“Hilton?”
“Go away.”
“I have nowhere to go.”
He was still shaking but not nearly so much, and his voice had no tremor at all. He just sounded very tired.
“Ted died,” he said. “The bullet taken out of him was a twenty-two. It came from your gun.”
“I don’t believe it. You’re trying to scare me.”
“You shot him. You shot my son, Ted.”
“Honestly I didn’t. I only held the gun. I only held that teeny little gun. You can’t blame me.”
“I don’t blame you. I blame myself.”
“That’s silly. You weren’t even there.”
“Go away,” Hilton said. “Go away.”
She returned to her room, thinking that Hilton’s brain, not merely his liver and stomach and heart, had been ground up in the mixer because he was imagining that Ted had
died and that he himself was to blame. It was too bad. Hilton used to be awfully smart.
She brushed her hair, still wet, and put on the freshly laundered jeans and T-shirt, and wondered where mermaids went when they came up from the sea. There didn’t seem to be a place for them.
She asked Valencia, who didn’t understand the word, and Cook, who said, “Never you mind about mermaid. March back in there and finish your vegetables.”
Then she walked down to where Troc was barbering the juniper and she asked him about mermaids.
Troc gave her a peculiar look. “Are you having one of them foggy moments of yours?”
“All I did was ask you a question.”
“I’ll go fetch the boss. You wait here, girl. You wait right here.”
She waited only long enough for him to disappear around the bend. Then she ran down the rest of the driveway to the street. She felt very light and airy, moving with the wind like a silk sail. And suddenly, magically, she knew what mermaids did when they came up from the sea. They went down to it again.
She could see the harbor in the distance and she kept running toward it. Everyone on the Spindrift would be very surprised to see her and they would all have a party to celebrate, Manny Ocho and the crew, and Donny and Ted and the young man who told her about voting and some of her other rights.
None of that seemed important anymore. She was going to a party.
About the Author
Margaret Millar (1915-1994) was the author of 27 books and a masterful pioneer of psychological mysteries and thrillers. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, she spent most of her life in Santa Barbara, California, with her husband Ken Millar, who is better known by the nom de plume of Ross MacDonald. Her 1956 novel Beast in View won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel. In 1965 Millar was the recipient of the Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year Award and in 1983 the Mystery Writers of America awarded her the Grand Master Award for Lifetime Achievement. Millar’s cutting wit and superb plotting have left her an enduring legacy as one of the most important crime writers of both her own and subsequent generations.
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