Something Fishy Read Online Free Page A

Mr. Paradis will pay.”
    As she left, Jamieson heard one of the girls complaining that the salty fish could ruin the wild strawberry crop. There’d be none of the cape jam this year.
    â€œWe wouldn’t be allowed to pick anyway,” said another.
    Too right, thought Jamieson. Too bad. She loved strawberry jam. She’d never had it wild. She bet it would have been good.

Chapter Three
    The shoreline was crowded with the new cottages built over the winter, even though MacAdam’s had been removed, leaving a red scar on the cape.
    The whole village had turned out in mid-June to see it hauled off. He’d brought in a bungalow from town fifty years before, one of those wide-loads that travel maritime roads in spring, summer, and fall. Now it was going back to town. With Jim’s death – a grisly murder the previous year – the land and the bungalow belonged to his niece, Fiona Winterbottom. She’d sliced the unfortunate name in two and tried to get people to call her Winter, but it didn’t take.
    No one knew why Jim MacAdam had favoured this particular niece. Jim had a sweet tooth. He also had diabetes. Fiona would visit Jim on Sundays when his wife was at church and bring him a box of fudge. If an axe in the head hadn’t done him in, the fudge would have eventually.
    In return for her dubious generosity, Fiona had ended up with a prize piece of shorefront property. And a house. She lived in a trailer in town. Switching the two made perfect sense to her. She’d move the trailer out here as soon as she got the house into town.
    She had the bungalow lifted, with everything in it, including Jim’s last mug of tea, now green fuzz, still sitting on the kitchen table.
    â€œDishes still on the table!” the mover boasted. Village housewives didn’t think that was anything to boast about.
    He was less confident as the house bumped across the sandy land and down onto the potholed clay lane. The villagers had first stood watching, then followed until the truck and the house hit the puddle at the end of the lane, and bounced up onto the Island Way.
    â€œTime was,” said Wally Fraser, husband of Gladys, President of the Women’s Institute, “you’d’ve had a hundred men, all the able bodies in the village and the next, hauling that house.”
    â€œHeyup,” said carpenter Harold MacLean, with a deep intake of breath and a sigh. “Then there was horses and sleds…”
    â€œThere was an art to it,” said Wally. “You didn’t just pull the thing. You worked the weight of the house to shift itself around.” He nodded, and Harold nodded in harmony with him, both men’s eyes glazed over, thinking of other, better times.
    Gladys Fraser was lost in the past, too. Tears shone in eyes known for their cool, dry view of the world, as she said good-bye to the house where she and Jim MacAdam had shared happy moments in the last year of his life. She’d nursed a lifelong passion for him, ever since their early years in the village one-room schoolhouse, a passion that had flowered again when Jim’s wife had died. Gladys began daily visits, bringing him food, making him tea, cleaning up after him. Her husband Wally hadn’t cared, so long as she’d fed him, too.
    Then Jim had been murdered a year ago Labour Day weekend. Watching his house leave The Shores was like having him die all over again.
    Whoosh thwarp. Whoosh thwarp. Whoosh thwarp.
    The blades of the wind turbine sounded as they spun around at high speed, the wind powering them into a slow blur in the sky. Ian felt intimidated. He knew it was highly unlikely, but he felt as if a blade might slip off and slice through him.
    He knocked on the door. Waited.
    It had surprised everyone when the dome had sold. It had only been on the market since April, when all the legal matters concerning its previous owners, both dead, had been settled. The tragic history and odd