Haunted Ground ng-1

by Erin Hart

  “Your mother wrote me,” Joseph said, still gripping the handles of the tray. Only then did it occur to Cormac that this might be awkward for his father as well. “And we thought it would be best for me to come, to take some of the pressure off you while you’re at your studies. It can’t be easy traveling such a distance every weekend.”

  It isn’t, he wanted to say, but the real hardship was going back to Dublin at the end of each visit, knowing that she might not be here when he returned. “I don’t mind,” he said.

  Cormac’s thoughts were still in the past when the front door of the house opened, and out stepped a girl with pink-streaked hair, dressed in the current fashion, and tottering slightly on platform shoes. As she approached down the footpath, he decided she couldn’t be more than about fifteen; her lips were painted a deep shade of blue, and three tiny gold rings pierced her left eyebrow. “Are ye all right?” she asked. “Are ye looking for someone?”

  “No, I used to live in this house. My mother planted all these roses, and the apple tree in the back garden, if it’s still there.”

  “Yeah, it’s there.” He could sense annoyance as the girl studied him, worried that he’d want to have a look at that, too. She was late for something, he guessed, but didn’t like leaving the house with this lunatic hanging about the front gate.

  “I don’t mean to hold you up,” he said. “Just wanted to see what the old place looked like.” He wondered as he walked slowly back to the church whether there was an actual physical threshold in the mind, a point at which the past filled up more of one’s thoughts than the future.

  12

  On Sunday evening, Garrett Devaney sat in a straight-backed kitchen chair opposite his daughter Roisin. Her head tipped toward her left shoulder, where the body of his fiddle rested, its slender neck cradled in the curve of her hand.

  “There,” said Devaney, sitting back. “How does that feel?”

  “A bit strange.”

  “It might feel that way at first, but you’ll get used to it. It might even feel comfortable after a while. The main thing is to stay relaxed, especially here—” He reached out and pressed gently on his daughter’s shoulders, observing how small and thin she felt beneath the weight of his hands. It had been a long time since he’d actually made any sort of physical contact with one of his children. “Ready for the bow?”

  “Yes,” she said firmly.

  “All right.” He’d let her tighten the octagonal nut at the end of the bow, and slide the rosin block up and down its length. “Remember that you must never touch the hairs on the bow.” He guided her fingers around the frog, placing each one where it ought to go, then let her feel the weight of it in her hand, and finally, in her whole arm. “It all happens with the elbow and the wrist, not the shoulder—like this,” he said, demonstrating with an invisible bow. “Keep in mind that you’re making music, not sawing wood.” Roisin nodded.

  “Now the fingering,” Devaney said. Leaning forward, he gently placed his daughter’s fingers in the positions she would use to play a simple scale and called out the names of the notes as he did so. He waited for a moment, touched by the sincerity of her gaze as she concentrated on all the strange new sensations. Devaney felt disarmed, utterly defenseless in the presence of this fierce determination.

  “Lash away,” he said, and she looked at him with eyes grown round in disbelief. “Go ahead,” he said, “make some noise.” She tentatively set the bow on the fiddle strings, where it bounced a couple of times, then pulled, letting the weight of it make a deep, vibrating groan. A small smile and a look of surprise and pleasure crossed her face, then she wrinkled her nose.

  “Go mad,” he said. “Try them all.”

  Roisin bent the bow this way and that, testing the sonorous, deep notes, the high, thin sounds she could produce, chording two notes together as she pulled the rosin-laden bow over the strings. He gestured, showing her in mime how to use the full length of the bow, and she followed his example, at least as far as her short arms would allow. Even as he beheld the pleasure she took in these first few sounds, Devaney pictured the hurdles they still faced, and felt suddenly inadequate as a musician, as a teacher, and as a father. As he listened to Roisin’s first dreadful attempt at a scale, he thought of Orla and Padraig, and how he’d missed the few chances he had to be closer to them. He’d better not ruin this—his final chance, as he thought of it—by proving too harsh a teacher.

  “Is there any tune you know that you’d like to play? How about ‘Paidin O’Rafferty’? You know that one, don’t you?” He lilted the first few bars, until the spark of recognition lit up her face.

  “That’s the tune they play at the end of ‘Ceili House’ on the radio.” Devaney hadn’t even realized it, but Roisin was right. She was already listening like a musician, and there was no substitute for that. They worked away at the melody for the next half hour, stumbling painfully through it a few times, until she had the notes and the fingering right.

  “Well, how did you like your first lesson?”

  “Daddy,” she said, chiding him for teasing her.

  “That was it. And what you can do now is to take the fiddle to someplace nice and quiet”—not to mention as far away from human hearing as possible, he thought to himself—“and practice that tune and a few scales, and get used to it, especially the feel of the bow. We’ll try another tune tomorrow.”

  She looked slightly incredulous, but nodded anyway.

  “And we should see about getting you a smaller fiddle. I’ll ask around. Then you can practice whenever you like.”

  Roisin held the fiddle and bow in her left hand, and bent at the knees to gather up the case from the table. “Don’t worry, Daddy, I’ll be careful,” she said when she reached the door. “I’m going to practice a lot and be very good, I promise.” She scurried off down the hall, holding the fiddle before her like a prize.

  “We’ll see,” said Devaney quietly to himself. He resisted the urge to be as enthusiastic as he wanted to be. He’d already let himself imagine playing a duet with Roisin here in the kitchen, a vision that had prompted a curious tightness in his chest.

  He turned his attention to a thick file that lay on the table. For several days he’d thought of almost nothing but the Osborne case, going over and over the details, trying to find a loose corner, a crack in someone’s story. There had to be some way in. The opening was here—probably staring him in the face, if he only knew where to look. He tried to focus his mind on Mina Osborne’s journey between Point A, Pilkington’s shop in Dunbeg, and Point B, Bracklyn House. Where did she stop? Had she gladly accepted the offer of a lift from someone she knew, or been bundled into a windowless van against her will? And what wild creature along that empty stretch of road had been a witness to what actually transpired? Then there was Osborne, somewhere off on the periphery, on his way from Shannon, he said, and the only person in the whole equation who had no one to vouch for him during that time, and he was the one person who had the strongest motive. The best possibilities were still murder or flight. If it was murder, why were items of clothing missing from the house? And whose word did they have that the pair had never arrived home? Only that of Jeremy and Lucy Osborne, who might be looking after their own best interests. They could even be involved in some way. Devaney’s head ached. If only he had someone he could use as a sounding board. The details were disjointed from every angle. Nothing seemed to fit—but it must fit one way, and that was the way it had really happened. This kitchen-table detective work was fucking hopeless. He should be out there talking to people, doing something, instead of sitting here getting tied up in knots.

  Everything rested on getting to the essence of this fellow Osborne. Some of the statements from people in the village had mentioned his reputation as a playboy in years past, with a whole string of girlfriends—a different one every time he was home from university, people said, and many of them foreigners. So the man had a taste for the exotic. He was also handsome, considerate, apparent
ly well off—on the face of it, exactly the kind of man that women generally adored.

  Devaney started sketching out the scenario: Osborne meets Mina Gonsalves while he’s over teaching a summer course at Oxford. Nature follows its course and she gets pregnant, so he does the honorable thing and marries her; they settle back in Ireland. Devaney now felt he could see a hairline crack in the perfect marriage. They’re reasonably happy, for a time, but then he’s back at his old ways. Maybe he’d married her for money, not anticipating that the father might cut her off.

  Now that his wife was out of the picture, Osborne had enlisted the support of Una McGann and Mrs. Gonsalves. Interesting how it was always the women who believed in his innocence. No doubt if Osborne ever went to prison for this crime, there would be some female trying to rally supporters in his defense. There was nothing quite so dangerous as a professional pity-hound, Devaney thought. A man like that could twist the good nature in people to his own purposes, even have them feeling sorry for him, and trying to rationalize his violent outbursts.

  He flipped to the page listing Osborne’s assets. For a member of the so-called gentry, the poor sod didn’t have much—a modest salary from the university, not many investments, nothing but a couple of small parcels of land and the house. A house like that was always in need of major repairs, not to mention a bugger of a tax liability. What would happen if a man like Osborne got to feeling boxed in by marriage and money troubles at the same time?

  All right, supposing Osborne wanted money, Devaney thought, leaning back in his chair. The development scheme could be one way to get it; banks would see a model public/private investment, and no doubt the government ministers in Dublin would piss themselves for the chance to fund such a worthwhile cultural project. But would that be enough? Osborne had no more land to sell off, no other major assets that he could liquidate, except the house and the insurance. When he’d phoned a couple of days ago, Reidy the insurance agent had told him Osborne kept up to date on the premiums after his wife’s disappearance. Nothing funny about that; he’d probably been advised to keep paying. If the wife was dead, why not just produce the body? Why drag it out, unless there was something that would point the finger at him, or unless—

  Devaney sat forward abruptly, and the front legs of his chair hit the ground with a solid thump. Unless there was no body. Unless Osborne’s wife and son were still alive. Maybe he really was as devoted as some said. And if he needed money, why not send the wife and kid safely away somewhere, stage a disappearance, act the grieving husband, and collect at the end of seven years? Add the insurance settlement to the development money, and he’d have a fairly tidy sum. Nobody gets hurt, except the insurance company and the banks, and everyone knows they’re a bunch of fucking robbers anyhow.

  Devaney thought about where a person might hide a wife and child who were supposed to be dead. Ireland, even Dublin, was too small a place to be safe. The logical place to hide a couple of East Indians, he thought, would be among lots of other East Indians. Mina and Christopher could have been smuggled out of Ireland, but presumably Osborne wouldn’t go seven years without seeing them, particularly if he was so devoted. So where had Osborne traveled in the past two years—assuming he’d traveled under his own name? Perhaps he’d left some trail. Credit cards, traveler’s checks, something. There was a major problem with this scenario as well. What would happen at the end of seven years? Supposing Osborne went ahead and collected his money, then what? He couldn’t bring the wife and kid back, so what would he do at that point? Sell off the family home, stage his own disappearance, and start a new life somewhere else? All of these same arguments worked just as well in the case of outright murder. They had no evidence to pin any of this on Osborne. But there was that hole in his story, the drive from Shannon to Dunbeg that left nearly four hours unaccounted for. It didn’t seem as if anyone had been following the man’s movements since that intense period of scrutiny right after the disappearance. If Osborne’s statements about the past provided no clues, maybe something in his current actions would.

  Devaney heard the faint, scraping sound of a scale coming from upstairs as Roisin tried to coax a few pleasing notes from his fiddle. He wished her success. He wasn’t having much himself.

  13

  The red-haired girl’s dental exam wasn’t due to begin until two o’clock, but Nora Gavin was in the conservation lab at one, anxious to begin. She walked around the table, observing the instruments lying in their trays, the light above the table, and the familiar unwieldy bundle wrapped in black plastic. Immediately following its discovery, the head of the cailin rua had undergone a battery of examinations and tests. For the last several days, the remains had been stored at a temperature just above freezing here at the lab, and had no doubt been set out several hours before today’s examination was to begin, so that the tissues—and most particularly the jaw muscles—would become pliable enough to manipulate as they tried to extract the object that was lodged in the girl’s mouth.

  Nora had returned to Dublin Saturday night, after a long and unproductive day with Cormac on the priory excavation. They seemed to be turning up nothing but gravel. And every time she’d brought up Mina Osborne’s disappearance, he seemed to wish she’d talk about something else. It was possible that he’d never been confronted with bald-faced deceit, and was actually taken in by Hugh Osborne. The man had a convincing air of sincerity, she had to admit.

  But at least Cormac hadn’t refused her help on the dig. And so far he hadn’t told her to calm down. She could hear a voice from the past—Marc Staunton’s voice—suggesting that she take a few deep breaths and try to calm herself. When she’d first met Marc, she had loved his voice, that rumbling baritone she’d first heard through a surgical mask on an operating room visit during med school. She’d been smitten before she ever laid eyes on his face. For a long time, it seemed as if they couldn’t have been better matched: he loved music and theater, they’d read the same books, and had always been interested in one another’s specialties. And although her parents had never pressured her to get married, she knew they’d adored Marc, and were delighted when he’d introduced her sister to one of his college roommates. That was how she’d met Peter Hallett. The four of them had spent a lot of time together, before Peter and Triona were married, going out to dinner or a play, spending summer weekends on Peter’s sailboat down at Lake Pepin. At times she felt overwhelmed, realizing that all the happiness she’d experienced then was gone now, wiped away like some dream of a life that never really existed.

  When Triona was killed, it was as if Marc had become the self-appointed arbiter of rationality, while she could only feel. He hadn’t even heard the patronizing tone he began to use whenever she complained about the lack of news from the police. It was true that she had been utterly consumed by her sister’s terrible death; it had been a conscious choice, and one she still didn’t regret. But she’d been wrong to trust that Marc would help her, especially when the police started investigating his friend. Little by little, she’d felt Marc’s loyalty beginning to shift. First he’d warned her that she was becoming too emotionally involved, and ended up trying to convince her that she was coming unglued, even imagining things that never happened. Her “obsession,” as he referred to it, had finally driven them apart. As she had watched him pack his suitcase with the same meticulous precision he used in the operating room, Nora had felt that she had never really known Marc, despite the fact that they had been lovers since medical school, and had lived together for more than eight years. At least she hadn’t married him, she thought bitterly. The sound of his voice in her ears made her want to plunge farther into the shadowy thicket of Mina Osborne’s disappearance. But why did she presume that she could make a difference this time?

  With effort, Nora roused herself. It wasn’t even one-thirty yet. She pulled a white lab coat over her street clothes in preparation for the dental exam. As she did so, she noticed the file of written reports that lay on the near end of the exam ta
ble. She leaned forward to open it.

  At the postmortem examination on 6 May, Dr. Malachy Drummond, Chief State Pathologist, assisted by Dr. Nora Gavin, Trinity College Medical School, made the following observations:

  General: The specimen appeared to be the head of a young female, approx. 18-25 years of age, found two days previous at Drumcleggan Bog, near Dunbeg, Co. Galway.

  Preservation: Much of the soft tissue was remarkably well preserved. The scalp and hair were well preserved on the right side, which had been uppermost in the bog. There was no evidence of injury to the skull. The face was very well preserved; the hair appeared wavy and approximately 40 cm in length, and retained its reddish tint. The eyelids, eyelashes, and eyebrows were all present, with evidence of some tissue remaining in both sockets, the right eye being visible through the partially open lid. The cartilage and skin over the nose were well preserved. Both ears were present, the right ear in a state of good preservation, the left infiltrated with bog plants. There was a small portion of skin missing from the chin, leaving an exposed area of adipocere and bone. The neck was severed between the third and fourth vertebrae, although it was impossible to tell through naked-eye examination whether this injury occurred before or after death.

  Report by Dr. R. Kinsella, Professor of Radiology, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, assisted by Mrs. Maire Donegan and Mr. Anthony McHugh, Senior Radiographers, Beaumont Hospital, Dublin, on radiograph and CT scan:

  Plain Radiographs: Skull: No fracture can be identified. The slightly shrunken brain is well seen. The convolutional markings are clearly identifiable, as also are the cisterns. The ventricles are small, but not greatly distorted, and there is evidence of some air in them. In the lateral projection of the skull, there is a well-defined opacity within the mouth cavity. It is not certain whether this is part of the dental structure, or a foreign body inserted before or after death.