Cod Only Knows

by Hilary MacLeod

  “Could be. The mint doesn’t make them anymore, but Abel’s money would come from way back when they did, so there’d be a lot of thousand-dollar bills, is my guess. Gus says Abel worried about it when they stopped making them, worried they’d go the way of the one-dollar bill, and he’d be out of his life savings. I gather he got reassurance on that.”

  “Or he put his money somewhere no one, not even Gus, can find it.”

  “When you think about it, how hard could it be to find a ninety-year-old man who’s buying things with thousand-dollar bills?”

  But it was proving difficult. Impossible. They slipped into silence, contemplating, one more time, the disappearance of Abel Mack.

  Hy stared, mesmerized, at the flickering flames. The warmth was wafting across the room, and, oddly, that first burst of heat made her shiver. It always did. Ian was accustomed to it. It was one of those small habits that endeared her to him. He waited for it every time he lit the fire. That, and the flickering light catching her red-gold curls. Charming.

  He slid closer to her, as they both stared into the flames, nursing brandies as they had so many times before. In the past few years, added to that picture was most often a mystery or murder. Murder, usually. But Abel hadn’t been murdered, had he?

  And Letitia?

  Ian slipped an arm around Hy’s shoulder. She seemed not to notice. At least, she didn’t react. She kept on thinking aloud. “I wonder if Jamieson has followed the cash.”

  “Forget about Jamieson.” Ian bent down to kiss her.

  Before long, they had both fallen asleep on the floor in front of the fire.

  ***

  Toward dawn – a dawn that couldn’t really be seen or appreciated because of the smoke in the air – Hy woke up. She was an early riser, and especially when she fell asleep on Ian’s floor. One too many brandies.

  She extricated herself from Ian’s arm underneath her neck and the other arm thrown across her body. He grunted, but didn’t wake. He began a light snore to confirm it.

  Had anything happened?

  She didn’t think so. She was fully clothed.

  The kiss. Yes, there had been a kiss. One or two. Three maybe. She passed her fingers through her hair, and that reminded her that he had, too. Passed his fingers through her hair. There was something about it that she liked. She smiled a small smile as she hauled herself up onto her feet. Then she frowned. There was something about it that she didn’t like.

  They were friends. Close friends, but there had to be a limit. Limits. There must be limits. That worrisome thought kept her awake when she got home and tried to catch more sleep. She couldn’t. The puzzle of Abel’s disappearance kept playing on her mind.

  Three hours passed as she tossed and turned on her bed. How ridiculous that she was able to fall asleep – pass out? – on a wooden floor, but couldn’t in her own good bed.

  ***

  He hadn’t come out of the van all night or all morning.

  What was he doing?

  Every bit of Seamus was aching from having spent the night and the last several hours in his Cruiser. His right foot and left hand kept falling asleep, his bum was numb, and the boredom caused a physical ache, a twisting in his stomach.

  He had to keep his eye on the old man. He couldn’t let him go around talking about the fish and the kidnapping. There was still a chance The Hat Man might lead him to the fish, the fish Seamus was sure the old man hoped to catch. He wanted to be there when that happened. It would be easy enough to relieve him of it.

  He eased himself out of his vehicle, crept over to the van, and noted with satisfaction that, while the lock was rusted out, there were two handles, one on each rear door. They could be linked together to trap the old man in the back of the makeshift ambulance that had no access to the front, a peculiar arrangement the previous owner had welded into place for some unknown reason. It suited Seamus perfectly, and would buy him time to figure out what he was going to do next.

  He scrambled back to his own vehicle, pulled some strong rope out of the trunk, returned, and looped it through the rear-door handles of the van, knotting it securely.

  He was shaking with fear, fear of what he was doing now, fear of what he had done already, fear of exposure at fisheries. He had a couple of days, maybe, and then his actions would begin to be known, and they’d be after him, asking questions he didn’t want to answer. He turned the car on, and with it the radio. He was in time to hear the news:

  “A woman who won the lottery three times has died of asthma at the community hall in The Shores. She’s left almost all of a 16 million dollar fortune to her cats. That’s 79 happy pussies…”

  Definitely not the CBC.

  What did it mean? Did it mean Ferguson had no money – or was it all in trust to the cats? Seamus had to find out. He drove off without looking back at the van, where he believed his captive was secured inside. But he’d closed the barn doors after the horse got out, and he didn’t know it.

  Abel’s face stared out from the driver’s-side window.

  ***

  Ian had woken that morning on the floor, sore and disgruntled to find Hy gone. As he got up, a stabbing pain ripped through his back. He couldn’t straighten up. He shuffled across the room, each movement causing excruciating pain. He gave up when he got as far as the couch. He sat down. Stinging pain. He lay down. Deep throbbing pain. Fortunately, his phone was on the coffee table right beside the couch. He reached for it. His back sliced in half. It was lucky he only needed one movement to call Hy. She was number one on his speed dial.

  Hy searched for the phone, diving around her kitchen, trying to get it before it went to voice mail. Just made it.

  “Hy? Ian.”

  As if he had to identify himself.

  “Oh, hi.” She sounded uncomfortable. Ian found that painful, but not as painful as his back.

  “Hy, I can’t move. I’ve wrecked my back.”

  “Ouch. Sorry to hear that. Can you walk?”

  “Not really.”

  It wasn’t good. Ian had suffered back trouble before and been sidelined for weeks.

  “What can I do?”

  “I’m not sure, yet. I could kill for a coffee, and Jasmine will be wanting her food.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll be up in a bit.”

  Well, Ian thought as he put down the phone, nothing was going to come out of last night.

  ***

  Finn and Jamieson found Ferguson sobbing over the sink in the kitchen.

  Ferguson turned when he heard them enter – without a knock. She didn’t usually walk right in on people. It was a strategy. Jamieson had found out a lot of things when taking people by surprise. But it was she who was surprised. Was Ferguson grieving the loss of his wife? It certainly looked like it. A face already reddened by emotion became redder with embarrassment, his eyes flooded with tears. As he turned from the sink to face them, teardrops fell on the glass kitchen table.

  Ferguson put an arm up to his face, excused himself, and headed for the bathroom, his nose trumpeting down the hall as he scattered Kleenex in his wake.

  Finn fumbled in his breast pocket and pulled out a small plastic box.

  “What’s that?”

  “Always keep these on hand,” said Finn, slipping out a few glass squares. “For whenever I smell –”

  “A rat?”

  “Yes.” He screwed up his face. “And onion.”

  She watched as he expertly slipped the tears from the table onto the glass slides, secured them, and slid them back into the box. He held the box upright in one hand so as not to disturb the contents.

  “Just wondering what your plans are now,” Jamieson said when Ferguson returned to the kitchen. She wanted to keep him in her sights.

  “I don’t expect to stay here.” There was disgust in his intonation and on his face. It transf
ormed to sorrow, as he added: “Not without Letitia.”

  “Don’t be going anywhere without letting me know.” She turned to leave. Turned back.

  “By the way,” she said. “Did you ever find Abel Mack?”

  “No.” Ferguson looked at her with a sly expression. If she was trying to provoke him, he could play the same game. “Did you?”

  She didn’t answer. She had no evidence of any kind linking Ferguson with Abel – a possible killing, a kidnapping? She just wanted Ferguson on notice that she was keeping tabs on him for more than one reason.

  “That performance was entirely for our benefit,” Finn said as they got into the police car.

  “I agree, but can you prove it?”

  Finn held up the little plastic box. “In here,” he said. “Alligator tears…or onion tears.”

  “You said you smelled onion.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “I don’t have a great sense of smell.”

  “I’ll say. He must have pressed a honking big onion to his face when he saw us coming up the drive. He had a clear view from the kitchen.”

  “Can you actually prove he was faking it – with those?” She gestured to the box.

  “You’ll be the judge.”

  ***

  Seamus offered his condolences on Letitia’s death. Ferguson was surprised that he knew. The whole island knew. Any death was a community event. This one was especially newsworthy because of the money and the cats. Ferguson had received condolences from a lot of people he didn’t know. Some sounded substantially more sincere than Seamus. His social duty done, Seamus slipped his cellphone from his pocket, glancing, as people do, to see if anything more important than the person he was with had come up.

  “How did she die?” Seamus asked, phone in hand, scrolling his emails as he sat down. Ferguson could tell there was no sincerity behind the question, but he answered it, his voice flat.

  “Asthma. Of course, people will say I killed her.”

  “What?” Seamus looked up from his phone and down again. His fingers played quickly over the screen.

  “I said…” Ferguson paused. “Of course people will say I killed her.” Ferguson was irritated – by the idea and by Seamus, fiddling around with his cellphone.

  “Did you?”

  “Do you think I’m a fool? Risk losing all that money?”

  Ferguson looked around his den. Not his den for much longer. He was going to have to leave and go…where? What about his aquarium? His fish? The fish?

  “If you’ve come for money, I can’t give you any. I have to look out for myself now. I’ve paid to have the pond ready to receive that fish if you get it. Soon. It won’t be mine for long. So get it…now.”

  “Can’t do that. Nope.” Seamus shook his head. “No can do, amigo.”

  Amigo? The guy was nuts, talking like this.

  “No dinero. No fish.”

  “The well has run dry.” Ferguson shrugged.

  “What well? Were we talking about a well? I thought we were talking about a pond. Money. Moola.”

  That crazy talk again. Why had he ever got mixed up with this idiot?

  “There is no money.”

  Seamus stood up and looked around the room. His gaze swept, unseeing, over the fish jockeying for attention in the aquarium. He strolled over to the window and surveyed the long swath of field, diving down to the shore, to the pond, with its bridge and sluice gate.

  “That looks a lot like money to me.” Seamus turned and smiled. “None to spare?”

  “No, señor.” Ferguson spat out the last word, laced with sarcasm.

  “It’s all yours now, isn’t it? Don’t have to go begging to Mummy.”

  “She left it all to her cats. I thought everyone knew that.”

  That’s what they’d said on the news, but Seamus didn’t believe it. He couldn’t afford to believe it. He was sure there was something in the bank somewhere, and that it was time to rob it.

  His thumbs tapped on the cellphone.

  His insurance plan.

  Chapter 29

  “They were not tears of sadness. He was faking it.”

  “There were certainly lots of them.”

  “That doesn’t make them genuine.”

  “How do you know they weren’t?”

  “Apart from the smell of onion, take a look.”

  Finn had unpacked a travelling case of forensics. A favourite occupation was putting stuff under the microscope.

  He slipped one of the slides from his own collection and, after adjusting the focus, invited Jamieson to look.

  Jamieson peered through the microscope. A dense, intricate pattern showed on the slide.

  “That’s a tear?” She continued to look through the microscope.

  “Yup. Dried. It’s crystallized salt that forms into different patterns.” He reached over and slid another image onto the microscope plate.

  “Wow.” She studied the geometric crystalline effect. “That’s beautiful.”

  “That’s a tear of sadness,” said Finn. He pulled the slide out and put the original one in. “That’s a tear created by smoke, or an onion, or dust, or wind.”

  “How do you tell the difference?”

  “From their different formations. Like snowflakes and fingermarks, no two tears are alike.”

  “So how do you tell the happy from the sad?”

  “Some say you have to know the source to begin with. You know it’s a tear of sadness so that’s how the image is labelled. Or you already know there were tears of happiness and so on, but I’ve been puzzling over this for a while, and I believe I see patterns that tell me what kind of tear it is even if I don’t know to begin with. No one tear is the same, but there are patterns. See here…”

  Finn produced a series of images for Jamieson to look at, and slowly she began to recognize the patterns he was pointing out to her.

  “You get the hang of it after a bit,” said Finn, leaning over to put a slide in place, lightly brushing up against Jamieson. It sent a shiver through her.

  “There are only three different kinds, so the pattern begins to emerge. Here’s a basal tear, the kind you use to lubricate your eyes.” He put in a fresh slide, adjusted the lens, and pushed it toward her, grazing her fingertips. Not a shiver this time. Pleasure.

  “The second kind…reflex tears…your reaction to wind, dust, onions, tear gas, smoke.”

  “And the third…” Another slide, another light touch, this one intended, bringing her closer to the microscope. “Psychic tears…joy and sorrow, the emotions. They come from the same place but look different. Here’s joy.” He placed another slide under the microscope, then exchanged it, saying: “And here’s sorrow. The emotional tears contain protein-based hormones.”

  Jamieson looked up. “They are different. Why?”

  “The circumstances, how much you cry, the microscope settings, and other factors affect how the tear looks close up. It’s far from an exact science.”

  He put one of Ferguson’s tears under the microscope. “He may say he was crying over Letitia’s death, but he wasn’t. That’s a reflex tear, not sadness.”

  “So he was insincere. That doesn’t mean he’s a murderer.”

  “No. But it helps stack the cards.”

  “This is impressive.” Jamieson switched two of the slides again. And again. Peered. Admired. Then straightened. “As you say, not an exact science.”

  “Far from it.”

  “Like body language. People may fake it, but it can still be telling.” Jamieson considered herself an expert in the art.

  What about now? Here with Finn. There was no question his body movements had been tactile. The tricky part was interpreting. Finn might have been touching her, tentatively, to put her at her ease. Or he might mean something more.
Which?

  It mattered to Jamieson.

  “This may be farfetched,” said Finn, “but water imprinted with love and gratitude develops highly complex beauty. Water imbued with negativity loses its incredible patterning and looks disordered.”

  “Do you have any slides of that?”

  Finn smiled. “I’m sorry, no. If I do get hold of any, I’ll invite you up to see them.” He winked. “And my etchings.”

  Her porcelain skin flushed pink. Involuntary body language. How could she be so obvious? He was probably just teasing. What about Dot?

  What about Dot? Gone. Like Abel. With Abel?

  When Jamieson was leaving, Finn placed a hand on her arm, squeezed, and gave her a peck on her forehead. Jamieson fought the feeling it aroused in her, shoved it down. She was unwilling to let it out into the light, lest the light shine through and dissolve it. Could feelings be visibly captured in some scientific way and put under a microscope? She hoped not.

  Finn was holding something inside, too, his feelings for Dot, torn by this new complication. But Dot had left and not said goodbye, well able to take care of herself. Jamieson was, too, but she was hiding under a tough front. He wanted her to let her defenses down. Would she?

  He expected it would have made her furious that he was having romantic thoughts about her. There was a good chance it would have made her steer clear of him.

  In the end, she had no choice. They would be forced to collaborate.

  ***

  Seamus placed the cellphone on Ferguson’s desk.

  Ferguson was puzzled.

  “I think you can find some money for me. Listen.”

  Seamus lifted his finger to his lips for silence and turned the device on.

  Ferguson’s deep, sonorous voice boomed out of the tiny recorder in the iPhone. Seamus worked the recording app at lightning speed.

  “Of course people will say I killed her.”

  Ferguson shrugged his shoulders. He couldn’t imagine what the idiot was up to.

  “Oops,” said Seamus. “Hit the wrong pad there. Afraid I may have lost a word or two.” He turned the device on again and gave Ferguson a sly smile.