Read Online Off Season by Philip R. Craig - Free Book Online

together in my mind, and trying to taste it with duck. Not much luck. Too many flavors for my imagination to handle. But it had real possibilities, that was for sure. I headed for shore.
    Somewhere off to the west a distant shotgun fired, then fired again. At this time of day? High noon? With the sun high and bright? Who was fooling whom?
    Out of the west two ducks came flying fast and low. They zipped across the water and then rose over the trees and disappeared.
    Had there been four ducks before? Three? Had the gunner missed both times?
    Life was full of mysteries.

— 7 —
    I called the hospital and invited Zee for supper. She said she had a headache. Hmmmm. Tomorrow night, then? Okay, she said. She really did have a headache today and would see me tomorrow. Great.
    I believed her about the headache. I had had one myself before I went oystering.
    I spent some time working my way through my cookbooks, trying and failing to put oysters and duck together in one dish. I couldn’t get the tastes right in my mind, and my cookbooks seemed to agree. So things sometimes go, in the cooking game.
    But there are always other possibilities. I took some of yesterday’s scallops, put them in a layer in a baking dish, covered them with fresh dill, a quarter cup of sugar and a bit of salt, and squished them down hard with a little plate topped by an old flatiron held in place by big rubber bands. I put the dish in the fridge to meld. A sort of scallop gravlax. Would that be gravollops? I only had a little over twenty-four hours to blend the flavors, instead of the seventy-two I would have preferred, but it would still be good when Zee arrived.
    Maybe I should have a supper of seafood tapas. Lots of little plates of lots of good things: oysters on the half shell with caviar, gravollops, smoked bluefish with cream cheese and thin-sliced red onion, seviche and like that. All served with fresh, homemade French bread.
    My mouth watered. On the other hand, I had that new hunk of bluefish fillet in the fridge and my fall veggie garden. Plenty of stuff for a major meal.
    I had a Molson and thought about menus.
    The phone rang.
    It was Mimi Bettencourt. “My back steps just collapsed. Can you come over and fix them?”
    â€œAnybody killed?”
    â€œNo, but almost. I was bringing in the laundry, and my foot went right through. I should have had you do them while you were doing the porch, but . . .”
    â€œThere’s some wood left out in the studio. Maybe there’s enough. I’ll be right out.”
    I got my woodworking tools together and drove out. There was still some laundry hanging on Mimi’s line. Like me, she preferred to use the solar dryer whenever possible. It not only saved on electricity, but the laundry always smelled sweet and good when it was dry. You could put your nose in it and inhale it and you felt clean and happy.
    I carried my toolbox around back of the house and examined the steps. There were three of them leading down from the little porch in back of her kitchen, and they were not only sick, but dead.
    Mimi came out on the porch, crossed her arms over her flat stomach and looked first at me and then at the broken steps. “Well, doctor?”
    â€œ C’est mort , all right. I’ll see what there is in the studio.”
    Mimi used Gus’s old studio as a barn. It was full of useful and not so useful stuff. Part of the useful stuff was a stack of boards of different sizes. I’d used most of them for the porch, but there were some left. I spotted a ten-foot two by twelve and got that out, then found some shorter hunks of two by ten and pulled out three of them. I carried the boards back to the porch, ran my heavy extension cord into the house and got to work.
    I was about half done when I heard a car pull intothe yard. Then I heard voices at the front of the house, and then Mimi and Nash Cortez came walking around the corner of the house, headed for the