Murder With Puffins

Chapter 11

From Puffin to Eternity

The body lay facedown in a shallow, rocky pool, but my money wasn't on drowning as the cause of death.

"Michael," I yelled. "Could you come up here a second?"

I stood looking down the slope at the tidal pool where the body floated. I was shivering, from nerves as much as the cold rain, as Michael scrambled out to the cliff's edge and stood beside me.

"Meg, maybe we should just go back to the house," he said, his voice raised to be heard over the wind and surf. "Your father's probably back there by now; I'm sure he was only kidding about wanting to stand on Green Point and watch the hurricane hit the island."

"I'm sure he wasn't, but never mind that now," I said. "Look down there."

"Oh my God," Michael said. He tried to pull me away so I couldn't see the body. "It's not him, is it?"

"You mean Dad? Heavens no! Look at all that hair."

"You're right," Michael said. "Sorry. I panicked for a second. So who is he?"

"I think it's Resnick."

Michael craned his head to look at the body from another angle.

"I think you're right. Well, that's a relief, for us at least."

"Not much of a relief, considering he was almost certainly murdered."

"Murdered! What makes you think that? I mean, why not drowned?"

"Look at that gash on the back of his head."

Michael peered through the rain.

"Oh," he said. "Not so much of a relief after all, I suppose; and before you say anything, I only meant a relief because it wasn't your dad. I didn't mean I was glad Resnick was dead or anything like that."

"Although I have a feeling a lot of people will be, even if they don't admit it."

We just stood there for a moment, staring at the body.

"We'd better go and tell somebody," Michael said. "The helpful Constable Barnes, I suppose."

"We'd better haul the body up first," I said with a shudder.

"We can't; we'd be disturbing a crime scene," Michael protested.

"I think the storm's going to do more than disturb the crime scene by the time we could get down to the village, much less bring anyone back. If we don't haul him up, he's going to wash out to sea."

As if to emphasize my point, the crest of a particularly big wave washed over the rocks into the tidal pool. The body rocked slightly, and the right arm moved back and forth, as if Resnick were waving to us.

"See, the tide's rising," I said. "We'd better hurry."

"Right," Michael said. He took a deep breath and then began easing himself over the side of the ledge, feeling for a foothold on the rocky slope.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Not your fault," he replied, looking up with a reassuring smile.

"Yes, it is," I said. "I got us into this. Coming here was my idea. Some romantic getaway."

"Well, you never promised me a tropical paradise."

He gave me a hand over the edge of the cliff, and I began carefully following him down the slope. It wasn't all that steep; if there had been solid ground at the bottom, I'd have just slid and slithered down in a hurry. But considering what waited below--a dead body and a rapidly rising ocean--I very definitely didn't want to lose my footing.

"Getting him up again is going to be a real headache," Michael said, looking around. "I don't suppose there's another way back."

"There's a path that goes back toward Resnick's house," I said. "But I don't think the tide's low enough."

"You're sure?" Michael said. "Where is it? Maybe we can pick a time between waves."

I pointed to the narrow path hugging the side of the cliff. As we studied it, a wave sloshed over the path, stranding a wire-mesh lobster trap. A few seconds later, a larger wave broke over the path, crushing the trap against the side of the cliff and sucking the fragments back as it retreated.

"Okay, I guess the cliff's it," Michael said. He looked up at the cliff, frowning, and then back at the body. Water sloshed over our feet.

"Hang on a second," I said, pulling the knapsack off my shoulders. "I never thought I'd give Dad the satisfaction of hearing this, but for once this damned hiking emergency kit of his will come in handy."

I dug through the contents of the pack, passing up a hefty first-aid kit, a large bottle of SP35 sunscreen, plastic bottles of water and Gatorade, several packages of freeze-dried food, and a flare gun that probably dated from the Korean War. Sure enough, there at the bottom of the pack I found a long length of slender nylon rope.

"We can tie this to him and haul him up," I said. "There should be another rope in your pack, if we need it."

"He'll get a little battered," Michael observed.

"I think he's past caring."

"Yes, but it will complicate the autopsy, won't it?"

"Good point. We can hoist him up over there," I said, pointing a little to the right, where the cliff overhung the beginning of the submerged path. "We can keep him away from the cliff until the very top."

"I'll bundle him up," Michael said, taking off his parka and spreading it out on the rocks. "You find something up there to tie the other end of the rope to."

"Right," I said. But before I started scrambling back up the slope, I paused, took a breath, and tried to look around very methodically and fix the scene in my mind.

In the sunlight, the rocky shoreline would have looked ragged and picturesque, but in the gloomy half-light, I could think only what a bleak and cheerless place it was to die all alone.

Well, not quite all alone. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the sudden bright flash as a beam of sunlight broke through the clouds and reflected off the lenses of a pair of binoculars. Somewhere, farther up the slope, birders were watching. I only hoped they had been watching long enough to see that Resnick had been dead when we found him. Awkward if they'd only seen us messing around with a dead body.

"Meg? Is something wrong?"

"No," I said. "Just looking around to see if there's anything unusual we should report to the police. I mean, you're probably right about this being a crime scene. Want me to help you pull him out?"

"It's okay," Michael said. "I can manage."

He didn't sound too happy about it, but if he wanted to play strong, protective male, I didn't plan to argue. It was one thing to talk about corpses and autopsies around the dinner table when Dad went off on one of his true-crime tangents and quite another to haul a body out of the briny deep.

Michael frowned down at the corpse.

"Michael, I'm--" I stopped myself. He looked up and raised an eyebrow. I couldn't help smiling; I loved the way he did that.

"Having promised that I wouldn't apologize for anything that went wrong," I said, "I'm trying very hard to think of anything else to say right now."

He chuckled.

"I was just thinking what great research material this is for my acting," he said. "I had a part in a TV show once where I had to discover a murder victim. Had a tough time making it authentic, given the fact I'd never even seen a dead body. But since I've met you, I've seen more stiffs than a mafioso in training."

"Is that a good thing?" I asked.

"Well, it's useful."

With that, he bent down and began pulling at Resnick's body. I coiled the rope over my shoulder, replaced the pack on my back, and headed toward the cliff.

As I reached for the first rock in my climb, I saw a piece of paper fluttering on the ground at my feet. I stooped to pick it up. Force of habit--growing up with Dad, you tended to think the eleventh and twelfth commandments were "Thou shalt not litter" and "I don't care if you didn't put it there; pick it up anyway; it won't kill you to bend over."

I found myself staring at a familiar piece of paper; the map on which Dad had scoped out the best place on the island to watch the hurricane. It was soggy and some of the ink had smeared, but I recognized Dad's printing instantly. His handwriting achieved a degree of artistic illegibility that made him the envy of less accomplished physicians, but his printing was precise, elegant, more readable than most typefaces--and absolutely distinctive. I'd figured out the real scoop on Santa Claus one year when I realized that the note thanking me for the milk and cookies was in Dad's inimitable printing.

Oh damn, I thought. If anyone else found this, and figured out it belonged to Dad--and anyone who'd ever seen his printing would figure it out in a heartbeat…

"Meg?" Michael called.

"Sorry. I'm going," I said, stuffing the map in my knapsack and reaching again for the cliff.

"Hang on a second. Do you think we should take this, too?"

I glanced back. Michael had laid Resnick's body on a flat rock and was pointing down at something floating in the pool. I scrambled back down to see what it was.

A no trespassing sign, minus its post, bobbed just below the surface.

"It was under the body," he said.

"We'd better take it, I suppose," I said. "It could be evidence."

I tried a couple of times to snag it, using the rope so as not to touch it and leave fingerprints. But in the end, the only way we could manage to reach it without wading into the icy water was for Michael to hold on to my waist while I reached out and grabbed it, and even then both of us got half-soaked by the waves.

"Definitely time to make tracks," Michael said as I secured the sign to my backpack and he turned back to deal with Resnick.

Hauling the body up the slope took forever, and then we decided to put Resnick someplace out of the rain, since we'd moved him so far already. We picked him up---I took the feet, which seemed less personal somehow--and lugged him down the path to his house.

I didn't like the glass and steel monstrosity, but I couldn't help thinking it looked a little forlorn already. The wind had plastered the glass with wet leaves and mud, and the way the windows rattled made me glad I wouldn't be inside the house when the storm really broke.

We found room in the woodshed, put the body out of the storm, pulled a canvas tarpaulin over it, and stashed the sign in a corner.

Now that we were out of the rain, we paused for a moment. I took my flashlight out of the knapsack and played it over Resnick's face. In the struggle to get his body up above the tide line and under cover, I hadn't had much chance to inspect him. Now, in the harsh illumination of the flashlight, I had much too good a view. The angry gash on the back of his head didn't show, of course, since he lay faceup, but he had a nasty-looking bruise on his forehead, just at the hairline. And he definitely looked very dead. And very unhappy. Was the look on his face anger? Pain? Fear? Surprise? Probably a combination of all of them.

"Let's get out of here," Michael said, echoing my thought. "I mean, we need to get back to the village and report this."

As we stepped out of the shed, I tripped over something and went sprawling.

"Are you all right?" Michael asked.

"I'm fine," I said. "Just tripped over something Resnick must have left lying around."

"Even dead, that man's dangerous," he said.

Before I got up, I felt around to find whatever had tripped me--I didn't want to repeat the experience again immediately. My hands finally touched something--a thick, slightly damp nine-by-twelve envelope, curled up into a half cylinder. Was that what I'd tripped over? Odd that it was only slightly damp if it had been lying around in the rain for any amount of time. Perhaps the overhanging roof of the shed had sheltered it until I'd tripped over it. Or perhaps Resnick had carried it rolled up and stuffed into one of his pockets and it had fallen out when we moved him.

I stowed it in my knapsack for later examination; then Michael and I hiked back to the village, looking over our shoulders about every third step.

Jeb Barnes wasn't happy to see us again.