open year-round, and Vern thought that was the secret. They opened in 1993. It was never a gold mine, but they made a go of it.
Vern died in January 2006. Then when Rosario closed in 2008 they lost a lot of regulars who’d clock out of their resort jobs and head to town for drinks. Real estate and construction evaporated in the housing bust, forcing a lot of tradesmen off the island. As the U.S. economy further tanked, everyone—locals and tourists alike—spent less. Belinda had two neck surgeries, two back surgeries, and one on her arm, but she still worked full shifts cooking, waiting tables, and tending bar, trying to keep the business alive. Her daughter, Marion, served as general manager and tried to pull in trade by playing karaoke queen down in the bar.
On August 26, 2008, a package came to Vern’s addressed to Belinda. Marion took one look and called up the vendor. Despite their guarantee that her mom would pass all FAA tests or they’d refund her money, Marion told them Belinda was not interested in Sporty’s Complete Recreational Pilot Flight Training Course. Her mom was not, at the moment, tempted to go
Sporty’s informed Marion that they’d received a valid online order for the six-DVD set from Belinda’s credit card. She replied that her mom didn’t know how to use a “friggin’ computer let alone order something online.” Sporty’s said they’d be happy to give her a refund.
Marion resealed the package and set it on the desk below the window unit air conditioner that cooled her small, cluttered office adjacent to the restaurant’s kitchen. She then went back to handling the hundreds of daily details it takes to keep a restaurant running.
The following morning when Marion arrived at work, her office door was already open. Everything seemed okay at first glance, but then she stepped inside and peeked around the dividing wall that formed a little storage space for office supplies and the restaurant’s safe.
“It looked like a bomb had gone off,” she says. Powder from the cement used to fill the walls of the metal safe was everywhere. A hammer from Vern’s old toolbox lay broken on the floor. Someone had used it and a crowbar to peel back the steel of the safe until the lock gave way. It’d been a major demolition job, very noisy and done on exactly the right night.
Marion felt sick to her stomach. With the rumors of break-ins happening around the island, she’d just convinced her mom to move her personal cash into the office safe instead of keeping it at home. That money was gone, as were two credit cards, Belinda’s birth certificate and social security card, and her late husband’s passport. To make matters worse, the first thing Marion had planned to do that morning was go to the bank and make her weekly deposit of cash emptied from the bar’s pull tab gambling machine. In all, more than $10,000 of uninsurable cash was missing.
The safe wasn’t empty, though.
“At the bottom was a single dollar bill and the credit card that had been used to make the online order,” says Marion. “It was folded in half, creased as if to say, ‘Here ya go, I don’t need this anymore.’”
They called the sheriff’s department. Vern’s had suffered small thefts over its sixteen years, mostly summer employees dipping into the till, but never anything major like this. “We felt violated, raped,” says Belinda. “And then, worse, our police told us we were asking for it… just because we didn’t have a security system.”
In the disorder of deputies coming in and out and still trying to get the restaurant up and running because they couldn’t afford to lose a summer day’s business—especially now—Marion forgot about the Sporty’s package. Then FedEx showed up with another box. This one contained a pair of spy cameras, two tiny, battery-powered, motion-activated cameras designed to be hidden anywhere and record several days’ worth of surveillance video. Like the flying course, the cameras had been ordered a few days earlier using Belinda’s credit card.
“All kinds of alarm bells started going off,” says Marion, who suddenly realized that the Sporty’s package had been taken along with everything in the safe. “Learn-to-fly DVDs, surveillance cameras from a company that also sells untraceable cell phones… and now whoever ordered all this also had a shitload of cash… Hello? Certainly seemed to me like it could have something to do with terrorism.”
Beyond general post-9/11 awareness, the Pacific Northwest remains extra sensitive to the potential of terrorism due to Ahmed Rassem, the Millennium Bomber. In December 1999, the Al Qaeda–trained and –funded Rassem filled a car with explosives intending to blow up passengers at an LAX terminal. He successfully drove through U.S. Immigration checks and onto a car ferry in Victoria, B.C.—a city on Vancouver Island less than ten miles from the San Juans across Haro Strait. The bomber’s plan failed only because a U.S. Customs agent named Diana Dean at the ferry’s destination in Port Angeles, Washington, sensed something wasn’t quite right and searched his car.
Marion took the cameras and her hunch to the Orcas cop shop. The deputy shrugged her off.
“I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “But there was definitely something going on, and I wasn’t going to shut up until someone listened.” So Marion called the FBI. They did listen and took a report, and an agent phoned a detective at the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office headquarters over in Friday Harbor. They decided, though, that there wasn’t much to go on.
Marion kept wondering if she was soon going to hear about a crime or terrorist attack involving a small plane. She and Belinda also had another concern: staying in business. “That money was our winter,” she says, her soft face taking on a hard glower. “We’re not rich. My mom wouldn’t have been waiting friggin’ tables if she didn’t have to.” Marion eventually did make that trip to the bank, but instead of a deposit, it was to borrow enough money to keep Vern’s open and staffed for what looked to be a lean winter.
“And then we had to borrow another fifteen grand to put in a security system.”
Chapter 7
Mount Constitution rules over the entire east side of Orcas Island as the centerpiece of Moran State Park, a 5,200-acre Northwest wonderland of gigantic old-growth trees where mountain streams and waterfalls feed five blue lakes filled with rainbow trout and landlocked kokanee salmon. The view from the tower atop the 2,407-foot- high mountain (named for USS
In 2006, developers drew up plans to slice Turtleback into housing tracts. Full- and part-time San Juan County residents—including cartoonist Gary Larson, who came out of retirement to draw and donate a
The day after someone made off with the Sporty’s flight manuals and all of Vern’s cash, Martin and Ellen Brody (not their real names) returned to their home at the foot of Turtleback Mountain. Wooden stairs, decks, and walkways climb the slope to reach their comfortable single-story that’s partially hidden from the road behind a garden. With their back sheltered by the turtle’s shell, the Brodys face across Crow Valley, the island’s best bottomland. They can even see the small farm they bought when they first moved to Orcas from Seattle back in 1981.
“We’d been to Orcas on vacation and thought it would be the most wonderful place to live and raise a family,” says Martin. “And we were right.”
He hung out a shingle in financial services and became a gentleman farmer. “The rule was we could have any animals the kids wanted as long as they were small enough for me to chase down and tackle. Cows and horses were out, but we had sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens.”
Ellen became a beloved local teacher and spent her free time mastering woodwork. The Brodys kept the farm until their two kids graduated college, then downsized into the home on Turtleback.
“When we sold the farmhouse, the new owners asked for the keys,” remembers Ellen. “We said, ‘What keys?’ We’d never locked the doors in the sixteen years we lived there.”
