By Ed Staskus

   JT Markunas was assigned to the Queens County RCMP detachment.  He routinely patrolled the north coast of Prince Edward Island. He didn’t mind pulling duty in a police pursuit vehicle. He didn’t mind the car he had drawn today, either. He could have done without the blue velour interior but he liked everything else about it. It was plenty fast enough. It was a Ford Mustang Police Interceptor.

   He had rented a two-bedroom farmhouse in Milton. It was small but the appliances had been updated and it sported a new roof. He planted a root garden. His parents were pleased when they saw the photograph of beets, turnips, and carrots that he mailed them. JT was from Sudbury, Ontario and Prince Edward Island was his second assignment since joining the force. His first tour of duty had been at Fort Resolution in the Northwest Territories. He missed his hometown but didn’t miss Fort Resolution.

   When he was growing up, the Canadian Pacific hauled ore on tracks behind the family house on Stanley St. in Sudbury. When he was a boy, astronauts from the United States trained for their moon landings in the hinterland, where the landscape resembled the moon. After he grew up, he trained for the RCMP at a boot camp in Regina. He was surprised to see women at the camp, the first ones ever allowed on the force. They kissed the Bible and signed their names, like all the recruits, and wore the traditional red serge when on parade, although they wore skirts and high heels and carried a hand clutch, too. 

   He was sitting in his Police Interceptor under a sky that had opened up that morning. Even though Ford had built more than 10,000 of them since 1982, the RCMP had only gotten 32 of the cars. He had one of the two on the island. The car’s motto was “This Ford chases Porsches for a living.” There were lights on the roof, front grille, and rear parcel shelf. He was in Cavendish, on the other side of Rainbow Valley. He was watching for speeders, of whom he hadn’t seen any that morning. He was thinking of stopping somebody for whatever reason, if only to justify the pursuit car. He was also thinking more seriously about having a second cup of coffee, but was waiting until he started yawning. He thought it was going to happen soon. When it did, he would 10-99 the radio room and take a break from doing nothing.

   Cavendish was Anne’s Land. It was where Lucy Maud Montgomery’s book “Anne of Green Gables” was set. He had never read the book, but doubted it had much to do with what he could see in all directions, although the amusement park across the street was named after her book “Rainbow Valley.” It featured waterslides, swan boats, a sea monster, monorail, roller coasters, animatronics, castles and suspension bridges, and a flying saucer gift shop. The paratrooper ride might have been everyone’s favorite, at least if they were children who didn’t know what fear meant.

   Earl Davison, the man behind Rainbow Valley, had been looking for a roller coaster when he found the paratrooper ride. He was in Pennsylvania searching for a bargain at a park that had gone bust. Their coaster seemed to fit the bill at first sight. “It’s a terrific ride, but you’ll need to have a good maintenance team to keep ’er running,” the Pennsylvania man said with unexpected candor.

   When Earl hemmed and hawed, the man suggested his paratrooper ride instead. “It’s the best piece of equipment I have. I will sell you that for $25,000 and we’ll load it for you.” By the end of the next day Earl had written a check and the ride was ready to go for the long drive back to Prince Edward Island. He flipped a coin about it fitting on the ferry. The coin came up heads.

   Earl dreamed up Rainbow Valley in the 1960s, buying and clearing an abandoned apple orchard and filling in a swamp, turning it into a pond. “We borrowed $7,500.00,” he said. “It seemed like an awful lot of money at the time.” When they opened in 1969 admission was 50 cents. Children under five got in free. Ten years later, he bought his partners out and expanded the park. Most of the attractions were designed and fabricated by him and his crew.

   “We add something new every year,” Earl said. “That’s a rule.” The other rule was launching smiles on the faces of children. “Some of the memories you hear twenty years later are from people whose parents aren’t with them anymore. But they remember their visits to Rainbow Valley and that lasts a lifetime.”

   When his two-way radio came to life, instructing him to go to Foyle’s Cove to check on the report of a suspicious death, JT hesitated, thinking he should get a coffee first, but quickly decided against it. Suspicious deaths were far and few between in the province. Homicides happened on Prince Edward Island once in a blue moon. If it was a homicide, it might be his only chance to work on one. When he drove off it was fast with flashing lights but no siren. He reported that the address was less than ten minutes away. 

   Conor Foyle saw the Police Interceptor pull off the road onto the shoulder and tramped down the slope to it. Some people called the RCMP the Scarlet Guardians. Conor called them gavvers. JT put his cap on and joining Conor walked up to where Bernie Doiron was waiting beside the tractor. When he saw the arm handcuffed to the briefcase, he told Conor and Bernie to not touch anything and walked back to his pursuit car. He wasn’t sure what code to call in, so he requested an ambulance and asked for the commander on duty. He described what he had seen and was told to sit tight.

   “Yes sir,” he said.

   It wouldn’t be long before an ambulance and more cars showed up. They couldn’t miss his Mustang, but he turned the lights on top of it back on just in case and backtracked to the tractor.

   “Who found this?” he asked, pointing at the arm. 

   “I did,” Bernie said

   “Is it the same as you found it?” JT asked. “Did you move or disturb anything?”

   “No, we left it alone,” Bernie said. 

   “And you are?” JT asked Conor.

   “I’m across the street in the green house,” Conor said. “These are my fields. Bernie was plowing. He came down and got me when he found this. A fox has been at the arm.”

   “I see that,” JT said, even though he didn’t know what had happened to the arm. He rarely jumped to conclusions. The arm was flayed and gruesome, whatever had happened. He wasn’t repulsed by it. He was patient and objective. The quality that made him a good policeman was that he was patient. He waited alongside Conor and Bernie for backup resources to show up. None of the three men said much of anything..

   JT looked at the ground around him. It was ready for the growing season. There was no growing season where he grew up. Farming had been blighted by smelting. His father had worked the nickel mines in Sudbury his whole working life, never missing a day. He had been an explosives man and made it through his last year, last week, and last day unscathed. He had always known there was no one to tap him on the shoulder if he ever made a mistake.

   His mother raised four children. She dealt with powder burns every day. The family was among the few post-war Lithuanians still left in Sudbury. The rest of them had worked like dogs, scrimping and saving, leaving for greener pastures the first chance they got. His parents put their scrimping and saving into a house on the shore of Lake Ramsey and stayed to see Sudbury transition from open pit roasting to ways and means less ruinous to the land they lived on.

   An ambulance from a funeral home in Kensington was the first to arrive, followed within minutes by two more RCMP cars. A rescue truck from the North Rustico Fire Department rolled to a stop, but there wasn’t anything for the volunteer firemen to do. They thought about helping direct traffic, but there was hardly any traffic to speak of. The summer season was still at least a month away. They waited, suspecting they were going to be the ones asked to unearth the remains. They brought shovels up from their truck and leaned on them.

   A doctor showed up, as well, and bided his time, waiting for a commissioned officer to arrive. When he did there were two of them, one an inspector and the other one a superintendent. They talked to JT briefly and then to the fire department. The firemen measured out a ten-foot by ten-foot square with the arm in the center, pounded stakes into the ground, demarcated the space with police tape, and slowly began to dig, opening a pit. They had not gotten far when the arm fell over. It had been chopped off above the elbow. One of the firemen carried the arm and the briefcase to a gray tarp and covered them with a sheet of thick translucent plastic.

   “Has anybody got a dog?” the inspector asked.

   Many of the firemen farmed one way or another. Most of them had dogs. One of them who lived less than two miles away on Route 6 had a Bassett Hound. When he came back with the dog, he led him to the pit. The hound sniffed around the perimeter and then jumped into it, digging with his short legs, barking and looking up at his master. The fireman clapped his hands and the dog jumped out of the pit.

   “There’s something more there,” he said. “Probably the rest of him.”

   They started digging again slowly and steadily. When they found the rest of him twenty minutes later and three feet under, he was a woman. She was wearing acid wash jeans and an oversized tangerine sweatshirt. She was covered in dirt and blood. One of her shoes was missing. What they could see of her face had been ruined by burrowing insects and worms. She was decomposing inside her rotting clothes. The doctor stepped up to the edge of the pit with the two men who had come in the ambulance. “Be careful, she’s going to want to fall apart as soon as you start shifting her weight,” he said. 

   The two men were joined by two of the firemen. When all four were astride the dead woman they carefully moved her into a mortuary bag, zipped it up, and using the handles on the bag lifted it up to two constables and two more of the firemen. They carried the bag slowly down the hill, the dog following them, placing it on a gurney and inside the ambulance.

   The two constables went back up the hill to join the rest of the men, who were getting ready to sift through the pit looking for evidence. They would scour the ground in all directions, to the tree line and the road. JT had gotten his Minolta out of the trunk and took photographs before and during the excavation. When he was done, he joined the others. They spread out and with heads bowed started looking for anything and everything.

   The ambulance was ready to go when Conor came down to the shoulder of the road. He stopped beside it and tapped on the driver’s side window. When the driver rolled it down, Conor pointed up the slope.

   “Don’t forget the arm,” he said.

Excerpted from the book “Ebb Tide.”

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio 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