Declan Hughes - The Color of Blood

The cover on the photo looked new; it certainly wasn’t weathered the way it should have been. And it seemed to be stuck on the headstone with glue, or resin. The grave had been visited recently; the earth was dented with marks, and there were even fresh prints in the softer mud leading up to the plot: the prints showed the kind of treads you get on motorcycle boots. There were prints small enough to be Emily’s, and prints large enough to be Jerry Dalton’s. And right around the child’s grave, someone had spread a trail of rowan berries.

There were lights on in Jerry Dalton’s house in Woodpark, but I would have knocked on his door even if there hadn’t been. I knocked like a bailiff about to repossess the place; it was only a matter of time before his neighbors were awake too. Emily Howard’s voice came from behind the door.

“Who is it?” she said.

“Ed Loy. It’s time we talked,” I said.

She opened the door, said “Hi, Ted” and went back inside. The door opened into a tiny hallway; a door led right into the living room. Emily sat in the middle of the floor in that knees-tucked-beneath-her way only women seem able to do. She wore indigo blue jeans and a black sweater; her newly black hair made her pale skin appear opalescent; her eyes were panda black, and her lashes were thick with mascara; her bloodstone rings gleamed in the glow from a gas fire. On the floor around her, she was surrounded by old photograph albums and journals; there was a smell of dust and worn paper in the room, of the faded and antique, of the past.

“They went through every album, picked out every photograph, and destroyed it. Even the shots of her as a baby. Isn’t that weird? No, isn’t that fucked-up?”

“Are you talking about Marian Howard?”

“Ye-ah.”

“What about the photograph on her headstone?”

“Oh, we put that up,” Emily said, staring at me through solemn brown eyes. She seemed to have aged several years in the hours since I’d seen her; I felt as if I was meeting her for the first time: a serious young adult.

“We?”

“Me and Jerry Dalton.”

“You and Jerry Dalton. You’re working together, are you?”

“I don’t know about ‘together.’ Don’t know about ‘working’ either. We’ve…he’s been getting sent this stuff about his real parents, about his background. And it crosses over with stuff about my family. So we’ve been, kind of, comparing notes. Trying to find out who fucked us up.”

“When I met your father, he said you’d been a perfectly normal girl, and then all of a sudden you’d had your hair dyed, broke up with your perfect boyfriend, gone off the rails entirely. Was that because you met Dalton?”

“I guess so. Jerry told me stuff about my family, about the ways people close to the Howards keep dying.”

“People like Audrey Howard and Stephen Casey and Eileen Casey?”

“You’ve been doing your detective thing, haven’t you? Yes, people like that, Ted. But you know, what my father said, about me being perfectly normal-I’ve been bulimic since I was thirteen, been in therapy since as long, my perfect boyfriend was a cokehead addicted to porn and that turned me on. How the fuck is any of that perfectly normal? And you know the joke of it? My parents didn’t even notice. They weren’t paying attention. Dad was too busy working, or lost in the land of rugby with fat Denis and all the Seafield man-boys, and Mum was obsessed with herself, with her looks or her fading looks, with her career or her fading career, with cheating on Dad with as many men as possible. I’m surprised Dad even noticed I was missing. Bet if he hadn’t received the ransom demand, he wouldn’t have.”

She said all this in a matter-of-fact tone, without any self-pity; as if she feared I might attribute some to her, she quickly added, “I’m not doing a poor little rich girl routine here, it’s just…there’s something wrong. Something wrong with my aunt thinking it’s okay for me to screw my cousin, something wrong with me for doing it, something wrong for her to put me in therapy and not tell my folks, something wrong with me for going along with it. Even if I was the child, I’m not anymore. But I didn’t seem to have it in me to do anything about it on my own. Jerry said, what’s the problem? Something’s wrong in my family. What’s the solution? Well, if six years of therapy isn’t telling you, maybe it isn’t all in your head: chances are you need to find out for real. And I was getting somewhere, feeling better just searching, you know, looking at the Howards, at Dad, at Aunt Sandra, at Jonny even, trying to figure out what lies they were telling when half the time they didn’t seem to know themselves. And dumping David Brady, who was like my sick addiction. And then this fucking porno thing comes back to haunt me, Jesus.”

Her eyes welled up and spilled over. I had a clean handkerchief in my pocket. I offered it to her, and she dabbed her eyes with it, smearing the black makeup and mascara around her eyes. She looked at the black stains on the handkerchief and made herself laugh.

“I bet I look like some girl at a Debs dance now, who never wears eye makeup usually and doesn’t understand you’re not supposed to cry with it on.”

“You look fine,” I said. “And you’re never not supposed to cry.”

“Is that your philosophy, Ted?”

“I wish you’d stop calling me Ted.”

She giggled, then blew her nose, leaving it black on the tip. Then she went through the albums on the floor until she found something.

“So look,” she said. “I think I’m getting closer to finding out what’s wrong. Today Jerry got a photograph of Marian Howard, and a clipping. Look at this.”

She passed me an old scrap of yellowing newspaper, from the Irish Independent dated January 18, 1976.

DEATH OF DOCTOR’S CHILD

“TRAGIC ACCIDENT”

An inquest into the death by drowning of Marian Howard (12), the youngest daughter of well-known doctor John Howard, heard that the child was known to have a “mischievous” sense of humor, and that she had been in the habit of “messing around” in the large pond at the rear of the family home. Her elder sister Sandra said Marian used to hold her breath and hide underwater, fully clothed, often in one of the many crevices and breaks in the stone walls of the pond, as a practical joke, so that she and her brother and parents would panic and believe she had drowned. It was thought that in this instance, she became trapped by a large or unwieldy rock, which may have snagged on her clothing. A verdict of accidental death was recorded.

“It’s hilarious, isn’t it? The shit you can get away with if you’re a big rich doctor.”

“You think they just went along with whatever the family said to hush it up?”

“It was November, Ted. I mean, it’s bullshit anyway, there’s barely three feet of water in that pond, how the fuck you’d get jammed down there at the age of twelve, I don’t know. But say you did, and you couldn’t swim or something, and you had this yo-ho-ho mischievous sense of humor God help us, you might pull something like that in July or August, but November? I mean, who’d think to look in the pond, who’d be out in the fucking garden in November? It’s freezing, for fuck’s sake. Complete joke.”

“What do you think happened?” I said.

“I don’t know. But listen, a childhood accident, right, a kid drowns. My aunt. How is it Dad never told me? How is it Sandra never told Jonny? I mean, it was thirty years ago, obviously upsetting, but they’ve gotten over it, right? Except if they haven’t. And why haven’t they?”

“Where did you get all the photo albums?”

“Granny Howard left them to me. There are journals as well. Stuff she wrote, some stuff the kids wrote. That’s another thing, when Granny Howard died, she was cremated. I didn’t think anything, but it would have been the normal thing to bury her with Granddad. But if we had visited the grave, we would have found out about Marian.”