LAST WEEK BEFORE NANOWRIMO/RV-GO DOWN TO THE SEA LAST EPISODE!

(Photo: Sail boat "Autumn Wind", Westport)



Yesterday I participated in a pre-NaNoWriMo workshop on plotting - plotting being a pretty darn important skill for budding mystery writer types! And it was a really helpful workshop too - lots of super ideas and a marvelous workbook I know I'll use again and again.(Thanks again, Renda, for a great workshop!)

Down side of the day: it went from 10:30 to 2:30 with no lunch! Only food available was cookies - inedible to this gluten intolerant novelist. I filled up on the assortment of trick-or-treat candy scattered across our table (Not your fault, Renda, that there's not much on the planet I can still eat.). Luckily I'm not diabetic! I was glad there was plenty of food for thought because the stomach was fresh out of luck. By 2:30 I was reeling with sugar jitters.

This week I'll be doing the prep work for National Novel Writing Month - sketching out the plot, character studies, background information on settings etc. I go on vacation starting this Thursday so that I'll have the first two weeks of November doing basically nothing beyond writing non-stop. Goal being to have half the 50 thousand word novel under my belt by the 15th. I'll be spending a great deal of that two weeks up at Little Pat's Cafe on Ambaum pounding away on the laptop, since if I'm hanging around the house I'll find a thousand domestic activities suddenly, inexplicably enticing - dish washing, laundry, scrubbing the bathtub, dusting book shelves are never more compelling than when you are faced with writing 2000 words before sunset.

I'll keep you posted on my progress via the blog!

(Photo: Beach Biker, Westport)

Okay, here we go with the conclusion of RV-GO Down to the Sea. DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU HAVE NOT READ THE PREVIOUS EPISODES! That's cheating! So, catch up first. (Novel starts with the first post of August - click on "August" up there on the right and scroll back to the first week.)


Chapter 7
“Dooley! Dooley, where are you?”
It had to be a hallucination - a near death something or other - but it certainly sounded like Mert.
“I'm down here in the engine room!” I yelled at my hallucination. “I can’t get my hands free. Get me out of here!”
“Hang on, I’m coming,” he yelled back.
He took months to get to me - or so it felt at the time. Eventually he was hoisting me up the ladder in front of him, pushing me to the crazily canted deck.
“Can you jump?” he yelled in my ear.
“Jump where?”
“Into the water. We will have to swim to Angel Face. I couldn’t risk tying up to this wreck.”
“How am I going to swim with my hands taped?”
“Oh, yeah.” he said and tore off the tape and several layers of skin.
“You can swim, right?”
“Not in this heavy coat. Not for long.”
“It is not far. I’ll hold you up,” he said, grabbing me around the waist. “All you have to do is kick like mad.”
I noticed for the first time he had a life jacket on. I thought we might just have a chance if we got to the boat fast. It is not drowning that kills in these waters, it is hypothermia. We would only have a few minutes.
I took a deep breath, nodded my head to Mert, and together we plunged into the icy waters. There was no way to know where I was or in what direction we were swimming. I trusted Mert to know whether we were headed to his boat. And when we got to his boat how would we get aboard, I wondered. I needn’t have worried. A small Coast Guard rescue boat intercepted us, and two of the Guard’s finest pulled us out of the turbulent sea. I could hear a helicopter somewhere a way off. Eddie and Kyle would very soon have company.

* * *
“Okay everybody, I put on a new pot of coffee so drink up,” bellowed a yellow-haired Cindy over the din of the crowded restaurant.
I thought if I had one more cup I’d never manage to sleep again but it had taken that much - and a night bundled in Mert’s thick Hudson’s Bay blankets - to at long last reheat my bone marrow.
“You’re looking a little more cheery this morning,” said Mert.
“Guess our adventure put a lot of things into perspective,” I replied."And speaking of cheery, Cindy's in a good mood today - that's the perkiest color her hair has been since I got to Westport."
Mert chuckled. "Marj and Cindy's mom have decided to move in together at that new assisted living place down in Tokeland. We may have another murder on our hands with those two trying to be room mates but it's been a big relief to Cindy."
"Wonderful! I'm so glad for all concerned."
I caught sight of Alice Burnbaum threading her way through the tables toward us.
“Good morning, you two!” she said. “You gave us quite a scare, Cora Jane. Mind if I join you? Now that you can talk without your teeth chattering I have to hear how you managed to get yourself shipwrecked!”
“Getting shipwrecked is easy in Westport!” I said. “This town does shipwreck better than any place I have ever visited. It is staying above water that is hard.”
“Dooley could manage to drown in a tea cup,” offered Captain Merton. “Don’t scowl, drink your coffee.”
“I was doing pretty good I thought. After all, if I had not kicked the daylights out of Surfergirl’s innards that trawler might have gotten over the bar and away before you could catch up in your little put-put.”
“Don’t you be bad mouthing my Angel Face, little lady. She did just fine catching up with you on your joy ride.”
“How on earth did you manage to know C. J. was on that boat, Mert?” asked Alice.
“That’s easy. I was following her down to Float 3 and I saw Eddie Singer grab her but I was too far away to reach her before he could take her on board. I knew he might have a weapon and a pal or two with him so I needed back-up. I called the cops. Good old Eddie and his goon Kyle were casting off though before the cops could arrive.”
“Following her? Why would you be following Cora Jane in the first place? I never had you down as a secret stalker, Captain Merton.”
“All part of my mysterious aura, Alice,” Mert winked. “At lunch Dooley mentioned she left her bike down on the marina. I was still not sure what she was up to so I thought I would . . . well, make sure she was not doing something shady around my boat.”
“You see, Alice, it was all about his dang boat!” I said. “Just typical that the man would think first about his boat before he thought about a lone woman sailing into dangerous waters in the fog - figuratively and literally speaking.”
Before he could think up a suitable retort, Cindy swooped up to top off our coffee.
“Hi, Alice! Can I get you something to eat? Breakfast special is Italian scramble,” said Cindy.
“Italian scramble? What is in that, exactly?”
“Italian sausage, Italian herbs, tomatoes and cheese.”
“Hmm. Sounds good. Okay, bring me the special but no toast.”
“You got it,” she said. “How about you two? Do you have everything or can I get you something else?”
“I am fine, Cindy,” I said. “You sure you don’t want me to work this shift? It is absolutely packed in here this morning. Must be a convention in town.”
“No work for you this morning, C. J. If even half of what I hear is true about what you and Captain Merton have been up to, you need your rest. And this crowd? Shit, they aren’t eating all that much - they are just hanging around for the gossip. You are the hottest news since Pete Osterseller got his pinky caught in the cranberry picker.”
“Okay, if you’re sure. I’ll be in as usual tomorrow morning bright and early. And um . . . watch the language, young lady,” I said, laughing.
“Oops, sorry.”
She evaporated into the crush of diners taking the coffee pot with her.
“To get back to your question, Alice,” said Mert. “I had a reason to think that if Dooley went near Float 3 she might be in trouble. We all know what a pit bull Singer is but I suspected he was up to worse mischief than usual and would take serious objection if he saw Cora Jane snooping around in his business.”
“I was just looking for my bike,” I said.
“Oh, sure you were! You don’t expect any of us to believe that, do you?” he said.
“Mert, Cora Jane and I were already speculating that what Carl had discovered was that someone was smuggling illegal aliens into the marina - most likely from Float 3. That he had taken pictures.” Alice waited for Mert to fill in the blanks.
“I didn’t want to believe that Carl would . . . well, be involved in trying to shake anyone down. It was easier to blame a stranger for Carl’s death, easier to think that it was a random killing. Anything but what it really looked like. Carl was meeting someone at the Lens Building. He let his killer into the building with his own key. That was obvious since there was no break in.”
“But you wouldn’t listen to me,” I said.
“I wouldn’t, no,” he said. “I’m sorry for that, Dooley. But it looks like you and I came to some of the same conclusions.”
“I was going to tell you about Alice and me searching Carl’s photo files - about how I thought the evidence was on a digital memory card.”
“I’d already found it, though,” he said. He turned to Alice. “I don’t know if you knew it but I was on record as Carl’s executor since that year he had that heart attack - so the cops released his effects to me along with . . with the ashes for disposal. I had Carl’s key to the Lens House.”
“So you went over to get the Ashes Fund?” asked Alice.
“I didn’t need the fund to pay to fuel Angel Face - my usual fee and the fuel were going to be my gift to Carl - but I knew Carl would expect me to pick up whatever was in the bank. There wouldn’t be much in it this time of year any way but I wanted to honor his wishes as far as I could.”
“And when you opened the lighthouse bank you found my five dollar bill and a small memory chip from a digital camera,” I volunteered. “Did you know right away what it was?”
“Yeah, I knew that Carl had to have put it there on purpose. That he left it for me. It was something he wanted me to know. I took it into Aberdeen to a camera shop where Carl used to shop. I had the guy there print up everything on the card.”
“Was I right that he was taking night shots of the marina?”
“You were right,” he said. “He used a long exposure from probably the upper floor of the museum . . . “
“I figured it was from the widow’s walk. He would have a perfect angle to catch the full length of the float.”
“Right, that makes sense,” continued Captain Merton. “There was a Catch-a-Lot Seafood box truck parked at the top of the ramp, a blur of human shapes leading from Surfergirl to the truck. The time stamp said one a. m. It wasn’t too much of a leap to figure out what I was looking at. People were being smuggled into port, then loaded onto the truck. There were half a dozen photos, all different dates over a period of six months.”
“Wow, that is a lot of people!” I said. “From what I read it costs these folks from forty to eighty thousand dollars to get into the U. S. from Asia. Even if it was only five coming in each trip that’s millions of dollars!”
“Not that our boy Eddie would get that much. He probably got no more than ten percent to ferry a shipment in from open water.”
“Then why didn’t he just pay off Carl? Why kill him? Surely Carl was not asking so much that murder was the only answer.”
“Oh, I am sure Eddie would have just cut him in for a few thousand now and then. That is all Carl would have wanted - just a little extra to stretch his Coast Guard pension so he can keep up his photography. Not enough to kill for, no.”
“Then why did Eddie Singer - I assume we agree it had to be Singer - why did he kill the old fellow, do you think?” asked Alice.
“I think I know the reason,” I said. “Yesterday morning before breakfast I was down by the marina and I saw - well, heard actually - a boat come into the marina with no running lights on. I got nosy and followed the sound through the fog to Float 3. There I overheard a conversation - an argument actually. I recognized Singer’s voice from when he threw me off the float the day before the murder.”
“You remembered a guy’s voice from one chance meeting? That is pretty damn good remembering, lady,” said Mert.
“I’m a waitress, Mert. I have stored on my memory card every voice in this room, every order for every regular customer,” I said. “But to continue, Eddie and another man were arguing about something they had just disposed of off shore. I gathered it was something very unpleasant. They were blaming each other but it seemed to come down to Kyle screwing up and dumping something in a guts truck at Catch-a-Lot. They’d retrieved whatever it was and dumped it in the ocean. I had read in the newspaper’s police blotter how someone had reported a particularly bad smell coming from a guts truck - which sounded sort of normal to me actually but what do I know of normal fish gut stinkiness? If the cops had actually investigated the truck they might have found the source of the smell, which I figure was a dead Asian illegal. The poor man probably died in the truck and Kyle, being a few beans short of a burrito, panicked and hid the body under fish parts.”
“That’s horrible,” said Alice. “So, Eddie thought Carl might have been able to point a finger at him for the death. He was trying to cover up the trail that lead from the dead Asian to his front door - or in this case to Surfergirl.”
“Sure looks like it,” said Mert. “So far the police have those two for kidnapping and assaulting Dooley here, but I’m confident that with the photos and what she overheard they are going to be looking at charging Eddie with murder and Kyle with accessory to murder. Who knows, maybe they will be able to build a case against Eddie for beaning me and throwing my stuff around - maybe even arson for burning Carl’s cabin.”
“They were busy boys,” I said. “Hope they don’t get bail. I wouldn’t want to see either one of them again. Well, at least not until the trial.”
As I spoke, I suddenly realized I would have to go through another trial! I’d been assaulted and abducted! I was the victim and star witness! I wondered if there was still time to unplug RV-GO and high tail it out of town. No, I supposed not. The last thing I’d wanted was to get involved in another long legal wrangle but here I was neck deep. There went the illusion that I could live the rest of my life quietly beneath the radar.
“You okay, Dooley? You look kind of sick. Don’t worry, even if he gets bail I will not let that assh . . . uh, that slime ball anywhere near you.”
“Thank you, Rambo, I appreciate that but I’m sure I am quite capable of defending myself - if it’s not foggy, that is.”
“So, Cora Jane, since you will be staying in town until after the trial - which I suspect will last until the end of Spring or Summer - I hope you’ll consider becoming a volunteer at the Maritime Museum,” Alice interjected, patting my hand.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said.
“Ah, come on, Dooley. You know you are not going anywhere anytime soon. They got an opening for a docent. You’d be a natural.”
“Well, okay I’ll think about it.”
And I would. Cindy came back around with the coffee pot but we all three waved her off. We were swimming in coffee.
“I’ll be off now,” said Alice. “I’m so glad you’re all right, my dear.” she gave me a squeeze and wiped her eyes with her sleeve.
“Nice gal,” said Mert, after she had left. “She doesn’t take to everyone but she sure seems to like you, Dooley. You ought to take her up on that docent thing. Have you thought of settling here permanently? I know Westport hasn’t made the best impression so far but we grow on you.”
“I planned to leave in the Spring, but who knows how long this trial will go on. As to permanently, I don’t think I want to be anywhere permanently, Mert. In a previous life I stayed in one place way too long and it didn’t suit me. But if I were shopping for a permanent home Westport would be way up on the list. It’s a welcoming, pleasant little town. Well, if you can ignore the murder and mayhem factor.”
“We have our quiet moments too,” he said. “It’s not usually such nonstop excitement around this neck of the woods. Sometimes a person can actually go out on a boat for a nice cruise and not end up on the bottom of the bay.”
“I’ll take your word for that, sir. So far I haven’t had many quiet moments.”
“Maybe you’ll give me the chance to show you the peaceful side of Grays Harbor. As a matter of fact, I was thinking of asking if you’d want to join me for a moonlit spin around the harbor some time soon. I could make us some coffee. I think I still owe you an on-board cup of coffee.”
“Oh please, no more coffee! I think I am switching over to tea as of now,” I said. “But I wouldn’t say no to a glass of champagne on New Year’s Eve.”
“How about a hot turkey sandwich and a dry chardonnay on Thanksgiving next Thursday instead?”
“You drive a damn hard bargain, captain,” I replied.
He drove me home in his pickup truck, my rusty bike bouncing in the back. When we pulled up at RV-GO he lifted it out of the bed, walked me to my door, gathered me in his arms and . . . well, I’ll leave something to the imagination.
I hadn’t decided how long I’d stay in Westport. There were too many other places I wanted to see in my cozy RV. But I was warming up to this water logged community and its hardy people. Especially one charming silver fox of a charter captain. Not to mention that I still wanted to get out there and catch me some salmon!

THE END
(Photo: Crab Ring, Westport)