Seaweed Under Water (23 page)

It was Tess Rollins. She was grinning at me from the sidewalk. She asked, “Going anywhere special?”

The cabbie turned around in his seat, looked me over, frowned and demanded, “Where to, soldier?”

I said, “Wait a minute,” and got out of the cab. The cabbie gunned his motor—burning rubber as he took off.

Tess was grinning. “Good riddance,” she said. “You need to go somewhere, we'll use my car.”

I smiled, but I didn't like Tess's casual use of the possessive.

She said playfully, “l feel slightly aggrieved.”

“With me, or just in general?”

“With you, because I thought you liked me. You came back to Mowaht Bay, but you didn't pay me a visit. That was very naughty.”

“Who said I'd been back?”

“Does it matter? The fact is, you
were
there, right?”

“You're right, I was there. Briefly. How did you know?”

“Remember, I told you it's impossible to keep secrets in Mowaht Bay—it's too small.”

“That's what you said, Tess, but it's not true, is it? Mowaht Bay's full of secrets.”

She tucked my hand beneath her arm and raised her face to be kissed. I touched her cheek with my lips.

“My, my. Call that a kiss?” she asked, laughing out loud.

“I'm just surprised. Very surprised, running into you like this. What are you doing here?”

“I've been walking around, looking for
you
. I saw you earlier, in the Beagle. I was with some people; otherwise I'd have spoken to you then. You left before I had another chance,” she said, bubbling over with apparent delight. “Come on, my car's parked near yours, behind the pub. Let's go somewhere, just you and me. We'll make a night of it.”

I thought,
My car's parked near yours
? How did she know where my car was parked?

“Listen, Tess. It's lovely to see you, but I'm on duty now. I have to be going somewhere. Sorry.”

“Liar, you're not on duty,” she argued, her voice low. “Never mind, though. I'll let you go this time.”

She gave my arm a little squeeze, turned and ran quickly across the street.

I hadn't been lying. I
was
back on duty. Now everything was different. I had said Mowaht Bay was full of secrets, but it was dawning on me only now, with absolute certainty, what it's greatest secret was: the second time I'd seen the logging donkey, I'd noticed that the weld on the door had been broken, then resealed with a bicycle lock. I cursed myself, I should have investigated it immediately. It was probably too late now. Or was it? I checked the time. This was crazy, it was nearly 12:30 at night. I almost called it off, thinking to wait for the morning, for daylight. But I couldn't escape the rising feeling of urgency. No, I had to go there tonight. A feeling told me that tomorrow morning would be too late.

I kept Tess in sight till she reached the Beagle's parking lot, got into her Mercedes and drove away. I drove to police headquarters. Mac Anderson, the attendant on duty in the tool crib that night, provided me with a bolt cutter, although he balked when I requested a bike lock.

“A bike lock?” he repeated.

“Correct. Not the U-bolt kind. The kind with a spiral cable that curls into a circle when you release tension.”

“What do you think this place is? Wal-Mart?”

“Got one or not?”

Mac folded his arms, gazed into space and said, “I
own
one. Right now, it's out in the yard, locking my bike to a rack.”

We went outside together. Mac took the lock off his bike, gave it to me and asked, “When can I expect it back?”

“Never. I'll give you a new one tomorrow.”

Half an hour later I was steering the Chev along dirt roads. It was a warm night and I drove with the windows down. When I slowed for sharp curves, I heard waves, pounding the shores of Mowaht Sound. Little eyes, peering down from the branches overhead, reflected my headlamps. A barred owl, feasting on its kill in the middle of the road, swept up into the trees at my approach. Mowaht Bay's streets were deserted when I arrived there, about two in the morning. Apart from a few pole lamps on the government wharf, the township lay mostly in darkness. A motion detector lit up when I stopped in the Legion parking lot. The HANE bunkhouse was invisible in the dark. After thinking for five minutes, I drove on.

The woods were intensely dark when I parked in the bush near the Mowaht Bay Reserve.

I drank a couple of slugs from the glove-compartment mickey and put the bottle in my pocket. I switched on my flashlight, climbed the reserve's five-wire fence and floundered around in the dark forest till I picked up the game trail.

≈  ≈  ≈

The area around Boss Rollins' logging donkey had been cleaned up—just a little; there weren't quite as many empty bottles and other junk lying about as previously. I crossed to the logging donkey, positioned the flashlight and set to work with Mac's bolt cutter. It took me several minutes to sever the bike lock holding the furnace door shut. Instead of cutting cleanly, the bolt-
cutter's blades merely flattened the multi-strand cable. I had to twist the cutter back and forth strenuously for a while, until the cable parted.

I was sweating when I dragged the rusty furnace door open and looked inside.

Designed to burn firewood, the furnace was now a rusty mausoleum; rodents and insects had feasted within it for years. My heart palpitating like an amphetamine junkie's, I gazed at the mummified remains of a man sitting upright on the fire grates, still thinly draped in the rotten, lace-like fragments of the jeans and red flannel shirt he had been wearing when somebody shot him.

Conquering revulsion, I crawled inside the furnace and checked in what was left of the mummy's tattered pockets. They were empty, but there was a jagged hole in the dead man's temple, where a .25 calibre bullet had penetrated. The bullet was still lodged in the corpse's lower mandible. I backed out of the furnace on my hands and knees. When my heartbeat returned to normal, I used my cell phone and called headquarters. Tony Seamann, the duty sergeant, wasn't familiar with the Mowaht Bay area, so it took a while to explain my situation, exactly where I was and how to get there. Before hanging up I said, “And listen, Tony. No sirens, that's important. Okay?”

“Got it,” Seamann assured me. “No sirens.”

I sat on a tree stump and finished the mickey. Alcohol didn't stop my racing thoughts, but it took my mind off that eyeless corpse.

The purple starlit night was full of sounds. A distant coyote answered an owl's hoot. Small night creatures went about their business in the dark. Water trickled along a creek. I left the empty mickey bottle on the stump, went back to the logging donkey and closed the furnace-door. Kneeling, I used Mac's bike lock and made the furnace as secure as I'd found it.

No sooner had the lock clicked shut than a voice said, “Stand up, turn around slow and raise your hands above your head.”

I was kneeling on the donkey's deck, a foot or so above the ground. I stood up and spun around fast. Boss Rollins was standing below me, about four feet away. It was too dark to see the gun in his hand; otherwise I wouldn't have swung my flashlight at his head.

Rollins evaded my swing. He could have shot me, right then, but apparently he needed to keep me alive for a while before I joined that mummy in the furnace. He fired a bullet between my feet. I dropped the flashlight and raised my hands. The light went out, but Rollins didn't need it. He wasn't alone. Somebody else was with him, and had her own lamp. She focussed its powerful beam directly into my eyes, blinding me temporarily.

“Don't move!” Rollins commanded. “More tricks, and I'll beat your brains out.”

I believed him and turned my face away from the light.

Rollins asked, “How did you know?”

“Know what?”

“How did you know that Neville was inside the furnace?”

“So that's brother Neville, is it?”

Rollins didn't answer.

I said, “I didn't know what was in there till 10 minutes ago. Finding your brother was a fluke. The first time I saw it, the logging donkey's furnace-door was welded shut. It was a nice piece of work. I guess
you
did it, right?”

Rollins grunted his assent.

I said, “It struck me as a bit unnecessary, somebody going to all that trouble, but I doubt I'd have given the matter any more thought, if I hadn't come back for a second look around. That's when I noticed that somebody had sawn through the weld and put a bike lock on the furnace door instead. I began to wonder what for. I'm still wondering.”

I waited for him to say something, but he stayed silent.

“Seaweed's dangerous, you're wasting time,” the person holding the lamp said coldly, speaking for the first time. “Deal with it now. You know what's needed.”

It was Tess Rollins. I was already in a state of shock. Hearing Tess's voice nearly made my heart stop. I turned my head to gape at her, but that flashlight still blinded me.

Boss Rollins stepped close and lashed out with his gun while I was still looking over my shoulder. The blow was hard, and it landed on my jawbone. I took a nosedive. A knob of rusty iron came up off the deck, banged my head and nearly tore my ear off. Things went red, then black, and that was it.

I'd been cold-cocked.

≈  ≈  ≈

I don't know how long I was out. Not too long probably. I came to inside that rusty tomb, in pitch-blackness, sitting alongside a grinning mummy because the furnace was too short to lie down in. Fortunately for my state of mind, the furnace door wasn't completely shut. The Rollinses were standing outside, arguing, although I couldn't make out what they were saying. My head ached. My left ear was caked with dried blood, and it burned as if somebody had used a blowtorch on it. I started to inch out of the furnace, but the door, barely ajar, was too narrow for me to get through. When I shoved it wider, it creaked noisily. The Rollinses stopped arguing.

That's when we all heard the noise of approaching sirens. I managed to get out of the furnace before Boss started shooting; luckily, the sirens spooked him and his aim was off. Bullets ricocheted off metal as I made a run for it into the trees. The wailing sirens grew louder now as three police vehicles turned off the highway and raced toward us through the reserve. After a while, I heard more noises as the Rollinses drove off in the other direction in Tess's Mercedes. I reached Harley Rollins' house before the police did. I went inside to Rollins' bathroom, soaked one of his expensive white towels in warm water and wrapped it around my head.

Then I went outside and sat down on a lawn chair. Suddenly, my hands began to shake and my knees turned wobbly. Red and white lights began to flash intermittently between the trees as cars screamed toward me along the reserve's woodsy road, until blue and whites with RCMP markings arrived.

After 10 minutes of strenuous SWAT team athletics involving megaphones, bulletproof vests and trigger-happy shotgun-toting constables, the RCMP inspector in charge concluded that I might actually be the unarmed policeman I said I was, after which things calmed, a little.

CHAPTER TWENTY

I was sitting in Bernie Tapp's office with a band-aid the size of a birthday card plastered across my forehead. The ER surgeon who'd worked on my ear had left me with me with more stitches than a catcher's mitt. I was tired, groggy. My head ached, my back teeth ached, and I needed a drink. Twelve hours had passed since I'd opened that furnace door, and thoughts of spending eternity with Neville Rollins were still giving me goose bumps.

“We had no choice,” Bernie Tapp was telling me. “The Mowaht Bay Indian Reserve is under RCMP jurisdiction. We had to notify them first. They insisted on handling matters themselves. Besides, they had a SWAT team handy and ready to go. We told 'em you didn't want sirens, but I guess they didn't listen.”

Bernie had described a typical RCMP fiasco, one that had worked to my advantage. If I'd been forced to wait till police arrived quietly from Victoria, I'd be rooming with Neville by then. I cleared that grisly thought from my mind by asking, “Where are the Rollinses now?”

“Who knows? Your guess is as good as mine. The Mounties picked 'em up for questioning, kept 'em for a few hours, then apologized and turned 'em loose.”

I was incredulous. “They didn't lay any charges?”

Bernie made a wry mouth. “Not yet. The Rollinses' story is that you were trespassing by night on their private property. It was dark, and you hadn't identified yourself. The Rollinses didn't recognize you. They admit that things got a little bit out of hand, but it's your fault, they say. You acted suspiciously.”

“What about that mummy? How did they explain that?”

“They didn't
try
to explain it,” Bernie answered. “Neville went missing nearly 20 years ago. They insisted they had no idea he was in the furnace. Now that they
do
know, they want to be left alone so they can get on with their grieving in private. The Mounties found it hard to argue.”

“Rubbish. But for those two grieving hypocrites, Neville would still be alive.”

“Maybe. I haven't heard the rest of
your
story yet.”

“In a minute. What about Harley Rollins' gun?”

“Oh yeah, the so-called gun. You told the RCMP that Harley was packing a .25. They had a good look around, but didn't find it. All they found was an empty mickey of rye, with your fingerprints on it. Harley Rollins says he's never owned a .25 in his life.”

“The sonovabitch tried to kill me with a .25, so what about the bullets?” I asked. “Harley took three or four shots at me when I escaped the logging donkey.”

Bernie shrugged. “Ever try to find a bullet in the woods?”

“It isn't impossible.”