Revenge of the Lobster

by Hilary MacLeod

  “Forget him,” said Parker. “If he isn’t dead, he should be.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  “You idiots!”

  Sheldon Coffin was knocking back a brandy in the book-lined study of the former Parker summer home. The books had come with the house. He’d never read any of them—except the special “gentlemen’s” volumes, Victorian pornography that had belonged to Reinholdt. Naughty, as only the Victorians could be. Lifted dresses, dropped trousers, bare buttocks blushed red with strokes from flashing whips and rods. Naughty, naughty men and women astride benches, beds and each other, begging for punishment and for mercy with exclamation marks jumping off the text. Dirty. Stimulating. Sheldon would read them and go searching for Stella. He’d pin her roughly to the bed, wishing she had more flesh on her.

  “I didn’t say kill her…I know I said get rid of her…but you know perfectly well what I meant.”

  But once he was over the first shock of it, his brain shifted gears.

  “Are you sure she’s dead?” He never meant for her to die. By God, I’m not a murderer. But now, if she’s out of the way, well…all the better.

  He called the police and reported The Crustacean stolen. He said he suspected two former employees he’d recently fired. Yes, they both had records.

  Though she was light, all four of them carried her—like pallbearers, Hy and Ian at the head, Parker and Nathan at the foot. It was tougher-going across the sand, carrying the dead weight of her. No. Not dead, thought Hy. She could not be dead.

  “Will she live?” she asked Nathan, when he had done his best to stabilize Cam. He didn’t answer. He’d rarely seen worse—and what he had seen, in this shape, had never survived. He just bowed his head, and tucked blankets around Cam’s prone form. He turned to Hy. “You coming too?”

  “I’ll stay with her.”

  He nodded and jumped down, closing the door behind him.

  “How will you get over?” Ian had just remembered the ferry.

  “Taken care of.” Nathan jumped in the cab and sped off.

  Constable Jane Jamieson was on her way to coerce the ferry operator into putting the vessel into service early that Sunday morning. Chester Gallant was a religious man who’d had to make peace with his Maker on the point of working on the holy day. The double-time-and-a-half pay had helped convince him of the right thing to do, but he was not a happy man to be awakened at nearly three in the morning and pressed back to work.

  Jamieson hadn’t phoned him. She had simply found out where he lived, drove straight there with her partner Murdo, walked, heavy-booted, along the wooden porch and rung the bell with an urgency that struck terror into Chester when it woke him up.

  A short, squat man, he had the body of a wrestler gone to seed. He pulled on a pair of pants over thick, hairy legs and stumbled through the dark house, feeling along surfaces he knew by heart to get to the door without switching on lights. Even in a crisis, he was a thrifty man.

  There were two police officers. Chester had never done anything wrong in his thoroughly Christian life. It could only be bad news. His brother Alf had a poor heart.

  Constable Jamieson flashed her I.D.

  “You run the ferry over Campbell Causeway?”

  He nodded. Was something wrong with the boat?

  Parker was standing in the middle of the room, staring blankly into the dark night. The full moon was shrouded in the dark clouds building up along the coast.

  “Storm coming.” Ian was standing beside Parker—and the Egyptian god of death—the dog of death. Parker went over to the bar. He grabbed a bottle of Scotch, and two glasses. He set them down on the coffee table, sat down, and splashed the drink into the tumblers as if it were water. They clinked glasses—a grim toast. The look that passed between them was sombre.

  Ian took a sip and raised his eyebrows. He rolled the Scotch around his mouth. It slipped down smoothly, the heat of it flowing through his chest. He picked up the bottle. Thirty-year-old single malt. It was just what the label claimed—“seductive.”

  “What happened?” Parker seemed stunned. “What happened to her?”

  Ian told as much as he knew about the boat buzzing the dory—and a bit more about whom he suspected—Coffin’s thugs—and about the presence of The Crustacean on the coast.

  Parker looked as if he had been struck.

  “My fault.” He collapsed back on the couch. “I’ve killed her. I killed him and I’ve killed her. My own daughter.”

  Ian didn’t know what had happened between Guillaume and Parker. For all he knew, he was sitting beside a murderer. If so, he knew he wasn’t in any danger.

  “You didn’t know she was yours?”

  “No, but I should have known. I had no reason to suspect Claire was lying—but I didn’t think she could be mine. I couldn’t, not really, not the whole way, with a woman, you know.”

  “Why’d you even try?”

  “Well, it’s complicated.”

  “It seems we have time for complicated.”

  The emotional events of the evening had the effect of letting down Parker’s natural reserve. He was thinking of the past anyway, because of Camilla.

  “Her name was Claire. She was fourteen. I was sixteen. Local girl. Foster child. One of my grandmother’s protégés. She came to help in the restaurant kitchen for a summer job. She was beautiful, honey-blonde, delicate features…”

  “Like Cam.”

  “Like Camilla.” Parker nodded, remembering.

  “Four years. We clung to each other. Two misfits. A foster child in a world of wealth—and me.” He rolled the glass around in his hands. Ian kept silent.

  “I had no love at home. My mother was a socialite. She simply produced me because that was the unspoken bargain she made when she married. I don’t remember her ever hugging me. My father hardly paid any attention to me at all. In Claire’s arms was warmth—and love.”

  “Puppy love.”

  “Precisely. I didn’t know who—what—I was then. We kissed. I touched her breasts. They were perfect, and her skin—like a pearl. She might have let me do more, but I didn’t want to. I just liked to fondle her breasts because they were beautiful, and stroke her naked skin, I suppose, because it was forbidden.”

  “Like any teenager.”

  “Yes—if you forget about the desire that should have been there. I loved the heat and the warmth of close physical contact, but I had no desire.”

  “Did you love her?”

  “I did—in my way. Before I knew who I was, we swore to each other we’d marry. We did marry. Guillaume thinks I jilted him for her, but it was the other way around really. The sex—the act—it was awful. A disaster. She was hurt, so hurt. That was the end…the end…the absolute end.”

  Parker fell back into the couch, silent, closing his eyes, remembering what he didn’t want to remember. Ian remembered Jasmine—and that she had not uttered a sound. She was blanketed in her cage. He was tempted to get up and go to her, but he resisted. It wouldn’t be fair to get that bird squawking now.

  Parker sat up again.

  “When I met Guillaume, it was then that I knew who…what…I was. I was obsessed with him. For one whole summer I ignored Claire, hurt her with my mental and physical absence. She had always been afraid I would grow away from her, because of my family, but it was Guillaume, Guillaume who took me. All that summer, the secret meetings, the sex, even then, twisted, distorted. My need for him frightened me and I lashed out. At him. At my family. At myself. I thought it was the only way I could save myself. I thought I could escape who I was. I don’t really know what I thought. I was young, stupid. Claire and I went to a Justice of the Peace.”

  He pulled the pearls from his pocket and laid them on the table.

  “My grandmother knew who I was. She encouraged the elopement. She gave me these pearls for Claire, with he
r blessing. She hoped it would change me. Claire wasn’t suitable in many ways, but at least she was a woman. We had three nights. Three nights before we both knew it was hopeless. Guillaume had followed us on our honeymoon, so the marriage never really had a chance. He was charming at first, won her over. She didn’t know what he was to me, and when he told her, she was shattered. I went crawling back to Guillaume and clung to him like a life raft.”

  More like a rubber dinghy full of holes, thought Ian.

  “But Cam—”

  “Yes, Camilla. Claire wrote me, later, that I had a daughter. Guillaume found the letter and raised a holy stink. I couldn’t believe the child was mine anyway. I gave her money—and kept her at arm’s length. That was the end of it—I never spoke to her again. I heard she’d died—just last year. Then Camilla showed up for the first time…”

  He caressed the pearls and slipped them back in his pocket—his talisman, part of his deal with the god of death. If he held them, he held her.

  When he found out that Jamieson wanted him to get the ferry running, Chester protested—about the Lord’s Day, his much-needed sleep; he even had the temerity to talk about setting bad precedents. In the end, Jamieson won out. She generally got what she wanted.

  But when she, Murdo and Chester finally got to the ferry landing, the boat was already on the water, its lights headed for the opposite shore.

  Parker had recounted the entire tale of his life with Guillaume and finally retreated into silence and what Ian thought looked like sleep. It was four in the morning. The police had still not come. Jasmine was fussing in her cage, and he peeked under the cover, and saw that her water container was empty. He filled it and brought it back. She allowed him to stroke her without pecking him before he replaced the cover. In spite of the dark mood in the room, he felt a thrill.

  Ian let himself out, looking down at the cookhouse where Guillaume’s body lay.

  He wondered if Guillaume had been searching for love too—or trying to escape it. Ian’s research into drugs had taught him that a CAT scan of the brain of someone on cocaine looks just like the brain of someone in love. ‘Just say no,’ he thought, might apply to romance as well as to drug abuse. The thought was somewhat close to home.

  He got in his car and headed home. He expected the police would be knocking at his door soon, and he should get some rest, but his brain refused to shut down. He wondered how Hy and Cam were getting on. Hy had known an unusual amount about hypothermia. She did have odd pockets of knowledge because of her work, but this was different, deeper, more intense. What had she said?

  Google me.

  She’d been irritated, but it was permission, of a kind.

  Ian had never googled Hy. Now he did.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Nathan’s “ambulance” rolled onto the ferry. He jumped out of the vehicle and gave a high-five to his pal Shaun Dooley, Hal’s son. Shaun did an occasional shift operating the boat and didn’t hesitate when Nathan called and asked him to get it running. The Dooleys owed a lot to the Macks for helping them out after they had lost their boat and fishing gear in the storm surge. Besides, Shaun and Nathan had known each other all of their lives, eyed girls on the beach in summer—fought over one of them—buzzed around in snowmobiles in winter, and graduated high school together. They were so alike to look at, you might have thought they were brothers. Only Shaun was even taller than Nathan, and skinnier. He went into the engine house and started the ferry. Nathan opened the back door of the van. “Everything okay in here?”

  “I guess so.” Hy hadn’t moved. She was still crouched beside Cam, in spite of the shooting pains up her legs and her numb feet. She was holding Cam’s hand. She had begun to lose sensation in her arm as well.

  “Any change?” He got up into the van, felt for a pulse, fussed a bit, and jumped down again.

  “Just keep praying.”

  Hy was praying for the first time in her life—not to God, but to the wind, blowing down the bay, across the half-finished causeway and straight at the brave little ferry, rocking it on its line.

  She called the wind on Mutt and Jeff.

  She looked at Cam’s pale face.

  Take them.

  She held Cam’s hand.

  Take them.

  She listened for Cam’s faint breathing.

  Let them die on the wind, she thought bitterly.

  It became her mantra.

  Let them die on the wind. No mercy.

  The makeshift ambulance bobbed on the ferry. Nathan was feeling a bit seasick, but, for the first time, the motion didn’t bother Hy. All she could think of was Cam. Cam, lying there, looking like a ghost.

  All he had to do was key in Hy’s name and more than a dozen sites popped up—medical, magazine, newspaper and book publishing sites. It was a story that had made national and medical news nearly forty years ago. A one-year-old child stuffed into a life jacket, tied to the body of her dead grandfather, bobbing on the water beside a bush plane in a not-quite-frozen lake. Hy’s grandfather, an experienced bush pilot, had inexplicably done a nose-dive into the lake while evacuating his daughter and her child from a log cabin deep in the woods. Hy’s mother was presumed drowned—her body never found. As a last act, she had tied her child to the grandfather’s dead body to increase her chance of survival.

  Ian jumped to the CBC archive link and found a recent documentary series, “Back to the Landers.” One of the episodes was about Hy’s rescue.

  “We were worried about them.” Hy’s grandmother, Mimi McAllister, appeared in archival footage, in her front yard—tight pin curls, white apron, clapboard house, picket fence. “We didn’t know Ray, my son-in-law, was dead—he was caught in one of his own traps and died of exposure. We hadn’t heard from them, so Hugh flew in to see what was up. I don’t know what went wrong.” A photograph of the downed pane flashed on the screen, followed by one of Hy, being removed from her grandfather’s body, her tiny face blank of all expression. She, too, looked dead.

  The site for a medical journal outlined the details of Hy, the miracle child, in an article titled “Hy-pothermia.” She was rescued, hypothermic, believed dead, but revived. Later, her grandmother would make sure she knew everything about hypothermia, swimming and survival in the woods. So she wouldn’t have another loved one die on her.

  Hy had outlived her grandmother—and lived on the legacy her mother had tucked into her tiny life jacket—a manuscript titled A Life on the Land, written on paper she’d made from birch bark with textured leaf impressions. It was acid-free, and could last thousands of years, like Egyptian papyrus. She had used homemade quill pens and ink made from plants. The drawings were in charcoal from the embers of the woodstove. The book was an instant classic in the back to the land movement and sold copies steadily for more than a decade. Every now and then it had a resurgence of interest and went into another edition. Its early fans thought the most recent was an abomination, but they’d all bought it—a coffee table book, in simulated birch bark, her mother’s neat hand replicated by digital technology. Hy inherited, not only the manuscript and its proceeds from her mother, but her doggedness and writing skills as well.

  Ian passed a hand across his head, several times. It explained a lot. He decided to have something to eat, then head into town with the first ferry, whether the police had come to question him or not. They’d find him soon enough.

  Parker hadn’t moved from the couch since Ian had left. He lay sunk in a pool of sorrow, thinking the same thing over and over.

  Guillaume is dead. Camilla is dead.

  He kept repeating it to himself. Partly, he was torturing himself. Partly, he was forcing himself to believe the unbelievable.

  Guillaume is dead. Camilla is dead. I have killed them.

  On it went. When would it stop? When would he accept what he had done? For he had killed them both, as surely as if he had held a gun to
their heads and pulled the trigger.

  He poured another Scotch.

  In sickness and in health. No. In sickness. Guillaume’s. His own.

  It had brought him to murder. He had said it was an accident, but Parker knew that in the moment before Guillaume fell backward into the pond, he had wanted him dead. He had wanted to kill him. If murder was intent to kill, he’d had murder on his mind.

  The moon was now fully obscured by clouds and the wind was blowing hard and steady from the northeast. The Zodiac was floundering on the sandbar at the mouth of Big Bay, and Bill and Wendell were struggling to get the craft off the sandspit and out of the bay to the safety of The Crustacean. The wind and the tide kept shoving them back and their efforts to paddle out did little to move them, only left them forever in the same place, battling against the storm and the big lump of sand that stretched across the bay.

  “She walked up one side of us, down the other, and then did it a few more times, she liked it so much,” was how Nathan later described Constable Jamieson’s reaction to their commandeering of the ferry. After flinging about phrases like “obstruction of justice,” “aiding and abetting” and a number of others that would and would not hold up in court, she was on her way. Having taken down their names and details, she realized they had no more time to waste than she did.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” was her parting salvo. “I’ll be speaking to you.”

  Nathan had them at the hospital in Winterside in half the time it should have taken. The roads were empty and clear and he took advantage of his semi-official status to exceed the speed limit—and then some.

  The intensive care doctor, Dr. Fabio Diamante, was diminutive, dark and foreign. He looked out of mournful brown eyes—like a cow’s eyes.

  “It’s time to call the family.”

  On The Island, that meant the patient was dying.

  Hy thought for just a second. Parker was family, but he was worse than useless right now. Was there any other family? Cam had never spoken of any.