Double Bluff

Double Bluff Park,
Whidbey Island,
Washington
October 2010



Double Bluff. It's also something you do in a card game. And it's a lovely name for a story.

The day I visited was cold and windy. I spoke to a young surfer in a wetsuit. He smelled like marijuana. I asked him for directions to the Cottages at Hedgebrook, but he was from Tacoma; he didn't know the island very well. He said he had come to meet his friend and surf.

"I brought this bad weather," he said. "I feel guilty. The surfing conditions were perfect till I arrived."

Long thin line of houses along the coast. Tsunami evacuation route signs along the road. Wind and waves. There has to be a story here.

Probably that was what Agatha Christie was thinking when she published The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930.