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It was nearly one in the morning, by this point, so I had to move fast if I was going to get any rest before work the next day. It took me nearly half an hour to drag the body the short way up to the path, since I had to sit down panting just about every ten steps. People are heavy when they’re dead. I also nearly ralphed every time I caught a glimpse of the skin flap flapping, and I’d seen enough CSI to know that my stomach contents could be used to link me to the site.
Despite my exhaustion and nausea, we made it up to Mr. Flutie’s path. I tried arranging Peter so he looked natural until I realized how absurd that was. Then I felt that it was wrong just to walk away. So I bowed my head and gave as good a prayer as I could give, never having been in any place of worship in my life. I told Peter I was sorry he died and that I hoped he could find peace. I also told him I was sorry for leaving him and hoped that, as a writer, he could understand my dilemma and my reasons for not calling the police. As I started to tell him how efficient Mr. Flutie would be in getting the authorities involved, I had a mental vision of myself, starkers as I was, having a serious conversation with a cadaver. So I cut my prayer short and ended with a moment’s silence. Then I walked back to the beach, making sure that I erased any signs of our trail that the storm hadn’t gotten to first.
I made a beeline back to the ocean. I was filthy. The rain had melted the last of our most recent snowfall and I was covered in a thick coating of dirt overlaid with sand. I scrubbed myself down in the shallows and then swam out a ways both to rinse off and to get back to my secret cove where my clothes were.
Getting dressed, I knew that I wasn’t going to get any sleep that night. And that if I did, it would be full of visions of drowned bodies bobbing in my head.
CHAPTER THREE
The sharp notes of my alarm clock burst through my brain, setting the dreams that had haunted my night’s brief sleep to flee. There was an awful taste in my mouth: my stomach’s revenge for the panic and nausea it had endured the night before. Speaking of which…
I had found a murdered man.
I lay in bed, immobile, trying to get to grips with what I’d done. In the light of the weak November sun leaking through my curtains, my actions were nowhere near as logical as they’d seemed under cover of darkness.
First of all, I had no guarantee that the body was any more likely to be found where I’d put it than wherever the Old Sow would eventually have deposited it. What if Russ had decided he’d rather be taken down a different trail? What if Mr. Flutie had decided to skip his morning constitutional and instead gone to Vegas to blow his retirement savings on blackjack and lap dances? What if, gods forbid, I’d overestimated his intestinal fortitude and now there were two bodies lying across that path: Peter dead of foul play and Mr. Flutie dead of a coronary?
Second, I must have annihilated any evidence that might have been on Peter’s body. If there had been any clues as to who had killed him left intact after his time in the sea, they’d doubtlessly been totally erased by the long drag up the beach. Not to mention there would be confusion over the fact that it would appear as if his killer had left him on the beach after apparently dipping him in the ocean just for kicks…
In turn, this led me to my third reason for why I should never have touched Peter. If a murdered body wasn’t bizarre enough for Rockabill, the police would now have a body that had either dragged itself up out of the ocean or whose killer had had second thoughts about dumping it and decided to use his victim to decorate the local nature trail, instead.
I pulled my pillow out from under my head and smothered my face with it. How could I have been so stupid? Why didn’t I just leave well enough alone?
Then I thought of Peter’s poor dead face as well as the polite kindness he’d shown me when he was alive, and I knew I couldn’t have left him out there, abandoned to the elements.
I pushed the pillow away and willed myself to move. I had to get down to the village and face the music if there was any music to be faced.
Alternatively, came the sly voice in my head, you could just bury your head under the covers and never come out, no matter who came knocking.
But my hospital experience had taught me that bedclothes never protected you from anything. So I got up and got ready for work, and then went downstairs to make breakfast and perform my Tuesday chores as normally as possible. It’s not like my method of cleaning the upstairs bathroom would give away the fact that I’d spent the previous evening dredging a body out of the Old Sow, but I was still jumpy.
I started to relax when dad and I got through breakfast without Sheriff Varga stopping by in his official capacity. It was only when I walked into town that I realized a smallish circle of hell had broken loose.
A goodly portion of Rockabill’s permanent residents were milling about, sipping coffee from Thermoses and talking in hushed tones. Rockabill was still decidedly more shabby than chic, although it did have a naturally cutesy aspect that we’d tried to ham up for the tourists. And we did achieve a pretty homey feel, especially when the square was crowded with people, as it was today. Not that we often gathered to discuss the murder of a vacationing stranger.
I braced myself to weave through the small crowd, but I relaxed as I realized no one was paying me any undue attention. I could see Grizelda’s tall form—she was extra conspicuous in a fuchsia satin capelet—flitting from group to group, and I gave a little internal cheer. Grizzie was a gossip sponge. She’d have every single drop of delicious rumor soaked up in no time. I just had to wait for her to come spill.
Tracy was already opening up the store when I got there, and her normally cheerful face looked grim. My heart missed a beat. Was Varga waiting for me at work?
But she was just reflecting the town’s mood, and her greeting was normal enough until she added, “Did you hear about the body?”
I tried to make my face look confused.
“No, what happened? What body?”
“Peter Jakes,” she replied, frowning. “His body was found by Mr. Flutie this morning on that nature trail on the back side of the beach. ”
So, I thought, his last name was Jakes.
Tracy continued, “The police won’t say anything official, but apparently Jakes was murdered. ”
“No way,” I said, trying to channel a little bit of last night’s shock into my words. “Are you serious?”
“Yup. Grizzie’s getting the rest of the story now. Knowing her, she’ll have copies of the police reports by the time she’s done. ”
Tracy’s speculations weren’t far off. Grizzie came in about an hour later looking flushed. She was practically bursting with information, but she had to wait until we finished serving the last few customers from our unexpected morning rush before she could empty out her gossip sack.
And empty she did.
Before the door had even shut on the last customer’s heels Grizelda was facing Tracy and me, her hands on a shoulder each, as if linking us in her holy trinity of rumor, conjecture, and innuendo.
“Peter Jakes,” she said, with the voice of a narrator from some true crime docudrama, “was murdered. ”
Tracy just rolled her eyes in exasperation and I made a sort of “get on with it” rolling-hands gesture.
Grizzie ignored our impatience, continuing at the same dramatic pace.
“He was killed in his own driveway,” she intoned. “He’d been to market for groceries and was unloading them from his car when, bam, somebody hit him on the back of his head with a stone from his own garden’s decorative border. ”
She looked at each of us in turn, letting her words soak in before continuing.
“They know because that young bag boy at McKinley’s helped Peter load his trunk and his groceries are still spilled all over his driveway. And the stone was just lying there, all covered in blood, next to his Cream of Wheat. ” She paused for effect before gleefully plunging back in.
“
Old Mrs. Patterson says that she saw a black Mercedes drive up toward his place around five-thirty, and then drive away again at, like, four in the morning. ” Grizzie shook her head. “That old gossipmonger never sleeps. ” Tracy and I met each other’s eyes and tried not to scoff too openly. “Anyway, the police think that whoever was driving the car might be the murderer. If so, that means it was somebody from outside Rockabill, ’cause nobody here owns a Benz. ”
I felt a wave of relief wash over me, but the sensation was short-lived.
“There is one thing that doesn’t make any sense, however…”
Uh-oh, I thought. Here it comes.
“Apparently, the man we know as Peter Jakes barely existed. ”
I schooled my face into blandness, as Tracy grunted. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” Grizzie said, impatiently, “that Jakes had a credit card and a Canadian passport, but nothing else. No home address, no records in the U. S. or in Canada. Nothing. It’s like he didn’t exist. He just had some P. O. box out near Québec, somewhere. ”
“That is a mystery,” I murmured, but Grizzie wasn’t through. Dammit.
“Oh, duh, that reminds me of the big mystery… Jakes’s body was definitely in the ocean, which makes the police think that whoever killed him tried to dump him. But he somehow ended up on that trail, instead. ”