by Erin Hart
“I’ve been wondering about that place,” Nora said, shielding her eyes from the sun’s golden glare. “Know anything about it?”
“Just that it’s called O’Flaherty’s Tower. They were the landowners here at one time. Una McGann told me it belongs to the estate. And she said it’s supposed to be haunted. I don’t know any more about it than that.”
“Haunted? And you asked no more about it?”
“Oh, I forgot to mention,” Cormac said, suddenly remembering his conversation with Dolly Pilkington. “I found somebody who might tell us something about the local history. Ned Raftery, a retired schoolteacher. We’ll have to phone up and see if he’s willing.”
They had reached the shore again. Cormac turned the oars to stow them, then jumped out to pull the boat up the pebbly beachfront. “I was hoping we could put in another full day on the dig tomorrow, if you’re up to it. But I thought I might take care of some other things on Sunday, as long as you’re heading back for the dental exam on the cailin rua.”
“The what?” Nora asked, and Cormac realized he’d never used that name before, at least not aloud. “The red girl,” she said. Perhaps he shouldn’t be surprised that she had a bit of Irish.
“I suppose we ought to call her something more official, like ‘the Drumcleggan girl.’”
“No, I like cailin rua. It’s like something from a song,” Nora said, taking the hand he offered her. “I’m happy to work a full day tomorrow. And I don’t actually have to be back in Dublin until Monday afternoon, so whatever you need done on Sunday, I’m happy to pitch in.”
Something in her frank blue eyes disconcerted him, and he had a sudden vision of doors being thrown open. Maybe he wasn’t as ready for all this as he’d thought. “I appreciate the offer,” he said, letting go of her hand. “But I’m afraid Sunday’s personal.”
As they climbed the small embankment, Cormac thought he glimpsed a pale figure in one of the high windows at Bracklyn House, but when he focused on the place again, whatever had caught his eye was gone.
10
At half past nine on Saturday evening, Devaney sat at his kitchen table, disgusted that he had turned up nothing in the Osborne file. The truth was he’d barely had a chance to look at it. But this case was always on his mind. No one remembered passing Mina and Christopher on the road from town, so it was possible that they had never returned home. Or that they’d taken a different route, a shortcut away from the road. Hard to do with a pushchair, though, and everyone had seen her with it in the village.
He took a swallow of tea. Christ, he’d give anything for a cigarette right now, to help him concentrate, focus his mind on what was missing. He was going in circles.
Who stood to gain from Mina Osborne’s death? Her family in India had money, but the father had supposedly disowned her when she married. That sizable insurance policy might look dodgy, but without a body, Osborne would have to wait seven years to get any money. Besides, everybody said the man was devoted to the wife—but that’s what people always said, wasn’t it? That’s what they’d said about Barney Harrington down in Cork, who’d bludgeoned the wife with a frying pan when she criticized his cooking. The gossipmongers were having a field day now speculating about Hugh Osborne and Una McGann. Perhaps he should find out whether there was any truth to the rumors, and if so, how long the affair might have been going on. If he was going to look into the jealousy angle, why not Lucy Osborne? Say she’s living at Bracklyn House for several years, getting on with Osborne like a house on fire, when he suddenly up and marries someone else. Mina’s arrival must have been a blow, if Lucy had ever had any designs on the man. Nothing stayed secret for long in a town like Dunbeg. If there was anything funny going on, Mina Osborne was bound to have found out. Maybe she had just walked away.
He opened the file, flipping past the first few witness-statement forms until he came to a statement taken by telephone from Jaronimo Gonsalves, Mina Osborne’s father, who was living in India. He had sworn that no one in the family had made contact with Mina for several years.
He ought to have a word with the parents again, Devaney thought, just to satisfy himself that they had no further information. Better to ring from the sitting room, where he could shut the door and not be disturbed. He checked the spelling again. Gonsalves. What sort of name was that? It wasn’t like an Indian name at all—sounded Spanish or something. He carried the file to the sitting room as he repeated the name aloud: “Gonsalves, Gonsalves.” The foreign-sounding syllables felt strange on his tongue, but he repeated them until the sound started to become familiar, then picked up the phone. But what would he say? Your daughter is still missing, and we’ve made a complete bollocks of the case? The parents must be getting on in years. How would it affect them to have the past dredged up again? He pulled the file closer and punched in the number. A rapid rat-a-tat-tattat-tat on the other end told him it was ringing. A high-pitched woman’s voice came on the line: “Who’s calling, please?”
He hadn’t bothered to calculate the time difference—it might be the middle of the night in Bombay for all he knew.
“Who is calling, please?” the tinny-sounding voice repeated, and Devaney cleared his throat.
“Detective Garrett Devaney calling from Ireland. I’m trying to reach Mr. Jaronimo Gonsalves.” There was no immediate answer. Had he pronounced the name incorrectly? “I hope I’m not ringing too late.”
There was another brief pause, during which Devaney imagined his voice traveling to India, as he heard a faint echo of what he had just said on the line. When the woman’s voice responded, it sounded slightly weary, but not unkind.
“I am afraid you are too late, Detective. My husband died quite suddenly six months ago. Is there some way that I may help you? Do you have some news of my daughter?” The woman’s musical accent gave away the trepidation behind her question, and Devaney cursed the most terrible duty of his profession.
“I’m afraid I have no news, Mrs. Gonsalves. I’m just going back over the details, and I wanted to make sure that she still hadn’t contacted you or any other family members.”
There was another pause. “I have not heard from my daughter for the past two and a half years.”
“Excuse me?” Devaney said, thinking he must have misheard. “Your husband said—”
“When Mina first went missing,” Mrs. Gonsalves continued, “the police spoke to my husband. He told them that he had broken with our daughter when she married Hugh Osborne, three years earlier. And that was true—for him. You see, my husband was a very strict man, a proud man, Detective. He could be very hard. But I ask you, how could a mother who has brought a child into this world, and cared for her, just turn away one day—deny her existence, simply because that child fell foolishly in love?”
“You kept in contact with your daughter?” Devaney’s mind was racing; he was sure this information had never appeared anywhere in the file.
“Mina and I continued our regular correspondence, without my husband’s knowledge, of course. She sent her letters in care of my sister. But they suddenly stopped without warning. One week later, my husband received a call from your Irish police. He thought he spoke for both of us; how could he know he did not? I couldn’t go against him. His heart was already broken. I’m only sorry I didn’t contact you sooner.”
“And do you still have the letters?”
“Every one.”
“I wonder if you’d be willing to send them to me? There’s a chance they might contain some detail that would help us. I will return them to you.”
“Of course, of course, anything I can do.”
“And was there—” Devaney hesitated. “Was there ever any indication in these letters that your daughter was troubled, or in any way fearful?” He winced, hoping the last part of the question didn’t betray his suspicions. There was a brief silence on the other end of the line as Mrs. Gonsalves considered his question. God, his reflexes had completely gone.
“If you’re asking whether
my daughter was afraid of her husband, I think the answer is no. But of course there were things that troubled her. Who among us has no worries? I’ve no doubt that all these facts are in your files, but when you read her letters, I think you’ll understand that my daughter was already carrying their child when she and Hugh were married. I think it remained a question always in the back of her mind, whether they would have married if—well, if the circumstances had been different.”
“I appreciate your frankness, Mrs. Gonsalves.”
“I know you suspect my son-in-law. And I know it’s only natural in a case of this sort. But I’ve come to know Hugh Osborne very well, I think. I’m convinced that he loved Mina and could never harm her in any way.”
“You mean he’s contacted you?” This, also, was not in the file.
“Oh, yes. He rang us when Mina first disappeared, but my husband refused to speak with him. But when he heard of my husband’s death, he wrote me a letter. We’ve spoken on the telephone many times since then, and I would say we’ve become very good friends.” Unfortunately, Devaney thought, this could be either a genuine gesture on Osborne’s part, or just a cold-blooded ploy to gain a powerful ally.
“All this happened just when I thought that Mina and her father might reconcile. She’d talked about coming to visit us, bringing Christopher, but—”
“Would your daughter have gone against her husband’s wishes? Would she have tried to make the trip anyway, even if he opposed it?”
“I don’t know. If she did, she has never arrived home. I would give anything to see my daughter’s face.”
A silence fell on the telephone line. “I’ll do everything I can,” he said.
“You’ll let me know any news you might discover about my child?” She seemed at once old and young, Devaney thought: young in the way that she referred to Mina as her child, and old in the knowledge that her daughter and grandson were most likely dead.
“I will, indeed. There’s one more thing. Would you mind sending the letters to my home address? It’s a long story, but the investigation has been transferred to a task force in Dublin. I’m not supposed to be working on the case anymore.” As Devaney slowly walked her through the particulars, his heart held tandem hopes: that the letters would contain something useful, and that this decision would not get him booted from the Guards.
“I am getting to be an old woman, Detective. There are days when I am so very tired. But like you, I have not entirely given up hope. I know you will do what you can. Good night.”
Devaney hung up the phone, considering the benediction he had just received. He checked his watch. Nine forty-five. It must be nearly four in the morning in Bombay. When he returned to the kitchen, he found Roisin sitting at the kitchen table, writing in a composition book. Devaney poured himself a whiskey, then joined his daughter at the table, watching her dark head bent in concentration over her work.
“You’re up very late, aren’t you, Roisin? What are you writing there?”
She shrugged, but didn’t look up. “Nothing. Just things I think about.”
“And what do you think about, mo chroi?”
“About how everything got all mixed up the way it is.” Devaney felt his heart swell in his throat.
“What we all wonder,” he said, thinking of Mrs. Gonsalves, and admiring the mixture of profound sadness and innocence in his daughter’s deep blue eyes. They sat in silence for a moment, studying each other across the table. Roisin returned to her composition book, and concentrated on making a long line of curlicues across one of its thin blue rules.
“Daddy,” she said, when she had finished the last loop, “do you think I’m too old to start playing the fiddle?”
11
The churchyard in Kilgarvan appeared exactly the same to Cormac as it had nineteen years ago when his mother was buried there. The gray stone of the church seemed bleak against the vigorous green of the grass between the gravestones. Both the church and the grass were symbols of endurance, he thought. In the face of weather, time, the rash acts of man, both remained, one bound by tradition, staunchly resisting the forces of change, one engaged in a constant, defiant cycle of death and renewal. He walked slowly along the gravel path through the graveyard, reading the inscriptions, some moss-covered and worn with age, some newly made and sharp as the pain of loss.
He took the first left on the path, to the newer section of the walled-in yard, under a huge beech tree. He remembered hearing the gravediggers cursing as they tried to excavate the spot, running into tree roots as thick as a man’s arm, having to hack through them with picks and axes before they could proceed. How well kept his mother’s grave was. Maguire, read the Irish script on the stone; beneath that her first name, Eilis, and the dates. Someone had planted a small bunch of violets below the headstone. The heart-shaped leaves looked freshly watered, and grew in a thick profusion. He knelt on the grass, feeling the unmistakable ache of her absence once again.
She was growing steadily weaker, according to the nurse who looked after her while he was away at college. He had just started his second year at university, as she’d insisted, but on weekends he’d take the train from Dublin or get a lift down to be with her. One Friday in October, he’d caught an earlier train than usual—he was coming down to tell her he wasn’t going back to Dublin anymore. He was just thanking the salesman who’d given him a lift from Ennis when he saw his mother at the churchyard gate. She was in a wheelchair, and though he was more than a hundred yards away, he knew that the white-haired man pushing the chair was Joseph Maguire. His father. He hung back to observe them; he could see his mother’s head tilt, the better to hear the voice that spoke at her ear, and he felt somehow betrayed by the way she looked up at her husband. He was still her husband. They had never gone through the formality of a legal separation. He watched his mother’s frail body in the chair, her thin shoulders covered by a sweater and a Spanish shawl. When his parents entered the churchyard, Cormac crossed the street and moved closer to the gate. He watched as they moved slowly up the path. He’d taken the same walk with her only a few weeks ago, when test results had shown that further treatment was useless against the rampant cancer cells, and she had wanted to show him the place she would be buried.
He turned away and pressed his back against the gatepost, trying to work out what to do. He felt a fury of hurt and anger and jealousy. He stepped away from the curb and began walking blindly until he reached the coast road, where he turned northward, climbed down the rocks, and began trudging along in the sand. He felt ridiculous—he was nearly a grown man, and yet he felt like that confused and abandoned child of all those years ago. He understood when he saw them together that his mother still loved Joseph Maguire, a man who didn’t deserve to be so loved. Why couldn’t his father be the one who was dying? He dropped his pack on the sand, fell to his knees, and pitched forward, the pain in his chest feeling as if it would tear his rib cage apart. Hot tears seeped under his eyelids; he tried to breathe, inhaling in the salty, seaweed-smelling air of the beach. How long he lay there, he did not know. She was obviously happy to see him. What could he do now but feign gratitude at the old man’s return? It soothed him to think of the way things had to be. The wet sand was cool against his face, and eventually he felt a sense of calm returning. He pushed himself to his feet, brushed as much of the sand off his clothes as he could, and slung his rucksack over one shoulder for the walk back to the town….
The memory slowly faded. Cormac reached out one hand to touch the letters of his mother’s name, then rose from his knees at the graveside, quickly retracing his route back down the gravel path and out the cemetery gate. When he was growing up, Kilgarvan had been just a single, narrow row of houses and a few shops with their backs to the sea. Now holiday homes had succeeded fishing as the main economic force, and modern, sterile-looking developments had sprung up on concrete slabs in hay fields surrounding the town. Tiny flags signified that the natural dunes above the strand had become sand traps in a golf co
urse. He turned onto the coast road, and walked the quarter mile that used to seem endless when he was a boy. When he stopped in front of a two-story house, now painted yellow with green trim, he was pleased to notice that the rosebushes his mother had tended so lovingly still flourished all around the edge of the front garden.
No one seemed to be about when he arrived home, but a small gray Ford with a car-hire sticker was parked in the drive. He pushed open the front door and found his mother tucked up on her favorite antique chaise, her face bright with anticipation, as he had known it would be.
“Cormac,” she said, and in that instant, she saw that he already knew what she was about to tell him. She looked at him with a mixture of hope and pleading. He stood and returned her gaze, hoping that his look communicated understanding, or at least forbearance. The door from the kitchen swung open, and in backed Joseph Maguire, bearing a tea tray. “I’ve set three cups,” he was saying. “I think he’s bound to turn up soon—”
He watched his father straighten out of a slightly solicitous crouch. This man was white-haired and rumpled in a professorial way, not at all the image of the dashing, dark-haired warrior he had kept in his head all these years. The two of them looked in unison toward Eilis. Her eyes shone. Speak to each other, they urged silently. Say something.
“Hello, Cormac,” said his father, still holding the tea tray and looking slightly ridiculous.
“Hello,” he replied. How many times had he rehearsed this scene, trying to work out what their first words might be, what great deed he might have accomplished to bring his father all the way back across the ocean? Now the moment was here, and he was surprised how little he actually felt. Perhaps he’d spent all the feeling he had out on the strand.
“I was going to tell you, Cormac,” his mother said. “But somehow we got the dates mixed up, and your father arrived a day earlier than I anticipated.”
