False Mermaid (44 page)

“Who was that singing?” Cormac asked the barman, who’d come to collect their empty glasses.

“Ah, that’s Kitty Sean Cunningham. From Cappagh, just above Teelin. Seventy-eight last Monday week, but she can still wind a good song.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “They say she used to sing, out collecting seaweed, and the seals would come up onto the rocks and listen. Not everyone can call them. But Kitty has the power, they say, because her grandmother was one of ’em.”

“And people still believe that?” Cormac asked.

The barman smiled. “Ah, sure, no one believes the old stories anymore. But like my granny used to say, that doesn’t mean they aren’t true. Can I get you another drink?”

“No thanks,” Cormac said. “We’re finished here.”

As they left the bar, Nora still felt stunned. Devaney’s report dredged up all sorts of dreadful possibilities about what Tríona had gone through in those last few weeks. Each new realization brought fresh pain. Cormac followed her outside, apparently unsure what he should say. What could he say?

At the car, she turned to him. “Do you realize what this means? All this time, I thought Peter was just possessive and jealous. That he killed Tríona—had her killed—because he couldn’t bear to let her go. But it wasn’t that kind of jealousy at all. It was a different kind. He was taking her clothes, Cormac, wearing them down to the river. He didn’t just want to possess Tríona, he wanted to
be
her—I never understood until now.”

“Nora, what are you saying?”

“All those awful things he accused her of—the drugs and the late nights, the sex with random strangers—Tríona didn’t have any memory of doing those things, because she never did them.
He did.
And she must have found out somehow. That’s what she was trying to tell me, when
she talked about letting things go too far. But she gave him the benefit of the doubt. Right up until the very end. Even after she knew he was deliberately tormenting her, she still wouldn’t believe it. My God—it’s all so twisted.” Though the night was warm, Nora couldn’t keep from shivering. “And it just keeps getting worse. How could he have fooled us for so long—how could we not see what he was? He must have realized that Tríona would try to leave him sooner or later, that eventually she’d begin to figure it out.”

“But just as he was getting desperate enough to act, Miranda came onto the scene, mad jealous of Natalie Russo,” Cormac said. “She played right into his hand.”

“Oh, Cormac—how can I ever tell Elizabeth any of this? It’s all so insane.”

“Don’t think about it, not tonight. Let me take you home.”

The next morning, Cormac awakened to find Nora beside him in bed, the fingers of her right hand laced through his. They’d managed to make it through the night, but neither of them had slept well. He could see that the revelations of the previous evening had not loosed their grip on Nora. She looked pale, exhausted. And her parents were due to arrive in less than six hours. That meant everything would be gone over again, in detail, including Elizabeth’s accusations, and he could not save her from any of it.

Nora’s eyes were closed, but she was awake. He touched her face. “I meant to ask, where’s your hazel knot—the one I made you out at Loughnabrone?”

Her hand slipped from his. “It must have fallen out of my pocket the night of the crash. I kept it with me, Cormac, I swear. Right here in my pocket—” She leaned down to pick up her jeans from the floor, showing him where she’d kept it.

A crinkled bit of fabric peeped from the pocket, and he pulled it out, surprised to find an old-fashioned woolen stocking. “What’s this?”

“I’d almost forgotten about that,” she said. “I think an eagle dropped it on me, over at Port na Rón.”

Cormac held the stocking up to the light. Fine black wool—and the heel was neatly darned. He felt a vibration, the same frequency as when he’d first laid eyes on the high-button shoe from the abandoned cottage.

Nora continued: “I’m not sure why I kept it. An odd thing to find at a beach, I guess.”

“Could you show me exactly where you found it?”

“What is it, Cormac? What’s wrong?”

“I’ll explain when we get there.”

At the deserted village, they climbed down the rocky escarpment. Cormac glanced up at the craggy rocks, and at the steep bank that fell away above the beach. The enormous heap of pale stones had washed out of the boggy earth above them.

“Tell me what you saw that day,” he said to Nora.

“When we first arrived at the beach, I was standing here,” she said. “Elizabeth was on the rocks over there—” She pointed out a trio of flat stones at the north edge of the bay. “I was watching her, but something—a movement up there—distracted me. It was a pair of sea eagles. I’ve never seen two of them together like that. They were fighting over something.” She cast her eyes about for the exact spot. “Look, there’s one of them now—”

She set off climbing up the rocks, and Cormac followed. By the time they reached the top of the eroding bank, the eagle was long gone. But as they drew near, Cormac could see where the giant bird had been perched. The stony ground was covered in a blanket of peat that stretched to the edge of the escarpment. He crouched down for a closer look. The edge was unstable; one false move, and you might do a header right down onto the beach below—unless you had wings, of course. Two pairs of talons had made a series of gashes in the soft ground where the two birds had been wrestling. Cormac edged closer to the brink to push aside the drying edge of peat, and drew back in surprise.

“What is it?” Nora asked.

“I’ll let you see for yourself.” He grasped Nora’s hand as she leaned forward. What they were looking at was a human foot, mostly stripped of flesh, the toe delicately pointed seaward. Beside it, the toe of an old-fashioned shoe had begun to surface from under the peat.

“She’s here,” Cormac murmured. “She was right here under their noses all along.”

“What are you talking about?” Nora demanded.

He moved to where the woman’s head should be if this was a normal supine burial, and pulled out his pocketknife, cutting through the grass carpet and peeling it back to expose the wet peat underneath. As he dug with bare hands, he wondered: What would the face of a sea maid look like? Would she still have her beauty after years under the peat, like the
cailín rua
? His mind conjured the curious faces, the mournful eyes of the seals who surrounded him while he was out rowing. At last his fingers felt something—the roundness of a cranium vault. But as he worked to remove the peat, in the place where he expected to find a forehead, a brow ridge, a nose, there was nothing but a shallow depression and a fistful of splintered bones. Whoever this woman was, her face had been battered in, her identity effectively erased.

Nora knelt beside him. She said: “You know who she is, don’t you?”

“I haven’t had a chance to tell you about this place,” he said. “Remember the other night, when you sang
‘An Mhaighdean Mhara,’
and I asked why you chose that song? There’s a local connection. This is where she lived—”

“Who?”

“The woman from the song—Mary Heaney.”

Nora drew back. “It’s only a story, Cormac. It’s not real.”

“I don’t blame you for being skeptical. I was, too—” He climbed to his feet and reached for her hand. “Come with me.”

Inside the selkie cottage, he dug through the stones and shells under the cot until he found the high-button shoe. He handed it to Nora. “It’s been bothering me for days, ever since I first came here. Why would anyone leave home with only one shoe? Two shoes makes sense, or none—but one shoe doesn’t make any sense at all.”

Nora sat in one of the low chairs to examine the shoe. It was rimed with dust and white mildew, but the cutwork around the ankle was distinctive. This was unmistakably the mate of the one they’d just seen peeping from the turf.

Cormac sank into the opposite chair. “The woman they called Mary Heaney, the woman who lived in this house, was a foreigner. She showed up one day in 1889 on a small boat with a local fisherman, P. J. Heaney. The woman spoke no Irish, no English. But she stayed on and lived with Heaney as his wife, had two children by him. People began to believe she was a selkie, like the Mary Heaney in the song. She would sit alone on the headland; Roz had reports of her singing in a strange language. She has all this documented—Roz has—census records, interviews, newspaper reports. When Mary Heaney disappeared six years later, people said she had discovered the sealskin Heaney had stolen from her, and returned to the sea. Everyone bought into it—all her neighbors here at Port na Rón, the newspapers, even the police. Everyone wanted to believe the myth of the seal wife when it wasn’t what actually happened.”

“But that song is quite old, isn’t it? How could the person who lived here be Mary Heaney if the song has been around for hundreds of years?”

“They did share the same name. And people wanted to believe—Roz thinks it was a convenient way to absolve themselves of responsibility, since it was likely everyone in the village knew she was being ill-treated.
Her husband encouraged the selkie stories. If everyone believed she’d gone back to the sea, it would stop them having to search for her.”

“And was the husband never a suspect?”

“He was, of course, but because there was no body, and therefore no proof of murder, Heaney was never charged. Never even arrested. He disappeared from his boat a few years later—presumed drowned.”

“And the children?”

“Shipped off to relations near Buncrana; Roz thinks the boy may have been killed in the First World War. She still hasn’t traced the daughter.”

Nora turned to stare out the cottage door at the tumbling surf. They sat in silence for a long time, listening to the hiss of the tide, the rattling stones. At last she stood up.

“Let’s go back,” Nora said. “We ought to at least cover her face.”

Frank Cordova spent the day after Nora Gavin’s phone call putting away the murder book on her sister. Evidence would keep drifting in for a few more weeks, but it was over. At five, he got a call from Jackie Smart in the crime lab.

“Hey, remember that chewing gum you brought in the other day? We got a positive match to the unknown female from Harry Shaughnessy’s sweatshirt and shoes. Hope that helps.”

“It does, Jackie—thanks.”

With the DNA and the false mermaid seeds from the crime scenes, they would have had more than enough physical evidence to convict Miranda Staunton of two murders—if she had lived.

What they didn’t have was definitive proof that she’d actually been set up, that killing Tríona hadn’t been her own idea. But how did you prove Peter Hallett’s subtle brand of manipulation? In all likelihood, he would be remembered—by most people who knew him, at least—as a victim, an innocent bystander done in by the excesses of people around him.

The story of any crime left out most of the details, the tiny minutiae that he dealt with every day. So much of what they discovered about people—the victims and the perpetrators—stayed buried in the files: the secret lives, all the missed or hidden connections that were either too complex or too sordid for the public to comprehend. Heroes and villains, that’s what the public wanted, so they could shake their heads and cluck over their newspapers in the morning. The truth never really lined up with the facts.

The Nick Mosher connection had been bothering him ever since Nora brought it up, a dull presence lodged in the side of his head. How could it be just coincidence that Tríona and the friend she was working for both ended up dead on the same day? One thing was certain: Truman Stark knew more than he was telling.

Frank opened a drawer and dug out the file he’d retrieved on Nick
Mosher’s accident. His body had been found at the bottom of an elevator shaft; cause of death was a broken neck, compounded by blunt force trauma to the head and face, injuries consistent with a fall.

Closing his eyes, Frank saw the shape of a body sprawled four stories below. He saw a pair of dark glasses, lying facedown next to the elevator, one of the lenses cracked. The investigating officers had ruled out suicide. If Nick Mosher had simply stepped into thin air, why were his glasses still up on the fourth floor, and not at the bottom of the elevator shaft? Were they already broken when he fell?

There was another strange detail in the file as well: a bunch of wilted flowers in the elevator. Nothing fancy, just a handful of garden-variety blooms—picked, not cut, according to the lab. Not that a thing like that made much difference in a case like this. The weird thing was that the flowers had been crushed before they hit the elevator floor and wilted there. So what did mangled flowers conjure up—a jilted suitor, maybe? No way to know if the flowers were connected. Only one elevator in the building; everyone used it.

Truman Stark had admitted following Nora from the parking garage to the Sturgis Building, maybe afraid that she knew something, or that she’d discover something. Stark claimed he’d been watching Tríona in order to protect her, but she’d still ended up dead. If Stark was supposed to be protecting her, where had he been that night? What was he doing when Tríona was attacked? Maybe the kid felt like he’d failed, fallen down as a guardian angel. What would make him think that? Frank’s brain circled back to something Stark had said during his recent interview:
If I told the truth you wouldn’t believe me.

Frank slid the file back in his drawer, the image of Nick Mosher’s broken glasses, and those flowers in the elevator still lingering. He picked up his phone and scrolled through the recent calls until he found the number he was looking for. Sarah Cates answered on the first ring.

“It’s Frank Cordova. I wanted to thank you for coming to the visitation the other night. I saw you come in as I was leaving. Sorry I couldn’t stay.”

“That’s okay—I happened to see the notice in the paper. Thought I’d pay my respects. I’m sorry—”

“Thanks.” Frank felt his chest constrict, and braced himself for the stabbing pain, but it never came. “Does that offer of a free rowing lesson
still stand?” He closed his eyes and pictured the two of them out on the water, pulling in the same direction, her turning to him with those eyes the color of the river in sunlight.