recently-built deck had potted begonias in red, white and salmon. Showy burgundy dahlias, which lasted into the fall, added a cheery look.
“I’m Janet Jenkins. Come in,” Billy’s mother said, opening the screen door. She wore loose jeans and a red flannel logging shirt. “The boys will be back at three. They’re helping my husband Tom with the firewood.” Mike was staying with them because his mother was in Victoria getting radiation for breast cancer. His father had gone north to earn money at a fly-in, fly-out mine in Yukon, she explained.
The house opened into a living room, kitchen at the side. A small television sat on a crowded bookshelf. The number of other doors indicated two more bedrooms and a bathroom.
“They aren’t in any trouble, are they? You said this was routine,” Janet said as she took a blue enamel pot of coffee from the stove. She added a can of condensed milk and a sugar bowl, urging them forward on the circular pine table.
Holly had a slight stomach ache from the pizza overload, but she couldn’t refuse the hospitality. Her duty belt needed a bottle of Maalox. “Apparently they were on the beach at Botanical the night when a girl drowned. I need to know what they saw, if anything.”
The woman’s pleasant tan face shrank as she smoothed a crease on the freshly-ironed tablecloth. Rich black hair was pulled into a bun with an attractive shell holder, and her glowing, unwrinkled skin belied her forty-plus years. “My brother drowned. It’s a bad way to go. His fishing boat filled up with a rogue wave, and he never made it to shore.” She made a small fist, her hand worn from work, then reached for a tin of hand cream on the table. “Damn marine reports were wrong.”
Holly nodded, managing a smile to ease the woman along. “That’s so true. Weather changes by the hour around the lower island.”
“And we’re cut off out here. No cell coverage. Damn phone lines go down once a winter. Can’t even call an ambulance.” Janet finished anointing her hands and picked up her coffee. “Still, I prefer it to Victoria. It’s freer, you know? Not as many rules, and we help each other.”
A few minutes later, Holly heard voices outside. Through the calico-curtained window she watched two young men walking toward the house, followed by a mixed breed, German shepherd and collie at a glance. The dog lacked one front leg but handled its mobility without complaint. One boy had an axe over his shoulder, the other carried steel splitting wedges and a maul.
Janet said, “There they are now. Do you want me—”
“Please stay here. I’ll talk to them outside. Thanks for your hospitality.”
She excused herself and met the boys on the deck, explaining her visit. The dog was friendly if muddy. She gave its head a rub but steered it away from her pants. “I’d like to talk to you separately, if that’s all right. Maybe you could come back in a few minutes, Mike.” She saw them give each other odd looks. Mike pulled out a pack of bargain-priced Canadian brand cigarettes, lit up, and strolled off, his short legs slightly bowed like a sailor’s. Chances were that after all this time, they’d rehearsed their stories. She should have been out here earlier, from the minute they’d learned the results of the tox scan.
The taller at well over six feet, Billy wore green workpants and a hoodie. His clothes were covered in fir debris and the occasional oil stain. One temple bore a scar, the kind fashionable for nineteenth-century dueling Europeans. His nose was blunt but strong, and his hands could rip phone books in half.
She smiled to put him at his ease, but his eyes cut to her notebook. “The ranger says that he believes you and Mike camped in Botanical the night Angie Didrickson died.”
“Angie?” he repeated. “Mom said something, but I—”
“Angie drowned that night.” Surely news would have travelled fast. What was wrong here?
“Oh yeah, I heard about that. I was sorry.” A nuance of emotion passed over his face, raising a dimple in one cheek. Juvenile or ingenuous or both? Oddly enough, his voice cracked from time to time, mild as a girl’s.
“Did you know her?” He attended Edward Milne, but they could have met at twenty teen haunts. The video stores, Willie Blues Snack Shop, the A and W, Sooke Pizza and Wink’s, which nailed the student lunch trade. Aside from school, the Port Renfrew teens got to Sooke from time to time, hitched a ride, stayed with friends or relatives. Rock concerts in Victoria would pull them farther east. K-Os was playing at the Save-On-Foods Memorial Centre.
“Not really.”
What did that mean? “You did or you didn’t?” His hesitance made her suspicious, but the ambiguous teenspeak often meant “yes, but I’m afraid to admit it.”
He looked off to where Mike was tossing sticks for the dog.
“I might have seen her in Sooke...but we never talked.”
“She was beautiful. I imagine you’d remember her.”
“Yeah.” He blinked but didn’t meet her gaze. To some that spelled guilt, but the gesture was inborn in his people. It was disrespectful to lock eyes, especially a youth to an elder. Did he seem nervous? “What did you do that night in the park?”
Her begging-the-question technique worked. Instead of denying being there, he seemed to search his memory. “Made a fire. Cooked hot dogs. Went for a swim. We built a fort of driftwood.” Common practice for beachcombers. More shelter from the wind than rain. But she didn’t remember any food debris. Maybe here were two teenaged environmentalists.
“Can you give me a timeline? Start with dinner.”
“Uh, six, seven. I dunno. Before dark. We just hung out and talked.”
If she recalled correctly, dark came about eight o’clock.
“About what?” The devil was in the details, Roy had taught her. Once a suspect makes one mistake, he makes others. The cascade effect.
“Stuff. I mean girls, movies, school. Nothing important. The sunset was awesome. And we saw a couple of cruise ships. My cousin works on one. It’d be sweet to go to Alaska.”
“Then what happened? See anyone else?”
“Uh-uh.” He spread out his hands. One leaking blood blister dominated a finger, the price of working with wood. “Went to bed, I guess. Ten maybe. On the beach. We had sleeping bags.”
“By the big butt stump of driftwood? Was that your camp?”
Suddenly a wary look crossed his face, as if he knew he might have said the wrong thing, placed himself in the wrong spot. Innocence and experience collided. “Maybe down a kilometre from that. The shelter wasn’t anything special, more dug out in the sand. The main logs were already there.”
Why was he trying to minimize the fort now? Distance himself from where the girl had died? The sun flickered behind a cloud, but she felt the heat coming. “All right, Billy,” she said, and relief flooded his square face.
Mike took his turn next. The habit of reclusiveness wasn’t as strong for him. His eyes weren’t as intelligent as Billy’s, more crafty like a fox, though those animals were oddly absent on the island. Mike confirmed much of what Billy had said. Perhaps they had practiced their stories. A total consistency often spelled collusion. “So you went to bed around—”
