Even without turning to look Andrew knew his brother was sobbing on the floor. He stood at the window eating his chili from the pan and watching the distant roil of the waves. A film of Peter’s blood clung to his knuckles, sticky and red.
Luce was out there. Somewhere. But how was he supposed to find her?
He slept in Luce’s old bed that night in her tiny room with books heaped on the dresser and postcards from cities they’d traveled to together tacked around the bed. High on the wall were two photos: a snapshot of Alyssa holding a three-year-old Luce on her lap, a big white sunhat casting a slanting shadow across both their faces. The photo next to it was much more recent, an official school portrait that Andrew guessed had been taken not long after his boat wrecked. In it Luce appeared unsmiling and scared, her eyes wide and otherworldly, wearing a navy sweater that was getting too small for her. She looked lovely and horribly vulnerable, and he ached to hold her and tell her that everything would somehow be okay.
Alyssa was dead. That was understandable, natural, even if it ripped his heart to think about it. But the way he’d lost Luce, on the other hand . . . that was too surreal, too impossible. There was just no coming to terms with something that made so little sense.
He woke up to a silent house. Peter must have actually gone in to work, then, even with his busted face. Everyone would just figure he’d had a nasty fall while he was drunk. Apart from the endless hiss of the waves there was no sound at all. After a minute Andrew pulled himself out of bed, stretched and moaned. If he wasn’t going to kill Peter, then he also wasn’t going to be spending the next twenty years locked up. Looked like he’d have to think of something else to do, if rotting in prison was off the table.
He’d clear out after breakfast. Leave Peter a note and never come back. For all he knew Luce could be anywhere along the continent’s west coast, so there was no reason to stay put.
The photos of Luce and Alyssa almost hummed to him; he could feel their nearness, hear a wisp of their mingled voices. He pulled both pictures off the wall and slipped them into his backpack, then got dressed in the old clothes people on the islands had been kind enough to give him when he’d shown up wrapped in filthy sealskins. They’d been awfully good to him, the mad, tattered castaway who’d insisted at first—until he got his head together, anyway—that he’d been brought there by his daughter, Luce, and that she was a mermaid.
Andrew stumbled out into the kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee, stepping over the blotch of crusted blood on the linoleum. He’d been knocking through the cupboards for a few minutes before he noticed the dark silhouette floating on the door’s sunlit curtain. Somebody was standing there, dead still, watching him through the gap. Andrew swung around and saw a sliver of a tan-skinned, thickset man, his neat silver hair like a glaze in the pale daylight.
Once the man saw Andrew looking he knocked as if he’d just arrived. But Andrew was sure the guy had been standing there for a while.
“Yeah? Help you with something?” Andrew didn’t try to keep the annoyance out of his voice as he opened the door.
“Peter Korchak?” The man on the step had warm, sympathetic brown eyes, but his mouth was tense.
“That would be my brother, actually. Want me to tell him you were looking for him?”
“Your brother.” The tan-skinned man stared for a moment as if he weren’t sure whether or not to believe it. “And your name is?”
“You’re the one on the outside of the door. That means you might want to think about introducing yourself before you go asking me anything.”
In reply the man folded back his coat. His badge gleamed in the pallid day. “Ben Ellison. FBI.”
“All right.” That didn’t make too much sense unless Peter had gone and turned criminal. But there it was. “And I’m Andrew.”
Ben Ellison made a conspicuous effort to stay calm. “Do you have any identification?”
“No.” Andrew stared for a second. “Peter can vouch for me, I guess, if you’ve got some reason you need to know. What’s your business here?”
“My understanding is that Andrew Korchak was lost at sea. More than two years ago. But if that’s really who you are . . .”
“That’s who I am. I didn’t stay lost, is all.” He felt tired, and even though he’d washed his hand the night before, he suddenly noticed lines of dried blood still clinging in the grooves of his knuckles. “What’s your business?”
“Then I expect you would know who this is?”
A photo. Zoomed in until it was very close and grainy so that it only showed her face glancing back over her shoulder. The background was bright and blurry, but it looked like shining water. Her cheek was marred, and Andrew’s breath caught as he noticed the notch torn from her ear. “Where did you get this?”
“So you do recognize her?”
Andrew couldn’t stand it. He pivoted on his heel and walked to the counter, leaning with his head hanging down, his shoulders heaving. He’d failed to protect Luce again. And for some reason this FBI bastard was asking questions about her, and that might mean . . .
“Mr. Korchak?”
That might mean he knew . . .
“This photo was taken just a few days ago. I’d like to discuss the situation with you, Mr. Korchak, if that would be all right.” Ben Ellison stepped over the threshold and approached. The kettle was whistling out a piercing, horrible note.
“What do you want with her? Look, whatever you’re thinking . . . Luce is still a little girl . . .” His arms were crossed on the counter, leaning heavily, but he was painfully aware that Ben Ellison must have noticed how he was shaking.
“You know, you don’t seem at all surprised. To find out that Luce is still alive.”
Oh. Right. He was supposed to think that Luce had killed herself. It was too late to pretend, though. “I knew she wasn’t dead, is why.”
There was a pause. Andrew looked up to watch Ben Ellison’s face, to observe the thoughts churning just behind his eyes. The guy seemed pretty smart, actually. “And would knowing Luce is alive be somehow connected? To the fact that you didn’t stay lost?”
It was a strange line of reasoning, unless this Ben Ellison knew a lot more than he ought to. “Knowing she’s alive? It’s connected to the fact that I saw her a few weeks back. She wasn’t banged up like that then, though.”
“But I imagine there were other changes in her that you might have noticed,” Ben Ellison said. His tone was sardonic, but there was another suggestion in his voice at the same time, a definite hungry sharpness. Was it envy?
“What do you want with her?” Andrew’s heart was racing and his knees wavered, but even so he was starting to feel some humor in the situation. Whether your kid got caught swilling vodka in a cemetery or shoplifting or turning into a mermaid, it was all the same. You still had to talk to the cops.
Ben Ellison hesitated. “I’d like to help her. I’m afraid it might not be possible, but—”
“Help her how?” Andrew found himself feeling defensive suddenly. “Far as I can see my girl is doing pretty good, considering.”
“She’s wanted for murder.”
“She’s what?”
“Arguably it was self-defense.”
“This is garbage. She’s only . . . she’s a kid. A good kid.”
“Given her current situation, it’s unlikely that constitutional protections apply, and I doubt anyone will go out of their way to interpret the law in her favor. After all, she technically isn’t even . . .”