Seaweed on the Rocks Read online

  PRAISE FOR STANLEY EVANS

  “Evans’ combination of [Coast] Salish lore and solid plotting is a winner.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “A fast-paced, entertaining story with enough plot twists to keep the reader guessing.”

  —Times Colonist

  “A mystery novel worth reading and lingering over.”

  —Hamilton Spectator

  “A gritty murder-mystery with some violence and suspense thrown in for good measure.”

  —Oak Bay News

  “Tightly written mystery . . . a pleasure to read.”

  —Comox Valley Record

  “Evans does not disappoint.”

  —WordWorks

  “Well worth reading. Evans knows how to set a scene, creates vivid minor characters, and is capable of spitting out the requisite snappy dialogue.”

  —Monday Magazine

  “An exciting introduction to a Coast Salish cop with a lot more entertaining stories to tell.”

  —Mystery Readers Journal

  “Sharp, calculating and extremely convincing style of writing.”

  —Victoria News

  “Evans is a forceful story teller.”

  —Parksville Qualicum News

  “[An] evocative series.”

  —Montreal Gazette

  SEAWEED ON THE ROCKS

  Stanley Evans

  To Marlyn Horsdal, Vivian Sinclair and Pat Touchie.

  THE WARRIOR RESERVE does not exist. The Mowaht Bay Band does not exist. All of the characters, incidents and dialogue in this novel are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual living persons or to real events is coincidental. Depictions of Native mythology and religion are based on ethnological research and do not necessarily reflect the present-day observances and practices of Canada’s West Coast Native people.

  THE SALISH SEA

  According to Old Mary Cooke, Canada’s northwest coast and its many islands were once collectively a big raft anchored near the South Pole. When people living on the raft got tired of penguins and ice, they hoisted their anchors and let the raft drift loose. Some people dived off it and swam ashore in places like Hawaii and New Zealand. That’s why, Old Mary Cooke says, Hawaiians and New Zealanders look like West Coast Natives.

  After many years the raft crashed into North America, where chunks broke off, thereby creating Vancouver Island and a large rocky inland sea that my people call the Salish Sea. You won’t find that name on ordinary maps, even though its waters include the Strait of Georgia, Puget Sound, and Juan de Fuca Strait. Old Mary Cooke’s account of things may not be strictly true but, true or not, it is incontestable that Coast Salish people spend much of their time studying the watery horizon.

  One morning, not so very long ago, a Coast Salish man was looking out at the Salish Sea when he spotted a dugout canoe manned by a single paddler. It was blowing a gale, the sea was wild and full of driftwood, and the canoe appeared to be taking on water. The alarm was raised. Soon lifeboat men began launching a Zodiac inflatable. One of them tugged the Zodiac’s starter rope while another used a pole to hold its bow into the wind. But before the outboard kicked into life, a rogue wave buckled the Zodiac’s rubber hull and flipped the boat upside down.

  The lifeboat men were still scrambling back to shore when a lookout pointed out to sea. “Over there!” he cried. “The canoe just swamped! The paddler’s been washed overboard!”

  An hour passed before the waterlogged canoe washed onto the beach. Sloshing about in its flooded bilges they found a baby porpoise, along with a small wooden coffin daubed with ghostly red-and-black heraldic crests. Chief Alphonse tipped the porpoise into the water and opened the coffin, which contained a small human skeleton. At the same moment, a brilliant light flashed out on the horizon and travelled towards the canoe in zigzags like lightning, and the air smelled of forest mould, salt water and sulphur.

  Eventually the lifeboat men got their Zodiac launched, and they combed the Salish Sea and its beaches for ages, but no trace of that paddler was ever found.

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was a Welfare Wednesday in late April and nearly quitting time when an anonymous tipster phoned to say that a woman on my Wanted List was living on Donnelly’s Marsh. The tip sounded phony, somebody’s idea of a joke, and I was half-inclined to ignore it. Still, I cranked up my steel-bumpered, wire-wheeled ’69 MG coupe and joined the afternoon commute along Highway 1 out of Victoria. Half an hour later I reached View Royal, where the monotony of rush-hour traffic was relieved by glimpses of Esquimalt Harbour. A flock of massive yellow cranes and derricks were poking their noses at the sky above the naval dockyards, while warships aimed their guns at the strip malls and used-car dealerships. I couldn’t help remembering that before all the trees and farms had been subdivided in that area, there had been fresh air, and fruit stands and orchards and country roads to look at instead of payday loan sharks and the Great Canadian Casino.

  The sky above the Salish Sea had darkened to a menacing purple by the time I reached an area of broken-down shacks and live-aboard buses and neglected yards—places where nobody came from, where busted gambling addicts and other sad cases drifted in and out, waiting for their luck to change. It was a relief to turn off the highway onto Donnelly’s Marsh—a thousand acres of duck-hunting country—and when the blacktop petered out, I ploughed on along dike roads within hailing distance of the sea. After another half-mile I saw a crooked signpost warning all comers that these were Native lands and honky trespassers would be shot on sight.

  A lone coyote was feeding on watercress in a ditch, and for no particular reason I pulled up and got out of the car. As I followed the coyote’s tracks across sand dunes peppered with yellow sand-verbena and dwarf pines, a red-winged blackbird’s throaty cry broke the silence. I came out on a bluff overlooking the Salish Sea. The coyote, crouched amid driftwood the same colour as its bristly fur, was hard to spot until it broke cover and loped into the trees. In the evening calm I watched bufflehead ducks performing aerials and skating on the water as mallards and Canada geese dabbled in the shallows. A doe and two fawns were nose-down amid the sawgrass greening along the water’s edge. Backlit by a single beam of sunlight, they made a pretty picture.

  My people have lived here for at least ten thousand years, but human activities in this part of the world were cramped by the last great ice age, which lasted thousands of years, and most of the record of Coast Salish occupation up to that time was destroyed by glacial activity. Some of my hardy ancestors endured, however, because a few coastal refuges stayed relatively ice-free, though even that record was hidden beneath the sea when the icecaps melted.

  Nowadays Vancouver Island—285 miles long and 85 miles at its widest point—has pulp-and-paper mills, sawmills, logging camps, four-lane highways, and a few cities and towns of which Greater Victoria, with its population of about 300,000, is by far the largest. But the Island still has its primeval forests and isolated regions where wolves howl for an audience comprised principally of bear, loon, elk and cougar. Many snowy peaks and alpine meadows still remain where people seldom or never set foot. And there are dozens of small, tenacious Native Indian bands that continue to inhabit remote coastal villages, many of them unreachable by road.

  Long ago, Donnelly’s Marsh was one of these remote coastal villages. Then, in l838, Haida warriors sweeping down from the Queen Charlotte Islands in giant, ocean-going dugout canoes landed here one night, encircled the village and massacred most of its sleeping inhabitants. Every Coast Salish man in the village was killed. The Haidas kidnapped a few women and children and carried them back north, where they ended their days as slaves. Nowadays, few Coast Salish set foot on Donnelly’s Marsh at any time�
��and practically never after dark.

  I went back to my car and started driving again. Five minutes later, the gaunt shape of a derelict, two-storey house rose up. Shrouded in English ivy, it stood in lonely isolation on the marsh, the only building in sight. Gazing at it, my head full of memories, I saw a pale shade move across a windowpane—a passing gull, its fleeting image reflected by the glass. Two Cape Cod chairs mouldered on the house’s wraparound porch. Nailed to the front door was a hand-painted plywood sign: DANGER. DO NOT ENTER. The door had a thumb latch instead of a knob, but it wouldn’t open, and I hammered on the door in vain. Adjacent to the door, the bottom half of a sash window had been partially raised. I put my hands under the frame, heaved, and made an opening wide enough to squeeze through. I had one leg across the sill and was crouching to get inside the house, when the front door opened. I exchanged startled glances with a bone-thin Native man, aged about 35. He had long yellow hair with black roots, a pear-shaped face, a receding chin, fat lips and slitty black eyes. He was wearing a grimy fleece hoodie, baggy cord pants and baseball shoes with loose laces. This was Hector Latour—a crack addict with a rap sheet as long as a sermon. A small object fell from the backpack he was carrying when he slung it across his shoulders as he scurried away.

  As I scrambled back onto the porch, my jacket caught on the latch inside the window and before I could unhook it, Hector had vanished along a boggy footpath. The object that had fallen from his backpack turned out to be a white ballpoint pen marked DR. LAWRENCE TREW, HYPNOTHERAPY. I put the pen in my pocket and stepped into the old house’s vestibule, which reeked of urine, its ancient, ragged carpet spotted where birds had flown in and out. As I peered around, a feral cat nibbling something in the darkness fled upstairs.

  I heard—or thought that I heard—somebody open a door at the back of the house, and I began moving cautiously along a hallway lit only by a vertical sliver of daylight at the far end. Then a sudden draft slammed the back door shut and plunged the hallway into darkness again, and I became aware of tiny scratching sounds behind a side door. When I opened it, another cat darted past me from a gloomy kitchen. Light from a window set high in the kitchen wall revealed heavy dark counters, wooden shelving, a white enamel sink and a lot of dust. A loaf of bread was turning black atop an old-fashioned icebox.

  Suddenly the light in the kitchen dimmed as something appeared outside the window. A massive grizzly bear was standing on its hind legs and staring straight at me. The bear’s head, covered with dark reddish fur, seemed a yard wide and filled the whole window frame. Before I could reconcile this improbable apparition with my normal cognitive functions, it had vanished.

  As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I saw Marnie Paul sprawled in a kitchen chair. She was wearing a black leather jacket and black cotton pants, and the rest of her was just thinly fleshed bones, lip rings and earrings. She had meth mouth—rotten teeth and lips covered with blisters and sores from sharing hot crack pipes with other meth addicts—and her fingernails were blue from cyanosis. Two years earlier, Marnie Paul had been a healthy Coast Salish high school student. Now she looked older than Hector Latour. Her eyes were closed and she was apparently dead, but I felt for a pulse. It was barely discernible. I lifted her off the chair and laid her on the gritty floor.

  Things looked bad. Marnie’s brain had been denied oxygenated blood for God knows how long. I checked her foul-smelling airway for obstructions, made sure she hadn’t swallowed her tongue, nipped her nostrils shut and started a combination of mouth-to-mouth respirations and chest compressions. After working on her for a while, I took a few seconds to grab my cellphone, call 911 and tell the operator that I had a very sick woman on my hands. By then my lips were greasy and my throat felt like I’d been gargling grit.

  It took forever before I saw an ambulance’s blue lights flashing in the kitchen window. To judge by their tortured expressions, the medics didn’t like the kitchen’s sweaty reek any more than I did. One of them was Tony Roos, a Nimpkish guy from up Gilford Island way whom I’d known for years. He got to his knees beside me, jammed a plastic-tube safety gizmo into Marnie’s mouth and kept the CPR going. His partner stuck a syringe into her arm and gave her a shot of something—probably intracardiac epinephrine. After they had her stabilized, I helped them lift her limp body onto a gurney and wheel her outside to the ambulance. When the gurney was loaded and strapped, Tony Roos gave me a bottle of antiseptic mouthwash, told me that I was a bloody fool and then said, “Rinse your mouth out with this but don’t swallow any of it. Then get to a hospital and have yourself checked for Hep C and HIV.”

  The ambulance’s diminishing siren was still within earshot when I began to search the house’s grim, ugly rooms. I had to kick a few doors in, although why they were locked in the first place made no sense—the furniture consisted of valueless, worm-eaten three-legged chairs, threadbare carpets, warped tables, bare iron bedsteads and massive mahogany and rosewood wardrobes ruined by the damp. My head full of dire forebodings, I phoned police headquarters and brought the duty sergeant up-to-date.

  Occasionally rinsing with mouthwash, I left the house. A sliver of moon showed between ragged black clouds, and bats had replaced the swallows that had been feeding on flying insects all day. Half a mile away, waves boomed against the shore with metronomic persistence.

  I took a good look at the kitchen window and estimated that its bottom sill was at least 10 feet above ground level. If the thing that had shown its head at that window earlier had been a bear, then he was a really big, dangerous fucker. But Donnelly’s Marsh is spook country, and given the jumpy state of my nerves on that dark, evil night, I began to think that maybe what I’d confronted had been a signifier in the shape of a bear sent from the Unknown World by a trickster. I turned away from the house in time to see a coyote—perhaps the same one I’d seen on my way here—sniffing along the black lines of a hedge. He seemed real enough, anyway, and he paused to give me a cheeky, inquisitive stare before trotting away.

  I was suffusing my lungs with moist sea air when an unmarked black Interceptor arrived. A full minute passed before its driver’s-side door opened, and Detective Inspector Manners got out. A tall, dark-haired, angular man with a sharp jaw, narrow eyes and a nicotine-stained moustache, “Nice” Manners was wearing a smart charcoal grey suit, a silver-coloured necktie and the insincere grin of a man harbouring disagreeable thoughts.

  “You again,” he said provocatively.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  Manners flicked away the stub of the cigarette he had been smoking, fumbled another from a pack in his breast pocket and said unpleasantly, “They told me it was an empty house with a murdered girl in it.”

  “The murdered girl is inside the ambulance that you passed driving in here—except she isn’t dead yet.”

  “So she wasn’t murdered?”

  “Oh, she was murdered all right. And keep your eyes peeled for bears . . . I spotted a big one earlier.”

  By then more crime-squad vehicles were arriving, along with rain, and chilly gusts were ruffling the ivy growing on the house. After declining my offer of assistance, Manners went up onto the porch out of the rain and barked instructions to the flatfoots milling around in their white bunny suits.

  It was dark enough for headlights when I woke the MG up, got safely off the marsh and headed back to Victoria without spotting Hector Latour. At Hillside Avenue I stopped the car and wound the side window down. Rain was moving in sheets across the rooftops, and the traffic lights suspended across the street swung in the wind. A hustler named Claudette minced from the shadows on stiletto heels. He didn’t recognize me at first and offered to perform an illegal procedure for a hundred bucks. I told him to fuck off and asked him if he’d seen Hector Latour. “Not lately,” Claudette lisped, smiling at me with botox-bloated lips as fat as frankfurters.

  I told him to watch his ass, turned south onto Government Street and ended up parked on a yellow line across from Fran Willis’ Chinatown art gallery. Taki
ng a POLICE card from the MG’s glove compartment, I clipped it to the sun visor, got out, locked up and walked along to Fisgard Street. Most of the buildings around there are brick tenement houses, the rest being old warehouses, rooming houses, Chinese restaurants and shops. It was raining hard by then—what Canada’s west-coasters call Prince Rupert weather—and Fisgard Street’s black pavement shone like a brightly flowing river. But rain or no rain, Chinatown was crowded. Pyramids of vegetables and fruit sat beneath flapping canvas awnings, and here and there, open doors and windows emitted waves of laughter and music.

  However, I was headed for the Good Samaritan Mission, and there is nothing Chinese about it. A cube of concrete the size of a city block, it is topped by a giant neon crucifix. I waited for a break in the traffic, ran across the street and went inside. The mission’s free clinic smelled of bodily secretions and disinfectant, and it was jammed with the walking wounded—people debilitated by years of poverty and homelessness who just needed a place to escape out of the wet.

  An emergency room nurse—who obviously rated my hypothetical condition very low on the triage scale—took my name, gave me a number and told me to wait. I sat next to a scabby crack addict, sweating and ill and covered in bandages, who appeared to have fallen through a window. The whole room had that junkie constipation smell. When I grew sick of it, I nipped out of the emergency clinic, went down a flight of stairs and ended up in the clinic’s detox department, where a middle-aged woman with heavy purple stains under her eyes was working behind a U-shaped nursing station. She had a stethoscope around her neck and was wearing one of those white, smooth-fronted collarless shirts buttoned down one side.

  She gave me the once-over and saw a tall, 40-year-old Coast Salish Native with long black hair. From the look of my red Sierra Designs Gore-Tex jacket over an open-necked plaid shirt, my thirty-dollar wranglers and my caulk boots, she assumed I had lost my way to the soup kitchen and was telling me how to find it when I interrupted to explain that I was a cop. I asked to see Marnie Paul.