THE PLOT THICKENS/RV-GO DOWN TO THE SEA continued . . .

(Rainbow Over Condo Construction)


The Stock Market seems to have caught my flu and died this week. Whether it was the fever or a sudden attack of sanity, I sold almost all of my portfolio right down to my principle so as to preserve capital - it was the principle of the thing (sorry). At least I won't lose my core investments. Around here we are all hunkering down, hauling out our grandparents' Great Depression recipes. Beans, rice, bone soup. Buddy, can ya spare a dime?

At work the cancellations are starting to roll in. Several of my clients are mid-construction on new or renovated condo complexes. Have you ever seen photos of Old West Ghost towns? You have the idea. Funding has dried up, would-be buyers are nowhere to be seen. The Tonka Toys are silent, workers gone home to their rental units.

And now today Washington Mutual has gone the way of buggy whips. So terribly sad, it's hard to find anything positive to say except that we Americans are a hardy, creative, adaptable bunch - adapt or die! We've been through worse and we will survive these tough times. Today in Writers' Workshop my 94 year old mom shared her memories of the Great Depression - of five years working seven-days a week for $1 a day, eating two small meals a day, living in a charity boarding house run by the Volunteers of America - and being thankful for such bounty!

Now this week's episode of RV-GO DOWN TO THE SEA:
Chapter 6
To say I was disappointed was an understatement. I had envisioned emerging from the museum waving a fan of incriminating photographs all the way to the local police station. Even though I knew that the photos were not likely to solve the murder for us, they would at the very least provide a motive for the murder.
Alice and I left the museum glum and hungry. The easiest solution to the later was to walk around back of the museum and across the street to the Inn of the West Wind. The special was pot roast. I dived in like a refugee.
“What do we do now?” I asked my dinner companion.
“Not too much to do, as I see it,” replied Alice, between bites of tender meat.
“There must be something. I feel so . . . I don’t know, stymied. I thought sure I was on the right track.”
“It was not a bad theory actually, Cora Jane,” she said. “The problem is that maybe there were other, better theories we just are not seeing yet.”
“You are right - even though that felt like a pat on the head. There are a million scenarios we have not even entertained. I just got stuck on this idea and could not see beyond it.”
Remains of the pot roast congealed on my plate, reflecting perfectly the mood of the moment.
“In a way I am relieved,” said Alice.
“Why is that?”
“It would have been quite a responsibility to hold such dangerous information. What use would we make of it, do you think? If we found a photograph showing . . . I do not know, people coming off a trawler at midnight for example, what would that actually prove, C. J.? A thing like that could be explained in so many ways, none of which have anything at all to do with Carl’s death.”
“True,” I said. “But if Carl had been so sure the photos showed illegal activity and acted on that belief he could have ticked someone off sufficiently to lash out.”
“Yes. He could have waved it under the wrong person’s nose. It might never have had a thing to do with extortion - only anger. Like a barroom brawl gone too far.”
“In which case we might never know what happened . . . unless forensics comes up with DNA evidence. Or an eye witness.”
The waitress tried to refill our coffee. Both of us waved her off. Though we were both so wired from disappointment neither of us were likely to get any sleep tonight, with or without coffee.
Alice shrugged. “Well, at least we tried. I keep saying that to myself as if it is going to help me feel better. It is this feeling that nothing can be done that drives me mad. I hate being powerless. How do I go on with my day to day, leaving the dead behind? It is the bain of historians not to be able to let go.”
I could have told her that historians had no patent on having trouble letting go. There were so many things I wanted desperately to leave behind me in the dust but they stuck like road tar on a hub cap.
* * *
My brand new digital camera had all the bells and whistles but not one single photo on its memory card. I took the lens cap off, turned it on, checked all the settings against what the instruction booklet recommended for interior shots, aimed it at my living room and pushed the button on top. The room lit up and the camera emitted an official sounding click. Oops, I had forgotten to check the view on the little screen. Never mind, this was practice. I checked the screen. Yes, everything looked to be in its proper place. I snapped off another then saved my itty-bitty bathroom for posterity before turning my photographic brilliance on the kitchen. By the time I got around to the bedroom I was getting the hang of it and was just about ready to take the camera on the road. Or at least outside the RV.
I ran around like a dervish snapping all angles of the RV-GO’s boxy body. Close up of weeds between the tires. Wide angles of the single wide mobiles lined up like race horses champing in the paddock. Ron, from next door was out walking his bull dog and had to submit while I tried my hand at animal portraiture. After I had maxed out the memory card I went back inside to see if I could figure out the camera to computer interface. There was a kind of cradle I nestled the camera into which connected to one of the computer’s USB ports. I managed to find iPhoto, clicked here and there until my computer was happily displaying sharp close ups of the ugliest bull dog on the coast. Satisfied that I had the gist of the process I was raring to head for the marina, camera snug in my jacket pocket.
But was I getting ahead of myself? Action for the sake of action - action to keep ahead of despair? I hauled myself up short and sorted out the tangled cords pulling me in all directions. Cords that had nothing to do with power outlets and USB ports. I was still fixated on the marina. What did I think was going to happen if I showed up with my handy camera? Were all the perps going to parade down the boardwalk for me to capture? Did I think I could camp out opposite Float 3 until I saw what Carl saw? What a fool’s paradise I was living in these days. What I needed was a big dose of nature. I shoved my camera in the olive green jacket, pulled a wool watch cap over my head, grabbed my bike and set off down the road toward Grays Harbor Lighthouse Park.
Once out on the dunes, the guttural groan of an ocean cradling me like the heart of a mother, I began to hum a nameless melody as I walked along through the pure clinging sand. The rain of yesterday was a memory. Streaks of blue teased openings in the fat clouds. But it was cold so near the water. My nose burned with the freshening wind. I changed camera settings with ridged fingers, pointed the lens down the length of the bleached beach. Everything lined up. The textures of tire tracks in wet sand, prints of racing dogs and barefoot owners, sand pipers stalking on stick legs in and out of the surf - I studied the light and how it changed in the window of my camera with every inch I moved right or left. Drank in the thin sun bouncing on the curling water and the rich shadows seeping beneath the silver logs.
I watched the slow receding of the tide toward its lowest point, without knowing when exactly that occurs or how to tell when the flow back in begins. Was this wave pulling back now from that broken rock the farthest it will come today?
My hands clenched the camera feeling resistance as the shutter sucks what it can of the scene. Before I know it the memory is full and the beach is twice as wide as it had been when I arrived. Gulls wheel in close and photogenic just as I run out of space. I retrieve the bike and turn for the path back past the lighthouse.
Plunging into a sea of night I retreat like the tide, carrying my captured moments like a smooth stone in the depths of my pocket.
Once home, I empty the tiny box of images into the safe harbor of my hard drive.
Oh my God! Looking down at my camera, the realization hit all at once. I knew where Carl’s photos were!
TO BE CONTINUED . . .

LAST DAY OF SUMMER/RV-GO DOWN TO THE SEA CONTINUED

The vegetable garden was a totally super idea - too bad the sun wasn’t up long enough to engender tomatoes, cukes, squash ... or much of anything except slugs. A chill drizzle pounds what’s left of my hopes for pretty produce. At least the rain barrel is filling up.

And now I believe I have the flu. The weather is perfect for that, keeping me inside listening to my precious heating oil pumping into the furnace. Perhaps this convenient fever will allow me to turn off the heat before the oil bill exceeds the mortgage payment.

But for heart stopping excitement, how ‘bout that stock market last week! Wah Hoo! (Especially if you own Washington Mutual - fortunately I sold mine last Fall @$34.00) I love the market - never get enough of its highs and lows. Nothing makes me feel more alive than watching my net worth plummet into the abyss, while all the time keeping faith that someday some ditzy stock I forgot I owned will rocket past Google into the stratosphere. Yes!! Ka-ching!

Now, since I’m off to nurse my flu with a second cup of tea I’ll post some more RV-GO Down to the Sea . . .

RV-GO DOWN TO THE SEA continued:
* * *
The next morning I poured myself a glass of orange juice and thought about girlfriends while my freezer waffle toasted. I thought about girlfriends and about how I had never actually had one. Not since high school, at any rate. My morning with Alice Burnbaum had been a revelation. Yesterday I had set out to pump the woman for snippets about the museum and Carl Heslop, yet found myself getting more out of the encounter than mere scraps of information. I actually enjoyed palling around with another woman - something that had been significantly missing from my life without me consciously being aware of it. The whole time I lived in Boise I had had no close friends - no girlfriends to go shopping with - no gal pals to share a cup of coffee or a little harmless gossip. The only women I associated with were other waitresses - but when we got off shift we scattered to the four winds.
Now that I think about it, they may have been leery of getting too close to me. My husband did not encourage people coming over to the house - he especially did not want me spending time with women friends. When we first married I thought it was that he wanted me all to himself - I was even flattered on some level to think he could be jealous of anyone who took time away from our time together. How I got sucked into believing that I'll never know. But soon it was easier to avoid conflict by not inviting anyone over to the house. I told myself that we both saw enough of people at the work place - at home we liked peace and quiet. Before I realized it I had become accustomed to isolation. I was living in a cage and didn't even know it. Ironic, I thought, that now the foul man lives in a actual cage with real iron bars. I wondered how he liked the turnabout. Or if he really even saw the justice of it. Probably not.
As I buttered my waffle and poured myself a second cup of coffee the memory of those few hours with Alice cheered me. Even her squall of tears - though disturbing - had been the closest to true human connection and warmth that I had experienced in a very long time. I found myself wanting to know more about her. She was obviously an educated woman who cared deeply about the town and its people. She was well worth knowing. I had no doubt at all that if I stayed in town long enough she would have me joining the historical society and be handing me a docent badge. I might even accept it. I already felt dangerously at home in Westport.
At my first opportunity, I would get back over the gift shop for a cup of espresso with Alice - but this time I would have no ulterior motive beyond the hope of kindling a friendship. I was definitely a little rusty in the realm of social interaction but suspected it was like riding a bike - however rusty you or the bike have become it all comes back with practice and lubrication.
As I washed up my breakfast dishes I gave some thought to how best enjoy my day off - Sunday of my “weekend” which was really Wednesday. Should I go into Aberdeen to spend my brand new pay check? I considered that. My wardrobe was shy a few key pieces, like for instance a warm and sturdy jacket capable of withstanding the coastal weather systems. The Pendleton coat I bought in Oregon was cute but not foul-weather gear. During the storm I had learned a lot about hypothermia. I needed gloves and a scarf also.
And while I was making my mental shopping list I added a camera, though I knew I would not be able to afford anything too elaborate. Had Carl still been alive he would have been the perfect person to consult. He would know just what I needed. It seemed to me if I was going to be traveling around in an RV I should be chronicling my travels somehow for posterity. How I wished I had had a camera to take photos of the surfers. There were so many interesting and beautiful things to take photos of in the area. I thought of all of Carl’s magnificent seascapes - or would they be called boat-scapes? Then I remembered that one of them may have cost him his life. No, I would not think of that today.
Maybe I could make scrapbooks, I thought - though I did not feel at all confident in my artistic abilities. Still, you had to start somewhere. What, I wondered, do people generally do with photos besides send them to relatives - of which I had none. Well, I could always make a collection and enjoy them myself - something to remind me of the places and people I encounter. That was a good enough goal for now, I thought. I toyed briefly with the idea of going digital but thought I would need a computer and printer to make the most of that. Something that was completely beyond my budget. However, to start out I knew enough to know I could have digital prints made up at the Westport Pharmacy. I had seen a sign on the window. So that might be a way to get started. I would get myself a small digital camera and have it tucked in my jacket pocket for the next time I was something memorable.
I cleaned up, got dressed, and unplugged RV-GO for the trek into Aberdeen. It really was a pain the the patoot not to have a little car to run around in. I now understood why so many RV owners had compact cars hitched to the tail ends of their rigs. Much easier to unhook a trailer hitch than all the utility hoses and cables on the RV. I have heard boats described as holes in the water you pour money into - RV-GO was a hole in a sand dune gaping wide to receive my hard earned tip money. There was nothing I could see of the RV lifestyle that indicated it was a cheap way to live full time.
The cloud bank the evening before had rolled ashore during the night. I thought the rain might hold off until I got my errands done but just in case I checked the windshield wipers and the reservoir for washer fluid. Satisfied that all systems were go I fired up RV-GO and pointed his stubby nose at the highway for Aberdeen.
The RV and I had a companionable drive past the Ocean Spray Cranberry plant and over the bridge at the oyster beds. I promises myself I would stop some day at the Brady’s Oysters and buy myself a few cans of their finest mollusks. Just not today. Today I had bigger game in mind.
I would have actually preferred the mollusks, since I am one of those aberrant females who hate shopping. I never, ever shop for recreation. There has to be a real need, a list, a clearly defined intent. Thus armed with purpose - and a strictly adhered to budget - I launch myself into the fray of comparison shopping, fitting rooms, and suffocating crowds. Usually I come out of the experience with approximately what I went in search of. I cannot say I come out of it whistling happy tunes. I hear that my fellow shop-a-phobics are flocking to the internet as a way of saving sanity and shoe leather. That sounds pretty attractive. If I had a computer and internet access I would be joining the exodus from shopping mall hell.
The South Shore Mall was nearly empty, this being a wednesday. I tried on dozens of jackets before finding one that fit all the body parts it had to fit. It was unfortunately olive green. That is not my best color but fortunately it was not olive camo. Though all I expected of it was that it keep me warm and dry, camo would have been pushing me to the wall.
J. C. Penney had a nice sale on cotton turtle neck shirts. I bought four in assorted colors. Also a six pack of woolly socks. Now the weather could do its damnedest. I was ready for the worst.
My next stop was the electronic store for a small camera. Where I completely lost my mind. This was where my list and iron clad sales resistance should have simplified the task. However I discovered that I had - hidden deep in the abyss of my subconscious mind - an evil twin with her own agenda. An hour later I trundled out of the store with not only a six mega pixel palm size digital camera but a color ink jet printer and a twelve inch Apple notebook computer. Oh and lest I forget, and a decimated Visa card and a terrifying case of sticker shock. I loaded my new toys into RV-GO and headed back to Westport before I could do any more damage to my finances.
Looking on the bright side I vowed that by taking this step I would never be isolated and out of touch again. I would get myself online. I would be out in the world both physically and electronically. I could e-mail people - once I knew people to e-mail. It felt as if I were making a jail break. The first step of my liberation had been RV-GO, the next was to get myself visible in cyberspace - to connect myself to the outside world.
I was trembling all over with excitement! Which made driving back to Westport slightly hair raising but I pulled into my home slot a new woman, a woman of the wide world.
I had picked up a power strip at the hardware store on my way out of Aberdeen. The kid who sold me the computer assured me that I would need one, especially since I was going to be using my technology in an RV without a fool proof electrical connection.
All the rest of the day and far past my beddy-bye time I worked on getting all the plugs plugged into the right USB ports (and actually figured out what the hell a USB port was) and connected up with power. At last the computer was communicating with its printer and the camera figured out how to convey images to the computer’s iPhoto and I was pretty much up and running. I picked the Apple because it had fewer quirks to deal with and no weird software to install. It came with everything I needed already loaded. I plugged it in, turned it on and off I went!
My new cell phone company also provided internet connection so I called their customer service in the vast city of Mumbai. A helpful man speaking precise English embellished with a charming Indian lilt instructed me each step of the way through the process of launching myself out onto the Super Highway.
During the adventure I learned something about myself I had never suspected: I am no technophobe. I dived right in pushing buttons until I stopped getting error messages and the right things began to happen. If I got it wrong nothing blew up. That was a major discovery that gave me confidence. This stuff was no more complicated than learning to use a food processor or figuring out which hose was the gray water line to your RV.
By midnight I had Goggled the word “smuggling” and had learned that the most lucrative and fastest growing branch of that ancient crime was the smuggling of illegal aliens into the United States. And currently the hottest smuggling route was from Asia (primarily China), not Mexico as I might have suspected. The route was often through Alaskan waters down the coast into the Pacific Northwest. People wanting transport paid agents called “snake heads” forty to eighty thousand dollars for passage on ships, usually freighters. Either the people would be brought over in box cars directly into major ports such as Seattle or Portland, or they transferred in open water onto fishing boats and smuggled into smaller less secure harbors - usually at night.
This information gave me food for thought. Given what both Alice and Mert had told me about the long history of smuggling in Grays Harbor, I had been toying with the idea that Carl might have run afoul of some smugglers but I had been thinking drugs not human beings.
I reluctantly logged off and put my little white Apple to sleep, then fell like a log onto my queen size bed. If I dreamed at all it was in the form of icons and error messages.
* * *
I should have gone home right after work. Westhaven was a mean dark street slimed with new rain. The computer was waiting on my dining room table back home at RV-GO - waiting for me to confer my magic touch to wake it up, waiting in its computer coma to explore and transform. Knowing it was there drew me like a chocolate cream pie. But I resisted the temptation, struggled into my olive drab garment and thrummed down the stairs to the sodden street.
A few steps later I knew where I was headed. Gulls squawked at me from their pilings as I picked my way down the steel grid ramp to Float 9. Today Angel Face rocked securely in its stall like a bored Holstein cow. I clamped a hand on the rail and climbed onto her deck. The light rain shifted direction, slapping me in the cheek and trickled down my neck.
“Mert!” I yelled at the boat. “Are you here?”
The only answer was an avian squawk from overhead as a gull checked out the commotion. I had not really held much hope of finding Captain Merton puttering about the boat in the rain. It was more like an aimless re-circling, a vain hope that if I could try again to argue that I was innocent of everything but compulsive curiosity. But of course it had come to nothing. I was calling out to the rain and the rain was the only one answering as it pattered against my olive green hood. I felt slightly silly, like a love sick school girl haunting the side walk in front of the house where the coolest boy in third period lived. Not to say I was in love or anything approaching it. It was not love-born frustration - it was just plain frustration that I could not make myself understood. It was not fair, not just. I knew I was beating my head against a stubbornly held misconception. If he would not talk to me - if I could not even find the man - I was in serious danger of becoming a mad stalker.
Still avoiding the bike ride home in the sloppy weather I decided to try Bayview Cabins and Gifts on the chance that Alice braved the puddles to open up the shop. And lots of puddles there were. Several places along the jetty were leaking like a burst water heater. A feral jetty cat glared at me from the shelter of a crevasse in the mountainous jetty. She knew I carried neither fish heads nor cans of civilized feline food. I was useless and an intrusion. I walked on, using my creaking bicycle like a sort of walker to keep me from toppling over into the soupy slurry of rain, salt water and muck.
The red “open” sign flickered in the window above a handmade lost dog notice. I swam toward it as if it were a life raft in a tilting sea. And in a way it was. Pushing ahead through a beaded curtain of rain I fell into the shop, dripping and spattering.
“Cora Jane! Good lord, my dear, what on earth are you doing out in this weather?” said Alice.
“I am asking myself the same question. Got any of that espresso to revive a drowned rat?”
“I don’t know . . . I am so terribly, terribly busy right now,” she chuckled.
“Yes, I see that,” I said. “What are you even thinking opening up today - not that I am not delighted you are - the only people out and around are strays like me. You aren’t likely to sell so much as a stick of gum.”
“True, but I can get a little inventory done,” she said, holding up a clip board. “A dismal activity for a dismal day.”
“Ugh. How about I give you a break and bend your ear for a few minutes?”
“You are an angel. I had been praying hard for an excuse to chuck this project, and here you are!” Alice tossed the clip board next to the cash register.
“Come on back and sit down - take off you coat,” she continued.
“You are the angel, Alice. Seriously.”
I peeled off my drippy jacket and made myself comfortable in a wobbly oak chair beside the shop’s electric space heater.
“So, you want to bend my ear, do you, C. J.?” said Alice, whooshing our espresso into life.
“I sure do. If you don’t mind,” I said. “I can’t stop thinking about poor Carl Heslop.”
“You are not alone in that department. I hate that it is all up in the air and inconclusive. How I wish someone would come forward with information or that of that the police would finally arrest someone. It is driving me nuts that we haven’t heard anything.”
“Are you thinking that the police have given up?”
“No, they never really give up, do they? But it will not be long before they pack everything away in a card board box, hoping that someday they can reopen the case with fresh evidence.”
“Yes, that is what happens too often. The trail goes cold, and people forget. Move onto other mysteries,” I said, thinking of all those half-forgotten boxes my ex-husband undoubtedly left in his wake over the period of twenty years or maybe more. How many of his crimes remained boxed in climate controlled rooms, labeled with names and dates - boxes that will never be properly laid at his door? There has to be more, I thought, slayings that will go unsolved, the dead never laid to rest.
Alice set a steaming cup of caffein goodness between my chilled fingers. I looked up into her face and saw there the shadow of loss and hopelessness. I came to a decision.
“I have to confess to something,” I said. “You may hate me for it and I would not blame you. I misled you when we first met, Alice. My only excuse is that I did not know you at that time and I did not know who I could trust.”
“This sounds very serious.”
“It is. And it is important to me that you understand that I meant no harm by it,” I said, trembling. If she threw me back out into the storm it was all I deserved.
“I cannot think there is any harm in you anywhere, C. J. So tell me what it is you have to tell me, and then we will see what we do with it.”
“Okay. I led you to believe I did not know who Carl Heslop was. That I had never met him and did not know he was dead. That was untrue, and I am so sorry for that deceit,” I said. “The afternoon Carl died I came by the museum hoping for a tour but found it closed. However, there was an old man there - Carl Heslop. He showed me the lens, Alice, turning it on so I could see how it worked. It was stunning and he was so kind - such a nice old man. It really impressed me and so did he.”
“Carl was there when you came by? In the afternoon?”
“Yes. I told this to Captain Merton also and he told me that afternoon was not Carl’s usual time to be at the museum. Then you yourself told me Carl was the night security man - and it has puzzled me ever since that he was there so early. I keep thinking that he must have been there to meet someone. And I know for sure it was not me,” I said, pushing on before I could chicken out. “I talked with him for few minutes and then went on home. That night the storm hit, putting everything else out of my mind. “
“And the next morning he was found dead in the Lens Building.”
“Yes.”
I told her the rest - about how I had not heard about the murder until the police showed up at Bev’s to talk to Cindy. About deciding to try my hand at investigation when it did not appear that the cops were getting anywhere. So I had gone off like an idiot to take a look around the museum. It sounded wrongheaded and doomed. What had I expected, that clues were going to pop up all over the place?
“I know how stupid it sounds,” I said.
“So what you are saying is you sought me out because I had a key to the museum and you wanted to check out where Carl worked - see if the crime scene revealed anything about the crime?”
“That sums it up, Alice. I am so sorry I did not level with you from the start. I was such a total fool.”
“Not very flattering that all you wanted was to see the museum,” she said. “I really wish you had been honest with me. Still, no harm was done.”
I could not believe she was letting me off the hook. It could not be that easy. I waited for the other shoe to drop.
“Have you managed to come up with anything, since we last talked?” she asked.
“As I said, I have been giving it a lot of thought. When I was upstairs in the museum what struck me was what a perfect observation post it was. From up there everything that went on in the marina was in plain sight. A person with a telescope - or a telephoto lens - would not miss a thing. After all that was the original intent of the widow’s walk.”
“And Carl liked to take his breaks in the widow’s walk.”
“Exactly. It was very interesting and significant, I thought, that Carl was a photographer and liked to take pictures of the boats in the marina. I asked myself what would constitute a motive for murdering a harmless old man. But what if he was not all that harmless? What if he posed a significant threat to someone - or more to the point, what if something he photographed posed a threat?”
Alice stood up. “Do you want another espresso, C. J.?”
“That would be nice,” I answered. “You know, I kept thinking about how someone had searched Mert’s boat and house. Then someone burned Carl’s cabin.”
“Surely that could have been an accident, C. J.,” said Alice, pouring me another cup of fragrant black coffee.
“No, I do not for a minute think that fire was started accidentally, Alice. I do not believe in coincidences, especially three in a row. No, someone burned the cabin thinking that it contained something he desperately wanted destroyed. No other break-ins have occurred since then, as far as we know, so I would say the killer thinks he has succeeded in destroying whatever it was. I do not think that is the case. I think the incriminating photo or photos still exist. I am thinking that either they were at Mert’s boat all the time but well hidden. Or Carl stashed them in the logical place - his photo collection at the museum.”
“But why would Carl’s murderer think Captain Merton had them?” said Alice. “And come to think of it how would he have known about the photos in the first place?”
“He would know if Carl himself told him.”
“Why in the world would he do that? He would be putting himself into terrible danger. If he had seen something illegal going on in the marina he would have gone to the police.”
“Are you sure? What if Carl decided that keeping the information quiet could benefit himself in some material way?”
“Good God, you cannot seriously be suggesting that Carl was involved in an extortion scheme? Never!” she said. “You would not even suggest that if you had known him.”
“Alice, none of us knows what someone else would do. Mert himself told me he found Carl to be a difficult man to know because he did not like to talk about himself. Can actually you say you knew him any better than Mert did?”
She seemed to be mulling that over as she sipped her coffee.
“I see what you mean,” she replied, then as if talking to herself said: “If he thought he had control of the situation he might have tried it. What could he have seen that could be so bad someone would pay to shut him up?”
“It occurred to me since it involved the boats in the marina it might be about smuggling.”
“Heavens, C. J., smuggling is old hat around here and rather small time. Carl would not have thought too much about the odd drug shipment. He might not have approved but it is hardly worth making a big fuss. There is just not that much money involved in an occasional kilo of marijuana. Not to mention the unpleasantness of perhaps attracting the attention of the drug enforcement people.
“I agree. I do not think Carl would have stuck his neck out for a simple drug shipment. But drugs are not the only thing that can be smuggled on a trawler.”
She thought about that for only a second.
“Perhaps we should leave this alone, C. J.. Let the police do their jobs, however it may play out.”
“Meaning that we may end up like Carl if we step on the wrong toes.”
“What does Mert say about your theory, if you do not mind me asking?”
“He and I had a bit of a misunderstanding. To be honest, the captain jumped to the conclusion that because I am new in town I must be involved somehow,” I said. “I was just over at the boat trying to find him but he was not there. He has not been to Bev’s for breakfast for days. I think he is avoiding me.”
“Oh, surely not. How could you be behind any of this? You have no motive . . . do you?”
“Of course not. That was what I told him, but he refuses to listen. I think I am just a convenient target for a lot of misplaced anger. ”
Alice picked up our empty cups and put them in the small bar sink next to the espresso machine.
“Well, my dear, I would say the only thing we can do at this point is to go through Carl’s photos and see if anything looks like it would be worth killing someone for.”
“I was hoping you were going to say that, Alice!” I said. “If it turns out there is nothing but a lot of pretty pictures in the store room we will know I am full of whale pucky.”
“In a way I hope you dead wrong. I want Carl’s death to be a horrible mistake - an accident after all, that he fell against the lens and that was how his throat was cut. That could have happened, couldn’t it?”
“Anything is possible,” I said, slipping into my damp coat. “When do you want to check the store room?”
“We may as well go now, if that is all right with you,” said Alice. “I will lock up and we can drive over in the truck.”

By eight p. m. Alice and I had pawed through two huge file cabinets of photographic prints. We simplified the process by deciding that whatever had gone down it had to have been under the cover of darkness so we eliminated all daylight photos. There were still a significant number of prints to view. Carl had dated the files so we checked the most recent shots first, then after finding no likely images we went through the last few years.
“Cora Jane, there is nothing here.” Alice sighed and leaned back against the wall. “At least we tried.”
“I has got to be somewhere. Where could he have stashed it?”
“Perhaps he didn’t print it. It might be on a negative somewhere.”
“Well, if it is we will never find it, Alice. How could we ever make anything out of a negative,” I said.
I pushed a lank strand of hair out of my eyes. This had been a fool’s errand.
“I don’t know where else to look,” I said. We had come to a dead end.
Alice slide the last file back into the cabinet and closed the drawer.
“We have not looked in the Lens Building or the widow’s walk,” she said. “Do you think we should ?”
“It couldn’t hurt,” I said. “Though, really Alice, I am about on my last legs. This has been a huge waste of time.”
“I am not too perky myself. Let’s say we give it one more try then quit for dinner.”
“That sounds fine to me. Where do you want to go first?”
“I say we go up to the widow’s walk and look around,” she said.
We climbed three flights of stairs up from the basement, then up the ladder to the widow’s walk. It was a tiny square glassed-in room surrounded by a narrow open air walk way. The room was completely empty. There was nowhere anything larger than a dust bunny could be concealed. We descended with heavy steps.
We would not be coming back into the main building after searching the Lens Building so Alice checked that all the lights were off and the alarm system was armed. Then she locked up.
“I suppose we should have a security system in the Lens Building too but the only thing in there is the lens and I think it is a stretch to think any one could ever steal a two ton glass sculpture.”
Alice unlocked the door and switched on the overhead lights. It seemed so eery to be in there. I avoided looking at the floor at the base of the lens, though I felt sure any blood had been cleaned up.
She walked toward the center of the room.
“I think the most logical place to look is the motor housing at the base of the lens,” she said. “There is a door in the side where Carl might have been able to hide something flat, like photos.”
I walked the perimeter of room, paying particular attention to any cracks between boards where something could have been secreted. But this had been a thoroughly processed crime scene. Anything there had been there to find would already been found.
“Find anything, Alice?” I called over my shoulder.
“Nothing. I think we had better call it a night.”
“I am so sorry to have dragged you out for this.”
“The way I remember it, I dragged you out here, Cora Jane. It was worth doing, though, don’t you think? At least we know where the photos are not.”

TO BE CONTINUED . . .

WEATHER OR NOT/RV-GO DOWN TO THE SEA continued

Half Moon Bay, Westport, Washington
Week of 9/11, 2008

Who of us is not obsessed with the weather? We live within weather as a fish lives in the sea, its infinite changeability defining our days and nights. Just try to start your day without checking to see what it’s doin’ out there beyond your window!

Seattle is a city famous for its weather - “rain, rain, rain” (Thus the title of this blog!) though if you check the stats you’ll learn we enjoy fewer wet days per year than pretty nearly anywhere but Reno. We cunning northwesterners carefully cultivate our drippy, dreary image to discourage Californian migration. With limited success I have noticed.

The weather report: I sit down to my daily journal and sure enough the first thing I jot is the state of current weather (a boring predictability I repeatedly vow to correct before I go mad). But I am not satisfied with our own local weather - no, I must have world weather. I watch swirling hurricanes grind across the Gulf of Mexico even though I have never seen that body of water. Yesterday my yard was bathed in golden late summer sun - a peachy perfect day, a perfect day for tidying up my tired vegetable beds - and were was I? In a darkened living room following CNN reports of Hurricane Ike in Texas! We all love exciting weather - especially when it is not ravaging our own neighborhood.

And now I must clamp my garden hat to my head and march myself out into the morning light. While I dig weeds you can catch up on this week’s episode of RV-GO DOWN TO THE SEA, the adventures of Cora Jane Dooley:

(Continued from last week)
“On second thought,” I said to Alice. “I’m getting kind of hungry. Why don’t we tend to changing that alarm code and catch some lunch. My treat.”
“I should be getting back to the shop,” she said, hesitating. “But I suppose there is time for a bowl of chowder.”
“Alice, the archive in the basement - is it locked?”
“That it is. It is a walk-in safe. Tight as Fort Knox.”
“Well, that is comforting,” I said. “You know, on the off chance I am right about someone trying to get at Carl’s photos.”
Alice found the alarm system instruction booklet in a file cabinet and after a few bumbling attempts we got the code changed. I restrained her inclination to write the new code on the booklet cover. Besides being too obvious, I wondered how she would retrieve it fast enough from the file cabinet to keep the alarm from going off the next time she entered the building. After I pointed that out she wrote the number down on a small scrap of paper and tucked it into a side pocket of her purse, promising to memorize it by the following week. Well, it was a compromise.
The morning fog was mast high and lifting from the silent marina. It would be a clear, crisp November day. We walked down the sidewalk past the kite shop to Bev’s Burgers by the Bay. Today, on my day off, I would be a customer and I would try not to criticize the service.
The lunch special was oyster stew. With Cindy doing the cooking I was confident it was special indeed so Alice and I both ordered it. In the previous few weeks I had downed more seafood than in all my life up to that point, still it was such a treat to get fish fresh from the ocean after so many years living land locked in Idaho. Our stew was on our table in record time, hot and buttery and garnished with sprigs of lemon grass. Euphoria! Alice and I chatted through lunch about this and that - nothing touching on the tragedy at the museum. There was no telling who might overhear us. After we had finished I paid the tab, leaving a generous tip for Betty.
Alice drove us in silence back up the jetty to the gift shop where I retrieved my bike. I thought I’d check out that whale skeleton Alice had mentioned, walking the bike back to the museum since I’d eaten too much to pedal.
A skeleton says so very little about an animal, no more than a coat hanger says about a cashmere sweater. I stared at the jaw bones cantilevered over the steel display plaque. The jaw reminded me of an enormous pair of canning tongs. Everything whale-like had been removed. What was left were pale stone lumps, bumps, and shafts from which my mind refused to construct a living creature. Looking at this stiff and sterile armature, how could anyone begin to imagine a once majestic mammal leaping in a breathing sea?
As interesting as the exhibit was in a sort of macabre way, it saddened me that the whale had not died a natural death, its elements being absorbed back into the elements. It was as if Moby Dick had lost out to Captain Ahab’s dogged persistence, ending up as an opening act in Las Vegas. Some things are just not right. Even as a kid I hated zoos and those marine displays where they had dolphins jumping through hoops and eating salmon nibbles from their trainer’s mouth - it gave me the willies to see those beautiful innocent animals trapped and displayed like objects.
Captain Ahab’s unhinged single-mindedness inspired me to have another go at convincing Captain Mert that I was not the Westport version of Lizzie Borden. I hopped on my bike and set off for Float 9 without having the slightest notion whether he would be at the boat or not. Nor what I would say to the man if he managed to be there. Would he throw me into the bay? No idea. But I was optimistic. If Alice Burnbaum believed me, then why wouldn’t Mert if I spelled out what I had learned so far and what I suspected? Maybe there was something Carl had left with him - something he had not thought significant at the time. My notion was a lot more logical scenario than assuming an out of towner was the culprit. At least that seemed logical to me.
As it turned out I had no chance to plead my case. Angel Face was not in its accustomed berth. Considering how expensive petroleum was I figured it was improbable Mert had taken the boat out on a joy ride so where had he gone? Not that it was any of my business. What did I know - maybe Mert had taken someone’s ashes out for a sea scatter. In fact, it was always possible the Grays Harbor Medical Examiner had released Carl’s body for cremation, and even as I was standing on the float Mert was scattering his ashes on the outgoing tide. I wondered if some of Carl’s Coast Guard buddies would be there - or if he had buddies other than Mert. What did I actually know about the man? Would Mert perform a funeral service or just toss the remains off the stern as the sun went down? Was Mert at all religious? We had not talked about anything spiritual. I liked the idea that he was a bit of a pagan, with a deep abiding faith in the rhythms of nature - an aging New Age hippy.
I pulled up my flight of fancy and hopped off. Was I so bored with my retired state that I had taken to inventing dramas and the fabricating intentions of a man I hardly knew? Apparently. The only thing to do was stop and disconnect. I wheeled out to Half Moon Bay, sat on a smooth silver drift wood log and watched the surfers for the rest of the afternoon.
There were half a dozen brave young idiots in black wet suits, pushing their bright boards into waves still high and wild from uncertain winter weather. Mostly they just paddled out and flowed back without ever getting up on their boards. Once in a while one of them got lucky enough to catch a small curl, struggle up to a wobbly stand for half a heart beat, then collapse in the shallows in spittle foam. They had spent too much money on their boards not to try for that one uncertain ride that may or may not come along.
I started to see my own situation in the valiant and futile striving cycle they were showing me - push out, wait for the right moment, pull yourself up, pray you get a long ride, and then even if you do not, push out once again - because the next wave might be the perfect wave, the one you have waited for all your life, the one that will carry you clean and high all the way to the spin drift. It is always out there somewhere. You know it must be there, building under the glassy surface of the swell. It is only a matter of being in the right position when you feel its subtle lift, solid like the slick back of a whale under you. And when it at long last arrives to carry you forth, it makes all the empty journeys out toward the horizon worth the effort.
Every surfer knows this truth. It is why, in the birth place of the sport, surfers are accounted shaman of a sort - crazy wizards, wise mad men, an expression of God as berserker. Before I joined the Army, in the early days of my misspent youth I lived for a while in Northern California where I fell in hopeless love with a long haired lunatic who lived to surf. I never learned the skill myself. My sense of balance was not up to the challenge, but for a while - not more than a few sweaty summers - I worshiped at his salty shrine, watching him ride his huge board under the California sun until my nose peeled and my hair was a mat of bleached straw.
I can’t for the life of me remember the guy’s name. Maybe in my last earthly days, when people say you recall the distant past better than what you had for breakfast, I will summon his name and repeat it to myself like a mantra - maybe by then I’ll understand what I was doing sitting on that baking beach watching someone else have all the fun. Or perhaps not. Ah well, I am sure my surfer god has long since dried off, gotten married any number of times, and developed arthritis in both knees. It is quite possible, I thought, that his grandson is one of the intrepid boys plunging into the welling waves of Half Moon Bay. Hope. I guess it is all about hope - and stamina.
Brian! That was his name. How could I ever have forgotten that - like Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. We used to kid him about that, that he made it up to be cool and his real name was something like Rodney or Floyd. In my mind I was Annette Funicello or Gidget, playing beach blanket bingo and chasing after my surfer man. It was all bright sunny days and starry nights - we would be young and tan forever - there would always be another wave. We could laugh and love and chase each other up and down the white sand, roll in the warm surf and drink as much cheap beer as we had pocket change for. We told each other lies and looked into each other’s eyes. The endless summer - that was what it was called.
The ugliness came much later. That summer was before AIDS, before humans scarred the surface of the moon with rough foot prints, before the Viet Nam War turned one generation against another, before our summer-bright leaders were butchered in the burning streets. A faulty memory, under certain circumstances, could be seen as a deep blessing.
It was another life ago. I hardly recognize the girl I was then. I read somewhere that at the end of seven years a person has changed out every single cell of her body - there is not one cell left of the organism you were seven years before. Could that be the origin of the magic in the number seven? But how could the ancients have known that? Makes you think. One thing I know is I have been so many people in my sixty something years it is a wonder I can remember my own name, much less someone else's from the nineteen-sixties.
Especially since my name has changed a number of times since then. No wonder women have more identity issues than men. I really believe that. A man usually dies with the same name he was given at birth - which must provide him a strong sense of continuity that women rarely enjoy. If a man questions who he is it is not because he is wearing someone else's name. Women however, until fairly recently, were identified with whoever owned them at the time. And ownership was exactly what marriage was about from its inception in the dark past to present day. A couple of goats changed hands and a young woman is relabeled like a can of peaches. She is assigned a name - a toe tag to drag along through life. Instead of someone’s daughter, she is suddenly someone’s wife and must learn all over again who she is - and if the marriage is at some point terminated she is set adrift upon the world, nameless.
And so here I am right now - Cora Jane Dooley, sitting on a log on a silky cool beach watching young men push their boards out toward the sunset, my creaky bones aching from sitting so long on that hard log, my fingers numb in linty pockets, and my stomach reminding me that lunch was a distant memory. Only a little while longer, I told it.
The sun proceeded toward the horizon in its orderly, predictable way. Soon the bank of low clouds flowing in from the west ignited into purple and salmon splashes out across the sky. Yes, that was what I was waiting for. One by one the boys splashed out of the water, dragging their tethered boards. They were a procession of ungainly birds squeaking and dripping toward the parking lot, where they stripped off their rubber suits, stowed their boards in their glistening gray SUVs and drove off looking for the perfect pepperoni pizza.
I righted my rusty bike and rode a last wave of strength home to Blue Moon Bay Mobile Manor.
TO BE CONTINUED .....

POST-LABOR DAY POST/RV-GO CHAPTER 5 CONTINUED

HAIKU:
Sunflower-gold light
pours through the sagging bean vines -
rich vegetable broth.


I am glad this isn’t a political blog because, well, ohmygod!!! What a truly strange few weeks on the national scene. You couldn’t put this stuff in a novel and be credible - aging war veteran ex-POW running for President picks ex-beauty queen hockey mom from the northern wilderness as running mate. Nah, no one would buy that premise except as an episode of “Northern Exposure”. Causes me to wonder if the Senator suffered an undisclosed brain injury while in captivity. I’m sure he is a wonderful guy but how on earth can he seriously consider that Sara Palin would make a super-duper President - and considering that the esteemed Senator is no spring chicken ... oh wait, this isn’t a political blog. Sorry for the lapse.

But seriously, it appears McCain is making a symbolic gesture knowing that, what the hell, he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance - plus when he loses he can always blame it on his loony choice for running mate. Nice little twofer. I noticed today that the supermarket tabloids haven’t wasted any time - the Republican veep candidate for less than a week and sassy Sara’s already pushed Angelina and Brad to page two. This ought to be a really fun race. Oops, I’m doing it again. Let’s return to Jane Austen Land.


You will remember, back in the first week of June I vowed to read all of Jane Austen’s novels before Fall. Well, I did it! Finished “Lady Susan” on Labor Day. And hard labor it certainly was but I must say it has been a revealing odyssey. For one thing I have learned that the 20th/21st centuries have nothing on the 19th when it comes greed, pettiness, obsessive self-interest, bigotry, gluttony, and at least five other deadly sins - the sinners back then, however, dressed better than they do now. I mean, what is more flattering to the figure than an empire waist gown? Silks and satins and pretty pink ribbons - what’s not to love? Sure beats denim crop pants and torn t-shirts.

It was a pleasant place to visit for a few months but think of the laundry bills if you had to live like that! And what was with those horrible, silly hats? Is there any place in the world (besides jolly ol’ England and the Kentucky Derby) where women still stick fake flowers and pheasant feathers on their heads? Millinery is a justifiably dead art. And while I’m thinking of it, what’s with that nasty glob of snarly hair on Sara Palin’s noggin? Heck, there I go again - my apologies!

PLANT CARE TIP: I haven’t included a plant tip for a while but with Summer winding down it’s time to direct some attention to your poor neglected indoor plants. If you have had them outside for the Summer you should be bringing them in before the nights get chilly. When you do, make sure you check them carefully for insects that might have been vacationing on them. You don’t want to be bringing the bugs inside where there are no cooperative predators. Wash your plants carefully with mild soap and plenty of water. Also check the saucers and bottoms of the pots where slugs, snails and insect pests may be hiding.


RV-GO DOWN TO THE SEA: For those of you who just tuned in, I have been serializing the novel I wrote last Fall during National Novel Writing Month. It is a mystery novel so if you haven’t read it from Chapter 1 you had better go back to the beginning before you read this episode. So, now let’s return to the adventures of Cora Jane Dooley in the tiny fishing village of Westport, Washington:

RV-GO DOWN TO THE SEA - Chapter 5 continued -
Tuesday morning, my day off, saw me biking out along the jetty in a heavy mist. My Irish ancestors called this kind of day a “soft day” but it was not soft on my joints as I bumped over the crushed clam shells and beach gravel that made up the path along the spit toward Bayview Cabins and Gifts. Set at the very end of the crescent that made up the jetty protecting the harbor, Bayview Cabins and Gifts was exactly opposite downtown Westport. I knew there was something out there somewhere in the fog but all I could actually see was the rubble under my front tire.
Bayview Cabins and Gifts was a collection of late twentieth century manufactured cabins lined up like shoe boxes along the ridge of the spit. The gift shop building sat like a hen amid her chicks. I came out here looking for Alice Burnbaum who owned the place. According to Cindy, Mrs. Burnbaum was also curator of the Maritime Museum and president of the local historical society. She had a set of keys to the crime scene which I desperately needed to borrow if I was going to get a good look at where the killing took place.
Every day since Carl was killed I studied the Grays Harbor Gazette for updates on the murder investigation. There had not been much to read. It looked to me that the police were running out of ideas, though I could not exactly drop in at the police station and ask for a personal briefing. If the old man’s murder was to be solved - and my name cleared where Mert was concerned - it was up to me. My instinct was to high tail it out of town and never come back, but how could I leave with Mert thinking I had something to do with that poor old fellow’s death? Well, I couldn’t. I would have to stick around and do whatever I could to run down the real culprit. A logical place to start was the crime scene.
Alice Burnbaum was standing behind a long counter cluttered with revolving wire racks displaying postcards and embroidered souvenir baseball caps. She was a rangy, whippet thin woman with crisp white hair and a leathery face that caused her to resemble a salt cured strip of jerky. She looked up as I entered, her mouth creaking into a tight startled smile.
“May I help you?” she asked, without sounding particularly helpful.
“I will just look around for a minute, if that is okay,” I said, not ready to start asking favors from the woman right off the bat.
It was an intriguing shop. There were glass shelves displaying all sorts of made in China bric-a-brac printed with “Westport, Wa” and racks filled with tee shirts, sweat shirts, and jackets decorated with silk screen depiction's of light houses, whales, sailing ships, and fish. The shop also sold a wide selection of fishing tackle, crab rings, hunting knives, clam guns and buckets.
On the back wall under a wide window blind with mist were three small tables and some wooden chairs where customers could sit and enjoy a cup of espresso but there were no customers. No one in the shop except me and the shop keeper. I picked up a small wooden jewel box encrusted with delicate white shells, turned it over. Made in Taiwan. It was pretty even though the shells had never seen this side of the Pacific. I thought I had better buy something so took the box to the counter where Mrs. Burnbaum waited patiently for me to make it worthwhile for her to stay open.
“Will that be all?” she asked, disappointment in her voice.
“Yes. You have a very nice shop,” I said, looking around.
“Thank you. Would you like the box gift wrapped? I can do that for you, if you wish.”
“No thanks,” I said, searching my imagination for a way into my question and coming up with dry. Nothing to do but to plunge in.
“Are you Mrs. Burnbaum, the historical society president?” I asked lamely, knowing very well that no one other than the owner would be manning the shop in off-season, in pea-soup fog.
“Yes, I am,” she offered, handing me the paper sack encasing my shell box.
“Well, Mrs. Burnbaum, I just arrived in Westport a few weeks ago and I was disappointed to learn that the Maritime Museum was closed for the winter. I hate to ask, but is there any way I could see the exhibits? I am really very interested in the history of this area but I plan to leave before Spring.”
I was winging it again and doing a piss poor job of it but it was all I could come up with. I hoped she had not been keeping her ear to the rumor mill and picked up something of Mert’s reservations about me.
“Oh, what a shame!” she said. “I am sure we can fix you up with an off-season look-see. Why don’t we talk about that over a cup of espresso?” She motioned me to the back of the shop and I sat down at one of the fog-side tables while she busied herself with the espresso machine.
After a cyclone of whooshing and hissing she joined me, setting before me a tin tray with two demitasse cups and a plate of sugar cookies.
I introduced myself and she told me to call her Alice. We had a companionable chat, sipping thick black coffee in the cluttered shop surrounded by marine fog. To my surprise Alice proved to be a charming, friendly woman, grateful for an audience for her pet topic - local history.
I mentioned Pine Dunes Lodge and was treated to an epic tale of gangsters and smugglers made to order for a Hollywood block buster. Prohibition and the Roaring Twenties was her favorite period, she said, with its illicit pleasures and skimpy silk dresses. Her eyes twinkled merrily. Alice, it appeared, had a wild side she found little opportunity to express in this sleepy coastal village.
“People out here on the edge have always been on the wild and enterprising side,” she said, as if reading my mind.
“It seems like such a quiet place though.”
“Still waters run deep, as they say. You would be surprised what goes on around here.”
“You know, Alice, just the other day I was talking to a fisherman who hinted that a lot went on that would surprise me,” I thought of the sadness in Mert’s brown eyes. “I wondered what he could have been talking about? This is not exactly the big city where drive-by shootings are a way of life.”
“Oh, we have our moments,” she said, winking. “Most of our crimes are the sneaky, under the radar types of crimes, if you get my meaning.”
“Such as?” I asked, though I thought I got her drift.
“The fishing industry has been in a terrible decline for decades,” Now I was not sure I was following her. “What with short fishing seasons, dwindling salmon runs, offshore pollution and high fuel prices - if the men down at the marina had to depend on fishing they would all slowly starve to death.”
“So, what are you saying?”
“Our economy out here is based on fishing, boat building, lumber, cranberry and oyster farming - not to mention tourism. None of those industries are all that robust on a consistent basis . . . “
“You are saying that people have to have a ‘sideline’, to quote the fisherman I was talking to the other night. Smuggling.”
“It is the worst kept secret in town,” said Alice. “Everyone knows, but nobody mentions it because without it Westport would be even more of a ghost town than it is already.”
“Drugs?” I asked, having in mind the legendary “B. C. bud”, a super-strength marijuana grown in British Columbia.
“Oh yes, drugs are a very big part of the trade. Always has been. It was like the Wild West out here in the 60s, the larger trawlers ranging up and down the coast from here to Alaska and even into Soviet waters, then down into Oregon and California.”
“And now?”
“As I say, drugs are big,” she said. “Though they are not the only cash crop. Lots of things change hands, or at least that’s what I hear. A person hears rumors, you know, but if there is money in transporting something - anything - there is bound to be someone ready to make a tax-free dollar. But you did not hear it from me, if you get my meaning.”
She left it open for me to speculate - automatic weapons, explosives, stolen geoducks to Japanese clam traffickers?
“But Cora Jane, you said you wanted to visit our museum,” said Alice. “How about if I close shop and we go over for a while? This is not exactly rush hour. I can give you a leisurely tour. We have a wonderful gift shop there too if you’re interested in books about the area.”
“Great! I do not want to put you to any trouble, Alice, but I really would appreciate looking around. It is such a beautiful building, what I have seen of it.”
“Yes, isn’t it. I suppose you know it used to be the Coast Guard station?”
“That is what I heard. Back in the 40s wasn’t it?”
“That is right, though there was a Coast Guard presence in the neighborhood as far back as 1858,” she said. “Used to be a thriving whaling trade out here too, did you know that?”
“Whaling? No, I had not heard that. I thought that was just on the east coast, like up in Maine.”
“Oh, we had whaling here too. A big whale meat cannery just out of town at Bay City, not to mention the whale oil they processed there and shipped all over the world” she said. “We have a large exhibit at the museum I can show you, if you’re interested.”
I was not particularly interested in seeing photos of dead whales though I kept that piece of information to myself. I put my bike in the bed of her truck and she drove to the museum where she parked around back in the spot designated “Curator Parking Only”. I was getting the royal treatment all right.
Alice unlocked the back door and pushed ahead of me. The beep beep beep of an alarm explained the seeming bad manners. On the wall beside the door was alarm box. Alice punched in the numbers, the thing emitted a chirp as if someone had stepped on its tail, then went silent.
“Don’t you just hate these awful things?” she said. “I know I do, but the board of directors insisted we install one. I argued that we weren’t exactly displaying the British crown jewels in Westport. They out voted me though.”
“I know what you mean. I had a security system on my house back in . . . back home. I never set it because I tended to set it off.“
“I know just what you mean! I must have set this monstrosity off a dozen times - could not remember the code to save my life. I started putting the code on a Sticky note beside the alarm, which they frowned on as being poor security practice. Finally our resident techie set it to 1940 which is the year of my birth as well as the year the building was dedicated. Haven't set it off since.”
I wondered if she realized she had just let the cat out of the bag. I also wondered how many other people in town knew the code.
“This room to the left used to be the station galley - or kitchen. Now it is the staff and volunteer office. If you do not mind, I will just pop down the hall to the Director’s Office for a second to see if there are any phone messages.”
“No, that’s just fine,” I replied. “Go ahead, Alice. Did you say there was a gift shop?”
“Straight ahead through that door. Used to be the mess deck.”
My heels made a hollow cadence as I walked to the end of the hall and into the gift shop. There were book racks crowded with paperbacks and hardcover books on topics ranging from lighthouses, Native American culture, fishing boats, natural history to shell art and bird watching. They had it all covered. The books shared space with souvenir tee shirts and picture postcards.
Did people still mail postcards to each other from far locations? “Wish you were here”. Who would I send a postcard to if I wanted someone to know where I was and what I was doing? It occurred to me there was nobody I wanted to share that with, no family to wonder where I had gotten off to, no one who would come looking for me if I fell off the edge of the earth. If I died here who would show up for the funeral? I know that should make me sad. Someday perhaps it will, I thought.
I thumbed through a book on female lighthouse keepers. Gave a whole new meaning to light housekeeping. Apparently there were just as many women who “manned” the lights as men. The boys would be out on the boats doing manly things like fishing and whaling while their spouses kept the lights on - literally. Had I lived during the days of lighthouse keepers that would have been just the job for me. These days lighthouses were automated devices with all the romance of a can opener. What a loss! I could almost see myself searching the horizon for sails as the sun sinks into a turbulent sea.
“Did you find something you wanted, C. J.?” said Alice joining me in the gift shop. “I can’t make change because we do not stock the till in off season but if you want to buy something I will take a check.”
“This is a lovely book but it is beyond my budget this month, I am afraid. But it is so very interesting. I had no idea women manned lighthouses. Somehow I always thought that lighthouse keepers were antisocial old men.”
“Yes, it makes you think doesn’t it,” she said. “I can imagine the women’s children running up and down the spiral staircases while their mothers polished reflectors and lenses. Come to think of it, who would do that job better than a woman - meticulous, tireless, dedicated. Quite inspiring, don’t you think?”
“I do. In fact I was just thinking how much I would have loved that job. Well, except for the part about children running around. That would have been quite a challenge. Too much work and way too much responsibility! I have all I can do to take care of myself.”
“They were tough and resourceful women back then,” she said. “Follow me, C. J., and I will show you around. We can start with the C.O.’s Quarters which is where we have our ships and shipwrecks display.”
I thought it was a bit ironic that the commanding officer’s bedroom now housed the shipwreck display. I wondered how his ghost felt about that. Alice led me past the welcome station in the main entry to a room opening on the right. The cases were filled ship models and maps showing all the shipwrecks off the Westport, Grays Harbor, Long Beach coast. There were hundreds! I was astonished.
“This is amazing, Alice, it looks as if it was a rare day a ship got into the harbor unscathed,” I said, stepping up to a photograph of wreckage strewn the length of a beach.
“It was always dangerous. Still is, especially going over the bar at the mouth of Grays Harbor. Rip tides and obstructions, you know. We lose a boat every once in a while even with the high tech navigation they use these days.”
“This is quite a photograph.” The caption said it showed the wreck of the H. Charles Porter, a freighter out of Seattle that ran aground in 1959.
“It was taken by a Coast Guard photographer,” said Alice. “The Coast Guard documents every wreck. Their records are a valuable source of information about the maritime history of this region. One of our own docents was a retired Coast Guard photographer. This photo was one of his. He was always so proud of his work - an artist if there every was one. Just last year the museum presented a one man show of his work.” Her lines in her face softened as she spoke of him.
I could guess who the docent was. Now the camera equipment at the cabin made perfect sense. I had blown any opportunity I might have had to ask Mert about his friend Carl Heslop, but here was someone else who had obviously known and cared for the old man. Maybe I could still fill in a few of the blanks. In fact, there was a chance Alice knew what Carl had been doing at the Lens Building that afternoon. If I played my cards right she might even tell me.
“Come on upstairs with me,” she said. “You have to see our cranberry room.”
I followed like a puppy up the creaky stairs to the second floor. The building seemed so much older than its fifty-odd years - parched and swaying in the sea wind - salt cured like a cod. It felt as if time stopped at the front door. The stairs were very slightly concave, worn by countless rough boots pounding up and down from quarters to mess deck and back.
“You are going to like this room,” said Alice as we reach the landing. “We have an early cranberry picker.”
I hoped she was talking about a machine and not some ancient mummified field hand.
“You probably know this already, C. J. - you had to have passed the Ocean Spray plant on your way into town - the salt marshes down by Grayland produce huge crops of cranberries each year. There were native wild berries growing here before white men settled in 1856 but now the cranberry farmers grow a larger hybrid. More juice. But unlike east coast growers we harvest most of our bogs using the dry method.”
I had no idea what she meant.
“Back east they flood the bogs in the fall, then loosen the berries until they float free to the surface of the water. Then they just scoop them out and bag them. All but one of our farmers use dry method however,” she continued. “Unlike the wet harvest or flood method, our cranberries are picked with machines something like big lawn mowers that comb the berries off the vines. It is really amazing to watch.”
I am sure it was. I will from here on drink my morning cranberry juice with renewed appreciation.
“What are these things?” I stopped before a display of wooden shoes that looked like medieval patens.
“Cranberry shoes,” she said. “Oh, the little label has fallen off! I will have to get that fixed. Berry pickers in the early days of the industry would wear these shoes while they picked to keep themselves elevated off the berry plants so they would not crush the crop.”
“They must have had small feet.” The cranberry shoes looked like they were made for a platoon of Munchkin warriors
“The pickers were usually women and children in the days before machines took over stripping the bogs. See this photo over here? It was taken in the mid-thirties - the women lined up on their assigned rows, smiling for the camera. You can’t tell me they were all that happy to be hand picking berries in a stinky bog. The camera man must have been a real good looking fellow.”
“The kids worked too?”
“Oh yes. That was before all those silly anti-child labor laws. You’re probably too young to remember but before the sixties children were expected to contribute to family income. They all had summer jobs in the fields or helping on the fishing boats. Now days our kids are spoiled and lazy, if you ask me. No wonder there’s an epidemic of childhood obesity. Doesn’t hurt a youngster to learn to earn, I say.”
“You have a good point,” I said. “I remember that my friends and I used to pick strawberries and green beans during summer vacations to help pay for school clothes. We thought it was kind of fun even though we were filthy and exhausted by the end of the day - which was when it got too dark to see the plants. Dawn to dusk in the fields but nobody complained that we were being abused.”
“I am willing to bet you complained plenty at the time,” she laughed “Though it was no doubt the best thing for you in the long run, don’t you think?”
I was actually enjoying myself but this was not getting me any closer to finding out what Carl had been doing at the museum.
“Alice, you said there was a whaling exhibit?”
“Yes, in the next room. We have a complete set of tools the men used to cut up the whales,” she said. “Oh, and you might have seen our Whale House next to this building. It houses a complete whale skeleton. It’s an awe-inspiring sight.”
The curator launched herself into a detailed and rather graphic description of whale disassembly. I tuned out and looked around me. The room looked out over the harbor. From the vantage point of the window I could see the marina from the sweeping jetty wall to where the Lens Building obscured the view in front of the Museum.
“Alice, what’s on the third floor?”
“It’s not open to the public. We store many of our revolving exhibits up there. There is also a meeting room for the Historical Society.”
“Do volunteers have access to that floor?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Just wondered,” I said. “There must be a great view from up there.”
“There sure is! I could show it to you if you like,” she said. “After all, I can’t get into trouble - I’m the boss.”
She unlocked a narrow door in the hallway and we climbed a steep set of stairs to a long, low room cluttered with carefully labeled crates.
“Come on over here to the gable window,” said Alice.
Yes, it was a panorama all right - though not quite the angle I remembered from the photo above Carl’s sofa. There must be a way to the roof.
“This is magnificent!” I enthused. “I can see all the way from your shop on the jetty to the Coast Guard Station at the edge of town. Amazing. Did your docent photographer ever take pictures from here? It would make a perfect place to take photos of the boats coming into the harbor.”
“He may have. He loved to spend time up here, I know that. Used to come up here at night, he said, to watch the harbor lights play on the water,” she said. “I swear, the old fellow was a bit of a romantic.”
“You say ‘was’ - he has passed on I gather?”
“Yes, just recently. You probably heard of a very tragic death here a few weeks back. That was our Carl. It was a horrible shock for us all here at the museum.”
“I'm terribly sorry for your loss, Alice.” It was a lame thing to say but I had nothing else to offer her.
I prayed that she never found out I had met Carl Heslop shortly before he died. If she did she would have every right to think I was a deceitful cow. And I would hate that because I genuinely liked what I had seen of Alice Burnbaum so far. Had I not been concentrating so hard on finding the old man’s killer I would have enjoyed making friends with her - I just didn't have the luxury of a lot of bonding time right then.
“We're going to miss him so much,” she said, then burst into ragged sobs.
I was seriously out of my comfort zone at that moment. What sprang immediately to my mind were the wives, mothers, and sisters of my husband’s victims weeping at his sentencing hearing. I had sat in the back of the court room while, one after another, the bereaved family members stood and poured out their anguish and venom on the monster who had taken their loved one. I heard that heartbreak once more as Alice wept. I put my arm around her and gave her a hug, having no illusions that a hug from a total stranger would make much of a difference.
“I wish there was something I could do,” I said, more to myself than to her.
“He was such a sweet man,” she managed through her tears. “I can’t imagine who would have wanted to . . .” And she was overcome once more.
I patted her back and waited for her to get control of herself. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve.
“It was the shock more than anything. No warning,” she said, when she could finally speak. “They found him right here at the museum the day after the big storm. When the police told me he had . . . passed, I right off thought to myself it must have been the storm - some wood flying through the air, or maybe a tree falling and hitting him. Then they told me how it had been. I still cannot believe it, that someone killed him.”
“That's horrible,” I said. “Do they have any idea who was responsible?”
“No, none at all from what I hear. There is an investigation going on, of course, but I get the impression there is not too much to go on.”
“You say he was here at the museum that day?”
“Yes, in the Lens Building,” she said. “You have to see it, of course. They have taken the yellow tape down so I can show you when we go down stairs. It the famous Fresnel lens from the Destruction Island Lighthouse. Maybe you've heard of it.”
Remembering all those shipwreck maps I saw in the other room I could imagine how Destruction Island got its name.
“Alice, what was the man doing here that day if the museum was closed?”
“I don't have the foggiest notion,” she said. “He was our night watchman and was here most nights but he didn't start work until after his supper.”
“Year ‘round? Even in the off season?”
“Yes. Another security measure the board insisted upon even though I told them it was silly to pay someone to walk around in the empty building, especially after they put in the alarm system. Yet again I was out voted. Though it could be that Carl - that was his name, Carl Heslop - could be Carl volunteered to keep an eye on the place for free. He liked hanging around the old building. Used to tell people how he served here at this station before they built the new one down by Float 21.”
“He must have been a wonderful man. I can understand how tragic such a loss would be to the whole community.”
“Oh yes, tragic. He was well liked,” she said. “I keep thinking it had to have been a stranger, C. J. . No one who knew him could have done such an awful thing to Carl. It was all so peculiar, especially what with his cabin burning down, not more than a few days after his death. Terribly strange.”
“His cabin burned down!” I almost screamed. “Do you mean someone burned down his house? I didn't see anything in the paper. I can’t believe it! Do you think it could be connected to his murder?”
There went any chance I might have had of returning to the cabin to do a little breaking and entering. I had toyed with the idea that perhaps Carl had photographs or negatives that could provide someone with a motive for murder. Now I would never know.
“Oh, I'm sure it was no more than a coincidence. Probably electrical problems of some sort. After all, why would someone would want to burn his house on purpose?”
“Alice, you know Captain Merton or the Angel Face, right?”
“Yes, of course. He was a good friend of Carl’s,” she said.
“Something very disturbing happened to him recently,” I said. “It was shortly after Mr. Heslop’s death. I am wondering if there is a connection. Someone cold cocked Mert and searched his boat. Then a few days later they searched his house.”
“How would that be connected, C. J.?”
“I only think that because they were friends. And now you say someone burned Mr. Heslop’s cabin.”
“But why would someone be doing these things?”
Why indeed.
“What an awful loss - all those beautiful photographs,” I said, though I wasn’t thinking of their aesthetic qualities.
“Oh, Carl’s photographs weren't lost,” said Alice. “He didn't store his photographs or negatives or digital whatnots at the cabin. No storage room out there. It was just a little bitty shed of a thing. He stored his work in our archives here at the museum. We have climate control for all our fragile documents and records.”
I thought of that panorama above his sofa, now ashes as was the sofa itself. I had a sudden inspiration.
“Alice, is there any way to get up to the widow’s walk from here in the museum?”
“Certainly. There is a ladder. Carl liked to take his Thermos of coffee up there.”
So that must have been where he has taken the panorama shot. From that high up there would be a clear view of the entire marina. A chill went through me.
“Alice, who besides yourself knows Carl’s photos are stored in this building?”
“Why do you ask? Is there something wrong?”
“I'm not sure,” I said. “It just seems, as you say, strange that his cabin burned right after he was killed. Too strange. Maybe I have been watching too many crime shows on the television but I am wondering if someone thinks Carl took a picture of something he should not have.”
“Oh my lord,” she whispered. “If that is true, the museum . . . “
“Might be the next place this person looks,” I finished the thought. “I think we should see if we can figure out how to change that alarm code, what do you think?”
“It couldn't hurt,” she said. “But really, C. J., don’t you think that is a little far fetched? What could be so important to someone that they would kill a nice old fellow like Carl?”
I had no answer for her. In fact I wasn't sure I wasn't totally off my trolley. There could have been any number of explanations for what had happened. And she could be right about the fire having nothing to do with Carl’s murder. Still, I just could not buy such a convenient coincidence. There must be a connection with that event and the break-ins at Mert’s boat and house. Someone was searching for something - that was the inescapable conclusion. And if they had not found what it was they were searching for they would most certainly keep looking until they found it. I thought, given Carl’s hobby, it had to be a photograph.
“Alice, where is this storage facility where Carl kept his photos?” I hadn't noticed any doors labeled storage or archive.
“It's in the basement.”
“I thought buildings in town didn't have basements.”
One morning I had overheard a few locals discussing in unflattering terms the stupidity of a certain real-estate developer who thought he was going to build condos with underground parking out by the tsunami warning tower. They could not stop laughing at the idea that someone would sink a basement garage into a sand dune when the water table at high tide was only couple of feet down.
“They built things right back in the 30s and 40s - lots of unemployed men were glad to have any jobs at all, so they made the ones they had last as long as possible. The Coast Guard wanted a sturdy building and that was what they got - even if it did take nearly five years to get it built. This building has a basement built more like a bomb shelter or a munitions bunker than the usual basement. And as a matter of fact I do believe they did store weapons down there at one time. The walls are constructed of two foot thick concrete. Not a drop of water has ever seeped into that basement even when the town floods - which it does on a regular basis. Such as during the storm last week.”
Once Alice got going she was a one woman historical lecture tour. It was easy to see how she got the job of curator at the museum. But I had to keep her focused.
“Could I see it, do you think?”
“I don't see why not.” She was such a dear trusting soul. How did she know I was not the evil doer come to wreck havoc? Had it been Mert I asked, he would have booted me out the door, locked it behind me, and barred all the windows.
A twinge of unease crept over me. Something was not adding up. Well, a lot of things really but one thing in particular did not seem to make sense to me. I was assuming what happened was that Carl had tried his hand at blackmail or extortion. Sure, he was a sweet old coot but that did not mean he was not up for supplementing his modest government pension.
But why had the killer automatically assumed Mert had the incriminating material? I would have thought the logical place to start was Carl’s cabin on the dunes, but his first stop had been Mert’s boat. Could Carl have hinted to his killer that Mert held a copy of whatever it was just in case something nasty went down - a kind of insurance policy so he would stay healthy? If so, he had overestimated the guy’s restraint.
My guess was that Carl tried a bluff that fizzled. Or he actually did stash the goods with Mert. But either Mert was the best liar on the continent or he really did not know what Carl had been up to. The killer had not found what he was searching for on the boat or he would not have needed to go through the house. And it was not in the house or he would not have gone to the cabin.
But why burn the cabin? Why not search it as he had Mert’s house? Of course! The alarm system! The killer could not get into the cabin without setting it off so he must have lit a fire in the woodpile next to it and let the brisk onshore wind take care of whatever the cabin contained - camera, computer, photos and all.
Another thought surfaced. Maybe the item the killer searched for had actually been on the boat all the time but he did not find it because he did not know what he was looking for. This was way too nebulous and complicated. I had nothing really to go on, when it came down to it.

TO BE CONTINUED ***