Читать книгу Cordi O'Callaghan Mysteries 4-Book Bundle - Suzanne F. Kingsmill - Страница 23

It was a hot, humid day and the dust from the new road was clogging every one of my pores. I kicked the dust with my feet and headed off toward the cookhouse and the path to the lake. As I approached one of the mobile trailers I heard a noise and stopped.

“Psst.” It came again. “Psst.” I turned toward the sound and there, perched on an overturned bucket between an outhouse and what I took to be the cook-house, was Martha. Her back was to me, her head twisted around like an owl to keep me in view, and her thick, solid ankles were wobbling in time with the protesting wobbles of the aluminum bucket. I watched in fascination, wondering if the bucket would continue to hold her weight or would decide to crumple and, if so, what Martha would do.

“Good god, Martha, what the hell are you doing?”

“Shhhhh.” Martha’s low, insistent command slithered toward me and caught me just as I was about to laugh.

Martha motioned quickly with one hand for me to join her and judging by the protesting groans of the bucket would have lost her balance except for a rather remarkable balancing act.

I stepped into the alley between the two makeshift buildings and looked up at Martha as I struggled to adjust to the gloom. She was leaning against a fence that crossed the alley, her head just topping it so that she could see what was on the other side.

“There’s something fishy going on around here,” she said in her best Perry Mason voice. I rolled my eyes skyward.

“No really, Cordi. The cook told me all about it.”

“About what?”

“The fish,” said Martha in a dark, ominous voice as she strained to look over the fence.

“For heaven’s sake, Martha, get down before you kill yourself,” I said in a whisper.

“I can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t?”

“I can’t get down. I’m caught on something.”

I moved around behind Martha and saw that her shift was caught on a wicked-looking spike. I squeezed my arm in between Martha and the fence and untangled her. She dropped to the ground with relief, took out a large pink handkerchief, wiped her forehead, and slapped a mosquito on her arm.

“Really, Cordi, I don’t know how you can stand to be out here with all these bugs.” She looked at me and sighed, as if all her lifeblood had just been sucked out by that one lone mosquito.

“Check out the freezer on the other side of that fence.”

I looked at her in puzzlement and hesitated, wondering what she was getting at. “Well, go on. I can’t do it. You’ll get your answer when you see what’s inside it, mark my words.” I could almost see each of her words being ticked off with a little checkmark in Martha’s head.

I repositioned the bucket and leapt up, gripping the top of the wooden fence and scrambling over to the other side. The freezer was snuggled up against the fence and another fence with a gate in it, well hidden or presumably well protected from any animals. I opened the lid and looked down thoughtfully at the contents, pushing aside the top layer and rummaging down in the lower levels to be sure I hadn’t missed what Martha was advertising with her wildly dancing eyes.

By the time I had climbed back over the fence, Martha had rearranged her shift and fixed up her appearance by applying some more lipstick and brushing her hair.

“Well?” she said triumphantly.

“Well what? Your lipstick’s on crooked,” I said.

Martha pinched her mouth with her thumb and forefinger to wipe away the lipstick. “Gone?”

“Still some in the lower right corner.” Martha scrubbed some more and raised her eyebrows at me. I nodded.

“The stuff in the freezer. Did you see it?”

“So the loggers like corn. What of it?”

“Corn?” Martha said her mouth opening in a grimace and her eyebrows struggling to meet her widow’s peak.

“Frozen corn,” I said, and Martha’s features crashed down in bewilderment as I took her by the arm and led her out of the alley.

“No fish?”

“No fish. Now why don’t you tell me what the hell is going on here. What’s all this about fish anyway?”

I made for the path Ray had pointed out to me, dragging her along with me.

“Where are we going?”

“I want to see the lake.”

Martha dawdled and picked her way around rocks and branches most people would have stepped over. She doggedly pursued her latest theory.

“The cook really liked my dress, so when I told her I’d made it she asked me to send her the pattern.” Martha looked sidelong at me. “She’s a little bigger than I am, and it’s not always easy to find things to fit. Anyway I agreed and she took me into the kitchen for a bite to eat. She was cooking up a mess of fresh fish for the men and it smelled so good I asked her where it came from.

“‘Just down at the lake here. They bring ’em in by the barrelful,’ she said to me, and I swear she winked, but I wasn’t sure. But that’s when I got suspicious. They were having trout, Cordi, and I’m pretty sure it’s out of season.”

I stopped in my tracks and looked open-mouthed at Martha.

“How would you know if it’s out of season, Martha? You hate the outdoors and anything to do with it.”

“Ah, but Cordi, I love fish, fresh fish gently sautéed with a bit of lemon and garlic.” She closed her eyes and licked her lips. “Anyway, even if it is in season I’m sure they must have been way over their limit. Besides, the cook said they had a whole freezer out back that they kept stocked full of the stuff. Then I swear she winked at me again.”

“Did she say anything about bears?”

“Yeah, that was really curious. She said Cameron came into camp a while back all clawed along his arms. He’d been across the lake and said a bear had mauled him after he’d spilled a can of tuna fish on himself. Then that zoologist turned up dead and Cameron and his buddies told the wildlife guys that they’d shot the beast. The cook didn’t think they had, though.”

“Why not?”

“Because they always give her the pelts or the fish to clean. She gets paid extra under the table. But there was no pelt, she said. I suppose if she knew they were poaching fish she’d just keep quiet so that the extra money would keep coming in. She stopped talking after that because I think she knew she’d told me too much.”

“Did anyone else know about this rogue bear?”

“All the loggers, she thinks, but she wasn’t sure if they had told any of the biologists. They weren’t really on speaking terms, after all, but she figures it was only the decent thing to do. Although they all hated Diamond so much they may have practised selective amnesia with him. Served him right that he got killed by it anyway, was what she said. But she wasn’t supposed to talk about it. The loggers didn’t want the wildlife officers up here. One can see why if they were pilfering trout out of season.”

Martha paused and then in excitement said, “Maybe that’s the motive for moving the body. Maybe Diamond knew about the poaching and so they killed him. They moved him because they were afraid it would be discovered, either when the cops came out for a peek or when the wildlife guys came up to shoot the bear. They moved the body and then shot the bear to make doubly sure their secret would stay a secret. And maybe they tried to kill us just now to keep it all under wraps.”

“They’d go to all that trouble for a bunch of fish?”

“Maybe it’s something else besides fish. I’ve suggested it before. Maybe they have a still in the woods, or they’ve been making hash, or they’ve kidnapped some wealthy Arab prince. Maybe they’ve set up a trade in bear gall-bladders. There’s a lucrative market for those. I don’t know what it might be, but a dead body turning up near any nefarious doings would definitely cramp your style. You’d have to move it. Or maybe they baited him, just as you said. You heard Cameron earlier. He hunts bear, knows how it’s done — even spilled fish oil on himself and lived through the result. They save their logging jobs and their still, or their poaching, or whatever. Double motive.”

I was mulling over Martha’s latest theories when we finally broke out into a small clearing. The land sloped down to a pebbled beach and the lake stretched out before us. I took out my binoculars and scoured the shore on the far side.

“I got the gossip on Raymond and his wife,” Martha said.

I continued looking through the binoculars scanning the far shore. I thought I could make out a few cedars near the cliffs of the escarpment, but it wasn’t easy from this distance to see any detail. What was frustrating was that it wasn’t a small pocket of cedars but as Ray had said a fairly extensive forest. I had had vague hopes of finding a cedar forest of a couple of acres in size and being able to comb it and find out where and why Diamond died. It didn’t look good, and I knew I’d been incredibly naive in hoping otherwise.

“And?”

“Happened more than ten years ago, and apparently Ray has never forgiven Diamond.”

I lowered the glasses and eyeballed Martha.

“So Cameron was right?”

“Looks like it. Apparently she and Ray were an item and already married when he and Diamond were at university. Ray introduced them at a party and lost his wife a month later. Ray was beside himself with jealousy and threatened to kill them both. Can’t blame the poor guy, can you? Gives him a motive for murder though: jealous husband gone berserk. Held it in all these years, the bitterness growing like some cancer until it strangles his reason. Lots of those around.

“So he went up to kill Diamond and saw the bear, and made use of the bear to do it for him. The perfect murder, if the bear cooperates. It’d be awfully dicey though. Maybe it happened on the spur of the moment. Diamond’s sitting there watching his killer eat sardines when suddenly his killer sees the bear heading toward them. The killer throws the oil at Diamond and takes off, coming back when Diamond is dead to move the body. Or maybe they drugged him and dumped sardine juice on him in the area where the other guy got mauled.”

I swung the binoculars along the far shoreline and then scanned the area of the cliff face. Martha continued jabbering away, but I wasn’t listening anymore. My mind was racing a hundred miles an hour as I stared at a huge cliff soaring skyward. I adjusted the binoculars, focusing in on it, and there, on the full face of the cliff, glinting in the sun, was a livid jagged slash of rust red streaking diagonally down its face, like a huge red welt.