Hy wondered why she was now being included in police business. She didn’t realize it was to be another thank you from Jamieson.
“I’ve come to make an arrest.”
Ian looked puzzled. Jamieson was at his front door, with Hy and Murdo behind her. She came right into the living room. He and Suki were sitting on the couch having a morning coffee. He looked in question at Hy. She shrugged and opened her eyes wide to let him know she had no idea what Jamieson was talking about.
“Arrest?” he said. “For what?”
Jamieson turned to Suki.
“I’m arresting you for the murder of Lance Lord.”
“What?” Hy, Ian, and Suki spoke in chorus.
Just the sort of sound Jasmine loved.
“What?” she added.
“But – ” Hy looked confused. “Alyssa confessed.”
“And she was telling the truth, what she thought was the truth. She did try to kill him, but Miss Smythe beat her to it.”
“How?”
“You got me thinking, when you told me about the mussels.”
“The mussels?” Ian looked confused.
“What’s that got to do with it?” Hy was confused, too. It was hard to read Suki’s expression, as if she were waiting to see how she should react. That wasn’t lost on Jamieson.
“It was paralytic shellfish reaction. That’s what killed him. Not the blow to the head.”
“Para – what?”
Jamieson pointed at Suki.
“She stuffed a lobster in his head. There was tomalley in the wound. I’m betting he was allergic and she knew it.”
“And that’s what killed him?”
“In the immediate, yes. He was dying from the head wound – no doubt about that – but what killed him, almost instantly there on the sand, was the tomalley. I’m sorry I doubted that you’d seen a lobster stuffed in his head.”
Hy shook her head. First jokes, then thanks, and now an apology.
“Suki, you didn’t – ” Ian had gone white.
Suki’s head dropped.
“But I never meant to – ”
“Then you shouldn’t have done it.”
“It was just…I was angry…”
“Angry enough to kill?”
“No. No, not really. He was already dead.”
“Apparently not.”
“But Alyssa is still the real killer.” Ian laid a hand on Suki’s shoulder.
“Technically, no.”
“Morally, yes.”
“Perhaps. But this is how I see it. Lord went out to confront MacAdam. You – ” she pointed at Suki, “ – got tired of waiting for him. You found him lying on the sand. Dead? No, not quite. You heard a low moan. Something that told you he was still alive. You wondered – worried – that he might survive this. That you might be expected to care for him if he does. A drooling idiot in a wheelchair, like Ed. No, you decided. You realized you had a weapon in your hand, his allergy. You were finishing off your lobster, and then you used it to finish him off. If he wasn’t already dead, he soon would be, and you stuffed that lobster in his head, knowing it would kill him.”
Suki looked horrified.
“No. No. That’s not how it happened. I was angry, I admit, but…”
Jamieson made a quick, almost imperceptible signal to Murdo. He handcuffed Suki, almost before she knew what was happening. They worked well as a team.
“I don’t believe in allergies. I didn’t know what I was doing…”
“Save it,” said Jamieson. “The Crown will argue that you knew precisely what you were doing – making sure he was dead.” That was what the mussel chowder was all about. The final pieces of the puzzle were fitting together.
It had been a long case. First no body, then no suspect, then too many. Then dead suspects. And now this thin thread on which she hanging the case. She might be wrong, but she didn’t think she was. Even so, she suspected she wouldn’t get a clean murder conviction out of it.
All the bounce went out of Suki as Jamieson led her out of the house. And with the bounce went her beauty. She sagged into her age, her body deflating like a balloon slowly losing its helium, taut skin puckering, shiny swollen membrane becoming soft and thickened. The transformation happened right in front of their eyes. Hy and Ian watched out the front window as Jamieson helped Suki into the back seat of the car. She stared back at them out the back window. Pale, pathetic, every year her age. Ian wondered what he’d ever seen in her. So, of course, did Hy. And Jasmine.
“Silly bugger,” she said, unlatching her cage door, flying out and landing on Ian’s shoulder. Her beak caressed his cheek.
“Bloody silly bugger,” echoed Hy. “You slept with a murderer.”
“I believe you mentioned that before.”
“And do you think she tried to kill you, too? With the mussels?”
“Just an honest mistake,” he said.
“Maybe a subconscious mistake? A Freudian soup?”
“Well…”
“Well what?”
He hesitated.
“She did say she didn’t believe in allergies.”
Hy’s eyes shot open.
“She was setting you up.”
“Her alibi…,” he said slowly.
“Twice over. Bet she asks you to testify on her behalf in court…that she doesn’t believe in allergies.”
“Well…”
“Well, you know it’s true… Ian, you slept with a killer.”
“Guess so,” said Jasmine. “Killer. Guess so.”
“Well,” Ian winked. “The sex was certainly killer.”
“Sure,” said Hy. “Just muscle over mind.”
“Muscle over mind,” squawked Jasmine.
It would be a long time before either of them would let him live it down.
“Alyssa confessed to all of it. Lord. MacAdam. When they restrained her, she demonstrated it.” Jamieson was back to The Shores the next day to wrap up the case. She was having tea with Hy and Ian. On duty.
“Her strength?” Hy rubbed her still-bruised shoulder.
“Yes, but it wasn’t enough to overcome four beefy orderlies. And then she broke down, and admitted how she’d tried to put the blame on Leone, and how he’d agreed to shoulder it for her.”
I did it for her – that’s what he said. Not the killing but agreeing to take the blame. “I thought so,” said Hy.
“That’s what the footprints in the sand in that photograph of yours were about. Covering her tracks. He followed in her tracks. She got him to put his fingerprints on the axe, placed the ring by the body, just like she told you. Then she drew attention to it so suspicion would fall on him.”
“What about Suki?” Ian asked.
“She’ll get Lord’s money. There’s a lot of it.” Lord had been as close with his cash as he’d been with his land. He’d made steady investments with half the money he earned. He was worth millions, something neither of his wives had known.
“That kind of money will pay for an acquittal.” Jamieson’s expression turned sour.
Hy was finding victory bitter. She had been right about Suki; Ian had been wrong. But she felt sorry for her. She wasn’t really a killer, just a very foolish woman.
“Do you know what killed Leone?” Ian offered Jamieson a fresh muffin, brought up that morning by Moira, a smug expression still on her face from having seen Suki taken from Ian’s house under police escort.
Jamieson declined.
“Enlarged heart.”
“Cardiomyopathy.” Ian offered Hy the plate.
“Cardio what?” Hy bit into a muffin dripping with butter.
“A big heart,” said Jamieson. “His heart was too big.”
“I’ll say.” Hy thought about what Leone had been willing to do –
had done – for Alyssa.
“It certainly was,” said Jamieson, and Hy looked at her sharply. Jamieson was showing her human side. Again.
“When athletes die of a sudden heart attack…” Ian was on the Internet. “…cardiomyopathy is usually what they die of. Damage to the muscle.”
“Right,” said Jamieson. “He was being treated for it. His heart was as big as it could get. It was in a sort of a sling, well, a mesh sack that contained it.”
“Until…”
“Until it swelled so much it burst the sack.”
“Well, that’s not exactly the scientific explanation.” Ian looked up from the screen. The two women ignored him.
“Was it the strain of running across the cape?”
“Probably.”
“He died because his heart was too big.” Hy was shaking her head.
“Yes,” said Jamieson, on a sigh. Something in her tone –
“And good,” said Hy.
“No, bad,” said Ian. “Or he wouldn’t have died.”
“You know what I mean.”
“He died for love,” Jamieson said. Hy wanted her to say it again, so she could believe what she’d heard.
Jamieson obliged. “He died for love.” She straightened her jacket and became herself again, bursting Hy’s bubble that she was becoming soft.
“What a waste – to die for love.”
Hy had to agree. Lance, Leone, and Ed had lost their lives for love of Alyssa.
Love that hath no beginning hath no end?
For the three of them there had been an end. An unhappy, brutal end.
Epilogue
Red Islanders live and die by funerals, so they held the memorial service for Lance Lord as requested in his will, though most hadn’t known him or liked him.
“…Purple haze all in my brain…”
Jimi Hendrix’s signature song was emanating from the Hall, where distorted sound was usually young people scratching Celtic laments on fiddles. Toby and the other village dogs had gathered outside the building and were howling.
“Actin’ funny, but I don’t know why…”
Jimi Hendrix’s whining, overmodulated guitar tones were a strange accompaniment for the journey of a man in his fifties to his eternal home. That was the sixties generation, refusing to grow old, unwilling to put on a mantle of dignity, clutching their rock ’n’ roll mentality to the bitter and undignified end.
Moira stood up suddenly and marched out of the Hall. Estelle Joudry’s eyes followed her, admiring her guts.
Moira’s sister Madeline looked confused. Was she meant to follow? Stay put? She was sitting next to Billy, who was rocking to the music, knocking her with his knee. She began to tap her foot, too, and he noticed her. Pretty little thing. He smiled at her.
Hy found herself singing along. She didn’t know why. She didn’t know her mother had breastfed her to Hendrix. She’d absorbed him with her mother’s milk.
The song whined to an end:
“Ooo, ahhh
Ooo, ahhh, yeah!”
“And not a moment too soon,” said Gus.
They all trekked down to the shore to dispose of Lord’s guitars. The guitars were worth a lot of money. Some were shocked at the plan to burn them.
But a last request is a last request.
Hy and Ian had stacked the instruments in a pile on the sand. The neighbourhood dogs, led by Toby, were nosing around the bags of marshmallows and packets of hot dogs and buns the village children had brought.
Moira arrived, wearing yellow rubber gloves, dragging two garbage bags, red tin foil bulging out of them from Alyssa’s shrine.
She tossed the bags on top of the heap of guitars. Alyssa and Lance were about to create heat together that they never had in life.
Gus had caused a stir when she’d shown up. She hadn’t been to the shore in twenty years. She’d brought the wedding ring quilt. A waste of good material, Olive MacLean declared, but for Gus, it was tainted. And too hard to complete. She threw it on the heap.
Ian squirted the pile with barbecue fluid, struck a match, and lit it.
The red tin foil caught in a flash of oily, rainbow colours. Nothing else did. Ian squirted on more barbecue starter, which slid down the shiny red, green, and yellow gloss finishes on the guitars. Paper and cardboard at the base of the bonfire caught fire and ignited them in an impotent smouldering burn, melting them into distorted shapes and colours, sending an acrid yellow smoke into the sky and giving off a pungent smell that made the children hold their noses and put away their hot dogs and marshmallows.
Nathan hauled a container of gasoline out of the back of his truck, motioned everyone to stand back and hurled the liquid on the pile, then jumped back quickly as Lance Lord’s guitars went up in a fireball, a grand moment of Hendrix-style glory.
Someone found one of Lord’s No Trespassing signs and tossed it on the heap.
And, as at any good bonfire, there was music.
Jasmine was singing:
“I have only one burning desire
Let me stand next to your fire.”
And she went spiraling off into a rendition of a Hendrix guitar solo, weaving in and out of the sound of the crackling flames.
Stepping back from the heat, Ian wondered how Jasmine had learned the song. He had stood much too close to Suki’s fire, and now he was going to pay for it. Hy had introduced Jasmine to Jimi Hendrix’s greatest hits. They would become the winter soundtrack at Ian’s house. Hy would just have to say, “Jimi, Jasmine,” and off she’d go. Like now, as the bonfire blazed in harmony with the setting sun, a streak of deep red over The Shores.
“Scuse me while I kiss the sky.”
The fox, attracted by the heat of the fire, watched from the cape. She wondered at the strange ways of humans, who kill their own kind, but don’t eat them.
An excerpt from Good Will Toward Murder, the next book in Hilary MacLeod’s acclaimed Shores Mystery series
Prologue
A sparkle of light glimmered beside a deep blue coastline, like a diamond set in a sapphire sea. It was a still photo, but the light appeared to move, to radiate.
The tiny jewel was The Shores in a satellite photo called Red Island From Space, taken on a past December night. Now that Christmas was coming again, everything in The Shores that didn’t have the legs or sense to get away was strung with lights.
Thousands and thousands of Christmas lights. More every year than the year before. The Shores was just catching up. Electricity had only arrived in the tiny community in the nineteen sixties. When it finally came, the villagers lost all their traditional restraint.
One year, the residents had put out so many lights, it had caused a province-wide power failure, plunging the whole island into darkness on Christmas Eve – except The Shores. The villagers were used to power failures. Almost everyone had generators. They fired them up and plugged in the lights again. A legal limit had since been set on how many they could install, but they ignored it.
There were decorative Santas, reindeers and elves crammed in every available space. Christmas angels and stars. The holy family, complete with creche and wise men, was proudly displayed on roofs, front lawns, on mailboxes and well houses, in empty lots and on boats parked on land for the off-season. The Hall at the centre of the village had lights sparkling on a massive spruce at the front of the building, and Santa and his sleigh and reindeer rode the green steel roof. Some houses dripped lights like falling snow; others had tossed clumps randomly up on their roofs, creating shimmering drifts. There was hardly a tree or plant of any kind – lilac, maple, dogwood – that wasn’t strung with lights or a star or decoration of some kind. The Shores glistened in the night from every available source within plugging distance. Extension cord joined to extension cord, snaking around the village, causing potential hazards for pede
strians and drivers, and straining every household’s fuse box. Breakers hadn’t reached The Shores yet.
This overwhelming Christmas spirit was what had created the twinkling diamond seen from space. From the first of December until New Years, The Shores lit up the Red Island sky at night – and had become that tiny spark of light captured by chance in the satellite photo, announcing the existence of this forgotten village to the universe.
Apart from Ian Simmons’ place, and he was considered odd, there was only one house in the village that wasn’t lit up. It had been dark for years. That was about to change. Wild Rose Cottage was about to come to life, and death, once again.
Meanwhile, the villagers wished for snow to complete the Christmas portrait. When it came, they would regret it.
Chapter One
The house was weeping. That’s what it looked like – except that the tears fell from its eyebrows, the high gables, and dripped onto its eyes – windows clouded and streaked with grime running like mascara over the sills, black streaks down the grey cedar shingles.
The name, Wild Rose Cottage, didn’t suit the house. It was massive, ancient and nothing like a cottage, but in the summer, wild and domestic roses grew everywhere around it, out of control – so many they had become a tangle, an eyesore as unbecoming as the house itself, peeled to a faded rose, and deserted. Except for the vermin. And today one two-legged rodent.
Rats skittering across the wood floorboards, stained with their own excrement, competed with mice and ants for the remaining crumbs of human existence still to be found in the cracks between the floors and walls – so many had lived here for so long. In a hard winter, the animals sometimes ate the plaster and softened wood. There was no one to warn them it might kill them.
Certainly not the human parasite who was now tearing away at the walls and floorboards. He wasn’t looking for nourishment, but he was finding plastic bags of rodent “treats” that someone had left in the walls years ago. Whenever he found one, he flung it across the room and the rats scrambled for it, tearing at the plastic, wolfing down the contents, soon to be dead.
The man was looking for something, and becoming increasingly angry that he could not find it. The rats didn’t bother him. He had them at home. If one or more of them got in his way, he kicked them off. Every time he did, the squealing would rise suddenly, and then die off.
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