SIREN'S TEARS (ALTON RHODE MYSTERIES Book 3)

SIREN’S TEARS

A Novel By

Lawrence De Maria

(An Alton Rhode Mystery
)

SIREN’S TEARS, a novel by Lawrence De Maria

Copyright © Lawrence De Maria 2013

Revised 2016

This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations,

places and incidents portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce

this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this book may be reproduced, downloaded, transmitted, reverse engineered, decompiled or stored in or introduced into any storage or retrieval system in any form or by any means, whether electric or mechanical, without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading or distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the author is illegal and punishable by law.

Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

Special thanks to Nancy Kreisler, Maryellen Alvarez and Deborah Thompson. Published by St. Austin’s Press             

To
Patti
, without whose love, support and faith this book

– and others –

would not have been possible, and two my sons, Lawrence and Christopher, good men, both.

What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,

Distill’d from limbecks foul as hell within.

(William Shakespeare, Sonnet 119)

PROLOGUE

Cordillera Occidental (Western Andes) - 2003

Black spider monkeys are social animals, often found in close-knit family groups of 20 or more. Social, but not stupid.

Those that inhabit the Pacific slopes of the Andes of western Colombia are particularly cautious, constantly on the move, swinging through the trees with a genetic grace and power that would be the envy of Cirque du Soleil. To remain motionless for more than a few minutes in a South American rain forest is to be eaten.

But even some arboreal creatures must come down out of trees occasionally. But when a group of spider monkeys, mostly females and immature males, is on the ground foraging for fallen fruit and other food, the older males higher up are constantly on the watch for predators. These they usually manage to thwart with their early warning system. If an anaconda or jaguar is spotted in time, all it takes is a screech from one monkey to send the entire troupe up into the canopy, frightened babies clinging to the backs of their howling mothers.

There they will all sit for a moment, looking down at their frustrated pursuers, until, at a signal from the dominant male, all the monkeys will swing toward even more safety. Adding distance to height almost always works. Almost always.

Spider monkeys are reluctant to leave a group member behind, although in dire circumstances self-preservation wins out and, with the exception of females with young, it’s every ape for itself. On this day it was not a 20-foot snake or a big cat that caused the tribe to climb frantically into the trees. Humans were walking through the forest: Four loin-clothed Noanamá Chocó Indians and a young white woman. The Indians carried long palm-wood tubes; the woman, binoculars. Except for the low buzz of insects, the forest was now silent. Animals, even those not in danger, instinctively sense a hunt. Death was in the air.

The spider monkeys were the most nervous, and with good reason. The five humans circled their trees far below. But they made no move to climb. The four Indian men merely put their tubes to their mouths. There was a series of barely-audible “pfftts.” The small primates awaited a sign from the alpha male to flee. Suddenly, he jumped to another branch with a screech. It wasn’t the normal signal, but it was enough for the others. They started swinging away through the branches.

Surprisingly, the humans followed, at a loping pace that gave them no chance to catch the monkeys. With safety assured, the troupe slowed, waiting for their leader. For some reason, he lagged behind. At one point he did something none of the animals ever did. He missed a branch, and barely caught a lower one. He wrapped his legs and arms around it. Another big male, showing unusual courage, swung back toward the alpha. The leader raised his head, shaking it violently back and forth, as if to say, “Don’t come any closer.” But even had he been capable of such intelligent thought, it was merely the beginning of a convulsion. The shaking soon spread to the rest of his body.

Suddenly, the alpha male stiffened, and tumbled off the branch to the forest floor 60 feet below. With millions of years of accumulated rainforest detritus breaking his impact, the fall wouldn’t have killed him. It didn’t matter. The alpha male was dead before he hit the ground.

The other male didn’t hesitate, or wonder why the other ape fell out of the tree for no apparent reason. All he felt was fear. And even if he could have felt regret, he wouldn’t have. The dead alpha male had bullied him into second place in the tribe, and mated with all the best females. Now, he was the leader. He let out a loud screech and led the survivors away. The sounds of the chattering band soon receded in the distance. But other animal sounds, muted to be sure, resumed. An animal died, but the forest lived.

Below, at the base of the tree, the four men squatted around the dead animal. Their blowguns lay next to them. One of the Indians reached out and pulled a small dart from the monkey’s shoulder and placed it in a pouch tied to the lace string that held up his scanty loincloth. The woman came up to them and sat cross-legged. One of the men reached down and cupped his own dangling testicles and said something. The other Indians laughed and then looked at the woman. She smiled and nodded. The first man took out a knife and expertly castrated the dead monkey. Carefully, he sliced the animal’s genitals in four roughly even pieces and passed the dripping delicacies around to the other three men. Each tilted his head back and dropped their portions into their mouths. They looked like they were slurping oysters, she thought.

The woman had eaten much worse in her time with these people, but the monkey gonads were not offered. She was not offended. They liked her, and accepted her almost as one of their own, but she obviously didn’t need male spirit.

Thank God, they didn’t kill a female, Dr. Mary Naulls thought. Although I doubt if they even know what ovaries are.

***

A half hour later the small hunting party emerged from the tree line and walked into a small village. Two of the men carried a long pole, from which hung the body of the spider monkey, its long swishing tail almost touching the ground. The man whose dart killed the animal walked at the head of the column. No monkey-carrying for him. Naked children and several hairless dogs ran out to greet them. A woman with a baby at a breast walked over to the lead man and said something. She pointed at the dangling animal. He looked chagrined. Mary Naulls had a limited grasp of the language, but she got the drift. Something about a “small monkey.”

Mary smiled. It was domestic conversation, she knew, that dated from when the first humanoids themselves climbed down from trees. The man made a show of arguing but was quickly silenced by a sharp retort. He didn’t want to antagonize his wife. The traditional delicacy of monkey brains, eaten right from the skull, is reserved for the successful hunter’s family, and the woman of the house divvies up the portions.

Two of the village children ran over to Mary and took her hands. She was their favorite. Mary loved these simple, generous people, especially the kids. She wondered how long their way of life would survive. The rainforests were shrinking, though not as fast as on the east coast of South America. The Indians loved her back, admiring her fortitude. She could sit for days in a steady rain studying the plants and animals that fascinated her. Mary couldn’t explain to them that at least she was usually comfortable, unlike the many hours she spent shivering and hiding from her father back in Ocean Falls, off the coast of her own Columbia, British Columbia. The spelling was different, but Ocean Falls had almost as much precipitation as the Colombian rainforest, an average of 170 inches of chilling rain annually. To Mary, walking around with Chocó hunters during a downpour was as pleasant as taking a warm shower. In fact, she always carried a bar of soap with her and when alone stripped naked to wash.

One of children, the boy of about five, had a small sack in his hands, which he held up proudly. Mary knew what was in it but made a show of delight. A tiny frog hopped out, only to be snatched in mid air by the little girl and returned to the sack. Mary was momentarily startled until she saw that the little girl’s hand was wrapped in plantain leaves. Some adults handled a Rana Tóxico, the Spanish name for Poison Dart Frog,
without
even that rudimentary safety precaution. Just touching the skin of the tiny amphibian could be painful, as Mary knew from experience. She suspected that many of the hunters had built up immunity to the poison, at least externally. But when the toxin entered the bloodstream, via dart or ingestion, it was another matter. No animal was immune from its effects internally. Except for one local snake, anything that ate the brightly colored little frog died.

There are several varieties of Poison Dart Frogs in South America. Most are truly beautiful, with skins dappled with colors so bright they almost hurt the eyes. But none are as deadly as the one the little girl held, which had the scientific – and appropriate – name of
Phyllobates terriblis
. In fact, biologists consider it the most potentially lethal of all animals, its batrachotoxin even surpassing the potency of sea wasp jellyfish venom. One milligram of the thumb-sized frog’s skin-secreted alkaloid poison can kill 20 men or two bull elephants. The minute grooves in the darts used by the Indians contained a fraction of that amount and it had been more than enough for the unfortunate spider monkey.

When Mary got to her hut she carefully added her new frog to a small wicker basket containing a dozen others. Using techniques taught her by the villagers, she had been collecting toxin from her little captives for months. The villagers never asked her for any. The frogs were all over the jungle. She was due to go back home and knew she would have trouble taking any live frogs with her. There were plenty of South American dart frogs in North American research labs, and even in private hands. But they had limited use for the kind of research Mary wanted to do. The native frogs synthesized their poison from chemicals obtained from the bodies of specific insects, mainly forest ants and beetles, consumed locally. Once on a different diet in laboratories, such as fruit flies and crickets, Rana Tóxico became just another Kermit.

***

The Rev. Humphrey Naulls was waiting impatiently for his daughter in the Avianca terminal in the Vancouver International Airport on Sea Island. It took Mary more than an hour to clear customs. Fortunately, her academic credentials were iron clad, with letters from both Colombian and Canadian officials and colleagues explaining why the attractive woman scientist was allowed to bring in the clearly marked samples of various venoms into North America.

The vials were in a small lock box and officials made a show of counting them against a list that had been wired to them from Bogota. No one bothered to check the toothpaste tubes and face cream jars that contained the bulk of the toxins Mary had collected. In them was enough batrachotoxin to depopulate Canada’s Western Provinces.

Not that Mary planned mass murder. On the contrary, most of the venom would go into legitimate research to further her career. But she had planned ahead.

There would always be enough left over for selective murder.

When Mary finally greeted her father, there was no kiss, or hug, despite the fact that she’d been gone more than a year. A casual observer might have assumed that Mary’s recent conversion to Catholicism, the result of her time spent with a dynamic Catholic missionary from Spain who worked with the Chocó villagers, explained her father’s coolness. After all, Rev. Naulls served one of the largest Lutheran flocks in British Columbia, and was locally famous for flying his own plane to remote congregations. He did, in fact, consider her a traitor. But their personal schism ran deeper than religion. Mary Naulls hated her father, for what he did to her mother, and to her.

Her mother, a morally weak woman to be sure, was dead. The official cause was heart trouble. But Mary blamed her father for driving the woman to an early grave with his philandering. Not that Mary missed her mother, who had never lifted a finger when Rev. Naulls satisfied his urges with late night visits to his daughter’s bedroom that lasted until she went to college.

“How long will you be home for?”

It was the first words spoken by her father since they had climbed into his single-engine Cessna Skycatcher for the two-hour flight to Ocean Falls. Mary looked down at the waters of Queen Charlotte Sound while she answered.

“Just a few weeks. I start my new position in Ontario in September.”

“I had hoped you might stay longer.”

She looked at her father. At 70, with a full head of white hair and a ruddy complexion, he was still a handsome man, catnip, she was certain, to lonely widows in remote congregations. She smiled grimly to herself.

***

Once home in Ocean Falls, they maintained a polite civility. A week into her stay, Rev. Naulls told his daughter he had to make a pastoral visit to Masset, a small town on Graham Island, part of Nakoon Provincial Park, 200 miles to the northwest. He asked her to go along.

“I can’t, father,” she replied, thinking the timing couldn’t be better. “I have too much to do preparing for my new position. But let me pack a breakfast for you.”

Mary watched his plane take off due west over the Pacific Ocean. She wondered how long he would be able to resist the smell of freshly baked sausage biscuits. Then, smiling, she went into the house.

***

In his plane, 45 miles out and having reached the Cessna’s 14,000-foot cruising altitude, Rev. Naulls put a half-eaten biscuit on the seat next to him and started to make his scheduled turn to the north toward Graham Island. Much to his surprise, the Skycatcher, normally a nimble aircraft, responded sluggishly. He looked at his instrument panel to see what the problem might be. The dials were blurry. He blinked, but that didn’t help, especially since he had trouble blinking. He was also having a hard time concentrating, and he suddenly realized that it wasn’t the Skycatcher that was responding sluggishly. He was.

The minister’s lips and tongue felt numb and he had a strange sensation in his throat. It felt like the temporarily unpleasant feeling one has in the dentist chair after accidentally swallowing a topical gum anesthetic. Except this time the feeling didn’t go away. He tried to swallow, and couldn’t, succeeding only in dribbling biscuit and sausage bits down his chin.