She gave a wry smile. Not they. It was Hy who was bound to stumble on him. She came across all the corpses in The Shores. She’d tripped and fallen on Lance Lord, dead and dressed in his Jimi Hendrix outfit. She’d been knocked off her skis by a corpse swinging from a tree in a winter storm. Running on the beach a few years back, Hy had discovered a woman flattened by a massive chunk of sandstone, broken off the cape. The woman was splayed out underneath, only her plump little hands and feet showing.
Hy hadn’t found Abel. Not yet. Was there a reason for that? Was Gus right?
“He ain’t dead,” she kept insisting, as she presided over the teakettle in her kitchen, feeding and watering the searchers when they came for a break.
“How do you know?” the villagers asked again and again. And always the same answer:
“I know he’s alive. Just as I would know if he was dead.”
Odd, thought Jamieson. Gus didn’t seem especially worried. Did she know something she wasn’t saying? Or did she know deep within her, as she claimed? Jamieson found herself being carried away on that thought for a moment, feeling that Abel was alive somewhere, seeing his hat pulled down on his head against the wind, as he…as he…She pulled herself out of the vision. Her pragmatism took over. He would be found. He would most likely be found dead.
***
Ferguson’s relationship to his fish was deep, stronger than his feelings for his wife. As their colours and shapes glided by his peripheral vision, he would close his eyes, his forehead would smooth, his jaw relax, his muscles soften; he would give himself up to their soothing company.
The bond had become weird.
It had started with him going into the tank to clean it. Plenty of aquarium owners did that. It was the easiest way to do the job.
It became an experience. Daily. Clothed. In a wetsuit. Then unclothed, except for a Speedo.
He would lower himself into the biggest tank, wearing a snorkel attached to a long hose so he could descend, and he would swim among them. The water was warm for the tropical fish, and there was no reason to wear a wetsuit. Much too uncomfortable. To get into. To get out of. To wear in the meantime. With his naked skin he had the delight of fish brushing up against him, some taking a small peck to see if he was food, and the discus especially trailing him around, weaving in and out of his arms and hands.
He became one with the fish. Shivering with delight at the sensation of being with them, in their environment. Sometimes so besotted that he forgot he was in the tank to clean it.
In spite of the trouble and expense of bringing these fish to Red Island, Ferguson was already losing interest in them. The proximity to his prey – the record-setting giant cod – had altered his focus, his interest, his obsession. He couldn’t stop thinking about the giant fish. About acquiring it. And watching it. Owning it.
Chapter 6
Hy and Ian hurried down to the shore. Their group of searchers had spread out around Vanishing Point and over to Mack’s Shore. They headed in the opposite direction – over the rickety bridge to the sea rock, a chunk broken off the cape and worn away by the waves and the wind so that it became smaller each year. And changed each year. Cape and sea rock now looked like two old men, staring each other down, one with a white crewcut formed of cormorant excrement, a solvent that was eating away the top of the rock. The other, like most of the village men, bald.
No one could hide on the shore – unless he’d drowned. Even then, the body would soon be tossed up onto the sand.
The run, that was different, now that it had been carved out to its new depth. Abel could be dead in the run or the pond, drowned.
Hy and Ian scoured the length of the run. They navigated the spongy marshland around the pond, but could see nothing. Would it have to be dragged?
What about the cookhouse? Maybe he had found shelter there.
The door creaked open. Unlocked. The place was a mess. It had once been the dream kitchen of a French chef, with granite counters, tile floor, and, in the back, a grotto, an indoor pond constructed to keep lobsters happy and healthy until they were killed and eaten.
There was red sand all over the white tile floor and counters. The state-of-the-art appliances had been sold. The door to the walk-in freezer had been removed. Inside it, a lobster rights activist had nearly died of hypothermia.
Abel wasn’t there, he wasn’t in the indoor pond, and there was no sign that he had been. The footprints were all their own.
Outside, Hy and Ian scanned the sand, looking for evidence of a ducky mug. They found nothing and kept walking, plodding along the shore together, but separate.
“That way we’ll cover more territory,” Hy had suggested. She walked, barefoot, in the shallow water; Ian combed the capes. Together but apart. The story of their relationship. It was low tide, and so they were able to go from beach to beach, around the capes that jutted out into the water. At high tide, they couldn’t get around them, but at low tide, they could scale the slippery rocks to move onto the next shore.
This went on for miles, and so did they, mile after mile with nothing but sand, rocks, and sea.
No Abel.
They were the last on the shore. Heading back, they could see the full length of the beach, wisps of smoke drifting across it like dirty fog. But it didn’t smell like fog. Deserted. The searchers at the other end had given up. If they couldn’t walk any farther, how could a man who was more than ninety?
Hy and Ian stopped again at the cookhouse, staring down at the dory behind it. The dory and the cookhouse belonged to local scumbag Jared MacPherson, Hy’s near neighbour.
The boat didn’t look as if it had been used in a long time. Not since Jared had been poaching lobster five or six years before, stealing out of the fishermen’s traps at night. The dory was covered in sand and seaweed, shells and rocks. There were a couple of gashes in the wood. Not seaworthy.
Jared was in Sleepy Hollow, the provincial jail, serving time for fraud. Online fraud. A step up on the criminal ladder for Jared. Usually it was possession, dealing drugs, operating a grow op.
Not this time.
It was Ian who had found him out.
This past winter, when The Shores was snowed in for weeks, and he was bored of his other online pursuits, Ian had come across an Internet site, slugged Murder, He Sells.
The seller was cashing in on the notoriety The Shores had gained from the number of murders and deaths that had occurred there in the past several years.
The items offered up were beach stones and shells upon which, the claim was, Lance Lord’s body had lain, after someone had killed him with an axe to the head, right through his Jimi Hendrix wig. The murder had happened down on the shore, five or six years before.
Why would anyone be interested in buying the stones? Lance Lord had been a minor Canadian celebrity. His dubious claim to fame had been his role as an Anglo on a French TV show. He had become a cult figure among Francophones, not because he was so good, but because he was so bad.
Ten bucks. For a small bag of stones and shells. With a certificate declaring the items genuine.
“You didn’t go for it, did you?” Hy had asked Ian at the time.
“Not yet, but I’m thinking of it.”
Hy had examined the onscreen image of the stones and shells. They could have been picked up anywhere on Red Island.
The certificate of authenticity was hardly convincing – something anyone could have produced with a computer and printer, ignoring spell-check.
“There should be only one ‘r’ in guarantee.” Hy had pointed at the offending word. “Must have it mixed up with warranty.”
“And this…” Ian had tried to say the word as spelled, but had a hard time. “Authentica…authentica... authentica-city.”
A few days later, Ian had found more offerings on the site:
“Glad I waited. Now you can ge
t the bag of stones for only five bucks, if you spend twenty-five on the weights Big Ed used.”
Big Ed Bullock, owner of the fitness operation Mind Over Muscle, was famous for having used the power of his mind to build back his strength after his head was sliced open with a machete in Vietnam and part of his brain left lying on the jungle floor. He’d built a dome-shaped structure on the cape some years back. Hy had almost died there. Jamieson had almost died there, too.
“I wonder if they weigh anything,” Hy had commented wryly. Big Ed’s barbells didn’t weigh a thing – and yet they had managed to kill.
“Who do you think is behind this scam?”
Ian had shrugged. “You got me.”
Ian had bookmarked the site. A few days later, packs of Tarot cards were on offer. Cards that could, like the original set after which they were patterned, reliably predict the outcome of a murder investigation.
The next item made it clear who the perpetrator was.
Fish that had fallen from the sky. Cooked at the time, frozen now.
When Ian showed her, Hy knew.
“Jared.” She had whispered, stunned at his gall.
“Exactly.”
Jared had tried to sell the fish before. When they fell from the sky a couple of years back, he’d collected a freezer full.
“Do you think they’re the same fish?”
“I don’t know, but the rest is certainly a scam. This has told us who it is. Now I’m going to prove it. I’ve ordered the full set. To my post office box in Winterside, so he won’t know who it is. He’s got a P.O. Box on the site. Two can play the same game.”
“Don’t you think we ought to tell Jamieson?”
“When did you ever do that?”
That had silenced Hy. It was true. Whenever she stumbled on something, she tried to solve it herself first.
A week later, Ian had gone to Winterside to check his post office box. He stopped at Hy’s on the way home. The package was open, and he was beaming when she answered the door.
“I got a bonus,” he’d said. “Bits of the blade from the wind turbine.”
The turbine had nearly wiped out the village’s children. Some claimed it was evil and had done so with intent.
“I can get a special deal on the next item – pieces of plasticized flesh from Vera Gloom’s husbands.”
Hy had winced. Vera Gloom, the serial widow.
Ian presented his evidence to Jamieson – and his suspicions. She had flushed with anger that he’d conducted an investigation without filling her in, but she agreed that Jared was likely behind it.
She had busted him, and found all the evidence she needed in his house: the stones, the weights, the fish, and the fake flesh, laid out on the kitchen table to be packaged, should anyone other than Ian order them.
“Fraud?” Jared had looked genuinely shocked when Jamieson used the word. “Them stones are from this shore, you can’t say they’re not.” He gave her a sly look.
“No, but I can say they are not the stones Lance Lord’s body lay on.”
“How can you?”
“Because the winter before piled so much sand onto the shore, there was barely a stone or a pebble to be found that year.”
Some of the stones and shells had splotches of red paint on them.
“Is that meant to be Lance Lord’s blood?”
Jared shrugged.
It was the fish that had sealed it. It was herring that had fallen from the sky. Jared had cod.
He’d tried. “You don’t know if there wasn’t a patch of cod. Yes, it was cod that came down at the cookhouse, I could swear it.”
“Save your swearing for court.”
Jamieson would rather be booking Jared for murder, but settled for fraud. Jared had been implicated in at least one of the killings in The Shores, but she’d never been able to pin it on him. Now she’d got him, for taking advantage of the great interest in the killings in the tiny village. There had been so many. And such good media coverage. Lucky Lester Joudry, videographer son of Gus’s nearest neighbour, Estelle, had been on the scene for most of them and was able to disseminate the news rapidly and photographically, with video and online presence. The whole world knew about The Shores. That’s why it had been getting so many tourists lately.
So Jared had figured a website to sell items associated with the murders and deaths would be a great scam.
The judge thought it was a scam, too.
Jared was behind bars now for a good long while.
His dory was still there.
“No luck, then?”
They were startled by her voice.
Jamieson. In full uniform, hair neatly scraped back into a bun.
“This boat hasn’t been used in years,” said Hy.
Jamieson looked over the expanse of sand to the water.
“Even if it could be, I can’t see how a ninety-year-old man would drag this into the water.”
“Not even at high tide. But none of us knew…knows…him…or what he’s capable of.”
“Gus would know. Maybe she could pick up a trail we can’t see.”
“She hasn’t been to the shore in twenty years.”
“Maybe she should.” Jamieson turned and marched up Wild Rose Lane, leaving Hy and Ian in her wake, wondering: should they follow, or should they stay? Ian shrugged. Hy nodded. They followed.
Chapter 7
“Now what would I be doin’ goin’ down to the shore at my age?”
“Looking for your husband?”
“I never did go lookin’ for him. That’s one of the things Abel liked about me. Just stayed put and waited ’til he come home.”
“This is different. You don’t know where he is.”
“Won’t be the first time.”
“Are you saying – ?”
“Not lately, not since he was a young man. Down to Charlottetown when the season ended. Bit of fun. Can’t blame him.”
Jamieson bet she couldn’t. It seemed every time Abel had touched Gus when she was young, she got pregnant. Eight kids, thought Jamieson, who would likely never have any. What kind of life was that?
It had suited Gus, even though it hadn’t been promising at the start. As the three visitors stepped out her door, Gus stared out the window. A wave of smoke drifted by. When it settled, it was clearer to see. Past times.
***
She was going home from the potato fields on a crisp fall day with her three brothers and a sister. Was it more than sixty years ago – or was it yesterday? It felt like yesterday. She had a spring in her step and her hair in a long fat braid, and it swung in rhythm to her hips. Child-bearing hips.
The truck wagon chugged up beside her, and he leaned out.
“Fancy a lift?”
She did. Her back ached from a long day in the potato field.
She smiled when he shoved the door open and reached out a hand to help her in. She’d never been really pretty – especially not then, when she was so skinny. But her smile – in her eyes and her mouth – lit up an otherwise plain face.
“Room for a few in back, and one more up here.”
Her brothers climbed in and sprawled on the sacks of potatoes. Her sister squeezed in next to her.
It was a tight squeeze – and, as she later told him – the closest she had ever been to a man she wasn’t related to.
“I should hope so,” he had replied.
There had been many more lifts home after that, with a decreasing number of siblings in tow, until, finally, even the sister chaperone disappeared with some excuse, and he asked her to marry him.
What else could she say?
No.
***
It was eerie how quiet the house was without Abel, how hard it was not to see his duck cup there on the table. Wherever he’d gone, he
’d taken it with him. What did that mean – if anything?
The rockers on Gus’s recliner creaked in his absence.
The clock on the mantel in the dining room ticked louder, marking the time since Abel had disappeared. Making it seem a long time. Forever.
Other people didn’t seem to notice the strange silence of the house without Abel in it. They’d been in and out all day, sipping tea and chattering, none of them hearing the silence Gus heard. Nor did they notice when she thought she heard the tread of his foot, the familiar clearing of his throat. Were these sounds echoing through time, or was he here, somewhere, somehow here, but not visible?
He could not have simply disappeared.
But he had.
“Without a trace,” Gus whispered as she tried to force herself to mend a pair of his socks.
Socks. Did he have socks there, wherever he was?
He would be needing clean socks by now.
Perhaps she should give some to Jamieson for when she finally found him. He’d want those right away.
There was a clam chowder simmering on the stove. She’d made it – his favourite meal – in hopes that it would lure him home.
It hadn’t. She hated clam chowder. She poured it down the sink, not caring if it clogged and him not around to clear it, and went back to darning the sock, in the peculiar silence of the house without Abel.
***
No one had pressured Gus to go down to the shore on the chance that she would turn up Abel where they had not been successful. Somehow, she was here now – in the dark – stumbling along the shore in search of him. She was wearing her nightdress, and, thank God, her dressing gown. None of the neighbours could see her. There were no lights on in any of the houses up the Shore Lane. There were no houses. Not even hers.
A fresh breeze whipped her nightclothes around her ankles, and they billowed up with each gust. She shivered in the cold of the late August night.
As her eyes grew accustomed to the light, she saw a lump on the horizon, on the far side of the run, near the sea rock.
She panicked. Abel? How would she get to him? She stood at the edge of the run, peering into the dark, her eyes trying to make sense of the shape on the sand. She had no choice. She’d have to wade through. She had no idea of how deep the run had become. The cold salt water stung her, and the swift current twisted her nightclothes around her legs, threatening to pull her down.
Cod Only Knows Page 4
