False Mermaid

Ireland and Brittany remain especially the regions in which fairy beliefs widely prevail; and the attachment of the people there to religion may have something to do with the continuance of the belief in fairies…

There is a queer imagination about this. When fairies want to take a person away from this world into fairy-land, the Irish say that they make the person melancholy, tired of life. If you are melancholy and do not care whether you live or die, the fairies get power to take you away. You die and your soul becomes a fairy… Mysterious disappearances of peasant women are sometimes thus accounted for in Ireland. Very possibly the woman has been killed, or lost in a bog.

—Life and Literature, by Lafcadio Hearn, from a series of lectures delivered at the University of Tokyo between 1896 and 1902, selected and edited with an introduction by John Erskine, Ph.D., Professor of English at Columbia University, 1917

1

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.

2

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.