Siren's Secret

“Your mom left Eddie’s tote bag of dry clothes over here.” Shelly went to the bleachers, acutely aware of the sheriff following behind. Damn, she should have wrapped a towel around her waist. Toned or not, wet flesh in the light of day made her feel vulnerable. The one-piece bathing suit she wore was modest, but it was still a bathing suit. And her hair was flat and clung to her back in wet chunks. She’d given up on makeup at work. Even the waterproof stuff didn’t hold up to hours in the pool.

The edge of her bathing suit rode up the cheek of her left buttocks. Terrific. Shelly fought the urge to pull it down. If she was lucky and left it alone, maybe the sheriff wouldn’t notice.

She picked up the bag and forced herself to remain professional as she faced Eddie’s brother and held it out.

His eyes jerked up from her derriere. Oh, crap. She could tell by the darkening of those gray eyes and the ghost of a smile on his lips that he had definitely been checking out her ass. But perhaps that was progress, since he hadn’t paid her much attention before. “Hope your mom is feeling better,” she said with a self-conscious smile.

His lips thinned and a flicker of annoyance lit his eyes before he slid back into his cool, confident persona. “You’re limping.” He pointed at Shelly’s foot. “An accident?”

“A minor cut.” She shrugged. “Kitchen mishap.”

He jerked his head toward the locker room. “I better see if Eddie needs any help.”

Shelly stared at his back as he walked away, a tiny bit disappointed. The man was definitely not a conversationalist.

The sheriff whirled around and caught her staring. His lips twitched at the corners.

“I watched you working with Eddie. You’re doing a great job.”

“I love working with your brother. He’s my favorite—I know I shouldn’t have any, but he is.”

“How about you let me take you to dinner Friday in appreciation for all your hard work?”

Shelly fought not to sound too excited. “Sure.” Please don’t invite your mother, she thought fervently. Don’t let this be a family thing. Nice enough woman, but she wanted the sheriff all to herself. It had been too long since she’d felt any interest in dating again.

Lurlene Elmore and others from the senior water aerobics class, the Water Babes and Buoys, emerged from the ladies’ locker room.

“Eddie’s stark naked in our locker room,” Lurlene called out in way of greeting.

A tinge of red crept up the sheriff’s neck. So he wasn’t perfectly composed at all times, Shelly thought. What a relief.

The sheriff tipped his hat to Mrs. Elmore. “Sorry. He doesn’t know the difference between the men’s and ladies’ rooms. I’m on my way.”

“Don’t apologize.” Lurlene let loose a honking laugh. “For God’s sake, it’s not like any of us have reached our advanced ages without seeing a man’s talleywacker a time or two.”

Shelly followed her ribald senior clients to the shallow end of the pool. “Talk to you later,” she said with a wave at Tillman.

Lurlene pointed at Shelly’s legs. “I tried to find that lotion that makes your legs sparkly but I didn’t see it anywhere.”

Not that again. Lurlene had been hounding her for what she used to make her legs glitter. Shelly glanced down discreetly. They weren’t that noticeable. The skin had a faint opalescence, like silver-and-pink mica particles freckling the legs. Lurlene would freak if she knew the glitter came from the faint residue of her tail fin when she shape-shifted.

Shelly shrugged. “Just put some powdered pink and silver eye shadow in a jar of baby oil and shake it.”

Lurlene nodded as she sank her massive frame into the pool. “Saw the sheriff checking you out.” She winked. “He’s a handsome devil.”

It occurred to her these senior women had probably seen more action in the past two years than she had.

Friday night couldn’t get here soon enough.

* * *

Melkie roamed the downtown shops, avoiding eye contact and blending easily with the crowd. Even in early September, the air was thick with humidity and his shirt felt sticky from perspiration. He smirked as he passed the quaint shops. The town was nothing but a fucking Mayberry R.F.D. perched precariously on the edge of a continental shelf. Hurricane Katrina had almost swept it entirely away.

A fat woman in spandex bike shorts and an oversize fuchsia T-shirt exited the soda parlor and brushed against him. Her triple scoop of blueberry ice cream narrowly missed plopping on his chest.

“Excuse me, darlin’,” she said with an apologetic grin.

Melkie pulled away and shot her a furious look. He fought back the urge to growl. The woman’s smile faded and he registered confusion, embarrassment and fear in her fatty pig eyes.

He lowered his head and kept going.

She was like everyone else in this stupid, stinking backwater. They had no idea who he was, what he was capable of doing.

Three blocks away, he entered the Bayou Seed and Feed to get a bag of Rebel’s favorite dog biscuits. Several old men in denim overalls stood around the counter, bullshitting. Melkie plopped the bag on the counter where an old fart with rheumy eyes winked at one of the customers. “How’s that ol’ mutt of yers gettin’ along?”

Melkie threw down a ten-dollar bill on the scratched Formica, ignoring the jibe.

The cashier handed back the change, which Melkie stuffed in his pocket. As he headed to the door, one of the men muttered, “Ugliest damn dog you’d ever want to lay eyes on.”

Snickering ensued.

Melkie slowly turned. All of them fell silent and looked away. He wanted to say Fuck off, but he wouldn’t give the cashier an excuse to ban him from the store. Instead, he settled for banging the door shut behind him. The attached bells gave a satisfied clanging at the violence.

He was in a crappy mood today, when he should have been calm and in control. That’s how he had felt after the first hooker, anyway. The second one...well, that was a problem.

What the hell had happened out there? That—that thing had risen up from the sea. She—it, whatever—had seen him, knew who he was and what he had done. Somehow he had to find her again. He couldn’t let a witness live. Big mistake dumping that second bitch at sea. He thought no one would ever find the body. Unlike the first one he’d left in the shallow salt marsh. That had been clumsy and ill-planned.

Images from the night before consumed him. Sure, he’d had a few beers before getting on the boat, but he wasn’t stinking drunk. He knew what he saw and that was no scuba diver. When the woman disappeared with the body, he’d seen a giant fish tail emerge.

Melkie threw the bag in the bed of his rusted-out Chevy truck with his other recently purchased supplies and drove out of town, onto the white sandy roads leading home. In the past, he would have taken Rebel with him, but he got sick of the ugly jokes. Ignorant hicks.

He’d found the dog abandoned on the roadside years ago and had taken a shine to it. At first, Melkie thought the stray resembled an overgrown rat, but he checked the library’s internet and found it was a full-bred hairless Chinese crested. Try telling that to people in the bayou.

His thoughts turned again to the woman at sea. Either he was crazy or that woman was truly a mermaid. He brooded over the mermaid possibility.

Bayou La Siryna had as many mermaid tales and sightings as some places had their resident ghost hauntings. A few locals claimed to have seen strange creatures at night, half human and half fish, swimming deep at sea. Some scuba divers once claimed they’d seen a topless mermaid with long blond hair swimming close to the marsh grassland savannas that lined the shore. All stories Melkie never believed.

Buildings changed from redbrick structures to clapboard shacks with dirt floors that smelled like a combination of ripe soil and mice droppings. At last, his neighborhood was heralded by a faded hand-painted sign reading Happy Hollows, nailed to an oak tree.

There was nothing happy about Happy Hollows. He flipped off the sign, as was his custom. Tired shotgun-style houses lined the streets, in various states of disrepair. He pulled into an unpaved driveway on a dead-end street. Rebel yapped excitedly by the peeling handmade picket fence slapped together from scrap wood.

A smile tugged the corners of Melkie’s thin mouth for the first time today. Rebel spotted the biscuit bag and ran in circles, delirious with joy.

“Shut that ugly mutt up,” a neighbor hollered from a front porch crammed with broken kids’ toys and other unidentifiable junk.

“Fuck off,” Melkie hollered back. He didn’t have to pretend to be nice around this place. Niceness got you nowhere with these folks; instead, it was viewed as a sign of weakness. Melkie had learned early on not to take anything from anyone. Ever.

Melkie stomped up the rotted steps and onto the porch, arms laden with bags and boxes, carefully avoiding spots where pieces of boards were broken or missing, exposing sand and weeds four feet beneath the foundation. He opened the screen door, but Rebel pushed up underneath his feet and a cardboard box fell out of his arms. An explosive noise of crashed glass erupted in the box like a miniature self-contained bomb. Rebel whimpered and ran away, skinny tail tucked between his legs.