Stormy Cove (17 page)

CHAPTER 21

The item that Lloyd Weston had identified as a projectile tip was nowhere to be found, even after a thorough search. And Lori was absolutely certain she’d left it on the table.

The doors to the house had been unlocked during her trip—nobody locked their doors in Stormy Cove. Selina Gould hadn’t even given Lori a key. She’d taken her computer, photography equipment, and all her valuables with her to the lodge and so hadn’t given burglars a thought.

But who would go into her house while she was away? Selina, checking up on her tenant? Patience or Ches, who might have been worried? The paperboy, who regularly went into people’s homes? Or little Molly, who was curious enough to sneak into a house that had been empty for so long and now had an interesting outsider living in it?

But when Patience came over that evening, Lori couldn’t bring herself to ask about it directly, afraid Patience would interpret the question as a sign of distrust. She was leaning over the ice-fishing photo and busily writing down the names of the people in it in capital letters on some notepaper. She’d already written down seventeen names, but couldn’t make out a man in the background.

Two vertical creases appeared between her eyebrows.

“I’m not sure, it could be . . . Fred, Fred Bartlett. Or . . .” she said, bringing the picture closer. “No, I’m not sure. Better ask one of the Whalens tomorrow. They were there, after all.”

She pushed the picture away from her with an apologetic smile.

“By the way, Emma told me the party tomorrow is a potluck.”

A potluck; she’d have to bring something like everyone else. She offered Patience a glass of sherry and drank to their friendship. Maybe the drink would loosen her neighbor’s tongue enough for her to tell Lori more about Noah.

“So who’s going to be there?”

Patience shrugged.

“The whole family, I suppose. It’s Greta’s fortieth.”

“Who’s Greta?”

“Noah’s oldest sister. You’ve never met her?”

“No, only Nate. And Lance. There should be lots of people there tomorrow.”

“Yes, six brothers and three sisters, not to mention the little kids. The teenagers won’t be coming. They don’t like family gatherings.”

Lori did the math.

“Does that make ten siblings?”

“No, eleven.” Patience stopped. “One sister isn’t coming. Robine never comes.”

“Why not?”

Patience blushed.

“Don’t tell anybody you got it from me, but Robine . . . she went off when she was twenty-one and never came back. She . . . um . . . she had a girlfriend.”

Lori was startled.

“A girlfriend? What’s so bad about that? A young woman has to have friends.”

Then she saw the red glow on Patience’s face and suddenly got it.

“Oh, she loved women . . .”

Well, now, wasn’t that an interesting revelation!

“So what did the family think about that?”

“They were mortified, I think. Nothing like that had happened in Stormy Cove before.” She burst out laughing. “And Robine was very pretty, and all the boys chased her. And then”—she held out her hands—“well, it shows how you can fool yourself.”

“Where’d she go?”

“Somebody saw her in Montreal, but that was—let me think—maybe ten, twelve years ago. I heard she sends postcards regularly, from Barbados and Hawaii. And once from Paris.”

“So is it certain that she’s still alive?”

Patience gave her a look of surprise.

“Yeah, of course she’s alive. Her lawyer sent a letter once—about some legal matters.”

Lori offered Patience another sherry, but she turned it down.

“Thanks, but I’d better go get supper started.”

She stood up and an almost roguish smile flitted over her face.

“You’re in demand at all the events because of that camera, you know. Ever since those pictures you took of Elsie Smith’s family, everybody wants to be in your book.”

“Well, lots of them will be! But about Robine? What do you think about lesbians?” Lori asked as Patience was putting on her jacket and boots by the door. She couldn’t help sounding her neighbor out, but she didn’t expect the answer she received.

“Oh, every woman can be a lesbian, for all I care. Then they wouldn’t have to fight about men so much.”

She opened the door and disappeared.

Lori put the glasses in the sink. She was sure the pretty, beaming young woman in the pictures that Noah wanted her to delete must be Robine. Was he so ashamed to have a lesbian sister? She couldn’t imagine that. It didn’t add up somehow. Anyone who puts up a strange photographer from Vancouver overnight isn’t afraid of associating with women who don’t fit the norm. Her intuition told her that he wanted to protect Robine from something. But what? Why did he want to do everything in his power to stop her picture from appearing in a published book?

He couldn’t avoid her tomorrow at the Whalens’ party; the mere thought made her tingle. But she dismissed it immediately because she had to think of what to bring the next day. She should have asked Patience for advice.

And she’d forgotten to ask one other thing.

Who had been Robine’s girlfriend?

CHAPTER 22

Ice floes were rocking on the waves by the next morning. For the first time, Lori saw open water in the cove. Her eyes strayed over to the trees beside the house that now poked up higher out of the snow cover. The layer of melting ice on the cliffs sparkled in the pale light. When she opened her bedroom window for a minute, she heard a few muffled gunshots.

Men in the harbor were fiddling around on their boats or just hanging around together.

Lori drove down to the harbor, passing a chained-up husky squatting miserably in front of its doghouse. She strolled along the wharf and listened to several fishermen discussing the weather. No trace of Noah. Nor of Nate and Archie.

“Do you mind if I take some pictures?” she called to the fishermen.

“Sure,” came the reply.

“I’d have shaved this morning if I’d known,” someone shouted. The others laughed.

An elderly man turned to her.

“We were lucky this year. It’s the right wind to keep the ice away from shore until it melts.”

“When does fishing start up?” she inquired.

“Next week, twentieth of May, for lumpfish. Do you know what lumpfish are?”

Lori didn’t.

“We fish for them because of the roe. It’s a little cheaper than sturgeon caviar.”

She snapped a shot of a young man just as he hopped off his boat onto the jetty. He came over.

“You should come out with us tomorrow and take pictures. But you’ll have to get up early. We head out at five.”

A voice behind her replied, “You’ll have to install a new motor first, Hart, so she doesn’t conk out every ten miles.”

She recognized the speaker without turning around. To hide her embarrassment, she picked up her camera and panned until it was aiming at Noah’s face. Then she pushed the release.

“Who says I conk out every ten miles?” she quipped.

“I meant the boat. A boat’s a ‘she,’ my dear,” he said with the faintest of smiles. “Everything that causes problems is feminine.”

Hart laughed. “Yeah, every machine’s a ‘she.’ The truck, the computer . . . and the TV too, when it doesn’t work.”

He seemed to take no offense at Noah’s barging in. Lori had a retort on the tip of her tongue, but she restrained herself. She was there to take photographs.

“Which boat is yours?” she asked instead.

“Over there—the
Mighty Breeze
.”

There was pride in Noah’s voice, though he tried to sound cool. Lori felt his gaze on her back as she turned toward the boat. Suddenly, Archie stepped on deck.

“Does he go out fishing with you?” Lori asked.

“No, he just helps with repairs. He’s got his own boat, the
Bella Vista
. So you’re coming to the potluck?”

She nodded. Now that they’d seen each other at the wharf, she could feel more at ease about going.

“Your uncle said I can take pictures. Is that really true?”

He glanced over at Archie, who was out of earshot, and said, “If that’s what he wants . . . best I ask Mother as well. Don’t see any problem with it. She knows what you do and she’d like to meet you.”

He stood with his hands in the pockets of a jacket he’d thrown on over his blue overalls. He looked left and right to cover the lull in the conversation. Lori pretended she was watching the other fishermen. Then Archie shouted something from the boat, and Noah trotted off.

Lori parked near Nate’s house two hours later. She hoisted out the large bowl of potato salad she’d made following her mother’s recipe, which had come down from
her
German mother. She’d never yet met a person who didn’t rave about it.

She saw a man going through the door and decided to follow him in. A sharp, sweet smell hit her. At first, she could only make out shadowy outlines in the dim light. On the floor in front of her was a row of big black-and-white birds. Many had red bullet holes in their white belly feathers. When her eyes had adjusted to the light, she could see several men sitting on upturned pails; one of them held up a bird as a greeting.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” he shouted. “It’s not going to get eaten today.”

Laughter accompanied his words.

Lori swiftly recovered from her surprise.

“Doesn’t matter, still makes for a good picture.”

“Go ahead,” another man shouted.

She put the salad bowl on a box.

“Are all of you Noah’s brothers?”

“Brothers, nephews, cousins—take your pick!”

“And uncles.”

“A big family,” Lori said as she snapped away.

“You bet!”

There were wet feathers lying everywhere, and water was bubbling in a huge pot. Obviously, plucking was a man’s job.

“And what kind of ducks are they?”

“Eider.”

“Did somebody shoot them this morning? I heard shots.”

“That’d be Jack over there.”

A figure stepped forward out of the dark, a boy Lori figured was seventeen at most. He still had his shotgun on his back.

Interesting. A young teenager who’d shot two dozen ducks for grown men to pluck. He stood there with his legs wide apart, one hand on his hip, the other against a wooden post: every inch the proud hunter. She lay down on the floor to shoot from below, ignoring the dirt on her jacket. Then she entered his name in her notebook: Jack Day.

“I’m Noah’s cousin’s son,” he said as she put away her camera. She had him point out the way to go upstairs.

She took off her shoes before entering a brightly lit kitchen filled with loud voices and laughter, and with women and children, for the most part. Curious eyes turned in her direction, but nobody came over to welcome her. She put the salad on a large table loaded with brimming bowls and plates, and looked around the open living and dining room. Noah wasn’t there to help her navigate this difficult moment.

She approached a woman putting a plate of N
anaimo bars on the table.

“Hi, I’m Lori. Where can I find Greta?”

“Greta?” She scanned the crowd. “Over there,” she said, making a not very helpful nod toward the left corner of the living room.

Fortunately, she added, “I don’t know how she does it, but I always see her with a baby that isn’t hers.”

Lori spotted a woman with strong arms rocking an infant while carrying on a lively conversation with the people ringed around her. She was blond and animated, with cheerful facial features that didn’t look at all like her brother’s. While not pretty as Robine had been in the picture, she radiated a freshness and health that even the most expensive cosmetics couldn’t fake. Lori worked her way over to Greta, who suddenly noticed an unfamiliar face. She called out, “Are you that photographer from Vancouver?”

All of a sudden, it was noticeably quieter, and Lori felt the onus of being the focus of everyone’s attention.

“Thank you for inviting me to your birthday party,” Lori said, “and happy birthday!”

She handed Greta a small box containing a pretty key chain with a killer whale carved from gray-blue argillite by the Haida First Nations.

“Oh, I knew if I invited you then everyone would come by to have a look at you!”

Greta laughed at her own joke, and that set the whole group laughing. She said to an elderly lady on the sofa behind her, “Mother, this is Lori from Vancouver. She takes photographs and we’re all going to be in her book.”

Noah’s mother. Short, gray hair, astonishingly thin for a woman who’d had eleven children, with dark, almost angry eyes beneath thick eyebrows. A bit masculine, which didn’t surprise Lori. Anybody around here who was too soft didn’t survive. Particularly during the grim old times when this woman had raised her passel of kids.

Noah’s mother threw her a disparaging glance and said, “You won’t like the weather here. You won’t be able to stand it for very long.”

Lori hadn’t counted on this kind of welcome, but her voice struck a jaunty note as she said, “I’m not here for the weather, Mrs. Whalen, I’m here for the fat fish. Fish are so expensive in Vancouver, I can’t afford them anymore.”

That elicited a general murmur and some heckling.

“Yes, we’ve got fat fish here, alright,” a woman hollered, “and yummy fishermen!”

“Maybe they’re not fat enough for her!”

“She’s already got one on her hook. Don’t get your hopes up, Blake.”

Another woman: “Are you a hangashore, Blake?”

A loud outburst of laughter.

Greta turned to Lori. “Hangashores are guys who don’t actually fish—they just hang around on the shore and flirt with the women left behind.”

“And stick them with kids,” a woman muttered.

“Stop that whispering,” Noah’s mother shouted.

“Oh, you always act like you’re hard of hearing but your ears are sharp as tacks!”

Greta bent down to her mother and put a loving arm around her shoulders. They obviously understood each other well. But that same mother had kicked one of her daughters out of town because she loved women.

Suddenly, the energy in the room changed. Archie Whalen had arrived with a crew of men in his wake, Noah among them. He scoured the room until he saw her, but didn’t come over.
Peer pressure,
Lori thought to herself.

The men charged the buffet. Lori caught the attack with her camera. Then she got shots of a gaggle of half-grown girls in skintight stretch pants and T-shirts. They must have ordered their provocative clothing from the Sears catalog; Lori had picked one up in the village store too, and browsed through it at home. Girls always found ways to keep up with fashion, even in Stormy Cove. Lori was so busy with her camera that she didn’t get to eat until the buffet had almost been swept clean. There was only one dish nobody had eaten from: her potato salad was untouched. The paltry remains of another potato salad, gleaming with mayonnaise, lay on a platter. It probably wasn’t even real mayonnaise, Lori guessed, but the substitute they called “Miracle Whip” in these parts.

Nursing her injured pride, Lori served herself some of her salad, combined it with a chicken leg, and ignored the rest of the remains. Since every seat was taken, she ate standing up, while prying eyes fastened on her off and on. She sipped at her beer. Noah still hadn’t talked to her. He was engaged in an obviously marvelous conversation with the young mother of the baby. Was he trying to show his family that the rumors about him and that Vancouverite were completely unfounded? Just as Lori was starting to feel thoroughly uncomfortable, somebody invited Greta to cut her birthday cake. The cake was flat as a box of chocolates and covered with white icing and mint-green garlandlike decorations. Lori reached for her camera.

Greta divided the cake into pieces and began to distribute the plates. Then one of Noah’s brothers—it was Lance—smashed a piece of cake all over Greta’s face and hair—hard. Lori automatically put down her camera and yelped, “Hey!”

Every head turned toward her.

Greta just shook her head, laughing, and gave her brother a playful slap. Some cake seemed to have gotten into her right eye, and she tried to rub it out with her finger. Someone gave her a paper napkin and she hurried off to clean up.

Noah was suddenly at Lori’s side.

“Is everything OK?” he asked.

“Why’d he do that?”

“Oh, it’s a ritual here, but it’s not as common as it used to be.” He looked a little embarrassed. “You didn’t take a picture, did you?”

Lori shook her head. Was that all he was interested in? That his family might be seen in a bad light?

He served her a piece of cake.

“Best cake around.”

This time he stayed at her side while she stuffed herself in silence.

Greta came back into the kitchen, her damp hair hanging down on one side. She took Lori’s arm.

“Come with me, I’m opening my birthday cards.”

Lori followed her into the living room, where Greta opened her envelopes and took out some bills. Lori was astonished to see her hand the money over to another woman, who counted it carefully and wrote the amounts on a sheet of paper. So that’s what people were looking for: money, not for a pretty, but maybe unwelcome, key chain.

“Three hundred and twenty dollars,” the woman announced, and all the bystanders acknowledged their satisfaction with the haul.

Now Greta opened Lori’s little package and held up the key chain. Lori was embarrassed, but what could she do?

“What’s that?” a little girl shouted.

“A key chain,” somebody said. “A whale.”

Fortunately, Greta saved the situation by giving Lori a hug and thanking her.

Lori needed a glass of water and some fresh air. The men had congregated in the kitchen, each with a can of beer in hand. Noah gave her an inquiring look. She pushed past him to the faucet, but Archie intercepted her.

“You don’t want water; only animals drink water around here.”

Archie’s tone of voice told her that he now regarded her as a friend of the family. She dodged yet another debate about drinking by showing Archie the ice-fishing photograph.

“Who’s this man? I haven’t been able to get his name.”

Nate Whalen leaned over the picture before Archie could respond.

“That’s Gideon. Gideon Moore.”

“Is he related to you?”

“Gideon is Archie’s buddy. They used to fish together.”

“And then the boat burned down,” a man shouted, who was a little tipsy. “Then Gideon bought a lodge and it burned down, too!”

“And Gideon got a lot of money from the insurance, and bought a helicopter and now he’s—” shouted a young blond red-faced man who Lori hadn’t seen before.

Archie cut him off.

“None of your bullshit, Taylor! Gideon works hard and doesn’t spout off all the time like some guys here.”

But the young red-faced man was full of Dutch courage.

“Archie, you’ve got to admit that some guys made a nice pot of money from boats that burned. You can’t even get insurance in Saleau Cove anymore because so many boats were torched all of a sudden.”

“Not for houses either,” another man broke in vehemently. “And how do you explain the pictures hanging in the new houses that were hanging in the ones that burned down?”

The men laughed, but not Archie.

“You’re a bunch of blabbermouths,” he thundered. “Stupid gossip, nothing but stupid gossip.”