The Mountains Wild

by Sarah Stewart Taylor

  “Roly!”

  “We were driving by and we noticed that someone had broken a window in this house,” he says. “As law enforcement officers, we felt it necessary to investigate.”

  “Great. Now I suppose you want me to climb in there?”

  He finishes clearing the shards of glass away and then he says, “I’m too big to fit through there.”

  “All right.” I lay his jacket out on the sill and climb through into the silent dark house.

  The sound of my feet on the wood floor surprises me and I take a deep breath to try to calm my heart. It smells of old paper and cloth, dust, mildew, earth. I turn the lock and open the door to let Roly in, then lock it again behind us.

  “I don’t like it,” I say. “It’s fucking creepy in here.” I turn on the flashlight on my phone and shine it around. We check each room to make sure there’s no one there.

  “It looks like it was once some kind of hunting lodge,” I say. “Look.” There’s a gun cabinet on one wall in the sitting room and someone’s hung a mounted deer head above the fireplace. But everything’s old and dusty. I’m holding my phone up when the flashlight dims. “Shit, my phone is dying. Roly, shine the light up here.” There’s a calendar hanging on the wall, a picture of a tractor above “June 1993” and the name of a farm supply store in Arklow.

  “Well, someone was here in 1993, anyway,” he says. “Let’s see if there’s any more evidence.”

  We check the bedrooms more carefully, but they’ve been emptied of anything personal. One has a stained mattress lying on the floor, but it’s also covered with a layer of grime. We’re about to leave when I see a closet against one wall in the back hallway. I motion to Roly to shine the light on it and I open the door. It’s full of coats, old waxed-canvas hunting jackets, tweed blazers, rain slickers. Everything smells like it’s been in here for fifty years. The floor is littered with Wellington boots and lace-up leather shoes. I’m about to turn around when I catch sight of a round, metal object on the floor. I cover my hand with the hem of my jacket and stoop to pick it up. It’s a button. It reads, “Sustainable Galway.”

  And then I look up and see a door at the back of the closet with a padlock on it, also shiny and new.

  “Roly!”

  He shines the light on the door. My eyes are playing tricks on me now. I think I see something move, a mouse or an insect, but I’m not sure.

  I knock on the door. Silence.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. Some sort of crawl space?”

  And that’s when I hear a faint thump, like someone hitting his or her body against the floor or a wall. It’s coming from behind the door.

  “Roly! Help me with the padlock!” We pull at it but it holds fast.

  “Is there someone in there?” I call out. “Is there someone in there?”

  “It’s the Guards,” Roly calls. “You’re safe now. My name is Detective Inspector Roland Byrne.” We’re both silent, listening, and then it comes again, a faint thumping.

  “Christ.” Roly kicks the door. “I’m going to go get a crowbar out of the boot. Stay here, D’arcy. I’ll radio the station in Roundwood and get some backup. Just sit tight for a moment.”

  He takes the light with him so he can see where he’s going.

  I hear his footsteps go out through the main room and then the soft catch of the lock as he goes out the door.

  My heart is thudding in my chest. The house settles down around me, I say my name, pressing my lips against the wall, shouting as loudly as I can. “Are you in there? Can you knock twice if your name is Niamh Horrigan?”

  A faint knocking comes from the other side of the wall. “Lots of people are looking for you, Niamh. Lots of people want to get you to safety. We’re here now. Your parents are nearby. They’ll be here soon. You’re safe now.” I press my hand against the wall.

  It’s completely dark in the closet. “Hang on,” I say. “Hang on. He’s coming.”

  I count to sixty, then count again, and again. It’s been five minutes, too long. My hand goes instinctively to my left waistband. My service weapon is at home in Alexandria, locked in the gun safe in my bedroom. I have never wished for it quite as much as I do right now.

  Seven minutes.

  Eight minutes.

  Too long.

  “Roly?” I whisper into the darkness. “Roly?”

  The house is absolutely silent. Then footsteps, very quiet.

  I know. I feel him rather than hear him. I’m trapped in the closet. I need to get out into the open, where I might be able to fight. I slide along the wall and around the corner, into the living room. I remember seeing a fire poker leaning next to the fire. If I can get to it, I might have a chance.

  But he’s on me before I can do anything. He puts his hand over my mouth and locks a leg around my waist, wrestling me to the floor. I hear his voice and I know who it is.

  “Shut up. Don’t make any noise,” he whispers hoarsely. “Is anyone else coming?”

  “Yes.” I gasp. “Backup. He called for backup. You better go. They’ll be here any minute.”

  “I got him before he rang,” he says seriously and it’s only then that I see the knife.

  Roly.

  I feel myself start to panic, my breathing becoming shallow and inefficient. Calm down. Make a plan. I can smell his sweat, his breath.

  “How did you know we were here?” I ask, as loud as I can make my voice, which is barely above a whisper.

  “I have a camera on the driveway. The footage streamed to my computer when you came earlier.”

  “Did you kill my cousin?” I whisper.

  He doesn’t say anything. He’s busy. He has my arms behind me now and I hear a ripping noise; when I feel him wrapping my wrists, I know what it is: duct tape.

  I’m virtually incapacitated now. When you get someone’s hands secured like this it’s not just that they can’t use them, it’s that you take away their balance. Standing, I won’t have much of a chance, but if I can stay on the ground, I can use my legs.

  I roll over onto my side, bringing my knees up to my chest. I wait until he rolls back onto his knees, until his head is in the strike zone in front of me.

  And then I slam my feet against the side of his head.

  I hear him grunt. I got him, but not hard enough. He swears and grabs my shoulders, pulling me up to standing.

  And then he starts pushing me toward the closet.

  “No!” I’m thrashing around, trying to get us away from the doorway. If he puts me in there, that’s it. For me, for Niamh Horrigan.

  Erin.

  “Shut up, you fucking bitch. Shut up!” And he raises the knife high above his head and I close my eyes.

  Lilly.

  And then I hear glass breaking and a second later what sounds like a shot and Cathal Deasey is rolling off me as the sirens scream and suddenly the room is full of light. There’s one more gunshot, an explosion in the center of the chaos.

  “Maggie, stay down,” Griz yells and I look up to see her in shooting stance, looming over Cathal Deasey, who’s clutching his leg and screaming. The lights from the cars stream in the windows. The room is full of people.

  “It’s okay!” she shouts to me. “It’s okay now. We’re here.”

  “She’s in there!” I shout to them, pointing to the closet. “At the back! Get her out.”

  And it’s only a minute before they’re pulling her out, Niamh Horrigan, her hands and mouth duct-taped, her eyes wild and terrified. And I think, Erin? Erin?

  But they go in and search the crawl space and there’s no one—nothing—else there and I’m up and running and out the front door and it’s then I see Roly on the ground. They’re working on him but the blood is everywhere and when I look at his face, I can’t see anything there to tell me he’s alive.

  I’m two days over my due date when the doctors tell me they’re worried about Lilly. “Her fluid’s low,” a nurse says. “We want to get her out.” I call B
rian at work, and Uncle Danny. Brian meets me at the hospital, carrying my bag. He looks scared, so young I almost laugh, but I’ve never been so glad to see someone in my life. He grins and says, “Here we go, Mags. She’ll be here soon.” In that moment, I love him more than I have ever loved him. He’s safety. He’s home. He’s mine.

  The Pitocin hits me like a wrecking ball. I start to feel a few small contractions and then the next one feels like someone’s got me in a vise and is whipping my body back and forth. It goes on for what feels like forever, a powerful contraction gripping me and rising to an unbearable peak, then easing off for a minute or two only to rise again, worse than before.

  Brian keeps me going. He counts for me, tells me it’s going to be over soon. And then suddenly they’re pushing me down on the bed. Someone’s talking to Brian. The bed is moving. They tell me they’re going to get the baby out.

  Something on my face. Pain. I don’t remember anything after that.

  I wake up to a blurry ceiling, thirst, more pain.

  Brian is standing there, holding Lilly.

  “Here she is,” he says, smiling and holding her out to me. “Here she is, Mags. What’s her name?”

  “Lillian Erin,” I say. “Lillian Erin Lombardi.”

  I whisper her name to her. She’s tiny, wriggling a little as she gets close to me. “You should see her, Erin,” I whisper into her soft hair. “You should see her.”

  46

  WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8,

  2016

  It’s touch and go all the way to the hospital, but then they get Roly stabilized and by the time they get him to St. Vincent’s, they can tell us they think he’s going to make it.

  I sit with Laura until they tell her he’s awake and that she can go in, and when she asks if I want to come, too, I tell her I’ll catch up with her tomorrow. When she hugs me, I can smell her perfume and feel the tears on her cheek. She says, “A good few times now, I’ve had to sit with the wife at the hospital when her husband doesn’t come home. One of my best friends, like. She was widowed at thirty-six. Bernie. We sat here for days. But I never thought we’d be here. I never thought it would be him.”

  “He’s going to be okay, though,” I tell her. “You’re going to feel guilty about that, in the coming days, but don’t let it take away from how grateful you are. I’m grateful, too.”

  She smiles and I watch the nurses let her into his room.

  * * *

  When I come out of the hospital to hail a cab, Stephen Hines is up at the front of the clot of reporters. There are a couple of guards keeping them away from the entrance and they nod to me as I walk past. The reporters feel him watch me and they all converge, shouting questions to me: “Is your cousin’s body in Ballyclash, Detective D’arcy?” “What is Niamh Horrigan’s condition?” “Who kidnapped her?” I ignore them and keep walking.

  But Hines breaks away and follows me. “Any comment, Detective D’arcy?” he asks. His hair is loose on his shoulders and he’s wearing a dirty T-shirt under his jacket, as though he leapt out of bed to come here.

  “No, I don’t have any fucking comment,” I say, but good-naturedly. I smile at him.

  “Come on, give me something. You saved Niamh Horrigan’s life.” He’s holding his phone out, recording whatever I’m about to say.

  I talk to the phone. “No, I didn’t. Detective Inspector Byrne and Detective Garda Grzeskiewicz saved her life. They’re the heroes here. I just happened to be there.”

  “Does it give you any peace, knowing what happened to your cousin?”

  I stop walking and meet his eyes. “No, it doesn’t give me any fucking peace. What do you think?” For a second I wonder if he’s going to keep badgering me, but instead he nods, as if to say okay, and lets me pass.

  When I look up, past the reporters, Conor’s standing there waiting for me.

  “I called your phone,” he says. “And the woman who answered it said you were here.”

  “My…?” I realize my phone must still be in Roly’s car. Griz.

  “Can I drive you home?”

  “I guess so.” I look up at him for a long moment. His face is in shadow, his eyes dark and liquid. The car is warm. I wince putting on my seat belt and he touches my shoulder and then he pulls out into traffic and starts driving.

  “I heard about what happened on the news,” he says. “I saw you. They had a shot of the house and there you were in the background and I felt like my guts had been ripped out. You saved that woman. You saved her life. They said Detective Byrne is stable. I’m glad.”

  We’re completely silent. I feel the weight of him, the inevitability of something. He drives smoothly. The road is clear and empty this time of night. “You haven’t been honest with me,” I say finally, into the emptiness. “There’s something you haven’t told me. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something. Will you tell me now?”

  He turns the wheel, slowly, getting off onto a side street. He shuts the car off and puts both hands on the wheel. I wait.

  A man walking a dog crosses in front of us. The car makes a settling sound, a fan shutting off somewhere beneath the hood.

  He doesn’t look at me. “You know when you meet someone and you recognize something in them? You think, ‘Ah. I know you’? I felt like that when I first met Erin. She walked into the café and it was like I recognized her. I think she felt the same way. We just liked each other. We liked talking and I started walking her home sometimes.”

  I feel it as a physical pain. He loved her. I had known all along. I just hadn’t wanted to see it.

  “The gang of us from the café went out drinking one night. There’d been some conversation about a case that was in the courts then. It was in all the papers. She must have seen something on my face. I was walking her home and she said, ‘How old were you? When it happened. How old were you?’ and without even thinking, I said, ‘Twelve,’ and she said, ‘It happened to me too. I was fourteen.’”

  I turn to look at him but he has his eyes on the road ahead. I have the sense of something out there, something shimmering and dangerous, like an animal under the surface of the water.

  “‘Who was it?’ she asked me. I couldn’t say it. I’d never said it to anyone. I couldn’t say it. I just … I asked her the same question and she started to cry. She said she’d never told anyone either. That she’d been … raped.” There’s a long, heavy silence. “That’s what we were talking about.”

  Silence.

  “I didn’t know,” I say.

  “She said she’d never told anyone. I hadn’t either. We … We were friends after that. Everyone at the café thought I fancied her. Bláithín thought I fancied her. It was terribly cruel, when I think of it now. Here was Erin, who knew the most intimate, secret thing about me, something I hadn’t even told Bláithín. And I invited her out with us, let Bláithín see that there was this thing between us. In some ways, I don’t think we ever recovered from that.”

  “Who was it?” I ask into the quiet car.

  “Erin never told me,” he says. “But me? A neighbor. I went round to feed his cows sometimes, make a little dosh. I learned, in therapy—there’s been a lot of therapy—that I have it better than a lot of victims. I stopped it. I put my foot down after it … after it happened once. I made excuses not to be alone with him and it never happened again. I never told anyone, until I told the therapist. I’m okay now, but it took a long time. Splitting with Bláithín, it was … I could only see the marriage clearly once I’d reckoned with … it.”

  He starts the car up. I reach out and put a hand on his arm. I leave it there, rubbing little circles on his skin.

  We’re almost to the hotel. We pass the big AIB building. I take a deep breath.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It’s embarrassing. There’s a certain amount of shame. Erin told me never to tell anyone. I had the feeling it was someone close to her, that if it got out, it would be disastrous for her. She said something about how everyon
e would be mad at her if she ever told. Once she was gone, I couldn’t ask permission. I’m sorry,” he says. I turn to look at him.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say. “I had no idea. About Erin. About you. I’m so sorry.”

  He looks down at me. “It’s okay. It really is. I’m okay.”

  “Erin didn’t say anything…” I’m thinking horrible thoughts suddenly. Uncle Danny. My dad. No. “She didn’t tell you who it was?”

  “No. Not a word. It seemed raw, especially as the summer went on. It felt like she was starting to deal with it. I recognized the signs. I knew she hadn’t, well, gotten past it, you know? Because I hadn’t, either.”

  “Oh my God.” I’m staring straight ahead at the houses along the little side street. He turns the car on again and pulls out, turns back onto the Main Road. We’re silent as we drive up Baggot Street.

  I reach for his free hand and he takes mine gratefully.

  “I wanted to tell you,” he says. “But I didn’t know how to start. I almost did once.”

  “What stopped you?”

  “I think I was pretty sure I was in love with you. I thought it might make you not love me back, I guess. That you’d think something was wrong with me.”

  “I don’t,” I say, rubbing my thumb along his. “I could never.”

  “She told me once that she had hurt you. She didn’t tell me what it was, but she felt guilty about it. She said that it … the rape … made her do bad things. Made her hurt people. Do you know what she meant?”

  I nod.

  We’re almost to the hotel when I say, “I don’t want to go up there. Can we go to your house?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Bláithín’s bringing Adrien back, but I don’t care. I just want you there.”

  We ride through the quiet streets of Dublin in silence.

  Christmas. A grim, gray December day. My mother’s been dead for six months. We’re barely functioning, barely able to acknowledge the day. Father Anthony visits Christmas Eve and prayed with my dad but I can’t bring myself to say the words with them. I stay in the kitchen, baking my mother’s soda bread, trying to do it right. I can’t get through it without crying.