Lost & Found Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Book Details

  Dedication

  Lost and Found

  About the Author

  Lost and Found

  J. HOLLAND

  Nerissa has always been fascinated with humans, but when her seal skin goes missing, she's trapped in human form—which is way more human that she wants to be.

  Desperate to find the missing trunk that holds her skin, she winds up at Lorelei's bakery and soon finds herself drawn to the other woman. Lorelei offers Nerissa a place to stay, and friendship soon turns to further possibilities—until the true whereabouts of the missing seal skin threatens to tear them apart.

  Lost and Found

  By J. Holland

  Published by Less Than Three Press LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher, except for the purpose of reviews.

  Edited by Keith Kaczmarek

  Cover designed by Kirby Crow

  This book is a work of fiction and all names, characters, places, and incidents are fictional or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is coincidental.

  First Edition April 2017

  Copyright © 2017 by J. Holland

  Printed in the United States of America

  Digital ISBN 9781620049945

  To everyone who taught me to believe in fairy tales, no matter how old I get.

  Lost and Found

  Lorelei was having a heart attack. She was pretty sure she was having a heart attack or an aneurysm or possibly a stroke. Something life threatening, anyway. Her heart pounded and her legs shook as pain shot up her side and into her chest. She collapsed to her knees in the wet sand, cursing her recent weight gain and her sweet tooth and most importantly her decision to start exercising. Running was highly overrated and she figured it was more likely to kill her than diabetes or clogged arteries at the moment. At least no one else had been around to see her humiliation. The empty beach stretched out before her, ringed by large rocks and uninhabited aside from the crabs and the birds. She felt confident her secret would remain safe with them. This was her special place, her own personal stretch of the Maine coastline where she went whenever she needed solitude and silence. She spent as many hours as she could walking the beach, idly scanning for pretty shells and sea glass, or curled up on a large rock that she had discovered provided a perfectly contoured place for her to sit and think.

  As her heart rate slowed and she took deep breaths of the salty ocean air, she reminded herself why she was collapsed prone and sweaty on the beach in the first place. She had been so busy lately, between moving back to Bar Harbor and opening her very own bakery that she barely had time to sleep, let alone worry about things like diet and exercise. She had always carried a little extra weight, but sometime in the past few months a little had turned into quite a lot. Lorelei had been so focused on refining her menu and perfecting her recipes she hadn't noticed that all the taste testing and late night carry out and heavily-doctored coffees had caught up with her. It hadn't been until she lay sprawled on her bed this morning, exhausted from trying valiantly to wriggle into her biggest pair of jeans, that she hadn't been able to ignore the extra pounds anymore. Which had led to her failed attempts at running on the beach.

  Lorelei let out an irritated huff as she brushed back the strands of hair that had escaped from her messy ponytail. No matter what she did, her unruly curls refused to stay where she put them. She thought once more of just chopping off all of her shoulder-length blond hair. She had wanted it long enough to tie back, but now that it had grown out she was seriously considering shaving her head. No one wanted to find hair in their baked goods, so some days it seemed like the best option. Maybe a nice pixie cut, she mused, closing her eyes. She willed her body to relax completely and threw out her arms. She was dead.

  Pain lanced through her right hand as it hit something hard and she bolted upright, shaking out her hand to ease her throbbing knuckles. Glancing over, she saw a plank of driftwood, mostly covered in sand. Curious, she shifted to her knees and crawled toward the wood. She had quite a few pieces of driftwood furniture in her house and as any good beachcomber knew, the rule of the sea was mostly finders keepers.

  As she began brushing off the rest of the sand, she realized that it wasn't a plank at all, but a chest. Excitement filled Lorelei's veins as she took in her discovery. She had spent years walking this beach as a teenager, collecting mostly sea glass and pretty shells and interesting pieces of driftwood. Once she found an intact glass bottle, worn to a shine and empty. It still sat on her bedside table and she liked to think of it as full of potential and history. This find, however, was something else entirely. As she finally dug it completely free of the sand, her breath caught in her throat. The chest wasn't overly large, but its ornately decorated surface made Lorelei think of the old bedtime stories her father read her about pirate hoards and buried treasure. The dark wood was worn smooth with age and constant exposure to the sand and beautiful pearls and sea glass studded its sides. The chest itself appeared to be a work of art, and she lifted a trembling hand to open the lid, eager to discover its secrets. It was locked.

  Of course, Lorelei thought to herself.

  She examined the mechanism, trying to see if she could jiggle it open. The metal was strangely free of rust for something that looked so old, and it seemed as if it would open in a heartbeat, if only she had a key. She half-heartedly searched the nearby area, but Lorelei knew that anyone who went to the trouble of burying something in the middle of nowhere wouldn't be so careless as to leave the key lying around close by.

  Taking the discovery as a sign that her workout had come to an end, she rose to her feet and hefted the trunk. It felt heavier than it looked, but it also clearly lacked the weight it would have if filled to the top with Spanish doubloons and loose gems.

  So much for pirate treasure, she thought.

  She felt a twinge of disappointment from her inner child, but the beauty of the chest itself more than made up for it. She could probably get quite a bit of money for it on eBay, however, she was already thinking of places she could best display it in her small apartment. Checking her watch, she realized that she would have just enough time to walk home and shower before she needed to arrive back at the bakery for her afternoon shift. She sighed and shifted the trunk in her arms, grateful that even if she was a bit overweight, she was still strong from lifting sacks of sugar and flour and shifting inventory in her little shop. Smiling to herself, she set off for home.

  *~*~*

  Nerissa was running late. Late was such a human concept, one she had never had a use for before she started coming into Bar Harbor. Being around humans required human money which meant she needed to hold down a human job. She had been venturing into town for several years now, but she still found it difficult to hold on to the more abstract constructs like time while wearing her seal skin. Time meant nothing to her cousins and siblings. They all delighted in distracting her from what they considered her peculiarities. They didn't understand her fascination with the human culture or her insistence on venturing so far from the shore. They had teased her mercilessly as children, calling her a throwback with a little too much human DNA to be fully selkie.

  She pushed open the doors to the Bar Harbor library and heaved a sigh of relief when the large wall clock showed her she had a full thirty seconds to spare. Despite not actually being late, she felt a glare of disapproval from behind the counter. Michelle always found something to be upset about and Nerissa made a conscious effort to appear as though she had not been running across town only seconds ago. The flush in her normally pale cheeks and the messy state of the
jet-black braid hanging crookedly down her back made it difficult, but she offered Michelle a sunny smile anyway. Slipping behind the desk, Nerissa grabbed the return cart, rolling it around the corner and out of view. As she caught her breath, she ran her fingers along the spines, idly scanning the titles that had been returned earlier in the day. Her eyes came to rest on a book of lore and legends from Scotland and Ireland, and she quirked a smile at the irony.

  Her family had ventured to this new world from the Orkney Islands long ago, where the shores were less crowded with men and no one knew their legends. No one waited in the rocks and watched them hungrily, waiting for his chance to snatch up a skin and win himself a selkie bride. It happened to her grandmother as a young woman. A man stole her skin from the beach and she suddenly found herself unable to return home to her husband in the sea. She had been trapped on the land and though she could not find her skin, her magic would not allow her to travel too far from it. Bound to the man who had captured her, she tended his house and shared his bed and waited patiently, until she could steal back her skin and slip once more into the waves. She found her way back to her family, but soon realized she had returned to the sea pregnant with a daughter. Nerissa knew her grandmother had been one of the lucky ones. She grew up hearing cautionary tales about the dangers of leaving her skin exposed, about the countless selkie women forced to spend painful decades on the shore, unable to come home again while their allegedly loving husbands held them hostage.

  Shaking herself out of her maudlin thoughts, Nerissa tried instead to focus on her tasks for the day. It wasn't exactly a real job, because having a real job seemed to require all kinds of things she didn't have, like a birth certificate, and a social security number, and a bank account. Instead, the senior librarian Greta had taken pity on the strange girl who practically haunted the library and offered to pay her twenty dollars if she came in for a few hours in the evening to shelve books and tidy up the place. It didn't add up to much, but there wasn't much Nerissa needed to buy, and she would have most likely been at the library anyway. Having a job made her feel more connected to the community, more human in a way countless hours of just observing and reading about them had never accomplished.

  The rest of her family seemed content to spend most of their lives in their seal skins, only coming ashore rarely to peel them off and enjoy the moonlight and sea breeze on their pale skins. It wasn't that they were stupid or feral. She knew all of her relatives to be extremely clever hunters and they constantly came up with new games to play and tricks to pull on each other. They just felt content with their lives as selkie, with spending their days swimming and hunting together, sunning themselves on the beach and keeping secluded from the violence of the human world. The problem wasn't with them. It was with Nerissa.

  As a child, she watched the humans on the beach as much as she could. She trawled the beaches and the sea bed for trinkets and spent hours figuring out how they worked. She basked in the sun on the beach and let picnickers and sunbathers creep closer and closer to her for pictures, listening to every nuance of their conversations. Her mother tried to keep her to the more isolated coves and warned her over and over about the dangers of her curiosity. Her human form was slender and lanky, what she had heard humans call a swimmer's build. Her skin, pale from always being covered by her pelt, seemed at times to glow, a result of the leftover magic in her veins which allowed her to change forms so effortlessly. Her mother warned her that this would prove irresistible to humans and could only lead to tragedy on land.

  Her grandmother understood her curiosity, however. She had also been full of warnings, but she recognized the allure of the shore all too well. She gave Nerissa a beautiful chest lovingly decorated with pearls and shells and sea glass and worn smooth by the wind and the sand and the waves. Her grandmother made it for her own skin after escaping captivity so a human would never again be able to steal it. She indulged Nerissa's enchantment with human culture and after much whining taught her odd granddaughter to read English.

  After that, there had been no keeping her wandering soul in the sea. She started venturing further and further ashore, until she discovered the library. She systematically devoured books about history and philosophy and science, eager for as much information as she could absorb. A kindly clerk named Nancy taught her to use the Internet, and after that she practically lived at the library whenever it was open. By the time they offered her the job of re-shelving the returned books, she had known the library like she knew the rocks along the beach her family lived on and she had little trouble with the task. Her biggest problem, to be honest, was showing up on time.

  *~*~*

  Nerissa kept her grandmother's box on her favorite stretch of beach, buried beneath a rock that made a perfect perch as a seal or a girl. Over the years she had filled the chest with all kinds of treasures salvaged or stolen from careless humans. She now owned several sets of clothing scrounged from the beach or liberated from clothes-lines. An old wristwatch she found while digging for clams helped her to keep time, and several books wrapped in plastic helped her to pass it. An assortment of lovely pieces of sea glass and shells she painstakingly collected from the beach littered the bottom of the chest. An old satchel and some crumpled bills from her job completed her stash of worldly goods.

  This morning, she knew without even checking the over-sized wristwatch that she was running behind. Her brothers had been full of energy this morning and eager to play in the waves, drawing her into their fun despite herself. She swam as fast as she could to reach the cove where she always transformed, but the sun overhead showed her it hadn't been fast enough. Nerissa had flopped up onto the beach until she was clear of the waves and slipped her seal skin with a thought. She peeled the blubbery hide down over her naked skin as she fished under a rock for the key. With the speed of long habit, she unburied the trunk and threw open the lid. Nerissa exchanged the skin for her human clothes, pulling on undergarments, trousers, socks and shoes, before slipping several sweaters over her head. She snatched up her canvas satchel and shoved another sweater inside. The watch told her she needed to run if she wanted to make it to work on time. She had made it, however, so it was time to stop dwelling on time.

  Nerissa headed into the bathroom before getting started on the cart. She carefully washed the sand from beneath her fingernails and splashed water on her face to rinse away the sweat from her run. The magic of her transformation meant that she emerged from her skin clean, with shiny hair and a neutral smell, but after that all bets were off. She knew enough about humans to be grateful she didn't have to walk around smelling like a seal with fish breath. Selkie allure or not, that might be more than any of the humans she came into contact with would tolerate. She pulled the tie from her hair and ran her fingers through the waist-length strands before working it into a neater braid than before. When she met her large brown eyes in the mirror, she smiled. She looked almost human.

  After she finished shelving all the books on her cart, Nerissa spent some time dusting shelves and straightening several sections disrupted by impatient patrons. She finished early and spent the rest of the evening in the computer lab, lost in a series of articles about the Ebola virus and the likelihood of another outbreak. Humans were so fragile. She kept an eye on the time at the bottom of her screen, and reluctantly logged off of her machine. Making her way through the stacks, Nerissa stopped at the front desk. Michelle was nowhere to be seen, but Greta waited for her with a smile.

  "Not much to do today," Greta sighed. "Just wait until tourist season hits. A few more weeks and this place will be booming."

  Nerissa offered a murmur of agreement. Greta reminded her of her grandmother, probably because she treated Nerissa like a wayward child who needed looking after. She often kept treats waiting at the desk for her, cookies or small cakes that she offered Nerissa along with her not-so-hard-earned twenty dollars. Today they were pecan crescents. Nerissa was pretty sure Greta thought she was homeless or orphaned or something eq
ually tragic. That didn't stop her from taking the cookies.

  "Any big plans for the weekend?" Greta prompted. The library was closed on Sunday and Monday, and Nerissa didn't work Saturdays, though she sometimes came in the mornings anyway to read. Greta was always trying to set her up on dates or send her to meetings, worried that Nerissa didn't spend enough time with people her own age.

  "No plans, Greta. Thank you for the cookies."

  "You're a good girl, Nerissa. You need to find a nice boy."

  "I'm not really into boys," Nerissa blurted out, then winced. She wasn't sure what Greta would think of that, but she knew some humans could be remarkably closed minded when it came to sex, even though they all seemed to be very fixated on the subject.

  "A nice girl, then," Greta continued without missing a beat. "My granddaughter up in Portland is a lesbian and she is single now. I could give you her number. I have it in my phone. It's right here somewhere," Greta said, sorting through the papers and books cluttering the desk. Nerissa used the opportunity to start backing away.

  "No thank you, Greta. I'm not... I don't..." She sighed. "I'll see you Tuesday."

  She bolted out the door before Greta could reply. She knew Greta meant well and she was glad the woman was so supportive, but Nerissa did not feel up to an in-depth discussion about asexuality at the moment. Whenever she told anyone she identified as asexual, it inevitably led to a lengthy explanation, followed by awkward questions, followed by the person in question trying to convince her that she was just confused or that she hadn't met the right person yet. Usually followed by the insinuation that they were the right person. She was pretty sure she was safe on that front from Greta, but she would rather not have the discussion at all if she could avoid it.

  *~*~*

  Nerissa took her time walking back. She saw more people out than usual, taking advantage of the later twilight as the days grew longer, and she couldn't help but linger to watch them. Nerissa debated stopping at the bakery for a coffee and a cinnamon roll, but decided against it. A line of last minute customers filled the small shop, and if she stopped, she wouldn't make it home to her family before full dark. Her mother would worry. She was convinced that Nerissa spending so much time in her human skin was a recipe for disaster. No matter how many times Nerissa told her that the old legends had faded from memory and that no human these days believed in selkies or faeries or magic, her mother steadfastly held to her portents of doom.