Mind Over Mussels Read online

  Nathan had been in the house all summer while his parents were cosied up at their “Love Shack” and tourists rented their house. He could see it from Jared’s – back on the Shore Lane. He’d seen the woman who’d been staying there this past week, but only from a distance. Skinny, sickly looking thing.

  Nathan himself was bursting with health. He had high colour in his cheeks, a cheeky grin, rebellious hair that he kept short because it saved fuss, and legs so long it was hard for him to find jeans that fit.

  He’d been plowing through the garbage in Jared’s house for two months. Garbage, strewn all over the floors, all over the house. Nathan had carved out an area in the kitchen and living room, and tidied and fixed, room by room.

  The smell of coffee drew him downstairs. He dropped the weight, went down to the kitchen, and poured a thermos of coffee. He looked out the window. The wind was howling, and fat drops of rain were splashing on the window glass. It was shuttle day. How many of the old ladies would be willing to go out in this, he wondered. Still, if even one were willing, he’d be on the road. Nathan drove the shuttle bus between The Shores and Winterside once a week as a community service. There were more elderly people living in The Shores these days, their children in Charlottetown or other provinces. Even with willing neighbours to drive them, they preferred the shuttle. It appealed to their fierce island independence because they paid their own way. Nathan charged them a nominal fee, just barely enough to cover costs. Sometimes, he charged nothing at all, saying with a wink to Doris Sandler, “We’ll put it on your account.” And she, only pennies in her purse, would smile back at him, gratitude shining in her rheumy eyes.

  He’d better have a look at the causeway to see if it could be crossed. He took the stairs two at a time, and from the upstairs window could see the surf welling up on the shore. If the causeway flooded, there’d be no trip to town today. The ferry wouldn’t be running either.

  He shucked off his dressing gown, pulled jeans up over his long, skinny legs, yanked on a sweatshirt, splashed water on his face, ran wet fingers through his hair, and his “toilette” was done. Hair stuck up from his head making him look as cheeky as his grin.

  He grabbed his keys and the thermos off the kitchen counter, stuffed a donut in his mouth as he darted out the door, and jumped into his brand new, sparkling white Dodge Ram, bought from the proceeds of his souvenir stand and canteen at the ferry landing.

  He drove with abandon into the banks of dirty black clouds billowing across the road, driven by the wind, rain spilling from them, so that his windshield wipers could not keep up, even on the fastest speed. For a kick, he did without them, and drove blind.

  Murdo skidded to a halt just before they reached the causeway. Salt water was already splashing onto it. He darted a look over at the ferry, secured to the shore, not going anywhere. It should still have been running on regular hours on Labour Day weekend, the last weekend of the tourist season, but Chester Gallant had said he wasn’t taking any chances with the storm. He took his responsibility for the boat and the people on it very seriously, and he would not be taking them out in “this,” as he’d put it, even though “this” hadn’t happened yet when he’d said it.

  But it had started now, and Murdo froze. He couldn’t keep driving, not with that wash of water coming over the road the way it was, every few waves crashing up over the buttress of rocks piled up to keep the water off the roadway. Murdo had had no idea, until this moment, that his fear of going over bridges included crossing this unstable causeway in a rainstorm. But it did.

  Jamieson had been his partner long enough to know about Murdo’s fear of bridges. He had tried to hide it from her, but she was a sharp judge of people. It was what made her a good cop. Small gestures, the cadence of the voice, were clues to the truth behind the words. She’d learned to pay attention to a sideways glance, lowered eyelids, a nervous tic – all the unconscious gestures and facial expressions that betray.

  She knew about Murdo’s fear, but kept quiet about it. She could have busted him, put him behind a desk, but she knew other things about Murdo. He was loyal. He’d never let you down, just so long as you weren’t on a bridge. She read his fear in the set of his shoulders, the way his teeth were gnawing at his lower lip, how his hand came up to his mouth and he began gnawing on that, too. In the fact that he had stopped the car in the first place.

  She unbuckled her seat belt and said, “I’ll drive.”

  Suki dissolved in tears, her hair cascading forward and hiding her face, as she buried it in her hands. When Ian told her that Lance was dead, Suki threw herself at him, and her robe came undone. She wrapped herself around him, and he struggled to control himself, leading her gently to the couch, where he sat down beside her, patting her back and feeling useless.

  He told her then that Lord might have been murdered. Her body heaved with sobs, and Ian didn’t know how to comfort her. Perhaps another woman could help? He had no idea where Hy was. Gus? Should he call Gus? Even Moira Toombs might be welcome, so helpless was he with this sobbing woman, trapped in his boxer shorts and feeling ridiculous.

  He’d been sleeping with a dead man’s wife.

  It didn’t bother him that he’d slept with a married woman. Suki never took her marriages seriously, so why should he? Besides, he had come before all the others. Well, not exactly, not until last night, but he’d always wanted to, always wanted her. Those long nights he’d spent preparing their lab reports, doing all the work. He’d never said or done anything that might have changed things. He’d been afraid of losing the little he had.

  Now he had her, and this had happened. Here she was, bawling her eyes out, and he was half-naked, unable to comfort her. The worst of it was, the sobbing excited him.

  The dead husband. Maybe that, too.

  She was free now. They were lovers.

  Weren’t they?

  The wind had begun to blow and the waves were whipping up, dangerously close to the roadbed. The road crews had been in such a rush to get it repaired and completed before tourist season that they hadn’t built it up high enough.

  Murdo was gripping his seat, hands clamped fast on both sides of it, as they hurtled across the causeway. Water was hitting the tarmac from above and from below, waves crashing up and over the roadbed. The water was sluicing across the road, and the cruiser was hydroplaning.

  Murdo wished Jamieson would ease up on the accelerator, but he didn’t dare say so. Jamieson’s feet were freezing and numb. They were bare and sliding around in the big billy boots. She drove expertly but too fast for someone in floppy footwear. A wave came up and broadsided the vehicle, and she couldn’t press firmly enough to get the brake to respond. Helped by the wind, the car sailed across the road. Murdo had shut his eyes when the car had veered out of its lane, then opened them, to find the road was clear. They were still in the wrong lane, but no one was coming towards them. He crossed himself. They cleared the causeway, and Murdo relaxed.

  Too soon. There was that tricky curve next to Junior Johnson’s field, the one with the dung heap. It only took an instant. The curve came up seconds too quickly, Jamieson was going too fast to correct, and she drove straight into Junior’s field and the pile of manure.

  It had happened in an instant, but it seemed to the three in the car that the vehicle’s motion had been choreographed, gliding to a stop in the heap of dung. They could smell the wet manure even before Jamieson opened her door. She had to push against the heap, and when she did get out, clumps of it fell on her. She swept them off with a few sharp motions. Murdo unpeeled himself from the car and grinned, as he flicked manure off his shoulder, and picked some out of his hair. Lili sat in the back seat of the car, her face still and serene.

  Jamieson checked the trunk. It was full of stuff to help others in an emergency, but nothing that would help them here. She slammed the trunk shut, got back in the car, started it up, tried to back out, but the wheels
spun in the wet muck. The car wouldn’t budge. She barked at Murdo to push, but he couldn’t get a good angle, and he ended up covered in more shit. It didn’t seem to bother him.

  Stuck, they were well and truly stuck, the wheels of the car dug deep into the wet earth. Murdo got back in the car and turned on the radio.

  “My shed just got blown down…”

  “I almost didn’t make it up my laneway…it’s running with red clay…”

  “I’ve got the candles out and the propane camp stove. There’s bound to be a power failure…”

  “I never seen it this bad since…well, I never seen it this bad…”

  Listeners were calling in to CBC radio, which had gone on a twenty-four hour weather watch. It consisted of taking calls from listeners, consulting occasionally with meteorologists, who said they, too, had never seen anything like it, and cut-ins from reporters flung into the storm and yelling over the wind hissing and thumping into their microphones. Jamieson drowned it all out with the police siren. Nathan heard the siren as he rounded the corner and saw the cop car stuck in the field. He stopped his truck, got out, and hollered into the rain.

  “Anyone there? You okay?”

  Jamieson responded by honking the horn, then leaning on it. Nathan grinned when he saw the cruiser nose deep in the manure pile. Jamieson rolled down her window. A clump fell onto her lap.

  “Can you get us out of here?”

  Nathan frowned. He had chains and a winch in his truck, but there was no way he was going to haul that vehicle out of there now. Not in this rain. He’d get stuck himself or cause another accident.

  “No can do,” he said. “You’d better come with me, back to the village.”

  Nathan had a healthy appreciation of feminine beauty, and a real soft spot for older women. His interest was piqued by Jamieson’s severe manner, coupled with that porcelain skin. Flawless. Soft, you could tell. That raven hair, shiny, lustrous.

  His attention was torn from her by the movement of a slight body emerging from the back seat. When she got out, they stared at each other through the wind and rain. Nathan and Lili, their eyes melting into each other.

  He held out a hand. She took it, and he helped her through the mud, their eyes locked.

  Lili and Jamieson squeezed into the cab of the truck beside Nathan, and Murdo jumped into the back. Nathan and Lili were glued together, unable to tell where one stopped and the other began. They had not yet said a word to one another.

  Nathan drove into the rain down the Island Way, the main road that cut through The Shores. He was exceeding the speed limit in spite of the weather. He nearly hit a fox that dashed out ahead of him. He tried to pay attention to the road, but the girl beside him was all he could think of.

  Jamieson wanted to tell him to go faster, but couldn’t ask him to break the law. Anyway, in this backwater, clues probably weren’t going anywhere fast.

  She was wrong about that.

  Chapter Five

  The tarp over Lord’s corpse blew away in the mounting storm, the yellow tape flapping on the wind. Billy was a wet, miserable, and lonely individual on the shore.

  He was full of doubt. His stomach was grinding with anxious indecision.

  They had told him to guard the body. He’d been doing that. He was tempted to pull it up and away from the water when the tide crept up within inches of the corpse, but he didn’t dare. He had no idea if the water was at the high mark or not. Where were the so-called senior officers? They should be here by now.

  Jamieson opened her eyes as they crested the hill to see The Shores spread out beneath them – a cluster of cedar shingle houses, mostly white with green or black roofs radiating out from the village centre, revolving around its once-strong heart. Now the eye was increasingly drawn to the new cottages along the cape. More of them every year. Soon there would be more people from away than villagers. The same as any small community on Red Island. It was happening to them all.

  And no wonder. Red Island had more than its fair share of beauty and stunning coastline. Its landscape was like one of Gus’s patchwork quilts – fields of yellow and green bursting out of the rich red earth, lined by spruce, meadows tumbling down to the blue waters that cradled this small jewel in the ocean. Who wouldn’t want a seaside retreat here? And especially The Shores. It had the most spectacular shoreline on an island famous for them.

  That wasn’t the only difference.

  Cut off by the unreliable causeway, it was adrift in time. It was an older island, where the ladies of the Women’s Institute still wore dresses, each for a different purpose. The house dress, seen outdoors only when hanging the wash; the “good” dress, to wear to town to pick up groceries; and “Sunday Best,” for church, wakes, and weddings.

  Weddings. Jamieson’s sister had been married yesterday.

  Her head was throbbing and descending the steep hill made it worse. She was hungover. She’d got drunk last night, and had stayed at the beach house with other guests who’d overindulged. It was unlike her. She was ashamed, and hadn’t dared wake anyone for a change of clothes when Murdo had called her. She’d slipped back into her dress, stuck her feet into a pair of billy boots at the door, and grabbed a man’s jacket off a hook where it had hung for ten years. It smelled foul, but more fish than fowl.

  She squinted into the day, dark clouds turning the sky a grim grey. Her eyes hurt. The car manoeuvred along the Island Way, one of the province’s four officially designated scenic routes. Ahead of them was the village centre, which now consisted of one lonely white building with the requisite green roof. The school and the General Store were gone; the church had been converted into a smart summer home. The Hall was all that was left. Home of the Women’s Institute, the Christmas Concert, and not much else. Kept up by federal and provincial grants, and the old-fashioned way – ceilidhs, flea markets, and bake sales. Pillsbury and Duncan Hines had yet to arrive in The Shores – birthday and even wedding cakes were still made from scratch. A village woman had once tried to sneak a “boughten” cake into a ceilidh, but was quickly shamed into feeding it to the local dogs. Many of the women still baked their own bread, and the ice cream at the annual strawberry social was always homemade.

  Descending the hill, Jamieson felt as if she were simultaneously going back forty years in time, and facing the future. The demise of village life. The storm surges eating away at this fragile landscape. The place existed in a twilight reminder of the past.

  So it was fitting that when murder came to The Shores, it was old-fashioned, too – caused by thwarted passion, love, and loss. Jamieson thought herself thoroughly modern, completely independent, but those old-fashioned passions would turn out to be something she could understand, though people thought her a cold fish. She’d had a reason to get drunk at the wedding.

  “Stop! Now!” Jamieson pointed at the police cruiser parked outside Hy’s house. What was it doing here?

  Nathan swung the truck into the clamshell driveway and pulled to a stop behind the cruiser. He frowned. He, too, was wondering what it was doing here, and why Murdo and Jamieson were here.

  Jamieson jumped out of the vehicle and hammered on the door.

  Hy, just out of the shower, in terry robe and a towel wrapped around her head, answered it. She nearly burst out laughing at what she saw.

  Jane Jamieson. In a dress. A dress? Jamieson?

  Jamieson saw the shock reflected in Hy’s look, and frowned, the expression doing little to crack the pallid smoothness of her complexion.

  “You,” she said.

  “Uh…yes,” said Hy dumbly, still stunned by the sight of Jamieson out of uniform. It was a bridesmaid’s dress, that was obvious. It was purple, a colour brides instinctively choose for their bridesmaids because it looks good on nobody. This one was a soft lilac chiffon. Nothing about it, neither texture nor colours, suited Jamieson. It made her porcelain skin look green. Her
flesh was mottled by cold, in spite of the jacket that smelled of – fish? And the billy boots.

  Jamieson was trying not to shiver, to keep her usual composure.

  Hy opened the door wide to let her in.

  Billy was beginning to panic. The waves were coming too close. He didn’t know what to do. None of his so-called training had prepared him for this. If he knew anything, it was not to disturb the crime scene. Billy kept thinking about the green pus in the wound. He kept looking at it nervously, until a wave washed up and over the body.

  That did it. He had a plastic container of breath mints in his pocket. He emptied it into his mouth, squatted down, and scooped some of the pus out of the wound. He didn’t know, but it might be important. And the way the water was coming up, that wound would be washed clean before help came.

  He wondered where they were, the cops from Winterside. He looked at his watch. They’d had plenty of time to get here, but there was still no sign of them.

  Panic shot through him. He started to head for the cape, to phone and see what was going on. No. He shouldn’t leave the body. He came back. But what if no one was coming? The heat of panic turned to cold fear. He was well out of his depth.

  He turned again and headed for Lord’s cottage. Behind him, the waves were smashing on the shore, and sand-streaked foam gushed around the body.

  Jamieson turned on the siren as Murdo drove along the Island Way. She’d asked Hy some hard questions about why she had the cruiser, but not much else. She’d wanted to get to the scene, so she’d demanded the keys to the vehicle and ordered Hy tthem to the shore when she got dressed.

  The sound of the siren sliced through the village morning, waking anyone who wasn’t already awake. Jamieson’s stomach was jumping with excitement. Her case. She would make this her case. No one would get in her way thanks to the crisis in the crime unit. The chief had recently resigned and quickly died, for want of anything to keep him interested in life, and so couldn’t be called back to duty when the crisis occurred. The crisis being that the next head of the unit was himself murdered. Or was it suicide? Were there sexual overtones? Jealousy? Passion? Rage? All the top people were on that case.