Unfortunately, I don’t see anyone in the hangar… odd, since the door’s open. Then again, I don’t imagine run-of-the-mill car thieves would toddle off with a helicopter. Especially not having to figure out how to work the little towing machines first to get them out of the building. Someone would notice.

  “Hello?” I ask.

  A metal object clanks against concrete behind the last helicopter on the left.

  “Who’s there?” asks a woman.

  I sigh internally. Damn. Where’s a guy when I need one? “Hello. I’m looking for a pilot.”

  The woman who crawls out from under the helicopter dusts herself off and walks over to me. She’s in her mid-thirties or so with short ginger hair and bright-green eyes, wearing an olive-drab flight suit. “Well, you found one.”

  Drat. What is it with running into women? I need someone I can charm!

  “Ahh. Umm. Perhaps I misspoke. Is the owner available? I’m a private investigator looking into the disappearance of a missing person. I believe he hired a flight from here, and I’m hoping to get some idea of where he might’ve gone.”

  “Yes, the owner is available.” She smiles and offers a hand. “I’m right here. Caitlin McCarty.”

  Licinia snickers.

  I accept her handshake, hoping like hell my facial expression is still pleasant. It’s almost as though everything about this Ainsley case is cursed.

  “Do you have any sort of ID or something?” asks Caitlin.

  “Yes.” I tug my purse around and fish out my license, which I hold out to her.

  Caitlin looks over my ID, smiles, and hands it back. “Thank you.”

  I nod and stuff my ID back in my bag. “A man, Ethan Ainsley, chartered a flight in one of your helicopters about three weeks ago. He’s disappeared, and his sister has hired me to figure out where he went.”

  “Oh, my. I hope nothing bad has happened to him. I’d be happy to help as much as I can.” She starts walking off to the right and waves me to follow. “Come on. I’ll need to check some records in my office.”

  I follow her between two helicopters on the right and through a small door. The office has a matching door on the other side of a small alley littered with cigarette butts. Caitlin heads inside, hooks a left, and heads to an office at the end of a short corridor. Her desk is against the wall, littered with giant paper books stacked ten and twelve high, two computer screens, and a bunch of coffee cups. She gestures at a chair nearby and flops in the one at the desk, a beat-up thing with five wheels and half a backrest.

  “What’s the name of the missing person?” asks Caitlin while typing in her password.

  “Ethan Ainsley.”

  She opens a program, clicks a few buttons, then types the name in. A second later, another screen pops up with a single line. When she clicks on it, a full-screen view opens.

  “Here we are.” Caitlin reads it over. “Looks like he went about forty miles off the coast out over the Pacific. The flight plan is pretty basic. Right out and back.”

  “What did he do out there? Did you hover long?”

  She spins in her chair to face me, smiling. “Oh, I didn’t fly that one. He went up with Larry. Now that you mention it, I remember Larry talking about that run because it was a one-way trip for the client.”

  “One way? What did he do, jump into the ocean?” I blink. Could it be that Ethan Ainsley is a merman? Imagine the odds. Nah. Couldn’t be.

  Caitlin laughs. “No, Larry said he dropped him off on some kinda boat.”

  “A boat.” I slouch forward and catch my face in both hands. “Ugh. He could be anywhere in the world by now.”

  “I’m sorry. I’d love to be able to tell you more, but that’s all I have. If there is any more I can do, please let me know. I feel so bad that a client of ours is in trouble.”

  I sigh, but smile at her. “Thank you. You’ve at least helped me figure out why I haven’t been able to locate him. I’ve probably been looking in the wrong country. Any chance you could give me the flight plan?” Not that I suspect it will help much if he met with a boat. The flight plan will point me to empty ocean.

  “Sure. It’ll take me a bit. Need to check with Larry, the pilot who took him out. Can I email it?”

  I nod and give her my address. “Thanks.”

  After shaking hands, I walk out the office door and into the lobby. Theresa’s a lot older than I expected based, on her voice. She looks well into her forties, but short and thin, with frizzy black hair. Kinda strikes me like someone who’s trying to be eighteen forever—and honestly, not doing too bad a job of it.

  As soon as I’m back in my Rubi, I bonk my head a few times on the steering wheel.

  “Ugh. Why did I take this one? I had a feeling it was going to be one of those cases.”

  Because Pippa waved $5,000 at you the way you spend six dollars on coffee.

  “I guess.”

  Or, you saw genuine worry in her eyes and felt sorry for her.

  “That, too.”

  What’s your plan now?

  “Go home and lament that I can’t get drunk.”

  That should be quite effective.

  I let out a sad chuckle. It hadn’t been effective in helping me cope with Albert’s death in 1917, though enough wine did make me stop thinking about it. Of course, I also stopped thinking about everything else so it didn’t really help. I’d drink until blacking out, and when I returned to my senses, the grief came back, too. So really, I only succeeded in throwing myself forward a few hours in time. Between mourning my first husband and mourning the life I gave up to get married, I probably would’ve drank myself to death before I turned forty if I hadn’t gone down with a shipwreck.

  I sigh. “I guess it would be a better idea to start calling embassies and police departments overseas.”

  Well, either that or we could go to the islands around Midway. One of those whirlybird things couldn’t make it that far, but a boat could.

  “And I could run around there for weeks and weeks without finding anything.”

  True. Does that mean you’re giving up on him?

  I drop the Rubi into reverse and back out of the space. “Not just yet. I’ve still got some phone calls to make.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Widowed

  With the help of Google Translate as well as my passable Spanish, I flush the remainder of the day down the drain in a grandiose waste of time.

  After hours of working the phones, I’ve concluded that Ethan probably wasn’t picked up by the police in Hawaii, Alaska, Russia, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, or Panama. And if he did wind up in a foreign jail, the cops sure aren’t interested in telling me about it—or didn’t understand me.

  Thoroughly frustrated, I head into Lake Washington after sunset and anger-eat. Trisha once told me she binges on ice cream whenever she gets depressed or furious. I could totally do that without any guilt. Fish, on the other hand, does give me nutrition, but as a mermaid, I can’t get overweight on that either. No, I just wind up being overfull and sick for hours. My anger isn’t quite to the point where I feel like a blue whale hanging dead in the water, too fat to move… but I do devour a third fish purely out of rage.

  Eventually, I make my way to bed, trying not to be pissed at Ethan for being so elusive.

  Damn him.

  ***

  My eyes open to a tin-plated ceiling covered in pale beige paint. The raised parts of the pattern have darkened to a burnt brown that makes it somewhat resemble meringue. The smell of soap and starch water saturates everything about the place.

  At once, I know I’m dreaming.

  On autopilot, I get up and dress in heavy undergarments and a black floor-length dress. My little apartment above the laundromat is essentially two rooms: a bedroom barely large enough for my bed and a combination parlor/kitchen. The little closet with half-tub and toilet is too tiny to officially count as a third room. This place consumes my life. I work and live in the same building, a childless widow of a soldier killed in World War I. Finding employment as a woman at all had been difficult, and Mr. Cartwright acted as though he’d done me the greatest favor in the world. He paid me next to nothing, though he didn’t charge me to stay here, so I considered it him taking rent out of my imaginarily larger wage.

  With every step I take out the door and down the stairs to the ground floor, my hopelessness builds. Ettie and Pat, the two women I work with, wave at me as I walk into the laundromat’s back area. Cartwright’s son, Milton, is out front at the counter. He’s a miserable little weasel to us, worse to me after I disregarded his overtures of affection. The other two ladies are both in their fifties, and don’t suffer his attention in that way. Still, he lords over the three of us when his father’s not around.

  Ettie’s almost done with cutting up a bar of soap into the first tub and heating it into a lather. Pat’s heating the irons, basically thick metal plates with a detachable handle. We use one until it cools, then swap it back to the stove and take a freshly heated one. I get started on the starch basin, setting a giant vat of water to boil with starch in it. Garments in need of starching get a dip in that after they’re washed and rinsed.

  Again, I concentrate on knowing that I’m dreaming, but the drudgery of my life continues.

  Pat and Ettie chatter away about this and that, mostly about what their siblings, children, and grandkids are up to lately. Neither of them live in this building. They both have families to return home to at night.

  With each piece of clothing I scrub, my loathing for this place deepens. By the tenth dress, I’m spiraling into a vortex of hopelessness. Widowed, stuck in a tedious job, my dreams of a happy marriage and starting a family are as dashed as my earlier dreams of completing university. I hadn’t actually had any success applying to higher education before I met Albert, but I expected it would be an uphill fight. Few institutions of higher learning admitted women, especially for any of the fields I had interest in—biology, chemistry, or medicine. But that dream is gone, too. It might’ve been one thing for a younger girl, but at twenty-five and widowed, the life fate had in store for me looked grim. I fear I’ll grow old alone, trapped in this hell of a laundromat.

  The cruise is soon. Around now, I would’ve been arguing with myself and trying to come up with the courage to ask Mr. Cartwright for time off. I’d managed to save up enough money to book passage, but I hadn’t yet purchased the ticket. My hesitation’s from thinking how frivolous a thing it is to spend money on—especially for a lady in my position. Not to mention, if I did get the ticket, I’d only wind up throwing it away when I wasn’t permitted to take the time off work. I’d spend all that money and get nothing out of it.

  My dream clashes with my memory of not caring if I got fired. Increasing hopelessness caves in on me, and unlike what really happened, I chicken out and tell myself to forget about the cruise. The wild longings for adventure are a thing for schoolgirls, and I haven’t been one of those for a long time. I’m not some character in a Zane Grey story. I belong right here, elbows-deep in filthy water with my hands clutching someone else’s knickers.

  The front door opens with a jingle of bells, but I ignore it. We never speak to customers, simply stay in the back room working for most of the day, ten to twelve hours sometimes, if there’s a lot of clothes to catch up on.

  I’m a nobody that no one will ever love or want again. I’ll be working here until I’m an old maid and I’ll vanish forever into the mists of time. Tears fall into the laundry water over Albert, over my decision to marry him instead of going to school, over how much I hate this place and need to get out of here. In reality, I decided to go on that cruise even if I didn’t get the time off. If I got fired, that would only change it to a one-way trip. I’d stay in Alaska and follow wherever fortune led me.

  But not here. In this dream, defeat is legion and sorrow his handmaiden.

  An odd disassociation pulls me out of my body. Like a frantic ghost, Rational Me tugs at the arm of Dream Me, who continues dutifully washing clothing while crying. I know I’m dreaming, and this isn’t at all what happened.

  Fish appear in the water, biting and snapping at Dream Me’s hands. Blood foams the soap pink.

  Oh. Right. That’s what I get for eating right before bed. I’m having a nightmare.

  Light flickers at the curtain separating the work area from the showroom. My mother walks in, as always in one of her austere black dresses with a collar that looks like it’s going to squeeze her head straight off her neck. Even more bizarre than her visiting me here, junior Cartwright didn’t say anything to her about going into the ‘employees only’ area.

  “Mom?” I ask, as Rational Me’s ghost merges back into Dream Me’s body. “What are you doing here?”

  She walks over and smiles at me with the same expression she wore whenever she had to comfort me out of a bad dream.

  For no particular reason I can think of, I pull myself over the edge of the giant washtub into the water. My heavy dress melts off as if it had been made of sugar, and my mermaid tail unfurls. Pat and Ettie don’t react whatsoever to the change, though I expect the pair of them would’ve been far more stunned at seeing my bare breasts than a long rainbow fish tail.

  “That’s more like you,” says Mom.

  “But, what are you doing here?” I ask.

  She rubs a hand over my head and pats my cheek. “The answer has to be in his finances.”

  Mom shrinks an inch or so shorter and her skin turns tanning-bed brown; her dress reconfigures itself into silver spandex and a blue-and-white top with horizontal stripes. In an instant, Trisha Buda stands where my actual mother had been.

  “Follow the money,” says Trisha.

  I snap awake in bed—back in the real world.

  “Ugh.”

  With a groan, I sit up and cradle my head in both hands, staring into my lap. A short burp brings the flavor of fresh fish into my mouth. Yeah… I shouldn’t have gone to bed so soon after eating so much.

  Though, as nightmares go, that hadn’t been scary as much as bizarre. And sad.

  That is one bad part of living so long. For as long as I live, I will miss the man I gave up my dreams to be with, and lost far too soon.

  An eternity of heartbreak.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Contact Information

  Surprisingly, it didn’t take me too long to fall back to sleep after that dream, and I wake up late in the morning, still feeling full.

  Whether or not the idea of chasing the money came from mystical sources or my subconscious, I decide to trust it. Hey, it’s not like I have anything else to go on, right? First things first, I need to properly wake up considering I have no intention of going to the office today.

  Soon, I’m out on my deck and relaxing on my lounge chair with a giant mug of coffee. As often as I go in for lattes, I still have an industrial-sized bag of Starbucks dark roast in my kitchen. What most people refer to as a ‘pot’ is my favorite mug. It’s dark-purple, kinda pumpkin-shaped, probably handmade, and eats lesser mugs that encroach on its territory.

  My plans for the morning include: enjoy the sun and my coffee, then call Pippa once the mug runs dry. By that time, I’ll probably have talked myself into continuing to work on this case.

  Maybe ten minutes into this project, a small boat pulls up to the little pier at the back end of my yard. It’s lone occupant, a white-haired guy in a dark-blue polo and white pants, looks up from the controls at the house—and me. His expression of ‘whoops, wrong pier’ lasts only seconds before he realizes I’m not wearing anything. At that point, he kills the engine and steps off the boat onto the dock, heading toward me in a trance.

  Great. He is so lucky I don’t like eating humans. I’m basically like a bug zapper for men. Just stand around with ‘the girls’ out in view and men simply queue up to die.

  I project my mental influence over him, forcing his mind to randomly dress me in whatever he expects I would be wearing. A T-shirt and jeans appear in his thoughts. His meander slows to a stop.

  “Uhh, sorry. Wrong dock. Looks just like mine,” he calls.

  “It’s all right,” I half shout. “I never use it. Don’t have a boat.”

  He waves and trots back to his vessel. With a rumble of diesel, it backs away out of sight.

  I feel Licinia delving into my thoughts to understand what a ‘bug zapper’ is… and she laughs for a few minutes. Technically, that’s exactly what mermaids (who eat sailors) are. Lure in prey for a kill. The only real difference is bug zappers don’t eat what they kill.

  Anyway.

  You’re procrastinating, dear.

  I glance into my still-half-full mug. “Yes, I am aware of that. Is my dawdling going to get the man killed?”

  Perhaps not in the sense of move right this second or you’ll locate a corpse, but I am strongly of the opinion you shouldn’t waste hours.

  “Or he’ll die?”

  Something like that.

  How soon?

  Soon.

  I sigh into the coffee, blowing bubbles. “Do you have anything more specific than ‘soon’?”

  “Oh, great.” I sigh, shift my mouth fully to ‘bite a tuna in half’ mode and pour the remainder of the coffee down in one enormous gulp. My jaw and teeth shrink back to normal as I swallow. “Well, so much for enjoying the morning.”

  You did enjoy some of it. And I didn’t tell you to move right this second.

  “Yeah… I know. But you’re right.” I stand and walk back inside, depositing the mug on the kitchen counter on my way to my office room.

  Once I’m seated at my desk, I pull Pippa’s phone number out of the pile and call her.

  “Alex!” says Pippa, her voice a mix of worry and hopefulness. “Have you found him?”

 

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