Against the Claw

by Shari Randall

  A stone breakwater jutted from the beach. I walked out to the end and sat on the last boulder, already warm from the sun. A cormorant tilted its head at me then beat its wings to rise from the water.

  I’ve been a short walk from the beach all my life. My dad said I could swim before I could walk. I’d never feared what lay beneath the waves. All the ocean creatures I’d ever encountered, even the occasional shark, held only fascination for me. The dead girl was the only horror I’d ever found beneath the waves.

  Who was she? How did she end up at the bottom of the bay, fully dressed, snagged onto a lobster pot?

  Had she jumped into the water?

  A thought chilled me. Had someone pushed her?

  I hurried back to Gull’s Nest, showered in the outdoor shower, dressed, and headed for the Mermaid.

  Chapter 7

  My jaw dropped as I pulled into the Mermaid’s parking lot. Sometime after I’d left yesterday, Aunt Gully had finished decorating the shack for the Fourth of July. Bunting looked especially charming and old-fashioned against the weathered gray cedar shingles. A red, white, and blue wreath hung on the door. Silver stars sparkled from the windows. An inflatable Uncle Sam flanked the door across from our mermaid figurehead.

  On the roof, a giant inflatable lobster waved a flag in its claw.

  A patriotic lobster. Now I’ve seen everything.

  Over the top was how Aunt Gully did things. Hilda had planted half barrels by the door with red geraniums, ivy, white snapdragons, and blue violets, but Aunt Gully had added red, white, and blue tinsel garlands and patriotic whirligigs that spun in the breeze. Almost lost among all the decorations was the American flag that Aunt Gully put out every day as her remembrance ritual for Uncle Rocco.

  Two guys took selfies with Aunt Gully’s mermaid figurehead, complete with a Lady Liberty crown and red, white, and blue sash. I squinted. Sequined letters on the sash spelled out “Miss Crustacean Sensation.”

  It was barely eleven A.M., but customers sunburned lobster red streamed toward the door, and our lot was almost full.

  I hurried inside. The TV hung in the corner of the dining room ceiling was usually tuned to cooking shows and local news. The yellow tape scrolling across the bottom of the screen blared LOBSTER BOAT FINDS BODY IN MYSTIC BAY. My heart thudded.

  A black-and-white sketch of a young woman with short black hair filled the screen. Everything around me disappeared. That was the girl Bertha and I had found. I stepped closer to the television. The police artist’s pencil sketch stared from the screen—the full lips expressionless, large almond-shaped eyes giving away no secrets. There was little resemblance to the pallid body Bertha and I had pulled from the water.

  A guy in a Harbor Patrol polo shirt stood, coffee cup in hand. “Hey, weren’t you with Bertha when—”

  Lorel took my hand and pulled me behind the counter and into the kitchen. “No comment,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Thanks, sis.” I fumbled as I put on my apron then joined several women at the large stainless-steel kitchen table. They sported clamshell bikini T-shirts that said GULLY’S GALS and hairnets decorated with sequined lobsters.

  Gully’s Gals were Aunt Gully’s friends from the neighborhood, her former job at Mystic Bay Elementary’s cafeteria, church ladies’ circle, Girl Scouts, crafts group, book club, Zumba class, Mystic Bay Historical Society, and the League of Women Voters. Aunt Gully had lived in Mystic Bay all her life and had an inexhaustible supply of friends who thought it was fun to pitch in at the shack. If they knew about my role in the discovery of the girl on the lobster pot, they hid it well. Actually, I was sure they knew but they were trying to keep my mind off it. We laughed and gossiped and talked about everything but the news as our gloved hands separated cooked lobster meat from the bright red shell.

  An hour later, I took my shift at the counter. Usually the wooden screen door banged shut after each customer like an exclamation point, but now the customers were coming in such a steady stream that the door never really shut. Tourists stood half in and half out the door. The July Fourth invasion was in full swing.

  A young African American woman in a navy blue sheath dress edged in the door past a guy in a Hawaiian shirt and cargo pants. He watched her appreciatively.

  Her thick dark hair was sleeked into a chignon. She wore a jaunty red gingham kerchief tied at the neck. A straw purse was slung over her shoulder and she juggled a phone and clipboard. She looked like she’d just stepped out of the window of Fashions by Franque, the chichiest boutique in Mystic Bay.

  Her perfectly arched eyebrows lifted as she scanned the jumbled shelves of Aunt Gully’s mermaidabilia. Her mouth dropped open as she tilted her chin to take in the ceiling, painted in iridescent green scales, as if a magical sea creature swam overhead. She wrinkled her nose.

  Hmm, not a fan of Aunt Gully’s “primitive aesthetic.”

  She skirted the line with a big-city strut. Who wears stilettos to a lobster shack? She leaned toward me at the counter. “Hi, I’m Zoe Parker.”

  “Hi. The line’s over there.” It was early so I didn’t roll my eyes. Line cutting gets my goat.

  “Zoe Parker,” she repeated. “Assistant to Stellene Lupo.”

  I took a deep breath, then realized who it was. “Ah—”

  Lorel hip-checked me aside, wiping her hands on a dishtowel. She held out her hand. “Lorel Larkin. Welcome to the Lazy Mermaid.”

  “This place is amazing! I love it!” Zoe smiled wide and looked directly into Lorel’s eyes as they shook hands.

  Liar. I shifted to Lorel’s right. “Next.”

  There wasn’t a seat to be had inside the shack. Zoe and Lorel went out into the parking lot, Zoe’s designer heels clicking on the wooden floor. She wobbled in the gravel.

  An hour passed like five minutes. I relaxed into my work, picking lobster meat, making rolls, waiting on customers, only jarred when I heard the word “body.” My discovery was a big topic of conversation, but nobody had asked me about it. My name hadn’t been mentioned on the news. My shoulders relaxed. Maybe I could end my shift without anyone mentioning it to me.

  From the kitchen, excited conversation and laughter bubbled above the sound of tourists oohing and ahing over Aunt Gully’s mermaidabilia.

  Hilda joined me at the counter, slipping her apron over her hair, which she’d coiffed into a bouffant. Hilda usually wore little makeup, but today she sported bright red lips and a pearl necklace and matching earrings.

  “You look fabulous,” I said.

  Hilda grinned. “Had to look my best for Harmony Harbor.”

  “How was it?” I handed a customer a bowl of chowder. “Did you meet Stellene?”

  “No Stellene.” Hilda paused to take an order. “Her staff said she’s had very important meetings all week in New York and won’t be here until the Fourth. She’s relying on her assistant to do the legwork.”

  Zoe Parker. “Must be nice to have a personal assistant.” I poured coffee.

  “Allie.” Hilda’s big brown eyes sparkled. “Harmony Harbor’s just like one of those Newport mansions. Marble floors and walls. The garden’s huge, like at a castle. They have a conservatory full of orchids. Oh, they should call it Heavenly Harbor.”

  “How did they manage the lobsters?” I grabbed an overflowing plate from the pass-through and handed it to a guy with a handlebar moustache in a Patriots T-shirt. He winked.

  “Get this,” Hilda said. “Hector knew the chef they brought in from Maine! Stellene, well, her assistant, found the same steamer we use in an abandoned shack up in Rockport. She found a man who worked there. Turns out he was in the navy, just like Hector.”

  “Small world,” I said.

  “They bonded. He’s coming for dinner next week. Anyway, Hector and Gully say it’s under control. All I can say is”—Hilda sighed—“it’s impressive.”

  Zoe Parker’s and Lorel’s voices came through the kitchen pass-through. I watched them talk. The heat from the lobster steamer made
Zoe’s hair frizz out of place but a smile curved her glossy lips. This time her smile looked genuine.

  Zoe smoothed her hair and Lorel did the same. I sighed. Lorel’d found a match. They did the air-kiss thing and Zoe waved good-bye.

  “Allie. Psst.” Through the pass-through window, a young woman with a spiky short haircut stage-whispered. My friend Bronwyn Denby raised her eyebrows and gave me a curt “come here” gesture. What was she doing in the kitchen?

  I went into the kitchen.

  “Hey, Bron.”

  Bronwyn and I have been friends since preschool at St. Peter’s Church. She worked as an intern with the Mystic Bay Police Department while she finished a degree in criminal justice. She exchanged glances with Aunt Gully.

  “You’ve done a wonderful job holding down the fort, Allie. I think it’s time for a break,” Aunt Gully said.

  Gully’s Gals waved gloved hands. “Have fun!”

  “You need some ice cream, Allie Larkin.” Bronwyn tugged me out the kitchen door.

  “No argument from me.”

  Bronwyn yanked me behind the lobster shed and then flattened her back against the buoy-covered wall.

  “Bronwyn, are you okay?”

  She peered around the side of the shed into the parking lot. “Just in time.”

  I leaned around her. A news truck hulked by the entrance to the parking lot. A guy jumped out of the passenger door.

  “Leo Rodriguez,” Bronwyn said.

  “God, he’s relentless,” I moaned. I’d met Leo, a star reporter with the Hartford TV station, during the murder investigation centered around the Mystic Bay Food Festival in May. He’d gone to what I considered extreme and unethical lengths to get his story.

  Zoe Parker gave the news truck a quizzical look as she beeped open the door of a gleaming Range Rover. Leo Rodriguez brushed back his glossy black hair and pushed through the line at the front door of the Mermaid.

  * * *

  Bronwyn and I ate ice-cream cones and swung our legs off the pier at the Town Dock, a couple of blocks down Pearl Street from the Lazy Mermaid. Death by chocolate for me, strawberry with sprinkles for her.

  “Thanks for rescuing me from Leo Rodriguez. Finding that girl was awful.” I shuddered. “I don’t want to rehash it on camera. Besides, it’s best for Lorel to handle Leo. She’ll turn my finding another body into positive publicity for the Mermaid.” I shifted my bottom on the sun-warmed, splintery wood.

  Bronwyn chuckled. “Lorel’s something else. Miss Perfect.”

  I grimaced. “Her personal life’s not so perfect. She’s back with Patrick Yardley.”

  “That sounds perfect to me. Isn’t he the hottest guy in Mystic Bay?” Bronwyn said. “Owns the coolest nightspot in New England?”

  “You know how many times they’ve broken up and gotten back together,” I said. “He’s always got another girl in the picture somewhere. I wish she’d just—”

  Bronwyn held up a hand holding the last of her ice-cream cone. “Her life. Her rules.”

  Everyone kept saying that but they hadn’t listened to Lorel’s heartbroken weeping. “It’s awful when someone that buttoned up breaks down.” I licked the drips on my ice-cream cone.

  “Forget Patrick. How’re you doing?” Bronwyn’s forehead wrinkled. “Finding that girl. That’s rough. I wish I’d been at the Plex when you gave your statement. I was at training in chain-of-evidence stuff.”

  I watched boats stream unhurried upriver toward their slips at the marina. “It still doesn’t seem real.”

  As I told Bronwyn what had happened on Bertha’s boat, images flashed through my mind. The girl’s hand. Her hair, tangled with slimy seaweed. The flowered embroidery on her sodden jeans. This saddened me, this feminine, bohemian touch. The girl probably loved those jeans.

  “Do the police know who she is?” I asked.

  Bronwyn crunched the last of her cone and licked her fingers. “Not many details yet. She didn’t have any identification on her. Nothing special about her clothes except for the jeans, which were designer, pricey, like you’d get at a fancy boutique. No matching missing persons reports from here to Maine.”

  With a sigh, I finished my cone and licked my fingers. “She had a tattoo. What was it? A trident?”

  “They’re going to release all that soon. When there’s a missing person like this, the department will do a press release with details like that, trying to get an ID. Actually, that tat was a pitchfork.”

  “A pitchfork?”

  “And underneath that it said ‘hellion.’ In all capital letters.” Bronwyn frowned. “Poorly done. Kind of jailhouse.”

  “Jailhouse?” Hard to see a person who thought of herself as a hellion in the pathetic corpse I’d seen. A girl who thought of herself as a hellion but wore feminine, kind-of-hippie bell-bottoms. “Those jeans didn’t look jailhouse.”

  Frustration and sadness surged through me. “I feel so bad for her, Bronwyn. How could she have nobody? How could her family and friends not be looking for her?”

  “Some people don’t have a family.” Bronwyn shrugged. She had four brothers and used to sleep over with me and Verity to escape them.

  I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them. “It’s so strange, but I feel responsible for her.”

  “I get it.” Bronwyn squeezed my arm. “I feel that way, too. Maybe we’re the ones who have to help her since she doesn’t seem to have anyone else.”

  “What are the police doing?”

  “Bringing in the state police,” Bronwyn said. “Our department doesn’t have the expertise for this. The staties have an expert who’s worked a lot of drowning cases. Chief Brooks has been a basket case just coordinating it.” She gave me a rueful smile. “This hasn’t been an easy summer for him. We’ve never had all this serious stuff happening in Mystic Bay before.”

  “He’s a nice man.” Chief Brooks was Verity’s uncle and a father figure since her own parents had retired to Florida. He’d coached Lorel’s softball team. His wife and Aunt Gully were in the ladies’ guild together at church.

  “How long was she in the water?” I said.

  Bronwyn considered. “Two or three days. Long enough for certain changes to occur, such as—”

  I held up my hand. “I’m not sure I want to know.” Sometimes Bronwyn sounded just like her criminal justice textbooks. After graduating from high school, Bronwyn had gone backpacking in Europe, working in hostels to fund her travel. She joined AmeriCorps when she returned and used her stipend to pay for her criminal justice studies.

  “Sorry. Anyway, we’re doing a lot with this case. Checking hotels, motels, contacting other jurisdictions, asking for help from the media. Checking tide charts and currents. Trying to figure out where her body went into the water.”

  I thought back. “Two or three days before we found her there was a storm, remember?”

  “Yeah.” Bronwyn nodded. “So that might’ve changed things. Made the currents faster, stronger.”

  “Moved her farther away from where she went in?” I asked.

  “Possibly. Depends. You said she was caught on the lobster pot. That might have anchored her to that spot right away.”

  “Maybe.”

  Bronwyn stood and brushed the seat of her khaki police shorts. She gave me a hand up. “Time to get back to work.”

  We headed back to Pearl Street. “What happens now?” I asked.

  “The autopsy. A lot depends on how she died.” Bronwyn slid on her aviator sunglasses. “If it was a natural death or a murder.”

  Chapter 8

  I shouldered through tourists crowding the uneven brick sidewalks, the word “murder” hovering over me like a shadow.

  Back at the Mermaid, the news truck was gone. I exhaled and went in the kitchen door.

  Aunt Gully and her friend Aggie Weatherburn worked at the long metal lobster-picking table.

  Aunt Gully winked. “Lorel took care of him.”

  “Thank goodness.” I smiled.
“Hello, Mrs. Weatherburn.”

  “Allegra.” Aggie was our neighbor and Aunt Gully’s best friend. She squinted at me over her half-moon glasses. “Looks a bit peaked to me.” That was an Aggie word—“peak-ed.”

  “We’re okay here. Things have slowed a bit,” Aunt Gully said. “Why don’t you take a bit more time off?”

  No encouragement needed. “See you later.”

  I had an hour before rehearsal, so I took the van and headed to Main Street by the town green. Tourists clogged the narrow sidewalks, oblivious to everything except the gleaming wares in the gift shop windows and the beautiful view of the harbor.

  All I could see was the police sketch. Who was that girl?

  The artist’s sketch had been, well, sketchy. Drained of personality. In the sketch, her hair had been smoothed down, but most girls I knew with short pixie cuts, like Bronwyn, wore their hair tousled, carefree, and punk.

  I had no way of knowing what was under her clothing, but with the pitchfork and hellion tattoos, the girl was sending a message. She was tough. Badass. Edgy.

  But something about those feminine embroidered pants didn’t seem edgy to me. They were more girly, bohemian, and fashion conscious.

  The green and gold sign for Fashions by Franque hung a block down from the pink sign for Verity’s Vintage. I squeezed Aunt Gully’s van into the tiny Staff Only lot behind Verity’s building and hurried down the sidewalk.

  Mystic Bay’s stores were geared to appeal to summer tourists: ice-cream parlors, fudge shops, souvenirs, all with nautical flavor. Fashions by Franque kept customers coming all year by offering high-end designer clothes. No T-shirts with mermaids in clamshell bikinis here. The window was full of expensive, glamorous dresses for parties I’d never be invited to.

  Two giggling teenage girls looked in Franque’s shop window. A slender man with fashionable heavy black frame glasses, obviously dyed black hair, and fake-bake tan arranged a sea-blue chiffon dress by the front door, while wordlessly sending “don’t come in here with those ice-cream cones dripping” vibes.