All is Clam

by Hilary MacLeod

  “No, I’m a realist. I think Fitz was murdered. By Oliver, Rose. Or – ” A long pause. “Jamie.”

  “Oh, God, you don’t think – ”

  “I do. I don’t think Fitz mistimed in that gully. I think he was pushed at the critical moment. By someone who knew when that was.”

  “But he was legless – and neither Rose nor Jamie has the strength.”

  “It wouldn’t take much. If he were drunk enough. Besides, they would both know the timing.”

  “You haven’t told Jamieson what you think, have you?”

  “No. I don’t expect I’d have to. She should have figured it out herself.”

  Sudden, inexplicable panic gripped Hy.

  “You haven’t shown her the family history?”

  “No. I don’t expect Jane would consider it material or evidence of any kind.”

  “Jaaaane.” Jasmine had picked up the name again.

  So had Hy.

  It was the word Jane, not the word murder, that Hy had on her mind as she left Ian’s.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Rose Fitzpatrick had asked everyone to call her Rose Sullivan now that Fitz was dead. She looked happier, more alive. She didn’t have to have killed him to feel that way, look that way, but still –

  Jamieson was back for another round with Rose, like a dog chewing a bone. She felt ridiculous inside the tent, but the whole room was now leaking with the melting snow. At six feet, she had to bend over. It was uncomfortable, and put her at a disadvantage.

  “And so you went out. Why?” They’d covered this territory before, but a second interview, Jamieson found, could be more revealing than the first. It was a test to see if the stories matched – version one and version two. Jamieson had the notes, detailed notes, and she’d be comparing everyone’s first and second interviews tonight.

  “I was looking – ” she hesitated.

  “You were looking for…your husband?”

  A pause.

  “Yes.” Almost eagerly. “Yes.” As if she’d found a solution.

  Lying. She was lying. Why?

  “And you found him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dead or alive?”

  “Alive,” she said quickly.

  Lying. She was lying again.

  The way she said it told Jamieson that she was lying. Jamieson was keenly attuned to tone of voice and the meaning hidden behind the words.

  “So you found him alive?” There was a shade of disbelief in the question.

  Rose picked up on it. She nodded, and looked down at her hands, clasped in her lap. They both looked at them. Rose’s hands were trembling.

  Jamieson was also attuned to body language. She’d attended several workshops in it. All the trembling hands could tell her, though, was that Rose was upset, not guilty. As imperfect as a lie detector. Agitation, fear was easy to see, but not necessarily interpret. Upset didn’t equal guilt.

  “You found him alive. Was this before or after he met with Jared?”

  “I can’t say. I don’t know if he’d been there or not. All I know is, I found Fitz.”

  “Where was he standing when you found him?”

  A moment’s hesitation. Jamieson marked that, too, in her book.

  “On this side of the culvert.”

  “This side?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not the far side?”

  “No.”

  The content of the questions and the answers were barely important. What Jamieson was doing now was wearing down the…witness? Suspect?

  “Was he performing acrobatics?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “There’s no ‘of course not’ about it. We know he performed some stunts – and that, in part if not wholly, caused his death.”

  “I suppose.”

  Jamieson jumped into the tiny opening, the crack in confidence.

  “Might he have been – before you came?”

  “Might he have been what?”

  “Performing acrobatics?”

  “I suppose so.” Rose let out a sigh. She was weary of this questioning. When would it end?

  “What time was this?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “You can’t say – or you don’t know?”

  Jamieson’s tactic was working. She was wearing Rose down. A tear appeared in the corner of her eye. Not for Fitz.

  There was nothing of the grieving widow about this woman, thought Jamieson. She noted that down, too, and then circled back to where they had started.

  “So you went looking for your…husband…and you found him. Why were you looking for him?”

  “I wanted him home.”

  “Really?” The tone made it clear Jamieson didn’t believe her.

  “The weather was bad. He wasn’t in good shape.”

  “Was he stoned?”

  “He was drunk and stoned, both.”

  “And you left him there? In that condition?”

  “What could I do? I didn’t have the strength to force him to come home.”

  “But might you have had the strength to unbalance him in the middle of a flip? You, of all people, would know the perfect timing for that.”

  Would this woman never stop? Perhaps this would satisfy her.

  “That’s true,” said Rose. “I would.”

  Jamieson almost smiled with triumph. Was this a breakthrough in the case? Was Rose coming close to admitting she’d done it?

  It was one of them. One of the three. Which one?

  The woman, the man, the boy?

  They were her suspects, in that order. How was she going to prove it? What were their motives? Were their motives…mundane? Or were they…peculiar? She was betting on peculiar. It always went that way in The Shores.

  And that thought triggered another in her mind.

  Peculiar. Buddy is peculiar.

  She didn’t even say goodbye. She burst out of the house, jumped on her snowmobile, and made off to the shack in the field. No one was there. There was no smoke coming from the chimney.

  She charged up the steps, shoved open the door, half-expecting to find another dead man inside. But there was nothing. No one. She put her hand to the woodstove. Still a bit of warmth in it. She opened it. This time she didn’t notice the ember fall out.

  Buddy was missing. And she bet she knew why.

  Buddy had killed Fitz Fitzpatrick.

  She walked around the shack to make sure he wasn’t lying in the snow somewhere. The tracks around the shack were at least a day old.

  She headed for Hy’s, and walked up to the door with new determination.

  “Do you know where he is?” Jamieson did not even bother with a hello as she charged through Hy’s door. By now, she was thoroughly accustomed to the fact that Islanders expected you to come right in. Jamieson also expected Hy to know what she was talking about.

  Hy turned, interrupted from writing a piece about Old Christmas Traditions for her regular website client, the Super Saver grocery store. There were a couple of spruce needles in Jamieson’s hair. Hy smiled. She wasn’t going to tell her.

  “Where who is?”

  “Buddy. Second time I’ve been up there. No sign of him. He’s not in his shack.”

  “Oh, he’ll be somewhere around.” Hy looked out the window. Night was falling fast. It did that at this time of year. It seemed that the afternoon had only begun, and here it was ending.

  “I checked outside. No recent activity.”

  Hy screwed up her face. It wasn’t like Buddy.

  “You don’t think…?” Surely not someone else disappeared and dead?

  “I don’t know what to think.” Jamieson’s tone was impatient. She’d expected an immediate solution from McAllister. “I don’t
know the man.”

  Dark. It was dark now as Hy stared out the window, wondering where Buddy might be.

  Suddenly, through the window, she saw flames rising in the night.

  “It’s on fire,” she yelled, jumping up and knocking over her coffee so that it shot across the room, the liquid spilling all over the floor and splashing up onto the curtains. The new ones. She’d put them up yesterday as a Christmas present to herself. Creamy raw cotton, now etched with black coffee.

  No time for that. She grabbed a jacket, and tugged at Jamieson’s sleeve.

  “What’s on fire?”

  “The shack. Buddy’s shack.”

  They ran out the door, leaving it banging open, and jumped on the snowmobile. Jamieson accelerated so quickly it bumped down the lane and onto the road.

  Flames were licking the sky, so high up they were leaping beyond the tops of mature spruce trees.

  Like a tinderbox.

  They couldn’t get there fast enough. If Buddy were in the building he’d be dead by now. The entire shack was engulfed in flames.

  Outside, the well had an old-fashioned hand pump. Hy jumped off the snowmobile, grabbed the bucket hanging on a hook above the pump, and began pumping water into it. She whirled around and threw it at the inferno. The flames leapt out at her, as if fueled, not banked, by the water.

  Another bucket. The flames came shooting out at her again.

  Another. No change in the roaring power of the fire.

  And another. Until, exhausted, she gave up. Jamieson had not made a move to help her. She was frozen on her snowmobile. She knew the battle was hopeless, but it was more than that.

  Jamieson was reliving that other fire – more than thirty years ago. She was paralyzed, unable to respond, and buzzing with fear, an electric jolt through her like those flames shooting into the sky, a reaction that made her unfit for service. Her secret terror, the terror she never talked about, the terror she did not want to confront. And here it was, raging before her, and if she had needed to go into the building and save someone, she would not have been able to.

  Two snowmobiles pulled up. Murdo. Ben Mack. Behind them, a half-dozen cars, their occupants running awkwardly through the snow, some with buckets in hand. But when they got close to the building, they could see it was hopeless. The shack and everything in it would soon be gone.

  Jamieson managed to pull out of her paralyzed state. There were tracks and ice everywhere, illuminated by the fire. Buddy might have been back, fired up the stove – there were a number of ways a fire could have started. Ember on the floor. Spark from holes in the pipe. A tinderbox, as Jamieson had thought from the first. She had no idea she’d started it.

  Jamieson drove Hy back home when it was clear there was nothing to be done until the rubble cooled down, and they could search it to see if Buddy had been inside.

  Jamieson took a sip of tea. Hy was surprised when Jamieson accepted. She never had before. Was she melting? Becoming human?

  In a way, perhaps she was, but not in the way Hy thought. She was undone by the fire, by her memories, unsettled by her weakness, so off-balance that she had accepted Hy’s offer of tea. She didn’t usually drink on duty. Anything.

  But she had also begun to think that maybe this, too, was part of community policing. “When it cools down, we’ll search for human remains.”

  “Human remains?” Hy hated the thought of that phrase being attached to Buddy, to anyone she knew.

  “Yes, shards of bone and such. It won’t all have been burnt up.”

  “It?”

  “The skeleton. The body – if there is one in there.”

  “If there is?”

  “Well, we’ll have to get forensics to confirm that it is human remains and not a dog, or cat, or last night’s dinner.”

  Hy was not liking Jamieson, not liking her at all in this moment. She was so cold, clinical.

  What Hy didn’t know was that Jamieson was struggling back to normalcy. She was forcing herself to be analytical rather than compassionate, because it was the only way she could hold herself together.

  If she let go of the calm professional view, her blood would flood with panic, her mind would run away from her, leaving her here, a puddle of fear on Hy’s floor.

  She stood up, suddenly, because she had let that thought run away with her. She had to pull herself together. But her movement was so sudden, her composure still in pieces, that she lost her footing as she stood, grabbed onto the chair, knocked it over, and tumbled down with it.

  Landing, a puddle of fear, on Hy’s floor.

  Hy jumped up to help her, but Jamieson lifted a hand to stop her.

  “A minute. Just a minute,” she gritted her teeth. The pain of the fall had shocked her. She couldn’t move – at all – for a moment. Fear and shock running rampant inside her, unbalancing her, leaving her here, undignified, on the floor.

  Finally, she let Hy help her up, and eased back onto her feet.

  “Would you like another tea?”

  Jamieson shook her head.

  “No, no, I have to get back.”

  “Would you like me to drive you?”

  “No, I’ll be fine,” she said.

  Hy watched with concern as Jamieson left the house, got on the snowmobile, fired it up, and buzzed off into the dark, the beam of the craft’s light searching the road ahead.

  Hy was searching her mind for a clue to Jamieson’s behaviour. There had been that fire when she was a child. The loss of her parents. But Hy felt as if there were something more.

  Hy had never imagined that she would see Jamieson lack courage. Confronted by a fire, she lost it – and it wasn’t surprising considering her childhood tragedy. What Hy couldn’t know was the real tragedy. The shadow that stalked Jamieson.

  There were no bones found in the rubble of Buddy’s cabin – human, canine, feline, or supper. The final word would wait on forensics, when they bothered to get here.

  Jamieson was getting used to being ignored by the detachment. She didn’t mind it. She liked to have her own turf, and The Shores was becoming more and more hers. It would be better, though, if fewer people would spend their time dying.

  If the fire had killed Buddy, there was no evidence of it. She couldn’t say she was sorry about him, one way or the other. She knew some of the villagers were – they would miss his smile and his fiddle, they said, one after another echoing the same sentiment. And she would commiserate and pretend it meant something to her.

  It didn’t. Not the man. Not his music. Just his disappearance.

  Where had Buddy gone – if not to his death in the flames of that shack? Or somewhere else? Somewhere that had something to do with Fitz Fitzpatrick? Nothing was out of the question. Strange happenings around a murder must all be considered in the mix.

  Jamieson was thinking about that now.

  Where had Buddy gone – if he had not perished in the fire?

  Where would she find him?

  “Why?” Ian had asked the awkward question.

  Jamieson hadn’t thought of a motive. She knew it. Just knew that Buddy was to blame. There was a certainty in her that defied logic. She hated it. Wished she could prove it with the facts, but she couldn’t. It was just…just this feeling. This unwelcome feeling, this sure knowledge that she was right.

  “I don’t know why. Because he’s nuts.” If he were nuts, there didn’t have to be a motive.

  Jamieson had taken to stopping in at Ian’s on the way home to the police house. Home. It wasn’t a home. With Murdo gone so much, it was lonely. Jamieson had always been alone, kept to herself, enjoyed solitude. She had certainly never felt lonely before, in town with thousands of people whom she didn’t know. But here, in this village, surrounded by people who all knew each other, loved or hated each other, had at least feelings for each other, good or bad, Jamie
son felt lonely. Lonely for the first time. Ian’s computer screen saver throbbing its light onto the white landscape, chased by the flickering of the woodstove was warm and welcoming, and Jamieson responded to it.

  “Help me find him,” she said.

  Help? Ian found it an interesting choice of word. He was sure Jamieson rarely used the word, didn’t ever ask for help.

  But she had now, and he was more than happy to cooperate, to be in the thick of the investigation. This would put Hy’s nose out of joint, he thought. It wasn’t ill will, just part of their friendly rivalry.

  Hy’s nose would have been out of joint at Ian being so close to the investigation. And, maybe more, so close to Jamieson. He slipped onto the back of her snowmobile, arms around her slim waist, willow-thin like Hy’s. He could just feel the drop of her breasts on his arms, her back lined down his torso, her buttocks up against –

  Better stop thinking about it.

  Ian was very close to making his attraction to Jamieson abundantly clear.

  He tried to bring the stirrings under control.

  The hum of the snowmobile and the vibration of the engine didn’t help.

  As they sped across the shining snow, Jamieson went over and over it all in her mind. Jamieson suspected none of them – and all of them. Could it have been the woman? No. No. The fat man? The child? Any of them could have done it, she knew – by accident or intent. She had no desire to bring them to justice, not for that man Fitzpatrick. Lord knows what he had done to his wife and child. She’d asked, but they hadn’t said. That didn’t mean a thing. She thought of her own guilt, how she, at six years old, had gone downstairs on Christmas Eve and had turned on the tree lights to enjoy them secretly on her own, something that was forbidden, something that had killed her family. Her father never left the lights on overnight – a fire hazard, he had said. But she had done it. Left them on. Not even her sister knew. Or did she? Sometimes, Jamieson thought, she suspected. Perhaps it was why they were not close, this sliver of suspicion dividing them.

  Should she have confessed at six years old? Should she have been convicted? No, it was an accident. An accident that had haunted her all her life.

  The man, the woman, the child, she wanted all of them to go free, murder or accident. It wasn’t about justice in court. It was about a larger justice, for having suffered so and, having got rid of that suffering, as Jamieson herself had not.