by Lisa Alber
“Excuse me,” Dermot said, “did I hear you say that the matchmaker bought this necklace?”
Something in Dermot’s tone made Gemma shrink into the invisible shell she carried around with her. She curled back toward the wall. The connection between the matchmaker and the necklace hit too close to home, right where Gemma’s bottomless well resided. Out of her mouth came a sound, one of the few she made. The unearthly vocal scratch sounded far away, but it was hers all right. Her skin felt flayed, imagining everyone looking at her and wondering about her awful voice, so unused, so scratchy.
Behind her, Merrit rushed to ask what was wrong.
“We have our own long story.” The pillow shifted and Dermot’s body warmth replaced Bijou’s. Gemma pressed her spine against his side.
“What does my necklace have to do with it?” Merrit said.
I don’t know, screamed Gemma inside her head.
Dermot’s breath tickled the back of her neck. “You tell your precious matchmaker father that he matched our mother to her murderer, and we need to talk to him.”
SIX
ELLEN AHERN STOOD WITH shears in hand, stabbing at the blackberry vines that invaded her garden. She snapped the blades through a skeletal arm that reached for her out of the fog. Most of the time, she missed because tears clouded her vision worse than the fog. After a while, she punched out in any direction until, energy spent, she sagged against the rock wall. She managed a feeble last chop before dropping the shears. Scratches crisscrossed her arms from the blackberry thorns, but she didn’t care.
It was no use hacking at the mess this way. She must eradicate the bloody weed by its roots. She’d stared at the blackberry invasion all summer while her marriage continued to flounder, and now that it was too late, she attempted a salvage. She was pathetic. Once in, blackberries took over like chaos itself, overwhelming everything.
She let her head sag toward her chest. The mist muffled sound but not scents. Peat smoke, that comfort; lingering berries like bottled summer; baby shampoo that she’d let Petey rub into her hair during their shower. That last, the smell of innocence.
Without little Petey, she’d not have showered at all today. Couldn’t be bothered. But he’d recently started bathing with her again. At five years old, was he too old? She hoped not because that token of time with her son was one thing she could manage. He’d concocted elaborate games to prolong their showers, such as drawing on the tiles with his bath-time crayons and insisting he write the whole alphabet, then his name, then hers on the shower walls. This morning, he’d graduated to older sister Mandy’s name.
She almost smiled at that, but felt her lips sag when she realized that Petey was leading her into a conversation. Day after day getting closer to his da’s name. Danny. Petey already knew all the letters and sounds; he could spell out the word himself. By the end of the week, he’d ask her how to spell his father’s name anyhow, and she’d teach him, and then Danny would be in the shower with them like a steam-ghost.
“Damn you, Danny,” she said, turning away from the vines he’d promised to eradicate months ago. Every now and then, blaming her husband helped. She balled her fingers into fists, felt the pressure rub pain into her blisters, and then made for the house, the insides of which were no more cheerful than the outdoors. The gloom sank into rips in the sofa cushions and dulled the shine off the crystal stemware she’d inherited from her mother. Some might say her home was homey, but to her, it looked threadbare and empty.
At first she didn’t catch the sound of sobbing, but once she did, her heart wrenched. Petey. Jesus, Petey. She’d spent too long with her self-pity, as usual. She followed the sound of his tears to her bedroom, where he lay with her pillow clutched to his chest.
“Petey, my love,” she said. “I thought you were sleeping.”
He froze, and then a second later sprang off the bed. Ellen dropped to her knees. Petey patted her cheeks and let loose a series of wails. She picked him up and burrowed the two of them under the comforter. She inhaled baby shampoo. Between sniffs and little-boy gasps, he said, “I couldn’t see you. I looked out every window, but you were gone, and I thought Grey Man got you too.”
“Grey Man’s not real, I told you that.”
Petey shot out his lower lip. “He is too real.”
After five minutes trying to reassure Petey, Ellen gave up. She gazed at the snotty smears he had left on the window. She wouldn’t survive the day if she had to stay cooped up listening to him munge on about Grey Man.
“I have an idea,” she said. “We’re going for a walk.”
“No.”
“Oh yes we are.”
“Why? You can’t make me.”
Oh yes she could. She checked his forehead. Satisfied that he no longer had a temperature, she shooed her protesting son out of bed. She helped him with his sneakers and zipped up a jacket over his pajamas. They set off over the field that backed onto their yard. There hadn’t been much rain so the going was easy, none of the usual mud slurry. They walked along the drystone wall that bounded the left side of the field. Officially, they trespassed on neighbor Travis’s land, but no one minded such things as long as they left the cows and sheep to their peace. The fog lightened and other rock walls appeared as faint lines that divided the hills into squares and rectangles. Great swathes of heather covered the hillsides in a purplish haze. They’d turned colors overnight, September on the wane.
Little good the peaceful vista did her today. Something lurked, all right, but this could also be her guilty conscience. Failure as a mother. Failure as a lover. Failure as a wife. She just thanked whatever saint was out there that the children hadn’t mentioned the babysitter she’d found to sit them last night. Danny would have beetled his eyebrows at her and said “Oh?” in that leading way of his, putting her on the defensive. She deserved a life too.
Such as that went. What a bloody joke on her.
Petey yanked on her arm. “What about Grey Man?”
His whines filled her head but she kept on with shoulders tensed in response to the weight of him, her own sweet boy, dragging her down. Up ahead, an abandoned famine cottage perched on the nearest rise. She called the building their stone folly, and it usually welcomed them to treat it like a playhouse. Today, though, the cottage appeared like a primordial head rising out of the ground. The two windows were sunken eye sockets and the darkened doorway part of a nose. The mouth and chin were below ground, ready to gobble up wayward children. Or wayward parents. She banished the thought from her head.
Make it to the cottage; just that goal, for this moment, for this day. And then they’d turn back.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” she said when they arrived.
“Yes, it was,” Petey said, his tone sulky. “You’re mean.”
“I guess I am, but you’ll have to live with it, won’t you?”
His little fist connected with her hip. “I wish Da were here!”
Petey dashed into the cottage, stumbling over the sunken threshold. Ellen followed him but stopped just inside the doorway. The usual abandoned scent of the place had gone missing. Someone’s presence had rearranged the dirt on the floor in front of the door and the grit lodged in the rock walls. Petey stood frozen in the center of the room except for the foot he edged toward something bundled on the ground. When it didn’t move, he dropped to his hands and knees.
“I’m investigating like Da,” he said. “I’m not scared.”
On a slow breath Ellen said, “Peter Michael Ahern, come here. Right. This. Instant.”
“I hear something,” Petey whispered.
He crawled toward the far corner of the room, and before Ellen had made it halfway to him, he ran back. “We’ve got to save these kittens from Grey Man!”
Petey hugged two mewling kittens against his chest. Skinny and matted little things they were, and without thinking Ellen plucked them from her son and set them on the ground. She pulled Petey toward the door.
Petey let out a wail. �
��But what about the kittens?”
She half carried him over the threshold, and when he resisted, she gave him a get-going swat on the bum. “Off with you, or you’ll not be getting dessert tonight.”
“I don’t care about dessert!” His fist connected with her hip again. He added a second jab before running to the drystone wall. “I hate you!”
Exhausted, Ellen watched him almost disappear into the air itself. Her fingers tingled with unspent adrenaline. Once again, she had handled the situation all wrong, letting the pressures that surrounded her day in and day out—the instability, the loneliness, the isolation, the guilt—turn into a slow burn that lit up at the wrong times.
“Stay where I can see you,” she called. “And sing something so I can hear you.”
“No!” A few seconds later Petey started in on the ABCs.
Ellen pulled her mobile out of her jacket pocket and dialed Danny’s number. But after two rings, she hung up. She couldn’t bear the thought of him pooh-poohing her uneasiness, of finding her wanting in some way. Not today.
“Petey!” she called. “I’ll be right there. Keep singing.”
“I hate you!” His voice, vibrant with outrage and mock bravery, comforted her. Alive and well and sitting atop the wall, waiting to take her hand for the return trek. He continued singing the ABCs.
Ellen stooped back into the cottage and toward the object that Petey had poked with his foot. A sleeping bag. In the far corner she noted a nest of sweaters and a faint smell of cat urine. Someone was feeding the kittens milk with plastic gloves as teats. It didn’t look to be going well.
Ah, Christ. Squatters and kittens.
She backtracked toward the distressed mewling. Poor, poor mites. Unloved. In need of their share of cuddles too. She picked them up. Under the grime, they looked to be tabbies. She held them against her heart, feeling them settle into her warmth, feeling their fragility, feeling her own like cracked glass.
Something needed to be done, but she didn’t know what. Only that she couldn’t keep mewling about in ineffectual circles like the kittens she carried against her breast.
SEVEN
THE CROWD WAS STILL going strong at Alan’s pub at half eleven when Danny entered. Sleep had eluded him. He couldn’t rid himself of the image of Lost Boy’s gaze going lifeless, the way his last blink had shuddered to a stop with eyelids half covering his eyes.
So here he stood, surrounded by dozens of visitors to the village, some with arms around their new life-mates. A year ago, he thought, he’d still lived at home, he’d still had Liam and Kevin in his life. He’d had a life. Now he had to make do with the pub when his thoughts were too loud to let him sleep.
Danny caught Alan’s headshake from above his customers’ heads. “Don’t bother,” he called. “Come around. I’ll put you to work.”
Danny did as directed. Alan waved Danny to a stool located behind the bar. “Only room there is,” he said.
Danny gazed around the pub from his novel position. He’d never noticed the way the firelight and stained glass light fixtures reflected cheerful light baubles across the walls. Or the way the Sláinte! sign looked about to fall down. Spilled beer, heated wool sweaters, and peat made for a peculiar but welcoming potpourri. It didn’t look half bad and it might not feel half bad to view a sea of smiles every night.
Alan ordered Danny to grab his own Guinness, and while he was at it, to keep on pouring them because he couldn’t keep up. Danny was glad enough for the distraction. He lined pints to the right side of the taps to settle and placed the topped-off pints to his left. Quick as lightning they disappeared onto the waitresses’ trays or Alan’s quick grip.
After fifteen minutes of this, tension brought on by Lost Boy’s death settled into a slight tightness in his lower back. The death had felt like watching a premonition take on form. The sparrow hadn’t helped his uneasiness. What had Benjy said? Soul-bearers?
Danny gulped a mouthful of Guinness and listened in on the chat. The two Joes, Elder and Junior, were in rare form, soused on gin and mouthing off about the state of Ireland now that peoples from everywhere were moving in, changing their country with their Eastern Bloc “hoorish” ways. Sitting between the two of them, Nathan Tate, a new regular, sipped his beer and dared to disagree with them. “A few Polish girls aren’t the problem. The bloody economy is.”
The fight was off and running then.
“Most of them can’t talk or understand us,” Elder Joe bellowed. “They’re changing our words the way they misuse them.”
Nathan pointed to the chalkboard, where Alan’s quote attempted its wisdom. The meaning of a word is its use in language.
“Don’t give me that shite,” Elder Joe said. “You’re not even from here, so what do you know?”
“I’m as Irish as you,” Nathan said.
“But not from around here. What’s your story anyhow?”
Nathan pushed his empty pint toward Danny for a refill. Danny tried to recall what he knew about the man. Originally from one of the W counties—Wicklow, Waterford, Wexford, somewhere—but had lived in England for a long while. Nathan didn’t speak much, but Seamus had taken him on as one of his crew. He was an artist of some sort. Danny had heard some of the local women liked the looks of him. Goatee and silver rings on his fingers. A bit of early silver at his temples and a wounded air that attracted the lassies.
“I don’t have a story,” Nathan said.
Elder Joe burped. “The feck you don’t.”
And so it went. Danny had to wonder how Alan kept his sanity with their voices pounding against him up to the second he tossed them out of the pub for the night. Their leader, Seamus, kept up his own banter with Mickey, something to do with a neighbor’s wife who was so mean she’d eat you through a sack. Seamus had the grace to wait for the crowd to thin before bringing up the inevitable.
“Grey Man’s after leaving you a present, eh?” he said, more subdued than usual. “No use denying it.”
“If you mean, am I starting on a new case, then yes.” Danny lifted his empty pint to the tap and filled it halfway. He watched the thick brown liquid swirl, its tan foam rising to the top. A guilty stab reminded him that he’d forgotten to call home to check on the kids. The first twenty-four hours of a major case were always hell. “You know I can’t talk about it.”
“No matter.” Seamus sucked down half his pint in one go. “We’ve got the nearabouts truth from that eejit Milo of Milo’s Silos.”
“Brilliant,” Danny said. “He loud-mouthing it all over the land?”
“Seems so.”
A shiny bald head caught Danny’s attention as it leaned into their tight locals’ circle around the taps. Malcolm Lynch, owner of Pot o’ Gold Gifts. Every time Danny saw the man, he pictured an alien in human drag. The man had no hair, not even eyelashes or eyebrows, not that it mattered. He ran a nice shop, one of the better ones, and always seemed to be smiling.
Malcolm cradled a brandy snifter between his two middle fingers so it rested at a tilt in the palm of his hand. “Gents, top of the lovely coming day to you,” he said. “Thought I’d pop in for a nightcap before off to bed.”
A series of grunts and waggling fingers greeted Malcolm. His smile widened. “The day I’ve had.” He gazed at them expectantly and when no one responded except for a few more grunts, he continued on a brighter note. “And what’s the talk?”
Seamus gulped more beer and swiped at his upper lip with the back of his hand. “And what do you think? Jaysus.” Seamus informed Malcolm that they’d been talking about the dead boy in Blackie’s Pasture. “You must have heard the news. Grey Man got him, would you say?”
Malcolm let his gaze wander down to Seamus’s gut before beaming his smile around the room. “Grey Man indeed.”
Annoyed, Danny told them to close their traps about that old superstition. Malcolm sipped from his snifter. A serene smile danced over his face.
“What’s got you?” Seamus said.
“It’s no w
onder I didn’t hear the latest news,” Malcolm said, “what with my grand day in the shop. I’m telling you it was the dosh all the way around. I’m that lucky I didn’t have time to hear the gossip.”
Seamus rolled his eyes. “Ay, well, you mind how you treat Brendan, who does all the real work, as we all know.”
“The real work—like father, like son—like that?” Malcolm said. “Couldn’t be bothered to unlock the shop door if I didn’t remind him every day.”
Seamus flushed. The two men had puffed themselves up right enough while the rest of the crows jeered them on. Their dynamic intrigued Danny. Malcolm and Seamus were among the smiliest men in the village—Malcolm quick with conversation, Seamus quicker still with jokes. Now, the men considered each other and, while Danny watched, came to a silent understanding. Dance of the alpha male, alive and well in Lisfenora village.
“You mind yourself,” Seamus said. “My son, that’s what.”
“Of course.” Malcolm’s grin returned. “I’m owing you, is that it?”
Danny pulled more pints. Seamus never talked about it, but he’d almost lost Brendan to meningitis. Danny understood the sorrow of losing a child, the way the sadness burrowed into your heart, dormant but always there. Perhaps Seamus felt the pain of Brendan’s near death in the same way. It would be enough to turn anyone into a controlling parent.
Alan came through and lifted his eyebrows at Malcolm. Malcolm declined a second drink. “I’ve got a trim figure to keep,” he said. “Cut a bit of the dash in these suits I buy in Dublin.”
“And so you do,” Alan said and departed again to maneuver three falling-down drunk Germans out the front door. “Time, gents. Finish your drinks and pay up,” he said when he returned.
Alan grabbed up the till and the cash register tape. He told his junior barman to lock the door against newcomers and called Bijou from her corner pillow. The dog followed him into the back office with Danny close behind. Danny could almost hear Alan’s ex-athlete’s bones creaking and the tendons groaning against his right shoulder from an old hurling injury. By the end of the night, Alan often lurched about his bar like an arthritic bear.