Murder at five finger light (17 page)

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Authors: Sue Henry

Tags: #Mystery, #Alaska

BOOK: Murder at five finger light
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But most interesting to Jessie was that on one wall of this basement the last full-time crew had left their names (including the dog) and where they were from:
LAST 365 DAY
1983 CREW 1984
BM1 M.L. Harding—Washington
MK2 J.P. Breneman—Lancaster PA
FN R.A. Gere—Washington
SN M.J. Rausch—CO
Dog Neva
With only three useful bedrooms in the one-story building that, before the light was automated, had been occupied by a keeper and three or four assistants, the nine members of the current work crew were somewhat creative about sleeping spaces. Jim and Laurie had long ago set up a queen-sized bed for themselves in the largest of the bedrooms. Hoping that Alex would come with Jessie, Laurie had assigned one of the smaller bedrooms to them. Now she gave one of the single beds to Karen instead. It was, they learned, where Anna and Becky, now on their way home to Colorado, had slept.
“But you didn’t expect me,” Karen protested. “And I don’t want to take someone’s bed. I really don’t mind sleeping on the floor.”
But Jessie claimed that space, having brought her own sleeping bag and an inflatable mattress, and insisting, truthfully, that she was used to sleeping on all kinds of surfaces when she was out training or racing her dogs. So with Karen in one bed, Whitney, who had been sleeping on the couch in the common room, moved in to occupy the second, and they were three.
After establishing their sleeping arrangements, they went back to the common room for a few minutes.
Don Sawyer and Sandra had moved into the other small bedroom in that hallway when they arrived, while both Curt and Aaron had elected to make their beds, like Jessie, on the floor. Curt, however, was sleeping in the lower room with his generator and Aaron had chosen the first wide landing on the way up to the tower, where a door could be opened onto the roof that Sandra had been painting red.
“That paint better be dry before you step out there and make prints in it,” she called after him, as he and Curt said their goodnights and headed for the stairs, one up, one down, Aaron taking his guitar with him.
“He likes to sit out on the roof and sing to the whales at bedtime,” Don explained to Karen. “They never answer, but it makes good music for the rest of us to go to sleep by. He’s pretty good.”
Jessie stood behind a chair looking around the room with interest, in the soft glow of an oil lamp and several candles that had been lighted in preference to running the noisy generator downstairs. A bright plastic tablecloth covered the broad table, now partially occupied with scattered coffee cups, wineglasses, and a single plate empty of all but cookie crumbs. The desk where Aaron had eaten his dinner took up one corner, with an office chair in front of it. A couple of lounge chairs stood under the east-facing windows. In an alcove on the south wall stood the afghan-covered couch that Whitney had used as a bed. Over it on the wall was a dartboard and next to it a shadowbox frame that held a sample of several nautical knots. Pinned up beside a window hung a chart showing various kinds of saltwater fish. Here and there maps, charts, fishing gear, a barometer, and other oddments covered the walls.
Turning, Jessie ran a finger along a collection of books, fiction and nonfiction, on three shelves of a case recessed in the wall under a map of the lower part of Alaska. Some she recognized; others were new to her, including an interesting-looking volume in a three-hole binder labeled “Historic Lighthouse Preservation Handbook.”
“That’s got everything you need or want to know about fixing up old lighthouses,” Jim said. “It’s put out by the government and includes all kinds of lighthouses anywhere in the United States.”
“Interesting. I’d like to take a look at it tomorrow,” Jessie said, yawning again. “Right now, I’m for bed.”
So was everyone else, and things were soon very quiet at Five Finger Light. Even Aaron had stopped his songs and gone to bed.
 
Without the residual light of a town nearby, it was very dark in the small bedroom and Jessie could see nothing at all when something woke her much later in the night. Assuming she had heard someone headed for the bathroom, she rolled over and had started to drift off again when a soft, faraway resonance caught her attention. Almost too faint to be heard, it sounded like an engine, but who would be running an engine in the middle of the night? It couldn’t be Curt’s generator downstairs, for that would have been much louder. Sitting up, she reached for the small pencil flashlight she had tucked under her pillow, a habit she had acquired on the sled dog trail. Switching it on, she shielded the glow with her fingers and pointed it in the direction of one of the two beds in the room.
Whitney, covered except for the top of her head, made a quilted lump in hers and was snoring gently.
Jessie swung the narrow beam of light past the door, which was unexpectedly open, to Karen’s.
It was empty.
Turning off the light, she lay back down and waited to see if Karen would come back from down the hall.
But what must have been ten minutes later, she still hadn’t appeared.
The engine sound Jessie thought she had heard had died away completely and she told herself that it could have been a passing boat in the distance, but somehow felt it was not that far away.
Knowing she wouldn’t go back to sleep without solving the puzzle of the sound and the missing woman, Jessie got up, slipped on her jeans under the large-sized T-shirt in which she slept, put on her shoes without socks, and went out into the hall with the flashlight once more shielded by her fingers. As she passed Karen’s bed she laid a hand on the sheets and found them cold. How long had the woman been gone anyway?
The outside door in the kitchen was open a crack.
What could be going on? Listening carefully, she heard no voices.
Turning off the light, she walked quietly out onto the porch and stood looking around. As her sight adjusted to the darkness, she could see the solid shapes of objects on the island against the pale light reflected from the sea beyond it—the wall of the lighthouse, shrubs and brush, the roof of a shed on the lower platform, the raised helipad to her left, and a tree or two against the starry sky. A small scraping sound from the helipad attracted her notice. Carefully, she crossed to its steps, on which she and Jim had settled earlier, and went halfway up to be able to see across the top of the wide flat surface. Something moved directly across from where she stood. Climbing on up, she walked to the center and saw that it was the shape of a person sitting on the edge facing west.
“Karen?”
“Oh!” The figure swung around, surprised. “Didn’t hear you coming. You startled me.”
“Don’t fall off of there,” Jessie warned. “There are some big rocks a dozen feet below.”
Karen had now turned halfway around, but didn’t get up.
“I couldn’t get to sleep,” she said. “So I came out. It’s a little claustrophobic knowing the weight of that huge tower is above you, don’t you think?”
Jessie hadn’t considered it and it made no difference to her now. “I think if it’s stood there since the mid-1930s, it’ll probably stand awhile longer,” she said, a little amused.
Moving to the edge of the platform, she sat down beside Karen and leaned back on her hands to look up at the sky, now almost empty of clouds, but full of stars that were brighter and seemed closer without the conflict of artificial lights.
“Yes, I guess it’ll stand,” Karen said. “But it’s nicer out here, don’t you think, with the ocean all around and the stars? You can near the waves splash on the rocks down there. Look up. There are millions of stars. I wish there was a moon, don’t you?”
Why, she asked herself, did she have the uneasy feeling that Karen was talking more than usual to cover something?
“Well, it’s nice. Did you hear an engine a little while ago?”
“An engine? No.”
“You must have heard it. I could hear it from inside the building.”
“Oh. Well—there was some kind of a boat that went past a little while ago, but it was a long ways away.”
There were no lights from a boat to be seen now, Jessie noticed.
“Which direction did it go?”
“That way.” Karen swung an arm imprecisely toward the south. “Its lights went out of sight behind the trees at that end of the island.”
Must have been going faster than she thought. The engine had not sounded up to speed, but almost at an idle. “What kind of a boat?”
“I don’t know. All I could see was its lights. Fishing boat, I guess.”
Jessie wished she could see Karen’s face to read her expression, but it was too dark.
All kinds of vessels—ferries, freighters, oil tankers, fishing boats, private pleasure boats, cruise ships, and others—went up and down the Inside Passage at all hours of the day or night, and she knew they were required to have running lights after dark. The larger ones, however, at this point did not make their way through Frederick Sound, for there was no passageway large enough to accommodate them. They took the outside route, or ran up through Chatham Strait on their way to Sitka, Juneau, or points farther north. The only boats that took the route through Frederick Sound must pass through the Wrangell Narrows, which were much too shallow and constricted for anything larger than fishing boats, power- or sailing craft. She remembered that the
Spirit of ’98,
192 feet long and 40 feet wide, had had a shallow enough draft to pass through the Narrows—one of the characteristics that made traveling on it such a pleasure, because it could carry its passengers to places those on huge cruise ships would never experience or even know they had missed.
Karen shifted her weight from hip to hip, as if she was uncomfortable sitting on the hard wooden surface of the helipad with her knees hanging over the low, six-inch rail at the edge of it.
But, Jessie wondered, was that the real reason for her discomfort?
“Think I’ll go back to bed,” Karen said, standing up. “You coming?”
“In a minute,” Jessie told her. “You go ahead.”
She thought about loaning Karen her flashlight, but didn’t.
If she found her way out here in the dark, she can find her way back,
she told herself, and realized she was annoyed and somewhat disturbed by Karen’s middle-of-the-night skulking.
If it had been anyone else
—
Jim, or Laurie, or Don
—
I wouldn’t feel that way, would I
?
But she lied, didn’t she?
By herself in the dark, she wondered why Karen would lie about hearing a boat, for she was nearly convinced that it had been an attempt at a falsehood the woman hoped to get away with. A shred of doubt lingered, however, for it could, as she had claimed, have been a passing fishing boat—seen and dismissed. Some worked late. Some didn’t return to port until they had a good catch, but anchored up at night, or motored to a new and, hopefully, better location to be ready to drop their nets in the morning. There was nothing to be proved, or gained, by accusation—or speculation, for that matter.
Tired of conjecture, Jessie lay back on the helipad platform and looked up at the sky. On the island, with the mountains so far away, it was full of stars almost to the horizon. There was a cool breeze coming off the always-icy waters of the sound, but watching so many stars was almost as pleasant as lying on her sled bag during a race to see them through the northern lights that swirled slowly across overhead—and warmer. Picking out the Big Dipper, so closely associated with Alaska’s identity that it was portrayed on the state flag, she mentally extended the line of the two pointer stars on the front of its bowl and, approximately six times that distance across the sky, found Polaris, the North Star, at the tip of the Little Dipper’s handle. In the Far North the two constellations are circumpolar and always visible in the sky, so they were old familiar friends to Jessie.
Time to go back to bed, she decided, turned on her flashlight to make sure she didn’t fall going down the steps of the platform, and went back to the lighthouse.
Sometime later the distant sound of an engine occurred again as part of a dream, but she had forgotten it by morning.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
 
 
 
 
“WANT TO TAKE A LOOK AT THE ISLAND BEFORE WE GO TO work?” Laurie asked as they finished the last of the breakfast dishes the next morning.
“Sure,” Jessie agreed, curious to see the southern end beyond the two acres of trees that grew tall in the patch of woods behind the lighthouse.
She had been awake early, but not as early as Karen, whose bed had once again been empty. Heading for the bathroom, Jessie had found it locked and heard the shower running, but in a few minutes Karen had come out in clean clothes, her wet hair wrapped in a towel. Tucking the roll of clothes she had been wearing into her suitcase, she had left the room with a brush in her hand, evidently headed outside, though Jessie had found her helping Laurie with breakfast a little while later, when she had finished her own quick shower.

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