Jake waited somewhat impatiently in the small foyer. He trusted that Ashley knew what she was doing. “You sure we can trust this guy?”
She smiled. “If you can’t trust Garrison Booker, you can’t trust anyone. This man should be dipped in bronze, covered in gold, and adorned with a crown of diamonds.”
“How come I’ve never heard of him?”
“He moved here from the Bahamas a year ago.”
“But he went to medical school, right? I mean a real one, not some online college or something.”
“He went to Cornell. He was born in Jamaica, raised in Haiti and Botswana, and moved to New York when he was sixteen to go to college here in the States. He ran his own private practice in the Bahamas for fifteen years before ending up here. He owns a non-profit called Island Kids that treats sick kids all over the Caribbean.”
“Why did he end up here?”
“His girlfriend is a Marine from Jacksonville.”
“Makes sense, I suppose.” Jake slid deeper into the plush chair. “How’d you meet him?”
“My car broke down on the bridge at Snow’s Cut. It was raining ice, and he’s the only one that stopped to help me. As soon as I saw those big brown smiling eyes, we became friends.”
Jake felt a little better after hearing about Garrison. It’s not that he didn’t trust Ashley, he did. But he had to consider everything, it was just in his nature. He was a born cynic, which by definition meant he looked for the potential fault in everything.
“Hey, Jake, let me ask you something.”
“Sure.”
“How come you dropped out of school?”
“Who told you I dropped out?”
“You did.”
Jake fought back. “Well, I never technically dropped out, I just didn’t go to graduation. I still got my degree a year later.”
“How come you didn’t go?”
He shrugged. “Wasn’t really a point. My parents weren’t going to show up, they were off on some wild tangent at the time. I guess I just didn’t want to be bothered with it all. It was dumb, anyway.”
“Yeah, I guess they all are.”
“I mean, I already had the financing lined up for the bike shop by my second year, I didn’t really need to finish anything. I was eager to get the shop up and running, so I had to get home to do that.”
“Mike always thought you were too soft to make it in the real world, so you opened a bike shop. I assure you I didn’t agree.”
“I mean, I’ve wanted to open that bike shop since I was fifteen. I only went to college so I could learn how to actually run a business. I didn’t want to fail right out of the gate.”
“You didn’t.”
“Not at first. I guess I have now.”
Ashley shook her head. “Not true, Jake. The shop has only been closed for a few months. You could get it up and running again in no time.”
“I suppose I could.”
“I’ll help you.”
Jake smiled. “You want to work at a bike shop?”
“I could still teach my real estate classes on the side.”
“I guess so.”
“C’mon, let’s do it.” She leaned forward. “We could get that thing ripping again. Let me be your partner.”
Jake nodded. “Okay, if we live through this, you have a deal.”
The doctor came out of the white door, drying his hands. Ashley wasn’t lying, he did have the biggest, kindest brown eyes Jake had ever seen. They were only slightly lighter than his dark chocolate skin, which was only slightly lighter than his short black hair. Jake and Ashley both stood.
Garrison smiled. “She’s going to be okay.” His accent wasn’t thick, but it was there. “The bullet missed mostly everything. It was easy enough to remove.”
Ashley reached out and hugged the doctor. “Thank you so much.”
Jake reached out a hand. “Yes, thank you, Doctor. This is a debt I can’t repay.”
Garrison smiled. “Of course you can. Every debt can be repaid. It matters only what the lender wants in return.”
Jake wasn’t sure where he was going with this. “Umm…I—”
“Relax, man.” Garrison lightly tapped his shoulder. “I’m kidding with you.” He tossed the paper towel in the garbage pail. “She’s sedated now, probably won’t be awake for a couple of hours.”
“But she’s going to be okay?” Jake asked.
“She’s going to be fine.” He made a face. “But what you were telling me, about the tail. I did…well…let me just show you.”
They went into the room. Ariel was lying in the bed. Her tail was propped on a low table with a white sheet underneath it. Garrison pulled back a tiny piece of her tail from around her hip. “This is not something I’ve ever seen before.”
Jake looked at it. “I don’t know what I’m seeing.”
“This tail—it’s a shell, yes—and it is a biosynthetic-like material of some type. But it doesn’t appear to be synthetic in a true sense. There’s a membrane underneath that is part of her, it’s grown into the tissue. I mean, this isn’t something that you can slip on and off.”
“So,” Ashley asked. “What’re you saying?”
“I don’t know. But it’s not some simple fake like you said it was.”
“No, I don’t imagine.” Jake stood upright. “These people have big bucks, whatever they made her into, they probably spent a fortune.”
“Well, that’s just it,” Garrison offered. “I don’t know how you could make something like this.”
“But I saw the plans for fitting the tail onto her legs.”
“I don’t know what you’ve seen, but this is not something that was fitted on. This is something that is part of her, like your skin is part of you.”
Jake asked, “Are you saying she’s actually a mermaid?”
Garrison turned up one side of his mouth. “I am not able to say such a thing. I am saying that this tail, this skin, it is not manufactured. It is grown. It has viscous properties, and it is alive. It may not have nerve endings, but it is definitely not rubber, Kevlar, neoprene, or something made in a factory. I do not know what to make of it, but it appears to be skin. Unlike any I have ever seen on a person.”
“But you have seen it?” Ashley asked.
Garrison nodded. “It is very similar to the skin of a sea mammal, a dolphin or manatee perhaps. Only it is more pliable, softer and much thinner than those animals. You could no sooner remove this skin than you could remove human epidermis.”
Jake shook his head. “But I saw diagrams, plans, and sketches for tails.”
“I can’t speak to that,” Garrison replied. “I can only tell you what I see right now. And what I see is something extraordinary.”
Jake nodded. “I know who does know something. And we’re going to see him. Right now!”
He turned out the door, waiting for Ashley to follow. It took her a few long seconds, but by the time he reached the sidewalk, she was running after him.
“Jake, wait.”
He turned. “You’re not stopping me. I’ve had enough of this.”
She held his arm as she spun in front of him. “I don’t want to stop you. I just won’t let you go off all half-cocked.”
“I’m not. I’m fully in control here. I’m just tired of the lies.”
Just then, his car pulled up with some strange dude behind the wheel, and Jesse in the big pickup behind. She’d gone back to the motel to retrieve his car.
She jumped out of the truck as Jake approached. “Thanks again, Jesse.”
“No problem.”
The tall lanky guy climbed out of Jake’s Volkswagen and tossed him the keys. Jake caught them and headed to the car.
Jesse chased him down. “Hey, cops are all over that place, man. They’re going to be looking for someone, I’m sure.”
“Anyone see us?”
“I can’t say. But I mean…” She nodded to Ashley. “You killed a dude on the beach. So, like, I’d stay low for a while.”
“Don’t worry,” Jake assured her. “That man will never be identified, I’d bet my life on it.”
He got into the car and waited a beat for Ashley to climb in before he tore away from the scene.
* * *
They arrived at Dr. Bruce Shepard’s home. Jake didn’t wait a second before he went up to the gate. He expected to have to break in, or jump the fence, but much to his surprise the gate swung open before he even had the chance.
Ashley followed him through the white iron fence, and when they approached the door, a short, thin man with kind eyes and a sad, drawn face opened the door. His salt-and-pepper hair was dry and frizzy, and his face was old, not distinguished.
He waited for them to enter. “I’ve been expecting you.” He closed the door behind them.
Jake didn’t reveal the fact he had a gun in his pocket, but he was fully prepared to do so if he had to. “You have every reason to expect us.”
Bruce walked into a library. Tall shelves stacked with books on dark wood surrounded them on three sides. “Please have a seat.”
This was all too cordial for Jake. He was angry and wanted this to be anything but cordial.
Bruce sipped from a white coffee cup. “Is my Ariel okay?”
“She’s not your Ariel. Not anymore.”
“I raised the girl since she was a baby, she’s every bit my daughter.”
“You treat your daughter like a lab experiment?”
“I treat her how she must be treated for what she is.”
Jake said nothing, but he knew for certain that this man was not the one he had spoken with on the phone. His voice was tired and lagging in speech.
Ashley huffed. “You’re a sick bastard.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. Not the first thing about of what you speak, my young friend.”
“That girl is fighting for her life right now,” Jake exaggerated.
“Because of your incompetence, Jake, because you stole her from her world.”
“No, Bruce, because you pushed her too far. I came here to confront you and found her on the street.”
The old man sighed. “I know. I saw the surveillance video.”
“Then you know you pushed her too far.”
He sipped his cup. “I know. I told them it was too much. Ariel is not like the others, she’s much more headstrong. She’s smarter. She definitely knows what she wants. Perhaps I read her too many books as a child, but she had such a voracious appetite to learn and read. They will blame me for it.”
“Who are they?” Ashley asked.
“Oh, they are who they are.”
“What do they do?”
“They do what they do.”
Ashley laughed. “You don’t want to tell us, I get it.”
“I’m just a humble servant to the master.”
Jake interjected. “What master?”
Bruce sipped his drink. “When Ariel was a little girl…when she first came to me, I knew she was special. She was just like her mother. I’d raised her mother from a baby and she was a real pistol, as they say. But much less adventurous than this Ariel.”
“Wait,” Jake said. “So you didn’t steal her?”
“Steal her? Young man, why would you say that?”
“I know she’s not a mermaid. I saw the tails in the basement.”
Bruce smirked, then let out a loud belly-laugh that would have rivaled even the best department store Santa Claus. “Young man,” his voice was still peppered with laughter, “you don’t know anything. Not even the first thing. She is not like you or I in any sense.” His laughter trailed off. “She’s much more special. What you saw is not any sort of explanation. Something that appears to be one thing might turn out to be something, or some thing or nothing or no thing.”
Jake looked over at Ashley, she had the same puzzled look. “I don’t know what anything you’re saying means. But are you trying to say all that crap Ariel told me is real?”
Bruce took a longer swig of his drink. “Everything I’ve told her is everything I know. I’ve never knowingly lied to Ariel.”
“Well, what the hell is really going on here?” Jake asked. “Is she a real mermaid or not?”
“Do you believe she is real?”
“I don’t know what to believe.” Jake leaned forward. “I believed she was real, then I saw your little laboratory and figured it was all fake. I mean, if she’s real, why does she need more tails? What the hell is real?”
Bruce sipped his drink and leaned forward to match Jake’s posture. “The illusions of your reality are always tied directly to the reality of your illusions.”
“Huh?”
He raised his cup. “We create the world we want. Our minds are the most powerful thing in the universe. We control the destiny that we think is so random.” He paused, folded his arms over his legs. “There is a small aspect of chance which we cannot control, of course. But ultimately, everything we do, every choice we make, is the ruler of our reality.”
Jake bit the inside of his lip. Something about those words hit him too hard. “That’s bullshit.”
Bruce smiled. “I’m sorry?”
“Things happen to us. We can’t control everything.”
“You don’t think so?”
“No.”
“You don’t think you could’ve driven another way home that night?”
“Huh?”
“You don’t think you had a choice not to chase those kids that night?”
Jake swallowed hard, his voice bit back. “How do you know about that?”
“They know everything about you, Jake. They know everything about you, Ashley. They know every move you’ve made and have an answer for you at every turn. There is no place in which you can hide. There is nothing you can do to change what’s going to happen because you chose this fate by pursuing this to the end. You can fight it with all your life, but it will only cost you more than you have in the end. You don’t want this fight, you cannot win it.”
“Why?” Ashley asked. “How can they know about me, and why would they want to?”
“It is their world and we are just in it. I’ve come to the end of my time here. I’ve decided to go out on my own terms and not let them be the ruler of me. I wanted to quicken my end. It is not…” Bruce’s face changed, it went slack. His eye started to twitch. He clutched his chest, and fell forward onto the ground with a sickening thud.
Ashley stood up, slowly reaching her hand to her mouth. “Oh God.”
Jake sank down to one knee and reached for Bruce’s wrist, but pulled his hand back. It would have been nothing but a formality. He knew.
Ashley gripped the top of her head with a fistful of hair. “What the hell just happened here? Did he just kill himself?” Ashley walked in a circle around the room. “This is crazy—this is crazy—this is crazy.”
Jake stood. “This has gone about three turns past crazy.” He picked up the coffee cup, a white substance still floated in the murky black.
“Jake, what are we going to do? I’m really getting scared. I feel like we’re losing this fight.”
Jake sighed and glanced around. He knew she could be right. The better part of his brain said to get the hell out of this place immediately. “We should go.”
Ashley took a step, then stopped. “You don’t think they know where we took Ariel?”
He shrugged, half jokingly offering, “They probably have a GPS tracker on her.”
They shared a look of paranoid concern.
Jake rushed out of the house, jumping into his car in one motion and turning the key. Ashley was quickly next to him. With screeching tires, he ripped away from the curbside. He drove in a hazardous panic. Memories of that night, the accident, all came flooding back, but he didn’t dare take his foot off the gas. This time he wasn’t recklessly chasing a car full of jerks out of anger, he was hurrying to try to save a life or two.
In front of Garrison’s office, he brought the car to a skidding halt on the gray asphalt. He barely remembered to put the car in park before he was heading full speed toward the front door.
As he ran into the office, he expected the worst and he found it.
Garrison was dead on the floor, there was blood everywhere. It looked like he’d been stabbed twenty times. On the floor next to him was someone Jake recognized, but didn’t know. His name was Hops, and he was a local homeless man who spent much of his time drifting around the island, hopping from one part-time job to the next, and one cheap motel to another. They called him Hops because he was constantly drunk and always looking for booze. He too was dead, but not a scratch on him; in his hand, a large hunting knife.
As Ashley entered the room with her hand over her mouth, his first instinct was to push her away from seeing the carnage, but it was too late. She’d seen it already and looked ready to vomit.
He quickly ran into the exam room, and as expected, Ariel was gone. Nothing remained of her except the brown blanket she’d used to wrap herself.
“She’s gone?” Ashley stated more than asked, even though it sounded like a question.
Jake pinched his nose. “Another random coincidence.”
“They’re cleaning up their mess. And obviously anyone who saw that mermaid has to die.”
He shook his head. “No, not just anyone who saw her, but anyone who knows what we know.”
She glanced back toward the bodies and bit back tears. “I can’t believe this. This is my fault. I should have never brought her here. Garrison is dead because of me.”
“No, Ash, he’s dead because of some psychotic clan of mermaid creators, or whatever the hell she is, or they are. I don’t even know which way is up anymore.” He thought he felt crazy before, now he just felt like a rubber room was probably a better option than this insanity.
“Jake, maybe we should just get out of here.”
“Yeah, I don’t want to be here when the cops show.”
“No, Jake. I mean we should get the hell out of town. My cousin has a condo down in Florida. It’s usually empty this late in the summer. He spends the winters down there from Michigan. The keys are with the local real estate office and I’m on the VIP list.”
As smart as that idea sounded to preserve their lives, he felt the compelling need to find Ariel. Ashley must have known what he was thinking.
“Jake, maybe you can’t save her.”
“Maybe I can.” He stormed out of the office and got into his still running car.
The second Ashley’s ass hit the seat he sped off, annoying her as she struggled to click her seat belt. “Jake, slow down please.”
He was so mad he didn’t want to.
“Jake, saving Ariel is not going to bring back Cassie.”
Like a slow, creeping scorpion, he felt the insect legs of realization feeling their way all through his body. Maybe she was right. Maybe that’s exactly what he was doing. He slowed the car and pulled down one of the sandy beach access roads and stopped. “Is that what I’m doing?” he asked more to himself than Ashley.
“That’s what is seems like to me.” She twisted to face him. “Do you love her?”
“Cassie?”
“Ariel.”
He thought about the question. He kind of did, but not in the traditional way. It was something different. It was a connection unlike he’d ever had with anyone or anything. And maybe it was directly tied to what she was. Or maybe it was how they’d met.
“Well, do you?”
He met Ashley’s eyes. “I don’t know.”
She looked visibly upset. “You either do or you don’t, Jake. It’s not a trick question.”
But it kind of was. “Not like I love you.”
She formed an uneasy smile. It was one of those half-scared and uncomfortable smiles. It was the kind of smile that told him he’d just said the right thing but at the wrong time.
He huffed. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Hey, I get it. She was there for you when no one else was.” She looked away.
“Yeah, but…I don’t know.”
“Yeah, you don’t know. Because other people were there for you, Jake, you just didn’t take our help. My help. I was there for you from the start and you didn’t see it.”
He nodded slightly. “I know, and I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say. I was in a bad place, Ashley. No one could help me, and I didn’t want help. The truth is I was addicted to the pain. I was addicted to the hurt. And if I stopped hurting, I felt like Cassie was gone forever.”
“Jake, Cassie is gone forever. She’s gone from this world. Nothing you do will ever bring her back.”
He clenched his teeth so hard his jaw started to hurt.
“She will always be part of you. She will always be in your heart. Nothing can take that away.”
“I know all that.”
“You know it, but you’re not living it. It’s that simple.”
“Oh, thanks for that. Now you tell me,” he quipped sarcastically.
“Stop being an ass. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, but how…how the hell do I live it? It’s not as easy as just that.”
“Yes, it’s exactly that easy. It’s just that easy. You have to make the conscious choice to do it. You have to be better than the tragedy.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means that what happened does not define you. It’s not a part of you. It’s just the way it was. It was a tragic event, but you’re better than that one event.”
He didn’t say anything he just mulled over what she’d said.
“Right?”
He shrugged.
“Say it, say you get it.”
“I get it.” And he did. For the first time he got it. He glanced over the top of the dune, stretching his neck to see the ocean. But couldn’t quite make out the waves, so he got out of the car and climbed the dune, ignoring the protected dune sign and stepping over the hump.
When Ashley stepped up next to him, he said, “When I was first getting used to the idea of Cassie being gone, I would purposely make myself cry. I don’t even know why. I don’t even remember what motivation I had for it. But I would just want that pain so I could feel close to her. It felt like if I didn’t cry, then I didn’t love her anymore.”
“That’s not the way it works.”
“I know. But it seemed logical at the time.”
“Of course it did. Everything seems logical while we’re doing it. That’s why people make mistakes all the time. And I’m not saying you were mistaken to feel that way. But you were mistaken to keep feeling that way. You have to just acknowledge the feelings and then move on. You can’t dwell on them for weeks and months. I mean fercrissakes, Jake, you were going to end your life over it.”
“I don’t do well with guilt.”
“I can understand that. Guilt is a funny thing. Unless you’re a sociopath, you’re going to feel some guilt over things. In some cases, you’re going to let it linger.”
Jake shot her a look. “What did you say?”
“I said you can’t let it linger.”
“No, the part about being a sociopath.” Something she said brought back the conversation they’d had with Roger Pender.
“What about it?”
He turned to step in front of her. “Roger Pender.”
“Who?”
‘Roger Pender, Dr. Shepard’s former partner.”
“What about him?”
“He said something very interesting about sociopaths and their behavior.”
She shook her head. “So what? Where’re you going with this?”
Jake didn’t know how he knew, but it just came to him that Roger Pender knew more than he’d led on. “He did lie to us.”
“How do you know?”
“It was something he said. Or rather how he said it.” Jake jumped over the dune and ran to the car.