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. Call her unambitious, lover of Lalaland, but Holly had no desire to walk mean streets, even in Nanaimo, though she might entertain the idea if she could join a Canine Unit.
With a proprietorial eye, she considered her new preserve and nosed stale cigarette smoke from the decades before the new laws. A coat of paint wouldn’t hurt. That she could do herself. And maybe an area rug. Then a few hardy plants and a picture of her German shepherds, now playing at Rainbow Bridge.
She resigned herself to paperwork, reading the latest crime figures for the province. The Capital Region of Victoria had one of the lowest stats in the country for gun-related incidents, fewer than one per cent. Knives were more popular. Among the bulletins on emerging technologies for law enforcement, one report claimed that soon pistols would be personalized; only the owner could fire it. An officer shot with his or her own gun would be an ugly irony of the past. Another focused on robotic delivery of pepper spray in cases where the suspect couldn’t be approached. Every black-leather duty belt held OC, aka pepper spray, along with metal handcuffs, a 9 mm Military and Police Smith and Wesson, a collapsible asp baton, keys, and a radio. Only those who chose to take an orientation carried the controversial Taser. Recent deaths across the country and in the U.S. had raised serious questions about the excessive use of that defensive weapon. The Taser should be used as a last resort before the gun, not merely to subdue without breaking into a sweat.
From the monthly statistics Ann had compiled, Holly pinpointed the petty efforts at crime that dogged the community. Reg had told her what to expect, and she’d had a taste in Port McNeill. Thefts, stolen vehicles, noise complaints, unruly dogs and unrulier drunks. Now and then a police car visited the many beach parks down the coast on open-container violations or to take a report on an auto break-in. French Beach, China, Mystic, Bear, all the way to Botanical, a necklace of rain-forest emeralds beckoned tourists from California to Calcutta.
“Don’t discount penny-ante crime,” Ben Rogers, her mentor in The Pas, had told her. “Sometimes they’re part of a bigger picture, and it usually involves drugs. Why steal a CD player you can sell for only a twenty unless you need another fix?” But Ben had made his own fatal error. Their last month together, checking out a stolen car seen at a trailer park, he hadn’t expected the twelve-year-old deaf boy to be holding a rifle instead of an air gun. The frightened child fired, and Reg went down with a hole in his chest where his heart had been. Holly had secured the rifle, turned the boy over to a motherly bystander, then cradled Ben’s head in her lap until the ambulance came. When she’d cleaned his office to give personal items to his wife, the Classic Car calendar’s date read “Ninety-nine days to go!”
Around eight fifteen, a bump of unidentifiable music sounded outside, a cheerful whistle came up the walk, and into the office came Constable Chirakumar “Chipper” Knox Singh. Though both his parents were Sikhs, his father had been raised in a Scottish Presbyterian orphanage in the Punjab and baptized with the name of Knox. Like many immigrants, Gopal Singh had worked menial jobs, living like a pauper, finally able to open a convenience store with an ethnic foods sideline in nearby Colwood. Transferred last year from his first post in the Prairies, twenty-eight-year-old Chipper wore a handsome light-blue turban, designed for the force, with a yellow patch to match the stripe down his pants. A trim light-brown beard set off his café-au-lait face. Earnest black eyebrows capped a handsome brow and fine features. At six-three, he towered over the women.
He saw Holly and saluted. “Welcome, Corporal, or should I call you ‘Guv’?” he asked with a grin.
“You’ve been watching the BBC too much.” Her cheeks pinked, and she wondered if Ann had heard the informal exchange.
“Blame my mother. She never misses Coronation Street. Anyway, the car’s all set. That squeal was the fan belt. No big deal.
Hoping to make an ally, she pointed to the banana bread. “Dig in.”
The phone rang, and Ann answered. As she listened, a frown creased her freckled brow, and she wrote rapidly on a pad. “Calm down and tell me what happened. There’s no rush now, is there?” Her
