by Erin Hart
“Let me go in first—” She saw trepidation in her niece’s face. “Don’t worry. I’ll be right back, I promise.”
Elizabeth didn’t look up. She picked at the zipper on her backpack, and Nora noticed for the first time how the skin around her nails was chewed ragged. And the child never let go of that bloody pack—what on earth was she carrying around in there?
The door of the house was open as Nora rounded the corner, and the tinny noise of an old fiddle recording trickled out through the open door. She peered inside and saw the back of Cormac’s head, and felt a breaker of homesickness so strong it threatened to knock her down. He was sitting on an old leather sofa in front of the fireplace. She was just about to call out when a mop of ginger hair lifted from the crook of his shoulder. “Please don’t, Roz,” she heard him say. “Don’t cry. Everything’s going to be all right.”
The ground seemed to roil under her feet, and the music grew louder. She gripped the doorjamb, trying to remain upright, but felt her knees buckle. The floor came up abruptly to meet her.
Nora felt herself drifting in and out of consciousness for what seemed like a very long time. A damp cloth against her face, the sound of whispering voices. She had the same sensation as when she was a child, riding in the backseat when the adults thought she was asleep. The image of a car pricked her into alertness, and she sat up abruptly.
“Where’s Elizabeth? I left her in the car—”
Cormac’s voice was near, mingled notes of worry and relief: “Elizabeth is right here, Nora.” The child’s face loomed close as he continued. “You’ve only been out for a minute or two. We just got you inside the house.” His fingers brushed her face. “Rest awhile.”
Nora felt small, cold fingers press into her hand. No sign of the ginger-haired female. Maybe she was imagining things. She seemed to be drifting away again on the tide.
It must have been some time later when the chiming of a clock awakened her. Elizabeth was curled up at the other end of the sofa, draped in a blanket and fast asleep. Nora felt someone stir in the chair beside her. She looked up to find the ginger-haired woman, the one who’d been crying on Cormac’s shoulder. She was dry-eyed now, and spoke in a whisper: “How are you feeling?”
“Better.” Nora tried to sit up without disturbing Elizabeth. Her muscles were still stiff and sore from the impact of the crash. “How long was I asleep?”
“About an hour and a quarter,” the woman said. “I’m Roz Byrne, by the way—colleague of Cormac’s from UCD, and extraneous houseguest. He’s just gone into the kitchen—I’ll send him out to you, shall I?” She retreated through the sitting-room door, and Cormac emerged a second later.
“Nora—” He knelt on the floor and brought his face close. “How are you?”
“I’m all right. You must wonder what we’re doing here.”
“You’ve hardly had a chance to explain anything. Including that—” He gestured to the bandage on her head. “I was beginning to think you might have a concussion.”
“No—it’s just a scratch. Really.” Nora glanced back at Elizabeth, still slumbering deeply. It was amazing how much younger children could look while they were asleep. “It’s a very long story. Any chance of a cup of tea?”
Cormac helped her up, circling an arm around her waist as they moved across the room. Out in the hall, he stopped, pressing her against the wall with the length of his body, cradling the back of her head, kissing her with gently parted lips until she was floating, breathless with desire. He pressed his forehead against hers. “Sorry. But God, how I missed you, Nora. It seems like decades since you left.”
She raised a hand to touch his face. “I know. Lifetimes.”
4
Harry Shaughnessy’s clothing was laid out on the table at the center of the crime lab. Frank Cordova stared at the bloodstains on the sweat-shirt—that’s what they seemed to be, here under the bright lights of the lab—heavy, fresh stains around the neckline, and several large, lighter areas under the white letters spelling out “Galliard.” What was Harry Shaughnessy doing with a sweatshirt from Peter Hallett’s alma mater? Frank reminded himself that the shirt hadn’t necessarily belonged to Hallett—he could think of several other people in the Twin Cities who might belong to the same alumni association, including Marc Staunton. Harry might have picked the shirt up at the Goodwill, or the St. Vincent de Paul shop on West Seventh Street.
Jackie Smart, the forensic scientist, was going over the sweatshirt inch by inch with magnifier, tweezers, tape, and swabs, on the hunt for DNA. “Somebody said you knew this guy,” she said.
“Everybody knew him.” It was true. Generations of Saint Paul cops knew Harry Shaughnessy. He’d haunted Rice Park ever since he got back from Korea in 1953. Never the same after. And there were plenty like him—more after every war—sleeping under bridges, unable to cope with “normal” life, men who took to raving on street corners or quietly drinking themselves to death. Probably plenty of others, too—playing golf, puttering around in garages and basement wood shops—who were never the same either. Most of them just managed to hide it better than Harry Shaughnessy had. “Have you tested these spots that look like bloodstains?”
“The police lab did the presumptive—it’s definitely blood. There wasn’t much from the accident, the ME said. The vic’s heart stopped pretty much on impact. To me, those stains under the letters look quite a bit older than the accident anyway. See how the surface here is all cracked, and completely flaked off in places? What do you make of that?” She pointed to a small scrap of paper next to the sweatshirt—a handwritten note, gray with grime, and worn tissue-thin. “I found it in the pocket.”
Frank studied the faint block letters, written in blue ballpoint: I know what you did. Hidden Falls 11 pm tonite. It sounded like a threat. Hidden Falls tonight, or else. Or else what? I’ll tell where you buried Natalie Russo? The note made nailing down the DNA evidence even more crucial.
He said: “Jackie, can you get wearer DNA on all these things?”
“Sure, I can try—we usually get pretty good samples under the arms, around the collar.”
Frank picked up the nearly new pair of black running shoes, examined their slightly muddy soles. “What about these?”
“Again, the presumptive for blood comes up positive; we have to do more tests to see if it matches the blood on the shirt. It’s kinda funny—the vic was wearing all these clothes, but not those shoes; they were stuffed in his backpack. He had on these lovely size twelves.” She held up a battered pair of high-top sneakers. “The running shoes would have been way too small for him. But somebody wore them—I found white cotton threads inside when I was swabbing for DNA. There was quite a bit of dirt in the treads, too. When I’m done here, I’ll send all this over to trace. You can have a look—”
She waved a thumb over her shoulder, and Frank leaned down to peer through the eyepiece of a microscope at varicolored crystals of soil particles, dull fragments of decaying leaves, and dozens of small, wrinkled spheres. They looked exactly like the seeds from Holly Blume’s poster, the one with a picture of that rare plant she’d identified from Tríona Hallett’s hair. Plants are clever stowaways, Holly had said. They’re all about survival. All at once, he felt a thousand flashbulbs going off in his brain, and the usual sour feeling in his stomach was suddenly swallowed up in a surge of hope.
“Listen, Jackie, can you do me a favor, and run a DNA comparison on samples from these clothes against these two cases?” He scribbled names and case file numbers in his notebook, then tore out the sheet and handed it to her. “I promise, I’ll fill out all the proper forms as soon as I can. And one more thing, too—can you take a sample of that dirt from the shoe treads and send it over to Holly Blume, the forensic botanist at the University?”
“And how soon do you need this done?”
“Yesterday. No, the day before—thanks, Jackie. I’ll owe you one.”
5
Garda Detective Garrett Devaney had just packed
the last item in the boot of the car, his daughter Róisín’s fiddle case, resting lightly on top of their other luggage. He was always amazed at the apparent weightlessness of an instrument that could bring forth so much. “You’re sure that’s everything now?” he asked Róisín.
“Yes, Daddy.” She rolled her eyes, as if asking who should be more nervous about this trip—dear old dad, or the one who was actually going to be playing in competition. He’d tried to downplay it, his anxiety over this milestone, but it somehow seemed the measure of him, both as a teacher and as a father. He tried not to let it show, but Róisín understood exactly what her taking up the fiddle meant to him. She was determined not to let him down, and therein lay the danger.
His wife Nuala had tried to ease his mind a bit the previous night, slipping into bed beside him. “Just look at her face when she plays, Gar. She’s going to bowl them over. I wish I’d had that kind of confidence at her age.”
He hadn’t said anything, but his thoughts were troubled. Certainly, by rights, Róisín should bowl them over. But what if she didn’t? You were always at the mercy of adjudicators at these things—narrow-minded people, some of them, with their own parochial tastes. Róisín had talked about nothing but this Fiddle Week for months. She wanted to compete, and in the end, he couldn’t refuse her. He often observed her, head tilted to one side over the fiddle’s round belly, a picture of concentration. He had watched the secret notes seep into her ears, and then into her soul, and understood that what he was doing was only window dressing. What she needed to learn could never be taught, not directly. The music was a thing that could only be grown into, like a well-worn pair of britches or an oversized jumper.
Fortunately, Róisín had fallen in love with the sound of the fiddle, just as he had, with all its shades and feelings. No amount of technical ability could substitute for that. She had become a hunter of those quicksilver flashes of genius that entered the soul and came out the fingers—the enchantment, the draíocht. All he could do was to show her his own way of recognizing those rare moments, how to receive them when they came.
Traditional tunes were only simple auld music, some argued. Notes you could learn out of a book. But the people who made such claims were not standing beside him as he turned off the light in Róisín’s room, as he looked back from the doorway, watching her fingers stretch to fourth position as she slept. You didn’t get that from any fucking book.
He had worried and fretted for weeks about whether the competition was a good idea, but decided that in the end, for a child like Róisín, at least it couldn’t do much damage. She had to develop confidence in her own ear, her own taste in music, from listening to others. She hadn’t even heard many fiddle players, apart from himself, and it was time to start expanding her musical world. The idea that she might find someone whose style she admired more than his own had not occurred to him until this very moment. What would he do then, if she found someone else to look up to and emulate? Knowing the field, he decided to take his chances.
Róisín waggled a hand in front of his face. “Da,” she said, “snap out of it, will you? We have to go.” He focused, and saw her looking up at him with an expression that held both anticipation and a bit of mischief. Cheeky, as well as smart.
Nuala came out of the house to see them off, giving Róisín a squeeze and a kiss on top of the head. She wouldn’t be able to do that much longer, the way the child was growing. Róisín was going to be twelve in a few months. How had that happened?
“I’ll be rooting for you, sweetheart,” Nuala said, speaking over Róisín’s head straight at him. “I know you’ll do your very best. I’m already so proud of you for that.”
Devaney raised his hand out the window as they drove away. At moments like this, he usually felt as if he didn’t deserve to be enjoying life so much. There had to be a stumbling block down the road. He could feel it waiting for him. And yet he carried on—did his job, lived his life. What other choice did he have?
Garrett and Róisín were hardly gone when the phone rang. Nuala Devaney picked up, thinking it might be her husband, having forgotten something. But the voice on the other end was unfamiliar. Not to mention female, and American. “Hello—I was trying to reach Detective Devaney?”
Something to do with work, then, Nuala thought. It wasn’t purely American, the accent. Her ears had become finely tuned over the years to strange voices on the phone. Being married to a policeman forced you to act the detective, whether you wanted to or not. “Sorry, he’s not available just at the minute—”
“I hate to trouble him at home, but he said to call anytime.”
Of course he had.They’d argued about that endlessly—how he let people of every description ring their house at all hours. She had tried to make him understand the danger, and the calls had mostly stopped—until now. “If you’d like to leave your name, I could pass along a message.”
“No, it’s really—” The caller was trying to decide whether to ask for a mobile number, and eventually thought better of it. Just as well. There was no way she was giving out Garrett’s unlisted mobile to a stranger. Could be some tout who wouldn’t give a second thought to dragging him away from his Fiddle Week with Róisín. They’d been planning this trip for too long, and Róisín had worked much too hard for it all to be spoiled.
The caller must have sensed her resistance. “Why don’t I just try again later? Thanks for your help.”
After she set the phone down, Nuala’s hand lingered on the receiver. What help? She’d put up roadblocks right and left. Now she had two choices: she could ring Garrett and see what he wanted to do, or she could do nothing at all.
There had been no message. Surely it couldn’t be that important, could it?
6
Frank Cordova stared down at the items on his desk, just delivered by Tom and Eleanor Gavin. Along with the news that Nora was back in Ireland, they’d brought in three manila envelopes she’d prepared for him.
The first contained several items discovered at the river by the Cambodian fisherman, Seng Sotharith: a dirt-encrusted Nokia cell phone, and a handwritten note. I know what you did. Hidden Falls 11 pm tonite. The wording was the same as the note from Harry Shaughnessy’s sweatshirt pocket; it even had the same block capitals in blue ballpoint. Was the extra just a backup copy—or had somebody sent the same note to two different people?
In the second envelope was Nora’s account of her meeting with Harry Shaughnessy outside the library, a description of his bloodstained sweatshirt. She obviously didn’t know what had happened to Harry; she was asking Frank to find him.
The third manila envelope held a sheaf of articles about the Nash murders in Maine. Nora had circled the name of the lead detective on the case, a Gordon MacLeish.
He had just ended a call to the Maine State Police when his phone rang again. It was Nora.
“Frank, thank God you’re all right. I’ve been trying to reach you for days. Did Karin Bledsoe tell you I was trying to get in touch? She would only tell me that you were on leave.”
“I got tied up—some family business.” He couldn’t bring himself to talk about Chago, about the events that had landed him in the hospital. He pushed it all away. “Everything’s okay. Your parents were just here, dropping off your packages—they said you were back in Ireland.”
“And did they explain why I had to come back? Elizabeth ran away, Frank. She ditched Peter and Miranda when they arrived in Dublin, and she came looking for me. I couldn’t let them send her back to her father. I couldn’t.”
“So where are you now?”
She hesitated. “We’re okay, Frank. We’re safe.”
“You haven’t had any contact with Hallett?”
“No. I haven’t heard anything at all. I don’t even know whether he’s contacted the police. If he suspects that I have Elizabeth, I can imagine what he’s telling people—that I kidnapped her. But it’s not true—and this time I have witnesses to prove it. I tried getting in touch with a dete
ctive I know over here—no luck so far. That’s why I need your help, Frank. If you could talk to someone here, explain the situation, tell them Elizabeth is safe, that I’m not a danger to her—”
“Somebody here must have a contact in the Irish police. I’ll get in touch with the FBI and Interpol too, see if we can’t get some help tracking Hallett. You should have told me you were looking for Harry Shaugh-nessy—”
“I tried, but I couldn’t reach you, Frank. You have to find him, and ask him—”
“I’m afraid we can’t ask him anything. He was hit by a car, trying to cross Shepard Road. Killed instantly.” He could hear an intake of breath on the other end.
Nora finally spoke. “He was running from me, Frank. He thought I wanted something from him—and I did. That sweatshirt he was wearing—”
“—from Galliard. We’ve got it in the lab right now. The sweatshirt and a pair of shoes he was carrying both tested positive for blood. We’re checking against samples from Tríona and Natalie right now. It might be a break for us.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, Frank, and it’s too good to be true. I’m not trusting it, somehow. Even if the blood turns out to be a match to Tríona or Natalie, Peter is far too clever to leave such damning evidence. That sweatshirt can’t be his.”
“Let’s wait for the DNA results. You have to admit we’re doing a lot better than we were this time last week. If this is Tríona’s phone you got from the fisherman, we’ll finally have our first link to the primary crime scene. And even possible blood evidence. That note—”
“I think it may have been what sent Tríona down to the river that night. Maybe she thought the person who sent it could tell her what happened the night Natalie disappeared.”
