On Deadly Tides (A Wendover House Mystery Book 3) Page 3

  “No, I’m fine.” Walking to the car would be too much effort, and I might not find the fortitude to come back to the tomb a second time.

  The sky turned the saddest shade of gray as we waited and it began to mist. Not rain exactly, but a steady drip that covered the sound of the ocean’s distant whispers and made everything damp and clammy. Everyone stared at me as the fog thickened, perhaps believing that my grief was causing the sudden climate change. It wasn’t my desires though that affected the weather, because my wishes were running more toward something warm and Mediterranean. Sometimes weather is just weather.

  Harris put up his umbrella and moved closer. It did more in thought than in deed to keep us dry, but I was still glad for the minor privacy it afforded us. Unwanted, a tear trickled from my eye. I was not mourning. It was just allergies, I told myself. But it added to the unhappy mood of our party and made Bryson uncomfortable.

  Understanding my frame of mind, Harris put an arm around me and I leaned my head against his shoulder and half closed my eyes. I still find myself occasionally grappling with unforeseen emotions when Kelvin’s name comes up unexpectedly in company, and I am usually annoyed that I feel anything for a man I never knew. I am fine with honoring the islanders’ memory of him, but I resent the odd moments of regret and curiosity that drift by my subconscious, mostly when I am alone with one of his journals or inventions. Lots of people never met their great-grandparents. Why should I feel especially cheated?

  Bryson figured. I knew that he would have preferred that I not witness the event, but he didn’t say anything and Harris didn’t tell me that I needn’t have come. This was family. In Harris’ mind this meant that I should be present. Though it went against my usual sensibilities, I had to agree with Harris. Something was going to happen and I needed to be there, no matter how horrible.

  The cemetery’s caretaker was clearly more upset than anyone and felt the need to explain this obvious fact to Bryson, who, from his bored expression, had heard it all before.

  I could understand his upset. The rumormongers were probably having a field day. I was grateful that respect—or fear—of the Wendover name was keeping the ghouls away.

  “My family has lived here for centuries and we have never had a scandal like this! Never!”

  I didn’t snort, but I very much doubted this claim. Every household has some blot on the old family escutcheon. The ones who don’t know this are ignorant or delusional.

  “It’s ready to open,” the one called Shotz said after he and another man I hadn’t been introduced to pulled out the black casket and laid it on the floor, away from the mortar and brick rubble that had fallen while they opened the right niche.

  The cherrywood coffins rested in recessed hollows with bricked up doorways barely large enough to accommodate a casket. I made note that styles had changed over time. The current doorway had been done in a standard staggered pattern while the older ones were laid in something that looked like herringbone. I supposed there was some cultural tradition for this—for bricking the doorways up at all—but I didn’t enquire. The situation was quite morbid enough.

  Shotz stepped back and allowed the police technician to open the coffin. The bolts unscrewed in a counterclockwise direction—widdershins, it’s called.

  “They’re broken. Something happened to the locks,” I heard someone whisper.

  “Get it open,” Shotz said. Then there was a squeal of hinges.

  I was still looking at the sad sky when I heard general gasping and felt Harris start.

  “My God,” Harris muttered and this blasphemy had me looking down though at that point I had no desire whatsoever to see my great-grandfather’s body, especially if its state was so shocking the others were disturbed.

  I needn’t have worried. There was nothing there to see. The white lining was stained a putrid brown in the outline of where the corpse had lain, but the body was gone.

  “Well, that’s interesting,” Bryson said in a flat voice that held no surprise at all.

  Chapter 3

  The sun was setting, coloring the retreating clouds with the colors of a summer fruit salad. Though a bit numb, I still appreciated the view as I walked up the hill, listening to shushing waves and enjoying the shallow waters as they whispered over the rocks. I was alone at last and happy to be that way. Let Harris and Bryson figure things out for the official report. I was done for the day, emotionally and physically spent.

  The mail was waiting with Ben along with a wiggly Barney. None of my correspondence was interesting except a postcard from Brandy. My friend, the social carnivore, seemed to have put the matter of the body on the beach behind her and was having a great time husband hunting in New York.

  I showed the card to Ben though I suspected he had already read it along with the ferryman and everyone in the market/post office. As I said, there isn’t much privacy in the islands. My role as Wendover heir has no respite when I am in public. Mostly I don’t mind, except that just now I wanted to be sneaky and investigate without an audience who would try and steer me wrong. I could try intimidation with the islanders, but I had a suspicion that if Kelvin had faked his own death and that the people were shielding him, they would be more afraid of him than of me. The only way I would find out anything would be through subterfuge.

  “So, did you learn anything about Kelvin or his clone?” Ben asked, grinning at me. He held up a bottle, offering me a whisky which I declined with a shake of my head. If I added alcohol to my body I might not make it back to the house.

  “Come on. Share. What’s the situation with Kelvin?”

  I like Ben but that doesn’t mean that he isn’t annoying from time to time. I don’t suppose he could help it, being a true crime writer. This was all just book fodder to him. And he isn’t a font of sensitivity anyway.

  “Well, he isn’t in his crypt,” I said.

  “So I heard. Bryson may have trouble sitting on this one.” Ben sounded a little too happy about this for my tastes. I was betting that visions of bestsellers were dancing in his head.

  “I don’t think he’ll even try.”

  “No?” Ben sounded doubtful.

  “No. Too many witnesses. He’s going to go with the grave-robbing scheme. And he’s correct,” I said before Ben could interrupt with his own theories. He would probably have several of them and I was too tired to listen. The day had been quite horrible enough already. “The tomb was robbed of a body. The niche was then bricked back up with some weird pattern that bricklayers around here don’t use. The only real question Bryson needs to worry about is whose body is missing and where we should put the new one when the officials are done with it. I think everyone is leaning toward the version of events where someone took Kelvin’s body, robbed it of its valuables, and then dumped it in the ocean for an unknown reason. One body, one grave—and no mystery—except the robber’s identity.”

  “That would be tidy—just stick him back in the tomb and be done with it. The locals would go for it. But what does the DNA evidence say? Is either man actually Kelvin?”

  “It’s inconclusive. A close contest, at least in the preliminary tests matching the second body to Kelvin’s hair from his hairbrush. But the specimen taken from Kelvin—the first body they thought was Kelvin—has apparently degraded enough for evidence to be suspect. Hence the reopening of the tomb to get a new sample—and that won’t be happening now.”

  “Hm. Look, you know that the second body wasn’t the first body, right? I mean that they aren’t the same body. Couldn’t be. The second one was too well preserved.”

  He hadn’t been that well preserved, but I took Ben’s point.

  “I know. But it’s been a long cold winter and a frozen body might have kept pretty well, or so everyone is saying. I think people want this story to be the right one. They need Kelvin to be dead and bricked up in the mausoleum. The guard has changed, so to speak, and I’m the Wendover now. They don’t want any more weirdness.” I realized this was true as I said the
words. The King is dead. Long live the Queen.

  “Except you?” Ben guessed. “You want the truth, don’t you? You care what happened to Kelvin.”

  “Officially? I have no problem with this version. Personally, I probably need to figure this out. I mean, if Kelvin faked his death—why? And who the heck was the first body if not Kelvin? I refuse to believe that my great-grandfather went out and killed a stranger just so he could leave the island—but geez. I have to admit that this is the first thought that came to mind.”

  Ben didn’t argue my premise that the killing was motivated by a desire to leave. He’d been here long enough to know that some islanders take their curses seriously and this was just barely possible.

  “Maybe the body wasn’t a stranger,” Ben suggested.

  I stared at him, hoping revulsion hadn’t carved my face permanently, because it felt hard, frozen.

  “Then it’s even worse. Besides, no one local is missing and who else did Kelvin know? He’d been here his entire life.”

  “Calm down. You’re white as a sheet. I could help with this. Deal with the nasty stuff,” Ben said. “You just say the word.”

  “Thanks.” I didn’t mean it. “But not tonight. Barney and I are going home to build a fire, eat some dinner, and go to bed.” And read my new book in the hope that it gave me some answers because I was very confused and more than a little horrified.

  Barney barked once, glad to hear his name at last. I leaned down to stroke his head.

  “You could eat dinner here. I’ve got plenty. Stay.”

  So he could pump me for more details. I considered. Ben had some kind of soup belching meaty smells into the air. But it didn’t appeal. I needed comfort food. I needed buttermilk pancakes with blueberry syrup and hot tea. Charles II thought tea could vanquish heavy dreams, ease the brain and strengthen the memory. All things I needed just then.

  And I needed to be alone. My brain, my body were numb and needed peace and quiet while they thawed.

  “No thank you. Another night.”

  Home was waiting. This thought filled me with an unfamiliar happiness. Home—not just some house that kept out the damp and wind, but home. The place of emotional security and physical safety.

  “You sure? You look like you could use a few minutes rest and at least one stiff drink.”

  “Thanks, but I just want to get into dry clothes and go to bed. Come on, Barney. Let’s go find Kelvin and tell him about our day.”

  And I would tell Kelvin all about it. Call me superstitious, but that cat was uncanny and had a way of leading me to answers when I got stuck with tricky questions.

  Chapter 4

  I looked out the kitchen window and frowned. There was a black hunchback cloud inflating in the east, filled up with latent atmospheric violence. Some updraft was pulling up the fogbank and sucking it into its darker mass before it reached the islands. The waves were high and I worried that they would come up on the island and maybe even pound on the door.

  “If you want out, guys, better make it snappy,” I said to Barney and Kelvin as I opened the kitchen door and stepped onto the porch. I didn’t really think that the wind would whip the animals away if I turned my back, but I was uneasy until they were both indoors and the night and storm were shut firmly away.

  Kelvin and I read late into the night. Barney had tried to help by chewing on the pages, but he was a puppy and fell asleep almost as soon as he’d eaten his dinner. The book my great-grandfather had left for me was fascinating and horrifying in its weirdness, but so far offered no clue about why my great-grandfather might have wanted to fake his own death. And it wasn’t that I hadn’t given the matter some thought. Weird ideas had circled and circled all night long, but absent any new information they were just wearing grooves in my brain and furrows in my forehead.

  I watched the fur kids through the window the next morning as I waited for the coffee and marveled that the violent storm had passed us by with only the token squall of rain. The day was an odd one though. The island is rarely silent but there were no birds about, crying above the waves. They had fled, and except for Barney and Kelvin the world seemed lifeless. It was an eerie feeling and I feared the storm might be doubling back, so I called them back in as soon as their business was done and locked the door on the outside.

  After breakfast I settled in the library. It was comfortable, and with the door shut and with a fire laid on, it was soon warm. I had Kelvin’s book with me. Part of me—most of me—wanted to be doing something active, questioning people perhaps, but with another storm coming, staying huddled by the hearth seemed the wisest course.

  It was near the end of the book that I found what I think Kelvin intended me to see.

  For many years it had been the goode fortune of the small islands to have among them members of a certain family which were by commensurate misfortune the objects of a Bane.

  “Bane? Like curse?” I asked the air. And why the capital letter? Was it a title and not a simple noun?

  The only escape for the members of the family was to leave the islands at the height of summer and to venture inland to realms untouched by any sea, nor any tributary that emptied into any ocean.

  In generations where two or more children were born, it was sometimes permitted that one female child depart the island. But then a winter came when there was a plague which killed both man and beast and even fish in the sea, and both the Bane’s hostages were taken with terrible fever, and a great terror came upon the islanders that they would all perish was there no living Wendover on the island when the new year came.

  The son survived the wasting fever, but thereafter it was decided that for the public weal, no Wendovers would be permitted to leave the island, lest it again anger the Bane and he sent another plague to harm them.

  I exhaled and rubbed the hair on my arms which had raised itself. Well, this was what I had suspected had happened. I shouldn’t feel any shock.

  Thunder rumbled nearby and I noticed the windows were growing darker, starved of the daylight being consumed by the clouds. I wasn’t looking forward to the thunder and lightning that was coming, but the rain would melt the rest of the snow on the mainland and that would be convenient for my next trip.

  I put more coal on the fire and then returned to my book.

  To make amends for this heavy sacrifice needed to propitiate the Bane, the islanders collected a tithe. Nine shares were to go to God, but the tenth share was to be given to the family Wendover as recompense for being deprived of the usual means of livelihood. Straws would be drawn among the families when a Wendover came of age and needed to marry, thus assuring the line would go on.

  In exchange for these favors, a promise was extracted that, on pain of death, no Wendover—male or female—would ever again depart the islands and would remain of their own island on the eve and day of the new year.

  On pain of death.

  Was the narrator aware of himself as a chronicler for the future? Had he imagined that someday, someone like me would read this? Or was he just some guy, writing things down so the town’s acts would make sense, so that their beliefs were justifiable and not utter lunacy? Not that it mattered really. It was just that this person—man or woman, I couldn’t know—had reached down through the centuries and laid a chill on my heart, forced a hole in the shield of contented good sense, and let in this idea that wormed its way inside to incubate and probably eventually hatch into some lunacy that would haunt my dreams.

  The last page had a tiny scribble in the margin. Different ink, smudged. Not an original illustration. But it bothered me more than the words had done. It had a caption: Terryble Bane.

  Thanks to a steady diet of horror films and a passion for Jules Verne novels, when I thought of sea monsters, I thought of krakens, giant squids that pulled down ships and the occasional bridge. But this little inch-long squiggle was of something very different, something almost human. Actually it looked a lot like a close-encounter kind of alien with giant eyes. Excep
t it had webbed hands and feet and a finned tail. And twin air holes that were spraying water. Or something.

  And teeth. It had giant bristled teeth that would make a dragonfish proud.

  According to this drawing, it had legs. It could walk on land.

  I looked up, feeling a little dizzy.

  The clock on the mantle was ticking. In the painting above the fire, my ancestor’s ship was still sinking in the gray waves. Barney snored on the hearth and Kelvin watched me with unblinking eyes from atop a stack of art books on the desk. Everything was the same as always.

  Except it wasn’t. Everything felt slightly off, like I was wearing someone else’s glasses, seeing with someone else’s eyes.

  “Why am I so upset?”

  It wasn’t that the damned book said anything I hadn’t conjectured—and it was just a collection of superstitious rubbish anyway. And the drawing meant nothing. It was just someone’s nightmarish scribbles.

  I stopped my thoughts and reconsidered. Okay, sea monsters and banes were nonsense. But the legend did mean something after all. Because Kelvin had left it as an explanation—or warning, or apology—for whoever came after him.

  For me.

  And I didn’t understand the message. Had he left by stealth because of a sea monster? Had he feared the islanders would actually kill him if they knew his plans to escape? But why leave at all? And why not head for Nebraska on the first available flight once he made it off the island?

  Or had he tried to escape and been caught and murdered by some superstitious neighbor? Was the first body really Kelvin?

  “No, surely not.”

  Could anyone be left in the twenty-first century who really believed in a Bane?

  I looked down at the book. I wanted to deny the idea, but of course there could be belief. There were credulous people who would believe anything. Just ask the tabloids who routinely printed stories of Elvis sightings and green alien babies and werewolves. Why not believe in a land-walking sea monster?