He looked up at Aoife with the oddest expression. I’m not even sure I can recall it correctly now, but it was something like fatigue or resignation. Like an animal knowing the arrow is coming.
“And as for me?” He took a deep breath and told my twin, “You know why I chose you, right? And neither of these two? It wasn’t just because I knew you’d slept with half the town and would suspect nothing. No, it’s because I knew it would hurt you so much more than it would the others, especially afterward. Fiona, there, she’s tougher than she thinks, and little sis likes the girls herself. But the sound you made when I turned you over and stu-uurgghh! . . .”
I had jammed the knife into his chest, all the way to the hilt, before I could even think. I wrenched it out and planted it in him again. I got blood in my eye and wiped it away like sticky rain. I felt nothing. I understood nothing. My ears pounded, telling me something a wolf might have understood that I didn’t want to hear.
Someone took the knife out of my hand, I think it was Fiona, because I saw her bend over Jim herself and move her arm up and down. She only stopped when Aoife put a hand on her shoulder.
Something red and metallic caught the sun, and I turned toward it. I stumbled and fell before I reached the 1950 Vincent Comet, parked on the edge of the pier. There wasn’t as much as a speck of fly shit on the gas tank, and it sloshed as I rocked it back and forth. My hands tingled. The dark blood on them had already begun to coagulate. I looked back at my sisters. Aoife held Fiona, who waved one hand in the air and tried to get some words out between sobs. The heat beat down on us, turning even the sky paper-white, and it made me squint as I remembered how Sarah McDonnell was missing one shoe when they found her.
I broke the key off in the ignition and put the other piece in my bag. For a trophy, perhaps, I couldn’t tell ya. I just did it. Then I kicked the motorcycle into the water. When it was gone, you couldn’t even see a glint of red underneath the surface. Perhaps, I thought for a fleeting second, Jim Quick had never come our way after all. I could almost imagine it. Some of the pressure on my chest lifted as I walked back to join my sisters.
Jim’s eyes were half open. A white butterfly landed on his neck, drawn by the crimson of a fresh neck wound. I kicked him, and he slumped to the side. He felt like a bag of rotten apples already. He didn’t move as I put my foot into his back one more time and felt something breaking inside.
There again was the barking of a dog, somewhere close by. Without a word, Aoife slung the shotgun around her shoulder and grabbed each of us by the hand. My body was numb. I became aware of my hands once more when I sat in the passenger seat, wiping them on that stupid dress. They hurt, as if I’d beat him to death. I’ll never understand why that is. Do hands that kill also swallow a portion of the anguish they cause? Perhaps. Since then, they’ve always felt sore.
I looked out the rear window of Aoife’s taxi and saw Jim, still sitting underneath that tree, like a lad who just fell asleep. He even made a gorgeous corpse. I can remember wishing we’d hung him up by the heels, instead. Or asked him first if he knew that fella from my radio, who seemed to know all about him. Aoife stepped on it, and we were off. The sound of the sand crunching around the tires was louder than anything else I could hear.
Then we stopped so abruptly I nearly hit my head on the dash. Aoife left the Mercer idling and ran out the door, back to the tree. Fiona and I stared after her, silenced by the blood on our faces and this act we now shared equally. That damn dog hadn’t stopped barking and sounded closer now. Aoife came back, floored the gas pedal, and we drove with the door still flapping open like in one of those western saloons. God, but she looked like one of Fiona’s sphinxes just then. Eyes straight ahead, and no part of her face moving at all. She raced so fast all the way back to the cottage I couldn’t even read the road signs.
“Whatcha go . . . back for?” I finally asked her, finding my own breath in a stranger’s lungs.
“The knife,” she said, sounding centuries away. “You’d left it in his chest.”
IF YOU WANT to hear all about how we wallowed in mental anguish for what we did, I’m sorry to disappoint you. There was no frantic scurrying around for a spare rosary in the days that followed what can only be called an execution. None of us, so far as I know, asked forgiveness for our sins. And that old Lady Macbeth was wrong, as it turned out. Jim’s blood washed off nicely with ordinary soap and water.
And let me just stop you right there, for I can tell you’re thinking we relished what we’d done, right? Whooped and hollered around in Aoife’s living room like mad Indian squaws who had taken our favorite Seventh Cavalry scalp? We were corrupted youth with no sense of how serious it all was, knocking back firewater for days afterward? Did I hear you right? But that’s not how it was, not at all.
If you care to hear the truth, it’s simply that we knew there would be no more young women found half naked in a ditch somewhere. Yes, I’ll admit it was also revenge for Aoife, but there was something else, too. My sisters and I had begun to drift apart even before Jim made it worse. Aoife and Fiona had nearly fought over that bastard, and it pained me to watch. Not to mention our dear aunt’s threats of late. So if I say out loud that killing the seanchaí made me and my sisters a family again, you have my permission to roll yer eyes. Let’s just agree that we three grew closer the second Jim stopped breathing air and leave it at that.
Once we got to Aoife’s cottage, we didn’t leave that desolate spot of ground for days. I know that may seem stupid to you, us being the logical suspects, and all, but we needed one another more than planning a good defense for the first Garda enquiry. To be honest, the last thing on our minds was any kind of cozy future. For a brief time, we lived inside a bubble of our own making. And when we closed our eyes, it seemed to us all that we had returned to the second floor above the newsagent’s, with Father and Mother still downstairs, soon coming up to join us for dinner.
We spent the first night getting our heads together, but it didn’t work. In the end, we collapsed in a heap at dawn, our bodies heavy with the work we’d done. All the next day, so far as I can remember any of it, was spent rummaging through the kitchen for something more than chocolate fingers to eat. I found some frozen shepherd’s pie, which I divvied up by three. It tasted manky. We watched the night dissolve once more into gray, then black, while our stomachs rumbled.
The following day, we all seemed to wake up a bit. Perhaps, I thought, nothing had really happened that we couldn’t wish away by boring ourselves stiff. And still, the guards hadn’t come. So I decided to shake up the boredom by removing some evidence. I read about it in a book. It’s what you’re supposed to do, right?
While Fiona tried to make something edible out of spaghetti and tomato ketchup, I doused our clothes with petrol and burned them. Even Aoife’s favorite jacket, the one where yellow butterflies only just evaded the men chasing them with nets, went the same way as my demon-slut skirt. The knife was harder to make disappear. I used pliers to rip the blade from the handle, which I melted into a black glob. Then I took a shovel and trudged far into Aoife’s mysterious woods, where I often before had seen her stand in silence, just listening. It gave me the shivers as dew-covered trees seemed to close in on me, but I found the right spot. I heard the tide coming in and realized I had wandered so far away from the house that I was now close to the spot where we’d left Jim’s darling bones. I dug a hole three feet deep next to a decapitated oak with just one live branch left, dropped the blade into it, then filled in the dirt and covered everything up with fallen branches. As I turned to walk away, I was struck by something I’d been too caught up to realize earlier.
Jim had directed his own death right on the spot, hadn’t he? There was no other explanation for the way he’d spat his delight at tormenting Aoife into our faces like that. He drew my blade just as surely as if the fingers around the handle had been his own. I can remember feeling angry at the thought. Cheated, really. I knew why he’d done it. Sooner or later, some l
ucky garda would have caught him making a mistake and put the cuffs on him, perhaps even as soon as on his wedding day. And prison was out of the question. Perhaps, I wondered, he also knew that legends grow faster if they first suffer a spectacular death. I finally shivered and couldn’t get out of there fast enough. That forest scared me more than the sucking sound coming from Jim’s chest when I yanked out the knife. Was that the power of a story, I wonder, a lingering effect of Jim’s fairy tales? Or just the invisible nature of what killing does to the human mind? You tell me.
As I stoked the fire and watched the last shreds of fabric turn to ashes, I stared out across the field. When you stood at the edge of the gravel driveway and stared back toward town, you could see a few people’s kitchen windows lit up like dim stars. Moira’s house was over beyond the next ridge, just out of sight. But I imagined her pacing up and down the hallway, flanked by those plaster saints, checking her watch every few seconds. Because Jim still hadn’t come home. And I swear to you, I nearly felt sorry for her. I smelled something like burnt tomato from the kitchen and went back inside. My sisters had already ruined dinner, no doubt.
I wondered, as I closed the door behind me, when our aunt would be standing right outside, demanding more than an answer.
LATER THAT SAME night, I dreamed of Evvie. She had been unfurling the sails on a schooner built from used Egyptian sarcophagi, and we both sailed on a velvet sea, under a sky with no moon. I held her hand, noticing that it was changing color from pale snow to obsidian black. When I looked up at her face, afraid of what I’d see, an explosion somewhere beyond the tranquil horizon, in the real world, ripped our hands apart and I sat bolt upright in Aoife’s bed, wondering where I was. The windows rattled, and everything on the shelf came crashing to the floor. Outside, the flickering orange signature of a fire waved its many fingers.
Fiona had been curled up around me and she boxed a solid fist into my stomach as she started awake. Both of us knocked our heads together before finding our bathrobes and stumbling outside. Aoife was nowhere in the house as we found our way to the front door and opened it. I can remember thinking it was Aunt Moira, come to firebomb us back to Revelation.
The Mercer was burning. Flames poured out of its broken windows so quickly I could see the roof starting to buckle in the heat, before the tires were even flat yet. The lime green paint curled up in ever-widening craters. Another dull whoomph! from inside the wreck made me and Fiona fall down on our arses before we saw my twin sister, illuminated by the glow as she stood quite calmly, smoking a ciggie and toting the shotgun.
“What happened?” I shouted across the din.
Aoife shrugged and gave me a puff. “What happened was, we all saw a group of unidentified men flee over that hedge over there. See them?”
Boo-boom!
Before either of us could react, my twin had leveled the weapon and emptied both barrels into the sky.
“What the—” started Fiona, but Aoife wasn’t done yet. She spoke to us as if from a film script she’d just written for the occasion, expecting us to pay attention to how each part ought to be played. She pointed toward town.
“They ran that way, ya see, because they had just set fire to my car, hadn’t they?” She was asking the dark skies, not us. “And none of yis saw their faces clearly, because you had been asleep, but that’s all right. Because all Bronagh needs to know is that people have thought for weeks that we’d kill darling Jim Quick sooner or later. Now, those lads had just heard rumors of the seanchaí’s death and wanted revenge. And wouldn’t ya know it? They go and torch the very car we smeared his blood all over. But there’s nothing for it now, I suppose. The gardaí will be lucky if they can even lift the serial number from the engine block after this. Dontcha think?”
I had to admire her. I mean, none of us had thought of hiding the most obvious evidence, like in one of those detective shows Bronagh loved so much. But one look at Aoife would tell anybody that my sister had changed in just a few weeks. The last hippie slice of her, the girl who listened to trees, perished in the oil drum where I’d burnt our clothes. Fiona grabbed my hand, as if the sight of her two baby sisters preparing to deny murder, even for a good reason, frightened her more than she could say. A fat sharp petrol stench wafted around us like some mad demon and gave me a headache.
Aoife smiled in a way I’d never seen before, as she ground the butt into the ground with her naked heel. It wasn’t serene or vengeful. There was no hatred in her eyes. I suppose, more than anything, she was relieved that she could do something about how she was feeling inside, rather than just sit there and take it. I never did ask her how she felt about Fiona and me using that knife before she could shoot. Maybe that’s why she had set fire to her car. I know I would have wanted to blow something up, if it were me. Anything at all. As it happened, I’d become a murderer instead of her. And I felt nothing yet, nothing at all. My feelings were still sailing on the purple sea of dreams, holding Evvie’s hand and wondering if I’d ever get to see her face.
Bronagh and the other uniforms didn’t take long to show up.
“What did you do?” asked our intrepid sergeant, glaring impotently at the flames as they consumed any possible link to the dead man she’d probably just found, judging from her scowl.
“What d’you mean, I did?” said Aoife, acting pissed off for the camera, if there had been one. “A herd of mucksavage bollixes set fire to my taxi and ran off. They wore balaclavas, the lot of them, like they was auditioning for a spot in the IRA or worse. What, did ya not see them jumping the hedgerows, coming your way?”
Bronagh held her notebook out before her like the .357 Magnum she no doubt would have wanted instead. The other guards radioed for the fire brigade and got busy doing nothing, but in that most concerned and active-looking way cops learn early.
“Convenient, I’d say,” said Bronagh, looking at me and Fiona.
“Convenient for whom?” I heard myself shouting. “Some knuckle draggers decide to burn my sister’s livelihood to the ground, and you stand there and tell us she wanted it to happen? What are ya like, anyway?”
“You get a look at these . . . men?” Bronagh asked Fiona, who had been staring off into the distance. The other cops had found the garden hose and tried feebly to extinguish the flames, which still had plenty of plastic insulation to eat.
“I was asleep,” said Fiona, yawning. “We all were. All I saw was their backsides, and that wasn’t an impressive sight, let me tell ya. Aren’t ya gonna go and catch them?”
I haven’t seen Bronagh in the grip of inchoate rage very often, perhaps only once, when Martin Clarke from class stole her favorite doll and threw it into the bay when we were six. But now she simmered, as she put the notebook back in her pocket and walked up to Aoife, nose to button nose.
“We just found him,” she hissed, not knowing whether to cry or threaten, “still sitting underneath his tree, far from prying eyes, like he just rang an ambulance. But you knew that, didn’t ya? More holes in him than I could count. Tell me, did you all have a go? Because he bled so dry he’s only white like the ghost of Christmas Past. And don’t tell me ‘Who are you talking about?’ because I deserve better than that.”
“Jim is dead,” said Aoife, in a voice so neutral and devoid of judgment she might as well have told Bronagh the time of day. “Is that it? Well, no shortage of suspects, I imagine. If yer looking for sympathy, you’ve come to the wrong front door, I don’t mind telling ya.”
“Let me hear you say how none of you had anything to do with that. Go on.”
Aoife obliged. “We had nothing to do with it.”
“Tell me anything at all,” said Bronagh, in a voice so low I could barely hear the words. “It was revenge for what he did to you. Self-defense, even. Did he attack you with a weapon? Or one of your sisters?” When Aoife just stared at her without blinking, she went on, but mostly to herself. “You probably won’t do a day in jail if you tell me everything now. Everyone will understand.”
&
nbsp; “What about Sarah McDonnell?” I asked. “Will she understand, too?”
Aoife shot me a look that couldn’t be interpreted any other way than Shut the hell up, ya eejit.
“So, did yis kill him?” Bronagh asked me, her face transformed into a visage of forgiveness. If I’d just say the words. Confess. The fire crackled and hissed as it ran out of food.
“No,” I said, pretending to be angry. “But I love this part about everybody understanding us. Tell me something. Did they understand that yer man under the tree there, or wherever it is, raped my twin sister? Oh, I see. They understood it so well they decided to shut us out afterward, isn’t that it? Like lepers. Even you. Sergeant.”
“If I leave here and have to bring back the big boys from Cork City or Macroom HQ? Deal’s off.” She searched our eyes in the blazing glare to see if there were any takers. All three of us stared back and said nothing.
“Why don’tcha turn yer horse around, sheriff, and catch those varmints who just burned our stagecoach?” said Fiona, cracking a smile despite herself. “They can’t have got far. It’s Injun country out there, haven’t ya heard? Pure Fort Apache, where even the squaws are desperate.” I had to cover my mouth to keep from bursting out laughing. My stomach turned into triangular shapes to keep from howling. And I felt tears on my knuckles. I murdered someone, my brain whispered to my stomach for the first time, so let me see some waterworks to prove ya understand what that means.
“I always believed you,” Bronagh told Aoife, but there was shame in her eyes now.
“Sure you did,” said my twin, in a voice as hollow as the wind through a dead tree.
Darling Jim Page 22
