Mind Over Mussels

by Hilary MacLeod

“Marry me.” Big Ed was lucid today. Or maybe not. Maybe that’s why he could finally say it.

  “Marry me,” he said again.

  It was what she had wanted. It was why she had come here. For him. And Lance. To keep what was hers. How she would have both, she had never worked out.

  But now Lance was dead, it was perfect. He was hers in death – and Ed could be hers in life. Hers alone.

  “I will – if you tell me what you’ve been keeping from me.”

  “Nothing. I swear. Nothing.”

  Her eyes beamed intent. A grim smile on her face. She was trying to look soft, but she did not feel soft. She felt hard inside; she had always felt hard inside. Hard and cold as marble. There was nothing soft or vulnerable in her eyes. They could have sliced the arm off a Greek statue. They were cutting through him now, wanting to know what he couldn’t tell her, what he didn’t know himself.

  He held out a hand.

  “Come to me, Alyssa.” He wheeled toward her.

  “Come to me.” He became more insistent, grabbed her hand, desire – My God, desire – rising in him.

  “Then you will know…”

  She softened slightly. Perhaps he was finally going to tell her.

  “You will know…” He pulled her down on him.

  “How much I…”

  He was swelling with desire.

  An unwelcome desire. Physical. She hadn’t thought he could.

  It was worse. It was clear. Horribly clear.

  There was nothing beyond his knees.

  No legs.

  “No legs!” she shrieked. “No legs!”

  That was his secret. It sent her spinning from him.

  “No legs?” He didn’t know what she meant, but he saw the truth in her eyes. He looked down, his hand slipped below his knees, and they disappeared. His legs. For the first time, they weren’t there. It hadn’t happened in Vietnam or when he woke up from surgery. It hadn’t happened, not once, in the years between then and now. It had happened in this moment. Gone. The hard gleam in her eyes had done it, the look that could slice marble had amputated his legs.

  He looked at her in accusation, the knowledge flooding his brain.

  He had no legs.

  Confusion.

  She had taken them.

  His face crumpled, became a sack of wrinkles, tears trying to find their way down the ragged routes etched in the destruction of his face, his hope, his love for her.

  Gone. Like his legs, it was gone, the love for her that had been his hope for so long.

  Disgusted, with the force of someone more than twice her size, Alyssa toppled his chair. He smacked his head on the floor.

  Gone.

  Gone.

  Gone.

  His legs. His love. His life.

  Gone.

  Murdo was in the back of Nathan’s ambulance. His eyes were closed. He wouldn’t have seen much if he’d opened them – just the interior of the back of the van and Jamieson. Hy was up front in the passenger seat, giving directions, as Nathan negotiated the cape with abandon, thrilling at the bumps and the splash of the puddles as he carved through the dense fog.

  He came to a halt when Hy shouted, “There!” and pointed at nothing.

  “You sure?”

  She nodded. She knew the cape as well as Nathan, and she would never forget the spot where Leone O’Reyley had died.

  The four got out of the vehicle.

  The fog surrounded them, circled around Leone. Clearly dead, thought Jamieson. Leone, looking, not at rest, but as if in some terrible nightmare, his lips pulled back in a grimace, his eyes wide open. Jamieson leaned forward as far as her crutches allowed. The wound to the ear was superficial, a slice taken off the lobe. So that hadn’t killed him, but the shock, the physical effort? Heart attack probably, she thought. Not unusual in men of his age, especially if he’d had a shock, and he’d been running. She looked again. Had Alyssa aimed for the jugular and missed? Attempted murder? Jamieson closed Leone’s eyes, nodded at Murdo, and he and Nathan lifted the body into the van.

  While their backs were turned, Hy slipped away, soon hidden in the fog as she headed towards the dome, where she was sure she would find Alyssa. And Ed. She was thinking about the photograph. The photograph of the repeating suns and the footsteps planted down the shore beside them.

  Two sets of footprints. Alyssa had said she’d followed Leone, but what if it were the other way around? Had he been following her, covering her tracks? Had he followed her and killed Lord, as she claimed he had? Or had he followed her, watched her kill Lord and then killed MacAdam because MacAdam had seen her do it?

  “I did it for her.” Is that what he meant?

  Or was he protecting her by directing suspicion at himself? Lord and Leone were dead. There was a third man who loved Alyssa.

  Was Ed in danger?

  Hy herself might have been, had she not known the lay of the land so well. She skirted around the break in the cape, guided by the small outside light glimmering in the opaque night above the door of the dome.

  “Where is she?” Jamieson’s head whipped around from one direction to another, seeing nothing in the fog. “McAllister!” Nathan closed the van door as Murdo looked around helplessly.

  Jamieson whirled around on her crutches – she was getting good at using them. “The dome. She’ll have gone to the dome. Sticking her nose in police business again. Go after her. I’ll follow you.”

  “I can wait for you.”

  “There’s no time. I’d hold you back. She may be in danger.” From Alyssa? From Big Ed? From both of them?

  Murdo hesitated.

  “Now!”

  He began stumbling through the fog, in the direction of the dome. At least, that’s what he thought.

  “I’ll come with you,” Nathan volunteered as Jamieson watched Murdo disappear.

  Night was falling. Darkness and fog. Danger. Jamieson could sense it on the air. Was it just a fancy?

  “No,” she said. “You take O’Reyley into town, if you can.”

  “Oh yes I can,” said Nathan, with a grin at the prospect of daring the causeway again. But it wasn’t quite the broad grin of a few days ago, before he’d met Lili. All he wanted now was to complete his mission and slip back between the sheets with her. Sooner done, sooner he’d be in her arms again. He jumped in the van and took off, Leone’s lifeless body bouncing in the back as Nathan negotiated the bumpy lanes up onto the Island Way.

  Jamieson regretted sending Murdo on ahead, as she made her way towards the dome. She was not easily intimidated, but the crutches and injured ankle made her feel vulnerable, and the fog rolling in thick masses off the water was unsettling. When it thinned out, she would catch a glimpse of her destination, the dome appearing, disappearing, and reappearing at the will of the mist. That was unsettling as well.

  It was frustrating, pushing herself along, the crutches sinking into the sandy soil. But Big Ed must be told. Alyssa might be there. And McAllister might be in trouble. She shuddered in the cold mist, all of her hurting.

  She was in such pain that she almost didn’t feel what hit her.

  Her crutches were up from under her and she was sliding down, down the break in the cape, toward the shore, where hunks of jagged sandstone lay in wait for her, the waves washing over the rocks and beckoning her to slide into their cold grip. She was tumbling down, searching frantically for a foothold, and time moved in slow motion. She saw her hand, as if it were someone else’s, grab an outcrop of the cliff, and, watched her foot, her damaged ankle buckling as she came down hard on another support thrusting out from the cape. She winced in pain, but she had stopped the freefall. With one hand and her injured foot, she clung to life. Below was death, the jagged rocks reaching up to her, waiting for her to tire, to lose her grip, to fall. A clump of rock broke off beneath he
r foot. She hugged the cliff with her injured foot and one grazed hand.

  She looked up, and thought she saw a scrap of fabric floating on the fog.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Murdo didn’t know where he was. He was not on the cape anymore. He was not close to Cottage Lane or the Hall, or anywhere that might have restored his sense of direction. He was stumbling blind through a field toward an abandoned farm, its barn falling down, the terrain difficult to negotiate. He had burrs clinging to his clothes, panic on his brain, as he tore through tall grasses. His only certainty was that he was lost.

  If he’d turned around, he might have spotted the light coming from the police cruiser parked outside the Hall. Junior Johnson had opened the car door to take back what was his – the marijuana plants. His plants. His and Jared MacPherson’s. He began to stuff them into a large plastic yard bag.

  In the driver’s seat, Glady Fraser woke up.

  Alyssa opened the door of the dome to Hy. Big Ed Bullock lay on the floor. Alyssa didn’t know if he was dead or alive. Maybe brain dead but still alive, she thought. He wouldn’t last long. She smiled. Hers. He, too, would always be hers.

  Hy looked at Ed. What a machete in the jungle couldn’t do, tiny Alyssa had.

  Alyssa continued to look down at him and to smile.

  “I didn’t plan to kill him.”

  Hy thought she was talking about Ed.

  “I was thinking about it when I came back along the shore, with Leone following like a dog behind me, thinking I didn’t know he was there.”

  Lord. She was talking about Lord.

  “No, I hadn’t planned to kill Lance when I came back along the beach. But there he was, dressed like an idiot, staring up at the cape, his hands balled into fists, his vein sticking out in his neck. I could picture that vein bursting, his blood spilling on the sand, then he would be mine, he would be no one else’s in death.”

  Alyssa’s eyes were glittering. She was looking straight at Hy, but seemed not to see her. It was as if she were looking right through her to that night on the shore.

  “I saw her, nearly naked, through the window.”

  “Suki?”

  Alyssa nodded abruptly.

  “I saw the axe. His neck, the vein throbbing. I grabbed the axe, before he knew I was there. I summoned all my strength, my inner strength, my fierce strength of mind the way Leone had taught me, and I brought it down.”

  “And killed him.”

  “No, I missed.”

  “Missed? So it wasn’t…?”

  “No, I missed.” But Alyssa didn’t look up. Was she telling the truth? The rest of it had sounded like truth. Was this?

  “Then who?”

  Alyssa looked up, eyes gleaming.

  “You’d have to ask Leone that.”

  “He’s dead.”

  She smiled. “Is he?”

  Jamieson hung on to the cape by a thin thread of strength, a thread that was fraying. Every inch of her was aching. She had almost nothing to cling to, her body flat up against the wet sandstone, helping to hold her there. But she was slipping, slipping. Her fingers had begun to loosen on the rockface; pieces kept breaking off her foothold. She looked down to see if she could climb to the shore, but it made her dizzy. It was steep, too steep. She’d never make it down. If she did, she’d have to negotiate the slippery rocks at the bottom and the sand on the shore. Impossible, with or without her crutches. She looked up again. That odd, floating vision had appeared only once. Jamieson assumed it was drug-induced. She wished she had some of the painkiller now.

  No, she thought. She’d never have been able to hold on so long. But she wasn’t sure that she could much longer. She gripped harder. Something bit into her hand, broke the skin. It was a mussel shell, embedded in the sandstone.

  Mussels. Suki had fed them to Ian. She had sucked on the tiny lobster legs one by one. She had cracked the lobster open. Tomalley.

  Tomalley. The word echoed in Jamieson’s overwrought mind.

  She began to cry. Just one or two tears escaped. Then she gritted her teeth and hung on even tighter, the water pounding up against the rocks below her in a rhythm with the painful pulsing in her brain, as tomalley turned to mussels.

  Mussels. Mussels. Mind over mussels.

  A mantra to save her from falling.

  “You said you missed.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Hy wrinkled her forehead.

  Alyssa smiled that smile that was small, hard, crystallized, a smile that could shatter in an instant and become what it really was. A scowl? No. A sneer, full of spite and hate.

  “I missed. I missed that throbbing vein. But I killed him anyway. It turned out perfectly. Leone, you see, tried to stop me, so I missed my mark. But it left his prints on the axe, not mine.” She raised her gloved hands. “They’ll think he did it. He was prepared to take the blame.”

  “But it was you, not him.”

  “Yes.”

  I did it for her. That’s what he meant. Agreed to shoulder the blame.

  “And MacAdam?”

  Alyssa shrugged and repeated, “Why don’t you ask Leone that?”

  “You know I can’t. He’s dead. I’m asking you. What happened? Detail by detail.”

  She did. Exacting detail that took Hy back to that night, to what had happened between Alyssa and Leone

  Alyssa turned to Leone. There appeared to be tears in her eyes – or were they just glistening with triumph? She flung herself into his arms, her brain working furiously.

  They groped wildly at each other, falling onto the sand, so he never noticed – or so she thought – when she tugged the chain around his neck and broke it free.

  As soon as she had done it, she pushed him from her.

  “Not here. Not now. Later, darling,” she said, standing up, smoothing her dress and disappearing like a spirit into the night, leaving him there, hungry on the sand, lying beside Lord, like two dead men.

  “So that’s how your ring got there.”

  Alyssa inclined her head, just slightly.

  “Why did you say it had been stolen?”

  “To draw attention to it. To point to the killer.”

  “Of Lord. Or MacAdam? Did Leone kill MacAdam for you?”

  “You’ll have to ask Leone that.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Oh, that’s right, you can’t.”

  Ian was worried about Hy. The jungle drums, or coastal bodhrans, were beating in the village. Gus had phoned to tell him Nathan had gone rocketing down the road with Lord knows what or who in the back of his van. Ian phoned Hy and got no answer. Annabelle called Gus to say it was Leone – dead or dying, she wasn’t sure. Nathan had called Lili, and Lili had called Annabelle.

  Some instinct told him to head for the dome, his fog lights on and a flashlight on the passenger seat. As he passed the Hall, the fog prevented him from seeing Gladys Fraser crossing the parking lot, holding Junior Johnson by the ear, as she had when she was his schoolteacher. Later, there was much speculation as to what she would have done with him if Billy Pride hadn’t shown up and slapped a pair of handcuffs on Junior.

  Ian knew the capes well, because he spent a lot of time there working with his erosion monitoring system, keeping track of how much of the cape was being worn away by the action of the wind and waves and the tiny South American swallows who drilled holes along the top to nest. Ian parked well back from the edge of the cape, and was about to mount the stairs to the dome, when he heard a yell.

  “Help!”

  Hy?

  “Help! I’m slipping.”

  Crazy. She was crazy, thought Hy.

  That gleam in her eye, the way she smiled with eyes full of hate.

  “I didn’t want Lance, but I did want what was mine. He belonged to me – and now he
belongs to me forever. It was a clean death. Here on the shore. The ocean and the sand. A clean death.”

  As if that mattered. “It was a messy killing, though.”

  “Yes, bloody, but what killing isn’t?”

  Hy thought of Leone, dead on the cape. No blood. She looked at Ed.

  Dead or alive? No blood.

  “Oh, there are bloodless killings,” she said.

  Alyssa pouted, but her eyes smiled.

  “How did you do it?” Keep her talking. “Lord, I mean. You said you killed him with the axe, but how did you do it? I can’t believe you could kill him. Clean or messy. You’re not tall enough, strong enough.”

  Alyssa straightened. Already she looked larger.

  “Let me show you.”

  Ian looked down over the cape. In the fog, he could see nothing. Had he imagined it? A trick of the wind?

  “Help!”

  No. There was a woman’s voice. Not Hy’s, he thought with relief.

  He went to the car, got his flashlight, and trained it down the cape.

  Squinting into the beam was Jamieson.

  “How’d you get down there?”

  “Never mind that. Get me up.”

  How he would manage that, Ian wasn’t sure.

  Alyssa walked past Ed’s body as if he were not even there, to the barbells cradled on racks in the back of the dome. She picked up a five-hundred-pound weight and strode across the room towards Hy.

  Hy smiled. “That’s nothing. Those weigh nothing.”

  “Oh, yes they do. These ones are real.”

  Hy didn’t know whether to believe her or not.

  “Very real. If you think I can’t lift them, then how could I raise the axe that split Lance’s head open?” She was boasting, smiling, but in her eyes – venom.

  As Alyssa moved forward, she seemed to grow taller. Hy wondered if it was a trick of the light, or if her mind was playing games.

  Alyssa’s smile was gone. Her face was brittle, her expression chilling. Hy saw cold intent in her eyes. She was looking into the eyes of a killer. A killer who planned to kill her, too. The confession had been Hy’s death sentence.

  She backed away toward the door, left open when she entered the dome, filmy fog seeping into the room, a backdrop to Alyssa’s deadly intent.