She dragged herself out, wet cotton clinging to her and making it hard to walk.
“There he is!” A voice she knew. Gus looked behind her. Hy and Jamieson, wearing dresses and pushing bicycles through the sand. Jamieson shone a light down the beach. The beam appeared to be coming from the palm of her hand.
If she could have run, Gus would have.
There, just up from the high tide mark, was a pile of clothes, neatly folded and stacked, Abel’s work boots beside them. Sitting atop the dungarees and striped cotton shirt was the Tilley hat.
Jamison and Hy trudged through the deep dry sand. Their bicycles had disappeared. Gus stayed where she was, unable to navigate the sand, but itching to grab up Abel’s clothes; a part of him, at least, found.
Jamieson and Hy stopped and stared down at the pile.
Jamieson crouched down, looked at the clothes, out at the water, up at Hy.
“What do you think it means?”
“I know what it looks like.”
“That he took off his clothes and walked into the water.”
“That’s what it looks like.”
“Any other explanation?”
“None that I can think of right now.”
Had he walked into the water?
“He ain’t dead,” Gus kept insisting.
“How do you know?” Jamieson asked again. And again, the same answer:
“I know. Some things you just know. This is one of the things I know.”
“In spite of his clothes on the beach?”
“They don’t matter. Those clothes ain’t him.”
“Surely they suggest…”
Gus cut her off. She didn’t want to hear the “s” word, as she called it. Suicide.
“Only to some people as don’t know Abel.”
Gus stood up tall, in her “end of conversation” pose.
“’Sides, his long johns aren’t here.”
***
She woke to find herself standing on her stoop, Hy gently shaking her shoulder.
Gus was in a daze. It was dawn. She’d been dreaming. And sleepwalking. That hadn’t happened to her since she was a child.
“Abel…” she murmured.
“What’s going on?” Jamieson’s voice rang out from the lane.
Hy looked over. “Nothing. It’s…uh…nothing.”
“It doesn’t look like nothing.” Jamieson marched over and up the steps. She took a close look at Gus. At her eyes. Unfocused.
Hy could see, too, that Gus wasn’t quite with them.
“I wuz dreamin’ about Abel.”
“And?” Hy coaxed.
“I saw his clothes on the shore.”
“You were at the shore?” Hy looked down at her old friend’s feet. Bare.
“Can’t say as I was, but I reckon I was walking in my sleep.”
“I better check,” said Jamieson. It was a long shot, but who knew where Gus had been in her nightie?
As expected, she found nothing.
Chapter 8
It was Gus’s neighbour Estelle Joudry who spotted the body when she stepped out on her front stoop the next morning. She actually had to crane her neck to see it, but she was skilled at that, and the open door of the house across the road was just visible beyond the spruce trees that fronted it. Estelle made her way on tiptoes down her front steps and across the lawn.
She looked both ways before crossing the road – not to see if there were any cars, but to see if anyone was watching her. She continued on tiptoes up to the house.
When she saw him, it took a moment to register that she was looking at a body. A dead body.
She screamed.
Backed away.
Screamed again.
Turned and ran. No tiptoes now. Hard thumping on the wet morning grass. Her damp footprints fleeing across the road. Back to the safety of her front stoop.
She gulped in air, and with it, smoke. The smoke was so thick and her body so tense, she couldn’t take a proper breath. She kept gulping. The gulping turned to hyperventilating, panic, and the sound alerted her husband Germaine, who polished off his morning coffee before he went to help his wife.
He thought it might be a heart attack. He knew about those, having had a couple himself, bearing the red scar from a quadruple bypass.
While Germaine knew about having a heart attack, he didn’t know anything about dealing with one. So it was handy that Estelle was not in cardiac distress.
Gradually she calmed down, and Germaine went back to the kitchen to pour himself another cup of coffee, leaving Estelle on the steps. She came in a few moments later, her face white, her eyes bug-open, her mouth opening and closing with no sound coming out.
Germaine thought that if it was a heart attack, she had poor timing. She hadn’t made his breakfast yet. As if on cue, his stomach grumbled.
Taking the cue, Estelle cracked an egg into the toaster and popped two slices of bread into the frying pan.
Germaine looked confused. Estelle was confused by his confusion. Then she saw what she had done. Egg in the toaster and bread in the frying pan. She clutched her apron over her face. Dropped it down. Her world was upside down. Always looking for a choice piece of gossip, she had one now. Now she wasn’t sure she wanted it. Or that she knew what to do with it.
“He’s dead.”
“Who? Abel?”
Her coughing drowned out his question and prevented a response. She shouldn’t have run in that air. It was always worse in the morning, the smoke from Quebec. Germaine was watching the gelatinous egg white run down the side of the toaster. He could smell the bread, burning in the frying pan.
Germaine grunted. “How do you know he’s dead?”
“Saw it with my own eyes. Over the road. Lying flat out right inside the house. Strong nor’easter musta blown the door wide open.”
“How’d you know he was dead?” Germaine asked again, finding her answer unsatisfactory.
Estelle looked at Germaine with an edge of superiority.
“You’d know it if you seen it. Some things you just know.”
“Then you better be phoning the Mountie.” That’s what most of the villagers called Jane Jamieson. They couldn’t call her Jane. They couldn’t get their heads around her surname. Jamieson. It was a man’s name, wasn’t it? At one time, the word “Mountie” would have meant a man. Times had changed.
The yolk of the egg had now slid down the side of the toaster, too, and was congealing on the plastic tablecloth. “Phone after breakfast,” he added quickly, afraid his meal wasn’t going to happen.
“No, it’ll have to be now.” Estelle had spied her neighbour Gus, out hanging clothes on the line. It gave her a sense of urgency.
***
“He was lying there, just like that.” Estelle pointed down at the corpse splayed out in the tiny entranceway. She pointed at it, but turned her gaze from it. She couldn’t bear to look.
Jamieson sighed at the intelligence of her witness. She should have been used to it. It had been some years now since she’d been assigned to this village in the back of beyond. Assigned permanently, a full-time police presence in a tiny village with a history of murders.
“Abel Mack,” said Jamieson. So this is what he looked like. Thin. Spare, bones sticking out. She had not imagined him this way. A warm rush of anxiety overtook her. How would she tell Gus? Maybe she could tell Hy, and let her do the dirty work? She knew she couldn’t do that. It was her duty to tell Gus her husband was dead. That was the problem with community policing. Getting to know people. Getting to…like people. It got in the way of the job.
“What’d you say?” Estelle looked confused.
So did Jamieson.
“Abel Mack,” she repeated.
“No. No, this ain’t Abel. This is Jimmi Dunn.
”
“Jimmy… Dunn?” What Estelle had said on the phone now made sense. Jamieson had thought that when Estelle had said “done,” she meant dead. Well, he was dead. Dunn. Done. “Jimmy Dunn?”
“No. Not Jimmy.” Having finished his breakfast, Germaine had strolled across the road to weigh in and pay his last respects to his old friend, Abel. But it wasn’t Abel.
“It’s not Jimmy with a ‘y.’ It’s Jimmi with an ‘i,’ like his brother Billi,” Estelle explained, as if somehow she could hear that Jamieson had been mentally spelling it wrong. In fact, she assumed come-from-aways wouldn’t know, so she automatically corrected them. “Billi passed away a few years back. Same thing happened to him. Same exact door. Shoulda fixed it.”
“Thought Jimmi died years ago.” Germaine had overcome the shock of finding that Abel was not dead, at least not here right now. He gazed down at the body of Jimmi Dunn.
“No, no. That was his brother Billi.” Estelle was the only one in the village who could tell one twin from the other.
“Never could tell them apart.”
“Of course not. They was identical twins.” And identical fools. They’d both changed the spelling of their names to end in “i” after smoking dope in the sixties.
“It’s lucky we found him at all.” Estelle was full of self-importance. “He never went out and no one ever visited. Weren’t for that nor’easter that blew his door open, we’d never have known. For who knows how long.”
She didn’t stop to think that if the door had not blown open, neither twin would be dead, not from that, anyway.
Jamieson left the body untouched, until she got some forensic information on the manner of death from Finn Finnegan, Hy’s long-lost half-brother. Hy and Finn had reunited last year, thanks to Facebook. He came to visit and stayed, mostly because he’d fallen for Gus and Abel’s daughter Dot, who’d now dumped him and left the village. Finn was a forensic scientist who’d given up that career to focus on the environment, but he helped Jamieson occasionally.
This was surely a natural death? Hit by a door. Or perhaps a heart attack? Stroke? An old man. Jamieson found it disconcerting, that the death came hard on the heels of Abel Mack’s disappearance. Were the two connected? Jamieson knew that anything unusual that happened around a death or a murder, perhaps also a disappearance, should be considered connected unless proven otherwise.
What was the connection between Jimmi Dunn and Abel Mack?
***
“Abel owns the mortgage to Jimmi’s place.” Gus was forthcoming when Jamieson asked her about the two men. “Owns the mortgage on a lotta places, come to that. Didn’t ever make any money from it. Did it out of the kindness of his heart, helping people out.”
“But the Dunns have money.”
The Dunn family had produced a long line of doctors and undertakers in Winterside, keeping the business of the dying and the dead in the family. The senior Dr. Dunn was in his nineties, and still practising medicine. All those years practising and he hadn’t got it right yet, Gus always said.
“Happen that’s so. But Jimmi and Billi never went in for doctoring or dying. Their father disowned them. They shifted along as farm workers and fish-plant workers. They stopped working as soon as they got the old age pension. Then Billi died a few years back.”
“So Abel held their mortgage. So they owed him?”
“Everyone owes Abel.”
“And when they died, what was theirs became his?”
Gus looked up sharply.
“I s’pose it did.”
***
What was theirs wasn’t much, Jamieson discovered. Just the old house, in such bad shape it couldn’t even be called a fixer-upper. There was a shed, even older, and a patch of land carpenter Harold MacLean said “couldn’t keep a rabbit alive.” Hardly the killing fields.
Jamieson couldn’t believe that the ninety-year-old Abel had killed Jimmi Dunn, but it bore thinking about, the disappearance of one coming so close on the death of the other. Had there been an argument? Some pushing and shoving? An old man losing his balance? A wound to the head? Manslaughter, if not murder? Or was Dunn collateral damage – ahead of the main event? Was there murder in the smoky air? Was this death a foreshadowing of more to come? Deaths never seemed to happen singly here.
Jamieson continued to toy with the idea of Abel as murderer – or guilty, perhaps, of manslaughter, an accident he had fled from. Jamieson used to get excited over the possibility of murder, cracking a big case, bringing the homicidal to justice. That was before it became a regular event in The Shores, of all places. She’d never had a murder case before she’d come to this tiny, sleepy village. Now it was an annual occurrence.
Unnatural.
“Natural causes,” Finn’s message said on the police-phone voice mail. The forensic people rarely came way out here to The Shores. Jamieson was glad to have Finn in the neighbourhood at times like this. That’s what she told herself.
It didn’t explain why she felt a sense of disappointment that she hadn’t been there to take the call in person.
She brushed the feeling aside, and focused on what Finn had said.
What about the wound to the head?
It was as if the “voice-mail Finn” had anticipated her silent question.
“The door must have swung open and bashed him in the head. Same thing happened to his brother a few years back. Same door. Jimmi saw that happen, and Dr. Dunn was there at the time, visiting. That was before your time. Mine, too, but Dr. Dunn told me about it. Anyway, it works out mathematically and cerebrally. Should’ve fixed the door before it fixed him.”
Said with a grin she could hear but couldn’t see or respond to. Because he wasn’t there, he also could not see something, something rare – the sudden, soft smile on her face.
The thought that produced it would have surprised him.
It surprised her.
Open and shut case.
It was the sort of thing Hy would have said. She must be rubbing off on Jamieson. Perhaps it was born of relief. Relief that this was not another murder, the traditional annual killing.
Fine. So they weren’t looking for a murderer. Just a missing man. An old man who’d gone missing. Gone missing, the phrase they used in the media all the time. It did make sense in a curious kind of way, but did that mean if you found him he was here found? Gone found? Found missing?
Chapter 9
The hat was over his face, keeping the light out. There was a shade on the one window, but it had split with age and hung down, letting in a beam of light.
He had a pounding headache. A caffeine-withdrawal headache. He rolled off the cot, dumping the decades-old blanket on the floor, eyes squinting, adjusting to the play of the light and the dark in the tiny shack.
He searched for the ducky cup in the pink child’s knapsack on the floor. The knapsack had been…whose had it been? He scrunched up his face in puzzlement. Someone. Someone close. Spot? No, that was a dog’s name.
No mug. His face clouded, then cleared. He had three ducky mugs here, on the shelf above the sink.
He tugged a jar of coffee out of the knapsack. Water gurgled out of the faucet into a chipped earthen bowl shoved under it. The water came in burps, rusty at first, then clear. There was a single propane burner and a pot. He filled it with water, lit the burner, and soon was drinking his morning coffee out of the ducky mug.
He drank two cups. Put the cup he’d used back on the shelf and tossed an unused one into the pink knapsack.
Now he had to pee.
***
Seamus O’Malley’s heart was in Newfoundland, where generations of the men of his family had fished cod. Until the moratorium. The mismanagement. The dismal days of no decent employment. The days that drove desperate men to desperate measures. His father was one of the most desperate. The first day he had gone to the fo
od bank had been his last day. They found him late that night, hanging from a beam in the barn.
Like many others, Seamus emigrated to Canada. That’s how he, and others like him, thought of it. Going to another country. He hoped to be going home soon, a triumphant hero, the saviour of the cod fishery.
He was looking down at the photograph on his desk, tracing the outline of the big fish idly, as he had been doing the past several days. His officemate, curious, came and looked over his shoulder.
“Man, that’s some big fish,” he commented. “Tuna?”
Seamus snorted dismissively. Brian Cobb was an idiot. How he’d managed to get a job with fisheries, Seamus didn’t know. The feeling was mutual. Cobb thought Seamus was certifiable. That it was madness on the boss’s part that he’d been left in charge.
“Tuna?” Seamus sneered. “No.”
“Then what? That big?” Brian peered closer. It was hard to tell, because the fish was twisted around in its struggle to free itself, and he’d never seen any fish that big.
“Tuna could be that big – must be around two hundred pounds. Bigger than the man.”
“Could be around three hundred pounds. Maybe more. Yes, I think more.”
Brian whistled. “Where?”
Seamus suddenly realized he’d got sucked into this conversation all because of his own interest in the fish. He didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want anyone else getting ideas like he had. Not that Brian would know an idea if it hit him. Literally. Anyway, this was common knowledge. Or public knowledge, anyway. This photograph. He had to find the book. Or the fisherman. Or both. Before that Ferguson guy did. He wanted to have the upper hand.
When Brian left for lunch, Seamus picked up the phone and called his only contact at The Shores. Hy McAllister. She’d done a lot of work for the Red Island Department of Fisheries, through her website editing company, Content. She’d know.
Cod Only Knows Page 5