Something Fishy (25 page)

Jamieson felt her heart skip a beat. No, that wasn't true. Hearts don't always skip beats. Sometimes they add them. Little Alice had just added a beat to Jamieson's heart.

“Stupid. I was stupid,” muttered Jamieson, as she came back up onto the cape and joined Hy.

“What?” said Hy. “You saved all these kids. All the kids in the village.”

They had to pick their way through metal and plastic, large and small, strewn all over the cape. It would be a tough clean-up. Clearing fish off the cape had been a task, but they at least were biodegradable.

“Should have got them up the lane. Should've had them all out of here.”

“You do what you can do.” Hy dared to put a reassuring hand on Jamieson's shoulder. There were tears etched on Jamieson's face. Not something Hy had ever expected to see. Tears wiped to dirty streaks where Jamieson had tried to staunch them.

Billy and Madeline stumbled over, shaking, with Violet and Millie in tow. Jamieson had spied the two crushed tractors at the edge of the tall grass and figured out what they'd done. She jumped on the pair when they came over with the two girls.

“That was insane,” she scolded them, mostly from relief. “You…they…could have been killed.”

“They would have been,” said Madeline. “If we hadn't done something.”

Everyone was surprised that Madeline had spoken up, and to Jamieson. When Billy told everyone later – with pride – that Madeline had engineered the rescue, they were “…flummoxed,” said Gus. “Don't believe I've ever been flummoxed in my life, but I am now.”

“My children. Murdo saved my children.” April Dewey was collecting her six kids, clucking over them, patting their heads, wiping their tears. Watching her, Jamieson understood the term “mother hen.” A dull ache filled her centre. She remembered her own mother wiping away the wounds. Not for long. There was one deep wound she couldn't heal – the guilt over the fire she'd accidentally started, the one that had killed her parents.

Hy deposited Alice into her anxious mother's arms.

“So did she.” Pointing to Jamieson.

April flushed.

“Bless you,” she said to Jamieson.

“Let's be thankful that no one got hurt.”

Except Gladys was being a drama queen over a nick on her hand. Contemptible, thought Hy, considering her own granddaughter, Millie, was one of the two girls Billy Pride had saved. The other was Violet Joudry, the too-precious step-dancing, fiddle-playing granddaughter of Estelle Joudry. Hy vowed she would never be snarky about the girl in the future, who'd shed not one tear, and was busy comforting her own mother, who was a wreck.

Billy and Madeline were walking around like a pair of zombies, unable to take in what had happened, what they had done. There had been no thanks from Gladys when they brought the children over.

“Could of been dead,” Gladys insisted to a horrified Olive, who had watched from up at the hall and came scurrying down when it was all over. Gladys wasn't talking about the children. “That close it came to me. Mebbe I should sue.”

“Who?” said Hy in an aside to Jamieson.

It was then that she noticed what Jamieson was wearing. She started to laugh. Out of control. Fear released in guffaws. Jamieson started to laugh, too.

Her cream dress was covered in red clay.

The last time Jamieson wore a dress, it was dirtied and ripped to shreds. She'd answered a call a couple of years back in a bridesmaid's dress.

“Are you making a habit of this?”

“Well, I'm not a nun.”

Jamieson had made a joke. Another first.

And the shoes? Left behind the dome.

“Why'd you take the shoes off?” Hy asked.

“To run faster. Every second counted. Those wedges would have slowed me down. Besides, I was trained to run barefoot.”

She stared across the cape.

Not by the RCMP, thought Hy. There were still things to be learned about Jamieson. Secrets to unlock.

Jamieson stared across the cape, lost in a memory, her lips barely moving. Hy could hardly hear what she was saying – and what she heard, she could barely believe.

“
Empty-handed I entered the world

Barefoot I leave it.

My coming, my going –

Two simple happenings

That got entangled.
”

Curiouser and curiouser, like Alice in Wonderland. Was this the Jamieson she knew, running barefoot and quoting Zen poetry? Poetry clearly about death. Hy shivered and Ian came over and put an arm around her.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

It would be a long time – if ever – before April would forgive herself for sending the children onto the cape. She dug through the debris to reclaim her bowls. Each one was like an accusation. She gathered them up with her guilt, the bowls and the precious strawberries. She couldn't bring herself to fling them on the ground. That would be waste on top of near-tragedy.

She had sent the children into danger. Because of her, all the village children might have died. It was a mercy that none was even injured. But she had a vivid picture in her mind, not of what she had seen, but of what might have happened. She punished herself for sending them into danger. She couldn't let it go.

Murdo tried to get her to sit down and relax when she got home, body aching from hours of bending, but she was impelled to keep busy and distract herself. She began sterilizing canning jars and tools, preparing the fruit and sugar, stuffing wood into the range, ordering Murdo to fetch more, until the room was steaming in the hot summer night.

She plucked the stems from the berries, her fingers reddening at the tips from the juice. Red-handed. She was red-handed. Guilty of a crime against the youngest, most innocent and most vulnerable.

She wiped her hands on her apron, and smears of red defaced it.

She stirred the mixture of berries and sugar in the pot, seeing the deep red of it as blood that might have been shed. She stirred mechanically, until the juice reached temperature – hot enough that it would solidify.

Murdo wished he hadn't put on his freshly ironed shirt. Sweat was dripping off him, and April. In her mind, it was washing away her sin. Boiling over, the sweet syrup rose and dissolved in the air, the liquid in the pot thickening and shrinking. When she was finished, for all her effort, she had one jar. She labeled it and put it high up on a shelf where the children couldn't reach it, and where Murdo knew he mustn't.

He knew better. He had not only his freshly ironed shirt to mourn, but this year's wild strawberry jam, his favourite.

When April returned to the kitchen, she looked down,
distressed, at her blood-red apron.

She undid the bow at the back. It was a family heirloom.

She slipped the straps off her shoulders. Her mother's. And grandmother's before that.

She pulled it off.

She bunched it into a ball, opened the range, and shoved it in with the wood poker. It caught fire before she was able to seal it in, sending sparks and black ash up into the room.

Murdo didn't say a word. He didn't dare.

He knew the jam wasn't for him. There had been none of April's teasing glances and offers to taste. The jar stood, alone on its shelf in the pantry, a rare and precious thing.

So who, what was it for? All that effort for one jar.

She couldn't explain it herself.

But she knew who it was for.

It was Gus's idea. It came to her while looking out her back window at the devastation on the cape. The horizon was flattened, with the trailer gone, the dome a blackened circle, and the turbine a giant metallic skeleton clinging to the cape.

They could do something about the turbine. Sell off the metal.

Gus wanted rid of it. “I think young Lili's right. It's evil, that turbine—standing or lying down. We want it out of here.”

“How?” Hy was staring out the window at the damaged cape.

“Fetch a pretty penny for the metal in that. 'Spect Ben knows who'd take it. 'Spect Ben could use the money.” The tower had demolished Ben's farm tractors – his livelihood. Billy and Madeline were agonizing over that fact, although everyone, including Ben, kept reassuring them that it had been worth it, that you couldn't put a price on children's lives.

“No, no, don't even think about it,” Ben had told a worried Billy who kept swearing to repay him. “I'll worry about it.” Ben was worried. He had a bit in the bank, but that was for their retirement. Farmers don't have company pension plans.

“How he'll replace them otherwise, I don't know.” Gus sat down and picked up her sewing. “Those tractors and balers don't come cheap. Sell the metal, that's what I say. Get rid of it.”

“But Newton…it belongs…”

“Where's he now? We want clear of it. It'll hurt tourism more than that trailer of Fiona's, rest her soul.”

“I'm not sure…Jamieson…”

“If she has a problem with it, tell her to come to me.” End of argument.

Hy went down to the cape for a close look at the devastation. There was a dirty blue quarter-ton truck with a peeling sign painted on the cab:
Scruffer's Scrap Metal and Sanitation.
A short, odd-looking man with bowed legs stood beside it. His hair lived a life of its own atop his head, thinning, a mix of ginger and white, frizzing out in all directions. Ginger-and-white stubble peppered his chin. He looked a bit like a homeless elf.

“Heard that this come down yesterday,” he said as Hy approached.

“You live nearby?”

“Oh no. T'other end of the oi-land.”

Word travelled fast on this “oiland,” Hy thought.

“Come t'see if mebbe I can make somethin' of it.” He kicked a blade.

“We'd like to sell it as scrap.”

Scruffer surveyed the cape, his ginger brows hooding his eyes so that Hy couldn't read the expression in them. He scratched his stubble.

He shook his head slowly.

“I dunno. I dunno. It's tempting, but I'll have to think about it.”

“What's the problem?”

Scruffer pointed at the heap of metal. “That,” he said. “That turbine. I seen it was ours. We only just got rid of it. Why would I take it back?”

“We? Got rid of it? Take it back?”

He looked at her as if she were crazy, repeating everything he said.

“We is the folks in Herring Cove. Not called that fer nuthin'. But when that fella from away planted that whiney windmill in Herring Cove, our fish disappeared.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that. Overnight. Some said mebbe someone come and fished them out while we was sleepin'. I dunno. I just know they was gone.”

“Didn't they come back?”

“Oh, yep, they come back, but not 'til we got rid of that.” He spat on the blade, a large glob that splattered when it hit the metal.

“We convinced him to sell it off – to another come from away, and – ” he snapped his fingers again. “The fish came back.”

Newton. That other “‘come from away”' had been Newton.

“Would've killed our village without the herring harvest.”

“Almost killed ours, too,” said Hy. Scruffer lifted his ginger eyebrows in query.

“The children. It went for the children.”

Again, Scruffer surveyed the cape and the wreck of metal lying there.

“I dunno, might be different now that it's in bits. I dunno.”

“What do you think it's worth?”

“Couldn't say. Alls I know is there's somethin' about it. Somethin' I don't like. Somethin'…uh…what is it they say? Somethin'…”

“Fishy?” said Hy.

He smiled. There was a gap between his two front teeth.

“That's it…somethin' fishy.”

Hy thought of everything that had happened in The Shores while the wind turbine had been there. None of it good.

She nodded her head. “Yep. Definitely something fishy.”

She pulled out a business card.

“If you do decide to take it, call me.”

He took the card and stuck it in his shirt pocket. He pulled out one of his.

“Scrap metal and sanitation,” she read. “That's quite a combination.”

“Guess I don't mind cleaning up other people's messes.”

She watched as he walked back to his truck. He leapt over the metal nimbly. She wondered if he would be back. Should she worry about who to sell the metal to? Where its evil might go?

Hy told Jamieson about her meeting with Scruffer and the plan to sell the turbine for scrap metal.

Jamieson was doubtful.

“It is Newton's property. His estate's.”

“Then it should be his responsibility. But he can't do anything about it. There must be some law against leaving an unsightly mess like that in a prime tourist location.”

“If there is, I don't know of it.” Jamieson sounded firm, but she felt herself caving in. She said nothing more for a moment.

“If there isn't, there should be,” Hy said. Jamieson still didn't speak.

They were standing on the steps of the police house. Hy had found Jamieson there, staring down at the cape, the wind turbine a dominant feature, twisted and brought to ground.

“What do you think about Scruffer's story? Do you think it was to blame?”

“What? The windmill?” There was disbelief in Jamieson's response.

“Lili thinks it was evil.”

“Yes, well, Lili.” Jamieson dismissed the idea and the woman. Flaky. Sweet and as flaky as a chocolate croissant.

“Wind turbines are not a good thing, so close to people. Credible studies have shown that the noise affects the mind.”

“How is that different from farm equipment, cars on the road, our washing machines or fridges?”

“It's continuous, for one thing, and invisible. It's sound people can't hear, sound waves called infrasound. It penetrates indoors through windows. People may not hear it, but it can affect their minds. Make them dizzy, give them vertigo, depression, insomnia, extreme annoyance.”

“Someone would kill because they were in a bad mood?”

“I'm sure people have killed over trying to get a decent night's sleep.”

Jamieson was silent for a moment, thinking about what Hy had said. Could there be something in it?

“All of them – Viola, Fiona, Newton, and Anton were closer than anyone else to that turbine, and you have to admit they were all nuts. Mental instability. It's one of the side-effects.”

“They were all a bit nuts anyway – without benefit of the turbine.” Jamieson gave Hy the suggestion of a smile.

“You're right there, but I think it made them all spin right out. That windmill was the real killer, the force behind the deaths of Viola, Fiona, and Newton.”

“And the children,” Jamieson said softly, realization coming to her, unable to take her eyes off the mass of buckled metal on the cape. “It came for the children.”

“It did. A strike straight to the heart.”

Jamieson made her decision. “Get rid of the metal. Get it out of here. The sooner the better.”

Jamieson was in so deep, what did one more transgression matter?

There were plenty of rational reasons to remove it – safety was foremost – but what she really thought was that once that hunk of metal was removed from the village, things would get better.