The Mermaid Collector Read Online Free

Hammond had willed their historic Cradle Harbor lightkeeper’s house to someone they believed to be a perfect stranger. Tom knew little about small towns, but he imagined they were filled with people much like the hordes of seagulls he’d encountered all his way up the coast: sharp-eyed and insistent, unwilling to retreat until they’d gleaned a tasty morsel.
    Already he’d endured a slew of e-mails from the town’s historical society, demanding that he agree to allow them access to the keeper’s house for tours. Tom had replied only once, curtly and firmly, but still the e-mails and phone calls had continued. He’d ignored them, and he had the feeling they weren’t women used to being ignored. Making matters worse, he’d refused to let them send him a copy of their precious town manifesto. He had little interest in the folklore of this place, in whatever foolish legend they all dusted off every summer for their famous festival—or so Frank had referred to it in his letters over the years.
    Tom gripped the wheel with both hands, the plastic hot beneath his fingers, his scalp feeling the same fever under his wavy chestnut hair. He had meant to get a haircut. He needed one desperately; it wasn’t like him to go so long without one. He felt shaggy and crass. He could smell himself, and God, he stank. Even his fingers smelled—hamburger grease and motor oil (the car had been burning it copiously since Erie, and he’d left a constellation of droplets on one pant leg while checking the stick in Katonah). He only hoped the old house had running water. He didn’t care if all the windows were missing, even the front door. It could be without a stove or a fridge, infested with ants. Just as long as there was water. He wanted a shower, a shave, a bar of soap with corners.
    There was always the sea, he told himself as he arrived on the other side of the village, seeing the pines thin just enough to reveal fields of marshland, spotted with shingled sheds bleached as white as bone. If he grew desperate, maybe he could climb down the ledge of rocks below the lighthouse and splash himself clean. But then he’d smell of salt, wouldn’t he? No, not much of an improvement.
    Dean wouldn’t care, though. Tom knew his younger brother would rush to the water’s edge the minute he arrived; he would swim in the frigid ocean at all hours. Tom only hoped the current wasn’t too strong at the end of the Point. Dean wasn’t used to such rough waters, and Tom would be powerless to stop him.
    When the sign to Birch Cove Cottages finally appeared on the horizon, Tom had to squint to read it behind a veil of pine needles. He came to a stop, surveying the long driveway in front of him before starting down it. After swerving around several bends, he saw a stretch of cleared land and a handful of gaudily painted cottages. On the other side of the road, farther up a rise and right on the edge of the woods, stood a lemon yellow cottage with a watermelon door, and a ways beyond that, at the top of the hill, a fire-truck red trailer. Tom pulled the Volvo into the turnaround and killed the engine, not sure where to go first.
    Out of the car, he caught at once the clear sounds of wind chimes to his right. He glanced up at the yellow cottage and saw several sets hanging from the porch overhang, knocking together in the breeze. More sounded farther up the hill. Looking at the trailer, he could see a row of the metal rods hanging from the deck railing. The wind strengthened, and soon the air was filled with the cacophony of their bells, only for an anxious moment, then quieting remarkably seconds later as the breeze thinned.
    As if feeling somehow released in the quiet, Tom turned to the water and saw one more building he’d missed on his first survey, a shed with a hand-carved sign hanging over its door: TESS’S WOOD CARVING AND SIGN SHOP . Surely someone inside could direct him to Buzz Patterson.
    There was a window on one side, the side closest