False Mermaid (29 page)

“We’ve got officers working on that. We’ll let you know.”

“And in the meantime, Peter Hallett is about to leave the country tomorrow. I really need to speak to Frank. He doesn’t answer his phone. Could you let him know that I need to talk to him? Please—it’s important.”

“I can pass along a message—but I can’t promise that he’ll get back to you right away.”

“Why—what’s happened to him? Where is he?”

“Detective Cordova is on leave. That’s really all I can say . . . Thanks for your statement, Dr. Gavin. Here’s my number—” She handed Nora a card. “Call me if you think of anything else, or if you need anything. We’ll be in touch again soon.”

When Karin Bledsoe closed her notebook and stepped away, Nora knew she was on her own. Did the woman seriously think she would drive off an embankment and crash a car, just to implicate Peter Hallett? How could she be sure that Karin Bledsoe would send someone to Peter’s house, check on his movements last night?

Just then, a familiar voice cut through the chaotic noise of the ER. “She’s here, Tom.” Eleanor Gavin pushed back the curtain, taking in the bandage on Nora’s head, the bruises, the IV drip. “Oh, Nora—we’ve been trying to find you all night. We didn’t know where you were.”

Her father stood at the foot of the bed, lack of sleep evident in the dark circles beneath his eyes. “What’s happened, Nora?”

She couldn’t tell them the car wreck wasn’t an accident. “It was stupid—I took a curve too fast, went off the road. I’m all right, really. Nothing broken—just a few bruises. Why were you trying to find me?”

Eleanor Gavin broke down. “Oh, Nora—”

“What is it, Mam? What’s wrong?”

“She’s gone, Nora. Elizabeth’s gone. Peter’s taken her. We were going to go away, the three of us—”

“What happened, Mam?”

Her father said: “Let me, Eleanor. It’s all right, Nora. I know everything. Your mother had just brought Elizabeth back to our house. It was just after nine. We were loading our bags into the car when Peter and Miranda drove up in a limousine, saying they’d talked it over, and decided that Elizabeth was coming along with them after all. They were on their way to the airport.”

Nora looked at her parents in turn. “No—no! They weren’t supposed to leave until Saturday.”

Eleanor seized her hand. “We had to let her go, Nora—what else could we do? What could we have told the police? And Peter saw our bags; he knew what was happening, I’m sure of it. Oh, Nora, I’m so afraid we’ll never see her again.”

Cormac watched his father’s eyelids flutter. Surely that was a good sign. Dreaming—if that’s what it was—meant brain activity, at least. The afternoon crawled by as they waited for a sign—any evidence to indicate how much damage the stroke had done. At this point there were no external symptoms—no drooping face, no apparent weakness in his limbs, but the brain controlled all other functions as well: language, sensation, personality. Damage to any of those mysterious bundles of cells could wreak swift havoc.

Roz dozed in the chair beside the window. She was putting a good face on it, but he knew she was confounded. Bollixed before she ever had a chance. They were a strange trio. Anyone looking in might jump to completely erroneous conclusions. Several of the nurses had already taken himself and Roz for a married couple, and he hadn’t the heart to correct them.

He’d been reading up on some of the materials the doctor had provided on stroke rehabilitation, and was alternately encouraged and depressed. At this point they still had no idea who would come out of the coma. Would the man who woke up here be some reduced version of Joseph Maguire? There was risk of a still-vital mind trapped in a nonfunctioning body. Cormac suddenly realized he wouldn’t have much longer to wait and wonder. Joseph’s eyes began to flutter again, more rapidly this time. Then they opened wide, just as he took a deep lungful of air. It was almost as if he’d been underwater, holding his breath. Cormac watched his father blink several times, apparently unable to focus. Probably all he could see was the dust-clogged grate in the ceiling. Did that shape mean anything to him? Did he even know what it was?

The old man’s lips began to move; he was struggling to make a sound, but managed only a low moan. His hand reached out, and Cormac took it and held on. “Raahhh. Raaaahhh,” the old man croaked, and Cormac moved closer, unsure whether to speak. “Da?” he said at last. The shape of the word felt foreign on his tongue. It was as if they were both infants again, reduced to single syllables.

“Unnhhh. Raaaahhh,” the old man said again. Was he trying to say “Roz”?

“I’m right here. Roz and I are both here.”

Tears began to trickle from the corners of the old man’s eyes, but whether they were brought on by emotion, or merely the effort of trying to speak, Cormac could not tell. He only knew he was overwhelmed by the notion of having a second chance, an opportunity to forge something new from ruins destroyed long ago. How many received that gift?

Roz stirred in her chair. “What’s happening—what did I miss?”

“Nothing,” Cormac said. “He’s just now opened his eyes.” The old man’s hand felt warm, leathery. The words might be absent, but Cormac looked into his father’s eyes and saw something burning in the depths of those dark pools, a light of recognition. “I think he knows me, Roz.” His father’s warm, dry fingers closed around his hand. “That’s it. Do you know who I am?” Another small compression—but Cormac felt it as a semaphore, a signal between far-distant sentries.

“Do you know my name?” Again the slight pressure. “My God, you’re there, aren’t you?”

Roz approached the bedside, her eyes shining. “How are you, Joe? We’ve missed you.”

The old man’s gaze turned to her, and with a sinking feeling, Cormac watched the small light of recognition sputter and flicker out. “It’s Roz,” he said. “You know Roz—”

But it was no good. And Roz could see it as well. She had been erased from Joe’s memory by the recent brain storm. Every tender feeling the old man held for her had been wiped away. It made sense that the memories last formed were the least solid, while the older memories—of people, places, events—were cemented into place like a building’s foundation, the last thing left standing in the event of calamity.

Roz tried not to show how much she felt the slight. “Why don’t I just wait out in the—” She waved a hand and left the room. Cormac found her a few minutes later at the far end of the corridor, her face flushed and wet with tears.

“Roz, listen to me. You can’t expect everything just to be there as if nothing had happened. He’ll come back. Everything will come back, eventually. You have to be patient.”

“I’m not there at all, Cormac. It’s as if I never existed.”

When their plane touched town at Dublin Airport, Elizabeth managed to fall a few steps behind her father and Miranda after they made their way through customs and passport control. She fell a little farther behind as they headed toward the airport exit, and her heart rose into her throat as she slipped into a shop filled with whiskey bottles and perfume and all kinds of gleaming jewelry.
DUTY FREE,
said the sign above the door. She hung back beside a wall of crystal bowls and glasses and clocks, watching passersby through the glass, their faces and limbs distorted and shattered into hundreds of facets edged with rainbows, thinking about how those two words together—
DUTY FREE
—seemed like a contradiction. She watched her dad and Miranda move out of sight without even noticing she was gone.

Her plan was to look up Nora’s address in the phone book, and get a taxi to take her there. She approached the shop counter and addressed the woman who stood behind it: “Excuse me—would you happen to have a phone book?”

The woman looked like somebody’s grandmother, with her soft brown sweater set and glasses that perched on the end of her nose. She squinted down through them. “Sorry, love, what was it you needed?”

“I was wondering if you had a phone book I could use?”

“Phone book? Oh—the telephone directory, is it? What would you be needing with that? Sure, no one uses those old printed books anymore, not when you can just ring directory enquiries on your mobile—” She glanced down, sensing Elizabeth’s disappointment. “Do you know, I’m sure we must have a directory here somewhere. The oh-one for Dublin, is it?” The woman began to search under the counter.

Elizabeth glanced over her shoulder to make sure her dad and Miranda had not come back. “I’m not sure. I just need to look something up.”

The woman continued rooting around in the boxes under the counter,
finally producing a fat telephone book. “There you are, now. You’re not lost, are you, love?”

Elizabeth shook her head, and started flipping through the book, startled at all the pages and pages of Lynches, Kennedys, Kavanaghs—until at last she came to a page full of Gavins. There must be hundreds of them. She traced her finger down the column, looking for one in particular, and there it was: “Gavin, N., Whitefriar Street, Dublin 8.” The woman behind the counter was staring at her.

“Um—you wouldn’t have a pen?”

“Would a biro suit?”

Elizabeth wasn’t sure how to reply. Would a Byro Suit what?

The woman smiled and handed her a ballpoint pen. She quickly scribbled Nora’s address and phone number on the inside of her wrist, yanking her sleeve down to cover it.

The woman leaned down and spoke quietly. “First time in Ireland? You’re not in trouble, are you, love?”

“Oh no—nothing like that. I just wanted to surprise someone.” Elizabeth turned to see a well-dressed couple passing the store entrance. “There’s my mom and dad now—they’re looking for me. Thanks for your help.”

Outside the airport’s front entrance, she climbed into the first taxi in line. “I need to go to Whitefriar Street,” Elizabeth said to the driver, and waited for a reaction. She hoped he wouldn’t guess that she didn’t have money to pay the fare. Not the right kind of money, anyway. Elizabeth tried not to look nervous when he glanced back at her in the rearview mirror. What if he’d seen her checking the address on her arm?

“No luggage, miss?” he asked.

“No. I have to get to Whitefriar Street—where my aunt lives. It’s a family emergency.” That made it sound serious enough. The driver glanced at her again in the rearview mirror, then edged his cab out into the flow of traffic.

On the way out of the Emergency Room with her mother, Nora saw the fisherman, Sotharith. He was still there, waiting for her. She pulled on Eleanor’s arm.

“Mam, wait—there’s someone I have to see.”

Sotharith looked up as they approached. He stood, clearly uncomfortable in this place. But he had stayed. “You—okay?” he asked.

“Yes, they’re letting me go. This is my mother, Eleanor Gavin. Mam, this is Sotharith—I’m sorry, I don’t know your family name.”

“Seng,” he said. “Seng Sotharith.”

“My Good Samaritan,” Nora said to her mother. “He flagged someone down after the accident, and got me here.”

Eleanor pressed her palms together close to her face and bowed deeply. “
Choum reap suor,
” she said.

Sotharith would not meet Eleanor’s gaze. “
Choum reap suor,
” he murmured, mirroring her bow but bending even lower. “You speak Khmer?”

“Very little,” Eleanor said. “A few words picked up from my patients.”

A new light sparked in Sotharith’s averted eyes. “You a doctor?” he asked.

Eleanor nodded. “I run the community clinic in Frogtown.”

“Sotharith’s father was a doctor,” Nora explained. “Before the war.” She could see her mother grasp what had become of this man’s doctor-father, and perhaps the rest of his family as well.

Eleanor turned to him. “Lok Sotharith, you’ve been very good to us. I would like to repay your kindness somehow.” She handed him a card. “Will you come and see me at the clinic when you can?” He took the card and nodded, bowing low to her mother once more.

Nora couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her rescuer. She needed to speak to him, to find out more about what he knew about the phone and the note he’d found in the woods. “My father is bringing the car around—can we take you home, or offer you a meal—something?” He shook his head, and she realized that he had spent nearly a whole
day looking after her. He might have put his job at the restaurant in jeopardy.

“
Choum reap suor,
” he said, bowing again. Nora joined her mother this time, pressing her palms together and repeating after him as her mother did: “
Choum reap suor
.”

When Tom Gavin pulled the car up in front of the Emergency Room entrance, he said: “We’re taking you home with us, Nora. No arguments.”

“None offered.”

As they turned onto John Ireland Boulevard near the Capitol, Nora’s phone began to chirp. She hoped it was Frank, but the voice on the phone was female, and worried.

“Nora, it’s Saoirse Donovan. I’m not quite sure how to tell you this—I’ve got a child here who says she’s your niece.”

“Hang on, Saoirse—” Nora pressed the phone to her shoulder and spoke to her parents. “It’s a friend from Dublin. She says Elizabeth is there with her. I’ll find out what’s going on.” Lifting the phone to her ear again, she said: “Saoirse, tell me what happened.”

“Well, Jack and I were getting ready for a short holiday up at our summer place in Skerries. And as we were loading up the car, who should appear but this beautiful child, asking if you lived at this address. When I told her that you did, but you’d gone home to the States, she was very upset. She hasn’t said much more, only that she’s your niece, and needs to see you—it’s very important. And that’s all we’ve been able to get out of her. She wouldn’t even give her name.”

“How did she know where to find me?”

“I don’t know. She arrived in a taxi from the airport, had the address written on her arm. The thing is, Nora”—Saoirse seemed uneasy, and lowered her voice—“the thing is, the taxi man is still here as well. Says he’s got kids of his own, and he’s not about to leave a child with strangers unless he can be given assurances that she’s going to be all right. We explained to him that you’re a good friend, that we’re happy to look after the child, but—maybe you could talk to him. He’s quite adamant.”