Cod Only Knows Read online

  “Never misses a day. Only the once, I didn’t set out the pot for him, I was in such a flap to get to the hospital. Dot was that quick coming out.”

  Dot was Gus’s eighth – and last – child. Gus had been in her forties when she had her. After that, there was no more evidence of that kind that Abel was around.

  Dot wasn’t around anymore either. She’d left The Shores as soon as she could and become a doctor. Gus did not approve. She thought it would have been more fitting for Dot to be a nurse. Doctor Dot, as the villagers referred to her, had travelled the Third World, taking her medical skills to those most in need and photographing the misery she encountered. Then she had given birth in the Antarctic to Gus’s only grandchild, and spent the last year here at The Shores. Then she’d “up and left,” as Gus put it.

  Dot had disappeared the day before Abel had, but not as mysteriously. It was no surprise to Gus to see her come down the stairs, hauling her oversized backpack with Little Dottie casually slung under one arm.

  “You’re off, then.” Gus barely looked up from her knitting.

  “Yes.” Dot put Little Dottie down on the floor, where she grabbed a ball of knitting wool and stuffed it in her mouth.

  “Where to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Just not here.”

  “Not here, for now. No.”

  “And himself? Himself can’t keep you here?”

  Dot shrugged her shoulders. What could she say?

  “I guess not.” Finn had been fun, but it was no big romance. They both had known that. But the way she was leaving – without telling – wasn’t fair. She knew that. She hoped he’d understand.

  “And the little one?”

  “Dottie?”

  “What other little one is there?” Eight children she’d had, and only one grandchild. A grandchild she was aching to hold, now that she was about to lose her.

  Dot sensed Gus’s yearning and picked up the child. She placed her on Gus’s lap.

  “She could stay here.”

  Gus opened her eyes wide. They shone with expectation. Hope. Desire.

  “Here?”

  “There’s no other here than here.” Dot smiled.

  Gus hugged the child close.

  “No,” she said, finally. “It wouldn’t do. A child belongs with its mother.” She kissed the top of Dottie’s head and held her up.

  Dot scooped up the child. She never would have left her. They both knew that. What Gus also knew, in that moment, was that she was too old. Too old to be a grandmother of one so young. Certainly too old to be a mother and give her what a mother could give her, wherever in the world they were. Old enough to know that you couldn’t change someone’s ways once they were set. All her adult life, Dot had been travelling to remote places, taking photographs.

  Gus resumed her knitting.

  “Don’t be so long away this time.”

  “We won’t, Ma.”

  Finn, when he returned to Gus’s house later that day, was hurt, confused, and then angry. Angry that Dot had not thought better of him, that she couldn’t have told him it was time for her to move on. An odd glimmer of relief underlay that anger. He couldn’t deny that his attractions and attentions were straying from Dot. It had bothered him, because he cared for Dot. But now Dot had done this…

  He moved out the next day – back to his half-sister Hy’s – so that by the time Abel disappeared, Gus was alone.

  Quite alone.

  ***

  Hy scoured through “the room,” the one that was never used except for company and putting up quilts in winter. She inspected the dining room and back porch and peeked into the downstairs bedroom. No coffee cup.

  It wasn’t easy to miss, that bright yellow duck, its lip decorated with an orange beak that delivered the coffee directly to the drinker. Ceramic mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Perhaps that was the secret to Abel’s longevity.

  Hy returned to the kitchen and shrugged.

  Gus looked smug, in spite of her distress.

  “I told you. The mug’s not here. Didn’t have his morning coffee. Not here, leastwise. You find that mug, I ’spec you’ll find Abel.”

  “How long has he been gone?”

  “I don’t rightly know. I was asleep all night, like usual. Then when I woke, he was gone. I knew afore I saw his cup was missing. I could feel it in my bones.”

  “The same bones that predict the weather?”

  Gus nodded.

  “The bones that know if a pregnant woman’s going to have a boy or a girl?”

  Gus nodded again. “As long as she’s close kin.”

  “Did you check the building?” The building was a large shed that housed the lawn tractor and the place where Gus put up her quilts in summer. Friends and neighbours would drop by to help with the stitching and to gossip.

  “Yes, and the well house, though what he’d be doin’ squeezed in there I don’t know…”

  “Let’s wait and see if he comes back. If he doesn’t, we’ll call Jamieson in.”

  “What’s she going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever it is Mounties do to get their man.”

  ***

  RCMP Constable Jane Jamieson was at a loss as to what that might be, when she responded to Hy’s call later that morning once Gus had convinced Hy that Abel really was missing.

  “He can’t have gone far,” was her first response. “The man’s over ninety.”

  Ninety had been the age on his last driver’s license, the one she took away from him. Not in person. He was as hard to find then as now, but he always left his license on the dashboard of the car, and Jamieson, strolling by one day, had snagged it through the open window.

  It hadn’t stopped Abel from driving.

  “Did he take the car?”

  “I don’t think so.” Hy hesitated. “I’ll look.”

  “Okay. I’ll be right over.”

  Gus, at first, didn’t want to let Jamieson look around, because, she assured the Mountie, she’d already “looked everywhere.”

  People always said that kind of thing, Jamieson knew that much. But if someone were missing, they had to have gone somewhere, and that must be somewhere no one had looked. Jamieson had insisted on a thorough search of the whole house, including attic and cellar, and was about to check the outside buildings.

  “I’ve looked there, too,” Gus’s words were punctuated by the creak of her rocker recliner, underlining her certainty.

  “It would help if I knew what he looked like.”

  “He’ll be the man holding the bright yellow coffee mug shaped like a duck,” said Hy.

  Jamieson shot her a look that warned this could be a serious matter. Hy’s grin turned upside down.

  “Do you have any photos?” Jamieson asked Gus.

  Gus shuffled through the photos on the table. She’d found a whole new stash after putting together Time Was, the anecdotal history of The Shores that had been published the year before to commemorate the village’s two hundred years.

  “Wouldn’t you know I’d find these when it was too late to use them,” she’d said to Hy at the time.

  “You could use them still,” Hy had replied. “For the second edition.” The first had sold out as soon as it was published and Red Islanders were clamouring for more. Many of them could trace their roots back to The Shores, named for three once busy villages that had dwindled into one. It was an isolated area, cut off by a storm surge and rejoined to the rest of Red Island by an unreliable causeway, but it had supplied the main island with no fewer than five provincial premiers, several federal government ministers, – and could lay claim to the Island’s famous author, the literary mother of that irrepressible redhead who’d captured hearts around the world. She’d had family in The Shores and loved to picnic there. A descendant h
ad commemorated that fact at the 200th anniversary celebrations the year previous, by making a gift of the author’s cat carrier to the hall. Or, at least, a cat carrier she was said to have used. The red-and-black-checked cage now stood on proud display, centre stage at the hall, with a plaque that described in full detail whom the carrier had belonged to, or been used by, and the names of the cats it had carried. Lucky, Pat, Brownie, Duffy, and Smut.

  “Here.” Triumphant, Gus pulled out a black-and-white studio shot from the pile and handed it to Jamieson. Gus and Abel. The bridal couple. A winsome woman with long light brown hair and an apple-cheeked bridegroom, already balding and looking pleased with himself.

  “Me and Abel, afore our wedding. An hour later, we wuz man and woif.”

  Woif? Jamieson frowned. Then her expression cleared. Wife. Of course.

  “Very nice.” Jamieson handed back the photograph. She produced a thin smile. She’d been working on her people skills. “Have you any recent photos?”

  Gus shuffled through the photos again. There were few with Abel in them, and of those –

  “His face is shadowed.” Jamieson dropped one back on the table. “He’s turned his head.” She rejected one after another.

  “He never did like having his photograph taken.”

  Jamieson tossed another photo onto the table. “The brim of his hat is pulled down over his face.”

  It was a Tilley hat – a strange hat for an island farmer and fisherman to be wearing, although it was designed to be worn at sea. It had been given to him years before by a grateful tourist he had taken deep-sea fishing. Abel knew the quality of the hat. Best one in the village. He put the guarantee on the left-hand side of his bottom drawer, as advised by the Tilley people. It stayed there for twenty years. He wore the hat everywhere. It was knocked off his head many a time, because he refused to use the wind cord. The hat would float on the water a while, then sink, then show up days later, tossed onto the shore by the strong gulf currents. Seagulls had shit on it when they found they couldn’t eat it. Traces of their beaks were visible on its brim. When it finally wore out from such treatment, Abel sent it to the Tilley people and demanded a replacement. They sent it back, with a new hat. Free. It was a lifetime guarantee, after all. Most lifetimes didn’t last as long as Abel’s. Not active ones. And most people who wore Tilley hats were not outdoor workers. They just wanted a stylish sunshade, one they treasured and protected.

  Gus picked up the photograph, her eyes misting.

  “He allus wore that hat. He said it could drive him to Charlottetown.” She shocked herself. She was talking about him as if he were gone. Gone gone. Surely he wasn’t gone like that. Gus looked up at Jamieson, fear and a question in her eyes.

  “You’ll find him?”

  “I’ll certainly try. There can’t be that many ninety-year-old men wandering the village.” Then she remembered, looked at Hy. “You checked? He didn’t –”

  “Take the car?” Hy shook her head.

  “It’s in the backyard as usual.” Gus eased out of her chair, to confirm that the car was there.

  Jamieson went ahead of her, through the pantry, and looked out the dining room window. There it was, a brown 1964 Cadillac, long, and shark-like. A farmer’s car. She had tried to chase it down numerous times. She hadn’t been able to see Abel, only the hat. She knew he drove without a license. Other hats belonged to other eighty- and ninety-year-olds in the village, all of them driving without licenses. There were many offenders, but none as slippery as he.

  She was relieved that, wherever he was, Abel was not in the car.

  The relief was short-lived. Where was he, if not in the house or the car? She was convinced that wherever he was, at his age, he was probably nearby and undoubtedly dead. Still, she had at least to put on the show of a search, and the sooner they got to it the better.

  Chapter 3

  “Fisheries.” He spoke through gritted teeth, gnawing at his fingernail. “Seamus O’Malley speaking.” He was tapping one foot against the other on the top of his desk. He felt like bolting, stomach churning.

  He was off his meds. It made him feel powerful. Like he could do anything. But it made him shaky and nervous, too. Impatient.

  Brock Ferguson was on the other end of the line, leafing through The Shores’ 200th anniversary book, Time Was. It had brought him here. He’d found the book in the built-in shelves of the library at Dalkeith, meant to look at it, but never did. When the honeymoon was over, Letitia had mistakenly packed it, thinking it belonged to him. It sat hidden in a stack of books in their bedroom, and it was only months later that he came across it again. When he saw the photograph and the fish, he was seized by a desire to capture it, a record-breaking fish, a fish that would make his name. Over time, he managed to convince Letitia that a move back to fresh ocean air would be good for her. He reminded her how happy she had been at Dalkeith. She gave in. And Ferguson had preceded her to Red Island.

  While he was waiting for Letitia and her annoying cats to arrive, he had been keeping a low profile, but he was itching for the hunt to start. And, unlike the guy in the photograph, once he caught the cod, he would not let it go.

  “The Old Man Out to Sea” he had dubbed the photograph. The fish dragging the dory and the old man clinging to it. Had he landed it? Obviously not. If he had, there would have been a photo of that, most certainly. Unless, as often happened “time was,” the photographer had run out of film. The photo credit said: “Abel Mack and the one that got away. Three-hundred-pound cod drags Mack out to sea.”

  “Brock Ferguson here. I’d like to speak to the man in charge.” The fact that it might be a woman never crossed his mind.

  “She’s away at the moment. Can I be of any help?”

  “I’m interested in…interested in…” How much should he give away?

  Seamus himself was staring at that photograph of Abel and the giant cod, as he did several times a day, feeling a greater sense of urgency as the time for his boss’s return grew closer. He could do anything now, order out boats and crew as he wished. Maybe he’d have to answer for it later, but he was hoping he wouldn’t have to answer for anything. He’d be packed up and on his way to Newfoundland with a giant cod. Exactly how he’d accomplish that, he wasn’t sure yet. Seamus wasn’t a biologist. It just said he was on his resumé.

  “Ye-es.” Seamus drew out the word, fuelling it with impatience and a dash of sarcasm.

  “I’m looking for a fish.”

  “Plenty of fish around here. Any particular fish?”

  “A particular fish. A three-hundred-pound cod.”

  Seamus inhaled, a deep inhalation that burst down the phone line. Then silence. Someone else was after his fish? Damn. Then: “No such thing.”

  “Oh, but there is.” Ferguson’s tone was insinuating. “I’m surprised you don’t know of it.”

  Seamus paused again. What did this man want with the fish? He better find out. “Well, and I do, as it happens. So what of it?”

  “I’m a collector,” Ferguson put his feet up on his desk and leaned back in his chair.

  “You collect fish?” Seamus could imagine them stuffed and mounted on Ferguson’s walls. Dead fish, bought and paid for on some charter in the Gulf of Mexico. Well, he wouldn’t be catching or collecting this fish, not if Seamus could help it. This fish was his. Out there somewhere, he hoped, off the shores of Red Island.

  “Yes, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I have an aquarium, but I collect things, like bottle caps and tabs from cans, with the intent of setting and breaking records. I’m sure I have more tabs from cans than anyone in the world.” When he said it, Brock thought, it sounded pathetic. Not good enough. “I have nothing special yet. Except maybe my lottery-winning wife. Three times she’s won it.”

  Seamus whistled, his interest piqued. He was talking to money.

  “Now,” Ferguson
went on, “now I’m looking for the biggest cod in the world. I think it could be right here.”

  “Off Red Island?”

  Ferguson grunted. “Not too far, in fact, from where I sit right now.”

  Seamus’s eyes lit up. Desire and greed. Did this man know where the fish was…were?

  “Maybe we can help each other.” Seamus sat up straight, gripping the telephone receiver, interest sparking in his eyes.

  Seamus was thinking of the imminent return of his boss and his inability to play fast and loose with the taxpayers’ money after that. But this man had money – and the same desire he had: to catch the big one.

  “Ye-es.” He drew out the word again, but this time peppering it with curiosity.

  “Don’t know if you’ve seen this local book. Recent. About The Shores. It has a picture of a fellow battling a massive fish.”

  “You mean…” Seamus paused, not sure how much interest to show.

  “Time Was.”

  “Yes, of course.” Seamus wrote it down.

  “I want that fish.”

  Seamus surprised himself with his response.

  “So do I.”

  “Of course, it won’t be that fish. That was thirty years ago.”

  “No. It probably won’t be that fish, although you never know…”

  “It’s the size I care about. I want to find if there are any more where that came from – and where, in fact, it came from.”

  “We’re on the same page there.”

  “I want it alive.”

  “Of course. I can understand that.” Seamus wanted a live one, too. He could bring it back in triumph to Newfoundland. He had left in disgrace, having lost a lot of people’s money with a failed hatchery scheme. He’d promised his investors big cod. Instead he delivered dead ones. Food for the fish is eighty per cent of the cost of running an aquaculture operation, and he hadn’t been able to afford to feed them. Now, if he returned with a giant like this, he might be singlehandedly responsible for reviving the industry on the Rock. It might surpass anywhere else in the world. And this guy Ferguson could maybe help him, provide the backing, all the while thinking Seamus was catching the cod for him to keep.