False Mermaid (18 page)

After paying for their lunch, Nora found an unoccupied bench near the central fountain. How on earth was she going to broach the delicate subject of the stained sweatshirt? There was a very real danger that the man would bolt if she opened her mouth. She cast a few sideways glances, watching Shaughnessy—he ate slowly, almost daintily, savoring each bite, as though this were the most delectable meal he’d consumed in months. Perhaps it was. His nails were black with grime, and a few gray inches of waffled underwear peeped out between trouser leg and sock. His high-top sneakers were nearly worn through. But these were small details. The most notable thing about Harry Shaughnessy was that
his body was in constant motion, his eyes on high alert. Like a wild animal, Nora thought. Maybe that was how he had survived so long on the street.

Just beyond him, at the edge of her field of vision, a group of preschool children were crossing the park, hands holding loops tied into a long cord. Their teacher led the little flock, pulling them along behind her like ducklings. Harry gazed at the children, holding out one hand as if to pet them, though he was twenty yards away.

“Yeah, she was a real nice lady,” he said, continuing some unfinished conversation. “That gal in the picture. Used to see her at the library. It’s a few years back now. Always asked how I was getting on. Sometimes she had the little one with her—such pretty red hair, just like her mama. Most people, they don’t see you, but she was different. Even bought me a cup of coffee a few times.” His eyes focused somewhere in the middle distance as he remembered. “Never wanted to kill anyone. Not like some—” The grimy nails dug into his palms. “That’s just was the way it was. The fellas on the other side, they were all as green and scared as we were. You could see it in their eyes—”

“Mr. Shaughnessy?” Nora said. He looked up at her, barely a sliver of recognition in his rheumy eyes. “I hope you don’t mind my asking—where did you get that sweatshirt?”

He looked confused. “What?”

“Your sweatshirt. It’s from Galliard College, in Maine.”

“Is it?” He opened his coat wider and she saw the full word, just as she had suspected. Harry Shaughnessy was walking around in a sweatshirt from the college where Marc Staunton and Peter Hallett had become friends, where the trajectory of her sister’s life—all their lives—had been altered. Nora found it impossible to keep her eyes off the dark stain. Its color seemed unmistakable when exposed to bright daylight.

“You don’t see many people with sweatshirts from Galliard around here. My fiancé went to school there.” The tiny voice in her head made the necessary red-pencil correction.
Ex-fiancé.

Harry Shaughnessy glanced at the hot dog sitting untouched on Nora’s lap, and his face changed in an instant, befuddlement retreating behind a sudden, hard wave of paranoia and suspicion. He pulled his coat closer, despite the afternoon’s oppressive heat. “What do you want?”

She had no choice but to tell the truth. “I need a better look at your
sweatshirt. I can explain everything—please, it’s very important.” She put out her hand—a mistake. Shaughnessy was off like a shot, cutting in front of the pack of preschoolers, so that when Nora gave chase she got caught in the line and pulled several of the children to their knees, frightened and wailing.

She shouted after him: “Mr. Shaughnessy—wait, please!” Apologizing as she extracted herself from the preschoolers, she beat a path to the corner. But Harry Shaughnessy was already more than a block away. All she could do was watch as he rounded the corner and disappeared from view. She stopped to catch her breath, holding on to the arm of a bench.

“Might as well give up, girlie,” said a strange voice beside her. Nora glanced up. The speaker was a rail-thin crone dressed in a billowing powder-blue evening gown with a satin sash embroidered in flowing metallic script: “Princess of the North Star—1974.”

“Nope,” the princess muttered, her mouth a wry twist. “Nobody can catch ol’ Harry when he don’t want to get caught.”

“I just wanted to talk to him.”

“Well, it sure looks like he don’t want to talk to you.” The beauty queen eyed her suspiciously. “You a cop? You don’t look like a cop.”

“No, I’m not. Do you know Harry Shaughnessy?”

“Sure. Who don’t know Harry?”

“Do you know where I might find him?”

“I might. But I sure could use some smokes—they always help my concentration.” She tapped a wizened finger against her temple, and Nora finally realized what the woman was asking. She dug in her pocket and brought out a twenty-dollar bill. “Please, just tell me where to find him.”

“Hold your horses, hold your horses—” The princess made an elaborate production of slipping the twenty into a secret place within the folds of her sagging bosom. “He’ll be at the camp down below the old power plant. Sooner or later. Same as me.”

Cormac emerged into the corridor outside Casualty after his second meeting with the doctors. He sat down on one of the hard chairs along the hallway, and Roz came and sat beside him. “Any news?”

“They’re keeping him sedated until the swelling subsides. We probably won’t know anything until tomorrow at the earliest.” It was nearly ten o’clock in the evening now, and they’d been at the hospital all day. Cormac was still in his rowing gear. Roz looked worn out. “You should go back to the house, try to get some sleep,” he said. “I’ll stay.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“All right then, tell me more about this Mary Heaney case. How did the locals take to having a selkie in their midst?”

“Well, at first they were a bit leery, naturally—but I suppose they got used to her, in a way. The stories began to take on a life of their own. There were reports of her going up to the headland above the village while Heaney was out fishing. She’d sit there for hours, just staring out to sea. I think I mentioned that people heard her singing in a strange language. Some said that seals swam up onto the rocks when they heard her voice.”

“And all of that played into the rumors, I suppose.”

“How could it not? People began to believe that Heaney had some sort of power over her.” Roz paused for a moment, and looked at him. “You don’t have to pretend, you know. To be interested, for my sake.”

“I’m not pretending, Roz. I genuinely want to know. Where did the stories come from, do you suppose?”

“Where does any myth originate? Fairy brides are one of the major motifs in folklore. These are stories that have been with us forever, and in almost every culture. Most of the selkie tales weren’t written down until the nineteenth century, and it’s always interesting to me how they’re filtered through the prism of contemporary values. Loads of Victorian gentlemen were amateur anthropologists. They were tireless collectors, and we owe them a lot for all the work they did. But their
fascination with what they called ‘primitive’ cultures was coupled with an equally strong aversion. They were especially put off by the looseness of marriage bonds amongst the ‘savage races.’ The Victorians saw fairy brides as downright dangerous—wild, uncontrollable, impervious to reason and morality. They always found a way to break their marriage bonds; the Victorians especially disliked that uncomfortable twist in the stories.”

“How does a selkie break her marriage bond?”

“She discovers what was taken from her, the magic object that’s kept her in captivity. In her case, it’s a sealskin, stolen and hidden from her. If she can regain it, the stories say, she’s able to return to her true self, her true home in the sea. In other stories, the magic object is a red cap or a feather cloak. In others there’s no physical covering, but the human spouse might break some taboo—sometimes he strikes his bride three ‘causeless blows.’ In others he dares to speak her name aloud, or reminds her of her animal origins.”

“And what does all that mean?”

“In psychological terms, you can see these stories being about women who desire autonomy and equality within marriage, or male fantasies about subjugating the power of the feminine. You can also see them reflecting male anxiety about abandonment by females. Your choice.”

“What do you think?”

“I think we’ve always tried to come up with ways to explain the fundamental differences, not just between men and women, but between all of us as human beings. We’re all mysterious, indecipherable creatures. Unknowable, really. To me, the story is all about trying to come to grips with the detritus of a broken relationship. What’s ironic is that it’s usually the selkie’s children who find her sealskin. She loves her children, but can’t take them with her when she leaves. They’re half human, and would drown if she were to bring them with her under the sea. So her choices are grim: stay and renounce her true nature, or return to the sea and leave the children behind. It’s about impossible dualities—no matter which choice the selkie makes, she has to remain divided.”

“What was it that made you think your Mary Heaney was murdered?”

“It was nothing explicit, really. What we have from the song
‘An Mhaighdean Mhara’
is only a fragment, but I still thought it strange that she and the children are called by name, but there’s no mention at all
of her husband. I started to wonder if it was a subtle way of assigning responsibility. Pointing the finger precisely by not pointing it, if you see what I mean.”

“But how do you prove a negative?”

Roz nodded. “Exactly. In the absence of a body, what could anyone do? The case was written up in the local newspaper, complete with references to ‘local superstitions’ and ‘fairy romances’ and the ignorance of the Irish peasantry. Remind me to show you the piece—I’ve got it back at the house.”

“But surely that wasn’t what tipped the scales for you on Heaney?”

“No, there were several other bits of circumstantial evidence as well.”

“Such as?”

“Several people told me stories they’d heard from parents and grandparents, about a strange old man who followed Heaney around at the next fair day after his wife disappeared, asking, ‘Was it you? Was it you killed the woman?’”

“And how did Heaney react?”

“He struck the old man in the face, knocked him down, and bloodied his head. The old fella had never been seen before, and no one ever saw him again after that day. A few weeks later, there was a piece in the newspaper about a dozen seals found bludgeoned to death on Rathlin O’Birne.”

Cormac felt his curiosity quickening. He knew Rathlin O’Birne—he’d seen the island from the cliffs at Bunglas. “And how do you connect that to Mary Heaney?”

“All my informants claimed that P. J. Heaney was the culprit.”

“Was there any proof?”

“No witness to the actual deed. I can offer only what people told me. Some of them were still a little nervous talking about it. Depending on the day’s fishing, it wasn’t unusual for Heaney to return home spattered with fish blood. But several people claimed hearing stories that he pulled his boat into harbor the night of the seal slaughter without a single fish. The front of his gansey was soaked with blood—and not watery fish blood either, but something darker and more substantial. After he’d gone, a few of the locals had a look at his boat.”

“What were they looking for?” Cormac’s imagination had already conjured three ruddy-faced figures crouching among sodden nets with glowing lanterns.

“I’m not even sure they knew,” Roz said. “But what they found was a heavy fishing weight, still covered with blood and bits of fur.”

Cormac could see the terrible thing before him, glistening red in the lamplight. He imagined a lone figure out on the island, caught up in a fury of violence, striking confusion and fear into a crowd of hapless, slow-moving animals. He heard cries of alarm, desperate splashing as they tried to escape into the sea, and he thought of the creatures he’d seen this morning, not far from Rathlin O’Birne. Perhaps Heaney couldn’t bear what he saw in the dark pools of their eyes. “So what did they do?”

“What could they do? It wasn’t against the law to kill seals—not at that time.”

“But if people believed that Heaney had killed his wife—and it seems as though there was widespread suspicion—why wouldn’t they come out and say so?”

“I think it had to do with the remnants of fairy belief. And you have to consider the social context of that time. The local people feared Heaney, but they were just as fearful of the police—the Royal Irish Constabulary were an extension of English rule. Nobody wanted to cooperate, no matter what they knew. Heaney might come after them if they talked, and if he did, how could they entrust their families’ safety to the very same bailiffs who had no compunction about evicting people when they couldn’t pay the rent? The song might have been an indirect way to tell what really happened. I’ve always suspected that at its root, the selkie stories had far more to do with female emancipation than otherworldly sea creatures. Once they escape their enchantment, shape-shifting females are in possession of their own identities, liberated from the bonds of marriage and social expectation. In spite of being torn, they’re still able to leave their husbands, even their children. It’s a deeply unsettling notion, that there’s something pulling at women, far larger than any possible domestic concerns. Something as deep and mysterious and otherworldly as the sea. A whole separate realm.”

Cormac couldn’t help thinking of Nora, perhaps content to be her own person, apart from him. Roz was right—it was an unsettling notion. He tried to shake it off. “What made you decide to spend months digging all this up?”

“I came across the words of the song again, just by chance, and there’s something so powerful about the way it captures the wintry feeling of a place—the darkness and the snow, the cold sea, the utter desolation. It’s
the mood of the piece, and the ambiguity of the selkie’s situation—she may have escaped her captivity, but she’s not really free. It’s there from the opening line of the song:
Is cosúil gur mheath tú nó gur thréig tú an greann
—‘It seems you’ve faded away and abandoned the love of life.’ The woman is trapped and heartsick and exhausted, but she can’t seem to leave that place where her two worlds met. She’s divided, in body and in spirit; the love she feels for her children is as strong as the pull of the sea.” Roz gazed out the window into the middle distance. “I know she’s out there somewhere, Cormac. People might imagine that I study these things because I harbor some secret belief in mermaids. I don’t, as it happens. But our need for them is real. And so is all the anger and fear, the fierce love and jealousy embedded in the stories about them—all the things that make us humans carry on as we do. Think of it—Mary Heaney disappeared more than a hundred years ago, and yet people who live down the road still know intimate details of her life. Why? Because her dilemma speaks to them. Her story expresses a duality that’s deeply embedded in all of us. Folktales are really complex psychological ideas given form and flesh.” Roz touched his arm. “Tell me, Cormac, have you had a good look around your father’s house? Surely you’ve noticed all the photographs on the walls—and have you counted how many are seals? When I remarked on the pictures, your father showed me how all the drawers and cupboards in his room are literally filled with notebooks of selkie stories his aunt Julia had collected. And I got a very strange feeling at that moment, wondering how it was your father and I just happened to meet that evening at Port na Rón. Even if you don’t believe in other realms, or fate, or serendipity—‘all that auld shite,’ as your father likes to call it—you still have to admit, there’s something funny going on.”