Two Truths and a Lie

by Ellen McGarrahan

  Peter drives slowly over the ruts as the gale blows in, the old stones by the road coming alive as moss meets rain. At the far end of the road, we ease down along a grass trail past the house. We can just glimpse into the front yard through the gate—a ramshackle garden and rain-dark windows—and then, just past it on the left, a driveway leading to a green metal shed.

  There is something in investigation that is close to a chemical reaction. It’s a flush, a flash, a sting. It’s rare, because most things are easy to find, and it’s addictive, this jolt in the breastbone that comes only from finding something given up for lost.

  “Oh God, we have to get out of here,” I hear myself saying. Peter is already backing up and turning around. It wasn’t my intention to talk to Sunny today.

  “Wait wait wait wait wait,” I tell him, fumbling for my iPhone and hurriedly snapping a picture through the rain-blurred passenger-side window.

  * * *

  •

  On the way out, we pull over after the stone bridge to make sure. I have the photo I’ve just taken on my iPhone, and Peter has the Facebook images. They match.

  “I can’t believe it,” I say, in a rush.

  Now that we’ve found the house, it seems impossible that we stumbled on it at all. This falling-down cottage at the far ends of the earth. I look over at Peter, expecting to see the same look of relief on his face that I feel. But Peter looks concerned. He looks like it is going to pain him to say what comes next.

  “What?” I say.

  “There are no goats.”

  I stare at him, dumbfounded. Sunny and Pringle have goats, it’s true—they write about them on Facebook. And it’s true that the goats weren’t to be seen. But ours was a very brief stopover. The goats were out back there somewhere, I feel sure of it. We just didn’t walk around enough in the rain to find them is all.

  “I think they’ve moved,” Peter says, quietly, as if backing away from a lit fuse.

  “No, they’re just out,” I predict, confidently. “We’ll come back tomorrow and they’ll be home.”

  * * *

  •

  But when tomorrow comes, I am too afraid to try.

  Rain mists the windshield as we swing north from the coast road out into the flat expanse of the marsh. I try to steady myself, but it’s a looming black dark fear, this fear. How did I get myself into this I don’t want to do it no.

  “Do you mind if we drive past?” I whisper.

  “Are you okay?” Peter asks.

  I nod, unable to speak. It’s the house. It’s kept me up all night. I know it makes no sense, but I had expected a tidier cottage. Someplace sweet and well kept, a pretty little haven out by the water. The fairy tale. Had I fallen for that somehow? This place is messy and untended, fending for itself in the rain and the wind. Everything, all of it, come to rust and ruin.

  The road spins past a lake with wild swans, black water beneath a pale white sky.

  * * *

  •

  “I don’t know how I’m going to ask her,” I say, when the house is well behind us.

  The Taser the windshield post the bullet hole Steve Addis the car swap the Camaro Jesse’s holster the murder weapon the green bullets the cocaine. All the facts from three months in Florida are crowding around in my head. This woman was caught on tape negotiating for a pound of cocaine. She’s insisted over and over again that she and Jesse were innocent, but that is not what Robert McKenzie told me. The eyewitness who cannot forget what he saw. The lady had to have shot them, because that’s when they fall. I saw it, bam bam bam, it had to have come from the car.

  I look out the window. The stone walls across the green fields look like ossuaries to me right now.

  “Say to her what you’ve said to everyone else, that you’re here to find the truth about the case,” Peter says. “Just say that.”

  “But I can’t go in there with—” I stop, embarrassed.

  “With what?”

  “My soul,” I say, in despair.

  “You can,” Peter tells me. “You have to. That’s what this is.”

  * * *

  •

  The next day, and the day after, and the day after that, we are back at the house.

  Sunday dawns gray with a light rain, and along the coast road heading out of Galway the sidewalks are busy with small children, tiny bright creatures waving their hands in the air. At Inverin we stop to buy flowers at the market, but the only thing on offer is a cactus inside a faded yellow plastic wrapper with the word Happiness written in faded script. We stop again in Casla town, first at a supermarket with a giant display of detective magazines—I Have a Problem! I’m a Cannibal!—and then at the gas station, which offers a choice: a giant bouquet of lilies and zinnias, or a lavender plant. We decide on lavender. We take the left turn at the hedgerow, and then we are out in the wilderness again, with the stone walls and the tidal flats and the rough Atlantic beyond. We arrive at the house and it is just the same as it was. Windswept, empty.

  This time we venture up on foot to the front gate and peek through into the yard. There are rusted garden tools thrown about in the grass, tipped-over pots, plants that are in want of tending. Through the windows, I can make out boxes on a living room chair, stripped beds, a yin-yang symbol on the kitchen windowsill. The house is cluttered, which makes me think they’re still around somewhere, but there are no animals, which makes Peter think they’ve ditched it. I’m hoping I’m right, because if I’m not, I have no idea how we’re going to figure out where they have gone.

  On Monday, which is May 4, I wake up in our Galway apartment to a story in Time about Jesse Tafero. It’s the anniversary of his execution today. My name is in the article—it quotes an article I wrote about the flames and smoke. I read it, feeling numb. Time concludes:

  After Tafero’s harrowing death, the key witness against him admitted that he himself had pulled the trigger in the traffic-stop gunfight. Although prosecutors continued to insist that they’d gotten the right man, many concluded that Tafero was, in fact, innocent.

  Out at the house again, we walk through the long grass right up to the sheds. We walk around the back deck and peer into the windows: empty milk cartons in the sink, cat food, a dirty fridge. Just before noon, I walk to the top of the road, near the house, and stand looking out toward the water, underneath the cat’s-eye marble of the stormy sky. It has been twenty-five years now, exactly, since the door in the back of the death chamber burst open and the guards dragged Jesse Tafero in. I don’t feel lost. I’m not giving up. I will see this through. But right now it seems like a long way to have come for an empty house and a landscape where pain and hardship have been set in stone.

  * * *

  •

  “No. No! Do not tell them you’re looking into a murder case. Listen to me. What you’re going to do here is tell them you are Americans—okay, that’s obvious—and that you’re trying to track down information on your Irish heritage. Do you understand? Your heritage.”

  It’s our new friend Liam on the phone. Peter has found him, an Irish private investigator with four decades of experience and a web of sources and contacts across the island. I’ve called to ask him, PI to PI, for advice, and he’s been charming, generous with his insights and with opinions too. All of it helpful, because, as I have been dismayed to learn, Ireland doesn’t have the databases that we have at home. At home, if I need to find someone for a client, I can simply type the name into a giant computer network, press a button, and—well, it’s not bingo, but it’s close. But here all address information is tightly restricted by law. So there is—and Liam is now instructing me in no uncertain terms of this fact—no other option: It is time to go back to gumshoe basics. Time to get out of the car and start talking to people.

  “Tell them you’re doing heritage research and you’ve been directed to the Pringles,” Liam says. Pringle
is the surname of Sunny’s husband. “You’ve heard there’s a Pringle on the road. Do not under any circumstances mention the case or your project or the murders or his wife. That way, the neighbors will help you.”

  * * *

  •

  All the front gates of the houses along the tidal road are locked, or no one’s home, or they say they don’t know who I’m asking about. It’s late afternoon by the time we find ourselves on the doorstep of handsome Aiden, a tall man with raven hair, broad shoulders, and a stately house just across the tidal flat. He listens intently as I recite Liam’s intro, and then he immediately turns and points and says sure, the Pringles live right over there.

  “Oh, but their red caravan is gone,” he says, looking more closely. “So they must be away. Now, how are you connected to them?”

  “It’s a long story,” I begin. I feel squeamish. I do in fact have Irish ancestry, but as far as I know I’m not related to any Pringles. I decide to start slow. “Somebody told us to ask after the Pringles—my great-grandmother was from Galway.” True and true.

  Aiden is looking at me with a polite but unmistakably quizzical expression.

  “My great-grandmother’s sister got married in Tuam to a Pringle, and I’ve heard the family then moved down here,” I say, staring right into his clear blue eyes. “But after my great-grandmother moved to America she lost touch—it was hard, you know, she was a widow with eight children.”

  Handsome Aiden nods, and wishes us well with such kindness that I feel terrible.

  But now we know we are looking for a red caravan.

  One appears almost immediately. Outside the village pub in Casla town. A beat-up red mini-pickup truck, parked at an angle to the curb, as if the driver had exited at a dead run to the pub’s front door. We pull up beside it, eyeing it.

  “What is a caravan, anyway?” Peter asks.

  On the roads coming toward us. On the roads behind us. Pickups, short-cabs, lorries. Carmine, crimson, vermilion, brick. As the light fades, we make our way back into Galway city, petals from the crab apples along the roadsides aloft in the gloaming.

  * * *

  •

  It’s the neighbor with the white Mercedes who finally tells us.

  The next morning, Tuesday, we are down at the very end of the road again, at what has become clear—even to me—is their abandoned house. This time we’ve walked around the yard to the back deck and looked into the goat pens below, which are empty in the way that the house is, the leftovers of a life no longer lived here.

  “Yes?” The neighbor opens his door with a distinctly unwelcoming expression. Get the fuck out of my fucking yard would be the direct translation from the Gaelic, I believe.

  “So, I’m American,” I begin, again. “I’m doing a bit of heritage research and I’m looking for the Pringles—are they still next door?”

  “Ah, where are you from then?” He’s softening. The start of a smile.

  “California,” I reply. Why? No idea. It just flies out of my mouth.

  “Sunny is from California,” the neighbor says, brightly.

  “Who’s Sunny?” I manage.

  “That’s his wife,” the neighbor says.

  “Small world!” Peter laughs, jumping in.

  “It is indeed.” The neighbor is smiling too. “Come in, come in.”

  And then here we are, sitting at his kitchen table as he bustles around fixing a pot of tea and putting out cake on pretty china plates. His kitchen has a spectacular view of Camus Bay, behind him. Some chat about my real-life great-grandmother Margaret Joyce, from County Galway—apparently the Gaelic-speaking Joyces, of which she was one, hail from a marshy patch in exactly this area—and then the neighbor has his cellphone out and he’s reading an email from Sunny, saying that she and Pringle are in the United States and will be back May 5.

  “But they’ve moved,” he tells us.

  “Oh?” I say.

  “It’s remote.” He waves his hand in the direction they’ve gone, the next mountain over. We look out the window. Beyond the bay, the mountain is a gray granite monolith cast in shadows. Why did we want to see the Pringles again? he asks.

  “It’s for my father,” I find myself saying. “He was the one who was corresponding with the Pringles, but he’s fallen ill.”

  “Well, you could always say you found them, it won’t hurt him, he won’t know.”

  “Gosh, I could never do that,” I say. Mainly because my dad died five years ago. But also because he was a meticulous attorney with a righteous respect for life’s fine print.

  So the neighbor drags his laptop out and gets Google Earth up and running and points out an infinitesimally tiny lane on the far mountaintop. I stare hard, memorizing, just as I used to do out in the Los Angeles desert, with my road map in my car.

  “Do you think you’ll still be here on May fifth, then?” the neighbor asks. “When they’re back?”

  “I hope so,” I say, as Peter shrugs like, Who knows?

  But we do know, even if this nice neighbor does not. Because May 5 is today.

  * * *

  •

  And so we are on the road to Oughterard, a high barren stretch of moss and lakes, velvet and rock and sky. Below us, Connemara sweeps in grays and purples out to the coast. But in spite of my schemes and the neighbor’s kindness, we can’t find them. The mountain is too barren and the roads are too steep, and we are losing the light, the sun is sinking behind the far mountains, casting shadows across the emerald grass. I no longer have any idea what we are doing here, or what I am looking for. The only thing I know right now, after these days of searching, is that I have turned into a gray sky full of rain.

  I made a mistake twenty-five years ago, when just before the execution I reported that story about Walter Rhodes, giving his—and the state’s—version of events as the truth. I can see that now. For half my life, I realize, I have felt responsible for Jesse’s execution because I wrote a story for the state’s biggest and most powerful newspaper that completely failed to get to the bottom of things.

  Even I can see how self-important that is. A journalist with the world on her shoulders? Really. But without understanding them, I have carried these feelings with me all these years. This private horror that maybe my own ego and incompetence helped fuel this fiasco. How is it possible that it has taken this, a search through the far western reaches of Ireland, across a tidal flat and a mountaintop, to figure this most basic thing out about my own heart?

  That night, a pounding on the door wakes me. Echoing voices in the hallway, shouting. My heart starts beating so loudly I can hear it in my ears. They’re just drunk, Peter says, sleepily, in the dark. But fear keeps me awake.

  The next morning, out toward Oughterard again, we are picking our way along another threadbare road when a van is suddenly behind us, pushing us out of the way. It comes up so fast that I see it looming in the side-view mirror at the same time that Peter, who’s driving, sees it too. The top of the van is a darker color, but below its windows, the van is red.

  Peter pulls our car sharply to the shoulder. As the van barrels past, I catch a good hard look at the driver in my side-view mirror. A large man with silver hair and a silver beard.

  I feel it again, the bright spike.

  “That is Peter Pringle,” I say.

  The Irish Emigrant, May 1995

  Freed After Fifteen Years

  Peter Pringle, who was jailed in 1980 for the murder of a garda officer, has had his conviction quashed by the Court of Criminal Appeal. Following a bank raid at Ballaghaderreen in July 1980, Garda Henry Byrne and Garda John Morley were shot dead. Three men, including Pringle, were subsequently convicted of the murder of Garda Byrne and sentenced to death. This was later commuted to 40 years imprisonment without remission, in all three cases. For years Pringle maintained his innocence. In quashing the conv
iction the judges dismissed two of the three arguments put forward by Pringle’s legal team. The one which was allowed concerned a tissue which Pringle used when he had a nose bleed in Galway garda station. In a 1993 statement, Det. Sgt. Thomas Connolly said that he handed the tissue to Det. Sgt. Pat Ennis. The latter denied that he had been given the tissue. At the original trial Det. Sgt. Connolly told the court that Pringle had said to him, “I know that you know that I was involved, but on the advice of my solicitor I am saying nothing.” The Appeal Court now says that, had the disagreement about the tissue been known by defence counsel at the original trial, it would have been used to question Det. Sgt. Connolly’s reliability as a witness.

  A day after the court decision Pringle was released on bail of IR60k although this was objected to by Gardaí.

  When I first read about Pringle and Sunny, I thought, Wow. Both wrongfully convicted of murdering police officers, both sentenced to death, both had their convictions overturned because their defense teams were not told of possibly exculpatory evidence. They must have a lot to talk about.

  When I told a friend about them, he said, “Where did they meet? Match-dot-Con?”

  As the red van shoves past us, for a long instant, we hang in between. Even the clouds above us seem to freeze in place. Only the van is still moving, up around the next curve in the road, about to disappear.

  “There it goes—it’s going,” I say.

  And with that, the world comes roaring back to life. Peter slams the car into gear and starts off after the van. It’s a strand of macadam along a mountaintop, and we lurch and shudder past an abandoned house on our left and a large barn with a huge white bird in a cage on the right. Just ahead is the place where we turned back yesterday, an old farm courtyard with a stone barn and a cement mixer smack in the middle of the road. We’d figured that this was the end of things up here, that there was no going farther, but now we see that the road does continue, out along a long stretch to a promontory. Far ahead in the distance, we see the red van stopping in front of a house.