Legends Lake

by JoAnn Ross

  “I love her, Father.”

  “Of course you do, Mr. MacKenna. Isn’t she an easy woman to love, after all? It’s pleased I am that she’s finally going to know the happiness that’s eluded her for so many years.”

  He would make her happy, Alec vowed as he swept the flashlight in a wide arc. But first he had to find her son.

  Jamie was growing more and more frightened. He no longer felt like an all-powerful international superspy capable of saving civilization; what he felt like was exactly what he was: a nine-year-old boy who’d recklessly gotten himself in a mess. He’d managed to scramble onto an outcropping of limestone up near the ceiling of the cave, but the pull of the moon was causing the tide to come in faster and higher and he knew that if someone didn’t find him soon, he’d surely drown. Not yet prepared to give up hope, he assured himself that they’d all be looking for him—Alec, Quinn, and Michael, and the rest of his family. They’d soon be finding him.

  The night grew colder. Somewhere in the distance he could hear the lonely tolling of the foghorn off Castlelough Point, warning ships of the dangerous rocks. The wind howled at the mouth of the cave, the water roared and tendrils of fog skimmed across his face like the clammy fingers of ghosts. When another wave splashed all the way up to his ledge, the icy spray drenching him, the salt stinging his eyes, it was the thought of how sad his mother would be if he drowned that started tears streaming down Jamie’s face.

  As the word of the lost boy spread, more and more people from the village and local farms showed up to join in the search. The kitchen of the farmhouse took on the look of a war room. But still the hours passed and they found nothing. Kate O’Sullivan’s son appeared to have vanished from the face of the earth.

  Remaining true to form, Mrs. Sheehan, who’d shown up more to gawk than to help, suggested that perhaps Jamie had fallen off the cliff and drowned in the sea.

  “That’s when our poor Kate, her nerves frazzled, slapped the old biddy,” a still furious Nora related the incident to Alec later. “Despite the seriousness of the situation, I had the feeling everyone in the room wanted to applaud her for doing what so many of the rest of us have longed to do for years. Poor long-suffering Dermott took the woman away, of course, back to town, and good riddance to her.”

  Eventually Erin threatened to have Nora and Zoe hold Kate down while she gave her a tranquilizer injection if she didn’t go upstairs and rest so she wouldn’t be a wreck when they brought Jamie home needing his mother’s comfort. Alec found her lying on her back on the bed where they’d shared so much love, her eyes staring blankly at the ceiling, her arms crossed over her breasts, hands curled into fists.

  She turned her head toward him when he opened the door. Looked away again when she viewed the failure in his gaze.

  “We’ll find him,” he said again. “I promise.”

  Nothing.

  “Sergeant O’Neill has people checking all the buses arriving in Galway, Limerick and Cork.”

  “I suppose a boy who hates his lying mother might run away.”

  Her flat tone was filled with such self-loathing that Alec decided against telling her that the police had also put out an emergency bulletin for authorities throughout the country to be on the lookout for male adults traveling with young boys. If the possibility of Jamie being kidnapped hadn’t yet occurred to her, he sure as hell didn’t want to be the one to put it into her mind.

  Feeling more helpless than ever before in his life, Alex took hold of her hand and unclenched her fist. As he smoothed the deep moon-shaped gouges her fingernails had dug into her palm with a caressing fingertip, his attention drifted up to the photograph of Kate, Jamie and Brigid holding hands while walking on the beach. They looked so happy and carefree, he thought with a deep inward sigh. He was almost glad that Kate hadn’t been able to see this future moment….

  “Kate.”

  She didn’t look at him.

  He took her chin in his hand and turned her head toward him. “This is like Kevin Noonan.”

  “Kevin hadn’t gone missing.” That flat tone was downright spooky. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought Erin had followed through on the threat to drug her.

  “No, but he would have drowned. If you hadn’t seen him.”

  “You didn’t believe me.” She turned away again and stared out into the well of blackness.

  “That was then. This is now. You can do it, Kate. You have Biddy Early’s gift of Sight.”

  “It’s obvious that you weren’t listening to me that day, Alec. I’m mind-blind where my own life is concerned.”

  “No, you’re not. You told me, in the circle, that you’d sensed my coming. Then later, dreamed of me.”

  “Aye.”

  “See? You knew.”

  “Sensing and dreaming are different things from seeing.”

  “I’ll take your word for that. But the sergeant’s running out of options, sweetheart. We’ve searched everywhere the kids suggested he might be and turned up nothing. The longer Jamie’s missing, the colder the trail gets. He’s your son. You carried him under your heart for nine months. You can do this.”

  “We’ve always had a close bond.” Hope blazed in her eyes. “I used to think it was because until Brigid was born we only had each other. The only reason I had the courage to divorce Cadel was to make certain that Jamie wouldn’t be physically or emotionally harmed. Or end up learning such brutal behavior from Cadel.”

  “Never would have happened,” Alec said with confidence. “The kid’s got the heart of a cocker spaniel puppy.” He reached over and took the smoky globe from the dresser. “Will this help?”

  “Perhaps.” She reached out to take it. As their fingers touched, Alec felt a surge of warmth and knew that Kate had felt it, too.

  “Maybe I’d better leave you alone,” he offered, having no idea what the protocol might be for crystal-ball reading.

  “No.” She managed a soft smile that wobbled only slightly. “I feel stronger when I’m with you. And right now, I could use all the help I can get.”

  They sat there, side by side on the edge of the mattress, Alec watching as Kate stared into the smoky quartz globe. It had been a very long time since Alec had stepped foot in any church; as the silence spun out, he did what he’d been doing the entire time he’d been out searching the hillsides with Father O’Malley. He prayed.

  Jamie felt it at first. A light touch of a hand against his cheek, as soft as dandelion down, the way his mother touched him late at night when she’d come into his room to make certain he was safe before going to bed herself.

  He was curled into a tight, miserable ball on his ledge. As a wave washed over him, he smelled the kelp and salt and a wonderfully familiar scent that billowed in the cave like fragrant smoke from a friendly campfire.

  “Ma!” He bolted upright. “Ma! I’m here!” Then he heard her. Over the roar of the surf, the wail of the wind, and the foghorn, he heard his mother’s voice calling out to him. “I’m here, Ma!”

  You can do this, Kate told herself. If you can do it for others, you can do it for yourself. And your son.

  You never could before, a negative little voice pointed out.

  Ah, but isn’t that because you didn’t truly want to look?

  She concentrated, shutting out the external: the rain on the roof, the buzz of conversation filtering up the stairs, the cry of the wind, the squeaking of two-hundred year-old rafters, the sad and lonely sound of the foghorn off the rocky shoals of Castlelough Point. Even, and wasn’t this the hardest of all, the MacKenna whom she loved with all her heart. The man who’d just shown more faith in her than anyone she’d ever known.

  The first time she’d accidentally practiced scrying, she’d been a child, too young to understand that what she was viewing in her mother’s sterling silver hand mirror was not her imagination, but reality. After that, she’d practiced, at first using candles to light the crystal, and incense to attract positive vibrations. But eventually she’d go
tten so she could see things in her great-grandmother’s globe without such props. Of course, she still could not see things on demand, as Alec was suggesting. But she had no choice. What was the point, after all, of being born with this ability that was both gift and curse if she couldn’t utilize it to save her own child?

  She took a deep breath. Let it out slowly. Another. Focused on Jamie. On his darling freckled face, serious eyes and sweet shy smile that revealed the gaps of lost teeth.

  She continued to breathe deeply, clearing her mind of all conscious thought, allowing it to drift as she looked into the crystal. Nothing.

  Realizing she was staring into the globe, which would do little more than give her eyestrain, Kate blinked, lifted her gaze to the white plaster ceiling, and took another longer, deeper breath. Then, reminding herself that she could not help her son if she permitted her conscious mind to interfere with her subconscious, she returned her gaze to the small round crystal and let her thoughts drift.

  Amist began to swirl, slowly at first, then faster and faster, growing thicker and thicker until the entire globe was filled with swirling white clouds.

  Kate viewed herself walking out of the clouds, which had begun fading away. However, she was not a woman, but a girl in her teens, and it was not Jamie holding her hand, but Peter Quinlan, who’d cheated her of her long-awaited kiss and gone on to become Father What-a-Waste.

  But in this vision, she was not only allowing him to take her to the cave, she was actually laughing as she ran with him into the opening carved from wind and surf in the limestone cliff. The rising tide was chasing at their heels, but mindless of the danger, they’d no sooner entered the darkness when she held her arms out to him and …

  “No!” Her cry was that of a wounded animal as the globe began to fill with clouds again. She blinked furiously, unwilling to cede control. Forced her heart to slow its rabbit rhythm, and forced the fear and clutter from her mind.

  The clouds parted, allowing her to see Jamie. He was wildly waving his hands and calling her name. “Ma! Ma! I’m here, Ma!”

  “I’m coming, darling,” she promised as the globe turned misty yet again.

  Even as the globe clouded, her mind cleared. “He’s in one of the caves on the beach.”

  “There must be a dozen of those things.”

  He didn’t state the obvious. That with high tide coming in there would be no way to reach—let alone search—them all.

  It was then Kate understood her earlier vision. “I know which one.” Wasn’t it, after all, the very same one Peter had tried to lure her to all those many years ago.

  “Every breath stirs the universe,” Alec murmured, shaking his head as they both contemplated the fact that by wounding her heart all those years ago, the boy who would become a Limerick parish priest would be giving Kate the answer that would allow her to save her son’s life.

  33

  WHILE MARY JOYCE STAYED AT THE HOUSE in case Brigid might awaken, the others moved to the edge of the cliff, where the massive floodlight Michael had bought for nighttime plowing lit up the ocean below them.

  “Shit,” Alec muttered when it was obvious that several of the lower stone steps were covered in swirling surf. Then grimaced when he remembered a Catholic priest was standing beside him. “Sorry, Padre.”

  Father O’Malley shrugged. “No need to apologize, Mr. MacKenna. I’ll confess to sharing your viewpoint.”

  There was something else worrying Alec. The tide was so high, how could Jamie have possibly survived?

  “There’s a ledge near the roof of the cave,” Kate answered his unspoken question. He was no longer surprised she’d read his mind. Whatever powers she possessed seemed to have gone into overdrive. “He’s climbed onto it.”

  “Anyone happen to know the tide tables?”

  “I do,” Jack Feeny, a fisherman who’d come to the stud as soon as he’d heard the news on his radio, said. He pulled a laminated piece of paper from his jacket pocket. “We’ve got twenty-two minutes until high tide.”

  Twenty-two minutes, Alec thought grimly, exchanging a look with Kate. What would be eternity for a horserace seemed no more than a blink of an eye when it came to a young boy’s life.

  “I don’t suppose the police have a helicopter we could use?” Alec knew the answer as soon as he’d asked the question of Sergeant O’Neill, but didn’t want to leave any stone unturned.

  “A rescue copter operates out of County Galway,” he answered. “It’s most often used to rescue hikers who overestimate their abilities or go astray while climbing the Maumturks.” He frowned as he looked down at the surf. “But I doubt it would be able to get close enough to the cliff to serve our purpose.”

  “You can’t just leave him down there to drown!” Kate’s voice once again edged toward the hysteria Alec had heard when she’d first discovered her son missing.

  “Michael,” Quinn said, “what of that tractor you bought from Devlin Doyle last year? The one with the winch at the front you used to bring up your sheep that fell over the cliff onto that ledge last St. Brigid’s Day.”

  “It’s in Limerick,” he said gloomily. “At Fintan Doyle’s garage, where it’s been for the past month awaiting repairs. I inquired about it just yesterday, and didn’t he assure me the work will get done eventually.”

  Kate closed her eyes. Bit into her hand to keep, Alec guessed, from screaming. He drew her close. “It’ll be okay,” he promised her. He had no idea how. But there was no way he’d allow himself to fail her.

  He looked over at Michael. “You used a winch to bring up sheep?”

  “Aye. Alamebrained ewe and her lamb who’d tumbled over in search of a bit of green to eat.” His eyes narrowed as he realized what Alec was getting at. “But I didn’t go down on the rope, meself. I used the path. And I wouldn’t even recommend that for any man with half a brain in his head.”

  Alec didn’t answer. Instead he leaned a bit over the edge of the cliff, studying where, exactly the steps leading down met the water.

  “How high is the mouth of the cave?” he asked Kate.

  “Five feet. Perhaps a bit more. I seem to recall having to begin to duck down to go into it around my first year of secondary school.”

  “Piece of cake,” he decided.

  “No!” Although he would have thought it impossible, Kate went even paler. “I’ll not have you risking your life.”

  “Not even to save your son?”

  She stared at him and could only shake her head at the choice he was offering.

  “I know the steps better,” Michael said. “It’s going to be next to impossible to see them even with the lantern, the way the wind is blowing the rain and water over them. If it’s going to be done, I should be the one doing it.”

  “Jamie’s going to be my son.” Alec’s tone offered no argument. “I’ll be the one to retrieve him.”

  “Daddy?” a faint voice behind him said.

  He glanced over his shoulder and saw Zoe, looking as ashen as Kate. “What is it, sweetheart?” he asked, bracing himself for an argument he didn’t have time for.

  “I know you can do it.” She was looking at him the same way she had when she’d been four years old and had trusted him to lift her onto the back of a horse that outweighed her by more than a thousand pounds.

  “Thanks, honeybunch.” He bent down and kissed her cheek. “One of these days when you’re a parent, you’ll understand how much that vote of confidence means to me.”

  “Even if you were to do this daredevil thing,” Kate said, obviously torn, “how would you be lowering yourself past the steps and bringing Jamie up? Without Michael’s winch?”

  “Easy.” He pointed to the hawthorn tree that clung to the edge of the cliff at the top of the steps. “Looks as if it’s time for the faeries to repay the favor.”

  Alec had no idea whether or not his plan would succeed. He only knew that with the nearest tractor a good fifteen minutes away on Dennis Murphy’s farm and the tide rising by the
second, they didn’t have a helluva lot of choices. He also knew, as he fashioned the makeshift harness from the rope Devlin Monohan had retrieved from the barn, that he didn’t dare fail.

  “I’ll be asking God for a miracle for you, Mr. MacKenna,” Father O’Malley said.

  “Thanks, Padre. So far, it’s been my day for miracles.” He winked at Kate, kissed her quick and hard, then began his descent.

  Kate couldn’t think. Her head began to spin and little white spots were dancing in front of her eyes.

  “Take a deep breath,” Erin instructed. “Good. Now slowly blow it out…. Again. It’s called breathing, remember? We can’t have you passing out and breaking your neck at the bottom of the cliff.”

  No. That would not do anyone any good. As Nora and Erin kept reminding her, Jamie would need her comfort when Alec brought him to safety. Something she had to believe would be happening because she could not allow herself to think otherwise.

  The cliff was wet with rain and tide and slick with moss and gull droppings. Despite Alec being harnessed to the tree, despite a dozen men holding on to the rope they’d tied around the trunk of the hawthorn, there was always the chance that he could slip off the steep and narrow steps, slamming his body against the towering limestone wall. Not a single person said a word as he continued down the steps. Indeed, Kate suspected many of them, like her, had to continue to remind their lungs to keep the salt air coming in and going out on a regular basis.

  Kate could barely hear herself think over the moaning of the wind, the roar of the sea, and the drumming of her blood in her ears. When she saw Alec land on the ground, after what had seemed an eternity, a sob of relief escaped her throat.

  Brendan, who was gripping the rope nearby, glanced over at her with concern. “You okay?” he asked gently.

  Kate nodded. She only needed a moment to compose herself before Alec began the terrifying journey back up again with her son.