False Mermaid (43 page)

Ireland and Brittany remain especially the regions in which fairy beliefs widely prevail; and the attachment of the people there to religion may have something to do with the continuance of the belief in fairies …

There is a queer imagination about this. When fairies want to take a person away from this world into fairy-land, the Irish say that they make the person melancholy, tired of life. If you are melancholy and do not care whether you live or die, the fairies get power to take you away. You die and your soul becomes a fairy … Mysterious disappearances of peasant women are sometimes thus accounted for in Ireland. Very possibly the woman has been killed, or lost in a bog.

—Life and Literature,
by Lafcadio Hearn, from a series of lectures delivered at the University of Tokyo between 1896 and 1902, selected and edited with an introduction by John Erskine, Ph.D., Professor of English at Columbia University, 1917

Frank Cordova held the phone receiver to his ear, unsure that he had heard correctly. He felt as if he’d taken a hard punch to the sternum. It didn’t seem possible that Peter Hallett was dead. Five long years and it was all over, just like that.

Miranda Staunton had confessed to killing Tríona, but everything he had suspected since that conversation with Gordon MacLeish was true. Peter Hallett had murdered his wife as surely as if he had crushed her skull himself. Just as he had murdered his aunt and uncle all those years ago in Maine. But when Nora told him how it all went down, Frank hadn’t felt vindicated at all—he felt robbed, cheated out of his chance to look that bastard in the face inside a courtroom, to present the evidence and hear the word pronounced from the bench:
Guilty
.

Did Nora feel as betrayed as he did, the whole focus of her life for the past five years suddenly snatched away? Maybe she’d found something else to replace it already. The pain in his chest wouldn’t seem to go away.

“Frank—are you still there?” Her voice sounded distant. “There’s so much we haven’t talked about—”

He felt her presence at the other end of the connection and wondered if things had been different between them, if they had met in other circumstances—

But things had been as they were. Nothing to be done about it now. He cleared his throat. “I should let you get back to Elizabeth. Thanks for calling—”

After a pause, she said: “Look after yourself, Frank.” He closed his eyes and felt her hand brush against his face as it had that one brief, haunting night. “Promise me.”

“You too.” He felt the door of possibility about to close again, this time forever. “Good-bye, Nora.”

He hung up the phone. Looking at the piles on his desk, thinking about all the misdirected, messed-up lives they represented, he felt an immense, cavernous emptiness. It was as if all his insides had been
removed, and the open space left behind had been scoured clean. And yet there was one thing, one tiny detail that tugged at him: how Elizabeth Hallett had not only survived a fall that had killed her father and Miranda, but was apparently uninjured. Sometimes the innocents survived. The only way to describe it was miraculous.

Milagroso!
The word fluttered up from somewhere inside him, and with it he felt the breath of the
curandero
’s fan.

After washing up on the beach at Port na Rón, Elizabeth slept. She was not in a coma, the doctors said, but in a state of hypersomnia, long hours of deep slumber from which she could be roused only with great difficulty. Her eyes would open occasionally, but the wakefulness didn’t last. The larger mystery, from a medical standpoint, was how she hadn’t sustained any major physical injuries—either internal or external—in her fall from the cliff. No one could explain it.

Nora barely left Elizabeth’s bedside at the hospital. She spent the night in a chair. Now she stood looking down at her niece, and noticed the child’s eyes moving almost imperceptibly under their lids in the dim half light. What did Elizabeth dream about, in that mysterious, overpowering sleep? Given all that had happened, no one could blame her for not wanting to wake to the world again. Seized by a sudden stab of fear, Nora leaned forward and spoke softly into Elizabeth’s ear: “Come back to us, Lizzabet—you’re not finished here.”

Elizabeth stirred and drew a deep breath as though finally surfacing. She pushed herself up from the pillow and opened her eyes, though she didn’t seem completely conscious. Nora reached out to rouse Cormac, who was dozing in the chair in the corner.

“I’ll get the nurse,” he said, and quickly headed off down the hall.

“I’m thirsty,” Elizabeth murmured.

Nora poured a glass of water and pressed it into her niece’s hand. “How are you feeling?”

“Where’s my dad? I have to see my dad.”

Nora moved closer. “What about something to eat?”

Elizabeth shook her head and gave a great yawn as she sank back on the pillow again. “No, I just want to see my dad. Where is he?”

“He’s—not here, Lizzabet.”

“What do you mean? Where is he?” She seemed to understand that something was not right, and sat up in the bed, regarding Nora with alarm, as if she suspected some conspiracy. “Why won’t you tell me where he is?”

“Oh, Lizzabet. He fell, out at the harbor—there was a struggle, and he and Miranda fell—” She couldn’t say any more.

Elizabeth drew herself up against the headboard. Her voice was a whisper: “He’s dead, isn’t he? My daddy is dead?”

Nora could only nod. She reached out, but Elizabeth pushed her hand away, and began to thrash under the bedclothes as the memories began to return. “I heard, all that stuff you said about him to Miranda. It’s not true—it can’t be. You’re a liar!” She struck out, landing a few hard slaps before Nora could fend her off. “Why would you say those things? You’re nothing but a stinking liar!”

Nora tried to move closer, to calm her. “Lizzabet, please listen, please—”

But Elizabeth kept thrashing. “Get out! You don’t know anything. I don’t want you here. Get out!”

Nora backed away and retreated into the corridor, the angry slaps still smarting. What did she think would happen, how had she imagined a child might respond to such news? That was the trouble—she hadn’t imagined anything. She had never let herself get that far. It was always about nailing down evidence, convicting Peter, not about the consequences that would follow. She had let herself imagine that everything would be resolved, if only justice prevailed, if only she could convince the world of Peter Hallett’s guilt. But she had so far failed to convince the one person whose belief mattered most.

Her parents would be arriving tomorrow, and what would she say to them? After everything, there was still no concrete proof against Peter. He was ultimately responsible for the deaths of at least five people, maybe more, but it was possible that there never would be any proof. It had come down to her word against his, yet again.

Nora leaned forward and pressed her aching head against the cold tiles of the corridor. She felt so weary. It was clear from everything Miranda told her out on the headland, everything she’d learned from Frank, that they’d only begun to scratch the surface. But who would continue digging, now that Tríona’s killers were dead? She couldn’t rely on Frank any longer—the case would be officially closed. He had other leads to follow, other responsibilities. They might speak on the phone, but Nora knew with perfect certainty that she would never lay eyes on Frank Cordova again. This was not the way things were supposed to happen. Peter Hallett would continue to dog her for the rest of her life.

Nora felt someone standing behind her. Cormac touched her shoulder. “Elizabeth is all right,” he said. “The nurse is with her now. She’s still in shock, Nora.”

“He turned her against me—he’s still turning her against me, even after he’s dead. She’s never going to believe anything I say.”

“Elizabeth has to protect herself right now, Nora. Just to survive. It’s going to take some time for her to see what’s true and what isn’t.”

“She heard everything, Cormac. What he did to Tríona, what he was doing to Miranda. How can she not believe it?”

“She’s a child, Nora. All the family she’s had for the past five years is suddenly ripped away, and she doesn’t know where to turn. She’s suddenly thrust into the adult world, not at all sure that’s where she wants to be. You can’t blame her for wanting to retreat back into the past, the time when she still believed her father a decent man. We all want to believe our fathers are decent men. Even if they’re not.” He turned her around. “Will you come with me? There’s someone I want you to meet.”

“I can’t, Cormac—”

“You can—come.” He took her arm, and they walked down the corridor to the stroke unit, with patients behind glass windows. Cormac stopped and let her look in at a white-haired man, asleep with his mouth open, insensible to the world around him.

“I haven’t introduced you to my father,” Cormac said. “You may never have a chance to know him as he was. I’ve barely had that chance myself. Whatever brief time we had may be over. But being here with him these last few days has taught me something, Nora. I need to understand who he is, where I’ve come from—just as Elizabeth will need to understand, one day.” He turned her face to him, stroked her cheek. “Please believe me, Nora. She will come back to you—if you give her time.”

Nora gazed through the glass at Joseph Maguire, tears streaming down her face.

Nora stared out the car window through a light rain. The sky couldn’t decide whether it was stormy or fair; showers were mixed with bouts of sunshine. They were on their way back to the house, and had just come through a festival-clogged Glencolumbkille when Cormac’s mobile rang.

After a brief conversation, he snapped the phone shut and turned to her. “Garrett Devaney,” he said. “Are you up for a quick detour? Devaney says he has information on the case that he’d rather convey in person. He’s at a bar called Cassidy’s. On this road, he says, up near the crossroads at Largybrack. I gather there’s a sort of hideaway session going on there. Are you up to it?”

“To tell you the truth, I could use a drink.”

Cassidy’s was an old stone building at the side of a crossroads near the mouth of a glen. Cormac ordered up a pair of large whiskeys, and brought them back to where Nora sat in the mostly empty lounge. She glanced over at the small group of players in the back corner of the bar, and saw that Garrett Devaney had spotted them as well. After the next reel set finished, he put down the fiddle and made his way over.

“And how’s Elizabeth?”

Nora didn’t seem able to answer. Cormac jumped in: “A little better—she’s awake. But she hasn’t had a chance to process everything. She knows her father was killed, but—”

Devaney grimaced. “Still denies he did anything wrong?”

“She blames me,” Nora said. “For everything.”

Devaney shook his head. “Now listen, you can’t be thinking like that. It’s rough, I know, but you can’t.” He glanced around at the pub packed with patrons, and lowered his voice. “I’ve been checking with a few contacts. I’ve a mate over at the Serious Crimes Unit, the crowd that are handling the investigation. Here’s something he told me—searching through Hallett’s bags, they found his BlackBerry, with a link to a tracking device planted inside Miranda’s mobile.”

Cormac asked, “What does that mean, exactly?”

Nora said: “That makes sense. Peter knew where Miranda was all along, just as they both knew where Elizabeth was. Peter didn’t leave anything to chance. He must have known what she was up to—that she was coming after us. He was using her to get to me.”

“That’s not all,” Devaney said. “The scene-of-crime squad also found a small bottle of eyedrops—”

“But it wasn’t eyedrops at all. I can tell you what it was. GHB—liquid ecstasy. He told everyone that my sister was addicted to the stuff, out of control, but he was feeding it to her. Out there on the headland, I asked Miranda if she ever had blackouts—from her reaction, I think Peter had done the same thing to her. There’s probably no way to prove it.”

“But finding the stuff in his possession proves that he knew where to get it,” Cormac offered. “That’s something.”

Devaney pursed his lips and looked slightly uncomfortable. “I’m not sure how to tell you this last bit, except to say it straight out—your man Hallett was evidently into wearing women’s clothes. The state pathologist found lacy underpants on him at postmortem, under his regular clothes. I can’t say what it means—I’ll leave that to the psychologists. But I thought you ought to know about it, in case something should leak out in the press.”

Nora could hear Cormac ask a question, but her thoughts were far away, back in the cardboard evidence boxes at Saint Paul police headquarters. All those items of unwashed lingerie the crime scene investigators had found stuffed into the backs of drawers and under Tríona’s bed, all marked with her DNA, and Peter’s, along with unknown donors, male and female. They had always assumed Peter’s DNA was present because he and Tríona were married—and it was a logical assumption—but now there was another possible explanation altogether.

The river was where people went to become someone else. To shed all the strictures, the guises they maintained above, in the real world.

There are things you don’t know, Nora. About Peter, about me—

“For I have seen the false mermaid—” she whispered.

Devaney exchanged a quick look with Cormac. “Well, I’ll leave you. That’s all the news I’ve got for now. I’d better get back to Róisín before she’s completely corrupted by all these Donegal tunes. Give us a shout if you need anything, right?”

After Devaney left them, Nora was silent a long time, staring down
at her empty whiskey glass. “Why didn’t she come to me, Cormac? Why wouldn’t she trust me? I could have done something to help her—”

Suddenly the musicians hushed, and all ears in the pub tuned to the sound of an old woman singing. Only a few words of Irish came through; the other sounds seemed nonsensical, a series of long, plaintive vowels. But the leathery voice was so full of experience and grief that all who heard it were mesmerized, unable to move until the last note faded away. Nora swiped at her eyes.