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Christy: I’d feel it if she wasn’t okay. So she must be okay.
Rachel: I agree. She must be fine. Try to get some sleep.
Christy: Night, Aunt Rache.
I frowned and looked at Mason, then I tapped the play button on Episode 1, Fathomless, propped the phone against my dewy glass, and sank a little deeper into the hot, bubbling water to listen.
* * *
ZIG TALES
This is Zig-Tales. We solve mysteries here.
Welcome to Season Two, The Missing Mermaid.
I wanted to call it The Mermaid Murder, but that’s the thing with this case. We don’t know for sure there was a murder. What we do know is that ten years ago this very week, a beautiful mermaid vanished, and she hasn’t been seen again since.
Shy, beautiful, twenty-seven-year-old Eva Quaid was the star at a club in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she performed as a professional mermaid. Yes, people, that’s a thing. She wore a blue silicone mermaid tail and a faux seashell bikini top, and her skin always glittered when she turned in the lights.
Her mermaid name was Esmeralda, and she was magical.
So was her life. She’d been a mermaid for several years. But that last year was special, because she fell in love with Paul Quaid, a metalwork artist who’d stopped in one night to see the show. He would later say that the minute he saw her, he knew. She must’ve known too, because they were married within six months, and Eva was living happily with Paul in a woodland log cabin twenty miles north of the Springs. Eva waited tables by day, and performed as a mermaid on weekends— nightly, during summer and early autumn, when the tourists poured in. Paul cut and welded woodland creatures in his little workshop beside their rustic cabin, with a stream running by. It was an idyllic existence.
Until one weekend.
Paul was away at an art show, one he’d attended every single year for the past five and has attended every year since. The show provided a good chunk of his annual revenue, and he never missed it. Eva left her cabin with her mermaid tail in its carrying case, heading, we presume, for the pool at the club to practice for an important show. The owners were in town, and she wanted to impress them.
At least, that was what she texted to Paul. It was six a.m. when those texts were sent. They were the last ones she ever sent; the last communication between Eva Quaid and anyone living.
Her car would be found much later, abandoned along a deserted stretch of road between her home and the club. Apparently she never got there. Eva’s handbag, cash, credit cards, and cell phone were all still in the car.
But Eva, and her mermaid tail, too, were missing.
What followed was an intense investigation by the Saratoga Springs Police Department, with cooperation from the County Sheriff’s Department and even the State Troopers. Detective Jen Scott, a former Army explosives ordinance expert, was in charge of the case. According to the papers from the time, everyone who worked at the club was questioned, including its three owners, known to staff as ‘the billionaire bad boys’; a trio of unrelated men whose fathers gave them the funds to buy the place. Eva’s new husband, artist Paul Quaid, was also questioned no less than three times. Police had also interrogated the club’s bartender, Earl Mackey, who had a tense relationship with Eva, according to their co-workers. We have information that things might have been a little more complicated than that. But everyone had alibis, and none of detective-in-charge Jen Scott’s leads panned out. And now, ten years later, her case remains unsolved.
Here at Zig Tales, we intend to remedy that. We have resources that SSPD’s decade-old investigation didn’t have. And unlike them, this case will be our only focus until we solve it.
And trust me, we will solve it.
So hit that subscribe button and then share this podcast with every mystery-lover, Springs resident, and mermaid fan you know, as Zig Tales takes on the case of The Missing Mermaid.
* * *
RACHEL
“Holy shit,” I said, three hours later. Each episode had run a full hour, but a lot of that time was clever, compelling filler. Anecdotes about Eva from her childhood, offered by school mates; other memories from people who’d worked with her at the diner. It was all too compelling to fast-forward through.
Zig read off a mini bio of each of the original suspects, along with that suspect’s alibi, then made several attempts to poke holes in it. She claimed she had even driven routes with a timer, but she had yet to find any real bombshells.
Mason nodded as the final episode ended. And then he said, “Misty’s helping her.”
“Misty wrote the scripts,” I replied. He looked at me oddly, and I said, “What? It’s her voice. I recognize it. It’s a lot like mine.”
“Okay. I was basing my conclusion on it being way too coincidental that she’s working as a mermaid?—”
“At the same club—” I added.
“While rooming with the podcaster.” He concluded my thought.
