Erin Hart: False Mermaid

“Anytime. If you wanted to drop by after practice tomorrow—”

“I’ll be there.”

“You might not believe this, but when you called, I had just picked up the phone to call you. I’m organizing a kind of a memorial for Natalie. She wasn’t religious—neither am I, really—but I thought a few of us could meet down at the river some evening next week, maybe go out on the water for a while. A sort of remembrance. I can tell you more about it tomorrow.”

“That sounds good. See you then.”

As Frank passed through the station’s front lobby a few minutes later, the duty sergeant waved him over, indicating a figure slumped in one of the plastic chairs beside the front door. Truman Stark sat with his hands clasped before him, staring at the floor between his feet, both legs jigging to some internal rhythm.

“Somebody to see you, Detective. Wouldn’t give a name. Says he’s got information for you on an accidental death.”

In the interview room, Truman Stark once again avoided eye contact. And once again, Frank waited. The kid asked to see him. Maybe his hunch had been right; maybe Stark hadn’t spilled everything. A bit of a childhood prayer ran through Frank’s head: Ruega por nosotros pecadores. Pray for us sinners. Ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte —now and at the hour of our death.

He leaned back in his chair, trying to put the kid at ease. “When you were here before, you said if you told the truth, I wouldn’t believe. Why don’t you try me?”

It was clear that Truman Stark had made up his mind to tell what he knew. He just had no idea how to begin.

“The duty officer said you mentioned an accidental death—” Frank prompted.

Stark nodded. “Five years ago, in the Sturgis Building.”

“Didn’t happen to be a guy named Nick Mosher—the guy who fell down the elevator shaft?”

“I was there—” The kid looked as if he might choke.

“Relax, Truman. We’re in no hurry here.”

Stark nodded, and settled his shoulders. “I followed the redhead to the Sturgis Building that day. She met up with this guy on the fourth floor. He was wearing dark glasses.”

“Nick Mosher.”

“That was the last time I saw her, I swear.”

“Did she seem happy to see Mosher?”

The memory clearly pained him. “She kissed him.”

“Just a friendly kiss, or something more?”

“I don’t know—why are you asking me? She kissed him, and handed over a coffee she’d brought him from downstairs.”

“And then?”

“I hit the elevator button. I wasn’t going to stick around. I had to get back to work.”

An image began to form in the back of Frank’s brain. The flowers, the jilted lover. He kept quiet—the kid might clam up. “So you don’t know what Tríona Hallett was doing on the fourth floor of the Sturgis Building that day?”

Stark shook his head.

“But you had some idea?”

“I knew she was married. I thought maybe she was fooling around.”

“And you wanted to get your feet wet as a private eye, was that it?”

“No—no. I just wanted to find out why she was always looking over her shoulder. I saw the blonde following her a couple of days before. I thought maybe the blonde was a private eye the husband sent to check up on things.”

“You didn’t know who the redhead’s husband was?”

“Not then, no. I saw his picture in the paper, after—”

“Let’s get back to that day. You go back to work, you put in your shift, until what time?”

“Nine. I might have left the ramp around nine-fifteen.”

“And then—”

“I went back to the Sturgis Building.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know—”

“To see if the redhead was still there?”

“I told you, I don’t know why.” Stark was getting agitated. “I got in the elevator—it was the old-fashioned kind, with the gate that comes down—”

“A freight elevator.”

“I didn’t see anybody around, so I opened the gate on the fourth floor and got off. Then somebody upstairs must have called the elevator, ’cause it took off.”

“With the gate still open?”

“Yeah. Some of these old buildings—I had my flashlight, so I took a look down into the shaft, to see what I could see. And then I hear this voice behind me—‘Careful. It’s a long way to the bottom.’ It was the blind guy I saw earlier. I wondered how he knew the elevator wasn’t there. He says to me, ‘You were on that elevator, weren’t you? This afternoon.’ And I’m thinking—how the fuck does he know that? He’s blind. So I asked him, and he says—” Truman’s voice had dropped to a whisper. Shame rolled off him in waves. “He says, ‘Because you still smell of those flowers you were holding.’ Next thing I know, he’s behind me—” Frank stopped breathing. “And he—puts his hands on me. What did he have to go and do that for? I’m not a fucking queer. I had to get him off me, and it just—happened.”

Unburdened at last, Truman Stark laid his head on the table and sobbed like a child.

All night, Nora had tried to sleep and failed. It was something of a reversal; Cormac was the usual insomniac. She lay beside him in the gray morning light, listening to the pulse of the surf outside, reading a musty old volume she’d pulled from a bookcase behind the door— Ortha na nGael: Hymns and Incantations —a compilation of verses collected in western Donegal in the late nineteenth century. Most were dressed up as Christian prayers, invoking the trinity or the Virgin or Saint Brigid, but retained their old shapes from the time before trinities had anything to do with Christ. The verses had been translated from the Irish, no doubt filtered through the transcriber’s Victorian sensibility, but much of the beauty and plainness of the original language remained. Even written on the page, their repetitive rhythms still held the power of incantations.

In addition to the prayers, there were stories of shape-changers, and eerie lullabies; charms for all sorts of bodily afflictions, for fire smooring and night shielding; invocations addressing the moon and sun, for rituals of birth and death, and blessings for all sorts of animals, and not only cattle and sheep, but the wild beasts that figured in the local mythology as well: the salmon and the swan, the bull, the horse, the otter and the limpet, the seal. Rare glimpses into the rhythm of daily life in a place that had been for centuries the last outpost of the known world.

Nora closed her eyes, hearing the music of the words, seeing the images they brought forth, of darkness and light, of work and harvest, the damp breath of animals. The words carried a palpable sense of wonder from the people who had composed and repeated them so many generations before. Nora looked back at the book on her lap, fallen open to a charm against drowning. The words of the last stanza seemed to float up off the page:

She closed the book and set it aside. How did someone even attempt to carry the great surging sea?

Nearly two weeks had passed since her parents had arrived to take Elizabeth home with them to Saint Paul. Two weeks since the return of her hazel knot, discovered along a river path by Seng Sotharith, and two weeks since she learned that her parents had taken her protector in, that he would be staying in her old room and embarking on studies that would eventually transform him into a physician’s assistant.