5

Little Girls

On a path high above the ocean a man was walking. His hair was shorn within half an inch of his scalp, stubble covered his face, and a backpack thudded on his shoulders. He walked as if he were in a hurry, but then he would stop, sometimes for several minutes, as if he was searching for something in the long silvery grass. At first the path looked down on a harbor where sea lions sprawled, but after a while it bent back and ascended still higher over open sea. Tall cliffs plunged to knife-sharp rocks and the tumbling slopes of enormous waves.

It had happened somewhere around here. The man half expected a spike of cold anger to let him know when he was passing the exact spot, but all he could feel was the cool spring wind and the feverish determination crowding his thoughts.

He might go to prison for this, of course. Even if they bought his story—and there was no reason to think they would—the law didn’t make allowances for the kind of justice he had in mind. But that was okay with him. It wasn’t like he had anything better planned for the rest of his life. Luce was probably lost to him for good.

After another mile the dusk was dotted with golden squares and oblongs. Shining windows stood out against the blue evening and glowed through the spruce trees on the hillside behind while to the right a rolling silver-blue meadow dropped abruptly down into the waves.

Almost there, now. His heartbeat clattered in his chest like a handful of coins dropped on a hard floor. He climbed the steps up to the back door of a small brown house.

Through a gap in the curtains he could see a grubby pea green kitchen. A patch of bare wood showed where the floor’s linoleum had split and peeled away. Two heavy sock-clad feet were resting on the wood, but that was all the man could make out. It was enough, though.

He knocked. No response. Maybe the jerk had passed out. He knocked louder, sharper, making the loose windowpanes clack in their frames.

A moan, a shuffling noise, a fan of golden light where the door swung open. Eyes on his, blank and bleary. Definitely drunk. “You got a problem?”

“I got a whole bunch of them, as it happens, Peter.”

There was a long pause, a few panting breaths. Then recognition landed like a stone. The man on the outside step couldn’t help grinning as he watched his brother reeling back into the kitchen, too scared and shocked to muster a response at first. After another uncertain moment it came. “You’re dead.”

“Tell me about it. But I’m not half as dead as I used to be, brother. Shoulda seen me a couple months ago.”

“Andrew. You’re not . . . Christ, man, how did . . .”

“Gonna ask me in?”

“Oh. Yeah. Good to . . . good to see you. Didn’t think I’d ever . . .”

Andrew Korchak stepped into the house. It was almost too easy. He shut the door at his back and locked it then dropped his backpack. “Got anything to eat?”

“There are . . . I’ve got some cans in the cupboard. Go ahead and help yourself. Whatever you want. Andrew, how did . . .” Peter’s eyes suddenly turned skittish as if there was something in the room he hoped his brother wouldn’t notice. His body was bloated and saggy, and a web of broken blood vessels reddened his face. A half-empty bottle sat on the table.

Andrew Korchak didn’t move to get the food he’d asked for. Instead he paused in the center of the kitchen, slowly and deliberately looking around. He kept on examining the room, walking back and forth, his face carefully composed into a look of mystification.

“Something missing here, Peter? Feels like you moved some things around.”

“It’s about like when you left.” A pause. “Want a drink? It’s got to be a hell of a story. How you got here and everything.” Peter moved to sit back down at the kitchen table, but once he was sitting he didn’t look comfortable.

“Oh, I’m all right. But thanks. Or maybe someone? Isn’t somebody else supposed to be here?” Andrew was still peering around, down the dim little hallway, into the corners.

Peter’s face was just getting redder. He stared down, obviously straining to pull himself together. “I . . . You mean Luce? About that. I got some bad news.”

“I guess it is Luce I’m missing here, isn’t it? Yeah. How’s my little girl doing? Is she out with friends?”

“Andrew. About that. It’s a terrible thing . . . I don’t know how to break it to you, but . . .”

“She ain’t been doing good in school, or something? I’ll straighten her out.”

“She . . . Andrew, sorry, Luce passed on. To a better worl—She just . . . she got in with a bad crowd, drugs and everything, and she wound up going over the cliff. Got ruled a suicide. I’m real sorry.”

Andrew stopped searching the kitchen and paced over to his brother’s sagging figure. For a long moment he simply stood over him, too close, staring down into Peter’s worried eyes. “Well. That is bad news, Peter. My sweet little Luce a suicide.”

Peter slumped a little deeper with what looked like relief. “I didn’t know how to break it to you,” he agreed.

“I can see it would be a hard thing to say. But you manned right up and told me the truth. I appreciate that.”

Peter was nodding eagerly. “Had to do it.”

“Yeah. Now it’s my turn. I’ve got some even worse news I need to tell you. I’m afraid it’s gonna hurt.” Andrew was standing even closer to his brother. His arms were swinging lightly.

“I . . . What news?”

“Luce didn’t die.”

A swarm of conflicting expressions buzzed through Peter’s face. At first they were mostly variations on confusion, but as he felt his body heaving out of the chair and crashing backwards onto the floor, there was a lot more terror in the mix. Then Andrew was on top of him, knee on Peter’s chest, fists slamming down into his rubbery cheeks. Andrew punched again, feeling a few teeth break, while Peter’s heavy body flopped and grunted below him. It would have been more satisfying if only Peter had done a better job of defending himself. He tried to swing at Andrew’s head, but his blows were limp and disjointed, slapping like damp frogs.

It should have been a great moment, Andrew knew, making his creep of a brother pay for what he’d done to Luce. He’d been looking forward to it. But somehow in practice it came as a disappointment. His revenge felt as mushy and pathetic as his brother’s doughy flesh jiggling under his knuckles. Andrew hit Peter again, harder, hoping that savagery would help cancel out the disgust he felt. The bridge of Peter’s nose snapped.

In fact, Andrew felt more like vomiting than anything.

He stopped punching and stayed where he was for a minute, half kneeling on his brother’s chest, staring around the room. He’d faked looking for Luce before, but now he searched for her in earnest, desperately wishing she’d walk out of the shadows—walk out, on legs, the way a young girl ought to do—and gently pull him to his feet again. Peter was gasping, struggling uselessly. Andrew toyed with the idea of strangling him. He’d pretty much planned on it. He didn’t doubt that his brother deserved to die, and he didn’t care at all about the consequences. It was just . . .

It was just too sad.

Killing Peter would be too sad, too senseless.

“I should rip your throat out,” Andrew said to the twitching mass under his knee, but his voice didn’t have much conviction. “I should throw your dirtbag of a corpse off the same damn cliff where you left my little girl after you tried to rape her. I should . . .” There was a rivulet of blood dribbling from Peter’s swollen lips, pooling on the green linoleum. At least, Andrew thought, he’d accomplished that much before punking out.

Andrew got up heavily, walked to the cabinets, and picked out a can of chili. He started poking through the drawers for a can opener. Behind him Peter made slobbery noises and spat out his teeth. Andrew didn’t bother turning around.

“Andrew . . .” The tone wasn’t what Andrew would have expected. It was high and soft.

Andrew still didn’t look back. “Yeah?”

“She’s . . . really alive? Luce is really . . . she’s really alive? You’re not shitting me?”

“I just saw her. About four-five weeks ago, now.” He dumped the chili into a pot and fired up a burner, flicking the match into the sink. “She was a lot less dead than I am, for sure.”

The slobbery noise got louder. “Where the hell is she, then?” Peter’s voice kept getting higher, whinier. “Little girl just ran off and made me think . . . Didn’t even call. Is she coming home?”

“Is that what you call this dump? I’d bleed you like a pig before I’d let you get anywhere near her, Peter. No damn way you’ll ever see her again. You don’t even deserve a chance to apologize to her, you hear me?” He wasn’t about to explain why Luce wasn’t coming back. It was enough to know that the words hurt Peter more than the beating did.

Even without turning to look Andrew knew his brother was sobbing on the floor. He stood at the window eating his chili from the pan and watching the distant roil of the waves. A film of Peter’s blood clung to his knuckles, sticky and red.

Luce was out there. Somewhere. But how was he supposed to find her?

 

He slept in Luce’s old bed that night in her tiny room with books heaped on the dresser and postcards from cities they’d traveled to together tacked around the bed. High on the wall were two photos: a snapshot of Alyssa holding a three-year-old Luce on her lap, a big white sunhat casting a slanting shadow across both their faces. The photo next to it was much more recent, an official school portrait that Andrew guessed had been taken not long after his boat wrecked. In it Luce appeared unsmiling and scared, her eyes wide and otherworldly, wearing a navy sweater that was getting too small for her. She looked lovely and horribly vulnerable, and he ached to hold her and tell her that everything would somehow be okay.

Alyssa was dead. That was understandable, natural, even if it ripped his heart to think about it. But the way he’d lost Luce, on the other hand . . . that was too surreal, too impossible. There was just no coming to terms with something that made so little sense.

He woke up to a silent house. Peter must have actually gone in to work, then, even with his busted face. Everyone would just figure he’d had a nasty fall while he was drunk. Apart from the endless hiss of the waves there was no sound at all. After a minute Andrew pulled himself out of bed, stretched and moaned. If he wasn’t going to kill Peter, then he also wasn’t going to be spending the next twenty years locked up. Looked like he’d have to think of something else to do, if rotting in prison was off the table.

He’d clear out after breakfast. Leave Peter a note and never come back. For all he knew Luce could be anywhere along the continent’s west coast, so there was no reason to stay put.

The photos of Luce and Alyssa almost hummed to him; he could feel their nearness, hear a wisp of their mingled voices. He pulled both pictures off the wall and slipped them into his backpack, then got dressed in the old clothes people on the islands had been kind enough to give him when he’d shown up wrapped in filthy sealskins. They’d been awfully good to him, the mad, tattered castaway who’d insisted at first—until he got his head together, anyway—that he’d been brought there by his daughter, Luce, and that she was a mermaid.

Andrew stumbled out into the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee, stepping over the blotch of crusted blood on the linoleum. He’d been knocking through the cupboards for a few minutes before he noticed the dark silhouette floating on the door’s sunlit curtain. Somebody was standing there, dead still, watching him through the gap. Andrew swung around and saw a sliver of a tan-skinned, thickset man, his neat silver hair like a glaze in the pale daylight.

Once the man saw Andrew looking he knocked as if he’d just arrived. But Andrew was sure the guy had been standing there for a while.

“Yeah? Help you with something?” Andrew didn’t try to keep the annoyance out of his voice as he opened the door.

“Peter Korchak?” The man on the step had warm, sympathetic brown eyes, but his mouth was tense.

“That would be my brother, actually. Want me to tell him you were looking for him?”

“Your brother.” The tan-skinned man stared for a moment as if he weren’t sure whether or not to believe it. “And your name is?”

“You’re the one on the outside of the door. That means you might want to think about introducing yourself before you go asking me anything.”

In reply the man folded back his coat. His badge gleamed in the pallid day. “Ben Ellison. FBI.”

“All right.” That didn’t make too much sense unless Peter had gone and turned criminal. But there it was. “And I’m Andrew.”

Ben Ellison made a conspicuous effort to stay calm. “Do you have any identification?”

“No.” Andrew stared for a second. “Peter can vouch for me, I guess, if you’ve got some reason you need to know. What’s your business here?”

“My understanding is that Andrew Korchak was lost at sea. More than two years ago. But if that’s really who you are . . .”

“That’s who I am. I didn’t stay lost, is all.” He felt tired, and even though he’d washed his hand the night before, he suddenly noticed lines of dried blood still clinging in the grooves of his knuckles. “What’s your business?”

“Then I expect you would know who this is?”

A photo. Zoomed in until it was very close and grainy so that it only showed her face glancing back over her shoulder. The background was bright and blurry, but it looked like shining water. Her cheek was marred, and Andrew’s breath caught as he noticed the notch torn from her ear. “Where did you get this?”

“So you do recognize her?”

Andrew couldn’t stand it. He pivoted on his heel and walked to the counter, leaning with his head hanging down, his shoulders heaving. He’d failed to protect Luce again. And for some reason this FBI bastard was asking questions about her, and that might mean . . .

“Mr. Korchak?”

That might mean he knew . . .

“This photo was taken just a few days ago. I’d like to discuss the situation with you, Mr. Korchak, if that would be all right.” Ben Ellison stepped over the threshold and approached. The kettle was whistling out a piercing, horrible note.

“What do you want with her? Look, whatever you’re thinking . . . Luce is still a little girl . . .” His arms were crossed on the counter, leaning heavily, but he was painfully aware that Ben Ellison must have noticed how he was shaking.

“You know, you don’t seem at all surprised. To find out that Luce is still alive.”

Oh. Right. He was supposed to think that Luce had killed herself. It was too late to pretend, though. “I knew she wasn’t dead, is why.”

There was a pause. Andrew looked up to watch Ben Ellison’s face, to observe the thoughts churning just behind his eyes. The guy seemed pretty smart, actually. “And would knowing Luce is alive be somehow connected? To the fact that you didn’t stay lost?”

It was a strange line of reasoning, unless this Ben Ellison knew a lot more than he ought to. “Knowing she’s alive? It’s connected to the fact that I saw her a few weeks back. She wasn’t banged up like that then, though.”

“But I imagine there were other changes in her that you might have noticed,” Ben Ellison said. His tone was sardonic, but there was another suggestion in his voice at the same time, a definite hungry sharpness. Was it envy?

“What do you want with her?” Andrew’s heart was racing and his knees wavered, but even so he was starting to feel some humor in the situation. Whether your kid got caught swilling vodka in a cemetery or shoplifting or turning into a mermaid, it was all the same. You still had to talk to the cops.

Ben Ellison hesitated. “I’d like to help her. I’m afraid it might not be possible, but—”

“Help her how?” Andrew found himself feeling defensive suddenly. “Far as I can see my girl is doing pretty good, considering.”

“She’s wanted for murder.”

“She’s what?”

“Arguably it was self-defense.”

“This is garbage. She’s only . . . she’s a kid. A good kid.”

“Given her current situation, it’s unlikely that constitutional protections apply, and I doubt anyone will go out of their way to interpret the law in her favor. After all, she technically isn’t even . . .”

“Isn’t even what?” Andrew snapped.

“Human. She isn’t human. Not at the present time.” They were staring fiercely at each other, the kettle still shrieking behind them. “Of course you aren’t surprised to hear this, either.”

“Who cares? Whatever kind of . . . whatever she looks like now, she’s still my daughter, and she’s still a . . . barely more than a child, really. A juvenile, anyhow. Look. If somebody was trying to hurt her—”

“Can you contact her? Do you know where she’s going? That photo was taken off the coast of Washington, and at the time she was heading south. She was seen the next day not far from the Oregon border.”

“And if I did know that, you think I would tell you?”

“There are quite a number of people who are determined to catch her, and they’ll shoot her on sight.” Ben Ellison paused to let that sink in. “If you have some way to communicate with her, you’d be well advised to urge her to surrender before that happens. And if I’m involved in the process, I promise I’ll do whatever I can to ensure her safety.”

“Was it your people who tore up her ear like that? If you did . . .”

“That wasn’t us.” Ben Ellison was looking toward the window now, then abruptly he walked to the stove and snapped the kettle off. His expression was morose. “Mr. Korchak, the fact is that I think Luce has been . . . unfairly singled out. But she’s also been behaving in a way that is guaranteed to attract negative attention when she should be doing whatever she can to keep a low profile. That video, for example.”

“What video?”

“Check the Internet. Search for ‘mermaid.’ You might be the last person in America who hasn’t seen it.”

Andrew considered that. Things were starting to make a bit more sense. “So she’s in some video. But then how did you know it was her? You see a mermaid, you don’t go and spontaneously say, ‘Oh, I bet it’s that Lucette Korchak girl who everybody thought jumped off a cliff up in Pittley.’”

Ben Ellison wasn’t looking at him. He kept his eyes pointed at the sea.

“Somebody rat her out, Ben? Who’ve you got?”

No reply.

No reply in a way that told Andrew Korchak exactly what the situation was: not only was there an informer, but it was someone this FBI guy didn’t trust. Someone who was lying up a storm, talking all kinds of smack. Firing off ridiculous accusations, like . . .

“Who you all think Luce murdered, anyhow?”

“Five men, actually, in total. Special operations.” Ellison sounded remote, maybe sad.

“A fourteen—fifteen-year-old girl? You think she’s some kind of goddamned ninja?”

“She’s not technically a girl at all any longer. As we’ve discussed. And there’s no question at all that she can be dangerous.” Ellison looked away from the sea long enough to gaze bleakly into Andrew’s eyes. “The prevailing opinion is that she—and all the creatures like her—are nothing but monsters. Regardless of the fact that they were human at one time. I realize this isn’t something a parent wants to hear about his child, of course.”

“The ‘prevailing’ opinion,” Andrew growled.

“Yes.”

“Does that mean it’s the one prevailing in your head? ’Cause if it is, that just shows how damned ignorant you are.”

“I’m . . . suspending judgment. About all of them, but about Luce in particular. Clearly there have been situations where she’s made a deliberate choice not to kill, and where I’d imagine the temptation must have been intense.” Ben Ellison’s voice was grim and drowsy.

“You said . . . those special operations guys . . . it was self-defense.” Maybe they’d forced Luce to kill, Andrew thought. Maybe.

“They were firing spear guns at her, in fact. And they will again.”

“Can’t blame the girl for that! If she was just trying to survive—”

“Mr. Korchak . . . I’m afraid it’s worse than that. You say you’ve seen Luce quite recently. How much did she tell you about her life after she changed form?”

Not much, Andrew thought. “Enough.”

“She was a member of a particularly vicious mermaid tribe. It’s possible that she’s had a change of heart since that time, but it’s extremely likely that she was at least complicit in far more deaths than the ones I’ve told you about.”

“Like . . .”

“Hundreds. Probably hundreds. More. One ship last year had almost nine hundred passengers on board when it sank. And Luce was there. That I know for certain.”

“Luce wouldn’t . . . No way I’ll believe . . .”

“Tell her to turn herself in, Mr. Korchak. It’s the best I can do for her. Special Ops are out to avenge their own. If I’m there first, there’s a chance I can get her into some form of safe custody before anyone blasts her to ribbons.”

“Don’t you talk about my girl like that! My God, after everything she’s been through . . . me and her mom both gone, my loser brother beating her and—You’re talking about just slashing up a teenage girl like it means nothing.”

“I’m trying to prevent precisely that from happening. I sincerely want to help her. Luce rescued someone I care about, and I don’t believe she deserves . . . Can you find her?”

“I want to find her. She fished me off that island where I was stranded, but then she just zoomed off and vanished.”

“And? Do you know where to look for her?”

Andrew groaned. He was doing his best not to break down, but it kept getting harder. “I’ve got no clue where to even start.”