The Mermaid and the Murders Read online

  Table of Contents

  Excerpt

  The Mermaid and the Murders

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  A word about the author…

  Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  “The ocean is a woman?” His eyes twinkled, amused by the story, not disrespectful.

  “Of course it is. Think of all the life it gives.”

  “I guess I can agree to that. But the water takes life, too.”

  “It does what it has to.” I thought about Mom and all the other mermaids, the way they hunted. I turned my face to the horizon thinking about those girls and how they might be getting ready to hunt right now. Instead, in the center of the water I saw a blur of brown. It could’ve been anything, but I knew it was a body.

  “Did you see that?” Sam leaned forward and squinted.

  “The only thing I see is you.” I kissed him, turning his head away from the waves. I couldn’t let him find it, not when it could be another mermaid. We were about ten minutes from my house. If I could get him to take me home, I could get the body into shore if it was a dry-lander, or take her home if it wasn’t. Part of my mind raced through the possibilities, scared and anxious, the rest of it focused on how good it was to kiss him.

  The Mermaid

  and

  the Murders

  by

  Rachel Graves

  The Monster Beach Series

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  The Mermaid and the Murders

  COPYRIGHT © 2016 by Rachel Graves

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: [email protected]

  Cover Art by Kristian Norris

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

  Publishing History

  First Climbing Rose Edition, 2016

  Print ISBN 978-1-5092-0806-7

  Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-0807-4

  The Monster Beach Series

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedication

  In memory of my dear friend, Donalyn Frank.

  Thank you for being a real-life mermaid

  and teaching me how strong a woman can be.

  I hope the waves are gentle wherever you are.

  Chapter One

  My mother was doing it again. Swimming. Naked. The scales on her tail flashed in the sunrise. She did it to torture me. Every graceful arch and flip of her body designed to remind me how stupid going to school was. She promised my dad I could stay in school until I wanted to leave. No matter how many times I told her I wasn’t ready to go yet she never stopped trying to change my mind.

  I turned away from the deck, shutting the door behind me and ignoring the view of the ocean. It was the first day of my senior year, and the last thing I needed was her screwing it up. Before I could get worked up about it, a horn honked outside. Too late for Mom’s drama. My ride was here.

  Ashley owned a bright red convertible with barely enough room for two people, so it made complete sense that there were already four girls in it.

  “Sorry, Danny, you’re in the back!” Heather smiled in her half-hearted kind of way as I squirmed into the backseat. Sarah and Jennifer made a little room for me, but there wasn’t much. Thankfully, I wasn’t very big. Not that anyone who was overweight would’ve been invited. Sitting in the back seat of Ashley’s car was the pinnacle of anyone’s high school social experience. I was popular now, and if that meant I had to squeeze into the back of a car for the ten-minute drive to school, I’d deal with it.

  As the car pulled out of our subdivision, I hoped no one looked back and saw Mom in the water. She hadn’t been around much all summer. She told me she was giving me space. I knew she was out having fun. It didn’t bother me until she turned up three weeks ago, trying to talk me out of registering for school. Too bad I’d already forged the paperwork happily signing her name, Kai DelMar, above my own, Danika DelMar, in a completely different script.

  “Got your schedule?” Jen grabbed the slip of paper from me and immediately snapped a photo of it with her cell phone. A chorus of voices erupted as the picture made its way to each phone in the car. In seconds, they were comparing my schedule with theirs and deciding when we would all eat lunch.

  “Oh no, driver’s ed with Whoa-sley!”

  “You’ve got English with me.”

  “Who booked you into so many AP classes? You should sue.”

  Ashley spoke last, looking at Heather’s screen while she drove. “Tough break with driver’s ed, but maybe you can spend some time with the hot new guy.”

  Before I got a chance to ask who that was, the car skidded to a halt in the senior parking lot, with Ashley almost running over someone I didn’t recognize.

  “Who?”

  “Him,” someone supplied. I didn’t notice anything except the guy in front of me. Tall with dark brown hair and warm sepia skin, he looked almost good enough to eat. I felt a flutter in my stomach, hormones making me think about things that could probably never happen. When he turned to look at the car that had almost hit him, the hormones took it up a notch.

  “What’s his name?” I asked, not bothering to stop staring.

  “Sam. Sam Aviles? Anvils? Something like that.” The way Ashley said it, the studied nonchalance, meant he was next on her list of men to devour. She was queen bee, so she’d get him. But for now, he smiled at me. No one else noticed it, but the heat I felt went up ten degrees before he turned and walked away.

  Seven classes in seven hours, and even though our school had an awesome swim team, I knew better than to go out for it. Mom might flaunt her fins, but my life depended on no one calling me a freak. No one could ever know what I was. Instead, I kept my head down, took a bunch of notes, and focused on passing classes when the time for driver’s ed came around. Money wasn’t a problem for us. I could manage Mom’s bank account better than she could, so it wouldn’t be hard to get a car. A license was another story.

  “Hasn’t your mother ever taken you out driving?” Mr. Whosley looked like he was about to be sick as I tried to shift again. The car lurched, almost stalling.

  “She’s been real busy exhibiting this summer.”

  “Well, I’m sure being the darling of Miami’s art scene is fun for her, but if you want to pass this class, you’ll need more practice.” He reached for the door handle. Even though I wanted the car to stop, it jerked forward again.

  “Brake. Now,” he ordered, then got out of the car like it was a death trap. Maybe it was.

  I put my head down on the steering wheel. If I did what M
om wanted, if I went back to the ocean with her, I wouldn’t need to drive. It wouldn’t matter that I sucked at it. Then again, if I did what Mom wanted, none of the things I loved like books or learning would matter. I’d never wanted to know anything about her world, all I wanted was to be better at the life I already had.

  “Heavy sigh for someone who just started.” A rich voice stopped my thoughts and I jerked my head up. Suddenly, the crappy box of a car felt like it was a thousand degrees, all because of the guy putting on his seatbelt next to me.

  “Sam, right?”

  “The new guy. Is this school really that small?” He smiled with the sort of smile I wasn’t used to seeing in Playa Linda. His teeth were small, slightly crooked, and far from the bright white perfection most orthodontists made happen around here. I liked it, because it wasn’t perfect and didn’t really fit. Then I realized I wasn’t answering him and probably looked like a moron.

  “We’re that small.”

  “You’re supposed to be driving.”

  “Yeah, right.” I put the car in gear and tried again. “So you’re my partner?”

  “I’ve already got my license. I’m only here because there was nothing else to fit in my schedule, and since you need all the practice you can get…” He turned up his hands.

  “Sounds good to me. So where do you come from, partner?” The car still felt uncomfortably small, but I figured the only way to get over it was to make small talk.

  “Everywhere.”

  “Military brat?”

  “Something like that. Hear that whine? It means you should shift.”

  “Got it. Thanks.” I concentrated on trying to drive for a few minutes. “What are you into? Cars? Boats? The beach?”

  “Nightlife, I guess.” He shrugged.

  The car in front of me was changing partners but we didn’t need to. I turned to look at him instead.

  “So you're a vampire?”

  Guilt and surprise registered on his face, making me wonder what lie I’d caught him in. Could he really be a vampire? Weird, but not impossible. Mom always hinted there were more things in the ocean than I knew about. It wasn’t a stretch to believe there were things on dry land I’d missed. Besides, my own secrets made vampires seem mainstream. There were no shows on TV about people like my mom.

  “Yeah, that's me, I guess, sort of,” he confessed, not trying to cover it up. It almost sounded like he wanted to tell me.

  “Well, don't go after my neck; it might kill you,” I warned him. After I fell and scraped my leg in sixth grade, they had to shut the locker room down for an ammonia leak. If other people couldn’t breathe the fumes from my blood, he probably couldn’t drink it.

  “Good to know.” He nodded as I turned my eyes back to the driver’s course. We spent about ten minutes in silence, me worrying about turn signals and the painted lines on the track. Sweat plastered my long blonde hair to my neck. I rolled down the window but it didn’t change how small the car felt. When he spoke again, it almost surprised me. “Vampire’s not the right word. It’s salt golem. The whole thing isn’t about blood; it's about salt.”

  “Salt?”

  “Yup.”

  “The movies get it wrong?”

  “All the time.”

  “So I'll bring you French fries to keep myself safe?”

  “That'd be great.” He gave me a real smile that time, and it almost turned my insides to liquid.

  Driver’s ed was my last class, and even though I knew I was pushing it with Ashley, I ditched the after school deal to go straight into the water. Some days, that’s the only place I can think, the only place I can really breathe.

  Mom was long gone. But then, it was three o’clock so I hadn’t expected to see her. She’d been leaving me on my own for a while. I didn’t need her help to make the shift. I walked into the water in a bikini, going over the rocks on the little spit of sand and stone that made our beach. When the water lapped at my waist, I started checking around for people. After half a dozen obsessive checks making sure no one could see me, I stashed my bikini bottoms under a rock and slipped down into the water.

  The first few seconds amazed me. They always did. Mom said it was because I spent too much time on land. She went on and on about how when I went away with her, being a mermaid would finally feel normal. I tried to ignore her words, and hated how they colored the experience. One moment I was breathing, air coming warm and wet through my nose and mouth, but then it happened: cool, sweet air flooded my lungs as my gills took over. They only really came out in water, on dry land they looked like scars or dips in the skin. I still worried about them all the time. I spent my day making sure my hair hid them and I’d never managed to make out without pushing the guy away from my neck. During the day, my gills were something to stress about, but put me in the water, and I loved them.

  I dove for a while, following fish, looking at rocks, trying to chase the day out of my head. Mom kept the house on land for me, she let me go to school because of a promise to Dad before he died, but even with those two things, I never quite fit in. Most days I didn’t let it bother me, today for some reason it stuck in my head. I was thirty feet down when I realized it wasn’t the day I was trying to chase away but the boy, Sam, the salt golem. I’d never heard of a salt golem, but his explanation made sense. I’d read stories about golems, people made of mud or clay, why couldn’t there by one made of salt? Sitting under water, with my tail swishing in the current, it wasn’t hard to believe in things like that. It was just hard to know what to do about it. I wanted him. Not in some noble or pure way. I wanted him naked and sweaty and all those other things that girls aren’t supposed to want.

  Mom would tell me it was hormones, and soon I’d need to take a mate and have a baby. She was pretty vague on how it all worked. I’d spent some time visiting with my grandma and my cousins, but they all assumed Mom had told me. Like most things about mermaid life, I never bothered to get the details. I knew the stories that mermaids drown their lovers, and I wasn’t about to do that. But how much longer could I hold out? And what would happen when I gave in? My body couldn’t have sex without being in ocean water. I’d come close once, at the beach with Ryan, my ex-boyfriend from junior year. At the worst moment, I realized what was happening, that I was taking him farther and farther out in the water, and that in a minute I’d have a tail and gills and he’d drown. I’d sworn off boys right then.

  But Sam. The new boy. I couldn’t think about anything else.

  Until I flipped over on my stomach and saw the dead body.

  The eyes were open, staring at me. For a minute, it looked like the girl was wearing a heavy silver necklace. Then I swam over and it scattered—not a necklace, but a bunch of little fish grabbing dinner. Her neck looked ripped open. Pieces of flesh waved in the ocean current. Paler than any living girl I’d ever seen, she wore a pair of jean shorts and a flimsy shirt.

  The fish had worked on her, taking little pieces near the wound but nothing else. I guessed that meant she’d been down here less than a day, or maybe even since last night. This bit of sand and coral was one of my favorite thinking spots, so I would’ve seen her or even smelled her in the water if she’d been here before that. Her nails were painted yellow. I recognized the color from a limited edition nail polish collection. Pricey clothes, pricey nails, long brown hair, and she looked about my age…

  Tiffany. Tiffany Moore. She’d graduated two years ago, so she was probably around twenty. She shouldn’t be here, under my ocean, at my reef. She shouldn’t even be dead. People our age weren’t supposed to die. I struggled to sort through my emotions to think of what could’ve done this. Nothing came to me. The idea of death, so close up and real, was just too strange. Seeing her ruined my concentration, and left me feeling like I should swim away to someplace safe. Instead, I struggled to focus on what I could do, what I needed to do to help the girl who’d been like me in so many ways.

  I couldn’t tell anyone how I’d found her. Not like this.
I could go back to the house, take out the dive gear, get it wet and call the cops. I could say I was out diving or snorkeling and I saw her. Except I was pretty far out to be snorkeling from the house. Mom had probably left the boat at home; she never bothered to cover her tracks. So I could weigh down the body, take the boat out here, then call the cops. Or the Coast Guard? Who did you call when you found a body in the ocean? This wasn’t the sort of thing they talked about in health class.

  I shook my head, letting more water hit my gills. It cleared my thoughts. There was no way I could let them find the body here. First, because I didn’t have any way to warn Mom and if they sent out divers or whatever and found her, well, both our lives would be over. Second, even if they didn’t see Mom, they’d invade my space. There would be people and lights, maybe news trucks with cameras, all of them conspiring to keep me from swimming. I wasn’t sure I could handle that. When I stayed out of the water for more than a day my skin felt itchy and wrong. No one had ever told me mermaids had to get in the water every day but I didn’t want to risk finding out the hard way.

  Okay, new plan, I had to get the dead girl somewhere where she wouldn’t be connected to me, but where she’d be found. If I left her here, the fish would take care of her before anyone even came close to finding her. Assuming Mom didn’t carry her off. Assuming Mom hadn’t killed her. I mean, Mom killed Dad without much hesitation, so would some strange girl be a problem?

  As I dragged the body behind me, swimming toward the public beach, I convinced myself that Mom wasn’t like that. Killing men is what mermaids do, not something that made Mom a murderer. I knew there were bigger predators out here, probably attracted by the scent of the girl’s body. Swimming even faster, I felt the water go colder, darker, and then finally warmer as I got to the shallows outside Smatter’s Beach. I swam straight up sixteen feet, hoping no one would see my head above the waves. I bounced in the water, gills out in the air, feeling like I had one foot in each world. One foot in each world and a dead girl in my hand.

  If I let her go here, she’d probably be found. But could I depend on a probably? No, not when the stakes were this high. She could drift back to my reef or never get found at all.