The Bells of Ys Chapter 5

[To Beginning of Story]

Tina

One effect of rain is that it tends to dampen the more extreme emotions. Murders drop in the rain, as do domestic abuse cases, though suicides tend to increase. When rain is falling people separate from one another, each to their own room, or own corner. The only news is what sporting events get cancelled, not who scored what or bested whom. Rain is a time for coffeehouses and reflection, a time favored by writers and artists, a time for researching and being inventive. Rain brings with it the quiet, passive phase of existence, and is one of the few times when news people relax.

“Here’s a funny one,” I overheard Steve, the Sports anchor, saying to Brian, my producer. “Got this one over the police band. They picked up a guy wandering around naked at one of the beaches. He was digging for claims while the rain let up, he says, and he heard this woman calling to him. He looked up and saw that she was bare naked, pretty tits, and a come-on smile, standing in the water. She tells him to take off his clothes and join him, and the guy does just that, apparently shucking out of his clothes in Olympic time.

“He runs out into the water and she dives down, and then he swears he saw that she had a mermaid's tail. She disappeared into the water, knocked him down into the water enough so that he was floundering around, and up and disappears. When he finally gets back to the shore, all his clothes and his wallet have disappeared, and she never comes back up.”

“Ah, come on Steve …  ”

“Hey, I swear, that’s what I heard! They sent out a dive team to check around the area and make sure she didn’t drown, but they’re not searching too hard. ”

“As wet as it’s been, a mermaid in the Sound would be about right,” Brian snorted. “Don’t follow up on it! We’re short staffed enough as it is with everyone out with colds; besides, the granny contingent would pitch a fit if we …  uncovered her.”

I stifled a groan. Brian was an incorrigible punster, and should never be incorriged. Still, it got me to thinking back to Kira’s comments about needing to grow tails. I have always had a good feel for sensing when there was a bigger story hiding under an apparently innocuous incident, and something about the anecdote sounded enough out of kilter that my spider sense was definitely tingling.

I was distracted during the broadcast, not making any big fluffs, but certainly lacking my normal "sparkling" personality. Brian didn’t say anything when we took a break, but afterwards he came up to me.

“You all right, Tina?”

“Yeah, Bri. Sorry about tonight. Guess the weather’s just got me down.”

“Just worried about you, ’kay? Get some rest and take some vitamins –  last thing I need is for my star newscaster to be out with a cold.”

“Thanks,” I said, and meant it. Brian could be a tyrant at times, but his heart was in the right place. “I wanted to check out the police logs –  it’s been awhile since I’ve done it, and it may spark something.”

Brian agreed readily, thankfully having apparently dismissed the mermaid story from his mind. I’d come up with more than a few exclusives by spending the time in the morgue reviewing the various and sundry logs, and Brian wasn’t about to gainsay me when I took the initiative. If we could beat out KOPP in a story and push ratings up a few percent, he wasn’t about to complain

Being a talking head is all about acting, and there were any number of good actors out there. I was a little unusual in that I had the looks to deliver the news but enjoyed the nitty gritty of actually being an investigative reporter.

For the first couple of decades of the 21st century, being an investigative reporter was frowned upon ... you never knew which particular corporation you might offend, and who would consequently bring a lawsuit against you that would bankrupt you and everyone around you. However, the corps have been failing, one after the other, as the depression that came after the coup began thinning the ranks and depleting the resources of the ultra-rich. A couple of revolts in the interrim also happened, in one case turning much of Martha’s Vineyards into a cemetery, and not coincidentally creating several vacancies in the roster of the Fortune 1000.

Somewhere along the lines, between that and the pervasiveness of the Internet, the corporate controlled monopoly on the media fell apart, and investigative reporting came back into its own. Still doesn’t pay worth squat, but you don’t go into journalism for the money. You go into journalism because somewhere there is a story that needs to be told, a wrong to be exposed to the light of day. At least that’s what I tell myself everytime I get my paycheck.

All of the logs were automatically transcribed by voice recognition software, and most of the time it did a pretty good job of converting the screeches and squawks of police band transmissions into something resembling a real dialog. We have a server that picks up most police bands off the airwaves and can be tuned into from our intranet (yeah, its illegal as all hell ... ain’t freedom of the press great?), which is I’m sure where Steve heard it.

I went to the transcripts, doing a keyword search on "mermaid". The cluster from the day before popped up immediately, but I was intrigued to find that there were several such reports that went back for nearly a year. This was the first robbery, but prior to this a couple in a boat had seen a young woman swimming in the middle of Lake Washington well away from any boats (and given that Lake Washington was the size of a small sea this was exception), a fisherman had seen a mermaid about three months ago, though he had apparently also been most of the way through a six pack, and about five months ago a couple of teenage boys had reported seeing a nude woman in the water and thought she was high, but no body was ever found, and it was assumed to be some kind of prank.

Yet looking at the list, the pattern was pretty obvious. The woman was described as being between seventeen and twenty one years of age, medium length platinum blonde hair, fair skin, moderately heavy breasts, and a kind of stocky frame. What was more striking was the description of the tail –  starting at mid-waist, smooth, with a dolphin-like tail, and colored a pale blue.

I tried a little experiment at that point. I created a couple of quick polls in different places I frequent on the web, and asked the simple question:

What color is a mermaid’s tail?

I went back to my research, getting names and addresses of the witnesses when possible, then returned to the survey:

What color is a mermaid’s tail?
• Green. 91%
• Orange. 4%
• Silver. 2%
• Blue. 1%
• Others. 2%

About what I expected. If you ask most people what color a mermaid’s tail is, they will tell you green. Not blue. The orange took me by surprise until I remembered the Splash movie from the 1980s. Yet in the three reports that indicated a tail, it was given as being blue, and even more "light blue". So in all likelihood there was a crazy girl showing up every so often in a home-made mermaid’s tail, freaking out the locals and committing minor acts of larceny and identity theft.

Now I had enough suspicions to make a case for an assignment. After cleaning up, I submitted an article proposal to Brian, pointing out the oddities and the recent criminal act –  and making the not unreasonable suggestion that the girl in question might be mentally unstable and possibly a danger to the community. While I personally strongly doubted that, those magic words automatically elevated an oddball story into the province of being potentially news-worthy.

A few minutes later Brian came to my desk.

“Okay, you’ve done your homework, and Darryl Hannah is out there flashing the good citizens of the Puget Sound region,” he said in his most sardonic fashion. “I still think it’s a wild goose chase, and I don’t want it interfering with anything else, but if you can chase something down in the next week we’ll run with it.”

“Thanks, chief,” I said.

“Look, just be careful. I agree that it sounds like this is probably a harmless nutcase, but sometimes those nutcases aren’ quite as harmless as they seem.”

Brian rolled his eyes and headed back to the production booth, shaking his head, and getting back to the story about federal investigations into one of the local genetics tycoons.

Even in the rain, the government never sleeps.

21 Tue 10:10

[Chapter 6]