The Seduction of Water

by Carol Goodman

“At first, no, but then he left a particular message—a name, Joseph said, but Janine couldn’t remember what name—and after that Kay took his next call. That was in the last week of September . . .”

  “Just before she left for her conference in the city. She must have agreed to meet him at the Dreamland Hotel. He must have found a way to make her return whatever it was she had . . .” I look up and meet Hedda’s pale gray eyes. Her tears are all gone now, her eyes clear—not even red from the effort of crying. Even her hair has remained unruffled.

  “The net of tears. That necklace in Gordon’s slide show that belonged to Catalina della Rosa. That’s what my mother had that Peter wanted. And that’s what you’ve wanted all along—not a memoir or my mother’s lost manuscript. You thought that if I were up there looking for the manuscript I might find the necklace, but all the while you knew that there’s no third book . . .”

  “No, Iris, you’re wrong there. Your mother did write a third book—she told me she did and Joseph says she was writing that whole last year. I thought if you found her last book it might explain what had happened—the way the selkie story and the winged men tell the story of the McGlynns and the Crown jewel theft and how she and Rose fled the city—”

  “You thought it would tell you if she and Peter—he’d be the evil king Connachar, if I’m not mistaken—were in love again. You used me.”

  “No more than you would have used me to fulfill your ambitions of becoming an author. Please, Iris, you were willing to use your own mother to see your name on a dust jacket.”

  I open my mouth to protest, but then close it. She is, of course, right.

  “Okay. Let’s not blame each other. What I want to know now is who killed Joseph. You and I weren’t the only ones hounding him with questions all summer. There was Phoebe too. What do you think she knew about my mother and her father?”

  “She wasn’t even born that summer.”

  “She had her mother’s journals. She’s been editing them . . .”

  Hedda laughs. “She’s been ‘editing’ those journals for ten years now. It’s the joke of the publishing world—the rumor is that Vera Nix’s journals contain the ravings of a drunken, insane woman. By the time Phoebe edits out all the drugs and other illegal or immoral activities there won’t be enough to fill a comic book.”

  “What if one of the illegal activities Vera Nix wrote about was killing my mother?”

  I’m expecting surprise, but instead I can instantly tell from the way Hedda’s eyes flick back and forth nervously that this isn’t a new idea. Still, she makes her voice scornful. “You think Vera Nix followed Peter to the Dreamland Hotel, surprised him there with Kay, and killed her? And then what? Set the hotel on fire?”

  “Actually, I thought at first that she’d arranged to meet my mother there to get back something from her—some proof of her involvement in the Crown robbery, but I like your idea better. It explains the fire—Peter would have done that to cover up his wife’s crime. Monster or not, she was pregnant with his child. And he’d know the hotel was a firetrap from his years of listening to his brother lecture on hotel fire prevention.”

  “I suppose it’s possible . . .” Hedda says, looking away.

  “You knew right away, didn’t you? As soon as my mother died you knew it was Vera Nix who killed her. But you didn’t tell the police because you still wanted to protect Peter. And when he and Vera died it was too late—everyone would have known you withheld information from the police.”

  “What good would it have done? Everyone involved was dead.”

  “Not everyone. My father and I would have known that she hadn’t been running away with a lover.”

  “Your father never doubted Kay for a moment. As for you—I offered you the opportunity to find out the truth for yourself and look, you have. Would you have looked so hard if I hadn’t agreed to represent your memoir? Would I have set you on this course if I was afraid of what you’d find?”

  “You set me on this course without telling me that some people might be willing to kill to keep their secrets. Didn’t you wonder what Phoebe would do if it came out that her mother killed my mother?”

  “So you think Phoebe shot Joseph? Because he knew that Kay had gone to meet Peter that last night? It’s possible, I suppose. I’ve always believed that Phoebe inherited Vera’s mental instability, but why would she think that Joseph was finally going to tell someone who Kay went to see that night after keeping quiet for so many years?”

  “Because you and I were both hounding him all summer . . . and because I may have given her the idea that Joseph was ready to tell me something,” I admit reluctantly.

  “Still, she would have to be really crazy to kill Joseph if he had no proof that Kay was going to meet Peter . . .”

  “And if he did have proof—maybe a letter from Peter asking for the necklace—maybe the necklace itself—or my mother’s last book, which told the whole story?”

  “Why would she think the manuscript was in that room?”

  “Because Vera Nix wrote in her journal that she heard my mother typing in the Sleepy Hollow Suite.”

  “So she went to Joseph’s suite to look for the manuscript or the necklace—or to demand it from him at gunpoint—and then she shot him when he wouldn’t give it to her and bonked your boyfriend over the head . . .”

  “I think she planned to set Aidan up—she told him that he was supposed to check on the paintings one last time—” I notice Hedda’s lifted eyebrow and realize I’ve just let her know that I’ve had contact with Aidan, but I go on nonetheless. I have a feeling she’s the last person who’s going to the police right now. “—she let herself in the bedroom door to the suite and waited until Aidan opened the closet to hit him over the head and then she shot Joseph when he tried to get help. As she’d planned to all along—so he could never tell anyone that my mother had been on her way to see Peter Kron the night that she died. I don’t know if she found the manuscript or not but I’m pretty sure she didn’t find the necklace.”

  Hedda runs her fingers over the pearls at her neck meditatively and now, instead of that annoying clacking, they make a sound like rain. “Why not? How do you know Phoebe didn’t get the necklace?”

  “Because I don’t think it was in Joseph’s suite. I’m not even sure Joseph knew where it was. But I think I do now.”

  Chapter Thirty

  In the end it wasn’t anything Hedda said that led me to that final revelation—the secret hiding place of the net of tears—it was her pearls. The sound they kept making whenever she moved and they clicked together. It reminded me of my mother’s pearls and the sound they made when she leaned over me to kiss me good night and her pearls would fall forward and click against one another. It’s the sound I heard the night my mother went away. I close my eyes and it’s as real to me as if I were ten and my mother was leaning over me—I can almost smell her perfume and feel the soft collar of her coat . . . I open my eyes, as if to surprise my mother, and for an instant I do see her—an afterimage of my last sight of her—in her green coat with the fur collar buttoned to her throat. Any pearls she was wearing would have lain under the coat. They couldn’t have fallen forward and made the clicking sound I heard. Something else must have made the sound and I believe now it was the stolen necklace—that my mother took it out of her pocket and hid it in my bedroom. I close my eyes again and hear her voice telling the selkie story, even though she wouldn’t tell it to me that last night. “In a time before the rivers were drowned by the sea, in a land between the sun and the moon . . .”

  Phoebe might have thought the lines referred to the Sleepy Hollow Suite, between Half Moon and Sunnyside, but I’ve thought of another place between the sun and the moon. On my four-poster bed where the old finials had come loose Joseph had carved a sun and a moon. I think that my mother decided at the last minute not to bring the net of tears with her—maybe she believed that she wouldn’t be safe once Peter Kron had it—and that she hid it in the bedpost under th
e sun or the moon. She left it to me just as the selkie left her daughter a parting gift—a necklace woven out of sea spray and dew.

  I’ve called the number Aidan gave me and I’ve checked the train schedules and my five-boroughs map for how to get from the Marble Hill stop on the Metro-North line to Inwood Park. There’s nothing to do now but get some sleep for the long trip ahead of me tomorrow. I doubt I’ll be able to sleep, but when I close my eyes I hear my mother’s voice—the result of working so hard to conjure that last night with her—telling me the selkie story. I listen to it up to the part where the selkie’s daughter brings her mother her skin and they both fall asleep wrapped in its warmth. I can almost feel her fingers in my hair, combing away the tangles, weaving her story.

  In my dream I follow my mother into the sea. We swim together to the mouth of a great river and still the warm salt tide carries us as if we were riding in the palm of a giant’s hand. It’s only when I feel the cold fingers of the river’s freshwater current that I am afraid. I try to catch my mother’s hand—she is above me swimming between me and the river’s surface where the sun shines through the water—but when I touch her the skin comes away in my hand. But I thought I gave you back your true skin. I can’t speak the words because we’re under the river but she turns to me as if she’d heard. She turns in a column of sunlight pouring through the water, turns like something unfurling in the sun’s light, turns and keeps on turning, her face dark against the brilliant light, her skin falling away like a peel from an apple’s core.

  I awake drenched in sweat, parched and feverish. When I kick the sheets away from me I see bloodstains from the cuts on my knees that have opened up in the night. Even after I’ve taken a cool shower and drunk two tall glasses of water I feel hot and my throat feels sore. I take my temperature and find I’ve got a fever of 101. I take a couple of aspirin, rebandage my knees, and head out to Grand Central.

  I’ve decided to take Metro-North not just because I’ve had enough of subways, but because I can get off at the Marble Hill stop, walk to Inwood Park, and then continue on the train up to the hotel. I’m not taking any luggage, save for my usual canvas book bag into which I’ve stowed my toiletries case, because I’m not sure yet if I want to let Aidan know that I’m going up to the hotel. He’ll want to go with me and it’s the last place on earth he should go.

  I get off the Metro-North at the Marble Hill station and walk across the 225th Street Bridge, crossing the Harlem Ship Canal, which would be the border of Manhattan if not for the anomalous neighborhood of Marble Hill, which lies north of the canal. I pause on the steel bridge to look west at a large C painted on an outcropping of rock and a glimpse of the Hudson beyond the Henry Hudson Bridge. On a walking tour I took of the neighborhood several years ago I learned that the C was painted by the Columbia rowing team sometime in the 1930s and that the canal—which joins the Harlem River to the Hudson—was dug in 1917 in order to move iron to a munitions plant. Prior to the canal, the two rivers were connected only by Spuyten Duyvil Creek, which was sometimes more marshland than creek. When I enter Inwood Hill Park I see a reminder of that marshland—a tidal estuary, I read on one of the informative plaques set out by the Parks Department, rising and falling with the passage of the sea up the Hudson. A lone egret, slim and white, daintily picks its way along the shoreline. In the humid haze—and if you squint a bit to edit out the few skateboarders and picnickers on the grass—it’s possible here to imagine Manhattan as it was when Dutch settlers first purchased it from the Algonquins. A swampy island—not even a proper island—embraced by three rivers and a creek at the mouth of the sea. In fact, the rock where Aidan has told me to meet him commemorates that sale—or at least its plaque commemorates the tulip tree, now cut down, under which the sale took place.

  I’m early so I lean against the rock and watch some teenagers lounging on the grass—a group of girls in tank tops and shorts, passing a tube of suntan lotion around their circle, some boys in oversized canvas pants tossing a Frisbee back and forth—hitching their pants up over their slim hips after each throw—another boy with bleach-dyed spiky hair in the same uniform of oversized pants and black T-shirt lying on his side reading a book with a mermaid on the cover. He shuts the book, ambles toward me, and metamorphoses into Aidan. Aidan in disguise of bleached hair and sunglasses, managing to look about ten years younger than he really is.

  “What gave me away?” he asks after kissing me. Two of the teenage girls lean toward each other and laugh. It was bad enough when I was a thirty-six-year-old dating a twenty-nine-year-old; now it looks like my tastes run to high school boys.

  “The book,” I say, plucking at the old paperback wedged under his arm. “It’s my mother’s. The Net of Tears—the second in the series. And the last. My father always hated this edition because of the mermaid.”

  “Yeah, I wondered about that, there aren’t any mermaids in the whole damned book.”

  I smile, pleased at this evidence that he’s read it. “Where’d you find it?”

  “At a used-book store in Riverdale. I thought I might as well spend my holiday doing a bit of research.” Aidan turns toward the lawn and notices the teenage girls looking at us. “Let’s walk,” he says, “I know a place that will give us a little more privacy.”

  The path Aidan leads me to is soon private enough, shaded by the tall canopy of trees and narrowed by the encroaching underbrush. In fact, after a little while, it doesn’t look much like a path at all and we have to walk single file, Aidan in the lead.

  “Are you sure you know where you’re going?” I ask, batting at a swarm of tiny insects that have settled around my head.

  “I grew up in this park,” he says, turning his head slightly. At this angle, with the sunglasses and the dyed hair, it doesn’t look like Aidan at all. An irrational cold tide of panic moves through me—or maybe not so irrational, I think. After all, I am following a wanted criminal into the underbrush of a city park where a body could be left to decay for years before anyone would ever come across it.

  Aidan, unaware of my fears, is blithely rambling on about the park—about how it’s supposed to be one of the oldest stands of uncut forest in New York State, how you can still find the ruins of millionaires’ mansions in the woods and how the bones of a prehistoric mastodon were discovered at the turn of the century. He stops abruptly, turns on the narrow path, and wraps his arms around me. We’re both so slick with sweat that his arms sliding against my arms and under my drenched T-shirt feel like a serpent coiling around my body; his mouth, hot and insistent at mine, seems to suck the breath right out of me, and I’m caught somewhere between struggling to the surface and wanting to sink deeper into the embrace.

  When he takes his mouth away from mine he whispers into the hollow of my throat, “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

  I don’t know what to say so I hold on to him tighter, the sweat binding us together until I can’t tell where his skin ends and mine begins.

  We cross a bridge that goes over the Metro-North tracks and come to a stretch of green grass and benches bordering the river. We sit at the northernmost bench where we can see all the way up to the Tappan Zee where the river is as wide as a sea. I tell Aidan everything I learned at John Jay and St. Mary Star of the Sea and St. Christopher’s.

  “No wonder your mother was inspired to name her world after that family—they had even worse luck than most Irish people I know. Reading this book of your mother’s is like living every agony a people ever went through—the way the poor men’s backs are split in two and the women’s bodies are wrenched apart by the river. The wonder is she’s writing for the most part about her friend’s family, not her own.”

  “Well, Tirra Morrissey doesn’t have quite the same ring as Tirra Glynn. I do think that the part about Deirdre’s affair with Connachar came from her own history with Peter Kron, but I think Naoise is John McGlynn, that the imagery of the broken wings comes both from the carvings on St. Christopher’s and what happened to
Arden McGlynn’s arm, and the selkie ripped apart in the river is Rose when she falls under the train. Remember, Rose was her best friend, and I’m sure she was in love with John. They were like her family.”

  I show him the picture of my mother with Rose and John at the beach in Coney Island and then I tell him about my conversation with Hedda.

  “I don’t doubt but that Phoebe would kill Joseph before letting him prove her mother a murderer, but there’s one thing I don’t quite get,” Aidan says. “That necklace described in your mother’s book—the one she calls the net of tears—you think Peter Kron stole it from Italy, gave it to his wife, and then John McGlynn stole it from her?”

  “Yes. Remember, Gordon said that the ferronière may have been taken from the church and hidden in a villa by descendants of the della Rosas. Peter Kron hid out in a villa that belonged to some countess. After his first lecture I saw Gordon talking to Joseph. He thanked him for giving him a tip—Joseph said it had something to do with a countess he’d known after the war. Harry told me that he talked to the countess who shielded Peter after the war and that she was staying at the Hotel Charlotte in Nice. That’s where Joseph worked after the war. I think Joseph was helping Gordon tie the theft of the ferronière to Peter Kron . . .”

  “But you said Phoebe couldn’t care less about her father.”

  “Yes, but his having the ferronière could tie Vera to the robbery . . . and to the murder of my mother.”

  Aidan nods and takes off his sunglasses and I notice that he has dark rings under his eyes. He looks unconvinced by my explanation—or maybe he’s just too tired to follow it.

  “I think we’ll know more if I can find the necklace,” I say. “Somehow I think my mother will have left some message with it to explain what happened. After all, that’s why the selkie leaves her daughter the net of tears in the story—as a message of her love for her.”