False Mermaid (21 page)

“I wanted to tell you, Nora. I meant to tell you.”

“I know, Mam. Please don’t worry.”

“I don’t understand, Nora. If you were here, where did you sleep last night?”

“I got a little apartment. I didn’t want to put you and Daddy out—”

“Put us out?”

Nora could see the hurt in her mother’s eyes. “We both know it’s for the best, Mam.”

“Maybe you’re right. I don’t know. Sometimes I feel as if I don’t know anything anymore. There’s something else—” Eleanor’s voice dropped to a whisper. She glanced down the hallway again to make sure the door to the study was completely shut. “Will you come upstairs?”

Nora followed her mother up the back stairs from the kitchen, wondering what all the secrecy was about.

Once inside Tríona’s room, Eleanor sank down on the bed, taking up the chambray shirt Nora had left there. She began absently smoothing the faded material. “My God, I’d nearly forgotten this poor old thing. Your father wouldn’t get rid of it, even after it was threadbare. I was going to peg it out, but Tríona wouldn’t let me—” She lifted the material to her cheek, pulled back through its subtle fusion of scents to intimate memories of husband and daughter—lost, just as Nora had been, in an intensely private past.

After a moment, Eleanor spoke: “This is the only place I can still see her. I come in here every few months, thinking it’s time we started to clear away—I mean, really, how many jars of shells and stones does a person need? But when I touch anything, I think, ‘Tríona must have seen something special in this; she picked it up and saved it for a reason.’ And so I put it back. And everything stays just as it was.”

She had never heard her mother speak like this before. Nora crossed to a trio of antique apothecary jars resting on the window ledge. The nearest was filled with shells, the other two with sea glass and stones—all collected during their summers in Ireland. Every year, Tríona had smuggled home additions to her odd collections. Nora lifted the first lid and took out a conical shell—a black-footed limpet—turning it over and admiring all the varicolored stripes. “I tried to explain to her once, about all the different types of limpets. And do you know what she said? ‘I don’t need facts about everything, Nora. I just like the shapes and the colors.’”

“You’ve always tried to make sense of the world—that’s just the way you are, love. It’s your nature. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m sure Tríona didn’t mean what she said as criticism.”

Nora returned the shell to the jar and crossed to sit beside her mother on the bed.

“I know you believe we treated you differently,” Eleanor said. “And I suppose we did, in a way, because you
were
so different, you and Tríona. Not just from each other; from your father and me as well. Sometimes I couldn’t fathom where either of you came from. What all mothers have to wonder, I suppose.” She reached out to touch Nora’s face. “Every time I look at you, even now, I see you the second after you were born—such a shock of dark hair! I see you at six, at eleven, at fourteen, twenty-five. And the curious thing is that this package, this outward form that is you—it changes; it actually never stops changing, but the essence—” She laid her hand upon Nora’s breastbone. “The essence of who you are—that has never altered, not ever, from the time I carried you inside me. I’m not sure why I find that reassuring, but I do.”

Nora ached to let it all go—to tell her mother about Cormac, about Frank Cordova and the postmortem this morning, about Natalie Russo and the riverbank and the image of Tríona she had seen in that Lowertown window. How wrenching it had been to see Elizabeth so grown up today, and how fearful, witnessing that less-than-benign fatherly hand upon her.
There are things you don’t know, Nora.
She could not speak about any of that. Instead, she reached for the hand that rested on the faded chambray, feeling the bones beneath her mother’s beautifully translucent skin. “Was that what you wanted to tell me, Mam?”

Eleanor shook her head. “I wanted to say that I know why you’ve come home—”

Nora closed her eyes.
Here it comes,
she thought, the whole list of reasons why she ought not to be dredging everything up all over again. She could almost hear her father’s voice, trying to talk sense into her. Her mother continued: “What I mean to say, Nora, is that I understand why you’ve come back. And I want to help you—I
need
to help, whatever way I can. I can’t carry on anymore as I have been, doing nothing, feeling nothing. There’s only one thing I can do, and must do—and that is to find out what happened to my child—to both of my beautiful children.”

“Oh, Mam—”

“Wait, let me finish. I have to know if there’s anything you haven’t told me. Anything you know about what happened, that you couldn’t share with your father and me, anything you felt you had to spare us. You’ve got to tell me now—please.”

There were so many things she had tried to spare them. Nora took a deep breath, and dived in: “Frank Cordova brought me along to an autopsy this morning. A young woman found three days ago at the river. Her name was Natalie Russo. Does that name mean anything to you?” Eleanor shook her head, and Nora continued. “She disappeared six weeks before Tríona died, and was buried all this time in a seepage swamp at Hidden Falls—” The rising dread in her mother’s eyes made Nora feel dizzy.

“What’s she got to do with Tríona? Tell me.”

“Their injuries were identical. Her face was destroyed, just like Tríona’s.”

“What are you saying? You think Peter murdered her as well?”

As well.
Proof that the last doubts about Peter Hallett’s guilt had finally given way.

By the time the clock downstairs struck ten, Nora had told her mother everything. Every sordid detail. It came in a flood, all the knowledge she had held back so long. When she finished, her mother looked hollowed out.

“I knew there was much more than you were willing to tell,” Eleanor said at last. “Oh Nora, how can you ever forgive us?”

“I don’t blame you for not wanting to see what was happening, not wanting to believe. It’s all too horrible.”

“But you saw it, Nora. You believed. I just can’t understand—if Tríona was in such desperate trouble, why didn’t she come to us? Why wouldn’t she let us help her?”

“Maybe fear of what Peter would do. And shame. From what she said on the phone, I think she was afraid that she’d somehow let us all down—you and Daddy, me, Elizabeth—all of us. God knows what he put into her mind.”

“It doesn’t seem possible, Nora. That we could have been so utterly deceived—”

“He knows exactly what he’s doing, Mam. I’m convinced of it. That’s what makes him so dangerous.”

“But she loved him. I know she did. What is wrong with him, Nora? What’s missing in that man to make him turn against her?”

“I don’t know, Mam. How can we ever know? It’s the one riddle we’re probably never going to crack.”

After considering this fact for a moment, Eleanor took a deep breath and set her shoulders, as if trying to shake off despair. “So what can we do, right now? Tell me, I’ll do it.”

“I’ve been thinking—our first priority is keeping Elizabeth safe. In order to do that, we’ve got to get her away from Peter.”

“But she’s staying with us, Nora. While Peter and Miranda are in Ireland. It’s all worked out. We’re supposed to collect her tomorrow evening.”

“And are you prepared to take her away, Mam? Someplace far away,
where he won’t find her, where he won’t even think to look? You have to be ready to do it right away, tomorrow. Can you do that?”

Eleanor put a hand on Tríona’s faded chambray shirt. “I’ve been making inquiries. Anticipating, I suppose. There’s an amazing network if you know the right people to ask.”

“It could mean living on the run, for weeks or even months, hiding from the police. Are you sure you’re prepared for all that, Mam?”

“I know you may not believe me, but it’s all I’ve been thinking about for the past five years. If it comes down to a choice between losing all this and protecting Elizabeth, which do you think I’d choose?”

Back at her apartment, Nora crossed to the window and stood looking down through fluttering cottonwood leaves. One full day gone. And only three more days before Peter left the country, perhaps for good. He would be smart enough to know where he could escape extradition, to plan a route that wouldn’t raise suspicion. At least he was leaving Elizabeth behind. Had he perhaps just been waiting for the right opportunity to wash his hands of her?

What had she really discovered today, that couldn’t be put down to accident or coincidence? There was still no concrete connection to Peter Hallett in any of the day’s revelations. Maybe proof would come soon, but she was too tired to fit any more pieces together tonight.

She swung her backpack off the desk and reached for the cassette she’d lifted at the last minute from Tríona’s room. How could she have forgotten making this? Tríona had saved the original, and from the look of it, even taken the trouble to repair the thing when it had broken down. For some reason, that detail moved her to the verge of tears once more. She tipped the cassette into the clock radio beside the bed and turned the volume low, leaning back as the two voices surrounded her again—similar, but not identical, pulling against each other in the words of a deceptively simple song:

All you who are in love
Aye and cannot it remove
I pity all the pain that you endure
For experience lets me know
That your hearts are full of woe
A woe that no mortal can cure.

Tríona had been barely fourteen when this recording was made, and yet something in her voice captured that fatal collision of hope and heartbreak. Here was love as illness, as a terminal condition. How had she understood those things, when Peter Hallett wouldn’t even enter her life for another seven years? Nora shut her eyes, remembering a moment, only a few days ago, when, crossing the bog at Loughnabrone and seeing Cormac before her, she had suddenly been taken over—but by what? Some force she couldn’t even name. Five years ago, she had imagined herself in love with Marc Staunton, and it turned out to be an illusion. That flash of awareness she had experienced out on the bog with Cormac had felt entirely new. How could it be new when it also felt impossibly old, as if it existed independent of time, of circumstance, of reason? Especially of reason. Her entire life up to that moment had been spent resisting the chaos of unruly emotion, and now she was caught in it, that impossible, inextricable web of joy and misery and madness that was love. That exquisite, exultant ache for which there was no mortal cure.

That was the one thing Peter Hallett probably hadn’t counted on or even understood. That once Tríona was bound to him by such a feeling, there was no such thing as severance.
Isn’t it shocking, what you’ll do when you love someone?
What had Tríona done, how far had she gone for love?

Nora reached into her pocket for Cormac’s knot, turning it over and over, fingers now accustomed to its gaunt shape, as she leaned back on the pillow, listening to the voices, to the music of cottonwood leaves outside the window, rustling in the night air. The verses of the first song eventually gave way to another as she lay there, limbs growing steadily heavier, until there was no fighting it.
Jet lag
. In her half-conscious state, Nora couldn’t be certain whether she had spoken the words aloud or only imagined them. She tried to raise her head, but could not. Across her field of vision, the shadows of fluttering leaves outside turned to random diamonds, fracturing and melding together on the shimmering surface.

Outside on the street, Truman Stark turned off his idling engine. He still hadn’t managed to figure the connection between this dark-haired female and the redhead. But now that he knew where she lived, he could keep an eye on her. He could just show up whenever he felt like it. Any time at all.

It was after midnight when Frank Cordova arrived home. Inside the front door, he stooped to pick up the jumble of mail that had come through the slot, and tossed everything onto the mounting pile on the dining room table. Every day it was the same—nothing but junk mail. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t just pitch it all as it came in. No explanation, except that adding it to the heap at the center of the table had taken on the force of habit. Hard to break now.

He’d spent the better part of the evening going through the case files on Natalie Russo. He felt used up. It didn’t help that his head was still thick from all the tequila last night. Sleep was inviting, but he also felt a familiar rasp of hunger. He opened the fridge and leaned in. The blast of cool air felt good.

A noise came from the darkened space beyond the kitchen, and he felt a jolt of alarm. Across the nearly empty living room, a shadowy figure seemed to float up from the couch. The faint glow from the kitchen caught Karin Bledsoe’s short fair hair, the bottle of red wine and two glasses on the table beside her. Even in the dim light, he could see the bottle was nearly empty. She’d been here awhile. A handful of old LP sleeves lay scattered across the floor, and now he heard the click of the record changer, the reedy throb of accordions, and the faint, pleading voice of a
corrido
singer. He let out his breath and felt the adrenaline rush subside.

“What are you doing here, Karin? It’s late.”

She moved closer and pressed a wineglass into his hand, her body swaying slightly. “Wow, you really know how to make a girl feel welcome. Not ‘How was your day, Karin?’ or ‘Good to see you, Karin’? Not even ‘Hello.’ Just ‘What are you doing here?’” She kept her distance, as if trying to gauge his mood. “I thought you might need to unwind. You seemed a little tense this morning.” She swirled the wine in her own glass, still studying him curiously. “I told Rolf we were on surveillance again. I figure it’s only half a lie—I’m keeping an eye on you.”

He set down the glass she’d handed him without taking a drink. It was the last thing he needed right now.

“Oh, come on, Frank, if you’re not going to drink with me, you’ve at least gotta dance.” She took his hand and wrapped it around her, but he felt paralyzed. It had always seemed to him that unhappiness had its own distinct scent, and suddenly that sour, stale smell crept into his nostrils. Or maybe it was just acid fumes from the wine and dust from old record sleeves. Karin often paired
corridos
with serious wine-drinking. He remembered her tearstained face from the last time. He’d always hated
corridos
for their nauseating, self-pitying tone, and had meant to pitch those records ages ago, but somehow he never got around to it. They’d probably get stacked back on the shelf again after Karin went home this time, too. That was how it went.