Dark clouds were slowly moving in from the northwest, above the lowering sun. Ondine wondered if there would be a lightning storm and the air would clear. She looked at her phone again. Useless thing. She set it on the railing.

The old lady’s eyes were closed once more, lost in her story. “After Rose vanished just like our mother did, people whispered. I only know the bits I overheard, for no one would ever tell me the exact circumstances surrounding our mother’s disappearance. But it was common knowledge she was tired of our father’s constant fists and demands on her body.

“It wasn’t so easy for us, of course, left behind on the Mountain with our father. He wouldn’t let us speak of her. It may interest you to know our mother’s name was also Ondine, like yours, like Rose’s middle name. Our father insisted our mother was a loose woman who didn’t care about her children. His story for the neighbours was she had taken off with a travelling salesman who had come along selling farm equipment. I have a memory of him wiping down the kitchen counter and floor early one morning. He’d never done a bit of cleaning before. There had been a loud noise. I came down the stairs crying. Rose came after me and put me to bed. But when we were older she would never discuss it with me, no matter how much I begged. She only said to be patient.

“Our father never changed. We saw this with our stepmother, who come along so many years later when Daddy decided he wanted a new wife.

“I still make my way down to my stepmother’s grave and throw a few flowers about and say a prayer to Holy Mother Mercy. I would take you there, my dear, but we’re almost out of time. The tide will be high. There was never any grave for my sister or my mother. Every year in May I take spring ephemerals from the woodlands and throw them into the bay, hoping the waves will carry the flowers to them. And at summer’s end I always pluck the petals from the last of the beach roses and toss them into the sea.”

Ondine saw then that the brass door knocker was not a fish, but a woman with a tail. A mermaid. The old woman watched her. “There’s some things I won’t discuss, and I don’t care if you need it for your history projects and the like. I don’t care who you are related to. Ain’t it pretty up here on the Mountain? People have come by wanting to make an offer on that big old barn off behind the house. They say they’ll take it down board by board and ship it far away and raise it up in an alien land. And the work sheds as well. Imagine that. Idiots, is what I say. And they call me crazy. You couldn’t pay me to set foot in a barn moved so many miles. There’d be a curse on it.