Read An Ordinary Drowning, Book One of The Mermaid's Pendant for Free Online Page A

could follow where he went.
    She’d
followed him to the place where she’d left him the day before. That’s when she
realized that he was looking for her. The gossamer thread binding them grew a
little sturdier, a little more permanent. His thoughts were open to her and she
urged him into the water. He came, bringing the lifeless sea star. She felt his
pity and sorrow for the small animal and it moved her. When he lowered its
husk, she sent it away on the current. She couldn’t restrain herself any longer
and she swam around him, running hidden hands along his thighs and up his
flank. He radiated heat. She wanted it to weld them.
    As soon
as he sensed this, she backed away and they began to splash and roll. His deep
laugh surprised her. She’d never heard laughter quite like it before and that
too captured her. If she could elicit that again and again it would never be
enough.
    When he
said, “Where’s my lady del mar when I need her?” she knew that it was
time to reveal herself.
    At that
moment, the old woman spoke. The mermaid’s glamour wavered, but it held steady
under the old woman’s jagged gaze. The gossamer thread linking her and the man
attenuated and flattened but didn’t break. Heart skipping, she swam between him
and the old woman, who came closer to the water, squatted, fingered bits of
shell. The old woman radiated menace. Then she asked the man the unthinkable.
    “Don’t
believe in mermaids, do you? Why not? Maybe one is swimming right beside you.
Close to us vile humans, eh?” The old woman laughed, a sound of broken shells
tossed on stone. The mermaid knew that she laughed at both of them. When the
man wriggled behind her, she looked back at him. She recognized embarrassment.
And denial.
    Disconcerted,
the mermaid swam to a safe distance where she observed as the man spoke to the
old woman, saw him stop and scrutinize her search. She felt his perplexity when
the old woman reached the rock where the sea star had lain. Unlike the stranger
to whom she’d given her heart, this search troubled the mermaid. It troubled her
a great deal.

Four
     
    On Monday morning John awakened with an implacable urge to go to the
cay across Luís Peña Canal, an urge that went far beyond any desire to be alone
on his own private rock, beyond the fear of the ocean crouching in his brain
stem. It had all the force of ravenous hunger, of raging thirst, of insatiable
lust. After nearly drowning, he would have put off coming back to the dive shop
to schedule diving lessons—his stated reason for coming to Culebra—except that
he needed to rent a kayak today to quell this urge.
    So he
returned to Chris’s Sunken Reef Dive Shop, a dusty storefront carpeted in beige
and lined on one side with racks of snorkels, masks, and flippers, as soon as
the shop opened, which happened to be ten a.m. Chris, a slouching tanned man
with a phone cradled between jaw and shoulder, waved him in before disappearing
into the back room. While he waited, John studied the shop more carefully than
he had on Saturday. An assortment of artifacts—links of rusty chain, several
spikes embedded in worm-eaten planking, and disintegrating portholes—studded
the opposite wall along with other less certain items. What appeared to be a
palm-size, dark-orange cannonball served as star to a solar system that
included ancient handles and a dozen verdigris lengths of metal that may have
been fasteners (of what, John had no clue) before the sea laid claim to them.
The real treasure, presumably from Chris’s underwater adventures, resided in a
glass case that divided the shop. Inside, three dark gray plates—pewter, John
guessed—lay in state along with flat oval gold rings and several heavy coins
stamped with a cross surrounded by lions and what looked like castle towers. An
emerald, the size of a teardrop, and flakes of gold held the place of honor in
the center of the case.
    John
tapped his fingers against the smudged glass, his lips compressed and