Cod Only Knows Read online

  Other books in the Shores Mysteries series...

  Praise for Revenge of the Lobster Lover:

  “…[an] amusing comic mystery”

  – Margaret Cannon, Globe and Mail

  “Revenge of the Lobster Lover is a good read for lovers of light-hearted mysteries.”

  - Atlantic Books Today

  “Readers will find themselves hooked on this light-hearted, edgy read”

  - The Chronicle Herald

  “...readers will want to know whodunit -- and why. MacLeod’s droll humour helps propel her story.”

  - The Montreal Gazette

  Praise for Mind Over Mussels:

  “…a thoroughly delightful, cosy comic crime story - a restful break from the grittier and oft times gruesome murder mysteries…”

  - Cottage Lady, Sleuth of Baker Street

  “…this country is producing a wide range of thoughtful writing in this genre - which is also often funny…Mind Over Mussels…has a lot of fun as it stretches to its rather bizarre conclusion.”

  - Jenni Morton, The Star Phoenix

  Praise for All is Clam:

  “Mountie Jane Jamison returns in this delightful Christmas confection set in The Shores, that lovely fictional spot just off the coast of Prince Edward Island...As she sifts the clues, she finds herself hoping for a Christmas miracle: that this death will turn into an accident. This one is great fun.”

  - Margaret Cannon, The Globe and Mail

  “(Hilary MacLeod) manages to skillfully blend the dark side with the light, threading humour in characters and dialogue through the serious tale of human foibles and tragedy.”

  - Linda Wiken (aka Erika Chase), Mystery Maven Canada

  “...her best by far...this is a complex Christmas story and mystery. MacLeod is to be congratulated.”

  - Elizabeth Cran, The Guardian

  Cod Only Knows © 2017 by Hilary MacLeod

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

  P.O. Box 22024

  Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island

  C1A 9J2

  acornpresscanada.com

  Edited by Jane Ledwell

  Copy edit by Laurie Brinkley

  Cover illustration by Matt Reid

  eBook design by Joseph Muise

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  MacLeod, Hilary, author

  Cod only knows / Hilary MacLeod.

  (Shores mystery)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-927502-91-4 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-927502-92-1 (HTML)

  I. Title.

  PS8625.L4555C63 2017 C813’.6 C2017-905349-3

  C2017-905350-7

  The publisher acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada, The Canada Council for the Arts Block Grant Program and the Province Of Prince Edward Island.

  To the two friends who sparked my imagination:

  Henry Mead and Virginia Van Vliet.

  Without you, there might have been no stories.

  And God sighed in the sunset; and the sea

  Chanted the soft recessional of Time

  Against the golden shores of mystery;

  —From Progress of Love by Alfred Noyes

  Chapter 1

  The fish leaped in the air, yanking the line, tugging the dory across the waves.

  It was a small boat. It was a big fish.

  Bigger than me, thought Seamus O’Malley, looking at the photo. That was saying something, because Seamus was three hundred pounds on a good day.

  The fisherman’s back was to the camera. He was wearing a hat that obscured his head. There was no telling who it was, or how old he was. Then or now. Must be old, because the photograph was. So was the hat.

  The fish was a cod. They usually weighed around ten to twenty pounds these days. The record was about two hundred pounds, but never this heavy. It was a cod, that was clear, even though it was difficult to see all of it, twisted around in the air as it was, leaping and plunging to escape the line. It was mossy green, with the characteristic chin whisker, the barbel, of the cod. It had dorsal fins, the spotted back, and the telltale lateral line. It was interrupted, smudged in the middle, as if a part of it had been erased, making it hard to tell if it was a genetic or photographic error.

  It was a cod, all right. The biggest he’d ever seen. You couldn’t spread out your arms to show how big it was. Sometimes fishermen held up catches like this by the tail to demonstrate how long they were next to the man – five, six feet. In this case, thought Seamus, the fish would have to hold the man. If it were riddled with worms like the small cod, one giant cod worm would make a Sunday dinner. He paused to think a moment. A new industry? Cod worms? Taste just like the real thing. They would, wouldn’t they? You are what you eat.

  O’Malley had heard of big cod in the deep Atlantic, but not this huge. Here on Red Island? Never.

  Until now.

  Or then. Years before when the picture had been taken. Today, that photograph would have been all over Facebook. Then, it was just a curiosity to the inhabitants of a tiny village the world had never heard of.

  Until the last few years.

  All those murders.

  O’Malley was sitting, feet up on the desk, in his office at the Red Island fisheries department in Winterside. He’d been staring at the photograph of the man and the fish on and off for the past half-hour. It was torn, shredded on one corner. It had been stuck in the back of a file cabinet drawer he’d been cleaning out. It came from a book, but he couldn’t find the book anywhere. He knew that it was local because a patch of the photo credit remained: …Red Island, courtesy of... Who the photographer and the fisherman were had been lost when the page was ripped from the book.

  Probably it was one of those community vanities. There were several of them in the cabinet drawer, books that villages across the island self-published, detailing founding families, community firsts, faded and damaged old photographs of the hall and the school, the first automobile and its owner and so on. He’d searched through them all. None was missing a page, nor contained any other magnificent shots like this one, with the fisherman being dragged out to sea by a fish.

  The one that got away? Along with the book that told the tale? Had the cod been reeled in? Or freed because it was too big? Had it been eaten?

  Seamus smirked. It would take a village to eat that cod.

  It must have gotten away. If it had been caught the story would have been told. He had scoured the Guardian newspaper files with no luck. One way or another, the fish would be dead now. The oldest cod he’d heard of had lived twenty-seven years.

  But the man might be alive to tell the story.

  If he were, Seamus would surely be able to find him.

  If he could find out more about the big fish, where it came from, it might take him off this godforsaken island and onto that other one. The other might be godforsaken, too, but it was his godforsaken island. Home. Where cod had once been currency, Newfoundland currency, until the bottom fell out of the bank. The Grand Banks, that is. Codforsaken. If he could find a fish like this, he might return home a hero.

  Could more such fish exist? Here?

  ***

  Brock Ferguson tossed a bottle cap into the massive Nebuchadnezzar wine bottle, three times the size of a Jeroboam, filling the corner of hi
s den. He’d found the cap in his jacket pocket and remembered he’d picked it up off the bottom shelf of a cupboard and slipped it into the pocket. It was careless of him to have forgotten it. Care less. He’d once been fonder of the collection than he was of his wife Letitia – that was before she became a lottery winner three times over. A record in itself. How could he not love her for that?

  Their meeting was no coincidence. After her first lottery win, Letitia had given up her job at a snow crab processing plant in Nova Scotia and tried to hide from celebrity in a small village in northern New Brunswick. She became its most notorious inhabitant, the front-page story in a regional magazine. Ferguson had his own reasons for wanting to get out of Nova Scotia. He followed her, wooed her, and married her. He didn’t take long to put her money to his own use, engineering a move to the obscurity of Red Island.

  The move was in process, happening in stages. He had come ahead to supervise the installation of the cat litter removal system for Letitia’s strays and his own trio of massive fish tanks, all of them engineered by him. He’d had his collection of fish and all the comforts he required transported here, to his den at the back of the big old barn. Letitia, her cats, and the rest of their furniture would follow.

  He placed the last item from the last box, their wedding photograph, on the desk, slumped down in his chair and looked at it. She was wearing a Vera Wang dress that hung on her frail body. He was wearing Armani. The bridal bouquet burst with white lilies, obscuring the bride’s face. There was no reception, because they had no friends, but there was a honeymoon – the two of them sipping margaritas on a golden day with sunshine spilling across the neat, cropped lawn at Dalkeith, a massive nineteenth-century summer home with stone exterior and detailed wood interior, built by an American industrialist and later sold to a rum runner. The stay had given Ferguson a taste for Red Island and the ammunition for his latest obsession. It was a photograph. A photograph he came across quite by accident.

  The expensive wedding gear and the honeymoon stay at Dalkeith had been paid for by Letitia’s first lottery win and organized by Ferguson, although she would have preferred something more modest. If there hadn’t been a lottery win, there wouldn’t have been a marriage. Ferguson had married Letitia for her money. Then she won twice more. Was it she who was lucky, or he?

  He frowned again. It had been a trade-off. He hated asking her for money, hiding his needs inside her projects. For instance, the cost of building this den with its adjoining aquaria had been tucked into the price of the litter-removal system for her cats, a marvel of engineering, and his own brilliant invention.

  The three fish tanks, built to accommodate freshwater, brackish, and saltwater fish were the combined size of a four-car garage – ten-thousand-gallon tanks that had cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to construct. Ferguson was hoping to establish it as the largest in-home system of its kind in the world.

  The fish had been pricey. He’d spent fifty thousand of Letitia’s dollars on them. There were the discus, beautifully patterned circles of red, blue, turquoise, and other exotic colours. They were fish with personality, who would come and greet him when he walked over to the tank. The tigerfish, who liked to stalk and hunt, acting and looking like tigers with their thick black stripes. The freshwater stingrays, big and flat, some three feet across.

  There were black ghost knifefish, archer fish, lung fish, African butterflyfish, solo fish, fish in schools, so many species Brock sometimes found it hard to keep up with them. He had at least a hundred fish. It cost him two thousand dollars a month to feed and maintain them.

  Or rather, it cost Ferguson’s wife, Letitia, and was the cause of strife within the marriage. They were worth it, or so Ferguson thought, but it wasn’t his money he was spending.

  “I have to have something that’s mine,” he had argued when she found out that he’d traded up from his hundred-gallon tank, bought these monsters, and had them installed in their new home right next to her cattery.

  It would be an odd juxtaposition, no doubt, the cats and the fish. It wasn’t that Letitia didn’t like fish. They were beautiful, but she felt that, unlike her cats, the fish should be in the wild, not captive and nosing up to the glass of the tank that enclosed them.

  The tanks took an entire wall of Ferguson’s den, and a great deal of his interest that wasn’t devoted to the pursuit of the world’s fattest Atlantic cod, the only fish that would set a world record for him. This system wouldn’t hold that fish, but that pond might, that pond outside the back window, perched like a tadpole above the shore. It had turned out to be saltwater. Could it be a home for a massive cod? Maybe.

  His eyes fixed on the wall opposite where there was a print of a woodcarving that had hung in Boston’s state chambers since 1784. It was a codfish, just shy of five feet long, nicknamed “The Sacred Cod,” because it was a symbol of the state’s former dependence on the cod fishery, before it died, there and everywhere else on the east coast of North America. The woodcarving had been “codnapped” twice by students. Who wouldn’t want a big cod?

  Ferguson did. He wanted a real one. Bigger than the sculpture’s measly eighty pounds. He wanted a record-setting fish.

  He’d come to the place he thought he’d find one.

  ***

  The old man slipped out the back door, his form illuminated by the moon, but almost no one in the village would know who he was. They might recognize his bow-legged gait, but few remembered his face. If they did know who it was, the pink knapsack might throw them off.

  He wheeled the bicycle from inside the building and eased onto it. It wove erratically as he drove across the lawn and along the driveway before executing a wide right turn onto the Island Way, the road that led to Big Bay.

  He was anxious to get there, but he wasn’t going fast. He’d never been able to ride a bike with skill, not even as a child. Stubbornness was etched across his face. If you couldn’t see his face – and it was hard with that hat on – you could see his determination in the set of his body on the bike, the hard push on the pedals.

  It was a fifteen-minute ride to his destination – but, wheels wobbling, it took him more than twice as long. He knew where he was going, but he wasn’t sure what he was going to do. Not yet.

  Hidden behind a fishing shack, he scanned the harbour. Seeing no sign of life, he leaned the bicycle against the shed and climbed aboard a lobster boat. Was he going to take it? Now? In the middle of the night?

  He slipped down into the cabin.

  Four hours later, as dawn came on, he emerged, eyes heavy with sleep, a pair of binoculars in his hands. He shimmied up onto the bow of the boat and brought the binoculars up to his eyes, peering out to the west of Big Bay where the tall dunes and dangerous currents were.

  When he brought the binoculars back down, he smiled.

  Circles.

  The circles were back.

  The conditions were the same as thirty years before: the circles; the unusual height of the tide; the deep colour of the moon, its size, and the fact that it had risen smack in alignment with the “chimbley” of old Ethan Cooke’s wreck of a house. The second time only in thirty years.

  They were here.

  He hauled the bicycle up and cycled toward the village. As first light rode in on the waves, he pedalled into the blinding glow, through the village toward the causeway. He felt the way an infant does; if he couldn’t see, he couldn’t be seen.

  His mind was blind, too, a white emptiness. He was in a fog of forgetfulness, with glimmers of remembering. He knew who he was, more or less. He didn’t know if it was now – or then. Nor what he was doing.

  The circles turned in his head, making him dizzy.

  Chapter 2

  “Abel’s missin’!”

  Gus Mack came flying out of the house, faster than she’d moved in forty years. She almost smacked into Hy, who was coming up the front steps.
r />   “Abel? Missing? How can you tell?”

  Hyacinth McAllister wasn’t being unsympathetic to her old friend, but everyone knew Gus’s husband Abel was never around. Hy wasn’t sure when she’d last seen him. She’d begun to question if she ever had.

  The energy that had propelled Gus from the house drained out of her. She suddenly looked every one of her eighty-plus years, her face a map of worry wrinkles, deep set.

  “Don’t you think I’d know if he wasn’t here?”

  Hy kept silent. She’d always wondered when Gus ever saw him.

  “His coffee mug is missin’.”

  The only proof Hy had ever seen that Abel drank coffee, every morning, at home, was the empty cup. A duck cup. Big yellow head. Abel drank out of the bright orange beak.

  The sound of a screen door squeaking shut, being eased to a close and not slammed, told them that Gus’s neighbour, Estelle Joudry, had slipped out onto her stoop. They looked up. Estelle was slightly deaf. She was cocking her head in their direction, the better to hear what they were saying. When she saw them looking her way, she turned her back to them, pretending an interest in a murder of crows pecking at a dead fox on the road. She began to speculate about who had hit the animal.

  It couldn’t have been her husband, Germaine. He was still in bed. Moira’s man, Frank? No, he always went on about roadkill being the result of bad driving. Abel? Abel was ninety-plus. He wasn’t supposed to drive at all. There was his car, though, parked in the backyard for a quick getaway onto the Shore Lane, if he fancied a drive.

  Hy guided Gus up the steps and back into the house. She sat her down in her purple rocker recliner and went on the hunt for the missing coffee cup, sure that it must have been put down somewhere.

  “You’re on a wild goose chase,” Gus called from the kitchen. “For sixty years he’s been putting that mug down on the table here.”

  The table had not one clear inch of surface. It was covered in quilt patterns and patches, newspaper clippings, family photos, and odd bits and bobs of this and that.