Misery Bay: A Mystery Read Free Page B

sprouted on seemingly every headland with a view.
    The Germans were coming.
    In the past decade, German tourists had discovered Nova Scotia with a vengeance and were about as excited as Columbus must have been upon sighting Hispaniola. Like most of Europe, Germany had virtually no wilderness. As a result, her citizens were completely gaga over the rocky, remote, and—best of all—cheap oceanfront property to be had just a short flight across the big puddle. Already they had bought up every available yard of coastline from Yarmouth to Halifax. Now they were beginning to move farther up the Eastern shore. Even Misery Bay was getting in on the act. A developer had bought up several headlands sticking out into the ocean, run a gravel road out to the end, and put up lot numbers and For Sale signs. Sixty thousand dollars for a few acres and a rocky spit.
    The real estate boom seeped up from the south like a poisonous red tide. Paradise, the slick brochures promised; magnificent, windswept forests sweeping down to rocky coastlines. Well-to-do Germans bought it hook, line, and sinker. Invariably, the lavish advertisements showed sparkling sunshine and swimsuited revelers everywhere.
    It was all a lie. Oh, it was beautiful enough, if you liked that sort of thing, but sunshine on the Eastern shore could be as elusive as a snowfall in the Sahara. Heavy coastal fog and a cold rain sometimes set in for weeks at a time during the summer months. The water was a frigid fifty degrees in August. Garrett had once encountered a bewildered, bikini-clad German woman on a beach south of Halifax on a hot July day. As he passed her, she said in halting English: “Summer is late coming this year, yah? The water—she is very cold.”
    He hadn’t had the heart to tell her that this was the best it would ever get. She’d have to buy a wetsuit if she wanted to swim.
    Ten miles from Misery Bay, he began to pass people he knew. There was only the one road and everyone traveled it in one direction or the other every day. He recognized Dwayne Stewart’s red hair as his old classmate drove by in his small car. Then Lissa Publicover passed driving her father’s Nova Scotia Power truck. Next came a blue pickup he recognized immediately as belonging to Roland Cribby, one of the neighbors of the old Barkhouse homestead.
    No one returned his wave. He hadn’t been down this stretch in six years and had lost his membership card. Might as well have been a German tourist. He’d insisted to Tuttle that he didn’t want to arrive in a police car, so he drove his own nondescript blue Subaru. Another part of the deal was that he would continue to operate out of uniform. “Get me in practice for being a civilian,” he’d explained, “and I can operate at least a little bit undercover.”
    “Hard to establish a police presence,” Tuttle had fumed, “if no one knows who the hell you are.”
    “Humor me,” Garrett had said. “Word will get around.”
    In the center of town, easily missed if one drove over thirty miles an hour, he pulled in to the tiny grocery store. Perched at the edge of the sea, it had a rickety dock sticking out the back into the ocean. Last he knew it had been purchased by an Iranian couple who lived above the store with their two children. One family member or another was on duty from six in the morning until ten at night. He paused outside to admire an enormous bush of pink roses. The flowers grew wild all over the province and bloomed riotously in July.
    Inside, the shelves were barren as usual. No fresh fruit or vegetables. There were canned goods, white bread, racks of potato chips and candy bars, a cooler with whole milk only and soft drinks. Behind a makeshift counter in the back, pizza and hoagies were offered. A slender, olive-skinned girl of perhaps fifteen worked the oven. She stared at Garrett with haunted eyes, as though she could already see the entire rest of her life stretching out before her.
    The man standing at the