Something Fishy (5 page)

She'd been sent here because she was a pain in the ass. Well, she'd keep out of their way. As long as she sent in the reports, they didn't seem to care what was going on.

She did.

She stuck a label on the envelope. She was sending hard copy because she only had dial-up at the police house and it wasn't secure. Anybody might have hacked into it; not that anyone in The Shores, besides Ian, could. He was only one who would even be interested.

Other than Hy.

There. She'd done it. Referred, mentally, to Hy by her first name. That ridiculous name. A greeting, not a moniker.

It became quickly clear that no one was watching Jamieson. She had dispatched the envelope to headquarters, and there had been no response – other than the curt, automatic email:
Weekly rec'd.

It confirmed that no one cared what she did on her beat. They'd even let Murdo stay with her, though the size of the community didn't warrant two police officers.

The last official act the detachment had made was to relieve Billy Pride of his duties as a Community Peace Officer. He'd been devastated.

Jamieson wasn't inclined to acts of kindness, but she'd
enlisted Billy to do menial chores around the police house, things that Murdo would have done if he were still there.

Neither of them was obligated to live at the police house, but the fact that it was a house made it convenient. Not quite convenient enough for Murdo.

He'd moved out and was living with April Dewey, the best little cook in The Shores. Half-a-dozen buns had come out of her own personal oven. Six children under twelve, who all seemed to be dangling somewhere off her body most of the time.

Her husband had left her – and no wonder – for his mistress in Winterside, and Murdo had slipped into April's heart, home, and the chair at the head of the dinner table.

April had allowed Murdo to move in when her ex, Ron, had managed to get their marriage annulled. After six kids. It had soured April on the church. Ron didn't have any friends, but he must have known some people in high places to pull off that travesty. She quit going to church, invited Murdo to move in, and started taking the pill. Murdo couldn't understand why. He'd be happy to have more kids.

It should have bothered Jamieson that Murdo was more likely to be seen shingling April's roof than attending to police duties. At one time, it would have driven her nuts. Now she'd wave lazily as she walked by on her beat, breathing in the sweet salt air of The Shores, feeding her senses on the sights before her, the fields of grain or potatoes rolling down to the shore, and the pond – looking like a tadpole – with its tail running across the sand, a stream of fresh water mingling with the salt of the Gulf, while waves thundered up on the shore the day after a storm.

I've turned.

That's how she thought of it, as if it were treason. The truth of it was that The Shores – the village, the land, the sea, and the people – had seeped into her soul.

Chapter Seven

Moira answered her door to a uniformed man with a package
on a dolly.

It was another consignment of slow cookers. Moira had been doing a brisk business selling them in the village. Bulldozing over any objections had been her main sales technique.

“Fragile,” said the deliveryman, his eyes grazing up and down Moira's body. She wasn't fragile. Scrawny. Still – he hadn't had much luck lately, though this was a great business for meeting the ladies.

Moira managed a half-smile, her eyes quickly darting up the hill, as they did at all such opportunities, to check if Ian might have seen her with this man.

She opened the door wide, her eyes alternating from Ian's house to the stack of boxes the man was wheeling in on the dolly.

As he crossed the threshold, she stuck a hand out to stop him. She put newspapers on her floors to keep them clean. She had just lifted the papers to sweep and mop.

“Be careful,” she grabbed the sleeve of his jacket.

Strong.
He stopped pushing the dolly forward and looked back at her.
Not bad-lookin'. A tad white in the face.
Still, his mother had always said that was the mark of a lady.

“The floor.” She pointed at it, but she was looking at him. She flushed.

Now that's better, he thought.
Some colour, that's the ticket.

Moira didn't know much about men, but she did know the difference between Ian's thoughtless indifference and the spark of interest this man was displaying. He had a cheeky look about him, face formed in a smile, a wink always at the ready. His hair was greased into a cowlick at the front.

“Let's put them in the kitchen,” she said, playing her strong suit, taking him to the only room in the house that was homey, especially when it smelled of freshly cooked muffins, as it did now.

He began to push the dolly forward, and she put a hand on his chest to stop him. Now she felt it.

Strong. Yes, he was strong.
She felt a frisson of excitement.

“If you could, possibly, pick them up and bring them through.”

He did as she asked, taking his time, his long, lanky legs strolling in and out of her uninspiring kitchen. It was beige and white, yellowed with age. The linoleum was older than she was, and she was a bit over forty. The counters dated to the same era. They were worn in patches, the swirls of brown, made to look like marble, rubbed off in places by constant application of cleaning product and elbow grease, but otherwise undamaged and scrupulously clean. In spite of its über cleanliness, the kitchen was inviting. The scent of Moira's muffins had seeped into the walls, so that even when there weren't any in the oven, it smelled like there were.

“Cup of tea?”

“Don't mind if I do.” He sat down at the old wooden table, thinking something stronger would be even better. At some of the houses he delivered to, he was offered rum or vodka. Sometimes he was offered more than that. He gladly accepted.

“Muffin?” She pushed a plate forward on the counter.

“If you insist.”

Moira busied herself finding him a plate, still thinking about Ian, about how she might parade this man in front of him and finally win his interest.

She put the tea and a plate of muffins down in front of him. He took off his hat, and extended a hand.

“Frank,” he said.

She took his hand. “Moira.”

Moira now began to order the slow cookers one at a time, and he would deliver them, one by one. The slow cookers had caught on. The villagers couldn't wait to start cooking slow. And Moira couldn't wait for Frank's next visit.

He was quite a catch. Except for the cowlick.

“Slow cookers?” Gus shook her head and wrinkled her brow, dropped a stitch from her knitting and didn't notice.

“Slow cooking?” she said again, to underline her disapproval.

Hy grinned. She'd seen it coming.

“Alls I ever wanted to do was cook fast, and get it out of the road. Cooking's slow enough for me already.”

Hy nodded and sat down.

“Cooking's so slow at my place it doesn't even happen.”

Everywhere else in the village, the slow cookers were placed proudly on kitchen counters beside the little-used microwaves, indoor grills, and sandwich makers.

Moira even bought them for the cottages she was cleaning, including bills with a percentage added for herself, expecting that none of the wealthy cottagers would be so cheap as to reject the offer. She'd make a tidy sum.

Moira was turning into quite a businesswoman. She even purchased a cooker on behalf of the Hall, to Olive MacLean's dismay. Olive was treasurer of the Women's Institute, and as close with the “public funds,” as she referred to them, as she was with her own purse.

But there it was, spanking new, the packaging already distributed in the various recycling bags by Moira, fastidious daughter of a “waste management supervisor.”

The ladies were too embarrassed to say anything. Only one of them had ever returned anything to a store. Gladys Fraser. She had the nerve of a bull to go with her looks. It had been a vacuum cleaner that blew dust all over her living room on its maiden voyage across her carpet. She claimed to the storeowner, a lad she'd taught in high school, that she would never be able to remove that dust. Never, she had said emphatically, the pissed-off look on her face scaring him as much now as when he had been a callow, pimply youth thirty years before.

She got an exchange. And then some. A year's worth of vacuum bags for the replacement machine. When the former student made the offer, he didn't know how many bags Gladys used in a year. A lot. Or at least that's what she'd said. She'd claimed she vacuumed every day and changed the bag each time. Anybody who'd been to her house knew that wasn't true.

She'd had to store the bags in the shed, where, over time, they'd mildewed.

It was one of the few times anyone had ever seen Gladys smile. She made a triumphant return to the village, holding the new machine aloft as she strode up her walk.

“I'm surprised she isn't riding on it,” Gus observed.

Gus wasn't the only one who didn't like the slow cookers. April Dewey secretly disapproved of them, but didn't dare say so. She ordered one from Moira, like everybody else.

She dumped it, box and all, unopened, on the kitchen table. The family had to eat in the dining room for weeks after that, until Murdo picked up a microwave cart to accommodate it. April didn't have a microwave.

“I won't have one of those things in my kitchen,” she'd said, after even Gus had acquired one that she never used. “Sending its rays all over the place, harming the children's brains.” The children were one of the reasons Murdo was attracted to April. Six kids might have sent other men running, but he loved the domesticity.

Even on its own little cart, the slow cooker could not have looked more out of place. It made a matched set with the electric stove that still had a new smell if you opened the oven door. The instruction booklet and warranty were inside, wrapped in the original clear plastic. April's ex-husband Ron had bought it for her, trying to shove her into the twentieth, if not the twenty-first, century. April wasn't having any of it.

She still cooked on a wood range. She prided herself on it, and no one could fault the results. Except, perhaps, the man who'd died in the middle of eating a slice of her heavenly white cake with the thick all-butter icing. He'd died happy, a smile on his face, his hand clutching the cake that even the coroner found tempting.

“She's going to eat him up.” Hy and Ian were on the widow's walk of Ian's house on Shipwreck Hill, enjoying the sun setting in stripes of deep, deep yellow shooting across dark black clouds. An unearthly yellow. Not like any sunset Hy had seen before. The sunsets at The Shores were like that. Different every time.

“That's not very kind,” said Ian.

Hy dismissed his remark with a flick of her hand.

“I'd have said that of anybody.”

“But you did say it of her.”

“Well…yes.” Hy took a sip of white wine, cool and pleasant at the end of a hot summer day.

What had got them talking about Fiona was the sight of her huffing across the cape, carrying a tray of fudge on her way to the dome.

“Batteries. He'll have batteries in there, ringed right around the dome, I'll bet, on the track Big Ed used for his wheelchair. He'll be taking the power from that wind turbine for his house and generating more to sell back to the electric company.”

“Snowball effect.”

“Something like that.”

A shot of late-day sunshine lit up Hy's copper curls. Snowball effect, thought Ian. It didn't seem to work with the two of them. They'd just get going, and something would stop it. Start it again. Stop it. Like at Christmas.

He reached out a hand to touch a stray curl.

She jumped up.

“She's in! He let her in!”

Ian wasn't interested in Fiona anymore. He was wondering if Hy would ever be more than a friend. Once or twice, she had been. He wanted more than a friend, but he didn't know how to tell her. Or how she'd react.

They were single neighbours in a secluded village, so perhaps it was bound to happen.

Newton and Fiona. The odd couple.

For the first time since his lost marriage to Mary, Newton enjoyed carnal knowledge of a woman. No, he hadn't truly enjoyed it, and it wasn't exactly carnal.

He had smothered himself in Fiona, lost parts of himself in her folds and had never been purely happier.

Her breasts thrusting up from her tight V-neck top, so her breasts were squeezed up to her chin. Rolls of flesh appeared below the bottom of the T-shirt, squeezed by a belt hanging with difficulty onto her hip-hugging jeans. There were rolls around her thighs that may have been displaced hip flesh. Her calves were as big as thighs, her ankles so swollen they nearly hid her tiny feet.

She reminded him of the comic book character from the 1950s, Little Lotta, whose fat arms and legs tapered off into a “V” shape. Only Lotta had been a blonde, Newton remembered, and Fiona had black hair. Far too black, nature given a boost.

He'd found his way through her abundance, she squealing like a piglet as they performed a pathetic coupling, satisfying their minds, not their bodies.

Even that didn't last long. Both were soon in tears, after Newton zipped up and Fiona stumbled home. He hadn't been able to do it. And Fiona hadn't felt a thing. She never did. Not that she had the opportunity very often.

She was glad to be wanted at all. It pained her that she accepted so little.

Viola came early, too soon for Anton. He'd hoped to clear Fiona's trailer out of the way before she arrived. As he expected, it was the first arrow she launched after she had removed her white gloves. She wore them summer, fall, winter, and spring, no matter the climate.

She should keep them on, thought Anton, observing the number and size of age spots on hands as small and spare as a bird's claws.

“That will have to go.” She didn't bother to look at or gesture towards Fiona's trailer. It was obvious. She burrowed in her purse and pulled out a cigarette case and a long, elegant ebony and silver holder. She put the cigarette in place and pressed the holder between her thin, bloodless lips.

“I know.” Anton picked up the antique silver lighter from the coffee table, snapped it on and lit the cigarette. She took a deep drag.

“I've been trying, but I haven't been successful so far.”

Viola thought of herself as a tree hugger. She gave generously to environmental and wildlife causes, but didn't hesitate to pollute other people's environments and homes. She smoked everywhere she went, never asking permission.

“Trying is not…” She puffed a huge cloud of smoke out of her mouth and it floated up towards Anton. He dodged it, stopping short of fanning it away. That would have infuriated her.

Outside, the limousine driver who'd brought her from the airport in Charlottetown had all the doors of his vehicle open, using the sea breeze to air it out. It was a no-smoking car, but she'd given him a hundred bucks to shut up and let her do as she pleased. “I would simply die if I had to last an hour without a cigarette,” she'd said, in a tone that implied it was some special skill. As it was, she sounded to him as if she were going to die – blowing smoke, hacking and wheezing her way across the island.

That's what she was doing now – hacking and wheezing, while Anton fantasized she was choking to death. Tears running down red-rimmed eyes, she regained her composure.

“As I was saying, trying is not doing. Have determination, for God's sake.”

“I will do it,” he said.

“See that you do,” she responded. “Or there won't be any more money.”

A familiar refrain.