False Mermaid (37 page)

Elizabeth picked her way across the rounded stones that looked as if they had tumbled out of the sea. She was hunting treasure, but finding mostly trash instead—fishnets and nylon rope and yogurt cups, their bright colors standing out against the stones. She glanced up at Nora, who was hanging back and watching her. She thought about what Nora had said, about not wanting to grow up. It was hard to know what to tell, and what was better kept to herself.

She thought of the book she’d stolen from the library, and began to imagine its story played out on this beach. She could almost see the strange seal woman being rowed to shore by the fisherman, helping him to pull up the boat, going home with him and becoming his wife. She tried to summon an image of how exactly someone changed from seal to human. Did it hurt to slip from your sealskin? Was it as simple as taking off clothes, or was it messier and more complicated—like that film she’d seen once on television, of a calf being born? All that icky wetness had made her feel strange. She tried to picture a woman oozing from a sealskin, strange and slippery, her new skin underneath as pale and tender as a newborn baby’s. If you got your old skin again, like the boy’s mother did in the story, how exactly would you go about putting it back on? What if it didn’t fit? The book hadn’t bothered to explain any of that.

The weather was warm here, not at all what she’d imagined. She sat down on a flat rock and removed her shoes and socks, then stood at the water’s edge and closed her eyes, putting her hands to her face and tasting the salt and seaweed on her fingers. There was no mistaking it now. This beach was just like the ones in her dreams. The ones where she walked with the red-haired stranger out into the water, out past the rocks and down through swaying seaweed to where the sea people carried on, safe in their secret, hidden world. She had seen it all in her dreams.

Nora shielded her eyes to watch two huge brown sea eagles flapping and fighting over something at the edge of the precipice. She had been
watching Elizabeth explore, but her attention had been pulled away for a moment by the birds. When she looked back to where she’d last spied the child, all that remained was a pair of empty shoes and socks. Elizabeth was walking out into the water. Waves were breaking at her chest, now over her shoulders, and all at once, her head disappeared behind a rising swell.

Nora stripped off her pack and began to run, the round stones slowing her progress. It felt as if she were moving through some awful dream. Finally she splashed into the shallows, and flung herself into the waves, head down and arms churning, until she felt the wake of Elizabeth’s flailing limbs. “Put your arms around my neck,” she shouted. She felt the child’s sharp elbow deliver a solid blow to her cheekbone. Somehow she managed to hang on through an exploding field of stars. “It’s all right—I’ve got you. Just hold tight.”

With one arm, she clasped the child to her side and took long, even strokes with the other until they finally reached a spot shallow enough to stand up. She seized Elizabeth by the arms. “What the hell were you doing out there? Do you not know how dangerous it is—”

She watched the child’s huge eyes fill with tears. “Please don’t be frightened, Lizzabet. I’m not angry with you, love, I promise. I was just scared, that’s all. If anything were to happen to you—” She felt Elizabeth begin to shiver. “Promise me you won’t wander off like that again. Will you promise?”

Elizabeth nodded. Nora looked around, spotting a ruined cottage just above the beach. “Come on, let’s get out of the wind.”

They made their way up the steep bank to an abandoned house. A fisherman’s cottage, Nora thought, as they crossed the threshold. Decaying nets hung from the roof beams. There was a washbasin beside the back door, and a rude sideboard with bits of broken crockery and piles of limpet shells stacked where cups and saucers had been. The little light that pierced the room came from a gaping hole in the roof at the far corner of the house, and the relentless wind that came through shattered windows had reduced the curtains to gray tatters, airy as cobwebs.

She settled Elizabeth on a low chair beside the hearth. The child still shivered violently. As her eyes grew accustomed to the light inside, Nora could see that the abandoned house was strangely intact—furniture, candles, bedclothes, even a pipe on the mantel. The effect of everything left in place was quite eerie, as if the occupants had simply walked away.
She spied a basket beside the hearth and opened the lid. “There’s a little turf in here. I’m going to try building a fire.” Gathering a few handfuls of straw from a ruined mattress and a candle stub for a firelighter, she dug in her pack for a couple of strike-anywhere matches and managed to get a small blaze going, astonished that the ancient peat was still dry enough to burn. She beckoned to Elizabeth to come closer. They sat in small chairs pulled up to the fire, and Nora alternated rubbing Elizabeth’s arms with blowing on the meager flame.

“D-does s-s-somebody live here?” Elizabeth asked through chattering teeth.

“Not anymore. Cormac said this whole village was abandoned—” She stopped as her gaze fell upon a primitive muslin doll in Elizabeth’s left hand. It had one small black button eye on one side of a long nose; a bit of stuffing escaped from a frayed seam. “Where did you get that?” she asked.

“Over there.” Elizabeth indicated the cot pushed up against the wall.

“May I see it?” Nora asked. The single button eye stared blankly. The arms were flat and stubby, like flippers, the lower half all of a piece. A seal. She finally handed the doll back, and Elizabeth cradled it on her lap.

Nora took a deep breath. “You know we’ll have to talk about it, sooner or later, Lizzabet. About why you ran away. I think I can guess part of it. You found out, didn’t you—about what happened to your mama?”

Elizabeth stared wordlessly at the floor. After a few seconds, she wiped away a tear, and Nora felt as if her heart would burst. “Oh, Lizzabet, I wish we could have explained, but you were so little. It was so hard to know what to say—” She reached out a hand, but Elizabeth pulled away.

“Does everybody think my dad is a murderer?”

“Elizabeth—”

“He didn’t do anything, I know he didn’t. He couldn’t have.”

“There’s still so much we don’t know—”

“I don’t want to know! I’m not going to listen.” Elizabeth covered her head with both arms and began to weep. Nora felt helpless. What could she say to this child? What reassurances could she possibly offer?

She said nothing, but pulled the child to her side. Elizabeth tried to fight, but in the end clung on just as she had out in the water, frightened and overwhelmed.
This is it,
Nora thought.
This is where it begins.

At last, warmed by the tiny fire, and no doubt worn out by jet lag and tears, Elizabeth’s limbs began to grow heavy. Nora cradled her, afraid to move, knowing how desperately she needed even the temporary respite of sleep. By the time either of them stirred, twenty minutes later, Nora’s whole right side had gone numb.

Elizabeth opened her eyes and pulled away, evidently surprised to be in the cottage still. “I had a dream about this place,” she said. She seemed dazed, unsettled, perhaps still half in the dream. “There were people living here. Somebody was singing.” Elizabeth found the muslin doll on her lap, and began to fiddle with its ragged tail.

“Do you know, even with your hair cut short, you’re very like your mother?”

Elizabeth didn’t want to let on how interested she was in this information. “Really?”

“The same hair, the same freckles, even the same scabby knees. Tríona was always falling off her bike.”

“Is that true?”

“It is.” She reached up to smooth a ragged lock over Elizabeth’s forehead. “Do you remember much about her?”

Elizabeth stared at the floor again, thinking. “I remember how she smelled—like lemony soap.” A slight hesitation, a rubbing of the eyes. “Sometimes she let me climb up in the bed with her. She said she would read to me, but usually she just fell asleep. She slept a lot. That was okay. I knew how to make my own breakfast.”

Climbing back over the headland again a short while later, Nora felt something heavy and damp strike against her shoulder and fall to the ground. She looked up to find a sea eagle, probably one of the pair she’d spied earlier, flapping and calling out in dismay. She bent to pick up the object the bird had dropped. It was a black woolen stocking. Quite fine, if slightly moth-eaten in places, and the heel was thickened with darning. Strange thing for a bird to be carrying in a place like this. She was about to drop the stocking on the ground, but reconsidered and hastily stuffed it into her pocket. She could have a closer look at it back at the house.

Truman Stark seemed tired; it was nearly four in the morning, and he’d been answering questions since late afternoon. And yet he didn’t seem anxious to go home. Frank couldn’t shake the feeling that there was some extra piece of information the kid wanted to give up—but he didn’t know how.

Frank tapped the pen against his notepad. “Okay, let’s go over it one more time. You admit to following Dr. Gavin from the parking garage on Wednesday afternoon—”

“I knew she had something to do with the murder, the way she was looking at that parking stall—the one where they found the body.”

“So you thought you’d do a little investigation on your own?”

“No law against it, is there? People do stuff like that all the time—when the police fall down on the job—”

“Let’s leave the department out of it for now. So you followed Dr. Gavin home on Wednesday night, and tailed her all the next day. You must have. How else would you know where she was going to be that evening?” Stark didn’t respond, and Frank took it as an admission. “You chased away those kids in Frogtown.” Still no answer. “Then you followed her to the river road, watched her talking to this mystery blonde down at Hidden Falls. They got into an argument, and then what happened?”

“The blonde headed back up to the road. Walked right by me—she was pissed.”

“But you stuck to Dr. Gavin?”

“Yeah. She went back to her car, headed south on the river road.”

“And—?”

“And nothing. I went home.”

“But you knew somebody had fiddled with her brakes.”

“I didn’t know. I just—”

“You just what, Truman?”

“Assumed.”

“You saw what happened. How she started taking the curves a little
too fast. You knew she didn’t have any brakes. And then she went over. Why didn’t you do something?”

“I panicked, all right? I knew you’d think I had something to do with the crash, and I didn’t.”

“If you were so concerned about her, why didn’t you stop to see if she was injured? You didn’t even call 911, Truman.”

“She didn’t land very hard. There were lots of small trees—I thought I could see her moving around, and there was no fire or anything—it looked like she was going to walk away. I couldn’t afford to get mixed up in it, okay? My mother depends on me for everything. I got back in the truck and went home.”

“But you were already mixed up in it, Truman—I guess you forgot about leaving your fingerprints on the car. It was just lucky for you that she was okay.”

Stark stared at the table with a miserable expression.

“Okay, let’s go back. You said you saw this blonde—the same one who was arguing with Dr. Gavin—following Tríona Hallett in Lower-town a few days before her murder.”

“Yeah. I’ve told you that, like a hundred times.”

“How can you be sure it was the same person?”

“’Cause I knew her. I saw her at work.”

Frank sat forward. “Tell me.”

“I never got her name. She was putting on some big charity thing at the building across the street—”

“The Great Northern Trust?”

“Whatever—I don’t know what it’s called. The boss brought her around on a tour. She was going on and on about VIP security—she had a couple of movie stars and some big football player coming in for the party. They were going to use our ramp for valet parking, and she wanted to make sure everything was cool on our end. The boss started bragging to her about our new state-of-the-art system, how it was going in the next week. She asked a lot of questions.”

Frank felt as if someone had pulled all the air from his lungs. Stark looked up, wounded and defiant. “Yeah. All this time, and you never knew about her. I could have told you—”

“So why didn’t you?”

“Because nobody ever asked. That was your job. To talk to me like I wasn’t just some piece of shit from the bottom of your shoe. But nobody ever did.”