Mind Over Mussels

by Hilary MacLeod

  Jamieson had struggled to sit up, her head pounding. She dressed with difficulty, got unsteadily onto her crutches, and called for Murdo. When there was no response, she hauled open the stage curtains. His bed was empty – and not even made. Not that hers was, but she had an excuse. Where had he gone? And here, she couldn’t even stomp down three lousy stairs to release her anger.

  Murdo was in the comfort of April’s kitchen. She’d invited him for breakfast. She knew her husband wouldn’t be home. He never was after a ceilidh. She imagined he drank too much and stayed at Frasers’ or Gallants’. At least that’s what she liked to tell herself, and what he liked to tell her. They both accepted it as truth, but he was usually with that blonde piece of business in Winterside. He hadn’t been able to cross the causeway last night, or today, but he still hadn’t come home. Ron couldn’t remember what happened with Moira, whether he’d had her or not. But he’d landed up in Wally Fraser’s shed, sleeping it off.

  Both Murdo and April had avoided the juice last night. April had brought her own fresh-squeezed juice that she shared with him. While Ron was sleazing around the dance floor, his arms and body wrapped around Moira, Murdo had taken April home. She’d protested, with a fetching smile, but he’d insisted, and had walked her the short distance to her door. He’d planted a small kiss on her forehead before she’d gone up the walk. Her smile had become even broader, and that’s when she’d invited him to breakfast.

  “That’s ridiculous.” Jamieson’s lips were stretched in a thin line of disbelief. “It can’t be done. It’s just party tricks.”

  “But I was there,” Annabelle protested. “I experienced it.”

  “It can’t hurt to give it a try.” Hy wanted to see it. It might make a good article for one of her website clients, the Mental Health Association, maybe.

  “What will it prove?”

  “It will prove that anyone could have killed Lord – weak or strong, small or large.”

  “So it busts the suspect list wide open. I’m trying to narrow it down.”

  “But you’re not trying to exclude the person who did it, are you?” Hy challenged.

  The thin line of Jamieson’s set lips softened slightly.

  “Well, all right,” she said. “Bring her here.”

  Annabelle called Nathan.

  While they waited for Lili, they looked around for something she could move. She’d insisted it had to be a natural product. The tables were out – steel legs. Ditto, the chairs. There was one wooden table, but it was oak, heavy, large. The piano was made of wood, but it was large, too.

  It was the first thing Lili focused on.

  “The piano,” she said. “Perfect.”

  She took the three steps to the stage. Pulled out the bench. It was heavy.

  Jamieson snorted. The child barely had the physical strength to move the bench. How was she going to move the piano with her mind? If she thought she could, it must be as feeble as her body.

  “I can make it play.”

  Jamieson snorted again.

  “So can I – but not very well.”

  Lili gave her a withering look. Annabelle smiled. Tiny, a bit kooky, but not weak, this Lili, able to stare down Jamieson like that.

  “This will not be a concert. Not even music,” she warned. “Just a note – or two, if I’m lucky.”

  A sour note, or two, thought Hy of the perennially out-of-tune piano.

  Lili placed her fingertips delicately on the keys, poised in the same way she’d instructed Annabelle and Nathan to hold theirs over the tray. She lowered her head, closed her eyes, and sat still. Nathan, Annabelle, and Hy stopped breathing. Jamieson took a deep breath, her mind and stomach crawling with impatience. If…if she moved the keys, well…piano keys were one thing, an axe quite another.

  Nothing happened. Nothing at all.

  Please, Annabelle prayed, please let it work.

  Hy was simply curious.

  Nathan was hopeful and hopeless all at the same time.

  Lili had emptied her mind. Filled it up with the piano. Focused on a note. “Heard” the note play. Nothing happened.

  Something was interfering. Someone?

  It was Jamieson. Jamieson’s skepticism was as strong as Lili’s faith. They battled it out, the vibrations of belief and disbelief.

  Jamieson turned and began to leave the room, her crutches sounding like a metronome.

  One note came out of the piano, the key descending on its own, Lili’s fingertips poised but unmoving.

  Another note.

  One more.

  Jamieson turned back. She saw, with the others, that Lili’s fingers were not moving at all.

  But the keys were.

  “I wish you’d been there.” Hy had returned Ian’s call as soon as she got home.

  Suki had gone back to bed and was snoring off last night. It wasn’t an attractive sight or sound. Did she spend all her time in the bathroom or bed? It seemed like it. Ian was relieved when Hy called.

  She thought there would be no way to convince Ian of Lili’s mental powers, not unless he experienced it himself, so she was surprised at his reaction.

  “I don’t discount it,” he said. “I wish I’d seen it, too. The more I’ve been reading about Bullock – and getting into some of the science on the brain – it’s fascinating. Some say the mind is a separate entity from the brain. Religious factions suggest it may be the soul. Who we really are.”

  “The brain – physical. The mind – non-physical?”

  “Something like that – or we just haven’t found it yet. Don’t know where it resides. In our head? Our heart?”

  Hy grinned. “I could narrow it down.”

  “How?”

  “Well, the part of Bullock’s brain that he left in Vietnam is not where the mind resides, or he wouldn’t have been able to come back like he did.”

  Ian smiled. “You’re right about that.”

  They were silent for a moment. Ian broke the silence.

  “He’s not the only one.”

  “Huh?”

  “He’s not the only one who has that strength of mind. Others could have it, too – especially those around him. Any of them. Leone…Alyssa…”

  “Suki?”

  “Suki, I suppose.”

  “Does she have a mind?” Hy’s tone was snarky. She could hear Ian’s voice smiling back.

  “Are you asking if she has a mind or a brain? There’s a difference. We’ve established that.”

  “Okay, no brain then – but maybe a mind that could manipulate.”

  “Cheap shot.”

  “Ya, ya. Anyway, I agree, any of them could do what he did. That’s what I told Jamieson.” She paused. “And I told her that Suki fed you mussels.”

  “What? Are you trying to nail her?”

  “I just think I should keep Jamieson informed of anything of interest. She didn’t think it was relevant, but she wrote it down.”

  “You collaborated with Jamieson? I thought you were trying to outwit her.”

  “I was just letting her know I got there before her.”

  “But Suki? You don’t really believe she tried to kill anyone…tried to kill me. I’m her alibi. You’ve said so yourself enough times.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you did hear her go out. Maybe you talk in your sleep. Maybe she thinks that maybe you know something.”

  “Too many maybes for me.”

  “But Suki has the height and the strength, even without the brainpower.” Hy couldn’t resist the dig. “But the others – they’d need Mind Over Muscle to have killed him.”

  “Alyssa and Leone. What about Big Ed?”

  “He’s a vegetable. I don’t know what’s with his mind or his legs.”

  “He strides the cape every morning.”

  “No
t this morning. Or yesterday morning.”

  “Would you have in the rain and the wind and the fog?”

  “I guess not. But I think he’s losing it.”

  “Maybe it’s a ruse. To make people think he couldn’t have done it. And even if he is losing it, he could make a comeback. He’s done it before. He’s a very clever guy. His system is brilliant. Simply brilliant.”

  Something in his tone…

  “Ian, you didn’t?”

  “Well, you can’t say it didn’t work.”

  Ian had been proudly strutting his new physique around the village for months. It had started when he came back from that university reunion. Suki! Suki was behind the new Ian. And so was Mind Over Muscle. Ian had responded to an infomercial. No wonder he’d never let on.

  She scowled.

  “I think I liked you better the way you were.”

  It wasn’t just his physique she was talking about.

  Chapter Thirty

  The fog and gloom persisted past noon and through the day. The villagers weren’t used to it hanging over them for this long. They liked to say, “Don’t like the weather? Wait five minutes.”

  They were usually at the mercy of the wind, blowing across the slim strip of island, and the fragile finger that was The Shores. The wind, taking the weather with it – clement, inclement, dry, wet, cloudy or sunny, changing, if not in five minutes, very rapidly. But there was no wind and this fog had stalled over the entire island. Thick, grey, billowing, it cast a gloom over the village already suffering from a communal hangover and the fear that there was a killer loose.

  No one was more conscious of that than Jane Jamieson. She’d left the others in the Hall, her brain aching from trying to rationalize what she’d just seen. Trying, but not succeeding. She’d had Lili repeat the experiment several times, and hadn’t found a flaw.

  She didn’t know what to think. She went looking for Murdo, quite sure of where she’d find him. The cruiser sat in the parking lot outside the Hall, but she couldn’t drive it. Her ankle was swollen to twice its size, and so sore that she was beginning to think it must be broken.

  She swung along on her crutches, on the uneven, puddled lane towards April Dewey’s house. She would find Murdo and they would question Alyssa about the ring. Jamieson could just barely see her bandaged foot as she hobbled along. She could see only a small patch of the lane directly in front of her. She would have to rely on gauging the distance, hugging the edge of the road, peering for signs of a driveway to her right.

  She couldn’t figure out where the edge of the road was. Finally she located it, feeling the difference between the clay lane and the grassy verge. One crutch on the lane, one on the grass, both feet becoming soaked through. The bandage began to unravel, slopping in the puddles and wet clay. She nearly tripped over it a couple of times. The grass was slippery under her crutches and they kept giving way on her. The banging in her head and the fog clouding her vision made it difficult to know where she was. It felt like a long way to April’s driveway. She didn’t know she’d already passed it. She began to feel disoriented. Panic set in, her stomach and head tingling with anxiety. She wanted to go faster, but couldn’t with her crutches and injured ankle. To calm herself and try to stay focused, she thought about those other footprints. She, like Hy and Ian, had taken another look at the photograph of the sun reflecting in the water.

  The footprints on the sand. Leone stepped into Jamieson’s mind and slipped neatly into the prints, fitting them like Cinderella and the glass slipper. He was moving carefully, with the care a child takes not to “step on the crack, break your mother’s back.” Intent on obliterating the footprints and replacing them with his own?

  Not the action of a killer.

  Ahead of him, there could have been someone, someone who had left the prints and whom Leone was compelled to protect. Someone moving in the dark across the sand, eyes fixed on Lance Lord, breathing venom at Jim MacAdam for being in the way.

  Someone who had killed them both.

  The spiked juice had made her cry, but it was hard to tell if Gladys Fraser had a hangover. She was always grumpy. She did not emerge from her house until late in the day. She marched down the road, wincing with each footfall. Perhaps she did have a hangover, but it didn’t cloud what she knew to be her duty.

  She shoved through the door of the Hall, and was shocked to see what a mess it was in. The clean-up committee had been too sauced to tidy up. She was disappointed to find no one there to complain to or boss around. But that did not stand in the way of her mission. She flung open the cellar door and stomped down the stairs, the smell offending her nose. She hadn’t wanted the marijuana put in the kitchen and she didn’t want it in the cellar a moment more. She gathered up the plants, wilting and blackening, and hauled herself back up the stairs, out the door, and across the parking lot to the police cruiser. It was unlocked. Gladys was delighted in a mean-spirited way. She stuffed the plants into the back seat and slammed the door shut. The sound sliced through her head. A wave of nausea gripped her. She opened the driver’s door, got in, arms folded across her chest, and laid her head back to stop it from pounding.

  “We have to leave.” Leone’s vision was so poor, it had been no challenge for him to find his way to Alyssa’s through the fog. He was a human compass when it came to her. She was his north, south, east, and west and he could always find her wherever she was.

  “We?”

  “You and me. And Ed. Of course, Ed.” Ed wouldn’t last long, anyway. It made Leone sad, but it was for the best. The best for him and Alyssa.

  “We,” Alyssa stretched out the word. “We aren’t going anywhere, Ed and I. We have nothing to run from.” Ed didn’t. She didn’t – as long as Leone stuck to his promise.

  “You are safe because of me. I followed you…in your footsteps…I wanted to protect you…you wanted it too…” His distress had made him short of breath and he could only gulp his words out in short disconnected phrases. “The axe…the chain…I knew…you know I knew…and then I said I’d do it. That I would do anything to protect you.”

  Protect. The word was hollow. It had no meaning – from him. From her father, it would have meant something, but he had never protected her.

  “We must go away. You and me.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” There was a cold set to her lips.

  “Come. Come away – ” His words were choked off by the deep hate in her eyes, her contempt for him, his hope shattering like a glass that had splintered in his grasp and left him bleeding.

  She stared at him, eyes unblinking, a hard glint in them, turning them from pale blue to icy green.

  “I love you…” His eyes burned with his emotion. Hers remained cold green ice. “Don’t you…love me?”

  “What?” She spat the word out, reeling back.

  He moved forward, a condemned man. One careful step. He reached out.

  Was he going to touch her? She couldn’t bear it if he did. That once, that once only, she had allowed it, and there’d been a reason for that.

  Alyssa’s hand slid across the counter. She couldn’t bear it if he touched her. Her fingers edged toward a knife that lay there, as if in waiting.

  His small, golden eyes swam in a pool of moisture.

  “You said we would be together.”

  “Did I?”

  He moved forward another step. “The three of us could be so happy together. He could be your husband. And I…” he dared another step, now close enough to touch her.

  Her eyes froze. She touched the handle of the knife.

  He put a hand on her arm. “…and I…could be your man.” He pulled at her.

  She shoved him from her, disgust in her curled lips and hate in her eyes.

  “Man? Man? Monkey boy. That’s all you are.” She gripped the knife and slashed at him, aiming for the jugular.
>
  His face screwed up in terrible realization as the knife sliced his ear. His hands flew up to protect himself, and he ran, whimpering, from the room and out the back door, and with his hope went his heart. It filled with her hate for him – the pain jagged, growing, exploding as he flung himself up onto the cape. The throbbing in his chest made his breath come in short swallows of anguish.

  Not enough. Not enough breath, his heart swelling, head pounding the rhythm of her hate, her words thundering in his brain: “Monkey boy. That’s all you are.”

  The playground insult, more wounding than ever, her words carving deep into him. He felt a sharp pain in his heart. This woman he loved was selfish, grasping, unloving. He knew it now and his heart was about to break.

  Well and truly break.

  Hy was not far behind Jamieson on the Shore Lane, but never saw her. She knew Jamieson would stop her trying to find out more, from interfering in police business. Hy was determined to prove her wrong, that she could be pivotal in solving this case.

  It was creepy, walking in the fog, blind to everything but her own body, moving along the lane, tripping on the uneven clay, startled by sudden sounds. Like the whining of a screen door opening and slamming shut. Then slamming shut again because it hadn’t caught. It was probably April letting her cat in.

  The next sound wasn’t so easy to explain.

  A heart-wrenching scream came from Annabelle’s house.

  Alyssa?

  Hy stumbled to Annabelle’s door. She saw, through a tear in the fog, the shadow of Leone, staggering away from the house and stumbling down the cape, with his one arm swinging back and forward, beating the rhythm of his stride. The other was held up to his head. She wondered what he was up to. Another cry of pain came from the house.

  Leone stopped when he heard it. Stopped for a moment, then disappeared into the shroud.

  Hy ran up to the big double doors and straight in. The screaming had risen to a high pitch. She found Alyssa in the kitchen, a puddle of misery on the floor, weeping.