Cry for the Strangers (13 page)

“Give me a hand, will you, Harn?” he asked. He took hold of the rope that now dangled from the tree and yanked on it He felt a double jerk as the knot gave way. Then, with the chief helping him, he gently lowered the corpse out of the tree.

Doctor Phelps examined her slowly, first cutting the rope away from Miriam Shelling’s neck, then going over the body carefully, adjusting his glasses every few seconds as they slid down his nose. Finally he stood up, shrugged, and shook his head sadly.

“Why do they do it?” he muttered, almost under his breath.

“Suicide.” Harney Whalen made the question a statement.

“Looks like it,” Phelps agreed. “But damned strange if you ask me.”

“Strange? What do you mean?”

“Not sure,” the doctor said. “Seems like I remember something like this before. A fisherman dying and his wife hanging herself a few days later. It’s these damned storms.”

Whalen looked at the old doctor and Phelps smiled self-consciously. “Didn’t know the weather affects people?” he said. Without waiting for a reply, he went on: “Well, it does. There’s winds some places—down south, and in Switzerland and a couple of other places. They make people do funny things.” He paused significantly. “And we’ve got these damned storms. Whip up out of nowhere, blow like hell, then they’re gone. Vanished. They don’t show up inland, they don’t show up north or south. Just here. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

“No,” Whalen said flatly. “It doesn’t What makes me wonder, is why she chose Glen Palmer’s property to kill herself on. If she did.”

“She did, Harn, she did,” Phelps assured him. “Can’t put this one on anybody. Not Palmer, not anybody.”

“Maybe not,” Whalen growled. “But I can try.”

The old doctor stared at Whalen in puzzlement, then started toward his car. There was nothing further he could do. Behind him he heard Whalen begin giving orders for photographs to be taken and the body removed. But he was sure Whalen was not thinking about the orders he was giving. He was thinking about something else. Phelps wished he knew what it was.

They had barely spoken during lunch. As he finished his coffee and poured the last of a bottle of wine into his glass, Brad decided to face the issue.

“It’s bothering you, isn’t it?” he asked abruptly, sure that Elaine would know what he was talking about.

“Shouldn’t it?” Elaine snapped. “We’ve been here two days and two people and a dog have died.”

“You don’t know how long the dog had been dead,” Brad said.

“Then let’s stick to the people.”

“All right How many people do you think die in Seattle every day? Or didn’t you know that Seattle has the second highest suicide rate on the coast?”

“I know,” Elaine said darkly, resenting her husband’s logic.

“Then I should think you’d be wanting to pick up and move out I’ll bet the rate here is considerably lower than it is in Seattle. And frankly, I’m not terribly surprised by what happened.”

Elaine looked sharply at Brad. “You aren’t?”

“Think what it must have been like for her. Her husband was a fisherman—probably no insurance, and certainly no retirement fund with widow’s benefits. He probably didn’t even have any Social Security. Now, what is there for a woman in her position? Welfare? Small town people are very prideful about things like that.”

“She could have sold the boat,” Elaine said doggedly. “My God, Brad, women are widowed every day, but they don’t kill themselves over it” She drained her wineglass, then set it down and sighed. “Oh, come on,” she said tiredly. “Doesn’t it all seem just a little strange to you?”

“Of course it does. But you have to be reasonable. It would have happened whether we’d been here or not.
Two days earlier or two days later, and we never would have known about it You’re acting as though it’s some kind of—I don’t know—omen or something. And that’s nonsense.”

“Is it?” Elaine said softly. “Is it, really? I wish I could believe that, but there’s something about this place that gives me the willies.” She stood up suddenly. “Let’s get out of here. Maybe the sunshine will help.”

Brad paid the check and they made their way out of the café and down the stairs. In the tavern the same elderly men were playing checkers, as they had been the day before yesterday. Neither of them looked up at the Randalls.

“Let’s walk up the beach,” Elaine said. “Maybe by the time we get to the house Whalen will be there. If he isn’t, I suspect we can get in by ourselves—it didn’t look capable of being locked.”

They retraced the path Elaine had taken the previous morning, but to Elaine it all looked different now. The sun had warmed the afternoon air, and the crackle of the morning freshness had long since gone. As they made their way across the point that separated the harbor from the beaches, Brad inhaled the scent of salt water mixed with pine. “Not like Seattle,” he commented.

“There’s nothing wrong with the air in Seattle,” Elaine said defensively.

“I didn’t say there was,” Brad grinned at her. “All I said was that this isn’t like the air in Seattle, and it isn’t Is it?”

Elaine, sorry she’d snapped at him, took his hand. “No,” she said, “it isn’t, and I’m being a ninny again. I’ll stop it, I promise.” She felt Brad squeeze her hand
and returned the slight pressure. Then she saw a flash of movement and pointed. “Brad, look!” she cried. “What is it?”

A small creature, about the size of a weasel, sat perfectly still, one foot on a rock, staring at them, its tiny nose twitching with curiosity.

“It’s an otter,” Brad said.

“A sea otter? This far north?”

“I don’t know. It’s some type of otter though. Look, there’s another!”

The Randalls sat down on a piece of driftwood, and the two small animals looked them over carefully. After what seemed to Elaine like an eternity, first one, then the other returned to its business of scraping at the pebbles on the beach, searching for food. As soon as the pair began its search, four smaller ones suddenly appeared as if they had received a message from their parents that all was well.

“Aren’t they darling!” Elaine exclaimed. At the sudden sound the four pups disappeared and the parents once again turned their attention to the two humans. Then they, too, disappeared.

“Moral:” Brad said, “never talk in the presence of otters.”

“But I couldn’t help it,” Elaine protested. “They’re wonderful. Do you suppose they live here?”

“They probably have a Winnebago parked on the road and just stopped for lunch,” Brad said dryly. Elaine swung at him playfully.

“Oh, stop it! Come on, let’s see if we can find them.”

Her vague feeling of unease—what she called the willies—was gone as she set off after the otters, picking her way carefully over the rocky beach. She knew
it was no use, but she kept going, hoping for one more glimpse of the enchanting creatures before they disappeared into the forest. It was too late; the otters might as well have been plucked from the face of the earth. She stopped and waited for Brad.

“They’re gone,” she sighed.

“You’ll see them again,” Brad assured her. “If they’re not on this beach they’re probably on Sod Beach. It’
s
the next one, isn’t it?”

Elaine nodded and pointed. “Just beyond that point If you want we can cut through the woods.”

“Let’s stick to the beach,” Brad said. “That way I can get a view of the whole thing all at once.”

“Sort of a general overview?” Elaine asked, but she was smiling.

“If you want to put it that way,” Brad said with a grin.

They rounded the point and Brad stopped so suddenly Elaine almost bumped into him. “My God, it’s beautiful, isn’t it?” She came abreast of him and they stood together surveying the crescent that was Sod Beach. The sky was cloudless and the deep blue water and the intensely green forest were separated by a strip of sand that glistened in the brilliant sunlight, highlighted by the silvery stripe of driftwood sparkling next to the woods. The breakers, eight ranks of them, washed gently in, as if caressing the beach. Brad slipped his arm around Elaine’s shoulders and pulled her close to him. With his free arm, he pointed.

“And that, I take it, is the house?”

Elaine’s head moved almost imperceptibly in assent. For one brief moment she wished she could deny it, and instead say something that would take them forever
away from Clark’s Harbor and this beautiful beach with its bizarre past. For an instant she thought she could see the victims of the Sands of Death buried to the neck, their pitiful wailings lost in the sea wind and the roar of the surf that would soon claim them as its own. Then the vision was gone. Only the weathered house remained on the beach and, far off at the opposite end, the tiny cabin.

“Well, we won’t have many neighbors, will we?” Brad said finally, and Elaine had a sinking sensation in her stomach. Brad had already made up his mind. She pulled free of his encircling arm and started moving up the beach.

“Come on,” she said. “We might as well see what it’s like.” Brad trotted silently after her, ignoring the negative tone in her voice.

They had walked once around the house when Harney Whalen arrived, appearing suddenly out of the woods.

“Didn’t think you folks were here yet,” he called to them. “There wasn’t any car out on the road.”

“We walked along the beach,” Brad replied, extending his hand to the approaching police chief. Whalen ignored the gesture, instead mounting the steps to the porch and fishing in his pocket for keys.

“It’s not in very good shape. I haven’t even had it cleaned since the last people … left.”

Brad and Elaine exchanged a look at his slight hesitation, but neither one of them commented on it.

“The place seems to be sound enough,” Brad remarked as Harney opened the front door.

“All the old houses are sound,” Whalen responded. “We knew how to build them back then.”

“How old is it?”

“Must be about fifty or sixty. If you want I suppose I could figure it out exactly. Don’t see any point in it, though.” His tone said clearly to Brad, Don’t bother me with foolish questions.

But Elaine plunged in. “Did your family build it?” she asked. Whalen looked at her sharply, then his face cleared.

“Might say we did; might say we didn’t. We sold the land the house is on and my grandfather helped build the house, then we bought it back when the Barons … left.” Again there was the slight hesitation, and again the Randalls exchanged a look. Brad wondered how much more there was to the story and why the chief didn’t want to tell them all of it Then he looked around and realized that Whalen hadn’t been kidding when he said the place hadn’t been cleaned.

If it hadn’t been for the layer of dust covering everything, Brad would have sworn the house was inhabited. Magazines and newspapers lay open on the chairs and floor, and the remains of a candle, burned to the bottom, sat bleakly on a table. There wasn’t much furniture—only a sofa and two chairs—and what there was had obviously been obtained secondhand.

“They left in a hurry, didn’t they?” Brad asked.

“Like I told you, skipped right out on me,” Whalen said. Then, before Brad could comment further, he began telling them about the house.

“That’s a double fireplace over there. The other side opens in the kitchen, and between the two of them the downstairs stays pretty warm. There’s a bedroom through that door that I suppose you’d want to use,
unless you’ve got kids. If you do, I’d put them in there, just in case of fire. It’s a lot easier to get out of the first floor than the second.”

“We don’t have children,” Elaine said, and stuck her head in the bedroom. It was a large room, facing the beach, and one wall was partly brick. She heard Whalen behind her explaining.

“The brick’s part of the fireplace. The whole house is built around the fireplaces. You’d be surprised how much heat comes through those bricks, especially if you keep fires going in both rooms. Don’t know why they don’t build houses like that anymore—with all the talk about energy, you’d think they’d want to. But no, they build them with the fireplaces on an outside wall, and you can kiss the heat good-bye.

“If you go through there,” he went on, “there’s the bathroom—that opens into the kitchen as well. It’s not so convenient for guests, but for whoever’s living here it works just fine.”

Elaine followed his directions and found herself in a small and incredibly grimy bathroom. She went through it and into the kitchen, where she stared at the forbiddingly large and ungainly wood stove. It seemed to challenge her, and she glared at it, silently telling the stove that come what may, she would learn to make it behave. But she wasn’t too sure.

The kitchen was as filthy as the bathroom. The pots and pans used for the preparation of what had apparently been the last tenants’ final meal were still stacked unwashed in the sink. Elaine swallowed hard, wondering if she would be expected to clean up the mess in the event they rented the place, and pushed on into the dining room.

The table was set, and at each place there was the remains of a half-eaten meal. The food had long since decayed, but from the looks of things it was an abandoned dinner. In the center of the table an ancient glass kerosene lamp stood, and Elaine could see that it was empty: whoever had lived here must have gotten up in the middle of dinner and left without even putting the lamp out. The lamp—God knew how much later—had simply burned itself out.

She was about to ask Whalen what had happened—why his tenants had “skipped out” in the middle of dinner—when she became aware that Brad was already talking to the police chief.

“How much would you want if you were to sell the place?” he was asking. Elaine felt her stomach sink again, and was relieved to hear Whalen’s reply.

“It’s not for sale,” he said in a tone that left no room for argument “It was a mistake when my grandfather sold the land in the first place. I won’t repeat that mistake.”

“You’re going to pass it on to your children?”

“I never married,” Harney replied. “Got lots of family, though. Most of the town is related to me one way or another. I wouldn’t be surprised if my deputy wound up with this place—he’s some kind of nephew.”