his like a diffident lover. Hands clutched at him. He coughed out his mouthpiece and surged to the surface with a silent scream, choking as he yanked off his mask and thrashed his fins as if a killer shark rode his tail. When he scrabbled over the rocky shelf, his prize Canon fell onto the coral, cracking the lens.
You can’t go home again. As a tautology, it was both as true and false as the nostalgic snows of yesteryear. Here in body, here in spirit, but many grains of sand had fallen through the hourglass.
Corporal Holly Martin opened the creaky door of the white clapboard house and saw a head turn at the reception desk and nod in pointed silence. No warm welcome on her first day in charge. Once the ice was broken with Ann Troy, she had confidence that the business of policing the small community would proceed. So far she felt like an interloper. They’d only been introduced a week ago, but how could you offend with a “hello”? Easy enough if that person had expected to have your job.
The RCMP Fossil Bay Detachment, an hour west of Victoria, British Columbia, had seen its leader, Reg Wilkinson, take early retirement. A product of sausage-and-egg breakfasts, the tall, barrel-chested man had earned a triple bypass at fifty-two and was resigned to oatmeal, cholesterol medication, and half-an-hour a day on the treadmill at his cottage in Chemainus. In a cautionary tone during their interview in his office a month ago, he’d told Holly to expect a cool reception from Ann. “She’s a good officer. She’ll come around.” Had they been closer than colleagues? Reg was personable, a courtly charmer. Ann, a decade younger, was a single mother. At Holly’s raised eyebrow, Reg sat large and silent as the Sphinx. “None of my beeswax. You’ll find all you need to know in the staff bios.”
“Morning, Ann,” Holly said, making a point of using the woman’s name. She poured a fresh cup from the coffee maker. Half empty already. How early had the woman come in? It was only seven twenty. Holly had imagined herself opening up on her first day, asserting command if only in a minor way. “Next pot’s on me. Do you like it strong?” Nothing but a shrug in response. “I brought banana bread. My dad baked it.”
She placed the plate on the table and folded back the foil in unspoken invitation. Contrary to the romantic Rose Marie notions of red coats, a full-dress mode for special occasions, Holly wore a grey shirt, long-sleeved now in fall, with a dark blue tie, dark blue pants with gold strapping along with ankle boots spit-shined this morning, and a policeman’s style cap. Leaving on her protective vest, she hung her Gore-Tex jacket in the narrow closet, tucking her hat onto the shelf and relishing the new freedom of the mild climate. In The Pas, her first post, she had worn a parka eight months of the year. Southern Vancouver Island was Canada’s Caribbean. Little if any snow, but deluges of hail, sleet and rain all winter. Three sturdy umbrellas nestled in the corner.
Corporal Ann Troy wore her uniform with pride, but at 5' 4", she carried one hundred and thirty-five pounds on two fewer inches than Holly. A latecomer to the force after raising her son into his teens, Ann had been posted to Fossil Bay, on track to take over. But her intervention at an armed robbery at a convenience store had saved a young clerk’s life and changed hers forever. A crazed Victoria man had gone on a one-man crime wave, stealing car after car and crashing them as he sped west on the narrow coastal road. Ann had happened on the scene as he exited the store, waving a shotgun, people screaming behind him. A volleyball player in her youth, she had courted unaware the gradual onset of degenerative disk disease. The skeletal shock of tackling the large man had been the trigger that wore away the final lumbar cushion.
The exams she’d passed with honours the week before the accident gave her the nominal rank of corporal, but after an unsuccessful rehabilitation failed to improve her chronic condition, under the “duty to accommodate” regulations, she was given a desk job consisting of paperwork, phone answering and supervision of the small volunteer staff. Disability offers had been snapped back in the face of the administration. She didn’t intend to sit at home and measure her life with coffee spoons. Ann lived for the law, her son Nick and her cat Bump. A framed picture of the apricot devil with its rhinestone collar sat on her desk in reception. Nick’s college graduation picture had equal pride of place. He was model material, but his mouth had a kind and innocent smile. Perhaps in her happier pain-free days, Ann had once shared that attractive quality. Minutes ticked by on the wall clock as Holly sipped coffee.
“Seems quiet,” Holly said in an implied question, then realized how foolish she sounded. The overture had been made. Why grovel so much that she was annoying even herself? She moved to the front window, looking out on an empty gravel lot. “Where’s Chipper?”
“He took the car for servicing at Tri-City,” Ann said as Holly startled at the resonant alto voice. She felt so tense from the atmosphere that blood was surfing in her ears.
“We don’t have any stoplights, so nothing ever changes but the weather. Even the geese don’t leave,” Ann said with bitter punctuation, fixated by figures on her computer screen. She wore her lustrous dark brown hair in a short, no-nonsense style, trimmed tight around the ears.
Tiny Fossil Bay, named for the hosts of Oligocene creatures, snails, mussels and clams, which over twenty-five million years ago had become trapped in the sandstone and conglomerate of rocky beaches, consisted of barely five hundred people in a dozen streets. The fateful store where Ann had seen her life change. A Petro-Canada station. To cater to tourists, a number of seasonal B and Bs and a fishing charter. Nan’s, a small restaurant, flirted with bankruptcy. The lone grade school was on the brink of closing when new housing developments at nearby Jordan River had made the board in Victoria reconsider. With unusual foresight, the RCMP detachment had been opened at the same time as the fabled Juan de Fuca and West Coast Trails had raised the number of visitors. The trio’s job was to take the heat off the larger Sooke post to the east.
Holly watched the unappreciated pile of luscious banana bread. A sore back could make anyone crabby. Maybe the woman was trying to keep her weight down, too. Females could be cruelest to each other. She cursed herself for the unpolitic move. Unable to summon an appetite for a slice, she went into her office, one of four rooms in the former cottage.
On the wall were framed university diplomas and her certificate from police college. At twenty-two, she had been finishing her degree in Botany at UBC when her mother had disappeared. Desperate to help but powerless as the futile search wound down with a whimper, she’d switched to Criminal Justice courses, then joined the RCMP. Initial training took place in Regina. She had passed the exams with nearly perfect scores, been mentored for six months and served at The Pas, Manitoba. When an opening on the north island at Port McNeill arose, she was happy to return west. RCMP members were expected to move to different posts after no more than four or five years, preventing the establishment of close ties to the locals. That made marriage difficult enough for men, but an impossible dream for women.
Her final transfer, along with a bit of luck, brought her home to paradise, where roses sprouted in February. She liked the freedom of the rural and semi-wilderness setting with the amenities of nearby Victoria. Border living was another advantage. Seattle was a quick ferry ride.
British Columbia, known as E Division, encompassing policing at most provincial, federal, and municipal levels, was the largest in Canada, with 126 detachments and over 6,000 employees, about one-third of the total RCMP enlistment. Only twelve municipalities in B.C. had their own forces, and on the island, only Victoria, the capital city. The island itself had only 850 officers spread across its wilderness, many hours away from back-up.
At thirty-two, in a few more years, she could take the exam for sergeant, then staff-sergeant. At that level, she’d command a post with fourteen members, not including civilians, a comfortable number. Holly wanted to stay on the island, but moving any higher up the ranks would mean a transfer to a larger city with noise, crowding and major crimes.
