Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series Book 2)

by Cindy Brandner

  “Because you have a good face and—and,” he glanced up, giving Pat a glimpse of flushed cheeks, “you remind me of someone.”

  “I see,” Pat said, thinking he’d seen altogether more than he was comfortable with. “I’m not—you—it’s just that—” he closed his mouth in frustration knowing there was no polite way to string together the words that he’d been about to say.

  David looked at him candidly, eyebrows raised and an amused smile playing about his mouth. “It’s alright; I don’t want anything in return.”

  Far down the corridor came the faint sound of clomping boots headed in their direction.

  “We’d best get the hood back on,” David said, businesslike once again.

  “What were you supposed to be doing in here with me?”

  David laughed. “If anyone asks I grilled you brutally about the mythical arms dump at Toome, to which you, being stubbornly Irish, refused to give an answer. At which point I beat you mercilessly about the head and face with my fists. You’re so bruised up that it’ll be difficult for them to prove otherwise.”

  Pat nodded, and then took his last glimpse of light in the form of David Kendall’s eyes.

  “Thank you,” he said, then surrendered to darkness.

  Chapter Forty

  Nothing Sacred

  PAMELA STOOD IN THE STREET OUTSIDE Pat and Sylvie’s wee house, horror struck. She had awakened that morning to the sound of someone pounding on the door, Finbar barking like a mad thing, and Lawrence sleeping straight through it all.

  She’d opened the door with adrenaline racing through her, disorienting the normal waking process and jumbling her usual precautionary nature, now that she and the boy were living alone in the house.

  Jamie stood outside, face grim.

  “You shouldn’t open the door without being certain you know who is on the other side first,” he said in an admonitory tone.

  “It’s five o’clock in the morning—what on earth are you doing here?” she asked, ignoring his statement.

  “Can I come in?” he asked, a trifle impatiently, considering he’d just woken her from the soundest sleep she’d had in weeks.

  She stepped aside and he came in, bringing with him the smell of morning rain, which lay in crystals upon his coat and hair.

  Since the morning Jamie had told her just what had happened with Casey, their relationship had danced on the most fragile of eggshells. In fact if she looked closely enough, she could still see the trace of blue beneath his left eye, where she’d slapped him hard enough that she’d shocked them both into a stunned silence. But then Jamie had regained his equilibrium and said, “You’ve a helluva right hook on you.”

  Since then they’d been wary as cornered cats around each other, though Jamie had done his best to explain the events of the night that had led to Casey being incarcerated on the Maidstone, a prison ship of which she’d heard little good.

  “They were waiting at the top of road leading out from the mounds. Four soliders in a jeep. Someone had gone to a bit of trouble to make certain that Casey wasn’t going to get away, if they didn’t manage to kill him. We would have made a run for it, but they were fairly persuasive with their guns held to our heads. Otherwise, I would have found him a safehouse in which to ride out the time.”

  Instinctively she knew that there was a great deal more going on in the interstices of events than either Jamie or her husband thought she needed to know.

  She’d left his home that day and hadn’t seen him for a week until one morning he’d shown up, tools in hand and set to finishing the roof on she and Casey’s home.

  When she’d gone outside in her nightgown to protest, he’d merely said, “It needs doing. Would you prefer to have the rain falling on your head and belongings?”

  Grudgingly she’d allowed him to finish it. When he came down the ladder several hours later, she invited him in for dinner. A dinner that he ate with a good appetite, considering Lawrence glared daggers across the table at him and made comments about people showing up where they were neither welcome, nor invited.

  Jamie merely arched a golden brow at him and took another helping of potatoes. He really could be the most implacable bastard at times, she thought, banging the teapot down on the table and slopping hot liquid onto Jamie’s sleeve.

  He had looked at her then, green eyes candid, and said, “I would never cause you deliberate hurt, nor, I believe, would Casey.”

  While she doubted that their definitions on what constituted deliberate hurt matched up, she knew his words were not uttered lightly, and so they had mended their fence as best they might. The air still hummed with tension, but she had advanced to a cool civility, despite her inability to get a visitor’s pass to see her husband. Knowing where Casey was and that he was relatively unharmed had gone some way to softening her attitude, a crumpled and terse note from Casey, somehow smuggled off the ship under the guard’s noses, had gone another stretch towards relieving Jamie of blame.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, as Jamie shook the droplets from his hair. There was always a heart-stopped moment for her when she awaited news.

  “It’s not Casey,” he said, relieving her of her initial and foremost fear. “I heard on the radio that soldiers ransacked the Ardoyne last night. I think it’s likely Pat and Sylvie’s place has been hit. I stopped to bring you with me, I think Sylvie may well need your sympathy right now.”

  She turned toward the stairs, heading up to get dressed and then halted and turned back. Jamie looked at her enquiringly.

  “Why didn’t you go directly to her?” she asked. “This is a very roundabout route to their house.”

  Jamie flushed, looking slightly guilty. “I was on my way past. I had business in Armagh yesterday and it went later than expected, so I stayed over and set out early this morning. I heard the news on the car radio.”

  “Really?” she said politely, but knew the doubt was clear in her voice.

  She dressed, roused Lawrence and sent him down the lane to Mr. Guderson’s, and got in Jamie’s car. So that they now stood, speechless with shock, on the narrow pathway that led to Pat and Sylvie’s front door. Or rather, had.

  Wisps of tear gas still floated on the air, and both she and Jamie were breathing through their coats which they had put up over their faces before even opening the car doors. A pall hung over the entire street, which looked like a war zone. Shell casings littered the narrow sidewalks, traces of the soldiers who had rampaged through the lanes and small homes. Broken glass traced glittering paths through the rubble. Remnants of shattered windows and petrol bombs that would have been one of the weapons employed in retaliation. Both armies, the ostensibly legal one and the outlawed one, had been here and left behind their particular calling cards.

  Jamie blinked through eyes that were tearing, and walked up the path. There was no need to knock, for there was no longer a door to knock upon. He put a restraining hand on Pamela’s arm as she came up behind him.

  “Let me go in first.” He stepped through the doorway, beyond which lay a silence that didn’t bode well.

  A minute later his golden head appeared in the gloom of the entryway. He beckoned to her, his face grim.

  She followed him to where Sylvie was sitting at the little kitchen table, head in hands, while around her lay the wreckage of the soldiers’ foray into her home.

  The devastation was complete; there wasn’t an inch that hadn’t been torn up, defiled, broken, or smashed. It must have taken some special effort to smash the porcelain of the kitchen sink, but it had been done so thoroughly that there were only broken off chunks remaining—hanging precariously off the pipe that had been pulled away from its mooring, rendering it also, quite useless. Water was an inch deep on the floor, broken dishes, bent utensils, and shredded linens littered throughout it.

  “Dear God,” Jamie breathed out and Sylvie’s head jerked up from the table, her expression a distillation of the ruin that surrounded her. Her face crumpled further when she s
aw the two of them standing in what had once been her kitchen.

  Pamela went to her and put her arms around her. She held her tightly, rocking her, knowing words were pointless. When Sylvie had quieted, and a measure of calm was restored to her, Pamela began to thread her way through the damage, picking up the odd bit of crockery and linen that she thought might be salvageable.

  Sylvie gave a wan smile. “Well I’ve the comfort of knowing there’s nothing else for them to destroy. They’ve got my man and they’ve ruined the little we had here,” she sighed, “what else can they take?”

  “Don’t even ask that question,” Pamela said grimly, putting the head back on a figurine of the Virgin Mary. “I’ve a feeling they’re only getting warmed up.”

  “We still hadn’t finished cleaning up from the last time,” Sylvie said wearily. “Guess it’s just as well. They’ll likely be back in a couple more months anyway.”

  “You won’t be here if they do. You’re coming out to live with Lawrence and I,” Pamela said firmly, ignoring Jamie’s look of surprise over Sylvie’s head. “We’ll pack up whatever isn’t entirely ruined and bring it with us.”

  She handed Sylvie a tissue from her pocket, feeling a brisk determination sweep through her. It was only the thin edge of the fury that was boiling behind it, but she wasn’t about to indulge her anger in front of Sylvie.

  “Miracle these survived,” she said, pointing at a small collection of china figurines on a bookshelf.

  “They’re glued down,” Sylvie said. “We’re learning our lessons in odd ways. Not that it matters now. They might as well have torn the walls down while they were at it.”

  “No,” Pamela said firmly, “no, they don’t get this too.”

  “Don’t get what?” Sylvie asked, lifting her head up from her hand.

  “This,” Pamela indicated the wreckage around her with a sweeping gesture of her arm. “They don’t get to have your home.”

  “There’s no home left,” Sylvie said bleakly, “and if Pat doesn’t come back—” her sentence was cut off in mid-stream by Pamela’s hand grabbing her chin none too gently.

  “Don’t you dare say it Sylvie, don’t you dare. Our men are coming home if we have to go break them out of whatever hellhole the British have dragged them off to.”

  She released Sylvie’s chin and began to pick up shattered bits of china and glass, piling them onto a half-broken picture frame whose missing photo Sylvie had found razored to bits and thrown in the toilet.

  “We’ll glue together what we can and put the rest in the dustbin. Did the bastards leave any of the cleaning stuff?”

  Sylvie didn’t answer, just watched dazedly as Pamela stuck her head into cupboards and under the sink, emerging triumphantly some moments later with a cracked bucket and mop, a container of bleach and some matches.

  “What are the matches for?” Sylvie asked, a glimmer of worry at the determination in Pamela’s face.

  “What we can scrub clean we do, what we can’t remove their filth from—we burn.”

  “Burn?” That had gotten her attention. “We can’t just burn things in the back garden there’s laws...” she trailed off at the look Pamela gave her.

  “Laws, Sylvie? Do you really think there are any laws after what happened today? We are the only law, Sylvie, we will decide what’s to be done and what’s not. It’s that simple.”

  Pamela became a one woman hurricane after that. Sylvie helped half-heartedly, but the tears that she now could not hold back, made it hard to see what she was doing and Jamie finally pushed her firmly toward the couch and made her sit.

  “Let her do it, she always cleans when she’s upset,” he said.

  “She looks soft, but she’s tough as nails,” Sylvie said half-resentfully, half-admiringly.

  It took several hours but between them Pamela, Jamie, and Sylvie were able to get the small home back into a semblance of order. It wasn’t pretty, but it was liveable. Jamie had called in a favor and a plumber was coming to replace the sinks later that day. A locksmith was already replacing the smashed locks.

  There were the things that could be fixed—sinks, floors, walls and cupboards. Things that could be replaced—china, utensils, picture frames, a mattress that a soldier had urinated on, and clothing that had been torn out of drawers and off hangars. But what, Pamela thought, placing the few plates and cups that had survived in a cupboard, of the things that could not be replaced nor fixed—the fear, the sense of violation, and the knowledge that as an Irish person on an Irish street in an ostensibly Irish city, you were not safe nor did you have rights, even within the walls of your own home.

  “Ready to go?” Jamie asked.

  “If you don’t mind,” Sylvie squared her shoulders and took a deep breath, “I think I’m going to stay here. When Pat comes back I want his home to be waiting for him. And if I leave now I’ll feel as if they’ve won, and I won’t have that.”

  “Good girl,” Jamie said, “just don’t be foolhardy, if they come back get out right away. Come to my house.”

  “I will, I promise,” she said, fighting to keep the tremble out of her voice. She stood in the doorway, small and fair, appearing even tinier by virtue of an old sweater of Pat’s that she wore wrapped about her. As if she could keep some ghost of his strength beside her by wearing his clothes. Pamela understood the act, the attempt to keep the fear at bay, and to move forward for yourself as well as the absent man. She, after all, slept in an old jersey of Casey’s every night.

  Sylvie waved, backbone straight and a defiant smile on her face. Maybe there was, Pamela thought, a way through the fear and violation after all. The strength of the human spirit never ceased to surprise her. It was the one thing no enemy had ever been able to flog out of the Irish.

  The total arms haul secured by the army came to some 100 weapons, a similar number of homemade bombs, about 250lbs of explosive waiting to be made into bombs, 21,000 rounds of ammunition, and eight two-way radios. Thus the search had, in the army’s purview, been justified, regardless of the means to that end.

  Arms, though, had not been the only intent of the search. It was a rough-handed sack and pillage operation meant to scare the natives into behaving themselves. It didn’t quite have the intended effect, for the horror and anger it would leave in the Catholic community would exact a far greater price upon the occupying force. The stain of it would bleed forward into the years ahead, creating bitterness where once had existed a guarded tolerance.

  Though the British would not officially admit it, they were now openly and brazenly at war in their own province.

  Unofficial wars by definition are messy things and none more so than the war that had existed in Ulster for eight hundred years. It was updated occasionally with new players on the stage, many of the old cast having died or simply faded into the oblivion that endless fighting creates. New props were introduced from time to time in the form of anti-tank rockets, surface-to-air missiles and bigger, tougher tanks that rumbled through the narrow streets like behemoths in a nightmare landscape.

  Chaos reigned all that autumn. The travesty of internment meant all bets were off, it was now clear that the British were not going to play fair. All the talk of peace and political solutions was just what it had always been—talk. The IRA, returning to its militant roots with the phoenix-like rise of the Provos, was taking no prisoners and asking no quarter. Neither was there any granted for the civilian in the streets, merely trying to survive such a society. A society where police were murdered in their own homes or on the job with frightening regularity. A society where banks were robbed at gunpoint, arson was commonplace and riots were an after school activity every weekday.

  It was a society that was freefalling into anarchy, where the only coin of worth was that of brute force. The government sat upon its emerald hill, isolated from the city, paralyzed within the knots of their own tribal biases.

  Soldiers patroled Catholic neighborhoods amidst the hollow clang of bin lids, ball bearings shot w
ith deadly skill from slingshots and a miasma of hatred so thick that it could be smelled above the reek of cordite and tear gas.

  No one could pinpoint where it had begun, or what the latest battle was about nor how, in the name of God, it might end. What no one really seemed to understand was that it was not a war anyone could win.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Traveller’s Prayer

  JAMIE PARKED THE CAR AT THE BOTTOM of his estate, and they walked up through the woods that spread out behind the house. He’d convinced her to stay to dinner. In an effort to elude the press he had chosen this way as the path of greatest avoidance.

  The walk was a silent one. It was very still when they entered the woods that skirted the Kirkpatrick estate. Late afternoon sun slanted through the leaves creating a soft haze in the air, which was enhanced by the bone-deep exhaustion the both of them felt. Pamela followed behind Jamie, as he cut a path through the heavy undergrowth. Under her feet she could feel the pungent release of the half-decayed berries that had fallen from their stems.

  Jamie stopped so suddenly that she knocked into the back of him. She half stumbled, but Jamie reached back and caught her by the elbow, steadying her before she could fall.

  “What is it?”

  He shook his head and moved toward the small creek that cut across the northwest corner of his land. She looked in the direction his eyes were fixed and put a hand to her throat.

  The woman lay on her back, completely submerged, staring sightless into the vault of heaven. The odd bronze light of the day, muted here by the leaves into amber, cast a mask across her features. The current hadn’t been strong enough to pull her along, but had only stranded her here; the vee of one arm crooked about a rock that rose above the water’s surface.

  There was no need to ask if she were dead, the expression of surprise on her features spoke eloquently enough.

  Pamela’s vision was slightly hazed with exhaustion and so she saw as if through a vapor the waterweeds that waved gently between the woman’s fingers, the glint of a worn wedding band, and the faded pink flowers that were scattered across the print of her dress. Her photographer’s mind took note of other details; the woman was barefoot, a bruise the color of gentians flowering up her left shin, her face tinged blue under the rippling gold of the shadows. Her hands were rough, small transparent bubbles of air had affixed themselves to the ridges of skin, the way they would a worn piece of wood. The woman’s hair, a faded copper, waved in the tug of the current.