Read Online Something Fishy by Hilary MacLeod - Free Book Online

the offer. She’d make a tidy sum.
    Moira was turning into quite a businesswoman. She even purchased a cooker on behalf of the Hall, to Olive MacLean’s dismay. Olive was treasurer of the Women’s Institute, and as close with the “public funds,” as she referred to them, as she was with her own purse.
    But there it was, spanking new, the packaging already distributed in the various recycling bags by Moira, fastidious daughter of a “waste management supervisor.”
    The ladies were too embarrassed to say anything. Only one of them had ever returned anything to a store. Gladys Fraser. She had the nerve of a bull to go with her looks. It had been a vacuum cleaner that blew dust all over her living room on its maiden voyage across her carpet. She claimed to the storeowner, a lad she’d taught in high school, that she would never be able to remove that dust. Never, she had said emphatically, the pissed-off look on her face scaring him as much now as when he had been a callow, pimply youth thirty years before.
    She got an exchange. And then some. A year’s worth of vacuum bags for the replacement machine. When the former student made the offer, he didn’t know how many bags Gladys used in a year. A lot. Or at least that’s what she’d said. She’d claimed she vacuumed every day and changed the bag each time. Anybody who’d been to her house knew that wasn’t true.
    She’d had to store the bags in the shed, where, over time, they’d mildewed.
    It was one of the few times anyone had ever seen Gladys smile. She made a triumphant return to the village, holding the new machine aloft as she strode up her walk.
    â€œI’m surprised she isn’t riding on it,” Gus observed.
    Gus wasn’t the only one who didn’t like the slow cookers. April Dewey secretly disapproved of them, but didn’t dare say so. She ordered one from Moira, like everybody else.
    She dumped it, box and all, unopened, on the kitchen table. The family had to eat in the dining room for weeks after that, until Murdo picked up a microwave cart to accommodate it. April didn’t have a microwave.
    â€œI won’t have one of those things in my kitchen,” she’d said, after even Gus had acquired one that she never used. “Sending its rays all over the place, harming the children’s brains.” The children were one of the reasons Murdo was attracted to April. Six kids might have sent other men running, but he loved the domesticity.
    Even on its own little cart, the slow cooker could not have looked more out of place. It made a matched set with the electric stove that still had a new smell if you opened the oven door. The instruction booklet and warranty were inside, wrapped in the original clear plastic. April’s ex-husband Ron had bought it for her, trying to shove her into the twentieth, if not the twenty-first, century. April wasn’t having any of it.
    She still cooked on a wood range. She prided herself on it, and no one could fault the results. Except, perhaps, the man who’d died in the middle of eating a slice of her heavenly white cake with the thick all-butter icing. He’d died happy, a smile on his face, his hand clutching the cake that even the coroner found tempting.
    â€œShe’s going to eat him up.” Hy and Ian were on the widow’s walk of Ian’s house on Shipwreck Hill, enjoying the sun setting in stripes of deep, deep yellow shooting across dark black clouds. An unearthly yellow. Not like any sunset Hy had seen before. The sunsets at The Shores were like that. Different every time.
    â€œThat’s not very kind,” said Ian.
    Hy dismissed his remark with a flick of her hand.
    â€œI’d have said that of anybody.”
    â€œBut you did say it of her.”
    â€œWell…yes.” Hy took a sip of white wine, cool and pleasant at the end of a hot summer day.
    What had got them talking about Fiona was