Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel

III. THE MURDER MYSTERY

We stood on the dock a little while before sunset, Chip and I, with waves lapping quietly onto the sand behind us. I squinted into the distance, trying to make out the faint white dot of the island ferry.

Steve was there too, Steve the Freudian. By then we’d told him about the sighting. With Nancy and the mermaid footage both gone, we’d decided (over a lunch we had no interest in) that our embargo was beside the point. Obviously there couldn’t be an embargo without a commodity — in this case the mermaid video. So with me sitting upright next to him on their sofa, Chip had told Steve — Steve and his wife Janeane, who preferred to be called his life partner — about the mermaid sighting.

To my surprise the Freudian didn’t mock us. I’d assumed a therapist type would instantly dismiss our claims, but Steve just cocked his head to one side, contemplative.

“Something happened to me, not long ago, that I could never explain either,” he offered, nodding.

“What?” asked Chip.

“Enh, I’ll tell you the story sometime. But in a nutshell, I had a strange experience. It made me question things. Question a lot.”

“It was how we met,” said Janeane. “I mean, after his experience. We both went to this PTSD encounter group.”

“For post-traumatic stress?” asked Chip. “Hey. So sorry. I know they say they don’t let women in combat, but once you’re out in a war zone that line blurs. Doesn’t it.”

“Oh, she wasn’t in the army,” said Steve. “Janeane?”

“My practice is around peace,” said Janeane. “Sending out empathy for all beings.”

“What happened was, a therapist told her the phobia had features in common with PTSD, so she started going to the group. I was helping to moderate that day.”

“It was a new horizon,” said Janeane, smiling. “Plus I met Steve!”

Now, in the tropical dusk, Janeane was back in their cabana, resting and making all of us a late dinner; she didn’t like to eat out much. In the resort’s restaurant, she’d said, and the various restaurants off-campus too, there was always the chance of a bludgeoning. Especially now, after this, she was reluctant to emerge. She’d be picking at an overpriced entrée, she’d said, fingering the stem of a goblet, and then suddenly see, in her mind’s eye, a machete intruder.

Standing there on the dock, we wondered where Riley the videographer had gone. We hadn’t seen him since he told us the footage had been stolen; he’d said he was going straight to the police, to tell them about his camera. He’d promised to be here to welcome the Berkeley anthropologist, but he was nowhere to be seen and didn’t answer Chip’s calls or texts.

We worried about the Berkeley anthropologist, too — what he might say, without a video. He’d probably think he’d made the arduous and, let’s face it, expensive trip for nothing. It was no joke, flying from California to the Caribbean on a last-minute ticket. And if he turned out to have been close to Nancy, worse yet — for then, of course, there’d also be the grief. We couldn’t recall if she’d said they’d been friends or only colleagues.

The three of us watched the white prow of the ferry as it first appeared — it’s not a large ferry, really, mid-sized at best — and the lights of the harbor around us twinkled in the gathering dark.

“I like ferries,” mused Chip, and squeezed my hand.

“We came in by chopper,” said Steve. “I don’t do boats. Not anymore. No boats of any kind, not even a rowboat. I’ll never set foot on a ship again until the day I die.”

“Do you get seasick?” asked Chip.

“Not at all,” said Steve.

Chip and I waited politely, but he didn’t go on.

The ocean and horizon were dim purple shades, and the lights on the ferry twinkled — though way more dimly than the lights of the resort at our backs. Then we saw another light, the light of a second, smaller boat as it approached the ferry from one side.

“That’s a police boat,” said Steve. “The BVI police cutter. Or maybe it’s the Coast Guard. I’m not sure the Brits even have their own boats.”

To our surprise the two ships met. We couldn’t tell if the ferry slowed or stopped; it seemed to remain static until the police boat moved away again, off to somewhere we couldn’t see. After that it grew nearer steadily.

“I’ve got a bad feeling,” said Chip.

And sure enough, when the ferry reached us at the dock tourists streamed off — mostly couples, a few singletons with bulging shopping bags, the odd kid holding hands with a tired-looking parent — but there was no Berkeley anthropologist. We thought at first he might have been camouflaged among the day-trip shoppers, and Chip approached one or two, but we got no love from them.

“Do you think,” I asked the guys, when the last of the passengers had disembarked and we were still standing there lamely, “that police cutter could have had something to do with it? With the fact that he never arrived?”

Steve looked at me, and I saw it in his eyes: he did.

“I don’t get it,” said Chip, as we walked slowly back down the dock, slumping. “If the police boat intercepted the ferry to meet the anthropologist — I mean if; he could have just missed his plane. But first off, why would they? How would they even know he was coming?”

“They have her phone,” I suggested. “I’m sure they do. So they can access her voicemail, her texts and her email, no problem. That’s my bet. She probably unlocked her phone, since she was using it so much.”

“But why would they want to intercept him? I mean he’s not a suspect or anything.”

“And the cops around here are kind of a joke,” said Steve. “I researched it, you know — because of the phobia. Our assumption was, in this kind of tourist economy, good cops would actually be a bad sign, in terms of the likelihood of violent crime. The Virgin Gorda cops have to call in the troops from other islands when something serious goes down. I can’t see them doing anything they didn’t have to do.”

“Who does have the power on the islands?” I asked Steve. “Do you know?”

Steve shook his head.

“Is there power?” he asked naïvely.

“There’s always power,” I said. You’d think a Freudian would know that better than anyone, but I kept my mouth shut on that point. “The question is who has it.”

“Whoever has the money,” shrugged Chip. “Right?”

We stepped off the dock and onto the white sand; we looked up at the buildings of the resort in front of us, stretching far out to the sides, along the beach, and quite a ways back, to where the soft hill of the park began to rise. We felt the comforting shape of their well-designed spaces, their welcoming lights.

BACK AT THE Steve/Janeane cabana, the two men and I sat on the back porch and Janeane brought out a brownish pile of hippie-style grain, mounded low and flat on the serving plate like a dormant volcano. We all felt worried and restless, so the mood wasn’t great; soon after she sat down and we all began to eat, we were interrupted by a crisp knock on the cabana’s front door. I flashed back to that morning, when Steve had knocked on our own door and brought me news of death. Then I abandoned my fork and ran to answer the summons, admittedly relieved to be clear of my quinoa mountain.

There stood someone I’d never seen before, a young guy dressed in business casual — I’d almost say dapper, except his tan was a few shades too deep. It crossed the fine line between handsome and pleather.

“Hey there — Mike Jantz,” he said, or it might have been Jans or Jams, the exact name was one of those small slivers of knowledge that slips through your fingers forever. “I’m with Paradise Bay Guest Services. Good evening!”

“What’s this about?” said Chip, coming up behind me — he too, I think, was eager to escape the quinoa.

“You must be our newlyweds in the Star Coral Cabana, am I right?”

At Paradise Bay all the cabanas have names; ours was Star Coral, the Freudian’s was Pearl Diver.

“That’s us,” said Chip, and cocked his head. “How did you know?”

“We try to give all our guests a caring, very personal service. I make sure I always know who’s who.”

“That’s nice,” said Chip, putting a hand on my shoulder.

“I apologize for interrupting your dinner,” said the tanned man. “It’s delicate, but we at Paradise Bay want to bring together all those who were associated with Dr. Simonoff, who, as you know, has passed away. We want to make sure the guests who were associated with Dr. Simonoff are kept in the loop — that everything is done, from our end, to make sure your needs are met at this upsetting time.”

“We were associated too!” called Janeane, hovering at the sliding doors to the back patio. “We ate at the breakfast buffet together! Twice!”

“Talked about aphids,” said Steve modestly. “Pea aphids. These bugs self-detonate. Whole suicide bomber thing, they self-explode. To take out ladybugs.”

“Uh, sure,” said the tanned man. His tie, I noticed, seemed to depict fireworks on a maroon background. “That’s good to learn. Please join us, in that case. We’re gathering in the Damselfish Room in twenty minutes. We’ll send a buggy for you. I should go — doing my best to locate all the guests with a, you know, acquaintance or relationship. With the deceased.”

After I shut the door on him I couldn’t move for a minute. It was like I was paralyzed.

“Deb? Deb?” Chip was saying. “You OK there, honey?”

I didn’t like the way the pleathery man had said deceased. The texture of it was greasy, smarmy. Death was trivial, in that mouth. I felt dizzy.

Then I snapped out of it and nodded.

“Fine. Yeah. We should go.”

“Hmm — Damselfish Room,” said Steve, who’d also come in from the patio. He unfolded a dog-eared map that lay on the bar counter. “I’m pretty sure that’s — yeah. It’s way over on a far corner of the property. See? It’s where they do the nature slideshows no one signs up for, the natural history talks. I went to one. A guy talked about lizards that jump like frogs. It’s in one of those futuristic hippie domes. What are they called?”

“Hydroponic?” said Janeane.

“Geodesic,” said Steve, nodding like they agreed.

“I’ve always wanted to see inside a dome like that,” said Chip.

THERE WASN’T ROOM in the golf cart for all four of us so Chip volunteered to run beside the cart while Steve sat up front, squeezed in next to the buggy’s driver. This one wasn’t acting servile, I noticed — more casual. A relief. He and the Freudian started chatting about trivia; the driver couldn’t act fully servile, I guess, all thigh-to-thigh with Steve up there. The servile dynamic didn’t work smoothly, with two guys rubbing thighs.

At that point, with manly thighs rubbing — at that point even a servility professional has to throw in the towel.

It was just Janeane and me on the passenger bench in the back, left there to jiggle inertly. Janeane jiggled a good amount. What was it, I asked myself, about the jiggle that so captivated me? Then it occurred to me: this was a Gina thing, the small Gina that always traveled with me. Because Gina talked about fat quite a bit, in her career as an academic failure. She’d written an article once, which, she said, was published in a journal six people read, two of them exclusively while defecating. It was called “Death and the Fat American.” I remembered her telling me about it over beers. Or maybe that was her ironic wine spritzer phase, where she ordered cantaloupe spritzers, sometimes pomegranate/honeydew.

Of course, I didn’t remember exactly what she’d said. The bar scene stayed with me more than the details of Gina’s monologue. That often happens. She did say there was the phenomenon of morbid obesity and then, as a separate matter of study, our cultural and individual responses to it, the response of the non-obese as well as the actual obesity victims. Obesity was a piece of death we carried constantly, she announced to me as she scanned the jukebox lists for “Don’t Stop Believing.”

Not only physically, she rambled on in front of the jukebox — in terms of heart disease, the liquids pooling in the vast, giant bodies, the wrongness of any human being possessing ankles that could brush along the floor — but also spiritually/symbolically. Our fat was obviously our death, entombing us prematurely. But that’s not all, she said, there’s more! The passive, consumer posture of fatness was a perfect embodiment of our “object status,” I think that’s what she mumbled out, though I may have got it wrong.

Our life of abundance, our tragic lack of agency, our infinite foregone conclusion of abject uselessness — our fat was a death that went beyond death, Gina orated (as nearby men, with some belligerence, began to stare).

Fleetingly angry because the Journey song was not available, she settled for “Urgent.” A drunk guy stumbled over to us and asked Gina to give him some sugar, please. She said Fuck off and he asked if her sister was less of a bitch than she was (leering at me).

I tried to cheer myself up, after these unpleasant ruminations, by watching Chip’s lean, muscled ass as he jogged effortlessly alongside (Janeane did too, I noticed). It was a solemn time, an anxious time, but we still had eyes and there was still Chip’s ass, running. His beige cotton slacks showed it off — the grounds of Paradise were dark by then, of course, but the golf cart had headlights and there were footlights at intervals along the path.

When I turned to Janeane to talk to her, after a minute, she moved her eyes away in a small, shifty motion, like they’d alighted on my husband’s ass purely by chance, and purely by chance were moving off that ass again.

“We’re going into a rainforest,” she announced. It was a couple of scraggly bushes. “Look! Thick vegetation, big, waxy leaves, giant, bulging flowers like penises, gonads, flowers are sex organs, you know that, right?” Her voice was rising in pitch and volume. “In the tropics they’re huge — what does that mean? They threaten you! Tropical flowers are rapists! It’s a jungle! Giant rapist flowers!”

“Are you worried about, uh. .”

I trailed off. I didn’t know where to start.

“. . flowers?” I struggled on. “Hey. Don’t worry about them. You know — no legs. They can’t run after you. To get raped by a flower you’d have to, like, put yourself on it. But by accident. But then how could — no. Plants can’t be rapists, I don’t think.”

I was getting a little obscure, a little nitpicking, thinking about it. The day had been bad — man. So bad. I felt delirious.

But it didn’t matter. Janeane had already moved on.

“She was murdered. I know it!” she squeaked. “I’m sure she was murdered. Alone in her bathroom. Naked! In the tub! He burst in and he murdered her. He probably had a knife! Or gun! He wanted to shoot her face off! That poor, poor, poor woman. So full of life! Like we are now! Alive!”

I nodded. Nancy had been alive.

“The murderer could still be nearby. Concealed. He could be lurking in the bushes!”

By this time she was rubbing her hands together anxiously — wringing them, I guess you could call it. But the cart was already slowing down; we’d passed through the bushes and come out into a small parking lot, at the end of which was a dome-shaped building, gleaming gray. The cart stopped.

Chip was instantly pleased by the dome. He pulled up short. He hadn’t broken a sweat, and he hadn’t had to listen to Janeane, either.

“Deb, we should get a dome home,” he enthused.

I sprang out of the cart, leaving phobic Janeane behind; I wasn’t equipped to comfort her. There were lights shining out from the dome’s windows onto the parking lot’s pavement, making it look blackly wet. Light fell on the clumps of red flowers Janeane had talked about (admittedly they were large, roughly the size and shape of butternut squashes). Chip and I passed them, with Steve and Janeane lagging, and went through the door into a room with yellowing botanical drawings on the walls. It had to be some kind of disused educational facility. There was a small fleet of schoolroom desks near the back of the dome-shaped room, where the ceiling was low — wood, ink-stained children’s desks with chairs attached to them.

Some of the other members of our expedition were already sitting, legs awkwardly folded beneath the miniature desks. Some of them stood; some grazed along a foldout table against the wall. It bore a vat of coffee, a stack of plastic cups, and a couple of plates of cookies. I don’t know what I’d expected — a PowerPoint? Wreaths? There was a nondescript woman with a plastic name tag pinned to her lapel, wearing a long, Mormonish skirt and standing near the front of the room with her hands clasped.

“The gang’s mostly here,” said Chip. “Though I don’t see Riley the videographer. Still AWOL, I guess.”

“I hope he’s OK,” I said uncertainly.

“. . glad you could make it tonight,” the Mormonish woman was saying. We’d already missed part of her spiel.

“. . doesn’t feel like a safe space!” Janeane stage-whispered to Steve, nearly into our ears. She seemed to be gearing up to a panic attack. “How many bars does your cell have? Steve? Steve! How many bars?”

“We at Paradise Bay want to be sure that you, both our guests and members of our larger community, feel supported in this time of bereavement,” said the Mormonish woman.

It was her skirt, really, that made her a Mormon, an ankle-length floral thing a Mormon wife might wear; I couldn’t make out her name tag from where I stood.

“Here’s the thing,” said the old Navy SEAL, whose broad back I was looking at since he’d sat down in the front row. “We’re not buying the bathtub story.”

“Sir, my personal area is guest relations and community outreach,” said the Mormon. “Anything legal or technical — of course, you’d have to take that up with the police.”

“Don’t kid a kidder,” said the old salt. “I’ve been around the block. And back.”

“I’m sure you have!”

“I live here,” he went on. “The island cops? You’re joking, right? Those kids only take the job so they can dress up in the outfits. Not a man jack among them with half the sense God gave a Guinea baboon.”

“This is a time to come together,” said the Mormon. “Offer each other our mutual support. The healing can only really begin when we let go of the anger.”

“Shit on a stick,” said the old salt, and pushed himself out of his chair.

“It’s so important to us that our guests feel supported!” said the woman.

“Can you just tell us what happened to Nancy?” said Chip, becoming impatient. “That’s what we want to know. What the hell happened to Nancy?”

“We understand she had asthma,” said the woman. “There was, maybe, a breathing issue while she was in the bath, with the asthma, and then the bathwater, that situation in the bath, and so eventually, what we’re surmising, is what happened was, unfortunately, that.”

“What?” asked Steve, under his breath.

“What?” asked Janeane, loudly.

“Bathtub asthma drowning?” said Chip. “Is that even a thing?”

“In that scenario,” I said directly to the Mormonish woman, summoning my resentment, “she had an asthma attack while she was in the bath, is that what you’re saying? But then, instead of reaching for her inhaler, which she always kept close, she just, as an alternative solution, did a face plunge? Just stuck her face right under the bathwater to cleverly fix her major breathing problem?”

“Unorthodox,” conceded Steve.

“We don’t have the official forensic report at this time, yet,” said the woman.

“Bathtub asthma drowning?” repeated Chip.

“So then according to you,” said Janeane, her voice rising unsteadily, wobble-screeching, “no one came in? Snuck in with shadows disguising him and crept up behind while she relaxed in the soft bubbles, maybe with earphones in? Some peaceful music playing, like Zamfir flute? And then this guy never grabbed her and forced her under by the head? Burst in, strong and hulking, and murdered this poor, naked woman, meanwhile his dick raping?”

“Oh. My.”

“Rape-rape! Rape-rape! Rape-rape!”

Janeane’s brow was furrowed as she said that, her face red; one of her hands was clenched into a fist, her arm moving in a curious rigid, pumping motion.

“Oh dear,” said the Mormon woman.

“You know what, let’s head back to our cabana, why don’t we,” said Steve soothingly, his hand on her upper arm, rubbing, trying to slow the arm down. It was a raping arm. That much was clear. People were really embarrassed. “We’re maybe ruffling a few feathers here. And we’re all so tired, aren’t we? So exhausted. What a stressful day it’s been. Let me help you, honey.”

Chip felt bad for both of them, plain to see, and I felt restless, so in solidarity we followed them, filing toward the door. I figured the Mormonish woman wasn’t going to say much anyway. There was no point to her. At least from our POV, the woman had no reason for being. Sheerly from an outside perspective. I’ve noticed that can happen pretty easily: you look at a person from just about every side there is — except for from the inside, obviously — and there just doesn’t seem to be a good reason for them.

It’s frowned upon to say so, but if we’re being honest, come on — please. There are currently billions of humans. Even allowing for some repetition, are there billions of reasons for being?

“Before you go, though, would you sign in? Please? We really need to get everyone’s full contact info, emails, cell phone—”

She was cut off as we retreated.

OUTSIDE THE DOME, the golf cart wasn’t there. Those massive red flowers bulged under the building’s outdoor lights; our fairy-tale coach had turned into a butternut squash.

“Jesus!” shrilled Janeane, and stood still. “Now we’re supposed to walk? Across the whole grounds in the dark?”

Steve talked her down, holding her wrists gently.

“We’re perfectly secure,” he said. “Take a deep breath. In, out. That’s it. Good. In, out. In, out. You, are, safe, here. Now breathe again. Pranayama.”

“We can go back and ask the name-tag chick,” said Chip. “Or, hey, I’ll just run up and get a cart. You guys wait here, I’ll go get it. I need the exercise. It’s no problem.”

“No! No! We can’t split up!” cried Janeane, interrupting her breathing. “Disemboweling!”

“Sorry, she means that’s what’ll happen next,” explained Steve over her shoulder, still holding and patting her. “Like in the slasher movies.”

“OK, listen, I’ll call up to the front desk, then,” said Chip. “They’ll send a driver down, I’m sure. It’s no big deal.”

Chip’s a master of smartphone usage; he’d set up a Listserv for the dive group, which he used to communicate with everyone. He’d been messaging the Bay Areans, the foot fetishist, the divers and spearfishers all day.

Once he’d made the call, while we were waiting for the golf cart, the two of us left Steve to work his Freudian/yoga magic. We stepped back from the others, under the overhang of a big old tree with feathery leaves.

“Maybe she watched too many of those slasher movies,” said Chip quietly. “Maybe she saw it happen one too many times — where everyone gets picked off one by one.”

Hatcheted, I thought, and then de-limbed. Their arms and legs tossed here and there like rice after a wedding.

“I was thinking this was a single-murder scenario,” I said to him. “Hoping, at least. And then they solve it. But — you really think it might be more of a slasher deal?”

Chip cocked his head, considering.

“Wait! Think before you answer, Chip. It just occurred to me: if it turns out this is a slasher movie, and we act all dismissive — if for example you look too smug right now and shrug your shoulders, disdainful and smirking — then for certain we’ll be the next to turn up all murdered.”

“OK. So, for the record, I’m considering carefully. No one’s dismissing the slasher possibility out of hand,” said Chip. He looked around respectfully, reassuring the hidden camera. “But, having considered, I think it’s fairly unlikely, on balance. It’s not really a slasher format. Because Nancy, Nancy was great, I mean—”

He looked a little choked up for a second so I drew near and laid my cheek against his chest.

“—Nancy, man. I still can’t — believe. .”

We stood there in silence till Chip felt able to speak again. A few feet away Steve and Janeane were not dissimilarly clenched. Among the squash-sized flowers the four of us made up two couple-units, each standing close.

“What I was saying,” he said after a minute. “So. The slashers usually start with a beautiful, slutty woman getting the ax. Or cleaver. Butcher’s knife. Sword. Stiletto. Anyway, blade. There has to be a slice, a gouge, or a full-on carving. Often the sacrificial non-virgin is wearing white, right? She’s really young, too, maybe a teenager even. That isn’t anything like Nancy.”

I thought of the eyebrows and I agreed; if this was a slasher movie, it was the weakest possible knockoff. Like a Mickey Mouse doll fashioned of dirty straw in someplace like Guangdong.

The box office would be a bust.

“I hope you’re right,” I said.

We heard the whir of a golf cart and shuffled out of the shadows to greet it.

THE NEXT TIME we saw Riley was at breakfast.

Only he wasn’t Riley, or not exactly the Riley with whom we’d briefly had an acquaintance. He was the “after” photo in a before-and-after pair. He carried himself with more of a swagger; his hair seemed blonder. That he was actually blonder seemed pretty unlikely — a dye job performed so quickly and out of the blue — yet it was true: he seemed blonder. Even Chip noticed it.

More to the point, he’d turned against us. That’s the best way I can put it.

When Chip saw him and dashed over to his table we’d been loading up at the buffet, so Chip was hefting a huge plate of waffles, strawberries and whipped cream, scrambled-egg mounds, bacon, and green and orange melon balls that threatened to fall off and roll willy-nilly. Chip, with his happy, golden-retriever attitude, waxed joyful that Riley was in one piece, holding his heaping plate awkwardly all the while as he stood at Riley’s solo table with the videographer looking up at him impatiently.

But instead of thanking Chip for his concern, Riley brushed off Chip’s worry like it was girlish. He came off superior and breezy, with a grin from shampoo commercials.

I was standing a few feet away, holding a table open for Chip and me in the busy all-you-can-eat buffet scenario, so I didn’t hear all that Riley said. I just saw what I saw.

“Huh,” said Chip, coming over to me and sitting down.

His golden-retriever light was dimmed.

“That guy’s kind of douchey,” I said. “Isn’t he.”

“He said that Nancy drowned and I should just get over it,” said Chip, staring down at his cooling plate of buffet bounty.

I waited a second until I was sure: Chip had a tear in his eye — one at least, possibly two. I took his hand. “You know what, Chip?” I asked gently. “Someone just bought him off. That’s what it is.”

Chip met my eyes, touched his teary one with the back of a hand, then said gruffly, “Bought him—?”

“I’m in the business world, remember? I hear when money talks. Yesterday he was average or below, finance-wise — in terms of people who can afford to take Caribbean vacations in the first place, that is. But today he’s coasting. Today he feels rich. I can tell by looking at him.”

“His hair does seem yellower,” Chip mused, slowly returning to his baseline mood.

“And how come he’s here? He’s not a hotel guest.”

“He said he’s taking a meeting.”

Riley got up and strolled out then, leaving only a coffee cup behind. Wherever he was taking a meeting, it wasn’t in the buffet zone.

WE WENT DOWN to the shore later to forget our troubles, swim and snorkel off some buffet calories; Steve came with us, dressed in a cruel Speedo. We saw it when he shucked his oversize Pink Freud T-shirt. Janeane was recuperating in their cabana: she was much better, he said, he’d dosed her with sedatives the night before and at sunrise they’d done yoga and meditation.

It was while we were stretched out on some cotton-padded lounge chairs between snorkels — Chip scrolling and tapping, Steve touching his toes and grunting, me reading a dog-eared paperback from the resort’s library of exuberantly stupid books — that I noticed the crowds. Down the beach at the marina, out on the docks, there was a flurry of activity. There were more boats than usual; there was more movement.

“Huh,” said Chip, frowning down at his phone. “People are unsubscribing from my list! The fishermen, the guy with the foot fetish, a bunch of them. . they’re leaving the Listserv, sending me messages saying they want to be taken off. It was down to eleven when we got up. And now it’s down to six!”

I studied Chip’s bemused face; I swiveled and studied the scene at the marina, its far-off hustle and bustle.

“Let’s take a walk,” I said. “I need to stretch my legs. Shut off your phone for fifteen minutes, Chip, won’t you? Try to relax. Think of this as our honeymoon.”

We ambled along the sand toward the marina, me acting casual and leisurely on purpose, Chip trying to pretend he wasn’t hurt by the defection of his Listserv and speculating, to distract himself from those feelings, about Nancy’s family and what they had or had not been told. Steve, a relentless exerciser whose physique completely, utterly failed to reflect this apparent fitness obsession, was executing, as we walked, some arm-and-chest movements that resembled a slow chicken dance.

“We have to keep after the resort management,” said Chip. “At any time there could be brand-new information.”

“Mmm,” said Steve noncommittally.

“Mmm what?” asked Chip.

A pelican flapped slowly along the shore beside us and I felt a stir of fondness for the foolish-looking yet steadily graceful creature. I thought about how it must be inside the pelican’s throat pouch, the stench of bile and rotting fish. Nameless debris.

Steve and the pelican, each with their own flapping, made a nice parallel/contrast.

“I’m just not sure we’ll be told more than we know now,” said Steve. “That’s my feeling.”

“But that’s not right,” said Chip, agitated. “You know it isn’t. This isn’t right, none of it is. It’s like no one else cares. And someone’s dead who shouldn’t be! A good person, a person who has tenure at a major U.S. university!”

“Believe me, I agree,” said Steve.

“Deb,” said Chip, turning to me. “Please, honey. Can’t we call someone and give them a bunch of money to solve this? Aren’t there police you can just hire? Who figure out the crime and catch the bad guys? And make sure justice is done?”

“They call them private detectives,” I said. “I don’t think they handle the justice part, though.”

“I didn’t know if those existed anymore,” said Chip. “I thought maybe they went out with black-and-white movies, or maybe when Columbo died.”

Steve nodded sympathetically, did some neck rolls.

“I’m serious, Deb,” said Chip. “We can’t just let this go.”

I nodded too, wondering why the hard-boiled sleuth of the 1940s and ’50s had morphed into crime procedurals. People didn’t believe in a lone sleuth these days; they didn’t believe one man could solve a crime. Or one woman, either. Miss Marple was a joke, same with the Murder, She Wrote lady.

Deductive reasoning? Get the fuck out, was what Americans said to the obsolete sleuths of yesteryear. Even in the heyday of sleuthing, American detectives relied mainly on guns, not brains like the unmanly English. (I’d hardly thought of Gina since the mermaids, I realized then, Gina and Ellis in their love nest of Union Jacks and irony.) The gun is mightier than the pen, was our true opinion, and the RPG is mightier still.

Gina had discussed this subject with me too; Gina used me as a sounding board now and then. She said she liked to talk about her work to people outside the academy, people who weren’t constantly baffled about how she got tenure in the first place.

The sleuths who went solo, looking cool, smoking cigarettes, etc., had been replaced by highly efficient teams of police officers with integrity, brilliant forensics specialists, earnest lawyers, and superefficient computers. It doesn’t matter to the TV-watching public that in real life America has basically none of the above, Gina says, due to the fact that we stoutly refuse to cough up taxes to pay for it. Gina studies what she calls the formulas/standard deviations of TV, along with junk food and pop song lyrics. On our TVs, she says, we like to see the governmental institutions functioning perfectly. People don’t want a lone man armed with nothing but a snarky wit and a lame analog peashooter. They just can’t take that seriously.

That was my train of thought, walking along the beach in the British Virgin Islands while only partly attending to Chip’s worries over memorial-service protocol.

“. . want to send something ourselves, maybe a flower arrangement? Or maybe a donation to a charity?” he was saying as we came up to the marina, where the dock’s pilings, in front of us, stretched barnacle-encrusted above the lacework of the tide.

“Whoa,” said Steve, finally noticing the traffic. “I don’t like this. I don’t like being so close to boats.”

“What the—? What’s going on up there?” asked Chip.

I’d been walking a few steps ahead of them, and now I turned around. I was wearing a creamy sarong over my bikini, albeit a flowing sarong with pouchy pockets for my cell phone and room-key card, strands of my shining hair floating around my face and neck in the ocean breeze. I like to think I looked attractive at that particular moment — as well as authoritative and trustworthy.

To Chip, anyway. Along with being a universal ear, a spouse is a universal eye. A spouse is watching your biopic at all times, much as you’re watching theirs. And even if you don’t admit it you want both those biopics to be well filmed, in warm, nostalgic colors. Plus heart-achingly scored.

“I think you know what it is, Chip,” I said gently.

CHIP TOOK IT hard. I’d known he would, I’d feared he would take it hard and I was right: he did.

We got up on top of the docks, though Steve stayed down below. He didn’t do ship, boats, anything seafaring, he said, a matter of personal policy. Chip and I found ourselves among the slips, among the boats, within the throng rushing to and fro and readying vessels for excursions. Small boats but mostly larger boats, soaring white yachts you might almost feel comfortable calling ships—all manner of watergoing vehicle was being fitted out. Gorda’s the yachtiest of the Virgin Islands: yacht people swarm daily off their boats into the restaurants, onto the beaches, looking for terra firma and their share of landlubber food and sport. This was one of several marinas on the island, and it was white with yachts.

Also there was an overwhelming vibe of haste, mission, even urgency: a vital enterprise under way. We couldn’t get an answer out of anyone because they were ignoring us, in their furor and commotion. They wouldn’t stop to explain; they didn’t even look at us in passing. We moved among them like shadows or ghosts.

Presently, as we stood there being buffeted by hurrying people — a little dazzled, a little lost, now and then jostled by a passing workatron — Chip located someone from our dive group and grabbed his shoulder, stopped him mid-rush. It was a recent Listserv defector I hadn’t ever paid attention to, a thin guy with bulging eyes.

“They’re paying time and a half,” he told us, sweating from the exertion of hefting a sack. It wavered on his shoulder. “Plus open bar tonight.”

“What for? What’s going on?” urged Chip.

“We have to cordon off the area, these boats here are kind of the support system for those other ships we’re using, these big ships with fishing nets — trawlers, I think that’s what they are. Or maybe it’s purse seine. They’re going to drop the nets around where the marvels are so that they can’t escape,” said the guy.

“The marvels?” said Chip.

“The marvels, you know, the attraction. The fish people,” said the guy, and then he got a stressed look on his face, glancing past us at someone, I guess, who needed either his sack or his presence. He quickly turned to leave. “Gotta bounce.”

Chip looked at me, stricken.

“They’re going after them,” he said.

I saw a face I recognized, then, up on the deck of one of the nearer yachts: Mike Jans or Chance or whatever, the too-tanned resort employee from Guest Services who’d come to the door of Steve and Janeane’s cabana. He wasn’t wearing his maroon tie anymore; now he was clad in what I guessed was modern sailor gear, a windbreaker and a cap, a pair of mirrored sunglasses. Approaching him from the gangplank — another face I recognized! — was our other Guest Services rep, the name-tag woman who’d been Mormonish the night before.

Well, in daylight she wasn’t Mormonish at all. She wore flip-flops and shorts, and her bare legs were strong and muscular as a carthorse’s, plus clearly waxed. I’m not sure, but I don’t think waxing’s much of a Latter-Day Saints habit. She’s not a Mormon, I couldn’t help thinking a little disappointedly; I couldn’t help feeling just the tiniest bit betrayed. Sure, she’d never directly claimed to be LDS, but the ankle-length, floral, asexual dress had made the claim for her, and now she was renouncing it without so much as a by-your-leave. It came to me then that dressing badly could be seen, in a way, as a form of disinformation, a form, almost, of psychological weapon.

But I didn’t have time to go down that road. Chip was upset.

“Deb,” he said quietly, standing close to me. His hands were actually trembling. “They’re going out there to hunt them, is that it? Hunt the mermaids?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” I said. “I really don’t think that’s it.”

“Then what is it?”

I pointed at a banner flapping behind Mike and his coworker. And that was our introduction to the new mermaid tourism company — incorporated, as it turned out, with mysterious rapidity as a wholly owned subsidiary of the multinational chain that also owned our resort — that called itself the Venture of Marvels.

Beside the words, a logo of a fishtail sticking out of a frothy, stylized wave.

“They’re going out there to market them,” I said.

THERE’S NOT A lot of anger in Chip, really; I’d say he’s well below average on the anger meter, for his demographic. He’s white, he’s male, and he’s quite young, but he’s got no serial killer in him — none at all. No tendencies to violence that I’ve ever seen. Or if he does have them they channel completely into the gaming, sex, and athletics.

And yet, when he looked up at those words and that logo and then looked down at the Guest Services team standing beneath it, their tans glowing against the white of the yacht like twin beacons, I saw blood rush to his face. His face, all of a sudden, looked lightly mottled, and I actually caught the movement of his jaw clenching. I thought I heard his molars grinding, even amidst the pandemonium on the docks.

“No,” said Chip. “No. No. No. No. No!”

“Hey,” I said, “hey, there.” But as I reached out to comfort him I reminded myself of Steve the Freudian wrangling Janeane, which made me jerk back my hand from his arm. It wasn’t that I didn’t want him to be comforted, just that I didn’t want to act like a life partner, exactly. I figured the process would have a neutering effect.

“They can’t do this,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s just like Nancy said! They’re going to wreck everything!”

I didn’t doubt what he said, which made it hard to come back with a soothing remark.

“The others from the dive are working for them! For these people. The Venture of Marvels, whatever that is.”

“I suspect it’s the same people who run the resort. Or at least their parent company,” I said, inclining my head toward the tanned people astride their yacht, above us.

Chip’s brow knit.

“That’s why they left my Listserv, I bet they felt guilty,” he said. “They felt guilty because they were cashing in. They were betraying Nancy and everything she stood for! And violating our contract! They’re getting paid to sell out the mermaids!”

“Yes,” I said. “I think that’s a pretty fair assumption.”

“Deb,” he said, “you’re the strategist. What can we do?”

I looked around for a place to sit; all I saw was the top of a piling, a sawed-off stumpy thing spattered with seagull white. Any port in a storm, I said to myself, but then I disagreed.

“First,” I said, “who’s still on your Listserv, Chip? Who hasn’t defected yet?”

He lifted his phone, tapped a few times, studied the screen. “Thompson,” he said. “Rick. Ronnie. .”

“Thompson? Who’s that?”

“The retired wreck diver, you know, the ex-Navy guy with all the great stories. You called him the old salt. Then Rick and Ronnie from San Francisco that we had dinner with. And then — just — no way! Another unsubscribe. Right now!”

“And?”

“There’s only one other person left, I guess, Miyoko. Young, Asian, some kind of big-wave surfer but she came here just to dive. She wanted to see the reefs. Dolphin tattoo on her ankle. Remember?”

I vaguely did. She was quiet and self-possessed, with excellent skin; we hadn’t spoken much.

“OK, Chip. We’ve got to call a meeting.”

AFTER WE SAW the banner for the so-called Venture of Marvels I didn’t know whether to feel invisible or paranoid. On the one hand, we were afraid that Nancy had been murdered for her mermaid discovery, in which case we should be paranoid because we, too, could be killed if we didn’t toe the line.

On the other hand, it was in fact possible that Nancy had died a natural, if unlikely, death and that our mermaids had been discovered by the resort only after her death, basically because of her death — from Nancy’s cell phone records, which led them to Riley’s video.

In that case we’d invented the cover-up, invented the idea that the resort had murdered her in order to profit off the mermaids; in that case we didn’t need to be paranoid, possibly, because although the resort’s parent company, if that was true, had been repulsively quick to leap into a niche — had leapt into that niche unethically, cynically, and with the most craven of motives — it wasn’t per se criminal, necessarily. Or it was more a form of white-collar crime or maybe just moral turpitude (a favorite phrase of Gina’s). So maybe the parent company didn’t care what we thought or even what we did.

But of course, we didn’t know which it was, theft or murder. We had to err on the paranoid side, ultimately. Should we operate covertly, sneaking around like spies, or in the wide-open spaces?

In the end I opted to start with wide-open spaces, figuring that our best insurance might be obviousness. Or it might not. It was a risk. Anyway we gathered, the seven of us, in the gazebo of a palm garden (Janeane was still in the Pearl Diver Cabana, building her confidence). There was Steve, Thompson, Rick, Ronnie, Miyoko, Chip, and me. That was all that remained of our catered excursion force, our motley crew of spearfishermen, dive pros, vacationers, and parrotfish experts — all that was left of the boatload that had, for the first time in human history, videotaped mermaids.

Around us the palms were planted in a geometric pattern around the colorful tiled patio, creating a sense that we were on the grounds of some raja’s palace and might at any moment see a line of elephants lumber into sight, caparisoned in finery and bearing howdahs for some Indian royals. Of course we saw no elephants, only the golf carts, loaded with tourists like ourselves. There were also human-size statues of knights, kings, queens, and pawns, arrayed along opposite edges of the patio beside our gazebo. A couple lay on their sides, fallen. The patio was a giant chessboard.

“I guess my question is,” Chip said, when we were all sitting, “what’s our first priority? Justice for Nancy? Or helping the mermaids?”

“We gotta go where we can get shit done,” said the old salt Thompson, with his usual gruffness.

“Nancy would want us to help the mer-people,” put in Rick, the independent film guy.

“That’s right, she would,” agreed Ronnie, his boyfriend the designer. “That’s what Nancy would want. Definitely.”

Miyoko gave the slightest of nods.

“Makes sense to me,” said Steve.

“So the next question,” said Thompson, twiddling the knobs on his elaborate wristwatch, “is how far are we willing to go? To save these critters? Where do we draw the line?”

“Nonviolent protest?” offered Ronnie.

Thompson barked out a laugh.

“No, seriously though,” he said, turning to Chip. “One thing. I’ve got experience with explosives. Another thing. I’ve got explosives.”

“Jesus,” said Rick.

“What kind of explosives?” asked Chip curiously.

“Need-to-know basis. Just saying.”

“A middle ground, maybe,” said Steve. “Between the sign-waving and the bombing?”

“What’s the specific goal, Chip?” I asked. “If we’re trying to stop this hotel chain from destroying the mermaids, OK, but what’s the deliverable? What’s the actual outcome that we’d like to see?”

“It’s Terriault-Smith, right?” mused Rick. “The parent company? They also have a pharmaceutical arm, I think. And maybe frozen foods.”

“I know what Nancy really wanted,” said Chip. “She wanted, like, a mermaid park. That was her vision, a national park in the ocean, but for mermaids. Like with the Channel Islands, remember that trip, Deb? It’s set aside for nature, and then you’re not allowed to fish for them.”

“So how do we do that?” asked Thompson. “That’s a political deal. Got nothing to do with us.”

“A petition!” said Ronnie.

“Feh,” said Thompson, shaking his head, and started to roll a cigarette, pinching tobacco from a leather pouch.

“Well, we’re in a British territory,” said Rick. “So yeah, no. It’s kind of out of our hands. You live here, don’t you, Thompson — would you happen to be a British citizen?”

“Yeah right,” said Thompson.

Finally we decided the first step was to stop the parent company from dropping its long nets. The mermaids (none of us ever called them “mers,” no matter what Nancy had said) didn’t deserve to be imprisoned, we decided, whether we could do anything else for them or not. There was no call for imprisonment — it just didn’t seem fair. The nets might catch and hurt them; there could be sharp hooks on those things. I pictured them struggling in those nets like dolphins, asphyxiating, possibly. I saw their half-human blood dispersing cloudlike in the sea. It would be our fault: we would have brought those hooks to them. Not on purpose, but still.

We all agreed we didn’t like the idea.

“Time to monkey-wrench,” said Thompson. “The hour of sabotage is here.”

“We can’t stop the boats from sailing,” objected Rick. “Some are already out there.”

“The nets?” said Thompson. “Blast holes in them? Cover of night?”

“With terrorism going on, and that, we probably shouldn’t blow stuff up. I say we talk to the folks in charge, you know?” said Chip earnestly. “Just set up a meeting with whoever’s in charge and plead our case — plead on the mermaids’ behalf. Maybe we’re underrating them, maybe they’ll listen to reason.”

“A poodle pissin’ on a wildfire,” said Thompson. “Come on, Chip. And you too, what’s your name, the smaller homosexual — Lonnie?”

“Uh, Ronnie.”

“Boys, put some lead in your peckers. Sit-ins, writing letters, corporate-office chitchat, it’s for wussbags. Poltroons and pantywaists.”

The rest of us were momentarily silenced by this. Then, for the very first time since we’d gathered, Miyoko spoke. English wasn’t her first language; I hadn’t been sure how fluent she was, up till then. Her voice was small but firm.

“TV.”

IT TURNED OUT Miyoko was some kind of personality on Japanese television. She wasn’t a reporter, exactly — more of a VJ type. She talked to teenage girls about fashion crazes and middle-aged office ladies about weird fetishes; she interviewed pop stars and other brainless celebrities.

Millions of people watched her show, she said. She stated the figure offhandedly. She’d come here on vacation, she had no broadcasting equipment with her, per se, but she did have her ultra-powerful laptop with its various capabilities, and we could get our hands on whatever else was needed, she assured us.

“You think people will care about the mermaids, in Japan?” asked Chip.

Rick chimed in.

“Your, uh, Japan’s a whaling country, pretending to kill whales for scientific purposes, then eating them?” he asked. “Not exactly eco-freaks. Plus they do those dolphin slaughters on the beach.”

Miyoko didn’t take offense.

“The mermaids are very special,” was all she said. “My viewers will love them.”

Two prongs were needed, we determined; ours would be a two-pronged campaign. Thompson wouldn’t relinquish the idea of stealth; as a former Navy SEAL, he insisted on it. And he was right, we decided: there was a place for stealth, if not for heavy-duty weaponry. (At this stage in our discussions, we dispatched Chip and Rick, alternately, to walk the perimeter of the chess patio, checking for both skulking resort employees and security equipment; we couldn’t risk having our new plans overheard.) The place of stealth was this: we wanted to steal back our mermaid video. The chance of us finding the mermaids again anytime soon, under conditions ideal for recording, was virtually nil. And for those millions of Japanese viewers, we needed evidence. We needed the visuals. We figured that, by now, the parent company must have made copies; there’d be a few in existence, by this time, we guessed, and all we had to do was lay our hands on one of them.

Thompson and Chip and Ronnie, who was a decent diver, would make up the stealth team; Rick really wanted to go, I could tell — get in on the man-of-action deal. But with his filmmaking expertise he was needed for AV stuff on the media team, which included Miyoko, Steve and me. We split into our teams to plan, with media retiring to the Pearl Diver Cabana, where Steve made us vegan sandwiches and Miyoko discreetly checked the room for bugs. (We didn’t want to frighten Janeane.) She knew her way around a microphone, she said, even a small one; luckily, she didn’t find any.

Janeane was doing a lot better, I was glad to see, though her hair was flattened on one side of her head. Also she was wearing a housecoat garment that gave her an invalid/shut-in aspect. But she was smiling now and then and speaking normally, not screeching or gibbering. With her Steve tried to downplay the enterprise a bit, didn’t let on how sizable the allied forces were, the forces of the parent company. He didn’t mention the armada of yachts and fishing boats arrayed at the docks, the trawlers, the droves of eager, commandeered labor earning overtime pay and, afterward, free liquor. He didn’t tell Janeane how most of our own diving party members had defected to the other side. He didn’t mention the stealth prong, the fact that Thompson had advocated for the use of powerful incendiary devices, which he apparently had the means to produce and deploy. Janeane would ideate nonstop if she knew that.

While we sat around their bamboo table and ate our chunky sandwiches — which combined hummus, beansprouts, and diced cucumber into a substance neatly devoid of flavor — Miyoko typed out a few texts on her cell phone (it looked like a handheld, razor-thin spaceship). She had a quick conversation in Japanese, holding her phone in front of her so she could see the other person’s face and they could see hers too. I peered over, inquisitive: another Japanese person, this one with spiky hair. Probably male, either quite young or with skin as smooth as Miyoko’s. Hard to tell more.

“They’re ready when we are,” she said when she hung up. “For optimal quality, we need a portable satellite dish.”

“On it as soon as I’m done eating,” said Rick, his lips daubed in beige hummus-paste. I was gratified by the media team’s efficiency, though I personally had failed to contribute one iota.

We’d have a waiting game to play, when our tech ducks were in a row, until the other team fulfilled its own mission — which wouldn’t happen until dark. We planned to fill the time setting up social media, under Miyoko’s direction. Rick and Steve would be tracking down equipment while Miyoko and I labored to put together a mini-presentation on the reefs and islands, to go along with our mermaid story.

I needed Chip’s tablet for the task — I hadn’t brought my own on the honeymoon — so after lunch I headed back to our cabana to fetch it. I said I’d be back in ten minutes.

But on my way out of our cabana again, tablet in hand, I was met at the door. Of all five men standing there, blocking my free egress, I recognized only two: the bouncer from our party and the blond Riley.

“Ma’am,” said the man at the front, who wore a suit and no name tag at all, “we’d like you to come with us, please.”

I DIDN’T CAVE right away. I didn’t like the man-huddle. I felt their eyes burning into me, as I stood there in only my bikini and sarong. On the other hand, there were enough of them hulking there that I was in a bind. (Riley avoided my eyes, I noticed, looking pointedly off to one side like he had better things to stare at.) I protested, first asking why — they shook their heads and shrugged as if that was an irrelevant question — and then saying I had to tell my friends where I was going. Where was I going, by the way? A meeting in Conference Room B, said one of them. Can my friends come too, then? I said, but the man at the front said they were already there. Really? I said, because I’d just left them. In that case I’d stop at the Pearl Diver Cabana, I said, just to make sure my friends were all included in the meeting.

They nodded grudgingly, but a couple of minutes later — as we walked along the path that passed Steve’s cabana — I found myself jostled and forced away from it, surrounded by a wall of men.

At that point I considered making a scene, even yelling/screaming. But that’s where my personality got in the way, my personality that, especially as I got older, I hadn’t worried about so much. I’m not a screamer, never have been, and it turned out this situation was no exception to the rule. The idea of screaming seemed foolish. Here we were in a Caribbean resort. What was the worst that could happen? Then I caught sight of Nancy’s cabana and thought of her bathtub, but still the scream stuck in my throat.

So I didn’t do anything except call out Steve’s name a couple times, then Miyoko’s — probably not loud enough to be heard from inside. And for once there was no one around, not even a single golf cart transporting its inert, jiggling cargo.

We went through a side door into the main building, the building with the lobby and most of the restaurants, and then we were in a service elevator, and then a narrow corridor, and then we were in a room that, if it was the famed Conference Room B, was certainly a small one. It’d be your two-, your three-person conferences that took place in that baby.

There was barely room for the man-huddle; they pressed me in, then hovered at the threshold. The room had a table with two chairs, a TV, another door and one window — a picture window overlooking the beach and the sea.

A picture window that, of course, didn’t open.

At the door of the room they looked around at each other for a second, and then, abruptly, without saying a single thing, the one who’d stood at the front leaned out and just grabbed Chip’s tablet, which I was still holding. Just like that he took it from me. And then every one of them left. They sluiced out the door fast as liquid.

I was alone.

I stood there for a second, kind of in disbelief, and then stepped toward the door they’d sluiced through and rattled the knob hopelessly. Locked, of course. I crossed the room and opened the other door; there was a toilet, a sink and a pink plug-in air freshener shaped like a butterfly.

I walked back to the middle of the room — we’re talking maybe a twelve-foot room, so it wasn’t far — and stared out the picture window. I was in a bad situation, and really the person I had to blame it on was me, me and my personality, which, as a prisoner with nothing at all to do, I was now free to worry about. Who the hell wouldn’t scream, being kidnapped like that? I’d been abducted in broad daylight and I hadn’t even put up a fight. There was something wrong with me, and now I had plenty of time to ponder that. For all I knew Steve, Miyoko, and Rick were also in rooms like this, just stuck in idiotic rooms, like me. For all I knew it was the same with Chip, Thompson, and Ronnie. I hoped that wasn’t the case. I hoped, for the mermaids’ sake, that they had better personalities.

I blamed myself, standing there in my bikini and skirt, utterly powerless. Then I remembered something. I touched my loose, flowing sarong and felt a hard thing against my fingers and my bare leg. I said the word yes.

I glanced around me to see if there was a camera in evidence, a little electronic eye. Could I be sure? I investigated the TV. I looked at the electrical outlets. I even looked under the table, where a camera would be no use. There was one floor lamp, and I checked that. I stood on a chair and touched the sides of the fluorescent light fixture. But I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure. These days, who knew how small and camouflaged a camera could be? So I stepped into the bathroom and closed the door. There were no cameras there, unless they’d made cameras completely invisible, with their technology.

I slid my hand down into my pocket, standing there next to the toilet, and I took out my phone. There it was. They hadn’t seen I had pockets. They hadn’t seen that at all. I smiled. My kidnappers were even less competent than I was.

I felt slightly better about my personality — compared to theirs, anyway. I turned it on. Three bars.

I said the word again, somewhat triumphantly. Yes.

THE FIRST THING I texted Chip was an SOS. I let him know where I was, locked in a room with a picture window. I told him the elevator had taken us to Floor 3; I told him I didn’t fear bodily harm, though maybe I should. But I didn’t want to stop the mermaids from being saved, with my stupid predicament. On the other hand, I texted, I was locked up against my will.

It took him a few minutes to text back. During that time, I found out later, he was visibly upset. But then he gathered his wits and texted me back, asking what door we’d come through and could I take a picture out the picture window, just in case it helped them to locate me.

So Chip wasn’t also locked in a room, and that encouraged me. I emerged from the bathroom, throwing caution to the winds; I snapped said photo with my phone and sent it off.

I sent a text describing the path we’d walked along, the part of the building we’d come into. I wondered in passing how humankind had existed before the advent of cell phones — my own life, before cell phones, was often a featureless blur. I sent off a picture of the door, too, although I didn’t think it’d be particularly useful. From the outside it probably looked like every other door along that narrow corridor. Next I considered whether the men, watching me via a camera I hadn’t found, would come back in and try to grab my phone from me. I retreated to the bathroom. But there was no lock on its door, anyway, so I slunk out again.

I didn’t want to keep texting Chip, but I knew someone else who wouldn’t mind hearing from me. So, staring out at the empty beach and the sea, I went ahead and texted Gina. She prefers text to voice.

Kidnapped, I wrote. Locked in a room in our resort. Chip coming to save me (hope). Saw real mermaids. Even got video, but video stolen. Someone died. Possibly murdered.

That should pique her interest, I thought smugly. For once I’d be the one to shock Gina, instead of the other way around.

Gina’s never far from her cell, love nest or no. So I knew it wouldn’t be long before she texted back. Indeed: five seconds.

Fuck off! she wrote.

Of course, Gina would never credit such a fanciful-sounding tale. Her irony was far too bulletproof for a mermaid sighting; her irony was a Kevlar of the mind.

Then I remembered our code. The words we used to show we weren’t joking, that we were hardcore, that we meant every word. We’d used those words since we were kids, but only a handful of times and always in deadly earnest. Those words were not ironic. Those words, once spoken, could never be doubted and could never be taken back.

On your mother’s life, I typed. On the life of your mother.

Because Gina had lost her mother not long after we met. Ninth grade. Cancer, long and drawn-out. I was there for her from then on; I’ll never forget the depth of her grief. It changed her forever. It’s fair to say she never recovered.

For once there was a text silence.

Finally, broken.

Do you need me? she typed.

Just that.

It’s OK, I typed. You’d never get here in time. I’ll be OK. Chip’s coming to bust me out.

Mermaids, typed Gina, after a few moments. I’ll be goddamned.

I THINK PART of me expected, when I sent my SOS to Chip, that he’d show up in fifteen minutes. Maybe thirty. I thought Thompson might be in tow, possibly packing a sidearm.

But this was not reasonable. Also it was not the case.

I heard occasional footsteps outside the room; each time I did I got excited, all prepared to leave. But each time the footsteps faded. My texts to Chip came back unanswered, creating anxiety. I knew I couldn’t call the island cops; Thompson had said they were fully in the pocket of the parent company. I didn’t want to use my phone much, because I didn’t have a charger with me, and the battery was in the red. That phone was my lifeline; besides the toilet and sink, that phone was all I had. The TV, on its metal trolley, didn’t seem to get reception — when I turned it on there was nothing but gray static.

So I drank some water from the bathroom sink, splashing it into my mouth; then I sat and stared out the picture window. It was blocked on one side by the building itself, which stretched out to my right; ahead was a strip of beach and ocean, which stretched out to the left until some palm trees blocked the rest of the view.

After a while I saw boats on the ocean. First one, then many. White dots of varying sizes. It had to be the Venture of Marvels: the armada was going out, I guessed. The mermaid site must be within my field of view — too distant for me to see anything, though.

I got frustrated, without any response from Chip; I imagined scenarios, and those scenarios were not pleasant. I’d be like Janeane, I thought, if I let my imagination have free rein. That road was a bad road. I wouldn’t go down that road. I’d leave here, I’d get out, I vowed, and I’d be none the worse for wear, either.

In fact, I decided, I wasn’t going to sit around waiting to be rescued. My country didn’t have princesses — or if it did, they weren’t the kind you bowed down to. They weren’t the kind that got saved by princes, certainly.

I’d made my first mistake not screaming; I wasn’t going to make a second. I felt around for my key card, the plastic key to my room, remembering when Gina had taken a lock-picking course because she was pissed off that she had to pay a locksmith every time she locked herself out of her car. That was back in the days when cars had actual keys, obviously. Gina’s always been prone to losing keys, as well as phones, credit cards, and cash money. Back then she’d tried to convey her newfound knowledge of locks to me. I lost interest fast, regrettably, but I had a couple of the basics and it seemed to me there was quiet outside the door now. So I decided to give it a whirl.

My bet was they hadn’t planted a sentry; from the rare footstep sounds it seemed they were content to check on my locked door periodically. So I listened to make sure it was silent, and then I slipped the card between the door and the jamb and tried to get somewhere. I got nowhere, was where I got, with that flimsy rectangle — it simply didn’t have the thickness and quality of credit.

Then I noticed the knob was the kind with a hole in it; it wasn’t made to be secure, really. All I needed was something to fit in that hole. What did I have? I had a wedding ring. I had flip-flops. I had a pink butterfly air freshener. There had to be a thin piece of metal here somewhere. The TV was all plastic, nothing to break off there. .

Eureka. I’d put my hair up before we went to the beach; the bun in its elastic was falling now, wispy tendrils on my neck, but yes — a bobby pin. In fact I had two of them.

Gina had said you needed the curved end. The curved end could hook around the lock button inside the knob.

So I slid the bobby pin into that small hole. At first I jiggled, but then I thought that movement wasn’t right, too hasty, too chaotic. I pushed the knob in with the other hand as I moved the bobby pin slowly around. Now and then I got discouraged, my wrists aching a bit from the pushing and the turning, and took a break, and then I started up again, always listening for footsteps. Sometimes crying a bit, that weird dry-crying you do when there aren’t any actual tears, mostly from frustration. A few times I stood up, walked around, shook out my hands and aching wrists, gave myself a pep talk like a madwoman. Twice I thought I almost had it, I felt the pin catch, but then I lost it again.

The third time I thought I almost had it, and then I did. I turned the knob.

HOOKING MY FLIP-FLOPS from a couple of fingers, I bolted from that room like a bat out of hell. I ran, skin tingling, vision bleary with fear, to the service elevator. Then I didn’t want to be in another tight space, so I kept going right past it to the stairs, down the stairs on my bare feet, one flight, two flights, three flights and four — there was the door to the outside. It was a great feeling, coming out into the breeze and sunlight. I’d freed myself. I felt proud.

And from there I kept running, just ran and ran on those paved paths all the way back to the Pearl Diver Cabana. Now there were golf carts around, now when I didn’t have any use for them at all there were plenty of hotel guests moving to and fro, but I didn’t stop, just ran, smiling to be free, my phone hitting against my leg until I grabbed it in the non-shoe hand; I ran, not worrying about the sharp pebbles I stepped on, the stray leaves and grains of sand and flower petals that stuck to my heels and gathered between my toes.

It was the best I’d felt since we arrived, with the exception of a few seconds of sex on the first day. (Maybe.) Then I was banging on Steve’s door, breathing heavily, shooting worried glances over my shoulder.

It was Janeane who opened it, Janeane who said, “Good Goddess! I heard from Chip they kidnapped you — are you all right?” She pulled me in and shut the door, then bolted it. “We’re safe here. You poor thing!”

She was alone; the others had gone out before Chip called her about me; he’d told her not to worry them, that he and the stealth team had me covered, to just let them get the AV equipment.

We called Chip on Janeane’s cell, not wanting to use the hotel phone in case the bad guys might be listening in; I told him what had happened. Chip, whose voice cut out and in again, said they’d been on the brink of finding me, he was certain, but he’d tell me later about the obstacles they’d encountered. For now Janeane and I were in what she called a “safe space,” though I wasn’t so sure. But the doors to the patio locked too, and I figured that was probably the best we could do. Coasting on the high of my lock-picking self-liberation, I felt newly powerful.

Full steam ahead, damn it, said Chip, and I concurred. Those hotel-running, abductor bastards weren’t going to get us down.

I picked a lock, I texted Gina after plugging my phone in with Steve’s charger. Rock on, she texted me.

It was late by now, well into the waning afternoon, and before long Janeane and I were joined by Miyoko and Rick and Steve. They were loaded down with equipment, even a satellite dish, which Steve was manfully struggling to carry. There were no big-box electronics stores in the vicinity, so I was pretty amazed, but I didn’t have time to ask where they’d got the stuff, because Janeane was too busy squeaking out my kidnapping story.

“Jesus,” said Steve. “You actually escaped? Picking a lock with a bobby pin?”

“Must have been a cheap lock,” I conceded.

“Very good,” said Miyoko, but her composure wasn’t affected. She gave me a small, pleased smile. It’d take more than an amateurish kidnapping to faze Miyoko; I saw that now.

“Why you?” asked Rick. “Why bother with just one of us, wouldn’t they need to put all of us out of commission?”

“Maybe I was just the first,” I said. “I was the only one alone, anyway.”

“Phase one?” said Steve.

“Well, you were a sitting duck, going off by yourself like that,” nodded Rick.

“Blaming the victim!” said Janeane.

“So we have to stay in groups from now on,” I said. “I guess that’s the lesson here. No solo travelers.”

“Right,” said Rick. “I wonder what the situation is, litigation-wise. The parent company’s U.S.-based, you know. You should be able to sue these guys.”

“Instead we’re paying them,” I said. “I paid these people good money to stay here, and they go ahead and kidnap me.”

I found I could make light of the abduction, now that it was over.

We busied ourselves getting the tech set up — or at least Rick and Miyoko did, while Steve and Janeane and I offered moral support. Miyoko had brought her laptop in; she charged me with finding open-source video of the island that we could use. That was more up my alley than the AV end, so I set myself to the task.

It was almost dusk by the time Chip and Ronnie showed up — Chip and Ronnie, but no Thompson. They looked sub-bleached and waterlogged, with salt crusted on their skin and in their hair. When Chip and I were done with our reunion — not tearful, but a tad private, so we withdrew to the bedroom for a few minutes — he told me Thompson had stowed away. After they’d done some homework to identify the armada’s flagship yacht, and Thompson had equipped himself with a duffel bag of night-diving gear brought up from his condo down the beach, Thompson had snuck aboard the flagship while Chip and Ronnie created a diversion.

“What kind of diversion?” I asked.

“You’re going to be pissed at me.”

“What? Why?”

“So it probably wasn’t the best alternative. But we didn’t have many choices, was how we saw it. How Thompson saw it, anyway. With the time pressure and all.”

“Chip. Oh no. Chip! Did you guys. . blow up something?”

“It was just small, though, Deb. Just minor. Believe me.”

“Chip! You could have blown your arm off! Or someone else’s! You could have gotten arrested by Homeland Security! You still could! Jesus, Chip!”

“We’re not at home, though, is one positive. I don’t think they have DHS agents here.”

“Chip! Explosives? Who knows what file your little prank could end up in? You think I want to be married to some kind of PATRIOT Act jailbird? Seriously!”

“It was a broken-down part of the dock that was already wrecked, a couple of pilings off in the ocean there, not holding up anything at all. Just a small explosion. Deb, it was just a minor dynamiting. Hell, construction crews do way bigger things all the time. It wasn’t even that loud.”

He sounded a little disappointed, frankly.

“You’re missing my point completely.”

I’d been spot-on, I was thinking, to worry about Thompson’s powerful influence on Chip. Show Chip an ex-Navy father figure with a bomb, I’ll show you a bomb-exploding Chip. We were lucky it hadn’t gone terribly wrong, that no one had been injured. There’d be some serious work to do, when we got home, I told myself, on my better half’s daddy issues. Chip needed a personal Freudian.

“But it worked, Deb. It worked like a charm. They got so freaked out, running around and panicking, that they weren’t even watching when Thompson boarded her. Not a single one of them. Then they saw it wasn’t even anything and it all went back to business. No cops even showed up. None at all, Deb, not a single one! Mission completely accomplished.”

“Was this before or after I called you all kidnapped?”

“Deb. How can you even ask that?” Chip looked pained. “It was after you escaped. Of course.”

“Chip. I know you look up to Thompson, although, as far as I can tell, he’s a certified, wing-nut paramilitary freak. But from now on, acts of terrorism and violence are family decisions. OK, Chip?”

“Fair enough, honey,” said Chip. “I promise, though, there were no people anywhere near.”

“A boat could have passed,” I said. “Anything, Chip. Once the bombing starts, all safety bets are off. Look. I don’t want to argue about it now. But promise me.”

“Done,” said Chip, overwhelmingly relieved. “Done and done.”

“Thompson didn’t take more explosives with him, did he? That wasn’t part of his little kit?”

“No, no,” said Chip hastily. “None at all. The next phase is the robbery, that’s all. He’s just going to get the tape. And then he’ll swim back, in the dark, in his diving gear.”

“He must be a very strong swimmer. Those boats are pretty far out.”

“He’s super strong,” said Chip. “He once competed. Distance.”

“How about guns, Chip? Did he take a weapon with him?”

“Of course not. Guns can’t get wet, Deb.”

“He’s doing the robbing before he’s doing the diving, right? I could see that guy sacrificing a gun. If he got a chance to wave it around first. Plus which — you ever hear of dry bags, Chip? Maybe he just took a gun in a dry bag. I mean surely he took his cell with him, right, to communicate with you? That’s got to be in a dry bag. Maybe, while he was packing it, he also stuck in a gun.”

I didn’t put it past Thompson to go rogue. With the so-called minor dynamiting, he already pretty much had.

“But Thompson’s not a criminal. He used to be a Navy SEAL! He fought for our nation, Deb! Or dove, at least. He dove for our great nation.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, unconvinced.

Finally we hashed it out, as much as we could without a therapy session, and emerged into the main room, where the others were running an equipment test. We wouldn’t use it till morning — that was the plan, at least — when we’d likely be broadcasting from the beach.

“Pretty soon now the first boats are due back,” said Chip, checking his phone. “The flagship’s staying out there, from what we overheard, staying out tonight watching the nets, which will have been set by now. But a lot of the smaller boats are coming back in. We’ve got a man on the inside, Deb, did I tell you?”

Turned out they’d bribed the Fox News spearfisher, the one who’d rummaged in my tampon box. He claimed to be acting as a double agent, undercover in the armada. He had no allegiance to the parent company, much as he’d had no allegiance to Nancy or to Chip and me, but for a hundred bucks he’d agreed to tell Chip everything he’d seen, out there on the sparkling waves. And possibly beneath them. He’d promised to make his first report in the evening; Chip had an assignation with him behind the restaurant-bar where the other turncoats would be helping themselves to free libations.

I found myself wishing we were doing some sleuthing, that we had the manpower and the chops to figure out exactly what had led to Nancy’s untimely death. I discovered it was nagging at me, the unresolved question of whether our scientist had died through simple misadventure or someone’s evil intent. It nagged at me. It really did.

But for now, at least, the murder mystery remained unsolved. We had to fortify ourselves, sooner or later, and that was what we did; at a certain point I realized my brush with kidnapping had left me hungry. When dinnertime came we ate Janeane’s vegan fare, we drank, and periodically Chip received cryptic email bulletins from Thompson, whose cell phone was apparently hooking into the yacht’s WiFi. He was hiding in a closet full of mops, pine oil, and bags of scented kitty litter. Whoever the yacht belonged to liked to keep cats aboard, but Thompson hated cats, claiming their shit could make you schizophrenic. (Chip showed me his email: Cats> civilization> toxoplasmosis> people schiz out OR their brains swell/burst.) The smell of the scented kitty litter was making him, as he wrote Chip, “want to upchuck.”

There was the matter of sleeping arrangements, next, complicated by the fact that we didn’t want to split up. The more of us there were, in one locked space, the stronger our chances — who was to say another contingent of hotel employees wouldn’t show up, this time with firearms and greater powers of coercion? So we decided to camp out on sofas and the floor, posting sentries throughout the night. We’d take shifts, two at a time, one at the front window and one at the sliders; we kept the outside lights on. As Rick pointed out, if they had real brains they’d cut the power to our cabana, but it hadn’t occurred to them to do that, I guess — and here again their incompetence, as adversaries, was helpful.

But before we could sleep there was the problem of Chip’s appointment with the undercover spearfisher. He couldn’t keep it alone, since we didn’t do solo travel. We decided that Rick, Chip, and I would do the sortie.

It seems a little poignant, in retrospect, to think how we armed ourselves with kitchen knives — mine in particular, since it was a bread knife with a rounded end. I didn’t feel comfortable carrying a butcher’s knife, figured I’d slice myself to ribbons. So I took up arms with the bread knife, meaning the worst I could have done to an attacker was scrape him, kind of broadside — cause an abrasion of some kind.

But night served us well as we crept along the backs of buildings. Chip had mapped our route out in his head; he had orienteering skills gained while gaming in made-up lands. We didn’t use flashlights, though Thompson had lent us some, but relied on our eyes and Chip’s sense of direction, and whenever we heard the electric whir of a golf cart in the near distance we’d dodge behind a clump of trees, taking cover.

By and by we fetched up behind the main building, near the bar’s patio, where we were screened from view by an oleander hedge. It was five minutes till the meet time. We stood there wordless, waiting. The tampon spearfisher was late, of course, punctuality wasn’t his strong suit. When he finally stumbled out onto the patio, beer in hand, I could see right away he was a few sheets to the wind.

“Psst!” said Chip. “Over here!”

It took the fisherman a minute to make us out, shadowy figures behind the screen of foliage. He fought his way through branches, swearing; he dropped his beer bottle on the flagstones, making noise, and then complained it had been almost full.

“I have your cash,” said Chip. “But first we need the goods.”

“This is some sneaky shit,” said the fisherman, and actually belched. “So what’s your angle, man? Still trying to keep the mermaids for yourselves?”

“Not for ourselves,” said Chip. “That’s not the point at all.”

“Enough with the chitchat,” said Rick. “You’re here to make a buck, right? What’ve you got? Was there another sighting?”

“Nah,” said the fisherman. “They dropped the nets, though, and those nets are massive, man. We’re talking goddamn miles of them. Saw tons of dolphins.”

It was good, I thought, they hadn’t seen any mermaids, but I felt a pang about those long, long nets. I wondered if they were the kind that scrape along the floor of the ocean, wrecking and killing everything. I’d seen a documentary. They probably were, I cogitated gloomily. Otherwise how could they be sure of sealing it all off?

“Then what’s the plan?” said Chip. “What’s next?”

“Tomorrow we search the grid. They’ve got it all mapped out, you know, into these squares. And as we search, they move the nets. We basically search the area, square by square, right? And as we exclude the squares, we bring the nets closer in.”

“I see,” said Chip. “How about leadership? Who’s in charge of this operation?”

“Shit, I don’t know. They brought in suits from Florida. Plus there’s this geeky professor dude.”

Chip and I exchanged glances.

“An anthropologist? From Berkeley?” I said.

“Yeah, right,” said the spearfisher. “An anthrocologist. Yeah, he’s advising the suits. On search logistics.”

I could barely believe it. Nancy’s old colleague was a turncoat too. You couldn’t trust anyone, in this world we inhabited. Or was he just a stooge? Had they even told this guy what happened to Nancy? Did they secure his help under false pretenses?

My mind has cogs, and they were spinning.

“So what’s their endgame?” prodded Chip. “They want to, what? Sell tickets? To this Venture of Marvels? Sell tickets to see the mermaids?”

“Biggest tourist destination in the world,” slurred the fisherman. “It’ll be like Disneyland. You kidding me?”

“They already do fine with tourism,” demurred Rick.

“But see, the reefs, man,” slurred the fisherman. “Everyone knows they’re bleaching. Everyone knows they’re dying out. Shit. You can see it with the naked eye. Every reef man knows. I’m a reef man, see? But it’s some dying shit, those reefs. The reefs are done, dude. Done like a dinner. Global-ass warming. Acid oceans. Hey. Can I go in, get me another brew? I’ll come out again.”

“No, man,” said Chip. “Come on. Talk to us first. Then get your beer.”

“Killjoy,” said the fisherman. “Listen. It’s too bad, but the reefs are over. This is the next big thing, my dudes. Without the coral reefs, out here, we don’t have shit. Sand, water, you can get that boring crap in Florida. Hell, even in Jersey. This is the next big meal ticket. Man, this is it. I mean this is all we’ve got.”

And with that he held out his hand for the cash.

IT’S FAIR TO say we felt downcast, as we walked back to the cabana. I was remembering the first dinner with Nancy, when she’d said the same thing — except for the part about mermaids and meal tickets, of course. I know all about economic incentives; it’s my job. This was a big machine, I thought. A big machine you couldn’t stop. Once it was started, it kept moving. And who were we? We were honeymooners, tourists. We didn’t even live here.

“But they’re overlooking something,” said Rick suddenly, just as we reached the Pearl Diver. We were going in from the back, the way we’d come out, fighting our way through more flowering hedges to get to the patio. “That’s what Nancy would say. They’re overlooking one major aspect, if that’s their plan.”

“What’s that, Rick,” said Chip wearily.

“The likelihood that the mermaids also depend on the reefs,” said Rick.

We stood there, on the patio, Chip and Rick and I.

“Exactly!” said Chip.

“That’s where we saw them,” said Rick. “It’s probably their home. Just like so many other fish-type animals, right? Sure, we don’t know their biology yet, Nancy’d be the first to admit it. But chances are, the reefs are probably a major food source for them. Their hunting grounds, as it were.”

We nodded slowly, all three of us, like so many bobbleheads on my coworker’s computer.

“Then, to have the mermaids to show off for tourists, they’d have to save the reefs,” I said. “Right?”

“Easier said than done,” said Rick.

“But that has to be part of our message,” I urged. “What we broadcast with Miyoko. That they’re wrong, these mermaid hucksters have it totally wrong. They can’t use mermaids as their meal ticket when all the reefs are gone. It’s not either/or — it’s both.”

“I bet they plan to feed the mermaids,” said Chip. “They’ll make, like, kind of a zoo for them, I bet. Like, artificial reefs.”

Then we all felt discouraged again. A mermaid zoo. Yep: we could see that happening in a heartbeat.

It was a rollercoaster for us, the hope followed by the disappointment.

MIYOKO, I THINK, stayed up most of the night working on footage for the “B-roll,” as she put it. I slept a total of four hours, tossing and turning on my blanket on the narrow couch when I wasn’t on sentry duty. Chip slept even less; he finally settled down at three only to wake up again at five, when he received a text from Thompson: Santa Claus was coming down the chimney.

Chip didn’t wake me up right then — he was worried about me getting enough sleep after what Janeane called the psychic trauma of the kidnapping—but when dawn came I was woken by the soughing, restless trade winds rattling the palm fronds.

And then he told me right away.

I think it was the first time I’d seen him crack a real smile since Nancy.

I donned some fresh clothes borrowed from Janeane, since I didn’t want to wear my bikini for another day running, so I was dressed like a bona fide hippie, in a flowing, brightly colored dress that looked to me like maternity wear, when Thompson knocked on the sliding doors. And when I pulled the curtain back he raised two fingers in the V of victory.

I FOUND I warmed to Thompson quite a bit, after that. I appreciate a person who can get things done. And though his methods are sketchy, i.e. illegal, unsafe, and destructive, Thompson simply is such a person.

For here was our tape — now in the form of a shining silver unmarked DVD — and there, right on the screen when we popped that disc into the drive on the side of Miyoko’s laptop, were the mermaids, just as I remembered them. As soon as I saw that familiar footage, I had a renewed appreciation for the cunning and expertise of our nation’s armed forces, and in particular the Navy. A sigh of delight ushered from us — a sigh, some whoops, a couple of happily uttered swear words. Thompson was embraced, clapped on the back, heartily congratulated and thanked.

Had he been discovered? asked Chip. Had he met with any resistance?

Thompson shook his head. Surgical strike. He’d actually encountered people a few times, he said, as he made his rounds of the yacht, rummaging in strangers’ rooms and belongings; but he’d played it cool, like his presence was completely authorized, and no one ever questioned him.

“Well, not quite true,” he admitted. “A drunk woman asked me what my star sign was. A lady of a certain age. But I told it to her straight: I don’t give a shit about star signs, and I like my ladies young.”

“You’re a hard case,” said Chip.

“Huh. Not too young, I hope,” said I.

We drank some coffee and planned the logistics of our media strike. Go time was 8 a.m., the hour of Miyoko’s program in Japan, I guess, which came on at night, around the same time as the news. We wouldn’t be able to hide, once we were broadcasting, so the stealth team was going to be retasked: their new job was security. We’d make a circle around Miyoko, except for Rick, who would be filming her, and me and Chip, who would be guarding Rick. (Janeane would stay in the cabana, to guard it, as she said, though frankly Janeane couldn’t guard a hamster. She didn’t like to be alone there, she conceded, but she’d done it the day before and she could do it again.) Miyoko had to send the mermaid footage first — she swore her producers were trustworthy — and that would take a while to upload to their server, along with her B-roll, so we were on a tight schedule. She bent over her computer, focused, industrious.

“No guns, right?” I asked Thompson. “No guns.”

“Agreed,” he said. “Guns would attract undue attention. Give the rent-a-cops an obvious excuse. However, we will have other weapons. From my martial-arts collection. I stashed them in my jeep. Mostly numchucks. Correctly known as nunchaku.”

“No way,” said Chip, gleeful. “That’s pretty rad.”

“You’ll need a brief tutorial,” said Thompson. “It’s an ancient art form. No hope you kids will master it. We’re shooting to look credible, that’s it. A fifteen-minute tutorial will have to do.”

So the security team set off for the jeep, while we women, and Rick, stayed in the Pearl Diver, Miyoko typing away, Rick fiddling with his camera obscurely. Before I knew it Miyoko was done with her script-typing — she’d put in what we asked her to about the mermaids likely depending on the reefs; she’d reviewed and even memorized it — and moved on to her makeup. She didn’t have her professional kit with her, she said, but she had some odds and ends; before long, with the aid of some hair gel, eyeliner and fake eyelashes, she was a hipster Tokyo VJ again. She even stuck a small jewel to the side of her nose, to look like a piercing, I guess.

When our security detail returned — Chip swinging his numchucks happily like a man who’d been born to them, Ronnie carrying the things with what I can only describe as distaste — we loaded up our tech and, after a cringe-inducing breathing exercise mandated and led by Janeane, set out across campus. We were passing the side of the main building, trying to keep a low profile (the numchucks, at that point, were largely out of view) when a group of new arrivals filed into the lobby lugging their suitcases. We turned our faces away, avoiding eye contact studiously until I heard, behind my back, a British-accented voice call out, “What ho!”

I feared — all of us feared — an obstruction to our progress toward the beach from the minions of the parent company. And so I turned slightly, a wary, even hostile look upon my face, no doubt.

And there I saw not minions of said parent company but two highly familiar faces and forms. Standing in front of the lobby, smiling widely, were none other than my friends Ellis. And Gina.