Nicole Peeler - [Jane True 01] (4 page)

I sat down heavily, my back to the body, trying to breathe as I fought
the waves of nausea battering my stomach. Whoever this was, he hadn’t died by
drowning. There weren’t any rocky outcroppings around the Old Sow on which he
could have bashed his head like that. I felt a flash of relief: Whoever had
died here tonight, it wasn’t my fault. That didn’t make the guy any less dead,
but I couldn’t help but feel relief.

Then the penny dropped: Bodies with bashed-in heads didn’t walk
themselves down to the beach.

He’d been murdered.                                                    

And to find out who he was, I was going to have to touch him again to
turn him over.

So I did what any brave warrior would do when confronted with an awful
task: I squeezed my eyes shut and squealed, “Ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ewwwww,” as I
groped for where I knew the cadaver’s arm should be and hauled with all my
strength to propel him sunny-side up as quickly as possible.

Then I sat back down, shuddering and murmuring “ew” until the vomit
receded back down my throat.

I steeled myself to look at him, but couldn’t work up the nerve.

C’mon Jane
, I told myself.
It might not even be
anybody from Rockabill. He’s probably a stranger.

I actually had to use my fingers to peel my eyelids up. My body was
saying, “Oh, hell no,” even as my mind was scolding it for being a complete
pansy.

When I finally peered down at the dead man’s face, I nearly sobbed with
a combination of relief and guilt. I was relieved because although I knew who
the body was, it wasn’t someone I knew well or had any connection to. It was
Peter, who was renting one of the Allens’ rental cottages for the winter. I didn’t
even know his last name. He said he was writing a book and had come during the
off-season for the quiet. He shopped at the bookstore often, and always seemed
interested in speaking with me, but his interest didn’t seem creepy. Peter was
just a rather average, middle-aged man who was friendly to everyone and a
little lonely in his tiny cabin all by himself. He did ask some rather
intrusive questions sometimes, but when he realized he’d crossed the line he’d
back off, apologizing that he forgot that real people weren’t characters in
books waiting to reveal their secrets.

Which is why I felt really guilty about feeling relieved. Peter had been
a nice man, and he’d stayed nice even after he’d been in Rockabill long enough
to learn my “real” story. He certainly didn’t deserve to be murdered and dumped
like some sack of garbage.

And on that note…

What the hell am I going to do with this body?

There was no way I could call the police. How was I going to explain my
presence? Or the murder victim?
You’re “crazy,” remember
, my brain very
helpfully reminded me.
They’ll probably think you killed him.

My calling the police was
entirely
out of the question. I’d never
live it down. Things were finally okay for me in Rockabill. Not exactly
pleasant, but no one, with the notable exceptions of Linda and Stuart, was
actively trying to drive me away anymore. If I did anything weird—and finding a
murdered body was definitely weird—it would all start back up again.

An anonymous phone call was also out of the question. There are a few
hundred people tops in the Rockabill area during low season. Anonymity was
never an option where I was concerned, not least because the sheriff who the
phone call would go to was George Varga, one of my dad’s best friends and my
“godsfather” for the pseudopagan naming ceremony Nick and Nan had given me when
I was born.

But if I left Peter on this stretch of beach, anybody could find him. I
didn’t want some nice L.L. Bean family to come strolling along with their
obligatory blond-haired twins and Labrador retriever, only to stumble across a
man whose scalp resembled a cat flap.

Or worse yet,
nobody
could find him and he could lie here for
days. Even L.L. Bean catalog people didn’t go out strolling through storms.
Leaving Peter dead on the beach to be pecked at by seagulls and gnawed on by
crabs was out of the question.

Then I remembered old Mr. Flutie and his arthritic dachshund, Russ. Mr.
Flutie was a retired fireman from Eastport, so he could handle seeing a dead
body. And he used the same little path every day to “walk” his dog. I say
“walk” because he actually carried Russ for most of the way in one of those
fancy baby slings that trendy Trustafarian mothers in big cities use. He only
set Russ down to do his little doggie business and then back the dog went into
the sling.

I liked Mr. Flutie a lot, but even I had to admit that the baby sling
did interfere with his dignity.

Anyway, Mr. Flutie was the perfect body-finder. Come rain or shine, he
got up at the butt crack and walked the otherwise seldom used path that was
right off the main beach. And finding Peter’s corpse wouldn’t scar him for
life.

It was nearly one in the morning, by this point, so I had to move fast
if I was going to get any rest before work the next day. It took me nearly half
an hour to drag the body the short way up to the path, since I had to sit down
panting just about every ten steps. People are
heavy
when they’re dead.
I also nearly ralphed every time I caught a glimpse of the skin flap flapping,
and I’d seen enough
CSI
to know that my stomach contents could be used
to link me to the site.

Despite my exhaustion and nausea, we made it up to Mr. Flutie’s path. I
tried arranging Peter so he looked natural until I realized how absurd that
was. Then I felt that it was wrong just to walk away. So I bowed my head and
gave as good a prayer as I could give, never having been in any place of
worship in my life. I told Peter I was sorry he died and that I hoped he could
find peace. I also told him I was sorry for leaving him and hoped that, as a
writer, he could understand my dilemma and my reasons for not calling the
police. As I started to tell him how efficient Mr. Flutie would be in getting
the authorities involved, I had a mental vision of myself, starkers as I was,
having a serious conversation with a cadaver. So I cut my prayer short and
ended with a moment’s silence. Then I walked back to the beach, making sure
that I erased any signs of our trail that the storm hadn’t gotten to first.

I made a beeline back to the ocean. I was filthy. The rain had melted
the last of our most recent snowfall and I was covered in a thick coating of
dirt overlaid with sand. I scrubbed myself down in the shallows and then swam
out a ways both to rinse off and to get back to my secret cove where my clothes
were.

Getting dressed, I knew that I wasn’t going to get any sleep that night.
And that if I did, it would be full of visions of drowned bodies bobbing in my
head.

CHAPTER THREE

T
he
sharp notes of my alarm clock burst through my brain, setting the dreams that
had haunted my night’s brief sleep to flee. There was an awful taste in my
mouth: my stomach’s revenge for the panic and nausea it had endured the night
before. Speaking of which…

I had found a murdered man.

I lay in bed, immobile, trying to get to grips with what I’d done. In
the light of the weak November sun leaking through my curtains, my actions were
nowhere near as logical as they’d seemed under cover of darkness.

First of all, I had no guarantee that the body was any more likely to be
found where I’d put it than wherever the Old Sow would eventually have
deposited it. What if Russ had decided he’d rather be taken down a different
trail? What if Mr. Flutie had decided to skip his morning constitutional and
instead gone to Vegas to blow his retirement savings on blackjack and lap
dances? What if, gods forbid, I’d overestimated his intestinal fortitude and
now there were two bodies lying across that path: Peter dead of foul play and
Mr. Flutie dead of a coronary?

Second, I must have annihilated any evidence that might have been on
Peter’s body. If there had been any clues as to who had killed him left intact
after his time in the sea, they’d doubtlessly been totally erased by the long
drag up the beach. Not to mention there would be confusion over the fact that
it would appear as if his killer had left him on the beach after apparently
dipping him in the ocean just for kicks…

In turn, this led me to my third reason for why I should never have
touched Peter. If a murdered body wasn’t bizarre enough for Rockabill, the
police would now have a body that had either dragged itself up out of the ocean
or whose killer had had second thoughts about dumping it and decided to use his
victim to decorate the local nature trail, instead.

I pulled my pillow out from under my head and smothered my face with it.
How could I have been so stupid? Why didn’t I just leave well enough alone?

Then I thought of Peter’s poor dead face as well as the polite kindness
he’d shown me when he was alive, and I knew I couldn’t have left him out there,
abandoned to the elements.

I pushed the pillow away and willed myself to move. I had to get down to
the village and face the music if there was any music to be faced.

Alternatively
, came the sly voice in my head,
you
could just bury your head under the covers and never come out, no matter who
came knocking.

But my hospital experience had taught me that bedclothes never protected
you from anything. So I got up and got ready for work, and then went downstairs
to make breakfast and perform my Tuesday chores as normally as possible. It’s
not like my method of cleaning the upstairs bathroom would give away the fact
that I’d spent the previous evening dredging a body out of the Old Sow, but I
was still jumpy.

I started to relax when dad and I got through breakfast without Sheriff
Varga stopping by in his official capacity. It was only when I walked into town
that I realized a smallish circle of hell had broken loose.

A goodly portion of Rockabill’s permanent residents were milling about,
sipping coffee from Thermoses and talking in hushed tones. Rockabill was still
decidedly more shabby than chic, although it did have a naturally cutesy aspect
that we’d tried to ham up for the tourists. And we did achieve a pretty homey
feel, especially when the square was crowded with people, as it was today. Not
that we often gathered to discuss the murder of a vacationing stranger.

I braced myself to weave through the small crowd, but I relaxed as I
realized no one was paying me any undue attention. I could see Grizelda’s tall
form—she was extra conspicuous in a fuchsia satin capelet—flitting from group
to group, and I gave a little internal cheer. Grizzie was a gossip sponge.
She’d have every single drop of delicious rumor soaked up in no time. I just
had to wait for her to come spill.

Tracy was already opening up the store when I got there, and her normally
cheerful face looked grim. My heart missed a beat. Was Varga waiting for me at
work?

But she was just reflecting the town’s mood, and her greeting was normal
enough until she added, “Did you hear about the body?”

I tried to make my face look confused.

“No, what happened? What body?”

“Peter Jakes,” she replied, frowning. “His body was found by Mr. Flutie
this morning on that nature trail on the back side of the beach.”

So
, I thought,
his last name was Jakes
.

Tracy continued, “The police won’t say anything official, but apparently
Jakes was murdered.”

“No way,” I said, trying to channel a little bit of last night’s shock
into my words. “Are you serious?”

“Yup. Grizzie’s getting the rest of the story now. Knowing her, she’ll
have copies of the police reports by the time she’s done.”

Tracy’s speculations weren’t far off. Grizzie came in about an hour
later looking flushed. She was practically bursting with information, but she
had to wait until we finished serving the last few customers from our unexpected
morning rush before she could empty out her gossip sack.

And empty she did.