Erin Hart: False Mermaid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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