False Mermaid

“If things between her and Heaney were as bad as all that, what kept her from leaving? Why stay with him?”

“What keeps any woman in a bad relationship? It’s one of those age-old mysteries. Unsolvable.” Roz considered for a moment. “This wouldn’t be anything to do with your person over in the States, would it?”

Cormac didn’t seem able to respond. Part of him longed to retreat, sorry he’d ever opened that door.

Roz said quietly: “You don’t have to tell me.”

It suddenly occurred to him what Roz might surmise—that it was Nora who was trying to get away. “It’s not what you think.” Roz kept her eyes on the road, which seemed to make it easier to begin. “Nora’s sister was murdered, five years ago. The sister’s husband is the main suspect, always has been, but they’ve got no evidence against him. He’s never been charged, never even arrested. Nora’s gone back to see if she can’t dig up some new evidence, and I was going over to see if I could help—”

“I am sorry, Cormac. I didn’t realize.”

“It goes against all reason, staying with someone who actually takes pleasure from hurting you. And yet people stay. How do you account for it if you don’t believe in enchantment?”

“What do you know about the murder?”

“Not a lot. Nora hasn’t actually told me much about it. I think she feels guilty for not seeing things earlier, not doing more to help. The husband was some sort of a brute, apparently. What really tears Nora up is the idea that her sister still loved him, in spite of everything.”

“Is that so difficult to believe? We’re complex creatures, with complicated motivations and desires, divisions even within ourselves.”

They were approaching a crossroads. Roz pulled up and glanced over at him. “Will you bear with me a little while? There’s something I’d like to show you.”

He nodded his assent, and she turned from the main coast road and headed back up into the hills. Ten minutes later, they were rattling over a narrow road atop a heathery mountain. “Do you know where we are? Your father’s house is just the other side of this headland,” Roz said. As the car came over the mountain’s crest, the sun disappeared behind clouds, and a slight mist began to blow against the windscreen. The road wound down along a mountain stream, and finally ended in a sort of rough patch of gravel where a footbridge crossed the flowing water to a rude path on the other side. Cormac climbed out of the car and surveyed the handful of ruins perched on the slope above a rocky beach and a disused pier. Stone walls cut the hilly outcrop into smaller fields, which were even further reduced by wire fencing. A few houses with corrugated metal roofs were apparently still in use as sheep sheds. There was no sign of life anywhere at the moment, even of the ovine variety, despite ample evidence of their recent presence underfoot. Cormac could hear the surf rolling on the beach—a distinct, hollow rattling of stone on stone. “What is this place?” he asked Roz.

“It’s called Port na Rón.”

Seal Harbor, in English. But port was one of those words that held a double meaning. In addition to “harbor,” it also meant “tune.” The music of the seals.

Roz continued: “The caves at the far side of the harbor are a rookery for gray seals. It’s out of the way, but this used to be quite a busy place—a haven for smugglers and pirates, people tell me. It’s been abandoned for years, but that house”—she pointed to a dilapidated cottage on the far side of the stream—“that’s where Mary Heaney lived. I just tracked down the landowner and got permission to have a look around inside.”

They crossed the bridge and climbed the rutted path to the Heaney cottage, four stone walls topped with crumbling thatch, home now to birds’ nests and sprouting weeds. Nettles grew waist-high around the back and sides of the house, a typical Donegal fisherman’s cottage, low to the ground, with small windows and a piggyback roof. No overhang—the wind here didn’t need much foothold.

Cormac bent over to pick up a grapefruit-sized stone, measuring its weight in his hand. A dozen more lay scattered along the cottage walls. Tied together with rope and tossed over the top, they would have been all that kept the thatch from blowing away in a gale. He dropped the stone back on the path. “It’s amazing this place wasn’t pulled down ages ago.”

“No one will go near it; the locals say there’s an unlucky air about the place. Even more bad luck to him who pulls it down.”

“Whatever happened to Heaney and his children?”

“Did I not tell you? Six years after his wife disappeared, Heaney himself vanished. His boat was found adrift out in the bay, but no body ever turned up. The children were shipped off to some cousins near Buncrana. I found records of a Patrick Heaney from Buncrana killed at Gallipoli in 1916, but I haven’t been able to verify that it was the same one from Port na Rón.”

“And the daughter?” Cormac couldn’t help thinking of Nora’s niece, only a child when her mother was killed.