Something Fishy Read online

  Some villagers resented it. They hadn’t had time to grab any fish for dinner, but Jamieson, engaged in her community policing, went door to door to warn people not to eat the herring.

  “Not until we send a sample for testing.”

  They all knew that, by then, there’d be no eating them. Quite a few scooped them off their lawns anyway, checking to see if neighbours were watching. They were.

  Billy Pride slid off the road in his Smart car, not yet a year old. He had snow tires and he had summer tires, but he did not have fish-scale tires, so the tiny car with the hulking young man inside went sliding into a ditch. The car took more damage from the weight of Billy bouncing around inside it than it did from going off the road.

  Nathan jumped down from the tractor, and declared the car wrecked beyond repair. Billy had to return home to his mother to tell her they were without a vehicle.

  “And me a cripple,” she moaned. She spent her days and nights on the couch in the living room that doubled as her bedroom. Billy suspected that she could walk, but he didn’t dare say so. That would have made his life even more miserable.

  Billy and his mother lived in a ramshackle bungalow outside the village. He didn’t like to walk, so he went to the shed and hauled out the ride-on lawn mower. He would be getting around the village on it for the rest of the summer, even crossing the causeway.

  Chapter Two

  The causeway. Jamieson sighed. She supposed she’d better go check to see if the fish had fallen there, too. If they had, it would make for a more treacherous crossing than usual.

  The causeway formed an uneasy link between The Shores and the rest of Red Island. A storm surge a few winters before had carved it in two, thrown cars and houses and people around on its path of death and destruction. The province did a poor job of fixing it. The causeway could not be depended on in rough weather any season of the year.

  An old river ferry provided a back-up. In the summer, the boat was in high demand by tourists nostalgic for the Abegweit and other ferries that used to bring people onto Red Island. Now there was a train tunnel, a dark, stinky, unromantic way to arrive on “The Gentle Island.”

  The ferry was one of the reasons for The Shores’ new popularity. The number of deaths and murders in the previous two years had also made the place a hot spot for summer residents and weekly renters.

  They were arriving in throngs.

  No one was more aware of that than Hy. She ran along the shore almost every day. She tried to soak in the solitude and peace, but it wasn’t always peaceful. Last year she’d tripped over a dead body on the beach. Now it was all live bodies. Other runners, up and out early. Dog walkers. Insomniacs. Octogenarians, their blood running cold like a bird’s, would jump into the chill waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence to prove they still had it. Had what? wondered Hy. The ability to not die of a heart attack? To not catch pneumonia as they shivered their way back to cottages that were beginning to be called chalets?

  She forced herself to smile or wave at a couple with four dogs. Four. Crapping on the beach. People seemed to think it was okay not to poop and scoop here. The beach had become one big toilet.

  She resented the intrusion. She could hardly wait until September when they all went home.

  Fair-weather friends.

  “Thick as herrings,” Gus said when Hy complained about the tourists after her morning run. “There’ll be more of them than us.” Gus was right, as she almost always was. At last count there were exactly three more tourists than villagers and it was only the beginning of the season.

  “There’s another lot.” She eased up from her big purple rocker-recliner and peered out the window. A car was trying to negotiate the herrings on the Shore Road. Gus opened the window.

  “Go ahead and run over them,” she yelled. “They’re already dead. Hard as carps, every last one.”

  The tourists wouldn’t have known a carp from a herring, dead or alive, and they frowned at Gus’s yelling and apparent delight in dead things. The car continued on its way down the lane and took a turn up the long red clay road to the nest of cottages on the high cape above the shore.

  There were an even dozen, their numbers doubling over the winter. Some of them were in the old cedar-shingle house style, one of them a lovely gabled house with a wraparound verandah. It was yellow and green and perfectly tucked above the pond. Other modern, stripped-down edifices didn’t always fit with the landscape. One of them looked like a saloon from a frontier town and another was a California dream house.

  The new cottages, six of them, had popped up like mushrooms during the dark and wet winter. It made Gus shiver to think of building a house at that time of year.

  “Cold built right into them.”

  “Saves on air conditioning.” Hy poured out the tea from the glass pot that had been boiling the water and tea bags to a thick dark brown. Gus’s famous, sustaining, north shore tea.

  Gus still had her eyes on the car, stopped at the top of the cape. A woman got out, slipped on a herring, and fell into a puddle of wet clay.

  “They’ll not be here long.” Gus continued to gaze out the window – at the newest and most unusual feature on the shoreline. “A person would never need air conditioning here. As sure as sunrise they won’t need it, not with that contraption. I swear it’s interfering with my hearing aid.”

  The contraption was a wind turbine, erected a few weeks before, its space-age blades picking up the breeze and whirring into action. It was much smaller than the tallest of its type, which could run to thirty-eight storeys or more, but it still dominated the cape. Usually, the access ladder was inside the turbine tower, but this had one outside as well, and, at the top, there was a platform behind the blades.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if it was interfering with your hearing, not just your hearing aid.”

  The village was divided into three camps over the windmill. There were those who believed every bad thing said about it – it could cause headaches, vertigo, cancer, insomnia – and was doing so to them, some villagers claimed. There were others who thought the wind turbines were a great thing, but didn’t want them in their backyard. And then there were the fans of wind power, the people who were proud that The Shores, backward in so many ways, was spinning headlong into the twenty-first century.

  “It looks like the future,” Ian had said the day the thing went up. While he was concerned about some of the problems wind turbines created, he found them beautiful in design and function. Hypnotic.

  “There’s a fair breeze up.” Gus closed the window. Although she always made negative comments about the turbine, it gave her a secret satisfaction. It added to her weather arsenal. On the front side of the house, there was only the flag on the hall to tell her how hard the wind was blowing. They took it down in winter, because it would have ripped to shreds. Now she’d have the wind turbine. Would it be turned on in the winter? she wondered. She knew nothing about how wind turbines worked.

  “Have you found out anything more about himself?” Gus gestured toward the window and sat down again in her purple recliner. She was pointing at another peculiar construction on the cape. A dome that had appeared overnight a couple of years back. It had begun as a circle of concrete foundation. Then, one night, a white plastic balloon had been inflated, round as a golf ball but much bigger, as a frame for a house. It looked like an igloo, until it was covered over with a substance that would make it last five hundred years. It couldn’t guarantee the longevity of its inhabitants, though. The fitness wizard who’d built it had died there within months. His partner had died as well. Hy nearly had, too. The dome had now been bought by a strange individual who was hardly ever seen.

  Impatient, Gus pressed again.

  “Have you?”

  Hy had been lost in thought, staring at the dome.

  “Very little,” she said. “Ian went over to have a chat with hi
m. Thought they’d have a lot in common as scientists.

  “He stood at the door, opened just a crack, and spoke for a few minutes. Ian thought he was nervous, shy. Said he had a pinched look, pale, as if he never went out.”

  “He don’t. I can see his front door from here. I don’t blame him for not wanting to go out, these days. Fish falling from the sky. What next?” Gus looked out the window again. The blades of the wind turbine were moving at a good clip.

  “Guess I’ll hang out the laundry. You go check, see that the coast is clear.” She nodded toward the door.

  Hy wrinkled her brow.

  “No, the coast is definitely not clear. It’s crawling with tourists, as you said yourself.”

  “I mean the herrings. See there’s no herrings falling.”

  “Gus, the sky is clear blue. Where would they be falling from?”

  “I don’t know. Where did those ones come from yesterday, tell me.”

  “It was raining…”

  “And you think that explains it?” Gus shook her head.

  “All right. Just to prove my point.” Hy stood up, opened the screen door, and stuck her head part way out.

  A fish fell on her.

  “See.” Gus, triumphant.

  Hy yanked the fish off her head and looked up. There were two or three herrings lodged in the eavestrough. She pointed. “It must have come from there.” Before she could dodge it, another one fell.

  “I’ll be getting Abel to clear those out.”

  Hy thought about sticking around. It had been years since she, or anyone except Gus, had seen Abel. Then she thought about the mess her own lawn and drive were in and headed home instead. She walked. Everywhere she walked, she dodged fish decaying in the warming sun.

  Instead of the fresh smell of the meadow grass in June, there was an odour clinging to The Shores as bad as the manure in the fall.

  Something fishy.

  Ian was out on his lawn, measuring the size of the fish, the distance between them, and approximating how many there were in a square yard. He’d have to drive around to find the perimeter of the fall – where they had come down.

  When he finished his inspection, which included giving Nathan a hard time for clearing away so much of the evidence, Ian returned happily home to write up his report.

  “Evidence,” Nathan shook his head when he told Lili about his set-to with Ian. “You’d think a crime had been committed.”

  “Maybe it has.” Her eyes were dreamy. He had disturbed her during her meditation. She still hadn’t quite come out of it.

  “C’mon, Lili, snap out of it.”

  Her eyes came fully open and she smiled that small, effortless smile that he so loved, that told him everything was going to be fine.

  He took a bite of one of her healthy muffins, and very nearly spat it back out. He forced himself to swallow it. Its dryness scratched at his throat. He grabbed his cup of tea and knocked back a mouthful. Spat it out, too. Too hot. His mouth was burned, blistering. Wet muffin crumbs, clumped together in irregular balls, were all over the table. He jumped up and washed his mouth out at the sink.

  “Oh, Nathan, you’re such a pig.”

  Nathan rinsed one more time. He strode over to the table, and picked up Lili as if she weighed nothing. He pushed his nose into the curve of her neck.

  “All the better to snort you.” He laughed. She giggled. He carried her upstairs.

  Jamieson bristled at the sight of the village children playing tag on the cape. Again. She had been having a battle with them for the past month, trying to keep them off the land. She’d had complaints from both newcomers – Newton Fanshaw in the dome and Anton Paradis in one of the new cottages – about the kids trespassing and running free all over their property.

  The parents and grandparents were upset that Jamieson had warned the children off – and that folks from away had asked her to do it. It was the traditional village playground. Their mothers preferred them playing there, rather than the shore, because they could see them and there was no fear of drowning.

  Fall off the cliff, though, maybe, thought Jamieson. Especially after last winter. Storm waves had carved a slice off the end of Vanishing Point from beneath. From a side view, a few feet of land at the edge of the cape looked like a claw, or a beak, ready to attack. It had been shoved upwards into a striking pose. It would take only a push…

  It could crumble off anytime, but that didn’t seem to bother the parents as much as the denial of their traditional rights to use the land, to pick the wild strawberries. That was going to be the next battle. A year ago, as a newcomer, Jamieson wouldn’t have understood what the fuss over the wild strawberries was all about. Now she did, but it didn’t help. She couldn’t defend the villagers on this one. Tradition didn’t make something legal.

  Private property was private property and Jamieson had great respect for it, never having owned anything herself – not even the clothes on her back. She was almost always in uniform.

  She thought about what she’d bought last month, squirreled away in a closet, looking out of place next to the rest of her clothes. They all looked like they belonged to a uniform. Except that one. She smiled when she thought of it.

  She was soon frowning when she got out of her vehicle, shooing the children away as she advanced on them.

  “Get. Get off. Out of here,” she yelled, noticing that the tiny four-year-old blonde, who she believed was a Dewey, was frozen to the spot, as usual when Jamieson descended on the kids. She was unmoving, big deer eyes, round and brown, unusual in a blonde. She was scared of the Mountie.

  In one hand, she held a fish.

  In the other hand – a fish.

  Jamieson realized they were all holding or scooping up fish and dropping them into garbage bags. Some of the larger children were dragging the bags to Anton Paradis’ winged cottage.

  Jamieson grabbed the sleeve of a boy, about twelve. Big brown eyes. The Dewey eyes.

  “What’s going on here?”

  The boy jerked his head in the direction of Anton’s.

  “He’s paying us by the fish for bringing them in.”

  Jamieson let go of his sleeve.

  “Yes, well, we’ll see about that.”

  She marched down to Anton’s and rapped on the door briskly. When confronted, Anton confirmed he was paying the children to clean up the cape.

  “Call it a gesture to the community.”

  There was more to it than that, Jamieson was sure, peering shrewdly into his eyes.

  But what?

  “It’s sending out a mixed message.”

  He looked puzzled.

  “One minute you want them off the cape, the next minute you’re paying them to tramp all over it.”

  He shrugged. “I think anyone – even a child – would know this was an exception.”

  “I hope so. It’s certainly not making my job any easier.”

  Jamieson returned to the cape. The children, in awe of her authority, had stopped picking up fish. She nodded to the eldest boy.

  “Okay. Go on. But this is a one-off.”

  “One-off? What does that mean?”

  “It means that after this one time, you’re off the cape.”

  “What about there, in the middle? Do we clear that?”

  Jamieson surveyed the strip of land between the dome and Anton’s, a red scar where Jim MacAdam’s beige bungalow had been.

  Why shouldn’t Paradis pay for the lot?

  “All of it. Yes, clear all of it. Mr. Paradis will pay.”

  As she left, Jamieson heard one of the girls complaining that the salty fish could ruin the wild strawberry crop. There’d be none of the cape jam this year.

  “We wouldn’t be allowed to pick anyway,” said another.

  Too right, thought Jamieson. Too bad. She lo
ved strawberry jam. She’d never had it wild. She bet it would have been good.

  Chapter Three

  The shoreline was crowded with the new cottages built over the winter, even though MacAdam’s had been removed, leaving a red scar on the cape.

  The whole village had turned out in mid-June to see it hauled off. He’d brought in a bungalow from town fifty years before, one of those wide-loads that travel maritime roads in spring, summer, and fall. Now it was going back to town. With Jim’s death – a grisly murder the previous year – the land and the bungalow belonged to his niece, Fiona Winterbottom. She’d sliced the unfortunate name in two and tried to get people to call her Winter, but it didn’t take.

  No one knew why Jim MacAdam had favoured this particular niece. Jim had a sweet tooth. He also had diabetes. Fiona would visit Jim on Sundays when his wife was at church and bring him a box of fudge. If an axe in the head hadn’t done him in, the fudge would have eventually.

  In return for her dubious generosity, Fiona had ended up with a prize piece of shorefront property. And a house. She lived in a trailer in town. Switching the two made perfect sense to her. She’d move the trailer out here as soon as she got the house into town.

  She had the bungalow lifted, with everything in it, including Jim’s last mug of tea, now green fuzz, still sitting on the kitchen table.

  “Dishes still on the table!” the mover boasted. Village housewives didn’t think that was anything to boast about.

  He was less confident as the house bumped across the sandy land and down onto the potholed clay lane. The villagers had first stood watching, then followed until the truck and the house hit the puddle at the end of the lane, and bounced up onto the Island Way.