The Mermaid Collector (3 page)

“Of course not. I’m just curious, like everybody else. Aren’t you?”

“Oh, I’m curious, all right.” Tess slid her arms around him again, her hands riding up his spine, then coming around to his zipper. “I’m curious what would happen if I undid this button.…”

“Hey, now.” Pete grinned. “I’m already late.…”

“They’ll understand,” she whispered, freeing the button. “Everyone knows nothing gets done this close to the festival.”

“Everyone except Vic Marshall.” Pete gently removed her hands, buttoning himself back up. He dropped a kiss on her forehead. “I think you can wait a few hours, don’t you?”

Tess smiled. “Don’t be so sure.”

Still smiling after she waved him out of the driveway, she came back inside her woodshop and pulled the heavy door closed behind her, feeling as light and unfettered as the paper-thin wood curls that blew across her floor like sand-colored snow flurries.

Maybe she
had
waited forever for Pete Hawthorne.

But that was the thing about life on the water: Tides went out and, eventually, they came back in.

TOM GRACE SMELLED THE OCEAN
long before he saw it. It had crept into the old blue Volvo like smoke, thick and wet and salty, and he was grateful for it. Sixteen hours on the
road and he had grown tired of breathing in fast-food grease and restroom lemon soap. On either side of him, long stretches of white pines rose up like fence posts, straight and even, trimming a road that twisted like a string of black licorice.

When he saw the sign for Cradle Harbor at last, a tidy painted square nestled behind loose-petaled roses, he thought for a moment he could still turn back. But he couldn’t, of course. He’d moved them out of the apartment on Webster, and Dean wasn’t far behind, his younger brother having no way of reaching him except for his cell phone, a fact that had kept Tom in a constant state of panic for the entirety of his twelve-hundred-mile drive from Chicago. His panic seemed only to grow the closer he got to his final destination. In the seventeen years of caring for Dean since their parents’ death, Tom had never liked to let his younger brother out of sight for too long. The last thing Tom had wanted was to leave Dean to come a few days behind him, but what choice had he had? Tom knew he couldn’t risk losing the house Frank had given them, knowing how contentious the gift had been.

He reached for the foam cup wedged in the holder beside him, remembering as soon as he did that it was empty. God, he was thirsty. He tugged at his tie, feeling foolish for wearing it. Ten years of being a teacher had conditioned him to wear a tie every day. Out of habit, he’d even worn one on the weekends, much to Dean’s endless amusement.

Slowing as he neared the center of town, he found his thoughts drifting restlessly to the lines of Frank’s last letter, the instructions Tom had pored over so many times.
I’ve left the keys to the keeper’s house with Buzz Patterson at Birch Point Cottages on Birch Road. He’ll be expecting you.

Expecting him. The very idea rattled Tom to the core, filling him with a chilling image of wide-eyed faces and shaking fists, demanding to know why Frank Hammond had willed their historic Cradle Harbor lightkeeper’s house to someone they believed to be a perfect stranger. Tom knew little about small towns, but he imagined they were filled with people much like the hordes of seagulls he’d encountered all his way up the coast: sharp-eyed and insistent, unwilling to retreat until they’d gleaned a tasty morsel.

Already he’d endured a slew of e-mails from the town’s historical society, demanding that he agree to allow them access to the keeper’s house for tours. Tom had replied only once, curtly and firmly, but still the e-mails and phone calls had continued. He’d ignored them, and he had the feeling they weren’t women used to being ignored. Making matters worse, he’d refused to let them send him a copy of their precious town manifesto. He had little interest in the folklore of this place, in whatever foolish legend they all dusted off every summer for their famous festival—or so Frank had referred to it in his letters over the years.

Tom gripped the wheel with both hands, the plastic hot beneath his fingers, his scalp feeling the same fever under his wavy chestnut hair. He had meant to get a haircut. He needed one desperately; it wasn’t like him to go so long without one. He felt shaggy and crass. He could smell himself, and God, he stank. Even his fingers smelled—hamburger grease and motor oil (the car had been burning it copiously since Erie, and he’d left a constellation of droplets on one pant leg while checking the stick in Katonah). He only hoped the old house had running water. He didn’t care if all the windows were missing, even the front door. It could be without a stove or a fridge, infested with ants. Just as long as there was water. He wanted a shower, a shave, a bar of soap with corners.

There was always the sea, he told himself as he arrived on the other side of the village, seeing the pines thin just enough to reveal fields of marshland, spotted with shingled sheds bleached as white as bone. If he grew desperate, maybe he could climb down the ledge of rocks below the lighthouse and splash himself clean. But then he’d smell of salt, wouldn’t he? No, not much of an improvement.

Dean wouldn’t care, though. Tom knew his younger brother would rush to the water’s edge the minute he arrived; he would swim in the frigid ocean at all hours. Tom only hoped the current wasn’t too strong at the end of the Point. Dean wasn’t used to such rough waters, and Tom would be powerless to stop him.

When the sign to Birch Cove Cottages finally appeared on the horizon, Tom had to squint to read it behind a veil of pine needles. He came to a stop, surveying the long driveway in front of him before starting down it. After swerving around several bends, he saw a stretch of cleared land and a handful of gaudily painted cottages. On the other side of the road, farther up a rise and right on the edge of the woods, stood a lemon yellow cottage with a watermelon door, and a ways beyond that, at the top of the hill, a fire-truck red trailer. Tom pulled the Volvo into the turnaround and killed the engine, not sure where to go first.

Out of the car, he caught at once the clear sounds of wind chimes to his right. He glanced up at the yellow cottage and saw several sets hanging from the porch overhang, knocking together in the breeze. More sounded farther up the hill. Looking at the trailer, he could see a row of the metal rods hanging from the deck railing. The wind strengthened, and soon the air was filled with the cacophony of their bells, only for an anxious moment, then quieting remarkably seconds later as the breeze thinned.

As if feeling somehow released in the quiet, Tom turned to the water and saw one more building he’d missed on his first survey, a shed with a hand-carved sign hanging over its door:
TESS’S WOOD CARVING AND SIGN SHOP
. Surely someone inside could direct him to Buzz Patterson.

There was a window on one side, the side closest to
him, and he walked to it, having to navigate his way over a stack of logs to get there. Once he had, he cupped his hands around his face and pressed his nose against the glass. Squinting in, he could make out the shape of the interior, cluttered surfaces lit by a window on the opposite side. He scanned the room, almost all the way to the end before he saw her.

A woman sat in the cone of a spotlight and facing a mirror, one hand posed at her hip, the other reaching out to draw on what appeared to be a wooden dolphin. Tom squinted harder, shifting against the pane for a better view and got one. Now he saw clearly, too clearly to look away, though he knew that would have been the right thing to do. After all, the woman had drawn up her shirt on one side and gathered the cotton just above her breast, high enough that he could see the pale fullness of one side, the creamy skin in stark contrast to the rough wood of the shed’s walls. She was posing, he was certain of it, being her own model. But why, when she was sculpting a dolphin? Now she reached her arm behind her, arching her back, her dark hair washing her shoulder blades. She watched herself as her torso curved, causing more flesh, a crescent of nipple, to be exposed.

At that instant, Tom caught his own reflection in her mirror, then the woman’s eyes shifting to meet his and rounding.

She twisted to face him.

“Shit—” He darted backward so fast that he knocked
his head on a set of wind chimes—
Christ, how many does one person need?
—causing them to ring out in alarm. He grabbed the bamboo sticks to quiet them, rubbing his head with his other hand.

From the front of the shed came the creak of the door being pushed open and then the woman, barefoot, her hair wild and coppery in the sunlight, her eyes the color of freshly cut limes. Her T-shirt was down now, hanging nearly to the hem of her lopsided shorts. It was a man’s undershirt, there was no mistaking it, oversized and worn and low on one shoulder. She held a chisel in her left hand. More like
wielded
it, he thought. What had he gotten himself into?

“If you wanted to spy on me,” she said, “you should have gone around to the other window. The view’s much better from there.”

“I wasn’t spying,” Tom defended hotly, already feeling the color seep up his cheeks as he struggled to untangle himself from the precarious stack of logs he’d climbed over. “I was just trying to find someone to ask directions.”

“You could have knocked.”

“You could get curtains.”

“It’s private property.”

He cleared his throat, succeeding at last in finding level ground. “I’m looking for Buzz Patterson. Is he here?”

“I suppose he’s somewhere.”

“He’s expecting me.”

“I doubt that.” She dangled the chisel by its handle.
“Buzz isn’t expecting anyone today. Cottage reservations don’t start until Thursday.”

“I’m not here for a cottage,” Tom said, tugging on the knot of his tie, which seemed tight suddenly. “I’m here for the keys to the keeper’s house. I’m Tom Grace.”

“Oh.” She looked him over for a long moment before her eyes lifted to the hill. She pointed behind him with her chisel. “Guess you’re in luck.”

Tom turned to find Buzz Patterson marching down the hill, the sixty-five-year-old dressed in his uniform of jeans and an unbuttoned flannel over a tie-dyed tee, his long red hair, which, along with his beard, had become increasingly threaded with gray in the past few years, pulled into a ponytail that fell to his shoulders. He arrived and thrust out a meaty, freckled hand. “Tom Grace, right?”

Tom cautiously extended his own. “How did you know?”

Buzz nodded to the Volvo. “Saw the Illinois plates. Buzz.” He gave Tom’s hand a rough shake. “I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.”

“I decided to drive straight through,” Tom said.

“I see you’ve met my daughter, Tess.”

Tom turned to Tess but found she’d already returned to her shed. Buzz squinted up at the sky, then gestured to the woodshop’s open door. “Let’s get out of the sun a minute.” Tom followed Buzz inside, his lungs filling at once with the spicy smell of wood, so sharp his eyes watered.

“Tessie’s working on a big commission.” Buzz pointed
to the large sculpture at the other end of the room where Tess had returned, moving a chisel over a newly outlined curve. “They’re going to put her mermaid in the library. Going to have a big unveiling this weekend.”

Tom offered up a brief but polite smile, feeling dim. He’d thought it was a dolphin. No wonder she’d been studying herself. Breasts on a dolphin. Idiot.

“She’s crazy talented, Tom. You should see the stuff she’s done.”

“Don’t believe a word of it,” Tess said without turning. “He’s hopelessly biased.”

“Damn straight.” Buzz grinned, then looked back at Tom. “Long drive for you, I’ll bet. Traffic must have been hell.”

“It was all right.” Tom glanced compulsively back to Tess before he answered, the surveys becoming a nervous tic. He couldn’t stop watching her. That shimmering blade dangling over her bare toes made him nervous. What sort of person worked barefoot with sharp tools? And why should he care? He just wanted the damn keys already; he just wanted a shower, a bed, to be out of the car for more than ten minutes. He wanted to stop sweating. There was one thread of sweat in particular that was winding around his left shoulder blade and driving him insane.

“…Mermaids.”

“What?” Tom swerved his gaze back to Buzz, lost. Christ, how long had the man been talking?

“I said
everything
’s about mermaids this time of year,”
Buzz repeated pleasantly. “You’re lucky, getting here just in time for the festival.”

Tom saw Tess glance at him over her shoulder, her survey brief but pointed.

He cleared his throat, wondering what about any of this could be considered lucky.

“You know,” he said, “I’d just really like to get those keys.”

THE TWO MEN WALKED UP
the driveway, through a maze of standing bird feeders, and into the red trailer.

“Excuse the mess.”

Piles of folded linens covered almost every surface in the kitchen—the counter, the chairs. There was even a pile of washcloths on each of the four range tops.

“I’m never this disorganized,” Buzz said, relocating a stack of bath towels to the dining table. “Usually I got all the cottages set up weeks in advance. But this year…I don’t know. Losing Frank sort of took the wind out of my sails, I guess.” Buzz pulled down a coffee tin from the windowsill above the sink, tilted it, and reached in. After a moment of fishing, he retrieved a loaded key chain and handed it to Tom.

“Now don’t let all those keys freak you out,” Buzz said. “Chances are half of them don’t even go to anything anymore, but Frank figured you should have them all, just in
case. I labeled the important ones—you’ll see. The front door and the padlock for the lighthouse. Those old crows at the historical society might have gone and changed the lock—who knows? Maybe Frank warned you; they thought they were in line for the keeper’s house too, so don’t be surprised if they give you hell for a while over it.”

Tom rolled the stack of keys in his palm, fanning them out with his thumb and seeing the tiny strips of masking tape on several. “They’ve already been in touch actually.”