style="font-size:15px;"> “Hit the siren and lights,” she said. “Polite isn’t cutting it.” He flicked switches with a grin. The teardrop-helmeted crew shot glances over their shoulders and moved aside smartly. Once past, the car moved in silence, Chipper with his strong hands at ten and two on the wheel.
Twenty minutes later, they reached the small town at the end of the line. There were only bush roads north to Fairy Lake, Lizard Lake, and massive Lake Cowichan from that point on. Fewer than two hundred white people lived here, with half as many First Nations members in the immediate area. Originally the Pacheedaht tribe had made their homes on the coast and throughout the San Juan Valley. Earliest contacts had been prickly between the locals and newcomers, starting in 1798, when the crew from HMS Iphigenia engaged the residents in a dispute. Though logging had waned and the railroad tracks had been replaced by a road, the old beach camp area was soon converted to houses. By lucky coincidence, Port Renfrew sat at the L-shaped confluence of the northerly West Coast Trail and the easterly Juan de Fuca Marine Trail, which ended at Botanical Beach. The beach had been recognized at the turn of the twentieth century as such a gold mine of tidal life that the University of Minnesota had set up a research station. Though that unit was long defunct, strict regulations applied to the pristine shoreline. PICO meant “pack in and carry out.”
Nor was the beach the only attraction. From her younger days camping and exploring, Holly knew that nearby a forest legend spread its roots, sucking up the twelve feet of rain. The largest Douglas fir tree in the world, the Red Creek fir, with a circumference of over forty-one feet, grew on the outskirts of town. Passing the tourist centre, modest restaurants, a motel and a quaint old inn, they took the turn for the beach. Minutes later, they reached the parking lot and pulled through the gate, guided by a man waving his arms. In his early sixties, in a tan park uniform with shorts and knee socks English style, he was probably retired and happy for the extra money in a part-time job. On a boom box in his battered camo-coloured Jeep, an oldies station was playing “Love Me Tender”. He sipped from a water bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as they got out of the car. Splotched cheeks testified to a long life of malt appreciation.
“I didn’t hear you guys coming. What happened to the siren?”
Holly shook her head. Expectations already. Around the lot were parked a dozen cars and an assortment of trucks, vans and campers, with visitors from Alberta, Saskatchewan and Washington. The pay-for-parking machine sold daily windshield tickets for three dollars. Sporadic attempts to break into the little coin banks were another reason for regular RCMP patrol, though it was nearly impossible to catch someone in the act.
She made the introductions. “Are the students camping here? It wasn’t allowed in my day.”
Tim Jones waved a gnarly hand. “No way. Botanical’s too fragile and rare for that kind of disturbance. There’s an RV park in town. ’Course, you can’t always stop it. Shut the gate, they find a way around. Nature of the beast to keep trying. I live nearby and take a final look-see with the wife at nine, then I’m outta here. Come nightfall, some hitchhike, get dropped off, slip into the bush. Kind of a dare. Can’t blame them. Harmless enough, romantic even.” He gave Chipper a “between us men” look.
Holly opened her notebook, freshly inked and dated. Day One of My New In-Charge Career. Ben had collected what looked like thousands, neatly lined up in cabinets at home, to consult as backup to his court appearances. “Where will we find Angie?” She hoped she’d never become so hardened that bodies lost their identities. It was too late to help the girl, but the least she could do was serve her in the formalities of death.
“Follow that path. Come out on the beach, then go right a couple hundred feet till you come to a big mother chunk of fir with roots halfway to the sky. I call it Butt.” As he read their faces, he gave a self-deprecating cough. “No offense. That’s a logging term for the bottom of the tree. Kids are always building driftwood shelters off old Butt. Just lay on boards or straight branches. They float out with each high tide. Butt’s dug in like a two-ton tick. It would take the mother of all storms to carry him away.”
After grabbing a roll of yellow tape from the trunk, Chipper assumed a straight and serious posture which made him even taller. “Should we secure the scene, Corporal?”
“Good idea. Last thing we want is to wade through a bunch of thrill seekers. A girl is dead here.” She told Tim to keep an eye out for Mason Boone, the coroner, though from Reg’s description, he would be hard to miss. Meanwhile, Tim folded his arms in vigilance as if he were participating in a crime show.
The bright sun and warm temperatures made the beach an ideal destination, especially on a less-crowded weekday. Knotty shore pines bent from the ocean blasts, and swooping cypress shaded the area beneath the massive trunks of Douglas firs spared from the axe. They marched down the path with a “beach” sign, the gravel from the lot quickly turning into sand and duff. Halfway, a nearly new mountain bike lay on its side, unlocked and ready for the taking.
“That’s a beauty, but the owner is an idiot,” Chipper said. “A camera was stolen from a car here last week.”
“We’d better tell Tim. Maybe he can keep the bike safe at the gate until the owner returns. A cheap lesson.”
In a cool, wet section heavy with deer fern and shiny, rampaging salal, Holly spotted a banana slug in the middle of the path. Seven inches long, it was a leopard, haute-couture cousin to the traditional army khaki model. She bent down and gently lifted the creature to safety. “I brake for detrivores,” she said.
Chipper watched with a nostalgic smile. “In my survival course, we had to eat one of those. The wusses cooked it first. Once the...guts are out, a pinch of curry makes the difference. Everyone laughed. Then they all wanted some.”
“You must carry an unusual kit.” With a disgusted moue, she inspected the slime on her hands. “I don’t know why I do this. Maybe I’m thinking I might be reincarnated as one, not that I’m a Buddhist, or is it Hindu?”
“Whatever, I think the idea is to move up the ladder.”
“Hey, except for being slow and gummy, they vacuum the earth with only one lung. What more heavenly duties can you ask of a creature?”
They traversed a grove of sumac with wild roses blooming and forming rose hips, faint perfume for a funeral, not a wedding. The deepening sand, holding hardy beach plants such as silverleaf and yellow verbena, was littered with footprints, rough going for their leather boots.
Some island beaches were Hollywood stretches of fine silica, but Botanical had no pleasures for the foot, only tidal pools carved from sandstone and interspersed with ridges of shale, quartz and black basalt. As they hit the rock-shelved shore and turned, she saw why Tim had christened the huge stump “Butt”. What great wind had toppled the tree, and what greater tide had ferried it here, she couldn’t imagine. A photographer’s dream, except for crude initials carved into its bulk, it lay on its side, and from a branched bare root, pieces of driftwood artfully arranged like planks made a whimsical but secure shelter. Sand underneath had been scooped out so that two people could crawl out of the wind. Closer to the water, they picked their way between glistening tidal pools etched by time, wind and creatures like sea anemones, which hollowed out round homes for their delicate filaments.
A small group had gathered behind the berm of logs and twig trash at the high-tide line. American sea rocket and gumweed, hardy survivors, brushed at Holly’s pants as she walked. By itself, away down the grey basalt shore, was a small bundle. Blinking in the bright light, Holly tipped back her cap and swore softly.
“Covered with a blanket. And twenty feet from the edge. These rocks could have given
