Free Fantasy Life by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

perceptive.
    “But,” Gabriel said, “he’s hiding something.”
    “He’s hiding a lot of somethings. Have you ever heard of the
Lady June?”
    “The Oregon Coast’s answer to the
Titanic.”
Gabriel picked up a french fry. “What does that have to do with fish women?”
    “A lot, actually.” Denne pushed his plate aside and picked up his Scotch. He took a sip, then looked at the glass as if hewere contemplating something in the liquid. “But the
Lady June
really isn’t anything like the
Titanic.
We don’t have icebergs, and she didn’t run aground.”
    Maritime disasters didn’t interest Gabriel. He sometimes had to deal with their aftermath—he’d called the coast guard more times than he cared to think about to help disabled yachts in the surf—but he had no real interest in ships and sailing. Which was, he knew, rather odd for someone who had grown up on the ocean.
    “Fish women got her?” he asked, trying to lighten the conversation a little.
    “She went down in the middle of a storm. Pretty common for the Oregon Coast.”
    Gabriel nodded. He ate another try and watched Denne play with his alcohol glass. Gabriel had never seen Denne so reflective, and it bothered him.
    “Pretty common, except that there were lots of famous people on the yacht, right?” Gabriel asked, mostly to get Denne to continue.
    “Not as many as there could have been,” Denne said. “Only thirty of Oregon’s best families got touched by that disaster.”
    Only thirty was disingenuous. Oregon was a small state—and had been even smaller in the 1930s when the
Lady June
had gone down. Thirty families had probably been a significant portion of the “important”—i.e., wealthy—families in Oregon at that time.
    “I don’t understand how the
Lady June
relates,” Gabriel said.
    “Long story short. There was only one survivor that night. A man by the name of Henry Dyston. He claimed he was brought ashore by mermaids.”
    “Our fish women?”
    Denne nodded.
    “Did anyone believe him?”
    “The locals did,” Denne said. “But the press made a fool of him, not that he cared.”
    “Why would they rescue only one man?”
    “Well, that’s where local history comes in.” Denne set the Scotch glass down. He ran his finger along the rim. For a moment, Gabriel thought Denne wasn’t going to go on. Then he picked up his fork, scooped up some rice, and ate some.
    Gabriel let him eat. Denne had always been strange, but Gabriel had never seen him behave quite like this.
    After he ate a few bites, Denne pushed his plate away. He picked up his napkin and wiped his mouth. Gabriel thought he was going to leave, but instead, Denne pushed his chair away from the table.
    “The fish women,” he said quietly, “have a song like the sirens did. It lures men, charms them, makes them do things that they wouldn’t normally do.”
    Gabriel nodded. He decided not to interrupt again.
    “Most of us can’t hear it. The women issue an invitation, and the man must take it. I’ve heard that it’s a simple thing, usually something found in the sand. One man . . .” Here Denne paused, as if he were remembering. Then he shook his head. “A man I knew said that he found a bottle of wine, an expensive old one, on the beach. He shared it with his wife and, shortly thereafter, heard the mermaids.”
    “The wife too?”
    Denne reached for his Scotch. “She died not long after that. An accident on the beach—at least, that was what it looked like to me. The husband seemed guilty and Dan Retsler—remember him?”
    Gabriel did. Retsler had been police chief of Whale Rock for a number of years. He left after the freak New Year’s storm of 2000. Something had broken in him, something Denne once hinted had to do with the strange supernatural activity of Seavy County.
    “Well, Retsler had me do a full autopsy to see if I could find anything suspicious.” Denne paused, staring into his Scotch glass. “I didn’t—at least at the time. Although