The Mermaid Collector (9 page)

BEVERLY PARTRIDGE DREW DOWN HER
sunglasses and surveyed the village of Cradle Harbor from the front seat of her rented sedan.

She hadn’t expected it to be so busy, so colorful. When Frank had spoken of his hometown—which he’d done so few times over the years—he’d called it quiet, sleepy. He’d talked of thick banks of morning fog rolling across the sea, of hearing nothing but the faraway clanging of moorings on the water, gulls squawking at one another on an
empty pebble beach—except during the festival, he’d admitted once. Frank had said that the first weekend of August turned the town and all its inhabitants on its ear, like a sudden breeze overturning a picnic.

Beverly had waited for so long for him to reveal his home to her, to share these pieces of himself, but he’d refused. In the beginning, she’d told herself it was his right to keep secrets. After all, the reason a man had a mistress was to forget himself, not be reminded. But as the years had passed, three then five, her patience had waned. By ten years into their affair, her curiosity had turned to craving. When his wife, Joan, had died, Beverly had pleaded with Frank to let her come and be with him after the funeral. He’d told her it wasn’t possible, wasn’t right, and so she’d stayed away, sure that with Joan’s passing, his tight grip on his other life would loosen and Beverly would finally be granted access to the part of him he’d kept hidden from her. But in the months that followed Joan’s death, instead of turning to Beverly as he’d done for nearly fifteen years, Frank began to turn away. His calls came less frequently; his visits too. Where once she’d have looked forward to handwritten letters at least every other week, now only a few postcards came. They were nothing but loose, rambling sentences, useless observations about the weather and the loss of sunlight as fall approached. Beverly had scoured them like the map to a great treasure, sure there were hidden pledges of love somewhere in the few lines.

It was his death that was the final straw. No wonder
he hadn’t told her how ill he had become. Even to the very end Frank had wanted to keep her from finding out. Surely he’d known if he confessed how close he was to dying, she would have rushed to his side, making the pilgrimage despite his orders that she not come. And now she knew why he had never told her. It seemed she wasn’t his only secret.

It would never have occurred to Beverly to search the Internet for information about her lover. At fifty-eight, she had little patience for computers, but when her older son, Daniel, had grown weary of her constant grief over not knowing more about her beloved’s death, he’d suggested she do an online search. He’d offered to do it for her, but Beverly had been too afraid of what her son would certainly find in an obituary.

But it was she who was shocked at what she found.

It was like unwrapping something fragile. With each click of the mouse, Beverly couldn’t believe the layers she peeled away, and with each one, a startling discovery; the man she thought she knew she hadn’t known at all. And clearly, based on the outrage and shock of the town residents, they hadn’t known him, either.

Frank had bequeathed property to a pair of young men named Grace. The news had shocked her breathless, and so Beverly had searched on, stopping only when she came across an article from a local paper that quoted a resident—the head of the town’s historical society, in fact—who boldly suggested that the young men might be Frank’s illegitimate
sons. The mere suggestion had filled Beverly with such a sense of betrayal, she’d nearly collapsed with it. But instead, she’d stayed glued to the computer for the rest of the night, searching for everything she could find on Frank Hammond and the brothers to whom he’d bequeathed the town’s precious lightkeeper’s house.

Frank had stopped her from finding out the truth when Joan had died; he’d stopped her before his own death. But he couldn’t stop her now. By that next morning, her eyes blurry but her thoughts crystal clear, Beverly had decided she would go to Cradle Harbor, the epicenter of her lover’s life and lies. After all, she was as entitled to answers as any of them.

He won’t leave his wife; they never do
. How many times had Beverly heard that wisdom imparted to other women she’d known over the years? But she hadn’t wanted Frank all to herself—at least not in the beginning. By the time she and Frank had met, her husband, Clark, had been dead almost two years and Beverly had come to enjoy her independence. She wasn’t looking to marry again, wasn’t looking to have more children. She knew she was a pretty woman, the sort that men looked twice at, looked long at, even when they knew you saw them watching. Not that it was all luck. She knew better than to be so smug. She’d taken care of herself over the years—her figure, her skin—and it showed. Even pregnant, she’d kept her weight gain low, and she’d made sure to get back into shape quickly after each delivery. It had been important to her to keep her body intact. It was still.

Not that the transition was an easy one. No matter how quickly she regained her figure, Beverly had found herself struggling to resume her normal intimacy with Clark. This was not because she didn’t love her husband, but because she never understood how a woman could be both mother and lover. Once Daniel was born, she had felt a strange distancing from Clark, an alteration that she was all too aware of; yet there was no stopping it. When Frank had appeared, there was no confliction. He knew her only as a woman, and Beverly embraced his vision entirely, soaking up his attention like parched soil.

She’d been sure of so many things. Then she’d learned about Tom and Dean Grace.

Winding her way into town, Beverly had tried to imagine Frank driving these roads, maybe Joan beside him. Each car she’d passed, she had wondered if Frank had known the driver, and how well. She was especially nervous to meet this Buzz Patterson. Frank had spoken highly of his brother-in-law over the years, the only relative he’d ever revealed anything about. Buzz Patterson owned seaside cottages and rented them out, which was perfect, really, since she’d need a place to stay. She was confident that Frank had never revealed their affair to his brother-in-law, so there would be no risk of exposure should she try to draw information. And why wouldn’t she try? She hadn’t come all this way to make friends. She’d come for answers, and as harsh as it sounded, she’d played nice long enough. She’d soothed the ache of Frank’s loveless marriage, usually without any
hope that he might untangle himself. She’d made him a priority while he’d made her a footnote. Who could blame her for feeling so betrayed?

The town’s center was small, just a handful of streets spilling into a green, a short stretch of public beach nestled between the fingers of several old piers. Now Beverly turned away from the water to face the storefronts that lined the wharf, their windows dressed with banners and decorations. Which one to go into for directions? she wondered. It was like looking at gifts under a Christmas tree, not being sure which to open first. Now that she was here, opportunity was everywhere. Every encounter was a chance to get closer to the truth, a chance to snoop, to peek inside the sealed package of Frank’s life.

She decided on a gift shop with an amusing underwater display and stepped inside, the air fragrant with the sticky sweet smell of scented candles. A pair of old men stood behind the register, matching white-haired heads bowed over opened boxes.

The thinner of the two held up a tangerine coffee mug, the mug’s handle in the shape of a mermaid, and he cursed. “Dammit, Wall. They sent the wrong mugs again.”

The other man looked up over the tops of his reading glasses, seeing Beverly, and offered her an apologetic smile. “The orange don’t sell well,” he explained.

“I can imagine.” Beverly looked around the store, seeing shelves of green and blue wigs, rows of Cradle Harbor T-shirts and baseball caps. She’d never seen so much mermaid
merchandise in all her life—mermaid pot holders, mermaid shot glasses, even mermaid nail clippers. How absurd.

She stepped up to the counter. At her elbow, a rack of cast mermaid key chains dangled from their hooks, tinkling softly.

Wallace Mooney wiped his hands on his pants and tugged down his glasses. “Looking for something in particular?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Beverly. “I’m looking for directions to Buzz Patterson’s cottages.”

“Oh sure.” Wallace fished a pencil out of a standing tin, tugged a piece of scrap paper from a stack, and began to sketch a map. “Hope you’ve got a reservation,” he said.

“I certainly do. One of the last, he told me when we spoke on the phone.”

“Good for you. His cottages have some of the best views in town. Real pretty spot.”

Beverly smiled politely. “So I’ve heard.”

SHE WASN’T EVEN SUPPOSED TO
be at the perfume counter that day. Normally she worked the makeup counter—she had for nearly six years—but one of the new girls had fallen sick in the middle of her shift and Beverly had agreed to cover for her. After all, it had been the start of the holiday season, and the lunchtime rush at Marshall Fields was impossible to manage alone.

She’d noticed the man with the tidy salt-and-pepper hair
at the end of the display long before he made his way toward the register to ask her for a sample. He’d noticed her too, because he’d moved deftly around the other salesgirl who’d approached him first and walked straight to Beverly instead.

“It’s for my wife,” he’d said as she’d sprayed the tester slip, letting the scent settle before handing it to him. He’d taken a quick sniff and nodded.

“It won’t smell like that on her, you know,” Beverly had said. “It’s an entirely different smell on the skin.”

The man had looked at her then, wearing a tentative smile.

“I can spray some on myself and let you see,” Beverly had offered.

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

She’d spritzed the inside of her wrist and held it out. The man had leaned in, close enough that Beverly could see the flecks of gray in his eyes, long enough that he could see her see them. He smiled, and she wasn’t sure what pleased him—the perfume or something else.

“I’ll take that,” he said, reaching for his wallet.

“Good.”

Lots of married men came through the store during the holidays, some even to her counter. It had upset Clark, thinking that other men came on to her, thinking that she was kind to them, maybe even a bit of a flirt. But she wasn’t. Until that day, until Frank Hammond, Beverly hadn’t ever taken a man’s number or let a man buy her a late lunch.

Maybe it was because Frank hadn’t tried to hide the fact that he was married, and maybe it was that honesty that made him all the more attractive to her. They sat with coffees in the restaurant. He’d bought her a pastry, which she hadn’t touched and probably wouldn’t, even though he had pushed it gently toward her as they talked. Beverly had told him she was a widow and that she had two teenage boys. Frank had explained that he owned a business in Maine and that he was in Chicago for a conference. When the check came, he insisted on paying, though Beverly wouldn’t allow it. But when the taxi arrived, she let him help her inside and let him close the door for her; while she shuffled across the seat and waited for him to climb into his side, she kept her eyes forward. But after a while, as the driver steered them wordlessly down Michigan Avenue, she felt his eyes on her and she turned to meet them.

And as she sat there, she’d thought,
This is how these things happen. Like this. This quickly, this innocently. After years of walking past a smiling stranger, you decide one day at forty-three years old you’ll stop and talk to him. You’ll tell him things you wouldn’t have told most strangers. You’ll let him tell you the same. And then it begins.

This
.

BUZZ SAW THE WHITE SEDAN
just as he was coming out of the trailer with an armload of newly laundered blankets. The
woman driving didn’t see him, not at first. When she climbed out of the car, dressed all in white, she looked in the other direction, down at the stretch of cabins he had been airing out since morning, as soon as the fog had cleared and the sun burned hot enough to bake out months of lingering tides.

It wasn’t as if they
never
had guests outside of festival season. Sure, it wasn’t a regular thing—not like it was for Donny and Brenda up at the Heron House Inn, or the Pollards’ B and B. It used to be, when Buzz first opened the cottages twenty years ago, he could expect a dozen or so visitors every month. Lots of times it was old friends who had been passing through; enough guests to keep him busy with laundry and cleaning. But in the last ten years, he and Tess weren’t seeing much in the way of visitors—except for festival season, of course. But that wasn’t exactly a measure of their reputation or service. God knew people would pay big bucks to sleep in someone’s lobster pot if it came to that.

This time of year, though, Buzz worked up a hell of a sweat. It didn’t help, of course, that he’d put on weight in the years since Ruby had drowned. He’d let himself go—wasn’t that the ugly phrase people loved to throw around about other people? Not that he could be too sanctimonious. Many a morning he’d look in the mirror, certain Ruby wouldn’t even recognize the man who scowled back at him. Once he’d been so fit, so strapping, she’d called him “Buzz the Red,” her Viking. Now he huffed as he made the
march down the path to meet the woman in white, feeling the beads of perspiration clump under his ponytail, under his arms, in the lines of his palms.

Somehow she looked as fresh as a new roll of toilet paper. She was tall, too. And quite pretty in that fussy, fixed sort of way. Her skin was as pale and unblemished as apple flesh. She was lost; that was his first thought. She had to be. Women like that didn’t want cottages with torn screen doors and drawers that stuck. They wanted suites, rooms filled with antiques and canopy beds with no fewer than ten pillows on them.

“I’m looking for Buzz Patterson,” she said, even before he’d reached her, her voice crisp like someone used to speaking in front of a class, or someone just used to being listened to.