False Mermaid (32 page)

In fact, the more Nora studied the surrounding hills, the more she became convinced that this was the very place where the seal had rescued Tríona from drowning. It must have rained sometime during those
summer weeks, yet Nora couldn’t recall even a single cloudy day. She and Tríona had spent hours climbing among the rocks, searching for sea glass and other treasure. That shard of blue-and-white delft in her treasure box had come from somewhere along this coast. Visiting the grandparents in Clare every summer was never a holiday in the usual sense. There were eggs to be gathered, cows to be milked, garden patches to be weeded, honey to be collected from hives. Here in Donegal, there had been no responsibilities, only endless days of exploring and make-believe. She had dreamt of shipwrecks all summer long.

“Look!” Elizabeth’s voice had an excited edge.

Nora shielded her eyes against the strong afternoon sun, and peered out over the water to see a dark head bobbing just above the calm surface. “I see it.”

The seal swam closer, evidently curious about the pale creatures stretched out on the rocks. As it drew near, Nora could see that the left side of the animal’s face was damaged. It regarded them with a single dark and glassy eye.

Elizabeth jumped to her feet and ventured as far out on the spit as she could go, feeling her way over the rocks, never taking her eyes from the sleek head in the water. Girl and seal studied each other with intense interest. The creature’s nose and whiskers twitched as it huffed the air for clues about the human child, and Elizabeth’s hand remained half-raised in a gesture of greeting. Then the seal began to spin, rising up out of the water in a joyful dance.

Nora watched, fascinated, thinking of all the instinctive, animal ways of knowing that humans had begun to forget as soon as they had words. After a few moments of silent communication, the seal’s head slid beneath the surface and disappeared from view, leaving only a circling eddy where it had been. Elizabeth stood searching the water for a few more minutes before she turned around. Nora studied her face as she trudged back up to the flat rocks.

“Were you saying something to that seal?”

“No!” Elizabeth’s newly exposed ears glowed bright red.

“It’s all right, Lizzabet. Your mother used to talk to them. She said they didn’t understand when she spoke English, but they seemed to have a bit of Irish.” Elizabeth looked up, as if she had just confirmed something that had lurked in the murky realm of suspicion for a long time.

That was exactly what Tríona had said. Nora had completely forgotten
until the words came out of her mouth. Strange, how revisiting a place could bring back memories in that way. The smell of the seaweed, the texture of the stone underfoot, the way the light hit the water at a certain angle—if she closed her eyes, she could see pale limbs underwater, hair floating upward, a pair of coal-black eyes looming close.

Back in the car, the radio sprang to life with the engine. As they reached Carrick, a tune began flowing from the speakers, and Nora knew she had heard it somewhere before. The fiddler slid his bow along the strings, expertly teasing great feeling from the notes, starting low and rising up in exhilarating waves.

It was the same tune Cormac had sent her in his e-mail the other night, she was certain.

When the music ended, the presenter began chatting in Irish, from which she could only pick out a few words—
go hailainn,
wonderful;
an fhidil,
the fiddle. The tune’s title went by in a flash. Something
i Meiriceá
—in America. He had promised her the name of the tune the next time they met. It wouldn’t be long now.

Outside Carrick, they hurtled by a handmade banner fluttering from a pair of stakes at the roadside. Nora registered what it said only after they’d gone past:
FÁILTE FIDLEIRI!—WELCOME FIDDLERS! FIDDLE WEEK IN THE GLEN.

When they reached Glencolumbkille, the post office was closed, but the publican at the
óstan,
the inn next door, knew the Maguire place.

“It’s about three miles outside The Glen, just beyond a little place called Port na Rón,” the man said. “The village itself mightn’t be on your map. There’s no one living in it for years now. But head out this road, anyway, until you come to a fork. Keep to the left there, and the Maguire place will be on your left as you go down that lane, kind of up under a hill. You can’t miss it. And if you get all the way to Maghera, you’ll know you’ve missed the turn entirely.”

“Do you know Joseph Maguire?”

“Sure, wasn’t I in school with him? Josie, we used to call him, in them days. His auntie Julia was our schoolteacher. She’s the one left the house to him there about three years ago. We heard he was off in Bolivia or somewhere. Never thought he’d come back. But that’s the thing about Donegal people, you see. They’ll go off, for years sometimes. To America, Australia, Scotland, all sorts of foreign shores. But they always come
back. Something about this place that draws them—something in the blood. You know, it’s amazing. Maguire’s after having a fierce rake of visitors lately. I was terrible sorry to hear about his trouble, taking ill like that—he’s still in hospital beyond in Killybegs. I’m surprised you didn’t know, being a friend of the family, like.”

Nora saw the gossip hunger in the eyes that peered over the glasses at her, and she scrambled to make up a credible lie. “I have to confess—I don’t actually know him. He’s a third cousin to my husband, something like that. My daughter and I are up for the Fiddle Week—my husband is joining us at the weekend. We’re staying with friends up in Ardara, but I was supposed to call in, if we were passing this way. Still in hospital, though—that’s a pity.”

“I’m sure he’ll be up for visitors soon. But aren’t you lucky to have friends in these parts? When you came in, I was afraid you might ask if we’d any rooms left. I would have hated to turn away such a lovely wee woman as yourself.”

Down the road where the barman had directed them, the car climbed up past the church and out of the Glen. Houses were few and far between beyond the village, surrounded on all sides by treeless, mountainy bog. They passed shallow black cuttings, clamps of turf walled in by pallets held together with rope and netting to foil thieves, and thatched with rushes to fend off unforgiving wind and rain. Stone and wire fences hiked up over the hills, marking narrow fields for grazing sheep. The place looked barren, but Nora knew that—at least culturally speaking—nothing could be further from the truth. From the poorest places came the richest music—it had always been that way.

Suddenly she felt so tired that it was difficult to keep her hands on the steering wheel. She looked over at Elizabeth in the passenger seat. Was she doing the right thing, coming here, landing on Cormac without a word of warning? “Hang in there,” she said to Elizabeth. “We’re almost there.”

As she spoke, Nora felt a wave of exhaustion verging on dizziness. She reached up and touched the bandage on her forehead. More than anything in the world, she longed to sleep, but a host of worries pressed down on her. Around the next curve, they came to a Y-junction. Turning to the left, Nora coaxed the car along a rough patch of road. There it was, ahead on the left, a hill with a house tucked under it, just as the barman had said. Nora had never been so glad to arrive anywhere. The
long dusk was beginning to settle. There were two cars parked outside, and she could see a light through the windows. Cormac was home, then. She pulled in behind his Jeep and turned to Elizabeth.

“Let me go in first—” She saw trepidation in her niece’s face. “Don’t worry. I’ll be right back, I promise.”

Elizabeth didn’t look up. She picked at the zipper on her backpack, and Nora noticed for the first time how the skin around her nails was chewed ragged. And the child never let go of that bloody pack—what on earth was she carrying around in there?

The door of the house was open as Nora rounded the corner, and the tinny noise of an old fiddle recording trickled out through the open door. She peered inside and saw the back of Cormac’s head, and felt a breaker of homesickness so strong it threatened to knock her down. He was sitting on an old leather sofa in front of the fireplace. She was just about to call out when a mop of ginger hair lifted from the crook of his shoulder. “Please don’t, Roz,” she heard him say. “Don’t cry. Everything’s going to be all right.”

The ground seemed to roil under her feet, and the music grew louder. She gripped the doorjamb, trying to remain upright, but felt her knees buckle. The floor came up abruptly to meet her.

Nora felt herself drifting in and out of consciousness for what seemed like a very long time. A damp cloth against her face, the sound of whispering voices. She had the same sensation as when she was a child, riding in the backseat when the adults thought she was asleep. The image of a car pricked her into alertness, and she sat up abruptly.

“Where’s Elizabeth? I left her in the car—”

Cormac’s voice was near, mingled notes of worry and relief: “Elizabeth is right here, Nora.” The child’s face loomed close as he continued. “You’ve only been out for a minute or two. We just got you inside the house.” His fingers brushed her face. “Rest awhile.”

Nora felt small, cold fingers press into her hand. No sign of the ginger-haired female. Maybe she was imagining things. She seemed to be drifting away again on the tide.

It must have been some time later when the chiming of a clock awakened her. Elizabeth was curled up at the other end of the sofa, draped in a blanket and fast asleep. Nora felt someone stir in the chair beside her. She looked up to find the ginger-haired woman, the one who’d been crying
on Cormac’s shoulder. She was dry-eyed now, and spoke in a whisper: “How are you feeling?”

“Better.” Nora tried to sit up without disturbing Elizabeth. Her muscles were still stiff and sore from the impact of the crash. “How long was I asleep?”

“About an hour and a quarter,” the woman said. “I’m Roz Byrne, by the way—colleague of Cormac’s from UCD, and extraneous houseguest. He’s just gone into the kitchen—I’ll send him out to you, shall I?” She retreated through the sitting-room door, and Cormac emerged a second later.

“Nora—” He knelt on the floor and brought his face close. “How are you?”

“I’m all right. You must wonder what we’re doing here.”

“You’ve hardly had a chance to explain anything. Including that—” He gestured to the bandage on her head. “I was beginning to think you might have a concussion.”

“No—it’s just a scratch. Really.” Nora glanced back at Elizabeth, still slumbering deeply. It was amazing how much younger children could look while they were asleep. “It’s a very long story. Any chance of a cup of tea?”

Cormac helped her up, circling an arm around her waist as they moved across the room. Out in the hall, he stopped, pressing her against the wall with the length of his body, cradling the back of her head, kissing her with gently parted lips until she was floating, breathless with desire. He pressed his forehead against hers. “Sorry. But God, how I missed you, Nora. It seems like decades since you left.”

She raised a hand to touch his face. “I know. Lifetimes.”

Harry Shaughnessy’s clothing was laid out on the table at the center of the crime lab. Frank Cordova stared at the bloodstains on the sweat-shirt—that’s what they seemed to be, here under the bright lights of the lab—heavy, fresh stains around the neckline, and several large, lighter areas under the white letters spelling out “Galliard.” What was Harry Shaughnessy doing with a sweatshirt from Peter Hallett’s alma mater? Frank reminded himself that the shirt hadn’t necessarily belonged to Hallett—he could think of several other people in the Twin Cities who might belong to the same alumni association, including Marc Staunton. Harry might have picked the shirt up at the Goodwill, or the St. Vincent de Paul shop on West Seventh Street.

Jackie Smart, the forensic scientist, was going over the sweatshirt inch by inch with magnifier, tweezers, tape, and swabs, on the hunt for DNA. “Somebody said you knew this guy,” she said.

“Everybody knew him.” It was true. Generations of Saint Paul cops knew Harry Shaughnessy. He’d haunted Rice Park ever since he got back from Korea in 1953. Never the same after. And there were plenty like him—more after every war—sleeping under bridges, unable to cope with “normal” life, men who took to raving on street corners or quietly drinking themselves to death. Probably plenty of others, too—playing golf, puttering around in garages and basement wood shops—who were never the same either. Most of them just managed to hide it better than Harry Shaughnessy had. “Have you tested these spots that look like bloodstains?”

“The police lab did the presumptive—it’s definitely blood. There wasn’t much from the accident, the ME said. The vic’s heart stopped pretty much on impact. To me, those stains under the letters look quite a bit older than the accident anyway. See how the surface here is all cracked, and completely flaked off in places? What do you make of that?” She pointed to a small scrap of paper next to the sweatshirt—a handwritten note, gray with grime, and worn tissue-thin. “I found it in the pocket.”

Frank studied the faint block letters, written in blue ballpoint:
I know what you did. Hidden Falls 11 pm tonite.
It sounded like a threat. Hidden Falls tonight, or else. Or else what? I’ll tell where you buried Natalie Russo? The note made nailing down the DNA evidence even more crucial.

He said: “Jackie, can you get wearer DNA on all these things?”

“Sure, I can try—we usually get pretty good samples under the arms, around the collar.”

Frank picked up the nearly new pair of black running shoes, examined their slightly muddy soles. “What about these?”

“Again, the presumptive for blood comes up positive; we have to do more tests to see if it matches the blood on the shirt. It’s kinda funny—the vic was wearing all these clothes, but not those shoes; they were stuffed in his backpack. He had on these lovely size twelves.” She held up a battered pair of high-top sneakers. “The running shoes would have been way too small for him. But somebody wore them—I found white cotton threads inside when I was swabbing for DNA. There was quite a bit of dirt in the treads, too. When I’m done here, I’ll send all this over to trace. You can have a look—”