False Mermaid ng-3

by Erin Hart

  “Look, if you’re upset with me for some reason—”

  “What reason could I possibly have for being upset with you, Frank? Let’s see—ignoring my phone calls? No, couldn’t be that. Going off on your own, checking leads on cases we’re supposed to be working together—that’s not really it. Oh yeah—maybe it’s the fact that your brother died, and I had to find out you even had a brother from Don Padgett in patrol. We’re supposed to be partners, Frank. Does that mean anything to you? You’ve cut me off. You’ve been dancing around, trying like hell to avoid me ever since you got that fucking phone call from Dublin. You know it’s true.”

  It was true. But he suddenly felt so weary of it all—of Karin, Nora, everything. “Look, do we have to talk about this right now? We’re in the middle of something here—”

  “No—you’re in the middle of something, Frank. And I’m out in left field. I’m fucking miles away.” She studied him for a few seconds. “Okay—you deal with Stark. Be my guest. I’m going upstairs to start filling out paperwork for a transfer.”

  “Karin—” He could hear the note of resignation in his own voice, which meant she could hear it too.

  “Cheer up, Frank. I know it’s a relief for you. And let’s face it: I’ve never exactly been the sentimental type. We’ve both seen this coming for a while.” She turned on her heel and walked away.

  Frank waited a few seconds before going back in. He sat across the table from Truman Stark, and opened a file he’d been carrying with him. He read a flash of panic in the kid’s eyes, but went about his business calmly, methodically.

  He set a photo of Nora on the table in front of Stark. “We know this woman was in your parking garage the other day. Looking at the place they found her sister’s body.” A quick glance up said Truman Stark hadn’t been in possession of that fact. “Yeah, sisters. Bet you wondered why she was so interested in that space. What did you think—that she was a reporter, maybe a private eye?” No eye contact. “You chased those kids away in Frogtown, kept her from getting roughed up. So I’m wondering, why you would do that if you were just going to try to harm her later? Doesn’t make much sense.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “I’m not saying you did. But you saw something, didn’t you?”

  Frank had imagined a gloved hand, Peter Hallett’s hand, slipping that water bottle under the brake pedal, hoping to be rid of Nora Gavin once and for all. He was so close to nailing that bastard right now, he could taste it. And at this moment, Truman Stark was all that stood in his way. Hard not to pressure the kid, but he knew that would be exactly the wrong move.

  Instead he slid a glossy headshot of Tríona Hallett across the table. Stark tried not to look, but in the end, he couldn’t resist.

  Frank said: “Beautiful, isn’t she? I could understand somebody just wanting to watch her. To admire her.” No reaction. Frank continued: “Used to see her around Lowertown, didn’t you? Don’t worry, I’m not trying to pin anything on you. I just need information.”

  After a long pause, Stark mumbled: “She used to park at the garage. I’d see her on the cameras. Not every day, but pretty often.”

  Frank studied the young man’s miserable expression. “Did you ever speak to her—at the garage or anywhere else?”

  Stark shook his head wordlessly.

  “But you copied her picture off the video at work. You followed her.”

  “It wasn’t like that—”

  “What was it like? Tell me.” Frank waited. Silence—the interrogator’s best friend. He watched the kid’s eyes dart back and forth, his lips twisting with indecision. “We talked to everyone who worked in the parking garage. But you’re the only one who definitely saw Tríona Hallett in the neighborhood, and lied about it. You told us at the time of the murder that you’d never seen her before, and it turns out you’ve got pictures of her plastered all over your bedroom. You do see my problem, don’t you?”

  Stark said nothing.

  “What happened, Truman? Did you follow her, try to talk to her? Maybe you didn’t mean to hurt her. Accidents happen—we get that. The thing is, you lied to us—and I have to tell you, that part doesn’t look good at all.”

  “I never touched her, I swear. You said you weren’t trying to pin anything on me—” His voice was becoming a reedy whine.

  “And you said you were at home on the night she was killed. Your mother backed you up, but you weren’t home that night, were you, Truman? You were out on patrol, just like you were on Thursday night, like you are every night. I’ve been inside your house. I know why you can’t stay there.”

  “If I told the truth you wouldn’t believe me. You’ve got it all backwards—”

  Frank heard something new in the kid’s voice. “What have we got backwards?”

  “You just don’t get it. I would never hurt her—I was trying to protect her.”

  “And why did she need protecting?”

  “She was always looking over her shoulder, like somebody was after her.”

  “Did you ever see anyone following her?”

  “Once. Maybe.”

  “Was it this man?” He fished a picture of Peter Hallett out of his folder, and slid it in front of Stark.

  “No, not him.”

  Frank felt hope sputter and fizzle out. Truman Stark looked him directly in the eye for the first time. “Wasn’t a guy at all—it was a woman. Blonde. Kinda stuck-up looking. I saw her again at the river on Thursday night. With her—” He pointed to the picture of Nora. “They were arguing about something.”

  11

  The road that passed in front of the house at Ardcrinn was empty for miles, but Nora still couldn’t help looking back over her shoulder as she and Elizabeth made their way over the headland to the fishing village of Port na Rón. She had slipped one of Cormac’s walkie-talkies into her jacket pocket before leaving the house—just in case. He must have taken the other one into town. She glanced over at Elizabeth, trudging across the treeless upland, staring at what must seem like nothing but windswept desolation. The blanket bogs here in Donegal were completely different from the high bogs of the midlands. Here the peat was only four or five sods deep—a thin brown mantle stretched over unforgiving stone. This place, like all bogland, only appeared barren and empty; it was actually teeming with life: foxes and pheasants, hares and birds and insects and strange plants, a huge variety of miniature and microscopic worlds.

  They found the ruined village as deserted as the road. But the view from the headland was spectacular. A beach of round stones stretched in a crescent shape from the foot of the cliff around the mouth of the bay. The waves were wild today, rumbling like thunder on the way in, hissing and tumbling the pebbles as they withdrew. A silent white waterfall cut into the green cliff around the side of the small bay. A dozen mottled black-and-white sheep grazed in the pasture above the rocky strand, their shaggy flanks splotched with bright azure dye. From the height, Nora could also see several craggy islands, and the dark shapes of seabirds clinging to their precarious nesting places. The caves Cormac had mentioned must be over below the falls somewhere. The wind was relentless as ever, but the salt air it carried was warm and damp under heavy clouds. Nora plucked at her jersey front. They’d not even begun the climb down the beach, and she was already starting to sweat.

  She had told no one of the tiny, unsettling detail she had observed yesterday on the cross-country journey. Elizabeth had left everything behind in her luggage at Dublin Airport, so they stopped at Dunnes Stores on the outskirts of Sligo to pick up toiletries and a few items of clothing. Passing by the curtained fitting room, Nora had caught a fleeting sideways glimpse of Elizabeth in her white cotton briefs—and something else as well. A piece of sheeting, or something like it, wrapped tight around her child’s slender torso, fixed in place with a safety pin. The image actually took a moment to register. Nora’s immediate thought was of the old ballads about girls who bound their chests and dressed in sailors’ clothes to go off to s
ea. What was Elizabeth’s reason for disguising her developing shape? All sorts of disturbing possibilities loomed, and now Nora teetered once more upon the point where she had remained suspended for nearly two days now: broach the subject, or keep silent and wait?

  In the end, there was no guarantee that waiting would bring about a result. She said: “Lizzabet, I want you to know that I’m ready, whenever you want to talk.” No response. Nora felt as though she was treading on dangerous ground. She pushed on: “I remember being your age, not wanting to grow up, and wishing everything could just stay the same—”

  Elizabeth stared at the ground below her feet, newly exposed ears glowing with mortification, and Nora knew she’d gone too far. “Never mind. We don’t have to talk about it right now.”

  Nora’s probing words had left Elizabeth slightly unsettled, but standing here above the rocky beach, she turned toward the sea and felt her spirits lift. This place was the closest thing yet to her own Useless Bay. Following Nora down the embankment to the beach, she felt her attention drawn to tufts of wet grass that grew between the rocks, fascinated to find perfect spiderwebs sagging with tiny beads of dew, the curling fiddleheads of ferns, black-and-white-striped snails leaving shiny trails on the undersides of every prickly thistle leaf. As they reached the stony beach, she stopped to lift the drooping head of a delicate purple flower.

  “A harebell,” Nora said from beside her. “I didn’t know you were interested in plants.”

  Elizabeth shrugged. “I don’t know the names—I just like looking at them.” She bent to pick up a smooth oval stone, examining its tumbled, whitened surface. “I like collecting things.”

  “What sorts of things?”

  “Rocks and shells, mostly—I had to leave them in Seattle. My dad said there was no point in carting worthless crap halfway across the country.” She set the first stone back, and picked up another. “I kept the sea glass, though. It’s kind of hard to find.”

  Nora turned away abruptly, and Elizabeth stood for a moment, wondering if she’d said something wrong. “Is it all right if I look around?”

  Nora nodded without turning back. Elizabeth stepped away gingerly, following the line left by the high tide, eyes zeroing in on the ridgy cups of limpet shells, the blue glint of mussels with their bright pearly insides. She stooped to pick up a small scallop shell and glanced back at Nora—who was still standing, arms crossed, like she was stuck in that spot.

  Elizabeth picked her way across the rounded stones that looked as if they had tumbled out of the sea. She was hunting treasure, but finding mostly trash instead—fishnets and nylon rope and yogurt cups, their bright colors standing out against the stones. She glanced up at Nora, who was hanging back and watching her. She thought about what Nora had said, about not wanting to grow up. It was hard to know what to tell, and what was better kept to herself.

  She thought of the book she’d stolen from the library, and began to imagine its story played out on this beach. She could almost see the strange seal woman being rowed to shore by the fisherman, helping him to pull up the boat, going home with him and becoming his wife. She tried to summon an image of how exactly someone changed from seal to human. Did it hurt to slip from your sealskin? Was it as simple as taking off clothes, or was it messier and more complicated—like that film she’d seen once on television, of a calf being born? All that icky wetness had made her feel strange. She tried to picture a woman oozing from a sealskin, strange and slippery, her new skin underneath as pale and tender as a newborn baby’s. If you got your old skin again, like the boy’s mother did in the story, how exactly would you go about putting it back on? What if it didn’t fit? The book hadn’t bothered to explain any of that.

  The weather was warm here, not at all what she’d imagined. She sat down on a flat rock and removed her shoes and socks, then stood at the water’s edge and closed her eyes, putting her hands to her face and tasting the salt and seaweed on her fingers. There was no mistaking it now. This beach was just like the ones in her dreams. The ones where she walked with the red-haired stranger out into the water, out past the rocks and down through swaying seaweed to where the sea people carried on, safe in their secret, hidden world. She had seen it all in her dreams.

  Nora shielded her eyes to watch two huge brown sea eagles flapping and fighting over something at the edge of the precipice. She had been watching Elizabeth explore, but her attention had been pulled away for a moment by the birds. When she looked back to where she’d last spied the child, all that remained was a pair of empty shoes and socks. Elizabeth was walking out into the water. Waves were breaking at her chest, now over her shoulders, and all at once, her head disappeared behind a rising swell.

  Nora stripped off her pack and began to run, the round stones slowing her progress. It felt as if she were moving through some awful dream. Finally she splashed into the shallows, and flung herself into the waves, head down and arms churning, until she felt the wake of Elizabeth’s flailing limbs. “Put your arms around my neck,” she shouted. She felt the child’s sharp elbow deliver a solid blow to her cheekbone. Somehow she managed to hang on through an exploding field of stars. “It’s all right—I’ve got you. Just hold tight.”

  With one arm, she clasped the child to her side and took long, even strokes with the other until they finally reached a spot shallow enough to stand up. She seized Elizabeth by the arms. “What the hell were you doing out there? Do you not know how dangerous it is—”

  She watched the child’s huge eyes fill with tears. “Please don’t be frightened, Lizzabet. I’m not angry with you, love, I promise. I was just scared, that’s all. If anything were to happen to you—” She felt Elizabeth begin to shiver. “Promise me you won’t wander off like that again. Will you promise?”

  Elizabeth nodded. Nora looked around, spotting a ruined cottage just above the beach. “Come on, let’s get out of the wind.”

  They made their way up the steep bank to an abandoned house. A fisherman’s cottage, Nora thought, as they crossed the threshold. Decaying nets hung from the roof beams. There was a washbasin beside the back door, and a rude sideboard with bits of broken crockery and piles of limpet shells stacked where cups and saucers had been. The little light that pierced the room came from a gaping hole in the roof at the far corner of the house, and the relentless wind that came through shattered windows had reduced the curtains to gray tatters, airy as cobwebs.

  She settled Elizabeth on a low chair beside the hearth. The child still shivered violently. As her eyes grew accustomed to the light inside, Nora could see that the abandoned house was strangely intact—furniture, candles, bedclothes, even a pipe on the mantel. The effect of everything left in place was quite eerie, as if the occupants had simply walked away. She spied a basket beside the hearth and opened the lid. “There’s a little turf in here. I’m going to try building a fire.” Gathering a few handfuls of straw from a ruined mattress and a candle stub for a firelighter, she dug in her pack for a couple of strike-anywhere matches and managed to get a small blaze going, astonished that the ancient peat was still dry enough to burn. She beckoned to Elizabeth to come closer. They sat in small chairs pulled up to the fire, and Nora alternated rubbing Elizabeth’s arms with blowing on the meager flame.

  “D-does s-s-somebody live here?” Elizabeth asked through chattering teeth.

  “Not anymore. Cormac said this whole village was abandoned—” She stopped as her gaze fell upon a primitive muslin doll in Elizabeth’s left hand. It had one small black button eye on one side of a long nose; a bit of stuffing escaped from a frayed seam. “Where did you get that?” she asked.

  “Over there.” Elizabeth indicated the cot pushed up against the wall.

  “May I see it?” Nora asked. The single button eye stared blankly. The arms were flat and stubby, like flippers, the lower half all of a piece. A seal. She finally handed the doll back, and Elizabeth cradled it on her lap.

  Nora took a deep breath. “You know we’ll have to talk about it,
sooner or later, Lizzabet. About why you ran away. I think I can guess part of it. You found out, didn’t you—about what happened to your mama?”

  Elizabeth stared wordlessly at the floor. After a few seconds, she wiped away a tear, and Nora felt as if her heart would burst. “Oh, Lizzabet, I wish we could have explained, but you were so little. It was so hard to know what to say—” She reached out a hand, but Elizabeth pulled away.

  “Does everybody think my dad is a murderer?”

  “Elizabeth—”

  “He didn’t do anything, I know he didn’t. He couldn’t have.”

  “There’s still so much we don’t know—”

  “I don’t want to know! I’m not going to listen.” Elizabeth covered her head with both arms and began to weep. Nora felt helpless. What could she say to this child? What reassurances could she possibly offer?

  She said nothing, but pulled the child to her side. Elizabeth tried to fight, but in the end clung on just as she had out in the water, frightened and overwhelmed. This is it,Nora thought. This is where it begins.

  At last, warmed by the tiny fire, and no doubt worn out by jet lag and tears, Elizabeth’s limbs began to grow heavy. Nora cradled her, afraid to move, knowing how desperately she needed even the temporary respite of sleep. By the time either of them stirred, twenty minutes later, Nora’s whole right side had gone numb.

  Elizabeth opened her eyes and pulled away, evidently surprised to be in the cottage still. “I had a dream about this place,” she said. She seemed dazed, unsettled, perhaps still half in the dream. “There were people living here. Somebody was singing.” Elizabeth found the muslin doll on her lap, and began to fiddle with its ragged tail.

  “Do you know, even with your hair cut short, you’re very like your mother?”

  Elizabeth didn’t want to let on how interested she was in this information. “Really?”

  “The same hair, the same freckles, even the same scabby knees. Tríona was always falling off her bike.”