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That was weird.
She swam across to the other side of the tank, feeling a strange vibration as she did. But she was more concerned with getting a breath. The air-lily on that side was still working, so she got a few breaths as she went over the next moves in her head. The way they had to twist around each other without touching, and then as they parted, they would somersault in opposite directions, perfectly synchronized.
The music was swelling now, she’d have to skip the tangle and go straight to the rolls to keep time. So she swam out and rolled once forward, then once backward, then once forward and once more back, creating a lemniscate in the water.
It was on the second backward roll that she noticed the surface of the dark pool looked odd and, in a flash, realized the floor over the pool was in motion. It was closing, pushing water before it. It was nearly closed!
With a powerful flip of her tail, she propelled herself upward, toward the rapidly closing gap, and then she couldn’t stop her momentum and bashed her head into the barrier as it closed all the way.
She yelped, and released a bubble of sound that went nowhere. Her heart was pounding as she pressed her hands to the underside of the floor. There was no space between it and the water— no air pocket.
She had to let someone know she was in the pool!
She swam to the front and banged on the glass with fists but saw no sign of anyone out there. Then she went back to the air-lily behind the rock, the one that still worked.
Only it wasn’t working anymore.
Nor did any of the other hidden air-supply hoses.
Again, she surged to the front, pounding the aquarium glass with her fists. It occurred to her, as her lungs began to spasm and she held her nose to keep from sucking in water, that someone must have done this. Someone must have closed the floor and turned off the air supply.
Someone…
Her lungs spasmed hard. Water rushed in and it felt like relief. It felt cool and soothing as her final thought completed itself.
Someone had killed her.
* * *
MISTY
Zig handed Misty a five-by-seven black-and-white photo she’d probably printed for dramatic effect. “Eva Quaid, vanished without a trace ten years ago,” she said. “She was a twenty-seven-year-old newlywed who waited tables for a living and performed as a professional mermaid on the side.”
“She was a mermaid?” Misty’s interest was caught, as Zig had probably known it would be. They’d shared a dorm room last year too, so they knew each other pretty well. Misty knew that Zig’s real name was Karen Ziglar, which she hated because Karen. She also knew that Zig hated her braces and loved her corn rows.
She looked at the photo. She’d seen this woman before. “Where did she work?”
“Same place you do. The Sapphire Club.”
Misty frowned as Zig went on. “One night she left her woodland log cabin home and her brand-new husband Paul, and she never came back. Her car was found abandoned at a rest area off Eighty-Seven, twenty miles north of Saratoga Springs, not far from where she lived. But Eva Quaid was never seen again.”
“She worked at The Sapphire Club?”
Zig nodded. “Yes. Did you hear the rest, or have you been?—”
“I heard. I’m interested. Go on.”
That elicited a look of relief or something. Wait a minute, what was Zig up to? “She was declared legally dead three years ago, but nobody knows what really happened to her. This is the story I want to do for season two of Zig-Tales,” she said. She took back the photo, crossed the dorm room, and pinned it to a bulletin board, dead center. “‘The Mystery of the Missing Mermaid.’ I want to re-open that ice-cold case. Better yet, I want to solve it.” She adjusted the oval wire-rimmed glasses that were too small for her face. “But I only want to do it if you’ll help me,” she said.
Misty didn’t answer right away. “You want me to help you?”
“That’s what I said, yeah.”
“Well… I um…” Something was going on here. Misty’s chest felt all pattery, like she’d just run up a flight of stairs. “I can’t really do a podcast about my side job,” she said. “Nobody knows about it. I mean, Christy knows I work at a club out here, but she assumes I wait tables or tend bar. I haven’t told any of them anything specific.”
Zig put down her notebook and looked her in the eye. “Why the hell not? You’re amazing at it.”
“I don’t know, it just seems… kind of silly. Like performing as a Disney princess.”
