False Mermaid (22 page)

Everybody at headquarters knew about them. He didn’t know why they even bothered sneaking around anymore—that part had never been easy, even if Rolf Bledsoe had it coming. That bastard had been playing around on Karin since the day they met—he never bothered to deny it. Why she ever married Bledsoe was a mystery—maybe something to do with the perverse pleasure they seemed to take in tormenting each other. Frank had always understood that he was just the current round of ammunition in Rolf and Karin’s ongoing marital war. The whole thing was pretty sick. He tried not to think about it as he walked over and switched off the turntable.

Karin spoke behind him. “Aren’t you going to ask how everything went in court today?”

“How did it go?”

“Swell. The defense is dredging up the broken home, the abusive father, all the playground bullies who damaged his client’s sensitive soul, but you can see it on every face in that jury box—our boy is going down.” Karin moved in close behind him. “I suppose I should be happy. Another miscreant off the street. How did everything go with Dr. Gavin?”

That was the real reason she was here. Frank winced suddenly and pressed two fingers just below his breastbone. His stomach was at him again—that same hot, stabbing sensation, just like this morning. Then, as quickly as the pain had started, it began to pass. “Look, Karin, it’s late. And I don’t feel much like talking right now.”

She set down her glass and turned him around with one languid motion, reaching for his tie and slowly slipping the knot. As she leaned
closer, he felt the warm gush of her breath in his ear: “Who the hell said anything about talking?”

Just after five, he awakened with a start. It was that same dream again, wandering a strange house, hearing cries and words muttered over and over, like prayers or incantations. He always woke from it feeling anxious and unsettled, and usually couldn’t get back to sleep. Sometimes, as he was waking or drifting off to sleep, he would see an old man, dressed all in white, crushing leaves, or brushing a kind of broom over someone lying facedown on a bed.
Susto, susto,
the old man kept whispering to himself.
Es muy importante
. Had he actually seen these things, or just dreamed them? He had often wondered who was on the bed, what power was in those leaves. Something else floated to the surface as well, a word he didn’t know:
curandero
.

He sensed the warmth of someone beside him, and turned to find Karin’s fair head on the pillow. Disappointment seeped through him—not exactly noble, but undeniably true. What he regretted most about this affair with Karin was that there was no real kindness between them. They’d fallen into bed the first time almost by default, and had stayed together—if you could even call it that—for pretty much the same reason. At least neither of them harbored any false illusions. He told himself that was a good thing. Karin stirred, sleepily propping herself up on one elbow. “What time is it? Did they page you?”

“It’s only a little after five,” he said. “You can go back to sleep.” She slipped back into her dreams, and Frank lay back on the bed, crossing his arms beneath his head.

Natalie Russo’s ravaged remains tugged at him. She might well have encountered Peter Hallett along the running paths at the river. The trick would be establishing a connection with witnesses, dates, documentation. Hallett was probably too smart for that; he would have made certain there was no trace of him in Natalie Russo’s life. And if they had only met down at the river, she might never have known his name. Frank closed his eyes, trying to reconcile the smooth, dark hair in Natalie Russo’s file photo with the weathered strands they had pulled from the riverbank.

He’d had a suspicion Nora would head down to the crime scene as soon as he dropped her at the apartment. She would try to figure out what her sister was doing out in the woods the night she was killed,
maybe somewhere near a clandestine burial. There was still no proof that Tríona had been at Hidden Falls. Assuming they could prove it, there were three distinct possibilities. The least likely explanation was that Tríona had stumbled onto the burial site by accident. Or she might have suspected her husband of murdering Natalie Russo, and she was out there looking for proof.

There was at least one other scenario—one he couldn’t even mention to Nora, who had never seen her sister as anything but a blameless victim. Experience had taught him that very few human souls were completely free of fault. He had to consider every possible explanation, even the remote chance that Tríona had known where Natalie Russo was buried because she had somehow been involved in the murder. Or possibly just the cover-up. He didn’t like imagining that explanation, unlikely as it probably was, but someone had to. Nothing was ever as simple as it seemed.

Every once in a while, he could still feel the urgency he’d once felt on the job. He would have been glad to think he helped to spare or improve the life of even one innocent person. But the truth was that he couldn’t protect anyone. Even if he wore himself ragged every day, he was destined to fail; they were all destined to fail. It had taken him almost nine years to comprehend that unpleasant reality. People like him didn’t actually stop bad things from happening; their real function was to clean up after the fact, to write a report and file it away. His job was to maintain the illusion of order where it didn’t exist.

We then passed to the more important subject of the taboo. The taboo, strictly speaking, only appears where the peltry is absent. Several of its forms correspond with rules of antique etiquette. Others recall special points connected with savage life, such as the dislike of iron and steel, and the prejudice against the mention of a personal name. Other prohibitions are against reproaching the wife with her origin, against reminding her of her former condition, or against questioning her conduct or crossing her will.

But whether the taboo be present or absent, the loss of the wife is equally inevitable, equally foreseen from the beginning. It is the doom of the connection between a simple man and a superhuman female. Even where the feather-robe is absent the taboo is not always found. Among savages the marriage-bond is often very loose: notably in the more backward races. And among these the superhuman wife’s excuse for flight is simpler; and sometimes it is only an arbitrary exercise of will.

—The Science of Fairy Tales: An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology,
by Edwin Sidney Hartland, 1916

Nora awakened to the click-click-click of a cassette stuck in the player beside her head. She batted at it, but the tape continued to tick away in the machine, unable to advance. Groggy, she struggled to raise herself and checked the time—7:26—then pressed the button on the radio, trying to turn the machine off.

She flopped back down on the mattress, and heard Tríona’s voice through the speaker, anxious and urgent: “I haven’t got much time—”

Nora sat up, suddenly awake, her whole body on high alert.

“If anything should happen to me—an accident, anything—I want to make sure you know—” Her voice dropped to a whisper, and Nora had to strain to hear. “My God, I can’t believe I’m saying this. It’s like some horrible dream. I thought I knew him. Then a part of me pulls back, says how can you even think such things? He’s the father of your child. But I don’t know who he is, Nora. I don’t know how this all happened. There are so many things I don’t remember. Hours—whole days sometimes. I feel like I’m losing my mind. And I’m afraid it won’t matter what I say, because no one will believe me. But I’m not making anything up—I swear I’m not. I want you to go to the hiding place. You know the one I mean. Take what you find there to the police. I want Elizabeth to know I didn’t just leave her, that I had to do this, I had to find the truth. If I turn up missing, I want you to go and look at Hidden Falls. I couldn’t say anything on the phone just now, because I knew you’d come after me, and I can’t let you do that. I’ve got to go now, it’s almost time—”

There was no more, only the crackling of a microphone, then silence.

Almost time for what? Nora picked up the tape recorder and shook it. The small wheels kept turning, but there was nothing more. How could she have missed this for so long? Tríona had obviously thought she’d listen to this tape before now.

This was what they needed—proof that Tríona had been at Hidden Falls. And that she’d known something about Peter, something she was afraid to tell anyone, afraid even to think. What else?

I want you to go to the hiding place. You know the one I mean.

Nora scrambled to her feet, nearly knocking the lamp over in her haste to extract the tape. Fifteen minutes later, she was at her parents’ house again, up in Tríona’s bedroom, dragging the heavy cast-iron bed away from the wall. Behind the bed was a small paneled door, complete with miniature antique knob. When she turned it, the door creaked open, inviting a dusty, hot breath from the attic. Like the entrance to a secret world, she remembered thinking as a child. The opening was just large enough to crawl through.

Down on her hands and knees, Nora poked her head into the attic, feeling a little light-headed in the airless heat. As she ventured inward, her left shoulder pressed against the hardened ooze of plaster and lath, she tested for loose beams, while trying to avoid exposed nails that threatened to catch her from the right. Definitely a child’s hiding place, an unfriendly environment for grown-ups. Nora had found this attic space herself, the day they moved into the house. The small breach behind the chimney would have been perfect for passing secret messages between their rooms, but it had never happened. By the time her sister was old enough for secret messages, Nora herself had outgrown them. The story of their lives, really—always slightly out of synch.

She felt blindly around the back side of the rough brickwork, trying not to imagine all the many-legged creatures and silken egg sacs she must be disturbing. Lifting out a battered wooden cigar box, she crawled back out into the dimly lit room, trailing spiderwebs. The contents of the box still gave off a faint, brackish whiff when she opened the lid. A sign in her own childish handwriting pronounced it
NORA’S SECRET HIDING PLACE.
Every object in it was something she had squirreled away so many years ago: three buffalo nickels, six Irish ha’pennies, and even a worn shilling; the tarnished bronze medal on a tattered ribbon she’d found in the dirt under the front porch; a rather toothsomely grisly squirrel skull; some interesting fossils excavated from the river bluffs. The box also held bits of green and bluish sea glass, a vial of bonelike coral from Connemara, two brilliant Kerry diamonds from Inch Strand outside of Dingle, and a softened shard of blue-and-cream delft she’d scavenged along the shore in Donegal. Everything was familiar; there was nothing new. She lifted the box to scan the underside. Nothing taped on, nothing extra written on it. Maybe Tríona hadn’t left anything here after all.

Setting the cigar box aside, she crawled back into the attic space,
reaching again into the gap behind the chimney. This time her fingertips brushed against something. Whatever it was, it had fallen down between the chimney and the eaves. She managed to work the object closer until at last she was able to pull it out. It was a blue nylon duffel bag, hoary with cobwebs and plaster dust. She crawled backward out of the attic and set the bag on the floor of Tríona’s room. Inside, she found a small black datebook and a sheaf of papers—more newspaper articles about Natalie Russo. All printed out, just like the article she’d found at the library, on the last day of Tríona’s life. She flipped open the datebook, and saw various dates marked with large red Xs, sometimes one per week, sometimes more. There was an envelope tucked inside the back cover, addressed to Peter Hallett, with an unsigned, hand-printed note inside:

You’re gonna pay. For what you did.

Nora checked the postmark—the letter had been sent from Portland, Maine, two weeks before Tríona died. How was all this connected? Finally, at the bottom of the duffel, she found a crumpled brown paper bag with something soft inside. It turned out to be several items of clothing: a pair of shorts; a T-shirt that she’d given Tríona, with a University of Minnesota Medical School logo; and a pair of lacy underwear with matching bra.