To Sheldon, a few dollars added up to millions in the end. That’s why Pa’s Claw Game was so important to him. As for Camilla’s cause—he couldn’t understand it.
Sheldon had never met a creature he didn’t want to eat.
Hy got stuck behind a truck full of manure. Whenever that happened, she usually just slowed down and enjoyed the scenery, but not today. She was nosing up so close to the vehicle ahead that when it hit a bump, a load of manure dropped onto the hood of her truck. She tried to calm down. It was a long shot at best. It had been days ago that Nathan had dropped off Camilla. There was no evidence she was still around. She might have left and let that other Legionnaire take over at the supper last night. Maybe—Hy mentally crossed her fingers—that had been their parting shot and they had both left.
The manure truck pulled off into a field. Around the next curve was Bloodsucker Lane.
“What is this Claw Game?”
Sheldon had hoped Parker wouldn’t ask. He told him—in as sketchy a way as he could.
“And the profits go to my endowment—the summer camp?”
“Yes.” Sheldon didn’t like Parker’s tone. He wished he’d never mentioned The Claw.
“Odious,” he said. “Pull it.”
“What?” Sheldon wasn’t sure what he’d heard. It was the first business decision Parker had made in ten years. There had been only two before that—when he’d endowed the marine camp upon coming into his inheritance and when he handed over control of the empire to Sheldon.
“Get rid of them. In all the restaurants. They’re obviously an unnecessary irritant.”
Sheldon had a feeling, a bad feeling. He’d learned to trust his feelings. He’d told the Fortune 500 writer that too. The writer pounced on it as the kind of financial wisdom he had anticipated quoting in his article.
“It’s something you can’t explain. A gut feeling. An instinct,” Sheldon had said. “You know what you know.”
The writer quoted all of it—except that last bit. “You know what you know” didn’t sound like incisive business acumen to him.
What Sheldon knew now was that Camilla must be stopped.
“Pull the Claw? I could show you some figures might change your mind.”
“No figures,” Parker said sharply. “Get rid of the Claw. It’s offensive.”
Jesus. This is her influence. Bloody bitch. What if she persuaded Parker to sell out? Where would that leave him? There’d be some explaining to do about certain business practices. Some financial “arrangements”—the kinds of things that happened when one man had a free hand and no one was looking over his shoulder.
Sheldon wasn’t sure how he’d wriggle around that, and he could lose his management contract. It was a license to steal money and he’d been stealing a pile of it. Even without the management contract, he would still be a very rich man, but Parker’s contract was worth millions to him.
He licked his dry lips. “Well, all right.” What else could he say? Did he dare ignore Parker’s command and not pull the Claw? Would Parker know—or care—tomorrow?
“On that other matter,” he persisted. “Samson. Just say the word. We’ll get her out of there.”
There was only silence from Parker.
Did Parker have any idea who she really was? He couldn’t possibly—and Sheldon wasn’t about to tell him. Sheldon chose to take Parker’s silence as assent. He’d already been getting at Camilla, in small ways, trying to disrupt the lobster legion’s activities. Now he was going to turn up the heat.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Hy turned onto Bloodsucker Lane. The truck bounced over ruts and dipped into puddles, splashing mucky red clay up on the windows. It might not have been quite so bad if she’d driven a little slower, but impatience was making her foot heavy on the accelerator—impatience and excitement. She was going to ferret out Camilla and the Legionnaire. Get them out of The Shores, whatever it took. Surely she could persuade them to leave, leave the village alone, if nothing else, leave her alone. She’d seen a crack in Camilla’s shell after the Institute meeting. If she could direct any of the compassion she knew was in her—compassion for those ugly emotionless creatures—toward herself, maybe Camilla and the Legionnaire would relent and leave.
After he rang off with Sheldon, Parker felt buoyant. He’d surprised himself as well as Sheldon with his command about the Claw. He wondered if Sheldon would follow orders. He wondered if she was, as Sheldon obviously feared, getting to him. There followed a degree of self-questioning and self-examination about the family business that Parker had never before indulged in.
He now asked himself, as he sat back on the couch and looked out the window at the sun sparkling on the blue water: was it consistent with his love of beauty to own a business involved in killing; why didn’t he just let go of it? He had severed the family ties with the life he had chosen and there would be no continuity. No one would follow him. He would not pass on the family name or the business. He might as well have Sheldon break up the empire into bite-size bits and sell it off. Something in him still resisted that final step. Like his grandmother, Parker was holding onto a slim, unrealized hope.
More tentacles than an Octopus.
That was the headline of an article Ian had googled from the business section of The New York Times in August of 1957. It was reproduced in a website for Pa Parker’s restaurant chain which had, it claimed, been a Maine Institution for 50 years—starting with a fish and chip stand on a wharf near Ogunquit.
Not just any fish and chip shop, thought Ian.
Each generation of the Parker dynasty has to make it on his own. He gets seed money from the parent company, but has to build his own business.
Ian hadn’t established yet that Hawthorne Parker was a scion of this dynasty, but he was sure of it. He just had to find the link to prove that Clayton Parker was his father, Garth his grandfather and Reinholdt his great-grandfather—men who had built business upon business, starting with a dory and a few lobster traps. The restaurant chain was only the tip of a massive financial iceberg—even larger than the one that had carved away at the Campbell causeway.
The roadbed of Bloodsucker Lane was in terrible shape, but the rest of it was beautiful—one of those forgotten roads, carved out more than a century ago by man and horsepower alone, hacked through the woods by a handful of men with picks and shovels. There were maples, spruce, birch and mountain ash growing on either side and, when in full leaf, they met in the middle, forming a canopy over the road. The leaves were nowhere near full yet, except for the poplars, shimmering in just the slightest breath of a breeze. Ferns were uncurling on the banks of the road and compact blueberry bushes were coming into leaf. The road crossed over a brook with a culvert that was caving in. Hy took it slowly, looking out through her window down a yawning hole to the water. She drove past an orchard of apple trees gone wild and lilacs spreading from an old homestead. Soon the earthy scent of the clay lane would be mixed with the sweet fragrance of their blossoms, spilling like confetti onto the red road. She came out onto the barren landscape of the high cape. Only stunted spruce and grass grew here and, in June, the wild strawberries, sweeter, redder and juicier than any Hy had tasted anywhere else.
It was on red clay lanes like this that Hy felt most at home on The Island. She felt like just another living creature embraced by it, a part of it. Not from away.
She didn’t see it until she was almost on top of it—the camouflage jeep pulled into a stand of spruce at the side of the lane. She stopped the truck, got out and peeked in, her nose where it often was—pressed up against a window and in someone else’s business.
Ian was looking at an updated graphic of the octopus from the nineteen-seventies. Each of the tentacles represented part of the Parker Empire—the bumps on the tentacles were the offshoots, encompassing every area of the fishing and seafood industry on the east coast of the United Sta
tes.
Reinholdt Parker had started it all, three generations before. He was the body of the octopus. He began as a simple fisherman, but because he didn’t like to spend money, started to acquire the suppliers that provided services to his companies, an idea borrowed by another east coast entrepreneur many years later. Reinholdt’s boat became a fleet. He also acquired a boat repair business; a boat parts concern; a boat-building company and commercial fisheries outfitters—five of the eight tentacles.
His son Garth “Pa” Parker added tentacles six and seven, with his restaurants and wholesale seafood operation. His grandson Clayton created tentacle eight—a wildly successful retail store and catalogue business that traded in trendy fishermen’s wear and related items for the growing population of summer shore-dwellers. His line of deck shoes was especially popular with the well-heeled crowd.
They were productive men—in the boardroom. In the bedroom, they didn’t fare so well. They boasted a fertile business, but a relatively barren family tree. Each had managed to squeak out one requisite male heir, but no more than that. An empire that should have been peopled with many sons and daughters and nephews and nieces was left largely in the hands of others. It was an unhappy family tradition that Ian suspected Hawthorne Parker had taken to the extreme, but he still found no record of him.
He’d seen photos of the sprawling Victorian summer home near Kennebunkport, the Gothic mansion in Boston, aerial photographs of a Bahamian beach compound and a Swiss ski playground, but he had yet to find any mention of Hawthorne Parker. There was a convincing family resemblance in the photographs—thin, aesthetic faces, steel-grey eyes and pencil-thin mustaches. If Parker was, as Ian suspected, the last of this line, the final feeble branch of a sickly family tree, he had inherited a healthy business empire and a whack of money. The Parker name was stamped all over the fishing industry in Maine and Massachusetts.
He had to tell Hy. He called her again.
‘Hi. Hy here. Or not here. Please leave a message.”
Was she not answering his calls?
Hy’s breath was creating fog on the jeep’s rear window in the chill morning air. She could just see someone curled up in the back. She rubbed the mist to see more clearly, her fingers squeaking against the wet glass. The Legionnaire stirred and then woke, eyes blinking in the sunlight. She stared straight into the flattened nose and wide-open eyes of Hyacinth McAllister. She sat up, looked wildly around, grabbed her cap, hunted for her bandana, then gave up. Surrender. Trapped—with no escape, no place to hide. She squeezed out of her sleeping bag, and emerged from the jeep.
Hy looked at her once.
Then again.
Chapter Thirty
Finally, Ian found the Parker he was looking for. One dogged reporter had followed his trail when he came into his inheritance ten years ago, at the age of thirty-five. He’d inherited after the death of his grandfather, of respectable old age, followed quickly by his father’s demise—a massive heart attack caused by overexcitement in a threesome in a New York City penthouse. He’d been with another man and a woman. His mother had run off to Europe, married one of Italy’s countless princes, and cut off all communication with the Parkers, including her son. His grandmother had outlived her mind—becoming skeletally thin and mentally thick in a Boston condominium in the care of paid personnel. The empire was in her hands, until she, too, died and passed all of it on to Parker, in spite of who and what he was.
Parker’s trail had been swept clean upon inheriting the family holdings. Money could buy that kind of obscurity if you wanted it, and even the dogged reporter gave up after just one profile titled “Creature Comforts,” about the aesthete who’d abandoned his lobster legacy. It was mostly pure speculation about the eclectic art collection Parker had amassed. There was no interview, no personal history—nothing more.
It may just have been that interest in Parker disappeared as he did, quietly into the background, while his henchman, Sheldon Coffin, moved into the spotlight. This Coffin guy had been running the business for him. All the articles now were about him. He’d bought the Parkers’ Victorian summer home, the Boston mansion, the hideaways in the Bahamas and Switzerland. Ian felt his suffocating presence. It was as if Coffin had wrapped his own tentacles around Parker, grasping at everything that belonged to him.
The Legionnaire stood in front of Hy, ungainly feet in socks sinking into the mud. Her hair hung limp and matted. She’d slept in her camouflage clothes—with no contacts…
Her eyes were grey—not hazel.
“You,” Hy said, dumbly.
“Yes.”
“Just you?”
“Most of us are just…” A shrug. “Us.” A grin. “Me.” She pulled a foot out of the mud, looked at her white sock, coated with red clay.
“One. Not two?”
“Yup.”
“Why?”
“That’s a long story,” said Camilla.
“Metal in a Haystack.” Parker was in a foul mood looking at the morning paper, his coffee gone cold on the table. The early morning sun shone on the headline over a photo of his car on top of the haystack. He’d have been even more furious to know that the photo had made the front page of every newspaper in the Atlantic region and several others on the east coast of the United States. If he’d had television, he’d have seen it on every breakfast news show in the country. It had gone national. It would soon go international when Estelle’s son Lester Joudry, a student photographer and videographer, provided the hungry news media with video of the car being hoisted off the hay later in the day. It would earn him his first major league credit and enough money to take his second year of photojournalism at the local community college. The video made it onto YouTube, but that didn’t mean it was just an overnight media sensation. The story had legs, as they say in the business—long ones. The photo travelled—months later—to a newspaper in La Paz and, more than a year after that, found its way in a fuzzy, pirated form into a two-page local rag in the Scottish Hebrides. Talk of North American depravity warmed cold Scot hearts throughout their long damp winter. In an exhibit of just such depravity, Parker decided he didn’t want the classic Mercedes anymore. He’d have it fixed and get rid of it. He’d already arranged to have his 1960 Jag taken out of storage and delivered to The Shores.
“Helluva place to be sleeping.” Hy looked over at the jeep. “Is that where you’ve been living?”
Camilla nodded with an easy grin, engaging and genuine. Standing there in her crumpled camouflage, sleep and a smile in her eyes, she looked an entirely different creature from the woman at the meeting. That woman—tall, in command, a bit frightening with her sweater set and pearls—disappeared into the grin. So did the rabid Legionnaire. They’d become just one girl with a cheeky look.
Hy had to grin back. Then Camilla smiled, a full smile. Her teeth were white and one front tooth was slightly askew. That was what did it. Hy knew she was looking at a friend—in spite of everything.
“You’d better come home with me.”
Camilla hesitated.
“I bet you haven’t had a shower or bath in days.”
Another slight hesitation. She hadn’t.
“Sure. That’d be great.”
“You’d better leave the jeep here.” Hy was willing to help Camilla, but she didn’t want people to know—not with all those hard feelings over the meeting, the supper—and certainly not with that stinky and menacing message in her back room.
“Pack what you need.”
The vehicle was a mess inside: clothes all over the place; plastic grocery bags filled with what appeared to be everything but groceries; coffee cups stuffed in a makeshift garbage bag hanging from the glove compartment. On the passenger seat was a map of The Island, half-open, now outdated—the causeway was still there. The only neat thing was the hanger holding the skirt and sweater set. Camilla grabbed a knapsack and a vanity case—a navy blu
e vintage Samsonite. She left her alter ego—the skirt and sweater set—in the car, but not the pearls. She had those looped around her neck, hidden beneath her shirt. Since New York, she’d worn them everywhere.
“The car’s fine,” said The Island’s foreign car specialist, Carl Robertson. Parker had been surprised to find such a person on The Island, but Carl did a swift trade in fancy cars brought here as summer toys by rich American tourists. Carl Albert Robertson was his full name and the sign above his dubious garage—it looked like a big shed—highlighted the first initials of his name to spell CAR. There was a photo of the sign in the Yellow Pages ad. It had almost put Parker off, but the fellow came with a strong recommendation from his car man in the States, so he’d had the Mercedes towed there.
“Just a couple of small scratches and a dent or two,” said Carl now. “Easy to fix.”
“Fine,” said Parker. “Fix it and get rid of it.”
Carl already had a buyer.
He was going to make a nice profit on it.
The car would be fixed but the relationship would have to be scrapped. Not so easily done. Parker was still not ready for a final confrontation with Guillaume. What a fool he had been to think that this place might cure what was past curing—a sick connection gone rotten long ago. He should have known it was over when Guillaume had his “nervous collapse.” That’s how Parker still thought of it, but there had been a disturbing end to what had started out as a joke, a bit of flirtatious foreplay…
It was a Christmas present—the French rolling pin, so different from the North American kind, which is a blunt object. The French rolling pin is fat in the middle, gracefully tapering to a point at either end. This one was made by a highly-skilled artisan, of mahogany, and was a deep red colour like bull’s blood.
Revenge of the Lobster Page 16
