Something Fishy (18 page)

She mentally crossed Fiona off the list as a suspect in the death of Viola. It had been only a thin suspicion, and Fiona's own death was likely at the hands of the same murderer. Two deaths, in quick succession, made murder much more likely in Jamieson's mind.

“She'll have fallen off the cape,” Gus pronounced, setting her body in a firm statement of fact. There would be no budging her.

She and Hy were having dinner in the Macks' dining room, dinner being the midday meal. Gus was beaming about the feast of cod that tourists who'd gone deep-sea fishing had given her.

She polished off her plate. “That was a lovely fish. Had hardly any worms.”

Hy had been struggling through the meal. Cod was tasty, but she never could get her mind off the worms, and she'd had to watch Gus pick several wrigglers out of the fish before cooking.

She sipped her tea, constantly surprised at how delicious it always was here, and then remembering that Gus used whole milk, in all its delicious glory.

Hy had promised Jamieson not to tell anyone about Fiona, but that couldn't include Gus. Gus had to be the first to know – and could be sworn to secrecy. In spite of her need to be the first to have the news, she was very good at keeping secrets. Anyway, the idea that this could be a secret anywhere in the village was ludicrous. People have windows. Hy could imagine them:

“What's that young fella Nathan doin' takin' his digger to the shore, this time a day?”

“I seen his ambulance down there, too. Whaddya make of that?”

“And the po-lice car.”

And on and on, speculation sometimes nearing the truth, other times making a wide circle around it.

Gus sipped her tea.

“Yes. She'll have fallen off the cape.” She repeated the words and the squaring of her body that underlined the fact.

“Why do you say that?”

“Couldn't see her own nose. Blind as a bat. Too proud to wear glasses. Too poor to wear contacts.”

“How do you know all that?”

“Well, now, dint I bring her into the world?”

“Did you?”

Gus nodded, several times. “All twelve pounds of her.”

“Gus, you couldn't remember that.”

“How could I not remember that?”

“She didn't have bad eyes when she was born.”

“No, but she had the look of them.”

There was a long silence as Hy struggled with how to respond, but Gus spoke first.

“Besides, we couldn't have another murder here.” Gus's body language signaled the end of the conversation.

Chapter Twenty

“Murder? Are you suggesting murder?”

Jamieson said nothing. It worked even with Anton as he rushed to fill the gap.

“You are not suggesting I murdered her?”

He was not looking at all dashing at the moment. Raised from sleep, his hair was in disarray and he looked more like a man in his fifties than the forty-plus he claimed to be. He was wearing sweats, even though he had a beautiful set of silk striped pyjamas tossed carelessly over a bedroom chaise. They were for effect, not for wearing.

Jamieson looked up sharply from her notebook.

“I don't believe I made any such suggestion. Did you?”

“Make a suggestion?”

He was being deliberately evasive. She wrote it down. Evasive. She hoped she would remember what she meant by it. She'd been making her notes briefer, more cryptic since McAllister and Simmons had seen inside her book.

“No. Murder. Did you murder her?”

“Of course not.”

“There's no ‘of course' about it. A simple yes or no will do. Did you?”

“Murder her?”

They were going around in circles.

“No.”

“Perhaps an accident? An argument? She shoved you. You shoved her back. The cape gave way…”

“No. No. No. No. No. No. No. What reason could I have?”

“That's what I'm asking you.”

She noted beads of sweat forming around his hairline. Guilt?

“I think you could have several reasons. That trailer, for one. The plastic garden – a tasteless display, not anything like the stunning view you promise your guests. Too close to your proposed helipad, so you cannot offer the further convenience of flying in and out to your clients.” She looked out the window toward the helipad, the trailer, and the plastic flower garden. Reasons to kill? Often it was the trivial that triggered murder.

His gaze followed hers. Neither said anything for a moment. Jamieson was soaking in the sight of the sun setting over the water, drinking in the long shafts of yellow and orange streaking across the royal blue sea.

Murder? Here? Again?

She pulled herself away and focused again on Paradis.

“Let's go back to the beginning. Where were you last night?”

In bed, he would say. He hadn't seen anything, heard anything.

“The one you should be talking to…is him.” Paradis gestured in the direction of the dome.

“I have every intention of talking to everyone in the area. Anyone who may have seen something, done something. Right now I'm talking to you.”

“He was obsessed with her, and disgusted by her. I, on the other hand, had no relationship with her, except one that could be sorted out with money.”

Money. He needed money. How was he going to float this operation without it?

Jamieson wasn't sure whom he was talking about. It could almost apply to either of the dead women. Had he killed them both? Had they both died naturally?

His evasiveness made him suspect. So did his motives. He had stood to gain from Viola's death, although he didn't, and there was something for him in Fiona's death, too. Something that perhaps she didn't know?

She didn't know about the floral shrine, or the melodic moon at the French doors. She did know that murder had been committed for less.

Suspect number one.

“Murder? The law of probabilities suggests not,” said Ian later, when Hy dropped by after she left Gus. She'd sought refuge there from nosy villagers who confronted her as she went by the hall where they were having a family reunion. All the smokers outside the building had descended on her.

“They say you found it. Is that true?”

“Flat as a pancake, was she?”

“You've got a knack at finding bodies. Are you sure you didn't do it?”

And more of the same. She hadn't answered, but stared straight ahead and made her way up to Ian's.

“The law of probabilities? I think we've defied those already with all the killings in the past couple of years. Is there a law of possibilities?”

“I think it's the same law.”

“Probably.”

Ian smiled. “Anyway, my guess is she fell off. Maybe had too much to tipple.”

“Blind as well as drunk.”

“Huh?”

“Gus says she had poor eyesight.”

“Could be. She once gave me a ten instead of a twenty in change.”

“Not necessarily poor eyesight.”

“No…”

“Poor judgement, I'd say.” Ian was close with his money.

“So do we view these two murders as separate? Or is there a connection?”

“Hard to say. Do you know what Jamieson's take is on it?”

Hy shrugged and frowned. “I'm not exactly in her good books right now.”

Ian was staring at his computer screen. If you were having a conversation with him, you were always sharing space in his brain with whatever was on that screen.

“I think I have something that'll cheer you up. Come here.”

Hy got up, Jasmine on her shoulder. She flew off onto Ian's.

“There you go!” Ian spun around in his chair and indicated the screen.

Before she got there, Ian crowed:

“Newton is a botanist!” There was a big smile on his face and a look in his eye that indicated more to come.

“And not just any botanist.”

Ian scrolled up so Hy could see what he'd read, the title of Newton Fanshaw's doctoral thesis:

Intimations of experiential toxicity and the science of floral duplicity in abundant usage primarily of plants, especially indicating the common crocus.

“What the hell does that mean?”

Hy smiled. “I've got his thesis in three words. Crocuses can kill.”

“Isn't that croci? In five words: Too much crocus can kill.”

“Or Crocus O.D. can be fatal.”

“Two words: Saffron kills.”

“Four words. And so does Newton?”

“I wonder.” Ian got up from his chair. “What could his motive possibly be?”

Hy pulled the journal out of her red bag.

“I think the answer's in here.”

“I didn't murder Fiona.” Newton stared Jamieson straight in the eye. “She tried to murder me. And Viola. They both tried to kill me. Why do women always want to kill me?”

“Fiona tried to kill you? When was this?”

“When she got that damn slow cooker. Those damn beans.”

Jamieson sighed. Not the beans again.

“She made some in it. She should have known better. Had her diploma from Hollow College. I think she did know, and she was trying to kill me.”

“Why would she do that?”

He shrugged. “Maybe because she knew I didn't love her. Maybe she was fantasizing a Romeo and Juliet scene.”

It was all Jamieson could do to keep a straight face at the image of the two of them. Romeo and Juliet? Jack Spratt and his wife, more like. Dying, not by a blade, but by fatal flatulence.

“A murder-suicide?”

“Maybe. Maybe she was trying to murder me. Maybe she wanted to murder herself.”

“We call that suicide.”

“Even if she didn't mean to kill herself?”

“If, as you say, she didn't intend to kill herself, then it wouldn't be murder or suicide.”

“Manslaughter, then.”

If he didn't give over, Jamieson thought, she might kill him herself. He was being argumentative and evasive. He was wasting her time. Did that make him innocent, or just clever?

“So you had a hard night of it over the beans, but we're not talking about that night – or any other night except the one where Fiona went off that cliff.

“Tell me, step by step, what you know of that evening.”

“She came to see me. I was surprised to see her at the door. I didn't answer.”

“Why were you surprised?”

His lips met in a tight, thin line.

“I didn't like her to come to me. She knew that.”

“Why not?”

“If I had allowed it, she would have been around all the time.”

Certainly no Romeo and Juliet.

“So you didn't answer. She left?”

He nodded. “When she left, I followed her.”

“Why?”

“I changed my mind. I thought maybe I would like to see her after all. We usually met in her trailer anyway.”

“Had she returned to her trailer?”

“No. She was standing at the edge of the cape, staring up at the turbine.”

“Did you go to her?”

“No. She lost her footing and fell off the edge.”

“Did you not go to help her?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I can't stand the sight of blood. I'd be no help. And I'm afraid of heights.”

That was a lie, Jamieson knew. She'd seen him scaling the tower. Everyone in the village had.

“You go up the tower.”

“That's different.” He twisted his hands together.

Jamieson wouldn't let up. “How different?”

“Just different.”

“Did you see anything more? Anyone else?” Had that chunk of the cape fallen on its own or been pushed?

“No, I turned and ran, back into the dome.”

“Why did you not call me?”

“I thought someone might accuse me.”

“Of what?”

“Killing her.”

“But you didn't know she was dead. You might have killed her by leaving her there.” Jamieson knew she had already been dead, but, according to his story, he hadn't. “You might have alerted someone to rescue her. To allow her to lie, possibly injured all night and into the day, is inexcusable, inhuman, and quite possibly criminal.”

He went white at the word. He'd run out of excuses for his behaviour, what he had done or not done in Fiona's death. Let her, the Mountie with no emotions, figure it out for herself. That's what he, the taxpayer, paid for.

As for Fiona and her fate – good riddance. He had no intention of frying for her. His mouth curved up in a smirk at the silent cooking reference.

Jamieson made a note of the smirk, wondering what it meant. Then she asked Newton to tell his story one more time.

The wind picked up that night – but only on the cape. Gus could look out her window to the front and see that all was calm. To the back, the stunted spruce trees and scrub brush were being beaten by a wind as strong as any Gus had seen in a gale.

Lili and Nathan were visiting Nathan's parents on the Shore Lane. Like Gus, they were on the edge of the wind. To one side, it was blowing fast and furious. To the other, dead calm.

“I told you,” Lili said to Nathan. They were looking out his parents' dining room window – a picture window that faced down to the shore.

“It's evil.”

“The cape? Evil?”

“Think about all that's happened there in the past few years. Certainly not good,” said Annabelle. “The deaths, the murders – and now more of them.”

Evil seemed as good an explanation as any.

“I don't mean the place.” Lili continued to stare out the window. “I thought it might be the place, but I think it's that. That's evil.” She jerked her head at the wind turbine, its blades spinning so fast that they could not be seen. They had become a blur.

“The wind-maker.”

“Lili, it doesn't make wind – ”

Annabelle reached forward, and pulled the curtains closed.

“That's enough morbid talk. Let's eat dinner.” In deference to Lili, a vegetarian, it was macaroni and cheese. Not just any macaroni and cheese – Annabelle's. Nathan tucked into it like a starved man. It was his usual approach to food, intensified at his mother's since he'd been living with Lili and her nuts and grains and indigestible vegetarian fare.

Annabelle hadn't managed to block out the wind by closing the curtains. The howl of it – and the high whine of the turbine spinning around – was the soundtrack to their supper.

To Lili, so attuned to the fine layers that make up the world, it was very disturbing. She hardly ate her food, pushing it around the plate.

Jamieson drove up from the cape, the wind buffeting the police vehicle. When she reached the top of the Shore Lane, it stopped. The night was calm.

She didn't look back. She didn't know that, behind her, the wind was still gale force.

They started to fly into the sky – Fiona's plastic flowers, twirling about with their silly smiles, whipped by the wind, a dark sky full of bright plastic objects, tipped with the light of the full moon, a bizarre nighttime ballet. One by one, the wind ripped up Fiona's little garden and took them, plastic snow in the night, bobbing on the channels of the wind, batted out of the way by the force coming off the turbine blades. They were like balls being thrown at a baseball batter. Without touching them, the turbine blades hit home run after home run, the colourful flowers flying high in the sky, and landing in the sand, forming a circle around the spot where Fiona had lain the night before, without benefit of their cheerful company.

A shrine to Fiona.

It was one of those summer nights when Ian lit the woodstove. There was no wind up Shipwreck Hill, but there was a chill in the air.

Hy was lying on her stomach, the flames flickering golden on her hair, the soft leather journal in her hands. She was squinting as she flipped through its pages.

“There's forty years in this book.”

Ian leaned back into the couch, the only piece of furniture that could be relied on not to break. “Her writing is tiny.”

“It's not every day for forty years. Not even every month. The entries aren't long. More like notes. Some years have only a couple of pages.”

“Not much to show for a whole life.”

“The best stuff is at the beginning.” Hy flipped to the first page.

“
The Journal of Viola Featherstonehaugh,
” she read, sliding unevenly over the surname. On the next page, one word:
Motherhood.

There was only one, early entry: