Seaweed Under Water Read online

  This was black bear and cougar country. Waiting for somebody to answer my knock on the door I wondered idly how much livestock Boss Rollins lost to predators in an average year.

  Nobody answered the door. I assumed that someone was about the place, because curtains fluttered in an open window. I went back to the MG and raised the hood. The fan belt was loose. I collected tools from the kit in the back of the car, selected an appropriate wrench and leaned inside the hood.

  Somebody shouted, “Hey, you!”

  A pot-bellied Native man with a round puffy face and thick black hair was eyeing me from the house. He looked angry, like an infant whose pacifier has just fallen out. A foot shorter than myself, he was sweaty and dishevelled and carrying a long-handled shovel. He was dressed in a white shirt, black pants and black, pierced leather cowboy boots with three-inch heels. Give him a steer’s-head belt buckle and a tall black hat with feathers in it and he’d be a dead ringer for the guys who hawk turquoise souvenirs in the Mojave. So this was the witch. He didn’t look dangerous; he looked furtive and ridiculous.

  “What the hell do you want?” he yelled.

  I smiled. He edged closer. I said, “Mr. Rollins? I’m Sergeant Seaweed, Victoria City Police.”

  Boss Rollins tilted his face upwards to look me in the eye, heavy black brows pulled down, holding that shovel across one shoulder as if it were a rifle. His eyes were thick and oily—the eyes of an unstable man veering toward rage. I held his gaze and waited for him to speak.

  “I asked you,” he said aggressively. “What do you want?”

  “I’m a cop,” I said mildly, showing my badge.

  He waved it away and said thickly, “A stranger drives on my property and works on his car like it’s his fucking garage, how do I know he’s a cop?”

  “This isn’t a joke, Mr. Rollins. I’m here to ask questions about your sister-in-law.”

  My question startled him. Visibly agitated, Rollins drew his chin in toward his neck and a nervous reflex twitched his mouth slightly off centre. “Wait here,” he said, and strode to his house.

  Tightening the fan belt, I began to think about witches and shamans—religious polar opposites. Rollins fiddled around with black magic. If stories about him were true, he was adept, capable of summoning malignant spirits from the world of the dead.

  Shamans on the other hand commune with beneficent spirits conjured up in sacred places—caves high in the mountains or on lonely promontories overlooking remote lakes. There the shamans wait, fasting for days in conditions of appalling discomfort and pain, until possessed by enchantment. The intensity of such visitations temporarily endowed shamans with second sight and the power to heal.

  A good 10 minutes passed before Rollins came down the lawn from his house. I had no idea whether he’d been making a phone call or had been conjuring up evil spirits, and tried not to worry about it. I had tightened the belt but still had my head under the hood when I heard approaching footsteps.

  “I’m here,” he said, speaking to my back.

  I lowered the hood and said, “Loose belt. Engine was overheating a bit.”

  “What’s this about Janey?”

  I gave him a brief nod of acknowledgement. Without hurrying myself, I put my tool kit away and wiped my hands on a rag. When they were clean enough to suit me, I folded my arms, drew myself up to my full height and said, “You own the Rainbow Motel, correct?”

  He said belligerently, “What is this, a cross examination?”

  “Take it easy. Cops do talk to people. It’s nothing personal.” I said in a pleasant conversational tone. “I should remind you that hampering police in the performance of their duties is a serious offence. Anybody rash enough to try it can be arrested for obstruction. After that, nosy policemen can come back here with search warrants; seize files, search hard drives. If you’ve ever visited a dodgy website they’ll find out about it. You’ll become enmeshed in a nightmare. Your life will be a living hell for years.”

  Rollins’ mouth fell open but no words came out.

  I added, “On the other hand, you can cooperate. Then we’ll leave you alone.”

  He asked me what I wanted to know.

  “I’m looking for Janey Colby. Maybe you can help me find her.”

  His confidence returning, he said with a snicker, “Shouldn’t be too hard. Try the East End of Vancouver. She’ll be tits up in a gutter someplace.”

  “Alright, I’ll try just once more. To repeat: do you own the Rainbow Motel?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t think, I’m a cop. Do you have a particular reason for being unhelpful?”

  “That’s it,” he said, taking a step backwards. “I’m calling my lawyer, right now.”

  “You’re not phoning anybody. You’re going nowhere till I’m through with you.”

  “Who d’you think you’re talking to? Nobody tells me what to do,” he snarled, taking another step backwards and turning on his heel.

  I tapped his shoulder to get his attention, whereupon he whirled around and threw a clumsy, ineffectual punch. He was slightly off-balance. I brought up my right arm up and hit him in the face with the point of my elbow. There was a hollow crunching sound. Rollins fell to his knees, holding his bloody nose.

  I’d made a big mistake and knew it immediately.

  Rollins got up, yanked his shirt off and used it to staunch the bleeding. “I’ll break you for this,” he said, speaking in a blubbery nasal whine that made his bombast ludicrous.

  I felt hot, tired and disgusted with the way I’d handled myself. Nevertheless I said sternly, “I asked you when you last saw your sister-in-law and I want an answer. Savvy?”

  Blood dripped down Rollins’ bare chest and onto his fat belly. Tenderly fingering his nose he said, “You’re dead meat, mister.”

  “Answer my question.”

  “I haven’t seen Janey for weeks,” he said, his voice shaking. “How do I know when I saw her last? Maybe it was a month ago. I’m too busy to keep a diary.”

  “Were you in the Rainbow Motel, two weeks ago?”

  “Again, I don’t know. Maybe I was, maybe I wasn’t. I don’t remember.”

  “Let me refresh your memory. Two weeks ago last Friday is when somebody stole your speedboat.”

  Surprise made him blink. “That fixes it. I was nowhere near the motel that day. I was here. The reason I know is because Karl Berger phoned me, told me the boat was gone.”

  “All right, we’ve established something. Now, if you didn’t see Janey two weeks ago, when did you last see her?”

  Rollins had calmed. He said, “What’s the big deal? Janey goes where she wants, when she wants. Am I supposed to be Janey’s keeper?”

  “Do you live here alone?”

  “Mostly. A woman comes in to shove a vacuum cleaner around. She makes supper when I’m home.”

  “Does she live on the premises?”

  “She goes home every night.”

  “What time?”

  “It varies. Usually she’s gone by six.”

  I said, “Can anyone confirm that you were on the reserve when your speedboat went missing?”

  “Probably, I’d have to think about it. I was probably at the sawmill all day. I’ll ask my timekeeper, next time I see him.”

  “The sawmill’s closed, everybody’s laid off. What’s this about a timekeeper?”

  “He’s a timekeeper/watchman/dog-handler. If I didn’t keep somebody at the mill they’d strip it clean in a month.”

  I took out my cell phone and said, “What’s your timekeeper’s number?”

  “Waste of time calling because it’s Saturday. Weekends he comes and goes. Everybody’s off fishing, or playing ball, or something.”

  Rollins was lying. “Okay,” I said. “That’s all, for now. You’ll be hearing from me again.”

  He stalked back to the house without another word, that bloodstained shirt dangling from his hand like a freshly killed game bird.

 
; I started the MG and let it run while I wrote up some notes. By the time I’d finished, the engine’s water-temperature gauge was registering in the high normal range. I shut the engine off and rechecked the belt. The tension wasn’t great, but it was better than it had been. I figured I could make it back to the Texaco station okay. That assumption proved wrong.

  I drove back to the main highway, turned left toward Mowaht Bay, and I was still accelerating when a deer bounded out of the woods into my path. One moment I was doing 50 kilometres an hour, the next moment I’d come to a full stop. The safety belt saved me. The deer bounced off the front bumper, picked itself up and limped into the bush. The MG’s front end was concertina’d, and the headlights were bits of broken glass. Steam, gushing from a busted radiator, condensed in oily dribbles down the windshield. The steering wheel was jammed.

  I called 411 to get Texaco Tommy’s number. His line was busy.

  A Toyota Land Cruiser appeared from behind a bend in the road. I put my thumb out. The Toyota skidded to a halt. A bearded man aged about 30, wearing brown cord pants, a red flannel shirt, caulk boots and an aluminum hard hat got out and surveyed the wreckage. He lit a cigarette with a match and carefully broke the match into two pieces before dropping it onto the roadway.

  “Deer?” he asked.

  “Right. It went thataway.”

  “Yeah, they’re tough, but it won’t get very far. A cougar will be having it for dinner soon.”

  “Lucky cougar,” I said. “I’m Silas Seaweed.”

  “Urban Kramer,” he said. “Can I give you a tow? I’ve got a chain.”

  “Thanks, but the steering is jammed. If you’re heading into town maybe you could ask the Texaco guy to tow me in.”

  “Sure, no problem,” Kramer said amiably. “You okay? Not hurt or anything?”

  “I’m fine,” I replied, and gave him my card. “Here’s my cell phone number. Ask the Texaco guy to call, confirm he can tow me in today, instead of next week.”

  Kramer put my card into his shirt pocket and drove off.

  It was late afternoon, still blistering hot. A rickety five-wire fence blocked entry to the adjacent forest. I noticed—in a place where a section of fence had fallen down—a well-used game trail. The injured animal’s tracks wound faintly uphill through dense bush. Altogether, it was a sombre, shady backwoods. Shafts of diffused orange-coloured light filtered through the canopy creating grotesque shapes and shadows. On an impulse, I set out along the trail and in less than 10 minutes, I reached a spot from which Boss Rollins’ house was visible. Rollins was digging a hole at the foot of his lawn. Odd. What was he doing? I watched from the trees for a couple of minutes before resuming my search for the deer.

  I found it lying along a trail. It appeared uninjured, but it was dead. I stood beside it, bowed my head and said a Coast Salish prayer. When I looked up, the sun was shining directly into my eyes through a break in the trees. Squinting myopically, I noticed a large unnatural shape in a dark patch of bush. It turned out to be a steam-powered logging donkey.

  A hundred years previously, that chunk of obsolete hardware had been the last word in hi-tech logging. Outmoded for decades, nowadays rarely seen outside forestry museums, it consisted of a steam-powered winch and a vertical boiler. The whole rusty contraption was built on a steel platform supported on long wooden skids instead of wheels.

  My cell phone rang. Texaco Tommy said, “Urban Kramer just gave me the bad news. I’ll be with you in about an hour.”

  I sat down on the donkey’s raised platform. My thoughts wandered aimlessly, until I focused on an interesting fact: Earlier, I had noticed Boss Rollins’ Lincoln. Now I remembered Rollins’ DUI conviction; he’d had his licence suspended for six months.

  It was very hot, and my eyes closed; perhaps I dozed for a few minutes. I stood up, stretched and took a final look at the steam donkey. It had been built long ago by the Victoria Machine Depot and, given its antiquity, was reasonably well preserved. Why hadn’t Rollins sold the donkey for scrap, or donated it to a museum? Then I noticed something peculiar. The boiler’s furnace door was welded shut. Why? Perhaps, I thought, to prevent kids from climbing inside the furnace and latching themselves in. Earlier in my career, I’d been called to investigate the death of a small boy who had suffocated inside one of those old-fashioned fridges with self-locking doors. Once inside, the poor lad had been doomed.

  Something moved in a patch of shrubbery. I became aware of bad-smelling air, and of a low unearthly wailing. Kids! I thought. Kids throwing stink bombs.

  I ran into the shrubbery and began to look around. I saw nobody, although a circle of flattened grass showed where a dog or a wolf had been lying. The ground felt cool to my touch—no animal had lain there recently. That foul sulphurous odour increased, trees began to creak, branches rustled, the earth moved beneath me. I didn’t imagine this. The ground definitely shook, I felt it distinctly. Some weird force was at work and whatever it was, that force, or agency, meant to harm me. I was remembering Tommy’s remark about Sasquatches when there was a crash as something massive fell over. The earth trembled again, and a humanoid face appeared—or something like a face; it was a parchment-coloured oval with eyes, partially concealed by green leaves.

  Like a man in a nightmare, trying not to panic, I backed away. There are secret places in Coast Salish territory where ghostly creatures linger—or can be summoned. As I moved, the ground sloped precipitously. I lost my footing and began to slide. Seconds later I was dangling face down over the edge of a bluff. The only thing separating me from permanent oblivion was a slender young arbutus. I grabbed its smooth trunk and dragged myself to safety. When my heart stopped hammering I moved to a place where I could see down without danger. In a steep valley below, a narrow trickle of snowmelt widened out into a large circular pool.

  By the time I reached my wrecked car, my jitters had faded. All the same, I was very relieved when Texaco Tommy showed up in his wrecker and I put that spooky place behind.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Two hours later, I was at the Bee Hive’s counter, digesting one of Ronnie’s mushroom, sardine and olive omelettes. Four rambunctious teenagers were bingeing on ice cream sundaes in a booth behind me. Ronnie, leaning against a cooler, filled his lungs with what passed for air in there and used enough of it to say, “How you enjoying Mowaht Bay so far?”

  “As compared to what? Afghanistan?”

  “Tommy gave you bad news, did he?” Ronnie said glancing out the window across the street, where his brother’s legs were visible beneath the wrecked MG.

  “It could be worse. Your brother thinks it’ll be driveable by tomorrow afternoon. I’ll have it fixed properly in Victoria, after the insurance adjuster sees it.”

  “Does that mean you’re staying the night here?”

  “Stay where? All due respect, Ronnie, but Mowaht Bay reminds me of a girl I used to know: she was nice on our first acquaintance but soon got tired of me.”

  “Chrissie has a room above her beauty parlour that she rents out sometimes. Maybe it’s available. Want me to phone her and find out?”

  I was turning the idea over when Ronnie added, “It’s across from the Legion Hall. Nothing fancy, just a bachelor pad.” Amusement writ large on his face, Ronnie added, “I hope you’re not a light sleeper. The Legion gets noisy on weekends.”

  “Okay, but tell Chrissie it’s only a one-night stand.”

  The teenagers were ready to leave. After they paid and went out, Ronnie lifted his phone off its wall-mounted cradle, dialed a number and spoke a few words. He put a hand over the mouthpiece and said to me, “Chrissie says the room’s yours if you want it. It’ll set you back 40 bucks.”

  “Tell Chrissie I’ll be right over.”

  I paid for my dinner. Ronnie put a CLOSED sign in his window, locked up and followed me out.

  “That’s it,” Ronnie said, pointing to a wood frame commercial building, adjacent to the government wharf. “Chrissie’s in her parlour, waiting for you.
”

  It was Saturday night and getting dark. Texaco Tommy had stopped work and was in his office, taking off his coveralls. Loggers and mill workers were cruising back and forth in hot rods, SUVs and four-by-four pickups—raising dust and hollering at the girls congregated near the Legion Hall. Couples strolled arm in arm, enjoying the cool of the evening.

  Ronnie joined his brother inside the gas station. I unlocked my car, and I was reaching inside for the overnight bag I carry for emergencies when a series of minor explosions disturbed the night—people were setting off fireworks over by the school. The twins hurried off to witness the excitement as rockets began lighting up the sky.

  Just then, two masked men appeared from behind the Legion Hall. They came toward me carrying baseball bats and wearing generic plaid shirts, dark jeans and caulk boots. “That’s him,” one of them said, raising his bat. Only it wasn’t a bat. Oily metal glinted as he aimed a shotgun, fired and missed. The sound of exploding fireworks cloaked the Sound. A third masked man emerged from the shadows.

  Boxed in, I ran across the street onto the government wharf. The wharf’s plank deck was slippery underfoot as I raced out along a float between fishboats and pleasure boats. When I reached the end of the float, I was jammed. Instead of diving into the icy water I jumped aboard a troller and tried to open its cabin door. It was locked. Looking around for a weapon of some sort I noticed a box, full of fish-line sinkers. Made of cast lead, they were the size of tennis balls and weighed a good 20 pounds each.

  The goons had followed me onto the wharf but in the darkness had lost sight of me. Now they were getting their bearings. I heard them talking before they moved toward me, so I picked up a lead sinker. A man with a baseball bat reached me first. When he leapt aboard swinging, I hit him with the sinker. He collapsed at my feet with a broken jaw, but his bat struck my left arm first. The man with the shotgun showed up next and skidded to a stop. He was taking aim when I threw another sinker at him with the full strength of my right arm then dived into the water.