Bodies and Sole (10 page)

Chapter Eighteen

The rental car parked in the driveway at Macks' could mean
only one thing. Dot had arrived. Hy sped her bicycle the short distance from Moira's, jumping off it before the wheels had stopped spinning, and bounded up the front steps.

Hy had never met Dot. She had lived in The Shores for over twenty years, but had arrived just after Dot left. Only once in all that time had Dot returned home, and Hy had been away.

Once in twenty years, thought Hy. What did that long absence mean? There didn't seem to be any bad blood between Gus and Dot – Hy had witnessed their easy relationship on Skype. But there must be something. Twenty years away. It said complex, not simple, relationship.

Whacky charged past Hy when she opened the door, streaked straight for where she wasn't wanted, as cats do. Straight up to Dot and pawing at Dottie, who perched on her mother's hip.

Dot in person wasn't much different than Dot on Skype. They'd conversed a bit when Dot was pregnant with Dottie in Antarctica, so Hy was used to her open smile and breezy self-confidence.

Now, in person, Hy liked Dot for herself and she was glad, but she knew she would have liked her anyway, if only for Gus's sake. How could she not? The lovely smile lighting up her old friend's face, eyes sparkling with joy, settling on her own most loved child, and grandchild. Bustling across the room to hug them both and relieve her daughter of the baby. Simple pleasure. Nothing complex about that.

Until she sat down in her rocker.

“And where's himself?”

Dot frowned.

“Well…?”

“Well, there's been a parting of ways.”

“Never.” Gus shoved the baby back at Dot. “Let me get you a cup of tea.”

Gus scurried off to busy herself in the pantry – her reaction to all stripes of emotional shock.

“It's cold down there,” Dot whispered to Hy. “Someone to warm your bed can cloud your judgment.” She grinned. Hy smiled back. Gus fussed and fussed in the pantry, unable, at first, to find the tea, then the milk. She opened and closed the fridge several times before she located it – in the fridge.

She emerged – but without the squares, returned to the pantry, still holding the tea tray, came back with the squares but without the tea.

Hy jumped up and helped sort it out, while Dot nursed the baby, who had begun to fuss.

Gus wasn't sure she approved of the display in public, but she was wrangling with a bigger issue from the calming rock of her chair. It was getting less simple all the time.

“And so you'll be staying here. Home.” It was the only comfort Gus could find in the situation.

Dot darted a glance at Hy, adopted as a co-conspirator.

“Ma, I don't know…”

“Don't know? How could you not know? With the babe, where would you go?”

“Where I usually go.”

“Traipsing all over the world?”

“That's what I usually do.”

Gus sighed. A heavy sigh. She pointed to the dresser where Dot had stuffed the papers and photos of the heritage project back into the cardboard file. They were about to come out again.

“Bring me that folder, Hy.”

Ian had been useless during the weekly online forensics session with Jamieson, constantly jumping up to look out the window, and confirm, from the sight of Hy's bicycle, that she was still with Gus.

“Settle down,” Jamieson barked, annoyed when he jumped up for the fourth or fifth time.

“Did you digest this? Can I go to the next page?”

Ian returned from the window. The light beaming in flashed a sheen over Jamieson's black hair. He hardly noticed. He hardly noticed the screen either. He skimmed over the information.

“Yes. Uh-huh.” He sounded distracted, but Jamieson took him at his word and clicked “Next.”

Ian stood for a moment or two, watching the simulation of the case study crime, of a woman, sitting in a car, shot through the head on a lonely stretch of road.

When the video ended, Ian drifted back to the window. Hy's bike was still there.

Jamieson stuck in her USB, downloaded a few items and clicked off the screen.

“There are still two more sections and a quiz.” She ejected the USB and picked up her notebook and pen. “We'll catch up tomorrow. I see you're in no mood today.”

She walked over to the window.

McAllister's bike outside Gus Mack's? Why should that disturb him?

It didn't. Not as long as it was there.

When it moved, so did Ian. He jumped into his truck and headed down to Hy's.

He was dressed in the shirt and pants that had arrived that day from L.L.Bean. The tidiest they would ever look. After which they would land on a chair, become crushed under more clothes, be dragged out and stuffed in the washer and dryer, and then left in the dryer for days to allow the wrinkles to set. Ian never looked crisp. At best, rumpled.

Finn was crisp and had the look of someone who was always that way, even when he was living out of a backpack. His clothes were L.L.Bean, like Ian's. Unlike Ian, Finn didn't look as if he'd borrowed the skin he was in. The clothes looked made for him. A good-looking outdoors guy.

A spidery-thin, good-looking outdoors guy, tasting the tomato sauce that was bubbling up on Hy's stove. She arrived home to a house filled with the aroma of a fine Italian meal.

“I take it you're Finn. If you're not…”

“The very same. I hope you don't mind my making myself at home like this…”

“Not at all. Anyone who cooks for me is always welcome.”

“You don't make it easy.”

“I know, I know. The cupboards are usually bare or rotting.”

“However, I have devised a delectable shrimp in tomato sauce. With the house wine. Have a seat.”

Just as he spoke, Ian charged though the door.

“Pardon me for interrupting,” he glanced first at Hy, then rested his gaze on Finn. A full head of hair, Ian noted with distaste. He wasn't the least bit sorry about having interrupted them, she could see that. She was annoyed. She knew she liked Finn, she could tell that right off, and here was Ian barging in. She felt she had no choice but to invite him to what otherwise might have turned into a romantic dinner.

“We're just sitting down. Please join us. There's plenty.”

Ian never said no to a meal. And he saw all the signs of a romantic dinner hatching, so he was quite happy to accept the invitation. Very foolish of Hy, he thought. She didn't know this man and here he was cooking in her house, eating in her house…sleeping in her house?

He sat down and picked up a fork.

For a few moments, eating and comments about how delicious the food was filled what otherwise might have been an uncomfortable silence. But it came, as it was bound to. Dinner had reached the point where conversation was required.

“So you're a scientific man?” Finn started it up.

“How do you know?”

“Hy and I have communicated quite a bit. I understand you have a keen interest in science. Then we have something in common.”

Hy felt a spark of hope that this meeting might go okay. Finn was making overtures.

Ian raised an eyebrow.

“You think?” His voice was thick with doubt.

“I would think – although you have not gone as far with it as I did.”

“Did?”

“Oh, I don't bother with the stuff I used to anymore.”

So much for overtures.

“But when you
did
bother with the stuff…?” Hy sensed he was going in for the kill, looking for a slim connection to science, if at all.

“Not science exactly.”

Ian looked triumphant.

“Medicine. Medical doctor. My specialty was forensics.”

“Was?”

“I'm an environmentalist now. Got into the medical thing because it was what my mother wanted. Forensics… I don't know. It seemed to be on the cutting edge, so to speak.”

“Forensics?” A spark of interest from Ian. “Dabbling in that myself at the moment.”

“I had no real interest. My mother felt I should have a trade, a back-up. I chose forensics because I thought it would appall her and I'd be off the hook. It did appall her, but she waited it out, thinking I would cave in. I waited, too. We were both so stubborn that I finally found myself with the rubber gloves and scalpel carving into a cadaver.”

Ian's face whitened at the image.

Definitely a dabbler, not a carver, thought Hy.

The talk had put them all a bit off their meal, but Ian soon rallied and managed to have a second helping.

The folder became something that Gus and Dot began to shape their renewed relationship around.

Dot had all the contents of the folder spread on the kitchen floor again. Dottie was crawling all over them, shuffling them around.

Gus sighed.

Dot dove for a yellow piece of paper with a scribble on it.

“Here's a partial list of contents.”

“Well, now, and if it isn't. I been looking all over for that. In and outside my head. Couldn't remember for the life of me.”

“And here's your first settler.”

“Ebenezer Mack. Yes, that's right.”

“Might as well go chronologically with the people, the families, and then do some of the interest pieces. Like first barn, first car, all the firsts together with any photos that you have.”

Gus was nodding and rocking.

“Old Ebenezer. The stories they told about him.” She smiled. Her eyes closed in reminiscence.

Dot picked up papers and photographs and was sorting them in sequence. Gus was a bit like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence. She'd started it up and now Dot was doing the work.

“Old Ebenezer. Did you know him?”

Gus laughed and her eyes came open.

“No, but his name was spoke in my house as if he were still alive. Lived to be one hundred and twelve. Or so they say. No record of it.”

There was about to be. Dot pulled out her iPhone and hit
Record.

A few hours later, the floor was clean of clippings, scraps of paper and photographs. Dottie was tucked upstairs in bed, and Dot's iPhone was full of stories.

Dot had been asking questions.

Gus had done what she did best – told her stories.

Gus Mack's tales of the past – a documentary account unrivalled anywhere.

Chapter Nineteen

Ian now had over two thousand Facebook friends, many of
them called Finn Finnegan, or some variation. On his quest to find out who Finn was, he'd stumbled onto his own Facebook page. He wondered, briefly, how it had been created, and then used it for his own quest to find out about Finn. The Finn he wanted to find out about had not yet confirmed his friend request.

That Finn was friends with Hy, on and off Facebook, had become painfully clear to Ian following the awkward dinner.

Quite apart from his jealousy, he was genuinely concerned that Hy had a man she didn't know staying in her house. So concerned that he'd offered him a bed at his.

Both Finn and Hy had laughed it off.

This evening, he'd seen them strolling down The Shore Lane. Hand in hand. Down to the shore, as the sun set. Very romantic. Their heads close together. Talking. Laughing.

Ian thought the man looked like a spider.

This growing closeness between Hy and Finn made Ian more determined than ever to find him out. He'd confirmed Finn's status as a doctor and forensic anthropologist. He'd also found some references to his environmental activism, but he was looking for something more.

Everybody had a secret they'd rather other people didn't know. This Finnegan character would be no different.

The skull was killing time. The gulls were, too. A pair of them picked him up, beaks stuck through the holes where his eyes had once been. They carried him over the water, a flock of gulls pursuing them, deluded into thinking he was edible.

They pecked at and removed the seaweed stuck to his head, and, finding nothing more of interest, let go.

The skull dropped to the water with a splash, very near the hole in the ocean floor where it had been stuck for fifty years.

But the tide caught it up. It wasn't destined to be hidden anymore.

It was headed, once again, for the shore.

Hy's FB Status: The skin can stretch to ten times its size, so it's no wonder we get wrinkles. But if you use one of those anti-wrinkle creams, a substance in it may come from a cadaver.
Likes: 1
Comments: Eeeew.

Vera creamed her face, looking with displeasure into the mirror. All the lines. All the wrinkles, set by the sour expression she'd maintained ever since she was six years old and a boy had smacked her on the head in the school playground. She went dashing after him, arms raised, and, just as she was catching up with him and beginning to scream, red-faced and mouth stretched wide, the button on her skirt popped and it fell to the ground. Vera's anger melted into a pool of shame, gathered, with the skirt, around her ankles. She grabbed it, hung onto it tight around her waist with one hand; the other she clutched over one ear, to muffle the sounds of laughter following her as she dashed from the playground and into the school.

It was then that Vera had decided that life was not fair. The boy had misbehaved and she was the one who was punished. The boy had actually smacked her on the head because he liked her, but she would never see it that way. And she would never forgive the rest of the children for laughing at her.

Vera's expression had turned sour somewhere between her skirt dropping and the echoing laughter. By the time she left school that day, the expression was set, as if the wind had changed and made it stay that way.

She'd grown into it, so that now what had not been suitable on a six-year-old child was perfectly suited to a bitter sixty-year-old woman. She saved her best approximations of a smile for the men she wooed, but actually counted on her other qualities to attract them.

Chief among them, she was able to appear caring. Competent and caring. She didn't have to be good-looking. The men in the age group Vera favoured weren't interested in sex anymore, although some thought they might be. That was soon taken care of. No, what they wanted was someone to play nurse. For real.

Wipe their bums and noses, Vera thought, not for the first time, as she applied a thin line of lipstick to her pale, receding lips.

They didn't know they were doing it for a price, but of course they were.

A high price.

“Do you mind talking about your family?”

Finn and Hy were sitting over a glass of wine as dusk fell on another rainy day at The Shores. The ride-ons were idle, and Hy was thinking how peaceful it was. And how nice it was to have an amiable companion, a man, in the house.

Especially one as neat and tidy as Finn. But he'd made no overtures. Time enough, she smiled, thinking of the phrase that came quickly and often to Gus's lips.

The smile wasn't an answer to Finn's question. She hadn't really heard what he'd said.

“Mind?” She was buying time. Time for whatever it was he'd asked to come to her.

“I guess you do.”

“Mind?” It wasn't coming to her.

“Talking about your family.”

Oh.

“Not really. I, well – it's complicated.” With a bit of wine in her, Hy wasn't in the mood to talk about the past.

“I don't mean to be nosy.”

“Not much to be nosy about. There is no family. Hasn't been for as long as I can remember. All dead, including my bitter old grandmother, the only one I ever knew. Never knew my father, my mother.”

“Well, of course, I know about your mother. I'm sorry.” His two thick black eyebrows, like a pair of caterpillars knitted in a frown. Ian would have been grateful to have that much hair on his head.

“Nothing to be sorry about. I have no feelings for any of them, especially not the bitter old granny.” She gave a weak smile. She sipped the last of her wine and stood up.

“I'm going to bed.” She walked over to a library desk and pulled out a magazine. She opened it, and handed it to him.

“This'll tell you everything.”

She left him there, reading everything she thought he didn't know. But he did know, quite a bit. That's why he was here. He hadn't been asking, he'd been probing.

He had read into her reaction a warning not to mention her family again.

Better back off for a bit. What he knew would keep. He didn't want to shock her.

Finn Finnegan.

Finding out this guy's secret was not turning out to be easy. Ian scrolled through social media. He checked births and deaths over fifty years, until, finally, he found what he was looking for.

The accident. The mother. The child.

He hoped it hadn't gone too far. Hy would be appalled.

It was his duty to bring it up, even if that scumbag hadn't. How could he keep something like this from her? Why?

He was a pervert. He must be.

But really the only question now was who and how to confront.

Both, he decided. Together. Let Finn squirm in the web of his lie. Let Hy be embarrassed. She deserved it.

Hy was in for a surprise, but quite a different one, the next time she went to Macks'. Dot handed her a USB drive and a neat folder of printed pages, mixed with photographs, graphics and original documents.

“Dot,” Hy beamed. “You're a treasure.”

“It's Ma that did it,” she said, nodding at Gus, who held up her hands to deny it.

“Every word of it, Ma. I captured her on this little thing.” She held up her iPhone. “Word for word. Didn't change a thing.”

“It's a miracle.” Hy hugged the manuscript.

“Reckon you're right about that,” said Gus. “Got almost the entire top of my crazy quilt pieced at the same time. That's a miracle, too.”

Dottie was on the floor, grabbing up scraps of material and stuffing them in her mouth. No one stopped her. You could eat off Gus's floor.

Gus looked down, eyes and mouth both smiling.

“She helped me. Chose the pieces. Whatever she'd pick, I'd fit it in, so I didn't have to think at all. Came out beautiful.” She held up squares one by one, and Dottie smiled, squealed and clapped her hands.

Her squeals almost masked the sound of the screen door squeaking open. Finn popped his head around the corner.

“You,” said Dot.

He straightened and smiled, delighted. “You,” he said.

“You?” Hy.

“You. You. You.” Dottie, smacked her hands on the floor, pleased that the grown-ups were speaking her language.

Gus said nothing. She thought they were all as crazy as her quilt.

“Dot. Finn.” Hy looked from one to the other, with a puzzled expression. “You know each other?”

Dot smiled. “Met on the ferry.”

Hy wasn't sure she liked the way they were looking at each other. Eating each other up. Finn hadn't looked at her that way. He'd made no overtures of any kind. They'd been just like brother and sister. They'd held hands, but it was purely companionable. She'd been considering that maybe he was gay.

Hy wasn't sure exactly how it happened, but, after a brief conversation, Finn and Dot were off to the shore, Gus was babysitting Dottie, and she was headed home, manuscript in the basket of her bike.

Was Finn using her as a cheap hotel?

It was on the way home, some of Gus's familiar phrases ringing in her head, that Hy had an idea for the title and for publication. Time Enough. There wasn't time enough. Hy hoped Gus would last forever, but of course she wouldn't. And the village wouldn't last forever, not now that there were more tourists than villagers. It would be a slow death.

Time was. Another of the local expressions, and the more she thought about it, the more she liked it.
Time Was.
Yes.
Time Was.

She'd had a look through the folder Dot had given her and Gus's stories, her way of speaking, her old-fashioned phrases and point of view shone through it. She knew what she was going to do with it. This didn't have to be a vanity publication. It could stand on its own with a real publisher. The publisher of her mother's book. If she had to, she'd apply a little pressure.

She didn't have to.

When she got home, she copied a sample and pitched the manuscript to the publisher. After giving them a couple of hours, she made a direct phone call.

Brad Perkins took the call. She knew then that she was in. Brad was the co-publisher at Real Words Press. He was also a bit sweet on Hy. And he loved what he'd seen of
Time Was.

“I'll front it. I'll back it.” She rambled before he could even say a word. “I'll pay the losses if there are any. But I don't think there will be. I think you'll have a steady little income earner.”

Hy smiled a sly smile when she got off the phone. Done. She screwed up her forehead. Nearly done.

Brad had jumped on it, especially given Hy's agreement to take an editing role. Toss her mother's name in the mix and one book could feed off the acclaim of the other.

Now Hy had to pass the idea by Gus and Dot. Tell them that the original plan for a vanity publication had been scrapped, and now
Time Was
would be produced by a real publisher, who saw in it similarities to
A Life on the Land,
but replicating the popular bestseller in its own Gus-like way.

Hy returned to Gus with the news.

Gus blushed red. She was too self-effacing to believe that it had anything to do with her.

“Have to thank Dot,” she said. “She did it all.”

Finn's arm was around Dot's shoulder when they returned from their stroll on the beach. Dottie quickly clamped onto his long skinny black leg.

Bonding, thought Hy.

“Not me, Ma. You.”

“Maybe it was your mother, Gus, looking over your shoulder.” Hy was trying not to look at Finn and Dot.

Gus smiled softly.

“Happen it was.”