Something Fishy

Chapter One

My land, it’s rainin’ cats and dogs.

Actually, it was raining fish.

Gus Mack was preparing a lunch before bed while talking to her husband Abel. She stuck her head through the pantry door when he didn’t reply. He wasn’t in the kitchen, the room they lived in, with the couch, the two rocker recliners, and the stove. There was an empty teacup where Abel had been seated.

Gus picked it up and continued her pursuit.

You ain’t gone out, are you? she called in the direction of the back door. Not in this.

Where could he have gone in this weather? Red Island lawns were getting a much-needed soaking. There had been no rain all spring. The dry weather had turned the grass brittle, crusty. The red clay was pink and cracked.

She shuffled over to the back porch, empty cup in hand. She opened the door with her elbow.

A herring plopped into her cup. She jumped back, dropping the cup. It smashed on the concrete stoop. The herring slid free, and flipped like a Slinky down the three concrete steps. Plop, plop, plop – a streak of slime on each step. The slippery fish skin glistened under the glow of the outside light.

Her eyes now accustomed to the dark, Gus squinted into the night. A hard rain and a herring. More than one, falling from the sky. Gus was not a Catholic, but she crossed herself.

Hy McAllister was cycling to visit her friend Ian Simmons when the rain and the fish began to fall. She skidded to a stop. A herring smacked her head. It slid off, but another perched on her shoulder. A few more fish landed in the basket that hung from her handlebars.

Supper? Ian squinted down at the basket when Hy arrived at his doorway. He was holding the door open, entranced by the phenomenon. He’d read about such things, but to have it happen here at The Shores, a village that the world had forgotten, had him mesmerized.

Hy burst through the door and his reverie.

Gross, she sputtered, as she shook a herring out of the hood of her raincoat.

It flopped on the floor. Ian reached down and picked it up.

Interesting. He inspected it closely. Dead, of course. Otherwise a healthy specimen. Unusual colouring. Reddish brown.

Interesting. He turned it over.

You can say that again. Hy pulled off her raincoat. Ian looked puzzled. He thought he had.

Ian’s parrot Jasmine, who was allowed to fly free, caught the scent of herring in the air – and saw the fish in Ian’s hand. She’d learned to act like a gull, not just sound like one. Squawking, she swooped down on Ian and plucked the herring from his hands, then spat it out on the carpet.

Mountie Jane Jamieson was looking out the window of the asymmetrical police house up the road from Ian’s. She’d always thought The Shores and its people were odd. She would never have believed them if they’d told her fish had fallen from the sky. She’d have thought it was some peculiar rural code for…well, something else. But here they were, fish falling from the sky. It was really happening.

Ian would be able to explain it. Jamieson grabbed a raincoat, darted out the door, dodged the fish, and dove into the RCMP vehicle.

She lived only a few hundred feet from Ian’s, and would have walked, except for the fish. She fired up the vehicle. A herring thumped onto the hood of the car and another splattered onto the roof as she drove the short distance to Ian’s. She could feel the fish squishing under her tires.

Hy and Ian were examining a herring when she arrived.

Hy looked up.

Red herring.

Jamieson looked puzzled.

Hy gestured with the fish, pointing outside.

Red herrings. They’re all red.

Red herrings? What does that mean? Jamieson was a city girl, stuck in this outpost. A city girl who couldn’t tell the difference between a herring and a mackerel, an eel and a snake. It wasn’t a part of her upbringing, nor her RCMP training.

It means they’ve been cooked, said Hy.

Before falling from the sky, Ian added slowly, trying to figure it out.

I don’t know what that means either.

Neither did Hy. Ian thought he knew. That wasn’t much. He fell back on what he’d Googled.

No one knows what causes these things. High winds, a hurricane, tornado, a waterspout. The elements scoop the fish out of the sea and dump them somewhere else. It rained eels in Sunderland in the early 1900s, ducks in Maryland about fifty years ago, and fish different places, different times, past and present. This is not unusual. Well, it is, but… He shook his head, puzzling over what had happened. Cooked fish. Not like anywhere else. But when was The Shores ever ordinary?

Usually there’s a weather explanation.

Usually. Hy watched as Ian caressed his thinning hair and knit his eyebrows together. He was perplexed.

She grinned, a triumphant look – the look she always gave him when science failed him. In this case, she knew as much as, or more than, he did. Hy owned a company, Content, and wrote and edited for a variety of websites. She was a source of a plethora of small pieces of useless information.

Science doesn’t have a clear answer. I wrote a series for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans website on this – and I chose all the ones where there is no clear cause.

Such as?

In Louisiana about sixty years ago, a marine biologist and his wife saw sunfish, minnows, and black bass come down from the sky during a gentle shower. No big wind – and they were in at least 130 kilometres from the Gulf of Mexico.

Distance doesn’t matter. Ian was not to be outdone. What about the thousands of tiny African frogs that landed up live in Athens about thirty years ago?

I’d put that in with my inexplicables. Like the peaches.

Peaches? Jamieson and the parrot Jasmine chorused. Jasmine kept on saying it. The word was part of her repertoire that she’d forgotten. Now it would be dusted off for weeks.

Yeah, peaches. A bunch of them, hard, green, fell on workmen at a building site in Shreveport. There was a black cloud overhead, but otherwise clear sky – no wind, no rain, nothing to explain how the peaches got there.

I suppose this means we’ll be dealing with the media – and more tourists on top of the ones we already have. Jamieson’s control of the village was tenuous at best. Just last year, she’d been placed there as a permanent police presence along with her partner Murdo because a number of murders and deaths had occurred in The Shores in the previous couple of years. More had happened since she’d come. Too many. Too many for a place as small and isolated as The Shores. She could cope with the village regulars. She was getting to know them and their idiosyncrasies. She didn’t want more people, more unknown people, disturbing the balance. It had been quiet the past six months. She was finding that’s how she liked it. She would walk the capes at sunrise and sunset, enjoying her off-duty time – something she’d never done before, never known how to do, until she came here. She’d begun pressing wildflowers, a secret only the village snoop Moira Toombs knew.

Moira cleaned the police house, and did a very thorough job, into all the closets and drawers. There, in the back of the closet in Jamieson’s Spartan bedroom, was a flower-pressing kit, and a number of pressed specimens from the area, identified in black pen in Jamieson’s neat hand: lupines, wild roses, their fragrance still on them; there were daisies, St. John’s Wort, Queen Anne’s Lace, Gus Mack’s lilac.

Moira’s face had filled with contempt as she’d looked at them. What a waste of time. She’d have been better to clean her own house than to have this ridiculous hobby. As if you couldn’t see all these flowers outside, alive, and in their proper season. Left to her, that’s where they’d all stay. A fine mess, bringing the outdoors in.

We could always keep it to ourselves. Hy gave Jamieson a sly look.

It was tempting. But how to keep silent a whole village whose prime recreation was gossiping? Jamieson couldn’t ask them to keep it in the family. They were all related.

Fat chance.

Hy knew Ian was right. There’d be no way to keep this under wraps.

Besides, in the interests of science… A former high-school science teacher, Ian had been daydreaming of the attention he might get from documenting the case. Photographs. He’d need photographs. He rushed to the door. Damn! The fish were no longer falling, but the ground was littered with them. He charged out of the room, on a hunt for his night vision camera. It was up on the roof, on the widow’s walk where he kept his gadgets. Night vision camera, binoculars, telescope for searching the waters for illegal activity. Drug smuggling. So far only the local scumbag, Jared MacPherson, had been caught at that – and not by Ian.

His enthusiasm gave way to lack of desire to climb three flights of stairs. He’d get better shots in the morning. He looked at his watch. What time had it been? How long had it lasted? How many? He’d have to estimate. Already his scientific version of the facts was not scientific at all.

Jamieson flushed, her pearl-pale skin turning red with discomfort. She had no authority to stop Ian from doing what he was doing, but she wished it didn’t have to get out. She’d once had to deal with the theft of a dozen duck decoys. There had been another case of a stolen truckload of seaweed. The two incidents had made her colleagues in the detachment snigger. And quack.

No, there would be no way to stop this story from getting out, not on an island where you couldn’t sneeze without all your neighbours speculating why you caught the cold, who gave it to you – and how.

Jamieson left Ian and Hy and drove around the village to see how bad things were.

There were herrings everywhere. Her training had prepared her to ballpark the size of a crowd, but not a school of fish. There were hundreds of them on the ground, thickest at the centre of the village, tapering off in either direction. They had fallen for only a few minutes, but there were herrings everywhere – on roofs, in eavestroughs, spread over lawns, and covering the road. She stopped the vehicle and picked up a couple of fish for evidence, plastic gloves protecting her hands but not her sense of smell.

It was still raining, but not fish, thank God. The rumble of thunder rolled down the coast. Was there something she should hear in the sound that would be a clue to the phenomenon? It was pitch dark. She’d investigate more in the morning.

Face screwed up against the unpleasant smell wafting out of the evidence bag on the floor of the vehicle, Jamieson made a U-turn, her wheels losing traction as they skidded on slime. She headed back to the police house to field trouble calls. There might not be any. As Gus Mack would say, the villagers were used to shifting for themselves.

Since when did I start quoting Gus Mack?

Shifting for themselves is just what Gus said to herself when she returned from the back exit and peeked out into the front mudroom.

She added, for good measure: We’ll weather this storm, too. She was talking to Abel’s sou’wester, hung on a hook, a herring reclining in its brim. So he had been out.

Lester Joudry got the scoop. He was a local boy, a twenty-year-old journalist and videographer whose career had been launched three years before with a photo of a car that had landed on a haystack halfway to Winterside, then followed it up with photos and video of the ladies of the Women’s Institute forming a human blockade to stop a drug dealer and his truck from escaping up the Shore Lane – Jared MacPherson, who lived a few abandoned houses away from Hy on the Island Way. His house was in such bad shape, strangers thought it was empty, too.

Lester, who lived in Halifax, had been alerted by his mother Estelle, Gus Mack’s inquisitive neighbour. She’d called after a couple of herrings fell onto the grill of the barbecue when her husband Germaine wasn’t looking. He had begun to cook them up.

Where did those come from?

In answer, he’d looked up at the sky and shrugged. A few more fish came down, and she’d dragged him in out of the rain.

She’d phoned Lester, and he’d arrived in a record three hours.

He went over to interview Ian that evening. Ian flushed with pleasure and invited him in. Lester got more information than he would ever need about strange things falling from the sky.

What’s the significance – if any? Ian mused, asking and answering his own question, not for the first time. We may never know if, indeed, there is any significance. As I scientist, I’m gratified it has happened where I live. What an opportunity for observation.

Unfortunately, Ian couldn’t tell Lester much about what he’d observed, because he hadn’t observed much, but promised to fill him in on any developments after he conducted some research in the morning.

Lester left yawning. When he got home and sank his head into the pillow, he fell asleep as much from a boredom hangover as sleepiness.

Both men were up early the next morning. Lester, taking photos, and posting video online. He wished he could have got shots of fish falling. They would have been worth a bucket. Instead he was sending photos of buckets of fish to island and off-island newspapers.

It was all over the news and social media. Ian appeared as the local scientific expert; he’d provided a photo from when he used to have more hair. His lips moved silently as he read the parts where they had quoted him, frowning sometimes at an annoying misquote. He went on and on about all the cases of similar incidents happening elsewhere, but he couldn’t answer the one question they were all asking:

Why were the herring red? Cooked? Didn’t this phenomenon happen only to wild creatures, scooped up by the wind, tossed into air funnels by the waves?

All Ian could say was:

No. Apparently not. Because it’s happened here. Taking Hy’s lead he went on:

There are many other cases where climatic conditions appear to have had nothing to do with this phenomenon. It remains a mystery. A scientific mystery.

Ian decided to take the opportunity to try again to strike up a collegial relationship with Newton Fanshaw, the odd duck who’d moved into the dome and erected the wind turbine beside it. He also had a solar panel next to the house. The wind and the sun. They had plenty of both here. Fanshaw would be making and storing – and selling? – electricity.

The morning smelled like fish and chips – the smell of herring mixed with a wind from the southwest blowing in from the French fry factory located between The Shores and Winterside.

Nathan Mack, Abel’s nephew by his much younger brother Ben, hauled out the snowplow and attached it to his field tractor. It loomed over the small houses that lined the Island Way, Hy’s among them. He knew it was overkill, but how else were they to clear the roads of fish? He grinned broadly as he plowed down the Way, scooping up hundreds of herring, shoving others to either side of the road. Many were torn apart and their carcasses snaked slime all over the road.

Some villagers resented it. They hadn’t had time to grab any fish for dinner, but Jamieson, engaged in her community policing, went door to door to warn people not to eat the herring.

Not until we send a sample for testing.

They all knew that, by then, there’d be no eating them. Quite a few scooped them off their lawns anyway, checking to see if neighbours were watching. They were.

Billy Pride slid off the road in his Smart car, not yet a year old. He had snow tires and he had summer tires, but he did not have fish-scale tires, so the tiny car with the hulking young man inside went sliding into a ditch. The car took more damage from the weight of Billy bouncing around inside it than it did from going off the road.

Nathan jumped down from the tractor, and declared the car wrecked beyond repair. Billy had to return home to his mother to tell her they were without a vehicle.

And me a cripple, she moaned. She spent her days and nights on the couch in the living room that doubled as her bedroom. Billy suspected that she could walk, but he didn’t dare say so. That would have made his life even more miserable.

Billy and his mother lived in a ramshackle bungalow outside the village. He didn’t like to walk, so he went to the shed and hauled out the ride-on lawn mower. He would be getting around the village on it for the rest of the summer, even crossing the causeway.

Chapter Two

The causeway. Jamieson sighed. She supposed she’d better go check to see if the fish had fallen there, too. If they had, it would make for a more treacherous crossing than usual.

The causeway formed an uneasy link between The Shores and the rest of Red Island. A storm surge a few winters before had carved it in two, thrown cars and houses and people around on its path of death and destruction. The province did a poor job of fixing it. The causeway could not be depended on in rough weather any season of the year.

An old river ferry provided a back-up. In the summer, the boat was in high demand by tourists nostalgic for the Abegweit and other ferries that used to bring people onto Red Island. Now there was a train tunnel, a dark, stinky, unromantic way to arrive on The Gentle Island.

The ferry was one of the reasons for The Shores’ new popularity. The number of deaths and murders in the previous two years had also made the place a hot spot for summer residents and weekly renters.

They were arriving in throngs.

No one was more aware of that than Hy. She ran along the shore almost every day. She tried to soak in the solitude and peace, but it wasn’t always peaceful. Last year she’d tripped over a dead body on the beach. Now it was all live bodies. Other runners, up and out early. Dog walkers. Insomniacs. Octogenarians, their blood running cold like a bird’s, would jump into the chill waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence to prove they still had it. Had what? wondered Hy. The ability to not die of a heart attack? To not catch pneumonia as they shivered their way back to cottages that were beginning to be called chalets?

She forced herself to smile or wave at a couple with four dogs. Four. Crapping on the beach. People seemed to think it was okay not to poop and scoop here. The beach had become one big toilet.

She resented the intrusion. She could hardly wait until September when they all went home.

Fair-weather friends.

Thick as herrings, Gus said when Hy complained about the tourists after her morning run. There’ll be more of them than us. Gus was right, as she almost always was. At last count there were exactly three more tourists than villagers and it was only the beginning of the season.

There’s another lot. She eased up from her big purple rocker-recliner and peered out the window. A car was trying to negotiate the herrings on the Shore Road. Gus opened the window.

Go ahead and run over them, she yelled. They’re already dead. Hard as carps, every last one.

The tourists wouldn’t have known a carp from a herring, dead or alive, and they frowned at Gus’s yelling and apparent delight in dead things. The car continued on its way down the lane and took a turn up the long red clay road to the nest of cottages on the high cape above the shore.

There were an even dozen, their numbers doubling over the winter. Some of them were in the old cedar-shingle house style, one of them a lovely gabled house with a wraparound verandah. It was yellow and green and perfectly tucked above the pond. Other modern, stripped-down edifices didn’t always fit with the landscape. One of them looked like a saloon from a frontier town and another was a California dream house.

The new cottages, six of them, had popped up like mushrooms during the dark and wet winter. It made Gus shiver to think of building a house at that time of year.

Cold built right into them.

Saves on air conditioning. Hy poured out the tea from the glass pot that had been boiling the water and tea bags to a thick dark brown. Gus’s famous, sustaining, north shore tea.

Gus still had her eyes on the car, stopped at the top of the cape. A woman got out, slipped on a herring, and fell into a puddle of wet clay.

They’ll not be here long. Gus continued to gaze out the window – at the newest and most unusual feature on the shoreline. A person would never need air conditioning here. As sure as sunrise they won’t need it, not with that contraption. I swear it’s interfering with my hearing aid.

The contraption was a wind turbine, erected a few weeks before, its space-age blades picking up the breeze and whirring into action. It was much smaller than the tallest of its type, which could run to thirty-eight storeys or more, but it still dominated the cape. Usually, the access ladder was inside the turbine tower, but this had one outside as well, and, at the top, there was a platform behind the blades.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it was interfering with your hearing, not just your hearing aid.

The village was divided into three camps over the windmill. There were those who believed every bad thing said about it – it could cause headaches, vertigo, cancer, insomnia – and was doing so to them, some villagers claimed. There were others who thought the wind turbines were a great thing, but didn’t want them in