False Mermaid (24 page)

Ten minutes later, they were in the detective division’s interview room. Frank was still upset about yesterday. He looked as if he hadn’t slept. As she studied him, Nora became gradually aware of the other eyes outside the conference room window, the studiously averted gazes that said the whole detective division was watching them.

“Do you think we could close these blinds?” she asked.

Frank stood to pull the cords to shut off the glances from the cubicles outside.

Nora began to pace as she talked. “I know we always assumed it was Peter who had the connection to the parking garage in Lowertown, but maybe it was Tríona, and Peter somehow knew about it. Maybe he followed her. I found out yesterday that she’d been doing studio work for a guy called Nick Mosher, advertising spots and voice-overs for radio. I think she was trying to make some money and stashing it away, getting ready to walk out.”

“Why didn’t this Mosher come forward?”

“He couldn’t. He was killed in a fall at the Sturgis Building.”

Cordova grimaced. “Great.”

“Do you know what’s really odd? The accident happened the same day Tríona died.”

“So who told you about the connection?”

“A woman named Valerie Marchant, who runs a coffee shop in the building. She knew Nick Mosher, and Tríona, too, from theater work. But Valerie Marchant was out of the country at the time of the murder and Nick Mosher’s accident, and figured she didn’t have any useful information when she got back six months later.”

Frank’s eyes narrowed. “How did you even know to talk to this woman?”

She couldn’t tell him about seeing her sister’s ghost in the plate-glass window, or the book turned backward at the library. Harry Shaughnessy, too, was off limits until she could be more certain of what she’d witnessed. “I went to the parking garage showing her picture around. Just got lucky. Right after you dropped me yesterday, I went down to Hidden Falls—I think I saw the fisherman there, the guy who found Natalie Russo.”

“Asian guy, late thirties?”

“Yes—what do you know about him?”

“Keeps to himself. Lives with a cousin’s family in Frogtown, works at their restaurant—a Cambodian place called Phnom Penh up on University. Told us he’s been fishing that spot at Hidden Falls since he came to Saint Paul almost eight years ago. His English isn’t great—and he wasn’t all that excited to report the body.”

“But he did, Frank, when he could have just run away. Do you think we could talk to him?”

“We might need to line up an interpreter. Like I said, his English isn’t so hot. Don’t forget, until we crack this, he’s still a suspect.” He met her questioning gaze. “What can I say? Hazard of the business.”

Nora reached into the duffel and pulled out Tríona’s tape. “I found this at my parents’ house last night. I didn’t listen to the second side until this morning. I want you to listen to it all the way through before you say anything.” She played the tape for Frank, watching for a reaction. He pulled at his lip, frowning.

“I did what she said. I went to the hiding place. Here’s what I found.” Nora reached into the blue bag again and pulled out the datebook with its cryptic markings, the anonymous note addressed to Peter, the sheaf of clippings about Natalie Russo’s disappearance, and, finally, the bloodstained clothes. He took a pen and lifted the corner of the shirt.

“They’re Tríona’s clothes, Frank. I gave her that shirt.”

“I guess the next step is figuring out whose blood this is—”

“I have a feeling it might be Natalie’s. I think Tríona was terrified of what she might have done. She kept saying she had to know the truth. I’ve been trying to work it out.” Nora reached for the calendar. “Look at all these marked days, including the third of June, the day Natalie went missing. Put that together with what Tríona says on the tape, about the days she doesn’t remember, all that liquid ecstasy you found in her purse, around the house. You know what I think, what I’ve thought all along—that it wasn’t Tríona’s stash, that Peter was feeding her the stuff. It’s all beginning to fit.”

“What exactly is beginning to fit?”

“For whatever reason, Peter doesn’t want to be married anymore. He starts doping Tríona so she can’t remember things, so he can do what he likes. Then he murders Natalie—I’ll admit, I still haven’t worked out how or why—and he tries to make Tríona believe that she’s the killer. She wakes up on the third of June covered in blood, with no memory of
what happened. It takes a while, but she finally figures out that she can go to the library, and scour the newspapers for an attack, a murder on that day. That’s when she finds out about Natalie’s disappearance—”

“But how does she know about Hidden Falls? That part doesn’t connect—”

“Unless Hidden Falls was where she woke up that morning.”

“You know, it’s a great theory. I’m not saying it couldn’t have happened that way, but all these things on their own—they don’t add up to anything we could use in court.”

“If Tríona was afraid that she’d done something terrible, why hang on to incriminating evidence? Why not just destroy it? And why dig up all those old newspaper articles about Natalie? At least we finally know what she was doing at the library that day. If she was getting ready to leave Peter, maybe she was also getting ready to tell someone what she knew, how she knew it.”

“And what about this anonymous note?” He checked the envelope. “It’s postmarked Maine. Any idea what Hallett did, why he’s being accused?”

“No—I told you, I haven’t got it all worked out.”

Frank took up and flipped through the sheaf of newspaper articles. “Look at this.” He showed her a page not from the
Pioneer Press,
but from the
Press Herald
in Portland, Maine.

CONFESSED KILLER OF OGUNQUIT COUPLE
TAKES OWN LIFE

Jesse Benoit, who confessed to the brutal murder of an Ogunquit couple, was found dead in his room at the Augusta Mental Health Institute on Tuesday, an apparent suicide. Hospital officials did not issue a statement, but scheduled a press conference for this afternoon. Constance and Harris Nash were found bludgeoned to death aboard their boat, anchored in Ogunquit Harbor. The small, tightly knit resort community reacted in disbelief when Benoit, a childhood friend of the victims’ son, confessed to the brutal slaying, and was committed to state care at Augusta after being declared incompetent to stand trial.

“Where did this come from?” Frank asked.

“I don’t know—I didn’t notice it before.”

“Do you recognize any of those names—Jesse Benoit, Constance and Harris Nash?”

“No. But I know Peter went to college in Maine. Let me work on this, Frank. You’ve got too much to follow up as it is. This is something I can do.”

He was staring at her right hand resting on his sleeve. She had touched him without thinking. Nora pulled her hand away.

Elizabeth stayed in her room all morning with a pillow over her head. She could hear her father and Miranda talking and dragging suitcases up and down the hall. She was supposed to be packing, too, but her insides still felt upside down. Those awful words on the computer screen kept washing over and over her until she felt as if her head would burst.
Hallett slaying. The victim’s husband. Primary suspect.
If everyone was so sure her dad had done those horrible things, why wasn’t he in jail? They said her mother’s body had been identified by distinguishing marks. What exactly was a distinguishing mark? Elizabeth raised the pillow a quarter-inch to look down at her arms and legs. Nothing but freckles and chewed fingernails, the dark scab on her knee. That couldn’t be what it meant, she was sure.

She flung her pillow to the floor. They were talking about making her go with them on their stupid trip to Ireland. It was Miranda’s idea. Her dad was arguing against it; he said she should stay here in Saint Paul with her grandparents. Miranda was trying to convince him what a great time they could all have together.

Elizabeth knew what to do. She would go away, someplace they couldn’t find her. Wait until they were gone, and then go stay with her grandparents. How hard could it be, looking somebody up in the phone book? But first things first—she had to get out of the house.

She gathered up a few items of clothing and shoved them into her backpack, trying not to make any noise. She took her school ID from Seattle, and the book about the seal woman she’d stolen from the Seattle library. Almost as an afterthought, she stuffed in the worn and faded remnant of the baby blanket she still slept with at night. Finally, she tucked nearly two hundred dollars she’d saved from her allowance into a zippered compartment in the side of her shoe. She had a feeling her dad and Miranda would be glad to get rid of her. They might not even look very hard.

Peering out the door of her bedroom, Elizabeth made sure the coast
was clear, and then scurried down the hallway to the front door. She cut through the leafy yard down to the road in front of the house. There were lots of other people on the path—running, biking, walking their dogs. It was so different from Seattle here. It wasn’t just the trees and plants; there weren’t so many people around when you lived on the edge of an island. She realized that she didn’t know where she was going—and staying on the main roads meant that her dad might be able to find her just by driving around. But the riverbank was steep here. She had to walk until she could find a quiet spot, someplace out of the way, where she could sit and think about what to do.

The river was a long way down through the trees. On the other side of the road from the path were houses and big apartment buildings. The backpack began to feel heavy, pulling at her shoulders. Everything had changed since she’d read those words on the Internet. The whole world felt strange now, and not just because she was in a different city and the places she knew were far away. Something inside her had changed as well. To think that she had imagined her mother living happily somewhere else, with a new family. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Her stomach felt strange—maybe just hunger. But somehow the thought of food just made it worse.

A huge factory loomed across the road from the path, and Elizabeth could see smokestacks through the high fence. The road before her began to curve and slope downhill. There were no houses here, and fewer people along the path. All at once she came upon a wooden sign with carved letters that said
HIDDEN FALLS PARK.
Maybe this could be her quiet place to think. She set off down the steep drive, feeling the weight of her pack and the prickling of sweat making the back of her shirt damp. She hadn’t expected Minnesota to be so hot. At the bottom of the hill the road ended in several parking lots. A guy in a pickup sat watching as she made her way toward the river. Elizabeth felt his eyes on her, but forgot about him as soon as she got down to the water. She’d been right about one thing—a river was not the same as Useless Bay. The water was a cloudy green color—it looked dirty. She stood on the bank and gazed across to the sandbar on the opposite side, at some boys throwing sticks for their dogs to fetch. The animals’ sleek heads poking up out of the water reminded Elizabeth of her own spotted seal back at Useless Bay. She felt a pang of homesickness for her own beach, for a time when she knew nothing.

The ground beneath her feet was covered in small round pebbles of different colors that made a grinding, gravelly sound as she walked. She decided to venture farther up the beach, walking until she found a tree whose gnarled roots lay exposed at the river’s edge. There she slipped out of her backpack and set it on the ground. The tightness in her stomach had grown worse. She pulled the pack onto her lap and wedged herself into the roots of the tree, trying to shrink as small as possible, and wondered how long it would take before her dad noticed she was gone. He might think she was still in her room—he probably wouldn’t even check.

Those awful computer-screen words floated before her eyes again. She had never seen her mother’s body. So why did she see the same pictures every time she closed her eyes—a still, white hand, red hair against a pale neck? It was getting so hard to breathe. The backpack pressed down on her, cutting off her air. She flung it away, and all at once there were sounds coming out of her that she couldn’t seem to control. Her lungs felt as if they would burst.

“Hey!” said a voice from across the water. “Hey, Red—you all right?”

Elizabeth raised her head. She felt grit in her teeth, and smelled the sweet, rotting scent of dead fish. A curly-haired boy and his dog stared at her across the river. They started into the water, as though they might swim across. Elizabeth scrambled to her feet and picked up the backpack, plunging into the woods, running with no direction, just trying to get away. She could hear the boy’s faint, disappointed voice behind her. “Jeez, I wasn’t going to hurt you—just wondered if you were okay.”

She kept running, but the dirt and tears in her eyes made it hard to see where she was going. Branches scratched her hands and face, and she felt a sharp pricking as the plants brushed against her bare skin. She ran until she saw a yellow tape strung between the trees, people in white coveralls. Another voice, a grown-up this time: “Jesus—stop her! Somebody grab that kid!”

Elizabeth put on a spurt, and heard several sets of footfalls pounding the earth behind her. Hands reached out. She tried to twist away, but a solid figure, with heavy shoes and a wide belt hung with flashlight and handcuffs and a big black gun, seemed to materialize directly in front of her. She looked up into a policeman’s smooth, pink face just as he reached down and put his hands on her shoulders. “Hey—slow down there, kiddo. What’s your hurry?”

A woman’s breathless voice came from behind. “Thanks, Mike. I’ll take her back to the squad.” She kept one arm around Elizabeth’s shoulder as they walked, steering her up a path that led to the parking lot, and straight to one of the police cars. The policewoman opened the door and motioned for Elizabeth to sit in the backseat, then scrunched down beside her. The woman had square shoulders and short blondish hair. Elizabeth thought she looked pretty tough.