Erin Hart - Lake of Sorrows

Nora said, “If Quill was interested in Evelyn, then some of the things he said to Dominic Brazil down at the lake—things about losing a treasure worth more than gold—make a lot more sense. Maybe he felt he deserved the collar, as compensation or reparation for some slight he’d suffered. Rejection by Evelyn would be one explanation.”

“Jesus, poor Evelyn. I’m sure she’d no notion about any of this.”

“Now that Quill is dead, surely it’s all over.” Nora slipped the photograph from Cormac’s hand; before he could object she had lit a match under it and cast it into the ashes in the fireplace. She watched the edges curl and blacken. The last fragment of the image to disappear was Desmond Quill’s smiling face. With any luck, Evelyn might be spared the anguish of being Quill’s final, posthumous victim.

Cormac dropped Michael Scully and Nora at the hospital’s front entrance, and Nora stood by anxiously as Michael climbed out of the passenger seat. He moved slowly, but she wasn’t sure how much assistance to give, and didn’t know whether he might be offended by the offer of a wheelchair. When they’d made it through the sliding doors into the hospital foyer, Scully turned to her and tipped his head toward several wheelchairs that stood waiting just inside the entrance. “I think it may be a good idea to take a lift in one of those,” he said, “if you wouldn’t mind.”

She went to fetch one of the wheelchairs, and Michael sank into it, exhausted, though he’d walked only about thirty yards from the car. Taking her place behind the chair, Nora looked down at his thin shoulders moving up and down from the effort of breathing, his face showing the weariness of constant pain. His hands gripped the wheelchair’s arms, and she saw the veins standing out between the tendons. They would probably not meet again, after she left this place.

As they approached Brona’s room, Michael Scully raised a hand for Nora to stop the wheelchair outside the door. He looked in at his daughter, asleep in the bed, her injured throat still swathed in bandages. Brona had lost quite a lot of blood by the time they got her to the hospital, so her condition had been critical for the first couple of days, but she seemed to have suffered no brain damage from oxygen deprivation. In the past several days she was much improved, and yesterday they’d found her sitting up in bed. She would probably have a scar, but by some miracle Quill’s blade had missed the major vessels in her throat.

“Let her be,” Scully said. “I can wait a few minutes to see her.” Nora turned the chair around, and they went back down the hospital corridor in silence.

Scully finally spoke. “I’ve been thinking. There’s not much more I could do for Brona, even if I were going to be here. She’ll have to make her own decisions. But I want to be sure that she can make up her own mind, and not have others trying to do it for her.”

“I’m sorry that we have to go away tomorrow,” Nora said. “How will you manage your doctor visits?”

“I’ll drive myself as long as I can, and when she’s recovered, Brona can drive me, if I’m not able.” He looked at Nora’s startled expression. “Oh, yes, she has a driving license, and a Leaving Cert. She’s a very capable, independent young woman. But you can see the kinds of preconceived notions she faces, even from people like yourself.”

“I shouldn’t have assumed—”

“Nearly everyone does,” Scully said. “No harm done.”

“I’m curious about how you communicate—or I suppose a better question would be how Brona communicates with you. How does she tell you what she feels, what she needs?”

“You’d be amazed what can pass between two people without a word being spoken,” Scully said. “I’m not saying it isn’t difficult, but we’ve always managed. Even people who speak have trouble making themselves understood.”

Nora felt the words acutely, knowing how difficult it had been for her to tell Cormac she was leaving. “But she doesn’t write, she doesn’t use any kind of sign language?”

“Not really,” Scully said. “It’s difficult to describe. She does make herself understood in our daily life. It must be a terribly lonely life for her, out here on the bog with me, but she doesn’t complain. She cooks and keeps the house, she helps me with my work, she reads. We used to look forward to Gabriel and Evelyn coming down every summer; it took away some of the loneliness for a while. I sometimes thought of leaving here, but I didn’t have a notion where else to go. Where on this earth can a person be spared from loneliness? And I understand it’s sometimes far worse when you’re surrounded by people. Here it may rain enough to drown fish; it may not be the most picturesque part of Ireland nor the most desirable—but it’s my place, this.”

As he was speaking, Nora felt the stab of longing for her other home, where snow buried broken cornstalks in the prairie winter, where the river bluffs glowed golden in the autumn light, and the glorious, towering sky dwarfed all that lay beneath it. There was a great flatness and openness that she missed dreadfully, even out here on the black bog, and she envied Michael Scully that feeling of belonging somewhere.

“I’ve decided that I’d prefer not to be in here, when the time comes,” Scully said. “I’d rather be in my own home, on my own patch. I know I’ve asked a lot of you already, but is there some way you could help me arrange that?”

“If you’re talking about hospice care, yes, I could give you the names of some people who would be able to help.”

They continued down the corridor, both carried in the constant flow of their own thoughts. Nora wondered what would happen to the hoard of knowledge Michael Scully had built up over a lifetime—more than a lifetime, if you considered all the people from whom he’d gleaned bits of history over the years. He had all those incredible files, of course; but reading them wasn’t the same thing as walking out with someone who could take you to the very spot where three ravens had sung over the grave of a king.

Down the long corridor a white-coated figure was approaching, a brisk, clean-shaven young man, probably a resident. Nora stopped the wheelchair when he reached them, and saw the nervous way the man gripped the chair’s arm and ducked his head to speak to Michael. “Mr. Scully, before you go in to your daughter, I wonder if we might have a word—in private.”

Scully said to Nora, “Dr. Conran has been minding Brona.” He turned back to the physician. “This is Dr. Gavin, who has been looking after me. If she doesn’t mind, I’d like to have her with me, whatever the news.”

“As you wish,” said Conran. “We can go into the office here.” He led them a few yards down the hallway into a small room where three cluttered desks were pushed into the corners. The young doctor began cautiously: “Yesterday, as you know, Brona seemed to be having quite a bit of pain in her lower back and legs, and this morning we decided we should check to see whether she might be suffering from a compression fracture. It’s routine, when scheduling a pelvic X ray, to perform several blood tests before exposing a woman of child-bearing age to even such a small amount of radiation. One of those routine blood tests is a pregnancy test.” He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I have to inform you that your daughter’s result on that test came back positive.”

“Are you saying Brona is pregnant?”

The doctor ran one hand over his chin. “Yes. I had the laboratory run the test a second time, to be sure it wasn’t a false positive. The thing is, Mr. Scully, when your daughter was brought into casualty, we didn’t do any sort of examination for sexual assault. No one asked for it—”