"She's a good friend," I interrupted.
Silence lay between us.
Joe checked his watch. "I'm due at the inquest. The boys will be winding down their search of the woods soon, Lark. I told Declan Byrne to notify you when they've gone."
"Thanks."
At that point Dad came in and shook hands. Joe was so pressed for time he left me to explain to my father what the police had discovered. I could tell the lack of ceremony troubled Joe. At heart, he liked to do things by the book.
I poured Dad a fresh cup of coffee as I talked. "So Mahon has come around to Maeve's theory after all, but they didn't find the folly."
"Maeve will find it." Dad sat and sipped.
"Breakfast?"
"I am a bit hungry." He looked guilty.
I cut bread for him and scrambled a couple of eggs. When he had eaten, he phoned my mother. As I was pottering around the kitchen, tidying the table, Constable Byrne walked in from the woods. I brewed him a pot of tea. That seemed to be my role. I was beginning to resent it.
Byrne was finishing his cuppa and Dad had joined us when a rusty Morris Minor pulled in behind the Toyota. Three students erupted from it, two young women and a very young man. All three wore jeans, sweatshirts, and wellies. They began unloading gear. It was surprising how much junk the tiny car could hold.
I invited the kids in and made some more tea. Then I rebelled. I was not some kind of skivvy. I intended to be part of the action. I announced that I was going downstairs to change into work clothes.
Dad and the students and the young Garda looked at me with so much sympathy I nearly threw the tea pot at them.
Maeve returned before noon. She came in dressed in an Oxford gray pantsuit with her jeans and wellies over one arm. She greeted her pupils, dashed downstairs, changed, and reappeared in the kitchen before the kettle boiled. She waved off my offer of tea, whipped out her ordnance map and the sketch she had made, and began briefing her team. I told her what Joe had told me of the mixed results of the search.
"Mahon's come over to my view? Good, good. Any word from Teresa Tierney?"
"No."
"Right." She looked disappointed but not daunted.
"Declan Byrne said Mahon left a couple of men in the woods. They can lead you directly to the north face of the mound, and they're supposed to put themselves at your disposal. Mahon will come to the site himself as soon as the coroner adjourns the inquest. Is it over yet?"
"I don't know. I left as soon as they'd taken my testimony. The Gardai will dig?" She made a face. "Mahon watching over my shoulder, obviously." She looked round at her team. "So let's do everything in text-book style. Ready?"
They were straining at the leash. So was I. So was my father. That presented a problem.
Maeve solved it by pleading with him to stand by the telephone in case Teresa Tierney called. Grumbling, he acceded, and she went on with her briefing. Then we trooped outside. Johnnie Poole shouldered the theodolite, the girls lifted the chest of tools between them, and we headed for the stile. Before we reached it I heard a car crunch on the gravel behind us. A door slammed. Maeve motioned us on, impatient, but Joe Kennedy hove into sight as we entered the woods with our Gardai guides.
Joe's arrival created a delay while he ranked Maeve down for telephoning Teresa Tierney. They glowered at each other. Maeve did not apologize. The students set their burdens down and listened to the ruction with their eyes wide. The two uniformed policemen shifted from foot to foot. I felt like screaming, but I didn't.
As the barbed exchange softened into a discussion of excavation procedures I heard a further slamming of car doors.
"If you don't get into gear, Maeve, we'll still be standing here at sundown. That has to be Mahon." I waved my arm in the direction of the cottage.
Maeve and Joe exchanged looks. He made a gesture to the two patient Gardai, and off we went.
In broad daylight the woods had lost their airiness. I was again reminded of telephone poles. There was no birdsong—too many people, too much commotion. Occasional blotches of red paint showed like scabs on the tree trunks. The policemen led us north along the stone wall the full extent of the plantation before they turned west. They were taking us around the hill I had climbed the day I found my stone.
The north rim of the woods fronted a long green slope dotted with sheep. The road to Killaveen wound past with the hills of Wicklow blue in the distance. A police van had been driven down what must have been a farm lane along the pasture wall. It was parked a few hundred yards from where the trees began. When I saw it, I understood why Mahon had to investigate the possibility that Jay had been carried through the woods and out the other side to a waiting car. My heart sank. Maeve was sure Jay was hidden in the folly. I hoped she was right, but my doubts stirred.
We walked along the bordering wall perhaps fifty yards. The sight of all that open country diminished the woods. The plantation was, after all, a small area. I could see how the mound rose up irregularly and that the trees on the mound proper were scraggly and stunted by comparison with the straight, sturdy growth elsewhere. Then we were among the trees again, and I lost my perspective.
The silent Gardai took us directly to the area Maeve had designated in her sketch as the likeliest place for the folly entry. They stopped and the shorter man gestured at an unremarkable slope, stone-studded and overgrown with vines, thrusting ferns, and briars. Overgrown with trees, too. I felt my chest tighten with panic. We'd never find the key to Jay's prison in all that tangled greenery. Even the students, who had been chattering among themselves as we walked north, fell silent.
Maeve surveyed the unpromising slope with narrowed eyes. "Right. We have secateurs and pruning shears in the chest. We're going to need axes and a saw, preferably powered. Meanwhile, we'll pace it off. And I want grid-lines, chaps. Johnnie, set up the theodolite over there." She gestured.
I'd forgotten the tedium involved at the start of a dig. I had once spent an amateur summer on an archaeological dig in northern California. That was where I met Jay. I thought back, trying to remember the site on my first day. It seemed to me the university had sent a reconnaissance team out well before the excavation began, that the site had been surveyed and marked before we set up our tents. This site was much smaller, of course, but if Maeve insisted on a text-book job it might be days before she dug through to the passageway into the tomb.
I sat on a boulder and thought dark thoughts. Joe sent one of the Gardai back in search of axes and saws—and permission from the Steins to fell their timber. By the book.
Part of my uncharacteristic funk arose from my uselessness. I could do nothing helpful until the grunt work began, so I sat there and brooded. A crow cawed. Every once in a while a car or lorry passed along the road, and I heard the hum of their engines. Mahon appeared with his sergeant and constable in tow, and the police conferred in a clump while Maeve's team laid out the first of the gridlines. They used metal stakes and heavy yellow twine. The assistant, Johnnie Poole, called out numbers from time to time. Maeve supervised.
They had worked a good two hours, sweating in the sun, cutting brush, marking their lines, before Maeve was satisfied. I had wandered around a bit, kicking the needles, brooding, but I kept coming back to watch. Now I could do something. I went over to the chest of gear, now nearly empty, and pulled out a shovel.
"Hi," one of the Gardai shouted. "You two. This is a crime scene. What're you doing here?"
All of us turned to stare as my father and the unprepossessing figure of Grace Flynn's escort, Artie, emerged from the forest.
Dad looked splendid. He gave me a smile then turned to Mahon who had stepped forward, scowling. "Ah, inspector. This young man tells me his name is Arthur Sullivan. I think you should hear him out."
Mahon grunted.
Sunlight winked off the stud in Artie's nose. His eyes shifted, and his cheeks turned pink under our combined stare.
Joe sighed. "Why did you come here, Artie? Speak up, lad."
/> He wiped his sleeve across his nose. "Grace sent me."
Chapter 18
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
Hymn
"Grace sent you," Joe repeated in the calm, unthreatening tone I had once heard Jay use with a nervous gunman. "Can you tell us why, lad?"
Artie ducked his head, mumbling.
"You can what?"
"Show yez the way into the bolt hole, ye fooking idjit."
The breath went out of my body. Dad beamed as if a favored student had just passed his orals.
My heart hammered in my chest, and everyone began talking at once. I put my hands over my ears.
"Quiet!" boomed my father with the weight of forty years of lectures in his voice.
"Do you truly know the way in, Artie?" Maeve asked.
"Sure, and didn't Tommy show me ages ago? He learnt it from his da. Old Toss." Artie snickered. "It was a secret we had, me and Tom. The captain didn't know."
By captain he had to mean Slade Wheeler.
"For Godsake, Artie, show us," I said hoarsely.
Mahon didn't wait for the moment of revelation. He whipped out his cellular phone and called for an ambulance. He also sent one of the uniformed men off toward the police van to direct incoming traffic, or so I supposed afterwards when I was capable of thought.
While Mahon was giving the dispatcher explicit instructions as to where the ambulance should come—by the lane through the sheep pasture—Artie surveyed the archaeologists' work. Shivering, I watched him.
A half-grin curled his lip. He was drawing out the suspense, showing off. "Where do yez think it is, then?"
Maeve pointed to a steep patch on the slope of the mound. It lay between two uninteresting rock faces, and her crew had cleared it of vines.
Artie giggled. "Close. It's the fooking rock, though." He strolled over, touched the lichened gray surface of the farther stone, slid his hand sideways, and tugged.
Slowly the entire rough-hewn slab pivoted to reveal a black gap about my height and twice as wide as a broad-shouldered man. In the open position, the "door" cut the space in thirds with the slab taking up the middle segment. Needles and small stones sifted down from the mound above.
Artie spat. "It's a fooking fake, see. Tommy and me used to nip in and smoke our fags and look at the dirty pictures. The walls is covered with 'em." He snickered again. "And wasn't the captain and the lads hunting us the whole bleeding time? They never did find us."
I was halfway to Artie's side before he finished speaking.
Joe intercepted me. "No."
"I want to go in. I want Jay."
"Let me enter first, Lark. He may not be there."
He has to be there! I swallowed the instinctive protest.
Joe raised his voice. "Did any damned fool think to bring a torch?"
One of the uniforms took a half-step forward, but Maeve strode to her bottomless tool chest and pulled out a long businesslike flashlight. Joe took it from her with a curt nod.
Mahon said heavily, "Mind the blood, sergeant."
I gasped and took another step toward the black opening.
Joe thumbed the flashlight on and shone it at the packed earth floor of the entrance. A brown stain had been trampled into the dirt at the opening. It had dried in ridges. Footprints trailed into the dark.
I was biting my fists.
"I'm going in," Joe muttered.
Mahon's morose constable forestalled him, pulled out a camera, and took at least three shots of the entryway before Joe said with quiet menace, "Move aside, if you please."
"Constable." Mahon jerked his head, and the man stepped out of the way.
Joe inched sideways past the muddy patch, but he straightened at once, as if the passage had widened, and was soon out of sight. Mahon's camera-toting constable turned the lens on the hidden latch. His flash attachment strobed.
Maeve's students were talking in low voices, and I heard Artie giggle once, but I was so focused on the passageway the rest of the world receded. Dad walked over and wrapped his arms around me as he had done when I was a child. I buried my face for a moment in the tweedy shoulder. It seemed a very long time, though it was at most ten minutes, before Joe emerged.
He came straight to me. "He's there, unconscious but alive. I'm less certain of Liam McDiarmuid."
"Jay...oh, God, oh, thank God." I was half-crying, half-laughing and certainly not registering anomalies.
"Hush," Dad said. "Hush, darling, it's all right."
Joe turned to Mahon. "They're all the way in, at the end."
Mahon nodded. His constable took a step forward, but Mahon waved him back without looking at him.
Maeve touched the sleeve of Joe's blue uniform. "Liam's there, too? I don't understand."
"He was bound hand and foot, like Jay, and he has at least one serious knife wound. It bled a lot. His flesh is cold." Joe drew a breath. "They're both cold. I cut the ropes."
Maeve's hand dropped. I shivered again.
A klaxon sounded in the distance. Mahon must have had the ambulance crew on alert for his summons, the response was so quick. Either he had given Maeve's theory full credence, or he was a man who liked to cover all his bases.
I leaned on my father and listened as the sound drew nearer and broke off in mid-hoot. Mahon was on the phone again, a little apart. I couldn't follow what he said. Maeve was frankly brooding. Her students exchanged looks.
Perhaps ten minutes later, the uniformed Garda and a team of paramedics bearing a stretcher made their way to us through the trees. Joe led the medics into the passage. Another interminable pause.
They brought Jay out first, wrestling the stretcher past the fake stone door. They had wrapped him in a thermal blanket and strapped him to the stretcher. The collar of his blue anorak peeked from beneath the blanket. His eyes were clenched shut, and he didn't move.
I ran to him and stroked his cold, bristly cheek, but he didn't respond to my touch. His eyes must have shuttered in an involuntary reaction to the brilliant sunlight. He had been in the dark a long time. The area around his mouth was raw, smudged, his lower lip bleeding a little. He smelled of sweat and blood and fear.
Joe took my elbow and tugged me back so the medics could do their job. "His mouth was taped shut. I ripped the tape off. It may be I shouldn't have."
A third medic, probably the driver, reeled through the trees with a heavy looking case. The others dived into it, muttering.
Mahon was still talking on the cell phone while they set up an IV. A saline drip, I thought, or glucose. Jay was dehydrated, they said. He was also very cold. They told me his body temperature in Celsius degrees. My numbed brain refused to make the calculations, but I knew it was low. He had a knot on the side of his head, high in the hairline. They didn't think his skull was fractured.
I tried not to get in the paramedics' way, but I hung close to the stretcher. I was vaguely aware of noises. Maeve's team began to pack their gear. Dad and Joe conferred. Maeve was cross-examining Artie about Grace Flynn. How had Grace found out about the search for the folly, how had she known of the folly in the first place, and so on.
I heard all that and on some level registered it, but my full focus was on Jay. He might be bruised, filthy, unshaven, unconscious, and swaddled like a mummy in a gray thermal blanket, but I thought he was beautiful.
A crashing in the brush announced the arrival of a second team of paramedics. Mahon must have sent for another ambulance.
The new medics went in for Liam about the time the leader of the first team announced they could move Jay. One of the Gardai who had guided us to the mound hefted the back end of Jay's stretcher while a medic hovered over the IV. The apparatus stuck up like a flower stem stripped of petals.
"Easy does it, lads."
I followed on their heels.
Mahon's sergeant found his tongue at last. "You can't go with them, missus!"
I ignored him. Nothing and no one could
have stopped me from riding in that ambulance with Jay. To the medics' credit they made no attempt to stop me.
Maeve trotted after me. "I'll bring your father to the hospital, Lark. Do you need anything?"
"Uh, my purse." I ducked sideways around a tree branch, my eyes on the Garda's solid blue shoulders, my feet scuffing fallen needles on the path. There was something I should say, something important. "Uh, thanks, Maeve. And thank Artie for me."
The jolting ambulance ride is a blur in memory. I squished in near Jay's head. I could see marks on his exposed wrist from the rope that had bound him. The driver used the klaxon often, and we had at least one close call with an oncoming lorry. The medics made terse comments to each other. I was watching Jay's face. Once, when I touched his cheek, his eyelids fluttered.
The hospital was a new building, tastefully modern and full of light, with a sprinkling of bad religious statuary. I know that the Virgin has to wear symbolic colors, but why robin's egg blue? In the emergency room, the medics dislodged me from Jay's side, and a graying nun in semi-civilian garb came up with a clipboard to record vital statistics and insurance information. She asked if Jay had conditions the doctors ought to know about.
"Appalling nightmares." I stared at her round amiable face. Not to mention a flying phobia.
"Medical conditions," she said patiently. "Allergies, heart irregularities, and so on."
"He was shot in the stomach twelve, no, thirteen years ago." The nun's eyebrows disappeared into her modified wimple.
I plodded on. "The doctors say he's all right now, but he has to be careful what he eats and drinks. Because of the possibility of ulcers." I had learned to cook thanks to Jay's balky stomach. I thought of saying something about a bland diet, then it occurred to me I was in a hospital in the Republic of Ireland. They were not going to feed Jay fajitas with salsa picante.
The nun bent to her form and scribbled. Then she thanked me and let me go.
I kicked my heels for what seemed like hours among the anxious and the curious before a nurse in full starch beckoned to me. "Mrs. Dodge?"
I nodded.
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