Technical Support Chapter 4

Three hours later, well after dark and after having stopped at a Red Lobster and the astonished looks of the wait staff as he brought her in (“we’re shooting a movie, and it’s not worth getting her out of costume” had been his excuse) they pulled up the driveway to his childhood house, a rambling affair in Bellevue that sat on the waterfront of the Puget Sound. It had once been appraised at a couple million, but which was not moving now at even half that. Lenore had been trying to arrange the sale of the property, and had moved in rather than paying the cost of a condo.

They were thoroughly soaked, and somewhere along the lines LLlorana had even fallen asleep, which explained the half-awake look that she had as she blinked at the lights of the house. Matt walked up to the door and rang the bell, waiting then until the lights popped on in the foyer and the door cracked open, and an attractive coppery blonde woman in a pale blue nightgown opened the door wider.

“Matthew! I’ve been waiting for you for a couple of hours!”

“We ran into a bit of a delay, sis. Do you still have that wheelchair of mom’s?”

“Um, yeah. In the garage. Can I meet her?”

“Oh, year ... sure. Matt ‘Social graces’ Trewella at your service.”

“Brother mine, you have many talents, but social grace was never one of your specialties.”

They walked out to the driveway even as the garage door opened, and LLlorana and Lenore looked one another over.

“How do you do? I’m Lenore Trewellan, this lug’s sister,” Lenore said, extending her hand to LLlorana, who looked back at her with something approaching astonishment. Matt could see why. Had Nora’s hair been a little redder, they could easily have passed for twins, and they were close enough that they would pass as sisters.

“Ach and aye, you be close enough to Raine’s image to be her twin,” LLlorana said in turn. “If’n I had a doubt afore, Matthew Trewellan, that ye be of the clan Trewellan, I have none now.”

Shaking himself, Matt ran into the garage and pushed out the wheelchair that had been his mother’s in the last year of her life. Then, with her arm around his neck, Matt lifted LLlorana out of the sidecar and gently placed her in the chair, while Nora looked on in astonishment.

“So Great-Gran was right - there were mermaids in the family,” Lenore said quietly, then seemed to realize where she was. “Come on, let’s get her inside. The less the neighbors see, the better.”

They wheeled her up the ramp that her father had installed into the house, then Matt brought his bike inside to sit next to the Lexis in the two car garage as the women headed into the house. He slipped off the leathers and pulled on a plaid shirt, then grabbed both his laptop and LLlorana’s tablet from the bike. Matt paused, though, put the computers down and split the gold into two piles, the larger going under a board that he’d hidden things in when he was much younger, the smaller, about a dozen coins, going into his fanny pack.

The girls were in the living room. Somehow, in the time he’d been in the garage, Lenore had managed to get her mermaid twin out of the leathers and into a nightgown similar to the one she herself wore, with them now in the kitchen drinking tea as they talked, as if they had known one another for years.

Matt pulled a beer out of the refrigerator and opened it, then sat in the third seat, straddling the seat back to front.

“I’ve been thinking about things since we left, and there are too many things that don’t add up from what you’ve told us. Those men obviously knew you and you knew them, and the likelihood that I would just magically stumble upon a mermaid who was the splitting image of my sister rather beggars the imagination - which is saying something when I’m using mermaid and suspension of disbelief in the same statement. So what’s the real story?”

Lenore looked like she was about to object when LLlorana held up her hand. “You be shrewd, Matthew Trewellan, though given your mastery of yon infernal devices, this be not a surprise. When I left Wales, my objective was indeed here, because this be where your mother was.”

“Huh?”

“There be a story here. In the early 1700s, as you measure time, a mermaid did come upon the shore, attracted by the voice and looks of an attractive young preacher by the name of Matthew Trewellan. Sae taken by t’each other be they that they left the land and made their way to the sea, with Master Trewellan living in a house beneath the waves in which air be pumped. Five bonnie children did they hae, three o’ ‘em with merish features, two with legs. The sea children and the land.

“Their children formed their own enclave within Zennor, and over time there be many families where, when a child be born with a tail, then a moot would be held and the sea families would adopt the child, and when a child be born with legs, the land families would do the same.

“This were not an uncommon practice in many of the sea-bordering communities where the mers lived, for males be rare among our kind. Yet as the farms gave way to machines and the beautiful wooden boats became replaced with giant, oil-spewing behemoths, the land families dispersed to the winds, while the sea families faced polluted harbours, fishing nets, and ship captains that no longer respected the old truces. Our numbers declined until we were a small remnant of our former peoples, while the mers born to land people died young.

“In 1885, Heshaela Trewellan, a mermaid, bore a landling girl that we called Laisha, who was adopted by a Trewellan branch of the family that shortly thereafter were forced from their homes. They settled in Seattle. Laisha’s sister, Aerishala, would in time bear my line, just as Laisha, renamed Lacey by her land family, would bear yours.”

“Laisha wrote to both her sisters through some of the other land families, and in time, she wrote to the land families directly as her sister died. Laisha’s daughter never knew the mers, and found her mother’s stories fantastic, but her daughter, your mother, listened to her grandmother’s stories and eventually started writing to Mrs. Powell, who was herself one of the last of the land lineage there.”

“Which explained why Mrs. Powell wasn’t surprised to find mermaids in the harbormaster’s office,” Lenore replied. “I wondered about that when Matt told me.”

“Aye. Your mam knew of us, and even suggested that we come out here, but then Mr. Powell then Mrs. Powell died. A’fore she did, though, she asked me to come to her, and she explained to me that there be Trewellan’s in Seattle, and that your names be Matthew and Lenora, and said that when she couldna take care of us, that it was a geas upon me to seek ye out.”

Matt thought back - he had graduated from college, and was starting to look for work the year that his mom had died, and he’d taken work doing tech support for Geekmobile rather than taking an offer with a couple of companies that had approached him because it would have meant leaving Seattle. If she had in fact sent out a message - even over email - then they would have known where he worked, at least to within a few dozen stores. Subtle, but impressive.

“Okay - I can accept that … it raises some bigger questions about merfolk, but that’s not germane to the discussion. What about Captain Piedro?”

“Captains and sea folk, we have a long relationship. Though they will deny it if the be asked by most people, captains and some sailors know that sea people exist. We end up in nets, or sometimes we just get lonely for companionship. Sometimes a captain will take a first mate out to a bar or invite him in for a drink, and will tell about the time he met a mermaid, and will then tell him what his capt’n told him when he was a mate, and will tell of the wrath of the Sea People on those who mistreat them.

“Yet as the world has grown and we have shrunk, there are fewer that know this code. The captain who took me from Cornwall to New York knew the code, and we spent the time together in pleasant dalliance. He recommended a ship going to Seattle when we got there and until we got to Panama, the voyage had gone well. But we were attacked by pirates who flew out on helicopters from Columbia, and they killed the captain and crew. Captain Fleming had sent out a distress call, but the pirates were able to bluff that it had been a test call gone wrong, and the authorities let them pass.

“Piedro found me in the Captain’s quarters, found the gold in the Captain’s quarters, and figured out that I must know where there are wrecks. He let Raul force his attention on me, then threatened to let the other men do the same if I didn’t reveal what I knew. I … told them. Then he sent another sailor in, even more sadistic than Raul had been, but I hit him with me tail and knocked him unconscious, maybe dead. I didn’t care. I escaped from the room and dove back into the sea, and found a place to hide and nursed my wounds. I wanted to hurt them back, but I also wanted to get away, far away, and find you and get back home, and …”

Lenore reached out to Llanora and the mermaid folded into her, crying with weeks of pent-up range and hurt. His sister motioned for him to head somewhere else with her head. Matt understood - the girl had been hurt and imprisoned, and right now no male, no matter how well meaning, would be tolerated. He quietly slipped out of the kitchen, went into the living room, then to the bedroom his sister had apparently set aside for Llanora. Half an hour later, Lenore wheeled the mermaid, now fast asleep, into the bedroom, and together they put her to bed. It was hard for Matthew to look at her now and not see a vulnerable, very scared child laying there.

Matt’s sister motioned him out and they shut the door behind her, making sure there was a nightlight just in case. Then Lenore motioned for him to sit down in the living room.

“I gave her some Valerian in her tea to help her sleep. She doesn’t look it at first glance, but she’s actually pretty emaciated, she’s not slept much in the last several months, and she has what looks to be burn marks on her thighs and arms. She’s been prostituting herself to get here, that much is obvious, and its only because she’s very, very bright that she’s only been captured the once. I don’t know if mermaids have the same physiological aging as humans, but I’d place her age at maybe twenty-two tops.”

“So you think she’s telling us the truth?”

“Mostly. She doesn’t trust humans, perhaps with good reason, but human or not, I trust psychology. I’ve had to prosecute too many cases in Seattle of pimps with their girls, and most of them will evade telling the truth because they’re addicted or their in debt, and the only way they can make it to the next day is to put up with the abuse. Telling the truth ends that, and maybe gets them killed.

“Besides, what’s she saying about the families dovetails with something that mother told me, back before I’d gone off to school. She said that she’d been in touch with the old families in Wales, and that the world was a stranger place than most of us believe, that what we believe to be fantasy may actually be that which most of us choose not to acknowledge, that maybe, just maybe, old Gran Lacey wasn’t anywhere near as off her rocker as her children believed.”

“So what do we do?”

“Oh, no you don’t, Matt. You will not drop a problem like this on my doorstep and then walk away.”

“Chill, Nora. I’ve got some ideas - I think that if we can get her back to Wales, we might be able to find out the whole situation. If what she says is true … and I’m inclined to believe it … then we may be the only hope for them.”

“Always the Jedi Knight for you, huh, Matt? Help me, Obi Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.” She smiled at him. “But yeah, we help. So, how about you tell me your ideas, little brother, and I’ll see if I can knock some holes in them in the hope of making them better.”