False Mermaid

“Just want you to know—” He took the cards and the passport and stuffed them back into his pockets. “I’ve got to go up to Skerries. Wouldn’t feel right, leaving the little one without seeing how she’s getting on. I just keep thinking—what if she was me own kid?”

As Nora got into the car, she spied a snapshot tucked into the driver’s side visor. Three boys and a girl, all between the ages of six and twelve, and all dark-haired and blue-eyed, like the man beside her. “Your kids?”

“Ah, yeah, but that’s an old picture. The eldest, Damien, he’s nearly sixteen. Jaysus, where does the time get to?”

From the airport, they drove on in silence out the M1, through the village of Swords. Sean Meehan pulled a pack of Majors from his pocket and lit one up. Then he spoke, as though he’d been thinking about it for a while: “It’s not as if you can just make a child disappear. They’re sure to be on the lookout for her. What’ll you do?”

“I don’t know. Try to find somewhere to lie low, I suppose. We’re digging for new evidence on my brother-in-law at home, but whether it’ll turn into anything—”

“Want some advice?”

Nora considered Sean Meehan’s sensible idea from the day before, about getting Elizabeth out of Dublin. “What do you suggest?”

“Go as far away from Dublin as you can get. Somewhere in Cork or Kerry maybe, or Mayo—up the West, where there’s not too many people. Someplace remote. Up the side of some boggy mountain, where no one would ever think to look. A safe house. That’s where you want to be. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going. And make sure you have transport that can’t be traced to you. I suppose stealing a car is totally out of the question?” Before she could respond, he cast a sidelong glance at her and grinned. “Only joking. Maybe the Donovans would give you the loan of theirs. Whatever you do—cash only, no credit cards.” He handed her an envelope with banknotes in it. “There’s about three hundred euro in there. I can get more if you need it. You’ll need a mobile as well, one of them pay-as-you-go jobs. I can pick one up in the next village—that way it’s traced only to me. And if you should need other transport—say, a boat, just for instance—give us a shout.”

Nora studied his profile for a moment. “I hate to ask how you know all this.”

“Let’s just say I knew people who knew people, back when.” He glanced over at her. “All water under the bridge now.”

He took one last, long drag on his cigarette, and flicked the butt out the window. “Just read of a fella up in Ballina, done for smoking in his own fuckin’ cab—two hundred fifty euro of a fine. Did you ever hear the bate of that? The youngest has been at me to give them up. I’m trying, but it’s a devil of a thing to quit, you know? You never smoked, yourself?”

Nora shook her head. “Not in my line of work.”

“Your friends were saying—you’re a doctor?”

“Pathologist.”

“What, like those fellas on CSI?”

“Not exactly. I teach anatomy. But what I see on the dissecting table—well, let’s just say it’s incentive enough to stay off the fags.”

“Sweet Jaysus.” Sean Meehan pulled the half-empty packet of Majors from his pocket and stared at it for a few seconds, then pitched the whole thing out the car window.

They arrived just before noon at the Donovans’ place in Skerries. The house was part of a Victorian terrace that looked out over the Irish Sea. Gulls wheeled and cried overhead as they drove up the narrow street and parked outside. The house and the wall around the postage-stamp garden were painted in storybook colors, bright yellow and blue. The air was redolent of seaweed and fish, and the seawall opposite looked down over sand and rocks that would be covered with water at high tide, and were now furry with brown kelp.

Nora suddenly realized that Elizabeth had probably seen Ireland only in pictures. Would it seem foreign to her, or would she have some impossible memory of the place, a pentimento written in blood and bone? She thought of something Cormac had said to her once: We’re made out of the water, the earth, the air of the places that fed our ancestors, quenched their thirst, the basic elements of the places that gave them life. Is it really so strange if we feel the heave and pitch of those places, even centuries later, in the vibrations of our atoms?

Saoirse Donovan met her at the door. “Oh, Nora, I’m so glad you’re here. Sean—thanks for bringing her along. Won’t you come in? Elizabeth is in the sitting room, Nora. I’ll let you go in to her while I make tea.”

Nora took her friend’s arm. “Is she all right, Saoirse?”

“She won’t speak to anyone but you, Nora. But I should warn you—” She hesitated, nervous.

“What is it, Saoirse? Tell me.”