Salt & Stone: A Water Elemental Novel & Mermaid Fantasy (The Siren's Curse Book 1)

by A. L. Knorr

  “I’ll be fine, Georjie. I am glad you were here when all this went down.”

  “You call me anytime, okay?” She released me and stepped back. “I know you a little by now. I understand that you won’t take the easy way out—it’s part of what I love about you.”

  I gave her a shaky smile. “Thanks, Georjie.”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to ask her to stay a little longer, but that wouldn’t be fair. Georjie was looking forward to getting to Scotland, and someone she cared about was waiting for her.

  We rolled her luggage toward departures.

  “One day I’d like to meet your cousin,” I said.

  She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t like to think of him as my cousin, anymore.”

  “Sorry. One day I’d like to meet this Jasher fellow.”

  “Why don’t you come for a visit sometime?” she said. “And I was thinking that you, me, Saxony and…we need to get together to celebrate our graduation, since we kind of lost our final year together.”

  I didn’t miss the pause where she’d wanted to include Akiko. My heart gave an ache of a different kind.

  “That would be fun.”

  She brightened. “We could do our own little international prom night, meet up somewhere none of us has ever been, a girl’s trip.”

  I nodded and agreed that it sounded like a good idea, but I was too distracted by my present problems to allow myself to get too excited.

  “We’ll all be legal by then.” Her voice softened. “We can have a toast to honor our departed.”

  I nodded but didn’t trust myself to speak. The departed no longer referenced only Akiko, but also my mother. I tried not to let my misery claim all of my expression, but I wasn’t sure I succeeded.

  Georjie checked her bags and we stood outside of security.

  “Text me when you land in Edinburgh, let me know you’re safe,” I said.

  “Sure thing. Are you going to talk to Antoni today?”

  I nodded. “I want to give him a chance to talk to Lydia before the authorities figure it out.”

  “Then how about I call you once I get settled and you can let me know how that went?”

  “Sure.”

  Georjie took out her phone and took a selfie of the two of us to send to Saxony. We hugged again, and I watched her go through security until I lost view of her behind the opaque glass walls.

  Striding back to the Fiat, I braced myself for the difficult conversation still ahead.

  As I was mounting the stairs from the garage and turning the problem of how I was going to tell Antoni about Lydia over and over in my mind, my cell phone rang. I retrieved it from my bag as I stepped through the door into the foyer. It was a local number.

  “Hello?”

  “Targa?”

  I recognized the museum curator’s unique voice. “Abraham?”

  “Yes. There’s been a development I thought you should know about,” he said.

  Yeah, you’re not kidding, I thought, but kept my news to myself. I didn’t want anyone to know before Antoni did. “What’s going on?”

  “There was a strange fellow here less than an hour ago. He came in and bought a ticket for The Sybellen display. He was alone. He asked one of our staff members about the pendant specifically, saying that he’d heard it was part of the display but he was wondering where to find it.”

  I stood there with the door open as this sunk in, until a cold draft hit my back and I remembered to shut the door.

  “He was wearing a maroon hoody. Your friend told the police that the person who broke into your basement was wearing a dark hoody, correct?”

  “Yes.” My voice came out hoarse and I swallowed.

  “I immediately sent Helen to call the police, hoping they’d get there in time to question him. She called from my office but I swear it was like the guy had supersonic hearing or something. We tried to keep him there, get him to casually talk about the pendant, what he knew about it, why he was interested, but he flew out of the museum pretty quick and we weren’t able to detain him. If the police had gotten here faster, maybe we could have caught the perpetrator by now. I thought you should know.”

  My mind whirled. Whoever this guy was, was not the perpetrator, but he more than likely was the one who had broken into the manor. I couldn’t say that to Abraham though. “What did he look like?”

  “Dark, almost shoulder length hair, blue eyes, Caucasian. Medium height and with a lean build. Hard to tell his age. He could have been twenty or forty. You know how faces can sometimes be like that.”

  “Yes, I do. Okay, thanks for letting me know, Abraham. I’ll keep an eye out and let the staff know.”

  “No problem. I don’t suppose you’ve had time to do any searching in Martinius’s personal records for anything relating to this pendant, have you? This whole thing just gets stranger by the minute.”

  “I have looked a little, but I had a friend here until this morning, so I didn’t want to spend all of yesterday searching,” I admitted, stretching the truth a bit. The one half-hour I did get to snoop around Martinius’s office produced nothing of interest. “I’ll look again this afternoon.”

  “I appreciate that, Targa. I’m sure the Novak heiress has more important things to be doing than going through a bunch of old boxes and paperwork.”

  “Not really,” I said with a smile. “It’s a good excuse for avoiding writing my history paper on the Celtic holocaust.”

  “That does indeed sound grim. I’ll leave you to it then, and Targa?”

  “Yes?”

  “Just…be careful.” There was a pause, then, “I have a daughter about your age. I wouldn’t be sleeping very well if I knew that her apartment had been broken into.” He chuckled dryly. “I don’t sleep well anyway, but that’s beside the point. It comes with the territory of having a teenage daughter.”

  My thoughts flew back to Lydia and my heart sank. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll be as careful as I can be.”

  16

  After lunch, I changed into warmer clothes and got to work searching what used to be Martinius’s office. Though it was technically mine now, I doubted that I’d ever think of it as anyone’s other than his. I started with the desk. In the back of a drawer I found a brass key etched with the symbol of The Sybellen. A quick search of the room didn’t turn up a lock to use it in.

  Hefting the old brass key in my hand, I left Martinius’s office and made my way to the main staircase. Padding down the stairs until I reached the foyer, I heard movement from the large sitting room at the west corner of the manor. Poking my head in, I saw Sera kneeling at the fireplace, adding wood to the fire crackling away merrily in the large grate.

  “Hi, Sera.” I crossed the room, weaving my way between the antique furniture.

  “Hello, Miss Targa.”

  “Mr. Truliso called to tell me someone wearing a dark maroon hoody was asking about the pendant stolen from the museum.”

  Her green eyes widened and she got to her feet, dusting her hands off. “Really?”

  “Yes. That’s why I’m looking for anything in Martinius’s family records that might help the police figure out what’s so special about that pendant. I found this.” I held out my palm, showing her the brass key. “I’m wondering if you know what it unlocks?”

  She frowned, picked it up, and studied the imprint of the ship on the handle. “I’ve never seen the key before, but I have seen this symbol. I have a feeling I know exactly what it opens.”

  “Really!”

  She gave a nod. “Shall I show you?”

  “Please.”

  I followed Sera down the hall to the servants staircase and we climbed to the third floor, where she led me into the old part of the house. We passed Martinius’s office and when we reached the end of the hall, there was a low, narrow doorway with a brass plate under door handle.

  “Here. See?” Sera touched the brass plate where the same ship had been etched into the brass. “It’s the only door in the who
le house that has this. I think they all must have had them at one time, but as the house was renovated and added to, they did away with the old doors and locks. All except for this one. This is just a storage room, though.”

  “That sounds exactly like what I’m looking for, Sera. Thank you.”

  My heart had sped up a notch. Inserting the key into the lock, the unused mechanism was tight, but the bolt came free. I opened the door and we stepped inside. The room had one small dormer, similar to the one in Martinius’s office, only this window was dusty and the light in the room was dim. The space was similar in size and layout to Martinius’s office, but where his office was clean and cozy, this room was cobwebby and the air stale. There had been a fireplace at one time, but someone had bricked it up. An old writing desk sat in front of the dormer, with no chair and a few boxes stacked on top.

  “This looks like it was an office, too,” Sera said, eyes sweeping the shelving against the wall, which was stacked with boxes with handwritten labels on them.

  “The company’s old business files?” I stepped closer to the stacks of boxes and blew the dust off one of the labels. The ink was faded but I could make out a row of numbers which looked like a code for month and year all run together in six digits.

  “I don’t think so, or if they are, they’re very old. Everything to do with the company was moved to the downtown office archives back in the seventies.” Sera waved a hand in front of her face and gave a cough. Then she sneezed. “Awfully dusty.”

  Glancing up at her, I asked, “Allergies?”

  She nodded, a finger under her nose.

  “Don’t worry, I don’t need help, Sera. And I didn’t mean to interfere with your day. I can look. You go on.”

  “You sure?”

  I said I was, and she left me to it.

  Scanning the boxes and looking at what I assumed were dates, I found that there was no order to the way the boxes were stacked. Here was a box labeled 10-1945, and on top of it was a box marked 06-1892.

  “Wow,” I whispered. I didn’t know any families in Canada that had family records or documents dated back this far. Maybe there were North American families who’d colonized on the east coast and brought documents with them, but it was more likely that many of their belongings were left behind. “It’s a museum, with even older stuff than the rest of the house.”

  I continued to search for a box dated from before The Sybellen went down. She had sunk in the spring of 1869, so anything dated after that wouldn’t likely be of much help in solving the mystery of the pendant. When I found a box labelled 031867, I almost whooped for joy. Hauling the box from its pile, I took it to the desk, opened it, and began to look through the contents.

  It didn’t take long for my heart to sink at the daunting task. All of the documents were in Polish, naturally, so even if something was written here about the pendant, I wouldn’t be able to read it. It crossed my mind to ask Sera to do this job, but it would take her days, if not weeks, to read everything. And what a monotonous and possibly meaningless task.

  What I needed were access to old photo albums. Perhaps there was a photo of someone wearing the pendant.

  Putting all the documents carefully back, I closed up the box, returned it to the shelf, and looked for another box with any date before the spring of 1869.

  My stomach was beginning to complain for its dinner by the time I had repeated the process with other boxes three more times. I gave a sigh and stretched my back after sliding the last box back onto the shelf. No photographs, and if there had been something written about the pendant, any evidence of it in a letter, I would have just passed over it anyway. I gave a growl of frustration. This was useless.

  I locked up the storage room and went back to Martinius’s room to return the key to safe-keeping.

  His office was almost as gloomy as the room I’d just left and I wished there was a fire in the grate. I also wished Martinius was there, sitting on his chair in front of the fire, telling me about the mysterious pendant.

  My eye fell on a row of thick red matching spines on the far end of his bookshelf. Squatting in front of the low shelf, I retrieved one of them and flipped it open. Photographs. This was more helpful, except that the people in the photos were dressed as though it was the eighties, so way off in terms of era.

  Quickly, I flipped through all of the photo albums, looking for somewhere with a year inscribed. The photos became black and white, then yellowed with age, but the oldest year I could find notated was 1923.

  I shoved the last photo album back home with sigh. No dice.

  Sitting in the dormer seat, I pulled my legs up under me and frowned at Martinius’s office.

  “Can you give me a clue, old fella?” I asked the room. “What’s the significance of this pendant?”

  As I looked around, I spotted the old leather-bound journal, the one Aleksandra Iga Novak had written in, the one Martinius had translated so I could read it in English. It did not have any title on the spine but I recognized it because of that. Curious to handle the original, I got up and retrieved it, returning to sit under the window again. I smiled as I rubbed a hand over the old leather, cracked at the seams. I brought it to my nose and inhaled the smell of old paper, one I’d come to appreciate.

  A yellowed slip of paper fell from between the cracks and landed in my lap.

  My heart lurched as the drawing on the page caught the light from the window. It was just a rough sketch, but there was no mistaking it, it was the pendant. That same oblong shape, and even the strange glyph cradling the aquamarine. A bunch of Polish was scribbled on the page beside the drawing, as well as a tally of numbers. If I wasn’t mistaken, this was a receipt of purchase. There was no vendor name or address, so I wasn’t sure. I needed to get it translated.

  Heart pounding, I took the page and tore from Martinius’s office. Taking the stairs down two at a time, I landed in the foyer.

  “Sera?” I yelled, and paused to listen, chest heaving and heart pounding.

  “Here!” Came the borderline alarmed reply, and she appeared in the hallway to my right. “I’m here. Everything okay?”

  We met halfway in between and I handed her the paper.

  “Can you translate this?”

  Her brows drew together as her eyes scanned the drawing and the writing. “Is this the pendant?”

  “Yes, the very same.”

  She glanced up, shocked. “You actually did it. You must be some kind of magician. Where did you find this?”

  “It was inside Aleksandra’s journal. It’s a receipt, right? For the purchase of it?”

  She read the note a second time, brow furrowing. “Interesting. It is a receipt but not the way you think.” One tapered finger traced the handwritten scrawl beside the drawing. “Someone paid this fellow, Rainer Veigel––that’s the recipient––a finder’s fee for the necklace.”

  “A finder’s fee?”

  She nodded. “That’s what it says under ‘services rendered.’” She handed the receipt back to me. “And no surprise that it was definitely a Novak, look at the signature on the bottom.”

  My eye found the messy scrawl on the line at the bottom of the receipt and goosebumps rose on my skin like a ghost had breathed across my neck. If I had looked more carefully before I had barreled out of Martinius’s office, I would have noticed it myself.

  The signature on the bottom was the hand of Sybellen’s husband––Mattis Novak. I stared at the name, mouth hanging open.

  “The date, Sera,” I whispered, hoarsely. “Look at the date.”

  Peering over my shoulder she read aloud, “May seventeen, eighteen-sixty-nine.”

  I stared at her, and at first her expression did not convey any comprehension. Then the moment of realization struck and hers eyes found mine in disbelief.

  “That has to be significant, no?” she said, in awe.

  “I don’t know, but if it’s not, it’s one hell of a coincidence.”

  The receipt was made out on the
day before the ship went down.

  17

  I tried to wait until after dinner to break the news about Lydia to Antoni, but failed to act natural before we’d even started eating. He’d asked me three times if I was all right by the time we reached the dining room, which I’d tried to deny twice, and the final time, I had asked if we could talk after dinner.

  He grabbed my hand and pulled me around to face him. “Are you trying to torture me? No, we can’t wait. If there is something wrong and it’s something you can share with me, then please share it now. What is the point of waiting until I have food in my stomach? So I can feel sick afterwards?” He put his warm hands on either side of my face. “Is it something to do with you mom? Why we’ve hardly heard from her since she left?” His hazel eyes were dark with worry, and his brow wrinkled as his concern deepened. “Are you going to join her?”

  I put my hands over his. “No, it’s got nothing to do with my mother.” As always happened when she came up in conversation, my belly filled with guilt.

  “Then what?”

  I sighed, and the muscles of my stomach trembled with fright. I could face a storm-demon, a tidal wave, a selfish shark-finning bastard, but I could hardly handle the fear that accompanied telling my love something that I knew was going to hurt, and something that he might choose not to believe. I tried not to think about the possibility that he wouldn’t believe me, about the truth it might reveal––that he would sooner believe I’d tell a horrible lie than try and give him an opportunity to talk to his sister before the authorities got to her.

  But I had told him a horrible lie. My entire relationship with him was based on a lie. He believed me to be fully human, and I was letting the deception stand. Clenching my eyes shut against the awful feelings all of this torturous self talk roused in me, I asked, “Can we talk upstairs? Somewhere we can be alone?”

  “Of course.” He folded my hand in his and led me out to the foyer and to the stairway, almost pulling me along. “Your suite?”