Mom’s and not ours. She got mad and hardly spoke to me the rest of the time.
“As for the planning of the memorial service, Bruce’s widow and parents were involved, because they felt it should be a joint service, and Mom and Marie didn’t want that. Reverend Campbell had a real hard time getting everybody on the same page.”
“How did the service go?”
“It was a beautiful service, and Toby—there must have been more than two hundred people there. They held it in the school gym because the church wouldn’t hold all the people.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Nobody got to say good bye to either Dad or Bruce; there were no bodies, and that was very sad for me. I just can’t understand. Who would shoot them? And in the back of the head? How could that happen?”
Toby comforted her as best he could. He had no more idea of the how’s and why’s of the situation than Allison did. The whole thing didn’t make sense. Being lost in the vicious storm was understandable if very unlikely for Aubrey Smith to have had happen to him, but that obviously was not the cause of the deaths of the two men, and where was the third member of the crew? Had he done the shooting? If so how had he escaped? And what motive could there have been anyway?
After one last check of the light, the couple went to bed. Toby had done the laundry and cleaning and put things to right after the accident and the tromping around of the visitors. The bed was freshly made up, and once under the covers, the passion that had been held in for a week unleashed itself in their love-making.
Life was not back to normal, but Toby felt that the path was opening.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Liberian-registered ship, the Helen of Troy that had been caught in the storm off Rocky Island had been taken into Halifax under tow. The ship was a small freighter of about six thousand tons, originally destined to the St. Lawrence River port of Montreal until its engines had failed in the fight to overcome the incredibly heavy seas. The cargo was mixed freight from Venezuela, Barbados, Honduras and a couple of other Caribbean stops, not an unusual cargo for that destination. Customs Inspectors were nonetheless curious. They did a thorough inspection of the entire ship, but found nothing they could use to sustain suspicions of unusual activities. The crew were mostly Filipinos and Chinese with a Greek Captain and two Greek Mates.
The circumstance that had really aroused the customs agents’ curiosity was an empty space that could have been occupied by three small-sized containers. The Captain explained the discrepancy by saying that there had been three containers there but they had been filled with sugar and that those containers had broken open in the storm, so they had been tossed overboard before the tug had arrived to take the vessel under tow. Customs Inspectors could not prove otherwise, although they saw no evidence of spilled sugar. That too had brought a ready explanation from the Captain: he had simply had the crew clean up the mess. Again, although the story was suspicious, there was nothing to prove it untrue.
A second circumstance that created questions was the ship’s proximity to shore before the storm. The Captain insisted that the storm was responsible for the way the ship was blown onto a westerly course, a reasonable explanation since the strong wind was from the east. There was no way to prove that his story was wrong. Storms and vessels caught in them do strange things and those not involved cannot explain them, but eyebrows were raised and the thorough search by customs officials could not find anything out of order. All they could do was red flag the Helen of Troy for future voyages to and from Canadian waters.
The ship remained at Halifax for ten days before the engines were finally repaired and it was able to put to sea again to head for its original destination. When it had docked at Montreal, a visitor came on board while the cargo was being