Bodies and Sole (2 page)

Chapter Two

www.theshores200.com

Across from the hall there used to be a one-room schoolhouse and beside it was Mack's General Store. That went up in flames fifty years ago when a farmer, who will go unnamed, backed into a propane tank. Propelled by the subsequent explosion, owner Abel Mack came flying out the window, landed on his feet and went home to his wife Gus for lunch. He never rebuilt.

Gus Mack had spent sixty of her eighty-five years living at The Shores, collecting bits and pieces of history. There were photographs, press clippings and old, yellowed recipes, and letters and school copybooks spread all over her kitchen floor.

A patchwork quilt, Hy had advised her. Putting together a book was just like a patchwork quilt. It all pieced together.

Gus shook her head, and stuck a knitting needle into her shock of white hair.

She sighed and leaned forward, shoved a few items around with her hands, then leaned back and continued the job with her feet.

“You'll never get that finished in time,” said Hy. “It'll have to be edited, formatted…”

“Don't 'spec so.”

“What do you expect?”

Hy and Gus had gone through this over and over again during the past few years. Hy – offering to help Gus put it together; Gus – resisting all offers to sort it out.

“It” was Gus's history of The Shores – clippings, photos, handwritten anecdotes by herself and others, meant to form a book of a kind similar to those other communities had produced, all organized, typed and printed out, usually by one of the vanity presses. They were bought up, eagerly, by members of the respective communities. Everyone had to have a copy – especially of those editions that contained names and ages and family connections. They quickly became dog-eared, as locals made frequent checks of birth dates and marriage dates, all the small details of a neighbour's life a person could sometimes forget.

Gus looked up from slipping a photograph into a vinyl sleeve.

“I expect that this will be the only copy. None of that editing and formatting and printing. Just what I put together here. Always went that way in the past, and it's the past we're recording.”

“Just the one book? Your book?”

“That's right. They can keep it in the hall someplace.”

“Still, it would be nice if everyone in the village could have a copy. And if they bought it, it would pay for itself and maybe raise money for the hall.”

“It would be nice.” Gus had been trying to decide between two photographs. She chose one, and slipped it into a vinyl sleeve. “But I can't do it. That's it. Maybe if Abel were around more to help…” She shut the album. “Time enough.”

Comparing this book to a quilt was all very fine, Gus thought, but she wasn't having too much luck these days with the quilts. She'd begun a traditional log cabin, because it used up lots of small pieces and she had so many of those. A back porch filled with boxes and boxes of them. Some cut and sorted, some just a thought in her eye.

This book was more like that porch. So many things, some sorted, some just a thought.

Anyway, she'd gone off the log cabin quilt, though it was meant to be a heritage project, a 200th anniversary hanging for the hall. She didn't need that. She was already immortalized in town. “In town” never meant the nearest town, Winterside. There were only two on the whole island but the designation only went to the provincial capital, Charlottetown.

Gus had a true heritage quilt there in the permanent collection of the Confederation Centre of the Arts.

“Ugly as anything,” she always said. It was. She'd made it out of patches provided by her mother-in-law, patches that came from her mother and from generations of women in the family. Practically the whole two hundred years The Shores had existed. The patches weren't pretty. They were mostly from the men's work clothes – dull greys, browns and blacks, threadbare in places, but “serviceable.”

The quilt went in the Charlottetown exhibition the year Gus finally buckled down and “used them up.” The acquisitions curator for the Confederation Centre collection snapped it up the moment she saw it, drooling over its “authenticity.”

“Welcome to it,” Gus had said at the time. “Don't know what I would have done with it, home. Prob'ly have rotted out there on that back porch.”

No, Gus had decided, even though it was a heritage celebration
this year, there could be too much of a good thing, and she wasn't going to make “one of them dull quilts” again.

A crazy quilt. That's what she'd decided. She was finally going to get her head around a crazy quilt. She might be crazy to do it, but that would only be fitting.

It lay on the floor around her as well. Patches and bits and pieces of local history strewn around her purple rocker recliner.

She couldn't make sense of them, nor the book.

She leaned back and closed her eyes and dozed off. Hy slipped out, wondering how she was going to get the book on track for the big celebration at the end of August.

Every time Hy attempted to sort it, Gus messed it up again. It was as if she were sabotaging her own work. But Hy couldn't figure out why.

It was Hy's year to take care of the flowerbed alongside the hall. She hadn't been looking forward to the prospect until she got her bright idea.

She put a flyer in the village mailboxes, inviting all villagers to bring their marigolds to the hall, where they would be planted in a special commemorative flowerbed.

Hy knew she wasn't the only one who didn't like Marlene's landscaping. Marigolds kept popping out of line, until the straight marching lines formed a disorderly platoon.

She made it clear the villagers could keep the marigolds where they were – if they liked their flowers at attention. Gladys Fraser did. So did Olive MacLean and Estelle Joudry.

Moira Toombs also liked them just where they were. She liked the neat orderliness of them. Besides, thought Moira, shaking her doormat on the front stoop, she would be able to see the commemorative flower bed from right here, as if it were in her own garden. She'd have her cake and eat it, too.

And then there was the fact that the job was done. No extra work required, and her with another wedding to plan. The first attempt last summer had fallen through. A man had fallen off the cape right between the matrimonial couple just as they were saying their vows. Time had slid by and they hadn't set another date, but she wasn't going to let Frank get away.

Many of the other villagers found the marigolds inconvenient. They had to be watered and whipper-snipped, and the men couldn't get their mowers around them. The husbands had been threatening to mow them down.

They flocked to the hall to donate their unwanted marigolds to the cause.

By the time Marlene had any idea what was going on, it was too late for her to do anything.

Except one thing.

Mountie Jane Jamieson started every day looking out the picture window from the police house on Shipwreck Hill. She never tired of the beauty of her patch. Jamieson had been assigned to The Shores in a special arrangement with the island detachment because of the number of murders and suspicious deaths there over the past several years.

She'd started out as a tight-assed, by-the-book cop, but The Shores had worked its magic on her, transforming her soul to one that responded to the call of the most beautiful spot on the island.

Perhaps on the planet, she thought. Every morning when she stepped out of the police house, no matter how pressing her duties, she would stop and gaze down at the village, clustered in a circle of amity around the only remaining community building: the hall.

In winter, there would be smoke curling up from the hall and from all the houses that encircled it. Not from wood stoves anymore, but from furnaces, devouring oil and pumping out the heat that the village's aging population required.

Men and women who'd been born in a time when houses were not insulated – except by a bit of seaweed scattered in the attic – had become accustomed to the luxuries the modern age afforded.

Gus liked her creature comforts, too, but she was afraid of the furnace. She would not go to sleep with that monster grumbling in the basement. She'd turn it off, and swear she didn't suffer the cold at all.

People suspected that Abel turned the heat up after Gus went to sleep, and turned it down before she woke in the morning. No one could prove that, because no one ever saw Abel to ask him.

There were only two curls of smoke in the village today. Gus did like to turn on the furnace to take the chill off a spring morning. And there was the smoke billowing out of April Dewey's house, giving the May day the scent of fall.

April was the best little cook in The Shores, and insisted on cooking with her wood range. No one could dispute the results. Not Murdo Black, her partner, who suffered through the dog days of August in the baking heat of April's kitchen, with six children under twelve chasing around the room, yelling and laughing.

Welcome to it, thought Jamieson. She and Murdo had been assigned to watch over The Shores. She wasn't sure how that had happened. She didn't know it had been Murdo's persuasive tactics. He just happened to know about the extramarital affair of a senior officer, and had used it to get Jamieson and him posted together.

In part, it was loyalty to Jamieson. At the time he'd been her only friend. But it was also April. He'd fallen for her and her über domesticity, and now did hardly any police work at all.

Jamieson didn't mind. She'd stroll through the village, dazed by the beauty of the ocean or the sky, the land, or all three, taking great breaths of pleasure in the salt air. She'd pass by Murdo, mowing April's lawn, painting her front door, fixing fallen shingles, and she'd wave, sleepily, a small smile on a face not previously accustomed to that expression.

The phone rang at the police house, interrupting Jamieson's morning reverie.

“A theft. Of what?” She continued to gaze down at the shore, though the voice of the woman on the other end was high and irritating.

“Flowers? Flowers?!” Was it even possible to steal flowers? “What kind?”

A year before, the question wouldn't have occurred to Jamieson. She hadn't been able to tell the difference then between one flower and the next. Now she had a growing collection of pressed flowers stashed away in a closet – her secret hobby. Not a secret to Moira Toombs, who cleaned the police house, and snooped everywhere. She thought the less of Jamieson for having such a ridiculous hobby – when there were the flowers to be seen, in season, in the outdoors, where they belonged.

“Marigolds? Oh yes.” Jamieson remembered seeing them lining The Island Way, the provincial road that ran through The Shores to just beyond Big Bay, then turned around on itself and came back.

Flashes of orange caught her eye as her gaze moved out the window from the shore to the hall, where there were several women fussing around the flowerbed. Hy, she recognized right away. With her friend, Annabelle, the glamorous farm woman who fished with her husband Ben Mack. And some of the Women's Institute ladies coming and going.

Yes, of course, Hy would be behind it. Jamieson sighed. She'd nearly charged Hy for numerous offences in the past, but had never quite been able to do it. But stealing flowers? She'd be laughed out of the village if she tried to pin that on anyone, though the screeching woman on the phone just might drive her to it.

“You're staying at Toombs's?” As if she had to ask the question. As if everybody in the village didn't know Marlene was there, when she'd arrived, how long she was staying, and who her father and grandfather were. Even though she still hadn't bothered to introduce herself to the villagers.

“Well, I suggest you look out the window, or, better yet, go over to the hall. You'll find your marigolds there. And I would say this is not a police matter, but more a matter of taste.”

Jamieson had thought the marching marigolds looked
ridiculous, too.

When she got off the phone with “that annoying woman,” as she would henceforth refer to Marlene, Jamieson picked up her usual routine.

She would stop by Ian Simmons's house, just partway down the hill, and have a chat before she set off on her walking rounds.

Although she wouldn't admit it, even to herself, Jamieson was interested in Ian. She was well aware of his complicated connection to Hy. They were both her friends. They were both her partners, in a way, in crime-solving: Hy, curious, nosy and with odd pockets of knowledge that had been useful. Ian, analytical, a technical whiz and committed Google guy.

It wasn't for those qualities, though, that Jamieson dropped in on him practically every morning.

She told herself it was his intelligence that she found attractive, but she was interested in the man. If Hy weren't going to be bothered with him – which seemed to be the case at the moment – then she would be.

He provided her, that morning, with the perfect reason to keep dropping by.

“Look at this,” he said as she came through the door. He didn't turn, just kept staring at the beautiful glowing iMac screen. He was on a page announcing a free online forensics course at a British university.

Jamieson read the page over Ian's shoulder. On his other shoulder, Jasmine, his parrot, was eyeing Jamieson warily. Other than Hy, Jasmine didn't like women, especially if she could sense they liked Ian.

“Introduction to Forensics,” Jamieson read.

“For-en-sick. Gag gag sick…” Jasmine acted out throwing up as she said the words.

Too clever by half,
thought Jamieson.

“Want to do it?” asked Ian.

Jamieson opened her mouth to refuse. What could it possibly tell her that she hadn't already learned in her police training?

Ian patted Jasmine's head to calm her. “Together? With me?”