Читать книгу Dying for Murder - Suzanne F. Kingsmill - Страница 9

Stacey pushed back her chair and rose slowly to her feet, her plate still full of food.

“I’ll send Darcy to show you the equipment,” she said to me, and then she was gone.

“Is she always so abrupt?” I asked as I looked over at Sam and Melanie.

“She’s got a heart of gold,” said Sam “She just doesn’t know how to show it.”

“She means well,” said Melanie.

“Some people find it uncomfortable to be around a weight-challenged person,” said Sam, “and she feels that, that she is being judged by her weight and not her mind. It’s given her a bit of a chip on her shoulder.”

I looked at Melanie, whose face was neutral, and at Martha, whose face was screaming sympathy from every overweight pore.

We had just finished our breakfast when Darcy appeared at our table, his iPod dangling out of one pocket and his iPhone in his hand.

“Latest news — hot off my iPhone,” he said. “I’ve been making the rounds warning everyone. There’s a hurricane coming and we are right in its path. If it holds to course we will have to evacuate within forty-eight to sixty hours. If it veers north we’ll be okay, but the mainland will get the worst of it.”

Martha and I glanced at each other in alarm and she said, “But we just got here.”

“Maybe you should have checked the weather forecast,” he said, but when I looked at him he was smiling.

“Are they evacuating the mainland?” I asked.

“Not yet, no.”

“Surely we’re not that much different?” I really did not want to get back in that boat so soon, especially if the seas were swelling.

“It’s a barrier island. It got that name for a reason. It can take quite a punch from any hurricane that hits it.”

“But we have several rows of pretty impressive dunes between us and the sea,” said Martha, who was fiddling with her orange juice, swirling it round and round just like the sea in a storm. I dragged my eyes away from it and back onto Darcy.

“Thing is, Spaniel Island is barely above sea level and a bad hurricane or a direct hit could flood it badly. Those dunes can’t hold back the power of a really ugly sea. The barrier islands are always being evacuated, just in case. So please prepare a bag and be ready at short notice.” Darcy paused to catch his breath.

Martha’s eyes had widened to the size of saucers and the fact that she made no comment was a comment in itself.

“No worries,” said Darcy. Martha looked dubious. “It’ll probably miss us entirely. Meanwhile — business as usual. I have to go and help Trevor board up some windows but I’ll take you to your equipment now if you want.” Martha and I collected our dishes, said goodbye to Sam and Melanie, and deposited our trays in the kitchen. Darcy led us out a side door, which led onto the wraparound verandah. We were on the dune side of the building, among the trees, and it was quite dark. The sun had trouble penetrating the canopy. Martha excused herself, saying she had something to do, and I followed Darcy across a wooden bridge to a larger two-storey building. I was amazed that I had not noticed it from the clearing, until I realized it was hidden from view by the turning of the dunes, as the two main buildings followed the curving dune line. It was the exact opposite to the other building, made as it was from cinder blocks three stories tall. It looked like exactly what it was: a research station, with a nod to aesthetics in the vinyl siding that covered most of the cinder blocks. When we entered the new building we entered the universal world of a biology station, from the faint whiff of animal feces to the sickly scent of formaldehyde.

Darcy led me down a pale yellow corridor, lined with prints of cheetah and lions, gazelles and eagles. On each side of the corridor were doors that opened into lab space. Darcy disappeared through the last door on the left and I followed him into a room that was at once familiar and strange. Familiar because it contained the apparatus and equipment of biologists everywhere, from the live traps and mist nets to the radio transmitters and antennas to the binoculars, telescopes, raingear, and hip waders. Strange, because I’d never been here before, despite the familiarity. Darcy pulled out a parabola and handed it to me. It looked like a giant soup bowl and it helped to concentrate and amplify sound and funnel it into a recorder.

“How long have you been Stacey’s assistant?” I asked, and at once realized that it sounded rather abrupt. But he didn’t seem to mind.

“’Bout two years. I was her student and she offered me the job. I thought it would be a lark.”

“And has it?”

He grinned at me. “You bet. Beats a sit-down job any day.” I laughed. I couldn’t imagine him sitting down for long.

“Do you think we’ll have to evacuate?” I asked.

“That will be Stacey’s decision, but it’s not looking good. Just one more worry on her back.”

“Obviously I don’t know her,” I said, “but she seems kind of stretched out.”

“Yeah, well she’s had some kind of stomach flu or something and has been under the weather for the last five days, so she hasn’t been about much.”

He swivelled his head to look at me, a little dimple in his left cheek twitching.

“Is that why she hadn’t met Wyatt?” I asked.

Something in Darcy’s face vied for control but lost, and he rearranged his face into a look of pure neutrality. Intrigued, I waited.

“You could say that,” he finally said.

Darcy hauled out all my equipment and the two of us spent some time making sure it was working properly. I felt that little twinge of excitement I always get just before I go out into the field. Research is so stimulating because you are testing the unknown to see if your theory works or doesn’t work. The collection of raw data is exciting. Photographers know the feeling. The summer I stumbled across a body in the wilderness my brother Ryan had been so transported by his craft that he hadn’t noticed the lime green insect he was photographing was perched on a dead man’s body. You take your photos, hundreds of them, and then you go through them and find the gems. Only in my case it was getting the birdsong recordings back to the lab, to a machine that would turn the song into symbols on a page. These would then be analyzed to determine if my theory was supported by the data. It was like getting something for free — taking it from nature without leaving a trace — and using it as a palette for my research. I could do field work forever.

Darcy broke into my thoughts and led me back down the long corridor, every door open to the labs beyond. When I commented about it to Darcy he said, “Nobody locks anything around here. That’s why the missing vial of vaccine is such a concern. We work on an honour system and have never had any problems until now. And Wyatt isn’t helping much — he’s being pretty vague about what vial and when. It can’t possibly affect his work any, he has extra vaccine, so I guess Stacey’s doing damage control for the theft itself, if it is a theft.” He paused. “I wish she’d let me do the investigating — she’s so weak after the flu — but she’d have none of it when I suggested it.”

As we passed one of the labs a voice called out, “Darce?”

Darcy stopped and walked through the open door. I followed behind. Sam was standing amid a bunch of esoteric looking machinery, test tubes, and vials of all descriptions. He handed Darcy a sealed envelope and said, “Would you mind taking that to Stacey, please? It’s the diagram she wanted. And she wants it yesterday.”

Darcy took the envelope and turned to look at me. “Sam here is our resident forensics man when he isn’t batman.” I think I was supposed to laugh at that last reference, but Sam rolled up his eyes and I figured he’d heard the joke a million times. Darcy slapped the envelope in his hand and said, “Anything interesting?”

Sam shook his head, but there was a glint in his eye as he said, “Only to Stacey.” He smiled then and turned to me and said, “I’ll be mist netting some bats tonight. If you see Martha would you ask her if she’d like to come? You are welcome too, of course, seeing as how you were unlucky this morning.”

“Does Stacey often ask you to do forensics?” I asked, ignoring his invitation in the haste to get my question out. He was momentarily disconcerted and said no, drawing it out like pull taffy. It was an invitation to elaborate on why I had asked in the first place. Since I wasn’t really sure why, I changed the subject back to mist netting and begged off Sam’s invitation, citing Stacey’s invitation.

As Sam turned back to his work I said, “Is there a map of everyone’s study sites so I don’t traipse through them?”

Sam smiled. “Ah, you’ve been talking to Stacey, I see.”

I didn’t say anything. He and Darcy took me down the hall and into what had to be the biologists’ den, their hangout — big fluffy sofas, recliners, and a large TV set, all surrounded by windows looking out over the forest of live oak. The map was pinned on the wall and showed the island in great detail. What struck me most was just how small the island was and how big the neighbouring island, to which it was almost adjoined, was. Everybody’s study site was on the map. It was meticulously done and easy to see at a glance where everybody was.

Darcy said, “You’ll be mostly up at the north end of the island, the interior parts. The south end is mostly impenetrable.” He whisked a sheet of acetate off a nearby desk and laid it over the map at the north end. He used green putty to secure it and then took a black marker and outlined my study site, just like that, even going so far as to pinpoint where he had seen some actual male Indigo Buntings singing. I was itching to get started right away, but it was still way too hot for the birds to be singing their courting songs with any kind of gusto.

I left Darcy and Sam and went back to the cabin to double check the equipment and get all my gear ready. It was such a heady feeling! When I was satisfied that everything was working I took a tour around the clearing. Basically it was a network of paths through the palmetto and live oak, meandering from the various cabins and widening into a sandy area the size of a four-car garage, mostly covered in live oak leaves, at the base of the stairs to the mess. Five or six ATVs were parked near the stairs and someone was tinkering with one of them. There was a lot of cursing going on and I sauntered over to see what was happening. The man with the shaggy beard, Trevor, who had piloted our boat, was sitting knee-deep in tools and bits of vehicle. He looked up and caught my eye, his scowl slowly softening. “These damn machines are so temperamental. They are always and perpetually sick, which makes me sick.” He looked sick too — his moth-eaten beard partially hid a sallow complexion and sunken eyes that screamed out at me, but I wasn’t sure what they were trying to say.

I looked at the array of vehicles and asked him if I would be able to use one of them to get to my study site — which was quite far up the island.

“Stacey didn’t tell you which one you could use?” He spat out Stacey’s name as if he was getting rid of something unpalatable.

I shook my head.

“That one over there — the red three wheeler. It’s all yours. Key’s in the ignition, gas tank is full. Just hold the throttle and she’ll be fine. But be kind to her. She’s really old.” I hadn’t heard of a three wheeler in years and wasn’t even sure if they were still legal. I decided not to ask.

“Are you a mechanic?” I asked instead, looking at all his tools.

“Hah! Me, a mechanic? Only by happenstance.” He scowled. “No one else around here can fix these hunks of junk.”

“Don’t let him fool you.” The voice came from behind me, and we both turned. She stood there like a model, totally at ease with every part of her body, her beauty more related to how she held herself and the confidence she exuded than anything else. What do they say when a woman has “it,” that something you cannot learn. Well, this woman had it in spades.

“He’s really a very good mechanic,” she said, but there was a hard edge to her tone as she offered her hand to me. Her luxuriant, jet-black, curly hair shone in the sun as it cascaded down around her shoulders and her mahogany eyes had such depth of colour that they were mesmerizing. “I’m Jayne. Who might you be?”

I took her hand and introduced myself. Jayne turned back to the bearded man and said, “Trevor’s our Jack of all trades. When he’s not a mechanic he captains our ferries, when he’s not captaining our ferries he’s captaining a shrimp boat, and when he’s not doing that he’s the local taxi on the island. Isn’t that right, Trevor?” Did I detect a note of sarcasm in her voice?

Trevor scowled again and returned to his work as Jayne bent down and picked up some luggage from a pile dumped behind one of the ATVs. She was more than happy to accept when I offered to help and she led me down one of the palmetto-invested trails to a cabin that looked just like mine. Except it appeared that Jayne had it all to herself.

“Trevor scowls rather a lot,” I said by way of conversation, realizing too late that it sounded like a rather leading question.

“Only around me,” she said, and then added, “and Stacey, of course.” I didn’t see any “of course” about it and he’d scowled at me and I said so.

She smiled. “It’ll take you awhile to get the hang of the place,” was all she said. I changed topics as I helped her carry her luggage into the cabin.

“You’re the turtle lady.”

She laughed. “My pictures give me away?” she asked and flung her arm to take in dozens of pictures of sea turtles gracing every inch of her walls.

I laughed in return.

“I’ve been studying turtles of one kind or another since I was a little girl. They fascinate me. They are so ancient and have survived for millions of years. They swam the same seas as the dinosaurs. We can’t even come close to saying that about ourselves, and yet here we are endangering sea turtles for the sake of a shrimp cocktail or a bowl of soup. It’s criminal but the courts don’t seem to really know that yet.”

She paused and threw me a small metal ring with a removable rubber cap. I turned it over in my hand, trying to figure out what it was. I looked up at her and shrugged. She smiled and took the ring and cap from me and pulled the cap off. The brass ring was quite a bit smaller than a dime and the rubber cap was essentially another ring slightly smaller with a hunk of black rubber glued to it. She held up the ring and said, “I’ve done quite a few experiments over the years on the visual orientation of sea turtle hatchlings. It is quite extraordinary that the hatchlings, the size of a plum but flatter, come up out of a dark nest into a dark night and yet they make their way unerringly to the sea.” She took the ring back from me. “It’s really cool. I mean how do they manage to find the sea when they are so tiny that one dune is like Everest to them? At their level, which is about half an inch above the ground, they can’t even see the sea. The literature has pretty much confirmed that they are programmed to head toward the brightest horizon. But how are they programmed and when does the switch turn on and turn off — because it has to turn off or sea turtles would never come ashore to lay their eggs, they would always be swimming toward the brightest horizon, which is out to sea.”

She picked up a little rubber sea turtle hatchling from her bedside table and fitted the brass ring over one of its eyes.

“They’re goggles,” she said. “I glue the brass ring over the eye and then I can use the cap to blind one eye or both or change the rubber for colour filters.”

I tried not to laugh but I couldn’t help smiling. The image it conjured up in my mind was hilarious.

“I know,” she said. “Everybody laughs. It is funny and they do look ludicrous when they are wearing them, but it is harmless to the turtles. The glue peels off and I release them to the sea after any experiments. You wouldn’t believe how many people want to interview me about my bespectacled turtles. They are much more interested in that than in my nest predation studies.”

I rose to the bait. “Which are?”

“Oh, you know. I check each nest in our little hatchery here after it has come up and analyze the contents for diseased or depredated eggs, et cetera.”

“You have a hatchery on the island?” I asked, surprised and not all that interested in the contents of an old nest. I hadn’t read anything about the hatchery and no one had mentioned it.

“Well, it’s really a tiny hatchery. Most of the nests laid by the females we leave in place now, but it used to be that every nest that was laid was dug up and transferred to a fenced-in area so that the feral pigs and other animals didn’t gorge themselves. Now we only dig up a few nests for research purposes. We get the odd photographer too who wants to film a nest erupting. It’s quite a sight. You should sit up one night — they only come up at night — and see if you get lucky.”

“So you did your Ph.D. on sea turtles?”

She grunted.

“Where did you do it? What university?”

She moved suddenly and tripped over a pair of shoes on the floor. After I made the motions of helping her up I tried to take up where we left off, but she was having none of it. The moment was lost.