Twilight Is Not Good for Maidens (17 page)

As they finally pulled
out of the parking lot, Holly turned to Ashley. “I almost forgot. What is that thing under the seat?” She’d placed it in the passenger wheel well.

A cat-in-the-cream look sneaked across Ashley’s face, and her tones were matter of fact. “Don’t you have one of these? It’s a sound-wave lie detector.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no such thing.” Was the woman completely mad or merely immature? The Rube Goldberg device was made of metal, oblong, and had an opening with a flap and a small antenna. Homemade? Or an old eight-track player duded up?

“That’s what you think. We used them all the time in the interior. It’s activated by this cool buzzer.” From her pocket she pulled a small electronic device. “When we’re questioning someone and think he’s lying, we press this button and …” A
BRRRRTTTT
sound filled the car. Ashley laughed. “When he asks what the noise is, we tell him about our little pal. You can’t imagine how many fools fold and ’fess up. Do you want to borrow it?”

“Oh my god,” Holly said. “I’m going to pretend I never heard this. And don’t let me see it again.”

Back at the office, Holly made sure that Ed’s constable got the scrap of paper. He promised to feed it into the crime machine as quickly as possible. At least Ashley hadn’t embarrassed them, as far as she knew. She promised to fax her notes on the vehicles in the lot to Ed as well. She’d also turned back a dozen cars, according to Harold. “That little girl’s a keeper,” he’d told Holly. “She’s gonna make a damn fine officer.” Ashley had seemed almost subdued at the rare praise. But she’d taken in every word Holly had told her on the way back to the detachment and even asked a few intelligent questions.

In hours Sombrio Beach would return to its quiet peace. Everyone would have to be interviewed, perhaps more than once in Mike’s case since he’d admitted a fondness for Lindsay. She’s been so surprised years ago to learn the mind-blowing fact that witnesses could lie. Even in the innocent, the instinct for self-protection was powerful. And what of the other sets of campers down the beach? That was Ed’s problem now. Problem was, there were just too few people around. The miracle witness was not going to save the day.

Her father wasn’t home yet due to Shogun’s first agility lesson in Saanich. He was joining a group of twelve rookies, probably nearly all women. At least the dog had distracted him from his consuming passion for popular culture. A living interest was healthy. She never wanted to see him as downcast as he had been after her mother had vanished. Once or twice coming home for a weekend, she checked his medicine cabinet in case it contained anything that might tempt him to end to his pain. He’d confessed that he had tried a round of anti-depressants, but they’d made him sleepy. Even a year or two later, the bottle of little blue amitriptyline pills had the same three-quarter level as before.

Just before her father was due to arrive, she followed the instructions he had left for hamburger steak, mashed potatoes, and canned peas. He had the meat nicely mixed with chopped onion, parsley, and the miracle ingredient, ketchup. She almost turned to an easy package of gravy mix but knew he would have suspected the travesty, so she grabbed a couple of cubes of bouillon. Surely they had that in the thirties.

From downstairs in the crawlspace wine cellar, she selected a bottle of tank-car red and poured herself a healthy glass after setting out Shogun’s chow. To stave off her own pangs, she peeled a banana but left it half-finished. The idea of eating was more attractive than the reality, and the banana reminded her of Maddie. How was she doing?

Then she heard her father crunch up the drive in his toy car. He’d survived another harrowing trip on that highway to hell or Victoria, whichever came first.

His attaché case hit the floor by the closet as Shogun followed at his heels and rushed to his food bowl. Hanging up his overcoat and coming into the kitchen, Norman wore a more casual outfit more for golfing. Plus fours, knickers, and a shirt and sweater vest with a bow tie. Much of his wardrobe came from Value Village downtown, which appealed to his frugal nature as much as his demand for period clothes. How many other men ironed white handkerchiefs once a week and put on garters for their socks?

“Smells great. I taught you well. Pardon me while I change. Shogun was the star of his class, but that teeter looks like it will be tough. And I have more good news.”

About Chipper? She realized that she hadn’t thought of him once since she’d left Sombrio Beach. Mulling over the murder had taken all her attention. “Dad, wait, I …”

But he was already up the circular staircase and the squealing plumbing announced his entrance into the shower. Ever the food hound, Shogun was polishing his bowl with his tongue and pushing it around the kitchen.

After lighting the wall fireplace, Holly sat with the wine in the solarium, a glass for her dad on the coffee table. She had hit the CD, one compromise for him. Vinyl 78s were not only in short supply, they skipped and had to be changed every three minutes. Needles were difficult to source, too. Irving Berlin’s “Say it Isn’t So” seemed an emblematic title for the day.

She sipped slowly. Either he was getting better at winemaking or she was losing her taste buds. Then, as “What a Diff’rence a Day Made” came on, Norman strutted down the stairs. “Little girl of mine, Leo Buckstaff and his daughter Samantha aren’t going to be causing
any
trouble
anymore
for
anyone
.” He struck a dramatic pose. His elocution style brought spectators to his classes for key events like the evacuation of Dunkirk or Kennedy’s assassination.

He patted her head and cupped her chin in his hand, looking for a reaction. Her eyes were pooling with tears, and she turned away, but a sniff gave her up.

“What’s the matter? Didn’t you hear me? Are those tears of joy, I hope? I haven’t even given you the lovely specifics. It’s very juicy.”

She’d been waiting for this moment, when Chipper would be exonerated. Why not let the man tell her the good news? “It’s not Chipper, but something else. You go first.”

He drank deeply of the grapey purple wine, in another life a fine dye, and smacked his lips. Then he brushed a dust mote from his smoking jacket with velvet lapels. “Your old man has come to your rescue. I can get a signed affidavit from another faculty member of little Sam lying through her teeth to secure As in his English course. He knows someone in drama who says the same thing. With luck and a quick hearing, she will be out before Christmas for academic misconduct, perhaps even attempted blackmail, and have to continue her education in a third-world country. As for her scoundrel of a father, we are stuck with him. With that bloated administrator’s salary and the hide of a buffalo, he’ll probably never retire.”

She nodded, firming up a smile. A grim tableaux of Lindsay and her Easter bunny kept forcing its way across her mental screen. “I’m proud of you, Dad. This looks like the break we’ve been waiting for. When will you know for sure?”

“The assistant professor is in Edmonton, but he’ll be back next week. His office mate told me all about Samantha. Is that fast work on my part or is it not?” He beamed at her and smoothed back his hair. Did he take a picture of Leslie Howard with him to Barb’s Barber Shop every month?

The glass doors of the fireplace were reflecting a cosy blaze. He wasn’t even complaining that she had lit the propane earlier than January. Maybe he was mellowing. “I wish my news were good. I had a very bad day.”

She told him about the murder, and a palpable gloom came over the room.

Norman was not an overly demonstrative man, but he shook his head and a furrow appeared between his patrician eyebrows. “I see why you’re upset, then. Very tragic and unexpected. Completely senseless. I couldn’t do your job in a thousand years. But as you say, someone has to.”

She exhaled long and low. “I’m not staging a pity party for myself. I realized when I signed on that there would be times like this. Memories I wouldn’t want to take home. But aside from a child dying, I can’t imagine anything worse. And if the two park incidents are connected, you know what that means for this area.”

“But you’re not on the case, as it were. You told me that as a …”

“As a corporal, yes. Small potatoes in a big stew. Do you see that my limitations make me all the more frustrated? I’m not an inspector. So no matter what happens, I have to stand by and…. At least I got them to look at a scrap I picked up from that attack at French.” She gave him the details.

“No kidding! You have your mother’s eagle eye, all right.” He drained the glass and reached for the bottle. “Then we must hope that the upper echelon does its duty as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, let’s drown our sorrows in a beaker or two. What do you think of this colour, then? Rubiate, I’d say. Is that a word?”

Hangovers were bad enough, she thought, but this was a wine that warned you to stop at one. “Sure, pops. Tell me one of your Joe Miller jokes. The one about the parrots and the rosary.”

He began, and was getting to the part where one parrot said, “Throw away your beads, Harry.”

The phone rang, and Holly got up to answer it. A robotic notification to her father from the Vancouver Island Regional Library that the one copy of
How to Win Friends and Influence People
had arrived. Dale Carnegie’s Depression bestseller was still in print. As she hung up, she noticed that the answering machine was blinking. With all that was going on, she hadn’t even checked. She hit the play button, which sent the message across the kitchen into the solarium.

A man’s voice said, “We’re trying to reach Bonnie Martin. This is Rob Dales from the Black Ball Ferry Office. We have something she left on board. Maybe quite some time ago. Can you please call us at …”

Holly gasped and sat down heavily on the breakfast bar stool, her feet dangling like a kid’s. “What the hell?” she said. When she tried to call the number, the hours of operation were over.

“‘Some time ago?’ Is this a horrible joke?” Norman stood rigidly, his face draining of colour and his hand shaking.

Holly went down the stairs and put her arms around his tall, lean frame. Just a hint of a stoop beginning to remind her that he was beginning his sixties. As a rule, they weren’t very demonstrative. Sometimes she missed her mother’s hugs.

“Too late for tonight. I’ll go down first thing in the morning. It must have her ID. She never carried a purse, just that tote bag.”

Unwilling to wait UNTIL
after work, Holly broke personal speed records, arriving in Victoria the next morning the moment the Black Ball Ferry office opened at eight. The Inner Harbour was the crown jewel of the city, with the dowager Empress Hotel on one side, the parliament buildings on the other along with the pink granite Hotel Grand Pacific. A horse carriage clopped its lazy way down the streets to pick up breakfast fares. She was lucky to find a parking spot in front of the newly refurbished CPR coliseum next door. Cars had already started to pull into line for the nine o’clock sailing. The old M.V. Coho had been commissioned before Holly was born, unlike the splashy new B.C. fleet, and she remembered bygone days when her parents took her to the States for the weekend on the same boat. If only she could turn back time.

Inside the office, she was directed to the lost and found, where a middle-aged woman greeted her, plopping onto the counter something she thought never to see again. A sturdy open canvas bag embroidered with a German shepherd. Seventeen-year-old Holly had ordered it from the L.L.Bean catalogue for her mother’s birthday. Their old shep had passed on the year before to tears from everyone, but with Holly off to college soon, her mother’s travelling, and her father’s job, it was no time to get another dog.

Too informal for a brief case or an attaché, Bonnie loved the tote because she could toss everything into it, including the jerky and apples she preferred for an on-the-run lunch. She kept papers in it along with her wallet, comb and brush, tissues, and the “kitchen sink,” as Norman joked.

Holly ran her fingers over it in reverence. But it had no secrets to whisper. It was empty. She looked in question at the woman, a pleasant faced grandmother with her family in a picture on the desk nearby. “I don’t understand. How did you know where to call? How long has this been here? It’s my mother’s, you see, and she’s been missing for a very long time.”

Em, as her nametag read, blinked at the news as her reading glasses bobbed on a chain around her neck. “Oh my dear. I’m so sorry,” she said, as she reached under a fold in the bottom of the bag. “The bag was found fallen behind a shelf when we did a major renovation here last week. It could have been there for years. We don’t keep records. People usually claim their belongings soon after they figure out that it was left on the ferry. We’ve mailed things all over the country. Even to Europe and Asia.”

“Yes, but …”

Em gave a proud smile. “I just started working here last month. I’m guessing that it
seemed
empty at first. But when I lifted this fold on the bottom, I found an address.” She showed Holly the small paper label for envelopes. It had her mother’s name along with her address. They had tried four Martins in Sooke before leaving the message.

Holly showed her RCMP ID to claim the bag and signed off on a waiver. “And there’s no one here who could say when it came in? No log or anything?”

Em seemed embarrassed. “Oh my. Let’s see. You could try old Bob Filman. He retired last year after forty years on the job. He lives over in Port Angeles.” The Black Ball was an American company, so that stood to reason. The line had been started when clipper ships crossed the oceans.

Holly left a message on her father’s answering machine at the office. He had told her to call immediately upon collecting the bag. She pulled into traffic and began the long haul west. At least she was travelling against the rush-hour flow. She took Government Street and veered up at Hillside to Douglas. The bag sat beside her, mute and faithful. Holly reached over and touched it as if it were a live thing. Bonnie was never without it. If she’d lost it before she’d disappeared, they would have heard. But what the hell was it doing en route to Washington State? Did the ferry keep records of cars? If she’d boarded on foot, Bonnie had vanished just before passports became mandatory to enter the U.S.

Assuming again. It made no sense at all that her mother had left it two hundred miles south of her last known call from Campbell River way up island. And yet the bag asserted a palpability impossible to ignore.

A canvas witness to her past had driven the thoughts of Lindsay out of her mind. A gravel truck gave her the horn when a light turned green and she didn’t move. Holly snapped back to the present. With communication so instant, soon the murder would hit the headlines from Victoria to Vancouver to Toronto, and the public pressure would be in full force. This was no drug deal gone wrong, a fatal beating outside a nightclub, the fringes of a minor gang war. Not since the beating and drowning death of a Victoria teenager by a vicious mob from her high school had the climate been so incendiary. Years later, the unrepentant female ringleader remained in jail.

At the office by nine, Holly read some online editorials on the
Times Colonist
website: “Paradise Lost for Island Women?” Angry citizens attacked the police for their lack of quick results. Had they no idea what rainforest meant at a crime scene? “Not even one person of interest?” a mother asked. One suggested that the RCMP was losing its effectiveness as a policing unit, that it belonged to a frontier era long gone and buried. The magical island was in deep trouble, despite the smug satisfaction that separated it from the rest of the country. From a national treasure to a national disgrace.

“Listen to this,” she said to Ann, feeling the heat across her face as she read. “How long must we wait for justice? All over the world we are known for our natural beauties and our peaceful and progressive lifestyle. Every possible resource should be marshalled and no expense spared until women can feel safe outdoors again.”

“Radio, TV, all the sources have picked up the story. The panic is spreading beyond the parks now that the scenes are linked. At UVic and Camosun, campus safewalk programs are being pushed to their limits. Other groups plan to picket at the legislature. The outdoor stores are stocking pepper spray.” Ann pulled out a tissue and polished her reading glasses as the errant sun peeked through the window.

“That’s a mess waiting to happen. It’s almost impossible to control where that stuff goes. Remember that photographer airlifted to bear country who started spraying himself while he was in a helicopter?” A can of OC, pepper spray, rode on her belt, but she’d never had occasion to use it. Studies showed that a “velcro effect” operated with OC in that the mere threat was enough to dissuade a subject, at least a rational one.

“One bright spot. They’ve made an arrest in Langford for those assaults,” Ann said. “The radio said that they took a confession from an eighteen-year-old yesterday. Two of the women have ID’d him.”

“Can’t be the same guy at all. Not the same targets. Not the same method. Plus one was a robbery.”

“My neighbour down the hall said that he was thinking of nipping over the border to buy his daughter a ‘lady-gun’ special for when she works the night shift at the Village Market. I told him he would be in big trouble if he got caught at customs.
Lady gun
. Can you imagine?” She took a two-handed stance with the imaginary weapon turned at ninety degrees, a preposterous pose that usually made them smile. Like most Canadians, Ann and Holly didn’t believe that carrying a firearm made anyone safer; it just upped the odds of an innocent getting shot in the crossfire. Canada had a very controversial registry too tight for conservatives and too loose for liberals. Though varmint guns, hunting rifles, and shotguns were sold, hand guns and automatic weapons were off the menu.

“What nonsense. Many rapes and attacks are committed in daylight. There’s another false sense of security. And watch for the gun nuts to claim that everyone should be armed, even grade schoolers,” Holly added.

“What frosts me is that it’s the young, educated white women who make the news. Others are considered collateral damage as if they wanted to live in dangerous areas. What have you heard from Ed? My contacts downtown won’t even take my calls.”

“There’s a media blackout. Ed sent that paper scrap to forensics, but I’m not holding my breath. Another of those too-good-to-be true moments. It isn’t called a scrap for no reason.”

Holly looked at the calendar. It had been over a week since they’d seen or heard from their colleague. “I’m going to call Chipper,” she said to Ann, and picked up the office phone, on speaker function. “It’s a bad sign that he hasn’t contacted us. I’m thinking that he’s been told not to, but you’d think …”

A subdued but musical voice answered. Holly had met his parents only once, when Chipper had been hospitalized with minor burns from a brush fire. As an only child, he had a lot of pressure to succeed. “I am sorry, Corporal Holly, but he is working at West Shore.”

“When does he usually get off?”

“He used to be home right on time … before all this. Now it’s as if he doesn’t want to talk to anyone. At the table he is like a ghost. And he is out walking at all hours. Thinking he may see one of those men who have been preying on our women.” She choked back a sob.

“We hope’d he might call us.” She watched Ann’s face slump in the letdown.

“My apologies for my son. I know Chirakumar likes you and Corporal Ann so very much. He calls you his ladies. But he is not at all himself, my lovely boy. I think he has lost many pounds. I can hardly spoon a bite into him. Dessert he doesn’t even care to taste. And Diwali is coming. Our happiest time of the year. How can we celebrate when my son is in such trouble?”

Given her pride in her table, that must hurt. “I’m sorry to hear that. We think the world of … Chirakumar. He’s a friend as well as a colleague, and we’re sick about this.”

A sigh came over the speaker phone. “To be very honest, I think he is showing signs of depression. Not eating, not sleeping. A mother knows.”

“Did he say when he might get his official hearing?”

“The very formal part, you mean? He has already given testimony twice. I am thinking that this is killing him. Waiting, waiting, waiting. I have been making offerings to Ganesh ever since his happened. It may well take months, he tells me.” There was a pause and a sniff. “I am sorry. I must ring off now. Speaking about this distresses me so much, and my husband will be needing his tea. I have worries about him as well. He is not a young man anymore.”

Hanging up with her own sigh, Holly traded looks with Ann. The older woman had more faith in the force than Holly did.

A double line parted Ann’s eyebrows. “We need to give him a pep talk. Even if he’s not supposed to discuss the case. This doesn’t sound good. He’s way more sensitive than I thought. Men sometimes are, the poor babies.”

Minutes later, to their surprise, Boone checked in. “They’ve completed the autopsy,” he said, disappointment in his voice. “No semen, but lots of bruising. Poor kid had a rough time. She might have died during the rape because some of the tissue injuries are ante-mortem.”

“Jesus. No good news for us so far.”

“There is something. The fingernail scraping might provide some skin cells. That will take a bit longer even if they are rushing it. And of course they could be hers. When someone’s cutting off your air supply, your main concern is your own neck.”

Chipper would want to hear this. Maybe they should see what happened if they called West Shore. Trying his home in the evening might be the only choice, intrusive or not. A paranoid part of her wondered if his line was tapped. Surely not in Canada. She turned to Ann. “This day is dragging on forever. Ashley should be back from investigating that accident.”

A car screeched to a halt outside. Was there any other kind of entrance for the woman? Ashley hadn’t learned like Chipper to duck her head when entering the former cottage. Her hat came off, and she turned to grab it.

Ashley had done well at Sombrio. Were they back to square one? Ann folded her hands on her desk. Holly waited for the buzz bomb to land. Now she knew how Londoners felt during the Blitz. “What now?” asked Holly, aware that she was sounding like her own mother.

“I was coming back from investigating a fender bender the other side of Juan de Fuca Road. Went into the bushes for a pee, which was good that I did because …” Ashley was breathing hard, as if she’d run the last mile. More from excitement than exertion.

“We’re not interested in your bathroom habits. Are you saying someone saw you and reported you or something absurd like that?” Holly drummed her fingers on the desk.

“A woman at Sandcut Beach came out of the forest to the road and hailed me. Said she’d been raped. Choked with a wire. I took a brief statement, but it made more sense to …”

Both women stood up. “A wire?” they said in unison.

French, Sombrio, now Sandcut. All spots on the coast. Two was a coincidence. Three was a pattern. Holly’s spine felt cut off at the neck. But a rape, not a murder. Her mind did cartwheels for a long fraction of a second before she snapped back into the moment.

“Where is she? How badly was she injured?” Despite her concern for the girl, the double-edged thought hit her that they might at last have a witness. They hadn’t let out the information about the wire, only that the women had been strangled. Maddie Mattoon didn’t seem the type to talk about her attack. Inspector Crew would have warned her. But the five students with Lindsay.… Odds were good that they had mentioned it, even if cautioned. There was also the crazy possibility that it was a copycat crime. Some of the cleverest killers, if that was the right word, sandwiched their personal victim between or after two other hapless victims to misdirect the police.

“She’s not beaten up. I’m not that stupid. It seemed better to bring her here. I took the initiative. She begged for a few minutes to pull herself together, so I came in here first.” She shot them a defiant look. “I rolled with the flow. Sometimes you have to. That’s part of …”

Ann broke in. “We don’t need a protocol lesson. Get to the point.”

Ashley gulped back a breath and cast a look behind her through the window to where the Impala sat, dust motes still roiling in the air. She had probably driven like a demon. “She seems okay, considering what she’s been through. You know what it’s like down there, and I couldn’t get a connection. Stupid fucking radio system. One of these days, someone’s gonna really suffer.”