False Mermaid (23 page)

All were stiff with what seemed to be dried blood.

Nora felt a hollow flutter under her breastbone. She remembered giving Tríona this shirt. Last night she had offered her mother all kinds of reassurances, but still had to push her own fear back into the dark place it dwelt deep inside her. Tríona had told her to take what she found here to the police. All of this had to start making sense sometime, but so many pieces of the puzzle were still missing. So why did she feel that a new threshold had been crossed?

Cormac paced up and down the hospital corridor, stopping briefly in front of the window to the room where his father remained motionless, still in a drug-induced coma. Roz Byrne sat in a chair beside the bed, holding the old man’s hand.

When Roz came out of the room, Cormac said: “I don’t know if I can stay here any longer. There’s nothing to do but walk the floor and wait. I’ve got to get out for a while.”

“Why don’t you head back to the house?”

“I’m guessing you could use a break, too. Why don’t we go somewhere?”

“Where do you suggest?”

“I don’t know—let’s just drive. The doctors have my mobile if there’s any news.”

As they headed west out of Killybegs, neither of them spoke. Roz had the wheel. The land grew progressively wilder and more rocky as they traveled westward, through Kilcar and Carrick. Finally, Cormac said: “I’ve been thinking about Mary Heaney. If her body was never found, how do you know she didn’t just walk away?”

“I hope she did. I hope she escaped, and lived to be a very old woman. I just don’t think that’s what happened.”

“If things between her and Heaney were as bad as all that, what kept her from leaving? Why stay with him?”

“What keeps any woman in a bad relationship? It’s one of those age-old mysteries. Unsolvable.” Roz considered for a moment. “This wouldn’t be anything to do with your person over in the States, would it?”

Cormac didn’t seem able to respond. Part of him longed to retreat, sorry he’d ever opened that door.

Roz said quietly: “You don’t have to tell me.”

It suddenly occurred to him what Roz might surmise—that it was Nora who was trying to get away. “It’s not what you think.” Roz kept her eyes on the road, which seemed to make it easier to begin. “Nora’s
sister was murdered, five years ago. The sister’s husband is the main suspect, always has been, but they’ve got no evidence against him. He’s never been charged, never even arrested. Nora’s gone back to see if she can’t dig up some new evidence, and I was going over to see if I could help—”

“I am sorry, Cormac. I didn’t realize.”

“It goes against all reason, staying with someone who actually takes pleasure from hurting you. And yet people stay. How do you account for it if you don’t believe in enchantment?”

“What do you know about the murder?”

“Not a lot. Nora hasn’t actually told me much about it. I think she feels guilty for not seeing things earlier, not doing more to help. The husband was some sort of a brute, apparently. What really tears Nora up is the idea that her sister still loved him, in spite of everything.”

“Is that so difficult to believe? We’re complex creatures, with complicated motivations and desires, divisions even within ourselves.”

They were approaching a crossroads. Roz pulled up and glanced over at him. “Will you bear with me a little while? There’s something I’d like to show you.”

He nodded his assent, and she turned from the main coast road and headed back up into the hills. Ten minutes later, they were rattling over a narrow road atop a heathery mountain. “Do you know where we are? Your father’s house is just the other side of this headland,” Roz said. As the car came over the mountain’s crest, the sun disappeared behind clouds, and a slight mist began to blow against the windscreen. The road wound down along a mountain stream, and finally ended in a sort of rough patch of gravel where a footbridge crossed the flowing water to a rude path on the other side. Cormac climbed out of the car and surveyed the handful of ruins perched on the slope above a rocky beach and a disused pier. Stone walls cut the hilly outcrop into smaller fields, which were even further reduced by wire fencing. A few houses with corrugated metal roofs were apparently still in use as sheep sheds. There was no sign of life anywhere at the moment, even of the ovine variety, despite ample evidence of their recent presence underfoot. Cormac could hear the surf rolling on the beach—a distinct, hollow rattling of stone on stone. “What is this place?” he asked Roz.

“It’s called Port na Rón.”

Seal Harbor, in English. But
port
was one of those words that held a
double meaning. In addition to “harbor,” it also meant “tune.” The music of the seals.

Roz continued: “The caves at the far side of the harbor are a rookery for gray seals. It’s out of the way, but this used to be quite a busy place—a haven for smugglers and pirates, people tell me. It’s been abandoned for years, but that house”—she pointed to a dilapidated cottage on the far side of the stream—“that’s where Mary Heaney lived. I just tracked down the landowner and got permission to have a look around inside.”

They crossed the bridge and climbed the rutted path to the Heaney cottage, four stone walls topped with crumbling thatch, home now to birds’ nests and sprouting weeds. Nettles grew waist-high around the back and sides of the house, a typical Donegal fisherman’s cottage, low to the ground, with small windows and a piggyback roof. No overhang—the wind here didn’t need much foothold.

Cormac bent over to pick up a grapefruit-sized stone, measuring its weight in his hand. A dozen more lay scattered along the cottage walls. Tied together with rope and tossed over the top, they would have been all that kept the thatch from blowing away in a gale. He dropped the stone back on the path. “It’s amazing this place wasn’t pulled down ages ago.”

“No one will go near it; the locals say there’s an unlucky air about the place. Even more bad luck to him who pulls it down.”

“Whatever happened to Heaney and his children?”

“Did I not tell you? Six years after his wife disappeared, Heaney himself vanished. His boat was found adrift out in the bay, but no body ever turned up. The children were shipped off to some cousins near Buncrana. I found records of a Patrick Heaney from Buncrana killed at Gallipoli in 1916, but I haven’t been able to verify that it was the same one from Port na Rón.”

“And the daughter?” Cormac couldn’t help thinking of Nora’s niece, only a child when her mother was killed.

“The 1911 census had no record of her, in Buncrana or anywhere in Donegal. She might have married or emigrated by that time—she would have been about the right age. I haven’t had a chance to follow up on all that. Come and have a look inside. I’ve been here a couple of times, but haven’t touched anything. You’ll see why people still call it ‘the selkie cottage.’”

Cormac followed Roz through the open entrance, and the first thing
his eye fell upon was the half-door, torn from its hinges and lying in the middle of the kitchen. He let his gaze wander across the room. The once-whitewashed walls were peeling and had gone black and green from seeping damp. The pine dresser against the wall still held a few cracked pieces of blue-and-white delft. A traditional box bed was built into the far corner of the room, an iron-framed cot stood in the other. Under a window on the far wall, a cupboard held a washbasin, and empty tins and sacks spilled out from the shelves beneath. There was plentiful evidence that animals had lived here, taking advantage of abandoned food stores. Layers of dust covered everything: the rude table, the child-sized rush-seated chairs, the iron kettle that still hung from a hook over the hearth. Cormac could see a half-finished piece of knitting someone had set aside, the contours of a clay pipe under the dust in the hob beside the fireplace. Everything spoke of lives suddenly and rudely interrupted.

“What do you see?” Roz asked.

“Hard work. Long winter nights.” He could actually imagine a family moving about this room, the woman tending the fire, the man mending nets in the flickering light, the children’s muted breathing from the cot. He tried to conjure Mary and P. J. Heaney before him. What exactly had passed between them? How little was left here to illuminate how, and in what spirit, those two human beings had occupied this space. Nothing to capture the fleeting evidence of a glance, a touch, a word. There was nothing to encapsulate the longing or the revulsion—or perhaps both, in endless close succession—that had flowed through them every day. Did she mind his touch, or had she invited it? Was she a willing participant, a kidnap victim, an amnesiac? To say that she stayed with him for years was no measure. People stayed for all sorts of reasons: inertia, the hope that things would change, fear of the unknown, poverty, a dread that things could actually get much worse. Physical objects might offer some glimpses into a life, but how could they get down to the real texture of everyday existence? How infinitely subtle were the traces of happiness and despair?

Nora had become so much a part of him that he could not imagine living without her, and yet anyone digging through his possessions would find no physical evidence of her at all. Not a single trace. They had exchanged nothing but a look, a touch, a few words—and not even written words, only fleeting conversations and marks on a screen that
evaporated into the ether. The one concrete thing he’d given her—the hazel knot—felt like a meager, temporary token.

Roz’s voice startled him out of his thoughts. “I was hoping to get some pictures, to start documenting what’s here.”

As Roz went around the room snapping photos, Cormac sketched a quick floor plan of the house. He found marks on the floor, where a heavy object had been dragged through the dust. Someone had stacked up dozens of conical limpet shells to form narrow, teetering towers on the shelves where delft once stood.

He said to Roz: “I thought you told me no one would come near this place—”

She looked up at the piles of shells. “That’s what people said. But it does seem as if someone’s been here, doesn’t it?”

Cormac noted the shells on his drawing, and left them undisturbed. Crossing to the iron-frame cot, he lifted the rotting straw mattress and heard something fall to the floor. Pulling the bed away from the wall, he found a threadbare muslin doll. The shape was not recognizably human, more like an animal—a seal. Someone had sewn on black metal buttons for eyes, but one had come loose. A mute witness to whatever had taken place here. Beneath the bed he found a short piece of a plank with holes in it, and two tiny sandbags that fit in the palm of his hand. The board was cracked and stained, but he brushed the dust away from its face, and saw that the plank had been brightly painted at one time. The only faint glimmer of happiness that this room had so far possessed. “Roz, look at this.”

She came closer and snapped several photos. “Some sort of game?”

Cormac set the board aside and peered under the bed again, this time finding several long, fair hairs twisted around one of the springs. Had they been caught here during a harmless game of hide-and-seek, or something more ominous? He thought of all the things he had noticed from an early age, the gestures and conversations he’d witnessed between his parents and other adults when they believed he was elsewhere, or not paying attention. A child was capable of sensing things, of taking in and interpreting unspoken emotions, as well as any lesser creature. And what of the person who had hidden here—a girl, presumably—what memories, what images had she carried, only to have them triggered later by a certain sound or scent, or the angle of light at a certain time of day? The gleaming hair between his fingers suddenly seemed sturdy as wire. What
if everyone had ignored the most important witness in Tríona Hallett’s murder? It was perfectly natural, trying to protect a child, but if no one had ever spoken to Elizabeth about her mother’s death—

He continued pulling out the jumble of objects hidden under the cot—a collection of small, rounded stones, no doubt robbed from the beach. More limpet shells, dozens of them. The last item was a woman’s old-fashioned, high-button shoe.

He called Roz over and held up the shoe. “It was here, under the cot,” he said. “Isn’t it strange, though? Who leaves home wearing only one shoe?”

Nora sat in her car outside police headquarters in Saint Paul. Beside her on the seat were the things Tríona had hidden away in the attic. She had rushed over here, not stopping to change out of the clothes she had slept in. And now she was remembering how it had all happened last time. Her emotional dissolution had taken place slowly, imperceptibly at first, just like this. She’d find something that could be a lead, and would bring it in to Frank as she had brought these things this morning—just out of bed, hair uncombed. The last time she’d come here before leaving for Ireland, she’d brought a bag of old clothes she’d watched Peter Hallett dump in the Goodwill collection bin on University Avenue. When she had arrived here at headquarters, she’d been left in a chair at the front desk to wait for Frank. It was only after fifteen minutes or so that she had looked down and realized that she’d driven to the police station in her pajamas. She had felt conspicuous, sitting in that waiting area, with cops coming and going, glancing at her and looking away with dismissive expressions. They had her pegged. A crazy. A kook. But she couldn’t leave until she’d handed over the clothing. And it had turned out to be useless.

That’s when she knew Peter was tormenting her, trying to put her off balance. That was his specialty. He’d put that bag of old clothes in the Goodwill bin knowing that she was watching him—knowing it would prove worthless as evidence.

And what about the evidence she had just found? What if these things only served to incriminate Tríona? He could have planned it that way. She reached for the datebook and scanned the marked pages. What did the Xs mean? There seemed to be no pattern, no regular rhythm to their placement. Several one week, none the next. No other notations. Nothing even to say the Xs had been drawn by Tríona’s hand. But if they were, what was she keeping track of, something that happened so randomly? Nora turned to the date of the museum opening. A large red X marked the day. She turned the page and found another on June 3,
the day Natalie Russo disappeared. Maybe there was a pattern after all. Nora gathered up the evidence that could potentially paint her sister as a killer, and went to see Frank Cordova.