Fantasy Life (3 page)

There was water in her nose and she was coughing, the sound muffled by the water, and she tried not to get water in
her lungs, but she was failing. Water was running down the back of her throat, and she was choking.

Daddy was holding her shoulders, pressing them down, playing too rough like he did last summer when he first scared Mommy, and he couldn’t tell Emily was in trouble.

She thrashed and struggled and grabbed his wrists with her hands, trying to let him know that she couldn’t breathe. Black spots danced in front of her eyes. Her chest burned, and she coughed again, this time sucking in a big mouthful of water.

She was dying, really dying, and Daddy wouldn’t let her go.

Anchor Bay. Oregon

Gabriel Schelling crouched beside the body on the beach. The tide was out, and the sand should have been dry, but it was the texture of concrete, damp and smooth. The air stank of dead fish.

A crowd of tourists huddled near the cliffs that formed the southern end of the bay. He had asked the tourists to go away, but that was like asking the ocean to get rid of its salt. Tourists never did what you wanted them to, and they never ever left—especially when a body was involved.

The tourist who had called the sheriff’s office had reported finding a woman who appeared to be long dead. But as Gabriel looked over the body, he realized that, although the creature before him was female, it wasn’t a woman.

Fortunately the face was pressed against the sand, and the tourist, like anyone who stumbled on something awful, didn’t look too closely. This so-called woman had bulging eyes, almost no nose, and lips that were permanently pursed.

She also had chalk-white skin that was covered with a layer of nearly translucent scales.

Gabriel’s father had called these creatures fish women, but the residents of the southern part of Seavy County called them mermaids. Gabriel didn’t think either description was exactly right.

He also had never seen a dead one before, and he doubted that anyone else had either. For all he knew, these creatures lived forever in their strange home deep in the sea, even though there was talk that they were amphibians, and that they often walked the land.

Gabriel grabbed his radio and pressed the talk button. “Athena, where’s Hamilton?”

Athena Buckingham had been the North County dispatcher for the Seavy County sheriff’s office ever since Gabriel was a boy. She was efficient and tough, and someone who still put the fear of God into Gabriel, even though he was, technically, her boss.

“He left the moment I contacted him.” Athena’s voice, operatic in person, seemed tailored for the radio. “He should be there at any moment.”

Depending on traffic and accidents along the way. Getting from one part of Seavy County to another in the summer was a nightmare, which was why the sheriff’s office had finally split into three districts.

Only one road, Highway 101, ran all the way down the Oregon Coast. In Seavy County, particularly in the northern part, the highway was often the only north-south road for miles. The Coastal Mountain Range was wider here, placing tall mountains on the east side of the highway. With the ocean on the left, there wasn’t a lot of room for roads, houses, or anything else.

And the traffic in the summer got worse every year. July was peak tourist season and roads that were built for hundreds
of cars had to cope with thousands. Usually if Gabriel saw a body, it was on the highway, inside a demolished car that had tried to pass in a no-passing zone. If he had a dollar for every one of those accidents he had seen in the seven years he had served as North Seavy County’s sheriff, he would be able to retire already.

Gabriel said, “Tell him to get his butt here as fast as he can. He’s going to like this one.”

“He’s going to like this one?” Athena repeated. “What does that mean?”

Gabriel let go of the radio and reattached it to his belt. He knew better than to answer that question on the public bands. But he also knew that Athena would repeat his words to the coroner, Hamilton Denne.

And Denne, who had a great scientific and historical interest in what he had once dubbed the fantasylife of Seavy County, would love this one. He would find out everything he possibly could about this creature, and then some.

Gabriel thought he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He looked over at the tourists. At least two families waited by the black rocks, as well as a single man standing off to the side. Two women wearing wet suits and holding their surfboards watched as if they were waiting for the right wave.

Gabriel studied the tourists out of reflex. If this were a dead human body before him, he would be thinking about suspects. Seavy County had at most two or three murders a year, but there were a lot of accidental deaths. And in accidental deaths, especially ones around the ocean, murder always had to be ruled out.

The family on the left had the same avid look on their faces as the surfers did. The children, a boy and a girl both nearing puberty, were beginning to lose interest. They were casting longing gazes at the ocean.

But the parents seemed riveted. Gabriel would guess that
they were Southern Californians just by their clothing. The shirts were tasteful, although short-sleeved, and their shorts were khaki, but completely inappropriate. Even though the sun was out, making the sky a brilliant blue, the temperature down here hadn’t gone higher than sixty-five. In areas the wind could reach, the temperature went down at least ten degrees.

No wonder the children wanted to move. They were probably cold.

The wind didn’t get to this part of the beach because of the cliff that the tourists were leaning against. The cliff, which extended for at least two miles, curved against the beach, forming a natural barrier to anything that came from the south.

The cliff was black and large. On the tip, the cliff rose even farther up, forming a shape that people had once compared to a goblet, giving the entire southern tip of Anchor Bay its name—the Devil’s Goblet.

A friend of Gabriel’s often joked that the Devil used to live on the Oregon Coast, and when he left, he abandoned a lot of things. Lincoln City had Devil’s Lake, and farther south tourists could find the Devil’s Punchbowl, his Churn, and his Elbow.

Hamilton Denne had told Gabriel that Dee River in Whale Rock used to be called the Devil’s River, and other sites in Seavy County were either still named for the Devil or renamed away from the original devilish names.

At some point, Gabriel thought he would do a travel article on the Devil and the Oregon Coast, but he had a hunch his usual publishers, both Oregon-based tourist magazines, wouldn’t take it.

The other family seemed even more intense than the first. These people, parents and three children, knew how to dress for the coast, and they looked vaguely familiar. Gabriel wondered if they were weekenders—people who owned a second home here and often thought they belonged.

Anchor Bay’s six hundred year-round residents never believed that weekenders belonged, and many of the locals thought the tourists should stay away. Often, at the end of a long summer, Gabriel was one of them.

But the person who caught Gabriel’s attention the most was the single man standing next to the surfers. The man was tall and thin and had straggly gray hair. He seemed nervous.

“Hey, Gabriel.” Hamilton Denne stood on the beach access steps. He was holding his kit in one hand and a body bag in the other. “What’ve we got?”

“Come see for yourself, Hamilton,” Gabriel said.

Denne stepped off the concrete steps and started across the dry sand. He was the strangest person Gabriel knew in an area filled with misfits, ex-hippies, and people who simply didn’t fit anywhere else. Denne’s family had lived on the Oregon Coast forever and somehow became one of the state’s most influential families.

Denne’s marriage to the daughter of one of Portland’s wealthiest families added to that. Hooking up their oldest daughter with a Denne was like having a member of the Bush family marry one of Bill Gates’s daughters, only on an Oregon scale.

But about four years ago, Denne quietly divorced his wife. Since then, he seemed lighter, happier, and increasingly more ghoulish.

He didn’t look ghoulish though. Denne still had an East Coast prep-school air to him. Some of that was his collection of Harvard sweatshirts, updated every year, and some of that was because Gabriel had yet to see him in jeans. Even Denne’s grungiest pants had a crease down the center.

This afternoon, he was wearing a brand-new pair of Nikes, and the sleeves of his sweatshirt were rolled up, revealing surprisingly muscular arms. Denne’s blond hair needed a trim, and his angular face actually looked a bit haggard.

“This doesn’t look good,” Denne said as he got closer.

That was precisely what Gabriel had thought when he’d first crossed the sand. “You have to see it from this angle.”

Denne set the kit and the body bag down, then crossed over to Gabriel, careful not to step on anything that could be evidence. Gabriel appreciated Denne’s caution. The two murders they had worked together had resulted in convictions because of Denne’s meticulousness.

Gabriel held his breath as Denne crouched. Denne loved anything unusual and collected most everything that had to do with Seavy County lore.

Denne peered at the body and then, to Gabriel’s surprise, lost all color in his face.

“Is this what I think it is?” Denne asked.

“What do you think it is?” Gabriel asked, knowing better than to put his assumptions on Denne.

“A mermaid.” Denne breathed the word, as if he didn’t want anyone to overhear him.

“I never technically think of them as mermaids.” Gabriel swept his hand toward the legs, bent at the knees, and the long, flipperlike feet. “No tail.”

“That’s true.” Denne spoke like someone crouched over the body of a friend. “My father used to call them sirens, even though that’s not accurate either. In Greek mythology, sirens never went into the water. They sang from the coastlines.”

Gabriel studied him. “You okay, Hamilton?”

Denne shook his head slightly. Then he leaned even closer, careful not to touch the body. “Definitely dead. See? There’s a bluish tint to the lips and nostrils that can’t be natural, and there’s some kind of substance in the gills.”

“Nostrils and gills?” Gabriel asked.

“I’m pretty sure she’s not the only one built like that,” Denne said. “Real mermaids of the fairy-tale type would have to have them too and so would water nymphs.”

Gabriel grinned. This was one of the many things he loved about Seavy County. He knew of no other place in the world where he could have this kind of conversation.

“How about in the real world?” he asked.

Denne’s smile was halfhearted and dismissive. “I don’t specialize in the real world.”

That wasn’t exactly true either, but Gabriel wasn’t going to argue. He shifted a little, his legs growing tired from crouching.

“Look at this.” Denne pointed at a space in the thin, strawlike hair. “No ears. Not even a place for them.”

Gabriel did look. The skull was perfectly rounded along the side, the skin—with no obvious scales—stretched taut. “I expect you’ll find a lot of differences.”

Denne gave him a look of surprise. “God, I hadn’t even thought of that. I was just going to look for what killed her. But this is something, isn’t it?”

“Alien Autopsy,”
Gabriel said, talking about a video they had both seen and laughed over. “Think of all the tourists we’ll get on this beach now.”

If anything, Denne grew paler. “I’m not letting this information out. The last thing we need is the
National Enquirer
here, making us all look like hicks.”

Gabriel smiled. Now that reaction was pure Denne. He would rather avoid controversy and public notoriety than claim the discovery of the century.

“What do we do with it?” Gabriel asked.

“We’ll treat this like any other body we find on the beach,” Denne said. “Full crime-scene investigation. Those people over there think this is human, right?”

He nodded toward the tourists.

“Yeah,” Gabriel said. “They didn’t give it a good look.”

“Perfect. Then that’s what we tell the
Anchor Weekly News.
A body on the beach, suspicious death.”

Gabriel gave him a sideways glance. Denne hadn’t moved
from his crouch, his hands hovering over but not touching the body.

“You want to use county money to investigate this,” Gabriel said.

“Damn straight,” Denne said. “If everyone thinks we might have a murder, no one’ll argue the state crime lab budget. They have better equipment than I do.”

“I thought you didn’t want outsiders to know about this.”

“They’re not going to examine her,” Denne said. “They’re going to look at the stuff around her, just like they would for any other crime scene.”

Gabriel nodded. Sometimes he liked how Denne thought.

“All right,” Gabriel said. “Let’s get to work.”

Madison. Wisconsin

Lyssa Buckingham first heard the sirens when she stepped off the bus at the corner of University and Linden, but she didn’t think much of them. Sirens had become a fact of her life since she’d moved so close to the University Hospitals and Clinic. Sirens, and bells from the First Congregational Church just a block away, and in the fall, there would be shouts from Camp Randall Stadium during the Badger football games.

Inconveniences that she didn’t mind, just like she normally didn’t mind taking the bus. On this day, though, it was a different matter. The bus’s air-conditioning had been out, and since she’d left her office at five like the rest of Madison, the bus was crowded. She’d had to stand for the full two miles, swaying in the intense heat, and as she had gotten off, the bus nearly drowned her in hot, smelly diesel exhaust.

Lyssa adjusted her bookbag so that it fell across her back. Her purse was heavy enough by itself, but the bag—filled with the research materials she had finally gotten from a rare-books Web site—made the purse seem like it weighed nothing.

In her right hand, she carried her briefcase, filled with this week’s papers from the course she had specially designed for the summer session: “Women and the Vote, 1868 to 1922.” She got to talk about all her favorite female pioneers, from Susan B. Anthony to Victoria Woodhull to Sojourner Truth. And she made the students understand that voting wasn’t just a right; it was a privilege, one many of them wouldn’t have had a hundred years before.