Seawitch

make, like a woman makes when she’s angry or afraid and she claws at your eyes,” he said, making a sharp gesture toward Fielding’s face with his own crooked and raking hand.

Fielding flinched.

“Come on, Fielding. We don’t have a lot of time. Maybe I can guess what happened and you can just tell me if I’m right.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“I think you said that before. So what is it?”

“I was out with Cas after the halibut and . . . he found out. He found out about Shelly—about us—and he . . . he wanted to fuck the mermaid,” he added in a mumble.

Solis fell silent and the sound of conflict still raged, but distantly and diminishing. Fielding’s whimpering sobs of shame trickled into the noise like tears into a pool.

I leaned forward and returned the knife to Solis, pretty sure he wasn’t going to use it on Fielding at this point but thinking I might. “So,” I started, “you and Shelly were together.”

Fielding nodded, still looking at the ground.

“Reeve disapproved, didn’t he?”

“Yeah . . .”

“And that’s why he didn’t get to come along on this trip. You or Shelly made sure he was too sick to sail. Didn’t you?”

Fielding nodded. “I put laxative in his beer at Charlie’s the night before we went out. He was talking about seeing the water hound on the boat and he was half-drunk and already half-spooked, so it was pretty easy.”

“You’re a real sweetheart, aren’t you, Fielding? How much did you know about Shelly then?”

“I knew she was special. She told me I was . . . something special, too. She couldn’t quite convince me it was true, but I was starting to believe it. She said no one could know about us—and especially not about how we were different.”

“But Reeve knew, or suspected, didn’t he?”

“Suspected. But Shelly wasn’t like that! She was . . . she was sweet.”

“So she didn’t come to the marina looking for victims for her mother. She came looking for something else.”

“She wanted to see the human world. She said she didn’t know any living humans. And when she found me she thought it was funny that I wasn’t really human at all. I didn’t understand. But I liked it. I liked her. I liked . . . being with someone forever, not just for the night.”

“I can understand Reeve figuring it out—he was a salty old guy and pretty observant—but how did Starrett find out about Shelly?” I asked. Solis seemed to have decided this was my part of the interrogation—I was good cop to his bad cop, I supposed.

“He saw her at Port Townsend. I guess she was upset after what had happened with Les so she went swimming to relax.”

“What did she tell Leslie Carson about his wife?”

“She knew Odile was dead—she just knew. He said she was teasing him since he complained constantly about how Odile threatened suicide all the time to keep him in line. Odile was messed up and unhappy and everyone but Les understood that. He thought Odile was just screwing with his head, because she’d told him she would do it this time and he’d come with us, anyway. So I guess when Shelly told him she was really dead this time and how and when . . . he was freaked, and more freaked when the cops called with the same details. Wouldn’t you be?”

“Yes. And his accusations upset Shelly because he didn’t take it seriously?

“Yeah. Well, knowing about it upset her, too. So she went swimming because that’s what she did when she was stressed out. It’s not very safe to swim in the Sound in the dark without dive lights—it’s easy to get lost and then you tire out and drown. But Shelly was half-fish and it was only in the dark that it was safe for her to swim near people. But Cas wanted his damned stupid halibut and he stayed up all night to get it. We didn’t have tank gear so he was using a mask and snorkel in the shallows where the halibut come up to spawn and he’d swum out pretty far from the dinghy. Shelly didn’t realize he was nearby—she thought we were going the other way. He saw her under the water. When I got the fish out of the fridge in the morning for him to clean, he told me he had seen her. He told me what he meant to do—he thought it was . . . funny, like it was a joke and I wouldn’t mind, ’cause we were buddies or something. He was that kind of jerk—he figured every woman was his to take. I was panicking—he was my boss’s boss and I’d made Reeve sick to get the cruise so the old man wasn’t there to back me up and he wasn’t going to take my side on anything when we got home, either. Hell, he was probably going to fire me once he figured it out. I didn’t know what to do. I already had the engines fired up and was ready to take the boat out. Cas didn’t seem in any hurry—it was like he was savoring the idea—and I didn’t know how to stop him, except to act like it didn’t bother me and try to get below ahead of him.

“It was my fault we were at sea when the call came in about Les’s wife and I wouldn’t go in to port because I was scared shitless about what was going to happen to me and what Cas would do to Shelly. I wanted to stay at sea so she could jump overboard and swim away, but . . . she didn’t. She wouldn’t. I got us out of Townsend and in the clear in the strait. I turned on the autopilot and I went down below, but she argued with me about leaving and we were still arguing when Cas came down. He laughed at us. And she . . . she told me I was an idiot. She told me to go away and take care of the boat and it wasn’t anything girls like her hadn’t been doing for centuries with guys like Cas. I didn’t understand what she meant—I still don’t. But I got angry and I shoved her and her foot slipped on the rug on the cabin sole. And then she was furious—it was like she’d flipped a switch and went from sweet girl to unholy bitch in a millisecond. I didn’t know what the rug was covering up until she started screaming at us. She threw it away and pointed at this crazy charm she’d drawn and now it was all messed up and she was shouting at us, telling us we were doomed, that we’d done it to ourselves and she . . . she was just crazy. She shoved Cas backward and he hit his head on the hatchway. She started pawing at the blood on his head and saying it wasn’t right, it wasn’t working, and I was trying to drag him away from her because . . . I thought she was nuts. I didn’t know she was trying to save us! I didn’t understand. She grabbed my arm and she cut me—”

“She cut you, not Starrett?” I asked for clarification.

“Yeah. It’s my blood in the cabin, but I figured no one has a DNA sample from either of us, so who’d know?”

“We didn’t need a DNA sample. The lab said it was only partially human blood; the rest was otter.”

“Crap!”

“Doesn’t matter. What happened next?”

“Shelly was trying to redraw her spell or whatever and I was just getting in the way. I was freaking out. I was trying to pull Cas out of the cabin and he wasn’t responding—he was barely conscious and he was bleeding and mumbling. . . . Shelly was angry at me and she was saying crazy things and crawling around on the floor. . . . And when I tried to grab her and make her help me with Cas, she screamed at me and started hitting me, hitting and hitting and calling me names. She clawed at my face and pushed me away and she cursed me and ran up on deck and threw something in the water. She was screaming the whole time. Then the rest of them came to carry her away. That’s when they started killing people.”

“You didn’t write any of this in the log.”

“I wasn’t sure I’d make it, but if I did, I didn’t want that kind of thing on the record. And if I didn’t . . . who was going to believe me if they ever found the log, anyway? I was going to steal the stupid thing when I brought the boat back but Father Otter convinced me to leave it—to bring you to us.”

“You brought the boat back.” As I’d suspected. “Good trick in the state you were in.”

“The ghosts and Father Otter helped,” Fielding admitted. “Then he went to look after Reeve, while I came back here for a while. I knew the merfolk would try to find me—even though they missed me right under their noses for twenty-seven years, the morons—and Reeve would be the obvious place to start looking. Even if he was still mad at me, I owed the old man some protection. None of this was his fault.”

“Wait: the merfolk didn’t keep you and torment you for that whole time, as you implied before?”

He looked a little uncomfortable at being caught out. “Not the whole time, but I couldn’t get any farther away than here until the gate in the worlds opened again. I found the bell by accident the first year and the ghosts said they’d help me hide if I helped them escape when the gate opened again. The sea witch was trapped in the cove