Only Jamieson appeared unaffected. She’d trained herself not to show the heat, even wrapped in her police jacket, pants, and boots. It was one of the things that Finn admired about her. He himself was ready to pull off his T-shirt and expose his naked skin. It would never do.
“Mighty hot in here,” someone said, finally.
It was, thought Jamieson. Too hot. She marched up the stairs to the kitchen and flung open the door.
A billow of steam hit her solidly in the face, burning, turning to water dripping down her skin. The vapour seeped around her and into the hall.
She could hardly see into the kitchen, so obscured was it by the clouds of steam coming from four big pots, boiling crustaceans to their deaths.
Coughing. Desperate coughing. Coughing, turned to choking.
“Help. Please help.” It was Ferguson, somewhere on the other side of the room. On the floor?
Jamieson skirted the island counter and almost tripped over Letitia. She was rolling around on the floor, hand over her mouth in an instinctive but useless gesture. Ferguson was holding her head up and trying to still her.
The coughing continued. Harsh. Sharp. It was painful to hear.
“Get her out of here.” Finn had followed Jamieson through the door. The steam was clearing; some of it had escaped through the open door. He strode over to where Letitia lay, Ferguson and Jamieson at her side.
She stopped coughing.
“Good,” said Jamieson.
“Not good,” said Finn. He knelt down beside Letitia, took her pulse.
“No pulse,” he said, and motioning Jamieson and Ferguson out of the way, began CPR.
After ten minutes, he gave up.
“She’s dead,” he said, and looked at his watch. “Six forty-one p.m.”
Jamieson slipped her notebook out of her pocket and wrote it down.
“Asthma?” she asked.
Finn nodded. “They’ll have to confirm it in town, of course.”
“Of course.” Then she looked over at Ferguson.
“I’m sorry,” she said. He had a curious look on his face. Not a smile, certainly. Not a frown. A grimace? She couldn’t interpret it, she who was so good at reading body language. Body language, yes. Facial messages, not so much. Facial messages were too close to the emotions for Jamieson’s comfort.
Finn snapped off all the elements on the two stoves. He stared into the pots.
“You may want these for evidence.”
She looked up. Her eyes narrowed. Ferguson focused on Finn with intensity. She knew better than to ask Finn more right now. If he thought it was evidence – evidence of what? Why had he used that word?
“For now…” Finn opened and closed a few drawers until he found one with tablecloths in it. He drew out a large linen one.
“Finn, that’s the best –”
“No better use for it then.”
He unfolded it and laid it gently on the body of Letitia Ferguson, her face more peaceful than it had been in years, with the racking coughing that had tortured her stopped. Forever.
“Best call Nathan,” he said.
Many suppers at the hall had ended in disaster, and this one had, too. There had been the lobster rights activist who’d crashed the annual lobster supper, tossing pamphlets and slogans around; Gladys Fraser’s poisonous potato salad that had killed a woman and sent the whole village to the bathroom; and the senior who’d died in the loo. Beans.
Now, a woman had died, and nobody got a feed of lobster.
The crowd dispersed, with some mumbles and grumbles about there being no free lunch…or supper.
Jamieson asked Finn to stay behind with her and prepared to seal the kitchen area with yellow police tape.
The body must be moved first. Where was Nathan?
As if the thought had summoned him up, he came through the door and shrugged, his mouth a grim line.
“The van is gone.”
“Gone?”
“Gone.”
It sounded as if Abel were missing all over again. Gone. Gone? Gone.
“Left it in my driveway as usual after coming back from Winterside.”
“When did it disappear?”
Nathan shrugged again. “Didn’t know until you called, and there it…wasn’t,” he ended, weakly.
“All day, and you didn’t notice?”
“I was up all night. I slept in and then Lili and I –” Lili was Nathan’s yogi girlfriend and the village flower farmer.
Jamieson held up a hand.
“Enough information,” she said. “For now. We’ll deal with the van later, but right now we’ll have to call Winterside.” Jamieson slipped out her cellphone and clicked on the contact.
Nathan’s paramedic van – stolen? So now she was missing an old man and a van. Jamieson thought of the fresh tracks at the cove. Were they related?
For a moment, she didn’t know what to do first. Go after the elusive Abel – assuming he had taken the van – or deal with the death on her doorstep?
Just a death? She’d learned to consider all possibilities. Was there any chance it might be murder?
No. No chance. She’d seen the woman die herself. Black and white. The way she liked it. None of those greys. The smoky sky. The disappearance of Abel. The stolen van.
***
The old man knew places beyond Big Bay that were even more secret than Bloodsucker Cove. He’d driven Nathan’s van to one of these hidden spots off the road, the only road. A lonely road. The Island Way, where, beyond Big Bay, it circled around on itself and headed back to civilization, through The Shores and then straight on to Winterside. Made lonelier now by the sudden silence that descended. A silence so profound it seemed like a roar. The gulls had moved inland. They knew what was coming. So did Abel. He hoped to get out on the water before it arrived.
***
Seamus had waited most of the previous night and following day in a glade at the edge of Nathan’s property, where the van was clearly visible. He didn’t dare take his eyes off it and let the old man escape again. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do with him, but, whatever it was, it wasn’t going to happen in Nathan’s driveway. It would have to be a more secluded spot.
He’d missed his chance when Abel turned off onto Bloodsucker Cove. Seamus was driving without lights on and had no idea there was a lane there. Abel just veered off the main road without signalling. Seamus went squealing by. The road narrowed to not much more than one lane, with deep ditches on either side as it crossed over marshland.
He finally found a place to pull off the road. When he did, the van shot past him, and Seamus continued following at a careful distance, lights out. The van slipped into a secluded place off the road, and Seamus parked close by, hidden from the road and from his quarry by a stand of evergreens. He’d been drinking coffee and knocking back caffeinated candies to stay awake, but, in spite of his best efforts, he fell asleep.
It didn’t matter, not then, because Abel had fallen asleep, too.
Chapter 25
Jamieson was shocked the next morning to find out that Letitia’s body had been cremated, and she was to be buried that day in The Shores Pioneer Cemetery. Ferguson had moved fast, but within legal limits. He had Dr. Dunn issue the death certificate and the body released before most of the villagers had finished a disappointing supper at home, robbed of the promised lobster feast.
It took a few hours to burn her remains at the crematorium in Winterside. A few hours to cool the ashes down. Popped into a cardboard box, the cheapest conveyance for “cremains” available, Letitia returned to The Shores in the back of Ferguson’s car. The local gravedigger had shovelled out a hole three feet deep in the Pioneer Cemetery, Letitia’s final resting place acquired with a generous donation to the local Anglican church.
***
The s
ky was black and oppressive over The Shores. The smoke from Quebec mingled with the dark calm of the storm coming, the mood set perfectly for the funeral of a woman few of them had known. The cemetery was on a sweep of land high above the capes and the ocean, where the wind whispered on a calm day; on wild ones it “blew a gale” that flattened the tall grasses. It was never neutral, always moody in some way. Today, silence circled the place where the bones of the earliest European islanders lay. The unseeing dead had a better view than the living – of the village and fields below, the ocean curving in and out, defining Montgomery Shore, Vanishing Point, and Mack’s Shore. On a clear day a person could see all the way to Big Bay. That day was not today, with its thick ridge of black clouds rumbling over the land and water.
There was no church at the graveyard. The bodies had been buried there before a church was built. When it was, it was located inside the village, and the dead were left to shift for themselves on that wildly beautiful swath of land.
The entrance was a black wrought-iron gate – a gate in the middle of nowhere. Visitors didn’t have to go through it to get to the graves. They could, and usually did, enter on either side of it. But it defined the place, as did the big granite rock that marked the graves no longer seen, hidden by time, the last resting place of the pioneers. Pioneers with their familiar names. Mack. Toombs. Fraser. Joudry. Dewey. Everyone had someone here.
The grass was cut the way Red Islanders liked it – short as a crewcut and maintained that way through the growing season. Around the outside of the clifftop cemetery, the wild grass grew, waving in the wind, moving to its command, blowing life through this place of death.
What a waste, thought Ferguson. It was a property he longed to possess. He wouldn’t mind the crumbling bones beneath him, but he might mind being so close to Letitia’s remains. It was too bad Letitia was dead, but now he’d have the money, to use as he wished. No more asking. Except, of course, there’d be a temporary freeze on all her assets. That would be a spanner in the works. Still, people would know he was good for the money.
In an exhibition of undue haste, Ferguson had requested the lawyer’s presence immediately after the burial, so that they could get right down to business.
All the villagers showed up for the send-off. They loved a funeral, and they loved their Pioneer Cemetery. It was a major tourist stop on the Island Way. That comforted them – knowing that people would always be coming to visit, even if they were strangers from away. They’d be buried next to their neighbours and visited by folk from around the world. They wouldn’t be lonely in death.
Connoisseurs of funerals, the villagers had been expecting something more traditional than Ferguson provided. The minister was of uncertain faith. There was no praying, no Twenty-Third Psalm, no “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places,” and no kind words about the dead woman. They watched, mystified, when Ferguson took off as soon as he could, leaving strangers to stand by Letitia’s grave, ears assaulted by the bagpipe playing of Millie Fraser, Gladys’s granddaughter. She was as bad at the pipes as she was at singing and step dancing. Gladys, critical of everything, had a big blind spot about her granddaughter’s talents and had provided her services for the funeral, unbidden and unknown to Ferguson. She beamed as the girl tortured the pipes, their sound like seagulls screeching. She thought Millie was doing Letitia a great favour. She didn’t see the irony in having bagpipes, an instrument that required healthy lungs and a large breathing capacity, played at the funeral of a woman who had spent years unable to catch a breath. And had died because she could not.
Gus surveyed the graveyard, looked down at the open grave, tossed a handful of earth onto the cardboard box. “She don’t know anyone here,” she said to no one in particular. She shook her head, unable to imagine being buried in a place she didn’t come from, without her neighbours close by. The graves were ready and waiting for her and her kin, with their names and birthdates carved in stone, lacking only that final date.
The Macks had a massive monument, detailing the deaths of generations. Ben and Annabelle’s names and birthdates were there, too, waiting with a dash. Annabelle found it creepy, but Gus found it comforting. What disturbed her was the possibility that Abel might not make it here, to lie beside her through all eternity.
Would Abel ever find his grave, Gus wondered, as she stood considering the monument. Was he dead, with nothing to be found, none of him to bury? What did you do when someone was “missing and presumed dead”? Did you dig a hole and fill it back up? Would he have anywhere to go after, if he didn’t start from the right place, this grave here, waiting for him? And when did you presume? Seven years, that’s what she’d heard. She didn’t expect she’d live another seven years. What would he do if he came back, and she wasn’t there?
She shuffled away with her troubling thoughts. She hadn’t lost her faith that Abel would be found and found alive. But he might have lost himself.
He might be found and not know who he was, who she was.
Chapter 26
“What did you mean…evidence?” Jamieson and Finn were back in the hall, still closed, the villagers grumbling that the Friday night crokinole evening might be cancelled.
“Evidence of what killed her,” said Finn.
“You said asthma.”
“That’s what it was, I’m certain. Asthma. But, when I looked in those pots, it made me think.”
“What?”
“She may have been murdered.”
“But I saw it. She obviously had asthma…or was choking on a piece of food.”
“No, I cleared out her tubes when I did the CPR. Nothing there. I bet she had The Lung.”
“The Lung. What’s that?”
“Crab asthma.”
“Crab asthma?”
“Like regular asthma, only it affects people who work in fish plants, mostly women, because that’s who works there. They become allergic to the crabs. The asthma is carried on the steam, you might say. Like any asthma, it can kill a vulnerable person.”
“What makes it crab asthma?”
“The steam from cooking crabs carries proteins that can cause asthma.”
“But it was a lobster dinner. Can lobster do it?”
“No. But you’re wrong. That’s crab in those pots. Change of menu.”
Jamieson flushed. She hadn’t looked in the pots. She ducked under the yellow police tape and motioned him to follow. She marched into the kitchen and lifted a lid off one of the pots. Then the next. Then another. And the final one. Crabs in all of them.
The scent of eight-dozen crabs sitting overnight in lukewarm water was overpowering.
“Phew. That could kill anyone,” said Finn.
“This is what you meant when you said evidence.”
“Yup.”
“What should I do with them?”
“You can’t keep them. Unless you want to freeze some, but it’s not like they contain a poison or anything. Why don’t you photograph them and then get Murdo to come and clean up?”
Jamieson thought that was a great idea. The ladies had been ordered out of the hall and wouldn’t appreciate being ordered back in to clean up. Get Murdo to do some work for a change, while she went over to ask Ferguson a few questions. But first, she had to field a call from the Superintendent.
***
“You’ve dropped the ball, Jamieson.”
Jamieson could hear that she was on speakerphone, that hollow sound. There was another sound, too, periodically, as she spoke to Superintendent Constable. A “whack,” followed sometimes by a curse.
The Superintendent was practising his golf swing. It wasn’t going well. The reason: his irritation and impatience at having to deal with police matters when he was due on the links in less than an hour. He was especially anxious to get there, as he was going to be playing his favourite partner, the only one he could beat.
> “You’ve got to keep your eye on the ball. On the ball,” he repeated, lining his club up for another swing. He swung. Missed.
“Around here, you need eyes in the back of your head.”
A moment’s pause as the Superintendent took what turned out to be an extremely satisfactory swing.
“That’s as may be, but you can’t have people dying on your watch all the time. This woman now. You said natural causes?”
“Apparently.”
“Apparently? Apparently? What kind of answer is that?”
“Apparently –” she dared to be cheeky – “not a good one.” It was the sort of thing, she thought, that Hy would say. Was she rubbing off on her? Probably. The entire village had been rubbing off on her.
He grunted.
Like a cod in heat, she thought. More Hy.
“So what were the causes?” Swing. Whack.
“Our forensic man…” she thought that sounded more professional than “Finn.” And Finn was a fully certified forensic scientist. “Our forensic man says…”
“Damn!”
“No…”
“Damn!” A sound like an impact of some kind. A golf club and a wall?
“…says it could be crab asthma.”
“Oh, yes. Stands to reason.”
Jamieson didn’t think it stood to reason at all. She had expected the superintendent to be surprised, curious, disbelieving. Anything but matter-of-fact.
She didn’t know he’d spent his early years as a Mountie in Newfoundland. He’d seen crab asthma kill. Many times. Fish-plant workers. Mostly women.
“Then why was she here?” He rapped out a series of questions, anxious to return to his golf practice. “Who brought her here, now? In the current conditions? Why was she cooking crabs?”
It was maybe the smartest thing the superintendent had ever said or thought. The most useful words he’d spoken in his long, lacklustre career.
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