“Did we have plans?”
“None at all,” said Leone. “Look outside.” The rain was pounding down so hard, there was nothing to see. “Where would we be going?” He seemed to smirk, too. Billy felt a rush of discomfort.
“Names. I need your names, please.” Billy pulled out his notebook. Flushed. “Of course, Mr. Bullock, I know yours.” He turned to Leone, still standing behind him and making him feel more uncomfortable.
“Leone O’Reyley.”
“Leone. L…i…”
“…e…” Leone corrected him, then rapped out the rest: “o…n…e.”
O’Reilly, Billy knew. Or thought he did. He hesitated. One “l” or two? With or without a second “e?” A capital “R?” His pen came to a halt after the “O.”
Leone, too short to peer over Billy’s shoulder, peeked around his arm and spelled out the rest of the name.
Leone O’Reyley. Odd, thought Billy. It was, and not just the spelling. The name was a clash of cultures, like the marriage – a fiery union between Leone’s Spanish mother and Irish American father.
“If that’s all – ,” Leone touched Billy’s arm, and motioned toward the door.
Billy hesitated. “You can expect the police to question you.”
Ed inclined his head again.
“Naturally.”
Billy fingered the notebook. Dare he ask for an autograph?
No. No, of course not.
He slipped the pad into his pocket and left.
When the door had closed behind him, Ed and Leone stared across the room at each other. Neither smiled. Neither spoke.
Failing to find Jim MacAdam, or any sign of him, Murdo was bumping down toward the Shore Lane, going slowly so as not to damage the cruiser.
A short woman with a square body rather like his own was marching up toward him.
Gladys Fraser was braced against the wind and the rain, breathless and still quite stiff from her exertions at the Hall. In her hands she held a baking pan, wrapped in tin foil. Normally she would not have walked, and certainly not in this weather, but Wally had taken the car, she didn’t know how to drive his truck, and she never missed a morning. No, not since Jim’s wife had died in July had she missed one morning. She had convinced herself that he couldn’t get on without her.
She would go there as soon as she’d finished her own chores, and he would be waiting for her, seated at the yellow Formica kitchen table, with the splayed-out legs, the cushioned seats in a swirl of yellows and oranges.
She’d prepare a pot of tea and, as she put it, “do” for him – tidy, wash the dishes, sometimes the floor, do a laundry, and then she’d sit down, feeling virtuous, and have her “cuppa” with Jim. She felt responsible for him.
“He’s not there,” Murdo rolled the window down and called out as she approached.
“What do you mean, not there?” Gladys’s mouth set in that stubborn, pugnacious way of hers, staring at Murdo to make him retract his statement. It worked with other people.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“No sign of him. No sign of anyone.”
That Murdo was a police officer didn’t intimidate Gladys one bit. She hauled on the passenger door and jumped into the vehicle.
“We’ll see about that. Drive back there.”
He did, because she might shed some light on the case. Who knew? She might find the guy, hidden somewhere. Perhaps he’d come out for her if he hadn’t for him. Taking a quick glance at Gladys, Murdo couldn’t imagine why.
Gladys was frowning. She rarely smiled. She didn’t have that kind of face. Or maybe it was because she’d been jutting her jaw forward so long in defiance, that it had formed that way, into the face of a bulldog. She’d been angry almost since she was born, one of a pair of twins, who hadn’t received the attention she’d wanted from her mother. The other, sicklier, twin had got it all, until she died at the age of six. Looking at the two of them, people said Gladys had eaten up all the food in the womb. It hadn’t given her height, but it had given her breadth. She was stocky, square. She looked like it would hurt to bump into her. It did. Not quite like a collision with a brick wall, but she was solid. Physically and mentally, it was hard to budge Gladys Fraser. If something or someone were going to give, it was not going to be her.
Her only soft spot was for Jim MacAdam.
She could be seen, every morning “on the dot,” as Gus put it, making her way up the cape to Jim’s house. Her husband Wally was “glad to be clear of her,” Gus pronounced. It gave Wally the few peaceful moments in his life, these visits up to MacAdam’s. Wally sometimes wished MacAdam had married her instead.
It was almost the only thing he and Gladys agreed on.
She’d always leave Jim’s glowing – not a word you’d attach to Gladys Fraser on a normal day. But people were seeing a difference, saying she’d changed, softened.
At the moment, though, she was suffering mounting anxiety. Elmer Gallant had died last month at just sixty-two. Took a heart attack. Died in his sleep.
Jim was in his seventies. In good shape, mind. But a big man, and he didn’t care what he ate. Gladys was feeling almost as if she could take a heart attack herself, so hard was it pounding in her chest.
All through Jim’s fifty-year marriage to Elvira, and Gladys’s own to Wally Fraser, Gladys had nursed the childhood crush she’d had on him, affection that, once given, was not taken away. When Jim woke one morning to find his wife dead in the bed beside him, Gladys had stepped into the breach. Wally kept busy making duck decoys and other wood carvings that had gained him an international name in folk art. And whenever Gladys made a casserole, bread, a pie, or lemon loaf for Jim, she made one for him, too – so he was a happy man.
So was Jim, even though there were lumps of cornstarch in Gladys’s lemon tarts, a soft doughy middle to her breads. Elvira had never been a great cook either, and anything homemade beat something out of a can.
Jim belonged to Gladys again, at least in her mind. The daily visits were pleasant for both of them. She tried to ignore his obvious grief over the woman who, she believed, had tricked Jim into marriage. Pregnant, she’d been. Or said she was. There never was a child. That was a secret grief Gladys didn’t know about and couldn’t understand.
And then there had been that fight with Lance Lord. Very stressful. Surely it was unthinkable that Jim might have done away with himself. Surely. He was a religious man. As Murdo pulled up to the house, Gladys shook the thought out of her head, unaware that the truth might be worse – that a man had been killed on the shore, and that her beloved Jim may have done it.
Chapter Ten
There were only three houses on the Shore Lane: Gus and Abel Mack’s, the Deweys’, and Ben and Annabelle Mack’s, with the strange female occupant. Ben was Abel’s much younger brother – ten other children separated them – but his whack of land was not, as you might expect, right next to his brother Abel’s. They’d wheeled and dealed, and traded bits and pieces of land over the years, so that now April Dewey and her husband Ron, with the spiky moustache that made him look like a catfish, lived with their brood of six kids, sandwiched between the Macks. It was at Deweys’ that Abel Mack could often be found when he wasn’t in some secret place around his own house or land. He’d breathe in the sweet air of April’s baking, accepting a few crumbs tossed his way – the scrapings from the cake tin, like the child he’d been at the beginning of the previous century, sitting at his mother’s kitchen table. It wasn’t that his own wife, Gus, wasn’t a good cook. She still baked bread daily and turned out muffins and pies – but he enjoyed April’s company.
Gus always knew when Abel had been at April’s.
Hy had found that out when she once absently asked the question no one usually bothered to ask anymore: “Where’s Abel?” He was never around.
“Over to Deweys’,” had been Gus’ reply
. She peered out the window. “That’ll be him comin’ back now.”
Hy peered out the window. She saw no one.
“How do you know where he’s been, when you hardly ever know where he is?”
“He comes back from there lookin’ like the cat that stole the cream,” said Gus. “Lickin’ his chops. Oh, I know. I know,” she said in that self-satisfied way she had.
So the Deweys were the Mack family’s nearest neighbours on both sides – Abel and Gus on one, and Ben and Annabelle on the other. The three strips of land ran right alongside one another, all the way down to the pond.
From her side window, Gus could see right into April’s kitchen – which was how she really knew when Abel was there. The Deweys’ shed blocked a similar view of Ben and Annabelle’s inside. It was just as well. Gus had lived long enough that there wasn’t much that shocked her, and she knew, everyone knew, that Ben and Annabelle did not behave like the old married couple they were. Their marriage was still very much alive, with constant kissing and hugging and “all sorts,” as Gus put it.
She had to content herself with the comings and goings out their front door.
It was through those doors that she had watched the latest guest move in. She thought, at first, that she was looking at a dress blowing away on the wind. But no, it was a person, a very insubstantial person, but a person nonetheless. A child.
As Gus later found out, she was no child. Just a child-size woman. Gus was quick to send Abel over with a plate of muffins and an invitation for a visit. At her age, she preferred not to go to people, but to have them come to her. And they did – paying court in her kitchen. Hy had labeled her “The Queen of The Shores.” But the new tourist did not pay court that day. So Gus was left to wonder about the strange way she had of going in and out the door. She’d never seen anything like it.
Gus wasn’t home when Billy knocked. There was no answer. He tried the door. It opened, and he poked his head in the “kitchen.” It was a holdover from the days when the woodstove was the focal point of any house – so that in the Macks’ “modern” kitchen, there was a mustard-yellow electric stove, as well as Gus’s purple chair, a moss-green sofa, coffee table, and television. All the “doings” of the kitchen were in the next tiny room, the pantry, which held the fridge, sink, and kitchen cupboards, the “new ones,” installed in 1942. There was a dining room and a real living room behind the kitchen. Gus called it “the room,” and never used it – only for company, big family gatherings or “putting up” a quilt. It was large and empty enough to accommodate a full-size quilt frame. It was there now. Abel had set it up, ready for the quilt Gus was working on, the Double Wedding Ring pattern of entwining circles. It wasn’t ready to be “put up” yet. She hadn’t finished all the patches. Piecing them was as complex as marriage itself, and it was giving Gus problems.
There was no one anywhere downstairs. Billy was reluctant to go upstairs. It seemed like snooping. What he’d just done would have been searching without a warrant anywhere else but The Shores. Here it was just what it was – looking for someone.
Billy heard the sound of a chainsaw outside. He went around the back of the house to find the shed door open. The chainsaw was on the floor. Billy touched a hand to it. Hot. But there was no sign of Abel.
Gladys could tell. She could tell as she marched toward the front door, Murdo behind her, she oblivious to the sharp wind, he with his jacket collar up around his ears, his hat pulled down, so that his cheeks bulged out and squeezed his eyes together. Gladys could tell that Murdo was right. Jim wasn’t there. She would have felt his presence.
There was only emptiness.
It was funny that, knowing when he was here the way she did. She’d mentioned it to Olive, who’d laughed and said, “But he’s always there. There’s nothing psychic about it.”
It was true. Jim was always there.
“And if he wasn’t,” Olive went on, “his truck would be gone.”
That was true, too, but Gladys knew there was more to it. She knew, coming up the laneway every day, exactly where she would find him – in the house or shed, sitting at the table in the kitchen or lying down in the living room.
Wherever he was, she went straight to him, every time. She knew, just knew, where he was. She knew now that he was not here, but she did not accept it. As Olive said, he was always here.
Jim’s truck was in the driveway, but it was no comfort to Gladys.
She looked up at the outside light. On, in the daytime. He’d never have done that. She tried the door, even though Murdo had told her it was locked. She gave him a sly look, and reached up to the overhang above the door. She held up a key. She unlocked the door and Murdo, giving a fleeting thought to search warrants, followed her in.
The kitchen was exactly as Gladys had left it the previous evening when she’d made a quick trip up, Wally being out, to see that Jim had all he needed to weather the storm.
It was exactly as she had left it. Only last night, Jim had been sitting at the table, a cup of tea in his hand. Jim was not there now. The teacup sat on the table. She picked it up. Still nearly full.
She turned to Murdo. “Something’s wrong.”
Murdo agreed. What was wrong was that Jim MacAdam had killed Lance Lord and now he’d got away.
Still, it didn’t explain his truck in the yard.
When Murdo drove Gladys back down from MacAdam’s, he told her about Lord.
“Someone killed him?”
“It seems so.”
“Murder?”
“Could be.” Murdo wasn’t sure just how much he was free to say.
“He and Jim were not friends.” It was a tentative suggestion, to get her talking.
Her face fell. Her shoulders drooped.
“It wasn’t Jim,” she said, fists balled up and staring at him with a fierce look, hostility in her narrowed eyes.
“I didn’t say it was.”
“As good as. You think it was him, don’t you?” After the first shock of the realization, she had summoned her pugnacity. Murdo could feel the solid wall of her, almost as if he could touch her stubbornness.
“All’s I know is, he’s not here. Where is he then?”
She began to fold inward, the wall melting.
“I don’t know.” Her eyes lost their hard edge. For a moment, just a moment, Murdo saw fear in them, doubt.
Jamieson had scoured Lord’s cottage. The sign and the will were the only evidence she had. She frowned at the red clay footprints inside the door. Too many of them, her own included, to gauge who had come and gone.
She went outside to wrap the front of the cottage in yellow tape. The wind yanked it from her hands, the tape flying free and slashing her face. She stood back for a moment, looking at the patch of sand Lord and his neighbour had fought over.
It was almost as if the sounds of their anger were whipping along on the wind.
“That’s my land.”
“No. Mine.”
“I’ll kill you.”
“If I don’t kill you first.”
Was that how it had been?
Jamieson tried again to secure the tape. It kept lashing at her face, until finally she gave up. Hanging just inside the door, there was a key. She locked the door and slipped the key into her pocket with the document.
The wind wrapped the flimsy bridesmaid’s dress around her legs. It had dried out while she was in the cottage, but the rain pelted down on her, and in a few seconds she was soaking again. The dress clung to her like grease and she kept tugging at it, pulling it away from her legs and her boots as she splashed along the lane. She didn’t bother to avoid the puddles. There were too many of them.
Billy had been miserable about the task she’d given him, but Jamieson would never ask anyone else to do anything she wasn’t willing to do herself. She trudged up to MacAdam’s, head into the
wind, the loose ponytail come undone and her hair whipping around her face. The wind blew under the jacket, inflating it so that it became like a sail, pushing her where she didn’t want to go. The billy boots were blistering her heels, and she was aching to yank them off.
There was no sign of Murdo. Or MacAdam. She peeked in the glass window of the door. No sign of anyone in the house. She knocked. The door came open, and she slipped inside, though she knew she shouldn’t. Jamieson went through the entire cottage. She noted the teacup on the kitchen table, the bed neatly made up, but above all, the silence of the place – different from the silence of a house whose occupant is merely out.
The silence of someone who has gone.
Was it just her imagination? MacAdam’s truck was in the yard, but Jamieson’s gut told her he was gone. Where? She gazed out over the capes, whipped by salt spray coming off the shore, the tall grasses blown flat. She looked around the room, the kitchen, and felt no presence.
Gone. He was gone.
Why? Because he had murdered Lord?
Then what did the document in her pocket mean? And why had someone tried to burn it?
April Dewey, still dressed in her track suit, an apron shaped like a strawberry tied over it, greeted Murdo at the door. She was making pies for the ceilidh the following night. She’d invited him in, with a great fuss about the rain, flicking the water off his jacket, then removing it and hanging it up to dry off.
Murdo was soon relaxing in the comfort of a chair by the stove, a plate of fresh cookies, squares, and sliced bread in his hand. He’d told himself he had to stay because she’d been so shocked when he told her about Lord. She’d clasped her floured hands to her face and ran them through her hair when he told her how the body had been swept out to sea. Perhaps he shouldn’t have told her that much, but he had, and it made him feel responsible for her, unable to leave.
Or was it the food?
No, he couldn’t leave her like that. It was polite to accept her offer of “a bite of something,” even though he knew he should be reporting MacAdam’s disappearance to Jamieson. He hoped she was still down at Lord’s cottage.
Mind Over Mussels Page 8