Hy had been trying to get Gus to organize the book. She dove down to retrieve some papers that had floated to the floor when Gus opened the manuscript and flipped through it, rearranging papers as she went. Hy sighed. In the wrong order again. Yet Gus always seemed to be able to find what she was looking for.
Gus wanted to publish it on the community’s bicentennial. That was just two years away, and Hy despaired that Gus would ever organize it in time. She’d tried to get her to keep the papers in order, by explaining, “It’s like pieces of a quilt. The pages all fit in a certain pattern.” Hy thought it was a brilliant explanation, but it didn’t work. Gus was tidy about her sewing, but not about writing.
She was using the manuscript now to jog her memory for Jamieson, although she was unconvinced about Jamieson’s authority, given her appearance. Gus eyed her over the top of her glasses. Was that the sweater she’d knitted for Hy a few years back? Well, the sweater at least was respectable, but it didn’t make this woman look like a police officer.
“Elmore Gaudet.” Gus pronounced it ‘Goody.’ “You’ll not be wanting him.”
Jamieson looked up from her notebook.
“He’s older than me. Ninety-two next month.”
It was a slow process, Gus reminiscing through the village names and bloodlines.
“Now Norah Blacquiere. She’d be the niece of Albert. Poor Albert. The woman he loved took off to the Boston States for work and never came back. He grieved for her for forty years. Then she married late in life. One day Abel found him hanging by the neck in his barn.”
“Well then, he won’t be a suspect,” said Hy.
“’Spect not,” said Gus, with a smile. “There’s those two poor old souls Anna Black and Wayne MacAleer. Brother and sister – only didn’t know it until their weddin’ day. Both been given up for adoption different times, never met until they was older, fell in love, and then someone finds out they’re brother and sister on their weddin’ day. Couldn’t marry, but they live together. Only knows what they get up to.”
“Not much anymore,” said Hy.
Gus nodded. “Yes, they upwards of eighty.”
Gus was a good storyteller, but she was wearing Jamieson down.
“Let’s start by eliminating everyone over seventy,” she said.
After that, it went more quickly. Half the villagers were over seventy. Only a small number were of prime axe-wielding age. Young people didn’t stay in the village anymore. All the potential axe murderers got out as soon as they could, and went to the big city.
Chapter Sixteen
Alyssa didn’t walk; she floated, so that it seemed as if there were no stairs, only a smooth ramp that she glided down, like a model on the runway, descending with no jarring movements as each tiny foot slipped onto each step. Her dress was a loose, shapeless swath of soft-coloured fabrics that swirled around her insubstantial body, flowed with her easy movement, occasionally billowing up and then collapsing as small drafts of air caught up in the flimsy fabric.
That’s what made Billy think he’d seen a piece of clothing emerge from the front door of the house, then go back in.
Then come out again. Then in, and out, once more.
Three times.
After the third time, he saw the clothing head up the lane toward the village centre, the loose fabric wet and snapping in the wind, wrapping around a small female body, and sticking to her. Gliding – she moved without effort against the wind, her movements not forced, her feet hardly seeming to touch the ground as she propelled through the storm.
His brow furrowed. What was she doing out in this weather? Why had she come in and out of the house so many times? He shook his head. Must have been deciding whether to go out at all. It was time for him to go back in. Wet and cold, and miserable at being left to guard the cookhouse, he was tempted again by the thought of all those plants. No one would miss a leaf or two.
That’s when he saw it.
“Hy McAllister…Ian Simmons…Moira Toombs…”
Jamieson was reading her list of potential suspects after eliminating villagers who were too old or too young.
“…Madeline Toombs…”
“Strike her,” said Hy. She’s too tiny.”
“How tiny?”
“Not five feet. Not a hundred pounds.”
“Wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Gus added. “I’d swear to that on my mother’s grave.” It, too, would be a mess with the rain and wind, thought Gus. She’d go tidy after the storm.
“She won’t even kill a mosquito feasting on her arm.”
Jamieson put a question mark beside Madeline’s name, and continued with her list.
“April and Ron Dewey…Ben and Annabelle Mack…”
“What about them tourists?”
“Who?”
“Them three. That Big Ed and his fella, Lee…Lee…some foreign name, and her, her, down the house.”
“Which house?”
“That one,” said Gus, jerking her head in the direction of Ben and Annabelle’s. “It wouldn’t surprise me if she did it.”
“And her motive would be?” Jamieson was making notes.
“She’s his wife.”
“His wife? What do you mean?” Hy had a cookie halfway to her mouth.
“His real one, what I mean.”
“Suki’s his wife.”
Jamieson looked sharply at Hy. Suki?
“The one afore her.”
“Before Suki?” Hy wondered how Gus knew and why she hadn’t said anything before. “Suki’s his wife now.”
“Well, not anymore, him being dead ’n’ all.”
Gus nodded and settled back comfortably in her chair.
Jamieson stopped writing. Wife? Wives? Why hadn’t she been told?
“That’s as may be. I say she’s his wife, still ’n’ all.”
The “still ’n’ all” meant Gus would listen, perhaps, to what you said next, but it wouldn’t change her mind. In Gus’s mind, the first wife was the wife. She nodded her head and pursed her lips. Case closed.
“You mean that weird woman was married to Lord before Suki?” Hy tried to put it as diplomatically as she could, knowing Gus’s mind on these points of social rights and wrongs.
“Well and she was.”
“Why didn’t you say?”
Gus looked smug. A tiny smile began at the corners of her mouth and that gleam came to her eyes, the one she always had when she revealed a piece of news she’d been guarding until the right moment.
“No one asked.”
“I’m asking now,” said Jamieson. “You had both better tell me what’s going on.”
Alyssa had not been debating whether to stay in or go out when Billy saw her. She could not go in and out doors like other people. She had to pass through. Return. Pass through again. And then one more time.
She’d given up trying to hide or suppress it. Doing so made her head hurt and her stomach ache.
In the days when she was still trying to hide this doorway dance from others, if something so quirky could be hidden, she would pretend she had forgotten something inside and return to get it. Then “forget” something else and start all over again. She’d been doing this since the age of three, and no one was fooled. Her father had tried to stop it. So had her teachers. Her classmates at school had made fun of her. None of it stopped her. Her obsession was stronger than their attempts to mock her or discipline her. It was stronger than the discomfort and anger they caused her.
Eventually, she gave up all pretence and did just as she was compelled to.
Three times through the door. Every time. Everywhere.
Therapy could not free her from it. She couldn’t curb it even though she knew why she did it.
A nun had pulled her aside on a hospital visit to her schizophrenic mother and filled her with fear o
f losing her virginity. At three years old. Alyssa ran off as fast as her baby legs would move, the word chaste ringing through her brain as her child-size footfalls echoed through the empty hall – thundering off the walls as if she were twice, no, many times her size. The sound made her dizzy, and she clasped her hands to her ears, but still the word was there. She’d heard it as chased. She would be chased. By what?
The adults. There they were now – following her down the hall. Chasing her. A large wood door, ornately carved with a cross and black iron hinges and handle loomed ahead of her. So great was her fear of being chased that she managed, small as she was, to haul one big door open just wide enough to slip through it.
But not quite all of her. One hand was left in the door when it came crashing closed.
Her piercing cry rang through the building, up the arched ceiling and out into the day, frightening some crows about to alight on the chapel spires. They’d flapped off, picking up her sound with their screeches.
The thundering footfalls joined in the chorus, Alyssa fell unconscious and woke much later, bandaged and in hospital.
The first face she saw was that of the same nun – and they could not stop her screeching then, until the woman left the room.
The hand healed with the help of many surgeries. Because she was so tiny when it happened, there was only a small scar left that could hardly be seen. But Alyssa still saw the wound in its raw, angry days. Ugly. Deformed. That’s how it remained in her mind. It was the first of her debilitating mental wounds. After the accident, she began her threshold habit.
Once. Twice through the door. And once again.
That’s how it worked in Alyssa’s world.
“Here’s how it works,” Ian gestured toward the screen.
He had seen Hy and Jamieson leaving Gus’s house, and intercepted them at the Hall, saying he had something to show them.
They were now looking at Hy’s laptop screen.
“Mind Over Muscle. Ridiculous,” Jamieson sniffed. “How could anyone buy that?”
“Plenty of people bought it, whether they believed it or not. It was sold mainly through those late-night TV infomercials.”
Hy knew them well. She could even quote some of the sales pitches word for word. She was not a good sleeper, and sometimes resorted to TV to pass the sleepless hours. Once, she’d ordered a vacuum cleaner she thought would save her life, make it better in every way, as promised. It hadn’t. The fancy and expensive vacuum operated just the same as her old one did – only if she took it out and used it. That didn’t happen any more than before. When she did try it, it wasn’t that good in spite of the claims.
“People are vulnerable at night,” said Ian. “They’re insomniacs, or on drugs, drinking, or feeling lonely.”
“Or all of the above,” said Hy. “Those marketers know what they’re doing.”
Ian clicked back to the home page of “Mind Over Muscle.”
“But most of the claims aren’t that outrageous. They usually make some kind of sense, provide some kind of evidence that the product works.”
“It never does, though,” said Hy.
Both Ian and Jamieson gave her sudden, quick looks. She coloured.
“I mean, I assume they don’t – or why are they so desperate to sell?”
Ian shrugged.
“I don’t know.”
“Does his system work?” Hy asked.
“How could it?” Jamieson again.
“Well it worked for him.”
It had.
Ed Bullock. High school football hero, cut down in Vietnam.
“A machete to the head, practically split his brain in two.” Ian shook his own head at the thought. “Doctors gave up on him almost immediately, but not Leone O’Reyley. Fifteen-year-old kid. Brought him to life again. It took years. Endless physiotherapy. He began to talk again. To walk.”
“And then he launched his physical fitness empire, based on the concept that had brought him back from the dead?” Jamieson looked skeptical.
“That was the big selling point. He made a fortune. Don’t tell me you hadn’t heard of it?”
Jamieson shook her head. So did Ian. She really did live in another world.
“Mind Over Muscle,” Hy mumbled. “ M.O.M. Mom. Is that weird? Do you think it means anything?”
It did. It was the source of Ed’s problems with Alyssa. Or so he thought. The obstacle he couldn’t overcome.
He closed his eyes as Leone massaged his ruined legs, closed his eyes on the sight that never left them, not even on that jungle floor in Vietnam. The sight of his father pinning his mother to the bed and raping her. Behind his closed eyes was that five-year-old boy, watching his trust shatter, his safe, secure place in shards. He’d gone tearing from the room, his father in pursuit. Pinned to the wall. Sworn to silence.
He’d been silent about it all his life, but it had simmered inside him always. Even as part of his brain had spilled out, the part that remained had re-lived that childhood scene.
So when he got everything else to work again with Leone’s help, the part that made him a man wouldn’t. Ed never acknowledged it. He focused on the ruin of his legs. Why couldn’t he make them work as they used to?
His ghost limbs. The ones Leone was pretending to massage.
He stopped when Alyssa came to the door.
The woman they both wanted.
Murdo had never seen such a clean and well-ordered place. They’d delivered the bodies to the morgue and Nathan was waiting in the van while Murdo retrieved Jamieson’s uniform from her apartment. It was just where she’d said it would be, hung up in the bedroom closet. On either side of it, clothes freshly laundered and pressed, all neatly spaced, not everything stuffed in and crushed together as in his own closet.
The bed was crisply made, as if it had never been slept in. Ever. The bedspread was pulled tight on all sides, not one wrinkle. He looked under the bed. No dust bunnies. In the kitchen, no crumbs around the toaster. The books in the living room were all about crime detection. No novels. No photographs. No knick-knacks.
He should have known. He should have known this is what Jamieson’s home would look like. Not a home, more like a store showroom or hotel. Clean and crisp, just like Jamieson herself. Nothing personal.
Chapter Seventeen
Billy was in a tailspin of indecision. He’d been told to stay to guard the dope. But there, on the ground, was most likely the murder weapon. An axe, lying in the tall grass, visible because the grass had been beaten down around it by the rain.
It took him a while to pick it up. Finally, he crouched and slipped his hand under it where the blade met the wooden handle, to avoid interfering with any fingerprints or DNA. He held it poised in that difficult position, feeling his fingers go numb, his arm muscles straining as he stumbled up to the Hall, fighting the wind and the rain, hoping he was doing the right thing.
“Billy Pride! Why the hell are you here? Why aren’t you where you should be?” Jamieson’s tone struck fear in him. He held up the axe in explanation, misery etching his face, convinced he’d done the wrong thing.
Jamieson stared.
“The murder weapon.”
“The murder weapon?” Hy asked. “Jim MacAdam’s?”
Jamieson frowned. “I don’t know.”
Jamieson took the axe from Billy.
“Get Gladys Fraser.”
When he returned with Gladys, the axe was laid out on one of the tables. It was the first thing she noticed. What was an axe doing here?
“It was found by the pond. Can you identify it?”
It was Jim’s, Gladys knew right away. Any fool could tell that. There were his initials carved right into the handle. It reminded Gladys of the day Jim had taken a penknife and carved their initials in a heart in the old willow tree by the hall. She hadn’t known he was teas
ing her, a kid he knew had a crush on him. The willow tree hadn’t lasted, as willows never do, and neither had the hint of romance. Except in Gladys’s mind. She went away to teachers’ college in Charlottetown, and Elvira McInnis moved in on Jim. She’d gotten herself pregnant and landed him. Gladys had never had a chance. She’d smoldered over it for years, even after she married Wally.
“She did well for herself,” Gus had said, who measured such things on acreage. Wally Fraser had a hundred acres more than Jim MacAdam, although Jim did have prime waterfront. It would do him no good now.
Gladys kept staring at the axe. Should she say it wasn’t his? She knew they thought he’d done it, but she knew he couldn’t have.
“Yes, it’s his,” Gladys said finally, a small tear escaping the corner of her right eye.
A tear.
Hy couldn’t believe it. Tough-as-boots Gladys, crying? Not a flood of tears. But that one single tear from Gladys was eloquent. She had loved Jim MacAdam, thought Hy. Crusty as she was, she was capable of an enduring love.
Gladys resumed her bulldog stance, grim determination etched across her face and in the thrust of her chin.
“It’s his. It may be the murder weapon, but my Jim did not kill anyone. As soon as he shows up, he’ll explain everything, you’ll see.”
Hy’s mouth dropped open in shocked surprise. “She doesn’t know?”
Gladys turned and shot her a sharp look, a pinpoint of fear in it.
“Jim is dead,” said Jamieson, glaring at Hy. She hadn’t been prepared to tell people yet. “He’s been killed, too.”
“By who?” The pinpoint of fear turned to horror.
“That’s what we’re trying to find out. That – and whether he killed Lord.”
Gladys’s eyes hardened.
“You don’t think that anymore?”
“He’s still a suspect.”
Gladys was too stunned to say anything. Her shoulders drooped. Her fighting stance dissolved. She shuffled out of the Hall, like the old woman she was, to nurse her private grief.
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