False Mermaid

1

The light was all that Nora could register, because her whole body was on fire. Strong hands held her wrists while soft, slow kisses found her most sensitive places. When her phantom lover raised his head, the face belonged not to Cormac but to Frank Cordova. Caught in his grip, she watched his lips move in slow motion: Don’t be afraid. I’ll catch you. When she tried to pull away, the face altered again, and this time the eyes looking into hers belonged to Peter Hallett. She struggled harder. How could this be happening? It wasn’t real. She jerked awake and threw off the tangled sheets, shot through with cold fear and disoriented by the half light in the unfamiliar room. Heart still racing, she checked the locks on the doors and windows. Everything was secure; it was just a terrible dream. She didn’t dare try to sleep again.

When the doorbell buzzed at a quarter-past eight, she had been awake and dressed and going through the case files for nearly two hours. She tried to look out and see who was downstairs, without success. Who besides Frank Cordova even knew she was here? After the bell sounded a second time, she ventured down the narrow stairs and peered through the peephole to see Frank standing outside, freshly showered and shaved, looking not much the worse for wear after last night.

“I figured with the jet lag, you wouldn’t be able to sleep in,” he said, when she opened the door. “I’m really sorry about last night.” He was staring down at the threshold between them. “I shouldn’t drink. I was way out of line. Sorry.”

“I was nervous about seeing you, too.” The memory of his looming countenance in the dream this morning made her flush, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“So we’re okay?”

“Yeah, we’re okay. You want to come in?”

Relief broke over his face. “Yeah, sure.” He followed her upstairs into the small kitchen.

“Are you hungry? I don’t have much—”

He waved a hand, looking a little queasy at the prospect of solid food. “No—just coffee, if it’s handy.” He took a seat at the table, looking uncomfortable. He wasn’t tall, barely six feet, but he had the sort of masculine bulk that made the kitchen furniture seem almost child-sized. Nora kept the door to the sitting room closed. For some reason, she didn’t want him to see her makeshift incident room with files still spread across the floor.

She poured two cups of coffee, while he cast an appraising glance.

“Seems like Ireland agrees with you.”

Nora felt the blood rising to her face again, and this time, Frank seemed to take note.

“It was good to get some distance,” she said. “From everything. I think going away was the only thing that saved my sanity. You remember what it was like.”

The downcast look said he remembered all of it—the late nights, the media circus, the grueling emotional roller coaster of leads that evaporated almost as quickly as they appeared. And the frustration and despair that had driven them together for one reckless night. It had been a mistake. But clearly she’d been wrong in thinking he perceived it that way as well.

“How have things been with you, Frank?”

Cordova shifted in his seat and looked away, and she could almost hear the sound of a door creaking shut. Not going to happen. Not in broad daylight, and certainly not when he was sober. He gave her a weary smile. “The usual. Not enough hours in a day. That’s what they’ll carve on my tombstone.”

“Frank, last night—”

“Last night was not exactly the usual, if that’s what you’re worried about.” His left thumb absently traced the groove around the rim of his mug. “I suppose you know about Miranda Staunton. You think her brother fixed her up with Hallett?”

Nora heard a note of antipathy in Frank’s voice that said he hadn’t forgotten or forgiven the way Marc Staunton had treated her. The way Marc had taken Peter Hallett’s word over hers. The way he’d walked out when she wouldn’t desist in unmasking his old friend. It was a little unsettling to admit how good Frank’s lingering resentment made her feel. She took a sip of coffee, but found its taste bitter on her tongue. “To tell you the truth, just hearing that Peter planned to marry again convinced me to come back. I didn’t find out that Miranda was the bride-to-be until last night. I can’t let go of this crazy idea that we might be able to stop him.”

“I hope it’s not crazy—I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

“Here’s something you might not know. He’s leaving the country on Saturday—taking Miranda to Ireland, the same place he took Tríona on their honeymoon. That was something I only discovered last night as well.” She watched the news work its way across Cordova’s features.

“So we have what—four days—to crack a case that’s hung us out to dry for five years? Even if we had something, it takes time to build a case.” Nora realized that he was probably swamped at work, and couldn’t just drop everything for a cold case, even this one. They sat in awkward silence for a moment. “Four days. I thought we’d have a little more time.”

“Frank, you said something last night, about another girl at Hidden Falls—”

His eyes narrowed. “What did I say?”

“That Peter didn’t know you’d found her. You said you weren’t sure it was anything to do with Tríona.”

Cordova took a deep breath. “A Jane Doe turned up down at the river three days ago. A fisherman came across the body, in a patch of swampland down at Hidden Falls—you know yourself, sometimes it’s just a feeling.”

Nora felt the beginning of a vibration, as if someone had touched a tuning fork to her solar plexus. “Where was this patch of swamp exactly?”

“Up under the bluffs north of the falls.”

Nora knew the place—one of a dozen sites the police had searched along the river five years ago, looking for evidence to pinpoint a primary crime scene, the place where Tríona had been attacked. There was nothing to say that this was the same wooded area—nothing, that is, except another body. Cordova’s eyes met hers, and the same frisson passed through her again.

“How long had she been there?”

“Hard to say exactly. The ME said he’s never seen anything like it. Half the body was reduced to bone, but the side buried deeper in the swamp was—”

“What?”

“Mummified, I guess—I don’t know what else to call it. The doc said it was probably something to do with the wet ground. He was guessing she’d been there three or four years, maybe longer.”

“And the cause of death?” Somehow she knew what Frank was going to say even before he opened his mouth.

“Somebody smashed her face in. I’m stopping over to pick up the final autopsy report this morning—”

“Take me with you.”

“What?”

“I need to see her, Frank. If the ME has a problem with me being there, you can say I’m a specialist on preserved human remains.”

His eyes narrowed. “Is that true?”

“It’s part of what I’ve been doing in Ireland, studying Iron Age remains recovered from peat bogs.”

Cordova smiled faintly and shook his head, as though it was difficult to process this new information. He stood and gestured for her to lead the way. “Okay, Dr. Gavin, let’s go.”

2

The Ramsey County medical examiner worked out of a low, nondescript building adjacent to the regional medical center in downtown Saint Paul. Nora hadn’t been to the building since she’d identified Tríona’s body. She tried to steel herself as Cordova parked in the small lot in front of the building.

Buck Callaway, the former ME, had been a colleague at the university, and a good friend who’d seen her through some rough times. They had kept in touch. Since his retirement, Buck and his wife had set off traveling the world. Nora was never surprised to receive their postcards from far-flung locales—the Peruvian Andes, Greenland, or the steppes of Mongolia. Buck’s travel had a serious purpose; in his retirement, he was compiling an epidemiological library of the ancient world. It was Buck Callaway who’d first urged her to take up the study of ancient bog remains in Ireland. She had yet to meet his replacement.

“What’s the new guy like?” she asked Frank.

“Solomon’s good,” Cordova said. “Very enthusiastic. Although that pretty much goes without saying for you pathology types.”

They signed in at reception, and Cordova led the way down the hall and through the wide double doors leading into the autopsy room. Not much had changed since she’d last been here; the place still had the look of a combination laboratory and operating room, albeit with some rather unorthodox surgical instruments. Three of the five stainless-steel tables were occupied. At the first two, the mortuary technicians were washing a pair of pale corpses, preparing them for the next step. On the last table was an articulated skeleton belonging to the county’s latest Jane Doe.

Nora’s first thought was that she might be back in Dublin, looking at one of the National Museum’s ancient specimens. The skull had been reduced to bone, along with one side of the body, just as Frank had described. Moving closer, she saw that the right side was mostly intact, from the shoulder down to the slightly darkened toenails and the sole of the foot. Taken as a whole, the image was grisly and surreal: a grinning, gap-toothed skeleton half veiled in tattered flesh.

Cordova said: “Something else, isn’t it?”

Nora let her gaze travel slowly across the face—what was left of it. The nasal bones had all but disappeared, and the exposed frontal bone bore evidence of several shallow, dishlike compression fractures. The maxilla was badly broken and a handful of teeth lay loose on the table. Whoever this young woman was, her face had been destroyed, exactly as Tríona’s had been. Nora reached out to grasp the edge of the stainless-steel table and felt Frank Cordova move incrementally closer behind her. He was about to speak when a voice sounded behind them.

“Hey, Frank. I’ve got that report for you, and personal effects are here somewhere—”

Nora turned to see a stocky, bearded figure in blue scrubs. She had to concentrate on putting on a professional face as Frank introduced her.

“Steve Solomon,” the newcomer said, extending his hand. “Buck Callaway has mentioned your name. And he told me a little about your work—in Ireland, right?” He turned his attention to the body on the table. “I’m glad to have you here. To be honest, I haven’t really seen much of this sort of thing, so I’m happy to have an expert—”

“Not exactly an expert,” Nora demurred. “Just trying to understand bog preservation a little better.”

Solomon said: “I do have a little experience with wet burials—did my residency at Tulane, and my first job was with the Orleans Parish coroner. But I never encountered anything quite like this. So how does our Jane Doe compare to what you’ve seen?”

“Most of the bodies I’ve examined were much older—about two thousand years older, actually. But there was one case recently, a young man who’d been buried in peat for only about twenty-five years.” Danny Brazil, whispered the small voice in her head. His name was Danny Brazil and he kept bees. Aloud she said: “Even after that short exposure to the bog environment, the similarity to ancient remains was pretty amazing.”

Nora turned back to the body and studied the edges of the flesh where the right leg must have been submerged in water; the visible tendons and ligaments looked frayed, and she could see a layer of adipocere beneath the skin—ordinary body fat transformed into a yellowish, waxy material—a common feature of preserved remains. “The darkening of the skin is just a basic Maillard reaction. It starts quickly, but takes a long time to become really well established. There’s some recent research from Canada, studies of fetal pigs buried in peat for different intervals, and some of them showed a slight change in coloration after only a few years. Sometimes it depends on the age of the individual, and the quality of their skin—how receptive it was to the chemical changes. Frank said you thought she might have been in the ground three or four years at least. From the degree of coloration, I’d probably agree with that.”

Nora could feel Frank checking her expression, gauging her reaction to the body.

She asked: “No evidence that animals had disturbed the site?”

Solomon shook his head.

“At first I thought that was strange, since people run dogs down there all the time. But it’s a floodplain—things shift around in high water. There’s quite a lot of debris, and very little undergrowth in the area where she was found, and I wondered if the body might have been buried deeper by sediment and floodwater. Might be a contributing factor to the state of preservation—and it could be one reason she didn’t turn up before now.”

“The gravesite itself—the surrounding material—what was that like?”

“Primarily organic,” Solomon said. “Lots of peat. The crime scene folks took plenty of samples. It seemed very wet for this late in the year—the ground all around her was completely sodden.”

“Probably a spring or a seepage area nearby. There are spots like that all over at Hidden Falls. It makes a huge difference in preservation, the water levels and temperature. Do you mind if I take a closer look?”

Solomon pulled the lighted magnifying glass into position for her. “Be my guest.”

Nora studied the broken edges of bone through the plate-sized lens, gently probing with gloved fingers and noting the angle of the breaks—the inward slope suggested impact from a convex shape, a rounded weapon. A fleeting impression flashed through the synapses in her brain: a raised hand, a heavy weight delivering a crushing blow. And not just once, but over and over again. Asking the next question meant straying from her consultant role. “Frank said you were thinking blunt force as the cause of death?”

“Looks that way,” Solomon said. “From the uniform weathering, it looks like the fractures occurred perimortem.”

“What about defensive wounds?”

“No marks indicating use of a sharp weapon, no trauma to the hands or forearms that would indicate defense against blunt force. Chances are the first blow was fatal and everything after that was unnecessary. Overkill.”

Overkill.The same word Buck Callaway had used about Tríona.

Nora asked: “How long will it take to find out who she is?”

“We’ve got eight missing women still on the books,” Cordova said. “Most don’t fit her description, so that helps narrow it down.”

“It helps that she took good care of her teeth,” Solomon said. “The incisors have come loose, but we recovered all of her teeth from the site. Just one filling. The forensic odontologist was here yesterday. She’s comparing dental records from missing persons right now. And this particular consultant is also an expert on facial trauma, so she should be able to provide information on the degree of force, maybe even the sort of weapon used. I’m guessing she’ll have an answer for us today or tomorrow.”

“You said you had clothing and personal effects?” Cordova asked.

“Right here,” Solomon said, reaching behind him for the marked evidence bags, which he handed over. “Running clothes, shoes and socks, a watch. No ID. Everything’s there.”

Solomon’s glance tracked over Cordova’s shoulder to the doorway, where the receptionist was signaling a call for him. “Sorry, that may be the odontologist. I asked them to track me down if she called.”

After he left the room, Nora spoke under her breath: “These injuries, Frank, they’re identical—exactly the same as Tríona’s. And the location—a black ash swamp—it can’t just be coincidence.”

“As soon as we figure out who she is—”

Solomon came back through the door, looking satisfied. “Looks like you won’t have to wait. The odontologist is faxing over her report right now. The dental chart matched one of your missing persons, a twenty-two-year-old female—”

Frank Cordova finished the sentence for him: “Natalie Russo. I’ve been going through the missing persons files, too. Natalie disappeared the third of June—five years ago.”

The words sent a cold knife down Nora’s spine. She had often been gripped by the paralyzing notion that her sister would not be Peter Hallett’s final victim. But for some reason it had never occurred to her that Tríona might not have been the first.

3

Cormac stood at the window of the hospital room, looking in at his father. No one had ever been able to explain what had prompted Joseph Maguire to leave Ireland. Perhaps he didn’t fully understand the reasons himself. Now he lay in a hospital bed on the other side of the glass, breathing steadily with the help of a ventilator, as the nurse checked intravenous lines, his pulse, his oxygen level.

An insult to the brain, the doctors kept calling it, as if mere effrontery could trigger physical disaster. But his father was in no immediate danger, they said, and could leave the hospital once he could breathe on his own, provided he had adequate care at home. Adequate care. The blithe assumption in those words struck him, and Cormac suddenly felt short of breath. He turned and made his way to the ward entrance, past the nurse’s station and the visitors’ lounge, the canteen area with vending machines for tea and biscuits. He pushed open the lobby door and felt the cool, damp air hit him in the face. The flight from Shannon to New York left in less than twelve hours. He could leave now, not tell anyone where he was going; he could still make it—

A voice at his elbow brought him back to reality: “I thought I saw you headed out here,” the nurse said, the same one who’d been taking his father’s temperature. “You can go in to him if you like. Just for a few minutes. Some say it doesn’t help, but I think they know you’re there, even if they can’t say. Go on, speak to him. You’ve nothing to lose.”

Gazing into the woman’s kind brown eyes, Cormac felt his prospect of escape collapse like a sail suddenly robbed of wind. He walked slowly back to the ward and slid into the chair beside his father’s bed. Speak to him? He hadn’t even figured out how to address the man. Calling him “Da,” or “Father”—anything remotely along those lines—seemed ridiculous at this stage. And using his given name seemed even more preposterous. Easier just to sidestep the whole issue. Call him nothing at all.

Cormac had long ago realized that the word father, whatever it conjured up for other people, held no association at all for him, unless it was a void, an absence. As a child, he had built a sturdy box around that void and buried it, tried to concentrate on filling his life with other things. But absence was something he understood, at least. It was his father’s sudden presence that was so bewildering. Cormac let his gaze wander across the man in the bed: the ropelike veins in the backs of the hands, the broken blood vessels visible through the papery skin at the temples, the unruly shock of white hair. This man looked so small, so insignificant, Cormac thought, for someone who had cast such a looming shadow. In dreams, Joseph Maguire had taken up a great deal more space.

He had no recollection of his father leaving, but they must have been living in Dublin at the time. There was only a vague memory of arriving in Clare, first to stay with his grandparents, then eventually settling, just himself and his mother, in the house along the sea road. No one ever talked about his father in those days—not to him at least. Over the next ten years, all he’d ever learned had to be gleaned from the few bits of conversation he might overhear after a letter arrived in the post. They came only sporadically—once, sometimes twice a year—but he’d felt the eyes of the village upon him for days after each delivery. In a small place like Kilgarvan, his family’s circumstances accounted for at least half the local scandal. Once the postmistress spotted a foreign stamp, the news spread, passed along in whispers and glances, and everyone in the town would know about his father’s letter before it ever arrived at their house. Cormac had felt the excitement each letter generated in the air around him—a volatile compound of curiosity, pity, and envy. At first he’d been unable to fathom the envy, but gradually realized that most of it came from schoolmates whose fathers were all too present, loading them with work, and ready with the strap if they dared shirk or disobey. Because his father was absent, they no doubt imagined him as free from all that—free to be coddled and cosseted by his mammy, with no manly interference.

He remembered watching the subtle change in his mother’s face when the post came bearing one of those striped air mail envelopes. She would retreat to her room, appearing still and composed when she emerged an hour or so later, but her eyes were always red. No one said the letters were from his father, but they didn’t have to—he knew. There was never a separate note for him, no word of greeting or even a postscript. After the third or fourth one, he had tried very hard not to care. At one point, he’d tried hating his father, focusing all his energy steadily on that one thing for a few weeks. But he found that loathing required a certain depth of feeling, which he had difficulty mustering against someone who barely existed. Eventually, he began to let people believe that his father was dead. It seemed true enough.

The old man’s first resurrection had come unexpectedly, when he was away at university. It might never have happened, if his mother had not fallen ill. Returning home one weekend to help care for her, he had found his place occupied by a white-haired man claiming to be his father. His parents had decided—without consulting him—that he should stay at his studies. But he had refused to go back to Dublin. He’d taken off the rest of the term, and they had all lived together for a few weeks in the house on the sea road, maintaining a veneer of civility for his mother’s sake. When she died, the charade had abruptly ended. Rejecting his father’s offer to stay on in Ireland, Cormac had returned to his studies an orphan, and Joseph Maguire, who had presumably gone back to Chile, returned to being dead.

The second resurrection had been as unexpected as the first. Cormac slipped a letter from his pocket, a small pale blue envelope that had arrived through his mail slot in Dublin more than three years ago. The return address had meant nothing then: J. Maguire, Glencolumbkille Post Office, County Donegal. The handwriting was small and compact, the old-fashioned Gaelic script taught in National Schools when the country was new. He occasionally received similar letters from amateur archaeologists, and expected this dispatch to contain an earnest account of a previously undocumented ringfort or souterrain. His expectation was immediately dashed at the salutation. “My dear Cormac,” it began:

The letter was signed, “Highest regards, Julia Maguire.” The signature was larger and steadier than the rest of the script, as if accomplished in a last burst of strength. The pages had laid on his desk for several days as he tried to work out how to respond. But as it turned out, writing the letter and seeing it posted were quite literally the last things his great-aunt Julia had done.

Gazing at the motionless figure in the bed, Cormac felt the past spilling over him, a torrent of images and sensations that felt as if it might overwhelm and drown him: he saw a solitary boy walking along the sea road, repelling all disapproving or pitying looks with his invisible shield; he saw the row of syringes lined up on a metal tray, and the worn chaise where his mother rested, wrapped in her paisley shawl; he felt in his bones all those years of digging, searching for answers in the distant past; and through all of it, the urge to flee so strong again now that he could taste it in the back of his throat. He bowed his head and grasped the edge of the bed for support.

It would be a simple act, getting up from the chair and heading down the hallway, out the front door again. He closed his eyes and saw himself crossing the threshold in the hospital’s modern glass foyer, not stopping, not looking back, just walking until he disappeared down the road. Toward the airport. To Nora.

When he opened his eyes, Cormac discovered that his father’s hand had slid down the bedclothes and come to rest against his own. The old man’s flesh felt warm against his, and he realized it was their first physical contact in nearly thirty years. For some reason, he could not bear to pull his hand away. Perhaps one day the words might come. For now, all he had was the faint hope of yet another resurrection.

4

Frank Cordova stood next to his car in the parking lot of the medical examiner’s office. Nora Gavin’s eyes seemed to drill into him. “Who is Natalie Russo, Frank? You know something about her—please tell me.”

“I’ll let you have a look for yourself,” he said. He opened his car trunk and pulled a slender file from the carton of missing persons reports he’d been hauling around the past three days. He remembered his own first sight of Natalie, down at the river three days ago, and how he’d felt that distinctive cold trace down his neck, wondering if this girl’s death was somehow related to Tríona Hallett’s. Nora took the file and climbed into the passenger seat. He knew what she was looking for, because he’d searched for it himself: an overlapping circumstance, a possible proximity, some person or place that would connect the dead girl and Peter Hallett. But there was nothing like that in the file.

Natalie Russo had been a recent transplant to Saint Paul when she disappeared five years ago. She had a job as a bike messenger for a company whose regular client list included law firms, graphic designers, people whose incomes depended on speed. But she worked only part-time, to leave plenty of hours in the day for training. Rowing was definitely her priority. The emergency contact on her employment application was a coach from the Twin Cities Rowing Club, Sarah Cates. Nothing out of the ordinary the week she disappeared: pickups and deliveries for the usual clients, rowing practice, her morning run along the paths at Hidden Falls. On Friday, she didn’t show up for work or rowing practice, but no one realized anything was wrong until her bike was spotted in its customary place outside the rowing club. Her teammates had turned out to help with a foot search, but they found nothing. She was just gone.

Frank’s cell phone began to vibrate, and he glanced at the number. His partner, Karin Bledsoe. She had already called twice this morning, probably wondering where the hell he was. He shoved the phone back in his pocket. She would have her answer soon enough.

He glanced over at Nora, watching the way she flipped through the pages in the file, the way her thumbnail absently brushed against her lower lip as she read. He felt suddenly unnerved by that gesture, and all the thousand other things he’d tried so hard to forget. It was stupid, thinking he could handle being with her again, any better than he’d handled it the last time.

Last night had started out innocently enough. It was sickening, wondering what he’d said and done. There was no car parked in front of the carriage house the first time he drove past in the afternoon. Never mind that the apartment was on a narrow, one-way street where nobody just happened to drive by. He could have turned around then, gone home. Instead he’d gone to a bar down on Grand Avenue to grab some dinner. Then he’d started ordering tequila shots, trying to talk himself out of going past the carriage house again on his way home. By the time he went back, there was a rental car out front. If she’d only been inside the apartment, he’d have been spared any humiliation. If memory served, he hadn’t even managed to ring the bell. Just his luck that she’d been out, and found him on the doorstep as she came home. There was one small mercy—at least he hadn’t tried to drive.

He’d awakened this morning just as he had three years ago—with a sore head, and a curious, buoyant feeling that lasted only until he’d turned over to find himself alone. Three years ago, after their one night together, Nora had managed to avoid him, and then left the country without a word. Not even a phone message or a note to say she was going away, that what had happened had been a mistake. That part he’d had to figure out all on his own. He’d been present when the need took her, but now it seemed he was nothing but a momentary lapse in judgment, a slightly embarrassing memory. Strange—even knowing all that didn’t seem to change the way he felt. Something had taken hold of him that night, and he had never been able to shake it off.

Nora finally spoke. “There’s nothing here, Frank. Nothing to connect her to Peter—except the river. He used to run down at Hidden Falls. That’s probably where he was the morning after Tríona disappeared. And the blows to the face—”

In addition to the dental match, the forensic odontologist had determined from the fractures that the injuries to Natalie Russo’s face had been made by someone with remarkable upper-body strength, most likely using a heavy, rounded object about the size and shape of a small grapefruit. Frank knew that Nora was thinking about the profiler they’d consulted at the time of Tríona’s murder. Injuries to the face—like those sustained by Tríona, and now Natalie Russo as well—that sort of an attack was usually personal. Much more likely to occur, according to the profiler, when the killer and the victim were involved in an intimate relationship. As if murder itself wasn’t enough, whoever had destroyed these women’s faces had taken a step beyond and tried to rub them out, deny their very existence. A strange sound floated through his head, an old man’s voice, like the buzzing of a fly: Susto, susto. He felt a tightening inside, a queasiness that hadn’t gone away since last night. He never should have started drinking tequila.

Nora said, “Have you checked through the evidence from Hidden Falls? If we could line up the two crime scenes, or find something that would link Peter to Natalie Russo—”

“The crime scene unit just finished processing, but we’ve got some of the stuff logged in down at evidence storage.”

“If they found something of Tríona’s at that site—”

When they arrived at police headquarters a few minutes later, Nora followed Cordova down a chilly stairwell, listening to their footsteps reverberate against concrete. The few people they passed greeted Frank by name, and she felt their eyes surreptitiously checking the name on her visitor’s pass. Some of them would remember the trouble she’d stirred up five years ago—and no doubt pity Frank, having to deal with her again. When they reached the basement, he led her to property and evidence storage, a vast expanse of shelving behind a glass window, home to thousands of cardboard file boxes. And this wasn’t even a tenth of it—there was another whole warehouse somewhere close by, filled with thousands more sealed cartons. Somewhere in this place they could also find Tríona’s blood-soaked clothing, all the physical details that painted the gruesome picture of her last moments. As many times as Nora had been here, for some reason it had never struck her before in the same way, this vast system of enumerated transgressions. This library of crime reduced every offense, even the most horrific, to office work. Perhaps boxing up and storing away all the disturbing details of robbery and rape and murder was a way to feel as though you could contain them somehow.

She hung back while Frank signed out the evidence files. He took the first two boxes from the property officer; they’d have to wait while the others were retrieved.

In the meantime, Frank led her into an evidence exam room and shut the door behind them. He set his boxes on the table. “Like I said, there’s probably more on the way, but we can go through what’s been collected—” He suddenly winced and tilted forward, pressing two fingers to his chest.

Nora felt stabbing fear. “Frank, are you all right?”

He waved her away. “It’s nothing—I’m okay.” He fumbled in his pocket and quickly popped two antacids.

“How often are you taking those?”

“I don’t know—a couple of times a day.” Cordova straightened, but his face was ashy. He let out a slow breath. “It comes and goes. I’m fine.”

“Have you seen a doctor? It could be more than heartburn.”

He turned on her. “Jesus Christ, Nora—will you stop mothering me?”

She took a step back, shocked by his sudden flash of anger. “I’m just worried about you, Frank.”

“Well, do me a favor and stop worrying.” He kept his face turned away, shielded his eyes with one hand. “For three years, I’ve been trying to tell myself that what happened with us was a mistake. Unprofessional on my part, a slip-up. But every time I try to get that night out of my head, it won’t seem to shake loose. I’m not sorry it happened.”

“But it wasn’t real, Frank—”

“How do you know that? You never gave us a chance to find out. For Chrissake, Nora, we never even talked about what happened. Can you honestly tell me you don’t feel anything—”

“Of course not—it wouldn’t be true. But things happen, Frank, things outside our control—”

His eyes narrowed. “You met someone. Over there.”

“It’s got nothing to do with you and me, with what happened—”

He let go a bitter laugh. “Christ, some detective I am. It was staring me right in the face. Here’s an idea—why don’t I stand here and make a fool of myself just once more, and you can stand there, laughing—”

Nora had never seen him like this; the change was bewildering. “Do you see me laughing? I care about you, Frank, and God knows I’m indebted—” She winced, regretting the choice of words.

His voice became deadly quiet: “So that’s what you were doing with me that night—paying off a debt?”

The heavy metal door banged open suddenly, and a handcart piled high with file boxes seemed to roll on its own into the room. A uniformed officer, a wiry terrier of a man in his mid-fifties, cocked an eye at them above the boxes. “Where do you want these, Frank?”

Cordova shaded his face with one hand. “Just stack them up along the wall, I guess, Charlie. That’s not everything, is it?”

“Hell, no—I got another half dozen in the lockup.” He glanced sideways at Nora as he unloaded the cart. “You might need a bigger room.” When the boxes were unloaded, he spun the empty dolly with a dancer’s finesse, whistling as he steered it out the door and back down the hall.

Nora waited until the door was shut to speak: “Frank, please—you know very well that’s not what I meant.”

“Just tell me if you met someone. Yes or no.”

Nora felt her throat tighten. “Yes.”

“Is it serious?”

“I think so—yes.”

Cordova’s head had dropped forward. He stared at the floor for a moment, then took a deep breath.

Nora felt a sudden urge to reach out to him, but resisted. “I was confused. You were the only person I could really trust. In the morning, I was afraid I’d completely messed things up between us, and I didn’t want to do that. I see now that going away wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair—I’m so sorry, Frank.”

He looked up at her again, but he wasn’t listening. His eyes had gone flat, and he seemed to be looking straight through her. “I should give Charlie a hand with the rest of those boxes.”

When he had gone, Nora sat down at the table and buried her head in her arms. She had known since last night that this conversation was in the cards. But could it possibly have gone any worse?

A few seconds later, the door swung open, and Nora turned to see an athletic-looking woman about her own age, with pale blue eyes and a summer tan set off by short-cropped, naturally white-blond hair. She was dressed in a neat brown suit and a white blouse open at the throat. The ID on the lanyard around her neck said “Detective” in bold letters.

Frank Cordova, standing beside her with a couple of file boxes in his arms, looked thoroughly put out. He said, “Nora, I don’t think you’ve ever met my partner—”

The woman smiled and put out her hand in greeting. “Karin Bledsoe. I’ve certainly heard your name, Dr. Gavin.”

Taking in the polite but slightly frozen smile, Nora could only presume what else Frank’s partner had heard. No time to worry about that now. Charlie was back with the next load of files, wheeling his cart past them into the room.

“So, what are you two doing down here?” Karin Bledsoe asked, managing with her tone to make the meeting seem slightly illicit. “I thought you were working that Jane Doe case today, Frank.”

“I am. We just got an ID—Natalie Russo, one of our missing persons. I wanted Dr. Gavin to have a look at the evidence from the scene because it may have a bearing on her own case—her sister’s case, I mean.” Frank seemed inordinately uncomfortable, even considering what had just passed a few minutes before in this room. For a moment Nora couldn’t grasp the reason, until at last she felt an unexpected jolt—it wasn’t just happenstance or professional curiosity that had carried Frank’s partner all the way down here to the basement. Despite the conspicuous wedding band on Karin Bledsoe’s left hand, Nora suddenly knew that this woman was more than Frank Cordova’s work partner. And if her intuition was true, it put a whole different spin on the conversation she’d just had with him, not to mention his appearance on her doorstep last night.

Karin Bledsoe turned to Frank. “I would love to give you a hand, but I’ve got court today. That’s why I was trying to call you, Frank. Just in case you forgot. The duty officer said he saw you headed down here, so I thought I’d deliver the message in person.” She turned to give Nora a last look and another frosty smile. “So nice to meet you at last, Dr. Gavin.”

After Karin Bledsoe left, Frank wouldn’t make eye contact. He turned away to open the first evidence box, and began checking its contents against the inventory list.

“Have you and Karin been partners long?” Nora could hear the brittle note in her voice.

Frank didn’t look up. “Two years.” From his tone, she knew he wasn’t in the mood to talk about Karin Bledsoe—or anything else.

She decided not to push. Maybe after that disastrous conversation a few minutes ago, she ought to count herself lucky that Frank was willing to stay here and work with her. That his need for justice was stronger than his pride.

They worked for a long time in silence, Frank removing bagged items one by one from each box and handing them to Nora. They both knew exactly what they were looking for: when Tríona’s body was discovered, her right shoe was missing, presumably lost at the crime scene or somewhere along the way to the parking garage. Her purse had been found in the car trunk with the body, but her cell phone—the same one Nora had tried calling from the hotel lobby—had never turned up.

The evidence collected from Natalie Russo’s grave site at Hidden Falls was mostly an odd assortment of litter. Nora counted at least a dozen cigarette butts, a couple of flattened beer cans, six sodden matchbooks, innumerable food wrappers, two used condoms, an empty spray paint can. How was it possible to focus on what was important? She watched Frank linger over a prescription pill bottle, trying to read the faded label, as she peered through evidence bags at a stone arrowhead; an ancient, corroded pocket watch; a rusty penknife. The next box contained a handful of mildewed pages that looked as though they’d been ripped from a book of poems. Nora watched as Frank flipped through the curled, black-smudged pages, looking for writing in the margin, underlined words, anything that might tell more. How was it possible to know which stories might be connected? Maybe the pill bottle and the cigarette butts were part of the same story—or perhaps the penknife and the poetry? It was also possible that these fragments were all from completely disconnected tales that overlapped only in the physical world, rubbing together in the layers of detritus left by different generations. Two hours later, they were getting near the end of their search through the evidence, with no sign of a shoe or a cell phone.

“There might be more on the way,” Frank said. “The state crime lab is still processing the rest.”

“What’s that?” Nora pointed to a manila envelope, the last item in the box.

Frank checked the label. “‘Soil and plant material.” He used his penknife to slit open the initialed seal and shook out a heap of dirt and organic material onto a large plastic tray.

Nora began to poke at the pile with a pencil. Some of the leaves were easily recognizable: cottonwood, ash and elm, buckthorn, along with loamy soil studded with many different kinds of seeds. She didn’t look up. “Frank, do you remember the stuff Buck Callaway combed from Tríona’s hair?”

“Sure—that’s how we knew her body had been moved.”

“If we compared these leaves and seeds—”

“What could that tell us? We already know Tríona was probably killed somewhere along the river.”

Nora spoke slowly: “Yes, but if Tríona was attacked near the spot where Natalie Russo was buried, she might have carried away something very specific to that site. We never had anything to compare to the material from Tríona’s hair. I’m just thinking—the leaves and seeds from a single parent plant carry the same genetic fingerprint.”

“But DNA testing takes weeks, months, you know that. The state crime lab is always backed up—”

Nora waved a hand to stop him. “The testing wouldn’t have to be done at the state lab. Do you remember Holly Blume, my friend at the University Herbarium? The forensic botanist who identified the seeds from Tríona’s hair. Her specialty is population genetics—she runs DNA profiles on plants all the time. We could ask Holly to compare the samples from the two cases, see if we can’t come up with a match on the crime scenes that way. It may be a long shot, but it’s at least worth a try.”

5

Thirty minutes later, Nora led Frank Cordova down an air-conditioned corridor on the eighth floor of the Biological Sciences Building on the University of Minnesota’s Saint Paul campus. She knocked on an office door, and a small, dark-haired woman answered. Holly Blume’s face brightened at the sight of her two unexpected visitors, but Nora was unprepared for her friend’s fierce embrace.

“Nora Gavin! What happened to you? You dropped off the face of the earth. We were all so worried about you—”

Nora had gone away believing that she’d lost everything, but perhaps she’d been mistaken in thinking she had lost all her friends. As Holly drew back to study her, Nora had to fight to keep her emotions in check. “I’m fine, Holly. I’ve been abroad for a while.”

“But nobody knew how to get in touch. You should have told someone where you were. I got married, Nora, had a baby.” Holly’s expression softened. “I shouldn’t scold you. I know you had good reasons for going away. Just want you to know you’ve been sorely missed.” She glanced at Frank. “Why do I get the feeling this isn’t just a social call?”

“Holly, you remember Frank Cordova—”

“Yes, of course. How are you, Detective? It’s a pity we only meet under professional circumstances. I’d ask you in to sit, but it’s a bit cramped in here—let’s go across to the Herbarium.”

Despite its impressive Latin name, the Herbarium was nothing more than a climate-controlled room full of metal cabinets, each containing specimens of pressed plants from Minnesota and all around the world. No one could enter without comprehending just how antiquarian the field of plant biology remained. Color-coded maps of county biological surveys hung on the wall. The images might be computer-generated nowadays, and the ranges of various plants tracked with GPS coordinates, but the data were still collected by human beings traveling on foot, taking samples from fields and forests and ditches. Holly gestured for them to sit at the battered lab table at the center of the room, and sat forward herself, fingers laced together expectantly.

“What we’ve got are samples of plant material from two crime scenes,” Nora said.

Frank held up two evidence envelopes. “We think both samples may have originated from the same site at Hidden Falls Park, but we need to know whether it’s possible to prove that—beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Holly eyed the bulging envelopes. “I’m not going to promise anything, but I can certainly have a look.”

Nora asked, “Do you remember the seeds you identified from my sister’s hair?”

“Sure,” Holly said. “There were lots of different species, as I recall, pretty typical of seepage swamp: black ash and cottonwood, buckthorn, marsh marigold, Virginia creeper, touch-me-not, wood nettle. They’re all pretty common. But there was one unusual find as well, seeds from a plant called false mermaid. It’s only been documented a couple of places in Minnesota, and only outside the Twin Cities. I was sorry we couldn’t pinpoint where the seeds came from—it would have helped your case, I know.”

“We might have another chance,” Nora said. “I remember that name, false mermaid. Something to do with mythology?”

“I’m astonished that you remember,” Holly said. She pointed to a poster on the wall, photographs of a wispy-looking green plant. A corner inset showed a close-up of three wrinkled seeds. “There it is—the Latin name is Floerkea proserpinacoides: The genus, Floerkea, after the famous German botanist Gustav Heinrich Flörke, and the epithet, proserpinacoides, which means ‘like Proserpinaca.’ Proserpinaca is a semiaquatic plant, also called ‘mermaid weed.’ The fellow who named false mermaid thought its leaves bore a strong resemblance to Proserpinaca. As it turns out, they aren’t genetically related, but the name stuck anyway.”

“But that’s the mythological connection,” Nora said.

Holly smiled. “Wow—no flies on you! Proserpina was the daughter of Ceres—”

“Goddess of agriculture.”

“That’s right. When Proserpina was carried off by Pluto, god of the underworld, her mother spent ages searching for her. When she was found, Ceres interceded with Jupiter, who said Proserpina could return to earth, as long as she’d taken no food or drink during her stay in the underworld.”

Nora felt her memory trickling back. “But Pluto had offered her a piece of fruit when she arrived, and she had eaten the pulp of a single pomegranate seed.”

Holly threw a wry look at Frank. “And here’s me, imagining myself the lone mythology geek in the room. Jupiter suggested a compromise; Proserpina got to spend half the year above ground with her mother, and half the year in the underworld with her husband-slash-captor. Now, here’s the connection to the plant world: Proserpinaca, as I mentioned, is semiaquatic. That means the lower part grows underwater, the upper part grows in the air. That’s how it ended up with the name mermaid weed. Floerkea, on the other hand, grows in seeps and marshes and other wet places, but it isn’t even semiaquatic, so that’s where the ‘false’ part comes in—sorry, I’m sure all this is way more than you needed to know. Back to the samples. What exactly are you looking for?”

Frank said: “We’re trying to establish a connection between two crime scenes, and what we need are a few hard facts.”

Nora jumped in: “I know you’re involved in population genetics, and I wondered if there’s any way to tell whether any of the leaves or seeds from these two samples came from the same parent plant. I know it’s a lot to ask—”

Holly considered for a moment. “In order to have any statistical credibility, you need enough material to establish allele frequencies, to say definitively that the plants in your two samples are related. I’d have to go down to the site myself to collect more samples—thirty is usually the magic number.”

Frank said: “The crime scene crews are finished up down there, but I’ll talk to the supervisor, let them know what you’ll need. They can give you a hand, if they know what to look for.”

“Even after I get the samples, you realize DNA results are going to take a few days.”

Frank said: “Unfortunately, time is the one thing we haven’t got. Our suspect is leaving the country Saturday. If we could find something before then—”

Holly stood and held up a hand. “Say no more—the sooner you two are on your way, the sooner I can get cracking.”

They were halfway down the hall when Holly stuck her head out the lab door and called after them. “I nearly forgot to say—you’ll also want to double check any clothing you might have in evidence for seeds and pollen grains. Plants are clever stowaways. They’re all about survival.”

6

After dropping Nora back at her apartment, Frank Cordova sat at the corner, waiting to turn east onto Summit Avenue. He happened to glance into the rearview mirror, and instead of seeing Nora, he saw a small, dark-eyed child standing in the car’s backseat. Suddenly he was that child, feeling hot vinyl upholstery burning the backs of his arms and legs, the soles of his feet as he stood looking into a pair of dark eyes that glared at him from the rearview mirror. There was no story, no context for the image, just terrible, crushing dread. And then the vision was gone; another random fragment of the past that floated briefly to the surface only to become submerged again. Frank put it out of his head. He had interviews to conduct, evidence to compare; there was no time for chasing phantoms.

But another memory surfaced: that girl’s body laid out on the table this morning, and he felt an almost electrical surge, then another. The vague fear that usually lived deep in his gut began to rise, and with it came the smell of dust, and the air of a closed-up space. He felt the unwelcome heat of someone close beside him, heard the rough breathing, the loud whisper that kept asking, Paco, what’s the matter? Why is Papi yelling? Stopping the questions took two hands. It also left his own ears open, but he had no choice. No one was supposed to know where they were. He cradled the back of his brother’s head with his left hand and clamped the other tight over Chago’s slobbery mouth, still mumbling beneath his fingers. He began to rock back and forth, hunching his shoulders, as if that might block his ears. He tried to drown out the noises in the next room by filling his head with a constant torrent of words: Please o h please oh please oh please—Díos te salve, María, llena eres de gracia, el Señor es contigo, bendita tú eres entre todas las mujeres, y bendito es el fruto de tu vientre, Jesús. Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte. Amén. Please oh please oh please oh please oh please oh please— hoping somehow his hundreds of unvoiced prayers would help speed the merciful silence that always followed.

The noise of squealing tires suddenly roused him, as if from a trance. He swerved instinctively to avoid the car that came careening toward him, and jammed on the brakes. The other driver pulled up just short of a collision, his shocked face visible through the windshield. Cordova felt his heart pumping; he suddenly felt woozy and light-headed. The other car had come to a full stop just inches from his driver’s side door in the middle of the intersection. The cathedral was directly in front of him, and all at once he knew what had happened—he’d run the red light. The other driver pulled alongside and lowered his passenger window to let go a string of curses. Frank could see the man’s lips moving, but the words didn’t register. It occurred to him, in some faraway part of his brain, that he must be in shock. The other driver eventually gave up and sped off, raising his middle finger in the rearview mirror as a parting salute. Cordova stared down at his own hands, still gripping the steering wheel. He remembered dropping Nora, and the next thing he recalled was the sound of squealing tires. The time in between was blank. His hands were clammy and his mouth felt dry. He finally shifted his foot from the brake and pulled away from the intersection. Behind him, the normal flow of traffic resumed.

He drove the rest of the way to the station on hyperalert, conscious of every turn and traffic signal. It wasn’t the first time he’d suddenly awakened from a reverie in the middle of traffic, sometimes miles from where he’d last been paying attention.

The usual culprits joined the lineup in his head: overwork, lack of sleep, lousy food, too much to drink last night. He hadn’t been to the gym in months; there was never any time. The way things were going, he wouldn’t pass his next fitness test. He’d seen it happen often enough to recognize the signs. This was the way it came, the beginning of the end.

Pulling into his parking space, he lifted his hands from the steering wheel to find they were still shaking. He reached up to the rearview mirror and, tilting it downward, found himself staring into an unfamiliar pair of dark eyes. Suddenly disconcerted, he flipped the mirror back, but could still feel that baleful gaze upon him, burned into memory like something from a bad dream.

7

Thirty minutes after Frank Cordova dropped her at the curb, Nora was in her rental car and on her way to Hidden Falls Park. Holly Blume’s parting words had only added to the creeping horror that had settled on her in the morgue this morning. Natalie Russo’s death had something to do with Tríona, she was sure of it. But dead certainty was not the same as proof.

After Tríona’s body was discovered in her car trunk, forensic details had come out only gradually. Buck Callaway estimated that death had occurred in the early hours of Saturday morning, probably sometime between midnight and 4 A.M. The seeds and leaves Holly Blume had identified from Tríona’s hair pointed to a seepage swamp—a place just like the boggy spot where Natalie Russo’s body had been buried.

On the map, the Mississippi meandered gracefully through the city of Saint Paul, from the leafy gorge on its western edge, to the railheads and stockyards of the east. Hidden Falls was just over four miles directly southwest of Crocus Hill, and it was a span Nora could have driven blindfolded. She headed west on Saint Clair, and turned south onto the river road. Just past the sprawling Ford plant, she made a soft right into the entrance of Hidden Falls Park. The parklands traced the southern edge of the only natural gorge along the Mississippi. The road plunged down a steep ravine, coming to an end at parking lots for the picnic grounds and boat landing along the river bottom. Nora knew the place well. The river was one of the few wild spots within city limits, and she had spent a lot of time here at Hidden Falls as an adolescent, collecting specimens, drawing interesting plants and insects, amazed at all the life-and-death drama in miniature going on below most human radar.

Parking in the lot next to the picnic shelter, she cast a glance in the direction of the river. Still high for this time of year. In midsummer, depending on the rains, the river sometimes had no visible current, but the water moved along under the surface all the same—she used to imagine the endless flow stirring the whiskers of huge carp that lurked along the muddy riverbed.

Because of the gorge, this stretch of river had long been a no-man’s-land, a strip of wildness and disorder cutting through the heart of civilization. Sometimes the park seemed perfectly harmless, with families picnicking, people walking their dogs; at other times it seemed forbidden and even dangerous, the sort of place where female joggers would be discouraged from running alone. It was common knowledge that high school kids ran keg parties on the sandbar below the veterans’ home; a mile or two in either direction were a couple of notorious gay cruising spots. For years, rumors of drinking and drugs and anonymous sex at the river’s edge had floated above into the real world. People came here to be someone else, to indulge appetites and fantasies they wouldn’t dream of admitting. Most understood that they were courting danger; no doubt for some of them, it was part of the attraction. Nora began to feel a vague unease, knowing what lay ahead among the chest-high undergrowth and layers of dead leaves underfoot. The fallen leaves and tangled branches of the forest floor suddenly seemed sinister, part of a teeming underworld of decay and corruption.

A few yards away, a man sat alone in a green pickup. Nora felt his eyes upon her as she walked past, but when she glanced up, he was staring at the river. She knew Frank wouldn’t approve of her coming down here alone, but it was broad daylight, and she couldn’t expect him to be her minder. He had enough to do. And she had to see it for herself, the place where Natalie Russo had been found. Slinging her backpack onto one shoulder, she locked the car and started on foot in the direction of the falls, glancing behind to make sure no one was following.

She’d always been drawn to Hidden Falls, as much for the mysterious name as for its wild, otherworldly aspect. A faint sound of falling water came from the ravine to her right. She stopped to listen. At the turn of the previous century, tourists had come from all over the city to see the falls, where water seeped through the rock face at the top of the bluff, spreading like a thin veil across a limestone ledge before spilling into the catch pool below. A hundred years later, the area was a little shabby, making it a perfect hangout for kids seeking adventure and danger.

She turned away from the falls and plunged almost immediately into one of the park’s more primitive portions, where narrow footpaths wound over and around the corpses of fallen trees. Marshy areas filled the low spots, and the limestone bluff rose up sixty feet or more to her right, its lower surfaces marked with spray paint and scarred with crudely carved initials. The river wasn’t even visible in this part of the woods, yet it was almost impossible not to feel the water’s ominous presence. Earthen ridges, some eight and ten feet high, marked the river’s variable path, and in the many low spots, drowned grass and broken branches aligned in one direction, combed out by floodwaters that had receded weeks ago. Nora felt a chill, and rubbed her bare arms as she walked along. She couldn’t help thinking of all the evidence that must have been swept away and carried along in the river’s current, swirled for miles in dirty water until it all piled up in that thick gumbo of silt and crawfish and chemicals that formed the delta more than a thousand miles downstream. This river had once been an artery, a channel that carried the lifeblood of a whole continent; in less than a hundred and fifty years, civilization reduced it to hardly more than a sewer and dumping ground.

She spied a few scraps of crime scene tape still wound around trees in a low-lying area a few yards ahead, and knew that she had arrived at the spot where Natalie Russo’s body had lain. No one was about. The slope beside the path was steep, and Nora held on to a sapling to keep from sliding on the thick bed of leaves underfoot. Inching sideways, down to the area of disturbed earth, she thought of the other damp burials she had helped uncover in the past year, remembering all that a grave could reveal. Like the others she had seen, this was no careful inhumation, but the hurried concealment of a crime. There was a deep gash in the earth, and the ground was covered in clods of earth and peat, trampled by the boots of those who had removed the remains, searchers who had combed the scene for evidence. She crouched down and peered into the depression, amazed to find that Natalie Russo’s burial place still bore the recognizable impression of a pair of shoes, soles outlined in a random maze of tiny whitened roots. Reaching out to trace the outline of the void, she was struck by the fact that even while she was viewing the body in the morgue, her thoughts about Natalie Russo had focused on whatever she might tell them about Tríona. The empty space before her now conjured a distinct human being. A person whose absence was no doubt still mourned by someone.

Sinking to her knees again, Nora picked up a handful of debris from the forest floor, staring down at the crumpled leaf skeletons and strange seeds, nearly overpowered by their damp smell. What would Holly look for when she came here to collect her thirty samples? What were the chances that the mystery of Tríona’s death would finally be unraveled by codes hidden inside these cells?

Her ears picked up a sudden noise from deeper in the woods, like someone scuffling through leaves. Rising awkwardly from her crouch, Nora lost her balance and stepped forward into the marshy depression, sinking quickly in the saturated ground. If working on bogs had taught her anything at all, it was that instinct could not be trusted in a place like this. She knew that the more she struggled, the deeper her foot would go. The key was to spread out. She sat down on the ground, feeling cold wetness seep uncomfortably through her thin summer clothes, leaning back on her elbows and hoping the spot was too damp to support poison ivy. That was all she needed. But her foot was well and truly stuck. She pressed her back into the earth, trying to relax, studying the undersides of the leaves all around her, amazed once more at the tiny flowers and fruits that grew so close to the ground.

She sat up at the noise of twigs snapping underfoot, the random sounds of someone rummaging through the tangled vines and branches that littered the forest floor. Had someone followed her? It sounded like more than one person. She tried twisting around to see who was coming, but with her leg still buried nearly up to the calf, there was no way to escape. She pressed her back to the ground again, watching and waiting for the trespassers to come into view. When they did, the two pairs of plaintive, dark eyes observing her did not belong to anything human, but to a white-tailed doe and her fawn. The young deer, not yet grown out of his spots, had a twist of vine caught on his slender hind leg. The noise she’d heard was the crashing of his hobble through the underbrush. As they passed in front of her, the mother looked straight at her. Nora didn’t dare blink or breathe. The doe stood still, too, sniffing the air as her offspring flailed his leg in an effort to break free. Finally the vine came loose, and they bounded off together, disappearing silently into the undergrowth.

Relieved to be alone again, she tried pulling her foot from the ground, slow and steady, until at last it came free. She started to climb to her feet, considering that if she hadn’t been out on all those Irish bogs she wouldn’t have known what to do—and no doubt would have lost the shoe.

All at once, a slow, horrible knowledge, a formless cloud of recognition began moving through her, thinking about Tríona’s missing shoe. No one had ever thought to dig for it.

She fell to her knees and began to claw at the earth, not thinking, just scrabbling at the soft peat. She stopped suddenly, holding out her hands to find the nails completely blackened, just as Tríona’s had been. Closing her eyes, she saw her sister being chased through these woods, scrambling and falling through brambles and stinging nettles, finally caught and pinned down—

Nora tried to force the images from her head, but they would not leave. She raised her eyes to take in all the loamy ridges and areas of disturbed earth. At least half a dozen within sight, and many more scattered all through the woods. Every one a perfect place to conceal a body. All those missing women in Frank’s files—how many more might be buried here? Tríona’s words came back: There are things you don’t know… about Peter, about me. I’ve done things, too. You don’t know—unspeakable things—

Nora felt a wave of panic beginning to gather inside her. She began to run, but stumbled forward and fell, waiting to be swallowed up.

8

Nora lay on the damp ground, letting the terrible knowledge rise up out of the earth and seep into her. If Tríona had been here, and if she’d been digging, it could mean that she knew where Natalie Russo’s body was buried—

Isn’t it shocking, what you’ll do when you love someone?

To think of all the times she had listened to those words repeating over and over inside her head, never understanding what they could mean.

All at once there was a commotion a short distance away. Without stopping to think, Nora made a lunge for the fallen tree beside the path, leaping behind it just as two figures, male and female, came into view.

The woman spoke first: “Here it is, Rog. Let’s get set up here—and make sure you get that crime scene tape in the shot.”

Nora recognized the voice—Janelle Joyner, one of the local television reporters who had covered Tríona’s murder. Janelle had boasted to more than a few people that Tríona Hallett was going to be her ticket out of the Twin Cities, maybe even her springboard to national cable news. Evidently not everything had gone according to plan.

Janelle must have come here to tape one of her awful teasers for the evening news. Nora couldn’t bear to listen. She looked down the length of the massive tree trunk, hoping to find a way to escape without being seen, and found herself staring into a pair of dark eyes about ten feet away. A slender Asian man of indeterminate age had concealed himself behind the twisted roots of the same fallen tree. He eyed her warily, no doubt hoping that she wouldn’t raise an alarm. He had a basket slung around him, and a fishing pole in his left hand—could this be the fisherman who’d found Natalie Russo?

Nora raised herself to peer over the log, watching Janelle check her makeup in a compact. When the shot was set, the cameraman gave the signal to go, and Janelle’s face was suddenly transformed. If Nora hadn’t watched her put it on, the look of concern might have seemed real.

Janelle was in top form. “A young woman’s skeletal remains were found in a shallow grave here at Hidden Falls three days ago. Her identity is unknown, but she could be one of several women still listed as missing. Police are comparing details from this case with several other unsolved murders. Should local residents be concerned about a serial killer on the loose? We’ll have the full story at ten.”

The full story. Hacks like Janelle Joyner never had the full story on anything. They weren’t even above dragging a victim’s reputation through the mud if it could get them into a bigger television market.

Janelle seemed pleased with the take. “Got that, Rog? Okay, let’s pack it up—we’ve still got to get that two-shot with the head of regional parks. People want to know if it’s safe to bring their kids down here.”

The cameraman muttered something inaudible, and Janelle turned on him: “Hey, I wouldn’t go bad-mouthing the brand if I were you. Channel Eight’s all about news you can use.”

Still hiding behind her fallen tree, Nora glanced over to see if the fisherman had taken in the whole Janelle Joyner spectacle too, but he had vanished. For a split second, she wondered whether she’d seen him at all.

Heading north on the river road from Hidden Falls, Nora only meant to drive past Peter Hallett’s house, but found her foot shifting to the brake almost automatically. She had stopped in this same spot more than once, taking advantage of its shielded view of the driveway and front door, as well as the adjoining terrace. The house stood well back from the road, across a deep wooded ravine. Peter had designed the place himself; with his signature modern style favoring strong horizontal lines and lots of glass, he had made sure his creation stood out from the neighboring houses, with their staid neo-Georgian brick faces and fan windows. Transparent walls had always seemed to Nora a somewhat paradoxical predilection for someone who led a double life. He’d left the house with furnishings, artwork, everything intact when he moved to Seattle—as if he knew he’d be coming back.

A sudden flash in the rearview mirror signaled a silver-blue Mercedes convertible rounding the curve behind her. Nora watched the car turn up the driveway, then flipped open her glove compartment and reached for the camera she’d stashed there. She focused the high-powered lens on Miranda Staunton climbing out on the driver’s side—Marc’s younger sister was in her mid-twenties now, with thin bronze arms, blonde hair perfectly cut and coiffed, eyes hidden behind a pair of stylish sunglasses. Nora zoomed the camera in closer, and braced for the jolt of seeing Peter Hallett again.

He was, as expected, still shockingly handsome, with a vital energy that she could feel, even across the distance that separated them. She watched as he turned and flashed his megawatt smile at Miranda, who reached out and led him up the steps and through the front door. Nora felt her body go cold. Beyond the chill there was something else—after five years of chaos and frustration, she sensed that things were beginning to align in some new and fateful way. There was the discovery of Natalie Russo’s body—and her own arrival here, at the very moment Peter returned from Seattle. It was as if the last piece of the puzzle was about to be laid out on the table. But where was Elizabeth?

As if on cue, her niece’s head suddenly appeared from behind a headrest in the backseat. Amazing that a child could even squeeze into that tiny space—the Mercedes was built only for two. Left to fend for herself, Elizabeth struggled to move the passenger seat forward, but couldn’t quite reach the lever. She pushed herself up and vaulted over the right rear wheel, landing awkwardly on both feet. Nora could not look away. Elizabeth was not a little girl anymore, but an ungainly adolescent, shoulders already beginning to slump with attitude. She had her mother’s coloration, and Nora knew that, up close, the child’s face would be lightly freckled like her own.

Elizabeth opened the trunk and pulled out a backpack. As she set her pack on the ground, a wavy curtain of copper hair fell across her face. Both hands came up, automatically pushing the thick tangle behind her ears. Nora tightened her grip on the camera lens. Where had that gesture come from? Elizabeth couldn’t possibly remember Tríona doing that. And yet there it was, an identical reflexive gesture, a distinct echo of her mother that was completely natural, completely unconscious.

Instead of following her father and Miranda into the house, Elizabeth ventured onto the terrace that overlooked the ravine and the steep riverbank beyond. She let her hand trail over the rough stone wall, stopping at the front steps at a shallow stone basin that held a mound of river rocks. Elizabeth picked up one of the stones and began to examine it. Eventually she set it back in the bowl and moved on. As far as Nora knew, no one had ever really explained to Elizabeth what had happened to her mother. How do you begin to explain such things to a six-year-old? A few days after the funeral, Nora had taken her aside, to ask whether she understood what it meant when someone died. Elizabeth had thought for a moment, and then asked if it was like the bird they’d once found on the sidewalk. A tiny fledgling, still and cold, pushed too soon from the nest. Yes, she had answered. It is like that. And she had held Elizabeth tight, feeling the child’s rapid heartbeat right through her skin and bones. So fragile, she had thought. We are such soft, fragile creatures.

What had Elizabeth believed all these years since the murder? She was just now reaching the age of awareness, starting to see things beyond a child’s perspective. And she probably knew more than anyone wanted to admit.

Now Elizabeth placed her hands flat on the broad limestone wall and peered over the edge, perhaps trying to see the water through the trees. A curious expression crossed her features, as though she’d caught a scent that brought back a memory. She put one knee on the wall and climbed up to stand on it, tottering under the weight of her backpack. Nora’s heart leapt.

Peter’s voice carried through the trees: “Elizabeth! Get down from there!”

Teetering precariously once more, Elizabeth jumped down from the wall as her father strode across the terrace and pulled her roughly by the elbow. Nora had to hold her breath and strain to hear snatches of their conversation:

“What were you thinking?”

“I just wanted to see the river—”

“When are you going to learn to think things through? What have I told you?”

“I wasn’t going to fall.”

“Don’t let me see you up there again, do you hear me?”

Peter’s fingers tightened on the child’s arm. When she tried to twist away, he held her fast, bringing his face down to her level and speaking very slowly, as if she might have trouble taking his meaning. “Inside—now.”

Someone else, someone ignorant of the facts, might see in Peter Hallett only a concerned father, taking a dreamy child in hand. But Nora was not ignorant of the facts. She had seen the defiance in Elizabeth’s eyes. And it wasn’t safe to defy Peter Hallett.

9

After a quick stop at the apartment to change and remove the dirt and grime from Hidden Falls, Nora headed to Lowertown, the warehouse district east of Saint Paul’s city center. She circled Mears Park on one-way streets until she came to the entrance of an underground parking garage. She drove past slowly, suddenly claustrophobic, unable to turn in at the entrance. When the driver behind her honked impatiently, she pulled ahead and parked at a meter on the next block. Returning on foot, she slipped past the ticket dispenser and started circling down the steeply graded concrete into the depths of a man-made cavern. At the lowest level, she crossed to the far corner and stood staring down at the floor at a large painted number, 114. This was the spot where Tríona had been discovered, three days after she disappeared. Where all hope and speculation had come to an end.

Four stories below street level the temperature was at least twenty degrees cooler than the air outside. The only illumination came from the glare of bare bulbs, and the concrete walls seemed to soak up their minimal light. Nora reached into her bag for a small flashlight, listening to the sounds that ricocheted off the unforgiving concrete and echoed in the shadows. Hardly the safest spot to explore alone, even at midday. But she had to stand once more in the place that had become Tríona’s monument and tomb.

She shone the light on the number painted on the floor, and remembered wondering whether the number was significant to Tríona’s killer, or whether any space would have done. There had been no useful evidence here, only a small amount of blood with the body in the car trunk; Tríona had clearly been attacked elsewhere and moved here. But why this place? If they could just figure that part out—if her death had been the result of a random carjacking, then why on earth would the killer have parked in a garage, when it made more sense just to leave the car somewhere along the street? If Tríona had been killed at Hidden Falls, why not just leave her and the car there?

Perhaps because of Natalie Russo. Because the killer needed to draw attention away from the river, and the other body—or bodies—buried there. Still, a parking garage meant people walking by, security cameras, a level of scrutiny even the most dim-witted criminal couldn’t possibly overlook. But as they’d soon discovered, the cameras in this garage weren’t functioning at the time of Tríona’s death—the whole security network was down for several days while a new system was being installed—there was no video of anyone coming or going from this ramp from two days before the murder to two days after. What were the chances that the killer had just been lucky? It seemed far more likely that the person who had chosen this place had done so deliberately, to avoid being caught on tape, despite leaving the car in such a public place. It was almost as if he wanted to make sure the body was discovered quickly. Looking at it that way, the location came across as a provocation, a deliberate catch-me-if-you-can. Not only did that fit Peter Hallett’s personality, it also suggested a chilling degree of premeditation.

But Nora had spent weeks digging for a connection between Peter and this parking garage—whether it was owned by any of his friends or acquaintances, located near any restaurant or business or gallery he frequented. There was no proof that he’d ever been here. Nothing. So how could he have known about the security system?

The flashlight beam bouncing off the walls caught his attention on the monitor. Truman Stark pulled his chair closer to the bank of screens to study the picture. He watched the female subject crouch down to examine the floor and felt an irresistible flicker of interest, the pulse-quickening of the first sighting. All sorts of possibilities. His work might be boring most of the time, sitting in this tiny security office and staring at monitors for hours on end, but he liked watching how people behaved when they thought no one could see them. He reached for the joystick that let him maneuver the camera and zoomed in on the subject. Not bad-looking. Looked like she could handle herself. What the hell was she doing down there?

Pushing back from the monitors, he felt for the reassuring weight of the holstered gun on his hip and left the booth, making sure to pull the door shut behind him. It wasn’t exactly standard procedure, leaving the office for something like this, but he had seniority and figured he was entitled to bend the rules once in a while. His shift was nearly over anyway. The cashiers could get him on the walkie-talkie if they ran into any trouble.

He enjoyed ranging around the building, checking the stairwells, making sure all the doors that were supposed to be locked actually were. The starched shirt and heavy shoes, they were all part of it too. He liked the noise his brogans made on the concrete floors, especially in the echoing stairwells. It felt almost like walking a beat. Sometimes he almost forgot it wasn’t real.

His whole life, all he ever wanted was to be a cop. The desire had lived inside him every single day since he was a kid, a dream that kept him safe, protected from real life. He’d practiced swearing the oath, imagined himself answering calls on the radio, in uniform. The physical stuff wasn’t a problem. He’d practiced with nightstick and cuffs and genuine police-issue sidearm until he knew how to use them blindfolded. It was the other stuff that tripped him up, all the reading and writing. That was the part he hadn’t expected. He’d tried cracking a few books that summer before community college. But the words got turned around like they always did, and trying to decipher them made his head hurt. He thought being a cop would be different, but it was all just more of the same bullshit. Books and studying and sitting in classes—it was all so flat, so foreign to him. And what good was any of that when you were out on the street?

He felt the elevator vibrate, imagined the cables and the hydraulics through the walls, riding in a box to the basement. The worst thing hadn’t been washing out of school, but going back home again. His mother was okay, but the old man couldn’t resist rubbing it in. Truman had been told so many times that he’d never make anything of himself, that he must be some kind of moron. He knew his father would make him wallow in his failure, force him to eat it every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But it must be true that meanness could give you cancer, because it was right about that time that the old man got sick. Just shriveled up, got smaller and smaller and smaller until he died. Nobody felt sorry for him, not then and not now. Not even close. What they all felt was more like relief.

On the whole, things had been better since then, but lately Truman had been feeling a new restlessness in his blood, a dissatisfaction that hovered somewhere between an itch and an ache. It wouldn’t go away. Something inside him had changed. He used to look up to cops, study the way their handcuffs and holsters fit on their belts, how the uniforms made them look bigger, bulkier than they really were. He couldn’t recall the exact moment his attitude had begun to turn. He only noticed one day that he felt something new as he walked past a squad car on his way to work. He could feel the cops sizing him up, checking the security company patch on his shoulder, and exchanging a dismissive glance. Now, every time he passed a police car parked on the street outside the ramp, he was almost overcome with one desire: to reach in through the open window and haul them out, to wipe those smug looks from their faces.

He remembered how the bright beam had crossed the space number on the monitor upstairs, and then it struck him—114 was the same parking space where they’d found that girl, the redhead. He hadn’t known her name until he saw her picture on the TV news. His job might have been in danger if he’d said anything to the police. But he could have told them plenty. How he’d seen her—three and four times a week, all through that spring and summer. He could have told them how he’d watched her, even followed her outside sometimes, admiring the way her long hair seemed to float around her when the breeze came up. How he’d imagined all that beautiful hair spilling over him when he looked at the pictures he’d taped to the sloped ceiling above his bed. But the police had no need to know any of that. There was no way they were going to find out. Because if they did, all those private moments would be destroyed, and he could never let that happen.

10

Leaving the garage and heading back to the car, Nora walked along the south side of Mears Park. The square itself was shady this late in the afternoon, but yellow sunlight still glinted from the windows above the trees. The pavement radiated heat, and the air felt sticky. She wasn’t over the shock of returning home. All the wide streets, the broad-shouldered buildings still felt strange and unfamiliar.

Pedestrians crossed the square with their dogs, accompanied by classical music piping from speakers in the modern band shell. Suddenly the true purpose of the music dawned: it was not about offering pleasure to the masses, but about repelling young people. The whole proposition rested on a presumption that no self-respecting, rap-loving juvenile would be caught dead within earshot of Mozart. There was something a little sad about that.

Nora pictured the timeline tacked up on the wall in her apartment, with at least eight hours in Tríona’s last, fateful day still unaccounted for. Every minute of every hour was made up of so many intricate layers and intersections, places where one stream flowed into another. What were the chances that she was walking by something vitally important right now?

Her ears became attuned to the sound of running water, which came from the stream that cut across the park. It wasn’t a real stream, of course, but a fountain that tumbled through faux boulders and feathery native grasses. An artificial prairie creek in the heart of the city. She followed the water to the opposite side of the park and crossed the street, moving to sidestep a couple of teenage girls walking by a large plate glass window of an empty office space. As she passed them, one of the girls shouted, “Hey, Latrice, that was us on the TV!” She yanked at her friend’s arm, and Nora had to swerve to avoid a collision.

“No way,” Latrice said. But she stared through the glass where her friend was pointing. Nora couldn’t help being drawn in. The whole window became a video collage: multiple fast-motion images shot from above turned pedestrians into ants, and slow-motion, street-level video was interspersed with still photos.

The friend insisted. “I know what I saw.”

“You trippin’,” Latrice said. “I don’t see nothin’.”

“I’m tellin’ you, it was us,” her friend said again, annoyed. “There!” She yelped and smacked Latrice’s bare arm. “Right there! Told you I wasn’t lyin’.”

Latrice finally caught a glimpse of her larger-than-life self. “Aw man, that’s wack!” She started trying out a few dance moves. “Here’s Latrice, baby. For real. Come on, everybody, get a good look!”

As she preened and strutted for the camera, her friend backed away, doubled over and breathless with laughter. A few other people stopped to watch the show. It was almost impossible not to get caught up in their high spirits. But when the images changed again, the girls moved on, jostling one another and laughing, embarrassed now at the stir they’d caused. Nora turned back to the window and saw her own image through the glass. She moved one hand slowly up and down, and her oversized likeness followed suit. The main screen suddenly switched to a street-level shot of a crowd in slow motion, perspective oddly flattened by the camera’s stationary single eye.

Nora felt her breath stop as a face in the crowd emerged, then disappeared for a long second, only to emerge again from behind a blurry figure in the foreground. The long, loose hair lifted and seemed to float for an instant in the slow-motion breeze. She had not been mistaken.

The face was Tríona’s.

Nora watched her sister’s graceful approach, caught in a web of memory. There was so much she had forgotten, and she felt the need to drink it all in, every detail. Even in slow motion, it was far too fast. Tríona overtook the camera and disappeared into the edge of the frame. Nora spun around and scanned the faces around her. It was impossible, she knew, yet the image had been so clear. She turned back and studied the picture, trying to fix the camera’s location. The shot had come from in front of the building where she stood, that much was certain. But the image also caught the edge of a distinctive stone arch half a block down. Tríona had been walking past that arch. Nora began to run, excusing herself to the passersby she jostled in her haste. She thought of the photo she’d shoved hastily into her bag and dug it out on the fly. She was on the verge of holding it up, saying to the passersby: You must have seen her—she was just here! But all at once she saw herself reflected in the blank stares all around her. They already saw her as a crazy person. The hand holding Tríona’s picture dropped slowly to her side, and in a few seconds, the foot traffic closed around her once more.

She had gone away three years ago, angry and frustrated, and thinking every possible avenue had already been explored, but it was clear from the few brief, chance encounters that had begun piling up today that she had been wrong. She walked back to watch the projection in the window again, and finally realized that not all of the pictures were live. Herself and the two girls, yes, but most of the footage was a video collage that could have been shot at any time—five years ago or more. She stood at the window long enough to see that the whole thing ran on a continuous loop. There was her sister’s face again, exactly the same as before. Standing in front of the glass, Nora knew what she had seen was a shadow, an image captured and reassembled in a stream of ones and zeros. A digital specter.

But what it meant was that Tríona had been here, on this street, at least once, perhaps many times. Where was she going? Nora scanned the buildings ahead for a sign, anything that might have drawn her sister inside. A half block down, the dark silhouette of an animal caught her eye.

The Blue Coyote Café was in the corner space of the Sturgis Building, one of the few old warehouses in the neighborhood that had resisted gentrification, and still gloried in its original cast-iron and raw timber framework. When Nora pushed open the coffee-shop door, not one of the half-dozen people sitting at brightly painted, mismatched tables even raised a glance. As she approached the counter, the glum barista set down her half-eaten apple and her paperback copy of Anna Karenina and stood up, eyeing her prospective customer without a hint of curiosity or interest. The girl was about eighteen, with impossibly jet-black hair, dark green lips, and a heavily studded dog collar.

“I’m not here for coffee,” Nora said. “I’m looking for anyone who might have been working here five years ago.”

“You’re not looking for me, then,” the girl said. “I was only twelve. But I think Val was around. Just a sec—” The girl ducked into the back room and returned a few seconds later in the company of a woman with spiky gray hair who sported a bright white chef’s apron over street clothes.

“I’m Valerie Marchant,” the woman said, wiping soapy hands on her apron front. “What can I do for you?”

Nora handed over Tríona’s photo. “I was wondering if you recognize her.”

The reaction was immediate. “Tríona Gavin. She used to come in here a lot. Sorry, what did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t say—Nora Gavin. Tríona was my sister.”

Valerie Marchant’s demeanor changed. “I’m so sorry. We were all shocked to hear what happened. And doubly shocked when that husband of hers was never charged, when he was so obviously guilty—”

Nora interrupted: “I’m sorry, you said Tríona used to come in here?”

Valerie Marchant looked surprised. “All the time. She did voice work at a studio upstairs, Nick Mosher’s place. Nicky always had actor friends coming through. I knew Tríona a little from her acting days, before she got married—I used to be a theater director once, before this place took over.”

Nora was trying to understand. “If you and this Nick Mosher knew my sister, why didn’t you come forward at the time of the murder?”

“I was abroad, in Helsinki on a fellowship, didn’t get back until the following January. And Nicky—” Valerie Marchant shook her head sadly. “Nick Mosher is dead. He fell down the elevator shaft here in the building. The police said it was an accident.”

Nora felt as if she’d missed something. “I’m sorry, when was this?”

“It happened five years ago yesterday. We always have a sort of memorial here on the anniversary. Nick’s old buddies come over, I close up shop, and we all sit around and get roaring drunk on red wine. I apologize if I’m a little bleary—we’re still clearing away the empties.”

“What sort of work did Nick do?”

“Sound engineer. Radio ads mostly, some audiobooks, and a bit of music. He still did theater work—that’s where he got started. But the real money was in advertising.”

“And you said he had actors going up to his studio all the time?”

“Nick kept his friends in steady work. The money was good, too. He was a lifesaver.”

“How did the accident happen?”

Valerie shook her head. “Nobody knows. Nick was always so safety-conscious. I’ve always had my suspicions about whether it was really an accident.”

“But you’ve never talked to the police about any of this?”

“I wasn’t here at the time—didn’t think I could offer any useful information.”

“How did my sister seem when she came in here? Did you ever happen to see anyone speaking to her, following her?”

“Not that I can recall. She’d come in, get hot tea with lemon for herself, and a double cappuccino with an extra shot for Nick, then head upstairs.” She tapped her temple. “It’s amazing—some of that useless crap never goes away.”

“Hey, Val, where do you want these?” The barista held up a slightly warped pair of dark glasses. Valerie pivoted and craned her neck to see.

“Oh, just set them on my desk, will you?” Turning back, she spotted Nora’s curious gaze.

“One of the melancholy mementoes we drag out every year—Nick’s glasses. I guess I forgot to mention that he was blind.”

“You never saw my sister’s husband around here?”

Valerie shook her head. “I’m sure somebody would have told me if he’d come prowling around. Not exactly the kind of guy who escapes notice easily, is he? Or who liked sharing the spotlight, from what I’ve heard. Your sister was so gifted—we were all disappointed when she gave up acting. When I started seeing her down here, I was hopeful; it seemed like she might be getting back into it. But she always seemed a little edgy. I’m pretty sure Nick was paying her in cash, but I don’t think it was the tax man she was trying to avoid. I’m not sure your sister’s husband knew about her work down here. From the few things Nick said, I got the distinct impression that something bad would happen if he ever found out.”

Nora remembered Tríona’s words: I’ve lied and deceived everyone. Was it the work she’d been doing behind Peter’s back, or was it something much worse? She asked: “Does the name Natalie Russo mean anything to you?”

“I can’t say it does. I’m sorry. But listen, I really wish you luck. We were all hoping the police would nail that sonofabitch.”

Outside the coffee-shop window, Truman Stark stopped and pretended to look for something on the ground, stealing a glance at the brunette who stood at the corner of the pastry case inside, talking to the owner. The same one he’d just seen at the garage, he was sure of it. She was putting something back in her bag—a picture of the redhead. They were connected somehow. He knew he’d seen her before, nosing around in the lower level at the parking ramp, right after the body turned up. But she hadn’t been back lately, not for a couple of years at least.

Truman pretended to look at the menu board, keeping an eye on his subject. Some people had hobbies, like woodworking or raising pigeons or growing tomatoes. What he did in his spare time was much more important than any of that stuff. More like a calling.

He had tailed the redhead into this building a few times. The very last time, he’d followed her across the square. When she stopped to sit on a bench, he’d fallen back, used the time to pick a handful of flowers from one of the beds along the stream. A wrinkled old broad on a nearby bench pulled a face at him, like the park was her personal garden or something. He didn’t care. He’d watched the redhead take a note from her purse. She stared at it for a minute, then she stuffed it in her pocket and started walking toward the Sturgis Building again. He’d caught up to her as she was waiting for the light. He thought about leaving the flowers somewhere she would find them. She’d be surprised, maybe even touched by the gesture. That’s the way she was; he’d seen it plenty of times. He wouldn’t leave a note or anything—that would be too much. When she walked into the coffee shop he stopped outside to observe through the glass, watching how her lips moved silently as she chatted with the girl at the counter, how her body swayed slightly as she waited.

He was going to head up to the fourth floor—he knew from the last time that’s where she was headed. He’d leave the flowers for her there. He thought he’d timed it just right, but the coffee-shop line was faster than he’d anticipated, and she stepped onto the elevator just before the doors closed. She saw that the fourth-floor button was lit up, so he punched number five, glowing with embarrassment, pretending he’d made a mistake. Then she’d glanced at the flowers, and briefly at him. His knees had begun to tremble. Open your mouth, said the voice in his ears. For some reason, the voice always sounded like his father. She likes the flowers—just open your mouth and say something, dickweed. But all at once he felt the elevator sway on its cables, and knew that if he opened his mouth, he would throw up. He couldn’t make a sound.

And so she’d stepped off on the fourth floor, leaving him standing there like a douchebag with the stupid flowers. He’d watched her plant a kiss on a bearded guy in dark glasses who met her off the elevator. Then she handed over the coffee, guiding beardy’s fingers to the cup like he was blind or something. All at once the realization dawned—the fucking guy was blind. So was that how it worked when they did it? Did she have to show him where to put his hands then?

When the elevator doors finally closed, he’d slumped against the wall, eaten alive with humiliation and jealousy, feeling sicker and more feverish as the box ascended to the fifth floor, where he got off and headed up to the roof to try and cool down. The next person getting on the elevator had found a heap of wilting flowers on the floor.

Now Truman glanced back through the coffee-shop window at the brunette, and knew it was beginning again, that same bad feeling he used to get when the old man would start in on him. Once that feeling overtook him, he couldn’t hold it together much longer. Everything was about to fly apart again, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

11

After leaving the Blue Coyote, Nora drove up the hill out of Lowertown, maneuvering through two-way traffic on Fourth Street, considering what she’d just learned about her sister. Tríona had gone back to work without telling anyone in the family. Was that what she meant when she said she’d lied and deceived people? The man Tríona worked for had fallen down an elevator shaft the very same day she was killed. Could it just be coincidence? What if it was Tríona and not Peter who had some connection to the parking garage?

Nora pulled into a parking spot in front of the Saint Paul Central Library. After plugging the meter, she crossed the plaza to the building’s main entrance. She had always admired the building’s classical design—the regular arched windows, white marble balustrades and terraces. The ancient Romans would have felt at home. But she was here because this place formed another inexplicable piece of the puzzle: when Tríona’s car turned up, the police found a parking ticket in her glove compartment, a citation for an expired meter in front of the Central Library. The ticket was stamped with a date and time, which placed her here less than twelve hours before she was killed. The police had canvassed the library and the area around it, and found only one witness who would swear he’d seen Tríona at the library that day. His name was Harry Shaughnessy, and he belonged to that flock of gray men who made a daily, circular migration from the homeless camps along the river to the library, then to the Dorothy Day Center for a hot meal at noon, and then back to the library or on to Listening House or the Union Gospel Mission, where the bottomless cup of coffee came with a side order of Jesus Saves.

As she entered the library, Nora was aware of the gaunt, bearded man leaving by the opposite door. He was dressed in telltale layers of clothing, including a scruffy trench coat, despite the heat. Their eyes met briefly, and Nora tried not to stare. Not having seen Harry Shaughnessy for nearly five years, she couldn’t be sure this was the same man. When the police questioned him, Shaughnessy had seemed remarkably lucid at first, explaining that he went to the Central Library every morning to read the New York Times. He had been adamant about seeing Tríona on the day in question, and positive about the date. He even remembered something he’d read in the paper that day, which checked out. Then he told Frank Cordova that it was the same day he’d seen the angel Gabriel driving a flaming chariot down Market Street. So Harry Shaughnessy couldn’t be counted upon as a credible witness in court. But what if they had discounted everything he said because part of it was unreliable? What if Harry Shaughnessy’s disconnection from reality was not complete, and he had seen Tríona that day?

As it was, even with the parking ticket, and even counting Harry’s statement placing Tríona at the library, they had never discovered what she was doing there. The library computer system showed no books checked out on her card that day, no returns. But the timing of the visit was important. Why would Tríona have taken the trouble to visit the library in those last hours, when her life seemed to be spiraling out of control?

Nora climbed the stairs to the second-floor reference room, a lofty space at the heart of the building. The smell of a library was instantly recognizable and distinct. Glancing up at the arched windows and polychromed ceiling beams, she was transported back to the time when she and Tríona used to come here every summer afternoon, escaping the scorching heat outside, spending languorous days in bookish coolness.

Much had changed since then, of course. The library had been remodeled; banks of computer terminals had replaced the dark oak card catalogs. It was possible that Tríona had been searching for something in the stacks or online, but library policy had put up an unexpected roadblock—call slips and computer logs were routinely shredded by librarians concerned about government bootprints on the Bill of Rights. Nora understood why it had to be so. Still, she had felt incredibly frustrated when all the luck seemed to run in Peter Hallett’s favor. If only she could figure out what Tríona had been searching for.

The occupant of the nearest computer station seemed on the verge of vacating, so Nora moved closer, waiting for an opportunity. When he was a proper distance away, she dropped her bag on the floor under the desk and slid into the still-warm chair. She stared at the anonymous screen, and it blinked back at her, asking for a name, keyword, subject, author’s name, title. She let her fingers rest on the keyboard, waiting. What were you looking for? she asked silently. Why were you here? No vibration stirred. She laid a hand on the table’s wood surface, imagining beneath her fingers the faint tracery of a hundred different pens on paper. Why could she sense so much in the presence of the cailín rua, the red-haired stranger she had never known, and yet feel nothing here from her own flesh and blood?

She suddenly felt foolish, and pushed the chair back. Hunches and intuition were fine, as long as they led to concrete evidence that would stand up in court. Did she really imagine that she could find such evidence here? There was nothing of Tríona in this place.

From the reference room, Nora ventured through the atrium stairwell to the nonfiction reading section. She remembered the moment of childhood discovery, when she’d found that the library had hidden places, flights of stairs to rooms that didn’t seem to exist from the outside. The nonfiction stacks occupied just such an invisible place, down a half flight of stairs from the reading room. This was where she and Tríona had actually spent most of their time. The floor was carpeted, the atmosphere still and studious, and while there were no windows in this limbo between floors, the books themselves offered glimpses into all sorts of strange places concealed within the real world.

While Nora had worked her way methodically through the natural history collection, Tríona had found her own place in these stacks—a far, quiet corner where she was surrounded by books about gods and monsters, elves and mermaids, a whole universe of shape-shifters. Nora remembered all the times she’d tried to needle her sister, wondering aloud how books about otherworldly creatures came to be shelved in nonfiction. Tríona’s only reply was a tiny, knowing smile. When they left the library in the late afternoons, Tríona would turn the spine of her current favorite book inward, a trick that made it easier to find the next time.

Nora counted down the stacks and stopped at the place she had invariably found her sister, sometimes flopped down on her belly with knees bent and bare feet swaying gently, sometimes with legs propped against the wall, and hair spread in a coppery nimbus about her head, so far immersed in whatever world she had entered that day that it sometimes took three or four hails and a hand waved in front of her face to drag her back to reality.

Nora felt a wave of despair. What on earth was she doing, standing here, dreaming? She was supposed to be cold, rational, relentless, connecting the facts of the case. But before turning around, she stooped down to check the lower shelves, and there it was—a single volume turned the wrong way. Pulling the battered green volume from the shelf, she opened it to a color plate, a rich illustration of a young man in doublet and hose, standing at the edge of a dark pool, holding a raised sword above his head. In the water, half submerged, writhed a naked female, a water sprite of some kind, with pale arms spread. The words at the bottom of the plate sounded like the text of a ballad:

She checked the spine. Married to Magic: Fairy Brides and Bridegrooms. The spidery call letters, handwritten in white ink, were like something from another time.

Five full years had passed since her sister could have been here. What were the odds that someone else had left a book turned backward here in Tríona’s favorite section? The rational part of her had to consider the number of people who had been in the library since then, picking through the hundreds of thousands of volumes on these shelves. Sliding the book back on the shelf, Nora felt a slight resistance. She pulled it out again and peered through the opening, then reached in and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper, a printout of a Pioneer Press article dated July 13, just over five years ago.

The date of Natalie Russo’s disappearance was circled in red. A footer at the bottom of the sheet said the article had been printed five years ago yesterday. The day Tríona had been at the library. The day she’d died.

Nora dropped the crumpled sheet and began pulling books from the shelf, not thinking about the mess she was making, but riffling through the pages, checking endpapers and margins for any scribbled notes. Nothing. Nora suddenly realized that Tríona’s prints might still be on the paper that lay facedown on the carpet. She pulled a zipper bag from her backpack, gingerly lifting the crumpled printout by a corner and slipping it into the bag. She should take it directly to Frank Cordova, but knew she would not do it. Not just yet.

Why would Tríona be digging around in newspaper archives for information about Natalie Russo? Nora felt the fear that surrounded her down at the river begin to rise again. If Tríona knew about Natalie, and about Hidden Falls—I’ve done things, too. You don’t know—unspeakable things—

The ugly fear that had gripped her at the river reared its head again. All these years spent resisting that insidious worm of doubt, insisting that everything Peter had said about Tríona was a lie. Stop it, said the voice in her head. It’s exactly what he wants you to believe. Don’t believe it. A single newspaper clipping meant nothing on its own. They still had no real proof that Tríona had been at Natalie Russo’s grave. Even if she had been there, Peter could have tricked her into going to the river, or forced her somehow—Isn’t it shocking, what you’ll do when you love someone?

Stepping from the library entrance a few minutes later, Nora saw a parking enforcement vehicle pull away from her car. She quickly crossed the street, but it was too late. She slipped the ticket from beneath the wiper, feeling a twist of bitter irony. With each passing minute of this strange day, she found herself becoming more and more convinced that there was no such thing as coincidence.

A knock sounded on the glass beside her head, and she turned with a start to find the homeless man she’d seen leaving the library. Harry Shaughnessy—she was certain of it now. As he motioned for her to roll down the window, his raincoat gapped open, revealing a stained gray sweatshirt. How anyone could wear such heavy clothes in this heat—

“Excuse me, miss,” he said. “You dropped this.” He handed over Tríona’s headshot. How on earth had it escaped from her bag?

As she glanced up, the white block letters on Harry’s sweatshirt—the few she could see—spelled out the word “LIAR.” The front of the shirt was also smeared with a rusty brown stain. Shaughnessy began to back away, raising one arm in a kind of salute, showing a few more letters, and Nora felt a surge of adrenaline. She opened the car door. “Mr. Shaughnessy—it is Mr. Shaughnessy, isn’t it? I wonder if you’d let me buy you lunch?”

He began to sidle away from her, uneasy at being recognized. “I was just on my way over to Dorothy Day—”

“Please—I’d like to thank you somehow for returning the picture. We could sit right here in the park.” She gestured to the hot-dog cart at Fifth and Market. Harry Shaughnessy scratched his head, and his eyes flickered to the corner, weighing the offer of immediate food against waiting in line for lunch at the shelter. “Well—I guess that would be all right.”

Nora climbed out of her car, trying not to make any sudden moves, and walked alongside Harry Shaughnessy to the opposite corner of the park. She ordered two hot dogs, studying Shaughnessy’s face as he watched the vendor at work. Impossible to tell how old he was—living rough made many men old before their time. But something in his manner, the upright, dignified way he held himself, reminded her of a certain generation of men born in the throes of the Great Depression.

After paying for their lunch, Nora found an unoccupied bench near the central fountain. How on earth was she going to broach the delicate subject of the stained sweatshirt? There was a very real danger that the man would bolt if she opened her mouth. She cast a few sideways glances, watching Shaughnessy—he ate slowly, almost daintily, savoring each bite, as though this were the most delectable meal he’d consumed in months. Perhaps it was. His nails were black with grime, and a few gray inches of waffled underwear peeped out between trouser leg and sock. His high-top sneakers were nearly worn through. But these were small details. The most notable thing about Harry Shaughnessy was that his body was in constant motion, his eyes on high alert. Like a wild animal, Nora thought. Maybe that was how he had survived so long on the street.

Just beyond him, at the edge of her field of vision, a group of preschool children were crossing the park, hands holding loops tied into a long cord. Their teacher led the little flock, pulling them along behind her like ducklings. Harry gazed at the children, holding out one hand as if to pet them, though he was twenty yards away.

“Yeah, she was a real nice lady,” he said, continuing some unfinished conversation. “That gal in the picture. Used to see her at the library. It’s a few years back now. Always asked how I was getting on. Sometimes she had the little one with her—such pretty red hair, just like her mama. Most people, they don’t see you, but she was different. Even bought me a cup of coffee a few times.” His eyes focused somewhere in the middle distance as he remembered. “Never wanted to kill anyone. Not like some—” The grimy nails dug into his palms. “That’s just was the way it was. The fellas on the other side, they were all as green and scared as we were. You could see it in their eyes—”

“Mr. Shaughnessy?” Nora said. He looked up at her, barely a sliver of recognition in his rheumy eyes. “I hope you don’t mind my asking—where did you get that sweatshirt?”

He looked confused. “What?”

“Your sweatshirt. It’s from Galliard College, in Maine.”

“Is it?” He opened his coat wider and she saw the full word, just as she had suspected. Harry Shaughnessy was walking around in a sweatshirt from the college where Marc Staunton and Peter Hallett had become friends, where the trajectory of her sister’s life—all their lives—had been altered. Nora found it impossible to keep her eyes off the dark stain. Its color seemed unmistakable when exposed to bright daylight.

“You don’t see many people with sweatshirts from Galliard around here. My fiancé went to school there.” The tiny voice in her head made the necessary red-pencil correction. Ex-fiancé.

Harry Shaughnessy glanced at the hot dog sitting untouched on Nora’s lap, and his face changed in an instant, befuddlement retreating behind a sudden, hard wave of paranoia and suspicion. He pulled his coat closer, despite the afternoon’s oppressive heat. “What do you want?”

She had no choice but to tell the truth. “I need a better look at your sweatshirt. I can explain everything—please, it’s very important.” She put out her hand—a mistake. Shaughnessy was off like a shot, cutting in front of the pack of preschoolers, so that when Nora gave chase she got caught in the line and pulled several of the children to their knees, frightened and wailing.

She shouted after him: “Mr. Shaughnessy—wait, please!” Apologizing as she extracted herself from the preschoolers, she beat a path to the corner. But Harry Shaughnessy was already more than a block away. All she could do was watch as he rounded the corner and disappeared from view. She stopped to catch her breath, holding on to the arm of a bench.

“Might as well give up, girlie,” said a strange voice beside her. Nora glanced up. The speaker was a rail-thin crone dressed in a billowing powder-blue evening gown with a satin sash embroidered in flowing metallic script: “Princess of the North Star—1974.”

“Nope,” the princess muttered, her mouth a wry twist. “Nobody can catch ol’ Harry when he don’t want to get caught.”

“I just wanted to talk to him.”

“Well, it sure looks like he don’t want to talk to you.” The beauty queen eyed her suspiciously. “You a cop? You don’t look like a cop.”

“No, I’m not. Do you know Harry Shaughnessy?”

“Sure. Who don’t know Harry?”

“Do you know where I might find him?”

“I might. But I sure could use some smokes—they always help my concentration.” She tapped a wizened finger against her temple, and Nora finally realized what the woman was asking. She dug in her pocket and brought out a twenty-dollar bill. “Please, just tell me where to find him.”

“Hold your horses, hold your horses—” The princess made an elaborate production of slipping the twenty into a secret place within the folds of her sagging bosom. “He’ll be at the camp down below the old power plant. Sooner or later. Same as me.”

12

Cormac emerged into the corridor outside Casualty after his second meeting with the doctors. He sat down on one of the hard chairs along the hallway, and Roz came and sat beside him. “Any news?”

“They’re keeping him sedated until the swelling subsides. We probably won’t know anything until tomorrow at the earliest.” It was nearly ten o’clock in the evening now, and they’d been at the hospital all day. Cormac was still in his rowing gear. Roz looked worn out. “You should go back to the house, try to get some sleep,” he said. “I’ll stay.”

“I’m not leaving.”

“All right then, tell me more about this Mary Heaney case. How did the locals take to having a selkie in their midst?”

“Well, at first they were a bit leery, naturally—but I suppose they got used to her, in a way. The stories began to take on a life of their own. There were reports of her going up to the headland above the village while Heaney was out fishing. She’d sit there for hours, just staring out to sea. I think I mentioned that people heard her singing in a strange language. Some said that seals swam up onto the rocks when they heard her voice.”

“And all of that played into the rumors, I suppose.”

“How could it not? People began to believe that Heaney had some sort of power over her.” Roz paused for a moment, and looked at him. “You don’t have to pretend, you know. To be interested, for my sake.”

“I’m not pretending, Roz. I genuinely want to know. Where did the stories come from, do you suppose?”

“Where does any myth originate? Fairy brides are one of the major motifs in folklore. These are stories that have been with us forever, and in almost every culture. Most of the selkie tales weren’t written down until the nineteenth century, and it’s always interesting to me how they’re filtered through the prism of contemporary values. Loads of Victorian gentlemen were amateur anthropologists. They were tireless collectors, and we owe them a lot for all the work they did. But their fascination with what they called ‘primitive’ cultures was coupled with an equally strong aversion. They were especially put off by the looseness of marriage bonds amongst the ‘savage races.’ The Victorians saw fairy brides as downright dangerous—wild, uncontrollable, impervious to reason and morality. They always found a way to break their marriage bonds; the Victorians especially disliked that uncomfortable twist in the stories.”

“How does a selkie break her marriage bond?”

“She discovers what was taken from her, the magic object that’s kept her in captivity. In her case, it’s a sealskin, stolen and hidden from her. If she can regain it, the stories say, she’s able to return to her true self, her true home in the sea. In other stories, the magic object is a red cap or a feather cloak. In others there’s no physical covering, but the human spouse might break some taboo—sometimes he strikes his bride three ‘causeless blows.’ In others he dares to speak her name aloud, or reminds her of her animal origins.”

“And what does all that mean?”

“In psychological terms, you can see these stories being about women who desire autonomy and equality within marriage, or male fantasies about subjugating the power of the feminine. You can also see them reflecting male anxiety about abandonment by females. Your choice.”

“What do you think?”

“I think we’ve always tried to come up with ways to explain the fundamental differences, not just between men and women, but between all of us as human beings. We’re all mysterious, indecipherable creatures. Unknowable, really. To me, the story is all about trying to come to grips with the detritus of a broken relationship. What’s ironic is that it’s usually the selkie’s children who find her sealskin. She loves her children, but can’t take them with her when she leaves. They’re half human, and would drown if she were to bring them with her under the sea. So her choices are grim: stay and renounce her true nature, or return to the sea and leave the children behind. It’s about impossible dualities—no matter which choice the selkie makes, she has to remain divided.”

“What was it that made you think your Mary Heaney was murdered?”

“It was nothing explicit, really. What we have from the song ‘An Mhaighdean Mhara’ is only a fragment, but I still thought it strange that she and the children are called by name, but there’s no mention at all of her husband. I started to wonder if it was a subtle way of assigning responsibility. Pointing the finger precisely by not pointing it, if you see what I mean.”

“But how do you prove a negative?”

Roz nodded. “Exactly. In the absence of a body, what could anyone do? The case was written up in the local newspaper, complete with references to ‘local superstitions’ and ‘fairy romances’ and the ignorance of the Irish peasantry. Remind me to show you the piece—I’ve got it back at the house.”

“But surely that wasn’t what tipped the scales for you on Heaney?”

“No, there were several other bits of circumstantial evidence as well.”

“Such as?”

“Several people told me stories they’d heard from parents and grandparents, about a strange old man who followed Heaney around at the next fair day after his wife disappeared, asking, ‘Was it you? Was it you killed the woman?’”

“And how did Heaney react?”

“He struck the old man in the face, knocked him down, and bloodied his head. The old fella had never been seen before, and no one ever saw him again after that day. A few weeks later, there was a piece in the newspaper about a dozen seals found bludgeoned to death on Rathlin O’Birne.”

Cormac felt his curiosity quickening. He knew Rathlin O’Birne—he’d seen the island from the cliffs at Bunglas. “And how do you connect that to Mary Heaney?”

“All my informants claimed that P. J. Heaney was the culprit.”

“Was there any proof?”

“No witness to the actual deed. I can offer only what people told me. Some of them were still a little nervous talking about it. Depending on the day’s fishing, it wasn’t unusual for Heaney to return home spattered with fish blood. But several people claimed hearing stories that he pulled his boat into harbor the night of the seal slaughter without a single fish. The front of his gansey was soaked with blood—and not watery fish blood either, but something darker and more substantial. After he’d gone, a few of the locals had a look at his boat.”

“What were they looking for?” Cormac’s imagination had already conjured three ruddy-faced figures crouching among sodden nets with glowing lanterns.

“I’m not even sure they knew,” Roz said. “But what they found was a heavy fishing weight, still covered with blood and bits of fur.”

Cormac could see the terrible thing before him, glistening red in the lamplight. He imagined a lone figure out on the island, caught up in a fury of violence, striking confusion and fear into a crowd of hapless, slow-moving animals. He heard cries of alarm, desperate splashing as they tried to escape into the sea, and he thought of the creatures he’d seen this morning, not far from Rathlin O’Birne. Perhaps Heaney couldn’t bear what he saw in the dark pools of their eyes. “So what did they do?”

“What could they do? It wasn’t against the law to kill seals—not at that time.”

“But if people believed that Heaney had killed his wife—and it seems as though there was widespread suspicion—why wouldn’t they come out and say so?”

“I think it had to do with the remnants of fairy belief. And you have to consider the social context of that time. The local people feared Heaney, but they were just as fearful of the police—the Royal Irish Constabulary were an extension of English rule. Nobody wanted to cooperate, no matter what they knew. Heaney might come after them if they talked, and if he did, how could they entrust their families’ safety to the very same bailiffs who had no compunction about evicting people when they couldn’t pay the rent? The song might have been an indirect way to tell what really happened. I’ve always suspected that at its root, the selkie stories had far more to do with female emancipation than otherworldly sea creatures. Once they escape their enchantment, shape-shifting females are in possession of their own identities, liberated from the bonds of marriage and social expectation. In spite of being torn, they’re still able to leave their husbands, even their children. It’s a deeply unsettling notion, that there’s something pulling at women, far larger than any possible domestic concerns. Something as deep and mysterious and otherworldly as the sea. A whole separate realm.”

Cormac couldn’t help thinking of Nora, perhaps content to be her own person, apart from him. Roz was right—it was an unsettling notion. He tried to shake it off. “What made you decide to spend months digging all this up?”

“I came across the words of the song again, just by chance, and there’s something so powerful about the way it captures the wintry feeling of a place—the darkness and the snow, the cold sea, the utter desolation. It’s the mood of the piece, and the ambiguity of the selkie’s situation—she may have escaped her captivity, but she’s not really free. It’s there from the opening line of the song: Is cosúil gur mheath tú nó gur thréig tú an greann—‘It seems you’ve faded away and abandoned the love of life.’ The woman is trapped and heartsick and exhausted, but she can’t seem to leave that place where her two worlds met. She’s divided, in body and in spirit; the love she feels for her children is as strong as the pull of the sea.” Roz gazed out the window into the middle distance. “I know she’s out there somewhere, Cormac. People might imagine that I study these things because I harbor some secret belief in mermaids. I don’t, as it happens. But our need for them is real. And so is all the anger and fear, the fierce love and jealousy embedded in the stories about them—all the things that make us humans carry on as we do. Think of it—Mary Heaney disappeared more than a hundred years ago, and yet people who live down the road still know intimate details of her life. Why? Because her dilemma speaks to them. Her story expresses a duality that’s deeply embedded in all of us. Folktales are really complex psychological ideas given form and flesh.” Roz touched his arm. “Tell me, Cormac, have you had a good look around your father’s house? Surely you’ve noticed all the photographs on the walls—and have you counted how many are seals? When I remarked on the pictures, your father showed me how all the drawers and cupboards in his room are literally filled with notebooks of selkie stories his aunt Julia had collected. And I got a very strange feeling at that moment, wondering how it was your father and I just happened to meet that evening at Port na Rón. Even if you don’t believe in other realms, or fate, or serendipity—‘all that auld shite,’ as your father likes to call it—you still have to admit, there’s something funny going on.”

13

It was just after five when Nora arrived at her parents’ back door. No one answered the bell, and perhaps it was just as well; she hadn’t yet worked out what to say to them. How could she speak about the shattered skull at the morgue this morning, about her visit to the river, seeing Elizabeth? She still felt peculiar, thinking about that ghostly vision of Tríona through the glass wall in Lowertown, the book turned inward on the library shelf, the way she happened to catch a glimpse of Harry Shaughnessy’s stained sweatshirt. Now, at the end of the day, it all seemed like the addled plotline of a dream. She had considered going to the homeless camp below the power station, but couldn’t convince herself that it would be either useful or prudent. There were probably lots of possible explanations for how Shaughnessy had come into possession of that sweatshirt, how it came to have that rusty-looking stain.

She glanced at her watch. Too late to call Cormac—she’d missed her chance. Pressing the bell again, she heard the old-fashioned ringer echoing through empty rooms. Her parents were probably still at work. It wasn’t exactly as if they were expecting her.

She fished for her jumble of keys, which still included one for this house. Being here brought back dim recollections of the day they’d moved in more than thirty years ago, including the creeping apprehension she’d felt about a new house, a whole new country. Curiosity had quickly supplanted fear as she began to explore all the secret, hidden places here—the cellar and the closets, even an attic—all so different from their home in Ireland, so wonderfully foreign. It seemed so long ago now.

Walking through the kitchen and dining room to the front porch, she could make out the constant, faint hum of the freeway; in the far distance, the river bluffs were just visible through the trees. She suddenly remembered another summer night. The family was out here on the porch, just home from a summer holiday in Donegal. The weather had been unusually fine, warm enough to go swimming among the small, rocky islands in the bay near their rented cottage. Tríona had gone out too far, paddling until she was only a small, bright head bobbing between the waves. Then she disappeared. Their father had panicked, diving in and racing out to the island, where he found Tríona, coughing and spluttering on the rocks. She claimed a seal had rescued her from drowning. Nora had remained unconvinced, choosing to believe that Tríona had made the whole thing up, that she’d only pretended to drown to get attention. She was always doing things like that. Why was it no one else had seen any seals about?

Back home again two days after the misadventure, Tríona lay spread-eagled on the ottoman, rolling her small island around the porch as she paddled her arms and legs. Nora particularly remembered how the hollow noise of the casters against the porch floor had grated on her nerves. “Tríona, would you ever stop making that noise? Mam, make her stop!”

Tríona steered the ottoman to the middle of the room. She said: “I was just wondering what it would be like to be a seal.” She flopped over on her back, looking up, as if the reflections that played on the ceiling were the surface of the ocean above her.

Nora remembered how she had been poised to make some cutting remark, but their mother, busy at a crossword at the other end of the porch, murmured absently: “We can get you a book about seals at the library, Tríona, if you want to know about them—”

“I don’t want to know, Mam—I just want to wonder. Did you know they look like they’re flying underwater? I wonder what they see out there, under the sea…”

Nora remembered feeling another reality rise up before her in that moment: whales and jellyfish and giant tortoises, sea snakes, and water spouts. She could feel the profound silence beneath endless swells. And suddenly she knew that Tríona hadn’t been lying about the seal at all. She didn’t have to lie. The world overflowed with wonders. Just because something was extraordinary or inexplicable—that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. Though they were as far from any ocean as it was possible to be, she had been immersed, feeling the pull of salt water half a continent away.

Back in the present, Nora gave the ottoman a little shove with her foot, listening to the hollow noise it made on the floorboards. Tríona had probably never understood what a rare gift she had passed along that night—only the first of many.

From the porch, Nora returned to the front hall and took the stairs two at a time, feeling familiar creaks underfoot like strange music. Everywhere she looked were ghostly images: Tríona cross-legged on the landing, engrossed in dolls or a game of solitaire; her mother putting away folded towels and linens in the hall; the sound of her father slowly climbing the stairs after checking the locks each night—the tiny, random slices of their lives here, all the seemingly insignificant moments that added up to earthly existence.

Passing the bathroom door conjured up the ritual of taming Tríona’s unruly hair. Why that task had fallen to her, she couldn’t recall; all that remained was an imprint of their daily battle of wills. She slid open the top drawer and found a limp circle of elastic strung with faux pearls and glass beads. Tríona’s favorite—there had been a time when she insisted upon wearing it every day.

Nora set the hair band back in the drawer, and went out into the hallway. At one end was her parents’ room; at the other end were two smaller bedrooms, hers and Tríona’s. The door to Tríona’s room was closed. She opened it, not sure what to expect. The air had a distinctive closed-up smell, a sign that the door was kept shut, perhaps a vain attempt to trap any ghosts that might dwell here. The room was now, just as it had always been during Tríona’s lifetime, in a state of chaos: stacks of books everywhere, theater scripts wedged at every conceivable angle into the bookcases. In stark contrast to her own room, with its orderly shelves full of field guides and plant presses and specimen jars, Tríona’s room had always been a realm of make-believe. She remembered believing that her sister must have been adopted, since she clearly wasn’t related to the rest of the family.

Opening the closet door, Nora recognized a sun-faded denim shirt their father had worn for gardening until Tríona appropriated it and started wearing the thing around the house. Whenever she put it on, she also assumed their father’s voice and mannerisms—the seeds of her acting career. Each of Tríona’s transformations was tied to some item of clothing, whether this chambray shirt or a character costume—as though the act of changing clothes could alter who you were.

Nora took the faded shirt from its hanger and slipped it on over her own clothes, catching the ghost of a musky scent. Though Tríona had worn this shirt for ages, their father’s essence still seemed embedded in it as well. She caught a glimpse of herself in the dressing table mirror. The low glass cut her head off; without it, she might easily be mistaken for her sister. She turned away, the sun-blanched cotton on her shoulders heavy as another skin.

Nora checked her watch again. After six, and still no one home. She sat down at the edge of the bed and started flipping through Tríona’s collection of old audiocassettes. Most were homemade, compilations of favorite songs. She opened the cassette player and found an unlabeled tape inside. Popping it back in the machine, she pressed Play, and after a few rustling noises, heard her own voice—noticeably younger and higher—spilling from the small speakers.

Then something extraordinary happened. A second voice joined with hers—close in character, but not identical—blending at first in unison, and then diverging in an eerie harmony through the strange words of the refrain. There was so much she had forgotten. Like the steamy August night more than twenty years ago, when she had crept down into the musty cellar, intent on making this tape to capture a song that had been plaguing her. The prospect was exciting and terrifying, but the need to pour her own voice into the mysterious shape of that melody had driven her past fear. When Tríona joined in from the darkness at the top of the stairs, she had been startled and a little angry at first—and then too intrigued to stop. She had come home from Ireland carrying that song in her head, daring to sing it aloud only in moments when she was certain to be quite alone. But Tríona must have been there all the time, secretly listening. When the song ended, she began again, and they had sung it over and over, invisible to each other, but closer in spirit than they had ever been. Watching the tiny reels of the cassette rotate slowly in tandem, she bowed her head and let the hot tears sting her eyes—for the lonely sea maid upon the waves, for Tríona, and for herself.

When the song finally came to an end, Nora lifted her head, and turned to see her father standing in the doorway, supporting himself on the door frame with both arms. His hair had gone completely white since she had last seen him, and his face, so much older than she remembered, seemed drained of blood. She had never seen him shed a tear, not even in the terrible days immediately following Tríona’s death. He did not weep now, but she could read distress in the deep hollows of his eyes.

“I thought you were—” Suddenly the words seemed to choke him.

Nora looked down at the faded chambray shirt.

“Tríona,” she murmured.

Her father flinched, and Nora felt a surge of regret. She hadn’t meant to say the name aloud. He shook his head and looked away. “I thought you were lost to us as well.”

“But now I’m found,” she said quietly. “The prodigal, returned.”

He offered a wan half smile, and Nora realized that this strange, sad welcome was more than she had hoped for, and probably far more than she deserved.

There was a noise from downstairs, the rustle of someone pushing through the back door. “That’s your mother home,” he said. “Shall we go down to her?”

14

Frank Cordova closed his trunk. He’d just wasted three fruitless hours at the courier service on West Seventh where Natalie Russo had worked, and another two at the nearby house she’d shared with some of her coworkers. The company had never contracted with Peter Hallett’s architectural firm, and not one of the current crop of bike messengers had ever known Natalie. To these kids, five years ago might as well have been ancient history. No one knew whether any of Natalie’s belongings remained at the house, a run-down side-by-side duplex that held an accumulation of many temporary lives.

He checked his watch as he left the messenger service. A quarter to seven, just enough time to make his meeting with the coach at the Twin Cities Rowing Club. Natalie’s emergency contact. He dropped down to Shepard Road at Randolph and sailed along the bluffs beyond Crosby Farm Park. The boathouse was on a private road that hairpinned from the top of the bluff down to the river’s edge. He parked along the service road and began to make his way down the steep incline. The road’s surface was loose gravel, and his leather-soled shoes weren’t suited to the terrain.

Nobody was around when he reached the boathouse, but the doors were open, and he scoped around inside. Some of the wall racks were empty; brightly colored sculls hung from others. Outside the open door stood matched pairs of fabric-and-metal slings, evidently waiting for the rowers to return. He heard a shout through a bullhorn, and turned to see a flotilla of long, narrow watercraft approaching from downriver. Some were rowed solo, some in pairs; one of the boats held a foursome stroking gracefully in unison. Oars lifted as the boats pulled in on both sides of the dock, and the rowers glanced at him as they lifted their lightweight sculls from the water and flipped them upside down onto the waiting stands. They began unscrewing the rigging hardware, swabbing the boats down with towels.

He approached the nearest sling. “I’m looking for Sarah Cates. She said I’d find her here after practice.”

The woman glanced up only briefly, eyes flicking to the badge he’d clipped to his belt. “She’ll be along in a minute. She was following in the launch.”

After all the rowers were in, a woman he gauged to be in her late thirties steered a motorized rowboat to the dock and raised a hand, signaling that she’d seen him. Not that hard to spot him, really—the only shirt and tie amid all the spandex. Sarah Cates had a lean, muscular body, and bronze skin that hinted at mixed origins like his own. Sunstreaks in her curly dark hair were evidence of hours spent out on the water. She tied up the launch and made her way up the dock. Cordova walked down to meet her.

“Ms. Cates—thanks for seeing me on short notice.”

“Sarah, please. No trouble at all. I’m here every day—when I’m not out rowing myself, I’m coaching the women’s team. We don’t have a coach at the moment, so we’re taking turns. Come on up.” Halfway to the boathouse, she turned and threw him a sideways glance. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

Cordova felt uneasy. He hadn’t been involved in the initial investigation of Natalie Russo’s disappearance, but then again, his memory seemed to be playing tricks on him recently. He shook his head. “Sorry—”

“You interviewed me—it was about three years ago.” Still didn’t register; he felt a little bewildered. She continued: “I found a body in the river. It’s okay. I know it’s impossible to remember everyone you talk to. You know, I’d always imagined that being a detective might be interesting, but after that—I certainly don’t envy you that part of the job. He was so tiny.”

At last Frank felt his memory kick in. The baby’s body had been discovered first; his mother turned up a mile downstream the next day. Witnesses said that she had cradled the newborn in her arms as she jumped from a bridge more than a hundred feet above the river. The memory of mother and child laid out side by side in the morgue had disturbed his dreams for a long time. “That was you?”

She nodded. “We meet again. And I’m guessing you’re here about another death.”

“I’m afraid so. How well did you know Natalie Russo?”

From her reaction, Sarah Cates had been expecting this visit. “That body at Hidden Falls—it was Natalie, wasn’t it?” Frank nodded, and she rubbed her bare arms, as if suddenly chilled. “I’m not sure any of us knew her all that well. When we talked, it was mostly about rowing.”

“How often was she down here at the boathouse?”

“Every day, morning and evening, rain or shine, whenever the water was open. She was a serious rower.”

“Isn’t everyone here pretty serious?”

Sarah Cates smiled. “Yeah—but some more than others.”

“Natalie was wearing running clothes when she was found. Can you tell me anything about that?”

“She ran every day, in addition to rowing practice. Most of us do some sort of cross-training—it helps build endurance.”

Frank said: “The people at her job and the house where she lived didn’t seem to know a lot about her. I was wondering if we might check club records for anything that might shed some light on what was happening in her life around the time of the disappearance.”

“Not sure what the club records might tell you. All we keep is contact information and membership stuff, speed and distance records, and the daily logs.” She pointed to a book hanging from a hook near the open boathouse door. “Liability insurance requires them on club equipment and private boats. It’s a safety thing; if somebody checks a boat out and doesn’t check back in, we have to send out a search party. That’s just this month. All the older logs are upstairs. You’re welcome to have a look.”

She pointed to an open stairway that led to a loft on the second floor. Cordova took note of signs at the foot of the stairs that pointed the way to men’s and women’s locker rooms as they passed. “Would Natalie have kept a locker here?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you. Not being uncooperative, it’s just that we’re not too strict about lockers. They’re not assigned; you just bring a padlock if you want to use one. We don’t really keep track of them.”

As they continued upward, Frank glanced at the row of photographs that followed the staircase. The more recent images appeared in color; the older ones were black-and-white.

“Team pictures,” Sarah Cates confirmed. “All the way back to the twenties, when the club was men only. We’re still not terribly organized, but at least we operate a little less like a frat house now.”

“Would Natalie be in any of these pictures?”

“At least one, I think. They’re in chronological order, so if we start at the bottom and count back—here she is.”

The photo showed Natalie Russo in the front row. She was smaller, slighter than most of her teammates. Her fellow rowers, caught up in the spirit of camaraderie, had arms thrown around one another’s shoulders. He let his gaze rest on the blonde standing directly behind Natalie. The face was partially obscured by someone’s elbow, but he was almost certain he’d seen it somewhere before, in a different context. The feeling was vague, but insistent.

Sarah said: “You know, it’s funny; even though they’re taken at the start of each season, you can tell just by looking which teams are going to be the great ones—”

“And this bunch?” Cordova nodded to the photo before them.

“Our best women’s team ever. We could have sent at least four people to Olympic trials that year, but—”

Cordova prompted: “But what?”

“Natalie disappeared just before they were supposed to go.” Her lips pressed together in consternation. “Things sort of fell apart.”

The upstairs office was a jumble of loose paper and lost-and-found clothing. “Please excuse the mess,” Sarah Cates said. “The usual problem—no one’s really in charge. The office is always in chaos.” She hauled a stack of boxes out from under a table, and found the one that held logbooks for five years previous. Flipping through the pages, she said: “Like I said, Natalie was on the water pretty much every day, from the time the ice was out—she usually did morning and evening workouts, and lots of running in between.” She turned the heavy ledger to face him.

Cordova peered at the handwritten pages of the log. Most names were illegible, except for all the repetitions of “N. Russo” in neat blue ballpoint. From June 3 onward, no “N. Russo” appeared in any column. Here one day, gone the next. Like we’ll all vanish some day, he thought, without so much as a ripple.He raised his eyes from the book. “She must have been good.”

“Only the best natural rower I’ve ever seen. Flawless mechanics. I remember something she said once, that winning a race was the best high. She told me she’d grown up sort of uncomfortable in her own skin. Rowing had turned her from this awkward, chubby kid into someone who actually knew what she was doing, what she wanted. The way she said it—just made me think she’d overcome some difficult things in her past, you know? Most people float along, but Natalie never did. She definitely had that fire in the belly, a competitive spirit, but not the kind that made her hard to live with. There’s always a certain amount of backbiting in any place like this, ego and temper and all that goes along with competition, but Natalie seemed above all that. She’d go out of her way to cheer on teammates, try to lift everybody’s game—unlike most of the lightweights I’ve known.” She lowered her voice. “They have to be cutting weight all the time, so they’re usually hungry. Makes ’em cranky.”

“Did any of Natalie’s teammates resent her ability?”

“Why should they? It wasn’t like she went around rubbing people’s faces in how great she was. We all like winning. And we had a much better chance of winning when she was with us.”

“What about friends, anybody in particular she hung out with?”

“Not that I recall. She did things with the team, but nobody in particular stood out.”

“You know that you were her emergency contact?”

“Yeah, they told me when she disappeared. I thought it was kind of sad. She didn’t seem to have any family—no one she wanted to stay in touch with, anyway.”

“What do you remember about the time she disappeared?”

“She didn’t show up for practice. That was totally out of character, especially with the trials coming up. I called her cell phone, but there was no answer. So I tried the messenger service, but they said she hadn’t been to work either.”

“So you reported her missing—”

“I wasn’t sure anybody else would do it. Then somebody spotted her bike behind the boathouse. I remember having such a bad feeling, right here.” She pointed to a place just below her sternum. “I’m constantly reminding people—novices, especially—what a dangerous place the river can be.” She gestured to the top of the bluffs. “It’s still wild down here, not like the world up there. We’re dealing with weird stuff all the time—currents, hypothermia, deadheads, floaters—and don’t even get me started on the wackos who think it’s funny to drop things from bridges. We have to be constantly on our guard. I was always telling Natalie not to run alone, but she said she didn’t need a bodyguard just to go for a run. I totally got what she was saying—it’s not fair. But whenever I run down here by myself, I always come home feeling like I’ve dodged a bullet.” She eyed him curiously. “It must be strange, doing what you do every day. Getting to know people only after they’re dead, I mean.”

“Guess I never looked at it that way,” Frank said. “It’s like any other line of work; some days are better than others.” His eyes suddenly focused on the delicate sprinkling of freckles across Sarah Cates’s face. All the time they’d been talking, and he had never noticed that detail until this moment. And her eyes, such an unusual hue—pale green, the same color as the river in the bright sunlight. “I could wonder about what you do every day, too. Cold, currents, deadheads, dead bodies—that’s enough to keep most people in bed. And yet you’re out here on the water every day.”

“I can’t really explain.” She looked away for a few seconds. “When the wind is calm, and your cadence is just right—it’s hard to put into words. If you really want to understand, I could take you out for a beginner’s lesson some evening—we do it all the time. No charge.”

15

The reunion with her parents was going somewhat better than Nora had expected. There were no recriminations about not calling, no questions about her plans. As if they all realized that the elaborate pas de trois they had been engaged in for the past five years had become necessary.

Going about the everyday rituals of preparing a meal, Nora felt two discussions going on at once—on their lips the mundane details of the flight home, her work in Dublin, the small permutations of her parents’ daily lives, while the larger questions lurked beneath the surface, unasked and unanswered. She had already imagined most of the conversation: her father’s inquiries about her work at Trinity, her mother asking after people they had known in Dublin, even the occasional awkward silences. They never spoke Tríona’s name. Still, as the three of them ranged around the kitchen, opening drawers and cupboards, Nora felt how good it was to have her bearings, to know precisely where everything was. But for some reason, she was filled with a distant ache as well.

She understood on a rational level her father’s reluctance to condemn Peter Hallett—or anyone else, for that matter—without proof. Watching him wrestle the cork from a wine bottle, she tried to imagine the place he’d been reared, the wild, wind-whipped west coast of Clare, where bleak history and compounded misfortune had fed a general faith in forces beyond the known world. From an early age, he had rebelled against that upbringing, rejecting all the old beliefs, demanding a rational explanation for everything. After Tríona’s death, Nora and her mother had watched him retreat deeper and deeper into his research, taking refuge in his orderly, microscopic universe. He delighted in the abstract beauty of individual cells, in cracking open their inner workings, unmasking invisible chemical changes. In her own work, she had followed her father a long distance down that path, but had come to see the fault in hewing too closely to scientific method. Where human behavior was involved, there was often no rational explanation.

The conversation that had flowed almost normally as they’d moved about the kitchen suddenly slowed once they sat down to the table. Nora sensed her mother trying to coax the conversation forward, but one gambit after another faltered and failed, and they finished their meal in silence.

“You haven’t told us how long you’ll be staying,” her father said abruptly. “I hope you haven’t left Trinity for good.”

“They’re expecting me back for fall term.” That much was true, at least.

A few moments later, Tom Gavin rose from the table. “I’m sorry to leave you, but I’ve got an early presentation tomorrow, and I’ve a few things left to prepare. Forgive me.” As he passed by the back of her chair, Nora felt her father’s hand hover briefly above her shoulder. Five years after Tríona’s death, and here they were, still in limbo.

When he had retreated into the study, Eleanor Gavin said: “There’s no presentation tomorrow. He’s just having a difficult time.”

Nora began to speak, but her mother hushed her. “I know—the past five years haven’t been easy for any of us. But your father’s been waiting out on the porch almost every night since you phoned. Now that you’re here, he doesn’t know what to do. He’s completely exhausted. I’m not saying any of this is your fault, love—please don’t misunderstand. I’m just telling you what’s going on. He did the very same thing before you were born. Couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t concentrate. And when you finally did arrive, he was a complete wreck. He’s missed you terribly, Nora. We both have.”

“Is he all right, Mam? He looks so pale—and I know doctors make rotten patients.”

Eleanor let out a breath that at once signaled her frustration, and her relief in having someone to talk to. “He’s been driving himself too hard—his way of coping.”

Nora studied her mother’s face, moved by the subtle changes she read there: the etching of fine worry lines was more pronounced, the eyes even more deep-set. Her mother’s hair had gone completely white as well. Seeing the changes the past three years had wrought, and imagining her parents alone in this house, the silences between them growing by a few seconds each evening—it was almost more than she could bear. “If you’d like, I could have a word with him—”

Her mother shot her a wry look. “And you think that might help? You know how he dotes on you, sweetheart, but you have to admit you’ve never been the most calming influence. You’re too much like him—it’s that Gavin stubborn streak. No, you worry about yourself. I’ll have your father in hand, even if I’ve got to grind up the beta-blockers and dissolve them in his tea.”

Nora couldn’t help smiling. “You’ve got some neck, calling other people stubborn. You look as if you’ve lost weight, Mam. Are you eating? Remember what Mrs. Makabo said—”

“‘No man likes a skinny wife, Missus Doctor,’” Eleanor said, echoing the musical accent of one of her longtime patients. They both smiled faintly, remembering the saucy wink that had accompanied the remark, and the chorus of giggles that erupted from the other patients in the waiting room.

“How is Mrs. Makabo?”

“Thriving—fourteen grandchildren. Number fifteen coming along any day now.”

“Will you tell her I was asking for her?”

“I will, of course. She and the other ladies still ask after you.”

The patients at her mother’s clinic were mostly immigrant mothers and children, and Nora had seen firsthand how they struggled with a strange new language, with poverty and bureaucracy and bigotry, with the bitter Midwestern cold. Many had survived so much worse, in home places ravaged by famine, genocide, endless war. She had always thought it no great mystery that her mother could imagine what had really happened to Tríona, while her father, insulated from human contact in his sterile, air-conditioned laboratory, could not. She watched her mother check the door to the hallway once more, and then steel herself, apparently to deliver bad news. “Nora, there’s something I haven’t told you—”

“If it’s about Miranda, Mam, I already know.”

“How did you find out?”

“Does it matter?” Her mother’s bewildered expression forced a confession of sorts. “All right—I was here last night, outside. I overheard you and Daddy talking.”

“Nora, why didn’t you come in?”

“It was a shock, hearing about Miranda, and then to find out about their trip to Ireland—”

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

“I know, Mam. Please don’t worry.”

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

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

“Put us out?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, Mam—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

16

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everybody at headquarters knew about them. He didn’t know why they even bothered sneaking around anymore—that part had never been easy, even if Rolf Bledsoe had it coming. That bastard had been playing around on Karin since the day they met—he never bothered to deny it. Why she ever married Bledsoe was a mystery—maybe something to do with the perverse pleasure they seemed to take in tormenting each other. Frank had always understood that he was just the current round of ammunition in Rolf and Karin’s ongoing marital war. The whole thing was pretty sick. He tried not to think about it as he walked over and switched off the turntable.

Karin spoke behind him. “Aren’t you going to ask how everything went in court today?”

“How did it go?”

“Swell. The defense is dredging up the broken home, the abusive father, all the playground bullies who damaged his client’s sensitive soul, but you can see it on every face in that jury box—our boy is going down.” Karin moved in close behind him. “I suppose I should be happy. Another miscreant off the street. How did everything go with Dr. Gavin?”

That was the real reason she was here. Frank winced suddenly and pressed two fingers just below his breastbone. His stomach was at him again—that same hot, stabbing sensation, just like this morning. Then, as quickly as the pain had started, it began to pass. “Look, Karin, it’s late. And I don’t feel much like talking right now.”

She set down her glass and turned him around with one languid motion, reaching for his tie and slowly slipping the knot. As she leaned closer, he felt the warm gush of her breath in his ear: “Who the hell said anything about talking?”

Just after five, he awakened with a start. It was that same dream again, wandering a strange house, hearing cries and words muttered over and over, like prayers or incantations. He always woke from it feeling anxious and unsettled, and usually couldn’t get back to sleep. Sometimes, as he was waking or drifting off to sleep, he would see an old man, dressed all in white, crushing leaves, or brushing a kind of broom over someone lying facedown on a bed. Susto, susto, the old man kept whispering to himself. Es muy importante. Had he actually seen these things, or just dreamed them? He had often wondered who was on the bed, what power was in those leaves. Something else floated to the surface as well, a word he didn’t know: curandero.

He sensed the warmth of someone beside him, and turned to find Karin’s fair head on the pillow. Disappointment seeped through him—not exactly noble, but undeniably true. What he regretted most about this affair with Karin was that there was no real kindness between them. They’d fallen into bed the first time almost by default, and had stayed together—if you could even call it that—for pretty much the same reason. At least neither of them harbored any false illusions. He told himself that was a good thing. Karin stirred, sleepily propping herself up on one elbow. “What time is it? Did they page you?”

“It’s only a little after five,” he said. “You can go back to sleep.” She slipped back into her dreams, and Frank lay back on the bed, crossing his arms beneath his head.

Natalie Russo’s ravaged remains tugged at him. She might well have encountered Peter Hallett along the running paths at the river. The trick would be establishing a connection with witnesses, dates, documentation. Hallett was probably too smart for that; he would have made certain there was no trace of him in Natalie Russo’s life. And if they had only met down at the river, she might never have known his name. Frank closed his eyes, trying to reconcile the smooth, dark hair in Natalie Russo’s file photo with the weathered strands they had pulled from the riverbank.

He’d had a suspicion Nora would head down to the crime scene as soon as he dropped her at the apartment. She would try to figure out what her sister was doing out in the woods the night she was killed, maybe somewhere near a clandestine burial. There was still no proof that Tríona had been at Hidden Falls. Assuming they could prove it, there were three distinct possibilities. The least likely explanation was that Tríona had stumbled onto the burial site by accident. Or she might have suspected her husband of murdering Natalie Russo, and she was out there looking for proof.

There was at least one other scenario—one he couldn’t even mention to Nora, who had never seen her sister as anything but a blameless victim. Experience had taught him that very few human souls were completely free of fault. He had to consider every possible explanation, even the remote chance that Tríona had known where Natalie Russo was buried because she had somehow been involved in the murder. Or possibly just the cover-up. He didn’t like imagining that explanation, unlikely as it probably was, but someone had to. Nothing was ever as simple as it seemed.

Every once in a while, he could still feel the urgency he’d once felt on the job. He would have been glad to think he helped to spare or improve the life of even one innocent person. But the truth was that he couldn’t protect anyone. Even if he wore himself ragged every day, he was destined to fail; they were all destined to fail. It had taken him almost nine years to comprehend that unpleasant reality. People like him didn’t actually stop bad things from happening; their real function was to clean up after the fact, to write a report and file it away. His job was to maintain the illusion of order where it didn’t exist.