Mind Over Mussels

by Hilary MacLeod

  “Never lift a finger to lift weight.” The MOM slogan.

  “Ed,” said Ian.

  Cut to a muscular full-body shot.

  “Not Ed,” said Hy.

  “Right.”

  “Ed. Not Ed. Ed. Not Ed,” echoed Jasmine. She liked it, and started up again. “Ed. Not Ed…”

  “But why?” Jamieson.

  Ian shrugged. “Beats me.”

  All three stared at the image of Lance Lord’s body with Ed Bullock’s head on it.

  “Maybe…” Hy broke the silence, “…the reason for the body double was something Lord knew that Ed didn’t want other people to know…” she paused, leaving time for Jamieson to pick up on it.

  Jamieson’s face creased and then smoothed out as it dawned on her.

  “The land deal.”

  “The land deal. Blackmail?” Hy barely concealed her pleasure at having made the connection.

  “The land deal?” Ian looked puzzled. “Blackmail?”

  “Interesting.” Jamieson’s face revealed nothing. She was good at that. She’d picked it up from her sister, who never let the sun kiss her skin, wore wide-brimmed hats, and rarely cracked a facial expression of any kind. Smile. Frown. It was all the same to her – a façade of cool neutrality. It gave her a sort of hauteur, but there was nothing special or superior about Jamieson’s sister. She just didn’t want wrinkles.

  “Could it have been blackmail?” Hy pressed the point.

  Jamieson didn’t answer. She had to credit Hy with making the connection, but didn’t want to encourage her.

  When the lights came back on, it was a miracle. The Shores was first to have service restored. Jamieson had put pressure on the power company and they’d snapped to attention at her air of authority and mention of murder. The weather improved, too. The rain was coming straight down instead of sideways, and the wind, while still strong, had diminished.

  Jamieson stepped out onto Ian’s front porch. Her foot slipped across the surface, made greasy by the rain, and she steadied herself. The steps, too, were slippery, and she grabbed at the handrail.

  The handrail was still in her hands when her feet flew up from under her and she spun into the air and plunged to the ground. There was a nasty cracking sound and a shot of pain seared her right ankle, twisted at a peculiar angle underneath her.

  “Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry.” Ian, who’d nearly slipped himself chasing down the stairs to try to break her fall. “I should have warned you the handrail was loose.”

  “Loose?” She grimaced and brandished the wood, rotting at one end, several nails sticking out where it had been “repaired” more than once.

  He tried to help her up. She winced in pain, unable to put weight on the foot. Hy came down, and, between them, they got Jamieson back into the house, her arms around them, hopping on her good foot.

  Suki was in the kitchen in Ian’s dressing gown. It seemed to be all she ever wore.

  “What happened?” She was slathering butter on a big wedge of toast.

  “Handrail broke,” said Ian.

  He and Hy took Jamieson into the living room. Suki followed and stood in the doorway, plate in hand, munching on her toast.

  “This better not break,” Hy said, as they lowered Jamieson onto the couch. Like the chair, it was vulnerable to the combined effects of the Red Island climate and Ian’s woodstove.

  “Can I help?” Suki sauntered into the room, chomping on the toast, her lips moist with butter, crumbs falling on the floor.

  Ian looked up, doubtful. So did Hy. And Jamieson. Then she spoke.

  “Not unless you’re a nurse.”

  Suki scowled. “Not exactly.”

  Jamieson looked at Ian. “Maybe Nathan…?”

  “It’s okay. I can deal with this.” Hy bent down and removed Jamieson’s boot and sock. Her grandmother had made sure she took CPR and Red Cross courses. She’d lost her husband and daughter, and didn’t want to lose anyone else, so Hy had been taught to deal with any emergency.

  She felt the ankle.

  “It’s swollen all right.” She pressed it. Jamieson squirmed. Hy pressed again. “Does that hurt?” She looked at Jamieson’s face. It hurt.

  “Too swollen to tell if there’s a break.” Hy turned to Ian. “Get an ice pack – it’ll help bring the swelling down.” Then she turned to Jamieson. “You’ll have to stay off this foot.”

  Jamieson looked rebellious.

  “There may be a fracture.” Hy probed the ankle. Jamieson winced.

  “See what I mean. Don’t put weight on it. Any weight.”

  Jamieson grimaced. Her ankle was throbbing, a deep dull pain, mixed with a sharp stabbing that was like a needle being stuck into it and twisted around. She couldn’t imagine putting weight on it, it hurt so much.

  Ian brought the ice pack. “Brought this, too.” He held out a gauze bandage from his seventy-two-hour emergency kit.

  “I have some crutches at home,” said Hy. She frowned at the smirk on Ian’s face. Hy had broken a few bones herself. “I’ll go get them. You stay here and keep your foot up.”

  Suki pouted and left the room. She wanted to lie on the couch, but Jamieson was

  hogging it. As she passed Jasmine, the parrot hissed. Suki jumped.

  “Shut your beak,” she snarled.

  Hy and Ian knew Jasmine would have something to say to that. She ruffled her feathers.

  “Shut your beak…squawk…shut your beak…bitch.”

  Jasmine always had the last word.

  Gus was still working on a quilt for Alyssa. She had said she wanted it to celebrate her new relationship with Lance, that they were to remarry. She’d offered a good price for it, and sworn Gus to secrecy – a rare thing in a small place like The Shores. Now that Lord was dead, would the woman still want the quilt? Gus was well into it, an ambitious project she’d never intended to take on at her age. She’d done a few of them in her time, and they were tedious, tiny pieces all patched together in an intricate pattern, looping circles together.

  Now she sat in her purple chair, with the patches scattered on the floor around her, wondering how she’d got into this fix. A quilt this complicated she usually did for family only.

  And only for a wedding, not for shacking up, thought Gus. But this was to have been a wedding. Not family, but a wedding. And a good price.

  She yanked at the material, pulling two patches apart. She’d sewn them together backwards so the curves of the circles went in the wrong direction. It was an easy error, but it had never happened to Gus before.

  She must be getting too old for this sort of thing.

  She looked up from her work, and out the window. Hy’s truck going down from Ian’s to the Hall. That Suki woman still up at his house. Gus sighed. Hy should just make it clear to the fellow how she felt about him. It was plain as day to everyone else.

  Jamieson could not stay off her feet on Ian’s couch. She refused to consider going to hospital. What, and leave her case? When Hy came with the crutches, she insisted she could walk to the Hall on them.

  She was persuaded to let Hy drive her there.

  Within minutes of settling in a chair and booting up the laptop, Jamieson had sent Murdo off to fetch Hy back – and bring Ian, too.

  Her eyes were fixed to the screen. She had keyed in Lance Lord, and clicked to a new Google site, dated that morning. She was horrified by what she saw. She had immediately suspected Ian. Or Hy. It was their equipment, after all, that she’d been using.

  When they arrived, she turned the laptop around so they could see it.

  “Who’s responsible for this?”

  The photo of Lance Lord, his brains on the sand, was splashed on the cover of Journal de la Cité, a Quebec tabloid that specialized in bloody crime photos on its front page. In a play on Lord’s name, the headline screamed:
“Le Seigneur est Mort! – echoing Time magazine from decades before: “God is Dead.” There was a white balloon pointing to the sign in Lord’s hand, with a translation of the No Trespassing warning.

  Sales had been brisk. The periodical had sold out by the time Jamieson logged onto the site. Lance Lord had a cult following in Quebec, in spite of speaking not a word of French, and never having set foot in the province. Inexplicably, his fans comprised of young francophone Goths who gathered to watch the show, laugh, call him maudit anglais, and throw popcorn at the screen. This newspaper cover, detailing Lance Lord’s fate, was the perfect ringing down of the curtain for his ghoulish fans.

  Jamieson would not be able to prevent the follow-up cover that the periodical’s gleeful editors planned for the next day, using another illicit shot, and promising to reveal Les Secrets Scandaleuses de la Vie de Melvin Gruber. The most scandalous thing that had happened in his life had been his death.

  “Well?”

  Ian and Hy had been too stunned to answer Jamieson’s question. Besides, they didn’t know who was responsible. They stood, staring at the screen.

  “Melvin Gruber?” squeaked out of Hy. “Melvin Gruber,” she repeated. “No wonder.”

  Jamieson looked up. “No wonder what?”

  Ian slapped a hand to his forehead. “It should have been obvious.”

  “What?” asked Jamieson, impatient, her eyes now on him.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Alyssa opened the box, not messy as jewellery boxes often are, but neatly organized, “a place for everything and everything in its place,” a refrain that had echoed in her mind since childhood. So she knew exactly where it was, tucked in the envelope that also held the appraisal for her engagement ring, a document she held in contempt. The envelope contained another document – a folded piece of paper that gave her pain. She had read and reread it dozens of times since the death last year of her father.

  It was Lance’s death that had made her open the box, to look at the tokens of their life together. She slipped the wedding ring she hadn’t worn since their divorce on her ring finger. Now he would never belong to anyone else. The need to possess had gnawed at her like something chewing on her brain, until, finally, it was put to rest. It was what she had come for. He was hers now, forever. It did not make her any happier.

  She pulled the folded paper from the sleeve of the box, the poem she had discovered amongst her father’s things. She peeled it open, to his beautiful handwriting:

  “In other worlds, I loved you long ago:

  love that hath no beginning hath no end – ”

  Alyssa was twelve again. Her father was out every night. After they had supper together and she went to bed, she’d hear the front door slam behind him, leaving her alone. She’d wake to the sound of that door, opening, closing, comings and goings in the night – not just her father returning home, with someone. There were times when she swore she heard a woman’s voice from her father’s bedroom down the dark hallway. Laughter in the night. An unheard-of sound in that grim house.

  It had ended with the return of her mother, still sick, maybe sicker than when she’d left. But her rages had been brought under control, shocked out of her. She’d spent most days sitting, listless, in the living room. Her presence had come between Alyssa and her father. He had withdrawn, slipped into a morose state, reading poetry in his library. And then there was this piece of paper. Alyssa had seen it before, when she was fifteen or sixteen, snooping in the case in which her father kept his cufflinks, seeking the source of his unhappiness. She’d found this scrap of paper then, not as yellowed, not folded in so many pieces, but the same. This proof of his love – not for her mother, not for her, but for someone else. Someone else had stolen what was hers, hers by right. Her father’s love.

  Now the paper was old, yellowed, decaying. It was coming apart along the folds, age eating at its edges, fraying in brittle bits, like the bitterness that was devouring her brain and stomach and heart. No, not her heart. Nothing could consume that. It had shrunk into a hard, dark knob, a weight with no feeling.

  She read it again, though she knew it by her hardened heart.

  “In other worlds, I loved you long ago;

  love that hath no beginning hath no end – ”

  And then she did something unusual. Normally she would eat bitterness off the page, then fold the paper away again. It represented her father. It also represented his betrayal of her, his love for another. All the rage that had left Alyssa when Lance died now began to boil up in her again. It wasn’t gone. In spite of the red tin foil shrine, the incense, the prayer mat, the photos of bald men all over the room, in spite of her trifling with Buddhist meditation, she was still angry to the core. She crushed the paper and threw it on the floor in a fury of hate – the one emotion still contained in her rock of a heart.

  She kicked the ball of paper, and the love that had no beginning and no end went skittering under the bed, trailing crumbs of flaking paper in its wake. He had loved someone more than her.

  She slammed the jewellery box shut. She whirled around, looking for some object upon which to unleash her hate, carve it out of her. That small hard heart had no room to contain it. It was already full – with envy, bitterness, and greed compressed, on the edge of exploding. Seeing nothing of use, she spun around, back to the box, picked it up, and flung it across the room. There was nothing precious in it.

  Silver and gold chains, stud and drop earrings, small velvet boxes, went somersaulting under the dresser, catapulting to the far corners of the room, scattering to secret places in the cracks of the old board floor, hiding there for years, a trace of Alyssa that would stay at The Shores.

  The paper, the scrap of poem that landed under the bed, was burned into Alyssa’s tortured mind. Envy. His love had not been for her, but for someone else. Her father had loved someone else more than her and it had not been her mother, the only one woman who had been her rival for his affections, or so she had thought.

  She stalked from the room. One small shard of regret at what she had done tried to follow her through the door, but she shook it off.

  She thought of Ed and Leone. Now that Lance was dead, Ed was her focus. He loved her, too. So did Leone. But they were keeping a secret from her. She’d asked Leone again yesterday, but, again, he denied there was a secret.

  She frowned. Then smiled.

  Leone no longer had her ring on the chain around his neck. She knew where it was. If the police found it, they’d conclude he’d done it. He’d admit to it. He’d said he would. Poor Leone. He’d go to jail. And she’d be left with Ed. She had caught Ed’s eye across the room, and made a silent promise to him.

  What was left of him.

  “It should have been obvious Lance Lord wasn’t a real name.” Ian was fighting a desire to scroll down to see what else was on the front page. More about Lord? Some other scandal?

  Hy was resisting the same urge. “I can’t believe I never thought about it, then or now.”

  “Then?” Jamieson was still in the dark.

  “When I used to watch him on TV.” Hy overcame her reluctance to touch the keyboard. She reached over, clicked back to the Google page, scrolled down, and found one of the sites she and Ian had visited. Jamieson looked at it briefly, and then looked up.

  “So Lance Lord’s assumed name wasn’t for the purposes of hiding anything, or himself, from anyone. It was a stage name.”

  “Yup,” said Hy. “And I bet he was glad when people recognized it.”

  “Not many did,” said Ian. “His career peaked at its beginning.”

  “I don’t know why he was so popular in Quebec. He played that part with a really bad accent.” Hy clicked back to the newspaper photo of Lance dead on the shore. Her photo.

  “What part?”

  Ian was staring at the wound in the back of Lord’s head.

  Hy too
k this photograph. She saw this, dead and in person. No wonder she threw up.

  “He played a minor French Canadian character in a popular English Canadian TV series. Not so popular that he was ever known outside Canada, or that people who watched very little TV knew who he was, but he had a small following.”

  Hy stepped on Ian’s toe. He was one of the people who didn’t watch television very much and hadn’t known who Lance Lord was. Now he was the expert. Typical. Pontificating. That was typical, too. And so was the fact that stepping on his toe didn’t stop him.

  “When the series ended, he went on to fewer and less significant roles in TV, film, and stage. Now almost nobody knows or remembers him.”

  “That just changed.” Jamieson pointed at the screen.

  “Melvin Gruber.” Ian shook his head and smiled. “Not macho like Lance Lord. No wonder he stuck with the stage name.”

  “Like he’s clinging to that sign,” said Hy.

  Melvin Gruber would never visit Quebec now, or any other province – until he was flown back in a jar to his birthplace, a small Ontario town – like him, unknown.

  Googling, they found that Lord’s slight notoriety had got him a mention in most of the nation’s major newspapers. He got more column inches because he had been murdered. If he had merely died, he’d have been buried on the back page.

  The fact that someone had taken a shot of Lord’s body on the beach added to the hype. Mainstream newspapers wouldn’t print the photo, and denounced papers that did, but provided detailed and very graphic descriptions of the image that sent their readers hunting the newsstands for the sleazy tabloid.

  Jamieson had been sidetracked. She looked up sharply at Hy, accusation in her eyes.

  “Yours?”

  “Obviously,” said Hy. “You’ve seen it.”

  Jamieson continued to stare, lips pressed tightly together.

  “You don’t think I had anything to do with this?”

  “Did you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “And why should I accept that? You didn’t sell it to them?”