Erin Hart: False Mermaid

“For I have seen the false mermaid—” she whispered.

Devaney exchanged a quick look with Cormac. “Well, I’ll leave you. That’s all the news I’ve got for now. I’d better get back to Róisín before she’s completely corrupted by all these Donegal tunes. Give us a shout if you need anything, right?”

After Devaney left them, Nora was silent a long time, staring down at her empty whiskey glass. “Why didn’t she come to me, Cormac? Why wouldn’t she trust me? I could have done something to help her—”

Suddenly the musicians hushed, and all ears in the pub tuned to the sound of an old woman singing. Only a few words of Irish came through; the other sounds seemed nonsensical, a series of long, plaintive vowels. But the leathery voice was so full of experience and grief that all who heard it were mesmerized, unable to move until the last note faded away. Nora swiped at her eyes.

“Who was that singing?” Cormac asked the barman, who’d come to collect their empty glasses.

“Ah, that’s Kitty Sean Cunningham. From Cappagh, just above Teelin. Seventy-eight last Monday week, but she can still wind a good song.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “They say she used to sing, out collecting seaweed, and the seals would come up onto the rocks and listen. Not everyone can call them. But Kitty has the power, they say, because her grandmother was one of ’em.”

“And people still believe that?” Cormac asked.

The barman smiled. “Ah, sure, no one believes the old stories anymore. But like my granny used to say, that doesn’t mean they aren’t true. Can I get you another drink?”

“No thanks,” Cormac said. “We’re finished here.”

As they left the bar, Nora still felt stunned. Devaney’s report dredged up all sorts of dreadful possibilities about what Tríona had gone through in those last few weeks. Each new realization brought fresh pain. Cormac followed her outside, apparently unsure what he should say. What could he say?

At the car, she turned to him. “Do you realize what this means? All this time, I thought Peter was just possessive and jealous. That he killed Tríona—had her killed—because he couldn’t bear to let her go. But it wasn’t that kind of jealousy at all. It was a different kind. He was taking her clothes, Cormac, wearing them down to the river. He didn’t just want to possess Tríona, he wanted to be her—I never understood until now.”

“Nora, what are you saying?”

“All those awful things he accused her of—the drugs and the late nights, the sex with random strangers—Tríona didn’t have any memory of doing those things, because she never did them. He did. And she must have found out somehow. That’s what she was trying to tell me, when she talked about letting things go too far. But she gave him the benefit of the doubt. Right up until the very end. Even after she knew he was deliberately tormenting her, she still wouldn’t believe it. My God—it’s all so twisted.” Though the night was warm, Nora couldn’t keep from shivering. “And it just keeps getting worse. How could he have fooled us for so long—how could we not see what he was? He must have realized that Tríona would try to leave him sooner or later, that eventually she’d begin to figure it out.”

“But just as he was getting desperate enough to act, Miranda came onto the scene, mad jealous of Natalie Russo,” Cormac said. “She played right into his hand.”

“Oh, Cormac—how can I ever tell Elizabeth any of this? It’s all so insane.”

“Don’t think about it, not tonight. Let me take you home.”

The next morning, Cormac awakened to find Nora beside him in bed, the fingers of her right hand laced through his. They’d managed to make it through the night, but neither of them had slept well. He could see that the revelations of the previous evening had not loosed their grip on Nora. She looked pale, exhausted. And her parents were due to arrive in less than six hours. That meant everything would be gone over again, in detail, including Elizabeth’s accusations, and he could not save her from any of it.

Nora’s eyes were closed, but she was awake. He touched her face. “I meant to ask, where’s your hazel knot—the one I made you out at Loughnabrone?”

Her hand slipped from his. “It must have fallen out of my pocket the night of the crash. I kept it with me, Cormac, I swear. Right here in my pocket—” She leaned down to pick up her jeans from the floor, showing him where she’d kept it.

A crinkled bit of fabric peeped from the pocket, and he pulled it out, surprised to find an old-fashioned woolen stocking. “What’s this?”

“I’d almost forgotten about that,” she said. “I think an eagle dropped it on me, over at Port na Rón.”

Cormac held the stocking up to the light. Fine black wool—and the heel was neatly darned. He felt a vibration, the same frequency as when he’d first laid eyes on the high-button shoe from the abandoned cottage.

Nora continued: “I’m not sure why I kept it. An odd thing to find at a beach, I guess.”

“Could you show me exactly where you found it?”

“What is it, Cormac? What’s wrong?”

“I’ll explain when we get there.”

At the deserted village, they climbed down the rocky escarpment. Cormac glanced up at the craggy rocks, and at the steep bank that fell away above the beach. The enormous heap of pale stones had washed out of the boggy earth above them.

“Tell me what you saw that day,” he said to Nora.

“When we first arrived at the beach, I was standing here,” she said. “Elizabeth was on the rocks over there—” She pointed out a trio of flat stones at the north edge of the bay. “I was watching her, but something—a movement up there—distracted me. It was a pair of sea eagles. I’ve never seen two of them together like that. They were fighting over something.” She cast her eyes about for the exact spot. “Look, there’s one of them now—”

She set off climbing up the rocks, and Cormac followed. By the time they reached the top of the eroding bank, the eagle was long gone. But as they drew near, Cormac could see where the giant bird had been perched. The stony ground was covered in a blanket of peat that stretched to the edge of the escarpment. He crouched down for a closer look. The edge was unstable; one false move, and you might do a header right down onto the beach below—unless you had wings, of course. Two pairs of talons had made a series of gashes in the soft ground where the two birds had been wrestling. Cormac edged closer to the brink to push aside the drying edge of peat, and drew back in surprise.

“What is it?” Nora asked.

“I’ll let you see for yourself.” He grasped Nora’s hand as she leaned forward. What they were looking at was a human foot, mostly stripped of flesh, the toe delicately pointed seaward. Beside it, the toe of an old-fashioned shoe had begun to surface from under the peat.

“She’s here,” Cormac murmured. “She was right here under their noses all along.”

“What are you talking about?” Nora demanded.

He moved to where the woman’s head should be if this was a normal supine burial, and pulled out his pocketknife, cutting through the grass carpet and peeling it back to expose the wet peat underneath. As he dug with bare hands, he wondered: What would the face of a sea maid look like? Would she still have her beauty after years under the peat, like the cailín rua ? His mind conjured the curious faces, the mournful eyes of the seals who surrounded him while he was out rowing. At last his fingers felt something—the roundness of a cranium vault. But as he worked to remove the peat, in the place where he expected to find a forehead, a brow ridge, a nose, there was nothing but a shallow depression and a fistful of splintered bones. Whoever this woman was, her face had been battered in, her identity effectively erased.