After his futile examination of the shore, he had moved inland to search the path for signs of disturbance. The three of them had all trekked up and down it, of course, as had the dog, so he wasn’t surprised to find nothing useful.
He worked his way past the cabin and up the hill to Stink’s body. As the sun heated the day, more flies gathered. He felt an urge to cover the body but knew he had to wait for the tarp. He forced himself to look closely at the corpse again, at the mass of tangled hair and blood. The poor man had been hit from behind, and, judging from the amount of damage, more than once. The rest of his body, although smeared with blood, seemed unharmed. Chris noticed that his feet were bare and he was wearing stained yellow clothes that had probably once been white. Long johns. Had Stink been in bed when the killer surprised him? Something to check on when he returned to the cabin.
Stink’s feet were filthy, but there were dirt streaks on the top as well as on his knees and palms. Stink had not been dragged here, but rather had crawled, mortally wounded, until he collapsed. There was no sign of a scuffle in the vicinity of the body, so if his attacker had followed him, he had not bothered to strike him again.
Stink’s fingernails were chipped and so encrusted with dirt that Chris doubted forensics would be able to extract much usable evidence even if Stink had managed to scratch his attacker.
Looking beyond the signs of violent death, Chris studied the old man. His skin was like a parched prairie plain, with dirt embedded in every crevice. His hair and beard blended together in a long, stringy tangle of white. Chris could not bring himself to check, but imagined he had few teeth left.
The long johns hung on his body, draping loosely over the contours of his body. He was a tall man, probably once a big man possessing a strength to be reckoned with, but now his collarbones and ribs stuck out. Either sick or starving, he would not have presented much of a fight. Chris felt a twinge of pity as he pictured the poor man, living by choice in the familiar isolation of his homestead, awakened abruptly in the night by a terrifying axe. Fighting for his life. Crawling, still fighting, up the path to what he hoped was safety. Only to have his life ebb out of him little by little.
Chris returned to the cabin to see what tales it could tell. He stood just inside the room, careful to stay clear of the blood, and studied it. An ancient mattress lay on the floor in the corner, but it was stripped bare. No one faced a Newfoundland winter without several quilts or blankets, but there were none in sight. Perhaps Stink had dragged them outside with him. Chris made a note to check around.
A pot-bellied stove occupied the middle of the room, with a single blackened pot on top. He felt the stove. Stone cold. He peered inside but could see nothing unusual in the thin layer of ash. Beyond this, the room looked stripped. No clothes on hooks, no boots. In what appeared to be the kitchen area, there was a single chair, a small table, and rows of shelving. One shelf held a few dishes, three bags of salt, and four jars of pickles, but the rest were empty. Had the man run out of food?
The room was surprisingly tidy. The axe and the blood were a violent intrusion, smearing the floor and speckling the walls. As part of his police training, Chris had taken a lecture on blood-spatter analysis, which he tried to remember now. If Stink had been struck more than once, there would be transfer blood from the axe to the walls and ceiling. Chris studied the spatter. It did indeed run in a single streak up one wall and across the ceiling, as if the killer had raised the axe over his head for a second blow. On closer examination, he found another streak near the door, where there was also a large pool of congealed blood.
Chris tried to picture the sequence. He was no expert, but it appeared that Stink had been struck at least three times as he moved toward the door. He had not been in bed, at least when the second blow had struck, but rather in the middle of the room, and the killer had been standing with the axe in the kitchen area. Stink had been nearer the door when the third blow struck. This one had felled him and he’d bled for quite awhile before getting up and escaping outside.
There were a lot of smears, but only one recognizable bloody footprint near the door. Likely Stink’s, but given the quantity of blood on the floor, maybe the killer had stepped in it.
That would be one lucky break for forensics.
Outside, there were scuffs and footprints criss-crossing the clearing, but Chris could make little sense of them. He checked the shed, which contained very little. A shovel, a winch, some cable, lots of broken old tools, a bag of seed, a few gardening tools, and pots stacked away on shelves. No rifle.
He headed back down to the shore to check the fishing stage, holding his nose as he stepped inside. In the gloom, he saw piles of rotted old netting, rusty tackle gear, several broken fishing rods, and paddles. A stack of lobster traps and crab pots, a couple of functional fishing rods, but still no Winchester.
Chris sat down on the dock to think. Sometimes the clue to a crime lay not in what was there, but what was not. The boat and gun were both gone. But also missing were blankets and clothes. Stink must have had a winter jacket, hat, and mitts, but there was no sign of them.
There was also no food. Stink could have been running out, which explained why he was so thin, but it was unlikely he had nothing, not even the usual staples like canned beans, dried capelin, or hard tack. Nor, Chris realized now, had he seen any matches. Without matches, a homesteader would be doomed.
Chris didn’t like the conclusion that he was staring at — that the killer had taken it all. Quite a lot to haul unless you have a boat to put it in. And why? It was sure to be worthless old junk, useful only if you needed those things — blankets, clothes, food — to survive. If you were on the run and had left most of your gear behind.
Don’t even think it, he told himself. Just listen for Casey’s boat.
Chapter Thirteen
After her phone call to Corporal Willington, Amanda lingered awhile inside Casey’s house studying her topographical map and trying to imagine where Phil might have gone. Conche was tucked into the protected inner nook of a gourd-shaped peninsula, with a long, thin neck connecting it to the mainland. On the other side of the thin neck was the back harbour and another, larger, cape jutting out into the ocean. Stink’s homestead was on that cape, but the map showed a few other homesteads as well, before the vast emptiness of rugged, barren wilderness to the north. Only three roads ran through the wilderness, the middle one to Conche, an upper one to the coastal settlements of Croque and Grandois, and a lower to the town of Englee farther south. Below Englee, there were no roads into the interior at all.
If Phil were on foot, rather than in a boat as the others believed, he could wander the wilderness for days without seeing or being seen by a soul.
But what if he’d taken Stink’s boat? Far out in the ocean were the two large islands that the villagers in Grandois had mentioned. They were deserted now except for birds and the occasional adventurer. Phil had expressed an interest, but to get out there, he would have to cross twenty or thirty kilometres of open ocean swells. Surely too daunting a prospect for a Prairie boy.
Galvanized, she rolled up her maps and strode back down the harbour to Casey’s wharf, where the man was readying the engine on his spare boat for Chris. Endlessly patient, fingers black with grease.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “This is turning out to be much more adventure than you were looking for.”
He still looked a little green, but he managed a shrug. “Least I can do for poor Old Stink. Did Willie say how long before he gets here?”
Willie, she guessed, was Corporal Willington. “He left about twenty minutes ago. Said he’d be an hour, tops.”
Casey nodded. “Good. Might be she needs a new motor.”
Amanda