Dying for Murder. Suzanne F. Kingsmill

for the sake of a shrimp cocktail or a bowl of soup. It’s criminal but the courts don’t seem to really know that yet.”

      She paused and threw me a small metal ring with a removable rubber cap. I turned it over in my hand, trying to figure out what it was. I looked up at her and shrugged. She smiled and took the ring and cap from me and pulled the cap off. The brass ring was quite a bit smaller than a dime and the rubber cap was essentially another ring slightly smaller with a hunk of black rubber glued to it. She held up the ring and said, “I’ve done quite a few experiments over the years on the visual orientation of sea turtle hatchlings. It is quite extraordinary that the hatchlings, the size of a plum but flatter, come up out of a dark nest into a dark night and yet they make their way unerringly to the sea.” She took the ring back from me. “It’s really cool. I mean how do they manage to find the sea when they are so tiny that one dune is like Everest to them? At their level, which is about half an inch above the ground, they can’t even see the sea. The literature has pretty much confirmed that they are programmed to head toward the brightest horizon. But how are they programmed and when does the switch turn on and turn off — because it has to turn off or sea turtles would never come ashore to lay their eggs, they would always be swimming toward the brightest horizon, which is out to sea.”

      She picked up a little rubber sea turtle hatchling from her bedside table and fitted the brass ring over one of its eyes.

      “They’re goggles,” she said. “I glue the brass ring over the eye and then I can use the cap to blind one eye or both or change the rubber for colour filters.”

      I tried not to laugh but I couldn’t help smiling. The image it conjured up in my mind was hilarious.

      “I know,” she said. “Everybody laughs. It is funny and they do look ludicrous when they are wearing them, but it is harmless to the turtles. The glue peels off and I release them to the sea after any experiments. You wouldn’t believe how many people want to interview me about my bespectacled turtles. They are much more interested in that than in my nest predation studies.”

      I rose to the bait. “Which are?”

      “Oh, you know. I check each nest in our little hatchery here after it has come up and analyze the contents for diseased or depredated eggs, et cetera.”

      “You have a hatchery on the island?” I asked, surprised and not all that interested in the contents of an old nest. I hadn’t read anything about the hatchery and no one had mentioned it.

      “Well, it’s really a tiny hatchery. Most of the nests laid by the females we leave in place now, but it used to be that every nest that was laid was dug up and transferred to a fenced-in area so that the feral pigs and other animals didn’t gorge themselves. Now we only dig up a few nests for research purposes. We get the odd photographer too who wants to film a nest erupting. It’s quite a sight. You should sit up one night — they only come up at night — and see if you get lucky.”

      “So you did your Ph.D. on sea turtles?”

      She grunted.

      “Where did you do it? What university?”

      She moved suddenly and tripped over a pair of shoes on the floor. After I made the motions of helping her up I tried to take up where we left off, but she was having none of it. The moment was lost.

      chapter seven

      During lunch we all listened to the radio and news of Hurricane Chase. It had pummelled the DR and Haiti and was barrelling down on the eastern seaboard of the United States — touchdown estimated at Charleston, South Carolina. We were right in its path unless some unforeseen phenomenon steered it away. As a result we were on alert for evacuation within twenty-four hours. It was frustrating, exciting, and a bit frightening, all at the same time. Now that I had seen the island and realized we were really only as high above sea level as the mercurial dunes that formed the island, it kind of hit home what sitting ducks we were. But nobody seemed too perturbed about it so I assumed everything was under control.