Before she could answer, Derek opened the front door with his own key and charged into the shop saying, “Weird accident! You won’t believe it.”
The three of them huddled in the chairs at the rear as he told what he knew:
“They went out in the boat and anchored somewhere and had a picnic lunch. Ernie had some red wine and got tipsy, so she went below for a nap, leaving Owen to do some fishing. Suddenly she, woke up because the boat was rocking violently. Also, her hands and feet were numb. She was scared.”
“Awful feeling,” Elizabeth said. “I’ve had it happen after drinking.”
“She called to Owen, and he didn’t answer. She crawled up the ladder on her knees and elbows, and he was gone! Then she really panicked, and the blood rushed back to her extremities. She radioed for help… That’s all I know.”
Qwilleran said, “I saw them bring her into the hotel in a wheelchair. How did she seem when you arrived, Derek?”
“In a daze. I had to drag the story out of her.”
“Did she have an explanation of his disappearance?”
“Yeah. He’d been drinking a lot. Booze - not just wine. She thinks they got caught in the wake of another boat, and he lost his balance and fell overboard.”
“Could be,” Qwilleran said, although a nagging sensation in the roots of his moustache was telling him, Not so! Not so!
Derek said, “I imagine she’ll want to sell the boat; it was Owen’s plaything. What she likes is the RV. It has all her cookbooks, and it’s kind of cozy. Sleeps two. Has running water. I think she’d be happy living in the thing.”
“Well, I’ve got commitments to take care of,” Qwilleran said. “I’ll leave you two to clean up the plaster dust.”
-10-
Halfway between the unhappy news about Owen Bowen and the happy prospect of dinner with the Rikers, Qwilleran received a phone call that left him with mixed reactions.
Wetherby Goode, the WPKX meteorologist - whose real name was Joe Bunker - had been his neighbor in Indian Village, and he was good company. An unstoppable extrovert, he announced his weather predictions in song or verse, played cocktail piano at parties, and boasted about being a native of Horseradish in Lockmaster County, once the horseradish capital of the Midwest. Like Qwilleran, a divorced man, he lived alone - with a male cat named Jet Stream.
Earlier in the year Wetherby had talked about his cousin, Dr. Teresa Bunker, a corvidologist at a Southern university. She wanted to produce an animated feature film about crows and was looking for a collaborator. In a weak moment, Qwilleran said he would be interested. Crows were a prominent feature of the environment in Moose County. They strutted around his backyard in Pickax and on the beach in Mooseville; they cawed in the woods incessantly . and had flying battles with hawks and blue jays. Unlike pigeons in the city, they were tolerated, however, and Koko was particularly fond of them.
Wetherby had said that his cousin would be coming up to visit her family in the summer and would like to meet Qwilleran and discuss a scenario for the film. Summer had seemed a long way off at the time, but now it was here, and Wetherby was calling to say, “She’s coming! She’s coming!”
“Who’s coming?” Qwilleran demanded, wrested from his speculations about Owen’s drowning and Ernie’s immediate future.
“My cousin Tess! She’s driving up. She’s already left. I don’t know her itinerary, because she has relatives and old schoolmates to visit. Besides, she changes her mind easily. However, I gave her your number at the beach, so you two can plan a meeting that’s convenient. She knows your cabin, by the way. She used to visit a friend at Top o’ the Dunes, and they’d walk on the beach and gawk at the Klingenschoen cabin. That was when the old lady lived there.”
“Tell me something about your cousin,” Qwilleran asked, thinking he should have asked the question a few months earlier.
“Well, she’s a little younger than I am. A big girl. A lot of fun. Likes to do things on the spur of the moment. She was married once, to another academic, but she’s an incorrigible optimist, and he was a card-carrying pessimist, so they drove each other crazy.”
Fighting his compunctions, Qwilleran managed to say, “Okay, I’ll expect her call.” He thought, I can spare an afternoon, or even a day, for a cousin of Wetherby Goode. Then he added, “It’ll be a challenge. I’ve never met a corvidologist.”
“So how’s the vacation?” his friend asked. “Are you renting your new guest house to Visitors from outer space?”
“Ninety-five percent of sightings,” Qwilleran shot back, “are weather balloons, and the other five percent are low-flying fireflies… By the way, what does Dr. Bunker drink?”
“Anything, but she’s crazy about mint juleps… And call her Tess. She likes to be called Tess.”
Qwilleran fed the cats early and announced, “I’m having dinner with Uncle Arch and Aunt Mildred.
I’ll be home around dark, and we’ll sit on the porch and look at the stars.”
They regarded him with mystification. Yet his mother had always said, “Jamie, it’s common courtesy to tell your family where you’re going and when you expect to return.” Now, after decades of living without a family, he found himself extending this common courtesy to the Siamese. Of course, they had no idea what he was saying, but he felt better for having said it.
He started down the beach carrying a canvas tote bag with the Pickax Public Library logo and marveling at the ever-changing aspect of the lake. This evening, the sky and water were turquoise, and a low cloud bank on the horizon resembled a mountain range. Flirtatious waves made passes at the
primly pebbled beach. At Seagull Point, broad wings wheeled over the water. Farther along, cottagers sat on their decks and waved.
At Sunny Daze, Arch was waiting at the top of the sandladder, and Qwilleran handed him two bottles of wine from the canvas bag.
“What else have you got in that thing? Arch asked with the permissible nosiness of an old friend.
“None of your business,” Qwilleran replied with the same liberty. Then he asked Lisa Compton, who was there without her husband, “How’s life without Lyle?”
“Serene!” she answered promptly.
“What are the superintendents doing in Duluth? Inventing new ways to give teachers a hard time?”
“Actually, they’re coordinating policies on homeschooling.”
“Does he approve of it?”
“He says Abraham Lincoln did it, and Thomas Edison did it, and they turned out okay.”
“That sounds like Lyle,” Qwilleran said. “To tell the truth, I don’t know how homeschooling works.”
“Ask me!” said Roger MacGillivray. Mildred’s son-in-law was a pale young man with a clipped black beard and plenty of enthusiasm. “We follow a prescribed curriculum. Kids get their lessons by E-mail. They take achievement tests. They learn at their own pace with no time wasted on the school bus.”
Lisa said, “I wish I’d been homeschooled. I was I the only Campbell in a classful of Macdonalds, and they were still avenging the Glencoe Massacre of 1692.”
Qwilleran asked, “But do kids get a chance to mix with their peers?”
“Better yet,” Roger said, “they meet a variety of adults and kids of all ages - through field trips, Scouts, Little League sports, and creative activities. For example, our group takes their pets to visit the women at Safe Harbor once a month. They’re widows of commercial fishermen, you know.”
Qwilleran said he knew - and pulled the embroidered sampler from the tote bag. He wanted advice on having it framed. He was giving it to Polly, thinking it more suitable for her house.
The women were agog over the concept, the tiny stitches, the colors of the yarn (Siamese colors). Lisa said her next-door neighbor on the beach had a framing shop in Lockmaster. Mildred suggested a narrow molding in dark wood.