by Anne Emery
That would be the IRA. The way I heard it, Father Burke’s dad was even in it himself. “Was your dad part of it?”
“He was. There was a . . . misunderstanding between him and others in the army. They thought he had betrayed them, but he had not. He would never have done that. Anyway, because of what they believed at the time, he had to get out. Fast.”
“That’s why you moved to New York.”
“That’s why. Da bundled us kids and our mam onto a ship at midnight. The ship slipped out of Cobh harbour and headed out into the Atlantic. None of us wanted to go. Cobh is one of the most beautiful towns in Ireland. It has lovely colourful houses built up on the hill rising above the sea, and there’s a magnificent cathedral atop it all. Even at night we could see the beauty of it. The beauty of our country receding behind us. I was leaving my grandparents, my aunties and uncles and cousins, my school, my Gaelic football team, and all my friends. It was unbearably painful.”
My God! I had never heard him talk this way before. I tried to imagine what it would be like to move away and know I’d never see my uncles and aunts and cousins ever again. Or my best friend, Kim! I couldn’t stand even thinking about it.
“The seas were high and the voyage rough. Everyone was sick, down inside where we slept. It was filthy, and the smell of it was terrible. And you couldn’t get away from it. Shite and vomit everywhere you stepped. And it went on like this every day and every night. All so we could get to a strange new land where we didn’t want to go. And we were all crying and saying we didn’t want to leave home. We wanted to get off the ship and catch another boat back to Cobh, and then we could go back to Dublin. But of course we couldn’t. As far as we knew, we would never see the country or the people we loved ever again.”
It sounded horrible. I felt like crying just hearing it. And you wouldn’t believe how clean Father Burke is, so for him to be in the middle of people pooping and throwing up would be the worst nightmare he could ever have.
“And one night I got up and went out on the deck of the ship,” he said, and he had even more of an Irish accent than usual when he was telling this, “and I cursed at God and told Him I might as well be in hell as be sick and filthy and lonesome on that ship. And I did not want to live in America. I was going to jump off.”
“Oh my God, you would have drowned to death, Father!”
“I would have, yes.”
“You were going to commit . . .”
“What we believed back then was that you would be consigning yourself to the flames of eternal damnation if you did that. But I was past caring. If God was going to do this to me and my family, I wanted nothing more to do with Him. I put my hands on the rail of the ship so I could pull myself up and over.”
He had me in tears. I don’t think he noticed. He was somewhere far away by then.
“I looked down at the water. It was two miles deep. I was petrified. But I took my right hand off the rail and made the sign of the cross, to the God I had just disowned, and I started hoisting myself up. I was set to jump. And just at that moment I felt pressure on the front of my shoulders, pushing me. I fell back, very gently, onto the deck. And I was lying there looking up at the stars. And there was a misty shape hovering over me. And my eyes were nearly out on sticks looking at her. I didn’t know who it was, but she looked like the women on my father’s side of the family. A great-great-grandmother, maybe. And she had the kindest face I had ever seen. She spoke softly to me and consoled me. I could never remember what it was she said to me, but I’ll never forget how loved, and how safe, she made me feel. And then I was back down in the shithole below. But the filth of it didn’t affect me then because she had let me know I was meant to stay in this world, and we were going to be all right, and she was looking out for us. I didn’t know how I got down below decks. But my experience of it was that she was carrying me in her arms. And she was whispering kind words to me. Maybe singing, because the next morning I woke up with a lullaby running through my head, an old lullaby in Irish that I had never heard before but heard years later. And, well, here I am, buíochas le Dia. Thank God.”
I just stood there gawking at him.
“The only person I ever told that to, until now, was my big sister. I told her the next morning.”
Wow! He was telling me this painful secret! “How come you never told anybody else till me?”
He leaned towards me and said in a joking voice, “Because they’d all think I was feckin’ cracked in the head!”
“But it really happened.”
“It happened, ceart go leor.”
“So there really are ghosts.”
“Usually not, darlin’. Those stories are usually a load of bollocks.”
“But sometimes they’re true.”
“Sometimes they are.”
“Father, that night when Morag was at the window, she told the ghost that it couldn’t have Bonnie! But could it? Could a ghost take Bonnie away?”
His answer came really fast. “No, of course not, angel.”
I wanted to believe him.
Pierre
Randy Gouthro was killed by the side of the Thompson Road, outside Kinlochiel, about three hundred yards from his house. That’s where his wife found the body in the morning, and that’s where he was killed, according to the blood that was found at the scene. There were shallow slashes on his neck, and his jugular vein was severed. His wife, Trina, said he often walked home late at night after drinking at the Dirk. So whoever was after him might have known that or might have followed him home. His buddy Al, who had been drinking with him before he left the Dirk for the last time, had nothing to offer beyond that. He had not seen anyone behaving in a suspicious manner. Things were normal, apart from the fact that Gouthro was on parole with a couple of no-contact orders and other conditions and was out past his curfew and was afraid he’d get caught and end up in jail again.
Anybody who has served time has obviously met some vauriens during his time inside and during the criminal career that put him in there. So there could be a whole field of candidates for the murder that we knew nothing about. But we did know some other things. Top of the list was Gouthro’s conversation with Sabrina Fay-Whatsit, who had prevented him from giving key evidence in the Bonnie MacDonald case to Monty Collins. It wasn’t hard to conclude that somebody else in the crowded hotel bar that night overheard some or all of that conversation. That individual could be connected to the Bonnie case or could have repeated it to someone who was. That was the most obvious clue: Gouthro was talking one night, silenced the next. But we couldn’t rule out a random or coincidentally timed attack related to his criminal history and acquaintances. Jailhouse grudges and flare-ups can be swift and brutal.
And there was another name that had been associated with Gouthro’s from time to time: Bonsai McCurdy. His occasional partner in crime. Gouthro had never been as nasty a character as McCurdy. My take on Gouthro was that he was desperate to make a buck, and that’s why he got into the drug trade and the trade in stolen goods. McCurdy was something else altogether, a real piece of work. And he had done a flyer some time before the tearful scene in front of his house the day I tried to tell the missus that her son had been a hero during the storm. That performance by Our Lady of Sorrows was on August 14. The concert was that evening, and Gouthro was murdered the night after that. Where was Bonsai McCurdy on the night of August 15? We went by there again Saturday. The old heartbreaker had not returned. And we knew something else. The young daughter of the McCurdys had been taken into care by the Children’s Aid Society, because she was a child in need of protection. Maura MacNeil had played some part in this, along with the priest, Father Burke. So McCurdy may have had another motive for fleeing the nest and maybe fleeing the jurisdiction. And we had a motive for wanting him found, tout de suite.
On Sunday evening at home, as I was contemplating the number and kind of charges McCurdy might
be facing, one of our Ident officers phoned me and said, “Good news and bad news.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Tire treads at the Gouthro murder scene. Unusual tires, made in Germany. Called Continental tires. So, unusual, easy to differentiate from all the regular tires around here. But also not likely to be on a local car. Guy may be long gone. I asked around the detachment, and nobody can think off-hand of anybody in Kinlochiel with the kind of car you’d tend to buy imported tires for. I mean, even the German cars, the Volkswagens, the occasional BMW, the owners would just get their tires here on the island, right?”
“You’d think so. Unless the guy was really full of shit.”
“That or a serious car buff.”
“I’ll talk to Dougald.”
So that’s what I did. I called Dougald. He knew a thing or two about cars. His dad ran an auto repair shop when Dougald was growing up in Sydney Mines, though I have to say I’d never heard him talk tires. I told him about the Continental tread found at the scene. And what he said jolted me out of my seat. “I have a car in mind. Let’s just hope we can find it. I’ll swing by now and pick you up, and we’ll hit the road.”
Chapter XII
Normie
I was having a nice visit with my great-grandmother Morag on Sunday night, while Mum and Dad were away with Dominic and Father Burke. Morag knew I was feeling sad about having to leave soon, so she brought out one of the old photo albums she knew I liked. We sat on the chesterfield and looked at the pictures together. She told me who all the people were, and where they lived, and whether there were any funny or weird stories about them. One was an old lady who looked even older than Morag. Her name was Gormal! Imagine having a sweet little tiny baby in your arms and saying, “Let’s name her Gormal.” But she was great. She used to cure people of sickness by boiling up all these plants and flowers in a big black kettle. She also had a special stick that she used to wave over the parts of people’s bodies where it hurt, and she made them better. Morag said the sisters swore by her; nuns came to her from a convent and got her to fix them. She looked scary in the picture, sort of the way Morag does, but Morag said she was very kind.
Then Morag started talking to me in Gaelic, and she helped me with words I didn’t know. She still had the sporran and the sgian dubh on her end table. I reached over and picked up the knife and asked her, “How come they say dubh? That means black, but the knife is a silvery colour.”
“Well, the knives often had black oak handles, but the word dubh can also refer to black as in blackmail or black market, something hidden, and these used to be hidden under people’s armpits, so that’s where the name came from.”
“Better the way they do it now, stuck in their socks.”
“Sort of a sign of good will. I have a knife here, and I’m not hiding it from you.”
“But it’s still a knife!”
“It is. Now, you have the Gaelic for all the colours, I imagine?”
“Yes, I’ve learned those.”
“How about spooky things? You can hardly leave my house without a lesson in the spirit world. People will say to you, ‘Ach, Normie Ruadh, you spent time in Cape Breton with that old witch Morag, and you didn’t learn any scary words?’”
Ooh, I wanted to learn those words, for sure. “Tell me!”
“First of all, did you know my name used to be MacAskill before I was married?”
“Yes, you used to tell the kids that you were Giant MacAskill’s granddaughter!”
“Aye, I made that up. But this is the truth: MacAskill, or Askill, comes from an old Norse word, and it means ‘cauldron of sacrifice to the gods’! So maybe I was meant to be an old witch after all!”
I didn’t know whether it would be polite to say yes to that, so I kept quiet. But I thought it was really spooky. Spooky and cool at the same time.
“And you know the word spiorad.”
“Right. Spirit.”
“Yes, spirit or ghost. We also say tanasg for ghost.”
“Wait,” I said then. “Can I write these down?”
“Good idea. Sit yourself at the desk there.”
So I went over to the desk where she had a couple of little notepads and a red tartan toffee tin filled with pens and pencils and other stuff like that. “Okay, I’m ready.”
“All right. Now, you’ve heard of a poltergeist.”
“There was a movie about them.”
“Right. It’s German for noisy ghost or a ghost banging or crashing about. Well, in Gaelic it’s bocan-ùpraideach.” She told me how to spell it — good thing — and I wrote it down and wrote spiorad and tanasg, too.
Then, out of the blue, I asked her, “Greatgran, did you see a ghost and think it took Bonnie?”
“I can’t make sense of what I see in this, my love.” Then she looked away from me and said, “It simply doesn’t make sense.”
She seemed to have got lost in her own thoughts, but after a minute she snapped out of it and spelled out, “Manadh. A forerunner. This would be a sight or a sound that happens, but the person doesn’t understand at the time what it means. Then, later, there is an occurrence and the person realizes she had been given a sign of what was going to happen in the near future. It might be the sound of footsteps. Or a flickering bluish light over a sick bed, a sign that the person will soon be dead. That’s a manadh.”
“Oh my God, I hope I never see anything like that.”
“You will.”
We were right in the middle of all that spooky talk when there was a loud bang on the door, and I thought Oh no! I didn’t want us to be interrupted, because it was so interesting even though it was scary stuff, and I was learning so much. Then the door opened because Morag never bothers to lock it. And this man charged right into the living room. He was really big and had a mix of dark and grey hair that was shaved off at the sides and bristly and sticking up on the top. His eyes were brown and they were strange. There was no liveliness in them; they were almost like fake eyes.
“Who in the hell are you?” Morag asked him in a furious voice. Then her eyes got wide, and she stared at him as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. But she didn’t move. She was as still as a statue in a park. This time her voice was really low and quiet, but you knew she meant business. “It’s you! Get out of my house. Leave us alone.”
He was really rude. “I want to see your daughter.”
“Get out.”
“Shut your mouth and listen. This is what you are going to do. You are going to pick up the phone and call your darling daughter Ginny and tell her to come over here. I would have paid her a visit at her house, but it doesn’t have the . . . privacy you have here, Morag. Too many nosy neighbours in bustling downtown Kinlochiel. Here? There’s nobody to hear us for miles around. Now get on that phone. And don’t even think about telling her there is someone here or hinting that there’s a problem or screeching at her to call the cops. Call her up and tell her nicely that you need to see her. You’ll explain when she gets here.”
“No.”
“I don’t think you understand, you crazy old bitch.”
I was scared to death. He wasn’t just rude to call Morag a name like that; he was bad. Evil. It was as if the scary low bass music that had me terrified before was now playing all around me in the room. It was like a roaring sound out of hell.
“Do I have to tell you again?” He crossed the room. It was almost as if he flew across on wings. I could picture huge black wings on him. And he stood over Morag, looking down at her, and he had his hand up as if he was going to hit her.
I cried out, “No!”
He whirled around and noticed me then. When I looked into those lightless eyes, I felt a chill all over me. I started shaking.
Morag said, “Normie Ruadh! Leave the house! Run!”
I wanted to run away, but how could I leave her with this
bad guy? I couldn’t do that.
The bad guy kept glaring at me, and then he changed his plan. “You! Whatever your name is.” He pointed to the table beside me, where Morag had her phone and a big, heavy vase full of white roses. “You are going to pick up that phone, you are going to dial the number I give you, you are going to talk to the bitch that answers, and you are going to tell her to come over to Grandma’s house. Get it?”
I was so scared all I could do was swallow, even though I had nothing in my mouth.
“Do it!”
I jumped up from the desk and went to the phone table and picked up the receiver. I stared at him. My hands were shaking.
He looked away from me to an old-fashioned dresser Morag had in the room. There was a long piece of white linen cloth on it. He whipped it off the dresser, and he put it across Morag’s mouth and pulled really hard on it. She was making noises, trying to talk, but she couldn’t say any words. He tied the cloth behind her head and then yanked her up off the chesterfield and pushed her to the middle of the room.
“Don’t hurt her!” I blurted out. “She’s old! I’m not saying old in a mean way; I’m just saying her bones might snap because you hear about old people breaking —”
“Shut up! Dial the number and ask Ginny in a nice, normal voice to come over and see her mother, who needs her help right now. No hints about what’s going on here, nothing to make her suspicious, or the old lady snuffs it. Hear me? I’ll break her neck.”
“Oh my God! Please, please don’t hurt her!”
“That’s entirely up to you. Do what I say and she lives. Fuck me around, and she dies.”
Morag’s eyes above the white cloth were blazing, she was so furious. I didn’t dare do anything to make things worse for her.
But I had to do something. Without getting caught.
I saw the wire where the phone plugs into the wall. I wondered if I could disconnect it without him noticing. There was a big vase of flowers that partly hid the wire. But I knew I had to get somebody on the phone. It was our only chance. I already knew the phone number but he gave it to me. He had it memorized. I pushed the number buttons, and the phone was answered. I cleared my throat and got ready to speak. I almost had a heart attack when the person answered and said hello, because I didn’t recognize the voice and I didn’t know what to do. But I had no choice except to go ahead with my plan.
