Erin Hart - False Mermaid

“But I saw it—I watched her fall.”

“Come on,” he said. He pulled her to her feet, and they both scrambled down the steep slope to the rocky beach.

Standing at the water’s edge, Nora spotted something floating on the surface a short distance away—what seemed like a human form, strangely buoyant. It was not possible. She closed her eyes and opened them again. It was.

Elizabeth floated, face up in the shallow surf, tangled in a raft of seaweed. Nora waded out and ran her hands over the child’s slack limbs, feeling for fractures. There seemed to be none. A few scratches and scrapes, but no other outward signs of injury. How could that be? A faint snuffling noise made her turn, just in time to catch sight of a gray seal retreating into the waves. The animal turned to face her, one good eye clearly visible. It let out a single, plaintive bark before plunging into the surf.

Nora sank to her knees in the lapping water, cradling Elizabeth and smoothing her still-ragged hair. Suddenly Cormac was beside her, sinking down to catch the two of them in his arms, murmuring: “Ah no, please—”

Nora looked down at the smooth, insensible face of the child in her arms, then reached up to touch his face. “No, Cormac—she’s alive. She lives.”

Frank Cordova held the phone receiver to his ear, unsure that he had heard correctly. He felt as if he’d taken a hard punch to the sternum. It didn’t seem possible that Peter Hallett was dead. Five long years and it was all over, just like that.

Miranda Staunton had confessed to killing Tríona, but everything he had suspected since that conversation with Gordon MacLeish was true. Peter Hallett had murdered his wife as surely as if he had crushed her skull himself. Just as he had murdered his aunt and uncle all those years ago in Maine. But when Nora told him how it all went down, Frank hadn’t felt vindicated at all—he felt robbed, cheated out of his chance to look that bastard in the face inside a courtroom, to present the evidence and hear the word pronounced from the bench: Guilty .

Did Nora feel as betrayed as he did, the whole focus of her life for the past five years suddenly snatched away? Maybe she’d found something else to replace it already. The pain in his chest wouldn’t seem to go away.

“Frank—are you still there?” Her voice sounded distant. “There’s so much we haven’t talked about—”

He felt her presence at the other end of the connection and wondered if things had been different between them, if they had met in other circumstances—

But things had been as they were. Nothing to be done about it now. He cleared his throat. “I should let you get back to Elizabeth. Thanks for calling—”

After a pause, she said: “Look after yourself, Frank.” He closed his eyes and felt her hand brush against his face as it had that one brief, haunting night. “Promise me.”

“You too.” He felt the door of possibility about to close again, this time forever. “Good-bye, Nora.”

He hung up the phone. Looking at the piles on his desk, thinking about all the misdirected, messed-up lives they represented, he felt an immense, cavernous emptiness. It was as if all his insides had been removed, and the open space left behind had been scoured clean. And yet there was one thing, one tiny detail that tugged at him: how Elizabeth Hallett had not only survived a fall that had killed her father and Miranda, but was apparently uninjured. Sometimes the innocents survived. The only way to describe it was miraculous.

Milagroso! The word fluttered up from somewhere inside him, and with it he felt the breath of the curandero ’s fan.

After washing up on the beach at Port na Rón, Elizabeth slept. She was not in a coma, the doctors said, but in a state of hypersomnia, long hours of deep slumber from which she could be roused only with great difficulty. Her eyes would open occasionally, but the wakefulness didn’t last. The larger mystery, from a medical standpoint, was how she hadn’t sustained any major physical injuries—either internal or external—in her fall from the cliff. No one could explain it.

Nora barely left Elizabeth’s bedside at the hospital. She spent the night in a chair. Now she stood looking down at her niece, and noticed the child’s eyes moving almost imperceptibly under their lids in the dim half light. What did Elizabeth dream about, in that mysterious, overpowering sleep? Given all that had happened, no one could blame her for not wanting to wake to the world again. Seized by a sudden stab of fear, Nora leaned forward and spoke softly into Elizabeth’s ear: “Come back to us, Lizzabet—you’re not finished here.”

Elizabeth stirred and drew a deep breath as though finally surfacing. She pushed herself up from the pillow and opened her eyes, though she didn’t seem completely conscious. Nora reached out to rouse Cormac, who was dozing in the chair in the corner.

“I’ll get the nurse,” he said, and quickly headed off down the hall.

“I’m thirsty,” Elizabeth murmured.

Nora poured a glass of water and pressed it into her niece’s hand. “How are you feeling?”

“Where’s my dad? I have to see my dad.”

Nora moved closer. “What about something to eat?”

Elizabeth shook her head and gave a great yawn as she sank back on the pillow again. “No, I just want to see my dad. Where is he?”

“He’s—not here, Lizzabet.”

“What do you mean? Where is he?” She seemed to understand that something was not right, and sat up in the bed, regarding Nora with alarm, as if she suspected some conspiracy. “Why won’t you tell me where he is?”

“Oh, Lizzabet. He fell, out at the harbor—there was a struggle, and he and Miranda fell—” She couldn’t say any more.

Elizabeth drew herself up against the headboard. Her voice was a whisper: “He’s dead, isn’t he? My daddy is dead?”

Nora could only nod. She reached out, but Elizabeth pushed her hand away, and began to thrash under the bedclothes as the memories began to return. “I heard, all that stuff you said about him to Miranda. It’s not true—it can’t be. You’re a liar!” She struck out, landing a few hard slaps before Nora could fend her off. “Why would you say those things? You’re nothing but a stinking liar!”

Nora tried to move closer, to calm her. “Lizzabet, please listen, please—”