Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel (18 page)

“We have to keep after the resort management,” said Chip. “At any time there could be brand-new information.”

“Mmm,” said Steve noncommittally.

“Mmm what?” asked Chip.

A pelican flapped slowly along the shore beside us and I felt a stir of fondness for the foolish-looking yet steadily graceful creature. I thought about how it must be inside the pelican’s throat pouch, the stench of bile and rotting fish. Nameless debris.

Steve and the pelican, each with their own flapping, made a nice parallel/contrast.

“I’m just not sure we’ll be told more than we know now,” said Steve. “That’s my feeling.”

“But that’s not
right
,” said Chip, agitated. “You know it isn’t. This isn’t right, none of it is. It’s like no one else
cares
. And someone’s dead who
shouldn’t
be! A good person, a person who has tenure at a major U.S. university!”

“Believe me, I agree,” said Steve.

“Deb,” said Chip, turning to me. “Please, honey. Can’t we call someone and give them a bunch of money to solve this? Aren’t there police you can just
hire
? Who figure out the crime and catch the bad guys? And make sure justice is done?”

“They call them private detectives,” I said. “I don’t think they handle the justice part, though.”

“I didn’t know if those existed anymore,” said Chip. “I thought maybe they went out with black-and-white movies, or maybe when Columbo died.”

Steve nodded sympathetically, did some neck rolls.

“I’m serious, Deb,” said Chip. “We can’t just let this go.”

I nodded too, wondering why the hard-boiled sleuth of the 1940s and ’50s had morphed into crime procedurals. People didn’t believe in a lone sleuth these days; they didn’t believe one man could solve a crime. Or one woman, either. Miss Marple was a joke, same with the
Murder, She Wrote
lady.

Deductive reasoning? Get the fuck out,
was what Americans said to the obsolete sleuths of yesteryear. Even in the heyday of sleuthing, American detectives relied mainly on guns, not brains like the unmanly English. (I’d hardly thought of Gina since the mermaids, I realized then, Gina and Ellis in their love nest of Union Jacks and irony.) The gun is mightier than the pen, was our true opinion, and the RPG is mightier still.

Gina had discussed this subject with me too; Gina used me as a sounding board now and then. She said she liked to talk about her work to people outside the academy, people who weren’t constantly baffled about how she got tenure in the first place.

The sleuths who went solo, looking cool, smoking cigarettes, etc., had been replaced by highly efficient teams of police officers with integrity, brilliant forensics specialists, earnest lawyers, and superefficient computers. It doesn’t matter to the TV-watching public that in real life America has basically none of the above, Gina says, due to the fact that we stoutly refuse to cough up taxes to pay for it. Gina studies what she calls the formulas/standard deviations of TV, along with junk food and pop song lyrics. On our TVs, she says, we like to see the governmental institutions functioning perfectly. People don’t want a lone man armed with nothing but a snarky wit and a lame analog peashooter. They just can’t take that seriously.

That was my train of thought, walking along the beach in the British Virgin Islands while only partly attending to Chip’s worries over memorial-service protocol.

“. . . want to send something ourselves, maybe a flower arrangement? Or maybe a donation to a charity?” he was saying as we came up to the marina, where the dock’s pilings, in front of us, stretched barnacle-encrusted above the lacework of the tide.

“Whoa,” said Steve, finally noticing the traffic. “I don’t like this. I don’t like being so close to boats.”

“What the—? What’s going on up there?” asked Chip.

I’d been walking a few steps ahead of them, and now I turned around. I was wearing a creamy sarong over my bikini, albeit a flowing sarong with pouchy pockets for my cell phone and room-key card, strands of my shining hair floating around my face and neck in the ocean breeze. I like to think I looked
attractive at that particular moment—as well as authoritative and trustworthy.

To Chip, anyway. Along with being a universal ear, a spouse is a universal eye. A spouse is watching your biopic at all times, much as you’re watching theirs. And even if you don’t admit it you want both those biopics to be well filmed, in warm, nostalgic colors. Plus heart-achingly scored.

“I think you
know
what it is, Chip,” I said gently.

CHIP TOOK IT
hard. I’d known he would, I’d feared he would take it hard and I was right: he did.

We got up on top of the docks, though Steve stayed down below. He didn’t do ship, boats, anything seafaring, he said, a matter of personal policy. Chip and I found ourselves among the slips, among the boats, within the throng rushing to and fro and readying vessels for excursions. Small boats but mostly larger boats, soaring white yachts you might almost feel comfortable calling
ships
—all manner of watergoing vehicle was being fitted out. Gorda’s the yachtiest of the Virgin Islands: yacht people swarm daily off their boats into the restaurants, onto the beaches, looking for terra firma and their share of landlubber food and sport. This was one of several marinas on the island, and it was white with yachts.

Also there was an overwhelming vibe of haste, mission, even urgency: a vital enterprise under way. We couldn’t get an answer out of anyone because they were ignoring us, in their
furor and commotion. They wouldn’t stop to explain; they didn’t even look at us in passing. We moved among them like shadows or ghosts.

Presently, as we stood there being buffeted by hurrying people—a little dazzled, a little lost, now and then jostled by a passing workatron—Chip located someone from our dive group and grabbed his shoulder, stopped him mid-rush. It was a recent Listserv defector I hadn’t ever paid attention to, a thin guy with bulging eyes.

“They’re paying time and a half,” he told us, sweating from the exertion of hefting a sack. It wavered on his shoulder. “Plus open bar tonight.”

“What for? What’s going on?” urged Chip.

“We have to cordon off the area, these boats here are kind of the support system for those other ships we’re using, these big ships with fishing nets—trawlers, I think that’s what they are. Or maybe it’s purse seine. They’re going to drop the nets
around where the marvels are so that they can’t escape,” said the guy.

“The marvels?” said Chip.

“The marvels,
you
know, the attraction. The
fish
people,” said the guy, and then he got a stressed look on his face, glancing past us at someone, I guess, who needed either his sack or his presence. He quickly turned to leave. “Gotta bounce.”

Chip looked at me, stricken.

“They’re going after them,” he said.

I saw a face I recognized, then, up on the deck of one of the nearer yachts: Mike Jans or Chance or whatever, the too-tanned resort employee from Guest Services who’d come to the door of Steve and Janeane’s cabana. He wasn’t wearing his maroon tie anymore; now he was clad in what I guessed was modern sailor gear, a windbreaker and a cap, a pair of mirrored sunglasses. Approaching him from the gangplank—another face I recognized!—was our other Guest Services rep, the name-tag woman who’d been Mormonish the night before.

Well, in daylight she wasn’t Mormonish at all. She wore flip-flops and shorts, and her bare legs were strong and muscular as a carthorse’s, plus clearly waxed. I’m not sure, but I don’t think waxing’s much of a Latter-Day Saints habit.
She’s
not
a Mormon
, I couldn’t help thinking a little disappointedly; I couldn’t help feeling just the tiniest bit betrayed. Sure, she’d never directly claimed to be LDS, but the ankle-length, floral, asexual dress had made the claim for her, and now she was renouncing it without so much as a by-your-leave. It came to me then that dressing badly could be seen, in a way, as a form of disinformation, a form, almost, of psychological weapon.

But I didn’t have time to go down that road. Chip was upset.

“Deb,” he said quietly, standing close to me. His hands were actually trembling. “They’re going out there to hunt them, is that it? Hunt the mermaids?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” I said. “I really don’t think that’s it.”

“Then what
is
it?”

I pointed at a banner flapping behind Mike and his coworker. And that was our introduction to the new mermaid tourism company—incorporated, as it turned out, with mysterious rapidity as a wholly owned subsidiary of the multinational chain that also owned our resort—that called itself the
Venture of Marvels
.

Beside the words, a logo of a fishtail sticking out of a frothy, stylized wave.

“They’re going out there to market them,” I said.

THERE’S NOT A
lot of anger in Chip, really; I’d say he’s well below average on the anger meter, for his demographic. He’s white, he’s male, and he’s quite young, but he’s got no serial killer in him—none at all. No tendencies to violence that I’ve ever seen. Or if he does have them they channel completely into the gaming, sex, and athletics.

And yet, when he looked up at those words and that logo and then looked down at the Guest Services team standing beneath it, their tans glowing against the white of the yacht like twin beacons, I saw blood rush to his face. His face, all of a sudden, looked lightly mottled, and I actually caught the movement of his
jaw clenching. I thought I heard his molars grinding, even amidst the pandemonium on the docks.

“No,” said Chip. “No. No. No. No. No!”

“Hey,” I said, “hey, there.” But as I reached out to comfort him I reminded myself of Steve the Freudian wrangling Janeane, which made me jerk back my hand from his arm. It wasn’t that I didn’t want him to be comforted, just that I didn’t want to act like a
life partner
, exactly. I figured the process would have a neutering effect.

“They can’t do this,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s just like Nancy said! They’re going to wreck
everything
!”

I didn’t doubt what he said, which made it hard to come back with a soothing remark.

“The others from the dive are
working
for them! For these people. The Venture of Marvels, whatever that is.”

“I suspect it’s the same people who run the resort. Or at least their parent company,” I said, inclining my head toward the tanned people astride their yacht, above us.

Chip’s brow knit.

“That’s why they left my Listserv, I bet they felt guilty,” he said. “They felt
guilty
because they were cashing in. They were betraying Nancy and everything she stood for!
And
violating our contract! They’re getting paid to sell out the mermaids!”

“Yes,” I said. “I think that’s a pretty fair assumption.”

“Deb,” he said, “you’re the strategist. What can we
do
?”

I looked around for a place to sit; all I saw was the top of a piling, a sawed-off stumpy thing spattered with seagull white. Any port in a storm, I said to myself, but then I disagreed.

“First,” I said, “who’s still on your Listserv, Chip? Who hasn’t defected yet?”