by Joan Boswell
“I’ll take it,” she said. Her voice hardened. “It’s perfect.”
Summertime and the searchin’ is over
Found a dream home and a dream of a guy
Got them both for the price of a condo... Gonna have fun under the Maritime sky.
“Widow’s walk”. How apt. Humming under her breath, Margo turned, pretending to admire the breathtaking views. She ran her fingers along the crumbling railing. Perfect. She’d bring George up to see the view. A little shove in the right direction at low tide, and her troubles would be over.
She looked at Gavin standing beside her. There would be no need for him to restrain himself any longer. So often during the week, she’d been aware of his drawing back from her. He’s such a gentleman, she’d thought, as she longed to tell him that his scruples were unnecessary. Only the thought of the time that stretched before them once George was out of the way had kept her from taking the initiative. For now, it took every ounce of restraint she could muster to keep her hands off him.
She knew that the strong physical attraction was mutual. Everything he’d done had encouraged her to expect so much more. His warm glances, his silky voice, his lingering touch, his constant attendance to her every need. Such a far cry from George’s continuing indifference.
She couldn’t wait any longer to tell him how she felt.
“Darling Gavin,” she began, pressing a hand against his chest, where she could feel the strong beat of his heart, which quickened under her touch.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a small red car careen up the driveway and screech to a halt in front of the house, spewing up clouds of dust and gravel.
The man who flung open the car door wore bright yellow pants topped with a pink and orange striped T-shirt which vied for attention with his magenta hair. He stood with his hands on his hips, his head flung back, and bellowed, “Gavin, darling, you’ve done it again!”
Margo felt Gavin suck in his breath. “Bruce!” he croaked. “What are you doing here?”
“You old silly. How many times do I have to come tearing after you because you don’t pick up after yourself?” The man pulled something from his pocket and waved it at Gavin. “You haven’t even missed it, have you? I found it on the dresser this morning. What am I going to do with you?”
“What?” said Gavin in a strangled voice.
“It’s your wallet, silly. I’ll bring it up to you. There must be a divine view from up there.” The man disappeared into the house.
Margo felt the anger leap through her body, followed by a wash of heat like molten lava that poured from her head and left her dripping with sweat. Gavin had played her for a fool.
“You bastard!” she hissed and pushed hard against his chest, putting all the frustration, fury and anger of the past twenty years into the shove.
He stumbled back several steps, hitting the railing hard. It crumbled behind him, and he went over the side like a child’s slinky toy, end over end, rolling with satisfying speed down the roof, then dropping onto the bare rocks below. Just as she’d expected, it worked perfectly.
Such a shame she’d wasted this particular opportunity. Now, she’d have to see what Prince Edward Island had to offer in old homes with widow’s walks. She opened her mouth for a suitably horrified scream.
Summertime, and the game is all over
Lost the deal, lost the client and all...
In his last split-second of awareness, just before his body began the long drop, which he’d advertised as “sloping to the beach”, Gavin played his game for the last time.
Sloping to the beach: a high cliff.
Pat and Kris have been friends and co-writers for over thirty years. As well as being regular contributors to the Ladie’s Killing Circle anthologies, they are also known for their humorous looks at life in the Maritimes. The “definitions” in this story come from their latest book, Extreme Sports of the Maritimes: Lobster Suppers, Fire Hall Bingos, Flea Markets and All the Rest.
A Little Bit Easy
Therese Greenwood
Lally Thibodeaux didn’t seem the kind of girl people shot at. Oh, she was different, I’ll give you that, but she was a pretty, well-mannered little thing. I took to her the minute she stopped in about renting the old place on the point.
I always thought the point was the nicest spot on Wolfe Island, maybe the nicest in the Thousand Islands, with the old frame homestead on the hill about thirty feet from the St. Lawrence River. Grandpa Allen had built it before they dug the well; back then they hauled water up the riverbank. You can see clear down the channel from the kitchen window, watch the lakers steam up and down, and there’s a fine stand of birch over on the American shore. There’s a nice pasture out back, too, ten acres you could hay as long as you keep an eye out and don’t let the tractor wheels get too close to the river bank. It’s pretty, gone to clover and wild carrot and mustard flowers. I wouldn’t mind looking out at it every morning, but the wife says I’m too sentimental. She likes the bungalow we built out near the road after our girls left home. But I liked the idea of renting out the old house. Someone ought to live there, although I wasn’t sure Lally knew what she was getting herself into.
She was just a slip of a thing. I could barely see her behind the steering wheel of her big red truck the first time she stopped on our road. She hopped down to the ground, tumbling out like the last peanut in the bag and pointing her little black remote control, click-click, to lock up her truck tighter than a drum, even though the wife and I were the only people for miles.
“We aren’t much for locking vehicles here,” I said.
“I find you can’t be too careful,” Lally said. She had a funny drawl, slow and twangy, and looked about the age of our youngest, in her middle twenties. Her sweet face had a tad too much make-up, but she wore clean clothes, not like some of those young people with ripped jeans and dirty shoes. She had on a nice blouse and pressed shorts like the women in banks wear, and her nails were a rosy pink. I noticed her hands because she was holding the For Rent notice we had put up at Mosier’s store in early spring. Since it was into June, and she was the first person to ask, we’d likely rent it to her. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why she’d want to live out there all by herself.
“Are you sure it won’t get too lonely for you?” I asked.
“Potable water in-house, clear view for a thousand yards, slight incline to slow invaders, and limited access points to the island,” she said. “It’s the perfect defensive position.”
“Planning a party?” I asked.
“Not if I can help it,” she said with a smile. I could tell I tickled her, and I like tickling a pretty girl, so I laid the yokel thing on thick.
“We had a family reunion out there on the long weekend last August,” I said, hooking my thumbs in my suspenders. “People who were supposed to stay Saturday night were still staggering around on Labour Day. But you can’t pick your family, can you?”
“No sir, you can’t,” she said, not smiling any more, her drawl so strong you could hardly make her out.
“That’s quite an accent you got,” I said. “Where you from?”
“South,” she said.
“A Yankee?” I nodded across the shore at the top of New York state. They call it The North Country, but it’s south of me.
Lally smiled again, like I was a real comedian. “In New Orleans, we’d call you a Yankee for living north of the Mason-Dixon.”
“Most people call me a Canuck for living north of everything Yankee,” I said. “But you can call me Jim. You sure are a long way from home.”
“As far as I can get, Jim.”
I fished around, but I couldn’t get any more information out of her. Lally always was tight-lipped. That’s another reason I was surprised when those bullets tore the place up. I couldn’t believe she’d open her mouth long enough to make anyone want to shoot her, let alone cut loose with a machine gun. We’re still picking bullets out of the old kitchen. I fou
nd one yesterday in the old radio next to Grandma Allen’s wooden rocking chair.
You never would have guessed Lally would be mixed up in that kind of a hullabaloo. After she got settled in, I dropped by a couple times to make sure she wasn’t finding it too lonely, and she always kept everything clean as a whistle, even the wife said so. You could’ve eaten off the floors, and Lally gave the old place some touches of her own, although they weren’t what I would call girly. First thing she did was put her shotgun on the rack on the kitchen wall. You’re supposed to lock away your firepower these days, but that rack has been up there since Grandpa Allen shot his first mallard and, anyway, it wasn’t like anyone would be around to check.
Lally kept a few more of her treasures on a corner table in the kitchen along with a bunch of wildflowers she picked fresh every day. There was a picture of a small, determined-looking woman squinting into the sun on a cement stoop, gripping a clutch purse in a hand that looked too big for the rest of her. Next to the photo was a black candle in a fancy ivory holder and a crazy statue of a skeleton in a suit. I figured it was left over from a childhood Halloween, and Lally put it out as a joke because we were just getting to summer.
“That must be a photo of your mother,” I said one afternoon as I dropped off another of the wife’s rhubarb pies. “There’s quite the resemblance around the eyes. But she’s even tinier than you. Looks like she couldn’t hurt a fly.”
Lally laughed. “Tell that to the crack dealers who moved next door to her. They never knew what hit them when Mama Marie put the mojo on them.”
“Crack dealers, that sounds like a bad neighborhood,” I said. “Your mother ought to move.”
“She doesn’t live there any more,” said Lally, her laugh gone. “Mama Marie’s passed over.”
“You’re young to have lost your mother,” I said, thinking of our girls.
“I didn’t lose her,” said Lally, taking a sulphur match and lighting the black candle by the photo. “Someone took her. Shall I cut you a slice of your wife’s fine pie?”
And that was all she said. She wasn’t one for spilling the beans, but otherwise she was a good tenant. She was determined to bring the place up to speed, with two hundred amp service and a backup generator to boot. She even put in those big halogen lights to show off the place. Too bad she picked the ones with motion sensors, the raccoons tripped them all night. I didn’t say anything at the time, though. I figured when she got done, the old place would be better wired than the Memorial Centre in town, and it wouldn’t have cost me a cent.
She got in her own electrician, and that’s when Gord McKillop met her. We thought Gord was a confirmed bachelor. He was a nice-looking lad, tall and strong as an ox, with a good job. One of the Huff girls set her cap at him for a spell, but he never took the bait. We thought maybe girls weren’t his cup of tea, if you catch my drift. But Gord took one look at Lally and fell like a ton of bricks. He’d find excuses to come by, little things he’d fix for her. Sometimes he’d get a job half-done and realize he needed a doo-dad he had to go all the way to town for, just for an excuse to come back the next day.
It was Gord who found the first voodoo charm. Lally and I were watching him set up an automatic skeet-shooting thing out in the pasture when he found a heart-shaped rock, polished smooth. It looked like the letter “L” had been carved into it.
“Fancy that,” I said. “Nature sending you a valentine.”
“It’s not natural, Jim,” said Lally, looking across the field, squinting so her pretty face twisted up like a monkey’s. “Supernatural.”
“Pardon me?” Gord and I said together. Sometimes we didn’t quite follow her accent.
“It’s a vengeance mojo,” she said. “My mother was a Creole. She practised voodoo.”
“We’re United Church,” I said.
“I’m a Presbyterian,” said Gord. “I saw a movie about voodoo. This corpse got up and did the limbo. It was pretty funny.”
“Nothing funny about it,” Lally said. “Someone put that mojo there.”
Gord and I tried to tell her that a person could find all kinds of comical-looking rocks in these fields, dumped off the glaciers a million years ago. But she wouldn’t hear any of it.
“Vengeance was Mama Marie’s speciality,” she said. “People hired her to get back at folks who wronged ’em. She’d hex a husband who laid one beating too many on his wife, or a gang-banger who shot a nine-year-old in a drive-by, or even on the butcher for keeping his thumb on the scale.”
“That’s one heck of a town you’re from,” I said. “Don’t people there ever call the law?”
“In New Orleans?” Lally laughed, but it wasn’t the pretty girl laugh Gord and I liked. “The police down there aren’t in the justice business, Jim. They’re in business for themselves. They don’t call it The Big Easy for nothing.”
“I saw that movie,” Gord said.
Lally sighed and wouldn’t say any more, but she was wired for sound. When Gord finished hooking up the skeet thing, she got out her shotgun and went at the targets like nobody’s business. She used her little black remote control—it amazes me how you can set almost anything to remote these days—to launch ten targets, and she hit every single one. I never saw anything like it.
“Where did you learn to shoot like that?” I said.
“Daddy was a Recon Marine.” Click-click. BAM! Another target took to the air and was blown to smithereens. “Vietnam. Every marine a rifleman.” Click-click. BAM! “Didn’t you pass anything on to your girls, Jim?” Click-click. BAM!
“Are you kidding?” said Gord with a grin. “You should’ve seen those girls on a tractor. You never saw anybody plough so straight.”
“I don’t like to brag,” I said. “But Laura, our youngest, was Queen of the Furrow at the ploughing match three years running.”
“You taught your girls to grow food to make people big and strong,” Lally said. “My daddy taught me to kill people with advance reconnaissance and the element of surprise.” Click-click. BAM!
I guess I shouldn’t have bragged.
Lally shot and shot that day, and all night with the big lights on. You aren’t supposed to shoot at night, but on the island there’s no police to stop you. We’re too small for our own force, and it takes a big deal to get the provincial police over from town. In fact, the last time I saw them was when the place on the point got shot-up. They didn’t do a hell of a lot then. I suppose we’re better off without them. Maybe we are a little bit like New Orleans. Maybe you could call us “a little bit easy”.
We didn’t see much of Lally for a while. She kept herself busy, clearing brush near the house, white-washing the picket fence and honing the points on the stakes so they looked tidy. I thought she went a bit far putting up the electric fence along the waterfront. It didn’t do anything for the view. She practiced her shooting, too, until she burned out the target-shooting thing. I watched her kick it one day and haul it into the house. Since I don’t go duck hunting any more, I got to use the binoculars for something.
I kept an eye on the mailbox, too. She didn’t get much mail, just the Hydro bill and a magazine called Soldier Of Fortune. The wife thought maybe it was about how to win the lottery. When both came in at end of the month, Lally saw the flag up on the box and roared out in her big truck. She hopped out and click-clicked the door shut while I hustled over, and I was just hitching my thumbs into my suspenders when I saw the chicken bones at the foot of the rusty milk can holding up the mailbox.
“Damn cats,” I said, reaching down to pick up the bones, which had been picked clean.
“Wait,” Lally said, squatting down on her little ankles as easy as you please. She picked up a twig and poked a bone.
“Worried about rabies?” I said. “We don’t get much of a scare, this being an island. We’re isolated that way.”
“It’s a message,” Lally said.
“A message I ought to get out the .22 for those cats.”
“It’s fo
r me,” she said. “He’s coming.”
“Who?”
That’s when Gord McKillop rolled up in that disaster area he calls a van, but I didn’t figure she was talking about him.
“I’m worried about you spending too much time out here alone,” he said to Lally through the van window. “You deserve some fun. Why don’t we go over to town for dinner and a movie? There’s a pretty good show at the Odeon that would cheer you up.”
I liked the way Gord pretended to be doing her a favour, but he should have had the sense to turn the engine off and maybe even get out of the van. No wonder he was still a bachelor.
“I’m not up for town,” Lally said.
That’s when the wife came out with a plate of her butter rolls and homemade strawberry jam. The mailbox was a regular Grand Central Station that morning.
“Darn cats,” the wife said. She handed Lally the plate and squatted to pick up the bones. Lally started forward, but the wife said, “Tut, tut.” When the wife tut-tuts, you stop in your tracks.
“Lally Thibodeaux, don’t you dare say you can’t take those rolls,” she said, picking up bones and handing them to me. “This isn’t the big city, we do things different here. We don’t lock our vehicles, we don’t put hexes on our neighbors, and if those neighbors give us homemade rolls, we take ’em and like ’em.”
“Homemade jam, too,” said Gord, eyeing the plate. “You don’t see that every day.”
“Lally, it wouldn’t hurt you to get out a bit more.” I put in my two cents, because I was starting to wonder at the voodoo talk. It didn’t seem normal. “Excuse me for saying it, but you tend to mope. A pretty girl like you ought to be out having a high old time.”
For a minute, Lally just stood there looking at us like we had two heads each. “Are you people for real?” she finally said.
“Beg your pardon?” we said together.
“What’s with the baking and the jam and the worrying and the advice? Why do you care?”