Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (7 page)

“Did ye write back?” Casey asked, digging in his pocket for another cigarette.

“I did.”

“Mmphmm,” was Casey’s only reply to this.

“We’ve written back an’ forth a few times since.” When this statement was met with stony silence, Pat sighed heavily.

“Would ye rather I ignored her, as ye’ve chosen to do?”

“No, yer grown, ‘tis yer business whether ye’ve to do with her or not.”

“An’ what about you?” Pat asked.

Casey shook his head, sending a cold spray of snow down the back of his collar. “She doesn’t exist for me anymore.”

Wisely, Pat changed the subject. “Do ye remember that Christmas Eve ye got legless on rum an’ eggnog, an’ passed out under the tree?”

Casey smiled ruefully. “Aye, I remember, ‘twas the night Mrs. McLeod found us out pissin’ our names in the snow.”

Pat winced slightly at the memory. “Never could see her after that without thinkin’ that she knew exactly what my backside looked like.”

“Was that same Christmas Daddy gave ye yer telescope.”

Pat nodded, a white halo of fluffy snow sitting on his short-cropped curls. “I never did understand how he managed to afford it. I’d expected a second-hand book, maybe a sweater or somethin’ but when I opened it, ‘twas magic.”

“He sold his books,” Casey said.

“He what?” Pat asked sharply.

“He sold all the books grandda’ had left him; some of them had a bit of value to them. He said that ye might have to have yer feet on the ground, but he’d do what he could to keep yer soul out there amongst the stars where it belonged.”

Pat shook his head. “I never knew,” he said. “Times I wonder if I ever knew Daddy at all.”

Casey shrugged. “He was a good man, an’ the best father anyone could ask for. Beyond that he kept himself to himself.”

“He was terrible private about himself, but mighty free with his opinions when it came to us.”

“I think,” Casey said slowly, “that he sensed at times that he’d not be with us for very long, an’ so he tried to cram all the things he wanted to teach us in the time he did have.”

“I used to think his tongue lashins’ were the worst thing about livin’ with him, but once he was gone, I realized the silence was much harder to bear. There’s still days I’d give anything to have him take a strip off me, or tell me he’d never known a more stubborn fool. Though I think he bestowed that title on you more often than me.”

“Aye, well, that particular shoe fit me rather well. Still does, I suppose.”

“Ye won’t find me disagreein’ with that statement,” Pat said, then shivered, “I’m for bed, man, are ye comin’ in?”

“No, I’ll bide for a few minutes more. Sleep well, brother.”

He heard the door creak as Pat slipped through it, and then the deep silence descended once again. Even the occasional car that went past seemed muffled and far away.

Casey hadn’t been entirely truthful with Pat, he did remember that Christmas Eve. He’d only wanted to forget, but had never managed to erase it from his memory.

They’d come from Midnight Mass, Pat asleep on Brian’s shoulder, a stick of candy someone had given him, still clutched tight in his toddler’s fist. Red and white stripes with a fine ribbon of green running between them. Casey eagerly anticipating opening the one gift he was allowed before bed.

The table was set with holly and red candles. There were candles in the windows as well, gleaming against the faultlessly polished glass. The smell of Christmas food provided a warm welcome. But there was no feeling of content, only a strange flickering emptiness, a silence that was not peaceful.

Many years later, he would look back and see it as one of those strange pivotal moments where the world you know slips away to be replaced by a completely new one, and as much as things look the same—the walls, the table, the streets, the sky, your father—they aren’t even similar to the way they were before. At the time, though, he only felt a strange hunger in his belly that had nothing to do with food. Even at six, he understood that much.

Somehow, the still had told him without words what his father tried carefully to explain to him the next day. But for those first moments of realization they had remained silent, both father and son, as if the web of quiet would somehow buy them a few more moments of ignorance.

“Blow the candles out, will ye, son?” Brian had said from over top Pat’s head, the wee lad boneless and heavy against their father’s chest. Casey had gone, window by window, seeing in each of them his own pale face, reflected starkly against the night that huddled tight to the glass. And blown the candles out, watching his face disappear in tendrils of candle smoke, and seeing in the face of that boy the knowledge that Christmas, however many might come, would never again be the same.

He stood up, body damp and chilled from sitting so long in the snow. He was tired, and wanted the comfort of his wife and his bed. He glanced upward before turning towards the roof door. The snow still fell thickly, melting as it touched his skin.

“
Nollaig Shona Duit, Mathair
,” Merry Christmas mother, he said softly, not to the mother that sold papers and sweets in England, but to the one who’d cleaned the windows and lit the candles before she’d left his life forever.

THERE WAS BLOOD. A great deal of it. Casey couldn’t see it, but he could smell it. That earthy fecund scent carried on the wind. No one could lose that much blood and live. He tried not to breathe too deeply. Was it possible that only two hours before he’d dropped Love Hagerty off at his Boylston Street office, and had been about to take the car to the garage where it stayed overnight, and then catch the train home?

But just as he’d been turning the car around, Emma had dashed out from the shadows of the office wall and knocked on the driver’s window. He had rolled the window down, thinking that maybe she needed a ride; he’d driven her home a few times. As usual, she was dressed too skimpily for the weather, and her hands were red and chapped with the cold.

There was a low-pressure system sitting off the coast, brewing up a brutal nor-easter that was expected to dump huge amounts of snow on the city overnight. He wanted to be home before it hit, but he knew he’d not rest easy with himself if he didn’t make sure she was safe home first.

“I—I need a ride, but not home,” she said and he saw that her shaking wasn’t just from the cold, she was afraid of something.

“Get in the car, it’s perishin’ out there.”

She scuttled around the car and got in, her cheeks bright red and her nose tipped in cherry. He handed her his fur-lined driving gloves.

“Thanks,” she said pulling the gloves on. Then she turned to him, and he saw beneath the winter-chilled flush, she was white with fear. Pale gold hair framed a face with high Slavic cheekbones and amber eyes. Emma was the prostitute Agent Gus had spoken of. She was also a friend of sorts. The first time Casey had met her had been when he found her crying on the front steps of the office building, seemingly oblivious to the people staring at her as they walked by. He had given her a tissue, put her in the car and driven her home. Since then he checked in with her occasionally, letting her warm herself in the car when he saw her walking, fed her hot tea from a thermos and gave her the extras from his lunch.

When he had explained this odd relationship to his wife she had sighed and said all things considered, it didn’t surprise her. Whether this was compliment or insult, or merely a commentary on his general nature, he did not know, though he noticed that his lunch increased markedly in quantity right after.

“How can I help?” he asked.

That misguided question was what had landed him here, in the snowy pine woods at the foothills of the White Mountains. Boston was now three hours behind them. The last town he’d seen was a good eight miles back. The foothills were the beginning of a stretch of fir and granite that ran up to the borders of Canada. The place he found himself now was as remote as the backend of hell, and twice as inhospitable. They had turned off the I-93 and taken four different secondary roads, to finally wind their way down a narrow twisting road, that was rutted with autumn’s hard frosts, and swiftly being obliterated by the driving snow.

“Are ye certain this is the place?” Casey asked dubiously. The property sat in a notch between two mountain slopes. It was a curved hollow with a lake cradled at its lowest point. Tall white pine coated the steep slopes that rose darkly from the shores. A small cabin and a weathered boathouse faced each other across a space of blowing snow. Both were dark and empty.

“Y—yes,” Emma said through chattering teeth. “I’m sure. She gave me directions in case she needed me to come up here. I thought she meant in case her car broke down or something.”

Casey blew on his hands. They’d had to leave the car back a ways, as the snow had simply gotten too deep as the road narrowed. Whatever reason Rosemary had for giving Emma directions to this isolated area, he didn’t think it was to provide transportation. The reasons that occurred to him weren’t designed to comfort either of them.

“Did she say why or who she was meetin’?”

“No, she said it was wicked dangerous for me to know. I don’t know why. Rosemary and I always tell each other where we’ll be, and with who—we watch each others backs. That alone worried me. It had to be bad if she couldn’t tell me.” She shrugged, “You were the only person I could think of that might help me.”

He checked the cabin first, a measure that was more avoidance than actual belief that it held Emma’s friend. The cabin was cold and damp, but it smelled of earth and dried wood, not blood. A lone set of tracks led up to its door, but they turned on the porch and ran in a wavering line down to the boathouse.

The back end of the boathouse stood upon pilings that were rooted deep in the frozen innards of the lake. He walked beside the tracks, careful not to step in them himself. The odd one was still clear where the woman had passed under overhanging tree boughs and the snow was light on the ground. And it had been a woman; the toe was narrow and the heel pointy. Fashionable boots that were as useless as bare feet in terrain and cold such as this. Emma followed behind him, her own suede boots completely inadequate to the weather.

He hesitated outside the boathouse door, Emma clutching tight to his coat. The wind was moaning eerily through the tops of the tall pines, and neither of them was eager to see what lay behind this door. There were no tracks leading away, so unless Rosemary had somehow crawled out the back onto the icy surface of the lake, Casey knew she had not left this building.

He pushed the door open and walked in, Emma so close behind that she trod on his heels. He flicked on the torch in his hand. The shadows danced ghoulishly up the two-by-six planking and rough plywood walls. Nothing there. He moved the torchlight down to the floor.

The cold had congealed the blood so that she lay in a blue-black pool of it. Tiny wisps of steam rose from the pool, but even as he touched his fingers to her wrist, Casey knew the woman was dead. Not long dead, though, there was still a residual warmth to her skin. He cursed under his breath, though it wouldn’t have made a difference had they gotten here earlier, she would have bled out anyway. Without a doctor and an emergency room, there was no way to stop a hemorrhage like this one.

O MOST MERCIFUL JESUS, lover of souls,
I beseech Thee, by the agony of Thy most Sacred Heart...

He muttered the prayer; in the face of death, his Catholic upbringing always asserted itself.

“Her throat’s been slit.” His voice was matter-of-fact. He knew there was no good way to relay such information. He slid the torch away from the gaping wound, the yellow-white of the large vessels of the neck were clearly visible and he did not want Emma to see them.

Emma nodded, still standing at a distance. Obviously, she too was familiar with the look of death, and had held no hope that the woman was still alive. He looked back at the dead woman. Dark red curls spiralled out from a narrow skull, the ends of her hair glistening black with blood. She was fair-skinned, with a handful of freckles splashed across the bridge of a sharpish nose. The eyes that stared unseeing into the beam of the torch were a pale green. An Irish girl, he thought. At least her ancestors were. It struck him hard, all the tragedies that had played out for the people that had come here with the very last of their hope. Hope so small that it could fit in a thimble, and yet had been enough to cross an ocean and begin life in a new and strange land.

“Why here d’ye think?”

“Far away enough from anything that no one would hear her scream.”

Casey nodded, the same thought had occurred to him. Whoever had drawn the woman here must have known the place was deserted all winter, and must have planned to kill her once she arrived.

“I’m goin’ back to the car to get a blanket,” he said as he stood up. His knees were damp with blood and the clammy touch made his stomach clench.

Emma nodded, still standing stiff and dazed, staring down at the corpse that had been her friend. A woman for whom she had cared enough to run to her in the teeth of a terrible gale, in the hopes that she would arrive in time enough to save her.

By the time he reached the car Casey knew they would not be going anywhere this night. Already the car was up to its axles and the snow was falling both thicker and heavier than it had been when they’d arrived. The wind was lashing the myriad flakes into small tornadoes that stung his face and eyes. He looked up the small knoll, where the cabin sat like a dour old man with an eye patch, the one good eye looking out over the silver frosted lake. Then his gaze, narrowed against the stinging ice, swept back towards the lake.

Other than their own and Rosemary’s, there were no tracks in the snow between the cabin and the boathouse, and had not been for some time. There had to be another set coming in from a different direction. Maybe the man had come across the lake itself. The wind was roaring down the mountain slopes and blowing snow in great gusts over the ice. Any visible prints might already be obscured. He would have to check now.