Stormy Cove (18 page)

He left the crowd, and the rest of them stood around, looking a bit chagrined.

Lori and her questions had once again brought discord into a family party.

Two couples with children got up to leave. Maybe it was time for her to go too. She looked around at the guests and was startled to see one of the very young, provocatively dressed girls sitting in a man’s lap.
Her uncle or her father?
The man crossed his arms over the girl’s chest and jiggled her breasts up and down. Lori was shocked, but none of the bystanders seemed to find anything wrong. She tried to locate Noah, but he wasn’t around.

He didn’t show up until she’d said good-bye to Greta and her mother and a few others and was putting her salad bowl in her Toyota.

“Do I get some of that?”

She straightened up beside the car.

“Nobody touched it, not even you. Does it look
that
unappetizing?”

“No, no, not at all. It’s just that people here only eat what they know.”

“It’s just a damn potato salad, anybody can see that!”

“Maybe it looks different, dunno . . . I’d like to try it.”

“But not in front of all the guests, oh no!” she said. “You’d never do that.”

He said nothing but looked out on the bay. Then he said, “I can bring some sausage and moose meat.”

She couldn’t be angry with him. He’d grown up in this world, and he obeyed its rules. He had to keep on living here long after she moved on.

“OK,” she said. “The salad will taste even better tomorrow.”

His clouded face brightened.

“Yes, a lot of things improve if you let them sit for a while.”

I must remember that,
she thought as she started the motor.

CHAPTER 23

It was five in the morning when she slogged down to the harbor with leaden feet. She waddled like a duck in the heavy rubber boots Noah had lent her, and her life jacket felt like a suit of armor over the winter jacket that was bulky enough already. It was drizzling, and her hood didn’t keep the dampness off her face.

Get over yourself, Lori. It’s not a beauty contest, just a job.

Her only consolation was that Noah, who, together with Nate, was shoveling crushed ice into brightly colored containers, looked just as ungainly in his rubber jacket and pants.

Lori was shivering. She didn’t know if it was the aftermath of the flu that had chained her to her bed for the past week or the chill of the gray dawn. How could it still be so cold at the end of May! Snow still clung to the hilltops. In Vancouver, the cherry trees began to bloom as early as March.

Maybe it was also the anticipation of her first adventure on Noah’s fishing boat that sent shivers down her spine. She hadn’t seen him for ten days, and wasn’t thrilled for him to see her with her nose rubbed all red, her swollen eyes, and a lingering air of the sick bed on her. Patience had insisted on coming over daily, making tea and bringing food Lori was too feverish to eat. The nearest doctor was a three-hour drive away. What did these people do if they had heart attacks and other emergencies?

Nate interrupted her thoughts.

“Do you get seasick?”

She shrugged.

“Never happened before. Will it be rough today?”

“Nah, sea’s pretty calm. Sometimes it gets to me.”

“What? A fisherman who gets seasick?”

“For sure, and I’m not the only one. If it’s really blowing out there, it’s no fun, no fun at all.”

But he smiled all the same.

The brothers heaved a box of ice on board. Then Noah held out his hand.

“Welcome aboard, milady.”

He helped her climb onto the rocking boat and find her footing among the buckets and white plastic bags. Then he slacked off the ropes from the bollards. Nate started the engine, and the boat chugged out of the cove. Lori kept a hand on the jamb of the wheelhouse door and watched the village of Stormy Cove vanish into the thin morning fog. The boat hugged the coastline, and its tall black vertical rocks.

Lori felt the boat rolling, breathed in the salty, fishy air. She was filled with a dizzying sense of lightness and freedom, and she felt deeply insignificant but uplifted by the sublime power of the sea.

Noah sat on the railing, his rain hood pulled up over his baseball cap. Lori sat down beside him.

“How many times have you set out from this cove?” She had to yell to be heard over the engine.

“Thousands of times. I know every rock and every shoal.”

He pointed a finger at the cliffs.

“Over there are the Devil’s Footprints. Do you see the claw marks in the stone? There’s the White Dog, the bright-colored rock that looks like a dog from this side. And over there’s the Oven, a cave.”

He looked at her.

“Rain doesn’t hurt your camera?”

“No, not this little drizzle. But I wouldn’t take it into the water.”

“Can you swim?”

“Of course. You?”

He shook his head.

“I don’t know any fisherman who can swim.”

“Why aren’t you wearing a life jacket?”

“It’s pointless. You’d freeze to death just like that in this cold water.”

“Not if somebody can pull you out of the water fast. Surely you don’t freeze in a minute.”

He shook his head again and said nothing. Lori knew him well enough to know she had to drop it. But then there was a new sound.

“The hydraulic hauler,” Noah shouted when he saw the puzzled look on her face. “Hauls in the nets.”

Lori photographed the nets coming up over the bow, the wriggling fish caught in the mesh, and Noah pulling at the stern. He grabbed the fish with his orange rubber gloves, freed them from the mesh, and threw them on the deck, where they still twitched a little, their mouths snapping in the air.

Filled with curiosity, she studied their plump, slimy bodies: gray blue, greenish, sometimes nearly black. The upper fin was almost as big as a rooster’s comb. So that’s the lumpfish. Or lumpsucker—she’d looked it up on the Internet. Genus
Cyclopterus
in the family Cyclopteridae, a description she found delightful.

“They don’t have scales,” she yelled.

Noah laughed.

“Fat bellies make up for it!”

She knew he meant the roe in the females; it’s what he was after. Her camera caught Noah throwing the nets over the rail and gradually sliding them back into the ocean. The boat started up again.

Noah took a big, sharp knife and opened a lumpfish’s belly. Caviar gushed out, thousands of tiny pink fish eggs that he dripped into a white bucket. He shoved a hand into the open belly and cleaned out what was left. She grimaced.

“Are the fish dead? Do they suffer?”

Noah looked up briefly as he kept working. She repeated the question.

“No, they don’t suffer. Do you hear a loud scream when I slit them open? They don’t have any feeling, these fish.”

His argument was unconvincing. But what right did she have to question thousands of years of fishing tradition? She enjoyed eating fish, not to mention lobsters and crabs and mussels and snails. She’d tried going vegetarian when she was very young, and had failed miserably because of her love of meat and her inability to concoct enough tasty meals.

It was a long day. The boat went from net to net—eighty in all—and Noah and Nate worked without a break for ten hours. All Noah wolfed down was a chocolate bar and an apple, Nate a sandwich washed down with Mountain Dew, which he offered to Lori. After one swallow of the sugary soft drink, she opted for tea from her thermos, but that put her in a bind. There was no toilet on the boat. Men simply peed over the rail. Noah handed her a big pail and closed the wheelhouse door so she’d be undisturbed.

She didn’t get seasick; however, she was frozen stiff after several hours and longed for solid ground underfoot. She’d taken enough pictures of roe and nets and the ocean and fishermen in green rubber clothes. But the brothers worked tirelessly. She didn’t dare ask if they could maybe put her ashore in the early afternoon.

Finally, when Noah was eating his apple, she asked with feigned indifference, “So, when is quitting time?”

“We’re not paid by the hour,” he replied. “We try to get in as much as possible.”

When at last they neared Stormy Cove harbor, surrounded by fluttering, screaming gulls, Lori heaved a sigh of relief that didn’t escape the men’s notice. They laughed.

“Next time we won’t drag you out for such a long day,” Nate said. “But you’ve got to experience for once what it really means to fish.”

“And that wasn’t a tough one,” Noah chimed in. “In summer we sometimes don’t get back until eleven.”

“Can you still see in the dark?”

“Oh, sure. We’ve got searchlights.”

Her questions obviously amused the fishermen, whose spirits were already high due to a good haul. They estimated the day’s catch at around eight hundred pounds.

When they moored, the buyer’s truck was ready to go and the driver was impatiently waiting for his load.

“You want to sell her too?” he shouted, an eye on Lori as she climbed out of the boat onto the wooden planks.

“You don’t have enough to buy
me
,” Lori shot back. “Where do you send the caviar anyway?”

“To Europe. Mostly Germany.”

“That far? Don’t Canadians like their native caviar?”

The driver laughed.

“Germans pay more, I guess. There’s a reason why lumpfish roe is called German caviar.” He grabbed a bucket and pushed it onto the back of the truck. “The guy who has the import company, he comes to Newfoundland now and then. Supposed to be a baron, or so I’ve heard. Posh people probably eat the stuff for breakfast.” He laughed again.

A baron. Lori hesitated.

“Does he stay at Birch Tree Lodge?”

“No idea. Possible. It’s the only hotel for miles around.”

Noah and Nate began to clean up the boat.

Lori couldn’t get warm fast enough.

She shouted them a good-bye and got into her car.

Her most urgent need had a name: hot chocolate.

When she got home, she didn’t even bother to check her messages on the computer or the telephone before going straight to bed. A wise decision.

In her exhausted state, she wouldn’t have known how to deal with the surprise that awaited her.

CHAPTER 24

The next day, Lori cursed the fact that there were six time zones in Canada and that Vancouver was four and a half hours behind Newfoundland. She absolutely had to talk to her mother, but had to wait until noon before she could call, even though her mother wasn’t one to sleep in on the weekend.

“I thought you’d call yesterday,” her mother said without standing on ceremony. “I didn’t even go to the movies.”

Lisa Finning was a film buff, and Friday night was her sacrosanct film date that she only canceled in extreme emergencies. She usually went to the last show, around ten. But it wasn’t like her to lay a guilt trip on her daughter, even for missing this ritual pleasure; she hadn’t even complained that she wouldn’t be seeing Lori for almost a year. Her mother was of the opinion that every woman was responsible for her own happiness. She must have had some other reason for giving up her movie date—Lori knew that right away.

“What? Are you feeling okay?”

“No, no, there are riots in the inner city, and I am quite upset about it.”

“Riots? Why? Not another hockey game?”

“No, not this time. The provincial government cut the minimum wage down to eight dollars. It’s a real scandal; nobody can live on that. And at a time when the big corporations are paying less and less taxes.”

“Since when do you have social justice in your soul, Mom? I hardly recognize you.”

“Social justice—you don’t have to be dramatic, dear heart. It’s simply not right for so few to have a lot of money and so many to have so little. It’s not good for the economy because who’s going to buy the goods we produce? It isn’t good for society because the middle class is declining. And it isn’t good for democracy because it undermines stability.”

Normally, her mother only got this exercised about mistreated dogs and cats. Usually, Lori got the impression she preferred not to talk about social ills at home because she had to deal with plenty of them at the office.

Under normal circumstances, Lori would have sounded her mother out and tried to figure out what was going on with her, but today she let it be. She had something more urgent to discuss, having heard this message on the answering machine that morning: “My dear, I’ve found out something about the case we talked about, something to do with a person you know. Call me at home, sweetheart.”

A person you know.
Lori’s stomach shrank at once, like a wool sweater in hot water.

“Mom, forgive me for changing the subject, but please tell me what you found out.”

“Ah, yes. I might have known you’d be more interested in that than riots in Vancouver. I was able to have a brief conversation with the investigator in charge of Jacinta Parsons’s file. He rather covered his ass, I must say.”

“Why did you say you were interested in the case?”

“I told him my daughter was in the area where the murder occurred and I wanted to know if I should be concerned for her safety.”

“What? You said
that
?”

“No, my dear, I’m joking. I told him that I was writing a book about extraordinary murder cases, which is true, and asked whether he could give me any information on the Parsons case.”

“But Mom, you’re writing a book about murders in
British Columbia
.”

“He doesn’t have to know that! Do you want the info or don’t you?”

“Of course. So?”

“As I said, the guy wasn’t very cooperative. But he told me that the file was still open, that is, the case is still being investigated, though I had the impression not very actively.”

“What about the person I know? Who is it?”

“I’ll get to that, my dear. Let me finish. I told him the things found in the grave made the case especially interesting because they were supposed to have been copies of those found in an ancient Indian grave. Up to now, I’d only heard of one case like that, in France, since I researched the topic.”

“You did?”

“I needed to do some spadework, Lori; the little bit you told me wasn’t enough. In any case, he thawed out a touch when I gave him some details concerning the French case—I won’t bother you with them now—and we started to chat. But listen to this: The killer in France was arrested because of an item in the grave. She made a fatal mistake: she threw in a ring that could be identified.”

“Was she copying a prehistoric grave as well?”

“No, a medieval grave, and the ring looked exactly like a piece of medieval jewelry. You know young people’s tastes, and rings haven’t changed much in the course of modern history.”

“I still don’t understand how the murderer was caught.”

“The murderer was actually a woman, remember. She killed her romantic rival and then put her own ring into the grave. She thought investigators would conclude that somebody wanted to frame her and that it was impossible for her to be the perp because it wasn’t logical that she’d give herself away like that. It worked for three years. But she was wrong.”

“Mom, this is too confusing. I haven’t the slightest idea where this is going.”

“My point is, it’s the same thing with Jacinta. The investigator told me there was an object in Jacinta’s grave belonging to the lead archaeologist. But they assumed it had been stolen and planted in order to shift suspicion onto him.”

“A personal object? A prehistoric item?”

“No, his hunting license.”

“What kind of license?”

“A government gun permit, for hunting.”

Lori was silent for a moment so she could process her mother’s report. Then she said, “And what about the person I know?”

“I was talking about the archaeologist, naturally.”

“Lloyd Weston . . . How do you know I know him?”

“You told me you met him at the lodge, my dear.”

Lori now recalled she’d e-mailed her mother about meeting him. She thought she’d be pleased that her daughter was meeting people who weren’t fishermen.

Lori’s body relaxed. She felt hugely relieved. Her mother hadn’t turned up anything about Noah. Of course, the investigator might have held back information about him. And there was still that matter of the arrowhead under the snowmobile seat. On the other hand, wouldn’t somebody guilty of murder make such an important piece of evidence disappear? Burn it in a stove or toss it into the ocean?

It seemed strange to her now that Weston hadn’t quizzed her more about the artifact. He’d been so quickly satisfied with the idea that she must have been mistaken. And now it had vanished from her house.

“What else did you discover?”

“Not much, because I would have had to officially request access to the files to get it. And then things get complicated.”

“I’m amazed the investigator revealed the business about the hunting license in the grave. That’s really something only the killer could have known. Why disclose something like that?”

“Oh, my dear, now you’re thinking like a detective! I imagine they hoped that after twenty futile years of searching that they’d make more progress by leaking information than by keeping it secret. And I assume they have more arrows in their quiver that only the perp can know.”

That made sense to Lori. After all, the police had told Weston about the carving in Jacinta’s grave.

Her head was swimming in a dense cloud.

“So what was your take-away from this whole thing?”

Her mother didn’t answer, but Lori stayed with it.

“Mom, did it seem like the investigator maybe isn’t so sure anymore that the archaeologist is guilty now that you told him about the French case?”

“No, I rather think . . . that they fear for his safety. A hunting license sends a different signal than a ring does.”

“But Jacinta wasn’t shot. So what’s the signal?”

“That the killer thinks Weston knows something and he’ll be shot if he squeals.”

Lori thought about that. She recalled her conversations with Weston. He’d never given the slightest impression of being in danger. On the contrary, he’d come back to the same place for a dig on a second grave.

Lisa Finning’s thoughts turned in a different direction.

“How are things with that fisherman? Have you got something going with him?”

“Mo-
ther
! Do you always have to be so direct?”

“Yes, I do, can’t help myself, you know that. Why beat around the bush?”

“I went out fishing with him yesterday, on the ocean . . . and—no, we’re not in a relationship.”

“But you like him a lot, don’t you?”

“Let’s say . . . I don’t fully understand what I feel. It’s a tight little world here, and I’m kind of lonely.”

“But that’s something we’re familiar with, no?”

She knew exactly what her mother was referring to.

“No, it’s not like in Germany. My photo assignment is interesting and, believe it or not, the people here speak English just like we do.”

Her words came out more sarcastic than she intended. But her mother didn’t take the bait.

“Just be careful, my dear. A year is a very long time.”

“I know, Mom. And thanks for the info on the case,” Lori said, striking a more conciliatory tone of voice. “I really appreciate it. Talk to you soon.”

“And if you feel lonely, then go take some poor dog for a walk. It’ll do both of you some good,” her mother said.

Lori stared out the window onto the bay. The sun’s rays pushed tentatively through patches of gray fog. The hills looked like shaggy animals, gradually molting their white coats and showing some dark spots. Springtime in Vancouver had something soft, optimistic about it. But out here, in the north of Newfoundland, nature seemed to be saying to people: we’re only giving you a short breather, don’t get too happy. There was a pride, an untouchability in it that appealed to her. The rocky landscape was uncompromising, untamable. It remained what it was, unwavering.

Her gaze wandered over to the boats. Noah’s wasn’t there. He and Nate must have gone out early that morning.

She pictured him in her mind’s eye, freeing the fish from the net, one after the other, radiating the calm of a person who was doing what he believed he was fated to do.

She often felt he was watching her when she was busy with her camera, scanning her surroundings for the best subject, the best angle, the most compelling composition.

Maybe they weren’t so different after all; maybe they had more in common than she supposed.

A warm, hopeful feeling flooded over her.

But that exposed a weakness that she had to cover up swiftly.

Be careful, a year is a very long time.