Murder On the Rocks (25 page)

“It’s me.” John’s sandy hair appeared among the bushes, gleaming in the sun. His lean face was dark. “Where is she?”

“Down there.” I pointed toward the rough edge of the cliff, averting my eyes as he leaned over and looked down at Estelle’s sprawled body. “I can’t believe there’s been another murder,” I said.

John leaned over and stared down for a long moment. “She’s still alive.” “

“What?

I can see her breathing.” He scanned the blue sky over the craggy humps of Mount Sheffield and Mount Pearl. “She still looks pretty banged up. I wish I could climb down to take a look, but I think I’d better wait for the helicopter. I hope it gets here soon.

We kept our vigil together in silence, straining our ears for the thump-thump of a helicopter, but hearing only the moan of the wind, the crash of the water against the rocks far below, and the occasional lonely call of a gull or a tern. As we sat together near the edge of the cliff, ready to stand up and signal at the first sign of help, I caught a whiff of his woodsy smell on the wind. The desire to lean over and bury my head in his solid chest flooded over me. Instead, I sat motionless, resisting the magnetic pull of the quiet man beside me.

“Who do you think did this?” I asked.

John paused for a moment before answering, his green eyes fixed on the horizon. The sunlight reflected the gold flecks in his irises and highlighted a small scar on his chin. “I don’t know. I just wish you hadn’t been the one to find her.” He turned the full wattage of his forest-green eyes my direction.

Despite the heat emanating from John, my stomach turned to ice. “Grimes really does think I killed Bernard Katz, doesn’t he?”

John twisted his lips into a grimace. “I’m afraid so”

“But if Estelle’s still alive, won’t she be able to say who tried to kill her?” I could hear the desperation in my voice.

“If she lives, and if she saw her attacker. There are no guarantees.” We lapsed into silence, scanning the empty sky, as I tried to quell the panic that pressed against my throat and prayed that Estelle would live.

Finally, the whir of a helicopter’s blades reached our ears, and a small speck appeared in the crystalline sky. John stood up, ready to wave them over to where Estelle lay. I hoped they hadn’t come too late.

The speck quickly grew larger, and soon the wind from the blades was whipping my hair across my face. Before long, two paramedics and a stretcher descended from the belly of the helicopter like spiders on a thread. After several minutes, they lifted the stretcher. The sun glanced off Estelle’s platinum hair as she disappeared into the hovering aircraft.

“Is she still alive?” John yelled into the thunder of the whirling blades.

“Yes,” a paramedic yelled back. The small flame of hope burning in my chest burned stronger. But before John could ask any more questions, the doors closed, and the helicopter sped away into the distance.

“THEY’LL SEND ANOTHER POLICE launch over soon,” John said as we watched the helicopter recede into the sky. “You might want to head back to the inn. Grimes is looking for you.” His smile was grim. “I’ll bet he has even more questions for you now.”

“Aren’t you coming?” I asked.

“I’m going to wait here for the police to show up. If you see Grimes, let him know what’s happened. It might get him off your back for a while, anyway.”

“Can I bring you anything?”

“No, thanks,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”

The phone jangled as I swung the kitchen door closed behind me. It was Charlene, her voice bright with excitement. “I hear another helicopter was out over the cliffs. What’s going on over there?”

“I found Estelle,” I said, swallowing hard. “It looks like someone tried to do the same thing to her that they did to her fatherin-law.”

Charlene drew in her breath. “Tried? You mean she survived?”

“Barely, I think. But yes.”

Charlene let out a long, low whistle. “Man, I never thought I’d say this about Estelle, but I hope she’s okay.” A slurping sound passed down the phone line, and then she continued. “Jeez, Nat. You’re always in the wrong place at the wrong time, aren’t you?”

“You’re telling me”

“At least you can knock another suspect off your list.” “

I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I guess you’re right.”

“Well, keep me posted. But before you ring off, I have news for you, too. And I think you’re going to like it, for a change.”

Good news? I couldn’t believe it. “What is it?”

She paused for another sip of whatever it was she was drinking. “Well, first, we’ve had lots of requests for more chocolate chip cookies down here. You’ve been slacking off, missy. If you could bring yourself to whip up a batch, my clientele and I would be much obliged,” she said in a fake Texas accent.

I rolled my eyes. “And?”

“And .. “Charlene paused dramatically. “I finally know what Barbara’s been up to.”

“Well? What is it?”

“She was putting together an expose on Premier Resorts International.” She slurped again. “It looks like there’s not going to be a resort after all.”

The resort wasn’t going to be built? “But how is that possible? The board already voted, and the evaluators said the endangered habitat status was a no-go.”

Charlene cackled. “Well, it looks like Katz has been robbing Peter to pay Paul. PRI is broke, and so is Bernard Katz.”

I paused to let this information filter through my brain. Bernard Katz, broke? I knew Stanley was having problems, but his father seemed to be doing just fine. “You mean PRI is a Ponzi scheme?”

“It didn’t start out that way, but it looks like that’s what it turned into. Two of their resorts never got finished, contractors haven’t been paid in over a year, and the money for the few bills Bernard Katz has been paying has come out of the funds he’s been drumming up from new investors. His own coffers are empty.”

My thoughts turned to the bank statements I’d seen in Bernard Katz’s room. They hadn’t been wrong; he and his company really had been in dire straits. At the board meeting, he had hesitated before outbidding Barbara Eggleby. Now it made sense. I would have hesitated too, if I was bidding on a big piece of land I didn’t have the money to pay for. If he’d been killed for his money, somebody had made a pretty bad investment.

“How come he was willing to fork over two million dollars for the land here, then? Where was the money supposed to come from?”

“I don’t know,” Charlene said. “Either he was planning on getting some big investors to cover it, or he didn’t know how bad things had gotten”

I leaned up against the wall. “Didn’t know how bad things had gotten? How could you not know your company was going belly up?”

“Maybe someone else took care of the finances.”

“So Barbara’s spent all this time putting together an expose?” I laughed. “So that was what she meant by alternate tactics.” Despite the horror I’d seen just an hour ago, I felt giddy. The resort wouldn’t be built! “Do you think the Shoreline Conservation Association will end up getting the land after all?”

“I don’t see why not” Charlene giggled.

“What?”

“I just can’t wait to see the look on Murray Selfridge’s face when he finds out he’s been hoodwinked by Bernard Katz,” she said.

A smile spread across my face as I hung up the phone. I might be going to jail, but at least the island had a reprieve. My stomach gurgled, reminding me that the issue of lunch still needed to be dealt with. I grabbed a few cold waffles and sat down at the kitchen table, thinking about what this new information meant to the murder investigation. If Katz had no money, I thought as my teeth sank into the first buttery waffle, then maybe the will wasn’t the motive for his murder. Then again, maybe Stanley didn’t know how dire his father’s financial situation was.

A fishing boat steamed across the water outside the kitchen window as I chewed. Even if the Gray Whale Inn didn’t survive, at least the slow pace of life on this island would continue unchanged. As the events of the last week replayed in my mind, I sat up with a jolt. I was convinced I knew who had murdered Bernard Katz. The only problem was, I needed to get to the mainland to prove it.

I grabbed my windbreaker and hurried down to the dock, a half-eaten waffle still in my hand. This might be my only shot at getting to the mainland. Grimes could be back at any moment, and now that I had found the murderer’s second victim, chances were excellent that my freedom was about to be curtailed.

As I trotted down the path to the dock, I eyed the Little Marian with trepidation. Handling the little boat had seemed easy when Eleazer was with me, but could I do it alone? I didn’t even know how to tie a proper knot, much less find somewhere to tie the boat up in the event I actually managed to get her over to the mainland. The small, white boat bobbed jauntily in the blue-black waves as I clambered in and untied the ropes, pushing wildly against the dock to avoid bashing the boat’s sides. I slid onto the bench in front of the engine and pulled the cord as Eleazer had shown me. The engine whined, but sputtered and fell silent. I took a ragged breath and tried again, with the same result. Great. The boat was drifting away from the dock-I’d untied the ropes and pushed off-and now the engine wouldn’t start.

I yanked again. This time, the engine sputtered twice and caught, and the Little Marian surged forward. I sighed with relief, then yelped as I realized the boat was headed straight for a barnacleencrusted rock. I grabbed at the rudder and pulled hard to the right, holding my breath at the low rasp on the left-port, I corrected myself-as the skiff grazed the barnacles. I hoped the scrape hadn’t done too much damage to the Little Marian’s paint job. As long as she had no gaping holes, though, that was good enough for me.

I guided the small craft out toward the open water, reflecting that whatever seamanship ran in my family’s blood had clearly not been passed on to me. John was right; I should have gone out with him a few times before embarking on this fool’s errand.

As I pulled farther away from the Gray Whale Inn dock, my eyes slid over to the cliffs. If John was up there, he might recognize me. I decided to veer south until I was too far away for John to see me before heading for the mainland.

As the nose of the little boat turned toward Sutton Island, the dark cleft in the rocks that Eleazer had pointed out to me caught my attention: Smuggler’s Cove. In all the excitement of the last few days, I’d forgotten about it. Yet someone had been there the night of the murder. As the cove slipped away behind me, I promised myself that if the Little Marian survived the trip to the mainland, I would visit it on the way back.

The cliffs receded from view, and the Little Marian was almost all the way to Sutton Island before I decided to risk crossing the open water. I steered the boat toward the mainland and pulled my hood over my head, hunching down as low as possible in the back of the boat as my eyes probed the rocky harbor. Where could I put the Little Marian? Was it okay to tie her up where the mail boat docked? My eyes were still trained on the harbor when the thrum of an engine caught my attention, and I looked up to see George McLeod waving at me from the Island Queen. I groaned. Now the whole island would know I’d slipped my leash. I ducked my head and gunned the engine.

The engine whined as I crossed the rest of the water at high speed, feeling like a criminal on the lam. A shiver ran through me. As far as Grimes was concerned, I was a criminal on the lam. I hoped the Little Marian wouldn’t encounter the police launch next. I also hoped my hunch about Bernard Katz’s killer was correct. If it wasn’t, I didn’t know what else I could do.

Finally, the Northeast Harbor dock came into view. I threaded the small boat through the moored yachts and sailboats and came up alongside the main dock, ramming the bumper hard. I winced at the sound of splintering wood as my fingers scrabbled at a cleat, wrapping the rope around it several times before cutting the engine and jumping out onto the dock. I fastened the other rope as best I could and jogged up toward the harbormaster’s little booth.

“I’m from Cranberry Island,” I said breathlessly to the young man behind the cloudy, pitted window. His brown eyes were expressionless, and he scratched at one of the pimples that were scattered across his cheek like a constellation. “Can I leave my boat down here for a few minutes? I have an emergency errand to run.”

He leaned back in his chair. “Sure. No problem.”

“Thanks. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” I ran up through the cracked asphalt parking lot toward my little Celica. I had to get to Somesville fast, before the police came looking for me. The little green car was right where it was supposed to be, and my hand dug in my pocket for the keys. My heart sank when I realized they were still at the inn.

“Damn” How was I supposed to get to Somesville? I hurried back to the harbormaster’s booth. “Is there a place I can put in at Somesville?”

“Yeah,” he said, scratching another pimple, this time on his bristly chin. “You just head down a ways south, go round the bend into Somes Sound, and it’s the first harbor you come to”

“Thanks,” I said, and ran back down to the Little Marian.

I hopped aboard and untied the ropes from the cleats, but this time I held onto them until the engine was up and running; I was learning. Fortunately, the Little Marian roared to life immediately, and I pulled in the ropes and shoved myself away from the dock, chugging past the expensive boats in the harbor and the equally expensive houses perched among the towering spruce trees on the mainland before veering southward down the coast.

Before long, I was pulling up to the weathered gray wharf in Somesville, and docked only slightly more gracefully. Then I checked in with the harbormaster to make sure I hadn’t put the skiff where it would be run over by a yacht, and headed for the library.

Somesville was a picturesque town, and images of its main street, which was decorated with brilliant flowerbeds and boxes, often appeared in the pages of Maine guidebooks. As I trotted toward the main square, two otters played together in a little cove beside the road, and the rows of bright red geraniums lining the quaint bridge glowed in the afternoon sunshine. I made a mental note to come back and spend a little more time in this attractive town, in the event Grimes didn’t arrest me. Now that I had a boat, it would be a lot easier to do.