Fantasy Life (8 page)

Gabriel held up his hands. “I’m crying uncle. In fact, uncle half this conversation ago.”

“You’re not normally squeamish, Gabe.”

“I don’t normally find a fish woman on my beach, either.”

“All right. We’ll stop focusing on her for a moment.” Denne pushed his Scotch glass away. “If you didn’t get time of death, what did you get?”

“Something interesting,” Gabriel said. “Most of the tourists had no idea that the body wasn’t human. A few said they thought it was a weird-looking fish. But that nervous guy, the one by the cliffs?”

“I really wasn’t paying attention to the crowd,” Denne said.

The waitress brought Gabriel’s meal. He had ordered the Gut-Buster burger—a thick, well-done hamburger patty, with three different kinds of cheese, guacamole, bacon, and salsa—along with a side of french fries and coleslaw.

“Planning to live forever, are you?” Denne asked with some amusement. Usually Gabriel ordered healthier foods.

“I can’t handle anything fishy right now,” Gabriel said. “Especially after that last description.”

Neither, apparently, could Denne. The waitress set grilled chicken, rice, and a side of tomatoes down in front of him. The meal looked lovely, even though it wasn’t on the regular menu.

“So,” Denne said. “Tell me about the nervous guy.”

“He’d seen her before.”

“Her?”

“Or creatures like her.” Gabriel took a bite from his burger. Juice ran down his chin, and the guacamole spurted out the back side of the bun, plopping on his plate.

He was coping with his meal and not watching Denne’s reaction. When Gabriel finally looked up, he realized that Denne’s face had turned pale again.

“What do you know?” Gabriel asked.

“Nothing about your man.” Denne had set his fork down.

“No, but you know something about our fish woman.”

“I know a lot about our fish woman, but you didn’t want to have that conversation during dinner.”

“Hamilton,” Gabriel said. “Stop playing with me.”

Denne’s fingers found his Scotch glass. They rubbed its sides as if he could absorb the liquid through his skin. “Just tell me what this guy said.”

Gabriel took another bite of his burger before reluctantly setting it down. It would take him a while to pick it back up again. The sandwich was falling apart.

“He waited until I got through everyone else,” Gabriel said. “Then he made sure no one was listening. He asked me if I had ever seen creatures like that before.”

“Had you?” Denne asked the question sharply. He seemed more intense than usual.

“No. But I’d heard about them, mostly from some oldtimers.”

And Gabriel accepted those stories, because he’d seen
stranger things than fish women on this stretch of Oregon beach. He had grown up here and had had terrifying experiences as a child. When he’d started traveling as an adult, he’d realized that nothing would compare to the experiences he’d had in Anchor Bay. Finally, he came home and started the slow process of accepting the supernatural as part of life.

“What did they tell you?” Denne asked.

“What the old-timers told me isn’t important. What the guy told me was weird.”

“Does the guy have a name?”

“Yeah.” Gabriel shrugged. “I have it written down somewhere.”

Denne picked up his fork and pushed the rice around. It seemed like his appetite was gone. “So he saw her.”

“And two others. They attacked his car one night.”

“Attacked?”

“His word. I got the sense he was covering something up. He said that was the beginning, and they’ve harassed him ever since. He said he was happy to see one dead.”

Denne pushed the rice so that it lined the edges of his plate. “I trust you asked him what he meant by
harassed.”

“He said they came into his house at night, and then he blushed. I thought that part was weird. He said that they left seaweed trails and sand, and sometimes they left sucker marks on the outside of the windows.”

“Sucker marks?” Denne said.

“She didn’t have suckers?”

“Not like an octopus.” Denne frowned. “I don’t recall seeing anything like that at all.”

“You’re telling me he’s making all this up?”

“No. I’m not saying anything of the sort. I haven’t finished examining that body. I just did a cursory, looking for cause of death. I’m going to have to do much more, obviously.”

“You believe him then, even though you didn’t find
anything to make the marks?” Gabriel didn’t understand what Denne was getting at.

“Just keep going.”

“He said that these women were driving him crazy. He couldn’t sleep because they sang so loudly, and if he did sleep, he’d wake up on the beach, and they’d be there. He said he hoped her death meant he was done with them for good now.”

Denne nodded.

Gabriel picked up his burger. A slice of bacon fell off the side and into the pile of guacamole. The bun squished between his fingers, and he took a bite before everything slid off.

Denne still hadn’t eaten any of his meal.

Gabriel finished the burger in four quick bites, knowing he would probably regret that later. Then he wiped off his fingers.

“Tell me what I should think of this guy,” Gabriel said. “His story sure made you quiet.”

“What do you think of him?” Denne asked as if he were a shrink, unwilling to express his own opinion for fear it would taint Gabriel’s.

“I don’t know what to think of his story, but his emotions are consistent with someone who’s being harassed. He’s nervous and confused and angry, and he’s pleased that she’s dead. I would expect all of that.”

“But?”

Gabriel gave Denne a sideways look. Denne was always too perceptive.

“But,” Gabriel said, “he’s hiding something.”

“He’s hiding a lot of somethings. Have you ever heard of the
Lady June?”

“The Oregon Coast’s answer to the
Titanic.”
Gabriel picked up a french fry. “What does that have to do with fish women?”

“A lot, actually.” Denne pushed his plate aside and picked up his Scotch. He took a sip, then looked at the glass as if he
were contemplating something in the liquid. “But the
Lady June
really isn’t anything like the
Titanic.
We don’t have icebergs, and she didn’t run aground.”

Maritime disasters didn’t interest Gabriel. He sometimes had to deal with their aftermath—he’d called the coast guard more times than he cared to think about to help disabled yachts in the surf—but he had no real interest in ships and sailing. Which was, he knew, rather odd for someone who had grown up on the ocean.

“Fish women got her?” he asked, trying to lighten the conversation a little.

“She went down in the middle of a storm. Pretty common for the Oregon Coast.”

Gabriel nodded. He ate another try and watched Denne play with his alcohol glass. Gabriel had never seen Denne so reflective, and it bothered him.

“Pretty common, except that there were lots of famous people on the yacht, right?” Gabriel asked, mostly to get Denne to continue.

“Not as many as there could have been,” Denne said. “Only thirty of Oregon’s best families got touched by that disaster.”

Only thirty was disingenuous. Oregon was a small state—and had been even smaller in the 1930s when the
Lady June
had gone down. Thirty families had probably been a significant portion of the “important”—i.e., wealthy—families in Oregon at that time.

“I don’t understand how the
Lady June
relates,” Gabriel said.

“Long story short. There was only one survivor that night. A man by the name of Henry Dyston. He claimed he was brought ashore by mermaids.”

“Our fish women?”

Denne nodded.

“Did anyone believe him?”

“The locals did,” Denne said. “But the press made a fool of him, not that he cared.”

“Why would they rescue only one man?”

“Well, that’s where local history comes in.” Denne set the Scotch glass down. He ran his finger along the rim. For a moment, Gabriel thought Denne wasn’t going to go on. Then he picked up his fork, scooped up some rice, and ate some.

Gabriel let him eat. Denne had always been strange, but Gabriel had never seen him behave quite like this.

After he ate a few bites, Denne pushed his plate away. He picked up his napkin and wiped his mouth. Gabriel thought he was going to leave, but instead, Denne pushed his chair away from the table.

“The fish women,” he said quietly, “have a song like the sirens did. It lures men, charms them, makes them do things that they wouldn’t normally do.”

Gabriel nodded. He decided not to interrupt again.

“Most of us can’t hear it. The women issue an invitation, and the man must take it. I’ve heard that it’s a simple thing, usually something found in the sand. One man . . .” Here Denne paused, as if he were remembering. Then he shook his head. “A man I knew said that he found a bottle of wine, an expensive old one, on the beach. He shared it with his wife and, shortly thereafter, heard the mermaids.”

“The wife too?”

Denne reached for his Scotch. “She died not long after that. An accident on the beach—at least, that was what it looked like to me. The husband seemed guilty and Dan Retsler—remember him?”

Gabriel did. Retsler had been police chief of Whale Rock for a number of years. He left after the freak New Year’s storm of 2000. Something had broken in him, something Denne once hinted had to do with the strange supernatural activity of Seavy County.

“Well, Retsler had me do a full autopsy to see if I could find anything suspicious.” Denne paused, staring into his Scotch glass. “I didn’t—at least at the time. Although she did have sucker marks on her arms and neck. At the time, I thought they were something sexual.”

“You don’t any longer?” Gabriel asked.

“Sucker marks are a theme with these fish women. I had no idea then, although I should have.”

“Why should you have had an idea?”

Denne gave a small half-smile and didn’t answer the question. Instead, he said, “My friend knew a lot about these women. He could hear their song. It made him crazy. He’d wake up on the beach—naked. I think he was convinced they killed his wife.”

Gabriel frowned.

Denne swirled the Scotch in the glass. “They killed him, I know that much. But I could never decide if it was suicide. All of the men these women killed—it’s like they have an addiction, and they don’t know any other way to cure it except to let it take them.”

“All?” Gabriel asked. “How many have there been?”

“I don’t know. A dozen. A hundred. Most of them don’t talk.”

“So how do you know there’s been more than one?”

“I know of three,” Denne said. “Henry Dyston, my friend.”

Denne paused, swirled the Scotch again, then downed it in a single gulp.

“And you?” Gabriel couldn’t resist the question.

“Close.” Denne set the glass down. “My father.”

Gabriel’s heart started pounding as hard as if he had been running. “I thought your father drowned.”

“That’s the official story.”

“And the unofficial story?”

“The night he died, he came into my room.” Denne’s fingers played with the table edge. He wouldn’t look at Gabriel. “He gave me some earmuffs, and a copy of Dyston’s testimony at his trial, where he was defending himself from charges that he sank the
Lady June
and murdered all those people. My father told me to read the testimony, reminded me that Dyston was acquitted by a jury of his peers—which at the time was an all-male jury gathered from Seavy County—and he begged me to wear the muffs whenever I slept.”

“Did you?”

Denne’s lips moved in that small smile again. “I still do.”

Gabriel frowned. He’d heard the mermaids were dangerous. He had just never heard how. Had he missed warnings somewhere?

“Then my father told me to leave Whale Rock as soon as I got old enough to travel.”

“But you didn’t,” Gabriel said.

“Oh, I did.” This time Denne did look up. His blue-gray eyes were sad. “College, med school, internship, and residency. Among them all, I managed to stay away for ten years.”

“Why did you come back?”

“Why did you?”

It was Gabriel’s turn to look down. Denne knew the answer; he had to. It was probably the same for both of them.

At some point, the lure of the ocean—this ocean, the dark Pacific—was too strong. No matter where Gabriel went—the Atlantic seacoast, the Aegean, the Caribbean, the warm Pacific off the tropical islands—it didn’t matter. He wanted the rugged coastline and violent waters of his youth.

All of the beaches had a hint of magic to them, but none of them had hold of his heart the way this one did. It was as if the Oregon Coast were a woman he loved with more passion than any other woman of his acquaintance. He compared everyone he met to her and found them all lacking.

Finally, he had given up and come home.

“Point taken,” Gabriel said.

Denne looked at him then. “My father also made me swear one thing. He made me swear I would never take a gift from the sea.”

“Like a bottle of wine.”

“A bottle of wine, a sea shell, seaweed—anything.”

“Couldn’t our fish woman be considered a gift from the sea?” Gabriel asked.

Denne’s head jerked back as if he had been struck. “If so, she’s not mine. You’re the one who had her taken away from the beach.”

But Denne didn’t sound convinced. After all, he had been excited about the find, as if she was something extra special for him.

“Maybe if you give her back when you’re done,” Gabriel said.

Denne shook his head. “I don’t think this is what my father meant. I think her appearance there is something unusual. I think it’s wrong somehow, something gone awry.”

“But you don’t know.”

“I don’t think any of us can know,” Denne said, “unless it happens again.”

Madison. Wisconsin

More sirens.

Lyssa drove the Bug through the rush-hour traffic traveling west on University Avenue. Everyone was leaving the city, heading home—to Middleton and the cookie-cutter west-end
suburbs. Lyssa had made this drive countless times, and usually she was oblivious to everything but the pattern of the traffic and the comfortingly familiar voices of the
All Things Considered
news crew on the radio.