“We were all surprised when Lorelei gave birth to a human child,” Liz told me. “It may have been because Sullivan Trask was a witch. But witch or no, Sullivan wasn’t able to keep Lorelei from going back to Faerie and then we all felt bad for Lura when Lorelei abandoned her. She was an awkward child, clumsy as a fish on dry land. We were happy for her, though, when she got engaged. During the Depression she rented out rooms to fishermen to make ends meet – the house was still presentable then – and one of them that summer was a painter from over in Ulster County named Quincy Morris, here sketching the woods. We were all happy she’d found someone and thought maybe a husband with an artistic temperament might do all right by her. The wedding was planned for the first weekend in September. It was to be held in the old Fairwick Hotel on Main Street, which got people to talking that it wasn’t in a church, but we figured that was because the church hasn’t always been friendly to undines.”

“Or succubi,” Soheila added.

Liz nodded and continued her story. “On the day of the wedding we all arrived at the hotel. It was done up in blues and greens like an underwater paradise. Lura’s dress was cut from a moiré silk that shimmered like water and was embroidered with a thousand seed pearls. I was there when the message came from Quincy Morris’s best man. He’d seen Quincy heading into the woods at dawn that morning and he hadn’t been heard from since. Lura insisted the townspeople search the woods for him, convinced that he’d had an accident, but it was clear to most of us that he’d gotten cold feet and cleared out.”

“Poor Lura,” Soheila said with a sigh that rippled through the room. “First she was abandoned by her mother, and then she was left at the altar. She’d always been a bit moody, but she went crazy after that. Shut herself up in that old house and refused to let anyone in. She doesn’t even come into town for food. She grows her own vegetables and fishes in the stream. Cuts her own wood and heats the whole house with a wood burning stove. The Women’s Club volunteers drop off packages of second-hand clothing and other essentials – sugar, coffee, flour – and one of us drives by regularly to make sure the packages get taken inside and there’s smoke coming out of the chimney.”

“She looked pretty fit when I saw her.” I told them about finding the Aelvestone and how Lura dragged me out of the river and then lifted up the back of my car.