Sherlock was nearly going to tear his hair out. The bodies had been recovered too late for anyone to really get good forensic evidence from them. Salt water could do that—which meant that he had to go to the crime scene, what existed of it, and look for clues himself. Sometimes he had dreams where he had a good pathologist on file somewhere in the city, who could be bullied to look at police bodies after he bullied the police to send them elsewhere than their own morgues.

The scene was a bit bleak.

A small harbor—not a good one, but with a few jetties it seemed to be passably functional. The perfect place for a little bit of murder—big enough that no one really knew faces, and not so big that there was much presence of security or cameras. None of the people who’d reported the two bodies—forcibly linked by a length of rope at their ankles—had actually seen anyone at that dock the previous night. It wasn’t a place for lovers, he decided rather grimly. In this little southern town on the coast they preferred to go to the beach and find a secluded spot for a few hours. Not a dingy little dock like—this—one.

There was a small face looking up at him from across the way, a hint of shoulder peeking out from the piling they hid behind. It looked like a woman’s face, but there was something not quite womanish about it. She was as pale and blue-hued as a corpse left in water too long—Sherlock felt this was an adequate description, having just been studying two such corpses in the town’s morgue this morning. Her face was thin and elfin, though, and her eyes were very much alive and curious as he glanced at her from the corner of his eye.

She—he would assign it if he felt the term was necessary, but for now the creature looking at him was most definitely a human woman—thought herself unobserved. He didn’t doubt that she was regularly well hidden by her little half rotted and barnacle encrusted pole. There was a practiced angle to her head, a knowledge of what was noticeable and what wasn’t.

His first witness, perhaps.

A skittish and odd one to be sure, swimming in the overly cool water of mid-May. It wasn’t quite warm and nice yet, and certainly not swimming weather at any rate with how the wind was going. This woman seemed familiar with this area—Sherlock desperately wanted to have a few words with her. Instead, though, he finished his inspection of the dock and walked back the way he’d come. The woman would be easily found—he’d ask around the waterfront businesses about a woman with a wayward streak to her approach to water recreation. People always knew and talked of the odd ones out in their professions and interests. Sherlock was the odd one in his group of private detectives, state and city detectives, regular police forces, the lot of them.

The woman hiding behind the piling was as much a freak, to those around her, as he was. Perhaps he could build trust on that currency.

  Sherlock ingratiated himself at a local pub which had a good view of the harbor. It had a good mix of older and younger clientele, and therefore a good mix of local knowledge and lore. He avoided the crusty old sailors and dock workers and gravitated towards the middle set, those between elderly and fresh faced. They’d know the history but hadn’t lived long enough to relive the glory days in an awfully longwinded fashion.

He asked about the woman swimmer out on Wickets Pier, and was rewarded with funny looks from some and guarded ones from others. He pressed them—they knew something, he could feel it. Taste it like blood in the water. The woman, the pale woman swimming out at Wickets, who hid in the ruins of Old Wickets—the woman who is she.

“Mister, I don’t wonder that you’re not from around here. Everyone knows about the ghost out at Wickets—girl drowned herself, ten year ago or more. Just showed up one day, ate fish and chips at every place here for a week—just lookin’ and starin’ out at the ocean. Then just walked out through town, without a stitch—wearin’ only what God gave her—and flung herself off Old Wickets pier. Never came up, and they never found her body. Water’s not deep there, but the current can be murder if you don’t know it. Eighteen years of age, from London. Her name was Molly, Molly something.”

The pub around him was silent as everyone stared at him, the foreigner asking painful questions about a girl who’d gone mad. Her face floated to the front of his mind, though. The face he’d seen had been of a mature woman in her late twenties or her early thirties. That had been no girl of eighteen.

“But—“

“And people know not to go out there, as sometimes they see her face. We used to tell the children not to go out there, or she’d grab them and drown them too—but this last has been the first time someone’s died out there. Now, you can go out to Wickets and look again at Old Wickets—I would bet you five quid that you don’t ever see that youthful face again.”

  He took a long walk on the beach instead of going back to Wickets. He had been so sure that he’d seen a woman. He’d been as sure of that as he was of his own heartbeat. He listened to that heartbeat above the sound of sand between his toes and the scuff of his trousers on the beach. That face haunted him. Eerily blue tinted, and she’d been as pale as death. The wide, dark eyes which had stared at him out of that face, and the peek of her shoulder behind the pole.

She had been real, he decided. No matter what the local legend was, no matter what improbability had led to her existing at the dock that afternoon she had been there. It was just then that he heard a high, feminine peal of laughter from the rocks exposed by the low tide.

Perhaps it was the focus on that one woman, perhaps it was genuine curiosity, but Sherlock padded his way farther down the beach towards the sound. The barks of seals started up, or he at least hadn’t heard them before. There was a person perched on a rock surrounded by the water—a woman from the set of her waist and the length of her hair—wrapped up in a sequined sarong of some sort. It was a muted and slightly pinked red. Her legs and her feet were obscured by the sarong and the water respectively.

Sherlock recognized her hair, even though at the moment it was drier than it had been at Wickets Pier. It was wavy and tangled from the water and wind.

She was sunning herself, her skin—so pale it seemed almost blue—flushed to a nearly healthy color from the warmth of the sun. Just as she was about to lean farther back on her rock and give him more than an eyeful of the rest of her lithe, swimmer’s body, Sherlock found his morals. This woman wasn’t put on earth for him to look at, her body’s beauty was not granted to his eyes simply for the fact that she was sitting—quite topless—on a public beach in late spring.

“Miss, I was wondering if I migh—“

She whipped around, one arm crossed over her chest and the other sweeping her hair out of her face. She moved unlike any person he’d ever observed, seeming to flow from one pose to another as though she was floating. No—she moved like a dancer who had been freed from gravity. He had seen her like, but only in the barest of comparisons.

To Sherlock’s great and everlasting astonishment, the woman he’d just addressed let out a startled squeak before sliding off her rock-perch and into the water without another sound. The seals, settled on their own rocks a distance away, barked louder at him for a few minutes until they quieted to the occasional whuffle or cat-call to one another. The near silence brought his attention out to them where the woman was curled up against one of the seals.

At the distance he was unsure of his eyes, but it looked as though the sarong he’d thought her to be wearing wasn’t a sarong at all. The woman, who stared back at him just as intently as she petted something on her throat, wasn’t a woman at all.

Mermaid.

The only rational explanation for her apparent drowning a dozen years ago and her complete set of tail and fins. Unfortunately for Sherlock’s highly rational mind, a humanoid creature with a tail and fins was completely irrational and he promptly fainted under her intense gaze.

  He woke up because he realized—somewhere in the great unknown of unconsciousness—that he was a bit chilled and felt like he’d been sleeping on damp sand. When he opened his eyes he realized he’d been half right. His coat was gone, and he was lying on his back behind a rock—not to be easily seen if someone were to stroll along the beach. The waves lapped and washed less than a dozen feet away, but there was no slithering trail from the water to where he was. Rather, there were unsteady tracks of footsteps all around him. As though he’d been found and arranged by some sort of clear-headed, kind-hearted drunk.

“You’re frightened, but you don’t think I’m a drowned girl,” her voice was high and sweet, and it drew his gaze to the woman who sat a few feet away from him—if he threw himself in a lunge towards her he wouldn’t make the distance—wrapped up in his long coat.

“I like that you don’t think I’m a drowned girl.” She was looking at the sea, and her toes laid straight against the sand and didn’t dig into it. It was as though she’d quite forgotten that they flexed independently and might want to do things like dig into the sand.

“You’re a mermaid.” His voice was croaky and he didn’t like it. The woman shrugged, the movement exaggerated by the coat over her thin shoulders.

“If that’s what you want to call me, then yes. I saw you at my dock, I didn’t know you’d seen me.”

“But you’re not a mermaid right now.”

She spared him a kind, alien sort of smile—as though she didn’t remember how nor care to try—and nodded.

“Did you see who murdered those two people at…your dock?”

Her eyes had left him and were back on the waves as they came in and out. She shook her head in a ‘no’ and that was answer enough for him. His one lead—brilliantly bizarre, yes, but a lead—had gone nowhere. A dead end with this drowned girl who was now a not-drowned woman. She must have felt his continued stare, though, for she soon added:

“They were killed there though, not somewhere else. There was fresh blood in the water, ask any—well there was.”

“Ask who?”

She shook her head once more and didn’t answer. Sherlock looked at her hair and her slender little hands—when she had the tail, she used that for primary propulsion. She didn’t use her arms or hands to swim, which meant she swam more like a mammal than a fish. But she had had her hand at her throat—he dimly remembered that from before he’d passed out.

“Do you breathe water?”

That brought out a peal of laughter from her, high and happy like he’d heard earlier as he’d walked on the beach. Molly. Molly something. This woman didn’t look constrained to names, but Sherlock thought it fair to give her one, at least in his mind. Molly Mermaid—it sounded like the title to a children’s book.

“When it suits. When I need it. Like I need your coat—so that I’m warm, so that you don’t stare, so that someone walking by doesn’t report us. They do that—I’ve watched many people get asked to leave, just for loving each other. It seems sad. But I’ll give your coat back when I don’t need it, when it doesn’t suit.”

“I see.”

And he did. Or at least he was trying.

  Sherlock stayed in the little town for much longer than he’d expected. The case he’d come for eventually resolved, but he took long and daily walks down the less frequented beaches. Some days he brought along books and others just himself. He kept Molly’s secret, though he kept it secret that he knew her name. She hadn’t shared it with him, and he found he could wait.

She was the perfect partner, he told himself sometimes as he walked to or from the beach. She was observant—a proper scientist sometimes—and she was observable. She was also trusting and kind, and showed him what her full tail looked like after just three weeks of knowing him. It was red, with scales ranging from the size of peas all the way up to his thumbnail. He hadn’t been surprised that he’d thought her to be wearing a sequined sarong. Molly’s tail glittered in the tidepool she’d slipped into to show him, and her pale skin had flushed as he stared.

A week later she had floated and played in the shallows of a tiny cove she’d found years ago and showed him. Sherlock had slipped in the water with her, wanting to run his fingers along the scales which sparkled brightly when they were submersed in seawater. Vaguely he wondered if she was a siren, and that the improbability of her existence was her song to trap him here. But no, he decided as she impulsively took his hands and put them where her thighs typically appeared during those few moments he saw her human.

He’d tugged her closer, sliding one hand over her cool scales to her hip and wrapping the other around her back. The kiss he drew her in for was just a press of their lips together, and it was bliss and perfection—and a splash of cold seawater to the face as Molly, his beautiful mermaid Molly, wriggled out of his arms and darted away like a minnow.

  There was one thing she’d kept from her life on land, that hell where she had had to avoid water and couldn’t go to France because she was apparently a mermaid and where every day she had fought to not march straight off into a river and see how long it would take her to get to the sea. It was a locket, with her name etched inside. The picture had long ago disintegrated in the seawater of the tiny grotto she kept her one treasure in, but the name remained.

Molly.

Molly Hooper.

Sherlock had been so kind, and there was so much boyish wonder in his eyes when he was with her. He seemed to be a rather cold man when he was away from the water, away from her. She knew he wouldn’t stay, but perhaps giving him this—her last tie to that life on land that she’d given up a long time ago—would keep him here for a little while longer.

The coolness of his lips on hers had been more exhilarating than the first rush of autumn’s glacially cold currents. The water around her had seemed uncomfortably boiling hot, whereas his arms were cool and his kiss had been a treasure. But if he was getting carried away enough to kiss her it meant that he would get carried away long enough to try and take her from the water. He would want a normal life, for him who didn’t sprout fins when dunked in water. He would want Molly Hooper, whoever she had been.

This locket was all she had left of that woman-child who had flung herself off of the off-limits dock. That woman, who had a life to look forward to which included a husband and children and baths where she shaved her legs, was right here with eleven little letters in straight font. She put it on, testing the feel of it where it sat over her heart. She loved Sherlock, but she couldn’t keep him.

  He hadn’t seen her for a week after he’d kissed her. A dozen times a day he’d cursed himself and his uncontrolled hormones and told himself to leave—go home to London, a place Molly would never go to by water and could never go to by foot. She would need to learn all the savvy of a thirty year old woman in the space of days or even hours, and while she was bright she was sometimes easily overwhelmed. Sherlock hadn’t haunted all of their usual beaches, but he had wandered along a few of them. He’d even gone to Wickets Pier and skipped stones for an hour.

You’re a detective, go find her.

And how? The case that brought me here was hindered enough by what saltwater can erase, what clues do I have on a woman who lives in the water?

Sometimes he thought he saw her tangled hair or her large brown eyes, but the visions were gone by the time he’d ever turned his head properly to look. It wasn’t until he was desperate to apologize, desperate to make amends for frightening her, that she appeared in his hotel room in the middle of the night. A sad scrap of cloth wrapped around her body had served well enough for a dress, it seemed, but it was soon dropped to the floor as she walked towards him on her clear-headed, well-meaning drunk feet. She’d confided to him once that she hadn’t been out of the water to such an extent that her legs returned for years and years. It was her afternoons and days with him which had her out of the water more and more often. Sherlock missed her glittering scales when she did, though, but found the words hard to say.

All that she wore was a little pendent on a chain which swung between her breasts, above her heart. Sherlock had let her push him back, urge him to undress with fingers which were unsure simply because they rarely worked with clothing. They both managed well enough, finally standing naked together in the small room. Just like in the cove, Molly grasped his hands and put them on her body.

“You might not—might not be normal afterwards,” she said, her voice soft as she let him pull her close. “It might be some sort of infection—“