would be forced out to new strip malls on the shore. The harbour would fill up with excursion ferries and charter boats, McDonald’s and video stores would look out over the docks and during the summer more and more people would come to the houses they would build backing onto golf courses or the ocean front, and the fishermen would sell their boats to buy a gardening franchise or sell ice-cream and hot dogs to bored teenagers from wealthy families.

What would her father, an old-fashioned St. Georgian, have made of it. She’d grown up with a man she both idolized and resented. Resented because she’d always sensed his lingering sadness over the son he’d lost. A gap she couldn’t fill. Subconsciously, from a young age she’d recognized his need and had even tried to become both son and daughter to him, setting herself an impossible aim. He’d loved her, she knew that, and she’d loved him, though her feelings were complex. She’d found him once, stinking of liquor in their ruined front room, with pictures and ornaments swept to the floor where they lay broken. In her room she’d listened to the sound of her mother sobbing.

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