Darling Jim

by Christian Moerk

  Here she comes, now, my dear aunt, dragging her miserable self up the stairs. Now? Really?

  It has to be, because Aoife is tapping the attack signal, like I’m deaf or something.

  N . . . O . . . W . . . !

  I always listen to my twin sister, so I have to go. Take care of yourself, whoever you are. And do yourself this favor:

  Love only the people who deserve you.

  Trust me on this. I know what I’m talking about.

  Part Four

  THE

  LEGLESS

  PRINCE

  • 8 •

  Niall hesitated before closing the book. The voices in it seemed so alive, they appeared still to resonate all around him, out here in the world of the living. He held his breath and listened, for it seemed to him that he’d heard someone mumbling. Impossible. The wind howled. He’d imagined it, he knew that, but he still had half his head inside Róisín’s last living moments.

  Hang on.

  Somewhere close by, he again heard a low murmur. It entered through a hole in the ceiling and drifted down onto him like fairy dust.

  “This is useless,” said a female voice, angry with itself.

  At first he thought it was his own imagination. For days, he’d heard voices in his head and begun assigning them to the three women, trapped like rats in the last room they ever saw. He had got to know their quirks, he felt, and not just as the goth radio rat, her elusive twin, and their protective big sister, who took the first swing with that shovel. Those were just thumbnail sketches, surface clichés. No, Niall knew he might be deluding himself, but each girl’s personality had become as vivid to him as the image of Jim’s wolf, chasing into a forest primeval. Except, perhaps, for Aoife. She still eluded his understanding, having always run faster than the other two.

  That’s why he nearly answered when he heard the same female voice calling out a second time, somewhere closer. She sounded more afraid than she let on. Niall couldn’t imagine why. If the lynch mob from the cemetery was near, she wasn’t alone.

  “Rain washed his tracks out already.” It sounded motherly, concerned. Not a young woman. But where was it coming from? Niall scrunched in the corner where he’d sat down, trying to take up even less space. There was nowhere to hide, unless he wanted to bump into things and give himself away. He could just see his own hand before him in the predawn blue, and noticed what was probably a window on his right. Boots crunched on gravel. Niall nearly jumped. So it ends here, he thought, imagining being hanged from a gibbet and beaten to death by angry townsfolk. He heard someone else, right before he started to ask himself if it was worth dying like this to protect the Walshes’ secrets.

  “Shh, Christ, Vivian,” hissed a man, breathing hard. “Ya might as well shoot a flare over our heads!” There was a metallic sound, too. A gun. Or a length of chain. Or anything at all that might hurt.

  Niall had heard him speaking before. The voice belonged to the heavyset man he had last seen standing outside Sacred Heart Primary School, looking very much like he’d prefer Bronagh to take a long coffee break and look the other way while he killed the man he was convinced had abused his only daughter. Oh, Aoife, I sure could use that old shotgun now, Niall thought, his eyes adjusting to the changing light that broke through the clouds like a postcard halo. Plastic Jesus, blind them with your wattage and blessed countenance. Mr. Raichoudhury will read my obituary and say, I told you so, you stupid boy. But what else could I do, sir? he would have asked his exacting ex-supervisor. Just forget about Róisín, Aoife, and Fiona? Excuse me, Mr. Senior Postperson, but are you joking or what?

  The woman was getting anxious. There was a quick intake of breath that never made it all the way past the throat and into her lungs. “We aren’t supposed to be anywhere near here, Mr. Cremin, this—”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” he almost shouted, forgetting his own admonition. “But the trail ends just down in the field there. Not many places to hide.”

  “You know the punishment. The rules.”

  “She turns me into a toad. All that kind of shite, I know. Nobody has seen her since sh—”

  “The rules are clear.”

  “And I’m my daughter’s father, okay? He’s here. I know he is. Enough with the witchy bollix.”

  “Then you do it alone, Donald Cremin.” She blew her nose, and it seemed to Niall as if she were making up her mind. “Lads?” Several more feet slopped around in the wet grass. Ten? he wondered, perhaps twenty men? Going or coming? Through the broken window, he saw a cluster of black oilskin overcoats, whose owners had already begun to fan out into the field, back the way they’d come. The pink reflection of the sun on their rubber boots would have been beautiful if it wasn’t for one thing.

  Mary Catherine Cremin’s father was still smelling the prey. And he was staying.

  Niall held his breath and imagined what Róisín would have done in this situation. Grab a table leg and beat the man in the face with it, most likely. Or maybe just wave about whatever ghostly spell the woman who had just left was so afraid of. He decided to wait until the man entered the house and then hit him low and hard, a rugby tackle. Beyond that, he had no idea.

  The boots right outside shuffled indecisively. And then Niall knew why.

  Mr. Cremin was afraid, too. He just didn’t want to admit it in front of the others. Big strong vigilante, all that. A whining, keening sound rose up from outside, because setting foot inside the house was a risk he couldn’t afford, as if the floor were toxic. He finally spat on the threshold and walked away.

  “Witches,” he mumbled, before the wind wiped the rest of the sentence out across the Slieve Miskish Mountains, and was gone.

  Niall let out his breath like a condemned man whose hangman’s rope was just cut. He leaned back against the wall, allowing his legs to shake it off before he even looked around the room. And once he did, and the sun smeared bright yellow on the ruined furniture, he knew without a doubt where he was.

  He was inside Aoife’s abandoned stone cottage.

  What Niall had seen on the floor earlier wasn’t rat droppings or bat shite. It had been tufts of cotton fabric from inside the couch Jim had disemboweled with a knife, before raping the one sister he wanted to hurt the most. The hole in the ceiling had only grown since then and now cratered downward, leaving just a small half circle of wall that wasn’t rotten down to the foundations. Teacups stood primly on the table, and plates, too, probably from the time the girls had left in a hurry to go see their aunt in Dublin. There was still brown liquid left inside what looked like a whiskey bottle.

  As Niall buttoned his coat against the sudden cold, he was certain about something else he had been wondering since setting out on this ill-fated odyssey.

  Aoife had been the mystery guest in her aunt’s basement, suffering in silence with her sisters until she could escape. Not Bronagh or poor Finbar, with some half-arsed rescue operation. Hell, Niall had read the leaked autopsy reports in the Irish Star, hadn’t he? He didn’t even need to guess much to know the geometry of the last stand in that upstairs room. Fiona had duked it out with the jealous troll, who had never got near enough to touch Róisín. But they had all three died, just the same. And Aoife could not save her sisters, Morse code or not.

  He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what had gone wrong. Why had Aoife not made it upstairs in time? Was there a locked trapdoor to slow her down? Niall guessed she had made it to the second floor, but too late to save Fiona and Róisín, and had only then fled with the diaries before the cops could get her, too. “Did you close their eyes, Aoife?” Niall asked the dripping wet curtains. Perhaps she’d even seen the funeral from afar. It was impossible to imagine that she wouldn’t have. She draped them in their carpet of stars.

  For the first time, Niall felt he had been allowed the faintest glimpse inside the mind of the family’s most private sister. She had been so close. The plan to silence their aunt once and for all must have seemed perfect. He was also certain t
hat someone had been back to the cottage recently, because the walls and doorways were festooned with clusters of new crow’s feathers and long-dried-up husks of small forest animals. Mumbo-jumbo nonsense to keep the fear of “the lone sister” alive, wasn’t it? But then why did he feel so unsettled? What looked like a desiccated fox hung by the tail, swinging like an extinguished lamp in some troll’s underground cave. If he’d had pencil and paper, he could have drawn a brilliant forest landscape, where a woman was forever just a step ahead of the wolf. Because Aoife had vanished. Again. She was good at it.

  “Where would you go now?” he mumbled to himself, suddenly afraid the walls could hear his thoughts. “And why did you leave your sisters to begin with?” Again, he thought of handing it all over to the gardaí—to Bronagh, the tireless crime fighter, and her little helpers. And again, he couldn’t. Wherever Mr. Raichoudhury was, he would surely be shaking his wise head and tapping his immaculate fingernails on his grandfather’s belt buckle. No, Niall wanted to say, in his own defense, I’m not heeding your advice. And no, sir, I still can’t get these images out of my head. Not after reading two diaries written in invisible blood and tears. And so I must pursue this journey to the end, no matter where it leads. It’s my job. Perhaps you’ll wander through a marketplace years from now, and notice me sitting in front of an image, expending my last breath to make it come alive. We’ll just see, won’t we, sir?

  The wind had got its nails underneath the loose plywood on the roof, and now gave it a playful slapping. Niall looked around and knew he had to leave, but he didn’t want to run into Mr. Cremin’s gunslingers on the way down. He could still see them, white spots of hair in a sea of green, tooth-combing for him on the sloping hill below. The road back to town was blocked.

  That meant he had to go west, back toward Eyeries. But that was just as well.

  Because Róisín had buried something sharp underneath a decapitated tree.

  DOES HIDDEN TREASURE lose its mystery the moment it’s unearthed? Or does the object, once touched by whoever dug a hole for it, retain a kind of magic that never fades?

  In Jim’s case, you could have buried a caramel wrapper, and it would still have been sanctified immediately upon discovery.

  Niall thought of the knife blade that had punctured Jim’s lungs and heart and decided its value lay not in the weapon itself but in the myth that had begun to surround it. Once he reached the spot where the seanchaí drew his last breath, he knew he was right. Rabid fans had long ago transformed the tree their hero had leaned against as his life trickled into the grass. It was now a shrine to sex-and-death fantasies everywhere.

  Elvis and JFK never had it so good. The bark was stripped off halfway up the trunk, and all branches smaller than an arm had been broken off for souvenirs. A bra hung on a surviving twig, next to a laminated card with the words LUV IS FOREVER. NEVER FORGET U, DARLING JIM. KISSES FROM HOLLY, OMAHA, NEBRASKA. Some girls had enclosed pictures of themselves, creating a school yearbook that never ended. The youngest face looked all of ten years old, buck teeth and freckles and dreams of dangerous romance. The grass had become mud. Beer cans and cigarette ends lay strewn about like newly fallen dirty snow. The rain was coming down so hard that Niall figured it was the only reason this place wasn’t mobbed.

  He looked about, trying to find anything that looked like a tree missing its crown.

  The rain cloaked the underbrush in darkness, and all the trunks looked alike. It took over an hour for him to find the place Róisín had described, because the headless oak had in the meantime withered completely, its one remaining branch wizened like an old woman’s elbow. Niall’s bad ankle pounded, sending jags of white pain up his spine. As he spotted a bent oak halfway up the hill, he couldn’t help noticing how much this place resembled the moment in Jim’s fairy tale when the old wolf attacked Prince Euan and pronounced his curse. Niall looked around, seeing nothing but wet branches smacking against one another in the wind. He half wondered if the trees had anything to say that he could learn to hear, if only he really listened hard, then decided even asking the question meant he had been in West Cork for far too long. He knelt down between two roots, poking up like bent suntanned knuckles, and began to dig with his hands. The wet, slimy ground made a sucking noise as it yielded. Are you sure you want to do this? it seemed to ask. Why not just go back, before someone finds you here, knee-deep in someone else’s dirty business?

  There was nothing down there, of course. What had he been thinking? This entire place was now sacred ground for all the world’s broken hearts, from Frankfurt to Osaka, and had been picked over for years. Niall was covered in mud and felt like giving up. Give all the information he had to the guards and take his chances. He stood, listening to the rain smacking against the leaves. He felt like a total eejit.

  Then he stared down one last time and wondered what a napkin was doing down in that hole.

  It was nearly rotted through, a square of cotton damask. Just an inch of fabric left, but it was enough to imagine the rest. There was even a floral pattern around the edges that would fit on any dinner table.

  Or atop the good china at Aunt Moira’s weekly Friday dinners.

  Niall bent down and gently tugged at the napkin, which tore with a tired yawn. Róisín wouldn’t just have buried the naked blade, Niall realized, feeling his ankle thumping harder now. She’d have taken the time to wrap it, like the properly raised girl she was, despite the demon-child act. He unpeeled the dirty brown cotton and saw what had ended Jim’s life.

  It was a serrated blade, beginning to rust around the tip. Whatever blood had once been encrusted on the metal was long gone, which would have disappointed any true souvenir hunter of Jim memorabilia. Niall pocketed it and walked out of the woods as quickly as he could, despite the pain. Because the skies dumped more summer rain now, blurring anything that could be moving toward him between the trees. Padraic and his wolf hunters, crashing through the thicket with the hounds driving the chase, wouldn’t have been a big surprise. The trees, even if they knew how to whisper warnings, would stay silent while the dogs made a meal of an ex-postman. Because even trees, Niall imagined, knew when to shut up or risk losing their own hide.

  And although he loved a good fairy tale, he knew how that story ended.

  BRONAGH WAS WAITING for him at the end of the trail, leaning on a fence. All that was missing to complete the image of the Wild West marshal staring down the cattle rustler before gunning him down, Niall thought, was a hand-rolled cigarette in her mouth.

  “Wrong day for a picnic,” she said, shaking her head.

  God, even her lines were stolen from a bad movie. Niall had to keep from smiling. “I know,” he said, shrugging. “Too wet to make a proper fire. So I left early.”

  Bronagh looked at the dried mud, which had caked an even milk-chocolate brown all over Niall’s clothes. “You never left at all, ever since you got here.” She flipped open a notebook, and her eyebrows shot up while she recited, as if to a retarded person. “Illegal entry on school grounds, posing as faculty—”

  “I never pretended to be—”

  “—exposing yourself to a child—”

  “Okay, now you’re just pissing me off!”

  “—ransacking a cemetery, unlawfully occupying private property as late as last night, and now”—she looked at Niall’s dirty hands—“defacing public land. As if you didn’t have enough problems. I just passed Donald Cremin on my way up here. He’s looking for the man who felt up his daughter.” A TV cop smile. “And I mean to tell ya, old Donald doesn’t wander around the countryside with a baseball bat at half seven in the morning just to feel closer to nature.”

  “I know what you’re doing,” Niall said, watching Bronagh’s fingers playing with the uniform jacket’s zipper.

  “Arresting you? Oh—you mean that?” She looked back over her shoulder. “Gave you plenty of warning.”

  “No,” answered Niall, remembering how made-up, how designed Aoife’s cottage had looked. Thos
e brand-new feathers. His pursuers’ unnatural fear of the place, which made no sense at the time. “No, I’m talking about your keeping the myth of the cursed Walsh family alive and well, now, isn’t that right? Bit of voodoo? Come on, even Mary Catherine’s father was shitting his pants to think of going inside that house after me. And he could smell me hiding from him! What, did you tell them the curse of the ‘stiletto sisters’ would put all intruders six feet under?”

  Bronagh’s eyes blinked faster now, and she wasn’t looking Niall in the eye. “You be quiet. You don’t know the first thing about how we—”

  All the tiny levers and tumblers began clicking into place inside Niall’s head. “She came to you, didn’t she? Aoife. I’m guessing it happened right after Jim’s death. You helped her get gone and stay gone, right? And dressed up her old house with feathers and dead animals to make sure nobody looked for her ever again?”

  “That’s it, you’re under arrest for—”

  “And then she knocked on your door again, around a month ago. Because she’d escaped from that house in Dublin, hadn’t she? Just barely, I’m thinking. And you’ve helped her all this time because you feel guilty about what happened back then. When you sat on your cop hands and let this whole town’s darling Jim rape her and did nothing about it. Just as you never investigated him and his creature for the murder of Sarah McDonnell and all the others before it was too late. Remember that? Where is she? In your basement now? In someone else’s cottage, way the hell out where not even the tourists can find her?” He held out his hands in a gesture of surrender and put on a really bad John Wayne accent. “Put the cuffs on me, Marshal. And take me to that hanging party of yours. I’ll tell the Southern Star and the Kerryman everything I know. Great front pages, I’m thinking. LOST MYSTERY SISTER FOUND. Or would MURDER COVER-UP BY GARDA suit better? Great stuff, either way.”