Erin Hart - Haunted Ground

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.

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 table. 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.