“The ocean is a woman?” His eyes twinkled, amused by the story, not disrespectful.
“Of course it is. Think of all the life it gives.”
“I guess I can agree to that. But the water takes life, too.”
“It does what it has to.” I thought about Mom and all the other mermaids, the way they hunted. I turned my face to the horizon thinking about those girls and how they might be getting ready to hunt right now. Instead, in the center of the water I saw a blur of brown. It could’ve been anything, but I knew it was a body.
“Did you see that?” Sam leaned forward and squinted.
“The only thing I see is you.” I kissed him, turning his head away from the waves. I couldn’t let him find it, not when it could be another mermaid. We were about ten minutes from my house. If I could get him to take me home, I could get the body into shore if it was a dry-lander, or take her home if it wasn’t. Part of my mind raced through the possibilities, scared and anxious, the rest of it focused on how good it was to kiss him.
“Are you trying to distract me?”
“Is it working?” I passed his lips and went to his ear, nibbling softly while I looked out at the water. The brown blur, the maybe mermaid, was drifting toward my reef. “Thanks for the wonderful birthday dinner.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I think it’s time I acted like a grown-up and faced my problems.”
“You sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
We walked back to the parking lot hand in hand. It had been a wonderful birthday dinner, and a great afternoon. Now I had to protect my reef, find out if that blur was a mermaid, and do something about it.
Sam dropped me off and I waved good-bye from the top of my stairs. As his car moved out of sight I went straight through the house, shedding my clothes as I moved. Mom wasn’t home, a small blessing. I hit the water and started to swim fast. The sun wouldn’t set for another couple of hours. I wanted to find that blur before it got dark. I didn’t have to swim far, a mile or two away from our beach and there it was, riding the tide, proving me right.
Up close I recognized the body, saw the hair I’d run my hand through, the shoulders I’d rested my head on. It was Ryan, my boyfriend from a summer ago.
I put my hand on his cold skin and thought about how warm he’d felt. Now his skin felt too slick. Small fish scattered as I approached him, more of them nibbling at his face, at the lips I’d kissed once.
I touched him there, my fingertips trailing over his face. I remembered him alive, playing football at school, walking the halls like he was king. He drove a black Mustang. His father owned a bunch of condos along the beach. He liked chocolate ice cream. Once, in the moonlight, I’d pulled him out into the water. Once I’d been scared I would cause his death. Now, someone else had. Someone or something. The thing had gone for his throat.
His throat. I looked at the wavy ribbons of flesh in the water. If I looked only there it might be Tiffany’s throat. The two of them died the same way, a single fierce attack. Not the way Mara died, not a scattering of bites all over. It made me wonder if the killer, the maybe monster, ate humans differently.
I suddenly wished I’d paid more attention when Mom tried to teach me all about ocean life. But would she have told me about something that ate girls like me? I didn’t remember her telling me much, she certainly hadn’t covered salt golems, but then I never wanted to hear it. I made it clear that the only world that mattered to me was the one with school in it. Now that world was on the edge of being lost to me forever.
I looked down at the body in the water beside me. Even with supernatural eyesight, I didn’t think Sam had really seen it. He’d been focused on our date…and on me. He’d been the best part of my birthday. Finding Ryan was the worst. Suddenly, the fight I’d had with my mother seemed childish. My driver’s test felt stupid. Ryan would never play football again. He’d never call me “Babe” again. I’d given all that up for his safety, and it hadn’t mattered. Someone else hurt him. Was he any more dead than he would’ve been if I’d given in to my worst impulses? No, but it hurt that the person I’d tried to keep safe died.
The futility of my efforts depressed me. So, like I always did when I was sad, I concentrated on the facts. I’d swum from home, finding Ryan by the scent of old blood. I realized suddenly that if I could find him, sharks should’ve. It made no sense that he was here, intact.
I stopped myself. Sharks hunted at dusk and dawn. If Ryan was…fresher than that, being whole made sense. Or, I realized, maybe the sharks knew something larger had already claimed it. Sharks weren’t stupid. They’d threaten me when I got a big fish or circle hoping for scraps but I’d never had a shark attack me directly. What if it went that way with other things? What other things were there?
I’d taken a summer session at the community college in marine biology. Unfortunately, they only covered mundane, everyday things. No mermaids. Still, it taught me how sensitive a shark’s sense of smell was. They could smell a drop of blood from three miles away. I forced myself to lean in close to him to see if there was a scent. At first, all I could smell was old blood, and my stomach heaved. Doing this so soon after eating dry-land food was a bad idea.
I pushed past the nausea and caught a tiny whiff of a scent, something like a medicine cabinet. I cleared my gills and leaned closer, practically sticking my face into his wound. Nail polish remover.
I took a deeper breath, this time through my nose. It didn’t make sense to breathe that way under water and it felt irritating. A second later, I realized that it wasn’t the process but the smell. It irritated my throat, like breathing in a chemical cleaner. I moved backward to clear my head. What smelled like that in the ocean? Nothing I could think of.
Ryan floated next to me in the water, his dark hair waving in the ocean current that reminded me of a more immediate problem. If the tide shifted a little more, his body would have almost no chance of being found. Ryan’s parents liked me. They’d invited me to supper at their house and told me to call if I needed someone and Mom was out. They deserved to know what happened to him. I needed to carry his body to shore. But where?
My choices were closer to shore here or back to the beach where Ashley had been partying. I thought about the long swim to that beach, and how long I would have to touch his body. I felt guilty, knowing touching Ryan underwater was something I’d wanted so much once. I’d fantasized about him, having him near me, taking his body. Now I didn’t want it in my ocean. Guilt washed over me, but I couldn’t argue with it.
In about two minutes, I was towing the body closer to shore, closer to the spot where I’d been standing with Sam not that long ago. The beach was deserted, empty under a starry sky. A couple might walk along it, holding hands, and falling in love. A mermaid might rest on that beach in the morning; waiting among the seashells for an early fisherman. A lot of things could happen, but I was making sure that one thing did: someone, that couple, that fisherman, someone was going to find Ryan. And, Mother Ocean willing, someone somewhere would solve his murder.
Chapter Six
I got home later than I wanted to, but Mom still hadn’t shown up. I needed her, wished I could talk this out with her but I suspected she was punishing me. She’d never met Ryan. She wouldn’t mourn his death, wouldn’t understand why it left me feeling confused and upset. I escaped the way I always did, deep into a book. This time I let myself be swept into a fictional world thanks to my literature class. The main character was poor but loved. She trusted the wrong man, though, and ended up raped at a carnival. I thought about it, about the words the book had used to describe it without describing it. He told her he loved her, but then he hurt her. Did he mean it? Could you love someone and hurt them at the same time?
I wondered about men and what it felt like for them to force themselves on someone else. Most women would never feel that, and for me, it was all I could feel. Men didn’t walk away from a night with a mermaid. Sometimes they lived to tell the s
tory, without a leg, half-drowned, everyone thinking they were crazy. One time with me would turn Sam into that, into a guy no one believed who walked with a limp. If he walked. Could I control myself that much? I’d never tried. My plan had always been simple: ignore the hormones, stay as far away from boys as possible. Except now, it didn’t feel like it was possible for me to stay away. Maybe it was getting older. Maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough. Maybe I didn’t want to. Whatever the reason, I wanted Sam in my life. I had to find a way to keep him safe.
I could’ve asked Mom if she was there. But I knew better. She’d mock me and then maybe go kill him. I tried to tell myself that was overly harsh, a mean thing to say, but I knew deep down that if Mom thought a guy was the reason I stayed on land that guy wouldn’t have long to live. It was why I’d never introduced her to Ryan, another way I kept him safe. Not that it worked.
The thought of him brought back the image of his throat and I wondered if mermaids ever killed that way. I didn’t think so, but really, I didn’t know. I wanted to kick myself for never asking Mom or Grandma about it. I’d always been so determined to learn in school that I didn’t care about what I could learn from them. Sure, I swam with them and sung a few songs, but I didn’t ask questions or pay attention when they tried to tell me things. Well, I could pay attention now. I needed answers that weren’t in any book. Tomorrow, I’d go swimming to find them.
****
I woke up before the alarm went off and texted Ashley to let her know I planned to ditch school. I waited for her to text back asking about my plans. A few minutes of waiting got me nothing. With an eye on the clock, I texted Sarah to ask if Heather had turned up, and I got no reply there either. Was it my turn to be kicked out of the cool kids? Did I care? I did a week ago, but this morning it seemed less important. Seeing how a mermaid could die, how it could’ve been me—that changed everything. Still, I gave my cell phone one last look before I headed toward the beach.
The sand still felt cold from the night before, but the water warmed me. I ticked off the things I knew about mermaids in my head while I swam toward the reef. How chocolate made us drunk, how processed food made us sick, how our legs switched back. I let myself settle on the bottom of the ocean. Could I get my legs back here? The same way I’d tried to speed them changing yesterday morning? I tried for an hour and couldn’t.
I thought about Mom, who knew all this…or maybe none of it. She’d never tried to pass for human. She spent an hour or two at the bank, made sure a lawyer was set up to handle the bills, and then went back to the ocean. When I was a little girl, we slept in the ocean. After she’d gotten me to school, she went back to the waves. If the school had called with some problem, if I needed her, no one could reach her. She’d be in the water until pick-up time. I resented her for it, but maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe it was just how she was. Maybe it was how I would be soon.
My mother wanted me to hang out with other mermaids, and I figured it was time to try. I swam out, not too far, not too close, and sang. Our voices work under water. They sound high and sweet. Out of the water, the same song could break glass; but under the waves my voice belonged to a diva. My cousins felt like a distant memory to me, but the song of our pod called them over in a matter of minutes. Every mermaid in the pod was my cousin, at least, we called each other that, but it felt like I’d never met the girls who swam up. Maybe they’d been at Mara’s funeral, maybe we were related, but they were still strangers.
“Hunting, cousin? Or fishing?”
Hunting meant finding a man to mate with, then drown. Fishing meant eating. I wanted to be cool, so I played it low-key. “Fishing first, then hunting, if there’s something worth hunting.”
Half the group laughed at this, not a giggle like I might hear at school but a deeper laugh, something you’d hear from an older woman. I looked at them for a minute, the matching group of girls between fifteen and twenty. As far as the dry-landers were concerned, they were children. Out here, they were killers.
“Ondine has never hunted.” The leader of the group, a long mermaid with a deep green tail gestured to a girl who looked younger than the rest. “Have you?”
I decided to be honest. I’d had enough secrets at school today. “Not yet.”
Did I want to? To take some boy? To mate with him the way a mermaid did or even to kiss him and do more the way a normal teenage girl did? Yes. But I didn’t want to kill him. “Can I still come with you?”
Heads nodded in agreement.
“Good. I live on land so I’ve never hunted.”
I felt them draw back, away from me, but the leader didn’t seem to care. “So you’re Danika. I’m Celeste.” She named the rest of them in a rush, but I didn’t follow. “We expected you to stay after Mara left us.”
“I’ll stay someday.”
“When?”
“I’m still deciding.”
Celeste shrugged, and the group moved back to me. She was their Ashley. Once she accepted me the rest of them did.
“There were grouper over there.” She gestured over her shoulder. We swam that way without much discussion. I’d never fished as part of a group, and it took me a minute to figure it out. They all circled the fish, driving them into a tighter and tighter circle. Then, one of the girls would dart in, grabbing a fish with her teeth or hands. Out they’d come, and another would go in. By the time they got to me I figured out how to grab one by the gills and another with my mouth. I came out with two fish instead of one.
“Nice catch,” Celeste congratulated me and the rest of them followed her lead as we settled on the sand to eat. It wasn’t long before Ondine came over. Her hair looked a little darker than the rest of us, cinnamon-tinted instead of just blonde. I offered her some of my second fish.
“Thanks.” She smiled with delight. “I’m too little to get the big ones.”
“You’ll grow.” I smiled back at her.
“Why haven’t you hunted yet?” On land it would’ve been an invasion of my privacy, here it was a totally normal question. Worse, all of them were leaning in to hear my answer.
“I feel like it would make all my choices for me, like the minute I did, I’d be trapped. It almost happened once, but I stopped myself. I knew him; I couldn’t kill him.”
“Never get to know them.” This wisdom came from a girl with pink scales on her tail. “That’s not what they’re for. Don’t even talk to them.”
“Come on, Rose. You don’t even ask them to kiss you?” Another girl, this one with a tail a bit darker than my own, made kissing noises.
“Not worth it.” Rose shook her head but her eyes stayed locked on Ondine. I thought the two might be sisters. I could see hints of similarity between them.
“Do you think the whole thing is worth it?” I asked her. Something about Rose sounded angry, as if she didn’t like that she had to hunt.
“Maybe. If it meant I had a daughter out of it. But how often does that happen? Otherwise it’s a mess and too much work.”
I didn’t know how often you got a daughter out of it, but I didn’t interrupt as one of the other girls, this one with a light blue tail, challenged Rose.
“I think it’s worth it. It feels great. I’d hunt more if I could.”
“It feels great for like ten minutes, then the cleaning fish are picking things out of your scales for hours, and the cramping, the pain. Not worth it,” Rose decided.
“Don’t listen to her, Ondine. It’s powerful and intense, and it’s what mermaids do.”
“Then why don’t we go do it?” Celeste ended the debate by tossing away the remains of her fish. “You don’t have to hunt.”
I think she said it to Ondine, but I decided I was included in the exemption. I expected us to swim close to the shore, by a beach filled with college kids or maybe a resort. Instead they turned and headed out toward a boat. As we got closer, I corrected myself, a yacht. There were some very rich people in Miami. I guess this group had decided to take their yacht out for a spin in de
ep water. We were miles from land, far from cell phone signals, and even farther from help.
Celeste popped her head out of the water and a few of the older girls followed. I joined in. Three or four girls sat on the deck, white sundresses looking classy in the sun. With a nod from Celeste, everyone ducked under the water again.
“I’ve got them, try the other end.” The group swam off, leaving me alone with Celeste and Ondine. “Want some practice, cousin?”
“I don’t know what you’re about to do,” I admitted.
“The women are useless to us. We could eat them, but we just had fish. Besides, their blood would bring sharks. What we need is for them to go inside.”
“Okay, so do we ask them?”
Ondine laughed, but Celeste had more patience. “In a way. Do you know the song to the sand crabs?”
I nodded. It was a stupid song, about how the crabs should run away sideways because the hungry fish was coming and if they didn’t run away home they’d be all eaten up. Each verse listed a different fish: sheepshead, redfish, flounder, drum. It felt like the song could go on forever. Mom had made me sing it when I was a kid, usually as a way to keep me busy when she needed to do something.
“Sing the part at the end, the part that goes up.”
I sang the line, an increase in notes where each one was held a little longer than the last.
“Perfect. Ondine, go with her.”
Ondine rolled her eyes like she didn’t want to take orders, but she did it. We both stuck our head above the water and sang the tones that signaled it was time for crabs to run away home. On the deck, the girls started to fidget. The longer we sang, the worse they fidgeted until one of them announced she was going inside and another complained about bugs. By the time the song was done, they were all gone.
Ondine and I slipped back under the waves.
“Does that work every time?”
The Mermaid and the Murders Page 7