False Mermaid

He drove the rest of the way to the station on hyperalert, conscious of every turn and traffic signal. It wasn’t the first time he’d suddenly awakened from a reverie in the middle of traffic, sometimes miles from where he’d last been paying attention.

The usual culprits joined the lineup in his head: overwork, lack of sleep, lousy food, too much to drink last night. He hadn’t been to the gym in months; there was never any time. The way things were going, he wouldn’t pass his next fitness test. He’d seen it happen often enough to recognize the signs. This was the way it came, the beginning of the end.

Pulling into his parking space, he lifted his hands from the steering wheel to find they were still shaking. He reached up to the rearview mirror and, tilting it downward, found himself staring into an unfamiliar pair of dark eyes. Suddenly disconcerted, he flipped the mirror back, but could still feel that baleful gaze upon him, burned into memory like something from a bad dream.

7

Thirty minutes after Frank Cordova dropped her at the curb, Nora was in her rental car and on her way to Hidden Falls Park. Holly Blume’s parting words had only added to the creeping horror that had settled on her in the morgue this morning. Natalie Russo’s death had something to do with Tríona, she was sure of it. But dead certainty was not the same as proof.

After Tríona’s body was discovered in her car trunk, forensic details had come out only gradually. Buck Callaway estimated that death had occurred in the early hours of Saturday morning, probably sometime between midnight and 4 A.M. The seeds and leaves Holly Blume had identified from Tríona’s hair pointed to a seepage swamp—a place just like the boggy spot where Natalie Russo’s body had been buried.

On the map, the Mississippi meandered gracefully through the city of Saint Paul, from the leafy gorge on its western edge, to the railheads and stockyards of the east. Hidden Falls was just over four miles directly southwest of Crocus Hill, and it was a span Nora could have driven blindfolded. She headed west on Saint Clair, and turned south onto the river road. Just past the sprawling Ford plant, she made a soft right into the entrance of Hidden Falls Park. The parklands traced the southern edge of the only natural gorge along the Mississippi. The road plunged down a steep ravine, coming to an end at parking lots for the picnic grounds and boat landing along the river bottom. Nora knew the place well. The river was one of the few wild spots within city limits, and she had spent a lot of time here at Hidden Falls as an adolescent, collecting specimens, drawing interesting plants and insects, amazed at all the life-and-death drama in miniature going on below most human radar.

Parking in the lot next to the picnic shelter, she cast a glance in the direction of the river. Still high for this time of year. In midsummer, depending on the rains, the river sometimes had no visible current, but the water moved along under the surface all the same—she used to imagine the endless flow stirring the whiskers of huge carp that lurked along the muddy riverbed.

Because of the gorge, this stretch of river had long been a no-man’s-land, a strip of wildness and disorder cutting through the heart of civilization. Sometimes the park seemed perfectly harmless, with families picnicking, people walking their dogs; at other times it seemed forbidden and even dangerous, the sort of place where female joggers would be discouraged from running alone. It was common knowledge that high school kids ran keg parties on the sandbar below the veterans’ home; a mile or two in either direction were a couple of notorious gay cruising spots. For years, rumors of drinking and drugs and anonymous sex at the river’s edge had floated above into the real world. People came here to be someone else, to indulge appetites and fantasies they wouldn’t dream of admitting. Most understood that they were courting danger; no doubt for some of them, it was part of the attraction. Nora began to feel a vague unease, knowing what lay ahead among the chest-high undergrowth and layers of dead leaves underfoot. The fallen leaves and tangled branches of the forest floor suddenly seemed sinister, part of a teeming underworld of decay and corruption.

A few yards away, a man sat alone in a green pickup. Nora felt his eyes upon her as she walked past, but when she glanced up, he was staring at the river. She knew Frank wouldn’t approve of her coming down here alone, but it was broad daylight, and she couldn’t expect him to be her minder. He had enough to do. And she had to see it for herself, the place where Natalie Russo had been found. Slinging her backpack onto one shoulder, she locked the car and started on foot in the direction of the falls, glancing behind to make sure no one was following.