Mind Over Mussels

by Hilary MacLeod

  Then, two weeks ago, they were assigned to the theft of twenty-five duck decoys. They did retrieve those – and the snickers of fellow Mounties when they brought the evidence back to the detachment. There were a few “quacks” as well.

  No, she didn’t want any more calls like those. Let it be murder, she thought. A murder that would get her off this godforsaken island and somewhere civilized.

  So she might have been forgiven her first instinct when she saw the two cars entwined on the shoulder of the road. She nearly waved Murdo on, barely able to choke back an order to keep going.

  Of course they had to stop. Check that the drivers and passengers were not injured. Take details. Make a report. Call for help. Put up with the odd looks the group gave her – the white-faced woman dressed kinda funny for a police officer.

  The man in the corner of the living room had been dead for a long time. The intruder who’d terrified Hy was Jimi Hendrix himself – a life-size stand-up cardboard image of Jimi Hendrix playing his guitar. Hy was a sight – soaking wet, laughing, and gulping air uncontrollably when Billy walked in.

  She looked up at the young community officer of staggering height and build. Impossibly young. Ridiculously handsome. Hy wondered if beauty as well as brawn was now required in law enforcement.

  “Billypride.” He said his name as if it were one word – the way he always had.

  Hy was stunned. Billy Pride.

  “How you’ve grown!”

  He frowned. She shouldn’t have said that.

  “Miss McAllister?”

  She nodded, dumb, unable to reply in any other way.

  Billy Pride. A Mountie? No, not quite. She remembered he’d been recently appointed some kind of community officer.

  “Someone is dead?” As he spoke, deep furrows of concern lined his forehead.

  No, not a real Mountie.

  She nodded her head. She wondered how he’d react to the sight of Lord on the sand. She hoped he wouldn’t cry. He had always done that in school. When Hy had come to Red Island as a fresh-faced young teacher nearly twenty years before, all the one-room schoolhouses had been long closed, but the one at The Shores had been forgotten and had stayed open. When officials had finally remembered it, they’d closed it, and Hy had been out of a job. That’s when she’d started “Content,” her website writing and editing service.

  She didn’t need the money really. She had a nest egg.

  “You found the body?”

  She felt unreasonably guilty. Why? She hadn’t done anything, just stumbled across a body and threw up on it. It was those clear eyes, the rosy complexion, his earnest, unlined face. Billy had always looked like an innocent, but he wasn’t. He’d often gotten into scrapes. He tried to stay on the rails, but always seemed to veer off. Maybe it was the lack of a father figure. Billy’s father had taken off as soon as he found out what his wife was really like – impossible to live with. But Billy hadn’t had a choice. At his mother’s beck and call, he’d rebelled with small offences. Underage drinking behind the Hall. Smoking dope. Stealing from his mother’s purse.

  Hy nodded dumbly.

  “I found it,” she mumbled, as if she were the guilty one.

  “Could you show me, please?”

  Hy found her voice.

  “Yes, yes, of course…”

  She walked out onto the deck and into the rain. The wind was churning up the surf and whipping sand across the beach.

  Hy led Billy through the marram grass slicing at their legs, with a delighted Toby panting at their heels, unable to believe his luck at finding two beach-walking companions. Once out of the dune, he pulled into the lead, and, nose down, began sniffing his way to the corpse.

  “Are you sure it was murder?”

  “Sure.”

  “Not an accident? Suicide? Perhaps he took a heart attack.”

  “Not with that great gaping wound in the back of his head.” She pointed, but didn’t look.

  They’d reached the body and Billy saw what she meant. He walked around the corpse, bent over it, his brow furrowed as he examined the wound. He sniffed. What was that on the air? Salt? Yes. Seaweed? Certainly. But something…something…the smell of death?

  No – vomit.

  Hy saw him look at Lord’s leg, covered in what was left of her midnight snack of toast and jam.

  “I threw up.”

  Billy stood up and pulled out his notebook. It was new and blank.

  “Vomit?” He scrawled down a few letters, then stopped. V…o…two m’s or one?

  Then gave up, and wrote “puke.” That would change in the official report.

  “You know the name of the victim?”

  “Lord. Lance Lord.”

  “What kind of name is that?”

  “Well – his.” Hy looked from Billy to the lifeless body.

  They would find out what sort of name Lance Lord was.

  An assumed one.

  It was thanks to Jamieson’s twenty-twenty vision that they didn’t hit the woman standing in the middle of the road. Girl, really. Twenty, maybe. In spite of the weather and her ill-suited clothes, Jamieson ripped out of the cruiser and charged on the tiny girl in a fury. It was really anger born of relief. Relief that they hadn’t plowed into her, coming around that corner blind, on the rain-slicked road.

  “Are you nuts?” She shook her hands above her head as she marched on the poor creature, standing still like a surprised deer hoping to be hidden by its stillness and camouflage – a black rain cape on black tarmac. A lot of people did think Lili Acorn was nuts, some of them her friends.

  The hooded cape was doing a poor job of keeping the rain off the young woman. It was flapping in the wind around her stick-thin body. The hood framed a pale face, nearly as pale as Jamieson’s own. Big honey-brown eyes peered out from the white face, an odd sort of calm in them.

  Jamieson took the blank stare for confirmation that the girl was nuts. She didn’t think about how she must look herself, marching forward, arms raised, shaking with fury.

  The girl didn’t move. Jamieson came right up to her, her face just inches away.

  “What the hell do you think you were doing?”

  Something like a smile, not quite, passed across Lili’s lips. Her eyes flicked sideways toward the shoulder of the road. There sat a bright red Volkswagen Beetle, its emergency lights flashing, a back tire flat.

  Jamieson groaned.

  “You might have got yourself killed,” she said. “All for a flat tire.”

  The beatific expression remained on Lili’s face. She shrugged.

  “I didn’t know how to change it,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do. I had to stop you. Who knows when anyone else would come by?”

  She was right. At the height of tourist season, there would be a stream of cars to the newly discovered “Shores.” Because of the dramatic events at Vanishing Point last year – the deaths and the property destruction, the lobster season shut d dodown – the world now knew about The Shores, and tourists wanted in. Developers were beaming as they counted US dollars and sales figures they hadn’t seen in years. They rhapsodized about their new discovery. “Like Long Island at the turn of the last century,” said one land-grabber. Another had billed it “the last unspoiled shoreline in North America.” The phrase had been used before, but this time it was the truth.

  The provincial head was turned by all the attention, and politicians and their spin doctors got together to re-brand and rename The Island, the argument being there were already others – Cape Breton, for one – that considered themselves “The Island.”

  The powers-that-be chose Red Island, for the colour of its earth. And though the province hadn’t completed the process of legitimizing the name, it had already stuck.

  Yellow police tape was up around the body, fixed to pieces of wood harvested fro
m lobster traps. Billy had tried to make the barricade look professional, but he’d done a poor job. Already one piece had given way and was flapping in the gathering storm.

  So was the tarp Billy had used to cover the body. The gulls had to be stopped from breakfasting on the evidence. Billy wasn’t used to answering calls like this one – “a possibly suspicious death,” he’d termed it, unable to commit himself to the idea of murder here in The Shores. He’d radioed to Winterside and was told again that more experienced officers were on the way. They’d ordered him just to guard the scene, but he had a better idea. Noticing Hy’s camera, he’d asked her to take photographs before he put the tarp over the body. It was a grim job but she did it, taking shots at every conceivable angle, including close-ups of the gash in Lord’s head.

  “What’s that?” she’d asked Billy, pointing at the green in the wound.

  “Maggots maybe,” he said. “Forensics use the presence of maggots to help estimate the time of death, but I don’t know if there’s been time for this corpse to have maggots. Anyway, aren’t they white and squirmy? This is greenish and not moving.”

  He pointed at the corpse. “Maybe pus.”

  Hy turned her head away and shivered at the cold and the graphic talk.

  “Here. Drive home.” Billy held out the keys to the cruiser.

  She darted a look up at the vehicle, covered in red clay, parked outside Lord’s cottage.

  “But…it’s a police vehicle.”

  “Yes, but it’s out of service right now. Take it home, get cleaned up and bring it back.”

  Toby followed her and jumped into the car the moment she opened the door, dragging wet, sandy dog across the driver’s seat, and settled into the passenger seat. As she drove off, Hy remembered she’d left her bag of beach treasures on Lord’s kitchen counter.

  The curtain in Annabelle and Ben Mack’s front room inched open as Hy drove the cruiser up Cottage Lane, and there was someone peeking from every front window in the village all the way home, wondering what Hy McAllister was doing driving a police vehicle, and what had happened on the shore. The usual relay of calls down The Shores’ internet – the Women’s Institute phone chain – had turned up nothing.

  Billy knew what he’d done was not procedure, but he’d been brought up to think about the comfort and convenience of women. He’d learned that from his mother. She was always finding things that he could do for her comfort and convenience.

  No, it wasn’t procedure, nor were a number of other things that were about to happen in this case, for which no one was prepared.

  For now, Billy looked handsome, dutiful, and chilly, watching over the corpse as the storm gathered around him.

  Chapter Four

  Lili was sitting on a mat she’d pulled out of the back of her car. Though her legs were hidden under her rain cape, she was clearly in the lotus position, her hands visible, palms perched upward on the outside of the cape, one on each knee, thumb and middle finger delicately touching, poised to connect with the universe, like a hydro transformer, to bring goodness and light flowing into her. Murdo and Jamieson were kneeling down in the mud at the side of the road, wrenching at the tire of her Bug, trying to get the damn thing off.

  Lili’s face was raised to the sky, soaking in the rain, her eyes closed, her body and her mind untouched by the wind biting into Murdo’s hands, his fingers red and raw. He noticed that Jamieson’s dress was stuck to her body, clinging to her flesh, irritating her. She kept tugging it away. Murdo thought Jamieson was too thin. Much too thin. Needed some filling out.

  “Ommmmmmmm.” Lili hummed from her island of calm, her voice clear and steady.

  “Ommmmmmmm…”

  The lugs on the tire wouldn’t budge. The last thing to touch that tire had been a machine in a factory. Human strength couldn’t get it off, not in the wind and the rain and the rush they were in.

  “Ommmmmmm…”

  “Noooooooooo…” Murdo drew out the sound so it melded with Lili’s chant.

  Jamieson glared at him, stood up, and tapped Lili’s shoulder, bringing the girl’s eyes wide open, startled out of her serenity.

  “Where are you headed?” Jamieson wiped at the mud on the front of her dress. It created a long smear. Her hair whipped around her face in the wind. She grabbed at the ponytail, and with muddy hands, braided it and coiled it into a bun. She had a patch of mud on her face. Neither Murdo nor the girl dared tell her.

  “The Shores,” said Lili, reaching in the back of the car for a satchel that smelled of patchouli oil. The rain intensified the scent.

  “I’m to give a yoga demonstration at the Hall. To the Women’s Institute.”

  “You’d better come with us,” said Jamieson. “We can’t leave you here.” They had tried to summon help from town. Winterside had four tow trucks. One had answered their previous call. Two others had had to answer a call to the train tunnel that joined Red Island to the mainland. There’d been an accident not far from the tunnel. A transport truck had jackknifed, another had plowed into it, and two cars were involved as well. The remaining tow company wouldn’t answer any calls. The owner had taped X’s on his windows at home and business against the big blow. He said there was no way he or any of his lads would come out to The Shores today on that causeway, with its fragile grip on the land. He didn’t want to be victim of another storm surge.

  It certainly wasn’t according to the rules to pick up a hitchhiking yogi, but nothing about this call so far was going by the book. Jamieson thought it still might be her big chance. It might be. She clung to that hope as they headed down the road and around the last curve before the causeway. Murdo had his hands tight on the steering wheel. He was never happy driving in the rain. He looked straight ahead, squinting into the gloom. He was afraid to have his eyes checked. Jamieson, beside him, with her perfect vision, was aware that his was poor, but had no idea just how poor. She wondered why he was going so slowly. Lili, in the back seat, was seeing – what was Lili seeing? A perfect world, not the potholed road. The light of life, not the grim dark sky. The harmony of the universe, not the tension bristling in the front seat between Murdo, eyes crazy-glued to the road and hands to the steering wheel, and Jamieson, wishing she were in the driver’s seat. She liked to be in control. Instead, here she was, in the passenger seat, out of uniform, soaking wet, with a bloody hippie in the back seat. Where did they get it from, this generation? Their grandparents?

  Lili was oblivious to it all, grabbing the chance to meditate, to reach perfect happiness. She was closer than she thought to attaining nirvana, but it would not come from meditation. She was about to meet Nathan.

  Nathan Mack was tossing a five-hundred-pound barbell up in the air with no effort. He was grinning. There were five sets of weights, each heavier than the next, but all weighing the same – nearly nothing. The collection was his latest “find” at Jared MacPherson’s house. Nathan had done what his aunt Gus called “a deal with the devil.” He was staying at Jared’s, fixing up the place instead of paying rent, while Jared was in jail for possession and suspected trafficking of cocaine. The weightless barbells and the literature that came with them had been in the back bedroom downstairs, the bedroom in which both Jared’s parents, one after the other, had wasted away from cancer. Cigarettes. There had been butts in containers throughout the house. They were mostly Jared’s, but in the back bedroom were his parents’ butts, at least five years old. The smell of them had nearly choked Nathan when he’d first gone in, but, under the bed, he’d found these barbells. What a joke.

  Nathan remembered the TV ads from years before. Mind Over Muscle. No fancy or heavy equipment needed. You could build strength with the power of your mind, just like the Vietnam vet who had patented the system. Big Ed Bullock. He was spending the summer here in that weird dome he’d built. Nathan had been twelve when those ads were all over late night TV. Big Ed had made the cover of Business W
eek as “Entrepreneur of the Year” and of Sports Illustrated as “Comeback of the Year.” Not for anything to do with the magnificent football career that had been promised for him, but for his fight back against overwhelming odds when that career – and very nearly his life – had tragically ended. The story of his amazing comeback had won more replays in more media than any of his unrealized touchdowns might have. Like millions of others, Nathan thought Big Ed was a hero. He thought his body was amazing. Nathan had bugged and bugged his parents to buy him a system.

  He shook his head now as he chucked the fake weight on the floor. Hundreds of dollars, it had cost. No wonder his dad had said, “Why buy the system, Nathan? Just pick up nothing instead. That should work.” Ben had tossed him a bag of marshmallows. “Here, use these.”

  His dad had been right, but those ads were enticing – promising the muscular body Nathan craved. Still lean in his early twenties, he’d been a wretchedly skinny boy.

  He’d gotten a kick looking through the pamphlets that had come with Jared’s barbells – and realized it wasn’t a lazy man’s game. The trick was to mentally follow through every millisecond of every motion required to lift a real weight. No one could do that. Or almost no one. Nathan thought of Big Ed. It was the perfect scam. No one could say the system didn’t work – because it was all in the mind. If a customer failed to build muscle, it was he or she who had failed, not the system. Big Ed was proof that Mind Over Muscle worked.

  Just what Jared would go for, thought Nathan. Lazy as an old dog. Mean as one, too. Jared was always looking for the quick fix.

  The house, when Nathan moved into it, was proof of that. Cabinet doors unhinged, or off, in the kitchen. Walls knocked out, joists exposed, bits of plaster and spider webs hanging off them. Doors that had been removed and not replaced. Windows that didn’t shut tight. The projects started in different rooms – floor sanding, plastering – begun and then abandoned.