False Mermaid (17 page)

And so she’d stepped off on the fourth floor, leaving him standing there like a douchebag with the stupid flowers. He’d watched her plant a kiss on a bearded guy in dark glasses who met her off the elevator. Then she handed over the coffee, guiding beardy’s fingers to the cup like he
was blind or something. All at once the realization dawned—the fucking guy was blind. So was that how it worked when they did it? Did she have to show him where to put his hands then?

When the elevator doors finally closed, he’d slumped against the wall, eaten alive with humiliation and jealousy, feeling sicker and more feverish as the box ascended to the fifth floor, where he got off and headed up to the roof to try and cool down. The next person getting on the elevator had found a heap of wilting flowers on the floor.

Now Truman glanced back through the coffee-shop window at the brunette, and knew it was beginning again, that same bad feeling he used to get when the old man would start in on him. Once that feeling overtook him, he couldn’t hold it together much longer. Everything was about to fly apart again, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

After leaving the Blue Coyote, Nora drove up the hill out of Lowertown, maneuvering through two-way traffic on Fourth Street, considering what she’d just learned about her sister. Tríona had gone back to work without telling anyone in the family. Was that what she meant when she said she’d lied and deceived people? The man Tríona worked for had fallen down an elevator shaft the very same day she was killed. Could it just be coincidence? What if it was Tríona and not Peter who had some connection to the parking garage?

Nora pulled into a parking spot in front of the Saint Paul Central Library. After plugging the meter, she crossed the plaza to the building’s main entrance. She had always admired the building’s classical design—the regular arched windows, white marble balustrades and terraces. The ancient Romans would have felt at home. But she was here because this place formed another inexplicable piece of the puzzle: when Tríona’s car turned up, the police found a parking ticket in her glove compartment, a citation for an expired meter in front of the Central Library. The ticket was stamped with a date and time, which placed her here less than twelve hours before she was killed. The police had canvassed the library and the area around it, and found only one witness who would swear he’d seen Tríona at the library that day. His name was Harry Shaughnessy, and he belonged to that flock of gray men who made a daily, circular migration from the homeless camps along the river to the library, then to the Dorothy Day Center for a hot meal at noon, and then back to the library or on to Listening House or the Union Gospel Mission, where the bottomless cup of coffee came with a side order of Jesus Saves.

As she entered the library, Nora was aware of the gaunt, bearded man leaving by the opposite door. He was dressed in telltale layers of clothing, including a scruffy trench coat, despite the heat. Their eyes met briefly, and Nora tried not to stare. Not having seen Harry Shaughnessy for nearly five years, she couldn’t be sure this was the same man. When the police questioned him, Shaughnessy had seemed remarkably lucid
at first, explaining that he went to the Central Library every morning to read the
New York Times
. He had been adamant about seeing Tríona on the day in question, and positive about the date. He even remembered something he’d read in the paper that day, which checked out. Then he told Frank Cordova that it was the same day he’d seen the angel Gabriel driving a flaming chariot down Market Street. So Harry Shaughnessy couldn’t be counted upon as a credible witness in court. But what if they had discounted everything he said because part of it was unreliable? What if Harry Shaughnessy’s disconnection from reality was not complete, and he
had
seen Tríona that day?

As it was, even with the parking ticket, and even counting Harry’s statement placing Tríona at the library, they had never discovered what she was doing there. The library computer system showed no books checked out on her card that day, no returns. But the timing of the visit was important. Why would Tríona have taken the trouble to visit the library in those last hours, when her life seemed to be spiraling out of control?

Nora climbed the stairs to the second-floor reference room, a lofty space at the heart of the building. The smell of a library was instantly recognizable and distinct. Glancing up at the arched windows and polychromed ceiling beams, she was transported back to the time when she and Tríona used to come here every summer afternoon, escaping the scorching heat outside, spending languorous days in bookish coolness.

Much had changed since then, of course. The library had been remodeled; banks of computer terminals had replaced the dark oak card catalogs. It was possible that Tríona had been searching for something in the stacks or online, but library policy had put up an unexpected roadblock—call slips and computer logs were routinely shredded by librarians concerned about government bootprints on the Bill of Rights. Nora understood why it had to be so. Still, she had felt incredibly frustrated when all the luck seemed to run in Peter Hallett’s favor. If only she could figure out what Tríona had been searching for.

The occupant of the nearest computer station seemed on the verge of vacating, so Nora moved closer, waiting for an opportunity. When he was a proper distance away, she dropped her bag on the floor under the desk and slid into the still-warm chair. She stared at the anonymous screen, and it blinked back at her, asking for a name, keyword, subject, author’s name, title. She let her fingers rest on the keyboard, waiting.
What were you looking for?
she asked silently.
Why were you here?
No vibration stirred. She laid a hand on the table’s wood surface, imagining beneath her fingers the faint tracery of a hundred different pens on paper. Why could she sense so much in the presence of the
cailín rua,
the red-haired stranger she had never known, and yet feel nothing here from her own flesh and blood?

She suddenly felt foolish, and pushed the chair back. Hunches and intuition were fine, as long as they led to concrete evidence that would stand up in court. Did she really imagine that she could find such evidence here? There was nothing of Tríona in this place.

From the reference room, Nora ventured through the atrium stairwell to the nonfiction reading section. She remembered the moment of childhood discovery, when she’d found that the library had hidden places, flights of stairs to rooms that didn’t seem to exist from the outside. The nonfiction stacks occupied just such an invisible place, down a half flight of stairs from the reading room. This was where she and Tríona had actually spent most of their time. The floor was carpeted, the atmosphere still and studious, and while there were no windows in this limbo between floors, the books themselves offered glimpses into all sorts of strange places concealed within the real world.

While Nora had worked her way methodically through the natural history collection, Tríona had found her own place in these stacks—a far, quiet corner where she was surrounded by books about gods and monsters, elves and mermaids, a whole universe of shape-shifters. Nora remembered all the times she’d tried to needle her sister, wondering aloud how books about otherworldly creatures came to be shelved in nonfiction. Tríona’s only reply was a tiny, knowing smile. When they left the library in the late afternoons, Tríona would turn the spine of her current favorite book inward, a trick that made it easier to find the next time.

Nora counted down the stacks and stopped at the place she had invariably found her sister, sometimes flopped down on her belly with knees bent and bare feet swaying gently, sometimes with legs propped against the wall, and hair spread in a coppery nimbus about her head, so far immersed in whatever world she had entered that day that it sometimes took three or four hails and a hand waved in front of her face to drag her back to reality.

Nora felt a wave of despair. What on earth was she doing, standing here, dreaming? She was supposed to be cold, rational, relentless, connecting
the facts of the case. But before turning around, she stooped down to check the lower shelves, and there it was—a single volume turned the wrong way. Pulling the battered green volume from the shelf, she opened it to a color plate, a rich illustration of a young man in doublet and hose, standing at the edge of a dark pool, holding a raised sword above his head. In the water, half submerged, writhed a naked female, a water sprite of some kind, with pale arms spread. The words at the bottom of the plate sounded like the text of a ballad:

Out then he drew his shining blade,
Thinking to stick her where she stood,
But she was vanishd to a fish,
And swam far off, a fair mermaid.

“O Mother, Mother, braid my hair;
My lusty lady, make my bed;
O brother, take my sword and spear,
For I have seen the false mermaid.”

She checked the spine.
Married to Magic: Fairy Brides and Bridegrooms
. The spidery call letters, handwritten in white ink, were like something from another time.

Five full years had passed since her sister could have been here. What were the odds that someone else had left a book turned backward here in Tríona’s favorite section? The rational part of her had to consider the number of people who had been in the library since then, picking through the hundreds of thousands of volumes on these shelves. Sliding the book back on the shelf, Nora felt a slight resistance. She pulled it out again and peered through the opening, then reached in and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper, a printout of a
Pioneer Press
article dated July 13, just over five years ago.

MISSING ROWER CASE STILL A MYSTERY

Police have checked hundreds of leads in the weeks since Natalie Russo vanished, but admit they know little more about her disappearance now than they knew on the first day of the investigation. The probe has been hampered by a lack of
information about the twenty-two-year-old Saint Paul woman, who remains listed as a missing person, police said. Russo’s crewmates from the Twin Cities Rowing Club said her disappearance was all the more puzzling, since she was taking part in rigorous training for upcoming Olympic trials. Russo is believed to have disappeared June 3 while out for her regular early-morning run.

The date of Natalie Russo’s disappearance was circled in red. A footer at the bottom of the sheet said the article had been printed five years ago yesterday. The day Tríona had been at the library. The day she’d died.

Nora dropped the crumpled sheet and began pulling books from the shelf, not thinking about the mess she was making, but riffling through the pages, checking endpapers and margins for any scribbled notes. Nothing. Nora suddenly realized that Tríona’s prints might still be on the paper that lay facedown on the carpet. She pulled a zipper bag from her backpack, gingerly lifting the crumpled printout by a corner and slipping it into the bag. She should take it directly to Frank Cordova, but knew she would not do it. Not just yet.

Why would Tríona be digging around in newspaper archives for information about Natalie Russo? Nora felt the fear that surrounded her down at the river begin to rise again. If Tríona knew about Natalie, and about Hidden Falls—
I’ve done things, too. You don’t know—unspeakable things—

The ugly fear that had gripped her at the river reared its head again. All these years spent resisting that insidious worm of doubt, insisting that everything Peter had said about Tríona was a lie.
Stop it,
said the voice in her head.
It’s exactly what he wants you to believe. Don’t believe it.
A single newspaper clipping meant nothing on its own. They still had no real proof that Tríona had been at Natalie Russo’s grave. Even if she had been there, Peter could have tricked her into going to the river, or forced her somehow—
Isn’t it shocking, what you’ll do when you love someone?

Stepping from the library entrance a few minutes later, Nora saw a parking enforcement vehicle pull away from her car. She quickly crossed the street, but it was too late. She slipped the ticket from beneath the wiper, feeling a twist of bitter irony. With each passing minute of this strange day, she found herself becoming more and more convinced that there was no such thing as coincidence.

A knock sounded on the glass beside her head, and she turned with a start to find the homeless man she’d seen leaving the library. Harry Shaughnessy—she was certain of it now. As he motioned for her to roll down the window, his raincoat gapped open, revealing a stained gray sweatshirt. How anyone could wear such heavy clothes in this heat—

“Excuse me, miss,” he said. “You dropped this.” He handed over Tríona’s headshot. How on earth had it escaped from her bag?

As she glanced up, the white block letters on Harry’s sweatshirt—the few she could see—spelled out the word “LIAR.” The front of the shirt was also smeared with a rusty brown stain. Shaughnessy began to back away, raising one arm in a kind of salute, showing a few more letters, and Nora felt a surge of adrenaline. She opened the car door. “Mr. Shaughnessy—it is Mr. Shaughnessy, isn’t it? I wonder if you’d let me buy you lunch?”

He began to sidle away from her, uneasy at being recognized. “I was just on my way over to Dorothy Day—”

“Please—I’d like to thank you somehow for returning the picture. We could sit right here in the park.” She gestured to the hot-dog cart at Fifth and Market. Harry Shaughnessy scratched his head, and his eyes flickered to the corner, weighing the offer of immediate food against waiting in line for lunch at the shelter. “Well—I guess that would be all right.”

Nora climbed out of her car, trying not to make any sudden moves, and walked alongside Harry Shaughnessy to the opposite corner of the park. She ordered two hot dogs, studying Shaughnessy’s face as he watched the vendor at work. Impossible to tell how old he was—living rough made many men old before their time. But something in his manner, the upright, dignified way he held himself, reminded her of a certain generation of men born in the throes of the Great Depression.