Siren's Secret

by Debbie Herbert

  The sheriff tipped his hat to Mrs. Elmore. “Sorry. He doesn’t know the difference between the men’s and ladies’ rooms. I’m on my way.”

  “Don’t apologize.” Lurlene let loose a honking laugh. “For God’s sake, it’s not like any of us have reached our advanced ages without seeing a man’s talleywacker a time or two.”

  Shelly followed her ribald senior clients to the shallow end of the pool. “Talk to you later,” she said with a wave at Tillman.

  Lurlene pointed at Shelly’s legs. “I tried to find that lotion that makes your legs sparkly but I didn’t see it anywhere.”

  Not that again. Lurlene had been hounding her for what she used to make her legs glitter. Shelly glanced down discreetly. They weren’t that noticeable. The skin had a faint opalescence, like silver-and-pink mica particles freckling the legs. Lurlene would freak if she knew the glitter came from the faint residue of her tail fin when she shape-shifted.

  Shelly shrugged. “Just put some powdered pink and silver eye shadow in a jar of baby oil and shake it.”

  Lurlene nodded as she sank her massive frame into the pool. “Saw the sheriff checking you out.” She winked. “He’s a handsome devil.”

  It occurred to her these senior women had probably seen more action in the past two years than she had.

  Friday night couldn’t get here soon enough.

  * * *

  Melkie roamed the downtown shops, avoiding eye contact and blending easily with the crowd. Even in early September, the air was thick with humidity and his shirt felt sticky from perspiration. He smirked as he passed the quaint shops. The town was nothing but a fucking Mayberry R.F.D. perched precariously on the edge of a continental shelf. Hurricane Katrina had almost swept it entirely away.

  A fat woman in spandex bike shorts and an oversize fuchsia T-shirt exited the soda parlor and brushed against him. Her triple scoop of blueberry ice cream narrowly missed plopping on his chest.

  “Excuse me, darlin’,” she said with an apologetic grin.

  Melkie pulled away and shot her a furious look. He fought back the urge to growl. The woman’s smile faded and he registered confusion, embarrassment and fear in her fatty pig eyes.

  He lowered his head and kept going.

  She was like everyone else in this stupid, stinking backwater. They had no idea who he was, what he was capable of doing.

  Three blocks away, he entered the Bayou Seed and Feed to get a bag of Rebel’s favorite dog biscuits. Several old men in denim overalls stood around the counter, bullshitting. Melkie plopped the bag on the counter where an old fart with rheumy eyes winked at one of the customers. “How’s that ol’ mutt of yers gettin’ along?”

  Melkie threw down a ten-dollar bill on the scratched Formica, ignoring the jibe.

  The cashier handed back the change, which Melkie stuffed in his pocket. As he headed to the door, one of the men muttered, “Ugliest damn dog you’d ever want to lay eyes on.”

  Snickering ensued.

  Melkie slowly turned. All of them fell silent and looked away. He wanted to say Fuck off, but he wouldn’t give the cashier an excuse to ban him from the store. Instead, he settled for banging the door shut behind him. The attached bells gave a satisfied clanging at the violence.

  He was in a crappy mood today, when he should have been calm and in control. That’s how he had felt after the first hooker, anyway. The second one...well, that was a problem.

  What the hell had happened out there? That—that thing had risen up from the sea. She—it, whatever—had seen him, knew who he was and what he had done. Somehow he had to find her again. He couldn’t let a witness live. Big mistake dumping that second bitch at sea. He thought no one would ever find the body. Unlike the first one he’d left in the shallow salt marsh. That had been clumsy and ill-planned.

  Images from the night before consumed him. Sure, he’d had a few beers before getting on the boat, but he wasn’t stinking drunk. He knew what he saw and that was no scuba diver. When the woman disappeared with the body, he’d seen a giant fish tail emerge.

  Melkie threw the bag in the bed of his rusted-out Chevy truck with his other recently purchased supplies and drove out of town, onto the white sandy roads leading home. In the past, he would have taken Rebel with him, but he got sick of the ugly jokes. Ignorant hicks.

  He’d found the dog abandoned on the roadside years ago and had taken a shine to it. At first, Melkie thought the stray resembled an overgrown rat, but he checked the library’s internet and found it was a full-bred hairless Chinese crested. Try telling that to people in the bayou.

  His thoughts turned again to the woman at sea. Either he was crazy or that woman was truly a mermaid. He brooded over the mermaid possibility.

  Bayou La Siryna had as many mermaid tales and sightings as some places had their resident ghost hauntings. A few locals claimed to have seen strange creatures at night, half human and half fish, swimming deep at sea. Some scuba divers once claimed they’d seen a topless mermaid with long blond hair swimming close to the marsh grassland savannas that lined the shore. All stories Melkie never believed.

  Buildings changed from redbrick structures to clapboard shacks with dirt floors that smelled like a combination of ripe soil and mice droppings. At last, his neighborhood was heralded by a faded hand-painted sign reading Happy Hollows, nailed to an oak tree.

  There was nothing happy about Happy Hollows. He flipped off the sign, as was his custom. Tired shotgun-style houses lined the streets, in various states of disrepair. He pulled into an unpaved driveway on a dead-end street. Rebel yapped excitedly by the peeling handmade picket fence slapped together from scrap wood.

  A smile tugged the corners of Melkie’s thin mouth for the first time today. Rebel spotted the biscuit bag and ran in circles, delirious with joy.

  “Shut that ugly mutt up,” a neighbor hollered from a front porch crammed with broken kids’ toys and other unidentifiable junk.

  “Fuck off,” Melkie hollered back. He didn’t have to pretend to be nice around this place. Niceness got you nowhere with these folks; instead, it was viewed as a sign of weakness. Melkie had learned early on not to take anything from anyone. Ever.

  Melkie stomped up the rotted steps and onto the porch, arms laden with bags and boxes, carefully avoiding spots where pieces of boards were broken or missing, exposing sand and weeds four feet beneath the foundation. He opened the screen door, but Rebel pushed up underneath his feet and a cardboard box fell out of his arms. An explosive noise of crashed glass erupted in the box like a miniature self-contained bomb. Rebel whimpered and ran away, skinny tail tucked between his legs.

  “What the hell was that?” his neighbor screamed from across the street.

  “None of your business,” Melkie yelled, kicking the mess to one side of the door. The box of broken Mason jars, used as insect-killing jars, joined the cast-off collection on his porch—a broken washing machine, plastic beach chairs with missing slats and who knew what else.

  Melkie perked up at seeing the brown package tucked between the screen and front doors. As he checked the mailing label, his mouth curved upward.

  He whistled for Rebel and the dog followed him inside. Melkie headed straight to the fridge and pulled out a beer. His unemployment check was running low, but he always had a cold one for himself, a biscuit for Rebel and his ever-increasing insect collection.

  Only ten steps from the den, he entered the cramped kitchen with its battered pine cabinets. Another eight steps and Melkie would pass through a tiny bedroom, leading to a bathroom with only a toilet, a rusted-out tub and sink. Another ten steps led to the final cramped bedroom, barely large enough for a mattress and dresser. This pathetic, rotting dump was all his. Mom’s last legacy. The sisters were long gone, escaped as soon as they’d found some pussy-whipped dope to take them away. But he was still trapped here. For all its miserable worth, the house was a way to live rent-free.

  “I don’t owe nobody nothing, do I, boy?”

  The dog
leaped on Melkie’s legs, clawing for his treat.

  “Coming right up,” Melkie promised. He peeled off his sweaty T-shirt. Opening the kitchen drawer, pulling out a dull knife with a cracked wooden handle, he cut open the bag and threw a biscuit on the ripped linoleum floor. Normally, he liked watching Rebel tear into the treat with his buck teeth, the few remaining ones jutting out at crazy angles. But today he stared at the knife gripped in his palms.

  His knife.

  Anger rose in him, fierce and hungry. Melkie tamped it down, refused to let it interfere with the gratification in his latest package. Pulling up a chair to the table, Melkie cut open the box and spread its contents onto the scarred Formica. A hurricane of colors lay hodgepodge before him, but he focused on the largest specimen—a black spicebush swallowtail with a robin’s-egg blush fanning its hind wing and the forewing bordered by white dots. Beautiful. The butterfly’s delicate antennae and proboscis had survived shipping intact.

  He dug out supplies from a plastic container and set to work, pinning the specimens with stainless-steel insect pins against a white styrene foam board. Rebel barked and whined, but Melkie shushed him with an impatient flick of his hand. At last pleased with the arrangement, Melkie slipped the foam under a shadow box frame.

  It took a good twenty minutes to find the perfect location amongst the den walls covered with similar arrangements, mostly butterflies but also mountings of praying mantises, grasshoppers and dragonflies.

  As soon as Melkie drove in the nail and hung his latest creation, Rebel barked and ran to the kitchen for another treat. Melkie tossed him one and Rebel gobbled it up with his yellow misshapen canine teeth.

  The anger returned as he palmed the kitchen knife. His prized knife was gone. He’d seen it stuck in the tail fin of that thing at sea. He grabbed a six-pack and settled into the den’s old recliner with its ripped turquoise vinyl upholstery. He gulped his beer in long swallows, brooding over the lost knife. It was what he had used to cut out both bitches’ eyes. It was special. It also happened to be the only gift he ever remembered getting from his mother.

  A big beautiful knife in a worn leather case.

  “Here, kiddo,” she’d said, casually tossing it in his direction one Christmas when he’d asked her where his presents were. “It belonged to your dad. He told me it was a gift from his father.”

  Melkie had grinned, fingers closing over the family heirloom. Violent vibrations hummed in his hand as he held the knife.

  It had been the best Christmas ever.

  Rebel jumped in his lap, jolting Melkie from the memory, and dog and owner stretched out to watch a police drama on the twenty-inch black-and-white TV set with a rabbit-ears antenna. No cable in this backwater hellhole.

  Melkie petted Rebel’s mottled skin before raising an arm to flip on the window air conditioner. Between the loud hum of the AC and staring at the fuzzy speckles on the TV screen, Melkie sensed the tension ease out of his lean body. He’d just relax a bit, not sleep. If he took short dozes, Melkie found he was less apt to dream or, at least, remember them if he did. He avoided sleep, but after days of only ten-minute naps snatched here and there, his weak, treacherous body would rebel and go under for hours at a time.

  Most people welcomed sleep, sought refuge and refreshment in the mysterious, suspended state of being. Not for him. Nighttime was when his mother used to slip into bed beside him. She’d creep past the first bedroom, which she shared with her two daughters, and seek him out.

  But most nights she didn’t creep, she stumbled, a result of too many gin and tonics, trying to wash away the taste of customers. Then she staggered and often fell as she went through his sisters’ room to get to him. Not that his older sisters gave a damn. They conserved their energy for their own survival—for those nights Mom brought a customer to their sorry shack.

  When he slept now he still fought against the groping, the sucking, the humiliation that rolled over him in waves, leaving him powerless and frightened. Even when it had happened, he knew it wasn’t right. By day he was her whipping boy and at night...

  The old bitch had been dead ten years now and she still haunted his dreams. But he had found another way to fight the memories, to punish someone and take back control.

  Melkie flexed his large hands with its long fingers, so out of proportion to the rest of his smaller physical frame.

  Oh, yeah, he loved taking control.

  * * *

  Jolene Babineaux. Age thirty-four. Caucasian.

  Tillman studied the photographs for what had to be the hundredth time. In one, provided by a family member of the deceased, Jolene sat on a sofa, cuddling a couple of children. A second photo was a grim mug shot of her arrest for prostitution a year earlier. She wasn’t smiling in that one. The last photograph was of her battered, skimpily clad body, sans eyes, which had been discovered last evening.

  Even though Bayou La Siryna was a relatively small town, Tillman had never run across the victim. And he was pretty good at remembering names and faces. All part of the job. But a large part of the population, at least a third of the county, lived in a squalid, poverty-ridden area with the unlikely name of Happy Hollows. Most of the families there were a tight-knit community of shrimpers—people who lived for decades fishing on family-owned boats.

  Evidently, Jolene had resorted to the world’s oldest profession to supplement that meager income.

  Tillman snapped the file shut. Despite door-to-door interviews in Jolene’s neighborhood and surrounding area, Tillman’s officers had no leads.

  Tillman shoved the file to the side of his desk and opened the second folder with photographs of the second victim, China Wang. Age thirty-seven. Vietnamese.

  She had the same missing eyeballs as Jolene. But there, the similarities ended. Where Jolene had been a big-boned, redheaded woman, China was petite and exotic-looking. Never married, but with three young children, now farmed out to relatives, she had spoken broken English and never made it past the sixth grade.

  The only obvious similarity between the two victims was their line of work.

  Because of the festering pockets of poverty in the bayou, it wasn’t unheard of for women to use their bodies. Often to drum up enough business, it was necessary for them to ride into Mobile, about twenty miles east, and walk along the port city’s shipping docks for johns. Even in bad economic times, customers could be found if you priced yourself competitively.

  He tapped his fingers on his lips. Jolene’s body didn’t have a rope around it and it was discovered by Old Man Higginbotham who’d been out boat riding in a remote swampy area.

  When China’s body had been found on shore at Murrell’s Point, there was a thick rope around the victim’s waist that frayed at the ends. The body hadn’t been submerged in water long enough for the rope to have disintegrated. He dialed the coroner’s office, anxious to see what forensic evidence had been unearthed.

  Jeff Saunders was the Englazia County coroner. A retired doctor, Tillman bet Saunders thought being coroner in a small town would be an easy gravy train. But that had all changed.

  Saunders confirmed sperm was found in China’s body, but the sample would have to be sent to the state crime lab in Montgomery to know if it matched the sperm sample from Jolene Babineaux. “We did find a curious thing with the second body. I recovered a couple strands of blond hair, thirty-one inches long, interspersed with the strands of China’s black hair.”

  Tillman sat up straighter. “Can you determine if the hair came from a male or female?”

  “Probably not. Unless the hair was yanked out of the scalp, there won’t be enough follicular matter to run a DNA test.”

  China’s family all resembled her, olive-skinned with dark brown or black hair. Tillman hung up. He tilted back in his chair, feet on his desk, and speculated on the news.

  It could be the killer didn’t act alone. Perhaps he had a female accomplice, Tillman thought, remembering the small footsteps they’d found leading from the body into the water.
But the psychological profile from the first case indicated the perp had a deep hatred of women. If true, a female accomplice seemed unlikely.

  How had the body been moved to shore? And why?

  The plastic bags covering China had been coated in sand, leaving patterns consistent with dragging. A thorough search had not turned up any evidence other than a baseball hat with Trident Processing and Packing emblazoned on it and footprints. Had the killer decided against leaving the body in the ocean and left it out to be found—either a subconscious wish to be caught or as a kind of sick bragging trophy that he had gotten away with murder twice now? And what was that damn rope around China supposed to be for?

  Carl Dismukes rapped sharply on the door before entering.

  “A little brain food,” he said, plopping a box of glazed doughnuts on the desk.

  “A little cliché, don’t you think?” Tillman asked. “But I could use the sugar and carbs right about now.”

  They dug in, Tillman studying China’s photograph, his deputy opening the first file and reviewing Jolene’s photographs. Carl threw it back on the desk after a cursory examination. “I ever tell you I knew Jolene?”

  Tillman gulped down a mouthful of doughnut in surprise. “No. I think that’s something you might have mentioned long before now.” He struggled to keep his censure mild. Carl was thirty years his senior and his dad’s right-hand man when he’d served as sheriff. When Dad died from a heart attack two years ago, Carl had been the one to break the news to him. And it was Carl’s suggestion that he come home and fill his father’s position until the next election.

  Tillman had been torn. He loved being an investigator with the Mobile P.D. and thought he’d been falling in love with Marlena. But shortly before Dad died, she’d moved to Atlanta to further her interior design business. Mobile was plenty big enough; he had no intention of moving to Atlanta. Besides, after he’d taken her home the first time, he’d known it would never work. Mom had been tipsy and asked pointed questions about Marlena’s family pedigree, while Eddie had taken an immediate dislike to his girlfriend. “Bye-bye,” he kept telling Marlena, taking her arm and leading her to the door. In the end, Tillman knew his duty and he’d come home.