“I’m looking for a fisherman,” he said when she answered.
“Why?” she asked, suspicious. She had never liked Seamus O’Malley. He was pushy. She could tell that right now he was trying to contain himself. That must mean that whatever he wanted, he wanted it badly.
He ignored her question. “A certain fisherman.”
She sensed he was pacing, because the line kept cutting out. He was on his cellphone, and he’d called Hy on hers. Hadn’t used the landline because he heard they still had party lines in The Shores. Whether that was true or not, whether The Shores was really that backward, he wasn’t willing to risk. What he didn’t know was some of the women had bought police scanners when the party-line system ended, and they could listen in on cellphones.
A few were doing so now.
“Which certain fisherman?”
“I’m not sure of the guy’s name. He was in the front photo of that community book, Time Was.”
“Abel Mack?” She’d blurted out without meaning to. Still, it was no big secret. All the newspapers, radio, and TV stations had done stories on the book when it came out the year before.
She’d reached over to a pile of books on the harvest table, slipped it out.
Time Was.
She opened it up. There was the photo – and it clearly named Abel Mack. A typical photo of him. Couldn’t see a thing. She wondered why Seamus wanted him.
“That’s it.” There was urgency in his tone. “I need to talk to him. Thought you might know how to get in touch with him.”
Silence.
“Do you know how to get in touch with him?” Seamus persisted.
“Wish I did.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s missing,” she responded.
“Missing missing? Or just missing at the moment?”
“Missing missing.”
He hadn’t counted on that.
He might have to go searching, but he didn’t know what Abel looked like.
He hung up and immediately phoned back, to ask what Abel looked like.
Hy could see it was him calling, so she let it go to voice mail.
He hung up without leaving a message, then rang back. There was something more important he wanted to ask.
Again, she let it go to voice mail.
She clicked to listen when the phone beeped the end of his message.
A desperate sound.
“Have you seen circles?” He knew they’d been seen elsewhere. But here?
She had. She had seen circles when she’d gone for a lobster lunch at sea with Ben and Annabelle, Ian, Finn, and Dot earlier in the summer. They’d seen the circles in the water west of Big Bay. She had no idea what they were or why Seamus wanted to know.
***
No one would have been able to identify Abel from the posters that now went up around the village, down to Big Bay, and east along the Island Way to the causeway and ferry crossing.
The causeway and the ferry were the slim links to what the villagers called “the mainland,” the rest of Red Island. Five years before, a storm surge had sliced through the natural causeway, driving a mass of sea ice that crushed and buried five houses, threw cars into the water and boats up onto the road, and killed nine people – all in thirteen-and-a-half minutes.
The causeway had been shored up, but never well, with the result that an old river ferry from New Brunswick had been put into service nine months a year. Still, rain and snowstorms often isolated the village from food and services. There were no stores in The Shores. There had been some tourist operations over at Big Bay for the 200th anniversary the previous summer, but they had closed. Now there was only the coffee stand at the ferry, run by Nathan Mack, Ben’s son and Abel’s nephew. Nathan was also the village’s volunteer paramedic, with a beat-up van he’d converted into an ambulance.
The unidentifiable Abel stared down from power poles throughout the village and from the salt-stained window of Nathan’s coffee stand, a structure of various vintages, fashioned from recycled pickings from the local dump. Abel was unidentifiable because the hat obscured his face, the face no one except Gus had seen in twenty or thirty years.
They did recognize the hat.
They all said:
“That hat drove him to Winterside, many’s the time.”
Underneath the hat, in bold, black capital letters:
MISSING:
ABEL MACK, 92,
COULD BE CARRYING A YELLOW AND ORANGE COFFEE CUP SHAPED LIKE A DUCK.
Not very helpful, thought Jamieson, looking at the poster on the hall door. She wondered who had made it.
Moira Toombs, who had not taken her husband Frank Webster’s name on their marriage a year ago – she oddly preferred her own – came slithering over from her house, a proud smile on her often sour face.
“That’s mine.” She pointed at the poster with pride. She’d borrowed the photo from Gus, scanned it, and played around with layout and graphics, all on the new iMac Frank had given her for Christmas. She no longer cared if Ian Simmons found her computer skills clever. She’d been in love with him for years, thwarted by his dithering affection for Hy. Then Frank came into her life.
“Hard to see his face.” Jamieson pointed at the hat.
Moira scowled.
“Everyone here knows what he looks like, anyway.”
“Do they?”
Moira looked doubtful.
“Do you?”
Moira hesitated. “I think the hat tells a lot about his character.”
“We’re not looking for his character. We don’t know if he’s wearing the hat.”
“Oh, he always wore the hat.” Moira spoke in the past tense. She’d written him off. Couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.
“That doesn’t guarantee he is now.”
Moira’s attention shifted from Jamieson.
Jamieson turned.
The hat.
But not Abel.
Hy was wearing the hat. It covered her face, but the rest of her was unmistakable. Red curls nudging out from under the brim. Tall slim body, dressed in old jeans and an Irish cable-knit sweater Gus had made. Following her was the cat that parcelled itself out among Gus, Jamieson, and Hy. Gus called her Blackie, because that was her colouring from an aerial view; Jamieson called her Whitey, because her stomach fur was white when she rolled over, which she always did when Jamieson emitted an uncanny purr that sounded just like a cat. Hy called her Whacky, because she never knew what to call her otherwise.
The cat sashayed over to Jamieson, dropped down and rolled over on her back. Jamieson ignored her, eyes fixed on the hat on Hy’s head. She recognized its pedigree. A Tilley hat.
“What are you doing with that?”
“Gus gave it to me.”
“Gave it to you?”
“To use.”
“In what way?”
“I suppose something like letting a search dog sniff someone’s clothing. She thought if we took it on our search, it might help find him. If it took him to Winterside,” Hy grinned, “it may take us to him.”
Jamieson sighed. A deep sigh of exasperation. People were not taking this seriously enough. The man was most likely dead.
Hy wasn’t finished.
“You know an elephant ate one of these three times. It survived.”
Jamieson took the bait.
“What, the elephant?”
“No, the hat. I guess the elephant, too.”
Hy frowned and removed the hat. Her curly red hair sprang out.
“I don’t think it’s such a bad idea that the hat might help us find him. Except it’s his other hat.”
“Other hat?”
“He never actually wore this one. This one’s the new one – the one he got from the Tilley people when he
wore out the old one. But he kept on wearing the old one.” She pointed at the poster. “That’s the one he’ll be wearing. Not this one. Obviously.”
She spun the hat on one finger. Jamieson grabbed it.
“Hey…”
“Evidence.”
“Evidence?”
“I’m keeping this as evidence.” Of what? There hadn’t been a crime, had there? She hoped not.
Beside the poster was a sign-up sheet for the various searches Jamieson had organized throughout the community. Potato fields. The Shore. Sheds and outbuildings. The woodlots that ran south of the village. South, but on the high ground.
There was not one name written down.
“This is disappointing,” she said.
“Oh, don’t worry. Everyone’s going. They don’t need to sign up.”
And some can’t write, thought Jamieson.
“Joudry’s potato fields today,” said Hy, looking at Moira and Jamieson.
Moira looked panicky.
“I’ll fetch Frank.” She turned and hurried back to her house.
“I bet,” said Hy, as she and Jamieson headed to join the crowd of people gathering in Ben Mack’s field.
Moira had improved since she’d married her Frank, but Hy thought a leopard doesn’t change its spots.
Or its hat?
Hy looked over at Jamieson, who had unconsciously put the Tilley on her own head.
“Now you look like Abel,” she said.
Embarrassed, Jamieson whipped it off, and then was stuck, hat in hand, not knowing what to do with it. She thrust it at Hy.
“Here. Take it back to Gus.”
Hy planned to return it, eventually, but not before she had tested if it would drive her to Winterside.
Chapter 10
The searchers had all gone home. It was dusk. Night falls fast in late August, and the dark this year was intensified by the veil of smoke still drifting down from Quebec. Hy could hear the seasonal chirping of the cicadas swell. They wake with the sunset and set with the sun. Some of their cousins, she knew, the southern cicadas, burrow into the ground as newborns and spend most of their lives there, waiting to emerge, mate, and die in a handful of weeks. Not much of a life, she thought, buried in the ground.
Something was up on the Island Way in “the holler” near Hy’s place. Looking down the road, she could see a car parked in the driveway of the house next to Jared MacPherson’s.
Three elderly sisters had lived there until last April, when they all succumbed to “the cruelest month,” and died within three weeks of each other. The house had always been plain, a big, grey unpainted barn of a place that looked as if no one lived there, except in the summer, when the sisters planted a thin thread of annual flowers in a row, along the ditch at the roadside.
The house had been on the market for only a month. Someone – unknown, as yet – had scooped it up, cleaned and painted it, mowed the lawn, and done a lot of construction work on the barn – mostly inside. It had been the talk of the village – all that work going on in the big barn of a house and the big barn itself – until Abel disappeared and became the new topic.
There had been a moving truck there, the day before Abel disappeared, but no one had spotted the new people yet.
Hy was feeling exhausted, her energy spent as much by the worry as the physical search. Worry not for Abel, but for Gus. Hy didn’t know Abel, but she did know he mattered to Gus. That made him matter to her, too.
A chilling damp was moving in with the dark. Hy shivered. Curious as she was about the new neighbours, she was more interested right now in a deep, hot bath with bubbles and a generous glass of white wine.
***
That “the moon was a ghostly galleon, tossed upon cloudy seas” was never truer. Dark clouds and wisps of smoke floated across its face, on a wind that was, blessedly, blowing away the fumes from Quebec, sending them back where they had come from.
Where was Abel, under the full moon? Gus wondered where he was, but didn’t question that he was somewhere. All their married lives, he had been somewhere. Mostly somewhere else. Not right there with her.
Why should it be any different now?
He was not dead, but missing.
***
He kept asking her to marry him, and she kept saying no. She wouldn’t say why. He couldn’t understand. Of course he couldn’t understand. He was older by nearly ten years and already balding, but he was a catch. He had land, a farm, a small fishery, and a canning factory. Or he would have when his father passed away. So why would a woman say no?
His mother and father weren’t easy, but everyone had to deal with in-laws. His mother, particular in her ways and thrifty – too thrifty, judging by the nearly inedible meals she served up. And his father, frankly, a drunk.
She drew away from him without even knowing these things. Some days, she refused the ride. On other days, weary from the day in the fields, she would climb in and sit beside him without speaking.
What had attracted him had disappeared into silence. No more of the funny stories of the day’s happenings and stupidities, the smile that lit up her plain face, the laugh that came from deep within her that promised so much about the wife she would be.
If he could only get her to say yes.
And then one day it came to him.
***
Two old men. Jamieson kept going over it in her head. Two old men dead? Jimmi Dunn. And Abel Mack? Surely Abel wasn’t merely missing. He must be dead. Exposure, if nothing else. The nights were cooling down as fire raged heat in the Quebec forests and rained ash on The Shores. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. A grim reminder of mortality. Smoke, drifting down over the village, enshrouding it, blurring the line between reality and another world beyond, slipping out on the tide.
Jamieson shook her head. Nonsense. What nonsense. She was prone to fanciful imaginings about her cases, but when she drifted off into one of them, like now, watching that moon rise along the chimney line over Ethan Cooke’s old cabin, she briskly shoved it away. There was no smoke tonight.
Back to work.
From the picture window of the police house, she could see the light in Gus Mack’s kitchen. Still up. What time? Nine o’clock. Late for some villagers, she thought, but not for Gus. It was at about this time of night, Jamieson knew, that Gus came alive, telling stories of the past, slapping her knees and laughing at the foibles of her neighbours – and her own. Everyone’s favourite story was about the propane tank explosion at Abel’s old General Store. He’d come flying through the window, preceded by a Coke machine that cleared the glass for him, and landed smartly on his feet, close to home, and in time for dinner. Gus had watched it all and had his meal on the table when he came through the door at his usual time, precisely at noon.
Jamieson pulled on her jacket against the chill night air. Fall announced itself in The Shores around the middle of August with crisp air and cool breezes and a dazzling clarity of light, giving what the villagers called “large days.” Light that, this year, was often obscured by smoke that hung low over the capes, grey and dirty. Not tonight, but still Jamieson coughed. The smoke had been burning her throat and sinuses for weeks. Coughing didn’t help. It only increased the pain – sharp daggers slicing through her throat and chest.
There would be more deaths, she thought, if this keeps up. The old folks would surrender to it, asthmatics could die, could be created. Jamieson wondered if that might be happening to her.
***
Finn stopped where he stood, on the cape where the dome used to be. The dome that had gone down in a fire two summers ago, a fire that had almost killed Jamieson. He had nearly lost her, he thought. But that thought was crazy. He’d never had her. He hadn’t even lived here when it had happened. Still, like the proverbial phoenix, rising out of the ashes of the dome, was this feeling for Jamieson. It had co
me to him as a complete surprise.
It had come, he had to admit to himself, before Dot abandoned him, returned to her life traipsing around the world, photographing and healing, now with a baby in tow. He couldn’t compete with her desire for that vagabond life, and he didn’t want to join her in it. They’d made a good-looking pair, tall and slim, doing tai chi on the cape as the sun went up or down. He had a dark thatch of hair, as dark as Jamieson’s, and he wore black almost like a uniform. His arms and legs were so long some people thought he looked like a spider.
He thought Dot might have sensed his pulling away, his growing attraction to Jamieson. Dot didn’t need him. He wasn’t sure if Jamieson did.
He noticed her everywhere, flushed when she found him staring at her, was, for the first time in his life, tongue-tied in a woman’s presence. He usually had charm, and to spare. It didn’t help that she rarely said anything to him. He couldn’t know what her silence meant, how deep he reached into her, causing a discomfort she’d been trying to ignore.
Now he watched as she moved into the beam of Gus’s outdoor light. Tall, slim, confident in her movements, with that tremendous black hair neatly tucked away in a bun at the nape of her neck. Porcelain skin, ethereal in the light.
He felt compelled by her. But he couldn’t budge. He stood where he was, watching her, unable to move until she had gone inside.
***
The old man was stuck in the shack all day. When he’d woken up, it was light, too late to move without being seen. He stayed where he was for the day, ducked down each time he heard a car pass, hit the floor when a big vehicle, a loaded hay truck, whipped by on the road.
He’d wait out the night and move before daybreak. In the dark. Why, he wasn’t sure. He had an urgent need not to be seen, not to have his plan uncovered.
He couldn’t think of what the plan was right now, but it would come to him, when he got where he was going.
Where was he going?
He lay on the floor for several minutes, puzzling it out. There was nothing but a muddle of images in his mind. His Tilley hat. The ducky mug. The dory, with the yellow and red stripes. And then the mix of images gave way to one clear, compelling thought.
Cod Only Knows Page 6
