Mortar and Murder (5 page)

Chilled and damp, I was focused on keeping my face down and my hood up, so I had no idea anything was wrong until Derek cut the engine.

“Are we there already?” I looked up, blinking as the rain hit my face.

“Not yet,” Derek said over his shoulder, still steering the boat. The motor may have been cut off, but the boat was moving.

“Why did we stop?”

“There’s something in the water.” Derek’s voice was muffled by the collar of the rain gear as well as the wind and rain. “Grab that hook, would you?” He waved a hand.

I looked around. Along the side of the boat lay an implement, a long pole that had a hook at the end, with a straight prong or spike behind it. “This?” I picked it up and extended it to him.

“Thanks. Could you to hold the boat steady?”

“Sure,” I said, scrambling forward. “What’s going on?”

I expected there to be a log or tree limb in the water, maybe, that he needed to push out of our way. I was wholly unprepared for what I did see when I followed the direction of his finger. All the color left my face and my breath caught in my throat. “That’s a body!”

“Looks that way,” Derek said. “Could just be a mannequin or a scarecrow, I suppose. Someone’s idea of a joke.”

“Not very funny, is it?”

He shook his head. “Not very, no. I think we’re almost close enough. If you’ll hold the boat steady, I’ll try to hook her and pull her in.”

I nodded, my hands wet on the steering wheel, my lips tight and my teeth clenched against the nausea rolling in my stomach.

The body was that of a girl or young woman, facedown in the water, and long, pale hair floated around her. She was dressed for summer, the small of her back exposed between low-riding jeans and a cropped top. Her skin, both on her back and arms, was pale and bluish, although not necessarily because it was her natural complexion.

“Don’t look,” Derek commanded, and I averted my eyes as he used the hook to snag the corpse and bring it closer to the boat.

“Do you need help?” I asked, not looking at him.

There was nothing else to see in any direction. No other people, alive or dead; no debris from—for instance—a shipwreck. Nothing but choppy waves and rain. Where did she come from? Had she fallen off a boat, and no one had missed her? Had she been on a boat that sank?

“I got it,” Derek said. “Would you go over to the other side of the boat, please. I’m gonna try to lift her in, and I need your weight on the other side so we won’t capsize.”

“Sure.” I left the steering wheel—the boat was stationary now anyway, drifting on the swells—and headed for the port side. From the railing, I turned to watch Derek bend over the wale, straining. The small boat rocked, tilting almost flush with the water surface before he managed to haul the body, none too gently, into the boat.

I squeezed my eyes shut. I’ve read books describing bloated, drowned corpses fished from the water, nibbled by lobsters and fish, and I didn’t think I’d like to experience one firsthand.

“It’s OK, Avery,” Derek said, his voice low. “She doesn’t look bad.”

“Just dead?” But I opened my eyes.

No, she didn’t look bad, although she looked very dead. Pale and somehow empty.

She must have been a pretty woman, alive. Her features were regular, with wide cheekbones and a dimpled chin. Eyebrows and lashes were a few shades darker than the blond hair slicked back from her face by the salt water. Dry, it would probably be ash or wheat blond. At a guess, she was somewhere in her midtwenties, about my height, but with longer legs and a slim figure.

“Are you going to try mouth-to-mouth?” My voice was hushed.

Derek shook his head, his eyes on the still figure in the bottom of the boat. “It’s too late. She’s been in the water for hours. Probably since sometime last night.”

“Poor thing. Drowning must be a horrible way to go.”

“I don’t think she drowned,” Derek said. “She probably died from exposure. Hypothermia. The water is freezing this time of year, with all the snowmelt. Wearing just that”—he indicated the jeans and skimpy shirt—“she would have frozen to death long before she had time to drown.”

“I’m not going to ask you how you can tell.”

He turned back to the wheel. “We’re gonna have to go back to Waterfield. Get your phone out, would you? There’s not gonna be any reception out here, but once we get closer to land, you should be able to raise Wayne.”

I nodded, digging in my pocket. Before I tried to call the Waterfield chief of police, though, I found a tarp under one of the seats and covered the dead girl with it. Both because I didn’t want to look at her, and because I thought she could use that little bit of dignity.

By the time we were within sight of land, I had coverage, and I dialed Wayne’s number. When he answered, I explained the situation. His first words were, “Not my jurisdiction,” but then he said that he’d call the coast guard, although “it isn’t their jurisdiction, either. They respond to incidents on the water, like shipwrecks, fires, and oil spills, but they don’t investigate drowning deaths.”

“So whose jurisdiction is it? The state police? Your friend Reece Tolliver?”

“Maybe,” Wayne said. “I’ll give him a call and find out. And I’ll meet you at the harbor in ten minutes. Tell Derek to put in somewhere out of the way. When the ambulance shows up, I don’t want a crowd gathering to see what’s going on.”

I relayed the instructions to Derek, and then I found myself caught up in thoughts about the girl—the corpse—and wondering what had happened to her.

She wasn’t dressed for being out on the water in early April in Maine. Or outside at all, for that matter. She should have been wearing an overcoat of some sort over the flimsy top, not to mention shoes and socks.

The soles of her feet were abraded, I’d noticed, as if she’d been walking barefoot over gravel or rough tree roots. But what kind of idiot goes outside barefoot in April, when the ground’s only been thawed for a week or two?

“A drunk one,” Wayne said when we had put in to shore and I had pointed out my observations. He’d been waiting for us at the far end of the harbor, as far away from any houses or businesses as he could get. “She’s probably some girl from Barnham College, who had herself a good time last night, and now she’s paid the ultimate price for it.”

He looked at her, shaking his head sadly. I knew he was thinking of his son, Josh, and his stepdaughter, Shannon—Kate’s daughter—both Barnham College students.

Our corpse would have to be one of the older students if she came from the college; she looked closer to twenty-five than twenty. Barnham was a four-year college, so barring the odd exception, the oldest students there were around twenty-three or so.

“If there were others involved, she probably scared them witless when she went in the water and disappeared,” Wayne added, “and they were too worried to report it. May be drugs or something involved, that would get them into big trouble if they called us. The ME will figure that out. Toxicology will take a few days, but meanwhile I’ll take a picture of her down to Barnham and see if anyone can identify her.”

“
You
will?” Derek was watching as the ambulance crew approached. The ambulance itself was parked at the end of the road; the two paramedics were maneuvering their gurney across the rough planks of the pier.

Wayne grimaced, hands in the pockets of his tan uniform pants and shoulders hunched against the weather, his curly salt-and-pepper hair beaded with raindrops. “I talked to the coast guard. If there’s a chance she’s from Barnham, they want me to handle it. Even if she’s not, I’m better equipped to deal with her than Reece, given the glut of dead bodies we’ve had since Avery moved to town.”

“It’s not my fault,” I said. Several of those bodies had been dead before I even got to Waterfield. And I certainly hadn’t had anything to do with killing the others.

“Of course not,” Wayne agreed. “But you’ve gotten up to some trouble in the past year, Avery.”

I shrugged, pouting. So what if I had? It still wasn’t my fault. And I’d helped him solve several of those murders, let’s not forget. Putting myself in grave personal danger along the way, too.

Well, this time there was no danger of that, anyway. I had no idea who the dead girl was, and apart from the fact that we’d found her, she had no connection to us. I had no reason in the world to concern myself in her death. In fact, once the paramedics had taken charge of the body, I intended to wash my hands of the whole thing—I’d make sure Derek gave his hands a good scrubbing, too—and then I intended to get back in the boat and go back to Rowanberry Island and back to work on the house, and I wasn’t going to give the girl or her death a second thought. This time, it had nothing to do with me, and I was happy to keep it that way. It made for a nice change.

The two paramedics wheeled their gurney up to where we stood, with the corpse at our feet, still covered by the blue tarp. Wayne had blocked off the entire pier, so the paramedics had had to duck under several lengths of yellow crime scene tape strung from post to post down by the road. A very few people were hanging out down there, looking our way, but there were no crowds, per se. Maybe it was simply the unpleasant weather that was keeping most of the crowds at bay. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t about to complain. I’d had my share of notoriety back in September, when news vans had been parked outside our house on Becklea Drive and Tony “the Tiger” Micelli from Portland’s Channel Eight News had been hoping for another case like Chicago’s John Wayne Gacy, with dozens of bodies buried in the yard and crawlspace. He hadn’t gotten his wish, thank God, and the media onslaught had only lasted a couple of days, but I wasn’t eager to repeat the experience.

It took only a few minutes for the paramedics to lift the drowning victim onto the gurney and confer with Wayne about where they were taking her and what they’d be doing once they got there. They were from the nearest fire department, doing chauffeur duty since it would have taken too long for a van to arrive from the medical examiner’s office in Portland, the nearest big city to Waterfield. “Big” being relative; metropolitan Portland has about 230,000 inhabitants, versus my hometown of New York City’s more than eight and a half million. Compared to Waterfield, though, it was a big place. Once again, I was aware of a feeling of displacement, my perceptions so radically different from what they used to be.

At any rate, the paramedics would be taking the victim to Portland, where they would deliver her to the morgue, where the ME would do whatever it is medical examiners do. I shut down that train of thought in time to hear what Derek was saying instead.

“. . . don’t need us, we’ll just head back to work.”

“Sure.” Wayne nodded. “It’s not like there’s much you can tell me other than that you found her floating in the water somewhere between Rowanberry Island and the mainland at 8:42 A.M. or thereabouts. If you’ve never seen her before and there was nothing else out there with her . . .”

Derek shook his head. “Nothing we noticed. We didn’t take the time to look around much, since we wanted to get her back here as quickly as possible.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Wayne said. “The coast guard is having a trawl for anything unusual. Keep an eye out, just in case you notice something on your way back to Rowanberry Island, but other than that, I don’t think there’s anything more you can do. And no reason for you to concern yourselves further.” His glance brushed mine.

OK, so perhaps a few times in the past I’d stumbled into one of Wayne’s cases, where I didn’t belong. Mostly because I’d found some kind of information that concerned someone I knew, and I felt compelled to figure out what was going on. And maybe he and Derek had had to come to my rescue a few times, when I’d gotten in over my head. Mostly because I didn’t watch where I was going. But there was no need to worry about that this time.

“You don’t have to warn me off,” I said. “I’m sorry she drowned, or died of exposure or whatever, but I don’t know her, and what happened to her is none of my business. I just want to go back to my house on the island and get back to work.”

Wayne nodded.

“She’s all yours. I won’t even ask you later if you’ve figured out who she is and what happened to her.”

“You don’t have to go that far,” Wayne said, while Derek’s lips twitched. “I’ll let you—both of you—know what I find out. Just as long as I don’t have to worry about either of you interfering.”

“I never interfere,” Derek said.

“I never mean to interfere,” I added.

Wayne shook his head, resigned. “Just go away,” he said. “Let me know if you come across anything interesting. Like another body.”

“Gah.” I shuddered. “Please don’t say that. One dead body is enough.”

“More than enough,” Wayne agreed, “but still, let me know if anything turns up.”

Derek handed me back down into the boat and jumped in after me while Wayne followed the two paramedics and their sad burden toward the shore and the ambulance and police cruiser waiting there.