Mary Catherine adjusted her barrette and eyed him warily. “Maybe,” she said, looking behind her out the half-open door. “I show up early for class, making sure the blackboard has been cleaned and that there is enough chalk.” She narrowed her eyes and her mouth became a tight ringlet of distrust. “Where are your books?”
“I . . . thought it best first to see what your class is learning now,” he answered, thinking on his feet, but not quickly enough to make this child unclutch her weapon. In about a minute, Niall knew, she’d be howling bloody murder down the hallway, and he’d be done for burglary or worse. “Must be confusing to have had so many teachers since Miss Walsh. Did you like her?”
Mary Catherine sat down behind her front-row desk, which was still only inches away from the teacher’s. Her hands lay folded across an impressive stack of notebooks that would have made a librarian envious. That little brow loosed somewhat, and her voice dripped with the kind of melancholy people use to describe doddering relatives, long passed. “She wasn’t a bad sort,” said the child, “except when that Jim person was around. Then she went nuts. They say their aunt killed her and her sisters, but my mum tells me it was the other way around.” For the first time, the eyes looked unguarded, even curious. “Did you know Miss Walsh? I mean, know her outside of work?”
“Only a little. We were old friends from Dublin.” Niall eyed the door without appearing to do so and hoped the kid didn’t notice. Less than two minutes left before the next bell, and he still hadn’t found any more clues. He would go down to find Father Malloy next, and invent some kind of airtight excuse about wanting to see Róisín’s diary, if it still existed. “Did she keep any kind of notebook here at school anywhere, do you know? Just in case I need to see a record of your studies?”
Any hope Niall might have had of uncovering another of Fiona’s hidden treasure troves about the town’s most famous scandal faded as the girl searched her book pile without even looking. She pulled out a pristine pink hardback with Hello Kitty stickers neatly affixed by the animal’s head size. “I took notes on everything she taught us,” said Mary Catherine with a smile wider than a cat’s to spilled cream. “And even more on what she missed whenever she was seeing . . . him.”
Niall took the notebook and leafed through endless rows of missing lessons, indexed in four different colors of Magic Marker. There was nothing about what he really wanted to know. How did Jim manage to blur the traces he had left all over the surrounding countryside and on any number of people who already knew better? He should have gone straight to Father Malloy for the next chapter of the sisters’ story. Jim’s opium, even from a distance, had begun to dull Niall’s good senses, too.
“This Jim character,” said Niall, in too bright a voice for the occasion, pretending to study Mary Catherine’s demerit list with real interest. “Did he die suddenly?”
Mary Catherine’s proud look expecting of praise evaporated, and her smile turned nastier than a summer storm. “Everybody here knows what happened to him,” she said, looking Niall’s ill-fitting wardrobe up and down for the first time and smelling a rat. “If you were such a close friend of Miss Walsh’s, why don’t you?”
“We haven’t been . . . close for a while,” Niall said, stalling, feeling uncomfortably like the worm at the end of the hook in a very large ocean. He wasn’t encouraged by Mary Catherine’s metal smile, braces and all, as she rose and took back her pink attendance sheet with a hard yank.
Brringg! went the bell. Niall wondered why none of the other children had come barging in, and didn’t like how he could hear no voices squealing in the hallway.
“Are you really Mr. Breen?” she asked, cocking that efficient little head like it was spring-loaded.
“Never said I was,” Niall answered, shooting her an apologetic smile that failed to impress. “I’m sorry, but I’m not your new substitute teacher.”
The girl straightened her back like the Queen of Sheba on her throne, just before pronouncing judgment on captured enemies.
Niall followed her gaze out the window, where the garda woman he’d seen earlier that morning was walking up the steps.
“Never believed you were. And now we’ll see what they have to say about it,” Mary Catherine chirped, walking out and leaving Niall alone with Fiona’s dead pharaohs.
BRONAGH’S FINGERS TOOK their time turning over the long-haired fella’s An Post ID card.
“Now, yer not chasing down stamp thieves out here,” she said with a sigh. “So what are ya doing? Frightening children for the fun of it? Or exposing yerself to them, more like.” They sat in the squad car she’d inherited after Sergeant Murphy, her eternal shadow of discipline, had finally retired. Outside its windows, Mrs. Gately, the headmistress, stood at a polite distance, sweatered arms crossed, glaring at Niall. Mary Catherine, never too far behind to be noticed, was next to her, no doubt fantasizing about a violent spectacle to top off the arrest.
“I did nothing of the sort!”
Bronagh caught Mary Catherine’s eye. “Not what I heard. So what are ya doing?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
“So you tell everyone who cares to listen. Except yer not telling them much else, are ya? Poor Finbar is only at his wits’ end every time he sees a stranger at McSorley’s. I know what yer all like. Come for the scoop? To find out ‘how it all began’?” She pursed her lips as if getting ready to belt him one. “Your kind have trampled through here since Fiona and Róisín died. Vampires, all of yis!” Bronagh looked through Niall’s still-damp backpack with the same distaste as if the contents were raw sewage. “Some ratty old T-shirts, spare trousers, socks. Cadbury milk bar, half eaten.” She looked up in surprise. “Didja leave the camera at Laura’s? Figure it would give you away? No shame in you. No shame at all.”
“I’m no journalist,” said Niall, watching some of the parents huddle close enough to the car door to make a rush for it and tear him into little bits. “I—”
I’m what, then? he thought, knowing he’d never imagined ending up in this mess. I’m a thief, a liar, and a slacker squandering the public’s trust, is what. And I’m about to join Fiona’s Chinaman soon unless I think of something.
Bronagh’s mouth hung open, one eyebrow ready to believe him, but not much else. “Yer what? One of those crystal worshippers come to save us from the ‘evil that lives in this town’? Believe me, now the news cameras finally left, I’m still cleaning up those crazies every now and again. So let’s have it.”
“I’m a postal clerk in the town where those girls died,” Niall finally admitted, drawing a breath of air to steady his hands, which had begun to shake. “Right after it happened, one of them, Fiona, posted her diary. It ended up in my dead-letter bin. I read it. There are more questions than answers in it. And that’s why I’m here.”
Outside the window, parents had started to gather. One of the fathers hefted a hurley and looked back at Niall with something like vulpine hunger for blood. Mary Catherine walked over to him with a puppy-dog face and pointed at the car. Daddy, look what the bad man made me do. That little witch! thought Niall. It won’t be long now.
But to his surprise, Bronagh started the car and waved at the obviously disappointed lynch mob. Her face was impassive, as people informed of a great loss usually are right before the feelings kick in. As the car sped down the hill, the last thing Niall saw was Mary Catherine’s patient face. Can’t keep running in a town this small, it seemed to say. You and my father will meet again soon enough.
“This conversation we’re about to have,” said Bronagh, in a voice much less cocksure than the New York City TV cop she had always pretended to be, “I’ll swear on my mother’s name never happened. And we’re not going to the station to talk.”
THE DARK BUTTER-COLORED grass covering the Caha Mountains like hundreds of sparse wigs whipped in the wind, as it always did. Sheep glared with mild disinterest.
Niall sat in the passenger seat of the patrol car, stomach curling into knots of e
mbarrassment as he listened to Bronagh verifying his story over the phone with the only person who could. Even from the next seat over, that voice of well-thought-out disappointment in a raw recruit was more than he could bear.
Bronagh smirked and turned her head to him. “He says he expected better of you, pretending to be a postal clerk when you’ve really been fired and all.”
“I never said I wasn’t.”
She held out an admonishing finger while listening to the rest, coming through the mobile like the very essence of a Bengal Lancer’s honor code. “Now he says something about how you didn’t listen to what he tried to warn you against,” Bronagh added. “And how he’s sure you’ve been sucked into the pictures again. Have you any idea what he’s talking about?”
“Yes,” admitted Niall, and locked eyes with a sheep right outside, chewing the grass. He thought of the wolf once more, except this time it had meshed with Jim’s image in his mind, creating a kind of half-human figure. “Unfortunately, I do.”
“Thanks a million, Mr. Raichoudhury,” said Bronagh, ringing off. She exhaled while she shooed the animal away, then looked out at the sea. “I failed her, you know. She was my best friend once, Fiona was, and she came to me needing help. Róisín did, too. And I didn’t help. Now it’s too late.”
“Maybe it isn’t.” Niall reached in the back of his jacket, and Bronagh jumped at him with a can of mace ready to go.
“Wait! I have something to show you!” shouted Niall, less than a second before eating pepper spray. Slowly, he withdrew the now even more battered diary and handed it over. “Here it is. See? I couldn’t help reading it, when it was just lying there with a dead woman’s name on it, could I? I’m sorry. But I’ve come too far already to worry about an arrest for stealing public property, Garda.” He hesitated, watching Bronagh’s eyes brimming with tears as she carefully opened the book, touching the pages as if they would burn if she looked at them for too long. “She was your friend, I know,” he continued, a bit more carefully. “But I’ve come to know her, too. In my own way.”
There was only the sound of the wind rocking the car, and of the sheep trying to nibble on the paint job. Out in the bay, two trawlers bucked against a headwind, aerials bending as far back as they would go.
“Thanks for letting me see this, really,” said Bronagh, having got some of her composure back. “But you still haven’t told me why you’ve come. And what you were doing inside the school. Parents will be calling me. Soon.”
“Then tell ’em I was Fiona’s exotic Dublin ghetto boyfriend,” said Niall, frustrated with all the gaps in his knowledge. “I wanted to find out more of what took place in that house, and of what happened out here. To Aoife. And to Jim.”
Bronagh’s eyes grew distant, and that frightened Niall more than her anger.
“We never speak much of that man out here anymore,” she said. “And neither should you.”
“Oh, really? Then what about Julie Ann Holland over in Drimoleague? I suppose she died from slipping on a banana skin, is that it?”
Bronagh’s hand clutched the pepper spray again. “You haven’t a fiddler’s fuck what yer talking—”
“There’s another diary in town somewhere,” Niall said, so loudly that a sheep outside flinched and scurried at the sound. “Róisín wrote one as well, if you believe what your friend Fiona says! I haven’t a clue how either book made it out of that house, but Róisín’s was sent to Father Malloy, unless it never got—”
Bronagh grabbed Niall by the scruff of the neck and pulled. “Police brutality is just a word, Niall. Until I break both yer arms and leave you here.” She saw no fear in his eyes and let go after a long breath, even smoothing out his collar.
“I forgot,” said Niall, heart racing. “You always wanted to be a TV cop in America.”
The husky garda fished around in the console for a cigarette and pushed some angry air out her nostrils when she found none. “Shut up. I’ve chased away goth girlies, journos, and yer ordinary sick souvenir hunters for weeks. The first place they all go is to Father Malloy’s, since a Dublin newspaper article had the grace to mention our church by name.” She tapped on the glass to make that same persistent sheep go away. “Trouble with that is, the good Father passed away more than a month ago now, God rest him. If anybody sent him anything, I would have found it. Me and some of Fiona’s students cleaned out his office afterward. But people like you still come. Looking for ‘the truth.’ Right?”
“Only the truth about what Fiona and her sisters did to Jim,” said Niall, without hesitating. “And to whether or not he killed more than just his old friend Tomo.” He felt his face flushing the same way it had when he thought the bartender was going to stomp his guts. What the hell was she holding out on him for? Hadn’t he proved his good intentions? “But you wouldn’t know about that, would you? Sarah McDonnell? And one more girl in Kenmare, if you believe Róisín’s radio voice. Ring any bells? What happened to Aoife? She go the same way as them? Shall I go look for her in old Glebe Graveyard, or what?”
Bronagh started the engine. Her chin was again resting firmly on the slick uniform jacket. When she spoke, the last trace of friendliness was gone. She handed Niall the diary as if it contained thoughts that could contaminate by touch. “I would have gone to Fiona’s and Róisín’s funeral, but I only heard after it had already happened. I spent weeks trying to find the postman who discovered them. You have no idea what it’s been like for us out here since. Living in the town that spawned ‘Moira’s murder house.’”
“Desmond,” said Niall, remembering a stooped-over figure, transformed by guilt into Malahide’s whipping boy. “Nobody ever heard from him after that.”
“Think about that the next time you poke around stories people want to forget.”
Niall tried to ignore the threat. The wind shifted and blew onshore, dusting the fields with a fine spray of salty rain. “He’s dead, isn’t he? Jim? Just tell me that much.”
Bronagh reached over and opened the passenger door. Her face betrayed a ghastly memory, before it vanished again. “Doesn’t matter,” she said, and pushed him out. “Memories die harder than people out here.”
Darkness crawled up on his ankles in the tall grass. The sheep scattered, as if an inaudible shotgun blast had gone off. Niall dug into his pocket and was reassured he could still catch the train back home and forget this entire story. Not that Oscar the cat would care either way. Niall looked west toward the setting sun, back the way they had come, and knew he couldn’t let it go. If he hurried, he might still be able to find a clue about where Róisín’s diary could be found, despite what Bronagh had tried to warn him about.
Somewhere Father Malloy could throw flowers on it, isn’t that what Fiona had written?
It was time to go treasure hunting in the graveyard.
He picked up his rucksack and began to walk.
• 6 •
There was something wrong with the lights.
Niall had chosen a new route back to Castletownbere, just in case Bronagh was waiting for him on the way. The rains had finally ceased, so he’d managed to reach town limits by walking across the rolling hills and following the last gleam of the evening sun. He’d twisted an ankle because it was too dark to see the rocks, jutting out of the ground like frozen gray hands.
That’s why he was surprised when he reached a back road and saw what looked, at first glance, to be thousands of candles on a giant birthday cake, looming out of the void. It appeared that an entire hillside was on fire, but the lights neither grew nor dimmed. Instead, they flickered on and off steadily, illuminating odd shapes it was impossible to distinguish even as he inched closer. This place was nowhere near anything Fiona had described in her diary but lay north of town, on the winding road toward Eyeries.
When Niall had walked around an endless hedgerow, he finally stood in front of an ancient stone wall, slick with rainwater and eroded by time. The lights, hungry and dark red, lit up the moist air beyond and produced a c
loud that seemed to breathe on its own. Niall’s fingers found a rusted gate and gave it a tug. It was locked. He fumbled his way past and stopped.
There. Letters. Hammered into the limestone. They had been worn down but were still traceable. A quick fumble for his mobile phone produced enough weak blue light to read that this was the old Saint Finian’s Cemetery, whatever that was. He looked both ways in the road and scaled the wall, minding the foot, swollen and tender already.
He stumbled off the wall and fell, feeling something warm and wet spilling over his hand. There was the tinkling of broken glass. Niall brought his fingers up to his face and smelled candle wax. All around, as far as he could see, someone had placed what appeared as thousands of votive candles encased in red glass. Many of the graves he could see were overgrown, while others were as lovingly tended as a war memorial. But this only appeared to be the outer circle from which the strongest source of light emanated. At the lowest point in the terracelike cemetery, the fiercest red gleam lit up even the distant trees, like floating embers.
“Who’s there?”
It was a young woman’s voice, both assertive and scared. Niall crept closer to a hedgerow, behind which he could see the vague outline of a female form, prostrate on a grave. He didn’t answer. The figure rose, impatient swoosh of the long hair, and began combing the grounds.
“Is that you, Séamus, come to steal our holy offerings again? I won’t just warn you this time, and that’s a promise.” How old could she be? wondered Niall, wedging himself down between two sunken headstones, and guessed about sixteen. There was in her voice the clarity and lack of hesitation found only in true believers. He stayed low and didn’t get a good look at her before she returned to her original spot, sitting back down this time in the lotus position.
Soon, a humming sound rose up into the fine crimson mist that first sounded like singing. Niall crawled out of his twin grave and edged closer. When he was near enough to smell the singer’s patchouli perfume, he could hear the words quite clearly, and they made his flesh crawl.
Darling Jim Page 17
