Lucille had championed the original version of the story—the tragic Hans Christian Andersen one—and though she’d tolerated young Eve’s obsession with the Disney version, she’d made sure to leaven it with exposure to the original.

It occurred to Eve that Lucille’s love for fairy tales—the traditional ones, like from Andersen and the Grimm brothers—was probably what had turned her into a reader. She would even go so far as to say it was what had set her on her career path. She’d wanted to be a librarian for as long as she could remember, and she’d done it. Lucille probably deserved a lot of the credit for that.

Lucille had raised her as much as her parents had. Maybe more, in the ways that counted. Eve was close to her parents and adored them, but they weren’t readers. Which wasn’t a knock against them, it was just that they had always been too busy making ends meet to curl up and read to her. Lucille worked hard, too—none of the Abbotts had ever been wealthy—but maybe when you lived where you worked, it left more time for fairy tales.

Returning the figurine to its ledge, Eve discovered half a dozen other mer-girls, all of them rather sad looking, none of them glued down. Each one triggered a ping of recognition. She knew these girls. They used to sit in the cabinet in the parlor.

The most unsettling thing about being here—well, one of the most unsettling things—was that this room aside, none of the decor in the inn today was very Lucille-esque. Lucille had been into mermaids, of course, but the hard-core kind. Selkies and sirens and even more obscure variations from different mythologies. The types that were more likely to be found luring men to a terrible death—spinsters unite!—than singing and frolicking with their underwater friends.

The inn used to reflect that stance. The mermaid touches had been subtle and sometimes even a little bit spooky. But now cartoon Ariels, fiberglass statues, and jokey inspirational signs had taken over. It seemed that a lot of the old stuff—the real stuff—had ended up in this room.

This must have been Lucille’s room. In the past she had occupied a room on the third floor, next to the tiny one in the back that had been Eve’s. But of course it made sense that Lucille would have moved to the main level as she’d aged and become less mobile. Eve’s throat tightened.