All is Clam

by Hilary MacLeod

  “A bloody miracle,” whispered Ed.

  The director of the hospital slipped away from the door, and tread softly for a few steps before moving rapidly down the hall. He didn’t want anyone to know that he’d seen. Because what he’d seen was certainly not medical procedure. But it appeared to have worked. He’d have to keep informed on the patient. And an eye on Dr. Diamante and Ed in the future.

  Later, he found out that Nathan had checked himself out. In his own good time, thought Lili, as they headed back home, Nathan as fit as if nothing had happened.

  Jamie had first called after Hy, then followed her. The skis slid underneath him, smoother than walking, the cold air whipped past him, stinging his cheeks, biting his ears. Jamie moved as if born to it, digging in his poles to pick up speed down the puffy white trail. Ahead of him, Hy was manoeuvring the curve before the gully and the bridge, and had calculated that she would be able to go right across the bridge and part way up the hill on the opposite side on the strength of the propulsion she was building up. She poled hard, increasing her speed in a delighted, reckless way, ignoring Jamie’s cries behind her to stop.

  Stop? Why would she stop?

  Then she saw why. Over the bridge.

  She raced right to it. She stuck her poles in the ground to stop, and sent herself flying up and into a solid wall of flesh. A body. She fell down into the water.

  Fitz Fitzpatrick fell on top of her.

  Jamieson had headed up to Wild Rose Cottage to see if Fitzpatrick was back home. Rose, her nose and hands red, had just finished washing the dishes, and was now stoking the range. Jamieson looked up the length of the battered chimney pipe. Another firetrap. She shuddered. She told herself it wasn’t the old fear, just the cold in this house. She looked at Rose again. Wearing boots. In the house.

  No, Jamieson thought, taking a look at the tent. Not a house. Her eyes swept the room. How could people live like this?

  “Any sign of your husband?” Was this investigation of an accident turning into a search for a missing man? Maybe. She wasn’t waiting for Rose to file a missing persons claim. She might never do it, with a husband like that.

  “No, no.” Rose sounded distracted. And looked it. She kept glancing at the window.

  “Are you expecting him?”

  Rose realized what she’d been doing and transferred her anxiety to drying her hands on a tea cloth and wringing it.

  “No.”

  “Then – ”

  “Jamie. He’s gone out skiing with Hy. I’m just concerned – ”

  “About what? He’ll be safe with McAllister.”

  “Yes, but – ”

  “But what?”

  “I’m just not sure where they’ve gone.”

  “Do you want me to go looking for them?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that. Please, sit down. Tell me why you’ve come.”

  Jamieson kept standing. “I think your husband’s been gone too long without a word.” Now Jamieson looked out the window. “And with nowhere to go.”

  “Have you checked Jared’s?”

  “MacPherson’s been seen and questioned. Says he doesn’t know where your husband is. That he didn’t see him after he left. Said he was on his way home.”

  Jamieson was standing in front of the stove. It took all her control not to shiver, but this house was cold, even close to the heat. Front, warm; back, freezing. Her toes were going numb in her warm police boots. She was fighting a desire to get out of the house, struggling with a rigid discipline that forced her to get the job done, to hang on like a terrier. Gnaw like a rat.

  “Besides MacPherson – any other friends?” It seemed an unusual word to use for a man like Fitzpatrick.

  Rose shook her head.

  “Acquaintances?”

  “We knew nobody.”

  “I’m not asking ‘we.’ I’m asking ‘he.’ Was there anybody he knew around here?”

  “If he did, I didn’t know them.”

  “Has he disappeared like this before?”

  “The odd time, but his truck’s at Jared’s.”

  “I know.” It nagged at her, that. But MacPherson’s story had seemed plausible – of Fitzpatrick, stone drunk, weaving down the road, mickey in hand, going to find Rose and “have a bit of fun.”

  “We’ll have to start a search.” Jamieson felt a slight thrill at the thought of using her snowmobile for real police business, not just transportation or sightseeing. That had been a lapse this morning, riding along the capes for the sheer fun of it, when a man was missing in a place too small to lose a quilting needle.

  “A search?”

  “Of the village, of the property.”

  Rose opened her eyes wide. Fear? Jamieson wondered what the woman knew that she wasn’t saying.

  “I think you can help me find your husband.”

  Rose had wrung the tea cloth into a tight little ball. It was she who sat down.

  “Oh, I can’t do that.”

  “Can’t – or won’t?”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Hy shoved Fitz away and pushed her head above water.

  “Here, grab on to this.” Jamie stuck one of his poles at her.

  Where had Fitz come from?

  Hy looked up and saw the broken tree branch that had been the hangman’s scaffold. It thrust out from the tree like a knife stabbing at the sky. It was thick at the base, held firmly to the trunk, and tapered to a spike that had snatched Fitz’s chain and the life out of him. Now the body was jammed up against the side of the creek, where Hy had shoved him, head back, mouth agape. A red ring around his neck where the ridiculous bicycle chain he wore had choked him to death. He must have panicked, flailed about and twisted it, securing it around his neck. His eyes were bulging out, and glazed over.

  Jamie was staring at his father, too.

  Jamie, she thought. How horrible for him. But he turned his attention from the corpse and poked the pole again at Hy.

  “C’mon. Grab this. You gotta get out of there.”

  Was he deliberately not looking at his dead father? Why? Couldn’t he bear it – or didn’t he care?

  “I’ve got to take my skis off first.”

  The water wasn’t deep, but her skis were sinking into the mud.

  She plunged under the water and unlatched one, but struggled with the other.

  “It’s caught on something.”

  “Forget it. Get out!” Jamie yelled.

  She yanked off the boot and freed herself. She grabbed the pole and he tugged. She fell back into the water twice, but finally made it up onto the bank, dripping wet and the coldest she’d ever been. Well, almost. There had been that other time. But she couldn’t remember that, not really.

  They climbed the hill, an agonizing climb, Jamie on his skis, Hy without them, but using her poles to move her along, her limbs stiffening with her frozen clothes, the toes on her bootless foot so numb they were like balls of ice. She couldn’t imagine afterwards how she’d done it, those last few steps slow and clumsy as the cold began to take her over. Hypothermia. It wasn’t long off.

  At the top of the trail, Hy put a hand on Jamie’s shoulder to steady herself.

  “Ski home now,” she said.

  “No, I’m going to stay with you.”

  “You’ll do more for me by getting home as fast as you can, bringing some dry clothes and help. Phone Ian. Phone Jamieson. Hell, phone Jared if you can’t find anyone else.” She was forgetting they had no phone. “Now go.” She pushed at him and he took off, already able to work the skis as if they were part of him, moving fast. Hy followed, dragging herself forward with the poles. She had to keep moving. She couldn’t risk hypothermia. She’d almost died of it as an infant. She knew the signs – not because she remembered them, but because she had studied them.

 
She was beginning to feel warm and drowsy.

  Jamie was clinging to Jamieson on the back of her snowmobile, a sled hitched to it. In spite of their mission, there was glee on his face, as they tore out of the police house driveway and bumped onto the back field. He felt important. He was there to show them the way. Murdo was right behind on Ron Dewey’s machine. Ron had left it behind when he ran out on April, and they were Murdo’s now. The snowmobile – and April.

  “There she is.” Jamieson pointed at a figure struggling through the snow on all fours. They sped up, and just as they got there, Hy slumped down.

  Jamieson rolled her over and took her pulse.

  “Thank God,” she said. In her haze, Hy half-heard. Was it real or imagined? Had Jamieson said that? That way? It sounded as if she cared.

  Jamieson wrapped Hy in blankets and they strapped her onto the sled. She was impatient to go down into the gully. The child had said his father was there. Dead. She didn’t want to lose a corpse like before, but she felt oddly protective of Hy. She sent Murdo on ahead.

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Don’t disturb the scene.”

  “As if – ” Murdo mumbled, the comment drowned in the roar of the motor.

  The closest place was Wild Rose Cottage, short on water and on warmth. No, best to go to Ian Simmons’. Jamieson called ahead, dropped Jamie off at the police house where his skis were, and went on to Ian’s. He was waiting at the door when Jamieson arrived. Together, they carried Hy in.

  “Is she – ?” His face was etched with worry.

  “She’ll be okay, I think. You’ll have to warm her slowly. Slowly.” Her tone underlined the word. “Cool water on her hands and feet. Then lukewarm, and so on.”

  “That’s okay. I’ve read up on it.”

  Of course he had. McAllister’s story.

  Jamieson had read up on it, too.

  She’d also lost a corpse before. Last year. That wasn’t going to happen this time. And now that Hy was safe, her mind was flying back to the gully – the gully where Jamie had told her his father was.

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to leave her with you. Fitzpatrick’s been found.”

  “By Hy?”

  “Yes. Dead.” Another one? Was death stalking her, reminding her of her loss and her guilt?

  “How dead?”

  Jamieson almost smiled. You could take that two ways.

  “Don’t know yet.”

  “Not another murder?”

  “Better not be.”

  Ian could imagine people would be lining up to kill Fitz. The list of suspects would be long.

  “But who – ?”

  “Everyone’s a suspect.”

  “But not me,” Ian grinned a silly grin.

  Jamieson did not smile back.

  “You as well. If it’s murder.”

  He should have known better than to joke – or flirt – with her.

  Hy was flying down the trail toward the culvert – only this time she had no sense of control at all. And no control over the nightmare. The lifeless body of Fitz Fitzpatrick suddenly swung before her, suspended from – nothing. Flying through the air, and she was flying toward him. She couldn’t stop herself.

  The impact was horrifying. His body came to pieces, but his head was now suspended by the bicycle chain, and his mouth was in a grimace. His hands reappeared, the body reassembled itself, and he reached for her.

  She woke on a scream, and Ian was right there beside her, holding a cool cloth to her head. She began to shake from both the cold of the cloth and the heat generated by her dream, her body thermostat all out of whack.

  “It’s okay, Hy. I’m here. You’ve been having a bad dream.”

  She smiled weakly.

  “I thought so, too,” she said. “But it was pretty real when it was happening.” She told him about it.

  He laughed.

  “Pretty real.”

  She smiled, a weak smile.

  “I didn’t know if I should wake you,” he said.

  “I probably would have killed you, thinking you were Fitz of the flying face.”

  Jamieson was staring at the body in the stream, his face contorted, gaping up into the sky and the tree that had killed him. She was examining the broken branch closely. Forensics’ decision. That lazy Ralph Wilson had no intention of sending any of his men, or himself, out in the aftermath of the storm a hundred kilometres to the godforsaken Shores. That’s why they’d put Jamieson out there. To deal with things like this. Obvious suicide. Murderers don’t hang people.

  She argued that it was only hearsay, that she herself hadn’t yet seen the corpse.

  “Then you better get over there,” said Wilson, tweaking his mistress’s breast and hanging up the phone. Hy had said the last thing she saw before she landed in the creek had been Fitz’s legs dangling, that she hit them as she went by, then was thrown into the water as he came tumbling down on her.

  Jamieson had no reason to disbelieve Hy, so she could assume that Fitz had died from a broken neck or suffocation. There had been a struggle. The branch was raw in several places, the smell of fresh spruce invaded the air.

  The water was high, rushing over the rocks fuelled by the melting of the wet new snowfall, some of it splashing over the bridge, icing over what was left of the footprints there. Spread out and enlarged by the melting. Too many of them. She tried to piece together what had happened. Was it an accident – or foul play of some kind?

  The body smelled. Urine. Tobacco. Marijuana. Rum. The scents were accented in this otherwise pristine place. Jamieson pressed a handkerchief over her nose, and leaned in to examine the wound. Terrible bruising around the larynx, the neck raw from grating against the bicycle chain that now lay limp around his neck. What had happened? Not suicide. An accident? Misadventure? Manslaughter?

  Jamieson could only imagine the sequence of events that must have taken place on the culvert. She couldn’t know, because she hadn’t been there. Plenty of other people had. It looks like the whole village has been here. As the top layer of snow melted off, there were footprints iced in all over the place. Footprints – so difficult to gauge because they were enlarged in the snow. There were her own. Those she could account for because of the distinctive pattern on the sole of the RCMP boot. Then there had been Hy, on her skis, those tracks cutting through some of the prints. Jamie. Same thing. Then what appeared to be cowboy boots. MacPherson? Billy boots – big enough to be adult? Child? Hard to say. Adult woman perhaps. One large, one small set of what looked like slippers. Slippers in the snow? And blood. Spots of blood. A trail of blood, which led out the other way from the culvert, but Jamieson knew the trail circled back to Wild Rose Cottage. She strung yellow police tape on two spruce trees across the trail, and went to ferret out how the blood got there. It didn’t come from Fitz.

  His was a bloodless death.

  Jamieson examined Fitz’s footprints closely. Her interpretation would be crucial.

  They were spaced far apart, a leap not a walk, the footprints landing heavily, evenly. In between them, the handprints, smudges in the snow, harder to discern unless you knew what they were. She knew. The handprints, deep into the snow, carrying weight. Rose had told her about the family’s acrobatic past, and close examination of the series of prints…hands, feet…hands, feet…told Jamieson that Fitzpatrick had been doing flips. In spite of his reported state of intoxication, the acrobatics appeared to have been executed under control. So how had he gone flipping off the bridge and onto that tree – unless he was helped?

  She examined the prints again. Was there a slight turning of the feet on the last landing? Was it enough to have unbalanced him and sent him flying in the wrong direction? It was just possible. She took measurements of the trajectory. It would only be rough, but forensics would have the mathematics to work with.

  She couldn’t mak
e a casting of footprints in ice, so for now she took photos of Fitz’s acrobatics. Hands. Feet. Hands. Feet. He flipped his way down the slope and across the culvert to his death. Such a cluster of footprints around Fitzpatrick’s final flip. They could have been put there at any time. They could have been witnesses to the event – or its aftermath. They could have been there even before he did his acrobatics, which some appeared to be, his footfall heavy on top of theirs.

  He could have been pushed. He very well could have been pushed. It could have been murder. At the very least, manslaughter.

  She imagined Fitz, down here on his own. This was something Jamieson was good at, though she tried to repress it. Imagining what might have happened often led her to the truth.

  The snow was falling, at first lightly, then thickening, the wind picked up and began to wail, even in the shelter of the woods. The sound of it circled around, until it became the only sound that he could hear.

  He might have been singing and weaving across the culvert, taking a swig from his mickey.

  The warmth of the liquor burned down his chest, mingling with the sweet taste of marijuana on his tongue. He was suddenly caught up in a feeling of expansiveness. Joy. A sense of his own strength and abilities. Immortal. And he began to flip. Back flips. One after another after another.

  And then he misjudged, and in a freak occurrence had hooked himself onto the branch. Or was it something more? He would not have heard footfalls behind him, cushioned by the snow, not – at first – have felt hands on his back, had there been any, at the height of the final in a series of flips, hands that might have been both soft and insistent.

  With the keen sense of the acrobat, in an instant he knew it was wrong, all wrong, and he went tumbling to his fate. A broken tree branch, jagged and menacing, thrusting up to the sky, caught the chain around his neck. He had struggled, and only wound it tighter. His hands grasped to tear himself free, but that just made it worse. His legs began to shake, independently of his desire. It seemed that every movement that he made only tightened the band around his neck that was robbing him of life.