A light flashed on at the nearest house. He jumped, startled, and ran, not up the shore, but toward the sea. He ran into the surf, and it cut him across the waist and he dived between the waves, clean and neat, vanished. She watched his head surface and then his arms as he stroked for deeper water.
Then he dived, and what splashed after him was the curving lines of a tail, like a whale, or a dolphin. He vanished under the waves.
Adria stood there for a heartbeat. She couldn’t have seen it. Could she? Adria glanced back at Rachel. She lay unmoving, horribly still.
Adria knelt in the wet sand. Her shaking hands couldn’t find a pulse. She pressed her ear to the chest and held her own breath. Adria had expected to hear a heartbeat. Even though she had thought death, she wasn’t prepared for silence. She pressed her cheek against Rachel’s slack mouth, nothing, no breath. “Oh, God, oh God.”
A man’s voice called from the house where the light had flashed on. “Is everyone all right down there?”
Adria couldn’t answer for a minute, couldn’t think, then she yelled, “Get an ambulance, and get the police. It’s an emergency! Hurry!”
“I’ll call, don’t worry.” He rushed back inside.
Tears threatened hot and close. “No!” She tilted Rachel’s head back, pinched off the nostrils, and began breathing for her. The chest rose and fell, four breaths, four rises. Adria stopped. “Breathe, Rachel, breathe.”
Surf rushed in and tugged at her body. “Damn it, Rachel, damn it!” Adria breathed and then cupped her hands over the chest and pumped, counting, “One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand.” She crawled back to Rachel’s head and breathed. Then pumped the chest. “Rachel, breathe, damn it, breathe. Oh, God! Help me!” Tears choked her, trying to steal her own breath away. She couldn’t cry yet. Not yet!
A man was there in his pajamas and bathrobe. He knelt in the wet sand. “I called the ambulance and the cops.”
Adria looked at him. She couldn’t think what to say. “Help me.”
“I’ll pump the heart, if you breathe.”
She really looked at him for the first time, younger than she had thought. She nodded and breathed three quick breaths. He pumped the heart, like he knew what he was doing.
“Rachel, please, please.” Breathing, breathing until she felt light-headed. She looked at the man as he worked to start Rachel’s heart. His eyes held hopelessness. Adria shook her head, tears tracing like fire down her cheeks.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I won’t give up until you do.”
“Then we won’t give up.”
They were still trying to breathe life into Rachel when the ambulance came. Adria sat in the rising surf, watching as they worked on Rachel. They punched needles into her arm, set up an IV of some clear liquid. They did what Adria and the man had done, but nothing worked.
Adria noticed the world looked flat, one-dimensional. There was no depth to anything. And all the noises seemed distant, dreamlike. She stared at her own hand and couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Why had everything changed?
They strapped Rachel to a gurney and began to carry her up the steps to the road. The police came in a flash of red and blue lights, a kaleidoscope against the darkness. There were men asking questions, but Adria couldn’t concentrate on it, she couldn’t hear them. Someone had thrown a jacket over her shoulders; it was too big and sleeves flapped in the wind as she followed the gurney to the ambulance.
A tall man with a gold shield clipped to his coat stopped her, putting a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll need to ask you a few questions.”
She nodded. “I understand, but later.” She looked up at him. “I have to go to the hospital, for Rachel.”
“I understand. Just tell us where he went. You are our only witness.”
She nodded, “He swam out to sea.”
The detective frowned. “Are you sure?”
“He swam out to sea.”
“Thank you.”
A second detective pushed close and looked ready to ask other questions, but there must have been something in her face that stopped him. “We’ll talk to you tomorrow then, miss.”
She nodded and crawled into the ambulance. Adria made herself as small as possible riding in the corner, not crying anymore. Everything seemed so distant, unreal, dreamlike. The world wasn’t meant to be flat, like cardboard.
The sirens blared to life, and they were out on the highway in a spill of gravel and brakes. She looked up at the paramedic as he checked Rachel one more time. He met Adria’s eyes once and then wouldn’t look at her again. Wasn’t it a bad sign when they wouldn’t look at you?
“She’s a doctor.”
He glanced at Adria. “What?”
“Dr. Rachel Corbin, that’s her name.” It seemed important that he know she was a doctor. Adria wasn’t sure why, but if anything made Rachel who she was, it was that. She was a doctor.
He whispered, “Oh, God.” And shouted something through the window to the driver.
Rachel’s hospital was the nearest one, so very close. They would take Rachel to Rachel’s hospital, Rachel’s emergency room.
THE police drove Adria back home as dawn was easing through the clouds. She stood in her own living room, looking out the sliding glass door. The sea was an immense blue, rolling out and out until it touched the sky.
The sun was rising and Rachel wasn’t rushing out to her car. Adria would still be in bed. The vague roar of Rachel’s car was one of the sounds of morning. But not today.
The doctors had given her something to take. They said she was in shock. She hadn’t taken the pills yet, and if this was shock, it didn’t feel so bad. It didn’t feel like anything. Adria felt distant, light, as if a strong wind would blow her away, shatter her into slivers of glass. She knew Rachel was dead, but it was a distant knowing, as if all of last night had happened to someone else.
If she walked into the other room, Rachel’s things would be there waiting. But Rachel would never come for them. Adria tried to make last night a lie as she stared out at the sea. So bright and blue, so inviting.
The dark-haired detective said, “Ms. Reynolds, do you feel up to answering questions now? I wouldn’t ask, but you are our only witness, and the sooner we start, the sooner we can catch him.”
She answered without turning around, staring out the window. “Yes, I understand.”
“Tell me what happened last night; take your time.”
Adria took a deep breath and let it out. Her voice belonged to someone else. She listened to some other person tell about waking up and going out to look for Rachel. The voice that was hers and not hers told everything, even glimpses of something impossible.
The second detective had gold-framed glasses that didn’t quite hide his eyes. “Excuse me, Ms. Reynolds. Would you repeat that, please?”
“Repeat what?”
“The part starting, I watched him swim out to sea, and then he dived, flashing a length of tail, like a whale or a dolphin. Is that what you meant to say, Ms. Reynolds?”
Adria thought about that for a minute, cheek pressed against the cool glass. “I didn’t mean to mention it to you, no. It’s what I thought I saw.” She shook her head, forehead against glass. “I don’t know.”
“Ms. Reynolds.” His voice was condescending, humor the poor hysterical witness. “You’re saying the perpetrator was a mermaid?”
She turned to stare at him, a small flash of anger making her feel more like herself. “Not a mermaid—a merman, a triton. A male equivalent.”
His face showed what he thought of that theory.
“I don’t know, detective. I don’t know if I saw it, or dreamed it, or hallucinated. I’d just found my best friend murdered, brutalized. I don’t know. Is there anything else? I’m very tired.” She wanted his condescension, his pity, out of her house, out of their house.
The dark-haired detective stood. Adria thought he frowned at his partner. “Ms. Reynolds, you had a very traumatic experience last night. There’s nothing wrong with seeing things under that kind of stress.”
“I suppose not.” She hesitated and asked, “Do other murder witnesses see monsters?”
He folded his notebook up and put it in his coat pocket. “In a manner of speaking, yes, they do.”