Mind Over Mussels

by Hilary MacLeod

  “It is the brain that signals the limbs to move, but in the absence of limbs, it is the mind that moves. You and the objects you choose. This is what I know.”

  Jamieson gained nothing from the experience, except a suspicion that Leone may have been threatening her. She left, frustrated. Who was Leone protecting? Himself or Bullock – or both? Was Ed Bullock, in spite of what Leone had whispered in the Hall, actually whole and capable of killing? At times he seemed so. One moment, intelligence shone through his eyes. The next, they were blank.

  Could it be an act?

  Hy and Ian were looking at the photographs she had taken of Lord and retained on her camera’s memory card. They clicked through the shots, looking for anything that might be a clue, and found nothing. They ended up at the first shot – the one Hy had taken of the repetitive suns in the water.

  “Look at that,” said Ian.

  “What?” Hy was looking at the composition, quite proud of the way she’d framed the shot.

  Ian zoomed in.

  “That.” He pointed at the screen.

  “Footprints,” said Hy.

  “Odd footprints.” Ian zoomed in tighter.

  “It almost looks like two sets of prints there. One on top of the other.” So had Alyssa been telling the truth?

  Ian peered at the screen.

  “You could be right. We better tell Jamieson.”

  She put a hand on his arm. “Not just yet.”

  “That’s withholding evidence.”

  “So’s the ring. And this isn’t really.” Hy hit print. “She has the photo, too.”

  Ian watched from the door as she left. He stared at her back as she walked all the way down Shipwreck Hill, admiring her straight posture and long, confident stride. As she rounded the corner at the bottom of the hill, he sighed and went back to his computer. Within minutes, he was lost in the machine.

  “Are you still working on that? Do you think she still wants it?”

  Hy had stopped to see Gus on her way home from Ian’s. Gus was ripping out and re-sewing yet another of the wedding quilt squares with its tiny patches placed just so. She’d made another error and turned it the wrong way and got the whole thing twisted around.

  Like relationships, Hy thought. Maybe those women from the past knew exactly what they were doing when they made the wedding quilt so complex.

  “Well, she hasn’t told me otherwise, and the thing must be finished. If it won’t do for her, someone else can use it. Maybe she’ll find another man and want it for him. One’s pretty much the same as another.”

  “What? The quilts? No, Gus, they’re absolutely unique.”

  “I meant men. Ain’t much difference between them.”

  “C’mon. It’s always been Abel for you.”

  Gus just smiled and punched the needle into the fabric.

  “Gus.”

  Gus looked up, eyes smiling.

  “When? Where? Who?”

  “Up West. Afore Abel. I was a schoolgirl. He was the teacher.”

  “The teacher?”

  “Oh, we was only two years apart. But he was a schoolteacher. Too smart for me ’n’ all.”

  “Was he good-looking?”

  Gus grinned.

  “Oh yes,” she said, drawing out the word and the memory. “Oh yes,” she said again, looking back down at the quilt.

  “Then why didn’t you…didn’t he…?”

  Gus shrugged. “Abel gave me a ride home from pickin’ potatoes one day in his truck wagon. Then it was every day. Then we was married.”

  Hy smiled. So matter of fact for such a long, productive marriage.

  “Me and Abel, we was suited anyroad. We rubbed along well together.”

  Rubbed along well enough to produce eight kids. But Abel was never around, thought Hy. Maybe that’s why the marriage had lasted so long.

  “Why did you come here?”

  He’d asked her the same thing the day before, and she had managed not to answer.

  Ian was sitting at his kitchen table. Suki was stirring a pot on the stove. She ladled the contents into two large bowls.

  “Made it myself,” she said as she plopped a bowl in front of him, not answering his question. Hungry, he began to spoon it up, slurping as it went into his mouth.

  She gritted her teeth at the slurping sound.

  “I don’t believe it was for me,” he said between spoonfuls.

  “What, the chowder?”

  “No, not the – ” He suddenly realized what he was eating. “The what?” His eyes opened wide. He stood up.

  “What’s in this chowder?” It was hard to make out what he was saying. His mouth was full. He was headed for the kitchen sink.

  “Uh…I don’t know…”

  He spat the chowder into the sink.

  “You said you made it.”

  He turned on the water, drank out of the faucet, rinsed, and spat again. He never drank tap water.

  Suki frowned. “I did…” She smoothed the napkin on her lap. “I didn’t think it was that bad.”

  “Mussels. Does it have mussels in it?”

  “Are those the things with the purplish black shells?”

  “Yes,” said Ian, washing out his mouth again, this time with filtered water from the fridge.

  “Yes, there were some of those.”

  Not too many, he decided. And he’d hardly swallowed any of it. He seemed to have had no reaction. He’d wait it out. Ian was allergic to mussels, his mouth blowing up in hives when he ate them. Each time – there had been only two occasions – it was worse. The doctor had told him that one more could be fatal.

  When he told her, her hand flew to her mouth.

  “Oh, I forgot. Well, no harm done.”

  Ian felt a thin prick of fear. She had known that about him, but could he expect her to remember all these years? Was she trying to kill him? No, she couldn’t be. He was her alibi. There, he’d used the word Hy had used. Alibi.

  “You could have killed me with your chowder.”

  “Do you really believe that?” She smiled. “I don’t believe in allergies. I think it’s all in your mind.”

  “You would believe if you had them. Trust me.”

  “If you say so.” She attacked her chowder with gusto.

  He sat down again, and grabbed the loaf of bread, sliced it, buttered it, and began chewing on it.

  “Sorry,” she said, sounding insulted, and as if he were overreacting.

  Life with Suki. Bread and water – and the occasional fatal chowder.

  Ian frowned.

  Suki scowled.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Do you think it was Suki killed Lord?” Gus could believe it might be. For one thing, there was the strange name. Names. Suki Smythe. What was wrong with Smith?

  “I don’t suppose so. I guess I’m just – ”

  “Jealous?”

  Hy squirmed.

  “Not really,” she said, but Gus wasn’t convinced. “It’s just that she takes up so much of his time. I’d like him to help me solve the murders.”

  “Well, now, the police will do that.”

  “They don’t seem to be in a hurry.”

  Jamieson’s words still stung: “Just stay out of police business.”

  It had made Hy want to find the killer before Jamieson did. She had her own list of suspects and intended to question them. She’d spoken to Alyssa and had access to Suki. If Big Ed and Leone weren’t at the ceilidh, she’d go up to the dome and speak to them there. If one of them was a killer, Hy told herself she wasn’t afraid. She had to know more about the connection between Big Ed and Lance Lord. Had there been enmity as well, hate? Had there been bad business dealings or trouble over a woman? Alyssa? She intended to find out. Her plans included the ring she had
found on the beach.

  She left Gus to her quilting and returned home to prepare for the evening.

  Like Alyssa, Hy had a piece of paper, folded up, tucked away. When she got home, she took it out for the first time in years. She’d found it in her grandmother’s jewellery box after she died.

  “lady through whose profound and fragile lips

  the sweet small clumsy feet of april came

  into the ragged meadow of my soul.”

  It hadn’t been from her grandfather. The penmanship wasn’t his. Hy knew his scrawl. This writing was elegant, well-formed. And Hy doubted her grandfather had a soul, much less a ragged meadow of one. He wouldn’t have known who e. e. cummings was. Not a man for poetry. No, someone else had given the poem to her grandmother. That was just as hard to believe.

  Hy wondered how “meadows of the soul” and “sweet small clumsy april” could possibly apply to her grandmother. That stick of a woman with her tight-lipped disapproving mouth – “profound and fragile lips?” – the lukewarm eyes, the brittle voice issuing its terse instructions about conduct and chores. The woman who did her duty. What secret love had she been hiding? Had her smile, her warmth, her joy in life disappeared with her love, followed him and left behind just the shell, to carve out the mere outlines of a life? But that shell had kept this last scrap of who she had been, might have been.

  It occurred to Hy then that she was not unique, having a lost love in the backdrop of her life. It seemed everyone had someone – her grandmother, Ian, with the ridiculous Suki, Gus and her teacher. Everyone had someone they’d lost – and there seemed no accounting for how one heart attached itself to another and why some held on so long.

  “We will go to the ceilidh,” Ed pronounced after Jamieson had left. He had to raise his voice above the noise of the vacuum cleaner Leone was pushing over the huge hand-hooked rug that dominated the main room. Curved like the walls, it had been custom-made to fit the dome’s round shape.

  Leone shut off the vacuum.

  “What did you say?”

  “We are going to the ceilidh.”

  “But you’re not well.”

  “I am. You see that I am perfectly fit.” He slapped his thigh. “Perfectly fit.”

  Leone wished it were so, but it was not.

  Ed’s mind was going, that was clear. And where his mind went, his body went, too. Leone had to pump him up every morning, for his daily walk – back and forth across the cape, from property line to property line, on what, Ed thought against all reason, were his own legs. They were as manufactured as the vacuum cleaner. But he had the ghost limb sensation, the feeling that his real legs were still there, and his eyes refused to see what his brain did not accept. Eyes and brain were in harmony. He had legs. Didn’t Leone massage them every day?

  He did, but only the thighs. Leone massaged mobility into him every morning, kneading his thighs and then his ghost limbs, the lower legs Ed thought were there, but he would never get back. They’d been amputated. The medical people and the army had been in a conspiracy of silence about it. First, because it was considered to be a part of the recovery process; then, because he became the poster boy for survival in medical and military circles; finally, because there was so much money riding on it, the secret had to be kept. Lord had been part of the tight circle who knew the truth. He had betrayed it. Lord had threatened to tell the secret and been silenced with land – and what did he, Leone, have for his loyalty?

  The few others who knew the secret had kept it. A small lie, considering the remarkable mental recovery Ed had made. So much did they want to believe the miracle – and there was no doubt it was a miracle – that, over the years, the lie became the truth.

  But the truth was that Ed could walk only with prosthetics, and was becoming less able to do so, as the threads he’d grown in his damaged brain had begun to wither and unravel. He spent most of his time sitting in his chair, which he refused to think of as a wheelchair.

  “It will have to be in your chair.” Leone wound the cord around the vacuum and stashed it in a closet.

  Big Ed frowned.

  “Well then, I won’t go.”

  “I’ll go instead,” said Leone. “To let them know we have no fear of being seen.”

  “Exactly,” said Ed. “No fear of being seen. Nothing to do with these horrible events. We have nothing to hide.”

  “Yes,” said Leone. “I’ll go. As your representative.”

  “My representative.” Ed beamed, apparently satisfied, having already forgotten his desire to attend.

  Billy had been looking forward to the ceilidh all summer, but didn’t know if he could go. He felt he was in disgrace over the loss of Lord’s body. But it had been found, hadn’t it?

  He was loading the washer on the back porch of his mother’s tiny house. Like a little dollhouse it was, built so long ago that a lad as tall as Billy had to duck through the doorways and at the top of the stairs. The house was falling apart. Billy wasn’t good like his father at keeping it in repair. Cars were one thing – at those he excelled, but houses? Downspouts, gutters, shingles, he couldn’t fix any of them, and it showed. Shingles were missing on the outside walls and roof, the gutters were hanging down, partly detached, the downspouts bashed in, the lawn turned to weeds. Billy was his mother’s only support. She was crippled with arthritis and couldn’t even make a cup of tea, or so she claimed.

  She was banging her cup on the table now, to inform him that she was ready for more. She insisted that she couldn’t grip the pot, nor hold it steady, though there were times when he returned home to find that tea had been made, poured, and consumed. She’d say something about a neighbour coming over. Billy had never encountered anyone who’d been in the house, but he didn’t question it. He was a good boy. He stuffed the rest of yesterday’s clothes in the machine and set it going, then went to see about his mother.

  Without filling her cup, he dashed back out of the room and slapped the dial on the washer. The sound of water streaming into the tub stopped. The sound of his mother banging her cup began again. He flipped the washer lid, dragged out his sodden jacket, and made a frantic search through the pockets. He pulled out the breath mint box. He had forgotten about it. He shoved it in a trouser pocket, then found what he was really looking for, the bunch of marijuana leaves, his own brand of tea.

  He poured for his mother and retreated to the shed, where he rolled himself a spliff. Soon he was feeling good enough to decide he would go to the ceilidh. And the mint box he’d forgotten about? Jamieson would be livid. He’d give it to Murdo. Let him give it to her.

  Hy saw Leone leave the dome at nightfall, heading in the direction of the Hall. Big Ed was not with him. Good. She’d approach them one at a time. She walked up the lane, leaning into a brisk wind. The wind was breaking up the cloud bank and allowing occasional glimpses of the moon. “A ghostly galleon,” Hy whispered as it sailed behind the clouds, appearing and disappearing.

  All the lights were on inside the dome, revealing a curious sight. In one porthole after another, in quick succession, was a face, looking out. She stopped and watched. Porthole to porthole, the head would appear, then glide away. After watching this happen half a dozen times, she approached the building and heard a rolling sound like a bowling alley. Surely not?

  She knocked on the door. No answer. She peeked through a porthole, straight into the eyes of Big Ed Bullock. They were blank. He was drooling.

  “Alyssa?” He croaked out the word. Hy couldn’t hear him, but she read his lips and saw a glint of gold. A gold tooth? Then he disappeared from the porthole, and the rolling sound resumed. He was somehow rolling around the circumference of the building.

  She waited for him to complete the circle, wanting to see his face again, to see if his expression remained blank, to see if he would call out for Alyssa once more. He did, looking straight at Hy. Did he think she was Alyssa?
And around he went again, rolling along in some way Hy couldn’t figure out. All she could see was the disembodied head of Big Ed Bullock.

  Hy left to the sound of the rolling, around and around the dome. She turned and descended the cape, heading for the Hall, but her mind was still back at the dome, thinking of Big Ed.

  That was the mastermind of Mind Over Muscle? A man who appeared to have no control over his own mind, no control of any kind?

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Alyssa.”

  Ed nodded his head, a small smile beginning to form on his lips, shaped with pain. Hard. It was hard to smile. He looked at all the photos of the women, with their endearments. To my Big Daddy. Big Ed, Best in Bed. Muscle First, Mind Later. He didn’t notice that they were all written in one hand. Leone’s hand. And now – they all turned into one woman. Alyssa. He hadn’t had them, and he hadn’t had her.

  Big Ed was breaking down, just as Leone suspected. All the connections he had wired in his brain to make his big comeback were fraying, along with Leone’s devotion, wearing thin. He had not been doing the upkeep necessary to keep Ed fully in the world, the tedious repetitions, the affirmations, the mental as well as physical therapy. Leone was becoming the master himself, making the decisions, running MOM, moving them from place to place whenever the secret of Ed’s deterioration began to be known. A deterioration now so severe that secrecy wasn’t the solution anymore. Leone had told Jamieson to keep Ed clear of suspicion. It was loyalty, but Ed had also become a means to an end. Alyssa.

  “Alyssa,” Ed said again. He wanted Alyssa, too.

  Big Ed began to wheel himself again along the track that ringed the dome, looking out from all the portholes. Looking out at nothing. If Alyssa had appeared, he might not have known her. Hadn’t he mistaken Hy for her? Or had he?

  Big Ed could not be the killer, Hy thought – even though he had good reason to want rid of Lord, to be jealous of the reconciliation. If he couldn’t be the killer, could he be behind it? She was trying to make sense of her different images of him. Yesterday morning, after the murder, he strode along the cape as he had done every morning, strong and sure. Tonight, he appeared to be a shell of a man, with only one thing on his mind. Alyssa. Hy looked at the ring she’d slipped on her little finger before she left the house.