COFFIN COVE a gripping murder mystery full of twists (Coffin Cove Mysteries Book 1), JACKIE ELLIOTT [most recommended books txt] 📗

Pipe Dream. Not today, though. As Harry waited for his coffee, dark clouds obscured the late winter sun, and the first fat drops of rain splashed down the windows.

Harry sighed. He was used to bone-chilling wind and relentless rain, but today marked thirty-five straight days of rain, and even he was getting cabin fever.

Harry took up a lot of space in the tiny galley. Over six feet and nearing 300 pounds of solid muscle earned working on fish boats for his entire adult life, he looked as though he would be clumsy in such a small area. But he was used to confined spaces and knew that the secret to avoiding chaos was efficiency and organization. Everything in the galley had a use, and everything had its place.

He ran his fingers through his shock of greying curls and examined his beard in a cracked mirror above the tiny sink. It was also showing signs of salt and pepper. Even this early in the year, Harry had a weathered tan. He had inherited his father’s dark skin.

Harry felt most comfortable on a boat. His happiest memories were with his father, Edward, on their tiny wooden trawler, leaving the dock before the sun rose, the smell of coffee on the old oil stove, and a day of jigging cod and pulling prawn traps. That was before the booze ravaged Ed’s body and mind and left a spiteful whining husk in place of the laughing hulk of a man, with long dark hair and warm brown eyes that charmed many a barmaid over the years. Harry preferred to remember Ed that way. The smell of the coffee always took him back to that happy place.

Fishing was in Harry’s blood, even though his father liked to remind him they weren’t a fishing family.

“You’ll never make it. Those people will step all over you. It’s a pipe dream, son, go logging.”

Harry had left school and gone to work on a fish boat when he was fifteen. The first summer he practically worked for nothing. His skipper, Lloyd, took him on only because a deckhand had quit, and he needed another body. He screamed orders at Harry all day long, had him running here and there, cleaning, sorting, sweeping, mending nets and cleaning out the one toilet that seemed, miraculously, to get plugged with shit every day.

But Harry wanted to learn, and when all the other deckies were snoring on their bunks, he snuck up to the wheelhouse and sat with Lloyd, learning how to read the charts and the tides. He soaked up knowledge. And saved every penny he could.

Three years later, he made a down payment on his own boat, and Lloyd co-signed for the loan. Harry remembered picking up Ed and taking him down to the dock to show him the tiny vessel, piled up with second-hand prawn traps, and rope and equipment that Lloyd let him take from his net sheds.

“See, Dad? I told you I could do it!”

“You fucking idiot,” Ed sneered at him. “You’ll be selling that before the season’s out, and you’ll be broke.” He turned and walked away.

Eighteen-year-old Harry had wiped away the last tears he would ever cry over his father and gone fishing. He did sell the boat. He traded up for the Pipe Dream a few years later.

Harry had stopped being angry at his father as he watched good men, great fishermen, beaten down by booze, and sometimes drugs, over the years. He forgave Ed finally, and dropped off a few fresh prawns and salmon now and then to the rundown trailer that Ed moved into when Greta, Harry’s mother, had finally had enough of the drinking and left, taking Harry’s baby sister with her.

Harry sat at the galley table with his coffee and let his mind wander back to the golden years of fishing, indulging himself with memories of the glory days.

And it had been like a gold rush back then. Fresh seafood from the pristine Canadian waters suddenly became a prized commodity in Japan. Buyers arrived in their chartered jets, with their slick suits, immaculate shoes and briefcases full of cash, in return for the finest sashimi-grade seafood in the world.

With cash came trouble.

Harry recalled sitting at his galley table doling out hundred-dollar bills to his crew with a loaded shotgun resting by his side. Mugging was a common occurrence in Coffin Cove. Drunk deckhands with their pockets full of cash in between openings were easy pickings for the drifters and grifters who always seemed to blow in wherever they thought there was easy money to be had.

Coffin Cove was a lot less sleepy then, Harry remembered. The rain had let up enough for Harry to take his second cup of coffee out to the deck, and from there he watched the trickle of trucks congregate in the Pulp Mill parking lot for the shift change. In the eighties, the Pulp Mill employed 2,000 men, and there were a hundred purse-seiners and gill-netters jostling for position at the docks. The fish plant was heaving with tons of product being processed and flash-frozen every day, and anyone who had any kind of trade experience was sought after and paid handsomely.

Young men graduated (or not) from the now boarded-up high school and either walked into a job at the mill, or down to the docks.

Harry looked around.

Twenty, maybe thirty boats? Sporties in among the commercial guys. The fish plant was boarded up, the warehouses derelict. These days, the boats unloaded further up the coast or in Vancouver. The small fish markets were gone. Instead of multiple buyers vying for their product, the fishermen had to take the price on offer — which often barely covered fuel and expenses. Quotas and licenses had been bought up by major corporations and they could screw down the prices because they owned the quotas, the processing plants, even