“Jim can’t be a suspect now,” said Hy. She’d said it before but it had obviously had no impact.
“As I said, he’s still a suspect in Lord’s murder. I’m not ruling anyone out.”
Jamieson wondered why she was having this conversation with Hy. She thought, with sudden irritation, that Hy had been around too much, seen and heard too much. Said too much, as well. She’d just given away that MacAdam was dead. It would be all over the village by now.
“You should go home too.”
“I’m sure I can help…” She had helped, thought Hy. She’d helped a lot.
“Just stay out of police business.”
That stung. Well, let Jamieson see if she could solve it on her own. It wouldn’t stop Hy from trying to find out what she could. About Suki. Leone. Ed Bullock. Alyssa Lord. Hy was convinced that one of them had killed Lord and MacAdam – and that no villager had anything to do with it. She would prove she was right. She stalked out of the Hall.
Nathan brought Murdo safely back across the flooded causeway. The rain had stopped and started on their journey, coming down so hard at times that it hit the ground and jumped back up. The wind carried the rain with it, blasting up from the coast, pummeling everything in its way. Nathan sped across the causeway, faster than before, anxious to get home to Lili. Murdo cowered, his body low, Nathan grinning and laughing at him, Murdo wishing Nathan would not take his eyes off the road.
When Murdo got to the Hall, Jamieson sent him to fetch Billy and the marijuana plants from the shore. In they came – all thirty of them – filling the Hall with the scent of cannabis. After they put the plants on the table in the Institute room, Murdo drove Billy home. He bashed into the computer monitor that still lay on the road where it had fallen off the cruiser earlier in the day. Billy got out of the car, and patted his pocket to make sure his small stash of stolen pot was there. He felt something else. The breath mint box, containing evidence from the crime scene. He was going to pull it out and give it to Murdo, but Murdo was already driving slowly down the road, unable to see anything clearly in the torrent of rain. Billy could have caught up with him, but he wanted to get out of his wet clothing and have a joint. He shrugged. Later.
Jamieson had put on her uniform, even though it was almost time for bed. Grey shirt and dark-blue tie and trousers, pleat on the pants pressed knife sharp. Highly polished ankle boots. Nothing dared stick to them. She felt a renewed sense of command. She blamed her unprofessional behaviour, her hesitancy, and lack of resolve on not being in uniform. She felt best, most assured, happiest in uniform. If she didn’t look professional, she didn’t feel professional. Now she was sure she’d get the case back on track.
Jamieson and Murdo had sleeping cots that Ben and Annabelle had brought them. Jamieson had set hers up on the stage, where, by pulling the curtains, she would have privacy, and be close to the seized marijuana plants. The illicit scent wafted under the regal nose of Queen Elizabeth. Prince Philip, hand on his sword, stared down with disapproval.
Murdo had the rest of the Hall.
“You’re sure you’ll be all right, here?” Annabelle fussed. “Because there’s plenty of room, you know…” Where? At Gus’s? Gladys’s? Moira’s?
Murdo looked hopeful, but Jamieson shook her head.
“No. We’ll be fine here.”
Annabelle shrugged and left. It wasn’t the kind of hospitality she was used to. You took people into your own home. But her home wasn’t her own anymore. That strange woman was there. Lord’s first wife, Hy had told her. And now here was his second, mixed up with Ian.
Like Hy, Jamieson was convinced that one or more of the four strangers in the village was behind the murder, but she still hadn’t ruled out MacAdam. She’d sleep on it, hoping the weather would improve the next day and she could get down to some hard questioning.
Jamieson undressed, laying each piece of the uniform out so that it wouldn’t get wrinkled, and slipped into bed.
She couldn’t sleep. The storm was howling along the coast, the wind rattling the windows, and a high-pitched whistle circled the Hall, sometimes sounding like wailing guitar riffs. It was the CD she’d put on at Lord’s that was torturing her brain.
Each time she began to drift off, something woke her. She got up and padded across the main room, not wanting to wake Murdo, but he was in a deep sleep. He was proving it with strong, healthy snores, interrupted by snuffling and an occasional moan. He was dreaming about April. He was in her kitchen again, warm, well-fed, and charmed.
Jamieson grabbed the laptop from the table and took it back up to her bed, hoping she’d still be able to hitchhike on Ian’s wireless.
She was. She googled Big Ed Bullock again, and clicked onto an old Time magazine article. It said he’d volunteered to go to Vietnam. She raised her eyebrows. Not many had. That said something about him. He had been on a two-man patrol when the Vietcong had come up behind them, and even the dog hadn’t heard as the guerrilla had slit his partner’s throat. Ed had barely had time to hear his partner drop to the ground, when the Vietcong had sliced his head open with a machete, and part of his brain had oozed out in the jungle swamp, as he lay there, paralyzed and dying.
Up at the dome, Big Ed was dreaming that he was back in Vietnam. Only mind over matter had saved him. Somewhere in a brain struggling to function, in his deep subconscious, his mind had fixed on his mother, waiting for him back home. As his brain had shut down, closed in on itself, there had been his mother’s face. He’d promised to return to her. All in one piece. Just like she’d begged him.
He had – one unmoving piece. A lump of a man, unable to lift his head, to move a finger, to do much more than blink.
He should have been brain dead, Jamieson thought, but he had been nursed back to health by his companion, Leone O’Reyley. It was Leone who had given him life the second time around. Given more than that. Success. Fame. Riches. There was something weird in such obsessive devotion, she thought.
Leone was awake, too, staring down at Ed as he slept, wondering how long he could live, fearing that his strength of mind was weakening, that he might, after all, give in to his injury all these years later. Leone had been Ed’s devoted follower ever since the star quarterback of the high school football team had rescued him from a bunch of bullies.
An undersized thirteen-year-old, Leone was watching his hero from the stands when some tenth-graders grabbed him, yanked off his trousers, and pulled on a pleated cheerleader’s skort and halter top. They decorated him with pompoms and tossed him up in the air, calling him monkey boy, chanting letters that spelled out his name, laughing.
Leone was squealing, more like a pig than a monkey, when Big Ed ran over and rescued him – not with muscle, but with his booming voice, which terrified Leone’s tormenters. They dropped him and ran off.
Ed extended a hand, and Leone grabbed it, his eyes shining with tears and gratitude as Ed helped him to his feet. He had worshipped him before; now he adored him, and followed him around, puppy-like for the rest of the semester. Ed never called him that nasty name. He said Leone’s real name in that big booming voice, so deep it was almost past hearing, softening into rich affection in Leone’s ears.
Ed had helped Leone muscle up, and with the muscles came confidence, sexual confidence.
Something Leone had, now that Ed didn’t.
A tear spilled down his cheek as he tucked the blanket around his hero.
Jamieson looked at a photograph of Leone in the Time article.
His complexion was swarthy. But in spite of this, and his name, Leone had been an all-American boy. His father had been a patriotic farmer from Nebraska. He’d named his son Leone after Sergio Leone, because he’d loved the spaghetti westerns, even though they were foreign, like his wife.
Leone had a powerful mind – a mind that brought Ed back from the netherworld he had been in. When Ed’s brain was sliced open,
he hadn’t been in pain. The weapon had carved out his capacity for misery. He had felt only pure happiness. Floating, he had been floating. He hadn’t felt his body anymore. He hadn’t been able to tell where he ended and the rest of the world began. He was part of the whole, the earth and the sky.
It hadn’t been easy to convince him to leave that place, to force the undamaged part of his brain to put right and left together again, to start blinking, then raising his head, moving a finger, then a toe, then his mouth – talking. Then he’d sat up. He’d regained movement of his arms and his torso.
The doctors had marveled as the fifteen-year-old boy brought Big Ed back to life. It had been a long, slow process. Leone had asked him simple questions, encouraged him to make small achievements, applauded every tiny sign of progress. And, against medical advice, had let him sleep ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day. He believed the brain needed sleep to heal, needed time. It had taken years to build Ed back up from the lump he’d become. Only Leone knew he had not been one hundred per cent successful. And only he knew something had gone terribly wrong lately.
Following Ed’s recovery, the two had come up with Mind over Muscle, the body building system that built strength by “thinking” weightless barbells up and down.
Ridiculous, thought Jamieson, both the concept and the idea that it could work. Ed was obviously an exception or a fraud. What she was most interested in was the wound. The wound that Ed had suffered had been to the back of the head.
Like Lance Lord. Like Jim MacAdam.
Was there a meaning or a message in it? Did that connect the murders to Ed and Leone? Or was it just a nasty coincidence?
It didn’t take much to keep Hy awake. She had good reason tonight – the wind, howling, whipping around the northeast corner of the house and tugging on the clothesline, so it gave off its blue jay shriek. The compost cart was banging up against the oil tank, and there was a new rattle in the bathroom window. Hy hated the wind. She lay firmly in bed, clutching the sheets over her head, gritting her teeth, flipping from one side to another.
She threw off the sheets and went downstairs, cursing the wind and the fact that Jamieson had her computer. She looked out the kitchen window up to Shipwreck Hill, where the lights were on at Ian’s house. Normally, she’d have called him or gone up to visit, but she couldn’t with Suki there. Damn her. Ian and she could have googled together if he weren’t with Suki.
He wasn’t. Suki was sound asleep and Ian had slipped out of bed and gone downstairs, where he was surfing the story of the romance between Alyssa and Lance Lord in the CBC archives. They’d met while he was in Cape Breton on tour for All Around the House when she was just sixteen. He was twenty years older. Unhappy at home, she’d run away with him. It had been an Elvis and Priscilla Presley type of relationship. Alyssa had lived with Lance until, at eighteen, she’d been old enough to marry. The marriage had lasted almost two decades, then come unraveled a year ago. No one knew why.
Chapter Eighteen
The computer screen flashed and went black. Jamieson hit a couple of keys. The battery was dead. She plugged in the cord. Still nothing.
Power out? She looked out the window. Lights were on at Shipwreck Hill.
She played around with the laptop some more, then got up and hit a light switch. Nothing. Power must be out. Then why were lights on up Shipwreck Hill?
Ian was fully equipped to weather any storm. He’d had a generator wired into his electrical box, and he was smiling smugly now as he continued to surf the net, uninterrupted by the gale.
Hy fell asleep on her living room couch after the power went out. Jamieson never did go to sleep. She kept getting up and checking the lights, and looking at Ian’s house. He had slipped back into bed with Suki, careful not to wake her, but his computer screen tormented Jamieson when she looked out the window. She saw an eerie glow of changing colours. The planets and stars were flickering across Ian’s living room walls. A comet crashing into Jupiter, ice floes on Mars, the moon with Venus rising. His screen saver. The only place the moon was visible tonight.
Down on the shore, in the spot where Lance Lord’s body had lain, a dark figure was searching frantically in the sand, digging like a dog, moving from patch to patch, the movements becoming more frenzied as Leone despaired of finding what he was looking for. But his persistence had brought Ed Bullock back from the dead, and he did not let up. An hour later, he was rewarded – partly. He held up the treasure – a thin gold chain, broken. He smiled, kissed it, and began another frenzied search in the sand. Hours later, he made his way back to the dome, head down, gait slow, and disappointed.
Olive MacLean would not have to worry about “paying the lights” at the Hall. There were no lights, all night and into the morning.
“Power’s out,” echoed down the phone lines, where the villagers automatically retreated when the lights went. They wanted to make sure their neighbours had no power either. They wanted to complain about the power company and why it didn’t just put everything underground, out of the wind that blew the poles down and dragged the lines with them. Wally Fraser was always first to reach the electric company and find out how bad the damage was. The information would be relayed and amplified down the phone lines, dubbed a province-wide disaster, whether it was or not. This time it was. It was comforting to know that plenty of others were in the same spot.
But The Shores was always last to get power back. Such a tiny community.
Was there even anyone still living out there?
It gave Ian smug pleasure to continue as usual with generated power, waiting for Hy and other neighbours to come seeking the comfort of his ingenuity. Today, he didn’t wait. While Suki slept in, he went out under a black sky down to the Hall. Inside, Jamieson was doing yet another round of the place, turning the light switches on and off, impatient at this new hitch in the investigation.
Investigation. The word stuck in her mind, grinding an ache into the back of her head, threatening to balloon into a full-blown migraine.
What investigation?
She had her uniform, but no power against the elements.
There were wrinkles in her smooth complexion when Ian burst into the Hall.
“Let’s get you out of here. It’ll be a while before they get us back on. Quite a few lines down. I’ve got full power up the hill.”
The creases unfolded from her face.
“You do?”
“As good as,” he said, eyeing her pathetic centre of operations – a couple of tables pushed together and the laptop, battery dead, its external modem hanging down, attached to the long phone cord.
Dial-up, thought Ian. Dark ages.
“This is interesting.”
Ian and Jamieson were hunched over the computer. Hy had come over, driven there by lack of both power and her laptop. She was also uneasy about having a killer in the village, so uneasy that she was willing to put up with Suki. She was lucky. Suki was still sleeping upstairs. Hy had dozed off on the floor, leaning up against the Danish modern chair with the collapsing arm. Her eyes flickered open.
“Interesting…squawk.” Ian’s parrot, Jasmine, was perched in her preferred place on his shoulder.
“What?” Eyes drooping, Hy propped herself up on one arm.
“What?” Jasmine repeated. “What?” Ending on a high note. She was fond of upward inflections.
“Lance Lord, modelling Stanfield underwear.”
Hy sat up. “That’s interesting?”
“Unusual. He has an outtie.”
“So?” Jamieson frowned. “That’s not unusual.”
“Unusual to find in an underwear ad.” Hy hauled herself up off the floor. “Advertisers like innies.”
Ian zoomed in on the underwear. He pressed his face close to the screen.
“Ian!” Hy laughed.
“Look,” he said.
Jamieson did – a
nd saw it.
“One undescended testicle.”
“Maybe it’s one descended testicle,” said Hy. “I think they scrunch them up.”
“Or bulk them up?” said Jamieson, with a half-smile.
A joke. From Jamieson.
“Or tape them up.”
Ian winced. “Okay. Forget the testicle. That’s not unusual anyway. This is.” He pulled up an ad for Mind Over Muscle. Hy and Jamieson stared at it, neither understanding what he meant. He cut and pasted both photographs side by side on the screen. Lance Lord modelling underwear. Ed Bullock showing off his physique.
It was the same physique.
“It’s the same body.”
Jamieson and Hy bent closer, eyes squinting on the images. Except for the faces, they were identical.
“The outtie, the undescended testicle, even the curl of the chest hair,” said Ian.
“What does it mean?” asked Jamieson.
Hy straightened up. “Body double.”
“Body double?”
Ian cast a look at Hy. Did Jamieson live in the same world as everyone else?
“They do it in movies. Cut to somebody else’s buff body after the close-up kiss. Or to better breasts than the actress has. It’s like a stunt person for appearance. Lance Lord was Ed Bullock’s body double.”
“Jesus,” said Hy.
“No – ” he grinned. She put a hand to his mouth.
“Don’t say it. I’ve had enough Lord jokes.”
“Said enough of them yourself.”
“I know…I know.”
“So Ed in his TV commercials wasn’t Ed at all?” Jamieson was scanning the screen, fascinated.
“Right. It was Lance Lord. Give me a minute.”
It was several minutes before Ian found what he was looking for.
“Here. See.”
There was Ed Bullock close up, a great big diamond-dazzling smile on Ian’s computer screen, spouting the virtues of his Mind Over Muscle system.
Mind Over Mussels Page 14