RV-GO DOWN TO THE SEA, Chapter 4

Thunder storm last night! My favorite weather, truth be told. And this morning there is a tang in the air, recalling rough seas and sea-foamed beaches. And with thought let me give you another chapter of my Westport mystery:

RV-GO DOWN TO THE SEA
Chapter 4
As silent as Mert had been on the topic of the murder he was the only one who was making like a clam at Bev’s that breakfast shift, other than the two cops that came in for a midmorning coffee break. As I took orders, delivered food, topped off coffee and gathered my tips I managed to collect quite a crazy patchwork quilt of information.
The crime scene tape still surrounded the Lens Building but the Grays Harbor police who had been processing the site were gone taking away whatever evidence they found. Though half the town had been interviewed no one had as yet been taken into custody. Carl Heslop’s throat had been slit with a fragment of lens prism - as close as they could tell, since the “murder weapon” was not at the scene and there were several broken prisms. Two shipyard workers shared that last gruesome nugget over their bacon and eggs. Quite amazing the capacity humans have for disconnecting their brains and good sense from their appetites.
What it amounted to was that time was flitting by and the authorities were no closer to learning why the old guy died and who did the deed. The clock was ticking. Matters were nudging close to that magic 48 hour mark beyond which things get hazy and evidence dries up. Once a trail goes stone cold it’s a crap shoot whether the crime will be solved or not. Especially if it is a one-off and not one of a series.
And from what I heard of this particular killing it appeared to be an impulsive act, not a premeditated homicide. Somebody got pissed off at old Carl, flipped out and slashed with the first thing handy, in this case a large sharp piece of glass which by now was no doubt at the bottom of the bay. Plus even if the guy had left a trail of bloody footprints right to his front door he might be home free since any trail would have washed away in the storm. Even dogs can’t track through a hurricane. (Photo Note: Breakfast at Westwind - Maritime Museum in background.)
When I got off work I picked up the Westport paper, rolled it into a tube, stuffed it in my purse and pedaled home. As I unlocked the door my phone was doing a rumba in the bottom of my pocket. I got it just before it went to voice mail. It was Cindy.
“Hey, C.J., your friend Mert called asking for you. I told him you had already left.”
“What did he say he wanted?”
“He said he forgot to get your number this morning. I was going to give it to him, then thought I had better ask you if that was okay.”
Hmm. Interesting.
“I suppose that would be fine,” I said. “Or if you have his number I can give him a call.” He had put the ball in my court after all.
“Sure, I have it. Got a pen?”
“Shoot.” I took it down and told her I would see her at work in the morning.
I shed my jacket, threw my purse on the counter and slipped out of my shoes. I would make myself a cup of tea and check out the newspaper - check if the media had anything to add to what I had overheard on the breakfast shift. Mert could wait. No sense looking too eager.
The murder held center stage right along with reports of the storm damage and clean up operation. No mention of “persons of interest”. Nothing about next of kin. Maybe at his age he had outlived his family. A note that speculation of burglary/vandalism had been dismissed - door was unlocked and Carl was found under the lens. Not robbery. There was surely not a possibility the man was killed for that little jar of donations he kept on the counter and I doubted he was rolling in dough.
Since he had the keys in his pocket, either Carl was already in the building or he let his attacker in. Of course, I thought, there had to be other people - the other docents - who had keys to the lens building. Was he meeting someone there? Why there and not at his residence or some more public place. Conclusion: they didn’t want to be seen together. I wondered if the police had gone through wherever it was he lived for clues to whatever he was up to. I wished I had faith they were that smart but I’d seen some pretty slipshod detective work in my time. A feeble old man killed under who knows what kind of weird circumstances might not interest them sufficiently to pull out all the stops. Sad that thorough police work often went hand in hand with pretty blond victims.
There goes my paranoia running on steroids again. In reality the tragedy was no doubt the result of a simple squabble gone horribly wrong. One of those things someone will confess on his death bed someday. I was way too prone these days to see violence in terms of crimes, imagining all sorts of convoluted plots and counter plots. The net result of the hundreds of true crime books I read nonstop from the time my ex-husband was arrested to the day the jury delivered its verdict. I must have gone through everything the Boise Library System had on serial killers, police procedure, crime scene investigation, criminal prosecution and deviant psychology. The librarians started looking at me from the corner of the their eyes expecting me to go berserk at any moment. When I realized I was creeping everyone out I discovered the internet and redoubled my research. I gobbled up everything there was on the topic. I had to know what had happened to my life. It was like learning I had some rare fatal disease - I needed to know what this foul thing was that devoured my husband, ended our marriage, slaughtered those women, and was destroying my life.
By the time they locked my ex away I had the equivalent of a masters degree in criminal justice. I could have taught a class on serial killers. And now I was seeing murderous intent under every bush when probably the only cause of Carl’s pathetic death was a good old’ boy with an anger management problem. I’d come all the way to the coast to leave the malignant past behind but obviously I hadn’t traveled nearly far enough.
I flipped the page to check out the police blotter column, curious what kind of major mayhem had been going on the day Carl died - thinking the old coot might have run afoul of some ruckus around town that had nothing to do with him. By big city standard the entries were comical, with a preponderance of animal references.
6:12 a.m. - 600 Block S. Hoquiam. Complaint of dogs barking when let out at 4 a.m. in the mornings. (C.J.: “a. m.” and “mornings”? Nice to enjoy a bit of redundancy in the wee hours.) Advised to discuss problem with neighbor.
8: 30 a.m. - North Well Field. Subject walking his dog concerned about a person in Well Field carrying a knife. It was a mushroom picker.
10:15 a.m. - 400 Block E. Elizabeth. Report of very bad rotting smell. Officer followed his nose to Firecracker Point where he discovered loaded fish guts trucks. Officer contacted a Catch-a-Lot Seafood Company employee and asked why smell was stronger than usual. He was informed that since the fertilizer processing plant in Hoquiam was shut down for a few weeks, the truckloads of guts were sitting longer than usual. Officer requested that employee contact a supervisor and request something be done to eliminate the overwhelming smell. (C.J.: Such as a case or two of Glade Plug-ins??)
12:45 p.m. - 100 Block S. Broadway. Report that coyote killed cat and fled with it.
1:05 p.m. - Citizen request for a ride because she locked her keys in her car at Post Office. Gone on officer’s arrival.
1:35 p.m. - Float 3. Suspicious activity reported around the boats. Extra patrols provided. (C.J.: Wasn’t that the float I got thrown off of? Was I the “suspicious activity”? That thug didn’t seem to be the kind to rat out little old ladies to the cops, but who knows?)
3:50 p.m. - 400 Block E. Pacific. Complaint of two black labs running loose. Dogs knocked over child while he was riding his bike.
4:20 p.m. - 200 Block S. Montesano. Black Chevy full size 4X4 truck seen dragging a deceased dog by a chain tied to bumper. Officer searched area with negative results. (C.J.: Related to the above report?)
6:20 p.m. - 200 Block W. Pacific. Domestic Difficulty: Non-Criminal. Couple splitting up fighting over the return of each other’s belongings. Appropriate exchanged made and male left.
7:33 p.m. - 300 Block S. Forrest. Barking dog complaint and stolen bike reported. Officer took description of bike that matched one that had been reported abandoned at the corner of Sherman and S. Forrest for a lengthy time. Bike no longer there. (C.J.: Was it the one the neighbor sold me?)
10:40 p.m. - Viking Bowl - 300 Block S. Montesano. Theft of cigarette butt receptacle reported. Possible suspect and location of item named. Officer checked location with negative results.
Nothing particularly reached out and grabbed me from the village police reports - unless it turned out that Carl was done in by a dog, coyote, kitty cat, or succumbed to rotting fish vapors. The “suspicious activity” on Float 3 sounded promising. My foul mouth pal from Surfergirl throwing his weight around again? He did not seem to be Mr. Popular with the Westport community.
I had let Mert wait long enough, I thought, dialing the number Cindy had given me.
“Who is this, please?” answered a female voice.
“I am sorry, I must have the wrong number,” I said and hung up. I dialed again. The same woman’s voice answered.
“Whose number were you calling?” she asked. Who was she, I wondered. Wife? Girlfriend? If so why had he asked me to call?
“Is Captain Merton there. I am returning his call.”
“Are you relative or friend of Captain Merton?”
A queazy shiver slithered up my spine. I wasn’t sure if I could be considered a friend after only talking to him a few times but if I played dumb I was not likely to find out what was going on.
“I am a friend of his,” I answered. “Cora Jane Dooley. What has happened to Mert?”
“This is Officer Sharon Quigley of the Westport Police Department, Ms. Dooley. Captain Merton has been injured and is on the way to the hospital in Aberdeen,” said the voice.
“Oh my God! What happened?”
“We are not sure yet. We are investigating at this time,” she said.
“I understand. Can tell me how badly he is hurt?”
“No, I am sorry. Confidentiality issues.”
“All right, sure,” I said. “Officer, did you say he was going to the hospital? What hospital?”
“Aberdeen General. Actually it is the only hospital in Aberdeen.”
“Thanks.”
I didn't know what else to say. What am supposed to do now? Do I call the hospital? Would they even give me any more information on Mert’s condition than the cop? Probably not.
Then I remembered that Marg Garvin, Cindy’s aunt, was Mert’s business partner - she might be able to find out how he was doing.
No, I thought, I'll go down to the boat and see for myself what was going on down there. Why upset Marg and Cindy? Once I knew more I would call them. Wait, I don’t know that Mert was at his boat, do I? He might have been anywhere. Maybe this had been a traffic accident - the cop did not actually say where whatever it was happened. She just answered the phone when I called. It could have been a cell phone. This was one of those times I truly hate cell phones! You can never tell where anybody is anymore.
I mentally shook myself until my figurative teeth rattled. Was I completely nuts?. Whatever had happened to Captain Merton had absolutely nothing to do with me. I was in very real danger of becoming stereotypical meddlesome snoopy old biddy. The next step would to get myself a pair of binoculars and a camcorder. Somebody stop me before I become my own worst nightmare!
I heated a can of tomato soup, made a cup of tea and sat my rear down for an early supper and some soul searching. What was it about this tiny coastal town and its people that had so totally sucked me in hook line and sinker in such a short time? At this rate I would be considering myself a native in outside of a month. Already I was living here, working here, pitching in on community disaster relief - insinuating myself into people’s personal lives. When I left Boise all I could think of was escaping involvement. A week later I’m hip deep and sinking deeper. Now I either pull all of RV-GO’s various plugs and hoses and hit the road - or I settle in to learn what this place has to teach me about myself.
I dashed some Tabasco into the tomato soup for a little kick. What the hell. Nothing does the trick like comfort food when the night stretches like an obsidian river out before you.
* * *
The term ship-shape sprang to mind as I stood on my pedals before Carl Heslop’s cabin. The yard was a clean dune furred with short salt grass. No flower beds or shrubbery this close to the beach. No clutter of any kind. The cabin’s white woodwork looked freshly painted.
After work I had biked out Forest Street to South Beach, the Westport telephone book was more like a pamphlet, Heslop’s address being easier to find than gulls on salmon guts. It only took a few minutes of bumping my way around puddles and fallen branches to find his street - a gravel side street behind the lighthouse. The street narrowed to a sandy path threading between scrub pine and dune grass. I could hear the guttural thrum of surf as I spotted the cabin.
It was a weathered cedar-sided box, its stout porch draped in graceful green fish nets. No vehicle stood in the drive, a reminder that the owner would not be coming home, his car or truck - probably a truck - stranded in Westport or in some impound lot.
A bare bulb porch light was burning. I wondered who had turned it on. Carl, before he left for the museum the afternoon he died? Or the police checking out the house? Someone had driven into the drive since the storm. I made out clear tire tracks in the packed sand of the drive. Truck tires by the look of the tread. More than one set of tires. I added my bike tracks to the collection as I approached the cabin.
After leaning the bike against the porch rail I climbed the three steps to the porch, my footsteps echoing too loudly on the dry redwood decking. I had the guilty feeling of being too exposed as I approached the door. There was no reason I could think of why anyone would be watching me but I still felt eyes on my back as I knocked on the door. I hadn’t expected an answer and was not disappointed. Still, if any one had been observing the cabin they wouldn’t take me for a burglar. Burglars don’t knock.
I tried the door. It was locked, which was not necessarily what I had expected since Westport residents boasted they did not need such big city security measures. Had Carl come down with a case of the nerves or had the cops obliged when they left? I tried to see in through the windows that flanked the door but the blinds were firmly shut, frustrating my attempts of see the interior of the cabin.
But I was not about to bike all the way out here only to leave empty. I scooted around to the back of the building where I found a small bare deck flanked by a carefully stacked wood pile. The deck was accessed through a sliding glass door but it was also locked and sported a dowel in the track to further thwart a break-in. The deck did not have so much as a chair on it. Didn’t the poor guy even own a barbecue, I wondered. What kind of retired guy did not grill a burger once in a while? It almost looked as if the cabin had been shut up for the winter, as many in the area were this time of year. Was Carl planning to leave town?
Good news - no drapes or blinds on the slider. I peered in through the glass. As I suspected, it was basically a one-room cabin, with a partition to separate the sleeping and bathroom area from the combination living room and kitchen. In the living room was an old fashioned pot bellied stove on a tile platform. Carl’s kitchen was a minimalist galley style affair along the right wall. White appliances and simple birch cabinets. No dishes in the sink or in the wooden dish drainer. I inwardly cringed at the contrast between his counter-tops and my own casual housekeeping. My closely held belief that bachelors were slobs took a major hit. Here was a man who liked to have everything in its place, no doubt a habit ingrained from his many years in the Coast Guard.
Not much personality in evidence here, no homey, individual touches to help me get a handle on who exactly he was. Had been. In hindsight I wished I had taken the time to talk to him longer at the lens building. But at the time I had seen him as simply an old man at a museum. Had he not been murdered I would never have given him another thought. Violent death has a way of lending a certain glamor to the dead they didn’t have in life.
I noticed a winking red light reflected off the shiny surface of the refrigerator and suspected that it indicated an armed alarm box on the wall beside the sliding door. I was not sufficiently techno-savvy to be sure. Pretty high tech for a rustic cabin, I thought.
I turned my attention to the living room. Brown sofa. Blue Lay-z-Boy chair facing a television on the back wall. Lamp, table, coffee table. Framed photos of boats and ships on every wall. Over the sofa hung a panoramic aerial view of the Westport Marina. No photos of people, as far as I could see though maybe he had family photos in his bedroom out of my line of sight. Mert was right, Carl almost lived for boats.
The only cluttered piece of furniture in the whole room was a long oak table adjacent to the kitchen. It had probably started life as a dining room table but now it was piled high with camera equipment, a large format printer and a computer. Carl was an octogenarian computer geek? Wonders never ceased. However I now understood why he so carefully secured this small house.
There was nothing more for me to see unless I wanted to risk breaking and entering, which seemed unwise considering it might be alarmed. Conventional wisdom held that to uncover the truth of a crime you must look to the victim. I always thought that put undue responsibility on an innocent person - still, the idea was that there was always some connection between crime and criminal if only one of proximity and opportunity. What connected Carl with the person who killed him I still did not know.
If I were to learn anything more about the old man I would have to ask Mert when he got out of the hospital. Cindy told me at breakfast that it could be any day, now that his eyes were tracking again. He was one lucky guy to have come away with only a concussion and not a skull fracture - or a broken neck. I still did not understand how he came to fall into the fish hold. And according to Cindy he could not remember that part, only waking up in the hospital. Good thing the deck hand from Molly IV had heard him groaning. Fishermen are always in danger on the open ocean, but moored in a quiet marina? That was pretty peculiar.
The previous few days I had bogged myself down with busy work - cleaning and oiling the bike, getting the RV serviced, having my hair cut - just to keep my mind off of Captain Merton. The longer he was in the hospital the more attractive the man became. It was quite an unsettling feeling. I had to admit I could hardly wait to see him again - and it had little to do with my need to talk about Carl Heslop. Our banter over the coffee “date” had been the most enjoyable interaction I had had with a man in decades, sad to say. I thought my ex husband had provided sufficient vaccination against me wanting to be on the same planet with a man ever, ever again. I’d have to watch myself, that was for darned sure.
Well, I had gotten as much from my visit to the cabin as I was going to get so I stepped back off the deck and took a look around. The breeze was freshening from direction of the sea indicating a tidal change though the dunes blocked any view of the beach. A foot path led out from the deck toward the dunes. Carl must have enjoyed walking the beach, I thought.
What a magical place even without the ocean view - wind-pruned pines leaned companionably toward the cabin like giant bonsai. Beneath their boughs bronze pine needles cradled newly sprouted bright red speckled mushrooms. A wisp of white cloud drifted through a sea-blue sky. I longed for one of Carl’s cameras to capture how lovely it was here, everything washed clean and pure after the storm. A camera would be nice to have, I thought, yet who would I share the prints with? Plus sometimes people get so caught up capturing images they do not actually see where they are.
What was that? Something large in the stand of pines to the side of the cabin - rustling like someone pushing between the branches toward me. Damn, Cora Jane, how could you be so stupid as to come out here alone, I asked myself. A twig snapped and blades of fear arrowed between my ribs. My God, how would I get back to my bike? I hadn’t heard a car - whoever it was must have been there all the whole time, watching me snoop around. I stood stock still, my ears straining for the slightest sound, ready to dash as fast I could manage for the road. Praying my knees wouldn’t buckle under me, hoping against hope my legs would obey me.
Crash! A rush of air. Heavy shadows falling toward my head - I duck, flatting myself against the ground - pine scent and fungus filling my senses, my heart pounding.
I gasp . . . as the dusky doe vaults over my head like an acrobat, vanishing into the dunes, her glistening black hooves flashing a farewell toward the sky. I lever myself to a squat, breath stalling at my teeth.
There I hunkered minutes on end staring down the trail in the direction the deer had fled, thinking that I really needed to switch to decaf. When had I ever been this jumpy and fearful? If I wasn’t careful I stood a fair chance of being the next one airlifted to Aberdeen. I unfolded my stiff body into a wobbly stand and brushed myself off. Then and there I decided to get myself a cell phone - as much as I hated the miserable things - so that I could call for help the next time something jumped at me, something that wasn’t a skittish deer.
* * *
If you want a cell phone you have to go to the big city, which meant driving RV-Go thirty miles into Aberdeen to the South Shore Mall. And as long as I was already in Aberdeen I thought I might as well see how Mert was doing over at the hospital.
I sat next to a planter filled with dirty and dying plants. A woman wearing green scrubs said she’d check to see if it was okay for me to visit Mr. Merton, as she called him. She then promptly disappeared down a green hall. The only thing in the hospital not green seemed to be the plants. I went green contemplating what germs might be evolving in that horticultural dead zone. That kept me occupied briefly, then I caught up on what Brad Pitt was up to in the People Magazine. Not a lot as it turned out. I was looking for something on Johnny Dep. I always felt that Brad Pitt looks a little too much like a chipmunk to be truly sexy - but that is just me.
“Get me the hell out of this place, Dooley.”
I looked up from my magazine. It was not Captain Jack Sparrow, it was Captain Merton, his head swathed in bandages. He was wearing a piratical scowl however.
“Should you be out of bed?” I said.
“I stood up and I did not fall over,” he said. “That was good enough for me. You have a vehicle, Dooley, or did you bus in?”
“I drove.”
“Great. Mind if I catch a ride with you?”
“Not at all, but did the doctors say you can go home?”
“Pretty much. I signed myself out and nobody complained. This place is driving me stir-crazy,” he said. “Anyway I’ve been hoping I could talk to you. You didn't return my call.”
“Actually I did but a woman answered - a very serious sounding Westport police officer.”
“Ah well, I hope you weren't too jealous.”
“Not under the circumstances,” I said. “I was more puzzled as to why you decided to nose dive into your fish hold.”
“I'll tell you the story on the way back to Westport,” he said. “Do you think we could stop by Denny’s first for something to eat? They fed me tapioca pudding and steam table chicken in here. It was worse than airline food. I need a bacon burger, quick.”
“That sounds serious,” I said “Hope you don't mind riding in my RV.”
“I don’t have a lot of choice in the matter,” he said. “If I were feeling better the prospect of riding off with a woman in what amounts to a bedroom on wheels . . . well, let us just say it would be an appealing prospect. As it is, I am just glad you showed up, no matter what you are driving.”
I suddenly remembered I had not made the bed this morning and my pajamas were in a heap on the floor.
“Better just keep your mind on the burger, Captain,” I said.
“No problem. Can I ask you something though?”
“Sure.”
“What are you doing here, anyway?”
“Aberdeen was the closest place I could buy myself a cell phone.”
He looked at my quizzically.
“I mean what are you doing here at the hospital?”
“Visiting you, of course.” Maybe I should have brought him a hand full of pretty flowers to clarify my intent.
“Oh . . .well, that is okay then.”

“That was certainly not much of a story.” I said, as we pulled up before the marina. “You promised me a good story about how you ended up in the fish hold, and all you could come up with is you must have hit your head on something and fallen?”
“It got me a ride, didn’t it?”
I originally volunteered to drive him all the way home but Mert wanted to stop by to check Angel Face - make sure she was “put to bed”, as he termed it. He couldn’t seem to get his mind off of beds, which could be a sign he was healing. Then he added that his truck was still parked by Float 9. For a man if there is one thing that out ranks a bed in terms of importance it is his truck.
“Nice rig,” he said, as I parked RV-GO next to his silver Dodge pickup.
“Yours or mine,” I laughed. After all, an ancient Minnie Winnie was hardly something to write home about.
“Yours,” he said, taking a long look over his shoulder at my living quarters. “A real classic, like a fine old wooden cruiser. Must be kind of like living aboard a boat for you. How long have you had her?”
Her? I had not thought of RV-GO as being any particular sex. If I had to pick, I would have said it had more male characteristics than female - hard to wake up and tending to pull to the right.
“I bought it a while back.” No need to go into details.
“Very nice,” he said, his eyes lingering on my lacy floral pajamas there on the floor - or so it seemed to me.
“Well, I'd better be off,” I said. “You sure you are okay to drive?”
“Yeah. No problem. Thanks for the ride, Dooley.” He opened the passenger side door, climbed out, swayed back and forth before slumping against the side of the RV.
“Oh my god!” I yelled. “Wait right there.” I got out, ran around to his side and put my arm around his shoulder.
“Whoa, that was weird,” he said. “Kind of dizzy all of a sudden.”
“Here, lean on me. We will lay you down in the RV.”
“No, help me down to the boat. I can rest awhile there in my bunk.”
“If you're sure,” I said, helping him up.
I looked toward the long ramp leading to Float 9 and wondered if I had the strength to hold him if he started tumbling into the bay. We staggered like two drunks down the ramp to the float. I kept a firm grip on Mert’s arm as we wove a path to Angel Face.
“Damn, I don’t know what’s wrong with my eyes,” he said. “Everything is wiggling around.”
“I’d say off hand you’ve got yourself a concussion,” I said. “You shouldn’t have left the hospital, Mert. It wasn’t the smartest thing to do.”
We climbed onto the deck.
“I want to see what beaned me.”
He led me to the stern where the fish hold was. Mert looked around at the various winches, pulleys and what not that surrounded the hatch.
“Dooley, you see any blood on anything?” he said. “Whatever hit me would have blood on it because I got a sizable crease on the back of my skull.”
I looked all around at anything that wasn’t stationary. No blood that I could see.
“Are you sure you didn’t get cut when you landed in the hold?”
“Not sure, no. But then what sent me into the hold in the first place? I didn't just trip over a line, Dooley. I have been a seaman all my life.”
I walked back toward the main hatch that led down a short ladder to the living quarters and engine room. There I spotted a smeared splotch of brown blood right at the top of the ladder. I mutter a very unladylike curse under my breath.
“Mert, it's over here. Blood.”
“What . . . “
“I would say off hand that someone clobbered you as you came up the ladder, then dragged you to the fish hold.”
“That is crazy. Why would anybody do that? I don't have an enemy in the world as far as I know.”
“Well, come over here and see what you think”
He joined me at the hatch, his face grim.
“Let’s go below,” he said.
I followed him down.
“Do you think the police saw the blood?” I asked.
“I doubt it. They responded to the 911 along with the fire department but it must have looked like an accident to them. They didn't show up at the hospital.”
We sat at the table in the boat’s tiny galley and for a while neither of us said a thing.
“I had better check to see if anything has been stolen,” he said at length. “Can I make you a cup of coffee?”
“Show me where the coffee things are and I will make it while you look around,” I said.
Mert went down a short hall and through a door into what I assumed was crew quarters. A boat the size of Angel Face probably didn’t boast much more than a few bunks and a head. I had the coffee dripping by the time he got back.
“You know, Mert, you didn't have to go to all this trouble to get me to have coffee with you,” I said, trying to lighten the mood.
“Whoever it was, tore the place apart back there,” he said.
“Was anything stolen?”
“Nothing, as far as I can tell,” he said. “I never keep money on the boat. A druggie might get a couple of bucks for the fishing gear or navigation instruments - but it seems to be all there.”
“No idea what they might have been after?”
“None.”
“Do you realize that whatever it was they thought you had, they were willing to risk killing you for it.”
He rubbed his hand over his face.
“Dooley, what the hell is going on around here? First Carl, then this.”
“Are you going to report it to the police, Mert?”
“I don't see that I have any choice. Not that I think they are likely to find out who did it or why. They mean well but they are not exactly C. S. I. Miami.”
“After we finish our coffee, I had better drive you on home,” I said. “Don’t give me that look - you are not getting behind the wheel of that truck on my watch. Plus you might need back-up. If they ransacked the boat, who is to say they did not continue the party at your house?”
“Not a pleasant thought,” he said.
“No, that it is not.”

Mert directed me south on the 105 spur toward Grayland, then right onto Cranberry Bog Road. His house was a two story salt box overlooking the razor clam beds. I pulled RV-GO up to the garage door. There were no obvious signs of a break in, but I was no expert.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“Well, we could sit out here and let the neighbors think we’re necking - or we could go inside and find out if I have had visitors.”
“I vote for going in,” I said, getting out of the RV and coming around to his side. I was not about to let him fall flat on his face this time.
“Dooley, about this idea you had for serving as my back-up - what exactly had you planned to do if we ran into trouble?”
“I'm not sure at the moment. I guess I'll wing it. You don’t happen to have a gun hidden under a rock out here do you?”
“Sorry, no.”
“Then I guess we'll just have to hope for the best.”

Together we made a thorough search of the house. Mert assured me he noticed nothing out of place or missing. I was vastly relieved. This whole cloak and dagger thing was wearing me out. Mert too was showing the strain now that he knew that he had been deliberately attacked. Once we had completed a full circuit of the house he dropped into a leather arm chair, leaned back and closed his eyes. The man shouldn’t be alone, I thought to myself, but what business was it of mine that he had left the hospital before he should. He is a grownup, I told myself. I should be on my way home.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Head is splitting,” he said. “They wanted to send me off with some pain pills but I turned them down. Now I am rethinking that.”
“I have some aspirin in my purse,” I offered.
A warm glow suffused the living room. Through the wide windows I noticed the horizon was coloring up for a spectacular sunset, the sea a tangerine soup all the way to Japan.
“Thanks, maybe that'll help.”
“I'll get you a glass of water.” I headed for the kitchen. “While I am out here I could whip us up some supper. That burger must have worn off by now.”
“I am a little hungry,” he said. “But if you think you'll find anything edible in my kitchen, think again lady. Why do you think I’m at Bev’s every day? I’m a lousy cook. You won’t find so much as a moldy bread crumb out there.”
“We could get a pizza delivered . . . “
“Forget it. I have a better idea,” he said. “Let me sit here for a minute or two until my head stops spinning around, then I’ll take us out to dinner. That is if you promise not to think of it as a date. I would not want to scare you off, you know.”
“Go back to Westport? I don’t know . . . “
“No, there is a place just down the road near Tokeland.”
“Okay, sure. But only if it’s not a date.”
“It is not a date,” he said. “And I will try to have a really miserable time.”
I found a glass in the cupboard, filled it with tap water, then sneaked a peek into his refrigerator. He was telling the truth. There was not a thing in it but a collection of condiment bottles of obviously antique vintage.

JANE AUSTEN BY THE SEA - RV-GO Down to the Sea, Chapter 3

A PLANT LADY'S LIFE IN GEEKATOPIA

The Weekend of 080808

I am doggedly progressing through Austen’s “Persuasion”, determined to fulfill my stated summer vow to read her complete works by first frost (and counting on global warming to give me many more months before deadline).

How’s this for a strangler of a sentence: “Anne thought she left great happiness behind her when they quitted the house; and Louisa, by whom she found herself walking, burst forth into raptures of admiration and delight on the character of the navy - their friendliness, their brotherliness, their openness, their uprightness; protesting that she was convinced of sailors having more worth and warmth than any other set of men in England; that they only knew how to live, and they only deserved to be respected and loved.”

You see why I sometimes wonder if I am up to this task - it is like being pulled to the bottom of a murky pond by the weight of your sodden ball gown. Or perhaps the simile should (due to Austen’s topic) refer to saltier water - how about, “like being pulled into the frigid depths by a giant squid”. Or maybe not. Ah well.

I continue as well revising my mystery novel, RV-GO Down to the Sea. I think I will give you another chapter or two - then I’ll put the book into text format and email it to you if you want to read the rest. Just let me know. A free book! Such a deal! No paperback gathering dust after you find out who-done-it-and-why - merely push DELETE and, pooph!, mischief managed!

RV-GO DOWN TO THE SEA - Chapter 3
The first thing that occurred to me was that boats don’t have doorbells. I suppose I already knew that but it was not something I had ever thought about much. How, I asked myself, was I going to announce myself? Ahoy probably went out with shiver-me-timbers.
I found Angel Face easily enough. She was roped to the floating dock all the way at the end, her name boldly painted in red, outlined in blue across her stern.
“Hello! Anyone on the boat?” I yelled, feeling like the perfect fool and hoping that this Mert guy was not the type to shoot first and ask questions later.
“Anybody home?” I shouted again. This threatened to be a repeat of my visit to the charter office. I also had an uncomfortable flashback to the thug who ran me off Float 3 the day before.
A molty looking gull gave me the once over from an adjacent piling. I hoped he was not the security system because I was wearing my favorite navy blue jacket.
“Who is up there?” came a voice from the bowels of the boat.
“Cora Jane Dooley. Could I talk to you for a minute, please?”
“Am I supposed to know who you are?” he shouted back.
“I work at Bev’s Burgers by the Bay,” I said, knowing that didn’t quite explain why I was shouting at the man’s boat.
“Well, I guess that should mean something,” he said. “What did I do forget to tip you? I will be right up.”
A minute later he came clambering up the stairs - the very image of the Gorton’s Fisherman, yes. Flowing white hair and crisp silver beard. Would have made a fine Santa given a bit more beard, I thought. But there was nothing twinkly and cheery about his eyes. They were a warm brown, but sorrow-filled.
Cora Jane, you are a prize idiot, I told myself, the poor man just lost a friend. You ought to get yourself out of here and mind your own damn business.
“I am sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what I was thinking - didn’t mean to disturb you. I will go.”
“I am up here now. You said you wanted to talk to me,” he said. “Come aboard. Here, I’ll give you a hand.”
Getting down from the float to the boat deck was . . . interesting, holding his strong, rough hand. If I hadn’t known better I would have thought our hands clasped each other a little longer than they really needed to. He was one very attractive man, though. Steady on, Cora Jane, I said to myself.
“So, how much do you say I owe you?” he said.
“It’s not about money actually.”
“Well, what was it you had in mind then?” he said. “You looking for a charter? Need to check with the office about that. Nothing going out for a few months yet. Maybe not even then if the storm damage is worse than it looks.”
“I stopped by the charter office already and talked to . . . is it Marg? She said you would be down here,” I said. “What I wanted is to talk to you about your friend Carl.”
“I have talked about him all I want to talk for a while. Cops, newspapers. Why do you think I would want to talk to you?”
Here it is, I thought, the point of no return. If I tell him he could tell the cops and then I would have trouble landing on my doorstep like flies on cow pies.
“Carl showed me the lens at the museum not long before he was killed,” I said, watching his face while he processed the information. “I may have been the last person to see him.”
“I can see why that would worry you. You tell the cops that?” said Mert.
Oh my God, I thought, if this guy is the one who killed Carl he now knows I was there that afternoon. What if he thinks I saw something that will lead the law in his direction? Cora Jane, have you learned nothing over the years? You may have really landed yourself in it now. I’d have to be a bit more careful. I ignored the question.
“What I was wondering, Captain . . . I am sorry I don’t know your last name,” I began.
“Merton,” he said. Well, that explained the Mert.
“Captain Merton,” I continued, not having the faintest idea where I was going with this. “Something that has been bothering me since I heard about the old gentleman’s death.”
“Death can be pretty bothersome,” he said.
“Yes, I would say so, but what I wondered was why Carl would have been at the museum the afternoon I showed up. I understand he was night security.”
I was fibbing a bit here since I had not known he was night security until Marg had mentioned it but it seemed like a plausible line of inquiry.
“That is true enough. He supplemented his pension working security. And that bothers you?” He shook his head. “I do not see what you are getting at. You think it was weird he showed you around? He was a volunteer docent as well as a guard - retired Coast Guard - so if someone came around the museum while he was on shift he would be inclined to show them around even when the place was closed. Nothing odd about that.”
“But if he was night security, what was he doing there in the early afternoon?”
“Afternoon? Damned if I know. Maybe he had to start work early for some reason.” He paused. “Which might explain a few things, come to think of it. He was supposed to meet me for supper but he did not show. What time was it you saw him?”
“Around two. I had just gotten off at Bev’s and I thought I would see something of the town.”
“The museum is closed for the season.”
“I found that out.” This was going nowhere. What had I expected to find out from this man anyhow? And to what purpose?
“But you say Carl was there . . .” He seemed to be chewing the information. “As early as two.”
“Yes. He let me in to see the lighthouse lens. He turned it on for me.”
“I can’t make head nor tail of this. Why would Carl be at the museum that early? More like him to be taking a nap around that time,” he said. “The cops said at first they thought Carl died some time after he began his rounds at seven until I told them he had not shown up for supper at six so he could have been dead by then. Now if you say he was at the museum as early as two . . . that might be important. Could be the cops would like to hear what you have to say.”
Damn, Cora Jane, when are you going to learn to keep your big mouth shut, I thought. Now, even if I do not speak up, this guy is sure to blow the whistle and the questioning will start. And they will want to know who they are talking to. It will all begin again.
“By the look on your face I would say you are not too keen on cops,” he said.
“I guess you could say getting involved with the legal system does not give me a warm fuzzy feeling,” I said. “In my experience too many times a person starts out trying to help and ends up being caught in the gear teeth.”
“Have to agree with you on that one.” He scratched his bearded chin and gazed past my shoulder toward the open harbor. “How about I make us a cup of coffee and we chew on this for a bit.” He motioned toward the stairs leading down into his boat.
“Thanks, but I should be going. I have taken up enough of your time already, Captain Merton. I can see you have a lot of work to do here.”
“Not the trusting type, I see,” he chuckled. “I can’t say I blame you with a murderer in town. ‘Course, come to think of it, could be I should be the nervous one, you being a stranger here. It does not take a man to kill a man . . . necessarily.”
“No, it does not. But of course being new in town I would not have a motive, would I?”
“Killers in novels have to have motives, little lady. Seems to me the real world operates more free form than that.”
I decided to let the “little lady” comment slide. He was after all a disturbingly attractive man.
“You have a point. Still, I can not imagine your friend’s death in little Westport was the result of random violence,” I said, shifting my attention back to the topic. “From what I read in the local paper’s police blotter the worse crime you folks see around here is the poker crowd getting rowdy on Saturday night. They may break a few beer bottles in the parking lot of Pines Tavern but they don’t seem to me to be the kind to butcher harmless old men for no reason. Or am I wrong? As you say, I am new around here.”
A curious gull made a wide swoop over our heads, settling with a flutter on a piling by the bow. He cocked his wedge of a head, weighing the possibilities.
I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with the salty scents of low tide and desolation, knowing that I should have just kept driving down the coast highway because here I was caught in the spiny net of by my own insufferable nosiness. Every community had its fair share of sad dramas and tragedies, Westport being no exception - every bronze-plaqued teak bench along the esplanade told stories of wrenching loss and grief - I didn’t need to become ensnared in these people’s problems in the off chance of briefly escaping my own.
“Truth be told, he was a pretty odd bird,” said Captain Merton.
“Odd bird?” For a second I thought he was talking about the gull, then realized he had been saying something about the old man that I had missed.
“Carl. I liked the fella well enough, do not get me wrong. Sometimes he helped me around the boat. If he were alive he would be right here helping me today - a good man with boats, was old Carl,” he said. “Always wanted to know what was going on around the marina. But now that I think about it he never let slip much about himself. He was kind of secretive that way.”
“You are saying if he had enemies or someone he was having trouble with he kept it to himself.”
“He did not mention anything to me, no.”
“And he did not seem worried or upset about anything?”
“Not that I recall,” he said. “What did you say your name was again?”
“Cora Jane Dooley. People call me C. J.”
“Figures. But you do not look like a Cora Jane to me. You know, if you had a boat, C. J. would not be a bad name for it. You would want to spell it s-e-a-j-a-y. though,” said Captain Merton. “Well, Dooley, if you will not let me make you coffee onboard how about we step across the street to the Spindrift and I buy you a cup?”
“Thanks, but I have to be off.”
“Maybe some other time, then,” he said. “I will be seeing you at Bev’s.”
“Sure thing. See you at breakfast.”


* * *
I kicked myself all the way back to RV-GO. A nice guy wants to spend some time with me and what do I do? I bolt like a winged doe. Understandable I suppose, considering that my choice in men had not ever been the wisest. What irritated me most was that I had just blown a golden opportunity to learn more about the old man, Carl Heslop, which might have helped me understand how the man came to be killed.
I was convinced that Merton knew more than he let on. From what Cindy told me, Mert and Carl ate dinner together two or three times a week. That was more often than most married couples see each other. I had to think that if something was bothering the old fellow his friend should have picked up on it if he was the least little bit observant.
This coming from a woman who had believed for two decades that her husband was merely a harmless if slightly shifty car salesman! What the hell did I know?
I heated up some leftover spaghetti from the night before and opened a bottle of screw top cabernet. Seated at the RV’s Formica booth enjoying my freedom from interpersonal complications I listened to the couple from the single wide next door squabble over the remote. They were at it every evening at six o’clock since I’d been living at Blue Moon Bay Mobile Manor. She wanted the channel five news but he liked seven. Said the sports coverage was better. Since RV-GO was parked five feet from their living room couch I was treated to every enthralling word.
Sometimes I wished they were more interesting people. But not tonight. I had about all I could take of interesting. I wound the spaghetti around my fork and listened to the woman argue that she had to hear Jean Enersen’s Health Link report on colon cancer treatments. I set the fork down and sipped my cabernet. Suddenly the spaghetti had lost its charm.
I wonder about people who get so excited about television news broadcast from a city almost two-hundred miles away when so much was happening in their own town. Maybe they had not heard about the murder. Or maybe since it was not covered by the big city Seattle media it did not have sufficient glamour to keep their attention. Poor old Carl Heslop would not make it to prime time for those two.
I scraped the congealing spaghetti into the trash bin and screwed the cap back on the cabernet after one more swig. For a brief second I had the urge to bawl like a baby at the mental image of a solitary youngish-elderly lady scraping pasta into a garbage can. I wrote it off to the depressive affects of wine and homicide, checked that the side door was locked and took my sad self off to bed.
* * *
The moon broke through the purple clouds as the pirates flooded up over the railings, pouring over the decks like a tide of shiny insects, their gleaming knives flashing through the salt spray spewing over the plunging bow - the captain, where is the captain, I ask the wind. He was at the helm just a moment before, struggling to hold our course into the storm as the dark ship gained on us - now as the screaming cutthroats grapple with the crew the helm spins free, moonlight streaming through the spokes like blood. I stand at the cabin door fixed like a splinter in the flesh of the night, mouth open in a cry still lodged in my frozen throat as they come aboard, as they advance across the heaving decks - bellowing and brandishing death with every stride. Nowhere to hide but the hold and they will be there soon enough - nowhere to go but over the side into the roiling waves, the plunging depths - but he has me before I turn to run, clamping his iron hands to my arms, drawing me to his cold naked chest, his snake covered skin, squeezing the breath from my lungs - as he bites through my throat, as salt stings my eyes and the slick deck slides out from beneath my feet and night swings wide as a torn sail.
* * *
I woke to the alarm at four o’clock with a stiff neck and a red wine headache. Cindy was counting on me so I could not exactly call in sick - even if I could afford to lose a day of work, which I could not with space rent due at the end of the week. Vowing there would be no more midweek cabernet sessions on an empty stomach I threw on a pair of jeans and a blouse, hurried through my bathroom routine and biked off to Bev’s for the breakfast shift.
Cindy had things well underway when I arrived ten minutes later.
“’Morning, C. J.,” she said, handing me a coffee pot. “Jeez, you look like hell. What happened, all night party at the mobile home park?”
“I had a bad night. This murder thing upset me more than I realized,” I said, starting the coffee. “Cindy, do you want me to top off the salts and peppers too?”
“Yeah, that would be cool.”
In a headachy fog I took the chairs off the tables, put the place settings out and filled the condiments. Cindy unlocked the front door, flipped the open sign and who was the first person through the door? Captain-Silver-Fox-Merton. What a day to have skipped the lipstick in my mad rush for work. This was going to be one heck of a long morning. Fortunately we got busy fast and I did not have time to worry about how I looked until Merton waved me over.
“You got my check, Dooley?” he asked. Dooley. Oh well, I probably looked more like a Dooley than a C. J. to him, especially this morning.
I tore it from my pad and handed it to him. He glanced at it and handed it back to me.
“You forgot to put the coffee on it, Dooley.”
“That is okay. My treat,” I said.
“So how does this work? I ask you out for coffee and you refuse but now you’re buying me a coffee? Is this some sort of women’s liberation thing?”
“No, more like an apology,” I said. “I am sorry I refused your invitation. It would have been nice to have coffee with you, so I hope that you will give me another chance to accept.”
“Well, I insist on paying for this coffee because I don’t want you accepting an invitation from me just so you can be paid back.”
“You are one sly customer, Captain Merton.”
“Maybe you should call me Mert since we’re involved in this complicated beverage transaction, Ms Dooley.”
I could not decide if he was asking me out or brushing me off. Surely I was way too old for this sort of boy-girl tap dance. Not to mention that my brain was seriously lagging behind the conversation. I added coffee to his bill and handed it back to him. He wedged a bill under his coffee mug and got up.
“I will get you your change, Mert.”
“Keep the change,” he said as he headed for the door.
“This is a twenty not a ten,” I called after him.
“You will owe me,” he said.
Damn him anyway, I muttered to myself. The ball was back in my court. Still, I had to admit that was a pretty cute move on his part.

RV-GO DOWN TO THE SEA, Chapter 2

A PLANT LADY'S LIFE IN GEEKATOPIA

This week I am noticing people's nerves are getting a bit frayed - in reaction to our moribund economy or our brief stretch of hot, humid weather? Both? A woman actually assaulted me in one of my accounts tuesday! That's not something that goes down every day, let me tell you! I had just turned a ficus tree and was about to prune out a small broken branch when a woman came up behind me, grabbed me by the arm pulling me away from the tree, while shouting "Don't do that!". For a second I thought someone was just goofing around, but no, she was perfectly serious - didn't want me to touch the plant near her desk. Quite amazing behavior, I thought. Especially since I've been caring for that particular ficus tree for the better part of a decade without bodily injury (at least to the plant lady).

I'm continuing to revise my RV-GO mystery. If you haven't read Chapter 1 yet, this would be the time to go back to last week's post and catch up. Here's Chapter 2! Enjoy!
(Photo: Maritime Museum, Westport, Wa)
RV-GO DOWN TO THE SEA
Chapter 2
I woke next morning a provisionally-employed, temporary resident of Blue Moon Bay Mobile Manor Community, plugged in and settled like a native between an orange crab-ring festooned single wide and a nearly horizontal pine tree. RV-GO’s windows were opaque with marine fog as I started a pot of coffee in the galley and went to wedge myself into my morning shower.
While I dressed I caught the news and weather on the radio. Cindy, the pink haired chef, had been right. There was a Pineapple Express system they were terming “the storm of the decade” headed right for the west coast. Sixty mile-per-hour winds loaded with rain. I wondered how my new coat would hold up.
Cindy, daughter of Bev the owner of Bev’s Burgers by the Bay, scheduled me for the breakfast shift which started at the unimaginable hour of four-thirty. Trial by fire. She told me if I survived the early rush I’d do just fine. I wondered what kind of a rush could there possibly be at that hour in a nearly empty village.
I found out soon enough. At exactly five o’clock a.m. a half dozen men in work clothes and caps took over the counter stools. Another fifteen minutes and every table in the place was filled. I ran my legs off skating coffee, water, and menus. Not that the men needed menus. They all knew the bill of fare better than their kids’ birthdays. Most of them, I came to discover, ordered the same breakfast every morning. And before they vanished out the door an hour later they all had put in their lunch orders. Later, Cindy told me the guys might as well have saved their breath - they ordered the same lunch day in and day out. Half of the men were workers at the shipyard. The other half were fishermen - mostly charter captains and their crews. No pleasure craft this time of year, said Cindy. Even if these guys didn’t take their boats out of the marina they were accustomed to getting up early every day to work on them, so here they were at Bev’s twice a day, year ‘round.
“Not bad, C.J.” said Cindy after we had loaded the last of the lunch dishes into the washer.
“Thanks,” I said, not sure if I was glad or not that she seemed to think I past muster. “How did you ever manage that crowd on your own?”
“After a while I would just throw the usual eggs and bacon on the grill before the guys even arrived. Slop the coffee around, deal the plates and you got it. Having customers that are compulsive and short on imagination plays to your favor around here.”
“So, every day it’s like this?”
“Pretty much. Today it’s a little more hectic because the storm’s coming. They’ve got to batten down the hatches and sand bag the town,” she said. “You decide whether you are hiring on?”
I took a look at the tip jar. It wasn’t what I was used to at the dinner houses I worked in Boise. But it would suffice to pay the utility bills at the RV park.
“Sure, Cindy, I’d love to,” I said. “Be back tomorrow at four-thirty. Now I’m going to walk around town and get acquainted with the locals.”
“Yeah. Better do that while you still can.” I followed her gaze toward the wide windows. High white clouds scudded overhead. Not all that threatening by the look of them. But then, I didn’t know local weather.
Westport was walkable, situated as it was on a flat spit of land surrounding flat water. Even so, I decided a bike might ease the one mile commute to work from the RV park. I would ask around and see if somebody would sell me a used one that didn’t have an excessive layer of rust. No doubt I could use the exercise as well.

It turned out to be a pretty pleasant stroll around town, working up a glow in the freshening sea breeze. The few people I passed on the way from one end of the street to the other actually smiled at me. You rarely get that response even in sleepy Boise. At the end of the street where it loops around the shipyard toward the road to Grayland I stopped at one of the numerous benches that dot the marina side of the street. There was a bronze plaque attached to the back rest dedicating the bench to a Westport fisherman - Brian Hansen, beloved son and brother, lost at sea, twenty-nine years old. And in that brief message on a gray wood bench I saw the other side of coastal life. I suspected that was why people were so generous with their smiles. Too soon those smiles could fade with the rigors of trying to carve out a living beside a turbulent ocean.
I still sometimes had nightmares of one terrible night off Anchorage when the cannery ship I worked on in Alaska came across a capsized trawler. We hadn’t heard a mayday but there it was almost directly off our bow. Weather can come up fierce and fast in those waters - every year it takes a few boats before they know what’s hit them. We barely avoided cutting the trawler in two. It was a long frustrating, miserable night. Never did locate any of the crew. They hadn’t even deployed a raft.
Gone fishing. For thousands of years the sad reality of men who go fishing is that so many of them don’t come back. I took a seat on the Brian Hansen memorial bench. Morning fog was long gone but it was as quiet as if the town were swathed in cotton. The term calm before the storm came to mind. A trio of seagulls squabbling over a segment of crab, momentarily disturbed the impression that I had somehow gone stone deaf.
Boats put to bed for the winter slept motionless in their berths on Float 3. Most were trawlers - forty-five to sixty feet. Big enough to ply the Pacific coast all the way to Alaska and back. It was a sizable fleet for such a small port. A few boats up the float someone was hosing off his deck. Other than that one person, there didn’t seem to be anyone around. Where were all the guys from lunch, I wondered. Drinking dessert in the galley? Of course it was off season, but I had been hoping I would find someone to talk to about the town. Not too much opportunity to yak while you are running burger orders and refilling coffee mugs.
I walked down the ramp onto the float, reading the names on the trawlers’ sterns as I went. It interests me what folks name their pets, cars, computers, motor homes, kids, boats. Some of the boats on Float 3 were named for women - no doubt in honor of wives or mothers. Others were more fancifully christened. Moored on this float were Alice Ann, Polkadot, Hannasam, Crusader, Eagle Scout II, and Surfergirl. Three of the six sported hand-lettered for sale by owner signs.
“Hey you, what are you doing down here?” came the shout from behind me, the float bobbing with each of the man’s heavy strides.
“Looking at the boats,” I said. “Why, is there a problem?”
The guy looked to be in his mid-forties, roughly the size of a combine, and with all the natural charm of a case of head lice. I thought I remembered him from the breakfast shift at Bev’s. A low tipper if ever I saw one with a few major issues judging by the purple tinge to his cheeks.
“There is if you’re snooping around my fuckin’ boat.”
Yep, issues.
“Whoa, fella. Nothing to be upset about. I am new here in town and just catching the sights,” I said, hoping I was sounding sufficiently non-threatening.
“Catch them someplace else. I don’t like strangers coming around my boat.”
“Well, I don’t know which is your boat so you point it out and I will do my very best to avoid it.”
“You are a smart mouth old bitch,” he growled. “Why don’t you just go sightseeing on some other float.” It was not a question. I abruptly lost my interest in the trawlers. Fond memories of my homicidal husband surfaced like fat globules on gumbo
“Okay, you win, pal” I said. He was still a wall between me and the ramp. “If you will let me get by I can be on my way.”
He allowed me a few inches and I made a speedy scramble up the ramp to the street, my stomach doing nervous little twitches. Looking over my shoulder I saw the guy boarding Surfergirl. Surfergirl? Picturing that unpleasant thug on a surf board jump-started a chuckle. He must have bought the boat off one of the Beach Boys. Or stole it, more likely.
Any illusion I might have harbored that all of Westport was ready to bend over backward to welcome me to the community could have evaporated right there. But people are people everywhere - no one knows this better than a waitress - so I shrugged it off as par for the course and decided to check out the Maritime Museum. A few musty dioramas and I’d have a feel for the area. I figured a museum was likely to encourage rather than object to my sight-seeing ways. I should have known better, considering how the afternoon had started out.
The museum was an impressive white three-story Nantucket style building complete with six gables and topped with a widow’s watch cupola. According to the wooden sign out front it had originally been a Coast Guard Station. I stepped onto the wide porch and tried the door. It was locked. Only then did I notice the small hand-lettered sign taped to the window. Closed for the season. That figured. Just when I was getting in the mood for a quiet stroll amid dusty ship models. Ah well, such is life. No doubt I should take the hint, I thought, and high tail it back to the RV for a nap.
“You here to see the lens?” said a voice from behind me.
“Lens?” I said, turning to see a shriveled figure in a yellow slicker. The man looked salt-cured as a strip of jerky and somewhere around ninety years old. If he turned out as nasty as the guy on Float 3 I thought I could probably take him.
“Yeah. The Fresnel lens. You know, from Destruction Island Lighthouse,” he said. “You here to see it?”
“Sounds interesting,” I said, having no idea what he was talking about. “But the museum is closed.”
He coughed up a lung and spat on the grass.
“Don’t matter. I’m a docent as well as the watchman. If you want to see it, I got a key.”
“Thanks for the offer,” I said. “But I can come back another time when the museum is open.”
“It’s not in the museum. Got its own special-built building ‘round back,” said the old man. “I could power it up for you.”
Power it up? How do you power up a piece of glass, I wondered. This, I had to see.
“If you are sure it’s no trouble . . . “
“No trouble at all, young lady,” he said. I liked the young lady part. A real smooth talker.
“I’m Cora Jane Dooley, by the way. I just hired on over at Bev’s,” I said.
“Glad to meet you,” he said, offering his hand. “Carl Heslop, retired Coast Guard.”
“How long have you been a docent, Carl?” I asked as we walked around the side of the main building.
“Since ‘85 when Westport turned the building over to the historical society. Served here myself back in the 70s when I was in the Guard, so I know every inch of the old girl,” he said. “This here, though, is new. They had to build this when they got the lens a few years ago.”
Carl brought out a ring of keys and unlocked the door of what looked like a large boat house. When he flipped on the room lights I understood why an entire building was needed for a lighthouse lens. The thing looked like a gigantic twenty foot tall Christmas tree ornament constructed of a zillion cut glass prisms and surrounded by an observation ramp.
“Wow!” I said. “That’s one hell of a beautiful thing!” No doubt about it, that was one over-the-top Christmas ornament.
“You ain’t seen nothing yet, young lady. Wait ‘til I get it fired up,” he chuckled, moving to a control box. “Just take a second.”
Carl flipped a few switches and a motor hummed to life somewhere under the lens.
“Okay, here she goes,” he said.
A blinding light strobed from the center of the Christmas ornament which began to rotate slowly, splashing the room with rainbows of brilliance.
“It is breath taking!” I said.
“Yeah, like one of those laser light show things, but better. If it was outside, you could see this puppy for miles. Sometimes I like to come in here and just watch it go ‘round and ‘round. Down right hypnotizing,” said Carl. “Costs some money, though, every time it gets turned on.”
Oops. Here comes the bottom line, I thought. I should have known the old boy wasn’t giving me the grand tour out of kindness to a stranger.
“Is there an admission charge, Carl?”
“Nah. But we do take donations,” He pointed to a bronze model of a lighthouse on a pedestal next to the door.
“I don’t understand . . .”
“It is a big piggy bank. Well, a lighthouse bank. We collect money for the Ashes Fund.” He was not quite getting his point across.
“We call it the Ashes Fund,” he said. “’Cause it is like a burial fund only for scattering ashes, ya see? Lots of times fishermen die and there is no money to scatter their ashes at sea. A friend of mine is licensed to scatter ashes from his fishing boat so this fund pays him for the gas to take the ashes to sea.”
“Well, I don’t have much with me but I really appreciate seeing this amazing lens so let me leave something in the box for your trouble, okay Carl?”
I dug around in my pocket where the morning’s tips nestled.
“Nah, don’t worry ‘bout that. No trouble at all. I was out here anyway.”
“If you are sure. But tell you what, Carl, let me buy you breakfast over at Bev’s some time.”
“That’s a deal, Cora Jane Dooley.”
He shut the lens down and turned off the overheads. Though Carl had said it was unnecessary, I tucked a fiver in the donation box anyway on the way out the door. He thanked me and locked up the Lens Building.
“Carl,” I said, before I turned to go on my way. “You must know most of the people around town. Do you know the owner of the trawler Surfergirl?”
“Why do you want to know?” he said, a frown playing across his face.
“I was down on Float 3 and the guy chased me off. He seemed to have a real problem with people coming around.”
“His name is Eddie Roy Singer. You want to avoid that one. He’s bad news. Stay clear of him if you don’t want to get yourself hurt.”
That sounded a bit melodramatic but what did I know? Every town has it’s characters. Could be Carl was one. Could be this Eddie Roy Singer was another.
“Well, I have to be off,” I said. “Thanks for the advice and thanks again for the tour. That lens is a marvel.”
“Glad to do it,” he said, locking the door. “You take care, little lady. Storm coming, you know.”
I headed back to Blue Moon Bay Mobile Manor and RV-GO for a late nap, wondering where this supposed storm was and when it was finally going to show up.
* * *
It was not much of a nap. Just as I was drifting off the southbound Union Pacific clobbered the side of my rig. At least that was what it felt like as my eyes sprang open. RV-GO was rocking and rolling like Elvis on speed. I unwound myself from the tangled sheets and staggered into the living room. I could not see a thing out the windows for all the water pouring down the glass in torrents. Something was banging against the door. I pulled it open and Ron from the single wide next door fell in, dripping water all over my scatter rug.
“What’s going on?” I shouted, as I slammed the door behind him.
“Storm,” he said. I had already pretty much figured that out. “Bunch of us are going downtown to help with the sand bagging. Wondered if you wanted to go along and help. We can use all the hands we can get.”
“They left it a bit late, didn’t they? How come they didn’t get it done yesterday? Isn’t this supposed to be the storm of the decade or something?”
“Hell, who knows. There is always a blow heading our way. Nothing generally comes of it so folks wait to see if it’s serious before they bother. So, you coming?”
“What about the mobiles and RVs? Is there something we should be doing? This thing feels like it is about to be blown over!”
“Nothing to be done now,” he replied. “They will either be here when we get back or they won’t. Anything that could have blown away easy, like tarps and garbage lids, is already half way down the coast by now.”
“Okay, Ron, let me get my coat.”
At that moment the microwave oven squawked as the power fizzed out. I pulled the plug on it and my countertop television to prevent any electrical fireworks once the juice came back on. If it came back on. Ron loaned me a heavy yellow slicker which smelled of sweat and rotting shrimp. I thanked him profusely.
Six other people from the mobile park were already wedged into Ron’s antique Volkswagen bus. I squeezed myself in between his wife and a thick necked man I did not know. Nobody talked as we inched our way into town through the six inches of water that covered the roadway. Ron had the wipers flapping wildly but visibility was next to zero. We might have gotten into town faster walking though we would have run the risk of drowning. As we finally reached The Inn of the Westwind I could just make out that they still had power. Maybe they had a generator. The parking lot was jammed with pickup trucks , the cafe clearly serving as a command post for the operation. Ron pulled the Volkswagen into the flooded lot next to a truck with a Coast Guard logo on the side doors.
We pushed through the door into a vortex of voices. The wall heater was blowing full blast but making little progress at drying jackets and slickers as a couple of teenage girls threaded their way through the crowd dispensing coffee to the throng. Nothing gets done in this town without a liberal application of caffeine. Amazing that this fact hadn’t yet been discovered by the Starbucks people. Of course this town wasn’t exactly upscale. I accepted a steaming mug of what tasted like Folgers drip and tried to make sense of what was going on in the terrible, steaming din of the room. I scanned the faces for Cindy but didn’t see her. Carl, the old guy from the museum, wasn’t there either. Neither was the thug from Float 3, a fact that cheered me somewhat.
“Do you know what we are waiting for?” I yelled to the young man at my elbow.
“Someone screwed up and left a pile of sand bags behind at the Coast Guard Station. A couple of guys have gone back to get them.”
“What do we do with the sand bags once they arrive?”
He threw me a look that spoke volumes.
“Fill them with sand and pack them against all the doorways so the shops don’t flood. You are new around here, right?”
“Just came in this week.”
“Yeah, well, I thought so,” he said, stating the obvious. “See, Westport is only a foot above sea level. When the tide is high, like it is right now, and it is stormy like it is now, before long the whole damn ocean is blowing up over the breakwater we are all up to our asses in salt water.”
“I don’t know, but it seems to me you folks ought to move the town to higher ground.”
“Tell me about it.”
A tall fellow in a Coast Guard Reserve jacket came through the crowd counting us off into teams and before I finished my coffee we were herded back out into the driving rain.
The four on my team shoveled sand into an unending assembly line of sopping canvas bags for hours while the water poured over us like the last gasp of the Titanic. Water blew in under my hood and ran down my neck but I was too busy to mind. I could not see anything beyond the mouth of each bag I held open for my teammate to fill. When the bag was full I closed it, slid it to the next person down who fit it against the door jam, then I grabbed another empty bag to fill. I kept my head down, clinging to the sand bags to keep from being blown over, knowing that if I managed to survive the day, my lower back promised to be a permanent pretzel.
I heard the wind howling through a forest of whipping masts across the street in the marina, mast rings clanging like church bells on dooms day. Then a loud crack like a tree splitting in half pierced the screaming wind. Boats breaking up. My teammate gasped and cut a curse as he shoveled sand into the bag. No time to wonder if it was his or a friend’s boat. A gust hit me, knocking me flat on my rear in swirling water. He helped me to my feet and handed me the next empty bag.
It was dark when we placed the last bag against the last doorway - ironically, Sailor’s Kite Shop. Dark as the hold of the Flying Dutchman. Dark and loud with rushing water, screeching wind. We staggered to the vehicles and drove back to the Westwind. I don’t remember how I got back to Moon Bay Mobile Manor.
No surprise that the power was still out. Soaked to the bone, my teeth rattling in my pounding head I could have murdered a hot shower. It wasn’t going to happen. I felt my way to the bathroom, peeled off my clothes, threw them in the shower and left them there to drain.
I pulled on a pair of sweat pants, woolly socks, a sweater and wrapped myself in two blankets before passing into a blessedly dream free oblivion.
The phone woke me a few minutes past four. If I had been expecting to sleep all day I was sadly mistaken. Sometime during the night the storm passed, lights had snapped back to life and Cindy was determined to open Bev’s for breakfast. Business as usual. The short bike ride into town was an agony of sore muscles and angry bruises. The rain had stopped but the streets were silted over and strewn with snapped branches, slick sorrowful leaves and broken shingles. Shopkeepers were already out shoveling muck from the sidewalks. Boat owners swarmed over the floats retying lines and accessing the damage and at the jetty a fire truck was pumping water back over the breakwater into the bay. Westport mopped up and brushed itself off. This was one tough town.
* * *
“Suspicious death,” said Cindy, answering my question.
The last cop car had just pulled away from the curb. I had served them their breakfast but made myself scarce when they started asking questions. I had had my fill of police back in Idaho. A whole raft of police show up and I clam up and slip out the back door. Besides, what could I tell them? The person they had wanted to talk to was Cindy.
“What did they ask you?”
“They wanted to know if he came in as usual for supper the other night,” she said. “Which he didn’t. I told the cops his buddy Mert came in, expecting the old man to meet him for the liver and onions special. But Carl was a no-show.”
“What happened, did they say?” I asked, a sick dread creep through me. Poor Carl - he had seemed like such a nice old guy.
“Only that one of the shipyard workers heading into work this morning saw a light in the Lens Building. He thought that was weird so he went to check it out, found the door open and Carl dead under the lens.”
“Why suspicious?,” I said. “It was a terrible night last night. Maybe he went to batten down the museum and had a heart attack.”
“Would the police be crawling all over town if that were the case?” Cindy asked, already knowing the answer. “It had to have been something obvious to get those good old boys going.”
As we cleared the tables I couldn’t stop thinking about poor Carl. What in the world could have happened to him? Suspicious, the cops said. That usual meant violence. Murder. An unsettling thought surfaced - I may well have been the last person to see him alive. Except of course for his killer.
I was not about to volunteer that information to anyone, however. If I put in my oar, the cops were sure to run a check on me. And what would they find? The wife of a serial killer visits with their homicide victim right before he dies. How many red flags does it take before I could kiss my restful retirement bye-bye?
But what if I kept my mouth shut and they found out anyway? It would look like I was hiding something. Which of course I was. They would circle like sharks and it wouldn’t matter how innocent I was. Either way I was implicated A little more information might go a long way toward keeping my neck out of a noose. Maybe I should have had more faith in the wheels of justice. I did not. The wheels had very nearly missed grinding up my unlamented ex next of kin. He almost dodged the bullet when his idiot attorney tried to get the case thrown out on a technicality. Unbelievable that they almost threw that monster back out on the street to kill again. Any faith I had in the system died that day.
And from the moment the police cuffed my husband and led him away I, as his wife, was convicted in the eyes of the community. Most people were careful not to ask but I could see it in their eyes. One reporter with the delicacy of a Jerry Springer regular asked me outright on the six o’clock news the obvious question. The one I had no good answer for. Living with the guy for twenty years how could I not have known? How did I miss the signs? There must have been signs, right? You don’t live with someone in intimate association and not observe . . . something. Odd patterns of behavior. Unsettling interest in the dark side of life. Blood stains? Anything?
It was clear early on that I would not be able to stay in Boise. Couldn’t get a job anywhere that the patrons would not recognize me. Stares followed me everywhere - the speculations - the morbid curiosity. The trouble was I asked myself many of the same questions strangers were asking, replaying all the years of my marriage over and over through long twisting sleepless nights for even the smallest clue.
It was no use. People don’t want to see what they don’t want to see. To be sure the wife is always the last to know, be it infidelity or homicidal tendencies. All the nights when he came home late from the dealership complaining about endless paperwork, tax audits or personnel troubles - there was always something - on how many of those nights, I wondered, someone died by his hand? The same hand that had held mine when we said our vows so long ago.
In my mind I saw the ranks of black and white photos - in some cases mug shots - of women who never seemed to have been able to catch a break. Young women wearing the labels of society’s condemnation - drug addict, shop lifter, prostitute, homeless. Their eyes will haunt me until my dying day. The last thing those terrified, little girl eyes saw in life was my husband.
I felt I had let those women down. Deep in my gut I knew it. If only I had been more observant, more aware, they might have lived - might have had the chance to turn their lives around. And I let their families down. Their daughters, mothers, sisters were dead because I had not stopped their murderer. How I failed those people never leaves my thoughts. That horrible man will live his life out behind bars and not feel a moment’s remorse while I drag around enough guilt for the both of us.
“Hey, C.J., you okay,” said Cindy.
“Sorry, I was day dreaming,” I said, glad to be jarred out of that particular line of thought. “Cindy, did you say Carl’s friend Mert was here the other night?”
“He was at breakfast this morning. Hang Town omelet with sour cream on the side. Though how he could eat this morning beats me. His boat too a hit last night,” she said. “Mert is a partner in Captain Garvin’s Charters downstairs - owns the trawler Angel Face at Float 12.”
In Westport a guy’s identity seemed to be inseparable from his affiliation with a boat.
“The silver fox with the pony tail?” I said. Yes, I remembered him. Stocky and rugged like an advertisement for Fisherman’s Friend. Blue eyes and a twenty percent tip.
“I never thought of him that way,”said Cindy. “But yeah, a silver pony tail.”
“Cindy, are you going to need me for the dinner shift tonight?”
“Nah. I’ll be fine. Mona is coming in. Why? You want more hours?”
“No, that’s okay,” I said, trying not to sound disappointed. If Mert was a regular there was a better than even chance he would be in for supper, eager to spill the beans on whatever it was happened to his friend Carl. And I really needed to know what happened - and if the police had any leads. Because I like the old guy and because . . . well, because I needed to know whoever did it would pay. Unaccountably, it seemed personal to me. As if something filthy and ugly had followed me here.
I would prefer to have a nice to have a quiet word with mister silver pony tail over the dinner special but as a plan B I could check out Float 12 before I went home. If that didn’t pan out, there was always breakfast. “See you in the morning, Cindy,” I said, starting down the stairs to the street. “Did you say Mert works for the charter downstairs?” I asked.
“Yeah. A partner actually.”
“Thanks, Cindy.”
At the bottom of the stairs I took a hard right into Captain Garvin’s Charters, stepping on a rubber mat that set off a buzzer somewhere in the back room. While I waited for someone to surface I flipped through brochures in a rack by the counter. According to the literature I could take my pick from tuna, halibut, salmon or bottom fish. Sounded like a combo plate at Skipper’s. Photos of pickup truck-sized fish cradled in the arms of startled tourists alternated with snaps of the charter company’s small fleet.
Second down was the trawler Angel Face. A fine looking trawler but then things are supposed to look good on a brochure. At the bottom of the brochure beneath the standard promises of limit catches and whale watching, Angel Face offered to scatter the ashes of your nearest and dearest upon the wide ocean. “Fully licensed and providing tasteful secular and religious services.” I wondered what a secular service entailed and imagined the recently bereaved rushing into Captain Garvin’s Charters with a jar under one arm and a fist full of dollars in the other for a quick trip out of this world on Angel Face.
“Hep ya?” shouted a disembodied woman’s voice from the back room. A restless spirit?
“Is anybody here?” I asked the air.
“Who wants ta know?”
The invisible woman needed a short course in customer service.
“I am new in town. Thought I might like to go fishing.” The words no sooner left my mouth than I realized how silly they sounded, spoken so soon after the nasty storm we just weathered. Yet I realized at that moment that they were true. I would not mind at all heading out for a fish or two. Fresh air and sea breezes sounded like just the thing to clear my head and help restore some sense of perspective.
I suppose I had been landlocked in Idaho long enough to have sanitized my memories of Alaska salmon fishing. All the slime, the dead eyes, the blood, and icy water had long ago sunk into the enveloping mists of my youth.
“Season’s over,” hammered the voice from the back room. “Come back in the Spring for fish. Crab season is next month.”
Spirit or no, she was pissing me off. I had just worked two shifts and my feet were killing me, not to mention the tortured muscles from hours of sand bagging. Pain has a tendency to bring out my stubborn side so whoever Miss Congeniality was she was not going to get rid of me until I was damn good and ready.
“Okay, let’s try crabbing. You got any brochures on that?” I yelled at the empty doorway.
“Hold yer horses out there,” was the return holler.
I heard what sounded like someone pushing a recycle bin to the curb and wondered if the invisible woman had taken up roller ball.
“Here, what you say about crabbing?” said the now visible woman, as she rocketed her wheel chair through the door like a berserk ballistic missile. She was ancient, leathery, mostly bald and she was glaring at me as if I had dropped a dead rat in her lap. I felt like backing very slowly out the door through which I had come.
“That’s okay,” I stammered. “I think I will come back some other time. As you say, in the Spring.”
“Spring’s too late for crabbing. Gotta be next month for that,” she said. “Garvin’s don’t take nobody out crabbing but if ya want I can fix ya up with some names of those that do. Can’t think why you would want to go though. Ya want some crab just wait 'til the fellas bring ‘em in and dump ‘em in the bin. Crabbing ain’t exactly exciting. Throw out a crab ring and come back tomorrow. About as exciting as a coma.”
“I am sure you are probably right,” I said. “Guess I will have to wait for salmon season. I heard someone say Mert was the one to talk to. Is he around?”
“Nah. He’d tell ya the same as me - no fishing 'til Spring.” It looked as if I had about the same chance of getting usable information from her as trying to crack open a clam with my bare teeth. Too bad I didn’t have a cookie jar filled with cremated remains to dispose of. I was willing to bet that was one thing that was always in season at Captain Garvin’s Charters.
“Do you know where he might be?”
“Try the marina. He’s probably working on the boat. She got roughed up pretty good last night,” said the woman. “Say, you that new girl Cindy hired?”
Considering that I would never see sixty again I wondered if the woman was blind as well as mobility challenged.
“Yes, I am waiting tables for her. How did you know?”
“Cindy brings me my meals. I’m not much for stairs,” she said, motioning to her chair.
“That is really very nice of her.” I didn’t know where this was going.
“She’s my niece, my sister Bev’s kid.”
“Oh, I see. She is a very sweet girl. And an excellent chef,” I said. “You and your sister must be very proud of her.”
Her face solidified into a frown.
“Always thought Cindy would go on to college. Smartest kid in town, but then her dad died and her mom got sick. Damn unfair, that was.”
I did not know how to reply to that but I understood just what she meant. A lot of things in life were unfair. In point of fact I had often wondered who the chuckle head was that first came up with the fairness concept. In my experience if you bought into the notion that things are supposed to be fair you were doomed to disappointment from the get-go.
“Well, maybe she will get to college eventually,” I offered, easing toward the door. “Guess I will be on my way. I will get back to you in Spring about the fishing.” The last thing I wanted was to get into a lengthy discussion of my young employer’s personal business.
“You said you wanted to talk to Mert?” she said, as I reached the door.
“Yes,” I said. I had almost forgotten what my cover story had been.
“This about what happened to Carl Heslop?” she said. “You maybe a reported? Mert’s not going to want to talk to you about that.”
“I’m not a reporter. But how did you . . . “
“Come on girl, you didn’t expect me to buy that fish story of yours did ya?” she said. “You got a particular reason for poking your nose in?”
Sometimes - just sometimes - the truth is the best tactic. My ex told me that one day, though I am sure he thought he was lying when he said it.
“I feel so bad about the poor old guy. He was kind enough to show me the lens over at the museum. Now I hear that was the afternoon he died,” I said, not sure why I felt I could level with the woman. “I haven’t told the police that.”
“You’re thinking the police might try to pin it on you, do you?”
“No, not really but I don’t much like police. Bad memories from a long time ago. Something that happened to a friend.”
“Police do have a knack for complicating a person’s life, that’s for sure,” she said. “You think Mert can tell you something that’ll let you sleep better tonight?”
“Carl seemed like such a nice old guy,” I said. “I can’t help thinking he might have been safely home if he hadn’t stopped to give me the tour.”
“Don’t you fool yourself, girl. Knowing old Carl, he probably thought he had a chance with you,” she laughed. “You know what I think? I think that was a pretty happy last thought for a guy to have, so don’t feel too bad for him.”
Somehow it didn’t help at all to think Carl might have seen me as a hot number.
“I’m Mert’s business partner, Marg Garvin, Captain Earl Garvin’s widow,” she continued, offering her hand.
She had a firm hand. She had probably boated her fair share of tuna in her time.
“Glad to meet you, Marg,” I said. “So, you think I will find Mert down at the marina? I really would like to talk to him.”
“Yeah. You go on down there,” she said. “Could be a kind word from a stranger would be just the ticket right now. He’ll be on Angel Face moping around and mopping up. Off Float 9.”
“Thanks, Marg,” I said. “And I really would like to get a little fishing in - in the Spring. Salmon.”
“You bet. We’ll get you fixed up with a fish come Spring and have Cindy poach it up in that wine sauce stuff she does,” she said. “Wait, did you say you saw Carl at the museum in the afternoon?”
“Yes.”
“Pretty strange time for him to be there. He was the night watchman”.
“So I heard.”
Pretty strange indeed. What had the old man been doing there? And could, whatever it was, have led to his death?

SUMMER READING BY THE SEA - I WISH! Chapter 1, RV-GO Down to the Sea

Week One, August 2008

As inconceivable as it seems, summer is already winding down, as evidenced by the condensation on the windshield this morning and a tired tangle of pea vines out back. How can there have been no recognizable spring or summer this year? What happened to that global warming thing that was supposed to be tossing us into a planet-wide frying pan? We seem to have leapt from late winter to autumn.

I wanted to accomplish so many things this summer! Remember the Jane Austen project? I still have one more novel to read - “Lady Susan”. Never heard of it? Neither had I. Probably just as well, since it is unlikely I will read it. My a.d.d. kicked in big time this week, plunging me into revising last autumn’s novel project - probably because it is set in Westport, Washington, my favorite vacation spot - and boy! am I ready for a vacation!! So, I present to you Chapter One of “RV-GO Down to the Sea”, intending nothing more than saving myself from coming up with new material for the blog - in other words, I'm cheating! After all, it's summer (I think). At the very least you can enjoy the pretty pictures from Westport - who knows, you might fall in love with the place too.

(“RV-GO Down to the Sea” is the first of a series of mystery novels featuring Cora Jane Dooley, a sixty-ish divorced waitress setting out into the world in a used Minnie Winnie RV.)

RV-GO DOWN TO THE SEA
Chapter 1
I lingered in Boise only long enough to make sure my ex was in prison for the rest of his poisonous, unnatural life. The trial wrapped up on Monday with sentencing on Thursday morning. They don’t dawdle in Boise when it’s a slam dunk. That weekend I held the largest yard sale ever seen on Adams Avenue and by Monday my condo wore a brand new “sold” sign. I bought a ten year old Minnie Winnie RV from the Norwegian-American next door and in two day’s time I was headed out of town.

The RV’s vanity plate read RV-GO, which was an exact rendering of my neighbor’s heavily accented attempt to say “Here we go”. I decided to keep the name. It made me laugh, and I could use every laugh that came my way at that juncture of my not uneventful excuse for a life. But I would change my own name. I was not about to keep the psycho's. Not after all the publicity. So then and there I thumbed through the Boise telephone directory for inspiration and re-christened myself Cora Jane Dooley. C.J. to her friends, had my ex left me any.

Getting out of Idaho is a piece of cake. The state is a slim blade of land wedged between six better known western states. No matter whether I went east, west, or south I would be out of Idaho before my bacon and eggs wore off so I pointed RV-GO up the first on ramp I came to and chased the sun into Oregon on I-84. I had never driven an RV before. The first hundred miles my two hands clenched the steering wheel so tightly my arms went numb to the shoulder. With every semi that swooshed on past I felt sure its wake would catapult RV-GO into a leafy gulch.

Eventually, I relaxed into my ride. By the Blue Mountains RV-GO was pretty much on autopilot humming over the asphalt while its driver mulled over her major life issues. Sixty-five years old, no husband, no children, no pets, no job, no home. What’s not to like? Well, quite a lot actually. At least I had retained my sense of humor and all my own teeth, had very little silver in my short brown hair and my joints still worked most of the time. Retirement might have been an attractive option had I ever held a job long enough to build a nest egg the ex couldn’t decimate. I hadn’t stayed in the Navy long enough to qualify for a pension - the Viet Nam war soured me on a military career. My work history jiggled around a lot after those years - everything from cooking on an Alaskan salmon cannery vessel to pumping cappuccino from a tiny (unheated) espresso cart after college football games. But I always came back to waitressing (“server” being the p.c. term or so I hear). I loved the contact with people - even the weird ones (some boring days the weird ones were the only thing that got me through to clock out). But even when tips were good there was never enough money to plunk down into a savings account. That was before I met and married Mr. Big Shot.

That was worlds away and long ago now. Useless looking back over the wouldas and couldas. Any money the psycho might have contributed toward his wife’s elder years was long gone into the plush bank accounts of his defense attorneys. At least somebody was getting something out of all this, I thought. Still, I was never the Bingo and shuffleboard type. So it was probably just as well. I would have been climbing the walls in outside of a week with that kind of lifestyle.

The Oregon countryside was coloring up to fire engine red and lemon yellow as the highway streamed golden toward the setting sun. When I reached Pendleton I bought a new wool coat at the woolen mill outlet. Then, after devouring a mushroom cheese burger at the local Shari’s Restaurant, I pulled RV-GO into a Motel 6 parking lot before I remembered that my new transport came equipped with a queen sized bed. I’ll have to get up to speed with the RV lifestyle, I muttered to myself. Well, since I also need to gas the thing up I will pump the gas station attendant for directions to an RV park while my yard sale money pours into the tank. For some reason Oregon does not trust people to pump their own fuel, but in this case that turned to my advantage. The teenage girl pumping gasoline into the RV knew just were I could find a K.O.A. Campground. Turned out I had passed it on my way into town without seeing it.


I had first night jitters worse than on my faintly remembered (and later regretted) honeymoon. Not the foggiest notion how to attach the RV to the various plugs and hoses at the campground. Fortunately Doug, the manager, was gentle and patient as he introduced me to the mysteries of sleep-overs on the open road. He also managed to locate the Winnebego’s yellowing owners manual wedged under the passenger seat and recommended I put in a few hours of intense study before I wend another mile. Point taken.

Only after I’d changed into sweat pants and a t-shirt and had brushed my teeth in the microscopic sink did the voice of my rational mind (which closely resembles the tone my late mother used to use) call me every kind of idiot. What was a woman of “a certain age” doing alone in a tin can in the middle of the night somewhere west of nowhere? Was I out of my mind? Possibly. Perverts of every description could be at that moment prying open the door like tabby cats after sardines. I might as well hang a sign on the bumper saying victim in residence!

At last my sense of perspective kicked in. I had survived worse fates than cat burglars, hadn’t I? Such as living in not-so-blissful wedded ignorance twenty years with a man every newspaper in my home town now called “The Boise Butcher”. What, I pondered, could possibly come at me down life’s lonely road to top that experience? Such events tend to toughen a gal up in no time at all. So, after checking to see if I had locked RV-GO, I slipped between my cool queen size sheets and turned out the bedside lamp. I would be fine. I just knew it. Well, I fervently hoped it at any rate.

Next morning, after unplugging RV-GO from the various utilities (with Doug’s help again), I followed the Columbia River into Portland, then hung a right onto northbound Interstate 5. I was aiming for Seattle with a half formed idea of escaping the country into British Columbia. However, just outside of Centralia RV-GO inexplicably exited at a sign that said, “To Ocean Beaches” and before I knew it the old Minnie Winnie was roaring along on West 12 toward the Pacific.

How had that happened? Maybe I had chickened out after all at the prospect of driving the rig through a big city. Or maybe the old RV had a mind of its own. At any rate, a beach sounded pretty inviting. Maybe just what I needed was to sit on a log watching the sun set into the sea. There was something about salt water had always drawn me - thus the Navy stint and the two years on the cannery ships, I guess. I gravitate toward water like a drought parched coyote. I had not realized how much I had missed being near salt water all those years in Idaho. At the shore I could collect my thoughts. Heaven knows they needed collecting. They were all over the map.

Not that I possessed an actual map. Maps are for people who care where they end up. They are for the goal oriented, not me. Not anymore. My only goal at this point was to leave behind as much asphalt as possible, as if the more highway that disappeared into dust the less hold a fractured past would have over me. I drove on. Through tiny towns with unpronounceable names, through dark shaggy forests, past rolling green farm land dotted with black cows, and over narrow bridges spanning unseen streams. I tried to keep my eyes focused on the center line. When there was one. Every once in a while when the road became so vague I was sure I was lost in the wilderness, there would be another West 12 sign. As long as I was continuing west I had to get to the ocean eventually. Or I hoped that was how it worked. Undoubtedly I missed a lot of pretty views and interesting roadside attractions. Perhaps I would return to them eventually, I thought. Anything was possible.

West 12 geared down to thirty miles an hour and spit me out in a town called Aberdeen. It looked like a nice enough town but it wasn’t the ocean. I had have to keep going. Three blocks into Aberdeen I spotted a large green sign that said “Westport”. Now that sounded promising. I followed its verdant arrow. A place with port in its name, I thought, must by definition be on the ocean. Any old port, storm or no, would do for me. Especially since I was getting hungry for a big salty order of fish and chips. Surely port meant there would be fresh fish and someone frying it for starving travelers.

I drove over a spidery iron draw bridge, then through miles of stunted trees and brown brush. Mine was the only vehicle on the road. Where was this Westport? It seemed hours since the turn off. At least the weather was holding itself clear and golden, a pure and shining early Autumn day clinging to Summer for dear life.

Every so often I glimpsed a flash of silver water off to the right between trees and at one point the road skirted a stinky tide flat but no buildings, much less a port, materialized. Maybe I should have picked up a map after all, I thought. What if Westport is a hundred miles down the coast with nowhere along the way to gas up or buy lunch or even turn the RV around? What will I do then? For one uncomfortable moment I suspected I was not nearly as fancy free as I wanted to believe I was. My whole life had narrowed down to where I could park, plug in, or replenish the RV.

On the verge of giving up on ever reaching the mythical Westport or any sort of port, the highway slimmed even further, shook itself as if from a dream, swooped to the right and plunged over a sand hill - and there it was - village on a harbor. But as my dad used to say, there wasn’t much “there” there. I don’t know what I had expected but this was certainly no big flourishing sea port. I took in the entire town at one glance as I drove down the hill - all four blocks worth of Westport.

The first structure I came to was a Chevron station beside a red-roofed salmon pink building called Queenie’s Surf and Turf. RV-GO snuggled up to the pump like a long lost brother. Civilization! Filling an empty Winnie takes quite a chunk of time, giving its soon-to-be-impoverished owner a few minutes to check out her surroundings. An easy task since the whole town was visible end to end from the gas pumps. I saw a tic-tac-toe grid of sandy streets squatting on a spatula-flat crescent of land cradling a boat-clogged harbor. That was pretty much it. What was obviously the main street was lined on one side with low clapboard buildings and on the other by a network of piers and docks that nearly obscured the surface of the water halfway out across the bay. I figured I could probably count the number of town buildings on two hands and half a foot, but to count the boats tied up at the innumerable floating docks would require a jar full of centipedes.

“My dad has one like that,” said the bald, grease-clad attendant as I pushed my Visa card his way over the counter. For a fraction of a second I thought he meant the plastic, then I noticed he was looking past me to the Winnebego.

“That’s nice. Has he had it long?” I said, signing the slip after a heart stopping glance at the total.

“Long enough. Keeps him flat broke,” he said. “You folks in town a while?”

A not so subtle ploy to find out if I was alone? Or the innocent assumption of a guy trying to be friendly? Was I getting a little paranoid? No doubt about it. I will have to watch that tendency, I told myself. Bitter, fearful old women develop unattractive facial landscapes.

“A few days. Is there an RV park around here, uh, Frank?” I asked, assuming the grimy embroidery on his overalls was his name .

“Yeah, a few. Flounder Inn’s got some hookups behind the cabins. Then down the road toward Grayland there’s a seniors only mobile park with RV spaces. Most of those are taken by the year-’rounders but there might be one open. I’d check there.”

“Thanks, I will. How do I find it?”

“See that road off to the left? Take that ‘bout half a mile and you’ll see it on the right. Manager is the blue mobile with the row boat in front.”

“Great,” I said, and then listening to my empty stomach, “Say, is Queenie’s a good place for lunch?”

“It manages. If you want something better go downtown across from Pier Nine. Bev’s Burgers By the Bay.”

“I was thinking more of fish and chips.”

“She does that too. Makes a bang-up clam chowder too.”

“Great. Thanks again,” I said, climbing back into RV-GO.

My next stop would be Bev’s, then the RV park. After I was feeling human again I would stock up my kitchen at the local grocery store. They must have one, I thought, and it couldn’t be too difficult to find among the collection of buildings that comprised what Frank had referred to as “downtown”.

Parking the 29’ motor home proved to be easier than I would have imagined. Every space along Westhaven Street seemed to have been scaled to accommodate trucks towing boats. And most of the spaces were empty. The street had a moth-eaten, closed-for-the-season look about it. Walls of sand bags filled the doorways of several shuttered shops - suggesting that winter storms could get pretty wild out here on the edge of the continent.

Bev’s was up a creaky staircase above Captain Garvin’s Charters. At the top of the stairs was a Seat Yourself sign. Which was the only indication they were open. Seeing that I was the only person in the dining room, I had my pick of tables. One by the window offered a panoramic view of the harbor. I staked my claim and sat myself down.

My chosen table sported a pink Formica top with boomerang-shaped squiggles in gray. I had not seen that stuff since my high school days of clearing tables at Harrold’s Horrible Hamburgers back in the late ‘50s. The restaurant’s knotty pine paneled walls were festooned with fishing nets punctuated with mounted trophy fish. The poor dead things appeared to be gaping in utter astonishment that fate had washed them up on such a foreign shore. I could identify with the sentiment. At any moment Rod Serling was sure to step from the shadows and welcome me to the Twilight Zone.

Instead, there appeared a pink-haired twenty-something in jeans and an acid green tank top.

“Crap!” she said when she saw me sitting there by the window.

“Sorry, are you closed?” I asked.

“Nah, we’re open. You just scared the shit out of me sitting there. Want coffee? I’ll get you a menu,” said Pink Hair.

“Sure, coffee would be great. But never mind the menu. Do you have fish and chips?” I said, though after seeing the fish on the walls I wasn’t as sure I shouldn’t change my mind.

“Yeah. You want regular fries or home fries? Breading or batter?”

“Regular and batter, please.”

“Okay. Sorry for saying ‘crap’,” she said and scooted off through the swinging kitchen door. I notice she had neglected to apologize for saying shit, however.

It did not look too promising that I would be delighted with my dining experience. Still, over the years I have eaten and even worked in worse joints. You never can tell. White linen napkins and silver plate are no guarantee your food will be edible.

While I waited for my order I studied the view from the window - primarily to keep my eyes from wandering toward the trophy walls. A flotilla of white boats dozed at their floating docks like milk cows in stanchions. A lone figure sat on an overturned bucket at the end of one pier trailing a line into gelid water. Three gulls circled the bay before fluttering themselves down onto the deck of a boat with the name Working Girl painted on its stern.

The boat’s name brought to mind a central issue I had been trying not to think about since arriving in town. I needed a job. The condo sale money had gone to buy RV-GO, whereupon the yard sale proceeds vanished into its gullet. My only steady income was a pathetically inadequate Social Security check. Clearly, my hefty dollop of freedom came with an equally massive absence of cash. I could use the credit card to get myself settled here but how would I handle the bill when it came due?

And how was I supposed to find a job in such a ghost town? Waiting tables was a highly portable profession, interesting if a person liked people, lucrative if you were clever and friendly. Wherever you go in this world, people have to eat which means there are likely to be restaurants, cafes, greasy spoons etc. to provide sustenance. Which was how I met the ex - he came in to eat at the Spaghetti Palace where I was working. And (because he wasn’t nearly as successful as he had led me to believe) over the twenty years of our marriage I must have worked every eatery in Boise except the McDonald's drive-through. Until that ugly afternoon when the police came to call on me at Chez Bob.

But looking around Bev’s empty dining room I knew I was up a creek without benefit of paddle. No huge demand for wait staff here. I would have to move on to a more populated locale sooner rather than later, especially with winter on its way. A sad thought, since I kind of liked what I had seen so far of the town. There can’t be many places where boats appeared to outnumber humans at least a hundred to one. That interested me. I wanted to know more about the people who managed to live here on the edge of America, where the next rest stop was Japan.

Pink Hair wandered back my way, leaving behind a mug of unexpectedly adequate coffee. Fresh brewed. Things were looking up it seemed. I cradled the mug with both hands and buried my nose in the rising aroma. Sipped hungrily. Ahh. Nothing like caffein for adjusting the point of view. I felt the tension between my shoulder blades uncoil a notch. I had a few days - maybe a few weeks - before I needed to hit the road again. Might as well take things as they come.

Before I knew it Pink slid a steaming plate of fish and chips before me. It was a work of art - fries crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside, sprinkled with crunchy kosher salt. Fish butter-tender and juicy, encased in sizzling beer batter. Whoever the cook was he knew fried food, that was for sure. Over the years I have observed that the proof of a pro is not what they do with complicated Frenchified recipes but how well they handle simple classics like fried fish and tatters (and as an Idahoan I know my potatoes). It all comes down to attention to detail - quality of ingredients, oil temperature, timing. There was more to this town than first meets the eye, I decided. Frank at the Chevron had been right about Bev’s. If my luck held he’d be right about the mobile home park down the road.

While I dug lustily into my lunch a few more customers trickled in. Two hefty men wearing work clothes and baseball caps ordered fried chicken and beers. A middle aged woman accompanied by a squirmy young girl took the table next to mine. The woman - probably the grandmother, I thought - ordered tuna salad and iced tea for herself and a cheese burger and a milk for the kid. I would really have to stop noting other people’s orders if I wasn’t being paid for it, I thought.

Our pink haired waitress zoomed back and forth between the kitchen and dining room delivering everyone’s drinks and food, then swooped by to check on me.

“Everything okay? Can I get you anything else? Dessert? Got homemade apple pie.” she asked breathlessly.

“No thanks, I’m fine. Could you please tell the cook the food was wonderful! Just perfect!”

“That would be me, so thanks, I appreciate it.”

I was totally thunderstruck but hoped I didn’t show it.

“You’re working this shift all on your own? That’s amazing,” I said with complete sincerity. Better you than me, honey, I thought.

“Oh, well, I usually have help out front but Judy quit last week to go back to school,” said Pink. “It’s not too bad off season though, so I guess I’ll manage ‘til I can get someone else.”

I hesitated a mere heartbeat.

“My name is Cora Jane. If I buy a piece of that apple pie could I talk to you for a minute?” I said. “When you have the time.”

“That’d be cool. I’ll get the pie,” she said. “Better hurry. No telling when that storm will hit.”

Storm? What could she mean? The sky over the marina was periwinkle blue, the water smooth and still as a marble countertop. But as I should have remembered, having married the “Boise Butcher”, appearances can be tragically deceiving.