False Mermaid (14 page)

The noise of squealing tires suddenly roused him, as if from a trance. He swerved instinctively to avoid the car that came careening toward him, and jammed on the brakes. The other driver pulled up just short of a collision, his shocked face visible through the windshield. Cordova felt his heart pumping; he suddenly felt woozy and light-headed. The other car had come to a full stop just inches from his driver’s side door in the middle of the intersection. The cathedral was directly in front of him, and all at once he knew what had happened—he’d run the red light. The other driver pulled alongside and lowered his passenger window to let go a string of curses. Frank could see the man’s lips moving, but the words didn’t register. It occurred to him, in some faraway part of his brain, that he must be in shock. The other driver eventually gave up and sped off, raising his middle finger in the rearview mirror as a parting salute. Cordova stared down at his own hands, still gripping the steering wheel. He remembered dropping Nora, and the next thing he recalled was the sound of squealing tires. The time in between was blank. His hands were clammy and his mouth felt dry. He finally shifted his foot from the brake and pulled away from the intersection. Behind him, the normal flow of traffic resumed.

He drove the rest of the way to the station on hyperalert, conscious of every turn and traffic signal. It wasn’t the first time he’d suddenly awakened from a reverie in the middle of traffic, sometimes miles from where he’d last been paying attention.

The usual culprits joined the lineup in his head: overwork, lack of sleep, lousy food, too much to drink last night. He hadn’t been to the gym in months; there was never any time. The way things were going, he wouldn’t pass his next fitness test. He’d seen it happen often enough to recognize the signs. This was the way it came, the beginning of the end.

Pulling into his parking space, he lifted his hands from the steering wheel to find they were still shaking. He reached up to the rearview mirror and, tilting it downward, found himself staring into an unfamiliar pair of dark eyes. Suddenly disconcerted, he flipped the mirror back, but could still feel that baleful gaze upon him, burned into memory like something from a bad dream.

Thirty minutes after Frank Cordova dropped her at the curb, Nora was in her rental car and on her way to Hidden Falls Park. Holly Blume’s parting words had only added to the creeping horror that had settled on her in the morgue this morning. Natalie Russo’s death had something to do with Tríona, she was sure of it. But dead certainty was not the same as proof.

After Tríona’s body was discovered in her car trunk, forensic details had come out only gradually. Buck Callaway estimated that death had occurred in the early hours of Saturday morning, probably sometime between midnight and 4
A.M.
The seeds and leaves Holly Blume had identified from Tríona’s hair pointed to a seepage swamp—a place just like the boggy spot where Natalie Russo’s body had been buried.

On the map, the Mississippi meandered gracefully through the city of Saint Paul, from the leafy gorge on its western edge, to the railheads and stockyards of the east. Hidden Falls was just over four miles directly southwest of Crocus Hill, and it was a span Nora could have driven blindfolded. She headed west on Saint Clair, and turned south onto the river road. Just past the sprawling Ford plant, she made a soft right into the entrance of Hidden Falls Park. The parklands traced the southern edge of the only natural gorge along the Mississippi. The road plunged down a steep ravine, coming to an end at parking lots for the picnic grounds and boat landing along the river bottom. Nora knew the place well. The river was one of the few wild spots within city limits, and she had spent a lot of time here at Hidden Falls as an adolescent, collecting specimens, drawing interesting plants and insects, amazed at all the life-and-death drama in miniature going on below most human radar.

Parking in the lot next to the picnic shelter, she cast a glance in the direction of the river. Still high for this time of year. In midsummer, depending on the rains, the river sometimes had no visible current, but the water moved along under the surface all the same—she used to
imagine the endless flow stirring the whiskers of huge carp that lurked along the muddy riverbed.

Because of the gorge, this stretch of river had long been a no-man’s-land, a strip of wildness and disorder cutting through the heart of civilization. Sometimes the park seemed perfectly harmless, with families picnicking, people walking their dogs; at other times it seemed forbidden and even dangerous, the sort of place where female joggers would be discouraged from running alone. It was common knowledge that high school kids ran keg parties on the sandbar below the veterans’ home; a mile or two in either direction were a couple of notorious gay cruising spots. For years, rumors of drinking and drugs and anonymous sex at the river’s edge had floated above into the real world. People came here to be someone else, to indulge appetites and fantasies they wouldn’t dream of admitting. Most understood that they were courting danger; no doubt for some of them, it was part of the attraction. Nora began to feel a vague unease, knowing what lay ahead among the chest-high undergrowth and layers of dead leaves underfoot. The fallen leaves and tangled branches of the forest floor suddenly seemed sinister, part of a teeming underworld of decay and corruption.

A few yards away, a man sat alone in a green pickup. Nora felt his eyes upon her as she walked past, but when she glanced up, he was staring at the river. She knew Frank wouldn’t approve of her coming down here alone, but it was broad daylight, and she couldn’t expect him to be her minder. He had enough to do. And she had to see it for herself, the place where Natalie Russo had been found. Slinging her backpack onto one shoulder, she locked the car and started on foot in the direction of the falls, glancing behind to make sure no one was following.

She’d always been drawn to Hidden Falls, as much for the mysterious name as for its wild, otherworldly aspect. A faint sound of falling water came from the ravine to her right. She stopped to listen. At the turn of the previous century, tourists had come from all over the city to see the falls, where water seeped through the rock face at the top of the bluff, spreading like a thin veil across a limestone ledge before spilling into the catch pool below. A hundred years later, the area was a little shabby, making it a perfect hangout for kids seeking adventure and danger.

She turned away from the falls and plunged almost immediately into one of the park’s more primitive portions, where narrow footpaths wound over and around the corpses of fallen trees. Marshy areas filled the low
spots, and the limestone bluff rose up sixty feet or more to her right, its lower surfaces marked with spray paint and scarred with crudely carved initials. The river wasn’t even visible in this part of the woods, yet it was almost impossible not to feel the water’s ominous presence. Earthen ridges, some eight and ten feet high, marked the river’s variable path, and in the many low spots, drowned grass and broken branches aligned in one direction, combed out by floodwaters that had receded weeks ago. Nora felt a chill, and rubbed her bare arms as she walked along. She couldn’t help thinking of all the evidence that must have been swept away and carried along in the river’s current, swirled for miles in dirty water until it all piled up in that thick gumbo of silt and crawfish and chemicals that formed the delta more than a thousand miles downstream. This river had once been an artery, a channel that carried the lifeblood of a whole continent; in less than a hundred and fifty years, civilization reduced it to hardly more than a sewer and dumping ground.

She spied a few scraps of crime scene tape still wound around trees in a low-lying area a few yards ahead, and knew that she had arrived at the spot where Natalie Russo’s body had lain. No one was about. The slope beside the path was steep, and Nora held on to a sapling to keep from sliding on the thick bed of leaves underfoot. Inching sideways, down to the area of disturbed earth, she thought of the other damp burials she had helped uncover in the past year, remembering all that a grave could reveal. Like the others she had seen, this was no careful inhumation, but the hurried concealment of a crime. There was a deep gash in the earth, and the ground was covered in clods of earth and peat, trampled by the boots of those who had removed the remains, searchers who had combed the scene for evidence. She crouched down and peered into the depression, amazed to find that Natalie Russo’s burial place still bore the recognizable impression of a pair of shoes, soles outlined in a random maze of tiny whitened roots. Reaching out to trace the outline of the void, she was struck by the fact that even while she was viewing the body in the morgue, her thoughts about Natalie Russo had focused on whatever she might tell them about Tríona. The empty space before her now conjured a distinct human being. A person whose absence was no doubt still mourned by someone.

Sinking to her knees again, Nora picked up a handful of debris from the forest floor, staring down at the crumpled leaf skeletons and strange seeds, nearly overpowered by their damp smell. What would Holly look
for when she came here to collect her thirty samples? What were the chances that the mystery of Tríona’s death would finally be unraveled by codes hidden inside these cells?

Her ears picked up a sudden noise from deeper in the woods, like someone scuffling through leaves. Rising awkwardly from her crouch, Nora lost her balance and stepped forward into the marshy depression, sinking quickly in the saturated ground. If working on bogs had taught her anything at all, it was that instinct could not be trusted in a place like this. She knew that the more she struggled, the deeper her foot would go. The key was to spread out. She sat down on the ground, feeling cold wetness seep uncomfortably through her thin summer clothes, leaning back on her elbows and hoping the spot was too damp to support poison ivy. That was all she needed. But her foot was well and truly stuck. She pressed her back into the earth, trying to relax, studying the undersides of the leaves all around her, amazed once more at the tiny flowers and fruits that grew so close to the ground.

She sat up at the noise of twigs snapping underfoot, the random sounds of someone rummaging through the tangled vines and branches that littered the forest floor. Had someone followed her? It sounded like more than one person. She tried twisting around to see who was coming, but with her leg still buried nearly up to the calf, there was no way to escape. She pressed her back to the ground again, watching and waiting for the trespassers to come into view. When they did, the two pairs of plaintive, dark eyes observing her did not belong to anything human, but to a white-tailed doe and her fawn. The young deer, not yet grown out of his spots, had a twist of vine caught on his slender hind leg. The noise she’d heard was the crashing of his hobble through the underbrush. As they passed in front of her, the mother looked straight at her. Nora didn’t dare blink or breathe. The doe stood still, too, sniffing the air as her offspring flailed his leg in an effort to break free. Finally the vine came loose, and they bounded off together, disappearing silently into the undergrowth.

Relieved to be alone again, she tried pulling her foot from the ground, slow and steady, until at last it came free. She started to climb to her feet, considering that if she hadn’t been out on all those Irish bogs she wouldn’t have known what to do—and no doubt would have lost the shoe.

All at once, a slow, horrible knowledge, a formless cloud of recognition
began moving through her, thinking about Tríona’s missing shoe. No one had ever thought to dig for it.

She fell to her knees and began to claw at the earth, not thinking, just scrabbling at the soft peat. She stopped suddenly, holding out her hands to find the nails completely blackened, just as Tríona’s had been. Closing her eyes, she saw her sister being chased through these woods, scrambling and falling through brambles and stinging nettles, finally caught and pinned down—

Nora tried to force the images from her head, but they would not leave. She raised her eyes to take in all the loamy ridges and areas of disturbed earth. At least half a dozen within sight, and many more scattered all through the woods. Every one a perfect place to conceal a body. All those missing women in Frank’s files—how many more might be buried here? Tríona’s words came back:
There are things you don’t know… about Peter, about me. I’ve done things, too. You don’t know—unspeakable things—

Nora felt a wave of panic beginning to gather inside her. She began to run, but stumbled forward and fell, waiting to be swallowed up.

Nora lay on the damp ground, letting the terrible knowledge rise up out of the earth and seep into her. If Tríona had been here, and if she’d been digging, it could mean that she knew where Natalie Russo’s body was buried—

Isn’t it shocking, what you’ll do when you love someone?

To think of all the times she had listened to those words repeating over and over inside her head, never understanding what they could mean.

All at once there was a commotion a short distance away. Without stopping to think, Nora made a lunge for the fallen tree beside the path, leaping behind it just as two figures, male and female, came into view.

The woman spoke first: “Here it is, Rog. Let’s get set up here—and make sure you get that crime scene tape in the shot.”

Nora recognized the voice—Janelle Joyner, one of the local television reporters who had covered Tríona’s murder. Janelle had boasted to more than a few people that Tríona Hallett was going to be her ticket out of the Twin Cities, maybe even her springboard to national cable news. Evidently not everything had gone according to plan.

Janelle must have come here to tape one of her awful teasers for the evening news. Nora couldn’t bear to listen. She looked down the length of the massive tree trunk, hoping to find a way to escape without being seen, and found herself staring into a pair of dark eyes about ten feet away. A slender Asian man of indeterminate age had concealed himself behind the twisted roots of the same fallen tree. He eyed her warily, no doubt hoping that she wouldn’t raise an alarm. He had a basket slung around him, and a fishing pole in his left hand—could this be the fisherman who’d found Natalie Russo?