by Tana French
Dina stared at me, openmouthed. My heart was ricocheting off my ribs; I could barely breathe. After a moment she threw her wineglass on the floor—it bounced on the rug, rolled away in an arc of red like flung blood—got up and headed for the door, scooping up her bag on the way. She deliberately passed so close to me that her hip barged into my shoulder; she was expecting me to grab her, fight her to make her stay. I didn’t move.
In the doorway, she said, “You’d better find a way to tell your work to fuck off. If you don’t come find me by tomorrow evening, you’re going to be sorry.”
I didn’t turn around. After a minute the door slammed behind her, and I heard her give it a kick before she ran off down the corridor. I sat very still for a long time, gripping the arms of my chair to stop my hands shaking. I listened to my heart banging in my ears and to the hiss of the speakers after the Debussy ran out, listened for Dina’s footsteps coming back.
My mother almost took Dina with her. It was sometime after one in the morning, on our last night at Broken Harbor, when she woke Dina, slipped out of the caravan and headed for the beach. I know because I came in at midnight, dazzled and breathless from lying in the dunes with Amelia under a sky like a great black bowl full of stars, and when I eased the caravan door open the bar of moonlight lit up all four of them, rolled up tight and warm in their bunks, Geri snoring delicately. Dina turned and murmured something as I slid into my bed with my clothes still on. I had bribed one of the older guys to buy us a flagon of cider, so I was half drunk, but it must have been an hour before that stunned delight stopped humming in my skin and I could fall asleep.
A few hours later I woke up again, to make sure it was all still true. The door was swinging open, moonlight and sea-sounds rushing in to fill up the caravan, and two bunks were empty. The note was on the table. I don’t remember what it said. Probably the police took it away; probably I could go looking for it in Records, but I won’t. All I remember is the P.S. It said, Dina is too little to do without her mum.
We knew where to look: my mother always loved the sea. In the few hours since I had been there, the beach had turned inside out, transformed itself into something dark and howling. A rising wind blustering, clouds scudding over the moon, sharp shells cutting my bare feet as I ran and no pain. Geri gasping for breath beside me; my father lunging towards the sea in the moonlight, flapping pajamas and flailing arms, a grotesque pale scarecrow. He was shouting, “Annie Annie Annie,” but the wind and the waves bowled it away into nothing. We hung on to his sleeves like kids. I shouted in his ear, “Dad! Dad, I’ll get someone!”
He grabbed my arm and twisted. My dad had never hurt any of us. He roared, “No! No one, don’t you bloody dare!” His eyes looked white. It was years before I realized: he still thought we were going to find them alive. He was saving her, from all the people who would take her away if they knew.
So we looked for them by ourselves. No one heard us shouting, Mummy Annie Dina Mummy Mummy Mummy, not through the wind and the sea. Geraldine stayed on land, up and down the beach, scrabbling through the sand dunes and clawing at clumps of grass. I went in the water with my father, thigh-deep. When my legs got numb it was easier to keep going.
For the rest of that night—I never figured out how long it lasted, longer than we should have been able to survive—I fought the current to stay standing and groped blind at it as it surged past. Once my fingers tangled in something and I howled because I thought I had one of them by the hair, but it came up out of the water a great lump like a chopped-off head and it was just seaweed, wrapping round my wrists, clinging when I tried to throw it away from me. Later I found a cold ribbon of it still bound around my neck.
When dawn started turning the world a bleak bleached gray, Geraldine found Dina, burrowed headfirst like a rabbit into a clump of marram grass, arms dug into the sand up to her elbows. Geri bent back long blades of grass one by one and scooped away handfuls of sand like she was freeing something that could shatter. Finally Dina was sitting up on the sand, shivering. Her eyes focused on Geraldine. “Geri,” she said. “I had bad dreams.” Then she saw where she was and started to scream.
My father wouldn’t leave the beach. In the end I wrapped my T-shirt around Dina—it was heavy with seawater, her shivering got worse—hoisted her over my shoulder and carried her back to the caravan. Geraldine stumbled along beside me, holding Dina up when my grip slid.
We pulled off Dina’s nightie—she was cold as a fish and gritted all over with sand—and wrapped her in everything warm we could find. Mum’s cardigans smelled of her; maybe that was what made Dina yelp like a kicked puppy, or maybe our clumsiness hurt her. Geraldine stripped like I wasn’t there and climbed into Dina’s bunk with her, pulled the duvet over both their heads. I left them there and went to find someone.
The light was turning yellow and the other caravans were starting to wake up. A woman in a summer dress was filling her kettle at the tap, with a couple of toddlers dancing around her, splashing each other and screaming with giggles. My dad had dropped to the sand by the waterline, hands hanging uselessly at his sides, staring at the sun rising over the sea.
Geri and I were covered head to toe in cuts and scrapes. The paramedics cleaned up the worst ones—one of them let out a low whistle when he saw my feet; I didn’t understand why until much later. Dina got taken to hospital, where they said she was physically fine apart from mild hypothermia. They let Geri and me take her home and look after her, until they decided my father wasn’t planning to “do anything silly” and they could let him out. We made up aunts and told the doctors they would help.
After two weeks, our mother’s dress came up in a Cornish fishing boat’s nets. I identified it—my father couldn’t get out of bed, I wasn’t about to let Geri, that left me. It was her best summer dress, cream silk—she had saved up—with green flowers. She used to wear it to Mass, when we were in Broken Harbor, then for Sunday lunch at Lynch’s and our walk along the strand. It made her look like a ballerina, like a laughing tiptoe girl off an old postcard. When I saw it laid out on a table in the police station, it was streaked brown and green from all the nameless things that had woven around it in the water, fingered it, caressed it, helped it on its long journey. I might not even have recognized it, only I knew what to look for: Geri and I had spotted it missing, when we packed away her things to leave the caravan.
That was what Dina had heard on the radio, with my voice swirling around it, the day I caught this case. Dead, Broken Harbor, discovered the body, State pathologist is at the scene. The near impossibility of it would never have occurred to her; all the rules of probability and logic, the neat patterns of center lines and cat’s-eyes that keep the rest of us on the road when the weather is wild, those mean nothing to Dina. Her mind had spun out into a smoking wreck of bonfire noises and gibberish, and she had come to me.
She had never told us what happened that night. Geri and I tried a couple of thousand times to catch her off guard—asked when she was half asleep in front of the telly, or daydreaming out the car window. All we got was that flat “I had bad dreams,” and her blue eyes skittering away to nothing.
When she was thirteen or fourteen we started to realize—gradually, and without any real surprise—that there was something wrong. Nights when she sat on my bed or Geri’s talking full speed until dawn, revved up into a frenzy about something we could barely translate, raging at us for not caring enough to understand; days when the school rang to say she was staring and glazed, terrified, like her classmates and her teachers had turned into meaningless shapes gesturing and jabbering; fingernail tracks scabbing on her arms. I had taken it for granted, always, that that night was the embedded thing corroding at the bottom of Dina’s mind. What else could have done it?
There isn’t any why. That dizziness took hold of me again. I thought of balloons unmoored and soaring, exploding in the thinning air under the pressure of their own we
ightlessness.
Footsteps came and went in the corridor, but none of them paused outside my door. Geri rang twice; I didn’t answer. When I could stand up, I blotted the rug with kitchen roll until I had soaked up as much of the wine as I could. I spread salt on the stain and left it to work. I poured the rest of the wine down the sink, threw the bottle in the recycling bin and washed the glasses. Then I found Sellotape and a pair of nail scissors and sat on my living-room floor, taping pages back into books and trimming the tape to within perfect hairsbreadths of the paper, until the heap of wrecked books was a neat stack of mended ones and I could start putting them back on my shelves, in alphabetical order.
15
I slept on the sofa, to make sure that even the quietest turn of a key in the lock would wake me. Four or five times that night I found Dina: curled asleep on my father’s doorstep, shrieking with laughter at a party while someone danced barefoot to wild drums; wide-eyed and slack-jawed under a glassy film of bathwater, fan of hair swaying. Every time I woke up already on my feet and halfway to the door.
Dina and I had fought before, when she was on a bad one. Never like this, but every now and then something I thought was innocuous had sent her whirling out in a fury, usually throwing something at me on her way out the door. I had always gone after her. Mostly I caught her within seconds, dawdling outside for me. Even the few times when she had given me the slip, or fought me and screamed till I backed off before someone called the police and she landed in a locked ward, I had followed and searched and phoned and texted till I got hold of her and coaxed her back to my place or Geri’s. That was all she wanted, deep down: to be found and brought home.
I got up early, showered, shaved, made some breakfast and a lot of coffee. I didn’t ring Dina. Four times I had a text half typed, but I deleted them all. On my way to work I didn’t detour past her flat, or risk crashing the car while I craned my neck at every slim dark-haired girl I passed: if she wanted me, she knew how to find me. My own daring left me breathless. My hands felt shaky, but when I looked at them on the wheel they were steady and strong.
Richie was already at his desk, with his phone clamped to his ear, swinging his chair back and forth and listening to perky hold music loud enough that I could hear it too. “Pest-control companies,” he said, nodding at a printout in front of him. “Tried all the numbers Pat got off the discussion board: no joy. This here, this is every exterminator in Leinster, so we’ll see what shows up.”
I sat down and picked up my phone. “If you get nothing, we can’t assume that means there’s nothing to get. A lot of people out there are working off the books these days. If someone didn’t declare a job to the Revenue, you think he’s going to declare it to us?”
Richie started to say something, but then the hold music cut out and he swung around to his desk. “Good morning, this is Detective Garda Richard Curran, I’m looking for some information . . .”
No message from Dina—not that I had expected one, she didn’t even have my work number, but a part of me had been hoping anyway. One from Dr. Dolittle and his dreadlocks, saying he had checked out the home-and-garden board and, whoa, some mad shit there or what? According to him, the lined-up skeletons sounded like something a mink would be into, but the idea of an abandoned exotic pet was also way cool, and there were totally guys out there who would smuggle in a wolverine and worry about the pet-care angle later. He was planning to have a wander around Brianstown over the weekend and see if he could find any signs of “something fun.” And a message from Kieran, who at eight on a Friday morning had already started pumping his world full of drum and bass, telling me to call him.
Richie hung up, shook his head at me and started dialing again. I rang Kieran back.
“Kemosabe! Hang on there.” A pause, while the music went down to a volume that meant he barely even had to shout. “I checked out your guy Pat-the-lad’s account on that home-and-garden board: no private messages, in or out. He could have deleted them, but to check that out, we’d need a subpoena to the site owners. Basically, that’s what I called to tell you: we’re running out of road here. The recovery software’s finished doing its thing, and we’ve checked out everything it gave us. No more posts about weasels or whatever, anywhere that’s in the computer history. Literally the most interesting thing we’ve got is some idiot forwarding Jenny Spain an e-mail about non-nationals kidnapping a kid in a shopping center and cutting its hair in the jacks, which is only interesting because it’s like the world’s oldest urban legend and I can’t believe people actually still fall for it? If you really want to know what was living in your guy’s attic, and you figure he told the net, then your next step is to put in a request to the vics’ service provider and keep your fingers crossed they hold info on visited sites.”
Richie hung up again; he kept one hand on the phone, but instead of redialing he watched me, waiting. “We don’t have time for that,” I said. “We’ve got less than two days to charge Conor Brennan or release him. Anything on his computer that I should know about?”
“Not so far. No links to the vics—none of the same websites, no e-mails to or from. And I’m not seeing any deletions over the last few days, so it’s not like he wiped the good stuff when he knew we were coming—unless he wiped it so well I can’t even see that, and excuse me if this sounds arrogant but I don’t think so? Basically, he’s barely even touched his machine in the last six months. Occasionally he checked his e-mail, he did some design upkeep on a couple of websites, and he watched a bunch of National Geographic animal documentaries online, but that’s about it. Real thrill seeker, this guy.”
“Right,” I said. “Keep looking through the Spains’ computer. And keep me posted.”
I could hear the shrug in Kieran’s voice. “Sure, Kemosabe. One needle in a haystack coming up. Catch you later.”
For a treacherous second I thought of leaving it. Whatever else Pat had said about his vermin problem, out there in cyberspace, what difference did it make? All it would do was give people yet another excuse to write him off as some nutter. But Richie was watching me, hopeful as a puppy watching his leash, and I had promised. “Stay on that,” I said, nodding at the pest-control list. “I’ve got an idea.”
Even under stress, Pat had been an organized guy, efficient. In his place, I wouldn’t have bothered to re-type my whole saga when I switched discussion boards. Pat might not have been a computer genius, by Kieran’s standards, but I was willing to bet he had known how to copy and paste.
I pulled up his original posts, the Wildwatcher one and the home-and-garden one, and started pasting sentences into Google. It only took four tries before a post by Pat-the-lad came up.
“Richie,” I said. He was already scooting his chair over to my desk.
The website was an American one, a forum for hunters. Pat had shown up there on the last of July, almost two weeks after he flamed out on the home-and-garden site: he had spent a while licking his wounds, or searching for the right place, or it had just taken that long for his need for help to reach a pitch he couldn’t ignore.
Not much had changed. I hear it most days but no real pattern—sometimes could be 4/5 times in a day/night, sometimes nothing for 24 hours. Have had a video baby monitor rigged up in the attic for a while now but no joy—am wondering if maybe the animal’s actually in the space between the attic floor/the ceiling underneath—tried to check w torch but can’t see anything. So I’m planning to leave the attic hatch open and point another video monitor at the opening, see if this thing gets ballsy + decides to go exploring. (I’ll put chicken wire over the hatch so it doesn’t show up on one of my kids pillow, don’t worry, I’m not totally mental . . . yet anyway!)
“Hang on,” Richie said. “Back on that home-and-garden site, Pat went apeshit about how he didn’t want Jenny knowing any of this; he didn’t want her scared. Remember? Now, but, he’s putting up that monitor on the landing. How was he
planning on hiding that from her?”
“Maybe he wasn’t. Married couples do talk occasionally, old son. Maybe Pat and Jenny had a good heart-to-heart somewhere along the way, and she knew all about the thing in the attic.”
“Yeah,” Richie said. One of his knees had started jiggling. “Maybe.”
But since the first monitor hasn’t been a big success I was wondering if anyone has any other ideas? Like species it could be or bait it might go for? PLEASE for Christ’s sake don’t tell me to use poison or get an exterminator or any of that shit because those are out, end of story. Apart from that any ideas welcome!!!
The hunters gave him the usual list of suspects, this time with a heavy slant towards mink—they agreed with Dr. Dolittle about the lined-up skeletons. When it came to solutions, though, they were a lot more hard-core than the other boards. Within a few hours, one guy had told Pat: OK so fuck this mousetrap bullshit. Time to grow a pair and break out the serious weaponry. What you need here is a real trap. Check this out.
The link went to a site like a trapper’s candy store, pages and pages of traps aimed at everything from mice to bear and everyone from animal lovers to full-on sadists, each one described in loving, semi-comprehensible jargon. Three choices. 1. You can go for a live trap, the ones that look like wire cages. Won’t hurt your target. 2. Go for a foothold trap, the one you probly picture from the movies. Will hold your target till you get back to it. Watch out though. Depending what you’ve got, the animal could make a lot of noise. If that would bug your wife or kids then maybe forget it. 3. Go for a Conibear trap. Breaks the target’s neck, kills it pretty much right away. Whatever you pick you want like a four inch jaw spread. Good luck. Watch your fingers.
Pat came back sounding a lot happier: again, the prospect of a plan had made all the difference. Man thanks a mil, you’re saving my arse here, I owe you big time. Think I’m going to go w the foothold—sounds weird but I don’t want to kill this thing, at least not till I’ve had a good look at it, I’ve got a right to come face to face with it after all this. At the same time though after all the hassle it’s given me, I don’t feel like going all out to make sure I don’t hurt a hair on its precious little head! To be honest I’m like fuck it, I’ve spent long enough taking shit from this thing, now its my turn to give it some shit for a change and I’m not going to waste my chance right?
