***
So Gus was away for the day. Hy pondered it. That would give her a good long time to examine the computer and its files. Could she break into Gus’s house? It didn’t seem right, but she knew Gus wouldn’t mind if she checked the computer.
That was the same as permission, wasn’t it? And she wouldn’t have to break in.
She knew where the spare key was. Under the pot that had been placed on the stoop for just that purpose. Every house had one. The back door led directly into the computer room, so she wouldn’t have to tiptoe through the house like an intruder. Hy wheeled her bicycle around to the back, leaned it against the wall of the house, and skipped up the steps to the back door. She searched under the pot. Not there. Slid her fingers blindly everywhere. She touched something metal. It fell through a crack in the wooden decking into the dark underbelly of the house.
She peeked under the house and saw nothing. She wasn’t going to crawl on her hands and knees in the dirt looking for it. Better wait until Gus got back.
***
The old man had discovered television. He’d only ever had two channels in his life, and he’d never seen a cartoon. Now, he couldn’t get enough of them. It seemed, except at the odd moment, he’d forgotten all about the fish. Or maybe he thought he’d caught the fish. He’d been on the boat when they snagged the big one. He’d seen it come and go. He muttered a bit while watching Finding Nemo, but that was about it.
Most of the time, like now, he’d sit on the couch, devouring a bag of chips and the latest animated special. Seamus had just brought in fresh supplies. He didn’t bother to put them away but just lined them up on the counter – chips, pizzas, Coke. The Hat Man would devour it all in no time. He was especially fascinated by the pizzas. Circle food. He would turn a pizza around, around and around, taking little bites of it.
The apartment looked like a dump. Fast-food cartons thrown on the floor, empty packaging on table and countertops.
Seamus knew they’d have to get out soon. He had no idea what he was going to do about the old man.
When he had no more use for him. That might be soon. He might never catch that fish.
He thought about driving him to some remote area and just letting him go. Like returning a beast to the wild. Like putting the elderly out on an ice floe.
There was no area more remote than where he’d come from in the first place, and Seamus didn’t dare return him there.
It would be known. That was the thing. It would be known that Seamus had abducted him.
Was there a chance that it would not? Dare he take that chance?
He didn’t want to kill him. He wasn’t sure he could. Oh, it would be easy enough to smother him in his sleep. He’d thought about it. A lot.
***
Damn! Hy couldn’t wait for Gus to return from Charlottetown, but she was going to have to. The brilliant idea simmered inside her, woven with a tight anxiety that Jamieson would think of it, too. But Jamieson wasn’t as familiar with the Mack household as Hy was. She probably hadn’t given the computer a thought, especially as it wasn’t in the kitchen anymore.
Hy was wrong. The idea had occurred to Jamieson about the same time it came to her. She hadn’t seen the computer in a while and didn’t know if it was still there. Dot had used it when she was there. Had Abel begun to use it? Might there be something on it that would provide a clue to his whereabouts?
Jamieson and Hy were in the door together, moments after Gus returned that evening. She hadn’t even had time to make a pot of tea, and here were the two of them descending on her, demanding to know where the computer was, who’d been using it…and all sorts. She waved them to the back room, continued making the tea, and left them to it. Whatever “it” was.
It wasn’t much. Jamieson had let Hy hack into the computer – she couldn’t have done it herself. And when they got in? Nothing. It had been wiped clean.
Like Abel’s memory?
Chapter 21
Seamus was shaking. With anxiety and fear. When his boss got back, it wouldn’t be long before she knew what he’d been up to – the trip in the fisheries boat, the helicopter jaunt, the purchase of the massive tank, and the use of personnel for his own purposes. The entire work of the department had come to a halt as he pursued his mad scheme. The bills were an unpleasant pile on his desk. Whenever he picked one up, there was another one underneath. He had to get Ferguson paying the bills, so he could pull out of his government job and realize his life’s dream.
Bringing the cod fishery back to Newfoundland. Restoring the way of life of his father and grandfather, and generations of O’Malleys before them.
When he thought about it, he began to sweat – from both fear and pleasure. The cold sweat of fear that he wouldn’t be able to pull it off. The warmth of the pleasure he felt rushing through his blood when he imagined himself, returning home, the conquering hero with a new kind of cod for a new life in Newfoundland.
He needed Ferguson, and what he thought was Ferguson’s money, for that dream to come true.
It annoyed Seamus that Ferguson wanted to keep the cod in the pond when they got it. He would play along if he had to, to get money off him, but their phone conversation was not going well. Ferguson wanted a fish alive and in his pond. That would be difficult to deliver, as Seamus had already found out. So would getting a fish that size to Newfoundland. Could he strip it of its milt and ova, and then kill it?
“You don’t need a live fish to establish a world record,” he argued. “You just have to photograph and weigh the damn thing, and you’re in. I might have to kill the cod after I harvest its ova and milt.”
“Kill the fish.” Ferguson frowned. It was true. The fish didn’t need to be alive to achieve a world record. But he wanted that fish alive. Period. He didn’t care what Seamus wanted. He’d just use him until the fish was reeled in.
“We can breed it in the pond. Find a mating pair.” A desperate suggestion, and he knew it.
“You couldn’t breed them for long in that pond.”
“Why not?”
“Look at the size of it. Look at the size of the fish. Imagine if even a dozen codlings came to life. They’d be so overcrowded in the pond they’ll kill each other, eat each other, die of disease, if they would even live and breed in warm water so close to the surface in the first place.” Another if.
“I’ll just keep one there.” Ferguson had been doodling a drawing of a cod on a notepad. “I’ll photograph it and weigh it, and leave it there.”
“First we have to get it.”
“How hard can that be? You’ve done it once… Now you know where they are, it’s not as if a fish that size can hide.”
“It’s done pretty well the past thirty years.”
Ferguson cracked his knuckles. “Things are different now.” Silence. Ferguson took a deep breath.
“Let’s just get the fish in that pond. I’ll cover your costs.” How he was going to get this past Letitia, he didn’t know, but he smelled a record-breaking deal and was chasing it down, like a cod after a clam.
Seamus smiled, a sly smile.
This might turn out for him even better than he thought.
A big fish and a weighty partner. With money.
But Ferguson didn’t have money. Not yet.
***
Ferguson surveyed The Shores pond, in the company of a contractor.
“Fix the bridge. It was damaged last winter. The community will want it repaired.”
His companion spat out a wad of chewing tobacco on the ground. Ferguson looked at it with distaste.
“Then build a frame and install this sluice gate.” He stroked his engineering marvel, welded himself, from his own design. He’d inspected the outlet on the far side. There was nothing needed there. It had been plugged up by the storm that had changed the pond from fresh to salt. There was only
a slight gap – too small for a big cod to get out.
A born Red Islander, the man knew his activity would attract attention. He also suspected the pond didn’t belong to this man. “What if someone comes up and asks me what I’m doing?”
“Tell them you’re with the Department of Fisheries…or Transportation…or something.”
That’s exactly what the man did when confronted by Jamieson on her daily rounds.
“What are you doing here?”
He’d put up yellow tape, to stop people from crossing the bridge.
“Fixin’ the bridge,” he said.
“Yes, it does need fixing. Who are you?”
“Department of Fisheries…or Transportation…or something.” He spit a wad of tobacco close to her boot.
What was that supposed to mean? Was he supposed to have a license, something to show her? She really didn’t know. Anyway, the bridge was getting fixed, that was the main thing.
***
Remembering. He was remembering. The fog cleared out of his brain and sent him spinning down into a memory.
A memory of the water circling.
A memory of the fish fighting.
A memory of the giant cod leaping into the air and dragging him out to sea. And then the near memory, the memory he almost never had. The fish hovering over the tank on the boat.
A memory that sent his heart beating, head pounding, arm shooting with pain.
He tried to get up, his feet touched down on open water, and he could find no solid footing. It felt real, the absence of a floor, of water, of something. The circles in the water became the room spinning around him, nothing firm anywhere.
He collapsed onto the floor, on the far side of the bed, beneath the windows. As he went down, he grabbed at the bedsheets and hauled them off. They fell on top of him.
***
It was an unusual repair job, everyone agreed, and a fast one. The man had it done in an afternoon. When he’d finished his work, they all walked down, one after another, to check it out. Wally Fraser waded into the pond shoulder deep to examine it and play with the new contraption under the bridge.
“It’s a sluice gate. Opens and closes automatically.” He pointed to a small black box in a plastic casing, with a red light pulsing. “Electronic. See, if I approach it, it opens up. Go through it, and it closes. Very clever.”
“And you’re very stupid,” said his wife Gladys. “Get out of there, Wally, you’ll catch your death. What do we need with a sluice gate?” she asked in her always-offended tone.
“Won’t last long… I give it one storm…see what the tide makes of that…” and other such comments came from the assembled villagers.
“Good job on the bridge, though,” said carpenter Harold MacLean. “That’ll withstand a winter or two, though I hear the next is bound to be the worst in a decade.” Harold was fond of predicting the weather, and people listened to him, though he was almost always wrong. When he nodded his head and said: “There’s talk of dirt comin’,” they’d prepare for fine weather instead.
“A sluice gate?” That was the refrain around the village all afternoon and into the evening, diminishing curiosity as to the whereabouts of Abel Mack. “Why a sluice gate?”
The question wasn’t answered, but they did solve part of the mystery. April Dewey had a cousin whose brother-in-law, Ken Campbell, was the guy who’d done the work. He said he’d done it for the cat fella, Brock Ferguson.
So then the refrain changed. It became: “Why’d he do that? What did he do it for? He paid for the bridge to be fixed and all.”
The most popular phrase was “can’t figure it out,” accompanied by shaking heads.
***
“There’s bound to be something we can do to find out the activities on that computer,” Ian said, when Hy called him from Gus’s on the phone with the long coiled cord that had been stretched so much it now reached from the dining room through the living room to the back room that used to be a porch. Hy and Jamieson were staring at the blank screen, hoping Ian would come up with something.
“I don’t imagine Abel was canny enough to keep it all from us.”
Ian frowned. Hy was right. Abel was not a techie. He was impressed that a guy in his nineties was using the technology at all.
“I’ll be right over. See what I can do.”
***
Ferguson had watched the villagers pointing, scratching their scalps, and shaking their heads over the work that he’d had done on the bridge. Too much attention being paid to the pond. O’Malley wouldn’t like it, he might bolt. He’d have to put a stop to it, create a diversion. He decided to do something for the village, to end their grumbling and bring them on side. A lobster dinner. The more he thought about it, the more he liked it. Yes, and he and Letitia would cook.
***
“A lobster dinner?” Gladys almost glowed. She would have if she’d ever spent any time outdoors, involved in healthy activity. “For the whole village?”
“Yes. For everyone.” Ferguson’s deep voice and creamy tones melted Gladys’s hard heart.
“That would be wonderful. What should we do? I could make my famous badada salad.” Gladys’s potato salad was famous, because it had killed an old lady and made the rest of the villagers ill at a community dinner years before. Ferguson didn’t know that.
“That would be great.” He gave her one of his best smiles, eyes flashing.
Gladys smiled back. She never smiled. This would be her vindication. She’d never been asked to provide potato salad for the village since that unfortunate incident. At least, she reasoned, the dead woman had been Wally’s cousin. Kept it in the family.
Letitia didn’t object to spending a bundle on a community dinner. Not at first. Not until she knew the reason for it.
Madeline, in her innocence, let her know.
“Let the cat out of the bag,” Gus chuckled when she heard.
“It’s kind of you to be hosting this dinner,” Madeline said when she next saw Letitia. “We usually have only one lobster dinner a year – after setting day – and we have to pay for that.”
“We’re happy to do it. It’ll give us a chance to get to know the community better.”
“And maybe they’ll stop being mad about the sluice gate.”
“The sluice gate…what?”
Madeline coloured. She could see she’d said something wrong. She wasn’t sure what.
Letitia went barging out of the room, as fast as her asthma could carry her, and confronted Ferguson in his den.
She began to wheeze. He tried to keep a benign expression on his face, but he felt murderous. It revealed itself in the grip he now had on her shoulder.
The wheezing intensified.
“My…p…p…puffer…”
He was tempted, for a moment, to let her be, to let her die of breathlessness. Whether or not he would actually have gone through with that was not put to the test, because Madeline appeared with the puffer. She’d heard the wheezing from the cattery and went running to the kitchen and back to fetch the device. Now she was as breathless as Letitia.
How could anyone breathe in the smoky air of The Shores that summer?
***
Gus was enjoying her cup of tea in the kitchen, puzzling over an entirely different conundrum. She had, she thought, cut all the pieces for the quilt she was embarking on. She’d done it so many years ago, she couldn’t swear to it, but it did have a piece of paper stuck in the plastic cover, and scrawled on it, the word “done.”
There were some sails missing. Perhaps she’d counted wrong. Like Abel, they must be somewhere.
***
Letitia was shaking her fist at Ferguson and breathlessly attempting to shout at him.
“You should not have spent that money without my consent.”
“Must I come
begging and scraping to you for every loonie I spend?” It was demoralizing. It made a child of him. Especially as there was so much money.
“What’s it for?” she demanded. “The sluice gate?”
The evidence was right there on Ferguson’s computer screen. He’d sat down to admire the design. Not so much for the bridge, which was a pretty straightforward repair job, but for the sluice. Elegant, he thought. Just because something was practical didn’t mean it couldn’t have grace. Grace wed to function.
Ferguson angled the screen toward her. The engineering diagram meant nothing to her. She saw neither grace nor function.
“The bridge at the bottom of the pond, where the water comes in from the Gulf. It was badly in need of repair. I thought it would be a nice gesture to the community, to help smooth our way into the village.”
Letitia’s frown turned to a small smile.
“Yes, that is a nice gesture.” There was a pause. Ferguson hoped it would silence her on the subject.
She was on the point of leaving, when she turned back.
“But the sluice. What’s that for? The community? Does it need a sluice?”
“Not exactly.”
“What does that mean? They either do or they don’t.”
“No, but I do.”
“For what?”
“Nothing you should bother your head with, my dear.” He stood up and reached a hand to her shoulder. He squeezed it lightly and lit up his eyes in that way he knew she loved and made her believe he loved her.
“It’s a little experiment I’m trying. I need to have something to do with my time.” He slid his arm around her shoulders and guided her out of the room.
“All in good time,” he said. “I’ll tell you all in good time. You’ll like the idea, you’ll see.”
Letitia wasn’t as much of a sucker for his charms as she led him to believe. That had worn off early in the marriage. But she needed to be loved. She felt so weak, so fragile, so unwanted that she welcomed any show of kindness, no matter how small. That’s why the cats. She knew they loved her.
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