“Bound to happen. Bound to happen. Search and rescue. Search and rescue. Call 911. R-r-r-ring. Squawk. Hello? Hello? All aboard?”
Jasmine!—running through a whole repertoire of her latest hits. Her call for help came just in time. The workers were about to pull the box spring off the top of the debris. It might have collapsed and crushed her. Ian held up his hands and shook them frantically in a “no” gesture. The workers stopped, box spring perched on their shoulders.
The villagers peered down from above. Parker? Had he found Parker? The men watched, holding the bed still aloft, as Ian scrambled over the debris, exposed nails slashing his hands and knees. He hardly noticed. His body was vibrating relief. Jasmine didn’t hesitate when he poked his finger forward. She jumped on it and stuck her claws right in. He winced and smiled at the same time. When he drew her out, she flew up on his shoulder—his new companion for life.
The rescue workers dropped the box spring, disappointed, but bemused.
A parrot? Here?
When Hy got home, the message light on her phone was blinking. Before she had a chance to check, the phone rang.
“Hy. Playing hard to get?” Eldon. She steeled herself for an unpleasant conversation, but it turned out to be a pleasant surprise.
“Look, I’m calling to say we’d like more of the same.”
“What?”
“Brilliant, the cockroach and spider bits. Lots of response. Lots of great response. Thousands of hits. And customers have been coming in to buy lobster in defence of your attack on the industry. Great stuff. Great stuff. Keep it up.”
A slow smile spread across Hy’s face. What a jerk. He was sounding just like the big boss himself, parroting Stewart Montgomery, right down to his repetitive manner of speaking. What did she care? She was off the hook. She promised plenty more of the same and rang off.
She put out her compost bin and her recycling bags and jumped in the truck to meet Ian down at the shore. As she reached the intersection of the Shore Lane, she saw that Moira’s recycling bag had split open and papers were blowing out of it. She stopped her truck and picked one up.
It was a copy of the notice cancelling the lobster supper. There were a few more papers swirling on the wind around her. She picked up another and another. They were all the same. She left her truck running, burning up valuable fuel, as she followed the paper trail to Moira’s house. The recycling bag contained several different versions of the invitation canceling the lobster supper.
Moira.
Moira had made them. To make me look bad. She’d never suspected because Moira didn’t know how to use a computer—at least not until now. She had once asked Hy if she used “one of those things” to write. Moira disliked Hy so much, she’d learned to use one to get at her. Hy wondered if she should confront Moira.
No.
She simply stuffed a fistful of the papers in Moira’s mailbox to let her know she’d been found out. Then she returned to her truck and drove down to the shore.
Jamieson was back, overseeing the rescue operation, unwilling to admit to herself her unprofessional fascination. It took some digging to find Parker’s body. Hy and Ian watched silently as the workers lifted out his grandmother’s painting. They had to pull it off Parker’s body. They had to pry him off the jackal. He had been impaled to the painting by the pointy ears of the Egyptian dog of death. An aesthete killed by a lapse in taste.
Jamieson examined the body when they brought it out on the stretcher. In his pocket, she found the acid free paper, the pearls and the tiny gun, with the silver bullet still in its chamber. He’d never had a chance to pull the trigger. Climate change had gotten him first.
Looking at him, Jamieson did not feel much pity. She’d been wronged by him, she was sure, over the car incident. He’d used his power and wealth to make the charges go away. In her secret heart, she suspected a corrupt superior. Someday, she’d be in a position to prevent that sort of thing happening.
She was a very ambitious woman, but she wasn’t without compassion. Jamieson looked at the paper, front and back, then beckoned to Hy and gave it to her, with the pearls.
“You’ll know what to do with these.” She didn’t see any point in getting personal articles all tangled up in red tape. It was unlikely that there would be an inquiry into this…incident—or the chef’s death. An initial forensic report showed the implement that had killed Guillaume St. Jacques was not equipped with an immersion protection plug to prevent electrocution, and the wiring of the cookhouse was not up to code—it was amateurish and dangerous. Add the saltwater pond and a concrete floor and it was a recipe for death. A recipe for murder? Well, not premeditated.
Hy took the paper and the pearls, thanked Jamieson and stood beside her as paramedics pulled a sheet over Parker’s body. All his wealth had not protected him. She was safer in her little house and modest life than he had been with all his money.
Maybe there was justice on the wind.
They watched the paramedics carry Parker away.
“It’s always about love,” said Jamieson, with unusual feeling. “There’s either too much of it. Or not enough.”
She turned away to follow the body up to the lane and Hy watched her with a grudging respect. Maybe Jamieson wasn’t the cold fish she appeared to be.
Hy slipped the pearls into her pocket and looked at the paper. On one side it was Parker’s handwritten will and testament, leaving everything to “my daughter Camilla,” should she survive. If she did not, he had left it to her anyway—to the Lobster Liberation Legion, in her name. He never knew, thought Hy, that the LLL was only Cam.
On the other side, in his spidery scrawl:
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
A suicide message? She knew that Jamieson had read it too. It didn’t take anything away from the police woman’s insight, but Hy did puzzle over what she’d said. What exactly did she mean?
Was it death—or life—that was always about love?
The storm that had levelled Parker’s house had also capsized the Zodiac carrying Bill and Wendell into the cold waters of the Atlantic. They were officially recorded as missing. Sheldon found it very convenient—it avoided the inevitable difficulties he would face if they’d been arrested for stealing The Crustacean. Now if she would just die too, he was working on a way he could absorb the Parker holdings.
But she didn’t die.
Hy brought the will, the pearls and the news of Parker’s death to Cam. She strung the pearls around her neck and stroked them. She said nothing at first, then:
“I’m sorry for him.”
Hy could still see Parker, his arms wrapped around Cam, rocking his daughter, and his grief, on the floor of the cookhouse. She felt sorry for him too.
“That’s all?”
Anger flashed in Cam’s eyes.
“That’s a lot. How could I feel anything more? What did he ever do for me?”
“Well, he gave you life.”
“An accident. Smart sperm, that’s all.”
“He felt bad at the end, Cam. Devastated.”
“What about me? I had this hole in me all my life. I wanted a father.” Tears welled in her eyes. “I found a pathetic little man wasting his love on that disgusting creature. How could I love him? The best I can do is feel sorry for him.”
“And yourself.”
Cam looked down, biting her lower lip, chewing on it. She was silent a moment, unable to speak.
“I hated him. Hated that I couldn’t love him. Hated to be so full of hate.”
Hy, helplessly: “It wasn’t your fault.”
“I know. I know that, but knowledge couldn’t fill the hole. Neither could he.”
“That’s what you were after—with all this lobster stuff?”
Cam looked up.
“Maybe—pa
rtly.”
“I’d say more than partly.” Hy thought Cam’s cause was clearly a public cry for private attention. Attention from the father who had rejected her.
When Hy left, Cam picked up the Halifax daily paper—another coup for Lester Joudry, who would never need to return to journalism school. Photographs of lobster traps smashed up and overturned under the headline: Bottoms Up.
“My work is done,” she said, to no one in particular. She could keep her promise to Hy and leave The Shores. She had a few other plans, too, as the heir to two legacies: the Parker fortune and the Golightly tradition of treading softly on the earth.
It was wind—or a lack of it—that brought justice to Sheldon Coffin’s door.
He was eating a breakfast of lobster crêpes, thinking about what a very, very rich man he was going to be, as soon as that annoying girl gave up and died. He was just considering a couple of clever, undetectable ways to have the company buy the company for him, when the butler brought in the newspaper.
The headline: Lobster Heiress Cheats Death and the Taxman.
There were two front-page pictures of Camilla—one in her lobster gear, the other, smiling from her hospital bed, the string of pearls around her neck. The cutline read:
“Camilla Golightly inherits entire estate—and lives to tell the ‘tail.’”
Sheldon scanned the article quickly. It relayed why Camilla had gone by the name Samson, a name she told the press she had chosen from a set of suitcases belonging to her mother. Now she took on her hippie grandparents’ assumed name and mission to tread lightly on the earth. Except for the vanity case and the pearls, Camilla planned to divest herself of the family baggage, including her massive inheritance. She would sell off the octopus and use the money for the renamed ALL—the Anthropodia Liberation Legion, dedicated to lobster and tarantula rights.
Sheldon began to choke.
He stood up, gasping, his eyes bulging from his head, staring at his wife in shock and pointing to his throat. He sputtered, gagged, coughed weakly, bent over and shook his head.
A vision of herself as a wealthy, unencumbered widow flashed before Stella’s eyes. She could not have performed the Heimlich maneuver had she known it, she protested later to paramedics, then friends, then anyone who would listen, because she could never have got her arms around his barrel chest.
Many years later, when her widowhood, by distance of time, could no longer be considered tragic, she would paint an amusing picture of her helplessness in this scenario, asking dinner companions what she should have done. She couldn’t have butted her head into his belly, surely. “Well, it might have worked,” said one potential paramour dryly.
But she didn’t even try.
It was left to Sheldon to attempt to deliver himself of the food lodged so securely in his throat. In a macabre joust with death, he grabbed hold of the high back of his chair and slammed his chest into it repeatedly to try to dislodge the offending comestible, fast robbing him of breath and life.
Stella waited a moment before she rang the bell.
If she didn’t ring it, would that be murder?
She tinkled it lightly to summon assistance.
It didn’t come in time.
Sheldon fell to the floor in a great lump—felled by a large piece of lobster meat. He was dead by the time the butler, who did know the Heimlich maneuver, arrived.
Revenge, is sweet—and sometimes savoury.
Epilogue
The sun rose in splendour at The Shores all through the hot dry summer that followed. It blazed through the day, and set in triumph every night—shooting rays of colour across the big sky and endless water.
People were saying that they needed rain.
They were also saying that Hy was a hero, honking at her when they passed by her house, waving when they saw her walking in the village. They had embraced her as one of their own—once they saw the media coverage and heard talk of a medal of bravery, she became “our Hy.” Gus and Ben and Annabelle organized a dinner in her honour at the Hall. The villagers didn’t approve of the woman she’d saved, but she had gone—and wouldn’t be bothering them again.
Cam had given up her laptop, her jeep, her cell phone—all modern devices. She’d sailed away on The Crustacean to an obscure island in the Indian Ocean, where she had finally learned to swim. She turned out to be a great little swimmer. All the Parkers were. Experts say webbed feet don’t enhance swimming performance, but Cam knew better. They gave her thrust, like a lobster’s tail. She’d had that confirmed by an Olympic coach who was first drawn to her feet—and then the rest of her. They were now living together in their tropical paradise. Hy received the odd letter or postcard, hopelessly outdated by the time it reached her, but it didn’t matter. Just knowing that Cam was alive in the world was enough.
Hy, to her horror, had become an authority on lobster and animal rights in the minds of the editors of various nature and geographical magazines after she published an article on Cam’s lobster tickling. She was inundated with requests to write lengthy articles on that subject and others. It meant actual work.
She was also secretly writing The Lobster Lover’s Blog. It was a deal with Cam to keep the ALL out of The Shores. She hadn’t even told Ian.
Ian had tinkered endlessly with his computer to find out how Cam’s blog had hacked in. He would never find out, even though he worked away at it for months when he wasn’t working on his other projects: the Nightview Webcam and the GPS units now stationed at what was left of Vanishing Point.
Construction on the causeway was delayed and Ian had begun a petition demanding a “fixed link,” but he wasn’t getting many signatures. The villagers really didn’t mind being isolated. It was the glue that kept them together as a community—and the tourists seemed to find the car ferry “charming” and “quaint.” Ian got more exercise than signatures that summer, walking around town with his petition—his parrot on his shoulder almost everywhere he went. People smiled. He was well-liked and from away, which explained a lot.
Gus was starting a new quilt. She’d tried one of those fancy modern ones that are like a painting with fabric and texture. She took Canada’s birthday as a theme. All she’d come up with was a red blob on a white background. She had tossed it aside. It lay on the floor for months, while she finished another nine-patch.
Jane Jamieson worked like a terrier chewing on a bone in her pursuit of the boat that had buzzed Cam and Hy. She did it on her own time. Her superiors had refused to allow her to follow a trail that wasn’t there. She was vindicated when a Zodiac washed up on the Gaspé shoreline, minus Bill and Wendell.
In the process of her investigations, she managed to book Scott Bergeron and Tom McFee for poaching. They met up with Jared in jail and spent many hours talking about what they might do when they got out.
While Jared was locked up, The Byrds were using his cookhouse to incubate their nestlings—and their seedlings.
Everyone in the village went back to eating lobster without feeling guilty about it. Everyone, that is, except Hy. The rest of them boiled it as long as they wanted, threw it in head or tail first, as they wished, baked it or barbecued it, and gave only a passing thought to That Woman, who’d tried to change their ways.
Toby and Newt were in dog heaven through the long, beautiful days of summer, dashing along the shore with kids whose names they knew and who all knew theirs. Charlie got fat on the leftovers in the fast food packages he found tossed in ditches along the road. The villagers were busy from dusk to dawn, and beyond—bed and breakfasting tourists, fishing the waters, farming the land and mowing their lawns. Mostly, mowing their lawns.
Every morning through that long hot summer, and all the years of April Dewey’s long life, the village air was scented, not just with the sweet grasses and tang of the ocean, but with the heavenly aroma of her blueberry muffins.
Her recipe remaine
d her secret.
As for whatever was going on between Hy and Ian, speculation and gossip continued. So did the intimate dinners and the occasional overnights. They happened more frequently in the inflamed mind of Moira Toombs. Not even Hy’s closest confidants, Gus and Annabelle, could figure it out. If anything was going on, the two remained firmly in the closet—together —doing Lord knows what—but they had not come out as a couple, even in their own minds.
Moira watched and waited through slanted, spiteful eyes.
Was it only friendship, or was it love?
Annabelle watched as well, her eyes soft and warm.
What is friendship, if not love?
Revenge of the Lobster Page 28