Murder at Fire Bay
Read Murder at Fire Bay Online
Authors: Ron Hess
MURDER AT FIRE BAY
by Ron Hess
Genre: Thriller
Kindle: 978-1-58124-449-6
ePub: 978-1-58124-472-4
©2012 by Ron Hess
Published 2012 by The Fiction Works
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission, except for brief quotations to books and critical reviews. This story is a work of fiction. Characters and events are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Death and Deception
in a Small AlaskanTown
Table of Contents
Prologue
An old man stood on the bluff overlooking the bay. How many times had he done this—a thousand? Too many to count. Leaning on his cane and breathing through his mouth, he had shuffled up the dusty path to the wooden bench he had set there years ago. He chuckled to himself. Never mind how many times he had been at that very spot—how many more times would he be able to walk here up hill from his house? He settled himself on the bench. His breathing eased and he began to take an interest in the sea a thousand feet below his perch. A smile crinkled his face. God, but it was beautiful. The bay reached fifteen miles across to the mountains on the other side, their jagged peaks so white it looked like someone had dumped ice cream on them. Boats gently bobbed on the bay’s blue surface this fine evening in August. He looked up. Not a cloud to be seen. Wasn’t it good to be still alive here in Alaska?
Yes, yes
.
He had made it to the bench. If he died on this very spot, this very second, his life could be counted as wonderful. If he completed the second part of his ritual, he’d feel truly blessed. With quivering hands he removed the binoculars from their case and lifted them to his eyes.
He could see only two skiffs, but that was not surprising. After all, it was past ten in the evening, and all the charter boats had long gone back to their harbor slips. That was okay; two boats were worth his trouble. No counting the times he’d watched as a boat’s occupants pulled a big halibut out of the water. Sometimes they were close enough for him to see them clubbing the poor creature to death. Not a pretty picture, but it was necessary.
He leaned forward on the bench and propped both arms on his knees to steady the binoculars as he focused on the two skiffs now very close to one another. There was a woman in each boat. They must know each other. Probably going to share a cup of coffee since the sea was so calm. Well, life was boring at times when you were waiting for Mr. Fish to bite. Hmm . . . the one in the blue jacket was getting in the boat with the one in the red jacket. Now that was odd. Ah, well, perhaps she was going to help the other woman. Yes, no doubt, that is what it was, something tangled up perhaps.
As the two talked they leaned toward each other, mouths moving, arms waving. It didn’t look very friendly. He lowered the binoculars and sat back, squeezing his eyes shut and opening them wide, trying to clear his vision, but it was no good. He sighed and spent a moment stretching out the kinks in his neck and shoulders. Giving up, he leaned forward again, lifted the binoculars back up to his eyes, and adjusted the focus.
One skiff was leaving. Must have gotten through with whatever they were doing. He glassed back over the sea to the other skiff. Wait a minute—where was the other woman? One skiff was empty and the other skiff was quickly moving away. He could distinctly hear the roar of its motor as it strained to get the boat up on step and then its sound leveling out as it cruised, waves slapping at its sides.
Something was wrong, terribly wrong. That woman in the blue jacket. Hadn’t he seen her somewhere? But where? Well, there was time enough to think about that later. He struggled to his feet, blowing through his mouth. Hell! Of all times to be impaired with a shortness of breath. Of course, that’s what his daughter had told him to expect after smoking all those years. To hell with his breathing! He had to get to a phone and tell the Coast Guard what he had seen. He stabbed the ground with his cane as he walked down the hill. His heart pounded. That was nothing new. But it was getting worse. His doctor had warned him about overexerting himself. He paused and put his free hand to his heart.
Oh, no. Not now!
His vision blurring, with one hand still bracing himself on his cane, he fell to his knees, then on his side onto the path. His vision cleared a few seconds, then dimmed.
What beautiful roses
.
* * *
Two days later the corpse of the woman lay face down in the sand. She wore Levi’s, a white sweater, and a red coat because even in summer the wind blowing over the cold waters of the bay could be quite cool. On the high bluffs above the beach, ravens soared and croaked their talk one to another. Intrigued by the red coat, they flew down close to the body as if daring it to come alive. Since only its arms moved in the small surf, they became bored and went back to their play. A few hours later a lone coyote came sniffing by. No doubt he was overjoyed by this prospective new food source, yet after a few more sniffs he wandered on, perhaps repelled by the human smell. Humans were dangerous.
She lay there through the night, the tide coming back yet again to gently nudge her. In the early morning of the following day, a passing pilot happened to look down as he turned on a long final at the airport of the nearby Alaskan coastal town. The sight of the body so rattled him that he did a go-around. This time he flew lower and slower making certain of what he had seen on his first pass. It was definitely a body.
Chapter 1
The phone rang. I knew who it was before I picked it up.
“Bronski!”
It was my boss in Anchorage. Who else? I mean, here at Howes Bluff in Western Alaska, the post office phone doesn’t ring often. From behind a sorting case, my wife, Jeanette, and her twin sister, Jean, at another case, peeked through open slots.
I gave Jeanette a wink, laid my wire-rim glasses down, and leaned back in my chair. “Yes, sir!”
There was a moment’s hesitation on the other end.
“Bronski?”
I could understand his questioning tone. Usually I answered with a somewhat unenthusiastic “Yeah, Boss.”
Things had been going well for the past month. I was a happy camper, simply enjoying life. “Yes, sir?”
“Oh, for a minute there I thought we had a bad connection.” His voice sounded muffled. That meant he was rolling an unlit cigar around in his mouth. Poor Boss. Now even he had to go outside to smoke. What this must have done to his work habits was beyond my imagination.
“How’s it going out there?”
“Okay,” I answered, trying not to sound too happy.
“I see.” More hesitation.
I learned long ago to wait him out, mostly because it infuriated him.
“Uh, Bronski, I’ve been thinking.”
Maybe it was the serious tone of his voice or maybe it was the funny feeling in my gut, I don’t know, but to be on the safe side I motioned to Jeanette to pick up the extension.
“Yes sir?” I said, and took my feet off the desk.
“Uh, you heard about the supervisor down in Fire Bay being found dead on the beach this morning?”
“Uh . . . no, sir.”
By now I was standing, my free hand tapping a pencil on the desk. I really had heard about the supervisor, but I was playing dumb. An old friend worked in the Boss’s office, and I had no intention of the Boss finding out.
“Well, they think she hit her head somehow and fell out of her skiff. I need somebody to take over her job and also serve as officer-in-charge until a new one can be appointed. You remember Bill, the O.I.C? Well, sorry to say, we had to ship him off for a while to detox. Bill has been having self-confidence problems. So, Leo, bottom line. I want you to go. It’s a double-duty assignment and I know you won’t be happy about it, but you’re just about all I got.”
I threw the pencil down and sat down with a thud. Go? Go to Fire Bay? I was happy here. Besides, what did “all I got” mean anyway?
“What if I said no?” I asked.
“Of course, you can say no, Bronski. But before you do, I want you to think about your Postal Service career.”
My career? I almost laughed out loud. I didn’t know I had one.
“Boss, you know I’ve been married only a little over a year. I’m not wild about leaving Jeanette, and besides, who would take over for me while I’m gone?”
The Boss’s chair squeaked. “Got that covered. Jeanette Bronski will take over your duties.”
I slumped over the desk, head in hand. I heard Jeanette walking toward the desk, coming to stand by me. I sighed. “How long do I have to think this over?”
At first, it sounded like w the Boss as trying to chuckle, but that would have been unusual. Instead, he went into one of his infamous coughing jags, the kind that lasted a minute or so. I held the phone away from my ear and rolled my eyes at Jeanette, who was standing very still, her hand cupped over the mouthpiece of the cordless phone. She did not smile.
Finally he quieted down and spoke, trying to be cheerful. “Take an hour, Bronski. Remember your Postal Service career.” With that, he hung up.
I sat there a few seconds, my hand still gripping the phone. Chills ran up my back, not unlike those I used to get in Vietnam walking along a trail. A shoulder squeeze from Jeanette brought me back to the present. I looked up at all five feet of her, resplendent in her pin striped Postal Service shirt, took her hand and kissed it, then held it to my cheek. This was my love, my peace, and my rock. I stood up and nodded to Jeanette’s sister, Jean, across the room.
“It’s all yours, Jean. Jeanette and I are going up front and then maybe to the restaurant.”
She nodded back. Taking over was no big deal, since most everyone had already been in to check their mail.
Jeanette and I grabbed our jackets, and walked up to the front window; where I paused for a moment to look out on the street scene. Not a person or dog in sight, just a gravel road with gray, unpainted single-story houses with smoke coming out of pipe chimneys. There was a blue-sided, single-story commercial store farther up the street that handled everything from food to pots and pans to clothing. A few feet farther was the white Russian Orthodox Church with its blue spires. At the end sat a small, gray building, now a café, a great meeting place if you wanted everyone in the village—and by the way, that’s five hundred people—to know some choice piece of rumor. There were a couple of side streets with a house here and there with maybe fish drying on a rack in the front yard alongside the satellite dish. Inside the house, impassive faces might be watching “Everybody Loves Raymond” or some CNN news event, or Mom and kids might be cutting up moose meat just taken for food. On the hill above us sat the school and electric generator. At one time or another, I had been in every building in the village. It was a scene that I had come to cherish in the past year and a half. Days were getting shorter as summer wore on and there was a certain waiting tension in the air. Winter was coming and you had better damn well be ready for it.