Marriage & the Mermaid (Hapless Heroes)

by Cusack, Louise

  The footsteps approached the car and then stopped beside it. Betty felt like a five year old with her hands over her eyes, hoping no–one could see her.

  “Miss Betty. Mr Randolph,” Carlos said, his voice oddly flat, as if he was making an observation rather than saying hello.

  Betty opened one eye and turned to peek up at the big gardener.

  “Are you both leaving?” he asked.

  Randolph cleared his throat. “That’s exactly what’s happening, Carlos. I was just leaving.”

  “You dropping Miss Betty home?”

  “Ah … yes.” There was more throat clearing as Randolph straightened and exited the car. “It’s late. I wouldn’t want her to get bogged and be alone out here in the dark.”

  Betty had to smile. If any car was going to get bogged it was the convertible, but Carlos made no comment about that.

  “I’ll just… check under the bonnet,” Randy–boy said, “and we’ll be on our way.”

  “I has been good to make your acquaintance, Mr Randolph,” Carlos said formally.

  Betty saw them shake hands.

  “You too, Carlos. Thanks for… everything.”

  “Miss Betty,” Carlos said and nodded to her.

  She smiled back. Then she crawled across to the front passenger seat and strapped herself in.

  Rand was behind the bonnet by this time, fitting the rotor, but when he dropped it shut again and saw her waiting in the front for him he closed his eyes in what she hoped was great exasperation.

  “Carlos is watching,” she hissed. “Time to leave.”

  “Pushy bitch.” He slipped into the driver’s seat and buckled himself in. “I swear I’m going to kill you and dump you in the bush.” He reached to the floor below his seat.

  Betty turned the gun she’d found there over in her lap and pointed it in his direction. “We’ll see about that,” she said.

  His eyes narrowed.

  “Drive,” she told him. “Before the cops come out.”

  He turned the car over and it purred like a turbocharged kitten. They both conjured a smile for Carlos as they pulled away, then they were alone together with the wind in their hair, the smell of wet bush around them and an odd wailing sound emanating from Randy’s side of the car.

  She looked him up and down. “Are you making that noise?”

  He sighed. “No, it’s Poss,” he said. “Blubbering fuckwit. I tried to shut off the vibrating while I was under the bonnet and I accidentally answered his call. If I ignore it he’ll hang up.”

  They both listened to the completely infuriating whine for several minutes while Rand negotiated the snaking mud track. Then he snarled in frustration and reached into his jacket. The car slid on a turn and he snatched his hand back to the steering wheel.

  Betty kept the gun in one hand and reached over with the other to extract the phone from his jacket.

  “Up here,” he said and tilted his head.

  She held it to his ear.

  “Poss!” he shouted. “Shut up and listen.”

  No change in the whining.

  “I’m going to turn the phone off! I’m turning it off!”

  Silence.

  “Is he tiny?” she whispered.

  “Fourteen,” Rand replied, then shrugged at her raised eyebrows before addressing the phone again. “Listen to me Poss. I’m coming home. You stay with Diamond Jack. Keep your bum against the wall if you have to. But stay there. I’ll be home by daybreak.”

  Betty glanced at the road ahead, which was far more difficult to negotiate than she’d imagined, and she decided she liked his audacity. He smelt pretty good too.

  “… don’t give a shit. I’ll sort it out tomorrow. Do as I tell you and no fuck ups, Poss.” He listened then while the boy moaned some complaint, then he said, “I said I’ll be home. We don’t need a contingency plan. Jeezus, what are you, the fucking State Emergency Service?”

  Betty pulled the phone away from his ear and put it to hers. “Listen little boy,” she said. “Just shut up and do what your friend tells you to, or I’ll come over there and spank you good!” She terminated the call and put the phone into the car’s console.

  Rand was smiling. He was seriously cute. “You’d make a good mother,” he said. “Can I take you home with me?”

  “Let me guess, to Neverland? Not likely,” she replied, but she had to admit she was warming to his style, which was almost as outrageous as her own.

  “I’ll let you keep your loot.”

  “I’ve got the gun,” she reminded him.

  “I pulled it out of the surf,” he replied, smugly. “It won’t fire.”

  Betty tipped it up and water ran onto her lap. “Shit.”

  “So, my place?” he said and glanced at her before returning his attention to the road.

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “What do you need?”

  “Place to hide from the cops.”

  “We don’t even blip on their radar,” he said. “If I drop this car back tomorrow it won’t be missed, and you’d be safe with us so long as you’re good to Poss,” he added.

  “Can I fuck him?” Betty asked.

  Rand laughed at that. “He’s not experienced —”

  “Like you.”

  Rand’s smile faded. “I’m taken,” he said categorically, “and experience is only as important as what it buys you.”

  “Been there done that, eh?”

  “I’ve done all the bad shit,” he admitted. “I don’t do it anymore.”

  Betty smiled a secretive smile. “I like some of the bad shit,” she said.

  Rand glanced at her sideways and she wanted to melt. “Naughty girl,” he said, with appreciation in his voice. “No drugs or prostitution. Those are my rules.”

  “Then I’ll fit right in,” she said and tossed the soggy gun into the back seat before snuggling down against the plush leather and closing her eyes. A couple of seconds later she yawned. Housework was harder than she’d thought. No wonder she was tired.

  “This trust thing,” he said, and she opened one eye to find him looking at her sideways again. “Do you think it can be learnt?”

  “Nah.” She closed her eyes again. “You’ve either got it or you don’t.”

  “So you trust me now?”

  “Sure. I’m your Wendy. Peter always looks after Wendy.” She wriggled in the seat, her pink leather squeaking against the plush black. “Wake me when we get to Neverland,” she said. “Second star to the right and then …” Yawn. “ … straight on till morning.”

  “I can pick ‘em,” Rand said and sighed.

  Betty grinned as she drifted off to sleep.

  Saturday

  Chapter Forty–Four

  Liam Moore stood at the kitchen bench watching Baz Wilson and his fiancé share a bottle of whisky at the table. Traci Knowles sat beside them, still shell–shocked, with an untouched whisky in front of her. Despite the fact that Moore still had to drive back to Bundaberg, he had a glass in his hand too.

  Dawn light drifted in the casement windows, competing with the overhead lights, and as Moore tossed back a swig he wished for nothing more than to take Traci back to his house and snuggle into bed with her, just holding her. She looked like she needed to be held, and God knew, he needed the sleep.

  They hadn’t found old man Wilson body, and Moore doubted they ever would. For that, he felt sympathy for Baz.

  But not for Waikeri who had organized the search for Ted Wilson then ostensibly gone ‘home’, only to be attended to by ambulance officers for suspected heart attack in his second cousin’s bed an hour later. Apparently the girl’s penchant for men ‘with meat on their bones’ had precipitated Waikeri’s gorge–fest, and when Waikeri’s ageing mother had found out, the shit had hit the proverbial. The big Maori would now be on a diet, and the girl’s husband was going to have something to say when his prawn trawler came back from Cairns.

  Then there was the young thief Betty’s aunt coming by later
with a spare set of keys and a new rotor to pick it up her VW bug. Betty herself was unaccounted for, much to the aunt’s dismay. Her mother used to run off, but we’d had such hopes for Elizabeth, she’d said.

  Not any more. Well at least the sassy minx would be causing problems in someone else’s precinct, which was a blessing.

  Moore tossed back the last swallow of his whisky. “We probably need to go,” he said.

  Baz nodded. “I guess we’ve covered everything we can this morning,” he said. “If you need written statements we can do that later, can’t we?”

  “Sure.” Moore had stayed as long as was respectful. It was time to leave. “I’m sorry about your father,” he said again.

  Baz nodded, but his gaze unnerved Moore. It was raw and exposed, his eyes dark pools of hurt. “I want to feel sorry too,” he said softly, “but I don’t yet.” He nodded to himself. “Not sure I will.” Then he frowned and glance away.

  Moore put his glass down on the table. “And you don’t want to press charges against the gardener for unlawful imprisonment?”

  Wynne covered Baz’s hand with her own and they exchanged a glance before he shook his head. “Carlos was distraught,” he told Moore. “We all were.”

  Moore nodded, but he was thinking distraught was a pale description of the big Spaniard’s condition when they’d pulled him from the water. Baz had met the launch and stayed with Carlos until the ambulance had arrived, then he’d organized to pay for any treatment Carlos might need.

  One man had died and another had tried to kill himself, but Moore had nothing he could give his superiors except ‘secrets from the past revealed’. Mermaid wasn’t a word he was about to type into a report, so the Dalrymple girl had already left the premises as far as he was concerned. What he’d seen… Right now he was too tired and too bewildered to think about it. So he did the practical things, stepping around the table to hold out a hand out for Wilson to shake.

  “Naturally we’ll ring if we find your father…” he said, but they all knew that wasn’t likely. The shark was nowhere to be found, although the QUT team had been tracking it towards the coastline off Saltwood when it had disappeared. Chances were it had snacked on old man Wilson on its way back to wherever it had come from, with the mermaid riding on its back for all he knew. He wasn’t a Bermuda Triangle sort of guy, but he’d heard people talking about ley lines off Bundaberg, and after what had happened in the last four days he was starting to think anything was possible.

  “Thank you,” Wilson said, releasing Moore’s hand. Beside him Wynne Malone tried to smile a goodbye, but it wavered and fell. She went back to her whisky.

  “Dr Knowles,” Moore said, keeping up the professional front. “I’ll take you back to Bundaberg now.”

  Traci dragged her gaze away from the whisky glass and pinned it onto Moore. She swallowed. “That… girl swam away. We have no proof.”

  Up to this point, nothing had been said of the inexplicable sight they’d witnessed in the water. To save himself a life of ridicule, Moore wanted to keep it that way. “We’ll talk about it in the car,” he told her and came around to pull out her chair.

  She rose slowly and looked from young Wilson to his fiancé. “I saw her,” she said. “We all did.”

  “Wynne didn’t,” Baz replied, giving Moore a pointed glance.

  “Dr Knowles,” Liam said again, taking her arm and nodding a goodbye to the new owner of Saltwood and his subdued fiancé. “We’ll be in touch,” he said, then he led Traci out of the house and across the driveway to buckle her into the four wheel drive. She sat there like a pliable doll.

  Baz Wilson wasn’t the only one suffering from shock.

  “You can sleep if you want to,” he said.

  She just stared out the windscreen at the house, so he fired up the car and drove away.

  When they’d pulled off the driveway onto the track that would return them to the coast road she said, “I’m glad to be away from there.”

  Moore flicked a glance at her but she was staring out the windscreen. “People in town think Saltwood is cursed,” he told her, remembering stories he’d heard about reclusive owners, acts of passion and suicides.

  “She came in with that shark,” Traci said. “They came in from somewhere, and then they went back.”

  “To where?”

  “I’m going to find out,” Traci said. She turned to look at Moore. The car hit a bump and her hair fell from behind her ear. She tucked it back in. A sign of normality. A welcomed change from her recent vacant glances. “She was a mermaid,” Traci added. “A real live mermaid.”

  Moore remembered the flashes of silver when the girl had blinked, but still he frowned. “I don’t know exactly what we saw —”

  “A mermaid,” Traci reiterated. Loudly. “The same mermaid whose scales I examined in my lab.”

  He wasn’t sure what to say to that.

  “I’m a marine biologist,” she went on, some of her old fire returning. “And I know what I identified from that clifftop. A fish with a human female upper body.”

  “We can’t be sure of that,” Moore said, but she was gaining momentum.

  “It’s my job to be sure,” she snapped, and this time he heard hysteria lurking at the edges of her surety. “I identify marine life and I report what I see.”

  Moore lowered his voice. “Still chasing a Nobel prize?”

  She stared at him hard but didn’t reply, and after a while her breathing slowed. “I know what I saw,” she said, so softly Moore had to strain to hear over the whine of the engine.

  “I saw it too,” he admitted.

  They glanced at each other, then the car bounced and Traci tucked her hair behind her ear again. “Are we going to pretend it didn’t happen?”

  Moore nodded. “We’re not going to announce it to the world,” he replied softly, “because we have no proof. But you and I can talk about it any time you want.”

  “I see.” She regarded him silently for a moment, then said, “That, Liam Moore, is the offer that just bought you a relationship.”

  Two months later

  Chapter Forty–Five

  Rand stood motionless on the busy Brisbane footpath, a solitary figure in a sea of moving pedestrians. He tilted his head up, squinting at a building that looked like a futuristic vampire lair, a spooky thirty story monstrosity of darkly tinted glass and batwing extensions. Obviously meant to intimidate.

  He dropped his gaze as the huge sliding glass doors at the base parted and a cream–suited glamazon emerged, all blond backswept messy–bun and celebrity dark glasses. She stalked down the impressive black marble stairs into the throng who seemed to recognize her superiority and parted to let her through. She strode past Rand in six inch heels as if he didn’t exist, and he supposed his years of trying to blend in, to become invisible, had finally paid off.

  A gust of cool air hit his legs and he turned to see a limo door close behind him, shielding her from the stifling heat faster than you could say ‘wilting makeup’.

  Rand knew he should get out of the sun too, but he wasn’t ready to go inside yet.

  So instead he returned his attention to the printed–out email in his hand. Mr Budjenski … request the pleasure of your company … news about a mutual acquaintance … ten am on the morning of the eighth. It was signed on behalf of Mr Balthazar S. Wilson by a solicitor who had offices on the fourteenth floor. Rand looked back at the building and counted floors. The fourteenth looked just the same as the others, except, maybe the windows were shinier up there.

  Wasting time Budjenski and it’s already nine forty–five.

  He glanced back at the building’s doors, reminding himself that he should be able to stroll in there and be perfectly safe. Betty was convinced it was a trap, but she didn’t know what he knew. Because he hadn’t told her. And he doubted Wilson had told anyone either. About their ‘mutual acquaintance’. The bikini bimbo, Betty called her, saying she was damned if she’d have that slut anywhere near her men �
�� plural — but Betty really only owned Possum who she led around like he had a ring in his nose. Rand had made it blindingly clear that he was unavailable to Betty, and she’d got the message.

  Possum was in sex–heaven, but Rand didn’t feel envy. He only wanted Venus, but she was completely unavailable to him for twenty years, irrevocably removed from his life, although that didn’t stop him thinking about her every day. When water came out of a tap he remembered where she lived. In the shower — oh yeah, the fantasies in the shower. Even the smell of fish gave him a hard–on now, and that was plain scary.

  But she hadn’t been, scary. She’d been more open and honest about sex than any woman he’d ever met. And the wonder of seeing her in the water like that… wow, it just wouldn’t go away. He only had to close his eyes and he was right back there, the breath locked in his lungs, skin prickling with awe as she’d looked up through the water at him. He’d never seen anything like it in his life, and he really, really wanted to see it again — to see her — before he died.

  Surely Wilson must feel the same way. That must be why he’d sent for Rand. He wanted a reunion, like war buddies who gathered together to affirm that what had happened to them on the battlefield was real. This wasn’t about stolen silverware or the old man dying. It was about fairytales coming to life.

  So he should go up there, instead of standing on the street in front of the building as if he wasn’t sure what to do. He was here, so he must intend to go in, and without giving himself more time to think he set off and was through the pedestrian throng and up the black marble stairs before second–thoughts could intrude. One step onto a beautiful sculptured mat activated those massive tinted doors and they slid across, releasing a wave of cool air that seemed to caress his skin and then draw him into the building. He went with it, his Doc Martens silent on the pristine red carpet.

  The uniformed lobby attendant nodded as he strode past, which surprised Rand. He imagined it wasn’t every day they had torn denim shorts through the lobby. But manners were manners. Rand nodded back, then he was inside the lift listening to Pavarotti. On the fourteenth floor a stunning blond receptionist — who Betty would probably also hate — showed him into an impressive book–lined office, and he went straight to the window and caught his breath gazing down on the winding Brisbane River, surprised that it actually looked majestic from up high. All he’d ever known of it was the bad quarter: mud and beer cans and mangrove stench.