Shadows on the Sand (13 page)

He knelt on the seat in the bow and leaned out to push the boat free of the islet.

He almost fell overboard when he saw the hand tangled in the grass, open palm flung skyward. The body to which the hand was attached lay submerged, bumping gently against the mud and grass with the movement of the water.

Greg recognized death but still reached out and felt for a pulse. With sorrow he also recognized the victim in spite of the damage done by the water and the nibbling sea creatures. His memory flashed on Joe and Margaret Peoples, their sorrow-filled faces, and their premonition of disaster. He knew the devastation about to suck hope and happiness from them. The only positive about this scenario was that he wouldn’t be required to be the one to inform them of their son’s death.

Scratch that. Their son’s murder. The coroner would need to make a final determination, but the marks about Jase’s neck told their own tale.

But he’d have to tell Carrie and the others at the café. It’d be best coming from him, and it’d save someone on the force from that difficult duty.

Some days life hurt.

He grabbed his phone and called 911.

The SPD Marine Unit arrived first, and Greg moved his boat out of the
way as he watched the officers assess the situation. Soon crime scene techs were doing what they could while the Coast Guard, Fish and Game guys, and the SPD talked jurisdiction and the coroner declared Jase dead, not that there was any doubt, but the law had to be satisfied.

Activity swirled around Greg, but he was no more than the one who found the body. Sure, several of the professionals going about their various chores acknowledged him by name, asked how he was. A couple of them even said they missed him. But he was outside the loop, merely the one who reported a tragedy, the one to be questioned about how he made his discovery.

He was amazed at how much the exclusion hurt.

H
arl Evans grinned as he looked at the bay stretching before him. It was a pretty scene on this warm October Tuesday—tall grasses rising from the islands on which the Ninth Street Causeway rested, the water reflecting the deep blue of the sky. A few motorboats made foamy wakes as they sped past, and a couple of catamarans with colorfully striped sails heeled in the soft breeze. He inhaled the scent of the marshes, a singular smell that was strangely pleasing to a man raised in backwoods Maine. The sun poured down on him, making him feel toasty and warm. He loved warm. It filled him with something approaching happiness. He loved hot even better—which was why he’d ended up in southern Arizona, as far from his home as possible.

Those cold Maine nights when he’d been a kid had been agony.

“Can’t we put more wood in the stove, Pop?” he’d asked as a young boy.

“What’s your problem?” Pop would retort. “Can’t you deal with a little chill? Put on another layer.”

Somehow “a little chill” seemed a gross understatement when there was rime forming on the inside of the windows across the room.

“That wood supply’s got to last the entire winter, Harl. I ain’t cutting any more, not in snow like we got.”

“We could buy a couple of cords,” he suggested once when he was about seven. He’d heard one of the kids at school talk about buying wood, and he’d been amazed that people did something so sensible.

“We ain’t spending what little we got on what’s out there for the taking,”
Pop snarled. Trouble was, Pop wasn’t taking, so Harl dragged fallen logs home through the thigh-deep snow and did his best to split them.

“Watchin’ you with that ax is better’n watching TV,” Pop said. “Ain’t laughed so hard in years.”

Harl bit his tongue to keep from suggesting yet again that Pop apply for a job at the lumbermill in town. Pop’s anger and the sharp blows he rained on Harl for what he called disrespect were powerful deterrents. It wasn’t until Harl was an adult that he understood that Pop couldn’t handle a time clock and a regular job. He just wasn’t smart enough, and his heavy drinking didn’t help. Doing summer maintenance at the Happy Days Campground was all he could manage, and that was done on his own unpredictable schedule.

Pop kept him home from school when the snow got deep, and Harl didn’t even have those few hours of warmth provided by the old hissing and groaning radiators in Moosehead Elementary.

“This room is always so hot,” his teacher complained.

Harl smiled and slid his desk closer to the radiator.

“You are a waster of resources, Harl,” Pop constantly growled at him when he returned from foraging in the woods with a fresh supply of downed limbs and rotting logs. “You are a weakling, a wimp, and no son of mine. For generations we Evanses have been strong, men of character. What’s a little chill to us? You make me ashamed.”

Then they were even. Pop’s laziness and inability to cope with life shamed Harl.

“I don’t want to freeze to death in my own house,” Harl said. “Talk about stupid.”

“Don’t you call me stupid!” Pop’s fist came up.

“I’m not! I’m saying freezing is stupid.”

“You just don’t unnerstand your heritage and the ways we Evanses become men.”

For once Pop was right. Harl couldn’t equate chilblains with manliness, so he kept chopping wood and building roaring fires.

Early in the winter of his sophomore year, he cut a hole in the upstairs hall and installed a grate to let the heat rise. Pop nearly had a cardiac when he found what Harl had done.

“You put that floor back,” he ordered.

Harl had expected this reaction. “Can’t. I burned it.”

Blind with rage, Pop swung.

The old man had been using the same move for years, and Harl dodged it with ease. He grabbed his father by the shirt front.

“Swing at me again,” Harl said in a low, tight voice, “and I’ll hit back.”

Pop’s face turned red and his teeth drew back in a snarl, but he didn’t strike out again. Instead he left the house and didn’t return that night.

The next day when Harl came home from school, a piece of plywood was nailed over the grate. Since Pop had already left for the taproom, Harl ripped it free, chopped it up, and fed it to the wood stove, stoking the fire hotter and hotter.

Pop came home late and, groggy with drink, had fallen asleep. There would never be a better time.

Harl fed the fire until it was a small inferno. He stepped back, leaving the door of the stove open as someone might if they wanted extra heat, watching, waiting. One coal leaped out, then two, then more and more, all pulsing a fierce red and fiery gold, sizzling, smoldering on the wood floor. When the floor exploded in flames, he smiled. He took his father’s bank card and all the money the old man had in his wallet. He then stood in the frigid air and watched the house and Pop go up in the crackling, soaring
flames, for once not feeling the bite of the cold due to the warm satisfaction flooding him at the success of his vengeance.

When he was certain nothing would save the old place or the old man, he drove Pop’s car to the nearest ATM and took out as much money as possible. He tossed the card in a nearby Dumpster so he wouldn’t be tempted to use it again and give the police something to trace. He headed south, toward warmth even in January, and never looked back.

He smiled now as he watched the bay. He liked this little town. It wasn’t as warm as southern Arizona, but he did like the wildness of the oceans’ waves and the peace of the bay’s calm, neither a feature that Arizona could offer.

He looked over his shoulder. Mike was fussing with one of his fishing reels. What was it with the man and fishing? Harl didn’t see the attraction. He also didn’t understand why a man who liked deep-sea fishing would settle in Arizona.

In the background the television droned on about the discovery of the body of the missing local guy in the bay. Not that such a grizzly find dimmed the scene’s beauty in Harl’s eyes. Nothing could do that. Nor did the retrieval of the body concern Harl. In fact he felt quite complacent. As far as anyone knew, he was at the compound keeping silence with Mike at the retreat house as they sought God’s leading for The Pathway.

Right.

Retreating to pray was Mike’s customary cover for his fishing trips. It wouldn’t do for his followers who lived in austerity to know of his excursions aboard rented luxury yachts. Oh, they weren’t big yachts, just small, well-appointed ones. Mike didn’t want to draw unnecessary attention when he anchored in some marina.

Nor would it do for his followers to know what some of their donations
were funding—and fishing trips were the least of it. Harl grinned what he liked to think of as his shark’s grin.

Was there time to sneak away for a walk on the beach, another feature Arizona lacked? But then Seaside didn’t have looming saguaro cacti, arms outstretched, thorns ready to impale you.

He thought for a moment about how different the two locales were, then smiled as he thought of the one feature they shared. Gullible people.

A
s I stumbled down the back steps in the early Tuesday morning light, bleary eyed from tossing and turning all night, I was still wrapped in sadness. In my head that little whisper reverberated louder than a rock band at full throttle.

“Ginny.”

Greg had sat at my kitchen table and whispered his dead wife’s name. I could stick bamboo shoots under my fingernails and experience less pain, less despair.

Even when Lindsay and I had been faced with living on the street, I’d had hope. We had escaped our own personal hell, were free, on our own, safe. Nothing we’d find in the wide world could compare to the dangers in our home.

We left all that evil for a better life. By God’s grace we found it. And I wasn’t ungrateful. Truly I wasn’t. Still my heart wept as I went in the café’s back door, my hopelessness jabbing, stabbing as I swallowed the tears burning in the back of my throat. Blessings in one area of life didn’t prevent sorrow in another.

I felt as if I had been robbed of my deepest hope, a foolish hope perhaps, an unrequited dream, but a hope nevertheless. And one word had done it.

“Ginny.”

I couldn’t imagine being loved like that, three years gone and still my name on someone’s lips.
Oh, Lord
, I wailed silently as I poured coffee and served Ricky’s food and Lindsay’s baked goods.
Why not me?

I must have sighed because a gnarled hand reached over the pink marble counter and patted mine.

“It’ll be okay, Carrie. Whatever it is, it’ll get better.”

I looked into Mr. Perkins’s kind, concerned face and wanted to lay my head on his bony shoulder and weep. “I’m okay.” I forced a smile.

He touched under his eye, and I lifted my free hand to my eye.

“Just had a bad night,” I said, unhappy that it showed so clearly in the dark circles I’d tried to disguise with eraser stick.

He nodded. “All that excitement yesterday.”

“Yesterday was wild.” I forced another smile.

The door opened and Greg came in, so handsome in spite of being bruised and scabby. The hematoma from the bump on his forehead had settled into a lovely black eye, which should have made him look disreputable but didn’t. My heart did its usual Snoopy dance, apparently unaware of the hopelessness of the situation, something my mind grasped with great sorrow. Clearly I needed better communication between body parts.

Mr. Perkins patted my hand harder. I looked at him with something like panic. He knew?

My face burned. It was a sad day when one’s deepest secret was known to all, because if Mr. Perkins figured it out, how many others had also guessed? Ricky? Clooney? I already knew Lindsay, Mary P, and Andi suspected. Could life get any worse?

I pulled free and reached for the decaf coffee before I thought. I almost poured it over Mr. Perkins’s hand as he covered his cup protectively.

“Carrie!” He looked at me, appalled. “The real thing!”

I gave him a weak smile. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. We’ve got to keep your blood pumping.”

I filled his cup with my special blend, knowing I’d have to say something to Greg and sure that everyone was listening.

“Hi,” Greg said with a warm smile. I felt I should look behind me to see who he was smiling at. If he wasn’t careful, I’d think he was glad to see me.