False Mermaid (45 page)

“Anytime. If you wanted to drop by after practice tomorrow—”

“I’ll be there.”

“You might not believe this, but when you called, I had just picked up the phone to call you. I’m organizing a kind of a memorial for Natalie. She wasn’t religious—neither am I, really—but I thought a few of us could meet down at the river some evening next week, maybe go out on the water for a while. A sort of remembrance. I can tell you more about it tomorrow.”

“That sounds good. See you then.”

As Frank passed through the station’s front lobby a few minutes later, the duty sergeant waved him over, indicating a figure slumped in one of the plastic chairs beside the front door. Truman Stark sat with his hands clasped before him, staring at the floor between his feet, both legs jigging to some internal rhythm.

“Somebody to see you, Detective. Wouldn’t give a name. Says he’s got information for you on an accidental death.”

In the interview room, Truman Stark once again avoided eye contact. And once again, Frank waited. The kid asked to see him. Maybe his hunch had been right; maybe Stark hadn’t spilled everything. A bit of a childhood prayer ran through Frank’s head:
Ruega por nosotros pecadores.
Pray for us sinners.
Ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte
—now and at the hour of our death.

He leaned back in his chair, trying to put the kid at ease. “When you were here before, you said if you told the truth, I wouldn’t believe. Why don’t you try me?”

It was clear that Truman Stark had made up his mind to tell what he knew. He just had no idea how to begin.

“The duty officer said you mentioned an accidental death—” Frank prompted.

Stark nodded. “Five years ago, in the Sturgis Building.”

“Didn’t happen to be a guy named Nick Mosher—the guy who fell down the elevator shaft?”

“I was there—” The kid looked as if he might choke.

“Relax, Truman. We’re in no hurry here.”

Stark nodded, and settled his shoulders. “I followed the redhead to
the Sturgis Building that day. She met up with this guy on the fourth floor. He was wearing dark glasses.”

“Nick Mosher.”

“That was the last time I saw her, I swear.”

“Did she seem happy to see Mosher?”

The memory clearly pained him. “She kissed him.”

“Just a friendly kiss, or something more?”

“I don’t know—why are you asking me? She kissed him, and handed over a coffee she’d brought him from downstairs.”

“And then?”

“I hit the elevator button. I wasn’t going to stick around. I had to get back to work.”

An image began to form in the back of Frank’s brain. The flowers, the jilted lover. He kept quiet—the kid might clam up. “So you don’t know what Tríona Hallett was doing on the fourth floor of the Sturgis Building that day?”

Stark shook his head.

“But you had some idea?”

“I knew she was married. I thought maybe she was fooling around.”

“And you wanted to get your feet wet as a private eye, was that it?”

“No—no. I just wanted to find out why she was always looking over her shoulder. I saw the blonde following her a couple of days before. I thought maybe the blonde was a private eye the husband sent to check up on things.”

“You didn’t know who the redhead’s husband was?”

“Not then, no. I saw his picture in the paper, after—”

“Let’s get back to that day. You go back to work, you put in your shift, until what time?”

“Nine. I might have left the ramp around nine-fifteen.”

“And then—”

“I went back to the Sturgis Building.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know—”

“To see if the redhead was still there?”

“I told you, I don’t know why.” Stark was getting agitated. “I got in the elevator—it was the old-fashioned kind, with the gate that comes down—”

“A freight elevator.”

“I didn’t see anybody around, so I opened the gate on the fourth floor and got off. Then somebody upstairs must have called the elevator, ’cause it took off.”

“With the gate still open?”

“Yeah. Some of these old buildings—I had my flashlight, so I took a look down into the shaft, to see what I could see. And then I hear this voice behind me—‘Careful. It’s a long way to the bottom.’ It was the blind guy I saw earlier. I wondered how he knew the elevator wasn’t there. He says to me, ‘You were on that elevator, weren’t you? This afternoon.’ And I’m thinking—how the fuck does he know that? He’s blind. So I asked him, and he says—” Truman’s voice had dropped to a whisper. Shame rolled off him in waves. “He says, ‘Because you still smell of those flowers you were holding.’ Next thing I know, he’s behind me—” Frank stopped breathing. “And he—puts his hands on me. What did he have to go and do that for? I’m not a fucking queer. I had to get him off me, and it just—happened.”

Unburdened at last, Truman Stark laid his head on the table and sobbed like a child.

All night, Nora had tried to sleep and failed. It was something of a reversal; Cormac was the usual insomniac. She lay beside him in the gray morning light, listening to the pulse of the surf outside, reading a musty old volume she’d pulled from a bookcase behind the door—
Ortha na nGael: Hymns and Incantations
—a compilation of verses collected in western Donegal in the late nineteenth century. Most were dressed up as Christian prayers, invoking the trinity or the Virgin or Saint Brigid, but retained their old shapes from the time before trinities had anything to do with Christ. The verses had been translated from the Irish, no doubt filtered through the transcriber’s Victorian sensibility, but much of the beauty and plainness of the original language remained. Even written on the page, their repetitive rhythms still held the power of incantations.

In addition to the prayers, there were stories of shape-changers, and eerie lullabies; charms for all sorts of bodily afflictions, for fire smooring and night shielding; invocations addressing the moon and sun, for rituals of birth and death, and blessings for all sorts of animals, and not only cattle and sheep, but the wild beasts that figured in the local mythology as well: the salmon and the swan, the bull, the horse, the otter and the limpet, the seal. Rare glimpses into the rhythm of daily life in a place that had been for centuries the last outpost of the known world.

Nora closed her eyes, hearing the music of the words, seeing the images they brought forth, of darkness and light, of work and harvest, the damp breath of animals. The words carried a palpable sense of wonder from the people who had composed and repeated them so many generations before. Nora looked back at the book on her lap, fallen open to a charm against drowning. The words of the last stanza seemed to float up off the page:

A part of thee on grey stones,
A part of thee on steep mountains,
A part of thee on swift streams,
A part of thee on gleaming clouds,
A part of thee on ocean-whales,
A part of thee on meadow-beasts,
A part of thee on fenny swamps,
A part of thee on cotton-grass moors,
A part of thee on the great surging sea—
She herself has best means to carry
The great surging sea.
She herself has best means to carry.

She closed the book and set it aside. How did someone even attempt to carry the great surging sea?

Nearly two weeks had passed since her parents had arrived to take Elizabeth home with them to Saint Paul. Two weeks since the return of her hazel knot, discovered along a river path by Seng Sotharith, and two weeks since she learned that her parents had taken her protector in, that he would be staying in her old room and embarking on studies that would eventually transform him into a physician’s assistant.

It was also exactly two weeks to the day since she and Cormac had helped to recover the preserved body of a young woman from the blanket bog above the rocky beach at Port na Rón. When she went into the bog, the young woman had been wearing two long black woolen stockings and one high-button shoe, a long skirt and petticoat, along with a shirtwaist and short jacket, in the fashion of the time. Her clothing had been preserved as if she’d dressed in it only a few days before, and not over a hundred years ago. There was still no definitive proof that the body in the grave was Mary Heaney, but Roz Byrne was now on a mission to trace the female line, to see if any link could be established through mitochondrial DNA between Mary Heaney’s descendants and the faceless female from the bog.

Nora turned to observe Cormac, breathing softly, his chest moving up and down in a steady rhythm. How many times had she lain like this beside him, trying to comprehend the lightning storm of thoughts and dreams that crisscrossed his brain in sleep? She put out a hand, feeling the warmth of his breath against her palm, hearing in the back of her head the notes of the melody he’d sent her that first night in Saint Paul. He still hadn’t spoken its name.

Maybe Cormac was right, and Elizabeth would come around. Maybe
someday she would want to know the truth about her parents. But what was the truth? Nora knew she had to brace herself for the possibility that Elizabeth might travel the rest of her life on a razor’s edge, on the one hand loathing the creature responsible for her mother’s death, and on the other, feeling affection for the decent human being her father had appeared to be.

The universe had turned out to be a much stranger and more fluid place than she had ever imagined. All the boundaries and borders she had once believed in now seemed to be shifting and disappearing. Nothing was cut and dried. If anything, she felt much closer now to the view she had held as a child, where any eventuality—wondrous or hair-raising—was equally possible. The image of Tríona walking along that street in Lowertown, the book turned backward in the library stacks, how Harry Shaughnessy just happened to be the person who picked up Tríona’s photo on the library plaza. The seal who had delivered Elizabeth from harm. These things could not be real, and yet they were—as real and true as any events in the history of the world.

Nora was beginning to realize that she had clung desperately to her own version of Tríona, much like one of the faithful might adhere to the legend of a saint—though everyone knew that saints’ legends contained only fragments of truth, along with large portions of exaggeration, even falsehood. In some ways, keeping Tríona preserved like a saint under glass was almost as much a diminution as the calumnies Peter Hallett had engineered. Surely the truest remembrance would not reduce her, not make her any less in death than she had been in life. What about the hidden, contradictory sides of Tríona Gavin? They had existed, and might still be discovered—maybe it wasn’t too late.

Rising from the bed, Nora tiptoed downstairs, past the door of Joseph Maguire’s darkened room. He was still in hospital, and would remain there for another few days. He had awakened from forced slumber a changed creature, not himself even to himself, but submerged in a sea of strangeness, speaking in a language no human could understand. Cormac hadn’t yet faced the prospect of what would happen when his father was ready to come home.

As she passed through the hallway, Nora perused a series of silver prints that hung on the wall. Photographs of seals—portraits, really—taken by Cormac’s great-aunt Julia. Perhaps it was the combination of the gray dawn and the waning moonlight, but each image took on
the aspect of a ghostly negative: the seals’ eyes glowed white, their formerly white whiskers now looked dark against pale muzzles. She had often wondered what it was that triggered Tríona’s fascination with these creatures. Was it the wordless, soulful eyes—the soft, motherly bodies? Or perhaps the amazing way they could move and hold their breath underwater? Nora herself had always judged seals a little too strange and ungainly, but Tríona had been extraordinarily drawn to them. Evidently the connection had been passed down to Elizabeth.

Nora leaned forward to read the lightly penciled caption beneath the last portrait:
A still dawn at Port na Rón—July 1947.
More than sixty years ago. The last and most haunting of the pictures showed an animal with a star-shaped mark around its one good eye.

Seized with a sudden desire to greet the dawn at Port na Rón, Nora threw on her jacket and shoes and slipped out of the house. As she pulled the door closed, the latch fell into place with a loud click. She stood still for several seconds, making sure Cormac had not been disturbed.

The sun was not quite up as she made her way over the headland. A thick mist drifted over the harbor ahead, and through it she caught occasional glimpses of the sea, as calm and glassy as it must have been that morning in 1947, with only a few ripples stirring against the pebbled beach. She stood at the top of the ridge, drinking in the fishy scent, while out in the harbor, a sleek form twisted up from the water and landed with a splash, the sign of a creature reveling in its own strength and speed, the sheer joy of sensation.

Nora climbed down to the beach and kept walking, not stopping to remove shoes or clothes, but striding straight out into waves until she was up to her hips, and within ten yards of the seal. It swam closer, only an arm’s length now, its whiskered face raised out of the water. She could see how the features on one side of its face were scarred from some ancient injury. The same face as in the portrait, she was sure of it. How could that be? She reached out a hand to touch its fur, and the creature allowed her. It felt sleek, warm beneath the wetness. She remembered the words of the charm:

A part of thee on ocean-whales,
A part of thee on meadow-beasts,
A part of thee on fenny swamps,
A part of thee on cotton-grass moors,
A part of thee on the great surging sea—
She herself has best means to carry
The great surging sea.

The seal regarded her for a few seconds with an air of infinite compassion, before opening its mouth to offer a single rounded vowel of a bark. Was it a greeting or a valediction? As if in answer, the animal twisted away with a flourish of its tail, and sank once more into the sea. Nora took a deep breath, and plunged straight down. She felt compelled to follow. What was it Tríona had seen that day she had been rescued from drowning?