The girl was chanting the praises of the person on whose grave she sat.
“. . . the most beautiful, blessed are your eyes. You are the most kind, blessed is your heart. You are the most generous, blessed are your acts. You are the most—”
“—the most homicidal raving lunatic ever to visit hell on West Cork?”
The girl leaped several feet into the air at the sound of Niall’s voice and turned to face the long-haired intruder, who had risen right in front of her like Lazarus from his grave. “Who . . . you’ve no right to be here!”
“As much right as you or anybody else, I reckon.”
“You’re a tourist? Come to take the name of a good man in vain?” Her mouth was hidden by the half darkness, but the sound of her breathing through clenched teeth was loud and unsettling.
Niall stepped all the way in front of the girl and could now see the headstone.
HERE LIES JIM QUICK
BORN OF WOMAN
SLAIN BY WOMAN
REST IN PEACE
There was no mention of God or any other benediction. Niall guessed even getting the bastard a half-decent burial had nearly caused a revolution at the parish. A mess of candles, rosaries, Tibetan prayer beads, and what appeared to be a human skull with a heart carved into its forehead covered the earth before the headstone. Rotting fruit, half-drunk bottles of whiskey, and hundreds—no, thousands!—of handwritten notes merely added to the reverence. The girl stroked the cold stone. Even in death, Niall thought, old Jim still knows how to reel them in.
“I don’t think some of the women he met on his way would agree,” said Niall, trying to keep his eyes on the girl’s hands, which she kept low and out of sight. He thought of the image he’d had in his mind on the train, of a wolf beset by furies with knives, and backed away from her.
“I suppose you believe the ones who murdered him to be heroes?” spat the girl. “Doing it far away from town, where nobody could see? Bleeding him like a dog?” Her ankle-length dress shivered as anger coursed through her body like fresh poison.
“They managed to do it after all? The Walsh sisters?”
The girl crossed her arms and regarded Niall for a moment, as some of the candles hissed and died. She seemed to squint at him in the darkness with new interest. “You’re that fella who broke into Sacred Heart today, aren’t ya? Sure.” She stepped into a ring of light next to a group of candles on a stone, and now Niall saw she could not have been a day over fourteen. Her eyes, evenly placed in an almost masculine face, now sought only answers where all they had wanted moments ago was Niall’s untimely end. “That means you must have the first diary. Can I see it? Is it true? Please.”
Niall backed a few feet farther away, to the edge of the uppermost terrace plot. Below him, there was nothing but steep darkness. It was impossible to measure how far he’d fall or how hard he might land. “So then you’ve seen Róisín’s diary?” he said. “It’s real?”
The star child held out a hand, as if to touch Niall to make sure he was flesh and blood and not some prophet from her wish-dreams, who might soon again depart into the ether. “I never saw it myself,” said the girl, who Niall could now see was wearing a necklace of dried irises around a thin neck. For some reason, this scared him more than anything. “But old Mrs. Kane says Father Malloy did receive it before his death. No one knows where it is now. It’s gone.” Her eyes flickered, and her voice broke as she repeated, “Gone. All gone.”
“Do your—erm, parents know you’re out here all alone?” Niall said, and caught a glimpse of something caroming off the treetops in the near distance. It looked like a flicker of headlights. “Seems they’d be worried about you.”
The creature didn’t answer but gazed behind Niall. She had a look of confusion on her narrow face, as if the cavalry was too early. Or, perhaps, never invited at all.
“They’re not welcome here either!” she said, setting her small jaw for a fight.
Niall turned and saw several beams of light in the road just beyond the stone wall, pinwheeling around as if held by many hands. The low muttering of men’s voices made the blood begin to beat faster in his throat. His way out was blocked. Niall stared into the darkness behind him and knew he had no choice, especially if one of those men was Mary Catherine’s father and half the parent-teacher council.
“Take care of yourself, kid,” he said, and ran past the waif.
He jumped as far into the black distance as he could, and waited for the pain.
Ba-da-thump! Niall landed, several terraces down, on soft ground. His ankle hurt, but he could move it about. He smelled fresh mud and praised the rainfall. Above him, broad-chested figures had reached the promontory and tried to shine their flashlights on him. They were silhouetted by red candlelight as the celestial embodiments of that poor girl’s visions.
“There he is!” one of them shouted. “Over here!”
Niall slipped in the marsh, but fear quickened his step, and he began to run. Despite the pain, he ran faster and farther than he ever had before in his life. His ankle hurt like someone had shoved glass up the ball of his foot all the way to the knee, but he didn’t stop. The last thing he heard before disappearing over a hill and losing sight of the red glow was a pleading, hysterical girl’s voice. It carried across the fields like a lost shepherd’s.
“Come back!” it cried. “I want that diary. Come baaack!”
NIALL FELT A prim, insistent whisper in his ear before he awoke. A child’s voice cut through the hazy dream he’d had about hippie girls chanting the dead back to life.
“Wake up, mister postman.”
He jolted awake and sat up. It was still dark, and all he could see before him were his own wet boots. He didn’t even remember dozing off. How long had he slept in his hiding place between an outcropping of moss-overgrown rock? Panic squeezed through him once more, and his eyes whipped around, expecting to see a lynch mob carrying druid lanterns and a hanging rope. But there was nothing, just the scratching sounds of nocturnal animals. It irritated Niall how right Mr. Raichoudhury continued to be, even from a distance. And he wondered how long it had taken that old teacher to die as he sat in the dusty marketplace, trying to copy the majesty of one perfect image.
“Over here!”
Niall nearly jumped out of his skin and scrambled to his feet. It hadn’t been a dream! The bloated ankle reminded him of its existence, and dropped him right back on his fugitive arse. That voice nearby sounded like the pursuers, who—
“Relax,” said the child again, giggling. “They’re looking along the coastal road so far, not here. But they won’t be gone for long.”
“Who is . . . ?”
A girl stepped out from behind a tree, dressed in a black rain slicker and rubber boots at least two sizes too big, probably her mother’s. She had the hood cinched tightly to her round face, but there was no mistaking the identity of the most ambitious sixth-class pupil Fiona Walsh had ever taught.
Mary Catherine Cremin knelt next to Niall and smiled.
“Come to lead the hunters to the prey, have you?” he asked.
“You have something I want. I’ll trade you for it. And don’t pretend you’ve no clue what I’m talking about.” She produced a large old-fashioned rifled metal flashlight from her pocket, and put her thumb on the power slide. “Because my father and the others react to one of these faster than if I called him on the phone. They’re all out looking. For the stranger who was alone with Mr. Cremin’s only daughter for a long, long time. Imagine that.”
Niall looked around. He could now see a faint cluster of bluish beams down by the main road, uncertain of where to search next. All they needed was one pinprick of light to lead them up the hill.
Mary Catherine took something else out of her schoolbag, neatly affixed across her chest. It was still wrapped in a plain brown envelope and looked like it had lived underwater for years.
“An even swap, right?” she said. The pages on the notebook she slid out of the paper were w
arped and bent out of shape from humidity. “I have already copied down the entire thing and don’t need it anymore. But I need the first part of the story. Miss Walsh’s diary. So show me.”
She had leaned so close to him that Niall could see her wide blue eyes. There was no pity or hesitation there. He reached back into the lining of his pants, found the plastic sheet covering Fiona’s dying thoughts, and held it out in front of him.
“Who was the girl back there? At the cemetery?” he asked.
The kid shrugged. “They keep showing up, and the groundskeeper keeps chasing them away. Some of them smoke so much skunk it reeks for miles.” A sly smile. “But my father tells me to be on guard for strange men like you, not hippie girls.”
“What does your father think I did inside that classroom?”
“Use your imagination. After Jim, parents have been easy to give a good scare.”
“You little witch.”
Her free hand made a gesturing motion. “You should be grateful I’m giving you Róisín’s diary at all. I could have sold it to them journalists who came around.”
“How’d you get it?”
Mary Catherine smiled. To Niall’s left, the flashlight grouping below him now seemed less confused. It marched, silently, back up the mountain. Toward him. “I helped clean out the rectory after Father Malloy died,” she said. “And the envelope was just lying there. His housekeeper, Mrs. Kane, never saw me do it. Some of the pages are destroyed, but. Must have been in some rainy bin somewhere.” She looked out into the darkness and the first beam of light strafed her forehead. “Out of time. Do we have a deal?”
Niall handed her Fiona’s diary. After a quick second, she handed him hers.
“Don’t stay here too long,” said Mary Catherine, sounding genuinely concerned for his safety. She pointed north, past the dark hills leading up to Eyeries. “Stay off the roads. Walk for another half hour or so. You’ll find an abandoned cottage. I won’t send anybody there. Promise.”
Niall’s ankle was throbbing, but fear gave him one last shot of adrenaline. He ran a thumb across Róisín’s diary, and it felt exactly like her sister’s, but even more damaged. The entire first half was illegible pulp. “Why are you letting me have this?”
At this, the little girl frowned, as if that was the dumbest question she’d ever heard. “Because Miss Walsh always said to be kind to strangers.” Then she was gone into the darkness, and Niall was alone with the rain and his new treasure.
HE HAD WALKED for over an hour across open ground when he walked right into a stone wall.
It was impossible to tell what else might be next to it, for the mountains had been covered by clouds, undulating between the peaks like fat gray snakes. Niall fumbled his way over to what appeared to be a door. A light push, followed by a reluctant creak, and he was inside. His fingers found a light switch, which didn’t work. Another light stumble, and he was standing next to something soft. A couch? A chair? He gently eased his way into it, and it appeared to be dry. There was the rhythmic drumming of water dripping through the roof from somewhere upstairs. Niall’s ankle was on fire. But his curiosity was greater than that discomfort.
He powered on his mobile phone and pointed the small LED screen down toward the notebook in his lap. Would the pursuers see the faint blue reflection? He moved the phone along the floor and saw rat droppings and strewn paper. Nobody had been here for a long time. Niall hid the mobile and stared out where he imagined the window might be. There were no lights to be seen anywhere. Had Mary Catherine sent her father up the hill after all? Niall took his pathetic reading lamp back out, and decided to take the chance. The phone’s battery had three bars left. And dawn had to be coming soon.
“Tell me a secret, Róisín,” he said, and turned the first page.
Part Three
RÓISÍN’S
DIARY
• 7 •
I’ve been hearing voices since I was six years old.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Poor girl, a recluse, shut-in and withdrawn from infancy. No doubt this kind of antisocial behavior is what led to her alcoholism and unquenchable appetite for wireless radios rather than fuzzy human contact. Bound to end up in black jeans and in the arms of some tart. Right? But you can take that politically correct pity and stick the label on somebody else. I’ve lived a life of dreams, you see. I’ve surfed on a many-layered cloud of strangers’ vocal cords, drifting out at me since the very beginning from cheap handheld transistors, where I could close my eyes and walk in the Kalahari or sail the seven seas. All without leaving the house. The room I shared with my sisters as a girl was tiny, you understand? Aoife and I slept in the same bed until the accident that left us orphaned. And in all those years I spent at Aunt Moira’s bed-and-breakfast, those invisible radio waves made every dreary Sunday bearable, each dull everyday sound glorious.
I’ve been loyal to those voices ever since. Because they never deserted me.
The room where I’m writing these words to you now is so small I can barely even call it a room. It’s a hollow section of the wall in my Aunt Moira’s house in Dublin, from where Fiona says we may never emerge alive. She could be right, I don’t know anymore. I’m usually too tired all the time now to analyze anything but the sinking feeling inside my chest. But Fiona talks a mile a minute, doesn’t she? Always did. I love her to pieces, but you sometimes have to subtract half of her ire to get at what she’s really trying to say. Not to mention her bleedin’ pharaoh fetish.
I know I’m as weakened as she at this point, and I look a fright besides, but this much I’ll give her: I feel that same gnawing inside that she moans about in her sleep. Like claw marks in my stomach lining. Something in the food, she says. Yeah, right, try calling it food one more time, willya? I’d brain ya with something hard if only I had the energy to get up anymore and look for the shovel Fiona’s just found.
Rescue.
I dream of it, even when I’m awake and trying to blink the blurry strangeness out of my eyes that’s there all the time now. I close them and think of endless horizons. Sometimes I dream of mountain climbers, plucked from howling summits by helicopter at the last moment. Other times it’s submariners, tapping a code on the steel hull to the divers outside before the oxygen runs out.
Just now, for instance, I see in my mind a lone mariner somewhere on the endless ocean. She’s been marooned inside a rescue raft when her ship foundered and sank, trying to signal planes flying past for weeks without noticing her. She’s survived this long by catching birds and sucking them clean, sparing only the feathers. It hasn’t rained for days, and her tongue is swollen like a bug. Then, disoriented by thirst and hopelessness, she hears the sound of propellers and looks up. There! It’s a seaplane, white and large and beautiful. It’s tipping its wings and droning so low overhead she can see the dried-up fuel spills on the battered silver fuselage. She leans back and tries to remember the sound of her own name. She hasn’t spoken a word for over a month.
Neither have I, come to think of it. Except for thank you and I love you to my sister, but those don’t count.
I have waking dreams like this, even during the day. Visions of freedom, images of escape. Of being outside, smelling grass. I watch over Fiona when she sleeps, or tries to. I listen to our demon aunt, scurrying downstairs like a roach at all hours of the night, or like one of those homeless fellas who used to sort through our rubbish bins at home. For some reason, it makes me homesick.
But mostly, behind my eyelids, I think of Jim.
And I dream of murder.
ONE OF THE last times I saw Jim alive, he was helping two girls across Main Street with their groceries.
Easy as you please, hand gently on one of their elbows, and a polite nod to traffic on the way. He was wearing one of Harold’s old Hawaiian shirts, green pineapples flapping on red silk in the sun. I hate to admit it, but it suited him.
I was coming down the hill on my bicycle, on my way to buy supplies for Aoife, who still refused t
o leave her house. It had been almost a week since that pikey bastard tried to shut us all up. And then I nearly ran him and those two girlies over, only stomping on the pedals at the last moment. Jim danced past my front tire and did a little jig, which made the girls laugh. He placed a steady hand on my handlebars, giving it a playful shake. My sister’s blade still lay at the bottom of my bag, inches away. I swear to Christ I could have bled him right then and there.
And then he smiled. Not too wide or too flirtatiously, just a lightning glimpse of whatever lurked beneath the handsome, suntanned skin.
If I’d had doubts before about whether I could go through with turning that skin permanently gray, I no longer had them as Jim continued to the parking lot by the harbor. I wanted him deader than Judas Iscariot. But I did what I’ve done to every gobshite hard-on in this town whenever I wanted him to feel like a big man, just to make him feel safe: I cocked my head at him like I was charmed or impressed, and flashed him my pearly whites. And as I got off my bike and went into the SuperValu, I could feel his eyes on my arse. It was almost depressing how easy it was with men, even for a cunning specimen like our resident storyteller. And you may wonder yourself, dear reader, why I did it at all. But trust me when I tell you that I was already devising my own plan to somehow plant Aoife’s steak knife in his back soon enough. In the meantime, I needed him to fear nothing from this cowed little goth girl.
When I came out of the store with my bags ten minutes later, he was nowhere to be seen. The two girls he’d helped were sitting in an old Renault, smoking cigarettes and laughing at something I couldn’t hear. Trawler diesel fumes mixed with stout wafted across the road and made me think of my father. He used to buy us ice cream cones right here with both vanilla and strawberry, nursing a pint he would savor slowly. Today, the crêpe cart was doing brisk business, and boys shoved each other to get the vendor’s attention. To anybody else, it was a day for taking a stroll down to the square.
Darling Jim Page 18
