'Call the Coast Guard,' I said. 'Maybe they're still staking out suspicious inlets for potential drug runners.'
The commandant of the local Coast Guard station was convinced that his colleagues had made landing in Florida too risky for the Colombian cocaine merchants. He thought a small, unassuming town like Yorktown would be the perfect base for a major drug smuggling ring. So far his intense surveillance of the local waterways had not produced any stray smugglers. However, fishing out of season and poaching from other people's crab pots had fallen to an all-time low.
'Yes, it was the Coast Guard who arrested young Scotty Ballister and your cousin,' Dad said, happily. In addition to being caught crab poaching, which wasn't actually illegal but hadn't won them any friends, the two of them had been arrested for possession of marijuana--the closest the commandant had actually come to a drug raid. But although the baggie of grass had inconveniently floated long enough for the Coast Guard to fish it out, the prosecutor's office couldn't prove that Scotty or the cousin had tossed it overboard--at least, not after Scotty's father the attorney had finished with them. Rumor had it the Coast Guard were patrolling the beaches of our neighborhood intensively, in the hope of catching Scotty and the cousin redhanded.
Dad trotted off to call the commandant. 'Excellent thinking, Meg!' he reported a few minutes later. 'There were no craft other than the Coast Guard cutters anywhere near the beach any night this week. They'd had an alert, and have been putting on extra patrols.' Translation: they were, indeed, still lurking off the shores of our neighborhood, hoping to catch Scotty and my cousin. 'It looks as if our criminal must have delivered the body by land after all.'
'Unless she got there on her own,' the sheriff added, shaking his head.
'I'm just glad I didn't somehow overlook seeing someone shove her over,' I said. 'That idea really bothered me.'
'Of course there's the question of whether she was killed there, or moved there after her death,' Dad continued. 'And if she wasn't killed there, whether she was put there for a reason, such as to cast suspicion on someone, or merely because it was the most convenient place in the neighborhood to dispose of a corpse.'
'And regardless of where she was killed, where was she all morning?' I put in.
'Good point,' Dad replied. 'How come no one saw her either walking or being carried down to the beach?'
'And for that matter, has anyone remembered searching the beach that day we were all looking for her?' I asked. No one, alas, had; so the question of whether she was on the beach on June 1 or put there sometime later remained unanswered.
'We're going to start the current tests tomorrow, to see how far it's feasible for her to have drifted before she was found,' Dad said, turning back to the sheriff. 'Did you bring the tide tables?'
Wednesday, June 8
Dad spent most of Wednesday preparing his tide and current tests. In the morning, he cruised upriver for several miles, noting every place where someone could have dropped a body into the river. Rob weaseled out, pretending to study. So since Dad's mechanical ineptness is particularly pronounced with outboard motors, I ended up as pilot, with Eric as crew. Eric could have run the boat himself, but it took both of us to fish Dad out whenever he got carried away and fell in.
Thursday, June 9
'Eileen still hasn't shown up,' I reported by phone to Michael Thursday afternoon. 'I've begun to wonder if she and Steven might have eloped after all.'
'Well, just bring her in as soon as you can.'
'Roger.'
'Or maybe you'd like to come in and do some preselecting for her, eliminating things that you know wouldn't work for her body type and so forth.'
'Sounds like a good idea. I'm rather stuck out here today, but maybe I should do that as soon as I'm free.'
'I could bring some of the books out to the house for you now,' he offered, eagerly. Evidently he was more anxious about the deadline than he was letting on.
'Thanks, but I'm not at the house right now.'
'Where are you, then?' he asked. 'They need to get their phone checked, wherever you are; this is a lousy connection.'
'I'm in a rowboat in the middle of the river. I'm using Samantha's cell phone.' There was a pause so long I thought we'd been disconnected.
'I know I'm going to regret asking, but why are you in a rowboat in the middle of the river?'
'Dad's driving up and down the bank, releasing flocks of numbered milk jugs at intervals. To test the speed and direction of the current and narrow down the sites where Mrs. Grover's body could have been dumped into the water.'
'That'll take forever, won't it?' he asked. 'After all, she was missing for several days before we found her.'
'Yes, but she couldn't have been in the water for more than a few hours. Trust me on that. If you want to know why, ask Dad, although I advise not doing it just before dinner.'
'I'll take your word for it. So you're out helping your Dad release bottles?'
'No, he and Rob are doing that, and keeping a log of exactly where each one was released. I'm out here to record my observations. Scientifically.'
'And what have you observed, so far? Scientifically speaking.'
'That there are getting to be a truly remarkable number of milk jugs bobbing around out here, but unless they start showing a great deal more enthusiasm, none of them are going to make it to the beach anytime this century. Most of them don't seem to be going anywhere at all. Except for the ones the sheriff is dropping into the current in the middle of the river. They're travelling rather briskly, but they're not coming anywhere near the beach.'
'Oh, the sheriff's involved, too?'
'I don't know whether Dad's convincing him or he's humoring Dad, but yes, he's out in the powerboat releasing jugs. That's why I'm in the rowboat.'
'Rather tedious for you,' Michael sympathized.
'Oh, it's all right. It's peaceful out here, and it's also amazing how much you can get done even in the middle of the river with a cellular phone. And I brought the stationery so I can keep on with the addressing for Mother.'
'Well, come in when you can. With or without Eileen.'
'Roger.'
I had a quiet day, but on the bright side, Barry took off to meet Steven and Eileen for a craft fair in Manassas. Good riddance.
Friday, June 10
I spent Friday in much the same way--bobbing about on the water watching Dad's latest crop of milk jugs. I found I couldn't write invitations after all; the sunscreen smeared them. I'd made all the phone calls possible.
All I could do was fret about the identity of the murderer, if there was a murderer. I resolved that once I was released from my observation post, I was going to go around to question some of my friends and family. With subtlety. The sheriff was about as subtle as a plowhorse.
