False Mermaid

1

Nora awakened to the click-click-click of a cassette stuck in the player beside her head. She batted at it, but the tape continued to tick away in the machine, unable to advance. Groggy, she struggled to raise herself and checked the time—7:26—then pressed the button on the radio, trying to turn the machine off.

She flopped back down on the mattress, and heard Tríona’s voice through the speaker, anxious and urgent: “I haven’t got much time—”

Nora sat up, suddenly awake, her whole body on high alert.

“If anything should happen to me—an accident, anything—I want to make sure you know—” Her voice dropped to a whisper, and Nora had to strain to hear. “My God, I can’t believe I’m saying this. It’s like some horrible dream. I thought I knew him. Then a part of me pulls back, says how can you even think such things? He’s the father of your child. But I don’t know who he is, Nora. I don’t know how this all happened. There are so many things I don’t remember. Hours—whole days sometimes. I feel like I’m losing my mind. And I’m afraid it won’t matter what I say, because no one will believe me. But I’m not making anything up—I swear I’m not. I want you to go to the hiding place. You know the one I mean. Take what you find there to the police. I want Elizabeth to know I didn’t just leave her, that I had to do this, I had to find the truth. If I turn up missing, I want you to go and look at Hidden Falls. I couldn’t say anything on the phone just now, because I knew you’d come after me, and I can’t let you do that. I’ve got to go now, it’s almost time—”

There was no more, only the crackling of a microphone, then silence.

Almost time for what? Nora picked up the tape recorder and shook it. The small wheels kept turning, but there was nothing more. How could she have missed this for so long? Tríona had obviously thought she’d listen to this tape before now.

This was what they needed—proof that Tríona had been at Hidden Falls. And that she’d known something about Peter, something she was afraid to tell anyone, afraid even to think. What else?

I want you to go to the hiding place. You know the one I mean.

Nora scrambled to her feet, nearly knocking the lamp over in her haste to extract the tape. Fifteen minutes later, she was at her parents’ house again, up in Tríona’s bedroom, dragging the heavy cast-iron bed away from the wall. Behind the bed was a small paneled door, complete with miniature antique knob. When she turned it, the door creaked open, inviting a dusty, hot breath from the attic. Like the entrance to a secret world, she remembered thinking as a child. The opening was just large enough to crawl through.

Down on her hands and knees, Nora poked her head into the attic, feeling a little light-headed in the airless heat. As she ventured inward, her left shoulder pressed against the hardened ooze of plaster and lath, she tested for loose beams, while trying to avoid exposed nails that threatened to catch her from the right. Definitely a child’s hiding place, an unfriendly environment for grown-ups. Nora had found this attic space herself, the day they moved into the house. The small breach behind the chimney would have been perfect for passing secret messages between their rooms, but it had never happened. By the time her sister was old enough for secret messages, Nora herself had outgrown them. The story of their lives, really—always slightly out of synch.

She felt blindly around the back side of the rough brickwork, trying not to imagine all the many-legged creatures and silken egg sacs she must be disturbing. Lifting out a battered wooden cigar box, she crawled back out into the dimly lit room, trailing spiderwebs. The contents of the box still gave off a faint, brackish whiff when she opened the lid. A sign in her own childish handwriting pronounced it NORA’S SECRET HIDING PLACE. Every object in it was something she had squirreled away so many years ago: three buffalo nickels, six Irish ha’pennies, and even a worn shilling; the tarnished bronze medal on a tattered ribbon she’d found in the dirt under the front porch; a rather toothsomely grisly squirrel skull; some interesting fossils excavated from the river bluffs. The box also held bits of green and bluish sea glass, a vial of bonelike coral from Connemara, two brilliant Kerry diamonds from Inch Strand outside of Dingle, and a softened shard of blue-and-cream delft she’d scavenged along the shore in Donegal. Everything was familiar; there was nothing new. She lifted the box to scan the underside. Nothing taped on, nothing extra written on it. Maybe Tríona hadn’t left anything here after all.

Setting the cigar box aside, she crawled back into the attic space, reaching again into the gap behind the chimney. This time her fingertips brushed against something. Whatever it was, it had fallen down between the chimney and the eaves. She managed to work the object closer until at last she was able to pull it out. It was a blue nylon duffel bag, hoary with cobwebs and plaster dust. She crawled backward out of the attic and set the bag on the floor of Tríona’s room. Inside, she found a small black datebook and a sheaf of papers—more newspaper articles about Natalie Russo. All printed out, just like the article she’d found at the library, on the last day of Tríona’s life. She flipped open the datebook, and saw various dates marked with large red Xs, sometimes one per week, sometimes more. There was an envelope tucked inside the back cover, addressed to Peter Hallett, with an unsigned, hand-printed note inside:

Nora checked the postmark—the letter had been sent from Portland, Maine, two weeks before Tríona died. How was all this connected? Finally, at the bottom of the duffel, she found a crumpled brown paper bag with something soft inside. It turned out to be several items of clothing: a pair of shorts; a T-shirt that she’d given Tríona, with a University of Minnesota Medical School logo; and a pair of lacy underwear with matching bra.

All were stiff with what seemed to be dried blood.

Nora felt a hollow flutter under her breastbone. She remembered giving Tríona this shirt. Last night she had offered her mother all kinds of reassurances, but still had to push her own fear back into the dark place it dwelt deep inside her. Tríona had told her to take what she found here to the police. All of this had to start making sense sometime, but so many pieces of the puzzle were still missing. So why did she feel that a new threshold had been crossed?

2

Cormac paced up and down the hospital corridor, stopping briefly in front of the window to the room where his father remained motionless, still in a drug-induced coma. Roz Byrne sat in a chair beside the bed, holding the old man’s hand.

When Roz came out of the room, Cormac said: “I don’t know if I can stay here any longer. There’s nothing to do but walk the floor and wait. I’ve got to get out for a while.”

“Why don’t you head back to the house?”

“I’m guessing you could use a break, too. Why don’t we go somewhere?”

“Where do you suggest?”

“I don’t know—let’s just drive. The doctors have my mobile if there’s any news.”

As they headed west out of Killybegs, neither of them spoke. Roz had the wheel. The land grew progressively wilder and more rocky as they traveled westward, through Kilcar and Carrick. Finally, Cormac said: “I’ve been thinking about Mary Heaney. If her body was never found, how do you know she didn’t just walk away?”

“I hope she did. I hope she escaped, and lived to be a very old woman. I just don’t think that’s what happened.”

“If things between her and Heaney were as bad as all that, what kept her from leaving? Why stay with him?”

“What keeps any woman in a bad relationship? It’s one of those age-old mysteries. Unsolvable.” Roz considered for a moment. “This wouldn’t be anything to do with your person over in the States, would it?”

Cormac didn’t seem able to respond. Part of him longed to retreat, sorry he’d ever opened that door.

Roz said quietly: “You don’t have to tell me.”

It suddenly occurred to him what Roz might surmise—that it was Nora who was trying to get away. “It’s not what you think.” Roz kept her eyes on the road, which seemed to make it easier to begin. “Nora’s sister was murdered, five years ago. The sister’s husband is the main suspect, always has been, but they’ve got no evidence against him. He’s never been charged, never even arrested. Nora’s gone back to see if she can’t dig up some new evidence, and I was going over to see if I could help—”

“I am sorry, Cormac. I didn’t realize.”

“It goes against all reason, staying with someone who actually takes pleasure from hurting you. And yet people stay. How do you account for it if you don’t believe in enchantment?”

“What do you know about the murder?”

“Not a lot. Nora hasn’t actually told me much about it. I think she feels guilty for not seeing things earlier, not doing more to help. The husband was some sort of a brute, apparently. What really tears Nora up is the idea that her sister still loved him, in spite of everything.”

“Is that so difficult to believe? We’re complex creatures, with complicated motivations and desires, divisions even within ourselves.”

They were approaching a crossroads. Roz pulled up and glanced over at him. “Will you bear with me a little while? There’s something I’d like to show you.”

He nodded his assent, and she turned from the main coast road and headed back up into the hills. Ten minutes later, they were rattling over a narrow road atop a heathery mountain. “Do you know where we are? Your father’s house is just the other side of this headland,” Roz said. As the car came over the mountain’s crest, the sun disappeared behind clouds, and a slight mist began to blow against the windscreen. The road wound down along a mountain stream, and finally ended in a sort of rough patch of gravel where a footbridge crossed the flowing water to a rude path on the other side. Cormac climbed out of the car and surveyed the handful of ruins perched on the slope above a rocky beach and a disused pier. Stone walls cut the hilly outcrop into smaller fields, which were even further reduced by wire fencing. A few houses with corrugated metal roofs were apparently still in use as sheep sheds. There was no sign of life anywhere at the moment, even of the ovine variety, despite ample evidence of their recent presence underfoot. Cormac could hear the surf rolling on the beach—a distinct, hollow rattling of stone on stone. “What is this place?” he asked Roz.

“It’s called Port na Rón.”

Seal Harbor, in English. But port was one of those words that held a double meaning. In addition to “harbor,” it also meant “tune.” The music of the seals.

Roz continued: “The caves at the far side of the harbor are a rookery for gray seals. It’s out of the way, but this used to be quite a busy place—a haven for smugglers and pirates, people tell me. It’s been abandoned for years, but that house”—she pointed to a dilapidated cottage on the far side of the stream—“that’s where Mary Heaney lived. I just tracked down the landowner and got permission to have a look around inside.”

They crossed the bridge and climbed the rutted path to the Heaney cottage, four stone walls topped with crumbling thatch, home now to birds’ nests and sprouting weeds. Nettles grew waist-high around the back and sides of the house, a typical Donegal fisherman’s cottage, low to the ground, with small windows and a piggyback roof. No overhang—the wind here didn’t need much foothold.

Cormac bent over to pick up a grapefruit-sized stone, measuring its weight in his hand. A dozen more lay scattered along the cottage walls. Tied together with rope and tossed over the top, they would have been all that kept the thatch from blowing away in a gale. He dropped the stone back on the path. “It’s amazing this place wasn’t pulled down ages ago.”

“No one will go near it; the locals say there’s an unlucky air about the place. Even more bad luck to him who pulls it down.”

“Whatever happened to Heaney and his children?”

“Did I not tell you? Six years after his wife disappeared, Heaney himself vanished. His boat was found adrift out in the bay, but no body ever turned up. The children were shipped off to some cousins near Buncrana. I found records of a Patrick Heaney from Buncrana killed at Gallipoli in 1916, but I haven’t been able to verify that it was the same one from Port na Rón.”

“And the daughter?” Cormac couldn’t help thinking of Nora’s niece, only a child when her mother was killed.

“The 1911 census had no record of her, in Buncrana or anywhere in Donegal. She might have married or emigrated by that time—she would have been about the right age. I haven’t had a chance to follow up on all that. Come and have a look inside. I’ve been here a couple of times, but haven’t touched anything. You’ll see why people still call it ‘the selkie cottage.’”

Cormac followed Roz through the open entrance, and the first thing his eye fell upon was the half-door, torn from its hinges and lying in the middle of the kitchen. He let his gaze wander across the room. The once-whitewashed walls were peeling and had gone black and green from seeping damp. The pine dresser against the wall still held a few cracked pieces of blue-and-white delft. A traditional box bed was built into the far corner of the room, an iron-framed cot stood in the other. Under a window on the far wall, a cupboard held a washbasin, and empty tins and sacks spilled out from the shelves beneath. There was plentiful evidence that animals had lived here, taking advantage of abandoned food stores. Layers of dust covered everything: the rude table, the child-sized rush-seated chairs, the iron kettle that still hung from a hook over the hearth. Cormac could see a half-finished piece of knitting someone had set aside, the contours of a clay pipe under the dust in the hob beside the fireplace. Everything spoke of lives suddenly and rudely interrupted.

“What do you see?” Roz asked.

“Hard work. Long winter nights.” He could actually imagine a family moving about this room, the woman tending the fire, the man mending nets in the flickering light, the children’s muted breathing from the cot. He tried to conjure Mary and P. J. Heaney before him. What exactly had passed between them? How little was left here to illuminate how, and in what spirit, those two human beings had occupied this space. Nothing to capture the fleeting evidence of a glance, a touch, a word. There was nothing to encapsulate the longing or the revulsion—or perhaps both, in endless close succession—that had flowed through them every day. Did she mind his touch, or had she invited it? Was she a willing participant, a kidnap victim, an amnesiac? To say that she stayed with him for years was no measure. People stayed for all sorts of reasons: inertia, the hope that things would change, fear of the unknown, poverty, a dread that things could actually get much worse. Physical objects might offer some glimpses into a life, but how could they get down to the real texture of everyday existence? How infinitely subtle were the traces of happiness and despair?

Nora had become so much a part of him that he could not imagine living without her, and yet anyone digging through his possessions would find no physical evidence of her at all. Not a single trace. They had exchanged nothing but a look, a touch, a few words—and not even written words, only fleeting conversations and marks on a screen that evaporated into the ether. The one concrete thing he’d given her—the hazel knot—felt like a meager, temporary token.

Roz’s voice startled him out of his thoughts. “I was hoping to get some pictures, to start documenting what’s here.”

As Roz went around the room snapping photos, Cormac sketched a quick floor plan of the house. He found marks on the floor, where a heavy object had been dragged through the dust. Someone had stacked up dozens of conical limpet shells to form narrow, teetering towers on the shelves where delft once stood.

He said to Roz: “I thought you told me no one would come near this place—”

She looked up at the piles of shells. “That’s what people said. But it does seem as if someone’s been here, doesn’t it?”

Cormac noted the shells on his drawing, and left them undisturbed. Crossing to the iron-frame cot, he lifted the rotting straw mattress and heard something fall to the floor. Pulling the bed away from the wall, he found a threadbare muslin doll. The shape was not recognizably human, more like an animal—a seal. Someone had sewn on black metal buttons for eyes, but one had come loose. A mute witness to whatever had taken place here. Beneath the bed he found a short piece of a plank with holes in it, and two tiny sandbags that fit in the palm of his hand. The board was cracked and stained, but he brushed the dust away from its face, and saw that the plank had been brightly painted at one time. The only faint glimmer of happiness that this room had so far possessed. “Roz, look at this.”

She came closer and snapped several photos. “Some sort of game?”

Cormac set the board aside and peered under the bed again, this time finding several long, fair hairs twisted around one of the springs. Had they been caught here during a harmless game of hide-and-seek, or something more ominous? He thought of all the things he had noticed from an early age, the gestures and conversations he’d witnessed between his parents and other adults when they believed he was elsewhere, or not paying attention. A child was capable of sensing things, of taking in and interpreting unspoken emotions, as well as any lesser creature. And what of the person who had hidden here—a girl, presumably—what memories, what images had she carried, only to have them triggered later by a certain sound or scent, or the angle of light at a certain time of day? The gleaming hair between his fingers suddenly seemed sturdy as wire. What if everyone had ignored the most important witness in Tríona Hallett’s murder? It was perfectly natural, trying to protect a child, but if no one had ever spoken to Elizabeth about her mother’s death—

He continued pulling out the jumble of objects hidden under the cot—a collection of small, rounded stones, no doubt robbed from the beach. More limpet shells, dozens of them. The last item was a woman’s old-fashioned, high-button shoe.

He called Roz over and held up the shoe. “It was here, under the cot,” he said. “Isn’t it strange, though? Who leaves home wearing only one shoe?”

3

Nora sat in her car outside police headquarters in Saint Paul. Beside her on the seat were the things Tríona had hidden away in the attic. She had rushed over here, not stopping to change out of the clothes she had slept in. And now she was remembering how it had all happened last time. Her emotional dissolution had taken place slowly, imperceptibly at first, just like this. She’d find something that could be a lead, and would bring it in to Frank as she had brought these things this morning—just out of bed, hair uncombed. The last time she’d come here before leaving for Ireland, she’d brought a bag of old clothes she’d watched Peter Hallett dump in the Goodwill collection bin on University Avenue. When she had arrived here at headquarters, she’d been left in a chair at the front desk to wait for Frank. It was only after fifteen minutes or so that she had looked down and realized that she’d driven to the police station in her pajamas. She had felt conspicuous, sitting in that waiting area, with cops coming and going, glancing at her and looking away with dismissive expressions. They had her pegged. A crazy. A kook. But she couldn’t leave until she’d handed over the clothing. And it had turned out to be useless.

That’s when she knew Peter was tormenting her, trying to put her off balance. That was his specialty. He’d put that bag of old clothes in the Goodwill bin knowing that she was watching him—knowing it would prove worthless as evidence.

And what about the evidence she had just found? What if these things only served to incriminate Tríona? He could have planned it that way. She reached for the datebook and scanned the marked pages. What did the Xs mean? There seemed to be no pattern, no regular rhythm to their placement. Several one week, none the next. No other notations. Nothing even to say the Xs had been drawn by Tríona’s hand. But if they were, what was she keeping track of, something that happened so randomly? Nora turned to the date of the museum opening. A large red X marked the day. She turned the page and found another on June 3, the day Natalie Russo disappeared. Maybe there was a pattern after all. Nora gathered up the evidence that could potentially paint her sister as a killer, and went to see Frank Cordova.

Ten minutes later, they were in the detective division’s interview room. Frank was still upset about yesterday. He looked as if he hadn’t slept. As she studied him, Nora became gradually aware of the other eyes outside the conference room window, the studiously averted gazes that said the whole detective division was watching them.

“Do you think we could close these blinds?” she asked.

Frank stood to pull the cords to shut off the glances from the cubicles outside.

Nora began to pace as she talked. “I know we always assumed it was Peter who had the connection to the parking garage in Lowertown, but maybe it was Tríona, and Peter somehow knew about it. Maybe he followed her. I found out yesterday that she’d been doing studio work for a guy called Nick Mosher, advertising spots and voice-overs for radio. I think she was trying to make some money and stashing it away, getting ready to walk out.”

“Why didn’t this Mosher come forward?”

“He couldn’t. He was killed in a fall at the Sturgis Building.”

Cordova grimaced. “Great.”

“Do you know what’s really odd? The accident happened the same day Tríona died.”

“So who told you about the connection?”

“A woman named Valerie Marchant, who runs a coffee shop in the building. She knew Nick Mosher, and Tríona, too, from theater work. But Valerie Marchant was out of the country at the time of the murder and Nick Mosher’s accident, and figured she didn’t have any useful information when she got back six months later.”

Frank’s eyes narrowed. “How did you even know to talk to this woman?”

She couldn’t tell him about seeing her sister’s ghost in the plate-glass window, or the book turned backward at the library. Harry Shaughnessy, too, was off limits until she could be more certain of what she’d witnessed. “I went to the parking garage showing her picture around. Just got lucky. Right after you dropped me yesterday, I went down to Hidden Falls—I think I saw the fisherman there, the guy who found Natalie Russo.”

“Asian guy, late thirties?”

“Yes—what do you know about him?”

“Keeps to himself. Lives with a cousin’s family in Frogtown, works at their restaurant—a Cambodian place called Phnom Penh up on University. Told us he’s been fishing that spot at Hidden Falls since he came to Saint Paul almost eight years ago. His English isn’t great—and he wasn’t all that excited to report the body.”

“But he did, Frank, when he could have just run away. Do you think we could talk to him?”

“We might need to line up an interpreter. Like I said, his English isn’t so hot. Don’t forget, until we crack this, he’s still a suspect.” He met her questioning gaze. “What can I say? Hazard of the business.”

Nora reached into the duffel and pulled out Tríona’s tape. “I found this at my parents’ house last night. I didn’t listen to the second side until this morning. I want you to listen to it all the way through before you say anything.” She played the tape for Frank, watching for a reaction. He pulled at his lip, frowning.

“I did what she said. I went to the hiding place. Here’s what I found.” Nora reached into the blue bag again and pulled out the datebook with its cryptic markings, the anonymous note addressed to Peter, the sheaf of clippings about Natalie Russo’s disappearance, and, finally, the bloodstained clothes. He took a pen and lifted the corner of the shirt.

“They’re Tríona’s clothes, Frank. I gave her that shirt.”

“I guess the next step is figuring out whose blood this is—”

“I have a feeling it might be Natalie’s. I think Tríona was terrified of what she might have done. She kept saying she had to know the truth. I’ve been trying to work it out.” Nora reached for the calendar. “Look at all these marked days, including the third of June, the day Natalie went missing. Put that together with what Tríona says on the tape, about the days she doesn’t remember, all that liquid ecstasy you found in her purse, around the house. You know what I think, what I’ve thought all along—that it wasn’t Tríona’s stash, that Peter was feeding her the stuff. It’s all beginning to fit.”

“What exactly is beginning to fit?”

“For whatever reason, Peter doesn’t want to be married anymore. He starts doping Tríona so she can’t remember things, so he can do what he likes. Then he murders Natalie—I’ll admit, I still haven’t worked out how or why—and he tries to make Tríona believe that she’s the killer. She wakes up on the third of June covered in blood, with no memory of what happened. It takes a while, but she finally figures out that she can go to the library, and scour the newspapers for an attack, a murder on that day. That’s when she finds out about Natalie’s disappearance—”

“But how does she know about Hidden Falls? That part doesn’t connect—”

“Unless Hidden Falls was where she woke up that morning.”

“You know, it’s a great theory. I’m not saying it couldn’t have happened that way, but all these things on their own—they don’t add up to anything we could use in court.”

“If Tríona was afraid that she’d done something terrible, why hang on to incriminating evidence? Why not just destroy it? And why dig up all those old newspaper articles about Natalie? At least we finally know what she was doing at the library that day. If she was getting ready to leave Peter, maybe she was also getting ready to tell someone what she knew, how she knew it.”

“And what about this anonymous note?” He checked the envelope. “It’s postmarked Maine. Any idea what Hallett did, why he’s being accused?”

“No—I told you, I haven’t got it all worked out.”

Frank took up and flipped through the sheaf of newspaper articles. “Look at this.” He showed her a page not from the Pioneer Press, but from the Press Herald in Portland, Maine.

“Where did this come from?” Frank asked.

“I don’t know—I didn’t notice it before.”

“Do you recognize any of those names—Jesse Benoit, Constance and Harris Nash?”

“No. But I know Peter went to college in Maine. Let me work on this, Frank. You’ve got too much to follow up as it is. This is something I can do.”

He was staring at her right hand resting on his sleeve. She had touched him without thinking. Nora pulled her hand away.

4

Elizabeth stayed in her room all morning with a pillow over her head. She could hear her father and Miranda talking and dragging suitcases up and down the hall. She was supposed to be packing, too, but her insides still felt upside down. Those awful words on the computer screen kept washing over and over her until she felt as if her head would burst. Hallett slaying. The victim’s husband. Primary suspect. If everyone was so sure her dad had done those horrible things, why wasn’t he in jail? They said her mother’s body had been identified by distinguishing marks. What exactly was a distinguishing mark? Elizabeth raised the pillow a quarter-inch to look down at her arms and legs. Nothing but freckles and chewed fingernails, the dark scab on her knee. That couldn’t be what it meant, she was sure.

She flung her pillow to the floor. They were talking about making her go with them on their stupid trip to Ireland. It was Miranda’s idea. Her dad was arguing against it; he said she should stay here in Saint Paul with her grandparents. Miranda was trying to convince him what a great time they could all have together.

Elizabeth knew what to do. She would go away, someplace they couldn’t find her. Wait until they were gone, and then go stay with her grandparents. How hard could it be, looking somebody up in the phone book? But first things first—she had to get out of the house.

She gathered up a few items of clothing and shoved them into her backpack, trying not to make any noise. She took her school ID from Seattle, and the book about the seal woman she’d stolen from the Seattle library. Almost as an afterthought, she stuffed in the worn and faded remnant of the baby blanket she still slept with at night. Finally, she tucked nearly two hundred dollars she’d saved from her allowance into a zippered compartment in the side of her shoe. She had a feeling her dad and Miranda would be glad to get rid of her. They might not even look very hard.

Peering out the door of her bedroom, Elizabeth made sure the coast was clear, and then scurried down the hallway to the front door. She cut through the leafy yard down to the road in front of the house. There were lots of other people on the path—running, biking, walking their dogs. It was so different from Seattle here. It wasn’t just the trees and plants; there weren’t so many people around when you lived on the edge of an island. She realized that she didn’t know where she was going—and staying on the main roads meant that her dad might be able to find her just by driving around. But the riverbank was steep here. She had to walk until she could find a quiet spot, someplace out of the way, where she could sit and think about what to do.

The river was a long way down through the trees. On the other side of the road from the path were houses and big apartment buildings. The backpack began to feel heavy, pulling at her shoulders. Everything had changed since she’d read those words on the Internet. The whole world felt strange now, and not just because she was in a different city and the places she knew were far away. Something inside her had changed as well. To think that she had imagined her mother living happily somewhere else, with a new family. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Her stomach felt strange—maybe just hunger. But somehow the thought of food just made it worse.

A huge factory loomed across the road from the path, and Elizabeth could see smokestacks through the high fence. The road before her began to curve and slope downhill. There were no houses here, and fewer people along the path. All at once she came upon a wooden sign with carved letters that said HIDDEN FALLS PARK. Maybe this could be her quiet place to think. She set off down the steep drive, feeling the weight of her pack and the prickling of sweat making the back of her shirt damp. She hadn’t expected Minnesota to be so hot. At the bottom of the hill the road ended in several parking lots. A guy in a pickup sat watching as she made her way toward the river. Elizabeth felt his eyes on her, but forgot about him as soon as she got down to the water. She’d been right about one thing—a river was not the same as Useless Bay. The water was a cloudy green color—it looked dirty. She stood on the bank and gazed across to the sandbar on the opposite side, at some boys throwing sticks for their dogs to fetch. The animals’ sleek heads poking up out of the water reminded Elizabeth of her own spotted seal back at Useless Bay. She felt a pang of homesickness for her own beach, for a time when she knew nothing.

The ground beneath her feet was covered in small round pebbles of different colors that made a grinding, gravelly sound as she walked. She decided to venture farther up the beach, walking until she found a tree whose gnarled roots lay exposed at the river’s edge. There she slipped out of her backpack and set it on the ground. The tightness in her stomach had grown worse. She pulled the pack onto her lap and wedged herself into the roots of the tree, trying to shrink as small as possible, and wondered how long it would take before her dad noticed she was gone. He might think she was still in her room—he probably wouldn’t even check.

Those awful computer-screen words floated before her eyes again. She had never seen her mother’s body. So why did she see the same pictures every time she closed her eyes—a still, white hand, red hair against a pale neck? It was getting so hard to breathe. The backpack pressed down on her, cutting off her air. She flung it away, and all at once there were sounds coming out of her that she couldn’t seem to control. Her lungs felt as if they would burst.

“Hey!” said a voice from across the water. “Hey, Red—you all right?”

Elizabeth raised her head. She felt grit in her teeth, and smelled the sweet, rotting scent of dead fish. A curly-haired boy and his dog stared at her across the river. They started into the water, as though they might swim across. Elizabeth scrambled to her feet and picked up the backpack, plunging into the woods, running with no direction, just trying to get away. She could hear the boy’s faint, disappointed voice behind her. “Jeez, I wasn’t going to hurt you—just wondered if you were okay.”

She kept running, but the dirt and tears in her eyes made it hard to see where she was going. Branches scratched her hands and face, and she felt a sharp pricking as the plants brushed against her bare skin. She ran until she saw a yellow tape strung between the trees, people in white coveralls. Another voice, a grown-up this time: “Jesus—stop her! Somebody grab that kid!”

Elizabeth put on a spurt, and heard several sets of footfalls pounding the earth behind her. Hands reached out. She tried to twist away, but a solid figure, with heavy shoes and a wide belt hung with flashlight and handcuffs and a big black gun, seemed to materialize directly in front of her. She looked up into a policeman’s smooth, pink face just as he reached down and put his hands on her shoulders. “Hey—slow down there, kiddo. What’s your hurry?”

A woman’s breathless voice came from behind. “Thanks, Mike. I’ll take her back to the squad.” She kept one arm around Elizabeth’s shoulder as they walked, steering her up a path that led to the parking lot, and straight to one of the police cars. The policewoman opened the door and motioned for Elizabeth to sit in the backseat, then scrunched down beside her. The woman had square shoulders and short blondish hair. Elizabeth thought she looked pretty tough.

“That backpack looks kind of heavy,” the policewoman said. “You can set it down if you want. I’m not going to take it.”

Elizabeth hugged the pack closer, guilty about the stolen book inside. She didn’t want the police to know she was running away.

“Can you tell me your name?”

Elizabeth shook her head. She couldn’t look into the officer’s questioning eyes.

“Were you supposed to meet somebody here? It’s okay—you can tell me.”

Elizabeth heard kindness in the woman’s voice, but maybe it was all just an act. They wanted her to say something, but she couldn’t tell them about her mother, about why she was running away. Telling the police anything would just make her dad angry.

When another cop approached, the policewoman stood up suddenly and spoke under her breath: “Christ, will you look at her? The kids they’re pulling get younger all the time. Bastards.”

What were they talking about? Nobody had pulled her anywhere. The other officer was talking into his radio, but Elizabeth couldn’t understand what he was saying. It was like they all spoke a foreign language. She looked over and saw the guy from the pickup sitting in the back of another squad car. Finally, the policewoman returned and crouched down beside the open door again.

“You’re a very lucky girl, Elizabeth—that’s your name, isn’t it? Your mom and dad were pretty worried about you. They’re on their way down here right now to pick you up.”

As the policewoman spoke, one thought kept circling through Elizabeth’s brain: She’s not my mother. She’s not my mother. I don’t care what anybody says. That witch Miranda Staunton will never be my mother.

5

After arriving back from their expedition to Port na Rón, Cormac was alone in the sitting room of his father’s house. Roz had gone upstairs to shower, and the house was quiet but for a steady wash of water down the exterior drain. The single high-button shoe at the house still plagued him. If Mary Heaney ran away, as her husband suggested, why would she have gone without one of her shoes? Women in her circumstances weren’t likely to have had more than one pair; they probably counted themselves lucky to have shoes at all. On the other hand, if she had regained her sealskin and returned to the sea, as the local legend allowed, the whole subject of footwear was academic… And why was he wasting time trying to reason it through?

Remembering what Roz had told him, he roused himself from the fireside chair and began to peruse the photographs hanging on the walls. His great-aunt Julia must have been a schoolteacher at one time; one picture showed her with a gaggle of pupils—all bare knees, freckles, and ears—outside Carrick National School. The pupils were in focus, but Julia Maguire appeared as a hazy specter in a dotted dress, as if she’d set the camera and not made it to her place in time for the shutter. It was the only image Cormac had ever seen of her. Another photo was a study of gaunt, dark men in long overcoats standing outside a church door, looking for all the world like a murder of crows. The photograph was labeled in pencil at one corner of the image, Father’s Funeral, 1956.

Cormac began to inspect the photos that hung on the opposite wall: crisp black-and-white images of standing stones up the Glen, the cliffs at Bunglas, modest homes of fishermen in Teelin. There were several of Donegal fiddle players—John Doherty, whom Cormac recognized from television, and a pair of middle-aged men, one dark, one with a shock of white hair and thick glasses. They were both playing fiddles, standing back to back. Francie Dearg and Mici Bán, read the caption. There were also, as Roz had noticed, many close-up shots exploring the wet, curious faces of seals. Each of the seal pictures was captioned as the others had been, at the lower right corner, and in the same old-fashioned script as the letter he’d received from his great-aunt. So she had been something of an amateur photographer as well as a schoolteacher. Suddenly Cormac understood all the brown glass bottles in the windowless garden shed built onto the back of the house—her darkroom.

He ventured into his father’s bedroom. A chest of drawers stood before him—large, heavy, and dark, like all the furniture in this house, a legacy of the generations of Maguires who had been born and died here. It occurred to him that when his father died, he would become a part of that legacy as well. Scraps of shadowy lives a generation or two back, a few random details, that was all most people could reasonably manage. The rest faded into obscurity. Opening the drawers felt vaguely wrong, but he told himself that it was important to find out more about the old man in order to communicate with him. He was rationalizing, of course, unable to admit the curiosity that had consumed him for the past three years, growing in strength and intensity ever since Julia Maguire’s letter had arrived in the mail.

The drawer slid open easily. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find there, but was surprised to see stacks of neatly pressed handkerchiefs, some plain, some monogrammed with the initials ERM. A gold watch, a tray of loose coins—the old money—and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. It looked as if nothing in the drawer had been touched since his greatgrandfather’s death fifty years ago. For some reason, he had no trouble imagining hotheaded young Joseph Maguire turning his back on this, on all worldly goods. But in the end, even he could not divest himself entirely of the legacy of his ancestors. You could deny who you were, where you were from, for a time—but eventually it laid claim to you, and would not be denied. Again Cormac detected in his own thoughts a creeping acknowledgment of mortality. Perhaps the gene that controlled the onset of old age also triggered a need to hear the stories of those who had come before. Perhaps his own devotion to archaeology was just an errant expression of that need.

He shut the handkerchief drawer and crossed to the bedside table, checking the drawer for anything he ought to bring along to the hospital. As he lifted the reading glasses from the book on the table, he saw the crinkled edge of a small black-and-white photograph peeping from between the pages. He cracked open the book and found the snapshot of a young dark-haired woman, standing somewhere overlooking the sea cliffs, head scarf untied and held aloft like a sail in a gesture of joyous abandon. His own mother. Could this have been taken in some oddly temperate stretch of days before he was born? He studied the smooth pliability of the flesh on her uplifted arms, trying to imagine his parents both young, flush with life and promise. The unique complexity of two individual lives became even more profoundly intricate with the addition of another life, a child. He had always wondered exactly what his arrival signified to his father, other than an unnecessary complication.

He slid the photo into his pocket for safekeeping and shut the book. The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries by W. Y. Evans-Wentz. He set it back, noting the title of the volume underneath: On the Radical Nature of Love: From Plato to John Coltrane. Perhaps his father was one of those people who found it impossible to apply abstract principles of philosophy to his own life. Cormac considered the title, remembering some of the freethinkers he’d met briefly at university, the ones who loved to rail against the plight of the downtrodden worker all night in pubs, oblivious to wives and girlfriends they themselves had left at home and up to their oxters in soiled nappies. Quare auld world.

He leaned over and pulled a pair of heavy brogues from under the nightstand. The same sort he wore on excavations. On a sudden whim, he set the shoes down on the floor and slipped his own feet into them. A perfect fit. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, staring down at the shoes, studying the cracks and creases in the leather, the places where the width of his father’s foot had strained the cobbler’s stitchery, the splatters of shiny red paint that matched the front door of this house. Apart from the shoes, he hadn’t found any of his father’s clothing. Rising from the bed, he crossed to the wardrobe that stood opposite. Inside, among print dresses and cardigans, and a pair of ancient worsted suits, he found a meager wardrobe of worn khakis and threadbare denim shirts, and a handknit jumper of undyed wool. Was it possible that this was all that Joseph Maguire had brought back with him from thirty years abroad? What was the old man doing here? Why had he come home? And as soon as the thought struck him, he quashed it. No point in worrying the question if he would never have an answer.

On the top shelf of the wardrobe he found a fiddle case. He took it down, and opened the case to find a stringless fiddle resting under a square of green velvet. Strange—he’d never known that anyone in his family had played music. Returning the fiddle case to the shelf, he found a dusty old 78 rpm record. He carried the disc out to the sitting room, where the gramophone occupied a corner near the fireplace. The record was labeled in the same hand as the photos. “Fiddle Duet. Glencolumbkille Hotel, June 8, 1950.” Cormac nearly dropped the disc when he saw the names of the players below: Joseph and Julia Maguire. His father would have been about sixteen years old.

Heading back to the sitting room, Cormac slipped the record from its sleeve and placed it gently on the turntable, wound up the old-fashioned crank on the side, and set the needle in the groove. Two fiddles sang out in unison—a wild, hectic reel—and it was as if a puzzle box was opening itself before his eyes, each note a key to an unfathomed existence. He could hear the two instruments growling together on the low notes and wondered: Was it his father bearing down more fiercely on the bow or his great-aunt? They leapt together from the end of one tune straight into another, the angular movement of the bows evident in their tone, and Cormac felt the heart swell in his chest at the sound. Although he loved the Clare music that had surrounded him as a child, he had also felt the pull of the wild, distinctive voice of Donegal. He had never really understood why.

He closed his eyes and tried to conjure the dining room of the Glencolumbkille Hotel on that day, the starched white linens, the gleaming glassware and cutlery, all vibrating in sympathy, tuned to the sound of the fiddles. From somewhere in the back of his head, the notion began to take hold—that this music might stir the old man from slumber. He couldn’t have forgotten, not completely. The notes must remain somewhere within his subconscious, even if they had lain buried there for fifty years.

The B side was “Lord Mayo,” a slow air played by one fiddle, both a lament for a past time and an anthem to carrying on.

At a turn halfway through the tune, Roz Byrne’s voice carried over his shoulder: “What’s that you’re listening to?”

Cormac didn’t answer, but lifted the record from the turntable and handed it to her, marking her surprise as the names on the label registered.

“And you’d no idea at all?”

“I’ve seen my father exactly three times since I was nine years old, Roz. Somehow, the subject of music never came up.”

Roz shook her head. “I suppose he gave it up when he went off to university. Donegal music was all but banned from the radio in those days. Too foreign-sounding, the RTÉ people said. Ridiculous.”

“It makes me wonder about all the other things I don’t know,” Cormac said.

Roz looked at him thoughtfully. “Did you have a look around at the pictures?”

He nodded. “The seals—they’re almost like character portraits.”

“I thought so, too. I wondered why there were so many, and your father told me a story, about his father—so that would be your grandfather and Julia’s brother. A melancholy, lonely man. He was away for years, studying medicine in France. When his father died, he came home and set up a practice here. After a few months, he took a fishing trip to Tory Island, and to the astonishment of everyone in the Glen, he came home with a wife. Being from Tory, she spoke an Irish that was different to the people around here. They called her ‘The Foreigner.’ She stayed on for a while, until Joe was born—”

“And then?”

“She ran off. Your father was still an infant at the time. He said his aunt Julia was the only mother he ever knew.”

Cormac felt thunderstruck. “Why did she leave?”

“No one ever knew. There was never any further communication; if she ever did get in touch with your grandfather, he never told anyone. He’d go and sit on the headland up at Port na Rón for hours, staring out to sea. It must have had a profound effect on Joe. He said when you came along, he wasn’t prepared to be a father. He had no idea what it actually meant. The responsibility terrified him.”

“We’re talking about the same man who traveled halfway around the globe to face down a military junta—and you’re saying a mewling infant terrified him?”

“I didn’t say it was plausible, only that it’s true.”

6

Nora spent the morning at the library, keeping an eye out for Harry Shaughnessy, and digging through newspaper databases for information on the murders of the Maine couple, Constance and Harris Nash. She found more than two dozen articles on the Nash case, beginning with the discovery of the grisly crime scene on the victims’ boat. The evidence trail implicated Jesse Benoit, a friend of the victims’ son. There was an underlying class element to the story that the newspapers touched on briefly but didn’t explore fully: Jesse Benoit’s mother cleaned house for the Nash family, which was how the two boys had become friends as children. Tripp Nash went away to boarding school, while Jesse Benoit attended local public schools.

She printed out each story as she read, trying to piece together the facts from the sketchy details provided. Benoit told police he had paddled his canoe out to the victims’ sailboat anchored in the harbor, and had gone on board intending to kill the couple as they slept. They’d been bludgeoned to death, Nash first, and then his wife, their faces completely destroyed. The murder happened while their son was away for the weekend, visiting a girlfriend in another part of the state. The murder weapon had never been recovered, but the police had found Jesse Benoit’s bloody fingerprints at the scene. Traces of the victims’ blood turned up in his canoe, and on clothing found stuffed in the back of his closet. A classic open-and-shut case. According to the newspaper reports, even though he confessed, Jesse Benoit had never offered any motive for the murders. After a psychiatric evaluation, he was found incompetent to stand trial and sent to the Augusta Mental Health Institute. After only a few weeks at Augusta, Jesse Benoit had taken his own life.

So far the only connection to Peter was the anonymous note addressed to him. What had he done? What was his connection to Constance and Harris Nash? From the physical evidence, there was never any doubt that Jesse Benoit had committed the murders.

After Tríona’s death, the police had searched for Peter in all the national databases, looking for criminal history, family connections, known aliases, previous addresses, job history. The information they’d been able to find was limited: Peter’s parents had been killed in a car accident when he was very young; his legal guardian was a widowed grandfather he barely knew. He had grown up mostly in boarding schools, then graduated from Galliard College in Maine and attended the Istituto Universitario di Architettura in Venice. After graduate school, he had spent several years in Europe. Nora had tried to envision him going around the streets and squares of Venice, sitting in cafés, speaking Italian. It was a side of him they had never really known. She couldn’t imagine he’d ever gone long without female companionship—it was something he sought out, something he seemed to need. So why was there no prior history? No former girlfriends, no domestic assault charges. Of course there were many actions, many degrees of shocking behavior that didn’t rise to the level of crime. But Peter paid his taxes, his professional licenses were up to date, he had a good credit history, sat on the boards of several respected charities, and gave generously to the arts and social causes. All part of the elaborate front he’d cultivated and presented to the world, Nora couldn’t help thinking. Cover for the creature inside who got pleasure from hurting people.

Peter’s only visible connection to the Nash murders was the fact that they had happened in Maine, where he went to boarding school and college. He would have been seventeen or eighteen at the time of the murder, about the same age as Jesse Benoit and the murdered couple’s son. Could he have been at boarding school with Tripp Nash? Nora stared at the article on the screen before her now, the last piece about Jesse Benoit’s suicide, the same one Frank had found in Tríona’s stack. Gordon MacLeish, a detective from the Maine State Police, was quoted in some of the newspaper pieces. Maybe he’d be worth a call. But the Nash case was long closed. There was no practical connection to Tríona. She could spend days following crazy tangents, as she’d been doing all morning here, getting distracted from the real thread. And meanwhile, Peter Hallett was preparing to leave the country, maybe never to return. It was time to move on to the next lead, to find Harry Shaughnessy, or the Cambodian fisherman from the river.

Before leaving the nonfiction room, she took a quick detour down into the stacks once more, just to check on the book that had led her to the article about Natalie Russo. She counted down the row of bookcases again, and turned in at the same spot, but the back-to-front book—Tríona’s book—was not there. There was a gap on the shelf. Maybe it had been checked out. She found an empty computer terminal, and quickly typed the title into a catalog search.

Impossible. That tattered green cloth cover, the spidery white lettering on the spine—she had seen it, held it in her hand. The blue-green hues of the watercolor plate stood out in her memory. Doubt began to pull at her. But maybe it didn’t matter—after all, Frank had the paper she’d found here, perhaps with Tríona’s fingerprints on it. They had the things from the hiding place. Nobody could doubt those—they were solid forensic evidence, concrete clues.

When his dark-haired subject finally came out the library’s front entrance, Truman Stark, waiting in his truck, watched her unlock her car and get in. She’d been in there for ages—what could she possibly be doing for so long? He’d checked the car last night, out in front of her house. Clean—like it was brand-new, or maybe a rental. That was when the notion had struck him—she could be a private eye, or a reporter, digging up stuff for a story on one of those true-crime things on TV. He had to admit, that last idea had sent a small shiver of excitement through him. He liked those shows, seeing how the people who did the crimes were stupid enough to get caught. They hadn’t spent time figuring out all the angles. Not like he had.

But the grinding feeling in his gut said the brunette was onto something. The way she’d gone straight from the garage to the coffee shop, she knew something was up, he was sure of it. Hadn’t spotted him, though. And she wouldn’t. He had been honing his surveillance technique for years. He’d gotten very good at it.

Remembering back to five years ago, he considered how the redhead always parked down on the lower level of the garage. Like she was hiding from somebody. That was how he’d first noticed her. He remembered studying the tilt of her head on the TV monitor as she waited for the elevator, the glances over her shoulder, in case someone might be tailing her. But she didn’t know he was watching her. She couldn’t have known.

7

Frank felt like he’d spent the whole day running back and forth between the crime lab and his office. The fingerprints lifted from the papers Nora had brought in were headed over to the state crime lab for analysis. The substance on the clothes was definitely blood, but now he’d have to wait for DNA results to find out if the blood matched anyone in their small circle of victims and suspects, or whether they’d have to start looking further afield. He had just retrieved the file on Nick Mosher’s accident—probably just coincidence that he’d died the same day as Tríona Hallett, but everything was on the table now. They were quickly running out of time. He’d just returned to his desk with the file when his phone began to vibrate.

“Detective Cordova, it’s Sarah Cates—from the rowing club. When you were here yesterday, you asked about the lockers, so I took a closer look. Some of them seemed abandoned, so I cut the locks. Thought you might want to see what I found.”

It was after five when he arrived at the road above the Twin Cities Rowing Club. For the second time in two days, he parked at the top of the river bluff and skidded down the steep road to the boathouse. This time Sarah Cates met him at the huge sliding door.

“I haven’t touched anything except the lock. I saved that in case you needed it—I wasn’t sure.” She handed him a clear plastic bag with the cut padlock inside. At the door of the women’s locker room, she paused to shout inside: “Everybody decent? I’m bringing somebody in.” A chorus of voices shouted an all-clear, and they advanced into the steamy locker room. “It’s right over here. I put my own lock on until you arrived.” She quickly dialed the combination and removed the temporary padlock, then stepped out of the way.

Cordova pulled on a pair of gloves and swung the locker open to find a series of snapshots stuck inside the door—Natalie Russo with various teammates, all grinning triumphantly at the camera. In one of the photos, there was a large silver cup blurred at the edge of the frame—a victory?

“That was the Winnipeg regatta,” Sarah Cates said, watching his reaction. “Natalie broke all the club and event records that day. That’s when we knew she was Olympic material.”

“I’m going to take this all back to the shop. See what we can shake loose.”

“So I did right to call you?”

“Yeah—you did.”

Just then, an athletic-looking blonde rounded the corner, apparently not anticipating a man in the locker room. She seemed confused, and turned back to check the sign on the door. “This still the women’s locker room?”

Sarah Cates stepped in: “We’ll be out of your hair in just a minute.” The blonde gave a shrug of indifference, and Frank knew it was the same face he’d seen in Natalie Russo’s team photo. He was finally able to place her.

Miranda Staunton.

He’d interviewed her at the time of Tríona’s death. But if his face rang any bells for her, it didn’t show. She ducked past them without another glance. He turned to Sarah Cates.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a spare box or a bag—something I could use to carry all this?”

She nodded. “Be right back.”

While Sarah was gone, Cordova stayed put and took the opportunity to observe Miranda Staunton. She must have known Natalie Russo—they were on the same rowing team. He watched her, one foot up on the bench, tying a strange-looking shoe. Must attach somehow to the boats they used. Unaware that he was watching her, she slipped a wad of gum from her mouth and pressed it to the undersurface of the bench. Frank had always wondered what sort of person did a thing like that. Now he knew. He averted his gaze as Miranda stood up and headed out the locker room door.

When he was finished clearing out the locker, Sarah Cates walked him out to the driveway. He gestured over at Miranda, preparing a solo scull for practice. “Know her?”

“Miranda Staunton? Sure. Joined the club out of college. I heard she was living out in Seattle, but she just moved back and rejoined a couple of weeks ago.”

“Good rower?”

“Great—”

Cordova sensed hesitation. “But?”

Sarah leaned forward slightly. “You know those cranky lightweights I mentioned the other day?”

The phone on his belt began to vibrate, and Sarah Cates signaled a silent good-bye as she backed down the driveway to the boathouse.

He expected to hear Karin Bledsoe’s voice when he answered, but it was his sister Veronica, upset and out of breath. “Oh Frank, he just stopped breathing. I didn’t know what to do—”

There was no reason to ask; he knew Veronica was talking about Chago. Frank and his brother had been born only minutes apart, but they were nothing alike. Twisted in his own umbilical cord, Chago had grown misshapen in the womb. His mind remained that of a child, ever joyful despite a halting gait and withered arm, his lopsided face perpetually split by a broad smile. Veronica, the eldest of his three sisters, had always been like a mother to them, looking after them ever since Frank could remember.

“Luis called the ambulance, and they took him away, to Regions Emergency. They said we should call the priest—” She broke off and began to sob.

“Go now. I’ll meet you there,” he told Veronica. “Get Luis to drive you.”

Frank’s tires sent gravel flying as he peeled out of the parking area above the boathouse.

8

Eleanor Gavin stood at her bedroom window, watching her husband deadhead flowers in the backyard. He’d been at it since they’d finished their supper this evening in awkward silence. Ever since her conversation with Nora, she’d debated telling him everything. But she wasn’t at all sure he could take the news. He already felt like a failure as a father—not that he’d ever admitted as much, even to her—but she could see it, in his posture as he stooped over the rosebushes, in every word and every gesture for the past five years. She watched him bend and snip, bend and snip, dropping each spent bloom into a canvas sack he wore slung around him like a sower of seeds.

And suddenly she felt a flash of affection so fierce it took her breath away. All the years of their history together cascaded over her, including the very first time she’d laid eyes on him, a hurling game with his pals on the lawn at Belfield. His ease with the hurley was the first thing she noticed, along with his physical beauty, the pleasing proportions of his frame. Good bones. There were no questions at all, really, about the choices you made then. Things happened, and you went along with them. That’s how she’d ended up here, in America, more than three decades gone, staring out the window at the man she loved and respected more than any other in the world, and making plans to deceive him.

She had to remind herself that he didn’t have all the facts, all that she had come to know only last night. If he did have those facts, perhaps he wouldn’t be out there, calmly snipping dead blossoms. He knew about Peter’s impending marriage, of course. The whole world seemed to know about it, and for the first time, Eleanor wondered exactly how that coupling came to be. In some ways, Peter’s choice hadn’t surprised her. Miranda Staunton had been on the periphery of all their lives, for as long as Nora had known Marc—always there, inserting herself next to Peter at every opportunity. He’d always seemed rather indifferent. But Miranda happened to get a job in Seattle only a month after Peter went there, starting fresh with his million-dollar insurance settlement. As if she hadn’t given a thought to Peter Hallett’s guilt or innocence. Did she have any idea what she was letting herself in for?

Eleanor left the window and sat on the edge of the bed that she and Tom had shared for forty years. She picked up the telephone receiver and dialed, plunging in when she heard the answer at the other end: “Hello, Peter, it’s Eleanor… Yes, we’re fine. How is Miranda? And how are you finding everything at the house?” She heard the strange, false notes in her own voice, as she stared down at Tom working in the garden, watching deadheads as they fell, one by one, into his sack. “And how is Elizabeth? We’re both so anxious and excited to see her. That’s what I’m calling about.”

9

A few minutes before eight, the lights began to blink off inside the Phnom Penh restaurant on University Avenue. Dinner business must be slow. Nora studied the sign on the brightly painted red and yellow storefront, top half in English, the bottom half in curling Khmer script. The fisherman she’d seen down at the river was the last one out, slipping through the side door just before the man with the keys locked up and closed the extra security gate. The men scattered silently, and the fisherman bent to unlock a bicycle chained to the fence.

The place he headed to was not far, a typical old Frogtown clapboard house, clad in terrible redwood siding, with an exterior staircase to the second floor. The fisherman locked his bike to the metal stair rail and had just placed his foot on the first step when Nora ventured to speak: “Excuse me—”

She was about ten feet away from him. He turned, braced for something, and glanced quickly up and down the street—what was he expecting? Better talk fast. She said: “I wonder if I could talk to you for a second?” His avoidance of Janelle Joyner and her cameraman down at the river gave her an idea. “I’m not a reporter, not with the police.”

He started to back up the stairs, and Nora felt a stab of panic. “Wait, don’t go. Please.” She began rummaging in her bag, conscious of the troupe of neighborhood kids down the block who’d started to notice her presence. They were about fifty yards away, pulling a beat-up red wagon along the sidewalk. She didn’t want to make trouble for the fisherman, but need drove her forward. She held up Tríona’s picture. “The person you found at the river. My sister.”

She felt guilty for lying, but couldn’t take the time to explain. Natalie Russo could have been someone’s sister. Frank had mentioned an interpreter. Maybe this man had no idea what she was saying. Her heart leapt when he said: “Your sister?”

“Yes—my sister. The person you found.” She reached back into the bag again and pulled out Peter Hallett’s picture. “What about this man? Did you ever see this man at the river?”

Too much—the fisherman started backing away again, glancing sidelong at the approaching gang of children. One of the older kids called out to him in a language she couldn’t understand. From the tone, it was not a friendly hail.

He spoke under his breath, clearly anxious to get away. “This place—not good. You go now. I fish river, same place every day—very early. Big tree.” His hands suggested a sloping trunk. “You find me there.”

He was up the stairs and gone before she could even react. She tucked Tríona’s photo inside her bag, and turned to find the children swarming around her. She looked down at smudged faces. In the wagon were four squirming puppies, panting from the heat.

“Hey lady,” one of the kids sang out. “Wanna buy a dog? Only five”—a swift kick from one of his compatriots changed his tune—“I mean, ten dollars. Cheap.”

She looked down at the dog he held up, a mixed breed somewhere between a golden retriever and a husky.

“He’s beautiful, but I can’t—”

“Tony’s dad is going to drown them. He said so.”

“Can you keep them until tomorrow?” They looked at one another, shrugging. “Do you know the clinic around the corner? If you bring them over there in the morning, I know some people who might be interested. I’m sorry—I have to go now.”

She climbed into her car, suddenly surrounded by a group of older boys on bicycles, their figures throwing long shadows in the fierce horizontal light of the setting sun. They balanced on their bikes, holding on to the car’s frame so that she couldn’t ease out of her parking spot without fear of doing one of them injury. Wannabe gangsters, too young for the real thing, not much older than the kids hawking the puppies. As if responding to some silent signal, the boys began to pound on the car with the palms of their hands, slowly at first, then building to a thundering crescendo as Nora sat locked inside, debating whether to call 911, imagining the operator’s voice. What is the nature of your emergency?

A hoarse yell pierced the air, and the pounding suddenly stopped. The crowd of teenagers lifted away on their bicycles like a flock of birds. In the rearview mirror Nora could see a uniformed figure climbing out of the dark pickup behind her, backlit by the sun. He was carrying a baseball bat. When he approached the driver’s side window and leaned down to peer in, she saw that he wasn’t a cop, but a security guard. The word “Centurion” was stitched above the breast pocket of his shirt; there were two holes in the fabric where his name badge had been removed. She decided against rolling down the window.

“You all right there, ma’am?” He rested his right hand on the car roof, and the fingers of his left played against the handle of the bat, which was now balanced on the ground.

“Yes, I’m okay—thanks for your help.”

“You’re better off not spending too much time in this neighborhood.”

“I’m on my way.” The security guard stepped aside. As she pulled away from the curb, Nora glanced up to see the fisherman silhouetted in an upstairs window, and wondered whether she would actually see him down by the river at dawn.

10

Time seemed to have ground to a halt as Frank sat with his sister and brother-in-law in the waiting area outside the ER. He hadn’t even seen his brother; the doctors had said they would do everything they could, but they didn’t want to sugarcoat things. Chago was in serious trouble. There was a dangerous buildup of fluid in his tissues, not uncommon in cases of advanced heart failure.

Just after eight, one of the doctors came out and led them back into the ER, to a curtained alcove where Chago lay on a gurney. “We did all we could,” she said softly. “His lungs were just too full of fluid—I’m very sorry. The priest is with him now.”

Veronica began to sob, and Luis had to help her to a chair.

Inside the alcove, Frank watched a black-clad figure whispering over Chago, anointing his forehead with oil in the sign of the cross. Then the priest drew the sheet up over Chago’s face, and Frank felt the world tilt. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen. He had driven as fast as he could. Chago had seemed fine only a couple of days ago, joking about getting together for a cookout, to play a little baseball.

“Soon,” he had promised. “I’m on a big case right now, but just as soon as I get a break—”

Frank left Veronica’s side and walked over to the gurney. He drew back the sheet, taking in his brother’s broad brown face, the slack mouth, and closed eyes. His other half. The good half, pure of heart and mind.

Images began to fly past at alarming speed: the old man in white, waving a fan of feathers, whispering, “Susto, susto.” The sound of a rattle, and smoke stinging his eyes. He and Chago, cramped together under the bed, afraid to come out, afraid the dusty cowboy boots might come and find them. The sound of voices and blows, and stars bursting in a black sky like fireworks.

Frank stood at his brother’s side, clutching the edge of the sheet. A dark wave seemed to stretch a great distance above him, trembling with a dreadful anticipation, until it finally came crashing down upon him with a deafening roar.

11

At eight-twenty, Nora pulled up in front of Peter Hallett’s house for the second time in two days. This time, the house was lit up by the sunset, a blaze of light that punched through the trees. She reached for her camera and focused in on the living room. She could see Peter surveying the space. He shoved the sofa two inches closer to the fireplace, and turned to shift an antique Asian shield five degrees toward the center of the room. He has to have everything a certain way, Tríona once said.

Nora adjusted the camera lens, studying the perfect musculature of his face, the slightly cleft chin, the broad shoulders and graceful hands. What strange power had this man held over Tríona, and perhaps others as well? What happened when he focused his charms on someone? Peter lifted his head and gazed in her direction. It wasn’t possible that he knew she was out here, but the expression on his face nearly made her drop the camera.

A red Volvo sedan passed by on the river road and turned in at the driveway. Nora focused on the bright windows, and once again, the glass house afforded a view of the story being played out, as if on a stage. She watched her mother embrace Peter at the front door. A convincing performance. After a minute or so, Elizabeth appeared, and Peter stood behind her, his right hand on the back of her neck. When it was time to go, and her father bent down to kiss her good-bye, the child twisted away, shrugging off his touch. Why was she was so anxious to get away? When her mother got Elizabeth settled in the car and drove away at last, Nora felt an enormous weight lift from her. One major worry out of the way.

She set the camera down and glanced through the windshield, startled to see Miranda Staunton standing not twenty yards in front of the car, apparently loosening up for a run. This might be her only chance to speak to Miranda. It was now or never.

After jogging in place for a few seconds, Miranda checked her watch and took off. Nora got out of the car and followed on foot, staying about fifty yards behind, and relieved that she happened to be wearing decent shoes. They traveled through the light and shadow of the streetlamps, under the graffiti-covered bridge at Ford Parkway. Miranda’s pace wasn’t killer, but it never slowed. She finally turned in at the north entrance to Hidden Falls. At the bottom of the ravine, she cut across the parking areas, headed toward the path that traced the river’s edge south of the boat landing. It was time to seize the moment.

Nora put on a spurt and called out: “Miranda—wait!”

Miranda stopped and whirled around. There was a brief pause as she put together the voice, the face of the person who issued the hail. “Nora? What are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to you.”

Miranda eyed her suspiciously. “What about?”

“Just to say—” Nora was out of breath, panting. She watched Miranda’s expression harden. “To tell you it’s not too late. You can still back out—”

Miranda cut her off. “You know, Peter warned me. He said you’d come around one day, making crazy accusations—”

“They’re not crazy, Miranda. Look at what happened to Tríona when she tried to leave. When she found out what he was. Please, listen—”

Miranda was trembling. “How dare you? Flinging around those sorry old lies. Peter had nothing to do with your sister’s death. Why can’t you get that through your head?”

Nora lowered her voice, hoping to find another way in. “Maybe you don’t know yet what I’m talking about. Maybe he’s been good to you. He was that way with Tríona as well, at first. I can’t just stand by and let you—”

Miranda’s voice turned cold. “You can’t let me? Just who the hell do you think you are?” She held up her left hand, flashing a large diamond and thick gold band. “And just for the record—we’re already married. We went to the courthouse before we left Seattle.”

“Miranda, you don’t know what he’s done—”

“I know exactly what he’s done. Nothing. You know, Nora, I pity you. You’re a bitter, mixed-up person who can’t stand anybody else getting something you can’t have. I don’t blame my brother for walking away. Your whole family is so screwed up. You know nothing about Peter. You have no right coming here, twisting the facts, trying to ruin everything. You need to stay away from us.”

Nora swallowed hard. “Please, Miranda—please think about what I’ve said.” She fumbled in her pocket for a card. “Here’s my number—”

Miranda batted the card away and it fluttered to the ground. She stamped on it, grinding it into the blacktop with the heel of her running shoe. “Now get the hell away from me—before I call the police.”

Nora held up both hands and backed away slowly. But the confrontation had evidently put Miranda off her evening run; she turned and headed back up to the river road.

Nora had plenty of time to berate herself as she walked back to where she’d left the car. What a disaster. A whole-scale, head-on debacle. Why had she imagined that Miranda would listen to her? Everything she said and did managed to make her look completely off balance. If Miranda had been experiencing any second thoughts, she had managed to quash them completely, coming on like some addled, street-corner prophet. Stop it, said the voice in her head. Stop it. You had to take the chance. Two days gone now. Miranda and Peter would soon be on the plane to Dublin. The one consolation was that Elizabeth was safely away from her father.

Nora opened her car door, realizing with a flash of annoyance that she’d left it unlocked. Fortunately, nothing seemed disturbed—not even the camera she’d inadvertently left on the passenger seat. She headed south along the river road, ticking through the day’s events. No word from Frank on the results from Tríona’s bloodstained clothing. Maybe she ought to try finding Harry Shaughnessy. She hoped the fisherman would have something useful for her in the morning. If he had recognized Peter from the picture, and could say that he’d spotted him at the river—

Caught up in her thoughts, Nora sailed along the river road. She tapped on the brake as she approached a curve, and wondered why it was so slow to respond—the bloody car was brand new, for God’s sake. And in a flash, she knew. It wasn’t a slow response; the pedal was stuck. She had no brakes at all.

Time seemed to slow as the car rocketed forward and left the road. The last thing Nora perceived was leafy branches whipping against the windshield as the car plummeted through underbrush, and finally came to rest, battered and steaming, against two trees at the bottom of the ravine.