Читать книгу Dying for Murder - Suzanne F. Kingsmill - Страница 5

Fortunately it was summer. Classes were out and I had some open time to redo my experiments, once I’d rescheduled some meetings. I rationalized that I would have had to take the time to go back to Pelee if Duncan hadn’t come through with Spaniel Island, so it wasn’t as if I was taking a vacation. It would be legitimate research. And Duncan, miraculously, had secured the recording equipment I would need to tape my birds. I wasn’t even going to have to lug it with me. It was already down there. It would be fun to be at a research station again. There’s something invigorating about the high-intensity atmosphere of such a place, where research is paramount and everyone is tied together to one common goal — to find answers to their questions. The questions, of course, are all different but the route to the answer lies in the heart and in the drive to do it, and researchers the world over have that in spades. If they don’t they won’t last.

The flight to Savannah was uneventful, although I was a little surprised when Martha showed up at the airport with a bag almost as big as she was and announced herself by calling out across fifty yards of airport that she was here and had managed to get a seat beside me. Don’t get me wrong. Martha and I are good friends. It’s just that I hadn’t known that she was coming with me. She had neglected to mention that when she booked the tickets.

“Duncan invited me down. Although I told him I wanted to stay at the research station with you, rather than with him. Hard decision, but you’re going to need me as a research assistant to help with all those little buntings,” she said, daring me to contradict her.

The fact that I hadn’t needed her at Point Pelee didn’t seem to have crossed her mind. She told me once that she hated the wilderness and this island was going to be pretty wild, if I knew Duncan. What people do for their lovers, I thought and then winced. My erstwhile lover, Patrick, had flown across the pond to take a job in London, England. I hadn’t been willing to give up my career to follow him and he hadn’t been willing to give up his. We had seen each other just once in the last eight months. I had new respect for Martha, to overcome her dislike of the wilderness because she loved Duncan that much.

We had to change planes in Atlanta. Our connecting plane was a tiny twenty-seat affair, and as it sat on the tarmac I looked out the window and watched a couple of men manhandle Martha’s suitcase into the hold. We were only in the air for forty minutes and landed at a tiny airport on the coast. From there we had to take a taxi, which proved problematic as we tried to stuff Martha’s suitcase in the trunk. In the end it had to go in the backseat. The taxi driver talked nonstop all the way to the wharf, where a boat was waiting to take us to the island. The wharf had seen better days and parts of it were plastered with seagull poop. The birds themselves had taken up perches on the tops of masts and bridges, watching guard over their domain, ever ready should a child drop a French fry or a fisherman unload some fish guts overboard. The marina was located up a tidal creek from the sea, so there were no breathtaking vistas or pounding waves, only a mediocre working marina catering to the sailors and captains of smaller vessels. It was actually anticlimactic.

We made our way down the dock to our boat — a large open wooden vessel with an enclosed front half that looked sturdy enough to easily manage rough seas. A black-haired, bearded middle-aged man had the hatch to the engine open amidships and was fiddling with something inside, a look of concentration on his face. When we hove in view the look turned to impending impatience. When I said, “Hello. Is this the boat to Spaniel Island?” he just grunted and went on with his repair work with a desultory wave of the hand, which I took to mean “Yes.” I must say it didn’t instill a great deal of confidence seeing all those tools laid out on the deck and the sweat on his brow. But it all washed over Martha, who started up a one-sided conversation with the man. While she was talking at him a very tall, very thin man wearing a forest green hoodie that half covered his face arrived and eyeballed the tools, and Martha and the captain.

“Looks like you need a hand, Trevor,” he said.

“In more ways than one,” growled Trevor. “Welcome back, David,” he added, but with gritted teeth.

“Still haven’t come around yet, huh?” asked David. When Trevor didn’t respond he said, “And here I thought you’d actually taken a liking to sea turtles.” And he laughed, but without any humour.

Trevor didn’t answer this cryptic comment but instead scowled, got up, returned his tools to a toolbox, and went up to the bow of the boat. Seconds later the engine coughed to life and Trevor released his lines and we were off. While the marina had been nothing to write home about, where we were going was quite another story. We motored into the inland waterway separating the mainland from the barrier islands and the Atlantic Ocean. There was a swell as we rounded a headland into the open ocean between two barrier islands and I felt my stomach begin to lurch. I had visions of myself aboard the Susanna Moodie, the ship that had taken me to the Arctic the previous summer and had left murder and mayhem in its wake, along with nauseatingly horrible seasickness. I tried to calm down by reminding myself that it was only a half-hour trip, or so Duncan had said. We were headed toward a long narrow island that danced in the distance, its white-sand beaches taking up the sun and flinging it back in a brilliance of dazzling light. I concentrated on that and the queasiness subsided. As we drew closer the island came into focus, the dark green of the live oaks in sharp contrast to the white of the beaches.

“I wonder why they call it Spaniel Island?” asked Martha. It was a rhetorical question that to our surprise actually garnered an answer. David had materialized at our sides and was gazing at the island with what looked like relish, his green hoodie now thrown back to reveal a circle of bright white hair outlining the bald spot on the top of his head. When he saw us looking at him he rearranged his long thin face and aquiline nose to look more or less neutral. I wondered why he had bothered.

“It’s the quintessential story of a dog and a boy,” he said. “Originally the island was called Little Island, rather unimaginative, if not descriptive. It is actually only ten kilometers long and maybe a kilometer wide, off its diet.”

He leaned against the railing of the boat and continued. “It was 1949. A mother and father and their three young children and the family Springer Spaniel were on the beach.” He pointed to the island. “See? The south end on the sea side. They had found a nice place on the white sands, very close to where a tidal creek penetrated into the island. It’s actually still there today. When the tide is going out these creeks become fast moving rivers. The little boy, the youngest, crawled over to the creek and the sandy embankment gave way and he fell in.”

Martha’s face was illustrating every detail of the story and I almost laughed, but it wasn’t exactly the right moment to do that.

“The tide was going out, and the little boy was being carried out to sea and was going under. The parents couldn’t swim. That’s when the spaniel catapulted himself into the creek and swam to the child, grabbing it by the back of his T-shirt and swimming with the current until it was weak enough to let the dog and the boy cross over to some islands of sand that had been exposed by the tides. It was a little miracle and the powers that be renamed the island in honour of the spaniel.”

“Why didn’t they name it after the animal’s actual name?” said Martha, her face a mixture of worry, indignation, and joy.

“Because the animal was named Bunchkins,” said David as he reached back and pulled the hoodie up over his head. The wind had sprung up and I wished I had a hoodie too.

We stood in companionable silence for a while, and then I said, “What brings you to Spaniel Island?”

He looked at me, his eyebrows almost meeting as they rose in a quizzical salute, as if he was trying to size me up. “I’d like to say that I come here quite often to rejuvenate, which is true, but this time I am here on some unpleasant business. In such a place of beauty it seems a shame that the banalities of life should intrude.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say to that little bomb and, in fact, he didn’t let me. He wanted to know why we were here. After I told him he chuckled. “I hope you don’t think it will be a vacation rooming in with that lot.”

Hearing him call my research a vacation grated on me, but I let it go. Instead I said, “You know them?”

He chuckled again and the smile on his face was not soft and warming — it was jeering and predatory and it made me very uncomfortable. “All a bunch of prima donnas,” he said and glanced at me again as if to say “Are you one too?”

I tried to imagine a research station full of prima donnas and couldn’t. Biologists may be eccentric, even opinionated, but most of them would not be classified as prima donnas. Although, maybe not. He seemed to be reading my mind.

“All right. Not ALL prima donnas. But they are a strong bunch of individuals and they make me uncomfortable always talking about their research as if it was the only thing on earth.” Did I detect a hint of anger in his voice?

“They’re just a harmless and dedicated bunch of biologists,” Martha said helpfully. I glowered at her. She had just pigeonholed my life in one lighthearted sentence.

“Dedicated? Yes,” he said and turned to stare at us. “But harmless? No.”