Erin Hart - Lake of Sorrows

Danny was sitting on the cot against the wall when she arrived, hands clasped around his drawn-up knees, staring off into the distance. She distinctly remembered simply standing before him, uncurling her fist to show the melted lump of wax. And somehow she had known that he already understood everything she had come to say, and that there was no need to speak. When he finally pulled her down on the cot beside him, the sensation was not one of submission or capitulation, but of long-awaited freedom.

She and Danny had planned to meet early on that Midsummer’s morning. She walked the two miles to the crossroads at dawn. He would come from the apiary; they would meet at the cross and thumb a lift from a lorry driver heading toward Shannon. From Shannon they would make their way somehow to Australia. A dense fog had spread low over the bog that morning, and a frisson of anticipation had bubbled through her, dissipating all fear and fatigue. When the sun broke across the horizon, she sat on her suitcase under the shelter of an overgrown hedge, listening to a lark’s celebratory chorus. She remembered how the minutes had slid by, but it was difficult to recall exactly when her hopeful anticipation had begun slipping toward disappointment, then apprehension, and finally bitter despair.

She had never seen any tickets. He’d said they ought to wait until they arrived at Shannon. At six o’clock, nearly two hours after the appointed time, she concealed her small suitcase in the hedgerow and began walking home, feeling with every step a heavy inward strike, burying disgrace and humiliation far down in the depths of her soul, never to be acknowledged, ever again.

She had arrived home just in time to put the kettle on. After starting the rashers and sausages for Dominic’s breakfast, she had begun preparing his lunch for the day. He would have to be up in a few minutes for the eight o’clock shift on the bog. The cuckoo clock in the kitchen sang its mechanical song at seven. Everything was as it had been yesterday, and as it would be again tomorrow. There had never been anything else; it had only been temporary madness, an illusion.

And she had remained steadfast in her denial. When the monthly blood stopped and she began to feel the quickening flutters in her abdomen, she had simply accepted the child, never once looking at him in search of some feature that would tell her which of the two brothers was his father. Never once, that is, until Charlie had brought home news of a blackened corpse with a triple-knotted cord about its throat. It had felt like a car crash, that moment, filled with sounds of tearing metal and shattering glass. It felt as if a yawning void had opened in the ground beneath her feet, and everything that existed these last twenty-five years had slipped away, suddenly devoid of meaning.

She carried the tin box outside into the haggard behind the house, where she had made a pile of straw. She lit a match and touched it to the golden stalks, watching the fire falter at first and then take hold. One by one, she dropped the treasures from the tin into the fire, watching as it consumed each one with bright, chemical confidence. When the last object was gone, she turned away from the fire.

As she opened the kitchen door, the hackney driver was just pulling into the yard. She waved to signal that she was ready, and went into the house for the last time. One by one, she unscrewed the valves on the three oxygen tanks that stood in the corner of the kitchen. Then she crossed to the cooker. She had already extinguished the pilots; now she turned the gas on at each of the four hobs, and in the oven as well. Teresa let her gaze sweep the room one final time before she grasped the handle of her brown suitcase and stepped outside, closing the kitchen door carefully behind her.

It was strange how calm she felt, riding in the back seat of the cab—how well she could envision the journey ahead, if not its destination. When it was finally time, she would make her way down the long corridor that led to the departure gate. A few hours from now she would emerge naked and new on the other side of the world. She had tried to keep from feeling each minute seeping into the next, bleeding away, until there was nothing left. But now she felt as if her veins had run dry. She was a husk, light and free. If by chance she should cut herself, nothing would flow from the wound but a meager trickle of dry yellow dust.

Nora tucked the photograph of the Brazils and Desmond Quill into her jacket pocket, and set out to find Brona Scully. If Quill had been out here at Illaunafulla last night, and she could get Brona to identify him from the photo, it would be something to take to the police. It still wouldn’t be absolute proof that he was involved in the murders, but it would be one step closer.

Michael Scully seemed surprised to see her when he answered the door. His hair and clothes were rumpled as though he’d just awakened from a nap.

“I’m very sorry to disturb you, Michael, but I need to speak to Brona.”

Scully let her in and called for Brona from the foot of the stairs, but received no response. “I don’t think she’s here at the minute,” he said. “She must have gone out while I was resting.”

Nora saw last night’s dreadful worry creep back into Michael Scully’s face. He might not know about Rachel Briscoe’s murder, and there was no point in making him worry needlessly. “I’ll go and have a look at the place where Cormac found her. But if she does happen to come home in the meantime, would you give me a ring?” She fished a card out of her pocket and scribbled her mobile number on it. “Just ring me on that number.” Scully nodded gravely.

All these paths, Nora thought as she picked her way up the small boreen at the back of the Scully property; all these trails twisting around and leading nowhere. The grass was deep, and there were blind corners everywhere.

If Quill had been part of the Loughnabrone excavation team all those years ago, he could have been involved in Danny Brazil’s murder. And maybe Ursula had found out about his connection, and had been using that knowledge as leverage to get something she wanted—the gold collar? The drawing was documentary evidence that it existed. If it had already been sold, maybe it was a share of the money Ursula had been after.

Nora’s head still ached, and her joints were stiff from the time she’d spent in the broom closet. If she couldn’t find Brona, or if the girl couldn’t identify Quill, then she could try to track his movements last night—find out if he’d left the hotel, who might have seen him in the town. It was impossible to know whom to trust, but she couldn’t stop now. The facts were starting to fall together, piecemeal though they might be, and it would all come out eventually. She had to believe that.

She quickened her pace, scanning the hedges at the pasture’s edge for Brona Scully’s dark head. It was probably crazy to think she could find the girl, but Cormac had done it last night. She climbed through a hole in the hedge and emerged amid a crowd of cattle, heads down at their grazing. A young bullock raised his head to inspect her, his innocent brown gaze raising a host of specters of fatted calves and sacrificial lambs. She had to find Brona, before it was too late.

No figure appeared near the fairy tree. Nora peered up into its swaddled branches, feeling once more the strange intensity in the hundreds of ragged and colorful supplications. She called out Brona’s name, not daring to speak above a whisper, as if the tree might catch and hold her plea in its gnarled limbs.

She crisscrossed the patchwork of fields a half-dozen times, poking at the base of any ditches where a hiding place might lie, skirting any low-lying spots. There was no sign of the girl anywhere. She suddenly realized that she was at a distinct disadvantage. Brona Scully knew this place, every hedge and bush and pile of stones; she could even be watching from some protected place. Nora turned, taking in the vista, the brown bog stretching into the distance, the lake below the hill. She hadn’t yet looked in Charlie Brazil’s apiary. The thought of running into Charlie again after their last meeting was not a prospect she relished, but she had to find Brona. She would advance on the place slowly, circling around it first, in case anyone was there. Brona might run if she was surprised, and Nora didn’t want to meet anyone else.