False Mermaid

She had already begun to go back over leads, looking for any loose threads that might begin an unraveling. There were a few facts she had never told anyone—not Cormac, and certainly not her parents. Forensic details that simply didn’t fit. The liquid ecstasy in Tríona’s purse was one. That glazed look in her eyes the night of the museum opening was another. What if pulling on any of these loose threads began to destroy her parents’ idealized picture of Tríona? Wouldn’t that be like killing her all over again? How willing was she to risk putting her mother and father through a second wrenching loss? She tried to summon the resolve she had felt on the plane this afternoon. No stopping this time. No going back.

A heavy fatigue had begun to settle in her limbs—apart from a nap on the plane, she hadn’t slept in almost thirty-six hours. It wasn’t too late to call her parents or Frank Cordova. What was she waiting for? Digging a small address book out of her bag, she looked up Frank’s home number, but hesitated before dialing.

He’d been the lead investigator, the person who had pulled her away from Tríona’s body in the mortuary. Two days ago, she had phoned Frank from Dublin to let him know she was coming home, and was relieved when the call went straight into his voice mail. She had left a rambling message, promising to call when she got in. He’d rung back the same day, but the conversation had been awkward. Frank Cordova had not forgiven her for running away.

For three years she’d tried hard not to think about the last time she’d seen him. They’d both been working around the clock, barely eating or sleeping, getting nowhere on the case. It wasn’t that Frank had ever taken advantage—if anything, it had been exactly the other way around. She remembered the desperate craving she had felt for a human touch, something to ease the pain. What she’d needed most that night was a respite from betrayal and brutality, a few hours not spent thinking about death. Not thinking at all. Of course, like all cravings, her need was short-lived. By the time the sun rose the next morning, she knew that her one night with Frank Cordova had been an admission of failure, a leave-taking of sorts. Frank had surely felt it too.

But whatever had possessed them that night was history now. So much had changed in the three years she’d been away, for her, and no doubt for him. She felt an involuntary twinge, imagining him with someone else—he could be married, maybe even a father by now. He’d said nothing about his personal life in their recent phone conversation, and neither had she. Better to call him at work in the morning, make it official.

That left her parents. She imagined the stony set of her father’s jaw, her mother’s gentler mien—they had always made a perfect pair of foils. But she ought to prepare for a shock upon seeing them. After three years, they would almost certainly seem older than she remembered. After pressing their number into the phone, she sat staring at the familiar string of digits, unsure what to say. She had told them she was coming home, of course, but hadn’t mentioned exactly when or for how long. The truth was that she didn’t want them meeting her at the airport, as if this were an ordinary homecoming like any other. All at once she was overtaken by a strong need to see them, to sit in the same room and breathe the same air, even if nothing in her childhood home could ever be what it had been before Tríona’s death. She snapped the phone closed and headed downstairs.

She had grown used to late midsummer sunsets in Ireland, and found it surprisingly dark outside. The wall of humidity also came as a shock after the air-conditioned apartment, but within a few minutes her body adjusted, settling into the dewy atmosphere. She had nearly forgotten the sheer physical pleasures of a summer night, with a warm breeze stirring the trees, the brightest stars and the planets visible. She cut down the hill to Grand Avenue, then crossed over and followed the curved sidewalks into Crocus Hill, the tiny pocket of a neighborhood that looked out over the river flats to the bluffs on the opposite shore. The broad streets here, even the shapes of the houses, seemed strange after three years away. Perhaps it was only the darkness. Pools of shadow seemed about to swallow up the pin oaks and lindens; the trees themselves were devoid of color, recognizable only by their silhouettes, the peculiar rustlings they made in the night air.