All is Clam Page 9

  “So you could speak to your children on it.”

  “On that?” Gus pointed, eyes wide open. “Why would I be doin’ that?”

  “Well you can Skype them.”

  “They’ve already escaped me. Sons is good for nothing. Seven of them I had. Just the four left. Only the one girl. And her all over the world.” She shook her head. So did Hy.

  “No, no. You don’t understand. Skyping is a way of communicating – through the computer.”

  “I can do that with the phone, and I know how to work it.” She flipped open the arm of the chair, where a phone nestled, still wrapped in its original plastic.

  “Or I did.” She shut the compartment. The real phone was in the next room, on the wall, its heavy black receiver at the end of a long misshapen cord that hung nearly to the ground and stretched right into the pantry. “Mobile enough for me,” Gus always said.

  “Yes, but this way you can see and hear.”

  “Well that would be somethin’. Because right now I don’t see or hear much of them at all. I don’t see how them fishes is gonna change things.”

  Abel, thought Hy. Maybe Abel would help Gus figure this out. He was handy. But where was he? Gus didn’t seem to see or hear much of him, either, Hy thought, as she put the kettle on for tea.

  Ian was smiling at his new computer. He stroked the screen, lightly, so as not to smudge it. His trailed his hands around the frame, loving the cool, fresh plastic feel of it. Those same hands had touched his old machine almost as lovingly, when he’d set it up at Gus’s. There had been something of reluctance in his touch, then, reluctance to let it go. He’d managed to finish without waking her, and smiled as he left, thinking Gus was in for a surprise. It never occurred to Ian that it might be an unwelcome surprise. Who wouldn’t be happy to receive, gratis, an iMac, just two years old, frequently but tenderly used, and maintained, in tiptop shape?

  As this one was going to be. He had checked all the systems, all the apps, and having done that, he checked his email.

  His smile turned to a frown.

  Wild Rose Cottage and its inhabitants, Fitz above all, were under what Gus called “a cloud of suspicion.” There was no question of Rose joining the W.I. now. There were no more visitors up the road, bringing welcoming gifts for the new family.

  The gifts had been mixed with more than the usual curiosity, once the word had gone out about the tent in the kitchen. No one believed it, until they saw it. And when they saw it, they talked about it for days.

  Rose was always home, so no one had to leave an offering at the door. All had it opened to them – and there, in plain view, was the tent in the kitchen. It gave rise to some exaggerations by those who had been there. And even some who had not.

  A campfire, right there on the floor. Roasting marshmallows, they was.

  The dog eating the same food as the humans, right alongside them.

  Rats and mice all over the place.

  That last, at least, was true.

  It was not the lobster. Nothing wrong with the lobster, the report said. Only a sample from one lobster, Gladys had made sure to point out. There had been a hundred served. The chowder – inconclusive. No clams left in it. And the potato salad? In the heat of that kitchen. The most likely culprit.

  But it couldn’t be tested. It had been thrown out, and the dogs had eaten it and barfed it up. Yes, thought Jamieson, it had been the potato salad.

  But what was the charge?

  Was there a charge?

  Was it manslaughter?

  Probably so.

  The woman who died – the victim? – was eighty-eight, for God’s sake, Jamieson.

  She’d been talking to herself more and more, alone in the police house. Where was Murdo? He was getting to be like Abel Mack, never around.

  Was that what happened to men in The Shores?

  “What’s this?” Hy had an annoying habit of hitting the space bar on Ian’s computer whenever she came in the house. She’d come up to Ian’s to thank him for giving the computer to Gus. What she saw on the screen blew that right out of her head.

  “Uncle Ian? Uncle Ian?” She stared at the screen, without reading any more than those two words.

  Ian was fiddling with the woodstove.

  He flushed.

  “You have a nephew?” She advanced into the room. “A nephew?”

  He nodded, a look of resignation on his face.

  She flopped down in the high-backed Danish modern lounge chair – the sturdiest piece of his furniture. It wobbled.

  “My brother’s boy.”

  “Brother? I didn’t know you had a brother. What other skeletons are there in the family closet?”

  Ian stood up and shook his head.

  “None. That’s it. The nephew and the brother. Younger, by two years.”

  “And a sister-in-law.”

  “Nope. Absconded long ago. They haven’t heard from her in years.”

  “But why do you never speak of them?”

  Ian sighed – a long intake of breath, but the exhalation unburdened him only briefly. He sat down in the chair with the arm that always fell off. It fell off.

  “I haven’t spoken to them in years. My brother and I are…estranged.”

  “Why?”

  “If you must know –”

  “I must.”

  Ian got up again. Went into the kitchen. Came back with two glasses of Chardonnay. He took a slow sip.

  “It was because of my mother.”

  “She had Alzheimer’s.” That much Hy knew. Ian had spoken of it. Once.

  “He never came.”

  “What – to see her?”

  “He said later that he couldn’t bear it. She asked for him when she was lucid. I told him that. Still, he didn’t come. To the last, when she didn’t know me and wouldn’t have known him, though he was her favourite.”

  “And? You argued? Fought over it?”

  Ian shook his head. “Not that passionate. He came to the funeral. We didn’t speak. I buried him with her. Haven’t seen or talked to him since.”

  “And now?” Hy looked over at the computer, wishing she’d read more than “Uncle Ian.” “Why the email?”

  “Redmond has it himself.”

  Redmond. As if she read Hy’s thoughts, Ian’s parrot Jasmine squawked: “Redmond? Redmond.” She liked both the name and upward inflection. “Redmond?” she squawked again.

  “Early onset Alzheimer’s? Like your mother?”

  “Correct.”

  “How bad?”

  “Bad.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Ian looked down into his glass, as if the answer lay there.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What does he want you to do? Your nephew?”

  “David wants me to see Redmond, make it up, I guess, before it’s too late.”

  “And will you?”

  “I told you.” His tone was hard, then melted in indecision.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  Sobered by what she’d found out about Ian, Hy cycled home, down Shipwreck Hill, around the corner at the village centre where the Hall stood, and the empty lot where Abel Mack’s General Store had been. Before Hy’s time. Gone, too, was the school, where she had taught briefly. She cycled onto The Island Way, the main road through the village. The province had made it a provincial scenic route to draw tourism. The murders and deaths over the past two years had done a better job of that, attracting nosy sightseers to the crime scenes on the shore and the capes.

  The village had suffered more than its share of killings.

  Hy shifted gears, and her gaze, down to the Macks’ house. Gus was in her rocker recliner, head down, working on the quilt. On fine summer nights, Gus would stretch out her quilt in the build
ing by the side of the house. It was just big enough to frame a large king-size quilt.

  “Them big beds,” Gus would complain. “Jus’ more work, if you ask me. A double is good enough. Time was it was three-quarters.” Then she’d get a twinkle in her eye, and say, “Don’t know how they make babies in them big beds. You could sleep the whole night and never know you had a husband.”

  No one ever responded to that. There were some people who hadn’t seen Abel in years. Hy was one of them. Odd, she thought – she was over there so often. When she asked Gus why he was never there when she was, Gus had shrugged. Gus couldn’t say what she knew to be true: Abel was hiding from Hy, the woman from away whose height and opinions scared him.

  Abel had built Buddy’s house, just ahead on The Way. Buddy had shown up in The Shores, a big grin on his face, looking for work, “missus,” as he called Gus. She wouldn’t let him in the house. Who knew what would come in with him? But she gave him soup and some of her fresh-made bread out there on the stoop, and then he offered to repay her – pointing at the hill-shaped pile of wood that Abel hadn’t got around to stacking yet.

  Buddy couldn’t talk properly. He had just a few words that he’d grunt out between heavy breaths and drool spilling from the corners of his lips.

  He was a special person, said Gus, when she got to know him. She let him do chores around the yard, chores that Abel always seemed to be too busy to do – especially when he was in the store, smoking with the other farmers and fishermen, all unable to work on any given day because the weather wasn’t “just right” for whatever it was they were supposed to be doing. Gus let Buddy sleep in the barn for a couple of weeks, until Abel built him this tiny house on a scrap of land no good for farming.

  Abel had built it, but it was Gus who made him do it, making use of the cozy size of their simple double bed to nudge him in the ribs one night until he gave in.

  You couldn’t do that in a king-size bed, Gus smiled, smug, whenever she told the story.

  Buddy was outside his house when Hy passed by. He was splitting wood, his height and strength making it as easy as carving up balsa. He paused and gave her a big grin and a wave. Then he made the motion of fiddling. She nodded her head.

  “Tomorra…” he mouthed.

  “Yes,” she called up. It wouldn’t be “tomorra.” Hy knew that. Buddy didn’t. He couldn’t keep track of the days.

  No one knew Buddy’s real name or where he came from. But they did know he was a mighty fiddler, who entertained in homes through the long winter nights, in exchange for offerings of food and clothing.

  No one need be homeless in a place like The Shores. Hy was comforted by the thought. The village took care of its own, and some who weren’t, like Buddy.

  “What if he were mine?” Gus asked. “Wandering around the world with no one, like a stray cat.” She would shudder. “No. No. He has no people of his own. Someone has to take care of him.”

  No people of his own, thought Hy. Did they kick him out – or did he wander off? He seemed happy enough, but he had no one.

  Alone at Christmas. Like her, but not like her. Somehow Buddy was facing a lonelier Christmas, in her mind, than even she. The warm feeling she had been experiencing dissipated. She felt sad. Sad for Buddy, and, self-indulgently, for herself.

  But Buddy was happy, content as he split the wood, eyes shining at he thought of fiddling tomorrow, or whatever day tomorrow was. He didn’t know he was supposed to have people. He never remembered Christmas from one year to the next. It was all new to him, every time. He couldn’t remember most things between one day and the next.

  Remembering was difficult for him.

  All of them were dead. Hy was home and sipping a glass of red wine – her third, counting the one at Ian’s. There were a couple of photograph albums, worn, discoloured, on the coffee table – a steamer trunk. The albums had been in the trunk; they smelled moldy. Hy had unearthed them and had tipped from feeling joyful about Christmas to feeling maudlin. Gus might not see her family, but at least she had one. Most of Hy’s had died when she was an infant, and she had very nearly died herself.

  Her grandmother had been her family. Bitter, brittle, standing ramrod straight by the white picket fence. The fence that embodied restraint, not the comforting circle of family life.

  The grandfather. Studio shots for work and passport. Driver’s license. Only one candid shot of him, with his hand on his bush plane, caressing it, a hint of a smile on his usually forbidding face.

  Ray, her father. She didn’t even know his last name. She’d been called by her mother’s family name. Ray. Ray who? She’d never known him. She was half in love with him. A tall American boy, no more than twenty. Long legs, crossed at the ankles, propped on the desk he gave up for a life in the woods. Her mother, tall, too, long-haired, doe-eyed, easily swayed by the American draft dodger into a new exile, a life of freedom from the white picket fence.

  Hy fingered the coffee-table book, the new edition of her mother’s work that had come out just a few years before. A Life in the Woods had been written in ink and on paper her mother had made herself. One reviewer had called it “the bible of the back to the land movement.” Her parents had lived and died by that religion. Her father, out trapping in winter. Her mother, when she flew out of the woods in the single engine plane piloted by Hy’s grandfather. It went down in a lake, and only Hy survived. Her grandmother had brought her up, bitter at the loss of her husband, and at having to care for an infant at her age.

  Hy snapped the photograph albums shut. Shoved them across the table. Leaned back onto the couch, eyes shut, glass in hand.

  She hadn’t loved her grandmother, hadn’t even liked her. She hadn’t shed a tear when the woman died. Hy had been only nineteen and left alone in the world.

  She was usually okay with that, but not at Christmas.

  I’m the last one.

  Every Christmas, Hy tortured herself with the thought. She knew that she would never have children. Too late now.

  There will be no one after me.

  A choice – or a mistake?

  Chapter Thirteen

  Moira Toombs had unhooked her computer in what had been the parlour of the family’s modest one-and-a-half-storey home. It had been turned into a bedroom for her dying father, and then her mother. A little more than a year ago, Moira had started cleaning the cottages mushrooming along the capes, and turned the room into an office. She’d bought a computer for the modest little business she called “Nice As You Please.” She didn’t really need it, but it had won Ian’s interest for a few weeks.

  Now she’d stashed the computer in the small room at the top of the stairs. She had hoped to get Ian’s help, but he hadn’t answered his phone. Instead, she’d made use of Billy. He had muscled the desk and file cabinet up the stairs, and shoved a bed and dresser into the room downstairs.

  Seeing the money some of her customers were making from renting their cottages, she’d decided to get into hospitality herself, although there was nothing hospitable about the Toombs’ home, or the name she chose for her venture: Toombs’ Stop. Hy had smirked when Moira told her the name she’d chosen.

  Moira had advertised online, but got no customers. Maybe because of the name, maybe because it had been late August. She’d left the posting up, more out of forgetfulness than savvy, but the previous morning she’d received a request for a downstairs room. She hadn’t prepared one. That’s why it was moving day.

  When it was done, Gus dropped by to give her opinion. She wasn’t in the B&B business anymore, but hers had been the first tourist home in The Shores.

  “My land, this won’t do.” Gus was shocked by how Spartan it was. The bed cover and curtains were a stark white. There was a simple bed and dresser, white walls, and old linoleum. Still good, but a drab colour somewhere between navy blue and black, worn, not from use, but from constant cleaning. It was
covering up a good wood floor.

  Moira pursed her lips. She didn’t really want an opinion from Gus. She’d expected praise for how neat and clean it was. Moira inhaled the fresh scent of Pine-Sol, which she preferred to roses. There was a slight undertone of tobacco. Both her parents had been smokers.

  “Clean and tidy,” Moira pronounced it.

  Gus screwed up her face. “What’s wrong with your mother’s good quilts?”

  “Nothing – ”

  “Well…?”

  “They’re put away.”

  “For what?”

  “For keeping.”

  “Quilts is for usin’.” Gus knew she’d find them in the cupboard at the top of the stairs. She puffed her way up and pulled out the best one. “Apurpose,” she would tell Hy later.

  “This’ll do.” She mumbled to herself and tried to conceal her glee.

  Moira watched, lips set in a thin line, as Gus descended. She said nothing. Next, Gus went looking for a hooked rug, took the best one out of the dining room, and tossed it on the floor of the bedroom. She turned round and pointed at the hall floor.

  “You’ll be taking that off before your guests arrive.”

  Moira looked down at the newspaper. Not just a single newspaper. Newspaper all over the floor, neatly layered and overlapped.

  Gus gazed at them. “Well, now, there’s somethin’ I didn’t know.” Moira flinched when Gus picked up a copy of The Guardian from the floor.

  “Mabel Allard, dead at 83. How’d I miss that?” Gus checked the obituaries every day. Gus claimed she was related to half of Red Island. She scanned the paper for the date.

  “Six months gone, and me only findin’ out now.” She looked at Moira, who was fidgeting, anxious to get the paper back where it belonged – on the floor. There was real hardwood under there. Here and in the dining room. She only removed the newspaper “for good” – when she had the Women’s Institute in, or at Christmas. She hadn’t thought about bed and breakfast guests. Tramping in and out as they did. Surely they wouldn’t object.

  “Well, she was only a distant cousin of Abel’s. I don’t think he ever knew her. Still, finding out this way…” Gus shook her head and dropped the paper to the floor. Moira leaned down and set it back in place.