Siren (24 page)

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House in 1965. A chef and businesswoman at just twenty-four years old, Miss Marchand admits to having had 'less than the proper training' for such a venture but, through hard work and her 'deeply rooted understanding of and respect for the sea,' has managed to create and sustain what is already a Winter Harbor institution.'"

"That's it?" Caleb asked. "No offense, but you didn't just tell us anything we couldn't have learned from a Winter Harbor visitor brochure."

"Exactly." Oliver patted the book. "What's in here is all Betty was willing to share. The restaurant was already a local legend while I was working on this history, and as such, I thought it deserved an entire chapter. But--one paragraph. That's all she'd let me write."

"Why?" Simon asked. "Was she uncomfortable with her unexpected success?"

"Oh, she was uncomfortable, but her success had nothing to do with it."

My head shot up as lightning struck the ground nearby, making the lights flicker overhead. When I lowered my eyes, they locked on Oliver's.

"Out of respect for her, I've told no one what I'm about to tell you. And I tell you now only because I know you know things, too." He shifted his gaze to Simon, then Caleb. "Even if you don't quite realize or understand it, you all know things Betty didn't want anyone ever to find out."

Simon and I sat on the couch opposite Oliver's chair.

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Behind us, Caleb leaned against a bookshelf and crossed his arms, willing to listen.

When Oliver spoke again, his voice was lighter. "When I first met Bettina Marchand, she was doing what she loved to do more than anything: swimming. She was doing the backstroke in a purple swimsuit, and smiling as though she could hear someone dear to her whispering about just how lovely she looked. It was obvious that she wasn't swimming for exercise or sport, but simply because it felt good.

"It was July 1965. She was twenty-four, new to town, and getting lots of attention from the local boys. I was twenty-six, Winter Harbor born and raised, and among those taken by her. She'd been in town a few months by that point, but we hadn't officially met. If she'd had her way, we wouldn't have met the way we did, either." He smiled. "But it wasn't like I was stalking her, or hiding so she couldn't see me watching her. I was there to swim, too. I tried to leave when I saw her there, to give her privacy ... but I couldn't. She was too beautiful."

"Was she mad when she saw you?" Caleb asked.

"For Betty to have been mad, she would've had to have first been aware that I was admiring her. But she wasn't. She never invited or wanted any of the attention she received."

"She found out eventually, though, right?" I asked. "That you admired her?"

"The only way she
wouldn't
have found out was if she'd left town. Fortunately, she was very committed to the restaurant, and that kept her here when she might've otherwise fled. The

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restaurant also made it easy to find her. I started going there on my lunch break every day, hoping for the chance to talk to her. When it was slow, she would sit with me. I did most of the talking, unfortunately--anytime I tried to ask her questions about anything other than the restaurant, she always changed the topic. And she loved listening to stories about Winter Harbor--she called it the home she'd always wanted--so I told her everything I knew, because it made her happy. When I ran out of material, I dug up more."

"Is that why you didn't talk about any of the unexplained deaths in your books?" I asked, handing him his note about Winter Harbor's brightness drowning out the darkness. "Because you wanted the stories only to make her happy?"

Oliver stared at the note, and then placed one hand on the front cover without answering. "After a few months, she finally agreed to go on a real date with me. By that time, it was almost winter, and the lakes had frozen over. We went skating on Lake Kantaka, and afterward, I made her dinner." He paused. "That was the first night that she told me things about herself and her life that she said she hadn't told anyone...."

"Like what?" I asked, my heart racing as his smile faded.

"She said she was raised by her mother and aunts in an 'unconventional' environment. And that she'd left without telling them why or where she was going because she didn't approve of their lifestyle, and never wanted to be found and made to go back." He looked at the fire, as if preparing to say what he was about to say next. "She told me, with tears in her

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eyes, that she spent so much time swimming not just because she liked to, but because she needed to. She physically
needed
to immerse herself in salt water several times a day."

I looked at Simon without turning my head. He was watching Oliver closely.

"She said if she didn't ... eventually, she wouldn't be able to breathe."

"Why not?" Simon asked after a pause.

"She wouldn't explain. And she started acting differently as soon as she said that much--distant, even more guarded. She said she was embarrassed, but I knew it was more than that. She was afraid."

The lightning was closer now; the ground rumbled, making the couch vibrate beneath me.

"I continued to see her every day and share stories about Winter Harbor, if for no other reason than to distract her from her fears. Her trust in me grew, and she seemed to forget how terrible she felt after revealing such personal details of her life. After two years of this, when things seemed almost normal, I asked her to be my bride."

My heart ached for him as his eyes turned down.

"She said we couldn't be together like that ... that she loved me too much to risk anything happening to me." The book shook as he squeezed it with both hands. "In an attempt to convince her it would be okay, I wrote this for her. I wanted her to know that I would always be there for her, to talk to her, to distract her from her fears, if that's what she

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needed from me. But she never changed her mind."

My eyes fluttered closed as Simon's hand pressed against my back.

"That wasn't the worst of it, though." His voice was lower now. "Just because she said we couldn't be together didn't mean she wanted it that way. And one late August night many years later, when I was missing her so badly I couldn't see straight, I looked for her at the restaurant. She wasn't there, and on a whim I returned to where we'd first met. She was swimming, and when she saw me watching this time, she climbed out of the water and came toward me without a word."

I was glad when the lights flickered off and stayed that way. My cheeks were burning as I listened to Oliver talk about his romantic rendezvous on the rocks, and I imagined Simon's lips against mine last night.

"Nine months later, she had Raina."

My eyes widened. I knew she was Betty's daughter, and that she had to have a father ... but it was hard to imagine that strange Raina was the result of such real, passionate, forbidden love.

"She stopped talking to me completely after that night on the rocks," Oliver said sadly. "I still went to the restaurant. I told her I wanted to show our daughter as much light and happiness as her mother had shown me. But she wouldn't listen. It was like she didn't hear me."

"And that was it?" Caleb asked. "She didn't give you another chance?"

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"I'm afraid not. I wrote, I called, I sent flowers. I went to the restaurant just to be near her. I sent gifts on every special occasion--birthdays, holidays, any day I thought of her so much I had to physically
do
something about it. And I did the same for Raina--until those gifts and cards started coming back to me." He paused. "Years later, after Betty's accident, I tried to visit her at home ... but Raina wouldn't let me in. She said it would be too upsetting. I still go to the restaurant now, though, just to feel as close to her as I can."

"Oliver," I said, "the place where you and Betty first met, where you met again a few years later ... where was that, exactly?"

He frowned, then reached into a leather knapsack at his feet. He pulled out a large drawing pad and held it toward me. "I'm not much of an artist, but doodling is quite therapeutic."

I took the pad and handed it to Simon to open. I already knew what Oliver wanted me to see.

"The water at the bottom of Chione Cliffs has always been a good swimming spot," Oliver said. "I liked it because it was secluded. Betty liked it because it was the area's deepest natural pool. She said when she dove into it from the cliff, she could swim straight down for minutes and never reach sand."

A log shifted in the fireplace just as my breath caught. Thankfully, no one seemed to notice my surprise.

"She could swim underwater for minutes?" Caleb asked. "How?"

"I thought it was a skill she'd learned after years of practice--

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that, or it was just another seemingly impossible talent she was blessed with. But when she stopped talking to me so abruptly after our night there, I started gathering information. I wrote down the few personal details she'd granted me--including swimming for minutes without oxygen. I wanted to help her. I wanted to figure out what she was so afraid of so that I could help her deal with it. I thought if I could just help her be not so scared, maybe we could be together." He reached forward and lifted a canvas bag of books onto his lap. "I didn't figure it out in time for Betty and me ... but maybe we can figure it out in time for Winter Harbor."

I eyed the covers of the books as he placed them one by one on the floor by our feet. "Greek mythology?
Untold Sailor Tales?
Mermaids?"

The last time I saw Oliver in the library, he'd said history repeated itself, that the way to figure out and stop what was happening now was to revisit what had happened in the past. I'd expected books about crime, murder, death, and destruction--nonfiction works that chronicled true, gruesome events throughout time. Kind of like the obituaries with the smiling victims in the back issues of the
Winter Harbor Herald
, but on a bigger, more terrifying scale.

"Les chanteuses de la mer?"
I read aloud as Oliver pulled out the last book. It had a faded red cover with an illustration of a woman reaching out of the water, toward the sky.

"'Songstresses of the sea,'" Caleb translated, his voice grim. "French was the only subject I ever liked," he added when Simon and I looked at him, surprised.

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I turned to Simon, my rock of scientific theory. "Really? You
really
think Betty's some kind of evil singing mermaid? With, what? Webbed feet and a spiked coconut bra?" I tried to joke because he wasn't laughing. He wasn't rolling his eyes or immediately dismissing the idea.

I turned back to the book, which Oliver now held open. My eyes skipped over the French text and landed on the illustration. The only light in the room came from the flickering fire, so I couldn't make it out right away ... but when another bolt of lightning struck nearby, the image was as clear as if it were blown up on a movie screen.

A man lay on a rocky shore. His body was limp, his limbs splayed across the beach like strands of washed-up seaweed. From the neck down, the picture suggested his death had been painful, even torturous. He looked like a fisherman who'd been caught in a storm, snatched from his boat, and then tossed about among the waves before being thrown to land.

But despite the unfortunate outcome, from the neck up, he looked like he wished he could do it again.

Because the dead fisherman was smiling.

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CHAPTER 18

"THIS IS CRAZY. You
know
this is crazy."

"It
sounds
crazy," Caleb said, "but it makes perfect sense."

Simon stared straight ahead as he drove, not agreeing with either of us.

"Raina might be strange and Zara might be capable of doing some terrible, unimaginable things, but ... sirens? Like the beautiful,
fictional
creatures that lured sailors to their deaths?" I shook my head. "This isn't
The Odyssey
. This is actually happening--here, in real life. If you want to call them serial killers, fine. But to say that they magically sing to guys for the thrill of the hunt is insane."

"Vanessa, I can
hear
Zara." Caleb sounded excited, as if relieved to have an explanation finally. "Even when I don't see her, I hear her. That's why I can't focus on anything else whenever she's calling to me. I can't even think about how much I can't stand the thought of her, or how I wish she would go away and leave me alone. I can only listen to her, and picture her,

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and want to be near her, even though being within a hundred miles of her is normally too close."

An image of the two of them on the rocks in the woods flashed through my head. He'd seemed simultaneously eager and uncomfortable as she'd crawled toward him and pressed her body against his--but he'd just lost his girlfriend. And despite whatever lay underneath the pretty exterior, Zara was still stunning. He'd just been hurt, and lonely, and guilty for being attracted to another girl.

"And you heard what Oliver said--this was the past Betty tried to escape. It's why she left her family and came here, and why she and Oliver couldn't be together."

"Because the other crazy, man-hunting women in her family would find out, lure him away from her, kill him, and then take her back?" I looked at Caleb. "Do you hear how that sounds?"

"What about the man who fathered Zara and Paige?" he asked. "Have you ever heard them talk about their dad?"

"No," I admitted, "but maybe they're just a very private family. I don't know Paige's favorite color or when Zara's birthday is, either."

"You don't know about their dad--just like we never heard anything about their dad--because there probably wasn't just one. And Raina probably killed them both after each deed was done."

"Um, Simon?" I looked at him, then at his knuckles turning white as he clutched the steering wheel. "A voice of reason would be helpful right about now."