By Ed Staskus

   When JT Markunas checked the weather report it looked like the outdoors was going to be in the 20s and sunny. It had been in the 20s and sunny yesterday, too. It was mid-summer. Sitting on a lawn chair outside his rented house in Milton he thought the forecast was like the murder he had been investigating on-and-off the past few months. It wasn’t any different today than it had been yesterday and looked like it wasn’t going to be different anytime soon.

   The difference was nobody could do anything about the weather. The RCMP could do something about the murder. They knew how the woman with the empty briefcase had been killed but didn’t know where or why. They still didn’t know who she was, nor did they have a clue about who might have done it. The more days went by the more it got pushed back in everybody’s minds. It was starting to go unresolved and cold.. Nobody had seen or heard anything the past fall and by the time anybody knew something had happened, winter was over and it was spring. Now it was summer.

   It was a hell of a shame, he thought. Nobody should get away with murder. Murders are often a spur of the minute violent outburst, but what happened in Conor Foyle’s field wasn’t a mistake. It was deliberate. It rankled him to think whoever did it thought they could get away with it. It was usually some poor slob who couldn’t get away with jaywalking. They got locked up. The rich hired somebody to talk their way out of it. They walked away free. JT thought what happened had to involve money, and lots of it. The rich didn’t brandish axes to get what they want. They had fountain pens for that.

   An execution is justice, but murder is injustice. There was no justice in taking the law into your own hands. There was money in farming and fishing, which Prince Edward Island did a lot of. Farmers and fishermen rarely shot each other, or anybody else. At one time lenders got rough when it came to collecting from debtors, but that time was gone. Criminal gangs shot first and didn’t ask questions whenever they were crossed, but there were no criminal gangs like that on the island. There were some with criminal minds. That’s why the force existed. He thought it likely that whoever did the killing was a lone wolf. That meant whoever it was, was likely to keep to themselves. Whoever it was, he was going to be hard to find. JT wasn’t holding his breath. He was a patient man, though. He believed he would get his man eventually.

   It was going to be a tough nut to crack but it was a nut that would have to keep. It was his day off. He tossed his bicycle into the back of his pick-up. The bike was a Specialized Rockhopper, nothing special, but virtually indestructible. It went up and down potato roads and single tracks just fine and rode smooth enough on pavement. Brackley Beach was about 20 kilometers away. He drove there.

   JT parked at the west end of the beach. It was 15 kilometers to Dalvay By the Sea. He was going to keep going another 5 kilometers farther on to Grand Tracadie, stop and stretch his legs, and ride back. Forty kilometers in the saddle would be enough for him. When he started the wind was at his back and the living was easy, until he realized it would be in his face on the way back. He thought he would find somewhere in Grand Tracadie to have a bite and a drink before turning around.

   He rode past the Harbour Lighthouse, some cottages, Ross Beach, some more cottages, Stanhope Beach, Long Pond, and stopped at Dalvay By the Sea. He rode to the front steps, parked his bike, and walked down the sloping lawn to a set of red Adirondack chairs in front of the big house. He was sitting there looking out at the ocean when somebody walked up and asked if he would like tea and biscuits.

   “Make it black tea and butter for the biscuits,” he said. He need not have asked for butter. If there was anything homegrown plentiful on the island, it was homegrown butter. There were enough cows in all directions that everybody on the island could go on an all-butter diet if they wanted to and there still wouldn’t be a shortage. There would still be plenty to export.

   Dalvay By the Sea was a big house and seasonal rooms. Before becoming lodgings, it was only a house. The Gilded Age industrialist Alexander Macdonald, who was an American, built it just before the end of the 19^th century on grounds of 120 acres. The lower half of the house and all the fireplaces were island sandstone. Windmills supplied power and water. He kept horses and carriages and a cohort of grooms to look after them. He and his wife entertained all summer when they weren’t riding their horses and at the end of every summer hosted a lavish dance for the locals. They were like patroons from an even earlier  age.

   By 1909 Alexander Macdonald was dying. At the beginning of that fall he stood on Long Pond for the last time staring at his house. He missed it already. He knew his heirs were spendthrifts and nothing good would come of them or his house. He died the next year. After his children squandered the family fortune the house was sold to the man who had been tending it. William Hughes had asked the family what should be done with the 26-room mansion. They said, “You can have it for the back taxes.” He bought it and all the furnishings for less than $500.00. Fifteen years earlier it had cost more than $50,000.00 to build. The furnishings were gotten during family travels to France and England. They were transported to Prince Edward Island by ocean steamer. Nobody knew what it had all cost. William Hughes turned around and sold the house for a handsome profit. The last owner went broke and sold it to the government in 1938, which turned it over to Parks Canada, which under a concession had been operating it for the past fifty years as a summer hotel.

   JT finished his tea and biscuits, saddled back up, and buckled his helmet. Before he got started, he saw two young women on bicycles going his way. They were noodling it. He rode past them giving them a friendly wave. They waved back. He thought they were both good-looking, one more than the other. He had a job, a house, and a bed, but he didn’t have a girlfriend. His job was the problem. The job was a Catch-22. Most of the women he met who liked policemen, he didn’t like them. Most of the women he liked, they didn’t like policemen.

   There wasn’t much other than houses and fields in Grand Tracadie. He rode as far as MacDougalls Cove and turned around. At first, riding back to Brackley, the breeze was at him from the side. Once he got back on the parkway, though, it was in his face. It wasn’t a windstorm, but it wasn’t a gentle breeze, either. He dropped his bike into a lower gear and plodded on. He rode the bike for fun and fitness. The ride back to his pick-up was going to be about fitness.

   He had just passed Cape Stanhope when ahead of him he saw the two young women he had seen earlier on their bicycles. It almost looked like they were riding in place, although he could see they were peddling. He was thirty-some yards behind them when a red motorcycle went past him fast. He had barely heard the motorcycle and was taken aback when it zipped by him. It was going 140 KPH for sure, maybe faster on a road where the speed limit was a third of that. When it passed the women the rider wiggle waggled his motorcycle at them and flashed away. The women were riding on the shoulder. The one closest to the road got shaky and see-sawed, lost control, and fell over. She bounced, her arms outstretched, and bounced again sideways into the sand. The other woman stopped and ran back to the fallen woman.

   If he had been working traffic enforcement in the Mustang Police Interceptor he could have caught the motorcycle, maybe. It had to be a Japanese bike. They made the quietest motorcycles. He hadn’t gotten the plate, but he knew high-tech when he saw it. It looked new and was probably faster than his Ford Mustang Interceptor. He stopped where the fallen woman was rolling over and sitting up. Her hands and forearms were scraped and bleeding. She had broken her fall with them. Both of her knees were scraped and bleeding, one of them worse than the other. He put his hand on her shoulder and pressed her back down when she tried to stand up. “No, don’t do that,” he said. “I’m with the RCMP. Stay where you are.” He turned to the other woman.

   “Don’t let her get up until I come back. It should just be a few minutes.” Some gulls flew up from the beach to see what was happening. They made a choking ha-ha-ha sound. After they saw there was no food to be had, they flew away.

   He rode back across the bridge the way he had come, turned down Wharf Rd., and stopped at the first deep-sea fishing shack at  Covehead Harbour where he saw somebody working. He telephoned for an ambulance and rode back to the two women. They were where he had left them, except a man and woman had stopped to help. Their Ford Taurus was half on the road and half on the shoulder behind the women, its flashers blinking. The man was Barry MacNeil and his wife Gloria.

   “We saw it happen,” Barry said. “That jackass must have the brain of a paper cup. If he had done something like that on the track, there would have been hell to pay, believe you me.”

   An emergency truck from the North Rustico Fire Department arrived and carried the injured woman away. The other woman went with them. Barry put their bicycles in the trunk of his car, securing the trunk with a bungee cord.

   “I got the address where to take the bikes,” he said  “She’s got road rash all over and there’s something wrong with her leg. At least they won’t have to shoot her.”

   JT stopped at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital the next morning. It was almost new, the biggest hospital in the province, having replaced two smaller and older hospitals seven years earlier. He was told the woman had been treated and released.

   “Is she an islander?” he asked.

   The woman at the desk said, “I don’t know, but she lives here in town.”  An islander was anybody who had been born on Prince Edward Island. The designation was closely watched. When a woman who had been brought to the province from elsewhere as a baby died 90 years later her obituary in the newspaper read, “Woman From Away Dies Peacefully in Her Home.”

   Some said you had to be conceived on the island to make the grade. A boy living in Souris was flummoxed when he found out he might not be an islander, even though both his parents were, and he was born on the island. It turned out he was brought into existence on an impulse in a dark corner of the ferry crossing the Northumberland Strait. “He was not conceived on the island so he’s not an islander,” his uncles and aunts said, their noses out of joint. His parents took the matter to his father’s father. 

   “It all depends on whether the ferry was going away or coming back,” the boy’s grandfather said.

   The fallen bicyclist’s name  was Kayleigh Jurgelaitis. JT got her address and went to work. After he was done wasting his time arresting a teenaged dishwasher smoking pot behind an all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant, he clocked out at the end of the day, changed his clothes, and went looking for the address. He didn’t have far to go. She lived near Holland College. It was a two-year trade school, home to the Culinary Institute of Canada and the Atlantic Police Academy.

   He recognized the friend when she opened the door and she recognized him. When Kayleigh limped out of a hallway into the living room, she was limping up a storm.

   “How’s the leg?”

   “Better than yesterday, believe it or not. I couldn’t even walk. You’re the cop, right?”

   ”Constable.”

   “Right.”

   “So, what happened to your leg?”

   “They said I have a slight meniscus tear in the knee,” she said, sitting down and elevating her bad leg. “I’m supposed to keep it elevated and put ice on it every couple of hours. They think I should be back on my feet in a week or two.”

   “I’m glad to hear it. So long as I have it on my mind, did either of you get the license plate of that motorcycle?”

   They both said no.

   “Neither did I,” JT said. “He was too far ahead and it happened too fast. We might be able to find him, but probably not, except maybe by accident.”

   “If I never see him again it will be soon enough,” Kayleigh said. “I wouldn’t mind seeing him lose his license.”

   “I couldn’t help taking notice of your name,” JT said. “Are you Lithuanian?”

   “Yes and no,” she said. “My mother was Irish, from here, and my father was Lithuanian, from there. I’m half of the one and half of the other. Why do you ask?”

   “Because my name is Justinas Markunas,” he said, explaining he went by JT.

   “I was wondering if I was the only Lithuanian on this island among all the Irish, Scots, and the Acadians,” Kayleigh laughed. “Now I know there are two of us.”

   “Spud Island is immigrants through and through,” JT said. “Everybody here came from somewhere else. I’ve run into a few Jews, some Swedes and Hungarians, not to mention the Mi’kmaqs. There aren’t many of them even though they were here first. I’ve even heard some Asians are thinking of setting up a Buddhist community in Kings County, which will probably make everybody’s heads spin when they do their chanting.”

   Before leaving, pausing at the door, he asked, “Since it seems it’s just the two of us on the island, we should have lunch or dinner sometime and toast our native selves.”

   “I think I might take you up on that,” Kayleigh said. “In the meantime, I’ll keep my eye out for the Tasmanian Devil on two wheels.”

Excerpted from the book “Ebb Tide.”

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, out of the past, a double cross, and a fight to the finish.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication