False Mermaid

1

Death was close at hand, but the wounded creature leapt and twisted, desperate to escape. Seng Sotharith pulled his line taut and played the fish, sensing in the animal’s erratic movements its furious refusal to give in. He would do the same, he thought—had done the same, when he was caught.

Sotharith sat on the crooked trunk of an enormous cottonwood that leaned out over the water and watched the river flow by. Sometimes as he sat here, suspended above the water, he whispered the words over and over again, intrigued by their strangeness on his tongue. Minnesota. Mississippi. He had been in America a long time—five years in California, and now nearly eight years with his cousin’s family in Saint Paul, but still the music of the language eluded him.

High above on the bluffs, the noises of the city droned, but here he could shut them out. Sometimes on foggy mornings, he looked across the water and felt himself back in Cambodia. He saw houses on stilts, heard the shouts of his older brothers as they played and splashed in the river. The pictures never lasted long, dissipating quickly with the mist. Now the sun was rising behind him, gilding the leaves on the opposite bank. Soon he would have to scale the steep bluff and get to his job at the restaurant. All afternoon and evening, deaf to the shouts and noise of the kitchen, he would wash dishes, wrapped in his thoughts and in memories that billowed through his head like the clouds of steam that rose from the sinks.

He had once harbored a secret ambition to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor. Now, nearly forty years old, he knew it was far too late. But he was determined to learn English at least, to conquer its strange sounds and even stranger writing. It was the one way he could bring honor to his father’s memory.

Sotharith concentrated on his fish, letting the creature run one last time before reeling it in. Coming here helped clear away the images from his dreams, the tangled arms and legs he stepped through every night, the expanse of skulls covering the ground like cobblestones.

When he first arrived in Saint Paul, his cousin had brought him to a doctor, a gray-haired woman with kind eyes. She asked him to speak about the bones, but he could not. No words would come. They all looked at him—his cousin, the interpreter, the doctor. She tried to tell him that he had nothing to worry about, that he was safe here in America. He repeated the English word inside his head: safe. No matter how many times he said it, the sound meant nothing to him. Sotharith only knew that he had to climb down to this riverbank as often as he could, to walk the woods and sandbars below the green canopy and hear the birds at first light.

His catch was finally tiring. Sotharith stood and edged his way down the cottonwood’s broad trunk and landed the fish in the shallows beside its exposed and twisted roots. It was time to go. He gathered his sandals and the rest of his gear and headed to the place where he cleaned his fish, a pool in a marshy clearing just below the bluff.

When he reached the place, Sotharith took out his knife, giving the blade a few sharpening swipes against a small oval whetstone he kept in his pocket. The flash from the knife fell upon a bunch of red berries growing a few feet away. Sotharith set the knife aside and crawled toward the fruit that hung like tiny jewels, bright crimson against the dry leaves. He plucked one berry, biting into its sweet-and-bitter flesh, the taste of survival. Then he lifted the fish from the basket and cleaned it with a practiced hand, slitting open its pale belly and clearing the shiny, slippery viscera from between the ribs with one finger as he watched the light in its staring eyes go out.

The sun was barely up, but already the heat—and the smell—were almost overwhelming. They were being marched across a muddy field littered with bodies, and although he tried not to, he could not avoid stepping on them. The soldiers ahead stopped for some reason, and they heard voices raised in argument.Get down, his father whispered suddenly.Get down and be still. He’d felt a hand pressing on his shoulder, and had done as his father commanded, slipping down between the still-warm bodies, and trying not to look into their unseeing eyes. He felt a cold, lifeless hand laid across his face, then heard the orders barked at his father and the others, and felt icy terror as they moved on without him. He did not make a sound. A few moments later he heard the soldiers call a halt. No shots followed, no shouting, just the distant, dull sound of blows and bodies falling, and a single faint cry, abruptly cut short. It hadn’t taken long; by then the killing had become habit.

Everything was less clear when he tried to remember what came after, how long he had lain among the dead, waiting for a chance to escape, or all the days and weeks he’d spent hiding in the jungle, catching rainwater as it fell from palm fronds, eating the fruit he could gather, insects and grubs he dug out of the ground, whatever he could find. Time lost all measure; it seemed that he had lived with the birds and the monkeys for years before the soldiers caught him and sent him to the camps. It had taken another kind of will to survive there.

Here in America, he had always felt the mark of death upon him, a stain where that cold hand had touched his face.

He washed the fish blood from his hands in the pool of spring water that rose up from the forest floor. After cleaning fish, he always took care to bury the entrails. He’d chosen this spot not just for the spring, but because the earth around it was soft—easy to dig. With one hand, he cleared away dead leaves; with the other, he picked up a broken branch to use as a tool. At first, the ground yielded easily, coming up in irregular clods. Then his makeshift hoe snagged on something. Rocking forward on his knees, he pulled harder, tugging the branch to one side and then the other, and felt the earth erupt beneath him as the object suddenly came loose. He tumbled backward, tasting a shower of rotting leaves and feeling dry branches snap under his weight. Sotharith raised himself on his elbows and looked down to see what he had unearthed.

On the ground between his feet rested a human skull, its cheekbones cracked and splintered, empty eyeholes staring. Sotharith could only stare back, not daring to breathe. Inside his chest, he felt a slow resurrection of the knowledge that he had carried within him for so long. There was no safe place, not even here. The killing fields were everywhere.

2

The elevator opened, and Nora Gavin peered out into a long, broad hallway. It was dimly lit, empty, and silent. She stepped off and felt the whoosh of closing doors behind her. No signs, nothing to tell her where to go. But this must be the place. Her footsteps sounded in hollow echoes against the tile, and she was acutely aware of passing through pools of light that fell from buzzing fluorescent fixtures.

Upon reaching the wide door at the end of the hall, she raised one hand to shade her eyes and peered through the window. In the glow of a single hanging light, a still, silent figure draped in white lay on a table in the middle of the room. A tangle of dark red hair fell from beneath the sheet. It was happening again. She backed away, pressing herself against the chilly tiles, unable to speak or move. The door began to swing open, and all at once a loud voice sounded close to her ear: “Ma’am, would you mind bringing your seat forward?”

She awakened with a start, still in the cold horror of the nightmare. It took her a moment to remember where she was—on a plane, headed from Ireland home to Saint Paul. She tried to take a breath, but her chest was still constricted with fear.

“Are you all right?” the flight attendant asked.

“Fine, thanks.”

The woman’s eyes held hers for a moment longer, until she felt obligated to say something more: “Bad dream.”

The flight attendant nodded sympathetically and moved on. Nora sat up and pulled the blanket from her shoulders, raking both hands through her hair to make sure it wasn’t sticking up in odd places. She must have been out for an hour or more. She had slept only fitfully the last few nights, probably the only reason she could nap on a plane—in broad daylight, too. It seemed like an age since she’d left her flat in Dublin, but that had only been the start of this strange, overlong day. Following the sun on its westward journey always felt like traveling back in time.

She scrubbed at her face with both hands, trying to erase the pictures that seemed to linger just behind her eyelids. Now that she was returning home, all the images she’d tried to push away these past three years were invading her waking thoughts and dreams once more. Strange—in all the times she’d had that awful dream, she had never made it inside the viewing room, never once lifted the sheet. And that was odd, because in real life, the nightmare hadn’t stopped at the door.

She had not been alone. Flanked by two detectives, she had entered the viewing room sick with dread. A disembodied voice had asked: Are you ready? She remembered nodding once, knowing it was a lie. How could anyone be ready for what she was about to see?

When the morgue attendant pulled back the sheet she stood frozen, trying to make sense of the coil of red hair and the features so brutally disarranged. A strident chorus of denials echoed in her ears as the attendant gently lifted the body’s right arm and turned the wrist to her, a reminder that she was here to check for identifying marks. What was the point, if this wasn’t Tríona? It couldn’t be.

Then she had seen it, a shape like a half-moon just below the wrist. There was no denying her sister had such a mark. The attendant moved down and lifted the sheet to reveal another small dark blot of pigment on the calf—yes, Tríona had something very like that as well, but still the voices shrilled—until he rounded the end of the table and gently turned up the sheet at the ankle to expose a small whitened zigzag scar. It was only then that the clamoring voices in her head were stilled. In the silence that followed, she reached out and placed one hand over the scar, remembering how she had been responsible for that particular distinguishing mark.

It had been a sweltering day in the heat of summer. Fifteen years old, and forced into a bike ride with her sister, she had deliberately taken a rough gravel path too difficult for ten-year-old Tríona to navigate. She remembered turning back at the sound of tires skidding in gravel, and how the oily bicycle chain had bitten so cruelly into her sister’s ankle. How she’d gone into automatic mode, doing all the things she had learned in first-aid class—wrapping the wound, applying steady pressure—until the blood stopped. She remembered her satisfaction when her first aid worked. She had felt prepared for anything in that moment—anything, that is, except for the way Tríona looked at her. How could she have forgotten? That moment had altered everything, when she saw herself for the first time through her sister’s eyes, and felt thoroughly ashamed. Standing in the mortuary, she could feel that there was no pulse, no breath, no life at all beneath her hand, and still she could not let go.

Nora sat back and closed her eyes again. Today was five years to the day that Tríona had gone missing, nearly five years since her almost unrecognizable remains had turned up in an underground parking garage in the trunk of her own car. Nora knew she could not let herself be pulled back into the downward spiral that seemed to draw her in whenever she thought of Tríona’s murder. Nightmares and flashbacks were not a good sign.

She reached into her pocket for the knot of green hazel Cormac Maguire had woven for her on their last evening together, at a place called Loughnabrone. Lake of Sorrows. A place where a number of people had died, where she had nearly lost her own life. She did not dwell on that thought. What she remembered most clearly from that awful day was the expression on Cormac’s face when he saw her hands, her clothes covered in blood. And the relief that washed over his features when she said: Not mine. It’s not my blood.

Swells of longing swept through her. It was just as she had feared that day out on the bog, that upon leaving Cormac she would start to see him everywhere. Stop. She was going to drive herself mad, thinking like this. And yet it was really because of him that she was on this plane, heading back home again. The time they’d spent together these last fourteen months made her question whether she’d done all she could for Tríona. Without Cormac, maybe she’d still be working away in Dublin, trying to avoid thinking about what had driven her there. But working beside him, she had been carried along into stories of people whose lives had ended in grief. They were all real to her, though she had become acquainted with them only in death. And most of all there was the red-haired girl, the cailín rua, that nameless, decapitated creature from the Irish boglands who had set everything back in motion. It was the cailín rua whose fierce and unending suit for justice had set Nora’s own foot again on the path she never should have left. As deeply as she’d become involved in the stories of the bog people, whose stories she had helped to reconstruct, she had come to realize that they were all just stand-ins. Behind everything, it was Tríona’s unfinished story that kept catching at her conscience, pulling her back into places she did not wish to go.

Cormac had not asked her to remain in Ireland. On the contrary, he said he understood why she had to make this trip—but how could he begin to understand, when there was so much she had deliberately kept from him? She had explained what happened to Tríona—the bare facts of the murder, at least—and confessed her suspicions about her brother-in-law, Peter Hallett. But the thought of spelling out all the rest of it—trying to find words to explain about the rift with her parents, about her young niece, Elizabeth, not to mention the harrowing dreams and doubts about her own grip on reality—all of that was more than she had been able to face in her evolving relationship with Cormac.

She must remember Elizabeth. How long would the innocence of childhood protect her, how long would it be before Elizabeth had to navigate the same minefields with her father that Tríona had tried to cross? No matter how many different ways Nora thought about the situation, it always came down to a final question: What was she prepared to sacrifice to see that tragedy did not repeat itself?

This time she would not fly away to Ireland when things got difficult—and they would get difficult; there was no point in deceiving herself. She felt the power of the jet engines only a few feet away, anticipating the dreadful roar they would make at touchdown, trying to reverse their own lethal momentum. She felt the last stomach-churning lift just before the huge wheels skidded onto the tarmac and understood that there was no reverse, no slowing down, no stopping now.

3

Rain was nothing new in Seattle. Usually it was just damp and misty, but today the clouds had begun to pile up in varying shades of black, letting down a hard rain all day long. Eleven-year-old Elizabeth Hallett slung her heavy backpack into the empty back seat in the yellow mini-bus, and sat down beside it, pushing the wet hair out of her face and watching the water streak against the windows, turned to shadowy mirrors by the strange mid-afternoon darkness. As she stared at her reflection—the high forehead, the sprinkling of freckles, the wavy red hair now plastered to her head and shoulders—she wondered what it was, exactly, that made people stare at her. To her own eyes, nothing stood out. But there must be something. She could see it in the way they looked at her. Maybe she should just learn to ignore it. Being different wasn’t so terrible. It was just a fact, like having freckles or red hair.

It wasn’t just the rainstorm that set this day apart. For the past week, she’d been going to day camp at the art museum downtown. Her dad’s idea—probably just a way to keep her out from underfoot while he was busy. Today, her last day of camp, was also their last day in Seattle. Tomorrow she and her dad were moving back to Minnesota.

Elizabeth wasn’t quite sure how she felt about that yet. The moving part might not be so bad—her grandparents lived in Saint Paul, and it was a long time since she’d seen them. It was the other part that made her feel strange, about her dad getting married again. Why did he have to get married? Weren’t things all right as they were? When she thought about all that, it seemed like something was caught in her throat, and she couldn’t seem to swallow. She should have known something was up when he started asking what she thought of Miranda. What was she supposed to say? She couldn’t tell him the truth, so she just said something stupid about how pretty Miranda was. That wasn’t a lie. But how could it not bother him when the look in Miranda’s eyes didn’t match her perfect, pasted-on smile? Elizabeth wondered why her dad didn’t notice things like that. Maybe he couldn’t see it.

Miranda was Uncle Marc’s sister. Elizabeth had always thought of him as her uncle, even though they weren’t really related—Marc was her dad’s best friend. He would have been her uncle if he’d married Aunt Nora, but something had happened, grown-up stuff nobody would talk about. Now Marc was going to be her uncle anyway, sort of.

Miranda was already back at their old house in Saint Paul—working on the wedding trip, she said, like it was a real job or something. Miranda had a real job—an event planner, whatever that was—but she never seemed to work. She seemed to like hanging out at their house a lot more than working.

The ride out to the island took a while, and the rain had begun to diminish as the mini-bus wended its way through the island’s curving roads and cul-de-sacs. When it pulled up beside their driveway, Elizabeth hopped out, hoping she could make it to the house before the rain started again. The driveway snaked from the main road along a crooked shoreline through spruce trees and white pines whose fallen needles made thick beds on either side of the road. Elizabeth felt the heavy backpack pounding against her as she tried to walk quickly.

A wild gust blew up and rain began to fall in sheets around her, pushing her forward, making it difficult to walk upright. She ducked under a pine tree to wait until the rain subsided. Among the books in her pack was one she had stolen from the public library two weeks ago. She had never stolen anything before and now felt pangs of conscience, remembering how her fingers had trembled as she removed the crinkly plastic jacket and substituted one of her own books instead. By the time the library figured it out, she would be gone. Of course they had library books in Saint Paul, but they might not have this one. She could not leave it behind.

She zipped open her backpack and took out the stolen book. The Selkie’s Child. A picture book, really, meant for little kids. But she had come across it by accident in the returned book bin, and found the picture on the cover irresistible. The story told of a fisherman taking refuge on an island during a storm. The next morning, climbing on the rocks, he happened to catch sight of a beautiful fair-haired selkie as she was shedding her sealskin and taking human form. He fell in love with her, and made up his mind to steal her sealskin, which meant she could not return to the sea. He took her home with him, and for a while they were happy. They had a child, a boy named Dónal. As Dónal grew, he could see that his mother was troubled. For days on end, she would weep and stare out at the sea. Sometimes she would sing in a low voice, in a language he could not understand. He began to hear whispers in the village that his mother was one of the seal folk, and she wept because she was missing her own people in the Land Under Wave. One day Dónal found a bundle of sealskin in the rafters of their house, and showed it to his mother. He didn’t understand the change that came over her. She snatched the bundle from his hands and disappeared over the sea rocks. When she didn’t come home, Dónal and his father had bread and tea for their supper. His mother had been gone for a few weeks when Dónal thought he saw her, one stormy day, floating on the waves at the mouth of the sea. He could have sworn that she raised one hand, as if to wave good-bye, and then she disappeared. He called her name, and squinted against the wind, but no one was there. From that day until he was an old, old man, he swore he had seen his mother’s bright head bobbing beyond the rocks at the edge of the sea.

Elizabeth closed the book and held it to her, aware of the new, slightly foreign tenderness of the skin beneath her clothes, wondering what it felt like to shed your outer shell and become something new. She didn’t fully understand why she couldn’t let go of this book; all she knew was that the words and pictures made her feel strange and sad, and that returning it to the library was out of the question.

From her refuge under the tree, she could see out into Useless Bay. Such sad names—Useless Bay, Deception Pass, Cape Disappointment—what were they looking for, the people who had put those names on the map? To her, this bay was anything but useless; at low tide, its beaches were studded with anemones, bright starfish, and sand dollars. She would miss the swirling patterns in the sand, the scuttling crabs and tiny freshwater streams and rivulets that trickled down from higher ground. She had studied the map of North America. Minnesota was as far from the ocean as you could get. Her dad said their house in Saint Paul was on the Mississippi River—but what good was that? A river wasn’t at all the same.

Through a curtain of mist, she could see a small shape moving far out in the bay—a seal, floating on its back, tasting the raindrops. The same one that came nearly every day, watching from a distance as she walked the beachfront. Sometimes she waved, and the seal would raise a flipper or dip its head in greeting. At least that was how it seemed. Mostly they just looked at each other. She knew it was the same seal from the mark on its face, an irregular dark spot like a star that covered its missing eye. Once she had even waded out into the water, and the seal had come right up to her. But when she reached out her hand, it had turned and backed away. She liked to imagine there was a communication between them, the understanding of two silent creatures, alone together. She had resisted the urge to give it any sort of a name, preferring to think that it already had one—something strange and beautiful in its own language. Seals did have their own language; Elizabeth had heard them calling to each other. An ordinary human name might be a bit insulting. As the seal ducked under the water’s surface, she felt an uncomfortable tightness in her throat. And suddenly her face felt hot, as she remembered an incident from earlier in the day. Normally she would have taken her lunch outside, but they’d been forced to stay inside the museum because of the rain. She was sitting alone—reading, as usual—when a group of girls walked by. Shelby Cooper and Nicole Buckley and some others. Girls like Shelby and Nicole and all their Crombie Zombie friends usually made a point of avoiding her, but today they’d been staring and whispering behind their hands. She had heard Shelby’s hushed voice as they passed by: “No, it’s true—I swear to God. Her mother is—”

The last word dropped to an inaudible whisper, and the girls moved closer together, covering their mouths and laughing nervously.

Nicole said: “If you don’t believe us, we’ll show you. It’s all on the Internet.”

Elizabeth knew her mother had been killed in a car accident when she was six. Why should that be some big secret? She felt a little sick, suddenly realizing that she didn’t know anything about the accident. Nobody ever came right out and told her what had happened. All she remembered was a series of strange, endless days where conversation seemed to be taking place far above her head, hushed voices stopping abruptly whenever she came near. At one point, she overheard something about a car. If she asked when her mother was coming home, her father would just look pained and turn away. One thing she did remember distinctly was Aunt Nora taking her aside one day, asking if she understood that her mother was not coming home. If she knew what it meant when someone died. Elizabeth thought about the baby bird she and Nora had found on the sidewalk once. She asked whether it was like that, and Nora said it was. Elizabeth had nodded then, and said she did understand, but it was a lie. She hadn’t understood anything at all. Any tears she had shed that day had been for the bird. She could still remember the downy softness of its breast, the wrinkled lids on the tiny eyes.

She couldn’t even remember her mother’s face anymore. In five years, the picture in her head had faded away until it was only a hazy impression, a shape without features. She did remember a few things: hiding in a closet, face pressed into clothes of rough wool and soft fur, the thrill of being discovered, gathered up and rocked by someone with a low voice, humming a tune that traveled through her bones. She remembered letting her fingers slide through long, smooth hair that smelled faintly of soap, drifting to sleep on whispered stories about fantastic creatures, half animal, half human. The stories themselves had mostly slipped away, but sometimes an unfamiliar word or the ghost of a scent could conjure up that strange mixture of sadness and contentment she had felt lying in bed and listening, fighting to stay awake.

Sometimes she could see her mother’s face, but only when she was dreaming. One particular dream came over and over again. A bell would ring, and she would answer the door to find a red-haired stranger on the front steps of their house. Even though the face was unfamiliar, somehow she knew this smiling visitor was her mother. That’s the way dreams were. Her mother would take her hand and walk with her down to a rocky beach, where they stepped into the water, wading out deeper and deeper, past floating seaweed and foam until the ground disappeared from under their feet and the waves pulled them under. Then came the big surprise: in dreams she could breathe as easily underwater as in the air above. It wasn’t even cold. Of course she knew it was only a dream. But upon waking she felt half sick with longing, wishing it could be true.

Elizabeth stared out at the rain, filled with a slowly expanding anxiety about all the things she didn’t understand. She had always felt as if other people saw and understood more than she did. They expected her to grasp things she hadn’t quite figured out. And at that moment, a notion—vague and indistinct at first—began to open up and spread out inside her. What if everyone had been lying? What if there had been no car crash, and her mother had just gone away? That happened sometimes. Her mother might even have another family by now, a new family she liked better than the old one. Elizabeth lifted the edge of a scab on her knee and watched as a few bright drops of blood began to ooze from the exposed wound. It hurt a bit, but she couldn’t seem to stop until she had removed the whole scab, exposing a patch of brand-new, bright pink skin beneath.

The violent cloudburst was over. She stood up and scanned the expanse of gray water in the bay, hoping for one last glimpse of her friend, but there was no sign of the dark, familiar shape. It was time to go.

4

It was late afternoon when Nora’s rental car pulled up in front of an Edwardian foursquare on a crooked side street off Summit Avenue in Saint Paul. Before leaving Ireland, she’d found a furnished apartment to rent here, a former chauffeur’s quarters tucked above a carriage house. The neighborhood was a maze of tree-lined boulevards atop the river bluffs, where nineteenth-century lumber barons and steamship magnates had spent their fortunes on extravagant homes. The carriage house happened to be only a few blocks from where her parents lived on Crocus Hill—easy walking distance. If only the breach between them could be bridged as easily as that.

Nora found the key hidden under a window box beside the carriage house door—exactly where the owner had said it would be. She unlocked the apartment door, venturing upstairs to look around before lugging in her bags. Standing on tiptoe, she could just glimpse the Mississippi river bluffs from the kitchen window. Wherever she went today, the river seemed to follow, lurking at the edge of her vision, never letting her forget its presence. Somewhere along that river was the place her sister had been murdered.

Tríona’s body had been found in the trunk of her car in an underground parking garage downtown, but seeds and leaves combed from her hair at the postmortem said she’d most likely been attacked and killed in an area of black ash seepage swamp. The trouble was, there were hundreds of miles of black ash swamps along the Mississippi corridor. They’d never found the primary crime scene.

Sweat was trickling down Nora’s back by the time she’d hauled everything up the winding stairs to the second-floor apartment. She flipped the switch on the ancient window air conditioner and heard it hum to life as she changed out of her travel clothes into a pair of shorts and a tank top. Three years in Ireland, and she’d forgotten how the Midwest summer felt against bare skin. She caught a glimpse of herself in the full-length mirror that stood in the corner and ventured closer to make an assessment. Although she was usually oblivious to her many flaws, they were now all she could see: the short, dark hair flattened from sleeping on the plane, eyes too large in the pale face scattered with freckles, mouth set in grim determination. She’d lost weight in the past few weeks. The pallor of her limbs was suited to the Irish climate but looked positively unhealthy here. Nora examined her face in the mirror. I wasn’t always like this. Where was the person she had been before, the one who could think straight, who could laugh and feel joy—could feel something, anything, besides this terrible hollowness? She spoke silently to the strange, melancholy creature who stared out at her from the mirror. Where is she? What the hell have you done with her? She had to fight a sudden urge to smash the glass. Not a mirror’s fault what it reflected.

She turned away and started to survey her new surroundings: windows on three sides of the sitting room, including a deep window seat on either side and an arched triptych of leaded glass at the gable. The sitting-room furniture was a hodgepodge of different styles, definitely secondhand, but comfortable enough: there was a full-sized spindle bed covered in a handmade quilt, a cane rocking chair and upholstered love seat, a small oak desk. The sloping walls were covered in ornately patterned wallpaper, the kind that might play tricks on you in the dark. The place was certainly sufficient; she wasn’t here for luxury. But it was time to rearrange. If she was going to act the detective, she might as well let this space play its corresponding role as incident room. She pulled the bed away from the center wall, repositioning it under the eaves. Then she returned to the wall and ran a hand over the smooth, papered surface. It would do as a bulletin board—any damage could be dealt with later.

Her second suitcase still stood in the middle of the floor. Inside were the files and papers she’d collected for the past five years, all the evidence and leads in the case, all the abandoned theories and blind alleys she had traveled down. The contents of the suitcase must have shifted in transit; as she began to unzip it, an avalanche of paper spilled across the floor. Sifting through the mixed-up files—autopsy reports, notes on physical evidence, search inventories, photographs, interview notes—she thought about the wasted effort these files represented. For two years after the murder, she’d spent nearly every waking hour trying to find enough evidence to put Tríona’s killer away. And she had failed. Seeing all the familiar, dog-eared corners, feeling the well-worn softness of every file, she was nearly overcome with despair, knowing there was nothing new inside them, nothing to tip the scales one way or the other. Every index card, every photograph, every scrap of paper had a dozen or more holes in it from being tacked up to walls, first here, and then in Ireland. It occurred to her, and not for the first time, that she had just been rearranging the pieces, trying different configurations, hoping that a recognizable pattern might begin to emerge. But if some major piece of the puzzle was missing, she could rearrange these things all she liked and the picture would never come clear. From the edge of the pile, she unearthed the ragged, taped-together city map she had carried to Ireland and back, tacking it up on the wall and once again marking important locations with red pushpins: Peter and Tríona’s house along the River Road, her parents’ place on Crocus Hill, the house she had shared with Marc Staunton across the river in Mendota, the sites she had scoured for evidence along the river, the library where Tríona had been spotted in the hours before the murder, and finally, the parking garage in Lowertown, where her sister’s body had been discovered.

She fished out and unrolled the timeline she’d begun five years ago, marking out the days and hours between the established facts, the documented events in the final week of Tríona’s life. Some of the handwriting was hardly recognizable as her own. As she glanced at the place where the solid red line representing her sister’s earthly existence came to an abrupt end, Nora realized she could never look at this piece of paper again without being reminded that her own life, similarly represented, would reach the edge of the paper and beyond. What exactly did she have to show for her continued survival? Since Tríona’s death, so much in her life had spiraled downward and ended in failure: her once-bright teaching career, her relationship with Marc Staunton, even the closeness she’d always had with her parents—all gone. She’d been away from Ireland less than twenty-four hours, and already her whole life there seemed like a distant dream. How had she let herself believe that time with Cormac had been real? It seemed such a long time ago now, though it had been barely three days since she’d awakened beside him. She stooped to pick up a bundle of photographs that had fallen on the floor. Ireland had been a temporary respite, and now it was over. Time to wake up, get back to reality.

She took apart the bundle of photos and began tacking images of Tríona to the wall: first, the close-up of a toddler with red corkscrew curls, dressed in overalls and a pair of homemade fairy wings, then a gawky ten-year-old straddling a bike and squinting into the sun—and, finally, the grown-up Tríona, in profile against the rocks and trees of Lake Superior’s North Shore. She kept these pictures together because they came the closest to capturing that rare quality her sister always had—she remembered looking into those eyes, even before Tríona could speak, and grasping the fact that there was a fully developed consciousness in there.

That Tríona had actually loved Peter Hallett, Nora had no doubt. He’d probably never deserved it. But what would the world be if people loved only those who were deserving? She often wondered what had been set in motion the first time Peter Hallett laid eyes on her sister. People talked about chemistry, and some of what people considered chemistry was actually measurable—pheromone levels, synaptic activity, pupil size. But those were just the observable responses surrounding the original glimmer of attraction, just as the songs and poems that tried to delimit love were not the thing itself. And what of the end of love? Sometimes it seemed to reverse itself in an instant. Perhaps it was not chemistry after all, but more akin to a magnetic charge, a force of nature that could bring people together and just as strongly repel them. Was that what had happened with Peter and Tríona?

The very next picture in Nora’s bundle was of Peter Hallett himself. Every detail of his appearance was exquisite: the thick, wavy black hair, full lips so prominent in the lean face, the eyes that could vary from deep aquamarine to cobalt, depending on the light. For some reason, it was always the word “beautiful” rather than “handsome” that sprang to mind when she looked at him. Always something subtly ambiguous about his sexuality, which somehow seemed to magnify its power. His gaze conveyed a blend of sensuality and self-assurance, tempered perhaps with a touch of wariness, a hint of vulnerability. There was something restless and impulsive about him, something dangerous and mysterious and mercurial—all qualities not unlike those of the theater directors and other creative types to whom Tríona had ever been drawn. One glance from those blue eyes could make you feel extraordinary, adored. Without warning, Nora was jolted back to the day she’d met Peter Hallett.

It was only about six months after she’d started seeing Marc Staunton, a fellow med student. Marc had been in excellent spirits that evening, pouring them each a glass of wine before they were off to dinner and then to the opening night of The Winter’s Tale. Tríona was starting to show real promise as a professional actress. She’d caught some critical attention for roles at smaller theater companies, and had just been cast as Hermione, her first major Shakespearean lead at the flagship regional house. It was a very big deal. Nora remembered feeling jittery with anticipation. Marc said: “You’ll never guess who called me today, out of the blue—my old college roommate. He’s just back from living in Europe, thinking of setting up shop here as an architect. I told him we might be able to swing an extra ticket tonight, introduce him around a bit. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Why should I mind? I’m sure we can finagle something. What’s he like?”

“All right, I suppose—if you go in for charming, talented, unbelievably good-looking people. He’s always been like that—a little too extraordinary. You want to hate him, but it’s not possible.” Marc hesitated. “You know, on second thought, maybe I should call the whole thing off, tell him I couldn’t score the extra ticket.”

“Relax—he’s probably fat and bald by now.”

Marc shook his head. “Nora, Nora, Nora. You don’t seem to comprehend the sort of person we’re talking about. It’s all right—you’ll understand when you meet him.”

Even with that forewarning, she was not prepared for the dazzling, dark-haired stranger who approached her in the theater lobby. He took her hand with a flourish, and pressed it to his lips.

“Nora—Marc’s description didn’t do you justice.” He must have seen them come in together.

She was genuinely flustered, not only by the suddenness of Peter Hallett’s approach and the oddly antiquated gesture, but also by the intense blue eyes that locked onto hers with a mixture of curiosity, playfulness, and frank sexual appraisal. The memory of that first encounter made her blush, even now.

“Unhand her, you rotten bastard,” Marc said, approaching from behind and clapping his friend on the back. “God, you haven’t changed a bit. I turn my head for half a second, and there you are, worming your way into my place—” In that fraction of a second, Nora wondered what the little exchange revealed about their relationship as roommates. Despite the mock jealousy, it was clear that Marc was enjoying himself.

But as soon as the curtain rose and Peter Hallett set eyes on her sister, all idle flirtation with Nora and anyone else abruptly ceased. How perfectly still Tríona had stood in that shaft of light at the play’s closing scene. How strange and magical she had seemed—the wronged wife turned by her grief into stone. Nora had often found herself wondering whether Peter Hallett had been attracted to the flesh-and-blood Tríona that night or to her character, Hermione. Whatever the answer to that question, his pursuit of Tríona had been relentless, full press from the beginning, and he had not stopped until he possessed her. His campaign had begun at the opening-night party after the show, when he stole a bottle of champagne from the servers and followed Tríona around all night, ready whenever her glass was low.

Later, as they stood at the mirror in the ladies’ room, Nora had ventured an aside: “I think Marc’s friend likes you.”

Tríona stared absently at her own reflection. “Who are you talking about?”

“The guy who’s been following you around all night—Marc’s friend, Peter Hallett.”

“Oh—right.” Tríona concentrated on something in the corner of her eye. “The stalker.”

“Something wrong with him?”

“I really can’t say, Nora. I only just met the man. He’s a little too good-looking, don’t you think?”

Was it tragic, or merely ironic, to be written off as too good-looking by someone whose own appearance had made passersby walk into doors and lampposts? Nora had actually witnessed such occurrences, sad to say, on more than one occasion. To her credit, Tríona never had any idea about how her exterior affected people. Perhaps it was growing into beauty after an ugly-duckling childhood that made her so infuriatingly oblivious. And maybe it was that very indifference that piqued Peter Hallett’s interest; maybe he couldn’t resist a challenge. He could have simply toyed with Tríona and cast her aside—but it didn’t happen that way. He was the one who pressed for marriage, for children. Tríona had always expressed ambivalence about both, but for some reason she went along with Peter Hallett. Eventually, every one of them had fallen under his spell. Some were caught in it still.

Nora told herself she shouldn’t have been so surprised when her parents stood by him after Tríona’s murder. They were quintessentially decent people, and Peter knew exactly how to play that against them. Her father, especially, had always been uncomfortable outside the realm of fact; he was mistrustful of secondhand information, of shadowy suspicions and feelings. Tom Gavin was a scientist, after all, someone who lived in a world shaped and defined by demonstrable proof, so how could he possibly condemn anyone without hard evidence? He had no choice but to believe that Tríona’s death was a random crime. Nora had seen flashes of doubt in her mother’s eyes, but Eleanor Gavin was possessed of an inborn pragmatism that would not let her risk alienating the one person who controlled access to her only grandchild. It was impossible to fault them, and impossible not to. Nora and her parents had lived the past five years in a state of artificial suspension, never speaking about Peter, never speaking about Tríona—barely speaking at all.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t tried. She had gone to them right after Tríona was killed, trying desperately to convince them that Peter was responsible. They had refused to believe her. And they weren’t alone—everyone who knew Peter Hallett thought she was certifiable. After all, what had she seen, exactly? Nothing obvious. Only tiny nuances, accumulations of behavior: a certain glint in Peter’s eye when he looked at Tríona, the faintly proprietary way he touched her. But whenever Nora tried to describe the things she’d witnessed, all those formless, nagging suspicions seemed to scatter, like so many slithering spheres of mercury. So she tried to ignore them, push them away. How could anyone fathom the intimate connection between two people from the outside? Again and again, she had to convince herself that whatever went on in Tríona’s marriage, it was none of her business. Until that night—

Nora stared at the picture in her hand, carried back once more, this time to a splendid May evening, the first warm night of burgeoning spring just five years ago. The trees along the river were beginning to leaf out in earnest, branches decked in shades of pale green. She had arrived at Peter and Tríona’s house just after five, to stay with her niece while they were off to the gala opening of his latest triumph, a gleaming new modern art museum in downtown Minneapolis. Elizabeth was supposed to go along, but she’d come down with a fever. Tríona had wavered about going out at all, but the museum was an important milestone for Peter’s firm, and he’d insisted on having his muse beside him. No excuses. A car would be arriving for them at six.

Tríona answered the door a little out of breath. “Oh good, you’re early. Sorry the house is such a disaster. I’m late for my half-hour call, as usual.” Tríona waved a hand as she bolted down the hall. “Why don’t you go in and talk to Lizzabet while I finish getting ready?” She seemed a little more distracted than usual, clasping a silky robe around her, trying to tidy up toys and clothes that were strewn about. The place wasn’t usually such a mess. Nora thought she detected an extra glassiness in Tríona’s eyes, almost as if she’d been drinking.

Despite her fever, Elizabeth had Nora deep into negotiations about snacks and bedtime stories when Tríona came in to say good-bye. Though less than forty minutes had passed, her transformation from harried young mother to goddess was complete. Tríona had never looked more radiant. Her long red hair hung loose as she whirled before them in clingy, beaded silk that shifted from pale sea green at the shoulders to deepest indigo about her feet. At her throat hung a stunning mother-of-pearl pendant, set off by a wrap of some translucent fiber that seemed to have been spun from water and air. Her eyes glittered more intensely than before, and her limbs seemed to float. Elizabeth sat up in bed, wide-eyed and bright with excitement on top of fever. “Oh, Mama—you’re like the queen of the sea!”

They’d all laughed as Tríona spun around once more, careful not to lose her balance.

Peter’s voice carried from downstairs: “It’s time to go.”

“You can have a little ginger ale, and if you’re very good, maybe Nora will make some popcorn. I’m sorry to leave you—” She leaned down to kiss the top of Elizabeth’s head. “Wish me luck.”

They listened to the wonderful silk dress rustling all the way down the hall.

Nora had thought nothing at all of Tríona’s last remark. But a few minutes later, after venturing down to the kitchen to microwave some popcorn, she heard strange sounds coming through the intercom beside the front door. Ragged breathing, almost like a violent struggle—what was happening? Pressing an eye to the peephole, she saw Tríona pressed against the wall outside, back arched and eyes closed, fingers twined through Peter’s dark hair. Her bare legs cinched his waist as he thrust himself again and again into the billow of beaded silk that rode around her hips. Was he hurting her? When a car pulled into the driveway, it was Tríona who held tight, panting, “No—don’t stop! Don’t you fucking dare stop now.”

Nora had clapped both hands over the peephole, rigid with shock as the ragged breathing on the other side of the door continued just a few seconds longer. Then the intercom speaker suddenly went dead, and in the same instant, the smoke alarm in the kitchen began sounding a piercing protest. The microwave was filled with smoke that burned her eyes and throat as she opened the door. She felt her way to the switch for the exhaust, and eventually managed to stop the shrieking alarm by flapping a towel beneath it. Once the noise was quelled, she emptied the scorched popcorn into a glass bowl, trying to regain her composure, when a small voice sounded from the doorway behind her.

“Nora? Where did you go?”

She spun around, startled, watching the bowl as it flew in slow motion. Clear glass and burnt popcorn seemed to explode everywhere, and in the brief, dead silence that followed, Elizabeth covered her ears and began to whimper.

“It’s all right, love, stay right where you are. It wasn’t your fault—I was just clumsy. Everything’s going to be all right.”

She never told anyone what she had witnessed that night. Not the police, and certainly not her parents. Looking back now, the paranoid part of her couldn’t be sure that Peter hadn’t staged the whole thing for her benefit. She pushed the thought away, telling herself it was a crazy idea. He couldn’t possibly have known she was there, on the other side of the door. He couldn’t have made Tríona behave that way—could he? And yet she was positive about one tiny detail—the hand she had seen pressed against the intercom definitely belonged to Peter Hallett.

The next troubling tilt of the seesaw came only a few weeks later, with Tríona’s final phone call. Nora had relived every word of their conversation, heard it in her head every day for the past five years.

“Nora—I’m sorry to wake you.”

“It’s all right, Tríona, I’m awake.” She sat up and looked over at the numbers glowing from the bedside table: 10:23 P.M.

“Is Marc there?”

“No, he’s on call—down at the hospital. What’s happening, Tríona?” Fear rose in her throat. “Is Elizabeth all right?”

“I sent her off for the weekend with Mammy and Daddy. I’m at their house now.”

“Something’s happened—what is it?” There was silence on the other end. “Tríona?”

“I’m leaving, Nora. I’ve got a bag packed. Can you meet me? Not your house, someplace else. You can’t tell anyone where I am—promise me.”

“I promise.” Still groggy from sleep, Nora seized upon the first place that came to mind. “What about l’Étoile?” The grand old hotel was a Saint Paul landmark. “I can be there in twenty minutes.”

“I need more time. There’s something I have to do first. There are things you don’t know, Nora. About Peter, about me—”

“Tríona, what are you talking about?”

“It seemed harmless at first, but now—I let everything go too far. It’s like he gets a strange sort of pleasure from hurting me. I couldn’t tell anyone, I was too ashamed. Because I’ve done things, too. You don’t know—unspeakable things. I’ve lied and deceived everyone. I don’t even know myself anymore—”

“If he’s hurt you, Tríona—”

“I can’t even tell what’s real anymore and what isn’t—I feel like I’m going crazy.”

“You’re not crazy, Tríona—you’re not. Listen to me—whatever it is, I will help you. We’ll get through this together, all right? Do you hear me?”

“I can’t talk anymore. I’ve got to find the truth.”

In the brief pause that followed, Nora heard her sister breathing at the other end of the connection. “Tríona, are you still there? Talk to me.”

When Tríona did speak, her voice was a hoarse whisper. “Isn’t it shocking, what you’ll do when you love someone?”

How many times in the last five years had she relived that fatal night? Pacing up and down the hotel lobby under the watchful eye of the night desk clerk. She had tried calling Tríona’s cell phone, but was diverted each time into voice mail. Two hours went by, then three, then four. At first light, Tríona had still not appeared. Unable to wait any longer, she had driven to the house along the river. Peter had looked genuinely surprised when he answered the door. It was just after eight on a Saturday morning, and he’d already been for a run, showered, and dressed. His hair was unusually wet, dripping onto the collar of his shirt—for some reason, that point had stuck. So had the fact that he stood blocking the door so she couldn’t see into the foyer.

“Where’s Tríona?” she had asked. “What have you done with her?”

He drew back slightly. “What have I done with her?”

“Is she here?”

“No, she said something yesterday about going for a massage—”

“At this hour?”

“Why not? I assumed she left while I was out for a run. You’re acting strange, Nora. Is something wrong?”

“I don’t know, Peter. You tell me.”

It was impossible to explain what she had seen in his eyes at that instant. No worry, no puzzlement. He was an island of calm and self-possession in the eye of a storm. He said: “I’ll leave a note, ask her to call when she gets home.”

Nora had often relived that conversation, imagining Tríona’s packed bag just out of sight in the front hall, the ghost of her scent still in the air, and somewhere deeper, behind closed doors, a swirl of pink-tinged water sluicing down a shower drain.

The whispering campaign had started almost immediately. A very efficient apparatus, the rumor mill, to anyone who knew how to operate its machinery. And Peter Hallett knew exactly how. In the days after Tríona’s death, people who’d been at the museum opening a few weeks earlier began to talk about her steady consumption of champagne. Nora realized she hadn’t been alone in her assessment. Something about Tríona had clearly been off that night; she hadn’t been herself. The glittering eyes, that strange note in her voice over the intercom. When the police found a bottle of liquid ecstasy in Tríona’s purse after her death, and as additional bottles of the stuff turned up hidden around the Halletts’ house, even uglier rumors began to surface. Some people were no doubt relieved to find the perfect couple were not so perfect after all. Everyone—including people who didn’t know Tríona—had pet theories about what had gone wrong in the marriage and who was to blame. A kind of protective wall had sprung up around the grieving widower.

Of course Nora told the police about Tríona’s final phone call. But in the end it came down to her word against Peter’s. It wasn’t as if the police didn’t want to believe her; the truth of the matter was that they had no other viable suspects. But without Tríona to back her up, without physical evidence, that last phone conversation had been rendered useless, reduced to hearsay. All Peter had to do was deny, which he had done, quite convincingly. And so the case had remained in limbo, with no new leads, for five long years. To those who only knew Peter Hallett’s public side, the notion that he was even capable of such a brutal murder seemed ludicrous. How easy it was to deny a shadow that came to life only in private, in that secret, intimate space between two people. Nora looked down at the photograph in her hand. He must have made some mistake. There must be something she could do or say to trap that warped creature who lived inside him. Perhaps the worst of it was that he actually enjoyed the cat-and-mouse aspect of his ghastly game. What would happen if she refused to play the mouse any longer? Holding the snapshot against the wall, she reached for a red pushpin and stuck the sharp point through Peter Hallett’s handsome forehead.

5

Elizabeth let herself into the house and ran straight up to her room to stow her backpack. She peeled off her wet clothes and put on a dry pair of jeans and her favorite shirt. No sign of the movers—maybe she had it wrong and the moving men weren’t coming until tomorrow. It wasn’t like they really needed movers anyway. The house in Saint Paul still had all the old things inside—everything they would need, her dad said. She could just move back into her old room. It felt a little weird, to know the old house had been there all this time, waiting for them to come back.

As she toweled the rain from her hair, Elizabeth’s eyes flickered across the broad flat glass of her fish tank. She felt reassured by the familiar and silent presence of the fish, swimming in their underwater world. What would happen to them during the move? Maybe the moving company had a special way to transport fish. Her dad had told her not to worry about them, but she couldn’t help it. She sprinkled a few flakes onto the water and stood watching them nibble at their food, darting to the surface, then back to the bottom again.

She was almost all the way downstairs before she sensed the stillness in the house. Her dad should be here. Something wasn’t right. She jumped down the last few stairs and pushed open the kitchen door.

“Daddy?” No answer. Elizabeth crossed to the phone and began dialing her father’s cell number. Then she hesitated. There was no real emergency. She was old enough to be on her own awhile. She set the phone down, and looked around the kitchen. The cabinets and stainless appliances gleamed dully in the late-afternoon gloom. Despite the recent storm, the sky was growing blacker. And at that instant, a notion began to twine around her brain.

Why couldn’t she just find her mother on the Internet, like Shelby and Nicole had done? The thought hadn’t occurred to her before. She didn’t exactly live on the computer like most kids. Wasn’t even allowed to use the Internet without her dad looking over her shoulder. Too many weirdos out there, he said.

She climbed the stairs and crept down the long hallway to her father’s office. Her legs felt cold and heavy, and her heart thudded against her ribs. The office had a glass wall facing into the trees, a computer desk, and a drawing table with its grid of cubbyholes underneath. Switching on the laptop, she sank into her father’s chair as the screen glowed to life. A sudden desire to know grappled with a never far-distant fear. Maybe no one had lied to her; maybe they hadn’t had to lie, because she had never asked.

Elizabeth steered the pointer toward a small box and typed in “Tríona Hallett.” There wasn’t much time—her dad might be back any minute. She had read about Pandora, and knew that hitting the button might be like opening that magic box. It could change everything. Her insides felt queasy and uncertain. Her mother’s name—a few small black shapes on a white background—hung before her. She remembered the whispers and stares, and realized she had never wanted to step across this threshold. All these years she’d been covering her ears, trying to stop the voices that were telling her what really happened. Now the knowledge lay before her, just within reach, and she felt herself unable to resist. She pressed the button, and in the space of a single heartbeat more than a hundred results turned up on the screen before her. Halfway down, one headline stood out:

Elizabeth felt the world around her begin to dissolve. The wind stirred leaves outside the window as she sat dry-eyed at her father’s desk, opening window after glowing window like the pages of a forbidden book. The letters seemed to shimmer on the page, turning from black to silver, and back again. Each word was a sharp hook, dragging her deeper against her will, but she could not look away. There had been a car, but what happened to her mother was no accident. She began to hear a noise inside her head, a sound like someone crying. She sank deeper into the chair and began to rock slowly, covering her mouth with both hands.

She had asked her dad once why Nora never came to visit. They lived far away now, he said, and Nora was busy with her own work—too busy to visit them, he seemed to be saying. Even at the time, she had known it wasn’t true. Now she understood—it was because Nora knew. She knew about all the things that came swimming back to Elizabeth now from dim, distant memory. Why Mama sat and cried sometimes when she thought no one was around. How she slept and slept and wouldn’t wake up. A hazy memory of Mama sitting on the couch, the round globe of a wineglass in her hand, dark red liquid sloshing dangerously close to the rim. Elizabeth remembered feeling a terrible, rising dread in case Mama would let the glass tip too far and spill on the white carpet.

A sudden noise sounded down the hall, and her father’s voice came booming up the stairs. “Elizabeth—are you home?”

Elizabeth heard her own heart pumping noisily in her ears. She abruptly switched off the computer, and in her haste knocked over a pencil cup, feeling clumsy as she tried to gather up rolling pens and pencils. Her father liked everything a certain way—were the points supposed to go up or down? No time to think. She shoved the whole handful into the cup, points upward, hoping her memory was right. He couldn’t know she had been here.

She tiptoed to the office door and peered out into the hallway. Hearing water running in the kitchen, she knew it was her chance to scurry down the hall. Once inside her own room, she pressed her back against the wall and tried to breathe. Beneath the panic, she felt something at the center of her chest squeezing to a cinder, shrinking smaller and smaller until it was no more than a dark, glinting lump of stone.

6

Cormac kept his foot on the accelerator, determined to make it to his evening lookout before the light was gone. The road up to the cliffs at Bunglas seemed harmless enough at the park entrance, just a cattle grid and a gate across the road outside Teelin. But here, only a quarter mile farther along, the incline was so steep that at times the car seemed to be climbing into empty space. This was his third visit in three days. If anyone had asked why he felt compelled to come here every evening, to sit on the cliffs and stare out over the North Atlantic, he could not have put the reason into words. It was just as well that no one asked.

He pulled into the car park and switched off the engine. Not many visitors stayed into the evening. Beside him, a narrow gravel path led up to One Man’s Pass, a treacherous trackway above the highest sea cliffs in Europe. Slieve League, the maps named this place. But the locals called it Bunglas—green bottom in Irish—maybe for the grass that grew on its almost vertical slopes. He could see two tiny figures at the top of the ridge, nearly two thousand feet above the sea. What were they thinking, hiking all the way up there at this time of day? The light would soon be gone, and it wouldn’t be safe. They must be mad, people who went climbing here for pleasure. Letting his gaze travel down the sloping cliff face, he stepped to the edge and stopped for a moment to watch the blue-green tide boiling around the Devil’s Chair and Writing Desk, a couple of rough crags hundreds of feet below. The person who had bestowed the name had no doubt taken one look at the dizzying height and felt a need to invoke the most extreme fall from grace.

The wind was fresh out of the west, and the sun loomed orange behind a bank of clouds at the horizon. He set off the opposite way from One Man’s Pass, in the direction of a tower that looked out over the small bay’s southern cusp. Above him, their nesting grounds disturbed by the hikers, gray fulmars and red-billed choughs rode the wind in great wide circles. Below, in the sun-gilded waves, several seals made their way to shore for the night.

The dilemma he faced nagged at him again this evening, as it had done every minute since he’d arrived in Donegal. He’d been here three full days now, and still hadn’t managed to tell Nora what was really going on—with his father, with himself. They’d spoken on the phone as recently as yesterday evening while she was still in Dublin, and he’d passed up several opportunities to explain, not knowing how she would respond. And now he was stuck. He glanced at his watch. She was probably safely landed in the States by now.

Should he try ringing, and hope that her Irish mobile was working in America? She hadn’t offered an alternate way for them to keep in touch, and he had to wonder whether that had been a conscious choice. There was e-mail, of course, but it seemed woefully inadequate. How could any electronic device capture what he wanted to say?

He wanted to tell her how he had pulled into the gravel driveway at his father’s house three nights ago, expecting to find quiet and darkness. Instead, he’d found a strange car parked beside the house, lights blazing brightly inside. He could hear music and laughter; animated conversation floated out through the open door. The ground-floor windows were wide open as well, and music played in the background, a jazz piece he vaguely recognized but could not name. Then Cormac had heard his father’s voice. Decades away from this place, and the Donegal accent had not faded; it had a milder northern edge than Belfast or Derry, but the same narrow-throated vowels. The laughter that seemed to follow Joseph Maguire’s every utterance was undeniably female.

Not Mrs. Foyle, surely. Recalling a few conversations with his father’s neighbor, he couldn’t believe the woman ever laughed. He had stood listening to the two voices as a person might hearken to birdsong. No, definitely not Mrs. Foyle.

She’d been very specific on the phone: His father had suffered a stroke, and needed looking after—more looking after than a mere concerned neighbor such as herself could offer, was the implication. But from the sound of things, his father wasn’t at all unwell. There must have been some mistake. Cormac walked to the open doorway feeling confused, relieved, guilty. Just what did Geraldine Foyle think she was playing at here?

“Hang on now,” his father was saying. “Hang on. We’ve gone past it now. This is the part I especially wanted you to hear.” Joseph stood to lift the needle from a spinning 78 rpm disc on the gramophone, and carefully placed it back to an earlier point in the groove. “Would you listen to that—” He paused to let the instruments speak, raising a hand to indicate a particular passage. “Pure genius, don’t you think?”

The woman in the easy chair opposite swirled and sipped from her glass of red wine as she listened to the music. Cormac was startled to discover that his father’s guest was someone he knew—Roz Byrne, one of his university colleagues from Dublin. They’d been hired on at the same time, and sat together on a few faculty committees. They’d always got on very well. Roz was a folklorist, a good-natured woman with a great hearty laugh, lively green eyes, and an unruly tumble of gingery hair. As neither of the room’s occupants seemed to mark his presence, he raised a hand and rapped lightly on the door frame. Roz put a hand to her throat. “Jaysus Christ, Cormac Maguire—you nearly put the heart across me. What in God’s name are you doing here?”

“Hello, Roz. I was about to ask you the same thing.”

Joseph Maguire looked from one to the other, slightly befuddled. “Don’t tell me you know each other?”

“We’ve only worked together these last twenty years,” Roz said. “What’s your connection?”

Cormac felt his color rising. He’d let the world believe his father was dead. Perhaps it was petty, but the first thought that leapt to mind was now that Roz knew his father was alive, everyone else at the university would soon know it as well.

“Ah,” she said, evidently experiencing a sudden flash of comprehension. “Maguire—you’re related.”

“Father and son,” Joseph said.

“I always had you down as a Clareman,” Roz said to Cormac.

“I am,” he said. “It’s—complicated.”

Joseph rubbed his hands together. “Now we’ve got all that rubbish out of the way, Roz, shall we offer my poor starving issue some of your marvelous fish stew?”

At that point it hadn’t seemed politic to bring up Geraldine Foyle. Cormac had to admit he was ravenous, and saw no other option than to sit down to a bit of supper and listen to the tale of how his father and Roz had met.

“I’ve been here a few weeks, digging into research for a book—” Roz began. “It started out as a collection of selkie stories from Donegal, but it’s morphed into something quite different. Anyway, I tried to find a little house to let for the summer, but you wouldn’t believe how tight things are at the moment. I had a research grant, but the money was literally being hoovered out of my pockets by an unscrupulous landlady all the way up in Portnoo. Bloody atrocious place, but all I could find. I happened to be walking the beach just over the headland here one evening—it must have been about three weeks ago—trying to work out whether to stay or to go. For some reason, I picked up a stone and pegged it into the sea—letting off steam, I suppose—”

“And I happened to be out for my constitutional. What can I say? I praised the ferocity of her stone-throwing, and we struck up a conversation—”

Roz said: “Of course I started whinging about the grant that was supposed to last all summer, when Joe had a sudden brainwave and offered to let me stay here. I’m making great headway now. And I have to say, it’s wonderful to have someone to bore with all my new discoveries at the end of a long day.”

She turned to cast a warm smile at “Joe.” Cormac added the cozy scene into which he’d just stumbled to Mrs. Foyle’s taut urgency on the phone. It was all beginning to make sense.

The old man said, “Well, scholarship is important, and sure, it’s not like I haven’t the room. Tell Cormac a bit about your project, Roz—it’s fascinating stuff.”

Roz said: “Shape-shifting and fairy-bride archetypes have always been my bread and butter as a folklorist. There’s a famous Donegal song, ‘An Mhaighdean Mhara’—maybe you’ve heard it—about a sea maid tricked into marriage with a human, who eventually leaves her family and returns to the sea. I’ve been fascinated by that song for as long as I can remember. What’s left of it is only a fragment, only four short verses, so that’s automatically intriguing. There were loads of stories about mermaids and selkies collected in this part of the world, but there’s one detail that makes ‘An Mhaighdean Mhara’ stand out. The sea maid has a Christian name and a surname—”

Cormac wasn’t sure he understood. “You’re not saying the woman in the song was a real person?”

“Why not? All sorts of songs were written about actual people, historical events.”

“Yes, but a mermaid as historical figure?” Cormac couldn’t contain his skepticism.

“There are several old families in Ireland—the O’Flahertys and the O’Sullivans, the MacNamaras, the Conneelys, and several famous old Scottish and Welsh families as well—who all claim to be descended from seal folk. I’m not saying it’s literally true, but such things were believed at one time—taken as fact. We can argue about that later, if you like. In any case, the woman in the song was called Mary Heaney, so I started to search the historical record for people with that name. To be honest, I didn’t expect to find anything useful. The song was originally collected in Gweedore in the fifties, and the singer, Síle Mhicí Uí Ghallchóir, referred to it as ‘Amhrán Thoraí,’ which means it probably came from Tory Island, way up north. I found similar versions collected in the Hebrides and Shetland—not at all surprising if you know anything about the cultural connections between Donegal and Scotland. I began with census rolls, starting from the sixteenth century, and a rake of Mary Heaneys—it isn’t an unusual surname in this area, and Mary—well, you couldn’t find a more common Christian name in Ireland, in any century up until the present. There were birth, marriage, death records for dozens of women called Mary Heaney, but none seemed to fit the particular circumstances of the woman in the song. I was about to give up. Finally, in local parish census records from 1901, I stumbled across a fisherman called P. J. Heaney, listed in the rolls with his two children—a daughter Mary, and a son Patrick—those were the names of the children mentioned in the song. They were living at Port na Rón—the place I met your father, just over the headland from here. There was no record of the children’s mother.”

“Perhaps she died,” Cormac offered.

“Certainly possible. But everyone else on the rolls seemed to be accorded a status—‘married,’ ‘unmarried,’ ‘widowed.’ No such designation for P. J. Heaney, even though he had children. It was odd, so I started asking around. Turns out Heaney never married, but he did have a common-law wife, who disappeared under rather mysterious circumstances in 1896. She was called Mary.”

“It all started to come out then,” Joseph said. “People said Heaney’s wife was a selkie. They remembered hearing their grandparents speak about her.”

Roz was really warming to her subject now. “I started digging out all the newspaper articles I could find about the disappearance. And I started thinking, even if the song is old, this woman may have been inserted into it because she fit the story. She was a foundling, you see—just appeared one day with Heaney on his fishing boat. He never explained where she came from, so of course that gave rise to all sorts of wild speculation. Some said he caught her in his net. Others swore he found her washed up on the beach—naked, some said, or wrapped in seaweed. Of course no one ever knew for certain, because Heaney was alone in the boat when he found her, and he was beyond taciturn. Never spoke more than two words to anyone. No one ever knew her real name. They said she spoke no Irish, and no English either, for the first several years that she lived here.”

“But why would they leap to the conclusion that she was a selkie?” Cormac asked.

“People had heard stories from childhood about the mysterious merging of humans and seals. It’s something deeply embedded in their consciousness. The way it usually happened was that a fisherman would come upon a selkie who had shed her skin, a beautiful young woman bathing naked in the sea. Of course, she was no ordinary female, but a selkie who had slipped from her sealskin and left it on the rocks. The fisherman would capture her by stealing her skin—without it, she had to remain in human form. Belief in the otherworld was still very strong a hundred years ago—if you look carefully it’s there still, under the surface.”

“But surely there was some logical explanation for this mysterious woman’s appearance. She could have washed up from a shipwreck—”

“I checked all the shipping records I could find for 1889—that would have been the year she arrived in Port na Rón. Nothing—no reported distress signals, no debris or other evidence pointing to a shipwreck in the locality. I suppose she could have gone overboard from an immigrant ship—God knows there were plenty of people sailing to America at that time. People said she was always staring out to sea. Some even claimed to have heard her singing in a foreign language. From the descriptions of her, and the way they described her language, I have a suspicion she may have been from the Faroe Islands, or somewhere in Scandinavia. You know how stories begin to circulate and grow.”

“What happened when she disappeared?”

“Her husband never reported her missing. According to the newspapers, she was gone at least four days before someone finally remarked on her absence. Heaney was questioned, but he told the police she’d run off. There were no witnesses, no evidence against him; she simply vanished. Her body was never found, so they let him go.”

“And you think people really believed she’d gone back to the sea?”

“It’s probably what most preferred to believe. If they could claim to have seen her, they wouldn’t have to admit what really happened. I’ve come to believe that she was murdered—most likely by her husband. A lot more plausible, unfortunately, than any other explanation. As a folklorist, I’m interested in the song, of course, and how it was handed down. But I’m also interested in the broader context of communal beliefs—what the song says about the attitudes and mores about female roles. The late nineteenth century was a period of upheaval in gender politics. Women were beginning to claim a bit more independence, economically and socially, and some people—some men, especially—felt that as a threat.” Roz was suddenly self-conscious. “There now, I’ve rattled on far too long!” She started gathering up the items on the table. “I’ve a whole day’s worth of interviews to transcribe, and I’m sure you two have plenty to talk about.”

Cormac half rose from his seat. “Let me give you a hand, Roz—”

“Don’t stir yourself. I’m just going to peg these into the sink—you and Joe can take care of them later.” She backed through the kitchen door, arms full of crockery.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get your chance,” Joseph said. “That’s the one thing I’ve learned in living so long—the washing up never ends.” He looked thoughtfully after Roz as she retreated into the scullery. “Well now, Cormac, I can’t imagine what brings you all the way up here. Delighted to see you, of course—”

Cormac leaned forward slightly and lowered his voice: “Actually, I’m here because Mrs. Foyle phoned and told me you’d had a stroke.”

“Bloody woman!” The old man looked like he was on the verge of apoplexy, but he spread both hands on the table in front of him, trying to stay calm. “I was going to tell you in my own time. A few days ago, I had what you might call a spell—not serious, a bit of dizziness—Roz drove me to Casualty over at Killybegs. A mini-stroke, they said—transient ischemic attack, if you want to get technical. They put me on blood thinners, advised plenty of rest. I’ve done everything they told me, and I’ve been right as rain since then, I swear. Don’t know how Geraldine Foyle managed to get hold of that intelligence. Foostering auld magpie—it’s she who’ll give me a stroke with all her meddling. The curse of fuckin’ Jaysus on her!”

Cormac felt slightly alarmed. “I’m sorry if I’ve been the cause of any of this. When you first came here, she offered to look in, see if you needed anything, and I’m afraid I didn’t dissuade her—”

“Ah, no, no, I didn’t mind, when I was first here it was grand, you know. She’d pop over—neighborly enough. That was fine. But here’s what happened lately—come here till I tell you.” He gestured for Cormac to lean in, and spoke under his breath. “Didn’t she happen to see Roz coming out of the house one morning about two weeks ago, and decided on the spot she’d call in? To see how was I getting on, she said. But what was she doing, only sniffing around the place, jumping to all sorts of preposterous conclusions! ‘At your age,’ says she, ‘you ought to be ashamed.’ I told her there was no need for me to feel shame, since she obviously fetched up enough for the whole parish. You should have heard her, the sanctimonious, Holy Mary carry-on. Wages of sin, all that auld shite. When you think of the suffering it’s caused in the world—” He stopped himself, but only momentarily. “Not to mention the sheer bloody hypocrisy of it—Roz may have neglected to mention it, but that flahoola of a landlady above in Portnoo happened to be Geraldine Foyle’s first cousin. At any rate, a few more words were exchanged.” He waved a hand. “I may have passed some intemperate remarks about the late Mr. Foyle’s untimely exit.” Cormac could see the old man was still feeling less than apologetic; on the contrary, he seemed rather pleased with himself. “She hasn’t put her beak in since.”

“Why drag me all the way up here over nothing?”

“Well, Geraldine Bloody Foyle wasn’t getting satisfaction from me, obviously. She had to create some pretext so that you’d come rushing up here to break up the love nest. Ah, don’t ask me how her mind works—the woman is sick.”

Cormac considered for a moment. “I hope you’ll forgive an indelicate question, but is there anything for me to break up?”

Joseph’s eyes flickered over to the kitchen door, beyond which they could hear Roz humming absently. His demeanor softened. “Are you serious? Roz Byrne may be a kindhearted woman, but she’s not completely daft.”

In the end, they’d agreed Cormac should stay on another few days, to spare him the long drive back to Dublin after he’d just arrived, and to be doubly certain that his father was suffering no ill effects from the “spell.”

As he looked out over the silent waves below Slieve League, Cormac realized that the time had come to make a decision: head back to Dublin in the morning, or catch a plane to the States. He had felt Nora deliberately keeping her distance when they’d last spoken on the phone, but was it because they were finished, or because she didn’t want to burden him with troubles that were not his own? Either answer, he realized, was unsatisfactory. He looked at his watch. Just after nine Irish time; she must have arrived at her parents’ place in Saint Paul by now. At least he’d assumed that’s where she would be staying; she’d offered no confirmation.

The setting sun slid down below a bank of gray clouds, a solid orange mass defying him not to stare. Out here on the headlands, each day mirrored the cycle of life. That was the way the ancients had seen it. Every new day was a resurrection, every nightfall a little death. How many more times must the mighty chariot driver perish in the sea before he stopped his dithering and actually did something?

He had simply appeared on Nora’s doorstep once before, fourteen months ago, and everything had worked out then. Beyond all expectations, really. He could make it to Saint Paul in a day or two, if he could only convince himself that she would welcome him. It was obvious that she wasn’t going to ask for help, but she couldn’t refuse it either—could she? He’d been going back and forth like this for days, trying to read into her words what perhaps wasn’t there. He didn’t even know how he could help her, only that he felt an overwhelming desire to try. Climbing to his feet from the damp, rocky ground, Cormac looked out over the choppy waves and considered everything he’d given up to be here, all because of Geraldine Foyle’s priggish puritanical streak. The curse of fuckin’ Jaysus on her, indeed.

Standing at the edge of the precipice, looking down hundreds of feet to the dark sea below, he knew he’d already flung himself from that place of safety, metaphorically speaking. He would go to America, just as soon as he could book a flight.

Cormac wondered whether he ought to tell Nora of his plan. Words—and e-mail most especially—seemed altogether too puny for his purpose. At that moment, the first notes of a sinuous melody began to snake through his brain, beginning long and low, then rocking back and forth, then surging forward with a wild abandon. That was it—he would send her a tune. The idea was beautifully simple—just attach an audio file to an e-mail message. How was it this notion had never occurred to him before?

The sudden stroke of inspiration absorbed his thoughts the whole way back to the house at Ardcrinn. He wasn’t even aware of the jarring ride along the narrow, crumbling road that went up the mouth of the glen from Teelin. In his head he was already holding the wooden flute, feeling its familiar heft, and thinking how strange it was that a man might pour the breath of his body into a hollow tube, and through a kind of wizardry that breath could be captured—bottled, in a way—and transmitted over vast miles, to any spot on the face of the planet. He tried to imagine where Nora was at this very moment, and how she might react to such a cryptic message. If she listened closely—even if she was unfamiliar with the tune, even if its title was obscure to her—surely she would hear and understand everything he was trying to say.

7

Nora pushed aside a teetering stack of manila file folders and checked her watch. A quarter to ten. She had only meant to unpack, but had been pulled again into the mystery of Tríona’s death. She’d been going through files for four solid hours. Dusk had come and gone, and the room was illuminated only by the bedside lamp and a shaft of light from the kitchen. She switched on the overhead fixture and studied the wall, now covered with maps and photographs, newspaper clippings, and dozens of index cards, each one enumerating a scrap of physical evidence, a witness, a lead. She had envisioned this wall like an incident room—thinking perhaps that seeing everything laid out would trigger some connection, some logical leap she might have overlooked. It looked more like one of those crazy collages put together by a deranged stalker.

She had already begun to go back over leads, looking for any loose threads that might begin an unraveling. There were a few facts she had never told anyone—not Cormac, and certainly not her parents. Forensic details that simply didn’t fit. The liquid ecstasy in Tríona’s purse was one. That glazed look in her eyes the night of the museum opening was another. What if pulling on any of these loose threads began to destroy her parents’ idealized picture of Tríona? Wouldn’t that be like killing her all over again? How willing was she to risk putting her mother and father through a second wrenching loss? She tried to summon the resolve she had felt on the plane this afternoon. No stopping this time. No going back.

A heavy fatigue had begun to settle in her limbs—apart from a nap on the plane, she hadn’t slept in almost thirty-six hours. It wasn’t too late to call her parents or Frank Cordova. What was she waiting for? Digging a small address book out of her bag, she looked up Frank’s home number, but hesitated before dialing.

He’d been the lead investigator, the person who had pulled her away from Tríona’s body in the mortuary. Two days ago, she had phoned Frank from Dublin to let him know she was coming home, and was relieved when the call went straight into his voice mail. She had left a rambling message, promising to call when she got in. He’d rung back the same day, but the conversation had been awkward. Frank Cordova had not forgiven her for running away.

For three years she’d tried hard not to think about the last time she’d seen him. They’d both been working around the clock, barely eating or sleeping, getting nowhere on the case. It wasn’t that Frank had ever taken advantage—if anything, it had been exactly the other way around. She remembered the desperate craving she had felt for a human touch, something to ease the pain. What she’d needed most that night was a respite from betrayal and brutality, a few hours not spent thinking about death. Not thinking at all. Of course, like all cravings, her need was short-lived. By the time the sun rose the next morning, she knew that her one night with Frank Cordova had been an admission of failure, a leave-taking of sorts. Frank had surely felt it too.

But whatever had possessed them that night was history now. So much had changed in the three years she’d been away, for her, and no doubt for him. She felt an involuntary twinge, imagining him with someone else—he could be married, maybe even a father by now. He’d said nothing about his personal life in their recent phone conversation, and neither had she. Better to call him at work in the morning, make it official.

That left her parents. She imagined the stony set of her father’s jaw, her mother’s gentler mien—they had always made a perfect pair of foils. But she ought to prepare for a shock upon seeing them. After three years, they would almost certainly seem older than she remembered. After pressing their number into the phone, she sat staring at the familiar string of digits, unsure what to say. She had told them she was coming home, of course, but hadn’t mentioned exactly when or for how long. The truth was that she didn’t want them meeting her at the airport, as if this were an ordinary homecoming like any other. All at once she was overtaken by a strong need to see them, to sit in the same room and breathe the same air, even if nothing in her childhood home could ever be what it had been before Tríona’s death. She snapped the phone closed and headed downstairs.

She had grown used to late midsummer sunsets in Ireland, and found it surprisingly dark outside. The wall of humidity also came as a shock after the air-conditioned apartment, but within a few minutes her body adjusted, settling into the dewy atmosphere. She had nearly forgotten the sheer physical pleasures of a summer night, with a warm breeze stirring the trees, the brightest stars and the planets visible. She cut down the hill to Grand Avenue, then crossed over and followed the curved sidewalks into Crocus Hill, the tiny pocket of a neighborhood that looked out over the river flats to the bluffs on the opposite shore. The broad streets here, even the shapes of the houses, seemed strange after three years away. Perhaps it was only the darkness. Pools of shadow seemed about to swallow up the pin oaks and lindens; the trees themselves were devoid of color, recognizable only by their silhouettes, the peculiar rustlings they made in the night air.

Nora slowed as she approached her parents’ home. She heard the music first, an Elgar cello concerto—her father’s favorite. She stopped to listen as the instrument’s deep vibrato, sonorous and sweet, spilled into the night. The broad screen porch at the side of the house was illuminated by a single reading lamp, and she could see her mother’s head bent in concentration over the crossword, a daily passion. Her father’s lanky frame was stretched on the daybed along the wall. He lay with his eyes closed, and fingers steepled over his chest as he listened to the music. Her parents had been like this always, Nora thought: two planets, each in its separate orbit. She remembered wishing once, when she was about thirteen, that her parents would shout or curse or throw things—display some feeling, anything at all. But the world around them was always calm and laid out according to scientific principles. Reason was the highest good. Nothing ever broke that peace.

When the music ended, her father sat up and leaned over to lift the LP from the turntable and slid it gently into the sleeve. He had never caught up with the world of CD recordings. Nora’s heart suddenly squeezed tight, remembering how he had played that same recording incessantly in the weeks and months after Tríona’s death. Some people reached out to others for comfort, but her father’s grief had driven him ever more inward. After five years, this nightly dose of Elgar still seemed his only consolation.

Eleanor Gavin set aside the folded newspaper and removed her glasses, rubbing her eyes as if plagued by a dull headache. Nora heard her father’s voice: “Are you all right, Eleanor?”

“I’m worried about Nora. I should have told her about Miranda. I just didn’t have the heart to do it over the phone.”

“She’ll find out soon enough.”

Nora stood in the shadows, wondering if she’d heard right. The only Miranda she knew was Marc Staunton’s younger sister. Had something happened to her?

“I’m sure she’d want to know, Tom. I should have said something. Peter said they were leaving on Saturday. Dublin’s not a large city. What if she were to run into them?”

“Have you tried the flat again?”

“No answer. Her office at Trinity will only say that she’s on break, and I can’t raise her on the cell phone.”

“Wait until she gets home, love. It’s all we can do. She’s probably on her way now.”

Nora stood in the darkness, a strange feeling settling in the pit of her stomach. What was it her parents had to tell her about Miranda Staunton?

And then she knew. Peter Hallett wasn’t returning to Saint Paul with some anonymous, clueless female he’d picked up in Seattle. He was coming back to marry Miranda Staunton, his best friend’s sister. And he was taking his new bride on a wedding trip to Ireland, where he and Tríona had spent their honeymoon. Was it some sort of deliberate taunt, a demonstration that he could do exactly as he pleased, and no one could stop him?

Nora wanted desperately to speak, but she couldn’t make a sound. It had been a mistake, coming here. The crickets’ thrumming suddenly turned unbearably loud and harsh. She turned and started back to the apartment, first walking, then running blindly, gulping air and trying to fight off the angry tears that stung her eyes. After two blocks, she slowed to a walk, suddenly so exhausted that she could hardly put one foot in front of the other.

Turning in at the carriage house sidewalk, she caught sight of a figure standing in silhouette at the side door to the garage. The door to her apartment. Her heart lurched as she jumped back out of view, perhaps too late. When there was no audible reaction, she leaned forward and peered around the corner again, slowly this time. A man stood in the shadows—not tall, but solid and powerfully built. He seemed to hesitate, outstretched thumb poised over the bell. Then he tipped forward, slowly banging his forehead against the door. “Press the button,” he muttered to himself. “Just press the fucking button and get it over with.”

She recognized the voice. “Frank—is that you?”

Cordova’s head shot up and he stepped back, one hand reaching instinctively for his holster. “Goddamn it, Nora, don’t ever sneak up on somebody like that. Especially not a cop.”

He’d kept his jacket on despite the heat, but his tie was loose and slightly askew. The street light in the alley threw most of his body into shadow, but Nora could see the crown of straight black hair, the sharp angles of the clean-shaven face, cheekbones that offered proof of Mayan ancestors. Cordova looked a little unsteady on his feet, and she realized that her sudden appearance wasn’t the only thing putting him off balance. He was holding onto the door frame for support. Something was a little off.

“I’m just surprised to see you here, Frank. How did you find me?”

“Give me a little credit. Carriage house, you said. Arundel Court.” He leaned forward and whispered: “I don’t know if you noticed, but there’s no other carriage house on this street.”

Each word was carefully formed—a little too carefully. Something was definitely off. She ventured closer. “Are you okay, Frank?”

“Perfect.”

She was finally close enough to catch a whiff of alcohol. Not beer—something stronger. “You’ve had a few.”

He looked wounded. “Maybe I had reason. You know, ever since you called, I keep seeing that bastard’s face.” He spat the name: “Hallett. Thinks he got away with it. I’ve seen guys like him, and they don’t stop. They never stop. He’s been laughing at us for five fucking years. Can’t you feel it?” The anguish in his voice tore at her. “You and I both know what he did. He knows we know. And that’s how he gets off, rubbing our noses in it, loving the fact that we can’t touch him. But we’re the same, you and me. Can’t let go.” His voice softened. “But we can nail him this time. I know we can.” Cordova pointed an unsteady finger at her. “He doesn’t know we found the other one.”

“Frank, what are you talking about?”

“The other girl, the one from Hidden Falls. You don’t know about her either. Nobody does. He thinks we’re stupid, can’t add two and two.”

“Who is this other girl? What’s she got to do with Tríona?”

Cordova squeezed his eyes tight. “You know, just forget about it. I shouldn’t have said anything. Jesus. I don’t know who she is, or if she’s got anything to do with anything.” He rubbed his head as if it pained him. “I don’t know why I told you. I’m not thinking straight—”

He suddenly lost his balance and lurched forward, forcing her to reach out and place one hand against his chest. The liquor on his breath mingled with a faint, not unpleasant musk of perspiration and the barest whiff of cologne. That volatile mixture had done her in once before. If she wasn’t very careful, it could complicate matters again in a way that neither of them needed right now. Frank Cordova wasn’t in any shape to think things through tonight. Nora pushed against his chest with both hands, trying to set him upright. “We’ll figure it out, but not right now, not tonight. It’s late, and I’m completely wrecked—”

He resisted her efforts and leaned in harder, pressing against her, his warm breath brushing her ear. “What’s the matter? You think if you let me in, we’d end up where we were before? Is it the worst that could happen?” As he spoke, his hands came up, the right around her waist, the left grasping her wrist as though they were dancing. Hot blood flushed her face and throat, a fierce flood of desire. She felt his eyes seeking hers in the humid darkness, and turned away, half afraid that he would find what he was looking for. Even standing with two feet on solid ground, she felt the heady, dangerous pull of that precipice. It would be so easy to go over, to forget about Cormac and all that had happened these past three years. Frank Cordova knew everything. He’d seen her at her absolute lowest point. As if he had read her thoughts, he said: “Don’t be afraid. I’ll catch you.”

He stepped closer, and all at once she felt a sharp jab as Cormac’s hazel knot poked into her hip. It was as if the pain pricked her awake. “Come on, Frank—I haven’t slept for three days. What we both need is a good night’s rest. Where’s your car?”

His face was still pressed into her hair. “Don’t ask me about the car. Fuck the car. God, you smell good.”

She tried to pull free of his grasp, but he held on. She said: “Okay, we’ll forget about the car. Why don’t I call you a cab?”

At that, he drew back and looked at her, wounded and groggy. “You think I’m being a prick.”

“Frank, stop it—you know that’s not what I think.”

“You do. You think I’m an inconsiderate, selfish prick. Maybe you’re right.” He put his head down and bulled forward, accidentally brushing against her as he made his way out the narrow sidewalk to the street. She held her breath as he lowered himself rather unsteadily to the curbstone and finally rested his head against crossed arms, like a wretched child. He was going to feel like hell in the morning, and there was nothing she could do about that either. She studied the back of his bowed head, trying to imagine spending day after day as he did, raking through the deliberate harm people did to one another. After a while, maybe even your own fundamental decency wasn’t enough protection. She reached for her phone to call a taxi, then headed out to join him at the curb.

It was nearly eleven, and in the gradually cooling night, the damp air had begun to cling like mist, making a halo around the light of the single street lamp. The roar of freeway noise below them was overlaid with a sharp, constant chorus of crickets.

“Get some sleep, Frank. We can talk in the morning.”

“In the morning. Sure.” He inhaled deeply, as if suddenly exhausted, unable to say any more. It wasn’t only her own life she was disrupting by coming home. Nora found herself wondering what time Frank had been hauled out of bed this morning, how many other cases he was juggling. She could have asked how things were going, but from his appearance here tonight, she could venture a pretty good guess.

When the cab arrived, Frank didn’t say even good night. He climbed into the backseat and gave the driver his address on the West Side. Nora watched the taxi pull away with his head slumped low in the back window.

8

As soon as the cab rounded the corner, Nora unlocked the carriage house door and began to climb the stairs, feeling as though she was moving in slow motion. Another eternity passed as she dragged out her laptop, and finally logged on to the archives at the local newspaper, the Pioneer Press. Another girl, Frank had said, at Hidden Falls. They had never found the exact spot where Tríona was killed. The words from the police report echoed in her ears: Because the body was moved, the location of the primary crime scene remains unknown. All they knew from trace evidence was that Tríona had been attacked in a wooded area, most likely along the Mississippi River. Maybe Hidden Falls. It was just one of many pockets of parkland along the river known as places to drink and get high, where people sometimes shed their clothes along with their inhibitions. Peter Hallett wanted everyone to believe that was what Tríona had done.

Sleep now seemed impossible. Nora typed “unidentified female” and “homicide” into the paper’s search box, bringing up dozens of hits. She added “Hidden Falls.” Still too many, all old cases. Had Frank mentioned a time frame? They’d spoken on the telephone a few days ago, and he hadn’t said anything then about another victim. She felt the wheels in her brain turning like rusty gears, not even engaged, just spinning furiously in neutral.

Maybe the Hidden Falls case was too recent to have made the papers. Then again, maybe it was just the booze talking, and there was no other victim except in Frank’s feverish imagination. He wasn’t usually like that. She’d never seen him drunk before, even when things were really bad. Maybe she had made a mistake in letting him go home instead of bringing him in, trying to sober him up. No, in the state he was in just now, that would have led to more complications. She would call him at the station first thing in the morning, get the whole story. Never mind the prospect that stretched before her, a long night of trying to force a second specter from her mind.

Nora was just about to switch off the laptop when her inbox suddenly flickered with half a dozen new messages. Her heart lifted at the sight of Cormac’s name, but it was a pleasure immediately dampened beneath a wave of remorse. She had promised to get in touch as soon as she arrived, and had completely forgotten. The message had been posted just after midnight Irish time. He must have sent it off before going to bed. She checked her watch. Just after daybreak in Ireland now, not a decent hour to call.

The subject read: Tune.No message, only an audio attachment. Opening it, she recognized Cormac’s flute instantly, hearing his breath in the low register that seemed to scour up dusky earth, and in soaring high notes that rang with the freshness of spring water and clear air. The music brought back that astonishing moment out on the bog only a few days ago when she knew all the way through to the center of her being that she loved him.

She hadn’t been sure for the longest time, and then suddenly it was a fact, a binary value that switched from zero to one in the space of a single heartbeat. The sound of the flute filled her ears, playing out all the fierce, secret relief she had felt at the sight of him that day on the bog. He would have come along on this journey, she was certain, had she given him the slightest encouragement. But for some reason she had resisted. She couldn’t ask him to follow her, not here, to this terrible place. At least he had not asked for an explanation. She wouldn’t have known how to answer, except to say that since Tríona’s death, things like honesty and integrity and decency seemed strange to her—suspect, almost. After all, there had been a time when she had believed that Peter Hallett possessed all those qualities. Sometimes it felt as if she’d lost the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood. The whole world seemed skewed off-center, and try as she might, she couldn’t manage to get it righted.

Cormac’s tune began again, and she let it play. You’re not a person who gives up, he had said. But neither am I. There was no doubt about the first part, much good it had done her so far. All she could do was to hold out hope that the second bit was true as well. Still, she could never blame Cormac for finding someone else, if he did. Someone who fit his life much better than she ever would. No promises, they’d agreed. Cormac had troubles of his own, without getting sandbagged by hers.

An instant message suddenly appeared on her screen:

She could hear his voice in the words, and her heart jumped again. She turned down the music and picked up her mobile. He answered on the first ring.

“Cormac, I meant to call. I’m so sorry—”

“Everything all right?”

How could she tell him the truth? “Everything’s fine. You’re up early.”

“I was going out for a row. Just thought I’d see if you were around.”

“How’s your father?”

“Actually doing what he’s told—for once.”

“I’m glad. Where is his home place, exactly?”

“Just up the road from Glencolumbkille. A very remote spot. Hard to believe, really. I didn’t know places like this still existed.”

“Sounds lonely.”

He hesitated. “I actually like it—the wind and the waves. You know me—the wilder the better.”

“Speaking of which, thanks for the tune. I was having a listen when I got your message just now.”

“So it came through?”

“Like you were right here beside me.”

She could hear the smile in his voice. “That was the general idea.”

“What do you call it?”

There was a slight pause, and she imagined him looking up at her from beneath dark brows—nervous, hesitant, unused to rituals of self-revelation. “What if I tell you the next time we meet?”

“So mysterious. What was it that ancient Greek said about the Celts?”

“‘They speak in riddles, hinting at things, leaving much to be understood.’”

“Some things never change, apparently.”

His voice turned serious. “Still got your hazel knot?”

She felt for it in her pocket. “Right here.”

“Good—hang on to it. I feel bloody useless over here.”

“Cormac, please don’t—”

“Nora—” He was on the verge of saying something more but demurred. “You’re probably knackered. I’ll let you get some sleep. Mind yourself now—and sleep well.”

“Good night, Cormac. Thanks again for the tune.”

She hung up, and placed one hand over his picture on the screen. To her surprise, an instant message popped up beneath her fingers:

Followed almost immediately by another:

She recalled the first time she’d spoken it aloud, in the conservation lab at Collins Barracks in Dublin. They were standing over an exam table, discussing the fate of the red-haired girl from the bog, and in her agitation she had touched his hand, addressed him by name for the very first time. “Cormac,” she said aloud into the darkness.

They were both treading across no-man’s-land, unsure where to put a foot down. She reached into her pocket for the hazel knot, studying the faint wrinkles in the greenish bark, the dark brown marrow of its angled ends. A charm against mischief, he had said. A protection. She couldn’t tell him how it had rescued her from danger this very night. Nor could she ask the host of questions that tumbled around inside her brain—how long did the charm’s peculiar powers last, and just how far did they extend? What if she wasn’t the one who needed protecting?

9

Cormac leaned forward, pulling hard on the oars, pushing against the aft seat with his legs. Another twenty minutes and he’d be completely spent. It was just after seven o’clock, but the sun had been up for nearly three hours, and glorious light fell against the wall of black clouds that obscured the western horizon.

The conversation with Nora had unsettled him, but at least she seemed pleased with the tune. He should have told her the name—what had stopped him? He poured his frustration into the rowing, pushing himself against the limits of his own strength, feeling the strain in his shoulders and thighs. The distance between him and Nora seemed to grow in that brief conversation, and for the first time he understood that it might be a span he couldn’t leap. But he’d made the decision, booked the ticket. It was too late now to turn back. With each oar stroke, he tried to wipe away his fears of the future, to concentrate on the task at hand.

The water was relatively calm today. Of course this wasn’t the smooth river sculling he had grown accustomed to in Dublin, more like the rough seas he’d plowed back home in Clare. But the motion was the same, tucking one oar handle under the other in a thoughtless, rhythmic repetition he found calming. It cleared his mind, helped him to see things outside the clutter and noise of everyday life. The first morning up here, he’d inquired at the local post office at Glencolumbkille, asking if there was a local rowing club, or anyone who might let him take a skiff out for an hour or so. He’d headed off to Teelin harbor this morning before anyone at the house was up, hoping to get in a good workout before going back to tell his father that he was leaving, booked on a plane that took off from Shannon tomorrow morning.

As he rowed below Sail Rock, a group of seals pushed up alongside him, heads poking out of the water. The frank curiosity in the dark, liquid eyes made it easy to see the connection people felt with them. There was something almost human in their aspect. What else could have fueled the long-held suspicions that they could slip from their skins and walk about on land, even bear human children? How amazing it must have been to live in an age where gods and men, animals and spirits mixed together freely, where shape-shifters and hybrid creatures were taken for granted. Or perhaps the old beliefs masked a darker reality. If what Roz was discovering was true, the story of Mary Heaney’s disappearance might implicate a whole community in her violent death. How much better if the villagers of Port na Rón could somehow convince themselves that she was a mysterious changeling who had simply returned to the sea?

Cormac looked into a pair of heavy-lashed, dark eyes that followed him silently from the water’s surface. People said seals were fond of music, that you could call them just by singing or playing an instrument. He watched the animal’s nostrils flare, trying to catch the scent of food, its flipper raised in unmistakable salutation. For one moment, it seemed possible that these creatures might carry knowledge of a young woman’s strange disappearance. The seal beside him opened its mouth to sing in a strange, vowelish language, and others in the group responded. At last the whole pod, evidently concluding that he had nothing to offer, dived deep and abandoned him. If they did know anything about Mary Heaney, they weren’t telling.

He’d almost completed his circuit out from Teelin, and now started to row back to the harbor. He stayed as far as possible from the base of the sheer drop, where, no matter what the weather, the sea boiled and churned around the rocks below. The Devil’s Chair was barely visible here at sea level, proving once again that point of view was all. In only a few days, he had developed a fierce attachment to this stretch of rough coastline, to its seals and seabirds, the beaches and tiny harbors tucked up beneath the soaring cliffs. And yet he felt himself already halfway across the ocean, already parted from this place before he had even left.

Despite the relative calm, the western wind off the Atlantic was never indifferent, and it took all his strength to keep from drifting too close to the rocks at the cliff base. Although it was July, and he was rowing flat out, the chill would have cut through him entirely if he hadn’t thrown on a windcheater over his fleece. He turned his rowboat toward the harbor and was tying it to a ring on the concrete jetty just as the dark clouds now settled overhead let loose their first few drops of rain. Time to head back and face the old man.

The house was dark when he arrived. He tried the switch inside the front door, but the wind had evidently knocked out the power—the second time in as many days. As he made his way through the darkened sitting room, he heard a slow creak from the back of the house. Someone else was up early. His father had been sleeping until at least half-nine every morning—following his doctors’ advice. The same creaking sounded again, followed by a sudden crash.

Cormac followed the noises to his father’s bedroom at the back corner of the house. The door was ajar, and in the half light, he could see Roz kneeling on the floor next to the old man, holding his hand, calling his name. He pushed the door open.

“Roz, what’s happened?”

“I don’t know—he just collapsed. We’ve got to call for an ambulance—quickly.”

Cormac felt himself moving automatically, fishing the phone from his pocket, pressing in the number for emergency services, and holding the phone fast to his ear, hoping to God that his father wasn’t going to die right here, right now. If Roz hadn’t been in the house, if he’d gone rowing just a few minutes later or hadn’t turned around exactly when he did—

“Yes, we need an ambulance—” He heard his own voice, calmly answering the operator’s questions, while his eyes got used to the half darkness. On the floor before him lay his father, naked but for a flannel dressing gown open to the waist. Joseph Maguire’s eyes were open but unblinking. That this could be the same man who had spoken so blithely about his “spell” the other night was inconceivable.

“They’re on their way,” he said to Roz. “They said to keep him warm.”

As his eyes grew more accustomed to the darkness in the room, he suddenly realized that the duvet from the bed was wrapped around Roz. Her shoulders were bare, her loose hair in disarray. Conscious of his gaze, she reached for a bathrobe that lay on the floor and pulled it about her.

“Cormac, I know how this must look—we’ll have to talk about it later. Help me.” She took the duvet and began tucking it around his father, speaking in a low voice: “Everything’s going to be all right, Joe—an ambulance is on the way. Can you hear me? Please don’t leave us.”

At the hospital, Roz sat beside Cormac in the waiting area at Casualty and handed him a plastic cup of weak tea, purchased from a woman pushing a food trolley through the wards. She took a deep breath. “Cormac, I know how things looked this morning, but it’s not what you might think—”

“You don’t have to explain yourself to me, Roz—”

“No, I do. He’s your father—”

“The man walked out when I was a child, Roz. I didn’t see him again for ten years. We’re barely acquainted, if you want to know the truth.”

“I know. He told me everything. About leaving Ireland, about his work in South America, all the people he knew who just disappeared. He told me about your mother—and you.”

“Me? He doesn’t know the first thing about me.”

“He does. And he cares about you, Cormac, more than you know.”

“He’s certainly had a very odd way of showing it.”

“You say he doesn’t know you, but what do you know about him? He’s such a remarkable man, Cormac. Do you know anything about his work in Chile all those years, the thousands of people he treated with no concern for his own safety—all the lives he saved? Did you know how many times he was arrested and tortured? And in spite of all that, I’ve never met anyone so…” She searched for the words. “I don’t know—so completely engaged with the world, so alive.”

“Why is it every person who tries to convince me what a great humanitarian my father is, just happens to be someone he’s shagging?”

Roz looked as though she’d been slapped.

“Please forgive me, Roz. That was a rotten thing to say. I’m so sorry.”

She was quiet for a moment. “We’re both upset.” A tear escaped and trickled down her face. She brushed it away, and then smiled. “Do you know what’s funny? We haven’t actually—I’d only moved my things down to his room on that day you arrived. He wanted to send me packing back upstairs, but I told him he was being ridiculous. For God’s sake, I said, we’re all adults. He kept insisting that he didn’t want to be unfair to me. Almost as if he knew—” She buried her face in her hands. Cormac moved closer and put his arm around her.

“As long as we’re offering true confessions,” he said, “I’m booked on a flight to America first thing tomorrow morning. “

Roz looked up at him. “Who or what’s in America?”

“Someone I don’t want to lose.”

She squeezed his arm, and shook her head in sympathy. “We are a pair, aren’t we? You know I’ll do everything I can to help.”

“Start of term is only a few weeks away, Roz. Nobody expects you to stay on here. I might be able to request some emergency leave. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.”

He stood and walked to the end of the corridor, where he could see the nurses still hovering over his father and hear the quiet murmurs, the squeaking of their shoes on the polished tile floor. One of his father’s bare feet poked out from under the blanket, and Cormac felt an unfamiliar surge of protective instinct. One of the nurses finally noticed as well, and tucked the blanket more securely around the old man.

Part of him couldn’t consider abandoning his father now, despite anything that had happened in the past. The man had left whatever life he’d made for himself in Chile to return home and care for his wife in her last days. Éilis—Cormac’s mother—was still his wife. And still loved him, all those years later. Maybe that should count for something.

The fantasy he’d had of landing once again on Nora’s doorstep was rapidly evaporating, and he could feel her slipping further away from him. Why had he not gone with her? Fear of crowding her, perhaps. But if she was going to reject him eventually, wasn’t it best to give her a clear opportunity? She must know how he felt, that he’d never felt the same about anyone else. But their lives were not yet intertwined, and maybe they never would be. He’d always been so separate, unto himself. Could he change—was it possible, at this late date?

He looked in at his father, and decided it was no mystery why the ancient gods had been so often imagined as moody, capricious parents. Something buried deep within the life-giving force bestowed a kind of extraordinary, mythic stature. How strange it was to see the person he had once imagined as a divine being, a colossus, reduced to mere mortal once again. Cormac turned away from that unsettling sight and stared down at the pale, bitter tea in his cup, now gone cold.