Malarkey

by Sheila Simonson

  I'm sure some of the southern suburbs of Dublin are interesting places, but I was greatly relieved when I finally stumbled on the N11 near the Bray roundabout. At six-thirty, as we were coming up on Arklow, I spotted Jack White's, the pub in which Tommy Tierney had had words with Slade Wheeler on Easter. I pulled into the car park.

  Dad jerked awake in the front passenger seat. "What?"

  "A beer," Jay said. "Sounds good."

  "A beer and a sandwich," I said firmly. "I refuse to cook."

  In fact, the roomy and pleasant pub served dinners, so we ate a real meal early. Afterwards, in the car park, a reporter came up and asked us for a reaction to the murder of Kayla Wheeler. I unlocked the car doors as fast as possible while Jay and my father dealt with the man, who was polite but persistent. He asked Jay about an article in the Times.

  When we got home, I brewed a pot of tea and brought it into the living room. Jay had gone onto the Internet straight from the car. I brought him a mug and leaned over his shoulder.

  He was loading the Irish Times.

  "I didn't know that was online."

  "I stumbled across it last night. Oh shit. Look at that."

  He had clicked on the Home section. The headline read Gardai Consult US Expert in Wheeler Case. Though the article was brief and uninformative, it identified Jay clearly. The source was Inspector Mahon.

  Dad peered over our shoulders. "I ought to check the Independent. I haven't really looked at it. I get sick if I read much in a car. Maybe they covered the story, too."

  Jay groaned.

  "Yes, here it is. There's a photo."

  Jay backed out of the system and disconnected. Then he picked up the phone and called Joe.

  Dad handed him the Independent article and Jay read it over the phone. I took a peek. The photo must have been taken as the three of us were entering the church hall for the inquest. Dad looked magisterial, Jay looked worried, and I had my mouth open.

  Chapter 15

  We may have good men, but we never had better.

  Glory-oh, glory-oh, to the bold Fenian men.

  Peadar Kearney, "The Bold Fenian Men"

  Maeve was coming.

  I decided to bake oatmeal cookies. Right after lunch on Thursday I went into Arklow and bought the basics. I hadn't brought a recipe from home, but I remembered the ingredients and thought I could reconstruct the proportions.

  At Quinnsworth I also bought a copy of the Times for Jay, in case he wanted to collect clippings for his scrapbook.

  He scowled when I told him that.

  "Just kidding." I handed him the paper and started putting the groceries away.

  "You're a great kidder." He was drinking tea. He flipped through the paper one-handed. "No more Yank Expert garbage, thank God, though there's a short article about the inquest tomorrow. The coroner's expected to adjourn that one, too."

  I got out the solitary mixing bowl and a tea cup. There were no measuring cups—or measuring spoons, for that matter.

  When I cranked up the oven temperature, the Rayburn coughed. "Where's Dad?"

  "Taking a nap. The trip to Dublin tired him."

  "Do you think he's okay?"

  He responded to my tone with a searching frown. "George will be all right, Lark. Don't worry about him so much. When you worry, he worries."

  I thought about that. "What time will they have the new passport ready for you tomorrow?"

  "After two."

  I visualized the rush-hour traffic and sighed.

  "Why don't we try the transit system? You could drop me at the station in Bray and come back for me."

  "I'd like to walk around Dublin myself."

  "Okay, and George can have a peaceful day with his notes. Lark..."

  "Mmm." I began mashing brown sugar into softened butter. "I hope this is the right kind of sugar. It's awfully lumpy."

  He got up. "I'm going for a walk. Are there hordes of reporters in the bushes?"

  "I didn't see any. You should be safe."

  He retrieved his anorak from the other room. It was misting out. "I can always dive into the bushes if I see a journalistic face."

  "Shall I make these with raisins?"

  He pondered, one arm in the jacket sleeve. "Half with and half without. No nuts." He slipped out the door.

  Maeve drove up in the van as I was removing the second batch of perfect cookies from the oven. I stuck my hands under the tap, wiped them on a dish towel, and met her at the door.

  She was laughing. "I didn't even have time to knock."

  "I was expecting you."

  "Something smells heavenly."

  "You did say teatime." I waved my spatula. She took her coat off and hung it on the back of a chair. When I had removed the cookies to a rack, I gave her one piping hot from oven. Cookies may be an American phenomenon, but I've never met a foreigner who rejected them.

  "Mmmm. I brought the book."

  "So I should hope." I filled the kettle and set it on the Rayburn.

  "Where's your father?"

  "He took a nap, but I heard signs of life a while ago. He'll be up soon."

  "And Jay?"

  I looked at my watch. "Taking a long walk. You didn't see a beleaguered Yank Expert in the bushes as you drove up, did you?"

  She hadn't read the article or heard of our Dublin excursion, so I filled her in. The kettle screamed, and I made a pot of tea. Dad came in as I was pouring the first mug.

  "Just in time. Do I smell cookies?"

  "Oatmeal," I said. "I had to use it up somehow." Both men had balked at porridge for breakfast that morning.

  Dad greeted Maeve. We sat around the table, nibbling cookies and admiring the book. The heavy rag paper with gilt edges was going to preserve an undistinguished travel diary longer than the greatest modern novel. I thought nostalgic thoughts about nineteenth century book binders. The cover was tooled calf.

  Maeve had done her homework. Slips of paper marked the references to Stanyon and the folly. She read a description of the artifacts to us, turning pink with indignation as she commented on the looting of ancient sites in that era. I was more interested in the two relevant illustrations.

  They were etchings, protected by delicate translucent paper. One showed a foreshortened view of a low mound with a handsome Georgian house below it and to the left. I screwed up my face, trying to superimpose Stanyon now on Stanyon then. Where in the woods would the mound be, if the present house had been built on the site of the first? The slope I had walked up seemed steeper than the slope of the mound in the drawing.

  "I don't know that the house was built on the original site." Maeve read my mind. "In any case, the artist's sense of proportion is off. Look at the size of that donkey cart in relation to the house."

  "Then all this does is verify the existence of a mound."

  "And that it was an earthwork, not a natural formation. That's useful. What do you think of the folly?"

  "Not much. It looks like a cave. Hey, is that my stone?" I squinted. "No, just a boulder. So the loopy uncle left most of the mound intact and excavated the tomb opening."

  "Apparently. He must have had prodigious luck to find it. I wonder how the tomb was oriented."

  "Oriented?"

  "At the Brugh na Boinne, in the valley of the River Boyne, the monuments have a seasonal orientation, south toward the midwinter sun or east toward the sun at spring equinox."

  "Like Stonehenge?"

  "Stonehenge is oriented to the summer solstice. It is," she said loftily, "later, smaller, and less important than Newgrange."

  Dad chuckled. "And entirely different."

  Maeve flushed and gave him a rueful answering smile. "Allow me a little chauvinism. Newgrange and Knowth are spectacular passage graves, Lark, among the most important in Europe. They date to the third millennium BC. However, your father's wrong. There are some minor similarities between the Newgrange site and Stonehenge. The ring of pillar stones and the heel stone, for instance. When you said you'd found an
incised stone, I thought immediately of the spirals on the threshold stone at Newgrange. Double spirals?"

  Dad had heard nothing of my stone, and I hadn't really described it to Maeve either. Under her expert questioning I managed to give some sense of the design and the sheer bulk of the stone. She got rather excited and talked in technical detail about similar markings elsewhere.

  I made another pot of tea.

  Dad munched a cookie. "Where's Jay?"

  I looked at my watch. He had been gone more than an hour. A chill ran up my spine. "Out for a walk." My voice was commendably calm. "I'm a little surprised he hasn't come back yet. I know he wanted to see Maeve's book."

  Maeve looked at me, eyes narrowed. "Shall we go look for him?"

  I said, "Give him fifteen minutes. I'm sure he'll turn up soon."

  But he didn't.

  I ate another cookie and drank a cup of tea. Maeve read us a couple of passages that dealt with quaint local characters in a patronizing upper-class way. The cookie sat in my stomach like a lump of concrete.

  When Jay had been gone two hours I called Joe Kennedy. He said he'd be right over.

  By that time we had moved to the living room, and I was frankly pacing. I refused to allow my imagination to paint a picture of what might have happened to Jay. He was a grown man and trained in who knows how many kinds of self-defense. No mad strangler was going to lay hands on my husband.

  It took Joe half an hour to get to the cottage. Maeve had made more tea. She poured him a cup while he questioned me about Jay's disappearance.

  "Which way did he go?"

  "I was baking cookies. I didn't see." I tried to sound reasonable. I should have gone with Jay. No, that was foolish. I'd had my hands in the cookie dough, and Maeve was coming. "He made a joke about avoiding reporters by diving into the bushes."

  "In the woods?"

  I cleared my throat. It felt awful, as if it might close and choke me. "I don't think he'd go there. He bawled me out for walking in the woods." Jay was neither inconsistent nor hypocritical. "I think he usually walks up to the road and over to the convenience market."

  "Findley's? East, then." He was taking notes, neglecting his tea. "Did you...er, what was his state of mind?"

  "We didn't quarrel."

  Dad's turn to clear his throat. I looked at him, pleading, and he said nothing.

  I drew a breath. "Jay was worried about the impact of that article in the Times."

  "Sure, he didn't like it." Joe's irony was mild. Jay had made his displeasure extremely plain on the phone.

  "The story worried him," I repeated. "It made him sound as if he were taking an important role in the investigation." My voice trembled in spite of me. "All he wanted to do was make sure we were safe and then go home."

  "But the plane ticket was stolen, and the passport."

  "Aer Lingus agreed to replace the ticket, and we were...we are going to the embassy tomorrow to pick up a new passport. That can't have anything to do with—"

  Joe said, "I'm sorry, Lark. I was thinking aloud." He fiddled with the notebook. "I reported your husband's disappearance as a suspicious circumstance. When an adult vanishes, Gardai policy is to wait twenty-four hours."

  "I won't wait. I want to do something, find him. You should be searching the woods."

  "Why the woods? I thought you said he wouldn't go there."

  "Where else can he be?" I looked at Dad. He was frowning and rather gray. I stood up. "I haven't called Stanyon. Maybe he's..." I broke off. Joe was shaking his head.

  "I rang up the Steins from the station directly you notified me. Liam McDiarmuid answered. He asked the others and called me back. They've not seen Jay at all, nor did Declan Byrne when he drove through the estate an hour ago. The area hospitals and the traffic control officers saw nothing of your husband either. However, I must ring up Findley's. May I use your telephone?"

  "Please."

  We waited, silent, while Joe spoke into the phone. He hung up slowly. "No, he's not stopped in there today. Moira Findley would have recognized him. She said they chatted each time he bought a paper, and she attended the inquest, so she knows who he is. She's a keen observer, Moira, and she watches the road. She says she'd have seen him if he'd walked past the shop, too." He picked up the receiver again and tapped out a number.

  "He's bound to be all right, Lark," Dad said for the third time, adding, "Jay can take care of himself. Perhaps he went for a walk in the woods and got lost."

  "Then they should search the woods." My voice sounded harsher than I intended. I bit my lip. "I'm sorry. Is it time for your pills? I don't want to have to worry about you collapsing." That was tactless of me, but I was beyond tact.

  He got up. "I'll go take them, and I won't collapse, my dear. I promise."

  "I'll hold you to it."

  I watched him walk downstairs, shoulders hunched.

  Joe was saying, "Yes, sir, I know. Call Mahon if you like. He can bloody authorize it. Wasn't Mahon the one gave out the information to that journalist? I want a team in the woods and another at Stanyon. Ah, bollocks. Call in the volunteers, then. I'll stay at the cottage for the time being." He read off the telephone number.

  Maeve said, "Are you going to do a search?"

  "In the morning." Joe avoided my eyes.

  I strode to the wall near the kitchen and yanked my anorak off its peg. "I'm going out now, before dark."

  Maeve said, "I'll come with you."

  Joe hesitated, as if he meant to object and changed his mind. "All right, but stay together and don't go deep into the trees. Call his name. If he's there and has stumbled into a trap—"

  "A trap?" I envisaged booby traps, mines, explosions. No. My brain stopped whirling. "Like a pit with sharpened stakes?"

  "More likely just a pit, though we found nothing like that earlier. If he's injured he'll hear you and may be able to respond."

  I struggled into the jacket. I was having trouble with simple things, like putting my arm in the right hole.

  "I'll sit here by the telephone," Joe went on. "I'm expecting Mahon to ring up. There's a fog forming, so be careful. I don't need three missing persons on my plate."

  Maeve had retrieved her duffle coat. She followed me to the door.

  "Tell my father where I've gone," I called, and went out into the late afternoon drizzle. "Soft" weather, but not yet a fog. The air was motionless.

  Maeve and I entered the woods by climbing the stile I had used before. I stood still, orienting myself, then I called Jay's name. My voice echoed. So did the silence.

  "No response," Maeve said. "Show me your stone."

  "It's fairly deep in the trees, up that way." I pointed. "At least I think it's there. I'm not sure I can find it again."

  "Give it a try."

  So I led her into the darkening woods. Every ten yards or so I called for Jay. We heard rustlings and birdcalls. The rows of identical trees told me nothing. The occasional blot of red paint, fainter than before, led nowhere. After ten minutes, I was lost.

  I stopped in my tracks and looked around me. "I'm sorry. I have no idea where the stone is, or where we are." Mist curled around the middle branches above our head and left my face wet. It was getting darker.

  Maeve turned slowly around, lips pursed in a silent whistle. "I do see the problem. Airy, isn't it?"

  It was eerier than a Halloween spookhouse. I felt my throat closing again so I yelled Jay's name. No response. The needle-thick ground beneath our feet was slippery.

  "Pity the light's so poor." Maeve was staring to the right. North, I thought. That's north. I hoped it was north.

  "Ja—a—ay!" I called again. No answer.

  Something hooted close by and a bush rustled. I whirled but saw nothing.

  Maeve touched my arm. "Let's go back. I want to look at the book again. I need to check one of the descriptions."

  I took a few paces up the slope and called once more without result. I drew calming breaths. "Okay. This is doing no good. We need lig
ht and more searchers."

  "In the morning," she said gently.

  "Which way did we come?" I should have known but the fog and my anxiety left me clueless.

  She pointed to the left, downhill. "That way."

  "Are you sure?"

  "No."

  We walked perhaps ten yards through twining mist. I called again.

  Maeve took my arm. "Is that it?" She pointed.

  My heartbeat quickened, but the stone she indicated was much too small. "It's a megalith," I snapped.

  "I wasn't sure you'd recognize one."

  "I saw the dolmens." I coughed. My throat felt rough with all that yelling. "Tell me about dolmens." Not that I cared, at that point. I just wanted her to talk.

  She led me down through the trees. "They're among the oldest monuments in Ireland. Pre-Celtic, of course."

  "Really?"

  "Really. The Celts didn't invade Ireland—or more likely, filter in—until the Romans and the Germanic tribes began pushing them west. These people, the ones who erected the dolmens, were much older. Formorians, in Celtic myth. The Celts weren't great builders in stone until the Christian era. Of course they invented legends about the stone works they found in Ireland, which were obviously the work of giants."

  "Obviously." My teeth had begun to chatter. The mist clung in beads to Maeve's hair and, I suppose, mine. It swirled round our knees.

  Maeve went slowly, her eyes on the ground. "Dolmens figure in the legends associated with Finn MacCool. He was a great hero who founded and led a band of warriors called the Fianna."

  I swallowed my panic. "Feena? Oh, Fianna as in Fianna Fail." I named the major nationalist political party. They were out of power just then, but I'd been in the country long enough to hear the name and see it in print.

  "That's right," Maeve said easily. We avoided a mist-heavy bush. She knew and I knew she was telling me stories to keep me from panicking. "Fianna Fail nowadays and the Fenians in the nineteenth century."

  "So tell me about Finn. Did his warriors use the dolmens as fortifications?"

  "No, it's stranger than that. In his old age, Finn took a beautiful young bride named Grainne."