Something Fishy

by Hilary MacLeod

Fiona again. Anton was in the kitchen and didn’t know she was back.

  She was back. In a big way.

  When she had the diners’ attention, she flipped up her dress, pulled down her panties, placed her generous bottom on the glass and farted.

  It made the glass rattle.

  Anton had returned in time to hear. He went red in the face with rage. He tore at the French doors. Locked. They were locked. The key. Where was it? He chased back into the lounge, but the damage had been done.

  His diners had all stood up. No one had spoken a word, but they all agreed. They were leaving.

  They hadn’t really wanted monkey brain anyway. It didn’t sound delicious enough to make up for its potential danger – mad cow disease or dementia. The women thought their older dates were headed that way already. The men wanted to display their wealth, and to Anton’s relief, paid for the meal, even though they hadn’t eaten it.

  When his guests had left, his reputation in ruins, Anton went to find Fiona on the cape.

  Fiona had gone to Newton, knocking on his door timidly. It was always he who sought her out, in her trailer, whose walls would squeeze them together as he attempted to become absorbed in her flesh. It wasn’t sex exactly, more like cuddling puppies, but it relieved both of them of the tensions in their lives.

  She knew it would make him angry if she approached him. It had in the past. She could still see his white face in a blaze of red, his fury distorting his features. She’d gone running from him.

  There was no answer at the door.

  She knocked again, a light tap that was drowned out by the turbine, the blades creaking in the near windless night.

  One more knock, and she turned away.

  She didn’t see, didn’t sense him behind her.

  She was staring up at the blades of the windmill, the setting sun colouring them red, the reflection blink, blink, blinking as the blades scoured the sky.

  Blink. Blink. Whoosh, thwarp. Blink. Blink. Blink. Whoosh, thwarp. Blink.

  She stumbled toward it.

  It was a soft night on the cape. Only a light wind. It was the time of year when mounds of seaweed called “eel grass” piled up on the high tide line. The scent of salt wafted up the cape on the breeze.

  The Milky Way dusted the sky, lit with hundreds of thousands of stars, like fairy dust thrown into the atmosphere. A satellite blipped its way above The Shores and a half-dozen planes sailed the air currents on their long journey to Europe, their lights pulsing over the village.

  Even the wind turbine failed to intrude on the feeling of peace rustling through the marram grass. Its whirr tonight was more like a purr.

  That didn’t make it a pussycat.

  Fiona had been standing, staring alternately at the sky and at the turbine. She drifted gently on the slight breeze toward the edge of the cape

  Was it the turbine? She thought she heard movement. In front or behind. She kept going, and stopped again, on the very edge of the cape, feeling dizzy, looking up, up, up at the softly purring wind turbine, the blades slicing shadows in the night, their rhythmic sound hypnotic. She was unsteady on her feet, reeling, stumbling toward the edge of the cape.

  The purr turned to a shriek that pierced her ears and made her buckle in pain. He was there. They were talking, but she didn’t remember words, only anger. Anger. The turbine shrieking. Loud words. An even louder sound coming from the sky, a jolt, knives in her ears, spinning, spinning off the cape.

  Falling. Her frothy dress looked like a parachute, but it was too flimsy to cradle her softly down to the ground.

  It was a hard landing, of hundreds of pounds of flesh on a granite rock. Newton was on the cape when it happened.

  Newton. And one other.

  It would have been merciful if the first rock had killed her. Instead, it took several more blows to extinguish the life in her, including the one that followed her down the cliff.

  The tip of the point gave way and pursued her, bouncing behind her as her head struck rock after rock after rock. Then Fiona’s head slammed onto the granite, smooth and curving like a Henry Moore sculpture. No one would ever look at it the same way again. Already unconscious, but what sealed Fiona’s fate was the tip of the point that had cartwheeled clumsily down the cape, and flattened her when she hit the sand. Her pudgy hands and feet stuck out from under the sandstone.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Hy was running on hard sand, firm beneath her feet. She had a good rhythm going, heading into the sun rising over water and sky, warming her and painting the sea rock in front of her and the cape beside it golden. The water was a deep blue, with frosted foam on the breakers, spilling onto the shore.

  It was a beautiful image, until the body came into focus.

  Hy squinted down the shore, trying not to see what she was seeing – two tiny fat feet and two plump hands, sticking out from under a chunk of red stone.

  She slowed to a walk, edging forward slowly, one step at a time, not knowing what she could do. By the size of it, she knew she couldn’t move that rock, and, even if she could, what difference would it make?

  She stopped, her eyes fixed on those tiny plump appendages, unable to look away.

  Another corpse.

  No.

  Not this time.

  She turned her back on it and picked up speed, running all the way back down the shore, looking left and to right, to see if anyone was watching her, if anyone had seen her.

  Not this time, not this time repeated in her head as she crawled up the nearest exit from the shore – a tough climb. There was no rope, and the stairs had been battered to bits in a storm the previous winter.

  Not this time. She heaved herself up onto the cape.

  Not this time.

  Let someone else find the body. She’d had her fill.

  She gazed around the cape. Saw no one. It looked quiet at Anton’s and at Newton’s. Quiet, too, at Fiona’s. Too quiet. Hy was the only one who knew why.

  As she headed home, Gus watched her go by through the picture window, finding it odd that Hy didn’t stop in as she usually did. She shrugged and returned to gazing out the back at Vanishing Point. The tip had come off it. Well that would be the choicest piece of chat in The Shores today.

  Not quite.

  Panoramic as Gus’s view was of the village and its inhabitants, she had no way of seeing from her house what had happened way below the point.

  Another dead body. Guilt followed Hy all the way home.

  Another dead body. She hauled her aching body upstairs and ran a hot bath.

  She was aching, not from the run, but from what she’d seen. What she’d done – or failed to do. It was nagging at her.

  Another dead body.

  Last year had been more gruesome. The corpse had fallen on her. She shivered at the recollection. The year before that, she’d tripped onto a body – an axe had sliced its head open, gulls eating its brain.

  Hands and feet. Hands and feet. That was all this time.

  She toweled dry and put on a fresh set of sweats. She went downstairs and sat at the big harvest table that was both her workplace and dining room. She never had guests. Hy hated to cook. She tried to put the sight of Fiona’s appendages out of her mind by beginning her workday as usual, writing articles for client websites.

  Articles about hand care.

  Footwear.

  Body-concealing clothing.

  She shut down her computer and shut her eyes.

  All she could see was that rock, and those hands and feet. Fat but tiny. Fiona.

  Did she think she could make them go away?

  She phoned Jamieson.

  “A body? On the beach? Who?”

  Hy mumbled.

  “I think it might be Fiona.”

  “Didn’t you look?”

  “
No, I didn’t look.” I turned and ran. She didn’t say that.

  “Where? When?”

  “At the bottom of Vanishing Point.” She hesitated, and then spit it out. “At dawn.”

  “Dawn! That was more than an hour ago. McAllister, I should charge you with something. I should have charged you with something a long time ago.”

  Hy knew she was right. She also knew Jamieson wouldn’t charge her with anything. They were friends. Hy knew that. Maybe Jamieson did, too.

  “Some animal could have been at it. Destroyed the evidence.”

  “Only hands and feet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Hy gave the grizzly details. There was a long silence down the phone line.

  “I hope we haven’t lost vital bits of evidence by this delay.” The best clues are found in the first twenty-four hours and the very best – immediately.

  “I searched the cape.”

  “And found?”

  “Nothing.”

  “McAllister, you searching the cape is not the same as me searching the cape. I have powers you don’t have.” It was time Hy realized that. “Powers to go knocking on doors and demanding answers. You could’ve cost me this case.”

  “If there is a case.” It was a low mutter.

  “What?”

  “It could have been an accident,” Hy offered, weakly. With hope.

  Jamieson was hoping that it was a murder, not merely an accident. Accidents were so…so…unnecessary…so…tragic.

  Murders were…well, murders were…what fueled her down the Shore Lane, onto Wild Rose Lane, and sent her stumbling, running, tripping along the sand to her quarry.,

  A body hidden, flattened by a big chunk of the cape.

  With one slow step after another, as if she might wake the sleeping form, Jamieson made her way up the beach, and as she got close, the word flashed through her brain.

  Blowfish.

  A human blowfish. Flattened.

  With no cell phone reception on the shore, Jamieson had to leave the body and rouse Murdo from his love nest with April Dewey. It was close by on the Shore Lane. She sent him to watch the body and take measurements and photos while she called for help from Winterside.

  It was not forthcoming. It was never forthcoming. This time the excuse was that they couldn’t spare anyone because they were all on leave. Jamieson didn’t fight it. It was what she’d expected. How was she ever to get a conviction if she couldn’t get a pathologist to look at the body before too many hours had passed? Or before the tide swept it away, as had once happened. Instead she did what she’d done before – engaged the help of Nathan Mack, the local volunteer paramedic.

  They had to remove the body before tourists flooded the beach.

  It wasn’t exactly a mystery what Fiona had died of, but a ballpark time would have helped with figuring out the how and who. If there was a who, she reminded herself, always quick to jump to murder as the cause. Still, her mind was churning with possibilities. Who would have wanted to kill Fiona?

  Nathan’s girlfriend, Lili, often came with him on his calls. As a spiritualist and yoga teacher, she was trained to comfort the injured, their friends and family. Jamieson privately called her the Kook, though she had to admit that Lili’s ability to move objects with her mind had once helped to crack a case.

  On the way down to the shore, Lili put a hand on Nathan’s arm.

  “Stop.” She was staring at the wind turbine.

  “I’ll be just a minute.”

  Nathan shrugged. The passenger they were picking up was dead. Time didn’t matter to the corpse anymore.

  Whoosh, thwarp. Whoosh, thwarp. Whoosh, thwarp.

  Lili looked up at the blades of the turbine. She felt electricity humming through her, prickling every pore of her skin, every organ, invading her brain, piercing her ears with a high electronic sound. Negative energy spun in a narrowing circle around her, sending her faltering forward, her balance lost.

  She felt Nathan’s arms around her.

  “Lili, what’s wrong?”

  She smiled up at him weakly.

  “You’re white.”

  “Take me away from here.”

  He lifted her up. It was nothing for him – he so tall, strong. She had a different kind of strength.

  They got back in the van.

  “Now tell me,” he said. “What happened there?”

  “When we get home,” she said. “That is an evil place.”

  “What, suddenly an evil place?”

  “With that wind-maker, it is.”

  “Wind turbine, Lili. Wind turbine.”

  “As you say.”

  Jamieson was skeptical, too, when Lili told her what she’d sensed on the cape. She’d been correct once before, but twice?

  Jamieson suppressed the uneasy feelings she herself had about the wind turbine. And yet she admired windmills. They were intoxicating, inspiring, beautiful in their design, their movement, their possibilities. She had never been so close to one before, never heard its unrelenting sound, never stared up and felt herself lose control, become dizzy – physically and in her thoughts.

  She shook her head. She was letting the Kook sway her better judgement. She didn’t consider herself suggestible. She’d proven impossible to hypnotize during Mountie training programs. What power did that tiny woman have?

  Nathan, Murdo, Jamieson, and Lili could not roll the rock off Fiona. Nathan had to go back and get his digger, his backhoe, to push the rock off the body. Murdo winced, Jamieson set her mouth in a firm line, and Lili turned her head away as Nathan moved back and forth with the machine, working against the sand under the treads and slowly easing the rock off the body. It made a nasty mess but he had been as tender as he could. Nathan tried to conceal that he was close to throwing up.

  Loading Fiona into the makeshift ambulance wasn’t easy. Hardest for Murdo, Jamieson noticed. His face was dripping sweat, he was out of breath, and his belly was straining at the buttons of his uniform – too much of April’s good food, too much of sitting by the range, taste-testing her offerings.

  Making it even more difficult was that Fiona had been dead long enough for rigor mortis to set in, and not let go. The rock had squished Fiona flat, splayed out. They had to manipulate her to squeeze her into the vehicle and prop her across the two stretchers.

  As the doors shut on the body, Jamieson gave the ungainly corpse a passing thought. Not very dignified. But when had Fiona been dignified in life?

  Jamieson’s mind was riveted on what had happened. How had it happened? Who – if anyone – was behind it? She looked at the water, as if for an answer, down the long stretch of beach in either direction, jellyfish and seaweed tossed up by the tide. The dead jellyfish looked like blood clots littering the shore. Deep, almost purple, red. Bloodsuckers, the locals called them. Jamieson could see why.

  She was getting distracted. She looked down at the sandstone rocks piled at the base of the cape, some bits and pieces of painted Styrofoam buoys and broken lobster traps dumped there in a storm. There was the occasional granite rock, thrust onto the island from away by furious winter waves. Just like the one on which Fiona had struck her head. Blood had spilled down it and seeped into the more accommodating sandstone. Red on red. She’d lost a lot of blood. Head injuries were like that. Lord knows what her other injuries were. Every bone in her body must have been broken, but the coroner would determine that. What mattered now was not what the fall had done, but how it had been done.

  Jamieson stared at the spot where Fiona’s corpse had been. It was the whoosh, thwarp, whoosh, thwarp, whoosh, thwarp sound of the wind turbine above that broke her concentration and drew her eyes up the cape.

  Had Fiona stared at the blades, as her guts spun inside her?

  The turbine. Had it contributed to her death? Had the rock that
had fallen from the cape killed her – or the fall itself? Or something before the fall?

  Jamieson realized that she had no idea – and few clues – as to how a dead body had landed on the beach.

  Manslaughter? Murder? Accident? Suicide? Here we go again.

  Whoosh thwarp. Whoosh thwarp. Whoosh thwarp.

  She watched the blades go around. Hypnotic. She saw Fiona standing at the top of the cape. She saw her reel back, miss her step, and come tumbling, somersaulting against her will, sticking a hand out, here, there, the crunch of a wrist, the smack of an arm, a leg against the stone until she came to her final fall, her head slamming against the granite, her skull cracking open. And then the wedge of the cape falling on her, pinning her down. Finishing her off.

  Jamieson replayed the fall, again and again, in her mind. She was trying to imagine someone else on the cape, someone who might have pushed Fiona. Why?

  She turned and walked away, the word bouncing around her brain.

  Involuntarily, she took a deep breath of the fresh salt air, moving on a thin mist across the shore. It filled her with well- being. It distracted her from her focus.

  She walked along the run, the tiny stream spilling freshwater from the pond out into the mighty Gulf of St. Lawrence. A piece of seaweed bobbed on the fresh water and would be caught up, and carried on the Gulf Stream across the Atlantic and around the British Isles. Water from The Shores warming England, Scotland, and Ireland. The home countries. Perhaps it was the invisible thread that had drawn islanders here in the first place.

  Jamieson looked down the shore to the sea rock.

  She shook her head, to stop the irrelevant musings.

  Why?

  There were plenty of reasons why.

  Who?

  That, too.

  She looked up at the winged cottage staring down at the shore through its cat’s eyes. At Fiona’s trailer smack in front of it.

  Reason – and suspect – number one, she thought. Paradis. The thought puzzled her. He was a rich man. He wouldn’t need to kill Fiona. Surely he could buy her out? He was so superior, so mannered, so supercilious, surely he wouldn’t stoop to pushing someone off a cliff?

  Jamieson had learned that, when it came to murder, anyone was capable of anything. It might be just a temporary lapse in otherwise impeccable behaviour. In some cases, it was a stupid accident that happened without rage or passion. Just happened. The person left with the knife in his hand, or blunt object, was often bewildered by what he’d done. Or she.