Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel (15 page)

Then Chip knocked on the door of the Freudian cabana, and Steve let us in.

“Statistically it’s low-crime!” said his partner Janeane, the muumuu woman who was now wearing a tie-dyed sundress. I accepted a cup of in-room coffee gratefully, though I’m an espresso person in real life and knew it would taste like backwash. “I mean, there hasn’t been a murder on this island in six years! Before this one. Right, Steve? I know—I have a violent crime phobia. We researched it before we came.”

“I didn’t know that was a phobia,” said Chip, not unkindly. “Old friend of mine has a fear of velocity.”

“Interesting,” said Steve the Freudian. “Even related, possibly.”

“I visualize impacts,” added Janeane. “Bludgeoning. Face punches. I took a pill just now. Well, more than one.”

“But listen,” I said. “Who can we talk to? Who’s gonna talk to us? Is someone going to put out a statement? The police? Because the thing is—I mean, we can’t talk about it, it’s supposed to be embargoed, but Nancy had—she had news. She had information. A major discovery. It was going to break today, maybe.”

“She was murdered!” said Janeane dramatically, clasping her hands.

“Uh, I don’t know about
that
,” said Chip.

“It’s not impossible,” I ventured.

“She was a fish scientist, wasn’t she?” asked Steve. “Did she discover a new kind of fish?”

“Something like that,” put in Chip hastily.

We took our mugs of bad coffee outside. By that time Chip was constantly checking his phone, texting back and forth with other members of the diving party, fingers twiddling. The news had leaked out to them all at once—even the vast majority who were residents of the island, not guests at the resort—and they were on Chip for information every minute, they turned to Chip as the premier Nancy authority. Chip had nothing to give, obviously, but promised to keep them informed of any new developments. Sit tight, Chip texted them. The embargo was still on, he assured them; we’d put the Berkeley anthropologist in charge of distributing the digital footage as soon as he arrived.

But of course the anthropologist wasn’t here yet. He was due in from Tortola on a late-afternoon ferry.

I watched officials mill around with a growing sense of despair. Chip wasn’t available to me, eyes avidly planted on his bright data-cell, attention utterly committed. This was a time of sad aftermath, and I’ve always hated aftermaths, with their dull, heavy weight of disappointed hope. Nancy’s body was already gone, so in fact there was nothing to watch. It was a matter of waiting for someone to speak to us.

And what about the mermaids? It was increasingly clear to me that we were shut out of everything now—the action was closed to us. Just a few hours earlier, with servers at our beck and call, we’d been members of an inner circle: we’d clustered at the nucleus, cleaved to the core.

Now we were far from the core, excluded, floating like weak electrons. Or something.

I worried, I felt queasy at the thought of Nancy, I still disbelieved the story of her demise—I understood it with my brain, possibly, but not the rest of me. The living Nancy, with her bushy eyebrows, was still realer to me than the dead Nancy.

Chip was busily texting when the videographer from Australia came galumphing toward us over the emerald grass, weaving between the spectators, flushed and sweating.

“It’s gone!” he said, panting, when he pulled up short. “Oh mate—my footage is gone! And my camera!”

“What do you mean?” asked Chip, looking up from the small screen at long last. “Gone where?”

“Stolen!” said the videographer. “They were both stolen!”

“Slow down there, friend,” said Chip. “OK. Let’s . . . maybe you left your camera somewhere? Our place, even?”

“I took it back to my hotel room last night,” he puffed. “You know—I’m at the Bitter End, about a half-hour drive, I got back to the room in the wee hours. Well, the camera was too big to fit in the bloody room safe, so I stuck just the video chip in there instead, and put the key under the pillow, just to be extra careful. Didn’t think I really needed to, but. Woke up this morning and the safe door was wide open. Looked under my pillow, the bloody key was still there! The chip is 
gone
, mate! All the footage is lost. Stolen! It’s bloody gone!”

“And there weren’t any copies,” said Chip slowly.

“No copies,” said the Australian. “I hadn’t uploaded it. I promised her.”

Chip and I looked at each other. We had the feeling, I think, people describe as
sinking
.

“Oh,” said Chip. “Oh no.”

He told the Australian about Nancy. The three of us stood there limply.

We had nothing left.
Poor Nancy
, I found myself thinking, as though she were still alive. But no. We had no mermaids; we had no Nancy. All we had was a deceased parrotfish expert and a story people would laugh at.

And memories.

“We can go out again,” said Chip weakly. “We’ll find them. We’ll go right out again. Tomorrow! She would want us to. She would insist, you know she would. We owe it to her. It doesn’t have to be a big group. Maybe a backup camera this time. We’ll
take the scholar from Berkeley. When we find them again, the scholar will give us credibility.”

But we weren’t comforted. Not even Chip could crack a smile. Our sadness stood there with us like a fourth person.

When we’d arrived on the island, buffeted by trade winds and cradled by the white sands and all for a few weeks’ pay, I’d felt like the American I was. It was a nice feeling, mostly. It had its minuses, sure (passivity, mental blankness), but also its pluses (vague background satisfaction caused by world dominance; non-starvation). When, carried by the white golf cart across the grounds, we’d jiggled inertly, I’d felt American then too—more American than ever, frankly. I’d felt American when we rented a boat and ordered a catered lunch and when we found mermaids. I’d felt American when we had the film of the mermaids in our possession, when we were drinking our fill and eating well and waiting for the anthropologist. I’d felt American when Nancy carried us along in the hubbub of her discovery.

We’d been Americans then, Chip and I; Nancy had too. Now we were spun off to the margins, us and our opinions, our visions, our memories—our singular knowledge. Now we had something to sell that no one would ever buy, we had a secret that cast us out into the wings . . . was it possible we’d stopped being American?

It’s like we’re not even Americans,
I said to myself.

In fact, I thought as I looked around me at the officials milling in their damp costumes, the female reporters in pancake makeup . . . wait, they weren’t female reporters at all—they had
no microphones! One looked like a secretary, the other someone’s girlfriend. Now that I looked more closely, their makeup wasn’t heavy enough—they weren’t even that self-important.

So where
was
the media? Was there no media after all? The van with the satellite dish—did it not have the call number of a local affiliate on it?

No, I saw now, it was the name of some kind of utility, maybe a cable provider. It wasn’t the press at all. There wasn’t any press here.

No one was watching us, as it turned out. We weren’t the focus of anyone’s interest. The death of one of our own seemed, as far as I could tell, to be passing without notice.

I looked around and saw no Americans—no Americans at all.

III.

THE MURDER MYSTERY

W
e stood on the dock a little while before sunset, Chip and I, with waves lapping quietly onto the sand behind us. I squinted into the distance, trying to make out the faint white dot of the island ferry.

Steve was there too, Steve the Freudian. By then we’d told him about the sighting. With Nancy and the mermaid footage both gone, we’d decided (over a lunch we had no interest in) that our embargo was beside the point. Obviously there couldn’t be an embargo without a commodity—in this case the mermaid video. So with me sitting upright next to him on their sofa, Chip had told Steve—Steve and his wife Janeane, who preferred to be called his life partner—about the mermaid sighting.

To my surprise the Freudian didn’t mock us. I’d assumed a therapist type would instantly dismiss our claims, but Steve just cocked his head to one side, contemplative.

“Something happened to me, not long ago, that I could never explain either,” he offered, nodding.

“What?” asked Chip.

“Enh, I’ll tell you the story sometime. But in a nutshell, I had a strange experience. It made me question things. Question a 
lot
.”

“It was how we met,” said Janeane. “I mean,
after
his
experience
. We both went to this PTSD encounter group.”

“For post-traumatic stress?” asked Chip. “Hey. So sorry. I know they say they don’t let women in combat, but once you’re out in a war zone that line blurs. Doesn’t it.”

“Oh, she wasn’t in the
army
,” said Steve. “Jan
eane
?”

“My practice is around peace,” said Janeane. “Sending out empathy for all beings.”

“What happened was, a therapist told her the phobia had features in common with PTSD, so she started going to the group. I was helping to moderate that day.”

“It was a new horizon,” said Janeane, smiling. “Plus I met Steve!”

Now, in the tropical dusk, Janeane was back in their cabana, resting and making all of us a late dinner; she didn’t like to eat out much. In the resort’s restaurant, she’d said, and the various restaurants off-campus too, there was always the chance of a bludgeoning. Especially now, after this, she was reluctant to emerge. She’d be picking at an overpriced entrée, she’d said, fingering the stem of a goblet, and then suddenly see, in her mind’s eye, a machete intruder.

Standing there on the dock, we wondered where Riley the videographer had gone. We hadn’t seen him since he told us the footage had been stolen; he’d said he was going straight to the police, to tell them about his camera. He’d promised to
be here to welcome the Berkeley anthropologist, but he was nowhere to be seen and didn’t answer Chip’s calls or texts.

We worried about the Berkeley anthropologist, too—what he might say, without a video. He’d probably think he’d made the arduous and, let’s face it, expensive trip for nothing. It was no joke, flying from California to the Caribbean on a last-minute ticket. And if he turned out to have been close to Nancy, worse yet—for then, of course, there’d also be the grief. We couldn’t recall if she’d said they’d been friends or only colleagues.

The three of us watched the white prow of the ferry as it first appeared—it’s not a large ferry, really, mid-sized at best—and the lights of the harbor around us twinkled in the gathering dark.

“I like ferries,” mused Chip, and squeezed my hand.

“We came in by chopper,” said Steve. “I don’t do boats. Not anymore. No boats of any kind, not even a rowboat. I’ll never set foot on a ship again until the day I die.”

“Do you get seasick?” asked Chip.

“Not at all,” said Steve.

Chip and I waited politely, but he didn’t go on.

The ocean and horizon were dim purple shades, and the lights on the ferry twinkled—though way more dimly than the lights of the resort at our backs. Then we saw another light, the light of a second, smaller boat as it approached the ferry from one side.

“That’s a police boat,” said Steve. “The BVI police cutter. Or maybe it’s the Coast Guard. I’m not sure the Brits even
have
their own boats.”

To our surprise the two ships met. We couldn’t tell if the
ferry slowed or stopped; it seemed to remain static until the police boat moved away again, off to somewhere we couldn’t see. After that it grew nearer steadily.

“I’ve got a bad feeling,” said Chip.

And sure enough, when the ferry reached us at the dock tourists streamed off—mostly couples, a few singletons with bulging shopping bags, the odd kid holding hands with a tired-looking parent—but there was no Berkeley anthropologist. We thought at first he might have been camouflaged among the day-trip shoppers, and Chip approached one or two, but we got no love from them.

“Do you think,” I asked the guys, when the last of the passengers had disembarked and we were still standing there lamely, “that police cutter could have had something to do with it? With the fact that he never arrived?”

Steve looked at me, and I saw it in his eyes: he did.

“I don’t get it,” said Chip, as we walked slowly back down the dock, slumping. “If the police boat intercepted the ferry to meet the anthropologist—I mean
if
; he could have just missed his plane. But first off, why
would
they? How would they even know he was coming?”

“They have her phone,” I suggested. “I’m sure they do. So they can access her voicemail, her texts and her email, no problem. That’s my bet. She probably unlocked her phone, since she was using it so much.”

“But why would they
want
to intercept him? I mean he’s not a suspect or anything.”

“And the cops around here are kind of a joke,” said Steve. “I
researched it, you know—because of the phobia. Our assumption was, in this kind of tourist economy, good cops would actually be a bad sign, in terms of the likelihood of violent crime. The Virgin Gorda cops have to call in the troops from other islands when something serious goes down. I can’t see them doing anything they didn’t have to do.”