Lies Beneath

by Anne Greenwood Brown

  “Talk about what?”

  “About them.” He laughed nervously. “At first I thought maybe you were one, too. That day you moved in. I could smell them all over your house. Spicy. Like smoke and incense.”

  He let out a short, hard laugh. “Back when you fell in the lake and you were talking all that crap about dolphins, I actually thought it was some cover story. But then it didn’t make sense.” He sighed. Disappointed. “You’re not one of them. You’ve just been near them. A lot.”

  Lily leaned away from him. “You’re the one not making sense.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to pretend for me. I’ve been near one of them, too. Very near.”

  “Near one of what?”

  He smirked. “Quit it. You know what I’m talking about. That thing you called a dolphin.” He laughed again and then lowered his voice. “Mermaids.”

  “Mermaids?” asked Lily. “You thought I was a mermaid?” Lily smiled, but at this distance, I couldn’t tell if she was flattered or amused. “Mermaids smell like incense?”

  He nodded and inched closer to her, pulling his knees up to hers. “There’s one who came to visit me last summer. Every week. We had a special meeting spot on some flat rocks just south of here.”

  “Had?”

  “I haven’t seen her since last fall. But I could smell her on you.” He leaned forward hopefully. “I thought maybe you’d seen her? She was supposed to come back for me.”

  From my hiding spot, I spun in a circle and threw my arms in the air. “Damn it!” I swore. So this was what Maris meant? Pavati didn’t have dibs on Jack Pettit as prey; he was one of her toys. How come I hadn’t seen that before? Maris and Pavati were getting very good at hiding their thoughts.

  “Wait. You’re telling me I wasn’t hallucinating?” asked Lily. “What I saw? Your painting—that was her? My dolphin was the mermaid in your painting?”

  Jack wasn’t listening. “For the longest time I wished I was one of those people the old fisherman told me about. The ones that don’t even know they’re manitous … or mermaids, or whatever. Just walking around like normal.… I thought maybe that’s why she came to me. Maybe she knew something I didn’t. I tested it out a few times, but nothing happened. I can’t even hold my breath for more than seventeen seconds.”

  Jack pressed his nose against Lily’s skin, in the corner where her neck met her shoulder. He inhaled deeply and groaned. “God, you smell good. Just like her.”

  He put a hand behind Lily’s neck. Under any other circumstances it would have been a romantic scene, but it was every horror movie I’d ever heard about. Lily flexed her wrist, and her palm came up flat and rigid against his chest. When it was clear it wasn’t just me who wanted to keep Jack Pettit away, I took off for the boat, keeping my eyes above water.

  Jack grabbed the ends of Lily’s scarf and pulled her hard against him. The boat lurched. Lily screamed as Jack mashed his mouth on hers. She pushed him off and slapped him across the face.

  Jack sucked in his breath as if she’d doused him in ice water, and he hit her back—hard. Lily fell over the seat. A vein bulged down the center of Jack’s forehead as he pulled Lily back toward him and grabbed her face with both hands.

  “Bring me to her,” he said. “Tell her I want to see her. Tell her I can’t stand it anymore.”

  Lily cried out, and then her voice was silenced.

  Maybe it was because of the darkness, or maybe it was because his eyes were closed, but Jack Pettit never saw the arm come up out of the lake. My arm. My fingers clawing the air, eager for his throat. I grabbed him by the neck and pulled him over the side of the boat so fast he was gone before Lily’s eyes popped open.

  I almost had Jack pinned to the bottom when I remembered Lily. I rose to the surface, just enough to propel the boat back to shore, and felt the tip of my tail break the surface. Cold night air flashed against my fin.

  Lily gasped.

  Damn it. What had she seen? As I decided my next move, Jack thrashed and churned the water. He regained the surface and screamed, taking in a mouthful. I gripped him by the back of the neck and drove him back down, pinning him to the sand. I rubbed his face in the grit, then let him up.

  “Jack! Jack!” kids yelled from shore. Someone jumped into the lake and pulled Lily and the boat in. I was going to have to remember to thank that guy. I brought Jack down one more time for good measure—just to make sure he’d learned his lesson—and then I was gone.

  23

  POETRY READING

  When I got to work the next day, Mrs. Boyd greeted me as she mopped the floor behind the counter. The morning would be even slower than normal with our few “regulars” at church.

  “Isn’t Lily working today?” I asked.

  “She’ll be in by ten,” said Mrs. Boyd. She put away the mop and went to her office, closing the door behind her.

  I busied myself with the New York Times crossword, watching the clock and getting about twenty words filled in before Lily walked through the door. A faint, finger-shaped bruise followed the line of her cheekbone.

  She pinched her lips together and put both hands on her hips. “What are you laughing at?”

  “Who’s laughing?” At the sight of the bruise, I wished I’d finished off Jack Pettit when I had the chance. “I’m just surprised you’re working today.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Long day in the sun and fresh air, then big night last night.” I shrugged, trying to keep things light. I walked behind the counter and tied a blue apron around my waist.

  She followed me. “What makes you think I had a big night?”

  I turned, and she was right there. Inches from me. I ducked around her and walked to the back to get a few pounds of decaf Colombian. “Didn’t you go to the Pettits’ party?”

  “I did.” Her voice was still right behind my ear.

  “That’s all. That’s all I meant.” I returned to the front, cut open the bag, and refilled the bin under the espresso machine. The rich smell of coffee billowed up into my face.

  “I thought maybe I’d see you there last night,” she said.

  “I wasn’t invited,” I reminded her. I touched my finger to her nose as I slid by her again. “And besides, I told you I had plans.”

  She chewed on her bottom lip, apparently contemplating what to say. “I thought maybe you’d ditch your plans because you’d want to be there with me.”

  I shuffled my feet and looked for something to clean.

  “Was I wrong?” she asked.

  “No,” I said with a sigh. I gave up and leaned against the wall. My chin dropped to my chest. “I would have liked to have been there with you.”

  “For a second I thought maybe I did see you there?”

  I looked up. “Nope. Probably just the smoke playing tricks on your eyes.”

  She grinned and nodded as if a different question had been answered. Mrs. Boyd came out of her office, locked the door, and headed out the back without another word to either of us. I watched her go, and when I turned back, Lily wrinkled her nose at me. “Y’know, you’ve been wearing those same clothes for the last three days. Don’t you have anything else?”

  “Not all of us have the luxury of lace and velvet, Miss Hancock.” The words came out more biting than I intended, but I was happy my lack of laundering was masking any other scent she might have been searching for.

  She hung her head. “Sorry. I didn’t mean anything. Really.” A long silence stretched out between us. Then she said, “If you’re interested, I hung out with Gabby most of the night. Jack went to bed early. He had a little boat accident.”

  “People should be more careful out on the water.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Do I need to be careful on the water?”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and faced her dead on. “What are we talking about, Lily?”

  “I’m talking about maybe my grandpa wasn’t crazy after all. Jack doesn’t think so.”

&n
bsp; I didn’t respond.

  “Hey, I’m talking to you,” she said, punching my shoulder with the heel of her hand.

  I rolled my eyes. “What do you want me to say, Lily? That I think you’re right? Well, I don’t. You want to know what I think? I think you’re spending too much time with Gabrielle Pettit. And while we’re on the subject, I don’t think much of her brother, either. You want to talk about monsters? Jack is an ass and a half, and if he touches you again he’s going to lose a few fingers.”

  “How do you know he touched me?” She reached out for me, and I stepped backward. My hair bristled on the back of my neck. My eyes flashed to her bruised cheek.

  “I don’t. I just think you could find better people to spend your time with.”

  “People?” she asked, her eyebrows rising. “People like you?”

  “Sure. People like me. Why not?”

  Lily flipped her backpack onto the black marble counter, unzipped the top, and yanked it open, revealing a book with several strips of paper marking favorite pages. I knew the book. It was the one I’d seen her with back in Minneapolis, when I was hiding in her bedroom closet. The memory was shameful, but it was burned into my brain—the book, the green velvet bag, the black miniskirt, her bending over to tie up her boots, the tattoo. It was the moment I decided she was the wrong target, and the moment I knew—subconsciously, I guessed—she was right for me. That was, if we were the same species and I wasn’t planning on killing her father by the end of the week.

  “I found a couple poems that might interest you. They’re some of my favorites. Want to hear them?”

  “No.”

  She gave me a funny look, then cleared her throat, bending over the book. Her hair fell in thick curtains along the sides of her face. “ ‘A mermaid found a swimming lad,’ ” she read. “ ‘Picked him for her own. / Pressed her body to his body.’ ”

  “I’m not a fan of Yeats,” I said curtly.

  “Okay.” Her stifled smile snuck back into her eyes. “How ’bout Tennyson?”

  I shook my head, but she started up anyway.

  “I would be a merman bold;

  I would sit and sing the whole of the day;

  I would fill the sea-halls with a voice of power;

  But at night I would roam abroad and play

  With the mermaids in and out of the rocks …”

  She paused, then nervously jumped ahead: “ ‘I would kiss them often under the sea, / And kiss them again till they kiss’d me.’ ”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.” She looked at me with huge innocent eyes. Like one of those old Betty Boop cartoons. “You don’t like that one, either, do you?”

  I glared at her. What did she want me to do? Did she want me to acknowledge her ludicrous assumptions? Did she want me to admit what I was? What would she think when I told her I was more like the monster lying on the bottom of the lake than any of Tennyson’s nauseating, narcissistic mermen?

  She shivered, but she didn’t give up. “Okay. No Tennyson. Do you want to hear something I wrote instead?”

  “That might be better.” It came out like a growl.

  “You won’t laugh?” She chewed on her bottom lip as if she wished she could take back the offer.

  Now I was intrigued. “I doubt I’ll laugh,” I assured her. I was pretty sure it was a promise I could keep. Nothing seemed funny right now.

  Lily pulled out a thick spiral notebook with the words MY SCRIBBLINGS written in capital letters on its purple cover. She flipped it open and cleared her throat. “I wrote this last night.”

  “Go ahead.”

  She took one more anxious look at me. “You promise you won’t laugh.”

  I drew a crisscross over my heart, and she read the words slowly. Cautiously.

  “Father, when I’m gone from you

  Mother, when I die

  Do not sit round my little grave

  But look in treetops high.”

  She stopped and looked at my face to see if she should go on. I nodded, prodding her forward. So far so good. Maybe her little Victorian poetry reading was just an unlucky coincidence. She cleared her throat again.

  “It’s not in flowers planted there

  Where you will find me still

  But in the soaring heavenward

  Of a humble whippoorwill.”

  Birds. Good. This was better. Lily looked up at me like she expected me to freak out. She shifted her weight before finishing the last stanza.

  “Or down I’ll go into the stripèd

  sturgeon’s slippery lair

  Where I’ll find myself entangled

  in a merman’s silken hair.”

  “Stop.”

  “Something wrong, Calder?” She looked at me again with the most serene, wide-eyed innocence.

  “What’s with all the mermaid poetry? This isn’t still about your dolphin?” I tried to sound disdainful, but I couldn’t disguise the panic in my voice.

  “There are no dolphins in the lake, Calder. You know that. You probably know that better than anyone.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know what I mean.” She closed her book quietly and slipped it into her backpack. In the same fluid movement, her fingers laced through mine. The flow of electricity from my hand into hers raised goose bumps on her arm, and I watched in horror as the air around our hands turned to raspberry syrup. The sweetness seeped into the spaces between my fingers and pulled color across the back of my hand and then through my wrist. Lily leaned in, and I choked on the sugary heat between us. It burned my lips, and I pulled back with a gasp. My throat swelled shut, and beads of sweat popped up on my forehead.

  “Do you smell incense?” she asked.

  “I’m not feeling well. I need to go.” Before I raced for the door, I thought I saw a satisfied smile pull at the corners of her mouth.

  24

  TRAPS AND SNARES

  I ran to the car, muttering a string of obscenities. The more distance I put between myself and the café, the better. My heart rate lowered with each step. But the farther I got from Lily, the more restless I became. I couldn’t put a label on this. The only thing I could compare it to was being caught in a whirlpool. But not in a bad way. It turned me upside down, but I wanted more of it. And I wanted to end it. It was a pull as compelling as the urge to migrate.

  I jumped into the Impala and slammed the door. No one could see me in the car. The oak trees cast shadows over the parking lot, and Maris had been smart enough to snatch a car with tinted windows. This degree of cover gave me the luxury of time. I needed to regroup. I closed my eyes and banged my forehead on the steering wheel. All I could see was Lily—her ivory face and serious gray eyes, her long red hair curling around her cheek and cascading past her shoulders. The tattoo at the small of her back, her quizzical smile, the feel of her hand in mine … the raspberry-pink fire running up the length of my arm.

  Stupid. Stupid. Stupid, I all but cried out loud. I shook my head and tried to clear the image, tried to regain some sense of sanity. This was not the plan. Damn you, Pavati. It was all her fault for planting the ridiculous idea in my head in the first place. Lily and I as a real pairing … I would have never come up with that on my own. Not in a hundred years. But there was no other explanation. I liked her too much. Way too much. I refused to think the bigger word; were merpeople even capable of that? The possibility was too awful to bear.

  But it seemed I had fallen for a human—and not just any human, the worst possible human out of all seven billion possibilities. I dissolved into hysterics and lay down on the front seat of the car, holding my sides while my body shook. It was beyond ridiculous. Tears rolled down my cheeks as another round of laughter hissed through my teeth. What would I tell Maris? Nothing, that was what. Nothing at all. So the Hancock girl likes mermaid poems. Big freakin’ deal.

  I leaned back against the headrest and counted out my breaths, clearing Lily from my brain, envisioning th
e metamorphosis instead.

  Since arriving in Bayfield, I had shortened my time by six seconds, but I was still on a seven-second delay from the girls. It might as well have been an hour. Pavati practically made the switch before her hands hit the water. Maris and Tallulah could have the job done within one or two seconds. The quickest I’d made it this season was nine, but I wasn’t consistent with it.

  That was where the self-visualization exercise came in. Without it, sometimes I’d have to surface for air before the change occurred. When that happened I usually came up yelling, which made my sisters laugh. There was nothing more eerie than underwater hysterics. Plus, I hated calling unnecessary attention to myself. A few summers ago, a boater thought I was drowning. By the time the man got to me, I was gone. I was reported as another drowning. No one thought it strange that a body was never found. They say Lake Superior doesn’t give up its dead.

  I stripped off my clothes, not bothering to fold them, and stuffed them under the driver’s seat. I waited for the Coast Guard boat to pass; it was pulling a smaller boat with a red UW pennant flying off its stern.

  Once it was gone, I set the timer on my watch and flung open the car door. I ran for the shoreline and dove, propelling myself through the air like a javelin before slicing through the water.

  For the first two seconds, I was no different than any human swimmer, completely enthralled by the sensation of being encased in water, the cool pressure against my skin. Then the water rushed into my lungs, filling my hungry cells with oxygen. Now I could really breathe.

  Still, despite the relief, I braced myself for the metamorphosis. The ripple and gush of cell transformation had a panic quality about it—like a manic roller coaster, or falling down an elevator shaft. The rush of energy raced through my thighs and out my toes, exploding into a great silver tail as fantastic as it was terrifying.

  I checked my watch, squinting through the red silt. Twelve seconds. Two seconds worse than last time. I cursed my pathetic lack of focus.