Siren Call

by Paul Lonardo

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

Marion spoke up with forced confidence. “Is it not obvious to all of you by now that Mrs. Deavers laced her husband’s food or drink with some kind of drug or poison that rendered him mad, causing him to mutilate himself?”

Cahill gave no acknowledgement to this supposition, but continued with his chronicle. “I must admit to you that the horrifying truth did not occur to me right away, even after a thorough investigation. Then I saw the thing for myself.”

“For the love of Pete, Cahill,” Buzzy snapped, “stop speaking in tongues and give us the lowdown already. How did Elizabeth Deavers conspire in the death of her husband?”

“After the funeral, I went to see Elizabeth at the Newport beach home to ask her a few follow-up questions. I spotted her outside on the furthest point of a jetty, which extended nearly a hundred yards into the ocean. It was overcast and drizzling.

“As I plodded carefully over the slick rocks, I called her name, but she couldn’t hear me over the pounding surf. Her back was to me, and she was staring out at the raging sea. The water was rough, the spray obscuring her already shadowy form. I finally reached her, and I was standing just a few feet away when I bellowed her name and asked her if I might have a word with her. She half-turned and I saw that she was cradling a tightly swathed bundle in her arms.”

“I knew it,” Marion said much too loudly, before lowering his voice considerably when he noticed the disapproving stares of the other men. “She had been pregnant. She had gone off somewhere to have the child because it had been sired to her by a lover, who in turn murdered Deavers.”

“Afraid not,” Cahill said with satisfaction as the other man’s smile dissolved. “After apologizing for my bluntness, I told Elizabeth that I believed she knew who her husband had been with the night he was killed, and that the only hope we had of solving the murder was talking with the last person who had seen him alive.”

“That’s laying it on the line,” said Sid Katz as he relit his pipe with a gold-leafed Zippo.

Cahill groomed his mustache, his eyes distant and reflective. “She just turned away from me, looking out to sea. When she didn’t respond, I began thinking of ways to rephrase my question, to better reflect the urgency of the situation when she finally spoke. I could barely hear her over the sound of the waves breaking on the jetty, and I wasn’t sure I heard her right, but what she told me was not only odd, but incomprehensible to me. At least at the time.

“What did she say?” Phahler asked impatiently.

“She told me that humans are not the only species that mate for pleasure.”

The men looked around at each other. Phahler had a cockeyed grin on his face.

“I, too, was taken aback by her remark,” Cahill acknowledged. “She went on to tell me that what she found most interesting to study were creatures that are truly ‘monoecious.’ That is, having both male and female reproductive organs, and reproducing asexually.”

“You mean they fuck themselves,” Buzzy contributed. “That would make Marion monoecious.”

Controlled laughter rippled through the ranks. A smile even played in the corners of Cahill’s mouth for a brief moment. Marion, his cheeks coloring, glowered scornfully at his pipe-smoking antagonist.

“In such a genus, Elizabeth told me that there is no need for sex,” Cahill continued, countenancing genuine unease, which suppressed any further laughter at Marion’s expense. “Now, it could have been a shadow, but I thought I saw her mouth curl up into a sinister smirk, which never left her face as she explained how in certain cases among some types of fish and amphibians there may be a shift from one sex to another during the life of the individual.

“Aside from one specific species of frog, she told me that normal hermaphroditism is extremely rare in vertebrates. However, she informed me that abnormal hermaphroditism has been known to occur regularly in fishes. It was at that moment that she looked me full in the face. I saw her eyes, the color of cold slate, and in deadly seriousness she asked me what I thought would happen to the human race if it were to become asexual and men had to give birth.”

“However did you respond to that?” Phahler asked.

“Before I could say anything, she focused her eyes back on the choppy surf and then told me about a previous voyage that she had taken with N.O.I. to a coral reef off the Albanian coast in the Adriatic. She made inferences to reported sightings of mysterious creatures of alluring beauty that had been reported there.”

There was an audible gasp among some of the men in the room.

“Now, I had been aware of the hyped-up stories that had been popping up in the news at that time about mermaids, or some such silliness, being spotted all around the world, including off the New England coast. Mind you, I’d never given credence to whimsy of any kind previously. Those of you who know me can vouch to that.”

“Are you insinuating that she had been out looking for mermaids?” Buzzy asked incredulously.

“She went on to tell me that she oversaw the Institute’s most recent expedition in the North Atlantic, from which she had just returned. She said they had been exploring an atoll just east of Chappaquiddick that allegedly had been witness to similar sightings, described by fishermen as sea nymphs.”

“Sea nymph,” Phahler repeated. “My second wife was a sea nymph. I once came home to find her in bed with three sailors.” He laughed alone without humor. All eyes remained on Cahill.

“Did Mrs. Deavers ever find one?” Marion inquired.

“I asked Elizabeth the same question,” Cahill told him. “She sighed, and with a tear in her eye, or maybe it was brine, she said she supposed that the mermaid legend was just that; a legend, conjures of lonely fishermen. I don’t know what made me ask the question I did next. Perhaps it was an attempt to break the chilling silence between us, or maybe it was to stifle the cryptic chatter of the sea. Whatever the actual prompt, before I could appeal to my better judgment, I asked her if hermaphroditism could occur in humans.”

A light was switched on upstairs in the Westerly Nursing Home for Men and the sound of someone stirring incited uneasiness among the men.

“What did she say?” Phahler demanded, not caring about the volume of his voice.

“She looked at me with such a disturbing cast to her eyes that I almost turned away from her at once. I must admit, never has another person’s stare held such humbling sway over me. However, her voice was gentle as she informed me that hermaphroditism in humans was possible. Then, before I could suppress my next thought, again I gave voice to a question that burst forth unimpeded from my brain to my mouth. I asked her about reproduction in such an unusual case.

“She smiled knowingly, as if expecting the question, but offered no response. That’s when the bundle in her arms shifted. I smiled and hooked a finger into the tangle of cloth. I was about to inquire about the child, but as the first syllable formed on my lips, the wrappings fell away. Every thought I had in my head broke off at once, and I shrank back in horror at the abominable infant. I almost slipped on the slick rocks underfoot as I recoiled.”

“The child was deformed?” Marion probed.

Cahill’s face soured with his recounting of the image. “Its mouth was a gaping, jawless maw, rife with needle-sharp teeth. The creature’s flesh was translucent and coated with a clear gummy substance. It possessed a single nostril, its eyes were black chips of onyx. It was making a tiny suckling sound, as if it wanted to be nursed. And a rasping, gray tongue darted in and out of the buccal funnel that was its face.”

“Good God!” Samuel Hawes rasped. Even in the dimness of the room, you could see a sickish green pallor imbue his face, appearing as if he might sick up the dinner he had eaten six hours earlier.

“Elizabeth seemed to be holding back a laugh,” Cahill continued as another light came on, illuminating the stairs behind them. Nobody looked up. “That did it for me. One of us was mad. It made no difference. Insanity loves company. I turned heel, anxious to be away from the urgent suckling sounds of this obscenity and the grinning face of the woman holding it in her arms.

“I looked back briefly as I jumped down off the rocks onto the beach. Elizabeth was almost out of sight, but she appeared to lean over and release the creature into the ocean, accompanied a barely audible splash. I turned and left, never speaking to Elizabeth Deavers again, and never did I make mention to anyone what transpired on the jetty that afternoon until this very moment. I determined Jonathon Deavers’ death to be a suicide and closed the book on the case.”

Cahill took a deep breath and closed his eyes. When he opened them a moment later, he seemed to have gathered his thoughts and returned from that time and place in his past to focus on the men in the room once more.

“Are we to derive from all this that Elizabeth Deavers arranged an unnatural congress between her husband and some kind of mythical creature?” Phahler’s tone was challenging.

“So, it was Congressman Deavers who was pregnant,” Sid Katz concluded.

“Preposterous,” shouted Marion.

“The congressman’s tumescent belly must have been churning with the lifeform at the time he removed the volume on the subject of pregnancy and childbirth from his personal library,” Buzzy deduced. “That’s why he called his doctor. The rapidly-growing embryo, seeking egress, finally burst from his stomach, and in desperate terror and agony, the congressman slit his own throat,” he remarked with finality.

“Completely unfathomable.” Marion insisted as soft footsteps descended the carpeted stairs.

“One thing I think we can all agree on is that the captain’s story takes the prize,” Sid Katz said, reaching into his wallet and removing a twenty-dollar bill.

“Pay up, men,” Cahill instructed with a hearty laugh.

The money changed hands quickly.

“But what was the damning evidence you spoke of destroying,” Phahler wanted to know.

“The following day I heard from the crime lab,” Cahill began, speaking quickly, “and I was informed that no fibers or prints other than those identified as belonging to Jonathan Deavers were found at the scene. However, a substance that was truly confounding was detected, something that was described as ‘an abundance of microscopic squamulose.’”

None of the men took the bait. Cahill looked directly at Marion and said, “Fish scales.”

“Up to your old tricks again, I see.” Rebecca stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips. “Men and their fish stories.” Her face was covered with a drying green mud mask that was flaking off as she spoke. Her hair was rolled in pink curlers, and she was wearing a purple robe with a missing button. The array of colors made her look like a macaw or some other unusual bird. “You gentlemen know that the rules do not allow for gatherings at this hour. And, Mr. Hawes, I know you are aware that alcohol is strictly prohibited.”

“Ah, it’s just a little nip,” Hawes said meekly in his defense.

“Come on then, let’s go,” Rebecca instructed. “Back to your rooms.”

The men groaned as they got up out of their chairs and were escorted to the stairs. Rebecca was last to leave the room. Before walking out. she paused and glanced at the rectangular aquarium by the door. Among the exotic fish inside the tank was a coral reef decoration and a ceramic sunken ship. There was also a tiny mermaid ornament and, clinging to the glass next to it, was the oddest-looking fish. It was long and tubular in shape, attached to the glass by its mouth, which held several circular rows of tiny teeth. She heard it making a faint suckling sound as a gray tongue licked the algae off the inside of the tank.

Disgusting, Rebecca thought. She had never seen it in the tank before. A shiver went up her spine as she left the sitting room, closing the door behind her.