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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781490747941 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Author Solutions Inc |
| Publication date: | 10/08/2014 |
| Pages: | 260 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.55(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Crimes of Summer
By Robin Timmerman
Trafford Publishing
Copyright © 2014 Robin TimmermanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4907-4794-1
CHAPTER 1
To northern peoples, summer is an annual miracle. Yet the three summer months last only a quarter section of the long year.
So much to do, so little time!
Most Canadians head as often as possible to the nearest body of water. Some to merely contemplate the serene blue waves where so recently there was rigid ice. Others to roar frantically over the surface in whatever loud, exhaust-spewing, water-roiling vehicle they can afford.
The bay that Middle Island shared with the neighbouring city of Bonville, was visited by both types. Unfortunately, farmers and jet-skiiers don't mix. So when the telephone rang, Jane Carell, office manager and nerve centre of the Middle Island police station, smallest independent police force in the province, resigned herself to listening to yet another complaint.
Would it be about a speedboat coming too close to a dock? Or a couple of jet skiiers having a race? Or maybe some raucus partying folk who had camped uninvited in a farmer's field. And the summer had just begun! Personally, Jane was already dreaming about quiet autumn when the holidayers would go home. She sighed now and called past the room partition to her boss, Chief Bud Halstead, "Do I have to answer?"
Halstead grinned and waved. "Be nice."
But the phone had blessedly stopped ringing. Thank you, lord, for small mercies.
When it started up again, she grabbed without looking, her mind on the schedule of the day ahead. "Middle Island police station," she said warily. "How can I help you?" Then she stopped and began listening.
"Is he dead?" she asked after a moment.
"Who's dead?" asked Officer Pete Jakes, coming out of the small room that served as a coffee and common room for the three police officers on staff. He carried a half eaten muffin in his hand.
The chief rose from his chair, echoing his own "Who!"
In a community as small as Middle Island (pop. 4500), the question was all-important. Jane whose wide network of her own family, plus siblings, nephews, nieces and grandchild were all local residents, waved the two men to silence, while she listened some more. Then turned, her expression serious.
"Some American tourists in a boat near Lighthouse Point, they say they've seen a body floating by the shore."
* * *
Lighthouse Point, one of four notable promontories on Middle Island, was about a fifteen minute drive from town. The southernmost and easternmost point on the Island, it jutted out into the main lake, where shipping traffic (from west to east and vice versa) had travelled for three hundred years. In this time, the vessels had undergone some changes, from sail to steam to oil powered. But the shipping routes had remained the same. Wind and water patterns don't change much in a century or two.
The Norris Lighthouse, that had served for over a century as a warning beacon to hundreds of ships, had seen better days. Far better days. The wood frame tower still stood straight and true but the roof boards leaked and the windows of the light cupola had long ago been broken and blasted out by winter gales. Wooden shutters now closed them up and the mud nests of swallows clustered under the eaves.
On a summer day though, with the swallows diving and soaring about, the place was an attractive picture-postcard ruin. In fact, there was a postcard of the lighthouse sold in the village drug store and it was a favourite subject for local painters.
This morning though, Jakes rocked the cruiser along the dirt road that led past the lane to the Lighthouse, barely sparing the structure a glance. Halstead braced himself as a particularly large rut loomed. The cruiser was fairly new and it had been hard enough to get the car included in last fall's budget. But Jakes, with the confidence of youth's good reflexes, easily navigated the bump. A half mile further on, he pulled the vehicle to a shuddering halt. The two men got out and stood briefly atop the metre-high slope that led down to the water.
"There's the folks who called in," Pete pointed to a nice-looking yacht, tethered about twenty feet out from the shore. A woman looked back at them, waving wildly. She wore sunglasses and brandished a huge pair of binoculars.
Halstead grimaced, looking at the other boat, a battered aluminum outboard bobbing forlornly against the narrow strip of rocky beach. "I was afraid it might be Mel Todd, and that sure looks like his boat."
He sighed. "Better get down there."
There was a bright yellow dinghy pulled up on shore as well. A grey-haired man came towards them. "He's over here, officers."
"I saw right away that I couldn't help," he explained. "So I didn't touch him."
Now Pete could see what looked like a bundle of sodden rags, bobbing between the old outboard and the rocks. Halstead stepped forward and uncaring of wet shoes and trouser cuffs, stepped into the water. He tugged at the body's jacket shoulder, just enough to turn the face partly up, and nodded.
"It's him. It's Mel Todd." Luckily he hadn't been in the water all that long. Possibly just overnight.
"You know him?" asked the grey-haired man.
"He's a local fisherman," Halstead said. "Or he used to be, anyway."
"Like I said I'm sorry we couldn't help. My wife there, she was just looking for birds, or ducks or something and she gives out this little shriek and tells me she's looking at a body. I didn't believe her at first but when I saw that she was right, I lowered the dinghy and came right over. But the guy was long past help," he finished. "Just as you see."
The three of them looked down again. A sombre sight.
"Help me move him to shore," Halstead said to Jakes.
"Harry!" came a strident call from the boat. "Are you telling the policemen the story? You don't know beans about telling a story. Come and get me! I'm the one who found the body."
Harry looked apologetically at the two officers. "Do you need to talk to her, should I get her?"
Jakes heaved at the body's legs and Halstead placed Mel Todd's head as gently as he could on the stones.
"Sure," Halstead said. "go get her."
It would be better than listening to the woman hollering from the boat.
Halstead made the necessary calls, one to Chris Pelly, the doctor from Bonville Hospital, who doubled as Island coroner when needed. The other to the ambulance service to pick the body up. They would probably be awhile but unfortunately, there was no rush.
Meanwhile Pete took down the statements from the couple on the yacht. Their involvement was slight, though the woman tried to make the most of it. To be fair, Pete amended, she had suffered a shock. Still, she was obviously thrilled by the excitement and already planning the story she would tell her friends.
"I was looking through the binoculars when I saw the boat. I gasped, didn't I Harry, when I saw the foot tangled in the mooring rope. Then I saw the body bobbing beside the boat."
She glanced quickly at the sodden heap of clothes that had once been a living man and shuddered theatrically.
"We saw a vulture circling. They haven't haven't been at him, I hope? The poor man!"
Basically though, they had little to tell. They'd spotted the body about an hour ago, and had seen no person or other boat anywhere near the site. They were from a town in New York State, were on vacation and had never met the deceased. The woman hadn't been quite so thrilled about having to view Mel Todd's dead face but she did her duty, alongside her husband.
"Poor fellow must have slipped on the rocks," said the husband.
Pete thanked them for their help and they set off in their yellow dinghy across the twenty feet of water to their boat, Mrs. Harry looking reluctantly back. She had wanted to take a picture but much to her disappointment, Halstead wouldn't let her.
Now he looked up the slope. "Mel would have a camp somewhere nearby. He liked to get away sometimes and do his drinking."
The spot was only a few yards away. Just a rough camp, comprised of a pup tent pegged down in the long, rank grass. Inside there were some empty whiskey bottles and a damp, foetid sleeping bag. Pete couldn't guess the original colour. At the entrance to the tent there was a smell of whiskey and some shards of broken glass.
Halstead stooped to pick up a piece of glass. "Looks as if Mel was pretty looped," he said. "Or he wouldn't have been spilling good whiskey. He must have wanted to get something from his boat, gone back down there and fallen in the water."
"Came here a lot, did he?" Pete asked.
"He practically lived on the lake, grew up on the fishing boats. His father and grandfather were fishermen, and Mel carried on the family business. Then the government took away the commercial fishermen licenses. Mel was only in his sixties, he didn't know what to do with himself. So he started to drink."
A familiar story.
Halstead shrugged. "He liked to come here. He used to say he could find his way blind drunk along the Island shores and if he couldn't, his boat would manage by itself, like an old horse. He was never any trouble, we left him alone."
He looked down at the body on the beach, and shook his head.
"And now he's drowned himself. Even if was lying there needing help, no one would know."
It was a quarter mile walk in from the road, the nearest house a mile away. A solitary spot. Obviously why Todd, had liked to come there.
"Maybe he had a heart attack," Pete said. "That happens to a lot of older guys."
Halstead felt a resonant twinge in his own chest – the twinge he got whenever he read an obit of a middle-aged man who succombed to cardiac arrest.
"Here's Chris," he said brusquely, turning at the sound of the coroner's car.
A half hour later, Chris Pelly rinsed his hands off in the lake water. A slight man, with cowlicked brown hair, Pelly greeted them with his usual boyishly cheerful grin. His at times grim work never seemed to get the man down.
"Looks as if the man drowned," he said without irony. "He must have stumbled getting in or out of the boat."
The three men looked out over the picture postcard scene. Blue sky, cotton puff clouds, the lake stretching to forever.
Halstead sighed. "I hope Melvin went looped and happy. At least he died out here, not in the Bonville drunk tank. The lake was pretty good to him and from the stories he used to tell of being caught out there in some bad storms with his dad, he had a few lucky escapes already."
Pelly grunted, gathering up his heavy case. "Yeah well I guess his luck ran out this time."
CHAPTER 2Ali Jakes poured coffee into three mugs and sighed. She'd rather not go back into the living room and keep on being polite to her husband's army buddy. But if Lieutenant Tyler Cotes made one more put-down comment about the Jakes' Middle Island friends and neighbours, he might just get a cup of steaming coffee in his lap!
Ah well, into the breach.
Cotes was a good-looking fellow, at thirty-four only a few years older than Pete. Dark where Pete was blond, a bit taller, but to her mind there was no contest. She'd fallen for hunky Pete three years ago in war-torn Afghanistan – she was teaching on a United Nations project and Pete's unit was assigned to safeguard the teachers – and she still considered their meeting the luckiest event in her life.
It seemed there was a contest between the two men though, at least in Cotes' mind, His voice was loud as if he was always striving for attention, like a toddler she thought. Like her own toddler Nevra, upstairs in her crib and recently bathed, read to and lullabied to sleep.
And kissed goodnight by her handsome Daddy, who never looked more attractive, Ali thought, than when he was gently holding their precious little daughter. That was a kind of maleness that Mr. Macho Tyler Cotes with his endless stories of guns and battle, obviously knew nothing about. And what was he going on about now?
She plopped the tray unceremoniously down on the coffee table and forced a smile, "Sugar, Tyler?"
Neither man was wearing army fatigues – Pete because he had thankfully left the forces when they married, and Cotes because he had suffered a combat injury three months ago and was now recuperating, very unthankfully in a rented cottage on the south shore of Middle Island. At times Ali regretted that the Jakes had ever made the suggestion.
But she could hardly have argued against the idea either. Although she had never met Cotes, she knew that he and Pete had served together for two combat tours. On the bookcase by the window, there was a framed photo of six young soldiers, in camouflage gear, smiling and looking ready to take on whatever the Afghani insurgents, or indeed the world, could throw at them. And sadly, they did get thrown at.
The bodies of two of the young smilers had been brought home in flagged coffins to Canada. Two others had been diagnosed with post traumatic stress syndrome. After the combat tours, Pete had signed up for the U.N. project where he'd met Ali. Ironically it was while escorting a visiting dignitary from Canada back to the airfield in Kabul, that Pete and the rest of the convoy had been blindsided by a roadside bomb. An experience that led to his own tough recovery.
And now here was the last of the six, Tyler Cotes sprawled across the Jakes' living room couch, his foot cast propped up on cushions. Not that she begrudged the man a dinner, for heaven's sake, nor comfort for his foot, wounded in the service of his country. It was a bad injury that required orthopedic surgery, and several months recovery involving intensive rehabilitation therapy.
She could even endure the seemingly endless tales of danger-filled days on patrol in the desert, on one of which he had been shot. But she did dearly wish that the man could be a little more sensitive in his comments about Middle Island life and its inhabitants. He had already complained of the country silence and worse, no highspeed internet service. He had also mocked the village Main Street for its lack of bars and restaurants.
"Maybe I should look into opening up a fast-food franchise," he was saying now. "You could use one of the big chain burger-pizza places here. Even that guy with the chip truck does O.K. I was talking to him the other day and he says he takes his wife back to Portugal every winter for a holiday."
Ali winced. 'Oh but you wouldn't want to take away Benny Sorda's living. They've still got a couple of kids in high school. Pete coaches his son in hockey."
Tyler shrugged. 'Business is business. Besides if the Island becomes a more happening place, there could be lots of money for everybody.'
Pete caught the look on his wife's face – it had been a long evening -- and quickly jumped in.
"So Ty, do you want to get out on the water tomorrow, catch some fish?"
Tyler grinned. "I don't know buddy, think you can tear yourself away from your important Island cop stuff? Maybe some old lady will jaywalk while we're out on the lake. Or somebody will park illegally on Main Street and deputy Jakes won't be there to write up the ticket."
Pete didn't mind the ribbing but Ali bristled.
"Pete and the Chief had to retrieve a body from the lake today," she said tartly. "That wasn't a lot of fun."
"Somebody offed the guy?" Tyler asked, just as irreverently.
"No," Pete shoook his head. "An unfortunate old drunk who passed out in the lake. Sad, though."
"That's too bad," Tyler said, quelled at last.
And thank goodness, Ali thought. A tragic accident was hardly something to joke about. Although dreadfully, for just a moment, she had found herself almost wishing that Pete could say he was involved in a homicide. Just to shut Tyler up.
That's how much the man irritated her. What shabby thoughts he drove her to.
Because of course she was grateful that Island life was rarely plagued by violence, that was one of the reasons they had stayed. She and Pete had experienced more than enough violence in troubled Afghanistan.
Now Pete yawned and stood up. "We should get going early tomorrow morning Ty. That's the best time to catch those walleyes."
"You know it, buddy," Tyler swung his leg out over the couch pillows.
When he had arrived on the Island a couple of months ago, Tyler was on crutches, now he wore only the foot cast and used a cane. Ali noticed though that he still winced as he stood up, and once again felt contrite. She wrapped up some of the dessert pie for him to take home.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Crimes of Summer by Robin Timmerman. Copyright © 2014 Robin Timmerman. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing.
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