Chapter Fourteen
Nathan was surprised when the good-looking woman who’d called from the Hall asked him to drive in the opposite direction from the ferry. Strictly speaking, he shouldn’t have. His cab was subsidized by the government and the contract stated that it was a shuttle exclusive to the boat, tied to its half-hourly schedule. But there were no calls for the next ferry, coming or going, so he didn’t mind. He eyed her in the rear-view mirror. He liked older women. Not that she looked it. She was maybe thirty-something, but that pink flush on high cheekbones, the glow of her skin, gave her the fresh look of a nineteen-year-old. Her clothes and air of authority said she was older than that.
“Sure this is where you want?” he asked, concern and curiosity mixed.
She had asked to be dropped at a clay lane that, as far as he knew, led nowhere except to a windy cape and a rough piece of shoreline.
“This is fine.” The expression on her face prevented him from asking more.
There had been a homestead back there one time, but he wasn’t sure it was there anymore, or who might be living in it. Truth was, he’d never been down that lane and, as small as The Shores was, he didn’t know everyone in it—especially those from away who came and went at odd times of the year, some in out-of-the-way places like this. Probably there was a mansion in back, built while they were all busy gossiping about someone or something else.
She got out of the car and didn’t move until he wheeled around and drove out of sight. She’s an odd one, he thought. Those shoes she was wearing wouldn’t take her very far on that lane if that were where she was going. They weren’t instruments of torture like his mother’s high heels, but still hardly made for walking.
Hy was staring at a photograph of Camilla Samson posing with that other notorious Camilla, standing with Prince Charles on the banks of the River Dee. The prince was pretending to break his fishing rod over his knee. They were all smiling.
Hy had googled Lobster Liberation Legion as soon as she got home and she knew quite a bit about Camilla now. No personal background. Nothing about where she came from. Just that she was the founder and chief spokesperson, the face of the Legion. There were photos of her—and of an unidentified legionnaire who appeared to be her second-in-command, dressed in lobster-like camouflage of blues, greens and touches of red. The legionnaire was photographed emptying traps into the water, standing in the middle of the road, preventing a truck from delivering live lobster to a seafood restaurant, paddling a dory out to confront an entire fishing fleet. The message was clearly one of David and Goliath and the modus operandi seemed to be good cop, bad cop, the refined Camilla and the roughneck legionnaire, of somewhat indeterminate gender.
All the photos of Camilla were with European government and industry leaders – and then there was the one with the two Camillas and the prince: the duchess—big and horsey, with a gummy smile; the lobster activist—fine, slender, with honey-blonde hair. The only similarities were their names and style of dress: wool sweaters and skirts in shades of heather, strings of pearls and sensible rubber boots.
Camilla could have used those rubber boots now, as she picked her way along the muddy, puddle-filled lane to where she was staying. She was wearing reasonably sensible pumps, but with feet like hers, it hurt to squeeze into them. She’d walked five miles to get to the Hall and stood for over an hour. Her feet were screaming at her and her back was aching. Once inside, she pulled off the shoes and put on her well-worn sheepskin slippers. She took off her pearls and placed them neatly in their black leather case, the gold lobster clasp centered in the box. She removed her clothes and hung them tidily on a hanger, put on silk pyjamas and took out her contacts. She tucked herself in under a comforter, her laptop balanced on her knees. It slipped from her grasp and slid to the floor. My lifeline. She picked it up, opened it and clicked it on, hoping there was no damage.
The Lobster Lover’s Blog lit up the screen. She scrolled down.
People will eat anything. Just about. Anything that doesn’t eat them first. The human race has only one real rule about what you shouldn’t eat: don’t eat other humans.
Lobsters don’t have this rule. They will eat anything they find on the ocean floor—even sons and daughters and potential mates. That’s bad news for Junior-to-be, or not to be.
Humans try not to eat each other and rarely stomach their kids. Otherwise, they eat just about anything too. If it moves, eat it. If it doesn’t move, eat it. We’re omnivores. We eat anything that doesn’t eat us first. Which may be why we don’t eat lions and tigers.
It does make you wonder why people eat lobsters. You have to fight them to eat them, even though they’re already dead: the shell resists you; the claws prick you; the salt burns you. You come out of the experience soaking wet, sometimes with blood—like Lady MacBeth.
Serves you right.
Amen, thought Camilla. She snuggled under the goose down duvet in her cosy berth. The lapping of the waves rolling off the ocean lulled her to sleep.
Chapter Fifteen
Boiled. Steamed. Baked. Barbecued. Cold in a lobster roll.
Did lobster rolls count? Sure. How about Lobster Thermidor? Hy wasn’t sure what it was. She googled and found a recipe. She’d abandoned the idea of asking the village women for their recipes for the newsletter. She dare not mention the word lobster to any of them—although she had offered, as penance, to cook as well as serve at the supper after Setting Day. It was the least she could do. She still had three recipes to go and the deadline was tomorrow. She came up with Lobster Newburg, Lobster Chili and Lobster Bisque. The bisque recipe was over a page long with a preparation time of one hour. That ensured that Hy would never make it.
All the recipes referred to Step One: How to kill a lobster. There it was in graphic detail and photographs, words and images that kept flashing through her mind:
…rubber bands secure around the creature’s claws…flatten the tail…grasp it where it joins the body…take the point of a hefty chef’s knife…an inch and a half from the eyes…into the head…blade down between the eyes…all the way through…a clean kill, quick and painless.
No wonder people just threw them in the pot.
Hy now had ten recipes, but she still wasn’t satisfied. There was nothing special about them. They could be found anywhere.
Frustrated, she put the laptop to sleep, padded in her sock feet across the room and pulled on her sneakers. She’d been up all night, napped a couple of hours, looked out at the fog and went back to sleep again. It was nearly noon and the fog had cleared off. The wind was brisk, but a welcome sun shone in a crisp blue sky. Maybe a run would clear my head. She was curious about what was going on at the cookhouse, even though the activity seemed to have ended. Perhaps Jared has finished whatever it was he was up to. Maybe some of those trucks had been headed for Parker’s house. Could be they were up to something together.
She smiled and shook her head. No it couldn’t.
“I want you to provide me with lobster.”
“I’m not a fisherman.”
Parker waved a hand dismissively. He frowned as Jared reached for a cigarette.
“I know that. I don’t want a fisherman. I just want small quantities—on a regular basis. I don’t want to have to get a license.” Parker had a loathing for forms, licenses, papers—the mundane details needed to get things done. It was why he had Sheldon running the business for him.
“This is not a commercial operation. I will not have Guillaume down to the wharf every day to pick up a few dozen lobsters.” He smiled, a small smile, seeming to find the image of Guillaume on the wharf funny, but Jared didn’t get the joke. It was a thin one anyway. What Parker didn’t want was Guillaume down at the wharf spending money on boys and drugs. He had clearly never been to Big Bay Harbour. It wasn’t that kind of wharf at all.
Guillaume came out onto the deck, a white apron stretched across hi
s midsection. The apron was fresh and clean, even though Guillaume was cooking a Szechwan shrimp with a messy but delightful spicy garlic tomato sauce in “zat pat’etic leettle galley.”
“Guillaume, this is Jared MacPherson, our lobster man.”
Guillaume raised his eyebrows. They matched the thick, bushy black hair escaping from his chef’s hat.
“Enchanté.” He bowed slightly, but kept his hands clasped behind his back. Guillaume thought that if he were to touch this filthy human, he would have to forget about cooking lunch while he cleaned and sanitized. But he studied Jared with interest. He was unnaturally thin, like someone who lived on cigarettes, booze and dope. Guillaume knew a possible source when he saw one.
“Jared will provide us with lobster.”
“Mmmmm.” And more, thought Guillaume.
“ How many will you need?”
“I can use two dozens a day.”
“Except on weekends.” Jared had no intention of giving up his Saturday nights in Winterside, especially since he had met that little blonde tart last week. She was a goer—a real hottie. She had sat on his lap and made herself quite obvious before they’d said hello.
“I can get that.” He’d poach them. He’d done it before. “What’ll you pay?”
Parker named a good price and Jared started to do the math, but got lost in the numbers. It was lot of money.
“Two dozen a day, five days a week, an’ pay me top price an’ all? I don’t get it.”
“You don’t have to get it. Just deliver the lobster daily.”
Did Parker know he’d be poaching, Jared wondered? What do I care? I’m going to be rolling in it. I’m going to be rolling that little tart. Her and her sister, the kind of money I’m going to have.
“Can we call it a deal?” Parker signaled the interview was over by gesturing Jared towards the stairs that led off the deck.
“Deal.” He better go check out that dory behind the cookhouse.
A man and woman in their early sixties were watching Jared from the deck of the cottage by the run. Like the swallows that return to Capistrano in mid-April every year, this human pair migrated to their cottage at about the same time. The woman had big glasses from twenty years ago that covered her face, except for her mouth and a tiny tip of her nose. They were reading glasses, but she wore them all the time so she wouldn’t lose them. Everybody said she looked just like an owl.
She sounded like one, too, when she raised an arm and yelled, “Hoy…hoy…hoy…” loud enough to scare the Piping Plovers, the tiny endangered birds she was trying so fiercely to protect. Jared was coming along the beach and about to place a dirty foot on one of their nesting sites, just a tiny scoop in the sand.
She cupped her hands around her mouth.
“The plovers! Mind the plovers!”
He looked up. She waved a hand at the sign she had planted just that morning, warning people away from the nest.
“Bugger off,” he called back, and planted his foot firmly in the sand. He missed the nest by a fraction. The mother bird, clearly upset, moved away and limped around, trying to draw the large predator away from her chicks by looking injured herself. Jared kicked her and she went flying across the sand, fell, fluttered and died.
The man on the deck began moving toward the stairs, not making good progress. He walked like a seagull. Even in his haste, the best he could do was to walk a few steps, stop, cock his head, dart a quick glance from side to side and swallow, his Adam’s apple rising and descending in his gullet. Then he would repeat the pattern. It was slow-going. His big beak of a nose looked like it could topple him over on his skinny legs at any moment.
The pair of bird-lovers was Noddy and Do Byrd—a happy coincidence of their name fitting their passion—or perhaps predisposing them to their path in life. Noddy and Do had met as science students at Dalhousie University, married and then both pursued advanced degrees in ornithology. Noddy’s specialty was the Argentinian swallow, the little bird that drilled its nests along the top of the capes and hastened their erosion. Do was an expert on plovers.
People couldn’t help making fun of them. What kind of name is Noddy for a grown man? was a common question. Do was often called Dodo behind her back. Even Noddy did it, affectionately. He never gave a thought to what it really meant.
Jared took one look at Noddy, laughed and kicked sand into his face.
“This is my beach,” he said, “I own these dunes and I’ll go where I want.”
Jared’s claim was the subject of some dispute. Tradition had it that islanders whose land backed onto the shore owned that shore, or at least up to the high water mark—the point at which the federal and provincial governments got into a wrangle about who owned what. New laws to protect the dunes from development had changed things, restricted what and where people could build on the shore, challenging traditional ideas of ownership. But most still did whatever they wanted. If Jared or Parker had requested a building permit for the cookhouse, they would never have received permission for the renovation, and certainly not for the ugly addition that stretched across the beach down to the water.
Now that he was going to be poaching from this shore, his shore, named after his family, Jared wanted the Byrds out of the way. He thought they were a pair of nosey parkers, always watching through their binoculars.
He spied the plover nest, raised a foot, and began to bring it down, but Noddy lunged forward and pushed him. They were both surprised when Jared fell backwards into the run. He pulled himself up, took one step toward a terrified Noddy, then stopped. He had too much riding on his latest venture to risk an assault charge.
“You watch it,” he said, “or there’ll be more than one dead bird on this beach,” His eyes under his single eyebrow were menacing.
Noddy, with uncharacteristic speed, retreated to the safety of the deck.
“Bully.” Do was outraged, brushing sand off Noddy’s face and fluffing a wisp of hair that grew like a faint trail of smoke directly upward from the top of his head. It made him look like some odd chick a long way from his nest.
Hy crested the dune behind the Byrds’ house in time to see Jared stalking off and getting into his truck. A Hummer. And it looks brand new, like Gus said. She wondered where he got the money for it. She climbed the steps up to the deck. Do was weeping.
“Our fault.” She choked out the words. “This is our fault.”
“What’s going on?”
Noddy told Hy what Jared had done.
“That bastard!” Hy made fun of the Byrds like everyone else in the village, but they were harmless. Jared was a brute. “You should call the police.”
“Oh, I don’t think we’ll do that.”
Noddy and Do continued to peer at the run, searching for the father to come back to the nest. Both plover parents take care of their young, Hy knew. Everybody in the village knew. The Byrds were strong advocates for their little charges and had managed to preserve, and even increase, the local plover colony. Their method was unconventional—it mostly involved yelling from their deck at tourists who strayed too close to the nesting site. The plovers—who don’t like noise—had somehow grown accustomed to the Byrds’ vociferousness, perhaps because it was similar to their own noisy bossing of their fledglings.
The three stood watching until, finally, the father came winging back to the nest.
Noddy tiptoed carefully down onto the sand and retrieved the dead mother bird.
“We’ll bury it out back.”
Hy watched from the deck as Noddy dug a hole and Do put the bird in a decorative box from the dollar store kept for just such purposes. They each said a few solemn words and stood in respectful silence for a moment. When they came back, Do still had tears in her eyes.
“We’d better go to the house.”
“Yes, Do, dear, we’ll go back to town for a while.”
&nbs
p; Hy was outraged. “You can’t let him bully you out of your home.”
“Just for a few days.” Do blew her nose—it sounded like the honk of a goose. “The weather’s supposed to turn nasty anyway. The surf’s picking up already.”
It was a signal for all to look at the water, and that’s when Hy noticed the black cylindrical shape cutting across the beach.
“What the hell is that?”
Noddy pulled out a pair of binoculars.
Do shaded her eyes with a hand and squinted through myopic eyes.
“I don’t know. Something to do with Jared’s cookhouse. There’s been a lot of work going on. They’ve been taking in kitchen equipment. Restaurant quality.”
“Now there’s this weird fellow—Frenchman by the look of him—going in and out of there.” Noddy had picked up the thread; the Byrds always talked in tandem. “I guess he’s got it rented.” He raised the binoculars to his eyes.
“Looks like a pipe.”
Hy was already off the deck and marching across the beach. It was a pipe. She took off her shoes and socks and followed it into the water. Jesus! It was cold. Her feet throbbed with pain. It shot up her legs. She squeezed her eyes tight, as if that might help. The pipe ran well out into the water beyond the sand bar.
Back on the sand, she sat down and rubbed warmth into her feet. She pulled on her socks, wincing as they tugged at her wet skin. She’d lost the feeling in her little toes. She put on her shoes and followed the pipe up the beach and over the dune, where it entered the cookhouse at the back of the building. She could hear a pump rasping inside the wall.
“Hoy…hoy…hoy,” Do’s plover call rose from the deck. Hy ignored it. She went over to a window, stood on tiptoe and tried to see in.
“Hoy…hoy…hoy…” Do was sounding more frantic. Hy glanced over. Do was waving her arms. Hy strained for more height, grabbed the sill, and hauled herself up.
“Hoy…hoy…hoy…” It was becoming annoying. She jumped down and looked over at Do again. The waving was directed at her, but she couldn’t figure out why.
Revenge of the Lobster Page 8