Mermaids in Paradise - Lydia Millet (phonics story books txt) 📗

people,” said the guy, and then he got a stressed look on his face, glancing past us at someone, I guess, who needed either his sack or his presence. He quickly turned to leave. “Gotta bounce.”

Chip looked at me, stricken.

“They’re going after them,” he said.

I saw a face I recognized, then, up on the deck of one of the nearer yachts: Mike Jans or Chance or whatever, the too-tanned resort employee from Guest Services who’d come to the door of Steve and Janeane’s cabana. He wasn’t wearing his maroon tie anymore; now he was clad in what I guessed was modern sailor gear, a windbreaker and a cap, a pair of mirrored sunglasses. Approaching him from the gangplank—another face I recognized!—was our other Guest Services rep, the name-tag woman who’d been Mormonish the night before.

Well, in daylight she wasn’t Mormonish at all. She wore flip-flops and shorts, and her bare legs were strong and muscular as a carthorse’s, plus clearly waxed. I’m not sure, but I don’t think waxing’s much of a Latter-Day Saints habit. She’s not a Mormon, I couldn’t help thinking a little disappointedly; I couldn’t help feeling just the tiniest bit betrayed. Sure, she’d never directly claimed to be LDS, but the ankle-length, floral, asexual dress had made the claim for her, and now she was renouncing it without so much as a by-your-leave. It came to me then that dressing badly could be seen, in a way, as a form of disinformation, a form, almost, of psychological weapon.

But I didn’t have time to go down that road. Chip was upset.

“Deb,” he said quietly, standing close to me. His hands were actually trembling. “They’re going out there to hunt them, is that it? Hunt the mermaids?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” I said. “I really don’t think that’s it.”

“Then what is it?”

I pointed at a banner flapping behind Mike and his coworker. And that was our introduction to the new mermaid tourism company—incorporated, as it turned out, with mysterious rapidity as a wholly owned subsidiary of the multinational chain that also owned our resort—that called itself the Venture of Marvels.

Beside the words, a logo of a fishtail sticking out of a frothy, stylized wave.

“They’re going out there to market them,” I said.

THERE’S NOT A lot of anger in Chip, really; I’d say he’s well below average on the anger meter, for his demographic. He’s white, he’s male, and he’s quite young, but he’s got no serial killer in him—none at all. No tendencies to violence that I’ve ever seen. Or if he does have them they channel completely into the gaming, sex, and athletics.

And yet, when he looked up at those words and that logo and then looked down at the Guest Services team standing beneath it, their tans glowing against the white of the yacht like twin beacons, I saw blood rush to his face. His face, all of a sudden, looked lightly mottled, and I actually caught the movement of his jaw clenching. I thought I heard his molars grinding, even amidst the pandemonium on the docks.

“No,” said Chip. “No. No. No. No. No!”

“Hey,” I said, “hey, there.” But as I reached out to comfort him I reminded myself of Steve the Freudian wrangling Janeane, which made me jerk back my hand from his arm. It wasn’t that I didn’t want him to be comforted, just that I didn’t want to act like a life partner, exactly. I figured the process would have a neutering effect.

“They can’t do this,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s just like Nancy said! They’re going to wreck everything!”

I didn’t doubt what he said, which made it hard to come back with a soothing remark.

“The others from the dive are working for them! For these people. The Venture of Marvels, whatever that is.”

“I suspect it’s the same people who run the resort. Or at least their parent company,” I said, inclining my head toward the tanned people astride their yacht, above us.

Chip’s brow knit.

“That’s why they left my Listserv, I bet they felt guilty,” he said. “They felt guilty because they were cashing in. They were betraying Nancy and everything she stood for! And violating our contract! They’re getting paid to sell out the mermaids!”

“Yes,” I said. “I think that’s a pretty fair assumption.”

“Deb,” he said, “you’re the strategist. What can we do?”

I looked around for a place to sit; all I saw was the top of a piling, a sawed-off stumpy thing spattered with seagull white. Any port in a storm, I said to myself, but then I disagreed.

“First,” I said, “who’s still on your Listserv, Chip? Who hasn’t defected yet?”

He lifted his phone, tapped a few times, studied the screen. “Thompson,” he said. “Rick. Ronnie . . .”

“Thompson? Who’s that?”

“The retired wreck diver, you know, the ex-Navy guy with all the great stories. You called him the old salt. Then Rick and Ronnie from San Francisco that we had dinner with. And then—just—no way! Another unsubscribe. Right now!”

“And?”

“There’s only one other person left, I guess, Miyoko. Young, Asian, some kind of big-wave surfer but she came here just to dive. She wanted to see the reefs. Dolphin tattoo on her ankle. Remember?”

I vaguely did. She was quiet and self-possessed, with excellent skin; we hadn’t spoken much.

“OK, Chip. We’ve got to call a meeting.”

AFTER WE SAW the banner for the so-called Venture of Marvels I didn’t know whether to feel invisible or paranoid. On the one hand, we were afraid that Nancy had been murdered for her mermaid discovery, in which case we should be paranoid because we, too, could be killed if we didn’t toe the line.

On the other hand, it was in fact possible that Nancy had died a natural, if unlikely, death and that our mermaids had been discovered by the resort only after her death, basically because of her death—from Nancy’s cell phone records, which led them to Riley’s video.

In that case we’d invented the cover-up, invented the idea