Something Fishy Read Online Free Page B

interior set-up – a narrow curved space around the perimeter with portholes, and what realtors liked to call “open concept” in the centre – should have put most buyers off, and did. Except that it takes only one person to buy a house. In this case, a strange person who’d shown up within just a few weeks of the “For Sale” sign going up.
    â€œPerfect,” Newton Fanshaw had said the first time he saw it. Billy Pride was trying his hand at real estate, in the hopes of affording a home of his own, moving away from his mother, and marrying tiny Madeline Toombs, Moira’s sister. It was Billy who’d made the sale, to everyone’s surprise. It had been his first, and made him a tidy commission.
    The buzz began almost immediately. Long before he’d arrived in June, Newton Fanshaw’s personal history, career path, likes and dislikes, hobbies, interests, and romantic life had been discussed and analyzed down to the last detail. All based on the only facts anyone had known: none.
    Now they knew a little more, but not much. He had erected a wind turbine and a solar panel. He was in his sixties – a pale, thin, and elusive creature.
    The lack of any information fueled the villagers’ imaginations, spinning conjectures they began to take as truth once they’d been repeated often enough. They were experts at it.
    Ian knocked again. This time he heard, between the rhythmic beating of the turbine blades, the soft tread of someone coming to the door.
    It creaked open. Not all the way. It was enough, though, to see all of Newton Fanshaw – a peaked face, a spare body. He had the stature of a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boy, not yet thickened into manhood. His grey hair was cut, monk-like, in a bowl. His skin, especially on his face, was soft and white and smooth and unwrinkled, like a virtuous priest. His face was hairless, like an aging woman’s. He had a beak of a nose and eyebrows whose grey hairs escaped in every direction.
    His pale blue eyes had a glaze of age on them, though he wasn’t that old. They were milky, diffuse, red-rimmed, the only spot of colour on an otherwise cadaverous face.
    Newton said nothing, just stared through those rheumy eyes, his face without expression.
    â€œI came about the fish.”
    A bushy eyebrow rose. The lone wrinkle in his forehead deepened on one side.
    â€œFish?” His voice was strangely hollow, as if it came, not from his body, but from somewhere outside it.
    â€œThe fish that fell from the sky.”
    Both eyebrows lifted.
    â€œFish. From the sky?”
    â€œYou didn’t see them?”
    Fanshaw shook his head slowly, moving the door slightly, as if about to close it.
    Ian put his hand on the door, to keep it open.
    â€œYou missed them. Fish falling from the sky? Surely you’ve heard of that happening?”
    â€œIt happened here?” Was that a spark of interest?
    â€œYes, last night.”
    â€œThen I missed it. Thank you for informing me. Now I must go.”
    Ian dropped his hand and Fanshaw closed the door.
    Ian left, shaking his head. He looked up at the turbine blades, but quickly drew his eyes away. As they passed across the sun, they created a flickering play of light and shadow that made him dizzy.

Chapter Four
    To Ian’s embarrassment, the fish were easily explained in front-page newspaper stories and all over the Internet the next day. Ian tortured himself, reading the online reports over and over again.
    It was another scoop for Lester who’d received an anonymous tip that took him hurtling down the Shore Lane to a cottage that was often overlooked because it melted into the sea and sky. It was a grey, weathered cedar shingle, slanted in a saltbox design, with a grey steel roof that mirrored the shades of the sky and the sea so that some days, at certain angles, it would dissolve into them, leaving the horizon unbroken.
    Ian was watching live-to-air Breakfast