False Mermaid

1

Frank Cordova held the phone receiver to his ear, unsure that he had heard correctly. He felt as if he’d taken a hard punch to the sternum. It didn’t seem possible that Peter Hallett was dead. Five long years and it was all over, just like that.

Miranda Staunton had confessed to killing Tríona, but everything he had suspected since that conversation with Gordon MacLeish was true. Peter Hallett had murdered his wife as surely as if he had crushed her skull himself. Just as he had murdered his aunt and uncle all those years ago in Maine. But when Nora told him how it all went down, Frank hadn’t felt vindicated at all—he felt robbed, cheated out of his chance to look that bastard in the face inside a courtroom, to present the evidence and hear the word pronounced from the bench: Guilty.

Did Nora feel as betrayed as he did, the whole focus of her life for the past five years suddenly snatched away? Maybe she’d found something else to replace it already. The pain in his chest wouldn’t seem to go away.

“Frank—are you still there?” Her voice sounded distant. “There’s so much we haven’t talked about—”

He felt her presence at the other end of the connection and wondered if things had been different between them, if they had met in other circumstances—

But things had been as they were. Nothing to be done about it now. He cleared his throat. “I should let you get back to Elizabeth. Thanks for calling—”

After a pause, she said: “Look after yourself, Frank.” He closed his eyes and felt her hand brush against his face as it had that one brief, haunting night. “Promise me.”

“You too.” He felt the door of possibility about to close again, this time forever. “Good-bye, Nora.”

He hung up the phone. Looking at the piles on his desk, thinking about all the misdirected, messed-up lives they represented, he felt an immense, cavernous emptiness. It was as if all his insides had been removed, and the open space left behind had been scoured clean. And yet there was one thing, one tiny detail that tugged at him: how Elizabeth Hallett had not only survived a fall that had killed her father and Miranda, but was apparently uninjured. Sometimes the innocents survived. The only way to describe it was miraculous.

Milagroso! The word fluttered up from somewhere inside him, and with it he felt the breath of the curandero’s fan.

2

After washing up on the beach at Port na Rón, Elizabeth slept. She was not in a coma, the doctors said, but in a state of hypersomnia, long hours of deep slumber from which she could be roused only with great difficulty. Her eyes would open occasionally, but the wakefulness didn’t last. The larger mystery, from a medical standpoint, was how she hadn’t sustained any major physical injuries—either internal or external—in her fall from the cliff. No one could explain it.

Nora barely left Elizabeth’s bedside at the hospital. She spent the night in a chair. Now she stood looking down at her niece, and noticed the child’s eyes moving almost imperceptibly under their lids in the dim half light. What did Elizabeth dream about, in that mysterious, overpowering sleep? Given all that had happened, no one could blame her for not wanting to wake to the world again. Seized by a sudden stab of fear, Nora leaned forward and spoke softly into Elizabeth’s ear: “Come back to us, Lizzabet—you’re not finished here.”

Elizabeth stirred and drew a deep breath as though finally surfacing. She pushed herself up from the pillow and opened her eyes, though she didn’t seem completely conscious. Nora reached out to rouse Cormac, who was dozing in the chair in the corner.

“I’ll get the nurse,” he said, and quickly headed off down the hall.

“I’m thirsty,” Elizabeth murmured.

Nora poured a glass of water and pressed it into her niece’s hand. “How are you feeling?”

“Where’s my dad? I have to see my dad.”

Nora moved closer. “What about something to eat?”

Elizabeth shook her head and gave a great yawn as she sank back on the pillow again. “No, I just want to see my dad. Where is he?”

“He’s—not here, Lizzabet.”

“What do you mean? Where is he?” She seemed to understand that something was not right, and sat up in the bed, regarding Nora with alarm, as if she suspected some conspiracy. “Why won’t you tell me where he is?”

“Oh, Lizzabet. He fell, out at the harbor—there was a struggle, and he and Miranda fell—” She couldn’t say any more.

Elizabeth drew herself up against the headboard. Her voice was a whisper: “He’s dead, isn’t he? My daddy is dead?”

Nora could only nod. She reached out, but Elizabeth pushed her hand away, and began to thrash under the bedclothes as the memories began to return. “I heard, all that stuff you said about him to Miranda. It’s not true—it can’t be. You’re a liar!” She struck out, landing a few hard slaps before Nora could fend her off. “Why would you say those things? You’re nothing but a stinking liar!”

Nora tried to move closer, to calm her. “Lizzabet, please listen, please—”

But Elizabeth kept thrashing. “Get out! You don’t know anything. I don’t want you here. Get out!”

Nora backed away and retreated into the corridor, the angry slaps still smarting. What did she think would happen, how had she imagined a child might respond to such news? That was the trouble—she hadn’t imagined anything. She had never let herself get that far. It was always about nailing down evidence, convicting Peter, not about the consequences that would follow. She had let herself imagine that everything would be resolved, if only justice prevailed, if only she could convince the world of Peter Hallett’s guilt. But she had so far failed to convince the one person whose belief mattered most.

Her parents would be arriving tomorrow, and what would she say to them? After everything, there was still no concrete proof against Peter. He was ultimately responsible for the deaths of at least five people, maybe more, but it was possible that there never would be any proof. It had come down to her word against his, yet again.

Nora leaned forward and pressed her aching head against the cold tiles of the corridor. She felt so weary. It was clear from everything Miranda told her out on the headland, everything she’d learned from Frank, that they’d only begun to scratch the surface. But who would continue digging, now that Tríona’s killers were dead? She couldn’t rely on Frank any longer—the case would be officially closed. He had other leads to follow, other responsibilities. They might speak on the phone, but Nora knew with perfect certainty that she would never lay eyes on Frank Cordova again. This was not the way things were supposed to happen. Peter Hallett would continue to dog her for the rest of her life.

Nora felt someone standing behind her. Cormac touched her shoulder. “Elizabeth is all right,” he said. “The nurse is with her now. She’s still in shock, Nora.”

“He turned her against me—he’s still turning her against me, even after he’s dead. She’s never going to believe anything I say.”

“Elizabeth has to protect herself right now, Nora. Just to survive. It’s going to take some time for her to see what’s true and what isn’t.”

“She heard everything, Cormac. What he did to Tríona, what he was doing to Miranda. How can she not believe it?”

“She’s a child, Nora. All the family she’s had for the past five years is suddenly ripped away, and she doesn’t know where to turn. She’s suddenly thrust into the adult world, not at all sure that’s where she wants to be. You can’t blame her for wanting to retreat back into the past, the time when she still believed her father a decent man. We all want to believe our fathers are decent men. Even if they’re not.” He turned her around. “Will you come with me? There’s someone I want you to meet.”

“I can’t, Cormac—”

“You can—come.” He took her arm, and they walked down the corridor to the stroke unit, with patients behind glass windows. Cormac stopped and let her look in at a white-haired man, asleep with his mouth open, insensible to the world around him.

“I haven’t introduced you to my father,” Cormac said. “You may never have a chance to know him as he was. I’ve barely had that chance myself. Whatever brief time we had may be over. But being here with him these last few days has taught me something, Nora. I need to understand who he is, where I’ve come from—just as Elizabeth will need to understand, one day.” He turned her face to him, stroked her cheek. “Please believe me, Nora. She will come back to you—if you give her time.”

Nora gazed through the glass at Joseph Maguire, tears streaming down her face.

3

Nora stared out the car window through a light rain. The sky couldn’t decide whether it was stormy or fair; showers were mixed with bouts of sunshine. They were on their way back to the house, and had just come through a festival-clogged Glencolumbkille when Cormac’s mobile rang.

After a brief conversation, he snapped the phone shut and turned to her. “Garrett Devaney,” he said. “Are you up for a quick detour? Devaney says he has information on the case that he’d rather convey in person. He’s at a bar called Cassidy’s. On this road, he says, up near the crossroads at Largybrack. I gather there’s a sort of hideaway session going on there. Are you up to it?”

“To tell you the truth, I could use a drink.”

Cassidy’s was an old stone building at the side of a crossroads near the mouth of a glen. Cormac ordered up a pair of large whiskeys, and brought them back to where Nora sat in the mostly empty lounge. She glanced over at the small group of players in the back corner of the bar, and saw that Garrett Devaney had spotted them as well. After the next reel set finished, he put down the fiddle and made his way over.

“And how’s Elizabeth?”

Nora didn’t seem able to answer. Cormac jumped in: “A little better—she’s awake. But she hasn’t had a chance to process everything. She knows her father was killed, but—”

Devaney grimaced. “Still denies he did anything wrong?”

“She blames me,” Nora said. “For everything.”

Devaney shook his head. “Now listen, you can’t be thinking like that. It’s rough, I know, but you can’t.” He glanced around at the pub packed with patrons, and lowered his voice. “I’ve been checking with a few contacts. I’ve a mate over at the Serious Crimes Unit, the crowd that are handling the investigation. Here’s something he told me—searching through Hallett’s bags, they found his BlackBerry, with a link to a tracking device planted inside Miranda’s mobile.”

Cormac asked, “What does that mean, exactly?”

Nora said: “That makes sense. Peter knew where Miranda was all along, just as they both knew where Elizabeth was. Peter didn’t leave anything to chance. He must have known what she was up to—that she was coming after us. He was using her to get to me.”

“That’s not all,” Devaney said. “The scene-of-crime squad also found a small bottle of eyedrops—”

“But it wasn’t eyedrops at all. I can tell you what it was. GHB—liquid ecstasy. He told everyone that my sister was addicted to the stuff, out of control, but he was feeding it to her. Out there on the headland, I asked Miranda if she ever had blackouts—from her reaction, I think Peter had done the same thing to her. There’s probably no way to prove it.”

“But finding the stuff in his possession proves that he knew where to get it,” Cormac offered. “That’s something.”

Devaney pursed his lips and looked slightly uncomfortable. “I’m not sure how to tell you this last bit, except to say it straight out—your man Hallett was evidently into wearing women’s clothes. The state pathologist found lacy underpants on him at postmortem, under his regular clothes. I can’t say what it means—I’ll leave that to the psychologists. But I thought you ought to know about it, in case something should leak out in the press.”

Nora could hear Cormac ask a question, but her thoughts were far away, back in the cardboard evidence boxes at Saint Paul police headquarters. All those items of unwashed lingerie the crime scene investigators had found stuffed into the backs of drawers and under Tríona’s bed, all marked with her DNA, and Peter’s, along with unknown donors, male and female. They had always assumed Peter’s DNA was present because he and Tríona were married—and it was a logical assumption—but now there was another possible explanation altogether.

The river was where people went to become someone else. To shed all the strictures, the guises they maintained above, in the real world.

There are things you don’t know, Nora. About Peter, about me—

“For I have seen the false mermaid—” she whispered.

Devaney exchanged a quick look with Cormac. “Well, I’ll leave you. That’s all the news I’ve got for now. I’d better get back to Róisín before she’s completely corrupted by all these Donegal tunes. Give us a shout if you need anything, right?”

After Devaney left them, Nora was silent a long time, staring down at her empty whiskey glass. “Why didn’t she come to me, Cormac? Why wouldn’t she trust me? I could have done something to help her—”

Suddenly the musicians hushed, and all ears in the pub tuned to the sound of an old woman singing. Only a few words of Irish came through; the other sounds seemed nonsensical, a series of long, plaintive vowels. But the leathery voice was so full of experience and grief that all who heard it were mesmerized, unable to move until the last note faded away. Nora swiped at her eyes.

“Who was that singing?” Cormac asked the barman, who’d come to collect their empty glasses.

“Ah, that’s Kitty Sean Cunningham. From Cappagh, just above Teelin. Seventy-eight last Monday week, but she can still wind a good song.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “They say she used to sing, out collecting seaweed, and the seals would come up onto the rocks and listen. Not everyone can call them. But Kitty has the power, they say, because her grandmother was one of ’em.”

“And people still believe that?” Cormac asked.

The barman smiled. “Ah, sure, no one believes the old stories anymore. But like my granny used to say, that doesn’t mean they aren’t true. Can I get you another drink?”

“No thanks,” Cormac said. “We’re finished here.”

As they left the bar, Nora still felt stunned. Devaney’s report dredged up all sorts of dreadful possibilities about what Tríona had gone through in those last few weeks. Each new realization brought fresh pain. Cormac followed her outside, apparently unsure what he should say. What could he say?

At the car, she turned to him. “Do you realize what this means? All this time, I thought Peter was just possessive and jealous. That he killed Tríona—had her killed—because he couldn’t bear to let her go. But it wasn’t that kind of jealousy at all. It was a different kind. He was taking her clothes, Cormac, wearing them down to the river. He didn’t just want to possess Tríona, he wanted to be her—I never understood until now.”

“Nora, what are you saying?”

“All those awful things he accused her of—the drugs and the late nights, the sex with random strangers—Tríona didn’t have any memory of doing those things, because she never did them. He did. And she must have found out somehow. That’s what she was trying to tell me, when she talked about letting things go too far. But she gave him the benefit of the doubt. Right up until the very end. Even after she knew he was deliberately tormenting her, she still wouldn’t believe it. My God—it’s all so twisted.” Though the night was warm, Nora couldn’t keep from shivering. “And it just keeps getting worse. How could he have fooled us for so long—how could we not see what he was? He must have realized that Tríona would try to leave him sooner or later, that eventually she’d begin to figure it out.”

“But just as he was getting desperate enough to act, Miranda came onto the scene, mad jealous of Natalie Russo,” Cormac said. “She played right into his hand.”

“Oh, Cormac—how can I ever tell Elizabeth any of this? It’s all so insane.”

“Don’t think about it, not tonight. Let me take you home.”

4

The next morning, Cormac awakened to find Nora beside him in bed, the fingers of her right hand laced through his. They’d managed to make it through the night, but neither of them had slept well. He could see that the revelations of the previous evening had not loosed their grip on Nora. She looked pale, exhausted. And her parents were due to arrive in less than six hours. That meant everything would be gone over again, in detail, including Elizabeth’s accusations, and he could not save her from any of it.

Nora’s eyes were closed, but she was awake. He touched her face. “I meant to ask, where’s your hazel knot—the one I made you out at Loughnabrone?”

Her hand slipped from his. “It must have fallen out of my pocket the night of the crash. I kept it with me, Cormac, I swear. Right here in my pocket—” She leaned down to pick up her jeans from the floor, showing him where she’d kept it.

A crinkled bit of fabric peeped from the pocket, and he pulled it out, surprised to find an old-fashioned woolen stocking. “What’s this?”

“I’d almost forgotten about that,” she said. “I think an eagle dropped it on me, over at Port na Rón.”

Cormac held the stocking up to the light. Fine black wool—and the heel was neatly darned. He felt a vibration, the same frequency as when he’d first laid eyes on the high-button shoe from the abandoned cottage.

Nora continued: “I’m not sure why I kept it. An odd thing to find at a beach, I guess.”

“Could you show me exactly where you found it?”

“What is it, Cormac? What’s wrong?”

“I’ll explain when we get there.”

At the deserted village, they climbed down the rocky escarpment. Cormac glanced up at the craggy rocks, and at the steep bank that fell away above the beach. The enormous heap of pale stones had washed out of the boggy earth above them.

“Tell me what you saw that day,” he said to Nora.

“When we first arrived at the beach, I was standing here,” she said. “Elizabeth was on the rocks over there—” She pointed out a trio of flat stones at the north edge of the bay. “I was watching her, but something—a movement up there—distracted me. It was a pair of sea eagles. I’ve never seen two of them together like that. They were fighting over something.” She cast her eyes about for the exact spot. “Look, there’s one of them now—”

She set off climbing up the rocks, and Cormac followed. By the time they reached the top of the eroding bank, the eagle was long gone. But as they drew near, Cormac could see where the giant bird had been perched. The stony ground was covered in a blanket of peat that stretched to the edge of the escarpment. He crouched down for a closer look. The edge was unstable; one false move, and you might do a header right down onto the beach below—unless you had wings, of course. Two pairs of talons had made a series of gashes in the soft ground where the two birds had been wrestling. Cormac edged closer to the brink to push aside the drying edge of peat, and drew back in surprise.

“What is it?” Nora asked.

“I’ll let you see for yourself.” He grasped Nora’s hand as she leaned forward. What they were looking at was a human foot, mostly stripped of flesh, the toe delicately pointed seaward. Beside it, the toe of an old-fashioned shoe had begun to surface from under the peat.

“She’s here,” Cormac murmured. “She was right here under their noses all along.”

“What are you talking about?” Nora demanded.

He moved to where the woman’s head should be if this was a normal supine burial, and pulled out his pocketknife, cutting through the grass carpet and peeling it back to expose the wet peat underneath. As he dug with bare hands, he wondered: What would the face of a sea maid look like? Would she still have her beauty after years under the peat, like the cailín rua? His mind conjured the curious faces, the mournful eyes of the seals who surrounded him while he was out rowing. At last his fingers felt something—the roundness of a cranium vault. But as he worked to remove the peat, in the place where he expected to find a forehead, a brow ridge, a nose, there was nothing but a shallow depression and a fistful of splintered bones. Whoever this woman was, her face had been battered in, her identity effectively erased.

Nora knelt beside him. She said: “You know who she is, don’t you?”

“I haven’t had a chance to tell you about this place,” he said. “Remember the other night, when you sang ‘An Mhaighdean Mhara,’ and I asked why you chose that song? There’s a local connection. This is where she lived—”

“Who?”

“The woman from the song—Mary Heaney.”

Nora drew back. “It’s only a story, Cormac. It’s not real.”

“I don’t blame you for being skeptical. I was, too—” He climbed to his feet and reached for her hand. “Come with me.”

Inside the selkie cottage, he dug through the stones and shells under the cot until he found the high-button shoe. He handed it to Nora. “It’s been bothering me for days, ever since I first came here. Why would anyone leave home with only one shoe? Two shoes makes sense, or none—but one shoe doesn’t make any sense at all.”

Nora sat in one of the low chairs to examine the shoe. It was rimed with dust and white mildew, but the cutwork around the ankle was distinctive. This was unmistakably the mate of the one they’d just seen peeping from the turf.

Cormac sank into the opposite chair. “The woman they called Mary Heaney, the woman who lived in this house, was a foreigner. She showed up one day in 1889 on a small boat with a local fisherman, P. J. Heaney. The woman spoke no Irish, no English. But she stayed on and lived with Heaney as his wife, had two children by him. People began to believe she was a selkie, like the Mary Heaney in the song. She would sit alone on the headland; Roz had reports of her singing in a strange language. She has all this documented—Roz has—census records, interviews, newspaper reports. When Mary Heaney disappeared six years later, people said she had discovered the sealskin Heaney had stolen from her, and returned to the sea. Everyone bought into it—all her neighbors here at Port na Rón, the newspapers, even the police. Everyone wanted to believe the myth of the seal wife when it wasn’t what actually happened.”

“But that song is quite old, isn’t it? How could the person who lived here be Mary Heaney if the song has been around for hundreds of years?”

“They did share the same name. And people wanted to believe—Roz thinks it was a convenient way to absolve themselves of responsibility, since it was likely everyone in the village knew she was being ill-treated. Her husband encouraged the selkie stories. If everyone believed she’d gone back to the sea, it would stop them having to search for her.”

“And was the husband never a suspect?”

“He was, of course, but because there was no body, and therefore no proof of murder, Heaney was never charged. Never even arrested. He disappeared from his boat a few years later—presumed drowned.”

“And the children?”

“Shipped off to relations near Buncrana; Roz thinks the boy may have been killed in the First World War. She still hasn’t traced the daughter.”

Nora turned to stare out the cottage door at the tumbling surf. They sat in silence for a long time, listening to the hiss of the tide, the rattling stones. At last she stood up.

“Let’s go back,” Nora said. “We ought to at least cover her face.”

5

Frank Cordova spent the day after Nora Gavin’s phone call putting away the murder book on her sister. Evidence would keep drifting in for a few more weeks, but it was over. At five, he got a call from Jackie Smart in the crime lab.

“Hey, remember that chewing gum you brought in the other day? We got a positive match to the unknown female from Harry Shaughnessy’s sweatshirt and shoes. Hope that helps.”

“It does, Jackie—thanks.”

With the DNA and the false mermaid seeds from the crime scenes, they would have had more than enough physical evidence to convict Miranda Staunton of two murders—if she had lived.

What they didn’t have was definitive proof that she’d actually been set up, that killing Tríona hadn’t been her own idea. But how did you prove Peter Hallett’s subtle brand of manipulation? In all likelihood, he would be remembered—by most people who knew him, at least—as a victim, an innocent bystander done in by the excesses of people around him.

The story of any crime left out most of the details, the tiny minutiae that he dealt with every day. So much of what they discovered about people—the victims and the perpetrators—stayed buried in the files: the secret lives, all the missed or hidden connections that were either too complex or too sordid for the public to comprehend. Heroes and villains, that’s what the public wanted, so they could shake their heads and cluck over their newspapers in the morning. The truth never really lined up with the facts.

The Nick Mosher connection had been bothering him ever since Nora brought it up, a dull presence lodged in the side of his head. How could it be just coincidence that Tríona and the friend she was working for both ended up dead on the same day? One thing was certain: Truman Stark knew more than he was telling.

Frank opened a drawer and dug out the file he’d retrieved on Nick Mosher’s accident. His body had been found at the bottom of an elevator shaft; cause of death was a broken neck, compounded by blunt force trauma to the head and face, injuries consistent with a fall.

Closing his eyes, Frank saw the shape of a body sprawled four stories below. He saw a pair of dark glasses, lying facedown next to the elevator, one of the lenses cracked. The investigating officers had ruled out suicide. If Nick Mosher had simply stepped into thin air, why were his glasses still up on the fourth floor, and not at the bottom of the elevator shaft? Were they already broken when he fell?

There was another strange detail in the file as well: a bunch of wilted flowers in the elevator. Nothing fancy, just a handful of garden-variety blooms—picked, not cut, according to the lab. Not that a thing like that made much difference in a case like this. The weird thing was that the flowers had been crushed before they hit the elevator floor and wilted there. So what did mangled flowers conjure up—a jilted suitor, maybe? No way to know if the flowers were connected. Only one elevator in the building; everyone used it.

Truman Stark had admitted following Nora from the parking garage to the Sturgis Building, maybe afraid that she knew something, or that she’d discover something. Stark claimed he’d been watching Tríona in order to protect her, but she’d still ended up dead. If Stark was supposed to be protecting her, where had he been that night? What was he doing when Tríona was attacked? Maybe the kid felt like he’d failed, fallen down as a guardian angel. What would make him think that? Frank’s brain circled back to something Stark had said during his recent interview: If I told the truth you wouldn’t believe me.

Frank slid the file back in his drawer, the image of Nick Mosher’s broken glasses, and those flowers in the elevator still lingering. He picked up his phone and scrolled through the recent calls until he found the number he was looking for. Sarah Cates answered on the first ring.

“It’s Frank Cordova. I wanted to thank you for coming to the visitation the other night. I saw you come in as I was leaving. Sorry I couldn’t stay.”

“That’s okay—I happened to see the notice in the paper. Thought I’d pay my respects. I’m sorry—”

“Thanks.” Frank felt his chest constrict, and braced himself for the stabbing pain, but it never came. “Does that offer of a free rowing lesson still stand?” He closed his eyes and pictured the two of them out on the water, pulling in the same direction, her turning to him with those eyes the color of the river in sunlight.

“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.

6

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:

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:

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?

Nora swam forward, eyes wide open, when all at once someone or something caught her by the waist and lifted her clear of the water. Setting her upright in the shallows, Cormac took her face between his hands. “I can’t let you do it, Nora—”

All at once it occurred to her what he must have imagined, following her, watching her walk out into the sea. “Oh, Cormac, I wasn’t trying to—”

“Weren’t you?”

“No—I don’t know what I was doing. But it wasn’t that, truly—I swear.”

“You walked straight into the water, with all your clothes on—”

She looked him up and down. “So did you.”

“But I was only going after you—” He stopped and sighed, resting his forehead against hers. “Why are we doing this to ourselves? You’ve been running from me for nearly two years, Nora. Why do you keep running?”

“I don’t know, Cormac. I can’t—”

“Can’t what? Do you really believe Tríona would want you to suffer as you have? I know you could go on punishing yourself forever—but when will it ever be enough? You wanted to know the name of the tune I sent—I’ll tell you. It’s ‘My Love Is in America.’ Do you understand? Can you not see that I love you? Stop running, Nora. Stay with me. Be with me.”

She looked into his eyes, and felt deep within them—and deep within herself—an immense, eternal pulse, calling up the words of that ancient, mysterious charm: She herself has best means to carry. When she offered Cormac her answer, it did not come in words.

As daylight broke over the headland, the mist slowly disappeared, and the surf began to churn around them with the incoming tide. The rising sun threw golden shafts on gulls and choughs as they took wing, and on the wet, curious faces of three young seals cavorting in the waves beyond the harbor rocks. High above the headland, almost out of sight, a lone sea eagle soared aloft.