When We Believed in Mermaids(13)

Around me, the house is very silent, and I’m aware of the size of it, the vastness. It’s a little spooky if I allow it to be. I can imagine Veronica’s ghost trapped here, wandering the rooms, seeking her lost lover.

A door slams upstairs, and I practically leap out of my skin.

Get a grip.

If there were ghosts on this earth, I’d have met one by now. God knows I’ve looked for them often enough. To explain. To put things right.

With a deliberate shift, I pop a tomato in my mouth and lean on the counter, wondering what I’m going to do with this space. It’s easily big enough to eat in, and we’ll have breakfast here almost certainly, but there isn’t as much light as I’d wish and no view at all, just the walls of the kitchen. Would it be worth adding some windows back here? I’ll have to get Simon’s input.

Opening the back door, I toss the clementine skins and overripe grapes for the birds. They land in a thicket of shrubs along a cracked path that seems to loop only around the house. I try following it, but it ends in a tangle of vines that seems to be both roses and scarlet rātā. A tree fern rises above the mess. There might be rats, I suddenly realize, and wonder if I should have left the damn fruit out there.

Whatever.

Washing my hands, I head back into the main living areas on this floor, a long, wide room that can be divided by pocket doors and rather spectacular mosaic screens. We’ll want an entertaining room, and it will be stunning at night, with the doors open to the sea and maybe a piano in the corner. I stand in the middle of the room, hands on my hips, letting the vision come to me. Colors of clear turquoise and orange and silver. The mirrors in this room are fantastic pieces, with stair-stepped geometric flares on the sides, and I’ll have them resilvered.

Many of the furnishings and appointments are mediocre. There are a number of knockoffs and facsimiles, which is odd, considering how particular the detailing in the actual house is. I wonder, picking up a bowl that looks to be an authentic green Rookwood with Native American styling, if someone furnished it for Veronica. She was a busy actress, much in demand, and although she started spending more time in New Zealand once she fell in love with George, she still didn’t have much time.

Or, one presumes, taste? Although that makes my ears flush a little in shame. Who am I to judge? It’s not like I had any training—I taught myself to recognize fine things. Maybe she did too. Maybe she just didn’t have time to approve everything.

Now I’m curious about her, and to understand what happened to her, and why, I’m going to need to do a lot more research. All I know at the moment is the top level—the doomed romance, the house, the murder. But what kind of woman was Veronica Parker? Where did she come from? How did she become such a big star?

And what about her lover, George?

It seems important to know all of it, to know Veronica’s wishes and dreams. Sapphire House was her home, her vision, her dream of luxury, and now it’s mine. It seems a sacred undertaking to honor her. By understanding her, I’ll do a better job of restoring the house to the glory it deserves.

My time is running out today, but I can at least explore the study. It’s a richly appointed room with a view through long windows to the curve of the harbor. In the distance are rolling blue hills rising out of the water with a scudding of long clouds over the peaks. It would be an excellent office for Simon—aside from the noise. He is very relaxed about most things, but when he works on his accounts or marketing or anything to do with business, he likes—needs—complete silence. He’ll want a space upstairs, away from everything. Maybe the sister’s suite of rooms.

This will be mine, then. I take in a breath and let it go, absorbing the atmosphere. The cherry-wood desk, the bookshelves, the glass light fixtures with their sleek geometric insets. I don’t like the desk sitting in the middle of the room, but that’s easily changed.

Remembering my task to discover more about Veronica, I open the drawers of the desk and find them all empty. Not just cleared out but untouched, as if they’ve never been used. It breaks my heart a little. That might mean the books were also stocked by a decorator. Bookshelves run the entire length of one wall, and on several there’s a conspicuous elegance—the books’ covers are printed leather, all classics.

Other shelves offer more insight. Aldous Huxley and Pearl Buck, along with the local beloved, Katherine Mansfield. Poetry and Maori culture and history, a lot of intriguing titles I want to explore. I touch them, one at a time, to settle their titles in my memory.

At the end of the third shelf is a collection of books with bright, often tattered covers, and I pull one out to see what it is. A mermaid graces the cover, her hair draped demurely over her shoulder, and I hastily put it back. The next is also a book about mermaids, and I shove it back just as fast but not fast enough.

I was eight and Kit six, and we wanted to be mermaids for Halloween. Nothing else would do, no matter how many times our mother said it was impossible to have a tail and also walk around the neighborhoods of Santa Cruz, where we would go trick-or-treating. She found skirts of turquoise taffeta, painted our faces, and—the crowning touch—carefully painted mermaid scales on our arms and legs.

Years later, Kit and I sat side by side in a tattoo parlor, each of us offering our inner left arm to the artists, who meticulously applied mermaid scales.

I hold out my arm, brush my fingers over that tattoo, still sharp and beautiful after all these years, a testament to the quality of the work. BIG SISTER, it reads over the scales. Hers is LITTLE SISTER, though we laughed about it at the time, since she towered over me by then, nearly six feet to my five three.