Deep Betrayal

chapter 28

CONVINCED



My friends didn’t stay the week. Instead, they packed quickly and headed home the next morning. Jules looked at me expectantly, as if she wanted me to come home with them, too. I didn’t make eye contact with her as Calder and I waved from the ferry office, watching the van turn left at the stop sign and head out of town, back to their lives where the worst they had to worry about were dead cell phone batteries.

When they were out of sight, Calder said, “I know what you’re thinking, so stop it.”

“You said I could trust you. You said my friends wouldn’t get hurt.”

“I said Maris and Pavati wouldn’t get to them. And I don’t think your friend is that hurt.”

I shot him a scathing look. “Pavati attacked him.”

“It wasn’t them. We were with them the whole time.”

“Not Pavati. She came late.”

“It wasn’t them. It hasn’t been them. Not once this whole time. I made the wrong assumptions. Maris told us the truth. They haven’t hunted in a while. They’re so past gone they can’t even bring themselves to eat. You saw what a mess they are.”

“A less experienced hunter then,” I said, my voice falling low.

Calder grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me around to face him. “It wasn’t your dad, Lily. He isn’t hunting, and even if he was, he wouldn’t take one of your friends.”

“How can you be sure? Maris was right. You can’t monitor him twenty-four/seven. And how is he supposed to live off the happiness of his family”—I choked on the sarcastic sound of my words—“when he’s never home?”

“There is another explanation.”

“Don’t make me laugh.” I couldn’t believe Calder was buying into this. “Don’t go grasping at fantasy. You can’t go blaming five attacks and two murders on a mythical being.”

“It wasn’t so long ago you would have said I was mythical,” he said.

I turned and walked away, marching up the hill. Calder didn’t let me go that easily. He was right at my side before I’d taken four steps. I fought back tears and refused to look at him.

“You,” I said. “You’re buying into Maris’s lie because you can’t face the truth. We’ve lost Dad forever.”

“I’m not ready to believe it, Lily. It took me forty years to find a father, and I won’t give up on him now.”

I stopped and turned around to face him. “You think that’s what I’m doing? Giving up?”

“Well, aren’t you?” He cocked his head to the side.

“I’m trying to be realistic.”

“Since when?” he asked, without a hint of sarcasm.

“Since now.”

He smiled and drew one finger through my hair. “I like the girl who welcomes fantasy better. Where is she?”

“To believe in a water spirit goes against everything I believe in.”

“What did you tell me once? That ‘God created the great sea monsters.… And God saw that it was good’?”

I wasn’t in the mood to be agreeable. “God made this Maighdean Mara to hunt people?”

“All creatures need to be tended and cared for. If Maighdean Mara has been neglected, wouldn’t it make sense that she would set off to fend for herself?”

I sat down hard on a park bench, facing the lake. “You better start at the beginning for me. Is this thing one of those manitou stories Jack was telling us around the campfire in April?”

“You should know by now that Jack never gets more than half of anything right. The native people have their own legends, and maybe over the centuries there has been some overlap, but Maighdean Mara is from the North Sea.

“Supposedly, she migrated here during the Great Flood.”

I crossed my arms and turned away. So far, his explanation wasn’t helping.

“She mated with the native men and had three daughters: Odahingum, Namid, and Sheshebens. Maris and Pavati’s ancestors, I guess.”

“They’re the half Jack got right,” I said. “The mermaids who walk around like regular people.”

“Right.”

“So what did Maris mean when she said people were neglecting it … her?”

“The story goes that when Maighdean Mara died, she didn’t leave. Her spirit increased in size and she became a guardian of the lake. Her descendants, and the descendants of the human men who loved her, paid her homage for centuries. They’d make offerings of tobacco or wild rice or copper.…” His voice trailed off, and I watched as his thoughts went far away.

“I remember Mother had a trove of Indian Head pennies. Old ones, from back when pennies were actually made of copper. She used to make an offering every year. But ever since she died, none of us ever did.

“That’s what Maris meant when she said we’d neglected her. I always thought it was just a story. I mean, it was easy enough to think so. I’ve been swimming this lake for decades, and I’ve never seen any evidence of her.”

I sank lower on the bench and groaned. “That’s my point, Calder. You know why you haven’t seen her? She’s. Not. Real.”

“C’mon, Lily. We came from somewhere. Let’s keep the possibility open that she’s the root of the problem. It beats the alternative. Have some faith in your dad. I do.”

With those words, I felt as if I saw Calder for the first time. How he cared for Sophie and doted on Mom. How he trusted Dad, even now, when I couldn’t.

With Calder, I didn’t have to worry about things falling apart anymore. In some strange, unexpected way, he had become the glue that held us all together. He had faith in my dad, and I loved him for it. I really loved him.

So there was only one option for me now. Like it or not, I was banking on an impossibility.