Undertow (Whyborne & Griffin #8.5)(20)

“You thought Irene was your friend,” he said, looking into my eyes. “And the female ketoi as well, it seems. But what you don’t know is the Bedlam didn’t simply founder in a storm. Everyone on board, including Captain Parkhurst and my father, were murdered by the ketoi.”

*

All the blood seemed to drain from my extremities. Surely I had to have misunderstood. “Wh-what?”

Oliver released my hand and sat back in the chair. He looked tired, suddenly, as if reaching the end of a long struggle. “I don’t know if you recall, but one of the few remnants of the Bedlam found was the cork-lined trunk my father owned. It contained his diary, a few odds and ends…and a strangely carved rock.”

A summoning stone? I kept my face as neutral as I could.

“I didn’t know what it meant at first,” he went on. “Of course, I read the diary at once. He spoke of the trip across country, from New Bedford to San Francisco, and of his first look at the Bedlam.”

I nodded. As the number of whales decreased in the Atlantic, the company had begun to send its senior captains and crew to the more plentiful waters of the western arctic. It had been their first expedition to that portion of the globe.

We’d remained behind in New Bedford, along with Mrs. Young and Oliver. Papa and Mr. Young hadn’t wanted to uproot us from the homes and neighborhood we’d lived in for so long.

In the end, it hadn’t mattered. We’d lost it all anyway.

And now Oliver said it was due to the ketoi.

“After the launch,” Oliver went on, “Father merely recorded the ordinary thoughts of a man at sea. Minor infractions on the parts of the sailors, the weather conditions, how the Bering Sea differed from Hudson Bay. I kept reading, though, because it…it helped me feel closer to him.”

His mouth tightened with emotion. An unexpected twinge of jealousy ran through me. If only Papa’s log and diary had been recovered as well. At least Oliver had something of his father’s to keep, whereas we had nothing.

“I don’t understand,” I said, by way of prompting him.

Oliver seemed to come back to himself. “Forgive me. It was hard to read—it both comforted me and made my grief keener. As I said, at first the entries were ordinary. Then, one day, the men dropped nets to catch a bit of fish for their dinner. And when they pulled one of the nets in, they found tangled in it a creature such as they had never seen.”

I sat up straighter. “A ketoi?”

He nodded. “It hissed and snarled at them. Started to bite through the nets with those awful teeth.” He shuddered. “One of the men, Martinez, shouted they had to put it back in the water. Let it go.”

I had an awful feeling I knew where this was going. “But they didn’t.”

“Of course not.” Oliver looked at me as though I’d be mad to think otherwise. “For one thing, it wore a small fortune in gold and jewels, even if it wore nothing else. And for another, they’d just captured a creature, a human like creature, of the sort no one had ever seen. P.T. Barnum made a fortune exhibiting the mummified body of a monkey sewn onto a fish. How much more would a real mermaid be worth?”

Oh God.

Bile stung the back of my throat, and my head throbbed in time to my heartbeat. “They killed her.”

“Of course,” Oliver said, as though there were no other possible outcome. “She was too dangerous to keep captive, that was apparent from the first. And a dead mermaid would be nearly as valuable as a live one.”

I’d asked myself what Papa would have done, faced with a woman from the sea. And now I had the awful answer. He’d responded not with awe, with love, but with greed and fear.

“Martinez tried to stop them,” Oliver went on. “He screamed that it would bring ruin on the ship. Captain Parkhurst had him put in irons for insubordination.”

“He should have remembered the ballad,” I said through numb lips. I have a wife in Salem town, / But tonight a widow she will be.

“He wasn’t to blame, and neither was my father,” Oliver snapped. I opened eyes I didn’t remember closing and found him glaring at me. “What they caught in the net was worse than an animal. A monster, with monstrous kin. As soon as Martinez was out of irons, he tried to break into the crate where the ketoi’s body was packed in ice. There was a struggle; he slipped on the ice and struck his head. He died a few days later. They found the stone amongst his belongings, and Father took it when the captain wasn’t interested. They sewed Martinez’s body into a bit of sailcloth and threw him in the ocean. But as it was sinking, one of the other men swore he saw hands reaching up to drag it down into the depths.”

I took a deep breath. Martinez had probably been a hybrid, then. Did he know the ketoi in the net, or had she inhabited a different city than the one from which he sprang?

Two deaths, now, aboard the Bedlam. Did the ketoi believe the ship had come to destroy them?

“After that, everything went wrong,” Oliver said. As if everything hadn’t already gone awry. “No fish, no whales, nothing but the endless sea. Father wrote it was as if the very creatures of the ocean hid from them. The ship sprang leaks it shouldn’t have, and sometimes moved slowly, as if something dragged on the hull from beneath. The men began to mutter among themselves, certain some bad luck had befallen them. Even Father began to feel it. It was as though some ill fortune stalked them across the waves. Which of course it did.”