Free The Mountains Bow Down by Sibella Giorello Page B

parents are on the cruise with us.” She sighed. “His dad got some convention going on, something to do with his matchsticks.”
    â€œThe phillumenists?”
    She looked up, surprised. “Yeah, them phillum-a-whatevers. But Sandy wanted his mom to see Alaska before she loses all her marbles.” Larrah pointed to her head. “She’s got that old-timer’s thing, where she can’t remember anything? I told him she’d be trouble. Sure enough she locked them out of their room and lost his dad’s wallet on our first day. The first day! We hadn’t even left Seattle. I told him to leave her there with somebody, but does he listen to me? No. All I hear is, ‘Laurrie this and Laurrie that.’” Wiggling back against the hot tub jets, she stretched out her long neck. “I want to play an FBI agent. It seems exciting.”
    I turned, staring into the penthouse. A half-dressed Sandy Sparks was racing across the cabin carrying his shoes and socks. Within seconds he was out the cabin door, into the hallway.
    â€œSee what I mean?” his wife said. “He didn’t even tell me good-bye.”

Chapter Seven
    T hat afternoon, as the tourists came streaming back to the cruise ship, I swam against the current like a spawning salmon, walking along Front Street, where the road literally ended at the water. Abandoned crab pots dotted the rocky beach, the scent of rust rising in the warm sun. Farther out, fishing vessels chugged for the marina and seagulls circled, calling out for dinner. On one prow, a burly man in hip waders threw a line to a man on the dock. He kneeled, knotting the rope to a steel cleat.
    I thought of Judy Carpenter’s rope.
    Whoever killed her picked an ideal location. Far from the captain’s bridge at the other end of the ship. No cabin windows. No security cameras. And that bracelet. I wasn’t sure what those gems were, except that they looked valuable—but valuable enough to cost Judy Carpenter her life? And I wondered why it was left behind.
    Lifting a hand, I shielded my eyes from the sun that refused to fade. No planes crossed the sky. I checked my watch. Thirty-five minutes. If he wasn’t here in thirty-five minutes, the ship would leave without him.
    Please .
    I climbed down from the pier and walked the coarse sand beach. Afternoon high tide was creeping up the shoreline, darkening the green sand until it looked black. Geologists have a term for the places where certain rocks or rock formations are initially discovered. It’s called “type locality,” and Ketchikan’s was a relatively recent volcanic basalt called the Gravina Belt. With heavy deposits of chlorite and epidote, two green minerals, the basalt produced beaches of dark sand. I pulled away the ribbons of rubbery sea kelp and dug my bare hands through the coarse sand. My hike was gone but there was still time to find some type locality samples for my rock collection. I rinsed the best candidates in the tide, the ocean so cold my fingers went numb. Later I couldn’t say where the time went, but my daydreams were shattered by a sound like a faraway buzz saw.
    I looked up. The wind blew my hair across my eyes, but I saw the plane turning sharply within the steep and narrow channel, then dropping through the air until the pontoons splashed on the glittery water.
    The window behind the rotating front blade was dark.
    The man who caught the rope earlier walked to the outer birth, waving in the plane and directing it to the outer bumpers. The plane taxied for the dock, where the man tied it. I held my breath as the cab door opened.
    Looking like an aviator sent from central casting, Jack Stephanson stepped out wearing a brown bomber jacket, Ray-Ban sunglasses, two days’ scruff of beard, and a smile that competed with the sun. He tossed a canvas duffel bag on the dock.
    And everything seemed to hurt. Even my feet. I looked down.
    The water had risen over