False Mermaid ng-3

by Erin Hart

  The figure in the chair sat forward. The fisherman held a small plastic tackle box on his lap. “You okay?”

  “Why did you want me to meet you at the river? You were going to tell me about my sister—I’m sorry, I don’t have her picture anymore.”

  He pushed his tackle box toward her. “You look.”

  Nora took the box and opened the lid. Inside were all the same sorts of useless treasures she had saved as a child: an orange plastic keychain in the shape of a crab, a rusty ball-bearing, a brass key gone to green, assorted marbles and coins. Collected like this, they seemed not like useless junk, but amulets or jujus, objects that carried a powerful spiritual charge. What was it he wanted her to look for? She pulled out a weathered scrap of paper with block letters in blue ballpoint: I know what you did. Hidden Falls 11 pm tonite. A smudge of something that looked like blood marked the corner of the paper. She set the note aside and kept searching. At the bottom of the box, her fingers crossed a rubbery surface. She parted the jumble to find a Nokia cell phone, the same model as Tríona’s missing mobile. No wonder they hadn’t found it in the crime scene evidence. All at once, she saw Tríona running for her life through the underbrush, trying to call for help, dropping the phone as she fled. She imagined herself in the hotel lobby that night, calling and calling, while this phone lay useless amid dead leaves.

  She reached out for the fisherman, seizing his shirtsleeve. “Where did you get this? I mean, where exactly did it come from—do you remember?”

  He backed away, alarmed. “At river. All from river.”

  Nora let go of his sleeve. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—” Her gaze caught on a faded color photo taped inside the tackle box lid. A father, mother, children. “Is this your family?”

  He nodded. “In Cambodia—before.”

  Nora struggled to focus on their faces: the bespectacled father, mother in a white blouse and dark skirt, and four boys, lined up eldest to youngest, mugging for the camera. All apparently unaware of the terrible wave that was about to catch them. “Which is you?”

  He pointed to the youngest boy, with the biggest ears and the widest grin. She peered closer and noticed the stethoscope slung around the father’s neck. “Your father was a doctor?”

  She looked up, recognizing the guarded, hollow look in his eyes. He must have been only a child when the Khmer Rouge came to power. When the killing started. “I’m sorry—” She struggled to think what else to say. “You’ve been so kind, and I don’t even know your name.”

  “Sotharith.”

  Nora threw off her blanket and sat up at the edge of the gurney. Sotharith looked alarmed. “I can’t stay here,” she said. “I’ve got to go. Do you know what happened to my cell phone?”

  He handed over a bag evidently containing her personal items. Nora dug for her phone and quickly checked for messages. Still nothing from Frank.

  A nurse pulled back the curtain and strode over to the bed, checking the IV and monitor in a single glance. “So—how are we doing here?” When Nora didn’t respond, she spoke sotto voce to Sotharith. “I’m sorry, sir, you’ll have to go back to the waiting area now.” She pointed to the large double doors outside in the hall. “We’ll let you know when your friend is ready to be discharged.”

  Sotharith backed out of the room with the tackle box pressed to his chest. When the nurse’s back was turned, Nora managed to tuck the note and the two phones under her pillow. She spoke to Sotharith over the nurse’s shoulder. “Don’t leave, please. I’ll come out to you as soon as I can—” The door swung open, and he was gone.

  The nurse spoke again, nodding toward someone standing outside the curtain. “The police are here to take your statement, Dr. Gavin.”

  Nora looked up to see whether they’d sent a patrol officer or a detective to take her statement. The one person she didn’t expect was Frank’s partner, Karin Bledsoe.

  “Hello, Dr. Gavin. The ER docs said you kept telling them the crash wasn’t an accident.”

  Nora tried to keep her voice calm. “It wasn’t. Somebody jammed the brakes in my car.”

  “And who would have any reason to do that?”

  “The same man who murdered my sister—Peter Hallett.”

  She walked Karin Bledsoe through the events of the previous night, from the time she arrived at Peter’s house to the time she woke up in the ER this morning. There were a few gaps, of course.

  Karin Bledsoe listened, and jotted down a few notes. “Do you mind telling me what you were doing parked outside Mr. Hallett’s residence?” she asked.

  Nora took that question—and the skeptical look that accompanied it—to mean that Karin Bledsoe had run her name through the computer and come up with the restraining order Peter had filed against her four years ago. Once again, she was coming across as the lunatic stalker, and Peter Hallett as long-suffering victim. “If you just look at my car, you’ll see that somebody jammed the brakes—”

  “We checked the vehicle. There was a water bottle rolling around on the driver’s side floor. Is it possible that your own bottle accidentally got stuck under the pedal?”

  “It was in the cup holder.”

  “And you didn’t notice it missing when you returned to the car?”

  “I can’t remember—I wasn’t thinking about water bottles. I was thinking about the person who murdered my sister. What about all those runners and dog walkers along the river road? One of them could have seen something—”

  “We’ve got officers working on that. We’ll let you know.”

  “And in the meantime, Peter Hallett is about to leave the country tomorrow. I really need to speak to Frank. He doesn’t answer his phone. Could you let him know that I need to talk to him? Please—it’s important.”

  “I can pass along a message—but I can’t promise that he’ll get back to you right away.”

  “Why—what’s happened to him? Where is he?”

  “Detective Cordova is on leave. That’s really all I can say… Thanks for your statement, Dr. Gavin. Here’s my number—” She handed Nora a card. “Call me if you think of anything else, or if you need anything. We’ll be in touch again soon.”

  When Karin Bledsoe closed her notebook and stepped away, Nora knew she was on her own. Did the woman seriously think she would drive off an embankment and crash a car, just to implicate Peter Hallett? How could she be sure that Karin Bledsoe would send someone to Peter’s house, check on his movements last night?

  Just then, a familiar voice cut through the chaotic noise of the ER. “She’s here, Tom.” Eleanor Gavin pushed back the curtain, taking in the bandage on Nora’s head, the bruises, the IV drip. “Oh, Nora—we’ve been trying to find you all night. We didn’t know where you were.”

  Her father stood at the foot of the bed, lack of sleep evident in the dark circles beneath his eyes. “What’s happened, Nora?”

  She couldn’t tell them the car wreck wasn’t an accident. “It was stupid—I took a curve too fast, went off the road. I’m all right, really. Nothing broken—just a few bruises. Why were you trying to find me?”

  Eleanor Gavin broke down. “Oh, Nora—”

  “What is it, Mam? What’s wrong?”

  “She’s gone, Nora. Elizabeth’s gone. Peter’s taken her. We were going to go away, the three of us—”

  “What happened, Mam?”

  Her father said: “Let me, Eleanor. It’s all right, Nora. I know everything. Your mother had just brought Elizabeth back to our house. It was just after nine. We were loading our bags into the car when Peter and Miranda drove up in a limousine, saying they’d talked it over, and decided that Elizabeth was coming along with them after all. They were on their way to the airport.”

  Nora looked at her parents in turn. “No—no! They weren’t supposed to leave until Saturday.”

  Eleanor seized her hand. “We had to let her go, Nora—what else could we do? What could we have told the police? And Peter saw our bags; he knew what was happening, I’m sure of it. Oh
, Nora, I’m so afraid we’ll never see her again.”

  4

  Cormac watched his father’s eyelids flutter. Surely that was a good sign. Dreaming—if that’s what it was—meant brain activity, at least. The afternoon crawled by as they waited for a sign—any evidence to indicate how much damage the stroke had done. At this point there were no external symptoms—no drooping face, no apparent weakness in his limbs, but the brain controlled all other functions as well: language, sensation, personality. Damage to any of those mysterious bundles of cells could wreak swift havoc.

  Roz dozed in the chair beside the window. She was putting a good face on it, but he knew she was confounded. Bollixed before she ever had a chance. They were a strange trio. Anyone looking in might jump to completely erroneous conclusions. Several of the nurses had already taken himself and Roz for a married couple, and he hadn’t the heart to correct them.

  He’d been reading up on some of the materials the doctor had provided on stroke rehabilitation, and was alternately encouraged and depressed. At this point they still had no idea who would come out of the coma. Would the man who woke up here be some reduced version of Joseph Maguire? There was risk of a still-vital mind trapped in a nonfunctioning body. Cormac suddenly realized he wouldn’t have much longer to wait and wonder. Joseph’s eyes began to flutter again, more rapidly this time. Then they opened wide, just as he took a deep lungful of air. It was almost as if he’d been underwater, holding his breath. Cormac watched his father blink several times, apparently unable to focus. Probably all he could see was the dust-clogged grate in the ceiling. Did that shape mean anything to him? Did he even know what it was?

  The old man’s lips began to move; he was struggling to make a sound, but managed only a low moan. His hand reached out, and Cormac took it and held on. “Raahhh. Raaaahhh,” the old man croaked, and Cormac moved closer, unsure whether to speak. “Da?” he said at last. The shape of the word felt foreign on his tongue. It was as if they were both infants again, reduced to single syllables.

  “Unnhhh. Raaaahhh,” the old man said again. Was he trying to say “Roz”?

  “I’m right here. Roz and I are both here.”

  Tears began to trickle from the corners of the old man’s eyes, but whether they were brought on by emotion, or merely the effort of trying to speak, Cormac could not tell. He only knew he was overwhelmed by the notion of having a second chance, an opportunity to forge something new from ruins destroyed long ago. How many received that gift?

  Roz stirred in her chair. “What’s happening—what did I miss?”

  “Nothing,” Cormac said. “He’s just now opened his eyes.” The old man’s hand felt warm, leathery. The words might be absent, but Cormac looked into his father’s eyes and saw something burning in the depths of those dark pools, a light of recognition. “I think he knows me, Roz.” His father’s warm, dry fingers closed around his hand. “That’s it. Do you know who I am?” Another small compression—but Cormac felt it as a semaphore, a signal between far-distant sentries.

  “Do you know my name?” Again the slight pressure. “My God, you’re there, aren’t you?”

  Roz approached the bedside, her eyes shining. “How are you, Joe? We’ve missed you.”

  The old man’s gaze turned to her, and with a sinking feeling, Cormac watched the small light of recognition sputter and flicker out. “It’s Roz,” he said. “You know Roz—”

  But it was no good. And Roz could see it as well. She had been erased from Joe’s memory by the recent brain storm. Every tender feeling the old man held for her had been wiped away. It made sense that the memories last formed were the least solid, while the older memories—of people, places, events—were cemented into place like a building’s foundation, the last thing left standing in the event of calamity.

  Roz tried not to show how much she felt the slight. “Why don’t I just wait out in the—” She waved a hand and left the room. Cormac found her a few minutes later at the far end of the corridor, her face flushed and wet with tears.

  “Roz, listen to me. You can’t expect everything just to be there as if nothing had happened. He’ll come back. Everything will come back, eventually. You have to be patient.”

  “I’m not there at all, Cormac. It’s as if I never existed.”

  5

  When their plane touched town at Dublin Airport, Elizabeth managed to fall a few steps behind her father and Miranda after they made their way through customs and passport control. She fell a little farther behind as they headed toward the airport exit, and her heart rose into her throat as she slipped into a shop filled with whiskey bottles and perfume and all kinds of gleaming jewelry. DUTY FREE, said the sign above the door. She hung back beside a wall of crystal bowls and glasses and clocks, watching passersby through the glass, their faces and limbs distorted and shattered into hundreds of facets edged with rainbows, thinking about how those two words together—DUTY FREE—seemed like a contradiction. She watched her dad and Miranda move out of sight without even noticing she was gone.

  Her plan was to look up Nora’s address in the phone book, and get a taxi to take her there. She approached the shop counter and addressed the woman who stood behind it: “Excuse me—would you happen to have a phone book?”

  The woman looked like somebody’s grandmother, with her soft brown sweater set and glasses that perched on the end of her nose. She squinted down through them. “Sorry, love, what was it you needed?”

  “I was wondering if you had a phone book I could use?”

  “Phone book? Oh—the telephone directory, is it? What would you be needing with that? Sure, no one uses those old printed books anymore, not when you can just ring directory enquiries on your mobile—” She glanced down, sensing Elizabeth’s disappointment. “Do you know, I’m sure we must have a directory here somewhere. The oh-one for Dublin, is it?” The woman began to search under the counter.

  Elizabeth glanced over her shoulder to make sure her dad and Miranda had not come back. “I’m not sure. I just need to look something up.”

  The woman continued rooting around in the boxes under the counter, finally producing a fat telephone book. “There you are, now. You’re not lost, are you, love?”

  Elizabeth shook her head, and started flipping through the book, startled at all the pages and pages of Lynches, Kennedys, Kavanaghs—until at last she came to a page full of Gavins. There must be hundreds of them. She traced her finger down the column, looking for one in particular, and there it was: “Gavin, N., Whitefriar Street, Dublin 8.” The woman behind the counter was staring at her.

  “Um—you wouldn’t have a pen?”

  “Would a biro suit?”

  Elizabeth wasn’t sure how to reply. Would a Byro Suit what?

  The woman smiled and handed her a ballpoint pen. She quickly scribbled Nora’s address and phone number on the inside of her wrist, yanking her sleeve down to cover it.

  The woman leaned down and spoke quietly. “First time in Ireland? You’re not in trouble, are you, love?”

  “Oh no—nothing like that. I just wanted to surprise someone.” Elizabeth turned to see a well-dressed couple passing the store entrance. “There’s my mom and dad now—they’re looking for me. Thanks for your help.”

  Outside the airport’s front entrance, she climbed into the first taxi in line. “I need to go to Whitefriar Street,” Elizabeth said to the driver, and waited for a reaction. She hoped he wouldn’t guess that she didn’t have money to pay the fare. Not the right kind of money, anyway. Elizabeth tried not to look nervous when he glanced back at her in the rearview mirror. What if he’d seen her checking the address on her arm?

  “No luggage, miss?” he asked.

  “No. I have to get to Whitefriar Street—where my aunt lives. It’s a family emergency.” That made it sound serious enough. The driver glanced at her again in the rearview mirror, then edged his cab out into the flow of traffic.

  6

  On the way out of the Emergency Room with her m
other, Nora saw the fisherman, Sotharith. He was still there, waiting for her. She pulled on Eleanor’s arm.

  “Mam, wait—there’s someone I have to see.”

  Sotharith looked up as they approached. He stood, clearly uncomfortable in this place. But he had stayed. “You—okay?” he asked.

  “Yes, they’re letting me go. This is my mother, Eleanor Gavin. Mam, this is Sotharith—I’m sorry, I don’t know your family name.”

  “Seng,” he said. “Seng Sotharith.”

  “My Good Samaritan,” Nora said to her mother. “He flagged someone down after the accident, and got me here.”

  Eleanor pressed her palms together close to her face and bowed deeply. “Choum reap suor,” she said.

  Sotharith would not meet Eleanor’s gaze. “Choum reap suor,” he murmured, mirroring her bow but bending even lower. “You speak Khmer?”

  “Very little,” Eleanor said. “A few words picked up from my patients.”

  A new light sparked in Sotharith’s averted eyes. “You a doctor?” he asked.

  Eleanor nodded. “I run the community clinic in Frogtown.”

  “Sotharith’s father was a doctor,” Nora explained. “Before the war.” She could see her mother grasp what had become of this man’s doctor-father, and perhaps the rest of his family as well.

  Eleanor turned to him. “Lok Sotharith, you’ve been very good to us. I would like to repay your kindness somehow.” She handed him a card. “Will you come and see me at the clinic when you can?” He took the card and nodded, bowing low to her mother once more.

  Nora couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her rescuer. She needed to speak to him, to find out more about what he knew about the phone and the note he’d found in the woods. “My father is bringing the car around—can we take you home, or offer you a meal—something?” He shook his head, and she realized that he had spent nearly a whole day looking after her. He might have put his job at the restaurant in jeopardy.