“I want to set a world record. A three-hundred-pound cod would be a record for its species, if we could get hold of one.”
“I may be able to help you there.” Seamus stroked the photo with a thumb, contemplating. How would this Ferguson fella be able to help him? He’d liked the sound of the money. No matter how much he was able to exploit the department’s resources, he was going to need money.
“Then perhaps we should meet.” Ferguson smiled. Seamus smiled. They were both after the same thing. Each thinking he would get the better of the other.
Chapter 4
Jamieson had to turn a blind eye to several octogenarian drivers who showed up to search for Abel and parked on the lawn beside the hall. The Women’s Institute phone chain had whipped into action and the villagers had gathered there, excited by the news and by the chance to tear themselves away: the women from watching soap operas and the men from tinkering in their sheds after the lawns were cut. Armed with binoculars that usually hung by their big picture windows, they were prepared to comb the area for Gus’s missing husband.
Some were concerned that they might not recognize him if they found him – dead or alive.
“Last time I saw Abel? Can’t say really. The centenary year…mebbe. Canada, that is. Not The Shores.” The villager – Jamieson couldn’t put a name to him – was toothless and so wrinkled that she thought he must be even older than Abel, perhaps a hundred years old or more.
“Don’t know as I seen Abel in the last twenty years,” said Abel’s near neighbour, Germaine Joudry. “Not since he retired from fishin’.”
Abel’s much younger brother, Ben, reminded them that, twenty years before, everyone had seen Abel when he took a stand against Canada Post. The corporation had sent him a letter, informing him that it was going to use a triangular piece of his land by the road – where the General Store used to be – to put up a community mailbox.
Abel never read the letter. Didn’t open it. He couldn’t see why Canada Post would be sending him mail. Wasn’t their job just to deliver it?
So, the first he knew of the community mailbox was when a big truck drove down the Island Way, past his house, past the hall, past Toombs’s, and screeched to a halt at that triangle of land where Abel’s General Store burned down. Two workers jumped out of the truck and painted a big orange square on the grass, one wielding the brush, the other holding the can.
“I was with Abel in his kitchen,” said Ben. Everyone knew the story, but they loved hearing it again, especially from Ben, who could spin a good yarn when he broke his habitual silence.
“We was looking out his big pikcher window when they come. He hustled out, taking the shortcut behind the hall, fast as his bowlegs could take him, with me behind, wanting to see the action.” Ben imitated a few of Abel’s bowlegged steps.
They all remembered Abel’s battle with Canada Post, and each added detail as the story unfolded.
Abel had got there just in time, as the driver was circling round to go back onto the road. He stopped the truck.
“What’s goin’ on?” Abel had called up, his authority diminished by the height of the truck and his squat stature.
“Didn’t you get a letter? This here” – the driver pointed at the gleaming orange lines – “is for the community mailbox.”
Abel had never heard of such a thing. He went marching straight home and scattered papers, family photographs, and quilt patches off the kitchen table onto the floor. He swept the ducky mug off the table, too, and it became the first of its kind to smash on the floor. Abel later ordered several more from the Sears catalogue. “Coffee don’t taste the same,” he claimed, unless it was from the duck’s beak. Why? “Cools it to just the right temperature,” said Abel.
He found the envelope from Canada Post, ripped it open, and read it. With difficulty. Abel had never got beyond the eighth grade, and what he had learned, he had sloughed off after one season of fishing. He passed the paper over to Gus, who read it, her brow wrinkling.
“Says here they’re using the spot for a community mailbox, whatever that is.”
Abel soon found out, and didn’t like it.
“Everyone’s going to come tramping all over my property to get their mail. They’ll be snooping in my box, too, I’ll bet,” Abel complained to customer relations in Winterside. Customer relations weren’t then what they are now – synthesized recorded voices and accents from countries far away. Customer relations then was the Island Telephone Company’s lone receptionist, Sadie Beirsto, a cousin of Abel’s several times and generations removed. Like practically everyone on Red Island – family.
“You’ll have a lock and key, Abel.”
“A lock and key? In The Shores? We don’t lock our homes, we don’t lock our cars, why would we lock our mailboxes?” Abel didn’t see the contradiction in his argument. He did realize the scheme could put him out of pocket. The letter hadn’t said anything about compensation.
“Are they going to pay for that land?”
“I can’t rightly say. You’ll have to take that up with someone else.”
Who that was wasn’t clear. Abel never did find out who was responsible. One morning while he was bringing in lobster, someone came and dug a big hole in the patch of land. There were two mounds of dirt on either side of it.
He was so mad he fetched a shovel and spent the afternoon in the baking sun, filling the hole back up, muttering complaints with each shovelful.
Gus tried to stop him several times, warning that he might “take a heart attack,” but, as she told others after, he was “bound and determined” to undo what Canada Post had done without his permission. All Gus could do was bring him lemonade to cool him down and towels to sop up his sweat. Even then, his face was bloated and red, and his shirt soaked.
When the earth was back in the hole, Wally Fraser and Germaine Joudry came by. They’d been watching from Joudry’s house, right next to Abel’s own.
“Nice job.” Germaine looked with admiration at the rectangular patch, Abel’s boot marks on it as he continued tramping down the red clay.
“You watched?”
Germaine nodded.
“You could of helped.”
Germaine put his hand over his heart.
“Oh, right.” His heart. Germaine had been begging off physical labour practically all his life with that excuse.
Wally Fraser nodded. “Good work,” he said. “Someone has to show the bastards.” It was a word he couldn’t use in his own home. His wife Gladys, president of the Women’s Institute, wouldn’t allow it. So he exercised it everywhere else, whenever he could.
“The bastards” returned the next day with the intent of erecting the box. They no longer had a hole to put it in.
Abel watched with satisfaction from his window as the crew turned and left. They’d be back, he knew, to dig the hole again, but he wasn’t finished.
He went out the next morning with a lawn chair, a lemonade in his ducky mug, and his Tilley hat pulled down low against the sun on his head and face. He planted the chair smack in the middle of the dirt patch and sat there until nightfall in the sweltering heat. Each time he took a swig from the mug it looked as if a duck was wearing the Tilley hat “ass backwards,” said Wally, with almost as much delight as he said “bastards.”
This was in the days long before cellphones, or there would have been a plethora of shots of Abel. There was not even one photograph of his triumph. Local videographer Lester Joudry was still in diapers.
Abel sat there the next day, and the day after that. He sat there for seven days, at the height of fishing and farming season, until the men returned in the truck, saw him, and turned and left.
Then nothing. For days, nothing.
Abel got a letter – in his roadside mailbox – from Canada Post. This one, he did open. It said the corporation had reversed its decision for a co
mmunity mailbox in The Shores.
Abel was triumphant, looking out the window at his patch of land. Then his face clouded over. A truck pulled up. Two men got out, began levelling the mound of earth, and rolled fresh turf onto the scar on the land. When they’d finished, they left the spot better than new, disciplined urban grass laid down next to unruly meadow grasses.
“They needn’t have bothered,” Abel turned to Gus. “It gave me an idea. I’m going to put a little building there to sell your jam and some campfire wood by the roadside.” That’s what he did.
Apart from those few days twenty years ago, there had been almost no sightings of Abel.
“The only other time I saw him for more’n a couple of minutes would have been at my wedding…thirty years ago.” That was Ben. If he’d hardly seen his own brother in thirty years, then who would have?
So not seeing Abel didn’t mean he wasn’t there. It was status quo.
How it had become so, Hy couldn’t figure out. Was no one curious?
Chapter 5
They were curious now. Curious to find Abel. Most of them; Wally and Gladys Fraser slinked off, though. Moira Toombs, who lived right next door to the hall and had been peeking out her kitchen window, disappeared when she saw that Jamieson was organizing people in groups. In their backyard, her husband Frank had been oblivious to the gathering at the hall, in a reverie that grass mowing and riding a lawn tractor seem to inspire in some men. Away in a world of their own. Or the best of both worlds. Working and not working at the same time. The tractor stalled and Frank came back to the real world.
He saw something was going on. He strode over to offer his help. Frank hadn’t forgotten how folks had helped him with his heritage project – half a dozen wigwams formed of metal poles and parachute silk, standing on land adjacent to Moira’s house. The wigwam village was the most unusual tourist accommodation in The Shores – indeed, on all of Red Island – and was listed in the top ten “Places to Stay in Canada” on several tourism websites. As long as it wasn’t windy. It was, most of the time. That made the accommodations even more desirable. Risk-taking for the jaded.
It was in one of these wigwams, the hole in the apex of its roof open to the starlight, that Frank and Moira had finally consummated their marriage, long after the ceremony. It had cemented their union and made them, to everyone’s surprise, a happily married couple, in spite of Moira’s sour ways and Frank’s philandering gaze. But now it was a gaze only.
Frank was grateful for the villagers’ help in sealing his marriage to Moira, and so, he was always happy to “give back.” He volunteered to lead a group into the potato fields along the capes. Other groups prepared to comb the shore – around the run, Vanishing Point, and Mack’s Shore. Finn said he’d go where he was most needed. Jamieson said that would be right here with her. He raised a quizzical eyebrow.
She flushed. She hadn’t meant anything by it.
“I want you…” she paused, flustered, “to map out the entire area between the causeway and the dunes on the west side of Big Bay. That way, we’ll know where we’ve been and where we have to go.”
He saluted and smiled. She almost smiled back.
“We have to start small from here at the centre and fan out. When you get where you’re going, do the same thing from there. Fan out from a central point, so that every square inch is covered. When you’re finished, report back to me. I’ll keep track of where we’ve been, so we don’t duplicate our efforts,” Jamieson instructed.
“Don’t skip a thing. We are looking for a man, but anything you see, anything unusual, may be pertinent.”
Some eyes had already glassed over. They were ready to search but unwilling to listen. Hadn’t they found missing people before? Children gone astray on the shore. Tourists who lost their direction cycling down one of the lanes that led nowhere. But the eyes came alive at the unfamiliar word. Pertinent. Some looked confused; others, angry.
Pertinent. Was that the same as impertinent? Like regardless – and irregardless?
Jamieson saw she’d hit a wall.
“Anything that you see may have to do with Abel’s disappearance. Anything.”
She checked her groups again, conferred with the leaders of each.
“Now don’t overtax yourselves. The forest fires in Quebec are sending us some dirty smoke, and though it only looks hazy, we are all inhaling that stuff, so, if for any reason, you feel breathless, sore, or thirsty, stop.”
Jamieson frowned. She didn’t need the complication of Quebec forest fires invading her turf. The search would get in the way of checking the elderly and asthmatic to see how they were coping. She’d been doing that all of August. A blazing sun had seared the forests mercilessly all summer, drying trees and leaves so that they were like matches waiting to ignite. The smoke filled the air above the woods, a grey cloud smothering the sky, and the winds blew it to Red Island, and even farther down the eastern seaboard. People were cursing and coughing, their summer fun destroyed. In Quebec, the fires showed no sign of letting up, and the winds blowing the smoke to The Shores showed no sign of veering off. New fires were sparking to life each day, and the old ones were taking time to run their course, burning, burning, until it seemed everything was ash, then reigniting and moving on. Authorities, who should have known, had no idea when it would end.
“Gus is serving tea and lunch for anyone who needs to take a break,” Hy put in, using the word the way the locals did, meaning biscuits and cheese and squares. On Red Island, “lunch” usually came after supper, a little snack at the end of the day. Dinner was the midday meal. Gus had no intention of feeding the whole village dinner but had agreed to provide a little “lunch.”
“I can’t sit there and do nothing,” Gus had said, when Hy suggested even that might be too much for her.
Hy and her close friend Ian Simmons were in a group going to the shore. They naturally paired up. They made a good team when it came to solving mysteries. Ian, a retired high school science teacher, had used his computer several times to solve murders. Hy had a knack for falling over or bumping into bodies, and a keen need to satisfy her curiosity about how they got that way.
The group would be taking the bridge over the run. The run had once been a comma of fresh water that flowed from the pond across the sand and into the salt water of the Gulf. It changed the way it flowed each year, depending on how winter storms carved out the shore. This year’s changes had been dramatic. A vicious storm had carved a deep trough along the full length of the stream, right up to the bridge where the muskrat lived and the pond began. It was as if a dredger had been through. The run had gone from being knee deep to shoulder high, five times as deep and twice as wide as it once had been. The land was tilted so that the ocean ran into the pond, not the other way around, and it was now salt water. Access to the far side of the shore was tricky.
“Be careful on that bridge. It’s not safe. Worse every day.” Annabelle, Ben Mack’s wife and Hy’s best friend, was getting ready to lead a group into the potato fields that lined the cape below the hall. She and all of April Dewey’s six children prepared to crawl down the rows of potatoes under the harvest-thick foliage, oblivious to the potato spray saturated deep into the soil.
Ian and Hy walked down Wild Rose Lane to the shore, in what should have been the easy companionship of a long friendship. It wasn’t easy. It almost never was. There had been romantic moments, even a few days over Christmas several years back. There had been that kiss on the beach last August during the fireworks for the village’s 200th anniversary. But no more than that. Neither of them could have said why not. Perhaps they feared romance would get in the way of a friendship they depended on, both being “from away” in this close-knit village.
But there was something between them. Their shoulders touched while they were combing the rose bushes that lined the clay lane for a sign of Abel. They both felt it was more than chance ph
ysical contact. It wasn’t clear who pulled away first.
Ben Mack climbed onto his huge fertilizing tractor. The tractor looked like an alien life form or an oversized mosquito with wings closed at its sides. When open, they spread out over the rows of potato plants and sprayed death into the earth. Spray that smelled on the air and seeped into houses with windows open – even though the farmers claimed the spray went right into the ground. They sprayed because there had been too much rain. They sprayed because there hadn’t been enough rain. They sprayed every chance they got when the wind was twenty kilometres or less. They sprayed sometimes when it was more than that, as long as no one complained. A legitimate complaint could stop the spraying. Usually.
The tractor towered above the land, and gave Ben a vantage point from which to watch the searchers in the field, to see that not a row was missed. It was fortunate the Dewey children were in the hunt. So close to harvest, the potato plants, deep green and lush, spilled over into each other from row to row, forming a thick carpet across the field. The children tunnelled under the plants in the furrows between the rows. Ben could watch their progress in the movement of the leaves like waves, as the children hustled down the rows.
If Abel were there, they’d find him.
Would they find him dead or alive?
***
The summer sun shone only as a faded outline, obscured by the smoke from Quebec, drifting in a constant canopy. The air smelled of fire, heavy with particles that coated everything with a smoky residue.
Somewhere, obscured in the filmy grey that choked the villagers and had sent tourists scurrying for home, leaving their cottages lined along the cape, deserted and desolate, somewhere was Abel Mack. He must be. Most likely dead. Jamieson became more convinced of that with every report back from each location. A man in his nineties, exposed to the elements – they were bound to stumble on him somewhere.
Cod Only Knows Page 3
