A San Juan Island Mystery

Chapter 1

Even before the morning of the dreadful accident, I’d been intrigued by talk of Anton Gropius,  how he’d turned hermit somewhere in the nearby Canadian Gulf Islands after someone bludgeoned his masterpiece sculptures.  How his mail, which came to a post office box here in Friday Harbor, sometimes included Thunderhead Island in the address, but how the nautical charts showed no such landfall.  Gropius had dropped in on my editor once, but few others in town had ever seen him during the twenty years he’d been in seclusion.  Someone else picked up his mail.

The code of island living calls for respecting privacy, but sometimes a journalist’s curiosity overcomes her sense of decency.  My penance for this lapse of manners?  Something that still jerks me awake in the night, twisted in my sheets.

I poured cream and watched it marble my second cup of coffee.  Daphne’s Café seemed unnaturally quiet.  We’d endured Labor Day, and now the tourists were gone and the summer-cottage crowd had migrated back to wherever.  The only customers besides me were two men in red plaid jackets—deck hands, from the smell of diesel.  They occasionally glanced my way.  When Shannon, my fellow staff writer for the Slacktide, arrived, they’d probably bay out loud.  She was twenty minutes late—the time it takes to do her lashes.  I spend about twenty minutes a year on mine.

I gave up waiting and ordered breakfast.  A minute later, Daphne stepped from the kitchen, the phone at the end of her saggy arm.  "Someone here called Murphy?"

One of the waterfront guys took the call.

“Ah damn!  Yeah.”  He handed the phone back.  "Let’s go!” he said to his comrade.  “They tried swinging that crate without us and now the skipper’s under it.  Anton’s messing his shorts."  He shelled money on the table.  The other guy crammed in a triple-decker bite of pancake while scraping his chair back from the table.

I had him by the sleeve before he’d straightened his legs.  “Anton Gropius?  The sculptor?”

Both men froze for a beat, looked warily at me, then scrammed without answering.

Before the door had swung shut, Shannon breezed in and stubbed her cigarette in some scrambled eggs on the men’s table.  She doesn’t trust any cook old enough to have lived through the Depression, and on that account suspects Daphne of re-heating leftovers.  My guess is that Shannon has only a vague idea of when the Depression actually happened.

“I’ve already ordered.  You can have it if you want.  Tell Daphne to put it on my tab.” 

“Egret—”

“I’ve got a lead.”

A long wooden staircase descends the embankment from the café to the marina.  I’d run halfway down it when I heard clunking footsteps following me.  Despite her platform shoes, Shannon wasn’t far behind so I waited.  From that elevation, I could see a small crowd forming on the commercial pier past the harbormaster’s building.  Above them, a pale disk of sun burned through the haze.  I didn’t mind Shannon tagging along.  By disposition we didn’t often compete for stories.  City hall, the county commissioners, the courthouse—these were my beats.  Shannon thrived on hearsay and scandal.

We hurried past trawlers and barges piled with colored nets.  Near a self-service hoist people gawked at something over the railing.  A siren warbled uptown as Shannon and I pushed our way to the action.  A man lay on the deck of a flat-bottomed cargo transport, apparently in shock, his right leg pinned by a crate the size of a deepfreeze.

The two men from the restaurant rigged straps under the load.  A stout Indian, tooled knife sheath showing below his denim vest, pushed us back from the scene.

“That’s Nathan Weeping Moon,” Shannon said.

“Is he connected with Anton Gropius?”

“How’d you know?  He picks up supplies for Gropius.”  She made it her business to know who hung out on the islands and how they earned their beans.

“Who’s the victim?” I called out to Weeping Moon.

He assessed me in a glance, then grabbed the hoist controls dangling from a fat wire and let out some cable.  “Reese.  He skippers the transport.”

I scratched a note on my pad.  “How’d it happen?”

"The rigging slipped," he said, without looking, his voice dull as a baked oyster.

"Is he hurt bad?" Shannon asked.

Weeping Moon stole a disbelieving glance at Shannon.  "Well, that’s a three-ton crate.  The deck plate is two-inch steel.  His leg broke the fall.  Yeah, he’s likely dinged up a bit." 

Shannon made a sympathetic noise, then grabbed my arm and pointed. “The older guy with the beard, he’s—”

“Make room for the stretcher,” Weeping Moon yelled. 

Two medics rolled a gurney toward us.  Just then Stu Broadbent, our editor’s pet nephew, edged around them and jogged ahead, brandishing a camera with an elaborate flash attachment.

I ground my teeth.

“Egret!  How’d you two get here so fast?  Am I too late?”

Without waiting for an answer, he hustled down the ramp and found a vantage point near a floating seafood shack.  Nathan Weeping Moon worked the hoist controls until the cable snapped taut.  A sign on the hoist rated it at two-tons capacity; had he been guessing when he said the crate weighed three?  The electric motor groaned, but the load budged from Reese’s leg.  His howl raised a chill at the base of my spine that nearly collapsed my knees.

While the medics did their thing, I overheard someone saying the crate had been boomed to the transport from the larger barge moored next to it.  Weeping Moon wouldn’t give us the destination, or explain why the crate had been lifted while the riggers were having breakfast.

A frenzied woman in a print dress arrived.  “Is he all right?”  After a husky wheeze, she added, “My husband?”

Before anyone could answer, Stu dashed up the ramp and pointed to his camera.  “Got a prizewinner!  I knew he’d come unglued the second they lifted that thing off him.  Did you hear him yelp?  Now if I can get a stretcher shot with the tubes and bottles...”

The distraught woman covered her mouth and hurried past us.

“The wife?” Stu guessed.  “This keeps getting better.”

As the medics heaved the gurney up the ramp, I stepped over to Stu and put my hand over the lens just as he fired.  Reese’s wife heard the click and looked up at me gratefully.

“You’ve got your trophy,” I said to Stu.  “Now leave them alone.”

He puffed up the layered muscles under his polo shirt and gave me a broiling stare.  When I didn’t spontaneously combust, he turned away and looked for witnesses.  "Did you see it happen?" he asked Nathan Weeping Moon.

“Stu, we’ve got it covered,” I said.

Condescending smile.  "This is a blue collar story.  My kind of meat.  Uncle will want me to handle it."

Rib Armentrout had retired from the Denver Post and, instead of working crosswords and healing his ulcers, bought the Friday Harbor weekly—the Slacktide—and continued his 12-hour workdays.  His one concession to advancing age was a keenly felt obligation to pass on his journalistic standards to anyone willing to endure his discipline.  For the last three years, that anyone was me.

Then Stu showed up fresh out of the Navy, a yeoman trained in public affairs.  He was 27, my age roughly when I’d first begged Armentrout for an apprenticeship.  Rib’s doting over his nephew during the past months had cost me considerable brooding—mostly about my hopes of someday owning and editing the Slacktide.

Nathan ignored Stu and vaulted aboard the small barge.  Shannon and I moved down the ramp to watch from beside a gurgling crab tank.  A man with a boxy gray beard, wearing a wrecked Stetson, commanded Nathan, in exquisitely foul language, to open the crate.  The sides, stenciled Republica Portugal, had been jarred out of square, a corner splintered.  As Nathan jimmied the top panel, the old man watched.  You could have struck a match off his eyeball.

"So that’s Anton Gropius."

Shannon nodded.  "Our own living treasure."

This living treasure had shown more concern for his crate than for Reese’s leg.  “Which island does he live on?”

"Up in the Canadian Gulfs, somewhere."  Unusual for Shannon not to know the details.

Nails squealed as Nathan pried the lid off, revealing a block of stone, sides lightly scored with quarry marks.

“Marble?” I asked Shannon.

“Interesting.”  She pursed her lips, probably wondering the same thing I was.  “He used to be world class, you know—way back when.  I thought he’d given it up."

Nathan knocked off the damaged side of the crate.  If the sculptor’s lack of profanity meant anything, the marble, a pinkish hue with a slight sparkle, had survived the fall.

“Button it up,” he directed, but then something caught his attention and he grabbed the crowbar from Nathan and worked at a side panel.  He jerked the panel aside, exposing something curious: a crimson blotch on the face of the stone.  I had a fleeting, irrational, thought that it marked the place where Reese’s leg had been smashed, but then I looked closer and made out the crude shape of something like a hand, but drooping and limp. 

Whatever the symbol meant, it had a powerful effect on Anton.  He stood transfixed, unsteady on his feet, then slowly deflated as if a vein had opened, coming to rest on the gunwale.  He breathed deeply, then removed his hat to rub his temple.

I didn’t understand his reaction and moved closer.  Still, I saw only stone and the red mark—dye perhaps—a limp hand.  Harmless enough.

Yet, it had caved the sculptor’s broad shoulders and turned his face ashen.  I knew the pose.  The hollow stare, gaping mouth, palms turned upward.  An appeal I understood all too well:  how the hell can this be happening?