Saltwater Japanese Akoya cultured pearls. He fingered each one, delicately. Pure white body colour, lovely rose hue, lustre off the charts. He glanced at Camilla. She nodded and he picked them up and turned them over in his hands. Unblemished. Matching close to one hundred percent, as far as the bare eye could tell, and what other measure really mattered? Skin thickness bound to be a full millimetre, once closely examined. The clasp—unique. He’d never seen another like it. Most pearl strands have what’s called a lobster clasp, one end squeezing into the other, which grips it like a claw and holds it fast. It doesn’t look anything like a lobster, but this one did—in 24 carat gold, claws and tail in two separate halves that clicked together to make the whole. It had tiny diamonds for eyes.
It was the custom clasp that gave her away. The pearls could belong to no other. Parker hadn’t really looked at her until then and only the pearls would have told him it was she, wrapped as she was in a big wool scarf, with large sunglasses. He paled at the sight of her.
The jeweller put the pearls down and looked up at Parker, so well-dressed in his Burberry trench coat; she…well, the coat was out of date, vintage he supposed. Still, she was slinging this exceptional necklace around like it was a string of candy. He looked at her, doubt on his face; she read his meaning instantly and stuck her chin out, defying him to challenge her ownership. He laid the pearls down and Parker swept them off the counter. In the end, it was he who bought them. Without negotiation, Parker made out a generous cheque to her and another to the jeweller. He signed them with his convoluted scribble. Her mouth was set in a determined line throughout the whole transaction. The jeweller did the least he could for his fat commission. He placed the pearls in a black leather case lined with cream satin, perfectly proportioned to hold them. He tucked them in expertly, a finger lingering on them as if reluctant to part with something so fine so quickly. He snapped the box shut and handed it to Parker. Parker handed it to her. Her eyebrows shot up.
Parker gave one curt nod.
“They were always yours.” The only words he said to her during the entire transaction.
She took the box, pocketed it, and raised the cheque to her forehead in a salute. She spoke just three words:
“For the cause,” she said, and left the store.
She had spent the money on her lobster war, of course. He liked to think she’d been so hard and cold about the pearls because she felt something for them. He dismissed the thought. Their meaning was for him alone. Yet, still she had them. In the chill region of his soul, there was an icy regret forming that he had let her come and go and given her no reason to open her heart to him. Why should she? He hadn’t even opened the door to her.
Jared had made it to the bar, where he met up with the two sisters who’d shown him such a good time a few nights before. Soon he was rubbing up against both of them in their king-size bed, but it wasn’t working. For the first time ever, it wasn’t working. Nothing he could do would make it work—not four boobs, not two of everything else. He couldn’t even whack himself off. It was just too damn painful. A real piss off. They were two horny girls and they wanted some. He didn’t have any to give. He pretended to pass out and then he really did. When he woke up it was morning and he was the only one in the bed. He got up, made a few calls, and soon had arranged a ride with a fisherman buddy back to The Shores.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Hy slipped out of Ian’s at first light. A thin coat of frost lay on the ground. She walked at a brisk pace down the hill straight into the red glow of the sun breaking over the shoreline, tipping the white caps of the waves with sparks of fire. At this time of morning, the sound of the ocean was a roar, even though the waves were just lightly rolling in.
There was the sweet skunky smell of foxes on the damp dawn air. She saw one as she reached the corner, on the vacant lot where the school used to be. A young fox, one of last year’s litter, ginger with a black tail. She stamped her foot and it skittered off, but not far. It stopped, turned back to gaze at her, unafraid, examining her with interest and intelligence in its eyes.
As she marched down The Way, Hy tried to figure out what she could do to defuse the lobster war. She couldn’t think of a thing. She picked up her pace. First, she’d get home, pull on her sneakers and go for a run. She always got her best ideas when she ran. Never mind that among those ideas had been to invite Professor Walpole and Camilla Samson to speak to Institute.
And maybe she’d be able to sort out last night.
Only friendship? Or something more?
Parker’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket. It woke him, stiff and aching, on the couch where he had lain all night. He looked at his Rolex. Six o’clock! Who’d be calling so early? He pulled the phone out of his pocket and flipped it open.
“Parker.”
Good Lord, the police.
“What?…Yes, I know him…Is any…Yes, that’s my car….What?”
“What!” He repeated, in disbelief.
“Yes…yes…yes…yes…I’d be grateful for that. No. Keep him there.”
When Hy got home, there was a draft blowing through the house. She felt the unusual, slightly dizzying, sensation of someone else’s presence in her home. She crept into the main room and paused, listening. So still was she, she could hear her own breathing, but no one else’s. No one was here. Not downstairs. She took a few soft steps toward the staircase, and then speeded up with strong, sure strides, straight towards the danger, she thought, if there were any. But no—no one in any of the three rooms. There was nowhere to hide. The upstairs rooms were tiny with no closets. There were storage containers, not criminals, under the beds. She went back downstairs, eyes sweeping the kitchen, the main room and the living room. Nothing looked wrong, but nothing seemed right.
It’s that damn back window. The one in the office she never used. Years ago, when she’d been away, someone had broken the cheap plastic lock—she suspected Jared —and stolen a sewing machine. A sewing machine. How desperate was that? At the time, Hy had an ancient television and cheap radio. She’d taken her laptop with her. There was nothing else worth stealing. She had always meant to fix the window lock, but hadn’t.
She opened the door to find the curtains flapping and the breeze wafting through the wide-open window.
Ian found the photo, with Camilla, the Duchess and the Prince, charming. He’d googled the Legion site and was smiling at the cheeky British tabloid headlines that accompanied the photo in paper after paper: Two Birds in the Bush…Double Trouble on the Dee…One Camilla Too Many. The more sober papers had run headlines like Lobster Lover Woos Royal Couple.
He’d woken up to an empty house, disappointed. Why should it be any different? Whenever Hy stayed over—and she always did if they’d been drinking—she would leave when she woke, around dawn. It suited them both perfectly; both treasured their single life and their private time. Today, he thought, the company might have been pleasant, but he couldn’t have slobbed around in his sweatpants, scratched various parts of his anatomy at will, put off brushing his teeth until he’d had his first coffee, and…well the list of things was rather long.
He got the coffee maker going for the second time that morning, thought he really should take a shower, but went back to the iMac. Ian had logged on to the LLL site about an hour before. He was still surfing the links. There were newspaper articles and podcasts from Europe. The media attention had begun with a campaign there about a year ago, then moved to Norway and Sweden, where the Legion had been immediately and well received. Now they’d brought their crusade to North America. Ian wondered why they’d begun at The Shores. What publicity could they generate in this tiny, unknown community on this tiny, unknown island? He was sure it had something to do with Hawthorne Parker.
“Yes?”
It was immediately obvious to Sheldon that Parker’s usual composure had deserted him. It showed in the way he blurted out what
had happened. Sheldon wasn’t that surprised. Guillaume was a liability, for Parker. An asset, for Sheldon, really. Not like that other one. That woman.
“Jeeees-us.” He drew the word out on one long breath, and then assured Parker he’d get Guillaume out. It would be no trouble. The incident actually suited Sheldon. The more chaos there was in Parker’s life, the less likely he was to give even the slightest thought to the business, and what Sheldon was doing with it. He knew just what to do to hasten Guillaume’s release. Even in a place he’d never been to, a place where he had no known contacts, Sheldon was confident he would find someone to whom a generous donation to a favourite charity or numbered account would unlock the power to sweep Guillaume’s actions under the carpet. He would manage to ferret out just the right person and was sure that within less than twenty-four hours, the charges would be dropped, there would be no court appearance and Guillaume would go free. It was familiar terrain.
What bothered him more was the woman, and her ridiculous LLL circling around Parker. Getting closer all the time.
How far had it gone?
Before Hy could close the window, she smelled it. God, it’s awful! What a stink. Did something die in here? It was smeared all over the walls—streaks of blood and pulverized fish flesh. Bits of scale, even a fish eye stuck to the wall, staring at her. She sniffed, and gagged. Herring bait. Who would do this?
It wasn’t just smears. There were words—a crude message. Three words. One looked like the c word. Hy hated that word, even though Professor Walpole had explained that it had originally meant wise woman.
“Embrace the word,” she’d said at last year’s Institute meeting, raising up her arms. “Be proud. Be proud to call yourselves—”
Hy had prayed for the first time in years. Prayed that she wouldn’t say it.
“Be proud to call yourselves by the word of the wise woman,” she had ended, presumably knowing her audience and just how much they could be expected to put up with. Hy had thanked God, the Goddess, the whole lot of them up there in heaven or wherever it was they were.
They could have been called worse than murderers.
She tried to decipher the other two words by squinting up close and pulling back to get the long view. She couldn’t make it out. Starts with “b.” Was that bitch? No, too short.
The phone rang. She closed the window and the door. That would keep the smell out of the rest of the house.
It was Nathan—home from his annual holiday.
“Bloodsucker Lane,” he said, when Hy asked him where he drove Camilla.
“Bloodsucker Lane?”
He mistook her meaning. “Or Sunshine Beach Lane, if you prefer—”
“No, I know where you’re talking about. It just seems an odd place.”
“That’s what I thought.”
She thanked him and rang off, abandoning her run and the muck coating her back room wall. She raced out the door and jumped into her beat-up half-ton pickup.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ian had become frustrated with his search for information about Hawthorne Parker. There were a lot of Parkers, and sticking the first name, Hawthorne, into the search wasn’t helping. It was sending him to gardening and naturalist sites. He tried another route and linked Parker with lobster. And then it happened.
The Lobster Lover’s Blog
There’s a game they play in some restaurants and bars on the east coast. It’s called Pa’s Lobster Claw Game. You play it on a big red machine—like one of those arcade games where you maneuver a claw to pick up a prize inside a glass case, a tacky stuffed animal or a cheap toy. It’s hard to win. The claw grabs, but doesn’t hold anything. You usually drop the prize or run out of time.
Pa’s Lobster Claw Game is a tank full of live lobsters swimming around in salt water. It works the same as the arcade game, only you’re manipulating a mechanical lobster claw around the tank, trying to catch a live one. You lift it out of the water and drop it down a chute.
Clunk. Down comes dinner. Happily, dinner beats diner most of the time. Pa’s Claw Game is a real challenge. Toys don’t move around, but lobsters do. They flap and squirm as you try to catch them and two out of three times they get away.
From the retailers’ point of view, it’s a great gimmick.
For the customer, it’s entertainment and maybe a free dinner.
For the lobster, it’s like being trapped and terrorized all over again.
The sick side of it is, that Pa donates part of the sales from every game to a scholarship for Parker’s Marine Camp. It’s a kind of business cannibalism – feeding on itself. Kids at camp eat Pa’s food—and go home with coupons for more.
They go there to learn about life in the sea—how to kill it and eat it.
The blog had come out of nowhere—just like Hy said. Ian picked up the phone and hit number one on his speed dial. No answer. That could mean anything. She could be out in the garden. Out on the shore. Out of her mind. Ian smiled.
Last night had been different. She hadn’t pulled away.
But it hadn’t been very romantic.
Hy backed down the long clamshell driveway and headed for Bloodsucker Lane. That was what it had always been called by the locals—except for a brief period when the introduction of 911 emergency service gave it a new official name, by mistake. Groups of student recruits had been sent out polling people for appropriate names for lanes that didn’t have official ones. When they got to this one—the last one—they’d surprised Germain Joudry, just about to relieve himself by the side of the road. They asked him what the lane was called. “Sun Don’t Shine Beach,” he replied gruffly, annoyed at being disturbed. They wrote it down as “Sunshine Beach.” Up the sign went—and with it a public outcry. First, from tourists, who struggled up the lane with beach towels and umbrellas, only to return battered, bruised and full of burrs when they found they couldn’t get down to the shore. The villagers got the province to restore the traditional name: Bloodsucker Lane. It wasn’t as romantic, but it was far more accurate.
It was as unpleasant as the name suggested, an unlikely place for anyone to be. Hy wondered what chance there was she’d find Camilla still there, if she ever had been.
Pa’s. Of course, Ian thought, I should have known. Pa Parker’s. Everyone knew the chain of restaurants that stretched down the U.S. east coast. Everyone had eaten there. He’d been there himself—with Hy. That Thanksgiving weekend they’d spent in Bar Harbour. It had almost happened there. Almost. Was it he—or she—who’d chickened out? He couldn’t quite remember.
Pa’s restaurants were family diners with predictable menus—big colourful foldouts and unending food choices with cutesy names. Two unfortunate mascots. Ollie the Octopus looked like a happy face on drugs. Lou the Lobster had a grimace of a grin, threatening, as if he wanted to rip your heart out. Hardly Parker’s style, but it would explain his money.
Ian phoned Hy again.
Again, there was no answer.
Where the hell had she gone?
“She’s following you.”
Parker grunted. How did Sheldon know she was here?
“When she showed up in Paris—possible coincidence. Then Oslo, okay—say it just happened. But now? There?” He said it in a tone of utter disbelief. Sheldon couldn’t figure out why anyone was there.
“Why would she follow me?” Parker asked, as if he didn’t know. It was the lobsters. He wished it were…well, something else.
“She wants you to wash your hands of this business.”
“I have.”
“It’s still where your money comes from.”
Parker was tied to the family business by tradition, three generations of hard work and history that he couldn’t let go. He owned the empire, but had nothing to do with it. He didn’t want to run it, but couldn’t sell it. It was his grandmother, she of the red blob painting.
It was for her that he hadn’t sold the whole lot off. It would have broken her heart to see it go out of the family. She had left it all to him in spite of what she thought about his lifestyle. Family was family to a woman of her generation.
“She’s never approached me.” It was a lie, but not a complete lie. The closest she’d come—apart from that time in Cartier’s—was last night. He’d never told Sheldon about New York, and he wasn’t going to tell him about last night either. He felt oddly protective.
“Just a matter of time,” said Sheldon. Here she was on his turf—just hours away from the heart of Parker’s empire, and the centre of Sheldon’s financial happiness.
“We’ve had protests. Not from the LLL, not yet, but the protests have had an impact. They’re aimed at Pa’s Claw.”
“Pa’s Claw?”
Parker didn’t know what Sheldon was talking about. He didn’t keep up with the business at all. Sheldon knew that, and he’d taken advantage of it—to line his pockets in a variety of undetectable ways.
“It started out great last year. A sweet little income generator.”
You might think a nickel-and-dime addition like Pa’s Claw Game would be beneath Sheldon’s notice, but Sheldon didn’t get rich by ignoring nickels and dimes. When asked the secret of his wealth, it was the little things he pointed to.
“I turn off lights,” he told the surprised writer from Fortune 500, who’d come seeking his savvy business acumen for a front-page article he had already titled “Sheldon Coffin—King of the Lobsters.”
“Turn off lights?”
“Yup. A fortune is made a penny at a time and lost the same way. The millions take care of themselves. It’s the pennies you’ve got to watch.”
That’s why Sheldon was making such a big deal about what Camilla and her Legion got up to. It was only a few dollars at a time—but a few dollars times as many restaurants as there were in the chain. A few dollars times the number of lobsters bought at the wharf. A few dollars less in frozen lobster sales. Money lost to the processing plants. Fishermen feeling the pinch and cutting back on supply orders. Holding off on buying that new boat. Well, the Maine lobster industry was already in bad enough shape.
Revenge of the Lobster Page 15
