Revenge of the Lobster

by Hilary MacLeod

  Hilary MacLeod

  The Acorn Press

  Charlottetown

  2010

  Revenge of the Lobster Lover © 2010 by Hilary MacLeod

  ISBN 978-1-894838-48-1

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

  Cover and interior design by Matt Reid

  Editing by Sherie Hodds

  The publisher acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund of the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Canada Council for the Arts Block Grant Program..

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  MacLeod, Hilary

  Revenge of the lobster lover / Hilary MacLeod.

  ISBN 978-1-894838-48-1

  I. Title.

  PS8625.L4555R48 2010 C813’.6 C2010-904871-7

  P.O. Box 22024

  Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island

  C1A 9J2

  acornpresscanada.com

  To my daughter Kirsten, of course.

  And to my parents Saxon and Bruce.

  “The weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure.”

  —Alice Hoffman, Here on Earth

  Prologue

  Click, click, click.

  A lobster claw was tapping on the dead man’s teeth.

  In a hand turned blue, the corpse gripped the handle of the lobster stunner that had killed him. The plastic inlay had melted into his flesh, creating a strange exoskeleton in the shape of a lobster claw, with the texture of a partly-skinned mushroom, speckled with decay. The rest of it—a long steel rod, like an oversized curling iron—lay on the ground, tossed aside by the powerful current that had coursed through him.

  Executed. The implement was designed to kill the creatures in the pond humanely; instead, it had turned on him. He lay partially submerged in the water, an oversized ingredient in a surf and turf supper, eyes staring unseeing at the ceiling with a look of surprise—or shock. A burnt smell like overdone pork chops rose from his body.

  One lobster had survived the electric jolt that had traveled through the man and the other crustaceans. She butted up against her dead pond mates, clambered up the rocks and, unable to see, felt her way onto the corpse’s chest. Propelling slowly forward on eight of her ten legs, she delicately tasted as she went. With the other two, she began to claw at his eyes, as sightless as her own, antennae circling the air, smelling this potential new food source. Then her attention turned to his mouth, slack and petulant in death. There was something in there that interested her.

  The click, click, click became a crunch. The creature had found what she was looking for—a morsel of salmon wedged and rotting under a porcelain dental crown.

  Crack. The lobster’s big claw, the crusher, broke the spike of decayed tooth holding the crown. With the smaller, the pincher, she threw it off.

  Dinner was served..

  Chapter One

  Hawthorne Parker had paid a great deal to ensure his privacy at The Shores, but he hadn’t planned on being quite this isolated. He had to fly in by helicopter because it was the only way. He wasn’t going to take that ancient river ferry.

  From the air, The Shores looked like a big tadpole that had been joined to the rest of The Island by the Campbell Causeway, about a kilometer long. On one end a large rupture had wiped out the only road that connected The Shores to The Island. It was red clay under a wash of blue water.

  It had happened suddenly, in January. A storm surge had shoved tons of ice into the fragile strip of land and rammed it at its weakest point. Driven by a northeast gale, the sea ice had pushed the shore ice across the causeway, ripping it apart and piling up in massive white peaks. Then it had come to a stop. It had crushed and buried five houses, killed nine people, tossed cars into the water and pushed boats up onto what had once been the road.

  It was over in thirteen-and-a-half minutes.

  The Shores was cut off by land. The Campbell Causeway was flattened at one end. Where once the strip of land had risen above the water, it now dipped into it.

  Tourist brochures called it “The Gentle Island,” and except for the unsightly rupture in the causeway, it still was. Parker gazed with pleasure on the palette of blue and red and green below him. It had the pleasant quality of an old patchwork quilt. Threads of evergreen defined fields of red clay—some bursting with bright new green, others yellow with the dry stalks of last fall’s harvest, not yet plowed in. Today the ever-changing blue water was navy in the cool April air.

  The Shores was the communal name for three once-thriving fishing and farming communities, now a random collection of houses and farmland cascading down to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The houses, mostly painted white cedar shingle, or clapboard with green and black roofs, radiated out from the village centre, dominated by a white community hall with a bright green metal roof. There was no church, no school, no store—not anymore. Smoke curled up from the chimneys, floating over the sleepy village of about two hundred people, just three roads, a handful of clay lanes and one of the most spectacular shorelines on an island famous for them.

  Hawthorne Parker was a collector of fine things, and the prized piece of waterfront property in The Shores was his latest acquisition. He stroked his razor-thin mustache with his forefinger and felt the glow of pleasure he always felt when he acquired a new and beautiful thing. It helped loosen the knot of anxiety in his gut, if only briefly. He kept a scrupulous list itemizing treasures locked in storage across two continents—with the exception of one. His lover Guillaume was not on that list, though he’d been in storage too.

  For Parker, the charm of The Shores lay in its solitude. He had prepared a stunning aerie on a cape, a place to start again after the night that had shattered their life together. He hoped being here would be healing. They might not find love again, but they could, perhaps, reconcile their differences.

  The helicopter hovered over Vanishing Point, so called because it would disappear in a fog or because chunks of it kept falling off, no one could quite remember which. Parker was shocked by what he saw. The house was still there. The real estate agent had assured him of that, but had soft-pedaled the damage to the cape, saying only that there had been some “landscape adjustments.”

  The storm surge had carved a triangle around the house, so that it was sitting on a pie-shaped “v” pointing inland. The A-frame jutted into the sky at the wide end, close to the edge of the cape. So close that, from this angle, the deck appeared poised over the slim strip of shore and surf below.

  Landscape adjustments! Parker should have known that the real estate agent was of dubious integrity when he had said, “Sean Connery lived here.” Parker had looked at him in disbelief and the agent back-pedaled. “Well, he stayed here.” After a silence: “Or so they say.” Parker was neither convinced nor star-struck. He bought the house because he liked it, because he needed the mental space it would provide. Even as the helicopter began its descent, Parker’s new acquisition was losing some of its charm. His knot of anxiety tightened around the feeling of emptiness deep within him.

  No. It had nothing to do with Sean Connery.

  Chapter Two

  The wind whistled around the northeast corner of the house and the eavestrough rattled. The woman, all long legs kicking and red curls matted with sweat, tossed in her sleep. Her body was buzzing with an electric energy, her mind fro
zen on the image of her infant self, bobbing on the water of a remote lake.

  Alone. Alone. All all alone. Alone on a wide, wide sea.

  Then, suddenly, no longer alone. Pulsing. Life. Lights. Flashing. The noise of a siren pierced the silence—high, ear-splitting, causing her child voice to burst out in short startled wails, become shrill, rise to the pitch of the siren, until the two intertwined in one long keening cry that rang out on the wind.

  Her cry. Here in this room, not out on some long-forgotten lake. Here, with the wind whipping around the house, Hy McAllister jolted awake, the vibration of the scream on her lips, so that she knew she had actually screamed herself out of the nightmare. Adrenalin coursed through her blood. She was unable to move, afraid to open her eyes.

  The old night terror had come ripping through her, ending, as always, with the scream and waking, sweating but frozen with fear. Fear formed from fragments of memory lodged in her infant brain, where they lurked and seeped poison. The nightmare always found her in a wind storm, or after too much wine and too little sleep. Steady, disciplined living wasn’t something she was good at.

  The room hummed around her, and she felt the dream pulling her down again. She struggled against it. Her blood tingled, the room hummed, the wind took up the sound like a refrain. A gust slammed into the north wall, and she felt the house shift, accommodating its force. The room swayed and changed shape, moved off its centre, sent vibrations singing through her, tendrils grasping and taking her down, back down into the dream.

  No. She forced herself up, like a drowning person coming out of the water into the air in one great motion. Gasping. She pried open her eyes and the terror came unstuck. The buzzing ebbed to a low hum. Free again.

  She propped herself up and looked around.

  Reality slipped sideways.

  The door wasn’t where it should be.

  There wasn’t a door.

  She felt dizzy. Am I still in the nightmare? Then she realized she wasn’t in her bedroom. She’d fallen asleep on the couch. Time? What time was it? Her clock was flashing twelve. Damn. The bloody wind has caused another power glitch.

  She ran a hand through unruly curls, untangled long, skinny legs all wound up in a duvet and sat up, shaking and cold. She dragged the comforter around her. There was a half-empty glass of red wine on the coffee table, an old wood steamer trunk. On it, curiously modern, a laptop was pulsing like a heartbeat, its green light glowing against the wall. She reached over and hit the space bar. The screen lit up.

  The Lobster Lover’s Blog

  Lobsters must be great lovers. They have two penises.

  Scientists view them as two sperm delivery appendages. What else is a penis?

  Odd. She’d never clicked on this site. She’d been working on the Super Saver newsletter, promising ten ways to cook lobster in time for Setting Day, when North Shore fishermen set their traps for the season. She remembered why she’d stopped writing last night after a half bottle of wine. She didn’t know ten ways to cook lobster. Not even one.

  On the lobster love scene no one asks: your place or mine? It’s always his. He doesn’t go sand bar hopping to find a willing female. She comes to him. He doesn’t have to be rich or handsome. Handsome? A lobster?

  If she’s really ready—there’s no polite way to put this—she pees in his face. It’s their version of foreplay. After the golden shower, she disrobes, sheds her hard shell, and becomes as vulnerable as any woman standing naked before a man—perhaps more so.

  Will he lay her—or eat her? That is the question. Fortunately for the survival of the species and the lobster industry, he usually decides to jump her. He clutches her around the waist, flips her over and takes her in the missionary position, their beady little eyes staring unseeing at each other. Call it a blind date.

  He’s a surprisingly tender lover. Hard shell, soft heart? She has a hard heart and pro-choice attitude. She stores his sperm and takes off with it. He never gets to know his children but nature has a way of making sure he doesn’t screw them too. He may eat them but he won’t bonk them.

  This is no joke. Experts in the field, or rather the oceans, have studied the sex life of lobsters extensively. We know almost as much about why and how lobsters do it as we do about human sex.

  Why the interest in lobster copulation? It’s all about population.

  The more there are, the more we can eat.

  Can you live with that?

  They can’t.

  The blog popped off the screen just as Hy finished reading. Her computer shut down. She rebooted and keyed in Lobster Lover’s Blog. No response. She tried again. Nothing.

  Where did the blog come from? Where did it go?

  She couldn’t sleep now. Her agenda lay open beside the laptop, the entries slanted upward, underlined, mocking her in a variety of highlighter colours, peppered with exclamation marks. She had three tasks.

  Lobster Supper Invites was in black, underlined once in red; Institute Speaker in green, underlined twice, one exclamation mark; Lobster—Super Saver in red, underlined three times with two exclamation points.

  The Super Saver was The Island’s only local grocery chain and Hy’s regular client. She ran a home-based company, writing and editing material for websites. She called it, in a play on words, Content. She was content, except about the lobster recipes she’d promised to produce. She didn’t have any yet, but emailed the Super Saver PR department that the newsletter was nearly ready to pressure herself into meeting the deadline. Almost instantly, the right hand column of her screen filled with links to keywords in the email. Sites advertising jelly and jam recipes, North Shore cottage rentals, the David Letterman show, and labour organizations holding May Day celebrations.

  Hy scanned the list.

  Lobster Lover? Catch us first.

  The blog again? She clicked on the site.

  Cooking lobster? Let our expert speakers fill you in.

  No. Not the blog. Better.

  She selected: Find Out More.

  Hy liked what she saw. A well-laid-out website, offering guest speakers free to non-profit groups. That certainly described the Women’s Institute at The Shores. As always, any money they made from next month’s lobster supper would go toward maintaining the Hall. The W.I. had a guest lecturer every month and it was Hy’s turn to book one. The last time she’d chosen the topic: “Friday the Thirteenth—Lucky for Women”—it hadn’t been lucky for her. The guest she’d invited had been a disaster, talking about menstruation as a sacred act. There’d been strange looks and awkward silences from the village women ever since. She had to redeem herself.

  She clicked on Contact Us, logged a request for a speaker, stood up, stretched and looked out the window. There was a thin streak of orange dawn over the water. The fields, the trees, the houses were black outlines on the sky. There was one light outside the house on Vanishing Point. The new guy. His recent arrival by helicopter had all the villagers talking about who he was and why he’d come. No one had seen him yet—except Harold MacLean and he didn’t count.

  Hy gazed across the fields and down the stretch of lonely road. Three dark and vacant farmhouses stood between her and her nearest neighbour, Jared MacPherson. His house was all lit up like a Christmas tree, as her old friend Gus would say.

  Jared was out of jail—again. Last year he’d spent six months at the provincial jail, Sleepy Hollow, for selling illegal cigarettes and liquor from his cookhouse on the shore. This time, the offense had been worse—much worse. But he’d served only two weeks.

  Hy smiled, thinking of what Gus would say now:

  Murderer.

  Chapter Three

  Parker made immediate inquiries about moving his house back from the precipice. He was told nothing could be done until the causeway reopened. No contractor would promise it even then. The shape of the land wouldn’t allow them to bring in equ
ipment big enough to haul the house.

  Only one man seemed willing to do it, and he was suspect at best.

  “You won’t have to pack away one piece of china, we’re that careful.” Dwayne “Goody” Gaudet rubbed his snotty nose with a beefy hand, scratched his crotch, and cleaned the hand on his trousers. Parker’s face wrinkled in distaste. He was neat, slim and compact, always impeccably groomed and dressed. Today he was wearing light wool slacks and a v-neck cashmere sweater in the same soft neutrals he preferred in his decor.

  “We’ll just lift ’er up, shift ’er over and put ’er down.” Dwayne grinned. A front tooth was missing, others were various shades of yellow, brown and black decay. The effort of speaking seemed to leave him out of breath.

  Parker smirked. The man obviously had no idea of the value of his treasures. He would be quite prepared to pack them all away when and if he moved the house. He thanked Goody, declined to shake his hand and went back inside.

  He gazed with satisfaction at the Great Room of the A-frame with his ancient treasures artfully displayed. He stroked the black balsam body of an Egyptian statue—Anubis, the jackal. His hand caressed the exquisite porcelain of a Ming dynasty cat, hand-painted with gold leaf, made, as the markings on the back attested, for the Imperial Court. Not that peasant blue and white stuff that’s so popular and ubiquitous—cheap but Ming. It was genuine enough, but not the real thing. His eye rested with pride on the rare Mayan fertility figurines in the glass shelving.

  The decorator had done exactly as instructed, with a few minor exceptions. An objet placed just so, a quarter-inch turn to catch the light in such a way, and the total effect was—

  He inspected the room through cool grey eyes. He stroked his mustache.

  The total effect was perfection.

  There was just one jarring note—a square painting of a red blob dominated the rear wall of the Great Room. The artist was perhaps the only person Parker had ever loved who’d loved him back—his grandmother. Even that hadn’t lasted.