The liveryman came to her with a blanket. “Miss, this was a bad night for the river. I told you that.”
Coralie’s father now approached, concerned for their plan. “Have you been found out?”
She shook her head. When she tried to speak, no words were heard, only a croak, as if she had lost her voice in the river. Her face smarted with the cold. The silence of the girl in the blue coat had affected her, chilled her to the core.
The Professor took her arm, demanding to know what had caused her such distress. “This is not a game.” He saw her silence as disobedience. “You’ll tell me directly, or you’ll regret it.”
Coralie’s pale face flushed. “I found a body in the river.” Her voice sounded strangely flat. “I left her in the woods. She drowned.”
Coralie expected her father to berate her, for the dead were not their concern any more than the living were. She presumed he would contend that a corpse in the grass was no different than a child offered for a good price. And yet a strange look began to play upon the Professor’s face, his interest piqued. He asked Coralie to lead them to the place where she’d left the body. The liveryman took them along the road by carriage. Coralie continued to shiver. “The road ends nearby,” she warned. “It’s best we avoid this situation and let the authorities find her.” Once, at the funeral of a living wonder, an old man with warts like a bullfrog’s who had died in his own bed of old age, Maureen had cautioned her that if she should look upon a dead man twice, she would carry him forever. They’d hurried away from the funeral home, but Maureen’s warning had stayed with her. “We should turn back,” Coralie recommended now.
“We’ll go when I say,” her father told her. “Have faith in me.”
At the road’s end, the liveryman tied his horse to the branch of a chestnut tree and they continued on by foot. A few birds sang in the dark, but the quiet was so deep that each branch breaking under the men’s boots echoed as if a rifle had been shot. A thicker mist began to rise off the water, turning the distant shore silver. The air was warmer than the cold, hard ground. The trees were pewter, the ferns black as coal. Confused, Coralie led them in the wrong direction, and then had to backtrack. The Professor grumbled, annoyed to realize she’d taken them in a circle. But Coralie wondered anew whether it might be best if they failed to reach their destination. Possibly she had been wrong and had mistaken exhaustion for death. There might well be nothing for her father to see. Surely it was within the realm of reason to think that the girl had slept for a while in the tall grass after Coralie had run off, then had awoken refreshed. She may have smoothed down her hair, buttoned her blue coat, and arisen from the meadow to walk barefoot through the woods. You will never believe my dream, she may have told her parents, waiting at the door, relieved beyond words by her return. I dreamed I drowned and a girl who was half fish discovered me and brought me to the shore, intent on rescuing me so that I might live and walk on land like any other young woman and be your daughter once again.
Their journey continued blindly, for it now seemed apparent that Coralie couldn’t find her way. How mortified she would be if she discovered that she’d dreamed the encounter and they found nothing more than a great blue fish in the grass. But then the liveryman called out. “I see something in the hollow.”
They followed him now, the Professor rushing through the bushes, Coralie trailing behind, for she not only dreaded what they would find, she feared the reason her father had insisted they come here. Perhaps the time had come for her to defy him. If only she could find the strength to hurl herself into her own destiny, running there head-on, resolved to find her freedom. She gazed at leaves, imagining Egypt and Paris and all the wonders of the world that awaited her.
“There she is!” the liveryman shouted.
A sheaf of blue in the dark ferns and brambles.
When they came upon the body, Coralie felt something sharp run through her. She knew Maureen was right. She would indeed carry the dead with her. Coralie had the urge to turn away, but she could not. She had already seen what was before them.
The Professor shrugged off his black overcoat and threw it over the young woman. “Take her back to the wagon,” he told the liveryman. “Our treasure.”
“This isn’t what I do,” the liveryman replied, bristling. “I’ve been to jail for too many years. Now that I’m a free man, I’m not about to go back.”
“You’ll do it, or you’ll find yourself in jail for worse offenses,” the Professor told him. When he saw the grim expression on the liveryman’s face, the Professor tried another tactic. “There’s double what I usually pay in it. That should make the deed easier for you to complete.”