The Book of Killowen ng-4

by Erin Hart

Her gaze caught on a photo of the Cregganroe conspirators, and this time her eye was drawn not to the shaggy young men but to a pair of peripheral figures, a young woman locked in an embrace with a tall man at the edge of the frame. Neither of their faces was visible, obscured by moppish haircuts of the time. They seemed disconnected from the others, Stella thought, with the fella’s hand right up under the back of his girl’s jumper. And then she saw it: the scalloped pattern on the girl’s right hip. Stella flipped the photo over, looking for the note about the identities of the subjects, but the label mentioned only the five young men at the table, nothing about the other two. She reached for the magnifying glass, trying to get a read on the tattoo. If she could enhance the image, there’d be a much better chance… and all at once, the marks took shape: the head of a knotwork snake, twisted around itself and swallowing its own tail. Claire Finnerty.

  The alleged warning call about the bomb was supposedly made by a young woman, but they’d never found any young female associated with the bomb makers. If the call had come in to the police, there would have been phone records, recordings—but there was nothing. Call or not, it made no difference now to the seven people who had died. But allegations in a scandal like that could have shaken both the Irish and the British governments to their foundations.

  She set down the photo, her mind reeling. Molloy must have discovered that Claire Finnerty was a party to the Cregganroe bombing, and that was how he kept her silence about anything else she knew.

  They’d never been able to nail the Snake, the head of the serpent, because no one knew who he was—that was the way paramilitary cells operated, then as now. But remaining incognito, even to the people you commanded, meant that the bloody Snake could be in their midst, even listening in on their conversations, and they’d never know.

  She glanced down at the picture once more and through the distorted glass saw the man’s hand magnified. His thumb and first two fingers were tucked up under the girl’s jumper, but the last two digits were visible. Stella sat forward and peered at the black-and-white surface of the photo again, not quite believing what her eyes were relaying to her brain. Around his left pinkie the man wore a distinctive rectangular gold signet ring.

  4

  Nora stood in the shower, letting the hot water course over her. She’d just finished helping Claire wash and lay out Anca Popescu’s body for the wake. These were not things she’d learned in medical school, but it seemed now that they should have been. Taking care of people in life ought to extend at least a little past that final threshold. She and Claire had worked in silence, gently washing, applying scented oils, and delicately daubing the girl’s dark bruises with makeup.

  When their work was finished, Martin Gwynne had come to watch over Anca—according to tradition, the body was never left alone—and he’d brought along a single goose quill. “From her writing desk,” he’d explained. “Her favorite. Any scribe will tell you, the quill becomes a part of you—like your own fingernail moving across the page.” He gently lifted Anca’s pale hand and slipped the feather between her thumb and forefinger.” On her way out, Nora saw that Martin also had framed Anca’s unfinished work and set it on a small easel at her head.

  Anca’s body was at rest now, in a plain wooden box in the yoga room adjacent to Martin Gwynne’s studio. Shawn Kearney and Anthony Beglan had gathered late-summer flowers, and the normally bare room had been transformed into a bower, filled with the scent of autumn ripeness and even the occasional bee arriving to collect the last and sweetest nectar before the flowers faded.

  As Nora stood in the shower, enjoying the pinpricks of the spray, she pictured the intricate letters and patterns from Anca’s page, the rich colors, the sharp teeth and staring eyes of the living creatures that leapt off the vellum. There was a nod to tradition, certainly, but also Anca’s own individual, inimitable stamp. As if some part of her were still present. And so it was.

  Nora had just laid out her clothes when Cormac came through the door. His face glowed with excitement as he took a seat at the edge of the bed. “You’ll never guess what Martin Gwynne’s just showed us,” he said, and began describing the scene he’d witnessed at Anthony Beglan’s farmhouse. Like a boy who has stumbled upon a long-buried treasure map, Nora thought, watching the light that danced in his eyes, the animated gestures that punctuated his story. He told her about the Book of Killowen, the generations upon generations that had taken up the sacred charge of protecting one of the world’s most dangerous books.

  “I keep thinking about what Tessa was saying, Cormac, that someone like Kavanagh could debate the existence of evil on a purely intellectual level, all the while behaving in unspeakable ways himself. If evil doesn’t really exist, does it mean that things like goodness and decency aren’t real either? What does it say about me, that I can’t bring myself to condemn Tessa Gwynne for wanting to stop Benedict Kavanagh once and for all?”

  Nora pulled the robe tighter around her, feeling her limbs take on the character of an ancient furze, a primeval, hobbled thing, covered in spikes and twisted by wind.

  Cormac drew her in, as if he couldn’t feel the barbs of her bristling anger. “It says you’re human, Nora. It says you desperately want to believe that kindness is real and justice is possible. I want to believe it, too.”

  He held on, tighter and tighter, until her shoulders sagged, the gnarled wood inside her let go its cramp, and she gradually became flesh again.

  5

  Stella arrived at Killowen at half past eight. The evening light was still bright, but a sliver of moon had risen over the oak wood, a silver crescent magnified by the late-summer damp. She entered by the front door, following the sound of a flute playing a slow air to the yoga studio, where the wake was under way. Flowers and candlelight, and a low murmur of conversation filled the room.

  She paid her respects, standing beside the girl’s pale body laid out in the coffin, again feeling a twinge at the realization that this was someone’s daughter, not much older than her own child. She noticed Cormac Maguire in the opposite corner, elbows on knees, ebony flute in one hand. He must have been playing the air she’d heard coming through the house. As Stella withdrew, he lifted the instrument to his lips again and launched into another slow air, a lament.

  Claire Finnerty entered the studio and crossed immediately to the coffin. She stood for a long while, five minutes or more, looking down into the dead girl’s face. She bowed her head and began to whisper, her lips moving silently. Was it a prayer, a message to carry into the afterlife, some sort of incantation? Eventually, Claire straightened and reached for a thorny branch among the flowers. She snapped a sharp thorn from the cane, then drew back her sleeve, and plunged it into the flesh of her forearm. She made no sound but drew the thorn out again and pressed the flesh to stop any bleeding.

  Stella knew that she must be invisible, behind a huge spray of leaves and flowers. As Claire left the room, Stella slipped from her place of concealment and followed, making sure not to be seen. She peered into the corridor, where Claire Finnerty stopped in front of each of the seven illuminations in turn, repeating the same ritual with the thorn in front of each. What strange sort of penance was this?

  After Claire left, Stella approached the first picture. She was standing quite still, and yet there was a feeling of movement, going down and down, like the steps of a spiral staircase, until the outlines of a letter—no, several letters—suddenly loomed before her eyes: E, D, M. They were not just letters, but words—and they formed a name.

  She stared at the picture again, and there was the name, still, where before she had seen only a jumble of shapes. Edmund Callan. She moved to the next picture and this time saw the name immediately: Margaret Rice. The third bore another, Gerard Nolan. And then she knew: these pictures were hidden memorials to the seven victims of the Cregganroe bombing. Visited daily by the person who felt responsible for their deaths. Perhaps there should have been an eighth, bearing the name of Tricia Woulfe, the girl Claire Fi
nnerty had once been.

  Stella stopped and gazed out the window. If Martin Gwynne had made these pictures, surely he had to know of Claire’s past—perhaps everyone at Killowen had known all along.

  She suddenly felt the weight of the file in her bag and began to hear the never-ending echoes that would bounce from the walls of these farm buildings if she were to produce that file right now and start asking questions.

  She reached the end of the corridor. Seven pictures, seven names. Stella could see Claire Finnerty’s head in the garden, stooping to gather herbs for the meal that would be a part of the wake. Diarmuid Lynch emerged from the kitchen to join her. They worked side by side for a moment, until Claire’s head dropped forward. Lynch put out a hand to lift her up, then he set aside his herbs and gathered Claire to him, smoothing her hair, drying her eyes with kisses.

  Stella remembered the words Claire had spoken in the entry at the station this afternoon. Digging in the dirt and growing things sometimes has a healing effect. And Stella understood what this place was, what it could become, if she made inquiries as she’d promised. She left the farmhouse and crossed the haggard to the burned-out creamery storehouse, pulling a handful of photographs from her bag and setting them on fire in a metal bin, watching as the flames consumed them.

  6

  “She has my author,” Joseph Maguire said. His eyes pleaded with Cormac to draw sense from his urgent words. “My author, my author!” His hands pressed against his chest, then bounded forward. He was in his pajamas and robe, pacing back and forth across his tiny room, refusing to go to sleep this night until they took his meaning.

  “Author,” he said again, and this time the pitch of his voice rose. Cormac stopped his father pacing and stood directly in front of him.

  “Show me,” he said, seizing Joseph’s wrists and holding his hands up between them. “Please. Use your hands and show me what you mean.”

  The old man looked down at his hands, and the agitation seemed to drain out of him. “Peas,” he said weakly, his voice reduced to a whisper.

  Back to the vegetables, Cormac thought. And it always came back around to peas, never runner beans or beetroot or cabbage.

  “La imagen de mi paz. Mi preciosa paz.”

  Cormac cursed his limited knowledge of Spanish. Paz was peace, that was all he knew. His father seemed to be saying, My precious peace—but what did that mean?

  The old man sat down on the edge of the bed, exhausted and frustrated, and with one sweep of his arm sent everything on the bedside table flying: the drinking glass shattered against the wall, and all the familiar, comfortable things Cormac had brought along to re-create his room at home scattered across the hard floor.

  He couldn’t blame his father for lashing out, even though the sudden violence was jarring. Cormac took a deep breath and sat beside the old man on the bed, looking down into the tumble of books and pictures. Why had he even brought these things on this journey? The books had been on his father’s nightstand when he’d had the stroke. It had never occurred to him that the old man might be frustrated that he could no longer read them.

  A white square stood out against a book cover. Cormac bent to pick it up and found a photograph with a date faintly penciled on the back: Noviembre 1983. The spelling was Spanish, but it was definitely his father’s handwriting, still so Irish in character. Turning it over, Cormac found a black-and-white image of his father with a lovely dark-haired young woman. A wedding photo. If he hadn’t spied the date, he could have sworn the bride was Eliana—

  Suddenly, he knew. The subtle evasions he’d sensed when asking about her home and family; his father’s obsession with the girl, which he and Nora had mistakenly read as unseemly intemperance. But it was something more.

  He knelt beside the bed and reached for the old man’s hand, placing the tiny photo on his outstretched palm. “Who is she?”

  “Peas-Pease,” he began, and stopped. “PAZ!” He’d finally managed to spit it out. Then he added, “Es-esposa.”

  Cormac knew that much Spanish, at least—wife. “Where is she now?” he asked.

  The old man did not reply in words this time but drew together the fingers of his right hand, which then exploded. Poof.

  “She disappeared?” The old man shook his head, and Cormac suddenly remembered where on the planet his father had spent all those years. “She was ‘disappeared’? She’s so like Eliana—”

  Joseph reached out and placed his two palms on Cormac’s chest. “My sum,” he said. His left hand stretched to the doorway, pointing to Eliana’s room next door. “My author,” the old man whispered, and this time Cormac felt the sense of it shining through at last. My daughter. For days, his father had been trying to tell them who the girl was, and every day he’d been flailing in that whirlwind of garbled words inside his brain.

  Cormac glanced up to see Eliana peering around the doorjamb, fist pressed to her lips as if she were afraid of crying out, silent tears streaming down her face. Nora stood behind her.

  “You knew,” he said to Eliana. “That’s why you came to us. You came looking for my father because you knew that he was—”

  The girl nodded.

  Nora took Eliana’s hand and led her into the small room as Cormac cleared a spot beside his father on the bed. He drew the two chairs closer. The whole scene was so unreal.

  Eliana had to take a moment to compose herself before speaking. “I didn’t know anything about that agency you rang about a minder. I only happened to come to your house on that day, and you said we were going to Tipperary. That we would be in time for lunch. And so I came along. I wanted to tell you, all the time, but I was afraid.”

  Cormac shook his head. “That doesn’t matter now. What I want to know is, how did you find us?”

  “It is a strange, sad story. I think you know I’m not from Spain. I was born in Uruguay, in 1984. I have no memory of another place, but I always felt as if I… didn’t belong. I never knew why until the man I called my father, he was very ill, dying. It was not so long ago. He asked me to bring him a book. I can never forget this book—Los Años del Lobo—it was about all that happened so long ago in Uruguay, in Argentina, and Chile—and this man, my father, he asked me to forgive him.”

  Eliana took a breath and continued. “After he died, my mother—the woman I called my mother—she finally told the truth, that I was not her child. She knew no more than that. But then a few months later, I received a visit from a priest. He said someone was looking for me, a woman in Chile. That this woman was mi abuela, my grandmother.”

  Joseph’s expression changed. “Vee-veelet,” he said, becoming agitated.

  “Yes, you know her, Violeta Mendes-García. She loved you as her son, and she sent me here, to find you. Because she always believed that my mother was eh—” She gestured, giving herself a round belly. “How do you say embarazada?”

  “Pregnant?” Nora asked.

  “Yes, yes, pregnant when she was taken. No one knew but mi abuela.” Eliana turned to the old man, who crumpled slightly and let out a low groan, the terrible knowledge like a dull spike to the heart. “How could you know? And mi abuela, she said she could not punish you that way. What if my mother had been killed, and there was no child? But she could not stop, she had to know. It’s strange to think now, but the people in charge, they kept such good records of their prisoners, of all the people they killed. And so my grandmother found my mother’s name in the secret files of the military hospital in Montevideo. She found a man there also who remembered my mother and how he was told to put her child into a basket and to bring that basket to the wife of a policeman, a woman who had no children of her own.”

  Joseph closed his eyes. “Cóndor,” he murmured.

  “Sí,” Eliana replied. “Operación Cóndor.”

  Cormac felt a knot under his rib cage. Twenty years after it ended, the whole world knew of Operation Condor. About the torture and the killings, the kidnapped children of the “disappeared,” who were robbed o
f their families, their very identities.

  “When did all this happen, Eliana? I mean, when did your grandmother find you?”

  “Three years ago. But still we didn’t know the truth, not for certain. The man in the hospital, he could have lied or made a mistake. And so I went for a test, ADN, which you call by something else, I think—”

  “DNA,” Nora said.

  “DNA, yes.” She turned to the old man, gripped his hand. “That’s when I knew, when I could be certain. Yo soy su hija.”

  The old man’s fingertips reached out and barely brushed her face. When he finally spoke, his voice was hoarse: “He soñado—contigo.”

  “And I have dreamed of you also, papá—” Eliana broke off, unable to speak. Her eyes locked on the old man’s, and his on hers, and upon that thread hung a look of such infinite joy and desolation that Cormac felt his own heart might crack.

  Eliana managed to smile through her tears. “How strange it is, to feel at once so full and yet so empty still.”

  Cormac could bear to look no longer. He turned away. The earth itself had broken open, the continents shifted, and nothing would ever be the same.

  7

  Stella Cusack snapped into action when she returned home from the wake, pegging all the dirty delft straight into the dishwasher, picking up the sheets she’d stripped from her bed and bundling them into the washing machine. She knew that it was only a feeble attempt to erase all imprints, all residues of Fergal Molloy, but it was the best she could manage right now. She sat on a chair, watching the water sloshing around inside the machine and sobbing like a child.

  When the cycle finished, she sat in the silent kitchen, staring at the mobile phone resting on the table before her. She was trying to screw up her courage—time to ring her daughter, see if they could talk things over before it was too late.