Ian had been so anxious to open the box that held his new iMac that his hands had shaken. The rigid foam squeaked as, with great difficulty, he pried it out of the box and gingerly removed the clean, flat, white object—his beautiful new monitor. The cardboard, foam and plastic liners that had housed the computer were strewn all over his living room floor. The mess had been lying there for two days. Ian had barely budged from his seat in front of the computer since then.
Moira Toombs would soon have it all cleaned up. A single woman of a certain age, she often arrived uninvited to cook and clean for Ian. He found no reason to stop her. He was oblivious to her intentions. He was oblivious to her.
Moira carried an armful of debris into the kitchen and religiously separated it into the recycling bins as she had been taught. Her father had been promoted, in politically correct language, from garbage man to garbage collector and finally to waste management supervisor. It was all the same job. Moira wiped the counter and stove, then emptied and filled the dishwasher with the stack that had collected in the sink.
Ian, lost in the iMac, checked the status of his online order for a geo-positioning base unit and receiver, and was satisfied to see it had been shipped yesterday. He was interested in the geological damage at Vanishing Point and wanted to keep track of it. He’d been corresponding by email with a National Research Council geologist in Halifax, who’d been helping him understand the phenomenon created by The Big Ice.
It sounds like a bedding plane, the email read. It’s unusual for The Island, but I understand the geology of The Shores is unusual too. From how you describe the base of the cliff with inclined layers, I’d say you’ve got a potential problem there. Sample photos of bedding planes attached.
Ian wanted to set up a monitoring site to measure cliff erosion at Vanishing Point. He would have to get that fellow Parker’s permission. He’d been waiting to bump into him and casually bring it up, but the man was as hard to spot as Sean Connery, he thought with a smile.
The smell of the muffins pulled his attention from the screen. Moira held out the plate. A half-hour earlier there had been six muffins—now only three remained. Absently, he took one and bit into it. Delicious. Butter ran down his chin.
Moira pursed her lips, disapproval at his manners fighting pleasure at his enthusiasm. She was personally fastidious, dressed in the best the Sears catalogue had to offer, but cursed with sallow skin and mousey brown hair. It was cut short, permed in tight curls with the texture of a scouring pad. Ian wondered if it was possible to mess it up, but had never been tempted to test his theory. He was not attracted to Moira, whose daily concerns moved in a narrow circle of interests, chief among which was cleanliness. She cleaned a few crumbs off the computer desk. She’d have been delighted to know that Ian was thinking about her, devastated at what he thought.
A squeal of tires startled them both. They looked out the window. Jared’s yellow Hummer narrowly took the corner at the Hall.
Moira snorted. “He’ll be up to no good.”
Ian had seen the vans and trucks going down to the shore. He agreed.
He passed a hand across his head, where a few silky threads of grey hair clung valiantly to his scalp. In spite of his baldness and his age (he told people he was fifty, but his birth certificate said he was a bit more than that) he was the most eligible bachelor in The Shores for any woman over thirty. He was the only man over eighteen not already spoken for. It made him popular. Women love a confirmed bachelor. It gives them a challenge.
The only woman Ian was even slightly attracted to was, of all people, Hyacinth McAllister. Moira noticed how much time Hy and Ian spent together. They saw each other almost every day. Sometimes he’d put on a tie and jacket and take her to dinner in town or Hyacinth would invite him to her place for a meal. He’d return from these occasions late—or not at all. Moira wasn’t sure which. She’d watch from her window, but she couldn’t be there all the time and sometimes she fell asleep. Of one thing she was sure—nothing much could have come of the homemade meals. She thought, with some satisfaction, of her own trump card: Hyacinth McAllister can’t cook.
Chapter Eight
“How do you cook lobster?” Hy had stopped in to see Gus on her way down to Parker’s.
“You don’t know how to cook a lobster?” Gus’s eyebrows shot up, her eyes opened wide. She was teasing. They made an odd pair of friends—Hy was nervous, nearly forty and from away. Gus was calm, eighty-two and only from as far away as “up West” —the western shore of The Island. She’d lived in The Shores for over sixty years, ever since she arrived as Abel’s bride at the age of eighteen. There were a series of photographs in the “kitchen,” a room furnished with a couch and easy chairs as well as a stove. The fridge, sink and cupboards were in the next-door “pantry.” The photos showed Gus, first as a winsome, undernourished eighteen-year-old bride with long honey brown hair, standing somewhat taller than her already balding bridegroom, both in their Sunday best. Later followed the acquisition of big glasses, children and larger hips; she became handsome, with a shock of white hair. The Evolution of Gus, Hy had dubbed the images, as her friend grew in size along with her family.
Now, she was receding again. She still had that great shock of white hair and the glasses. They were smaller now, as were her hips. She always wore a dress, white ankle socks and sensible black leather shoes. She and Abel had had eight children. Three were now dead and none of the rest lived on The Island. Visits from her kids were rare. A few of them were close to becoming senior citizens themselves and had a harder time getting around than their mother did. She took after her namesake, Aunt Augusta, still lively at one-hundred-and-two. Augusta hated her name, but had thought it rude to say so when they named baby Gus after her. They were born on the same day. There was a picture of the two together on their eightieth and one-hundredth birthdays. They looked like sisters.
“Well, technically I guess I could cook a lobster, but I never have. I could find what I want on the Internet, but I’d like a local feel, some down-home recipes.” Hy was sure Gus had plenty of them.
“What I really want to know is the best way.”
Gus wrinkled her nose. “There isn’t one. I stay clear of them. We used to take lobster sandwiches to school when I was growin’ up. Them days, you only ate lobster if you was poor. When I married Abel, he fished lobster. We’d can the meat and crush the shells and spread them on the fields. The stink—” Gus shuddered. She could smell it to this day. “I tell ya, I don’t want any part of it now.” That was why Gus had refused to volunteer for kitchen duty at the lobster supper. It was a big fundraiser for the Hall, constantly in need of cash for repairs and renovations.
The Hall dominated the view outside the Macks’ picture window. It was the last of the community buildings still standing, but the others continued to exist in the minds of the locals, who bewildered tourists when they gave directions like: “Take a left where the post office used to be.” The same thing happened with the general store and the school. The two-room schoolhouse had been closed and sold to someone from away for a summer home. The romantic notion seemed to die with the purchase. The new owner didn’t bother to visit and the building “went down” until the villagers took a match to it. They were nothing if not tidy.
Sometimes the women talked of selling the Hall. That meant they’d have to find a deed. No one recalled if there was one. The Masons had wisely turned the Hall over to the Women’s Institute more than a hundred years ago. The women took their responsibility very seriously and kept it in good shape. They did it with nickels and dimes—lobster suppers, strawberry socials, bake sales, flea markets, crokinole games in the winter, and the main event—the annual Christmas pageant, a show remarkable not so much for theatrical skill as for its high good humour and rollicking fun.
The thing that really bothered Hy was the idea of killing the lobsters.
“I read in The Joy of Cooking that y
ou’re supposed to put them in head first…”
Gus laughed. “You just throw ’em in the pot, any old way. Don’t matter.”
“Now, Gus, if I were to boil you alive, which would you prefer, head or feet first?”
That silenced her.
“I think it’s supposed to stun them,” Hy persisted, “so the meat doesn’t get tough.”
Gus shrugged. “Shouldn’t eat them things, anyroad. They feed off the bottom. Garbage. It’s eatin’ garbage.”
Hy noticed the patchwork on Gus’s knee.
“What’s that?”
Gus held it up. “I call this half-baked. It’s for the Institute in Alberta.”
“Oh, I forgot.”
“These are the colours they asked for. This here pink used to be red, but it sat out in the sun porch for years. It’s pink they wanted and it’s all I had.”
“So what are we supposed to do?”
“It says here—” Gus reached for the bright yellow pamphlet. “Eight by eight inch blocks, pink and blue, with ‘symbolic visual images of natural heritage, wildlife and settings.’ So I did the lobster.”
“Well, I’ll try to produce something. By the way, where’s Abel?”
“Oh, you know Abel. He’ll be around somewhere, doin’ somethin’.”
That was Abel. He was always around somewhere, doing something. But you never saw him, thought Hy. She wouldn’t have recognized Abel if she’d seen him. She couldn’t remember the last time she had, she thought, as she let herself out.
Moira had a shameful secret: she read Cosmo. She didn’t want anyone to know, so she never put the magazines in the recycling. Instead, she donated them to the county hospital, key articles clipped out and filed in a box she kept under the single bed in her Spartan bedroom. The linens, bedspread and drapes were all old, drab and serviceable—as were the couch covers, curtains and tea towels downstairs, thin with age and too many washings. They did possess newer towels, ordered from their bible, the Sears catalogue, but they were kept “for good,” and the Toombs sisters rarely had any guests. Moira didn’t want anyone messing up her house and Madeline was too shy and too scared of her sister to invite anyone in. Their mother’s best table linens were produced proudly when it was their turn to host an Institute meeting and otherwise only at Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter.
Moira never read the sex articles in Cosmo; she thought they were disgusting, but she pored over all the articles of the “How to Trap a Man” variety, clipped out the useful ones, and stuffed them in the bulging box under the bed. Useful, perhaps, but they had so far failed to rope Moira a man. The muffins and washed dishes didn’t seem to be getting her anywhere with Ian, so she flipped through her arsenal of how-to articles again and found “Make His Interests, Your Interests.” Of course, that was Hyacinth’s game—a supposed interest in computers—well, she could play it too.
The next day, Moira asked Ian if he could show her how to use the computer. It turned out to be the best idea she’d ever had. His face flushed with pleasure. He was always delighted to give advice, especially about computers. She read his pleased look as meaning something more than it did. She flushed with pleasure herself when she was seated in front of the screen and his body touched her arm as he leaned over to explain the intricacies of the keyboard. She didn’t care about the keyboard at all. She fumbled. He took her hand and placed one finger carefully on a key. He took her other hand, and put a finger on another key.
“Shift. Control,” he said. Her eyes were glazed, half-shut. She was faint with happiness. She wasn’t even listening to what he was saying, wrapped as she was in the warm cocoon of his proximity. Why hadn’t she thought of this sooner? As he guided her hand to F1, F2 and F3, she smiled, a small secret smile that spread to her eyes. She raised her head and glowed up at him. He was looking down at her, frowning. She’d been so lost in thoughts of their future life together that she’d missed everything he had said. This might be harder than she thought.
“F-what?” she asked, eyes wide open.
Chapter Nine
Hy was like a cat —a Siamese—thin and long-legged. She jumped at sounds. When trying something new, she took short tentative steps, shrinking back like an accordion if surprised, but always pushing forward again, wary and nervous but, above all, curious. She was always sticking her nose into something. Right now it was pressed up against the big front windows of Hawthorne Parker’s A-frame. A small cloud of mist from her breath had formed on the glass. She had knocked at the back door first, the one facing the road, because he was new to the neighbourhood. No one knocked here—you just walked in and said hello. Doors were never locked at The Shores. This one was. What made it even stranger was that the door had been fitted with a peephole. A peephole! If people at The Shores wanted to find out anything about their neighbours, they just looked right out the window or sat on the stoop, watching in plain view.
When there was no answer at the door, she went around to the front, onto the deck. She hugged the edge of the house, leery of the deck poised so precariously over the shore. It made her stomach queasy. “Built too close to the edge.” That’s what everyone said, but they said that about every house built on every cape. “Too close to the edge. Bound to slide off.” It had never happened, not at The Shores. That fact didn’t stop people from gloomily—and somewhat hopefully—predicting that it would. If someone pointed out that it had never happened, someone else would be sure to add “yet.”
Now Hy was peering through the glass. There was a lot more to see than when she’d last looked in this window. All the villagers had been up here to snoop more than once. It made a fine purpose for a Sunday walk. They’d had a look around when it was first built five years ago. They’d checked it out again when it was vacated last summer to see what improvements had been made, and then again in the fall after Parker bought it and the moving van and decorators had been in and out. That had been disappointing, because everything had been covered in protective cloths and they couldn’t see any of the furnishings—except what looked like a big quilt on the back wall. “A quilt on the wall?” Gus had asked in disbelief, unable to walk down to see the oddity for herself.
The next thing that had drawn the villagers to the property was the yawning v-shape the January ice had carved into the cape. “Like someone took a knife to cut a slice of pie, then pushed it off to the side to cut another piece,” was how Ben described it. They’d all seen it long before Parker had.
Now Hy realized that what everyone had thought was a quilt was a big painting of a red blob. In front of it, smack in the centre of the room, was a three-foot-high black dog.
“May I help you?”
Hy had heard about being so scared you jumped out of your skin. That’s how she felt now as she let out a high-pitched yelp. The shriek scared the bejeezus out of the man who had come up behind her.
Parker recovered himself and looked at Hy in distaste.
She felt foolish and grinned to cover her embarrassment.
“Sorry, I…uh…sorry.” She shoved a stray tendril of frizzy red hair back under her baseball cap. She didn’t like the way he was looking at her. A look that dismissed her, made her feel small, even though she was several inches taller.
A man who liked to study every fine point and exquisite detail of beautiful objects, Parker’s eyes were offended by Hy’s fisherman sweater, well-worn and shapeless; the T-shirt hanging down from underneath it; jeans, with a tear in one leg from her sharp, knobby knees. Her sneakers were expensive, but they’d run hundreds of miles on clay lanes and showed it.
So much for privacy. Not yet here a month and already the natives were banging at his door. It happened everywhere he went. They could smell money and would come looking for jobs or handouts with some lame excuse or another. Perhaps she was a cleaning woman. He needed one. Still, from the look of her… again he eyed her scruffy wardrobe. She stared right back at
him. No one here cared what you wore.
“If you’re looking for a job…”
“Well, no…I…uh…” She shoved an invitation at him.
Just as he had thought—some appeal for money. He glanced at the paper briefly. How quaint—a local supper. He’d be sure to avoid it. He looked up.
“Well,” he said with the finality that ends an encounter. He took a step forward in the direction of the stairs. “A pleasure to meet you—”
The way he said it made it sound like anything but. His eyes snapped shut—and held. It always happened when he was being insincere. “Miss…uh…?”
“McAllister.” She stuck out a hand. He took it, but didn’t shake, just held it limply and inclined his head.
“McAllister. As I was saying, if you’re seeking employment, I could use a cleaner. Someone steady. That is, reliable—and, above all, not clumsy.” He continued to move forward, encouraging her off the deck.
“I’m not…I don’t…I’m a writer.”
Just as he thought—she could probably use a job. Parker reached into his pocket, pulled out a small gold case, and slipped a business card out of it. He gave it to her. She glanced at it quickly, not registering the words, and stuffed it in her pocket.
“I really just came about the supper, you know. Maybe we’ll see you there.”
He said nothing.
“I’d better be going.” On that lame note, she left. On the way, she tried not to stare at the peculiar shape of the landscape around Parker’s house. Instead, she saw the yellow Hummer headed down to the cookhouse with Jared at the wheel. There was another truck parked there, one Hy knew well. Flush Riley, it read. Number one in the number two business. A catchy slogan could take a business a long way. Flush was The Island’s self-proclaimed “King of septics.” He had a fleet of trucks—“doing my business,” as he put it, “all over The Island.”
Revenge of the Lobster Page 4
