Page 11 of The Mermaid Murder

I was dry. My clothes, my hair— everything— bone dry. The water in front me was still and not a ripple indicated it hadn’t been the entire time.

“What in the ever-loving fuck is this?”

I don’t know, Outer Bitch. See what I did there? I’m sticking with the you’re-being-haunted-by-a-mermaid theory.

I looked out at the water for a few more seconds. Then, with a sigh, I headed back to the house, grabbing both mugs and the catalogue on the way. “There are no such things as mermaids.”

Right. Then what do you think it is?

I shrugged. “I need to call Jeremy. He’ll know what’s up with Misty, if anyone does. Come on, Myrt. Let’s go inside.”

She bounced to her feet and ran to my side.

Chapter 3

MISTY

Episode two was up. Misty had worked on it with Zig so much that she knew it by heart, but she listened anyway as she drove to work.

“The weekend Eva vanished, her new husband Paul was at the Unique Artists’ Expo, in Rochester.” Zig’s voice, when she was recording, took on a deeper, slower, more deliberate tone. And it was evocative, conveying emotion, suspense, tension. She was born to do this, Misty thought, and not for the first time.

But even Zig admitted the writing this year was way better than last. That was because Misty was the one doing it.

“He attends every year. I spoke to a fellow artist who asked not to be named…”

But Misty knew her name: Sarah Malone. She was a painter from Rochester, one of the event’s organizers, and she’d known Paul Quaid since the expo had begun in 2010. Misty and Zig had spent more than an hour talking to her about Quaid, without learning a helluva lot. She described him as a quiet guy, kind of shy. He rarely stayed long at the expo’s nightly mixers. UA was his only carved-in-stone annual event, she said, although he would do others, reluctantly, if money was tight. But mostly he sold his work online and that was how he liked it.

“A real loner,” Misty murmured to her Jeep. “Aren’t they always?”

“Quaid always drives out to Rochester and back in his old Volvo, a trip that takes three hours and twenty-one minutes, according to the internet,” Zig was saying in her dulcet but deadly serious podcaster voice. “He always stays in the same hotel room, always orders the same meals. The year his new bride vanished was no different. According to the local press back then, there was enough video footage of Quaid at the event to rule him out as a suspect.

“My silent partner and I were able to find extensive photos and footage of that year’s expo online, and we spotted him in several shots. But I don’t think the police did what we did. We found, in the local press, the photo with the latest time stamp, a grainy shot of him getting ice from the machine on his floor around midnight on the morning Eva vanished. Witnesses saw Paul Quaid at the breakfast buffet the next morning, according to reporting in the Springs Herald, and since the buffet only ran from 6:30 to 7:30 a.m., this provided his alibi. Police Detective Jen Scott, a former Army Explosives Ordinance Specialist, took charge of the case, and she cleared Quaid based on this alibi. But Detective Scott didn’t do what my silent partner and I did either.”

Misty smiled to herself. It had been her idea to stand in the spot with the ice maker, turn on a timer, and see how long it took to get back to Saratoga Springs. Driving fast, they’d made it in three hours and two minutes. Making a round trip of?—

“Six hours, four minutes,” Zig said slowly, drawing out the suspense. “Figure in a half hour to make Eva disappear, and he could still have made it back in time for that breakfast buffet. It would’ve been tight, but it was entirely possible. This makes us wonder if any of the other suspects the police ruled out have equally shoddy alibis. And we plan to test every single one of them.”

There was a two-beat pause, and then, “Don’t miss our next episode. Hit that ‘Subscribe’ button to get notified when it goes live. Thanks for riding along. Peace out.”

Misty was always amused when Zig flashed a two-finger peace sign with her sign-off. It was a podcast, audio-only. No video. Nobody could see her, but she always did it.

She pulled in along the driveway that hugged The Sapphire Club. It was a gorgeous place, fire-treated barn boards on the outside, dark brown, even black here and there. The border around the building was a sea-themed rock garden, with boulders, seashells, and sand. The entry doors were red, double, and bracketed by stained-glass sidelights depicting graceful mermaids.

The driveway curved in close for drop-offs, then curved the other way, around to the parking lot in back. The parking lot was paved in blacktop and surrounded by boulders that needed a little more imagination, in her opinion. They just sat there like they’d been dropped. They should have plants and smaller rocks and things around them, to make them seem more natural.

Just past the parking lot and down a little knoll, Saratoga Lake sparkled like a giant sapphire. The Sapphire Club’s property extended all the way to the beach. They offered wedding packages all summer long. Lakeshore ceremonies, with or without mermaids posing on rocks for photos. Receptions were held in the club a few yards away, with optional mermaid performances.

They booked out two years in advance. Misty had made serious bank doing those gigs last summer.

She parked her Jeep, headed up the clanging metal staircase to the second-floor entrance, and walked into warm chlorinated humidity. The cover was open, and the pool was blue and inviting. Its lights were on. Echo and Jasmine were already in the water. They did this bit where they made a living mermaid yin-yang symbol. Echo’s skin was dark as ebony, and her long dark braids trailed behind her when she swam. Her lashes were so thick she looked like she wore makeup, even when she didn’t, and her eyes were big, brown, and full of her feelings. Jasmine was milky pale, right to her eyelashes. Her brows were the same strawberry blond as her long, ultra-fine hair, that looked like smoke when it trailed behind her in the water. Her eyes were ice-blue and revealed nothing.

“Hey girls. Hey, Toby,” Misty said, hurling her garment bag from her shoulder to the floor. Toby was face-down on the floor, reaching behind him with a long-handled zipper hook to try to zip his own flaming tail. It had stripes of bright orange, vivid yellow, and blaze red. He’d dyed his hair to match, and it stood up on his head with waterproof mouse.

“Hey, put that hook down before you stab yourself,” Misty said, heading over to him and taking the position, straddling his head.

Toby sighed in relief and put the zipper hook down. She reached for the long string that was threaded through his zipper and pulled. She had to lean back to pull it up all the way. Mermaid tails were tight anyway, and Toby’s was getting a little tighter.

Coach Hannah came in from the locker room door on the right wall, still in the process of bundling up her long, short blond layers. She wore a black spandex tank top and calf-length swim pants, and carried a heavy rubber band that was not for her hair. It was for her legs.

---