Seaweed on the Street (30 page)

The room was masculine, almost spartan, furnished with a couple of leather armchairs and a matching sofa. A carved Kwakiutl cedar chest sat beneath the window. Driftwood logs crackled in the fireplace. Dr. Cunliffe noticed my yawns. He said, “You look bushed.”

“Probably. I drove almost non-stop from Reno, haven't slept properly for a couple of days.”

“Why, for heaven's sake?”

“I intended to spend the night in Eugene, but when I got there I didn't feel tired, so I just kept going. Then I got to my office and one thing led to another. But pretty soon I'm heading for bed because tomorrow I'm driving to Hornby Island.”

He gave me a clinical stare. “How old are you, 50?”

“Hell no, I'm just this side of 40. Do I look that old, Doc?”

“At the moment, yes, and if you make a habit of pushing your limits, you might not reach 50.” The doctor pointed to one of the leather chairs and as we sat down he said, “All right, I know this isn't a social call. So what's up?”

“I'd like to ask you a couple of things about Marcia Hunt.”

“Go ahead.”

“How deeply was Marcia Hunt into the drug scene? I heard somewhere that a few people wrecked themselves with acid and wonder if she could have been one of them.”

The doctor crossed his legs and thought about it before replying. “It's
possible
,” he said broodingly. “Medical journals published some alarming reports during the hippie era. Pure lsd is safe in suitable dosages, but there were some nasty side effects because a lot of the stuff was made in kitchen laboratories. I knew of one tragic case. The lad involved didn't lose his memory, but he lost his sight and hearing.”

“Permanently?”

“Yes. So to answer your question, it's possible. Marcia used drugs indiscriminately for a time.”

“What was Marcia's drug of choice?”

“She used whatever she could get her hands on. Marijuana, heroin, speed. But I always thought that she'd come to her senses eventually and give it up.”

“That might have been quite a trick, don't you think?”

“Why?”

“Well,” I said, floundering in my response, “if she was hooked?”

The doctor shook his head. “She wasn't hooked when I knew her. And in my opinion Marcia did not have an addictive personality.”

“You believe in a theory of addictive and non-addictive personalities?”

“It's the only theory that makes sense to me. Otherwise most of us would be hopeless drunks. Is the question very important?”

“It could be. There's a crazy woman on Hornby Island. Some people think she's Marcia Hunt.”

My words made him blink. He peered beyond me, out toward the grey sea, as I told the story of my search for Marcia.

He said, “This Hornby woman. Do you think she's an imposter?”

“I don't know. By the way, did I mention that Marcia was still doing drugs when she gave birth?”

His face hardened. “That introduces another element. If Marcia had a child, it could be impaired.”

I brought out my copies of the photographs. The first one he looked at showed an infant Marcia in her baby carriage.

He smiled. “The girl pushing the pram is Effie Charterhouse. She was the Hunts' housekeeper before Iris Naylor took the job.”

“Is she related to the maid who quit recently?”

“Yes. They're mother and daughter.”

The doctor resumed his scrutiny of the pictures. He gave a startled cry, leaped to his feet and hurried across to the window to examine one of them in stronger light. He lowered the photograph and gave me a bleak look. “What the hell's the meaning of this, Seaweed?”

Mystified, I went across to him.

The doctor shook a photograph under my nose and said angrily, “Don't you see who this is?”

It was the picture of Alison at the art show in Reno. She was standing next to the bearded young man. I said, “That's Alison with some stranger she met at an art show.”

“The boy, damn it! Don't you recognize him?”

“No. Should I?”

“That's my son. It's Harry!”

It was five minutes before the doctor calmed down. He went out of the room and returned with a bottle of brandy and two glasses. He poured two stiff drinks and gave one to me.

I said, “I've never seen a photograph of your son in a beard. The boy I saw at the murder scene five years ago was clean-shaven.”

The doctor nodded gloomily. “Harry used to grow a beard on his trips. He'd shave it off when he got home. I'm sorry, Seaweed, there's no way you could have known him. Bearded he looks quite different.”

I put my half-empty glass on the table and sat on the sofa. My head ached. My eyes felt as if they had sand in them. I heard Dr. Cunliffe leave the room. The last thing I remember was feeling somebody spreading a blanket over me.

≈ ≈ ≈

Jimmy Scow went Canoe Cove way. To increase his power he stayed celibate four days, following which he indulged in sexual intercourse with Effie Yokwats to the point of exhaustion.

It was night. Scow was alone now. In the path of a thin slivered moon, wet pebbles shone like jewels. Arbutus trees thrust gnarled red arms at the blue-black sky. First Woman and her children drifted above the earth, blocking out stars intermittently. A sailboat, its anchor light faintly gleaming, floated on the cove, as mysterious as a mirage.

Naked except for a wooden wolf mask, Scow padded up and down along the high-tide line, collecting driftwood for a bonfire. When Scow lit his bonfire, blue smoke drifted out to sea. From his medicine bag, Jimmy Scow got the silver hairbrushes that he had taken from Charles Service's house and from them carefully harvested eight short hairs. Scow then took water that he had brought from Service's toilet bowl and dripped it onto four small pebbles. After the four pebbles were dry, Scow put them into the mouth of a snake, along with the eight short hairs from Charles Service's head. Scow shut the snake inside a bentwood box. If the snake ate the pebbles and the hairs, Charles Service would urinate blood; his head would ache unbearably.

Jimmy Scow ate some mushrooms. Shaking his spirit stick, singing Wolf Song, Jimmy Scow danced around his fire.

Along about midnight, Jimmy Scow lay down on a cedar-bark mat. The waters of the cove parted. Waves crashed against the beach. The lone sailboat rocked at its mooring.

Wolf and four of his wives waded out of the sea, bringing with them the acrid reek of rotting weed and dead starfishes and oysters left too long in the sun.

Wolf killed the snake and buried its meat in a secret place, because if Jimmy Scow saw the snake or the pebbles or the hairs again, he would lose his senses. Wolf then returned the dry skin of the snake to the bentwood box, saying, “Now your name is Killer-At-The-North-End-Of-The-World. Now you will kill with fire.”

Jimmy Scow ate more mushrooms.

Jimmy Scow wrapped himself in the cedar-bark mat tied with a nettle-twine cord and threw himself into the sea, where he went to the bottom of deep water, anchored to a line supported by a cougar's bladder.

At daybreak the sailboat departed the cove. Later the same day, and on the third day thereafter, a Native crab fisherman came to check his pots. He saw but did not touch the cougar bladder.

For four days, nothing happened. When Effie Yokwats went looking for Jimmy Scow, she found him hanging head downward from a sandstone bluff, his ears and his mouth streaming blood. Small birds and stinging wasps swarmed around him.

Effie Yokwats put him in her car and drove him back to Vic West, where he came to and recovered. Because he had survived his ordeal, Jimmy Scow's people allowed him to keep his new name.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I phoned Nevada and spoke to Joan Alfred. I said, “Those photographs that I borrowed. One of them showed a young man talking to Alison at an art show. I believe he purchased one of her paintings. It turns out that their meeting was very significant.”

“Was it?” she said incuriously.

“Yes. Alison told me that he was a casual stranger.”

“That's not quite right. The man was a stranger, but the meeting wasn't exactly casual. I remember the way it happened, though, because it was one of Alison's first sales. What happened was, Reno newspapers ran feature articles to support an art show. The young fellow was only passing through town, but he happened to pick up a newspaper and noticed Alison's name. It interested him, but he didn't explain why.”

≈ ≈ ≈

The little inter-island ferry plowed across the narrow strait to Hornby Island. My Chevrolet was the only car on board. A few bicycle tourists had embarked with me, but they all trooped into the passenger saloon. I stood in the bows, wearing a heavy mackinaw jacket and thick wool pants. Ahead, Goose Cove emerged from the grey sea. Mount Geoffrey loomed in the distance. The Coast Range peaks, mantled with last year's snow, receded in diminishing shades of blue and white.

On the three-hour drive between Victoria and the ferry landing I had tried to sort out all the new information that I had obtained. There was one more person I would have liked to interview — Patrick Coulton, the old detective hired by Calvert Hunt many years earlier. But Coulton had been dead for years, had carried his secrets to the grave. Coulton's widow was ailing in a White Rock nursing home. I decided it was worth going to see her.

The ferry docked. I motored ashore, dawdling behind the bicycle tourists who disembarked first, weighted down with camping gear. I added my car to the lineup outside the Hornby Island pub. Inside, two loggers in tartan shirts, wool pants and cleated boots were shooting pool.

A barmaid appeared from a storeroom behind the counter. In khaki shorts and green pastel shirt, she could have posed for an L. L. Bean ad. I ordered a Foster's. When it came I said, “I'm visiting Hornby for a day or two. Anything interesting going on?”

“Sure,” she said cheerfully, taking my money. She rang the sale and dropped my change on the bar. “Let's see. They've got a meat sale on at the Co-op. Everything in their freezer is half-price from now until the weekend. If that isn't exciting enough for you, they're showing a Jack Nicholson movie at the community hall tonight. On Friday there's a dance.”

“These island dances,” I kidded her. “They'll be formal affairs I suppose, tuxedos, long dresses, women in tiaras?”

Straight-faced, she replied, “The last time I saw a tiara was when Freddy the Freeloader showed up in here one night, pretending to be Princess Di.”

“Was anybody taken in?”

“Only Freddy. The RCMP took him in to St. Joseph's hospital until he came down from whatever he was on.”

The barmaid, about 25, ran a cloth over the already gleaming counter, then stood back, grinning. She had a face like Audrey Hepburn's in
Breakfast at Tiffany's.

I said, “I'm hoping to run into somebody who lives here. Maybe you'd know her?”

“Maybe. Who is it?”

“A woman called Marcia Harkness. She has a daughter, Hockey.”

“That her name, Marcia? We call Hockey's mom Mother Harkness. I went to school with Hockey. You'll probably find one or both of 'em hanging out around the Co-op. That's if they're not out oyster picking.”

≈ ≈ ≈

The area surrounding Hornby Island's Co-op store was laid out like a village green from a bygone age. The main building was a barn-like general store with half a dozen small cedar-and-glass shops clustered around it. Entrepreneurs in Birkenstocks and handwoven clothes sold locally made arts and crafts, books, ice cream. I noticed a bike-rental place and a café with outdoor seating. I bought an espresso and sat on a canvas-roofed patio to watch the action.

Ten yards away a young woman was hawking copper earrings. Periodically, people stopped to chat, addressing her by name. Nobody bought anything. The woman, smoking innumerable cigarettes, did not seem to mind whether she sold anything or not. She was thin. It was hard to guess her age because of her deeply weathered skin. She had ornate copper rings on every finger. But the rings, instead of gracing the fingers, drew attention to their calluses, broken nails, the black half-moons at the tips. These were the hands of an oyster picker. I was looking at Hockey Harkness. Rain began to beat on the canvas awning.

The earing seller was standing beside the road with her thumb out when I picked her up in my Chevrolet. She climbed in and I said, “Where to, Hockey?”

She smiled, revealing a missing front tooth. “Do I know you?” she said in a soft voice.

“No. But I came to the island because I'm looking for your mother. I heard people using your name. I was wondering how to introduce myself when it started to rain.”

“Are you from the insurance?” she said, touching my sleeve shyly.

“No. Are you expecting somebody?”

“Ma doesn't get many visitors. If it's about the insurance you may as well talk to me.”

“Well, I'm not from the insurance. My name is Silas Seaweed. I'm from Victoria.”

“Well, you know my name, don't you?” she said, taking a tobacco pouch from a pocket and rolling a cigarette.

I said, “Just watch yourself if I have to stop the car suddenly. That seat you're sitting on moves forward sometimes.”

She laughed and said, “This car's a limo compared to some of the heaps you see around Hornby.”

As I drove I glanced at her from time to time, wondering if it were even remotely possible that the timid creature beside me could be descended from Calvert Harkness. It seemed unlikely.

Hockey pointed to a side road leading toward the sea at Tribune Bay. I turned off and we bounced along it in silence.

Set back in the trees were rustic shacks, apparently built of recycled materials. Hockey directed me to a tiny cabin in a clearing surrounded by Douglas fir and arbutus trees. As we pulled up, a woman who had been working in a vegetable garden scurried inside. She was a dumpy brown-coated figure in rubber ankle boots, wearing a scarf pulled tightly over her head and knotted beneath her double chin.