“Are you watching birds?” she said. “The island out there is full of them.”
“No, I’m not after birds.”
She knelt down and resumed unwinding fishing line from a driftwood piece she’d fancied. She hated his standing there stupidly.
“What brings you here then, Billy?” After yesterday’s disturbing accident up near Murdock’s, he was a troubling presence.
“You spend a lot of time on the beach here? Nice view. Shit, I wouldn’t want to swim here.”
“You wouldn’t, no. It’s deep. A swift current out there.”
She uncircled the string from the wood more slowly.
“You’re not much for the gab, are you?” he said.
“Gab away, Billy. I don’t mind.”
But he clattered carefully off, stopping now and then to squat over something. She could tell his attention remained on her, so she was not surprised when he looped back. She stood up with the driftwood under her arm, fingering its satiny grain. She wouldn’t mind seeing the red boat out there. Canadian law and order. A Mountie in a scarlet coat. Or Murdock.
“We lost something off our boat,” he said. He waved vaguely toward the ocean, Bird Island.
“A lobster trap? I saw one up …”
“No.” He unsnapped a button of his denim jacket. “No, it’s … a bundle, like, wrapped in green plastic. You know. Gear.”
She took a long slow breath, wary of details or lies. She smiled, tilted her head at him. “Art is all I’m interested in. Natural objects.”
“Art?”
“Pieces of old metal. Sometimes wood. Natural sculptures. Stones. I hope you find what you’re looking for. Lots of people use this beach.”
He looked slowly up and down the shore. “All I’ve seen is you.” “Sorry.”
“See, it’s that Liv and me, we got to find this gear, you know? It belonged to some other guys and they really want it. Need it.” He shaded his eyes unnecessarily and looked across the water. “You’d let us know, wouldn’t you? If you was to find it?”
“Of course,” she said. “It’s yours after all, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. It sure is.”
She listened to the stones shifting under his steps as he set off toward Murdock’s shore.
All the way up her path, lingering casually to pinch leaves off a tomato plant, her knees were a little weak. She was already unnerved by yesterday’s events, the sirens that froze her, their wails rising beyond the trees, so near on this dead-end road, then diminishing toward Murdock’s. Coming for who? Then she thought fire, then someone stricken, maybe Murdock, he was not young. She called him, the phone rang and rang before he picked it up, sounding tense and weary. I can’t talk now, Anna, a Mountie is here, an ambulance. Connie was killed up on the road. Car hit him, it looks like. I would hate to think, Anna said, this has anything to do with me, with, you know.… I don’t know, he said, just what it has to do with. The constable’s having a look up there. Nobody saw it or heard anything. Anna said, I wanted to be sure you were all right, that was the main thing. There was a pause and she could hear him breathing, he must have rushed to the phone.I’m okay, he’d said, but an old friend is dead, and I don’t know but I might have saved him.
She had so wanted to believe that the bale had drifted from a long way off, that no one here where she lived had a claim to it, but everything was constricting dizzily. She drank a glass of water, then walked through the woods to her mailbox as she would on any afternoon. Lowering the lid, she hoped for a letter that would take her somewhere else, but she felt nothing in the box, not even a flyer. She let her hand rest in the cool tin while she caught her breath: no one but Murdock knew what she’d found. How could they? Her hair was dense with fine rain and she pulled her hood up. A truck approached, heading out, its windshield fogged. The driver tapped the horn, waved, she waved, people did that here, they didn’t need to know you, and whoever it was did not. Breagh knew her. But she was up north, or down north, as they said here. Anna hadn’t seen her in a long while, and wished she could visit her and talk about inconsequential things, play the drawing game with Lorna, Anna starting it off with a crude figure on a sheet of paper, Lorna attaching something to it, however her whimsy moved her, and on they’d go, laughing as the figure grew more absurd, silly, grotesque. Anna was home too much, her lights burning, her radio playing the CBC’s eclectic menu, her car parked under the silver poplar with its high, dramatic branches. But Billy on the beach? Too close to home.
Upstairs, Anna wrestled the bale out of the trunk and carried it down to the kitchen. She drew back the old hooked rug, swept up the dust underneath. The trap door was heavier than it looked, but she pulled it up and flopped it open. She wouldn’t climb down into that musty, vegetal air. Something rotted there? Old potatoes? Damp cardboard? Sweating, she pushed the bale over the edge of the opening, watched it bounce once on the wooden steps and disappear into the darkness. Good. Much better. Once she laid the rug down—stained, a bit soiled—and smoothed it with her foot, the floor was as it had been. What could it possibly hide?
SHE LEFT the muddy road and its jarring holes and followed Red Murdock’s drive that, like hers, twisted through woods, then opened out to the old house and outbuildings and fields, more cleared than her own. She had not come to it from this direction before, only from the shore behind it. They had neither of them met up since she weaved home three nights ago, sweeping her way with his flashlight, a little paranoid about her visibility in the moonlight, she shut if off before she reached her path. She and Murdock had seemed to sheer off from each other that evening, as if at a certain point what they really needed was to be alone. The grass, probably, grass could do that, and Murdock’s moonshine or whatever it was that had left a sharp ache behind her eyes. She had hoped, while heading there, that something would resolve itself, but by the time she left she’d had no idea what she wanted to be resolved, needed to be, only that she’d believed smoking grass would, like a potion, put them on the same wavelength and all would dissolve into a congenial ease and frankness and something new.
Behind a small gabled building there was an upturned boat, its hull brilliant white against the greyed shingles. The house had a small front porch, but when she’d been inside, everything felt turned toward the sea, and Murdock too would be somewhere in the house with his back to the road, he was not in the woodshop with its smells of oil, fresh wood, thinner.
The back yard was familiar enough, the forge, the wild grass of the sloping field. She startled him when she tapped on the kitchen window. He beckoned her inside. In the sink lay fish, cleaned and filleted. She could smell them on his hand as he offered her a smoke.“I’m not hungry today,” he said. Liquor drifted off his words.
“I’m so sorry about Connie,” Anna said. “That’s terrible. You said he was hit?”
“Of course he was a Jesus drinker. Still, it’s odd, I don’t like it. The constable, he knows Connie, had run-ins with him. How deep is he going to dig? Drunk men fall down. But they don’t get busted up like that.”
“Is he coming back?”
“He’s still got people to talk to. Nobody heard nothing. You worried?”
“Not especially. It happened a long way from me.”
“It? Not all of it. Look what you got at home.”
He stood up at the sink, staring at the fish there. “I pulled in a few sculpin this afternoon, seemed like a good thing to do, fish for a while. Ugly little bastards, I always feel sorry for them. Good eating. Listen, I don’t know. Something moving through here hasn’t been here before. Left him like a dog in a ditch.”
“Any guesses?”
“You’d run out of guesses in a hurry. He staggered in and out of that pack down at Sandy’s. But then what?”
“Good thing you found him. Would coyotes have bothered him?”
“Just think how we’d taste. They’re too smart.”
His kitchen had seemed so pleasant to Anna in sea light, clean and spare, but tha
t ambience was gone. She wanted this to be an incident totally separate from her own, to which she could offer an outsider’s sympathy.
“Look at the sea out there, Anna. Dead still. The weather feels strange, eh? The rain so straight down flat. Somebody had him as a lookout, I think. Maybe Livingstone, or his pals. Why he came back here, I don’t know. Wanted to tell me something maybe, that’s what he did, he’d come see me. Oh, Connie could blurt out the wrong things sometimes, when he got oiled up. Talked too little, or too much, when he got older.”
Anna closed her eyes for a moment. “What did you tell the Mountie?”
“Not everything, not with you hiding that stuff, Anna. We’d have them nosing all over. How many got their fingers in this, I don’t know. It isn’t just Livingstone and Billy.”
“So Connie’s connected to me?” she said reflexively, knowing it was merely rhetorical, that she didn’t really want an answer.
“You’ve stumbled into it, Anna, whatever it is.” He took a glass from the cupboard and poured her a whisky. “Here.”
She raised the glass. “To your friend Connie. I’m sorry.” They drank the whisky down.
“You have to turn that marijuana in, Anna.”
“Murdock, I can’t turn that dope in now. I’d be embroiled in all this, I don’t want that. I can’t work. I’m barely working.”
“Then you have to turn it out, girl.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“None of it’s easy anymore, Anna. It’ll get harder if you wait.”
“I had a conversation with young Billy on the beach,” she said.
“Beachcombing was he?”
“I think he was looking for something already combed.”
Red Murdock frowned. “Like what you’ve got stowed away?”
“He wasn’t that specific. But close.”
“Jesus. What kind of talk was it?”
“What could he suspect? It’s a long shoreline. He doesn’t know a thing about my house.”
“Livingstone does.”
Her face went warm and he stared at her frankly, but without accusation, and though questions rushed her mind, there seemed no point in asking them.“Your house, you know, it isn’t hard to break into,” he said.
“I’m sure a good shoulder to the door would do it. And those old windows have no locks. But would Billy? Livingstone?”
“Someone else who’s in this might. Got to be others.”
“There are.”
“You can’t leave that bale upstairs, Anna. We’ve got to move it.”
“Are you trying to scare me?”
“They have an eye on your house, I’m afraid. Maybe it’s time you were scared.”
“They. Ominous word sometimes, isn’t it? I don’t want to be scared just because I’m a woman.”
“Common sense.”
“Not much excitement in common sense, is there?”
“Is excitement what you’re after?”
“I won’t let them bully me. Out of nothing more than suspicion? I’m supposed to just roll over?”
“God damn it, Anna! Do what you want!”
He got up and put his back to her. He stared out where a dark curtain of rain was moving in from the sea, flowing with wind.
“Oh, Murdock,” she said, turning the empty whisky glass in her fingers. “I’m sorry.”
“Have some sense about it. That’s all I’m asking.”
“I do have enough sense to ask could I keep some of my drawings here, in your house? Just in case. I would hate like hell to lose them.”
“I’ll look after them.” He faced her, gave her a slight smile. “Does that include the nude one?”
“Of me? Murdock, I’m flattered you’d ask.”
“Good.” He tipped his glass toward her. He sat again, leaned forward under the trawler lamp that hung above the table. “We used to sit here and talk,” he said, “under this cabin sort of light. Like in our own boat, that’s what it was like. Sat here smoking cigarettes.” He laughed, shook his head. “Smoked cigarettes. Can you believe it?”
“Do you mean her?” Anna said, nodding toward the photo of them on the wall.
“Her it was. Connie always liked her. Who didn’t like her? I’d wring their necks.”
Anna stood up. “You know what I’d like to do, Murdock? Drive up north, see Breagh and Lorna. Would that be awful? Am I running away?”
“Might be good to stay away from the house for a bit.”
“Just for a couple hours or so.”
“Ask her if she knows where Livingstone is while you’re at it. Lock up and I’ll go down there later,” he said, “have a look around.”
“Murdock, remember, if I should get busted or something, it’s all on me, nothing on you.”
“Oh, I’m in it too, dear.”
She started for the front door but he stopped her with his hand. “You have to leave the same door you came in, Anna. Bad luck.”
She turned and hugged him, felt his hesitation give way and he took her hard in his arms. “Ah, Anna Starling,” he said. “What are we going to do with you?”
ANNA FLED NORTH, over her mountain into clearing weather, avoiding the ferry at Englishtown for the longer route around St. Ann’s Bay, beautiful in any weather, its coves and inlets, the old houses high above the water, silvery in occasional flashes of sun, through the Tarbot valley to the Cabot Trail highway and up the east coast, the Atlantic never long out of view, it was like flinging open a door to a fresh wind. Of course this was escape, leaving matters with Red Murdock, as if when she returned he would have vanquished the curious, the dangerous, laid some protective shield around the house, shown that a man was there, not a woman on her own. For Now: the motto on their coat of arms.
When she’d come up this way in early spring there’d been hardly a tourist vehicle, but she was soon stuck behind a motor home all the way to the Wreck Cove General Store where she stopped to ask the woman at the counter if she knew of Breagh’s shop, Peerless Apparel.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “they’re nice girls, nice, those two. Maybe three miles on you’ll see it, on the water side. They come in now and again with the little girl, a sweetheart.”
“Yes, I know her,” Anna said—feeling for the first time the pleasure of telling a stranger they shared acquaintances here, and with a woman who knew nothing about who Anna was, here or beyond. Or cared.
Just off the highway, not far from a white church and its churchyard, Anna spotted the old schoolhouse, its shingles painted soft green and the trim in yellow, shades reflected in the art nouveau script above the door: Peerless Apparel: Original Clothing for Women, and (as if an afterthought) Men. No cars in the small lot out front but Breagh’s and an older van. Out back, a scrim of wind-stunted spruce and then the ocean, grey, jumping calmly with whitecaps. A plump blonde woman in jeans was leading Lorna out the door, and Anna stopped in front of them.
“Hello, Lorna,” she said. Lorna squinted up as if she didn’t know her and that chilled Anna for a moment. But then how well could she read the glance of a child, even Melissa’s girls, who were older? She introduced herself to the woman, who offered her hand.
“Isobel,” she said, “Breagh’s partner. You’re the Anna from California?” The woman wore a blouse of colourful quilt patches draped over an ample bosom and she laughed easily when Lorna tugged at her hand. “She’s mentioned you, a neighbour. Long way from home, eh?”
“Yes, Isobel, but I feel at home here.“ She might have said that with conviction not long ago, but now she could barely conceal its ambiguity. “Breagh mentioned me favourably, I hope.”
Isobel gave her an easy smile but said no more.
“Your business off to a good start?”
“Tourist season, Anna. Seven days a week. Breagh and Lorna crash in the back there. A couple cots, a bathroom. She loves the beach, eh, Lorna? It’s friendly, sandy, no high cliffs, like home.”
“Lorna? We could draw pictures again,” Anna said
. She felt the tension in her voice but she couldn’t control it. “Would you like that?”
The little girl considered this, staring at her sandals. “We have to get Popsicles,” she said.
“Yes, we’re off to the general store,” Isobel said, laughing. “You go right on in, Anna. Herself’s in the rear there.”
IN THE BIG, high-ceilinged room, the tall school windows were raised and a breeze rustled the racks of clothing, hangers tinkled. The walls and wainscotting had a fresh, warm coat of pale yellow paint, a mature hue bright in a way this room had never been. Wares were arrayed—hats and scarves and shawls, a few sturdy sweaters—on two long trestle tables of stout pine, left over surely from the school. There was a round wood stove further back that looked older than Anna’s, well-used, how well could it have warmed a room like this, the kids on the outskirts? Anna made her way through the clothing toward Breagh at the far end of a table, bent over a shoulder bag, sewing by hand a bright blue strap to lemon-yellow cloth dashed with forget-me-nots. She pulled the needle through high and held it as she glanced up.
“Oh, it’s Anna Starling.”
“Hello, Breagh.” Anna felt suddenly like a customer, some tourist who’d pulled in on a whim. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Did you want to?”
“Why would you say that?”
“I thought maybe it’s Livingstone you’d be wanting to see, off the road somewhere.”
“You’re wrong, then. It’s very much you I needed to see. Oh, I might have a couple questions to ask Livingstone Campbell, if I ran into him.”
“Oh? I’d love to hear what they’d be.”
“Why are you so cool to me?” Anna had to ask even though she knew the answer, she’d face it however she could.
Breagh set aside her sewing. She stood up, tall and lovely in a dark green gypsy blouse of soft cotton, cinched with a wide black belt, its silver buckle incised with a Celtic horse, her full skirt crimson, its hem just above high black boots. Anna had missed the sight of her on those wet, grey days, the energy in that absurdly lovely hair: there was nothing passive or complacent about her beauty, she made no great thing of it, used no makeup but touches of mascara that startled the green of her eyes.
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