CHAPTER 21
“DO YOU EVER see the otters?”
The children and I were on the beach again, and I couldn’t resist scanning the knobs of kelp—deceptively like heads—that rose and sank in the waves for the unusual creature I’d spotted when I’d lost myself among the rocks. And I couldn’t keep from my mind the baby Jane and I had found. I imagined that the two belonged together, perhaps as mother and child.
“No.” They shook their heads.
“I think I have. At least your mother thought that’s what it was.” I described the small black head that had frightened away the seals.
“Oh,” Jane said, “that wasn’t an otter. That was the mermaid. Want to see where she lives?”
“Ma says we’re not to go there,” Mary warned.
“Mama says mermaids are dangerous,” Nicholas said. “She says they like children so much that they drag them down to their lairs under the water.”
“Where they drown!” Edward finished.
“But her lair isn’t under the water,” Jane objected.
“I think it would be all right,” I broke in, “if I’m with you.” I smiled, wondering what sort of animal or make-believe the children would show me. “Only we must come back right away if I say so.”
Immediately, they began to run, and they kept going with remarkable endurance, much farther than I’d anticipated, all the way to the end of the beach, where they splashed into the shallow water to make their way around the rocks.
“What about the tide?” I called.
“It’s going out,” Mary called back over her shoulder. “We have hours.”
I didn’t know whether to trust their judgment. I was much older and therefore should be the one responsible, but I had no idea what was wise and what was foolish here.
We reached the pool of violet-spiked urchins, which was obviously familiar to the children, for it seemed to serve as a sort of landmark where they turned inland. Soon they stepped into what, from a distance, appeared to be a rock wall but which was a passageway, so narrow in places that it was nearly closed at the top.
With a start, I realized that this must be the very place Euphemia had meant them to avoid when she’d warned them to stay on the beach. “Maybe we should go back,” I said.
“Shhhh!” Edward whispered. He turned to me. “We don’t want to frighten her.”
Were otters like bears, animals that could be dangerous if they felt cornered?
“I think we should go back.” This time I whispered. The passage was so tight in places that I had to turn sideways to slip through. Any animal at its far end would surely feel trapped.
The children pretended they hadn’t heard me. Suddenly, they stopped and crowded against one another.
“See?” Jane breathed.
I had to push against the children to peer into the dark space, but once my eyes were accustomed to the low light, I recognized at once the cave Jane had drawn. It was a low-ceilinged room, obviously formed when one boulder had crashed down upon three others that refused to give way. I’d expected some sort of burrow or nest, but although an animal stink hung about it, it was clearly the home of a human being. It smelled of smoke and unwashed skin and skeins of seaweed that hung from a crude wooden rack. Piled higgledy-piggledy about the floor were enormous abalone shells, their mother-of-pearl bowls exposed. Heaped in some were what I took to be tools: mallets and scrapers and pointed sticks. One shell was brimming with acorns, another with sharpened yellowish bones, another with round shapes I first took to be ivory buttons or clasps and then realized were vertebrae. Here and there were baskets as well, some flat-bottomed and some rounded, one in the shape of a cone. Most were finely woven of some light-colored plant material I couldn’t identify, into which dark patterns had been worked. Near the center of the cave was one piece of what might have been called furniture: skins stretched over a wooden frame to make a kind of platform that served, I supposed, as a couch or bed. Along the far wall, arranged in a pyramid, were brightly labeled cans of the kind I’d come to know well: green corn and tomatoes, sardines and plums, and at the apex, a hash made of beef and potatoes, its label bearing a large blue ribbon. The floor, covered in sealskins, was a lustrous brown. Folded in one corner was a navy wool blanket, Lighthouse Service–issue. Most astonishing of all was what was beside the blanket, arranged neatly side by side: my shoes and stockings.
“Who lives here?” I whispered, astounded.
“The mermaid!” Jane looked at me as if I were a simpleton. How many times did I need to be told?
“Well, we’re not entirely sure.” Edward looked to the others, as if uncertain how much he ought to reveal.
“She doesn’t have a tail,” Nicholas explained. “Just ordinary legs.”
“But she is a mermaid,” Jane said stoutly. “We saw her come out of the water.”
“She had a spear and a big rockfish stabbed right through,” Edward said.
I saw that the crevices between the rocks at the entrance were filled with fish vertebrae and that the stone surfaces were flecked with scales that shimmered like quartz.
Jane took a step into the cave, but Mary grabbed her crossed pinafore straps and pulled her back. “You know better, Janie,” she said. “It’s not polite to go in if she’s not at home.”
“Why isn’t she here?” Jane asked, a little petulantly.
“Probably because of Mrs. Swann,” Nicholas said. “It’s only that she doesn’t know you,” he added kindly.
“The things in your collection, in the box,” I said. “Did you steal them from her?”
“Steal them!” Edward was indignant. “Of course not!”
“They’re meant for us,” Nicholas said. “She puts them on the stones.”
“I told you,” Jane said.
“Ma doesn’t like it,” Mary said.
“It was my turn, and she threw it away,” Jane complained.
Mary sighed. “I gave you the feathers, didn’t I?”
“I wanted the necklace!”
“I told you not to wear it,” Mary said. “I told you to put it straight in the box.”
“She wanted me to wear it. She was sad when I didn’t have it. You know she was.”
I could hardly listen to them, caught as I was in my own conjectures about the creature who lived in this hole. Who was she, if, indeed, she was a woman at all?
I feared that a black-haired, seal-skinned banshee might come whirling down the narrow path, brandishing a spear. I glanced at the rock walls that rose high over our heads. There were dozens of crevices that, for all I knew, might hide a person.
“We’d better go.” I didn’t wait for arguments but turned and began to make my own way back. This time they accepted my authority and followed without protest.
They would have dawdled along the beach—to them, apparently, the idea that a wild woman lived in a cave not five miles from their home was only a bit of distraction to spark up an afternoon, something like going down to the river to watch the drawbridge open had once been to me—but I hurried them on like a hen pushing her chicks toward the roost. This time I kept up with them as we straggled up the steep morro—I had learned to crouch low and use my hands as well as my feet, as they did—and I went with them all the way to their parlor.
Through the doorway, I could see Mrs. Crawley—Euphemia—reaching into the oven for a pan. On the worktable beside her were two cans of the blue-ribbon hash that had been so artfully displayed in the cave.
“Wash,” Mrs. Crawley called, and the children crowded past me and pushed into the kitchen.
“Mrs. Crawley. Euphemia.”
“Oh!” Startled, she let the hot pan clatter onto the stove. “Why are you lurking there? Come in.”
I stayed where I was. I wondered if she’d deliberately misled me about the otter, and I wasn’t sure how she would respond.
She advanced through the kitchen doorway and came toward me, wiping her hands on a towel. “What is it?”
“It’s a woman, I think. Or a person, at any rate. She lives in a cave in the rocks, not five miles from here.”
“They took you there? I told them—I told you—to stay on the beach!” She directed an angry look toward the kitchen, where the children were laughing and clattering the china. “Be careful with those plates!” she snapped.
“Yes, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize what you meant until . . . Is she dangerous?”
“She’s mad,” she said firmly. And then she softened. “I don’t mean that she’s a lunatic, exactly, but she’s touched . . . different from you and me. She’s . . . unpredictable.” She paused, absently adjusting the wooden teeth and other items of wreckage on their lurid cloth. “It’s not so unusual around here, you know. This is the kind of place that attracts people who can’t get along in regular society.”
“How does she live? Won’t she starve? Or freeze? Isn’t she lonely?”
“I wouldn’t worry about that. She knows better than any of us how to live. She’s been there for years, you know.”
“Since before you came?”
“No. Not that long.” She held me in her formidable gaze. “My children are not to go near her, you understand. And if I were you, I would stay away from her, too.”
? ? ?
In my own kitchen, I pounded the chisel into two cans and poured their contents into a skillet, distractedly mixing oxtail and duck. Then I remembered that I’d neglected the stove all afternoon and let the fire go out. It would take at least an hour to warm it up again.
I set a plate of cold meat in congealed gravy in front of Oskar that night, and he began to eat without comment. I was too preoccupied to lift my own fork. I thought about the woman returning to her cave and wondered if she would smell us on the air and know we’d been there. I imagined her squatting on the rocks, scraping scales from a limp fish, or sitting on the sealskin floor, rolling acorns about. Who was she? How had she come to be there? Were there more like her?
“Oskar,” I said abruptly.
He looked up, raising his eyebrows slightly at the intensity in my voice.
“I saw something strange today. A sort of hideout in the rocks. Euphemia says a madwoman lives there.”
I was leaning forward, unconsciously heightening the intensity of my words, but he seemed unaffected. He continued chewing a cold oxtail for what seemed a long time. “It’s not all that surprising,” he said at last. “Didn’t the Crawleys say there was some crazy old hermit around here? I can see how this place could drive you insane, the damn wind, the damn waves, the damn foghorn, the damn rust. It all keeps worrying at you until you’re ready to do something desperate. You were right, Trudy; people aren’t meant to be here.” He pushed his plate away as he spoke and stood up from the table.
“Oskar, she doesn’t seem crazy to me. I mean, not really. Her things are organized. And some of them are beautiful.”
“Well.” He sighed. He was already halfway down the hall so that the walls muffled his words. “I suppose you’ll have to show me one of these days.”