Seaweed in the Soup (3 page)

The tension and conflict existing between Manners and me had resurfaced. I didn't care; I was just glad to get out of that room. Without troubling to suppress a smile, I tramped upstairs, went outside through a pair of wide French doors, and across the gravel drive to the garage.

The first car that I looked at was Mrs. Milton's twenty-year-old Corolla. After a perfunctory search, I turned my attention to a newish black BMW sedan. The shiny car reeked of cigarettes. Its ashtray, full of half-smoked butts, might provide some useful DNA when Forensics got around to checking it. Otherwise, the car was tidy with nothing lying on its leather-upholstered seats or cluttering its dashboard. The glove compartment also proved empty except for manufacturer's handbooks. There was nothing in the car to say who owned it. I went back through the house, where I heard Bernie Tapp tearing more strips out of Lightning Bradley's hide. Crime squad detectives and forensic specialists were coming and going.

After writing some notes into my little black book, I went around to a sprawling flagstone terrace at the back of the house. Ten yards away, Mrs. Milton was seated inside a wisteria-draped gazebo, gazing into space, until she noticed that I was watching her. When I smiled, she turned away, her face registering a mixture of apprehension and aversion.

Footpaths wound through well-tended flower gardens and downhill to a landscaped lower terrace, where a large swimming pool blended nicely with the marble statues, imported Lebanese cedars and weeping sequoias that adorned the property. I followed a series of curving balustraded stairways to the beach and gazed out at the Strait of Georgia, the large inland sea that separates Vancouver Island from the British Columbia mainland.

Locally, the Strait of Georgia and Puget Sound are known collectively as the Salish Sea. The cities of Vancouver and Seattle are short ferry rides away from here. Small waves lapped the shore in a slight breeze. White triangular sails dotted the horizon. The day's warm air carried the high midsummer reek of oceanic mud and rotting fish. Horse clams, buried in the sand, were shooting crotch-high jets of water here and there. Mount Baker's immense volcanic peak rose up forty miles east, in Washington State.

Constable Ricketts had been wearing cleated-sole boots. What I took to be his footprints—visible here and there on patches of wet sand—were being erased by a rising tide. If the women that Ricketts had been pursuing had passed this way, there was no evidence to show for it by then. Standing there under the mewling cry of gulls, I concluded that Ricketts—by heading north along the intertidal zone—had guessed wrong. The suspects had either gone south or were still hiding in the bush.

I abandoned my speculations in favour of doing something concrete and used my cellphone to call headquarters. Bill Friendly was the duty sergeant that day. I asked Bill who' d reported the suspicious females.

“The caller was shy, he hung up when I asked him,” Bill replied. “Call display says he was Tudor Collins. He lives at 515 Collins Lane.”

“Does Collins have form?”

“No, Silas. Mr. Collins is a fine upstanding citizen. The Collinses have been in Victoria since the beginning of time. They used to own that porcelain shop on Broughton Street.”

“Anything else you can tell me about him?”

Bill laughed. “Isn't that enough?”

I put my phone away. Footsteps became audible above the heavy buzz of sandflies where Constable Ricketts was coming down the stairs to the beach. When he noticed me, he turned away and began to retrace his steps. I said, “Hold it, Ricketts.”

He turned, one hand on the balustrade, looking down. “Sir?” he said nervously.

“Have you made the notes that Chief Tapp asked for?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“You told Chief Tapp that you thought the women you were chasing would head north. Why north?”

“I dunno,” he said, his voice slow and abstracted, as if his thoughts were focussed somewhere else. “It was just a guess.”

“I wonder if perhaps you'd noticed something. Footprints in the sand, a broken branch?”

Shaking his head, Ricketts came down the stairs.

I said, “Tell me again about that bird or whatever it was that you saw earlier.”

Ricketts frowned. He didn't look me in the eye. He seemed slightly embarrassed. Seconds passed before he said, “It's strange. I don't know how to explain this without sounding foolish. I was alone in the woods. There had been no sign of the women and I was just standing quietly, waiting and listening. Suddenly I had a strange feeling that I wasn't alone, that somebody or something was watching me. When I turned around, I saw a vague shape for a moment before it vanished. Since then I've been thinking, maybe I didn't see anything. It might have been nerves, I might have just imagined it all.”

“Do you think you could find the same place again?”

“I expect so, Sergeant. It's only a few hundred yards from here.”

“Okay, let's go. I'd like to have a look for myself.”

We started walking. Olive-green seaweed with yellowish tips mantled the offshore rocks. A wedge of majestic white swans bobbed up and down in the waves. Leaves of decaying sea lettuce littered the beach like scraps of crumpled parchment. I said, “Describe the two women that you and Bradley saw on Echo Bay Road.”

Ricketts looked at me sideways, but continued to evade my eyes. “They were a couple of Indian girls. Dark or sallow skin, there was nothing remarkable about either of them. They had the same skin pigmentation as you, Sergeant, if you don't mind me saying so. They were just like the people I see hanging around the Native Friendship Centre. About 18 years old. Maybe 20. Nice looking girls, a little overweight. They might have been sisters or cousins. One of 'em was wearing a funny T-shirt. It said,
Jesus loves you, everybody else thinks you're an asshole.
”

I began to think about ravens and Tricksters.

Ricketts had recovered from his earlier shock. Smiling absently, he led me away from the shore along a ravine studded with small trees and stunted shrubs. We began to ascend an incline where the brush thinned and the floor of the ravine became a loose scree of pebbly soil covered with leaf mould and scattered patches of lichen-covered rock. Towards the top, the incline steepened precipitously; our feet began to slide. After a struggle, we reached rimrock.

Ricketts and I grabbed overhanging branches and we rested for a moment before Ricketts reached over the rim and used his free hand to part a clump of tall grass. Gazing across the rim, he said hesitantly, “I don't see it now, but I know that the big rock where I saw something strange is close by.”

I dragged myself up and over the rim, and on into a patch of coastal rainforest, where access through the dense tangle of green wilderness was restricted to animal trails and to whatever footpaths may have been cleared by determined hikers. Moss draped the surrounding trees like shreds of ragged green wool.

Hearing a slight noise, I looked up through the sun-shot foliage and saw a squirrel clinging to the trunk of a big Douglas fir. The animal scampered from sight behind the trunk. After a moment, the squirrel's nose reappeared. I watched it run out along a downward-sloping branch before it leapt into space and went from sight again. The breeze had stiffened into a wind and a fir cone struck my shoulder. The cone had not fallen from the fir tree. It had rolled off a sandstone boulder.

The boulder, about the size of a small car, was partially shrouded by seed husks, fallen leaves and pinecones. I noticed an unnatural mark on the boulder's weathered surface and dirtied my hands brushing it clean. Carved into the boulder's front face were two petroglyphs, Native rock carvings that had been created by chipping and abrading with stone tools. The first was a life-sized anthropomorphic shape. A naturally occurring protuberance in the sandstone, suggestive of male genitalia, had been incorporated into the design. A second and much smaller petroglyph located below and to the left of the main figure showed a wolf, its gaping jaws held open by two pointed sticks.

Ricketts scrambled over the rimrock and joined me. Sounding vindicated, he said, “This is it. This is the place.”

Vancouver Island's petroglyph sites are rarely, if ever, found away from water. Some petroglyphs are found in riverbeds and are only visible when water levels drop. Many are found on tidal beaches submerged by high tides. The petroglyphs that I was looking at had been created long ago, by a shaman or by a spirit quester seeking knowledge.

For the Coast Salish, the vision quest is a turning point in life. When our youngsters reach puberty, they endure rigorous training in preparation for vision quests alone in the wilderness. This quest usually lasts for a number of days during which the initiate tunes into the spirit world. An essential part of the process involves fasting, sleep deprivation, and immersion in icy water to the brink of unconsciousness. Sometimes, not always, a guardian animal or spirit will then appear to the seeker in the form of a vision or a dream. After his vision quest, the youngster may be apprenticed to a shaman, a carver or a hunter. The vision quest may be a part of shamanism, or more exactly, an apprentice's learning and initiation process under the guidance of a practising shaman. The shaman quest—its secrets and its search for power—is strongly related to petroglyphs because spirits—good and bad—dwell in certain boulders and trees.

“Sheesh!” Ricketts said, after looking at the petroglyphs. “What are these things?”

“Stone age rock carvings.”

“They're sort of crazy-looking, if you ask me.”

Ricketts was right: most petroglyphs are a bit peculiar. The creatures portrayed on them are birds, shamans, monsters and fantastic spirits. Many have overtly sexual overtones. Apart from a very few examples, the locations of which have long been known, petroglyphs are rare on southern Vancouver Island, although they are numerous farther north and on some offshore islands. To put it mildly, I was very surprised to discover a previously unknown petroglyph site half a mile from a well-travelled urban road.

Needing to take a leak, Ricketts turned his back on me and moved behind the boulder. “Holy Christ,” he said. “What the hell is this?”

I went to have a look. Ricketts was standing with his dick in his hand, staring down at what at first sight appeared to be an old leather glove. Forgetting his bladder, Ricketts zipped up and bent forward. Up close, the object looked like a brown paper bag. It was about the same size and shape as a human hand. Before I could stop him, Ricketts had reached out for it. At the same instant, a heavy gust of wind roared in from the Salish Sea. Trees shook. Loose branches and other forest litter fell down from the overhead canopy. Instinctively, Ricketts and I covered our heads with our arms and crouched low. The wind continued to howl; we heard a terrific cracking noise. A big old cedar tree with two long overhanging branches was splitting down the middle. One branch fell noisily into the ravine. The old tree swayed unsteadily for a few moment and then fell towards us. The sudden effect was unnerving. Ricketts screamed. I jumped out of the way. The earth shook, and a cavity appeared where the tree's rootball pulled out of the earth. The boulder shook a little and then moved slightly. After sliding downhill a few inches, the boulder came to rest. Ricketts' panicked screams faded, and when I turned to look at him, the constable was disappearing headfirst into the root cavity. His head and shoulders were completely covered with loose earth when I grabbed his ankles and dragged him out.

Ricketts was unhurt. He rested face down for a moment, blinking his eyes and trying to regain his composure. Then Ricketts tried to get to his knees. He couldn't. Something that had been buried underground had wrapped itself around his right arm. Using my bare hands, I managed to dig him free.

Ricketts stood up with something dangling from his wrist by a leather thong. It was a sack, about the same size and shape as an ordinary supermarket shopping bag. But this sack wasn't plastic. It was made of ancient buckskin. The sack's dirty cracked leather was marked with reddish stains. I used my pocket knife to cut the leather thong away and then I carefully opened the sack. It contained half-dissolved feathers, bits of fur and skin, bones, small pebbles, a chunk of woven cornstalk and small unrecognizable decapitated animals—all of them immersed in a cauldron of clotted blood.

It was a shaman's medicine bag.

Ricketts had been fairly stoic till then, but the awful stink wafting from the medicine bag did him in. He leaned forward, holding his knees, and spewed up everything he'd eaten that morning.

CHAPTER TWO

Back at the house, I gave the medicine bag to Forensics. Lightning Bradley had already been interrogated, sent home and told to stay near his telephone until further notice.

Bernie Tapp and Nice Manners were interrogating Mrs. Milton in the gazebo when I joined them. Constable Cynthia Leach had set up recording equipment, and the session was being taped. If Mrs. Milton had been panicked earlier, no signs were in evidence by then.

Speaking with a trace of a British accent, she was saying composedly, “Oh no, my goodness, I'm the housekeeper but I don't live on the premises, because I have my own place in town. Ronnie, that's Mr. Chew, has the downstairs room. He seems like a very nice man, although I can't say that I know him very well. Ronnie's only been with us a month or two. He was polite, but his English wasn't fluent. He never had much to say for himself. He guarded his privacy. If people trespassed on the grounds, he was downright uncivil. I remember that one day when these Jehovah Witnesses came knocking on the . . . ”

Abruptly, Bernie cut her off. “You're the housekeeper, and Mr. Chew was employed as a gardener. Is there any more domestic staff?”

“No, sir. Except for parties, when we need caterers and so forth.”

“What about the owners? Why are they not here?”