by Mary Carter
CHAPTER 38
Down Under
When Carlene was a kid, you couldn’t buy mini-bottles of hand sanitzer with clips to attach to your key chain like you can now. So her father sent her to school with industrial-strength bottles, enough to sanitize a small village. The bottles weighed down her backpack, and Carlene developed shoulder pains and backaches, but nothing was worse than the fear of someone discovering the bottle in her bag. She took to wrapping them in brown paper bags like a bum with a bottle of vodka.
She would hunch over the bag nervously, strategically placing her head so her hair would hang over the bag and shield the large bottle from view. Sometimes, if she forgot to screw the cap on tight enough, the sharp smell would permeate the classroom. It wouldn’t take long for people to start sniffing, looking around, and asking, “What’s that smell?” She sniffed the loudest and was always the first to ask the question.
In addition, every two days her father supplied her with a box consisting of a dozen pairs of blue rubber gloves, one for each hour, which he actually thought she would wear. There were six hours in a school day, so the box was supposed to last her for two days. His first act of business when she came home from school was to check the box to make sure there were six left for the next day, before an air kiss to either cheek and a “How was your day?”
Carlene wondered how in the world her father could actually believe that she would wear them. It would have been social suicide, and of course she never did, not once, and at the end of the day she’d march to the nearest garbage can and throw away six pairs of brand-new gloves. She didn’t feel too guilty; it was his ritual, not hers, and he was out of his mind to think she would don blue rubber gloves in front of her classmates. She convinced herself he did know she was throwing them away, but he wanted to be soothed by the fantasy anyway, so she went along with the game. She made it through middle school unscathed. All that changed the first day of high school when she was partnered in chemistry class with Shawn Cole. She’d had a crush on him forever. Chemistry. Could the universe have been more clear? Carlene was so excited, she forgot to hide her backpack.
When she stooped over and retrieved her notebook, all she could think was—Don’t let him see the back! That was where she’d scribbled I Love Shawn Cole about a hundred million times. So when he glanced over, saw her bag, and exclaimed, “What is this?” her first thought was that he could see through her notebook to the back of the book, that not only was he the cutest boy in school, but he had x-ray vision as well—truly, a score. But instead, he reached over her and pulled out the industrial-sized bottle of antiseptic and the box of rubber gloves. The smell of latex and sanitizer permeated the classroom. Even the stench of plugged-in Bunsen burners couldn’t disguise it. To Carlene’s horror, Shawn pulled gloves out of the box, one by one, like a magician pulling on an endless string of scarves. When he got to the last pair, he put them on and launched into a comedy routine. The class erupted in hysterics.
By the end of the day, Shawn Cole picked a new lab partner. Julissa Lions. Carlene had always secretly admired her; she was so pretty with long black hair and shiny pink lip gloss. Julissa’s backpack was filled with neon-colored pencils, gum, and a pack of Kool menthol cigarettes. Julissa’s mom, Cathy, always picked Julissa up after school, and Carlene had taken to hanging around, just so she could see Cathy Lions pull up in her blue station wagon. Julissa would always get into the passenger seat and lean over and kiss her mother on the cheek.
Carlene imagined she and Julissa were sisters, pictured herself getting into the passenger seat leaning over and kissing Cathy Lions’s cheek. She had been determined to become best friends with Julissa Lions. But that day, after Julissa snuggled up to Shawn, she turned to Carlene, laughed, and called her Germ Girl. It didn’t make sense—if she’d called her Clean Freak she would have understood, but no, Germ Girl. The nickname would stick with her for the rest of high school.
Carlene vowed from that day on, she would not be her father’s prisoner of clean one more second, hour, or precious day of her life.
She gathered all the gloves Shawn had strewn around the room and put them back in the box as neatly as she could so it looked as if she hadn’t touched a single pair. She bypassed the trash can at the end of the day. When she came home, if her father noticed she’d been crying, he didn’t acknowledge it. Instead, he counted the gloves like he did every day. There were twelve pairs in the box. He counted again, like she knew he would. He counted again, and again, and again. She wished she had another pair of gloves to slip into the box, just to watch him short-circuit.
“Tell me you took two boxes of gloves to school today,” her father said.
“No,” Carlene said.
“No, you won’t tell me, or no, you did not take two boxes of gloves to school today?”
“No, I did not take two boxes of gloves to school today.” She mimicked her father’s clipped speech back to him. With each second, her defiance grew, which both fascinated and appalled her, yet she couldn’t bring herself to stop.
“It looks as if you didn’t use a single pair of gloves today,” her father said.
“That is correct, sir,” Carlene said. Her father looked at her as if he’d never seen her before. And then it hit her. All these years. He really, truly thought she’d been wearing the gloves. It wasn’t a self-soothing game. She pitied him, then hated him, then hated herself.
“There are still twelve in the box,” he said.
“Count them again,” she said. The image of Shawn and Julissa hovered in her mind, cuddled together in chemistry class, laughing at her. Her father counted the gloves again.
“Twelve,” he said. He held out the box. “Count them.”
“I don’t need to count them. I just counted you counting them. You counted them twenty-seven times.” Michael Rivers rubbed his hands on his pants, kneading his fingers into the folds that he ironed no less than three hundred times that morning. Carlene wanted to scream that it didn’t make sense for a person to iron their pants three hundred times and then rub creases into them with their fingers. She didn’t know how this showdown was going to end, and she was both thrilled and terrified that she’d finally stood up to him. She was prepared to be grounded, or shunned even, but nothing could have prepared her for what came out of his mouth next.
“Your mother would have been very disappointed in you,” he said. He cradled the box of gloves to his chest and walked out of the room. He never made her wear them again. But it didn’t matter. He’d won. She’d never been able to get the sting out of his parting comment. Your mother would have been very disappointed in you.
Carlene would wear gloves today, but this time it was of her own free will. She was going to go down into the souterrain, and this time she was going to crawl all the way through. She would go early in the morning—there was no way she was going to crawl around down there in the dark. She would leave a note on the bar, telling anyone who cared where she was, in case she never returned. Surely, if enough time went by, someone would come into the pub and see her note.
Would it be Ronan? Should she make it a love note? Tell him that despite his fatal flaws she thought he was beautiful and amazing? Or should her note say: Be Mine? She didn’t write any of that, instead she drew a map to the souterrain. Then underneath she jotted down:
I, Carlene Rivers, being of sober mind and body, announce that upon my death in a narrow underground passage, I leave this pub to:
She wrote, Ronan. Scratched it out. Nancy. Too busy; suppose she got distracted running both the café and the pub, and there went the best cappuccinos in Ballybeog? Carlene didn’t want that on her conscience. Carlene scratched Nancy out as well and wrote: The half dozen. There, that’s the way it should have been in the first place. There were six of them, they could rotate their shifts.
Carlene wore a small backpack too, the first time since high school. She would bring enough water and food to last her a few days. After a bit of deliberation she also brou
ght a small kitchen knife and a bottle of hair spray that she could use like Mace. She would also carry a flashlight. She thought of going to the hardware shop to see if she could buy a miner’s hat with a light on it, but in a town that oozed gossip, she decided it wouldn’t be the best move.
She went at six A.M., when the sun was just beginning its ascent. A yellow ball hiding behind gauze-curtain clouds. It smelled like fresh grass, dirt, and heather. She fed Columbus, then kissed her little head for luck. She wished she could take the kitten with her; after all, she was the one who discovered the passage in the first place. As she padded across the moist ground to the trapdoor, she felt happier than she’d been in a long time. Maybe all women had a little Nancy Drew in them; Carlene was certainly relishing the adventure. How often in life, as an adult, did you get to explore hidden passages?
She hadn’t gleaned much information from what she’d read in the book so far. She’d tried to stay up late last night reading it, but it was very technical. She didn’t know how someone could make a book on secret passages a snoozer, but the author had managed it quite well. All she knew was that Ireland was full of such spaces, from Dingle to Donegal. Some were made of limestone and timber, others were just plowed earth. A good number of the soutterrains were located near ringforts, which bolstered the argument that they were originally built as places of defense.
Others said that they weren’t defense at all, they were simply used as cold storage to preserve food. Later, it was said that cattle thieves or IRA members used the underground spaces to hide weapons or themselves, but it was pretty much agreed that the spaces had been built long before. The exact age was unknown, and again subject to disagreement. Some thought they dated all the way back to the Bronze Age, others dated them as late as the eighteenth century. Some had spaces where you could actually stand up in them, some had multiple passages ending in beehive-shaped rooms. Carlene couldn’t wait to see what hers was like.
Dropping down onto the chair was easy. She’d done it many times. The familiar smell of wet limestone and dirt was surprisingly comforting. She wore jeans, tennis shoes, a sweatshirt, a rain jacket, and heavy work gloves. She didn’t want to cut her hands on anything as she crawled. She dropped to her hands and knees and breathed. I can do this.
She shone the light down the passage. The beam of light only illuminated ten feet ahead. She would need both hands to crawl. That meant tucking the flashlight into her shirt. When she felt as if she’d made enough headway, she would stop and shine the light again. It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it was better than nothing. It was now or never. Carlene started to crawl.
It was damp, and within a few feet her knees were wet and aching. She should have worn knee pads. The space was barely big enough for her and the backpack. It scraped along the timber roof, shaking loose dirt and pebbles as she crawled. The backpack snagged a few times, and Carlene had to force her way through, after which the light sprinkling of dirt turned into a downpour. Please don’t cave in, please don’t cave in.
She stopped after about ten paces and breathed. It was so dark. The space wasn’t large enough to turn around. If she wanted to go back now, it would mean crawling backward. If she wanted to quit, now would be a good time. She reached into her shirt and pulled out the flashlight. Her hands shook as she turned it on and shone it down the passage. Still, more of the same, for at least another ten feet. She started up again.
Right hand, right knee, left hand, left knee. The farther in she went, the more the temperature dropped, until soon it felt as if she were crawling through a freezer. The food-storage theory was starting to gain credibility. Imagine having to crawl through here every day for milk. Carlene started to sing to herself. She’d never been one to sing much before, but everyone over here did it, no matter how terrible their voices were, and it seemed to make them deliriously happy, so she was going to try singing too.
She didn’t know enough words to the Irish songs she liked to keep herself entertained, so she started in on a military cadence of right, left, right, left. She stopped after what felt like ages, and this time, when she turned on the flashlight, she could make out a large opening just six feet away. Her heart began to pound. It was a dark, dark hole. Anything could be there. Anyone could be in there. What if someone was living down here? Surely, they’d heard her coming. But could someone really just be sitting there in the dark, waiting to pounce? Unlikely. Unless they were asleep. Imagine waking a sleeping terrorist. It was just after seven in the morning. Most criminals were probably night owls. Carlene held her breath, kept as still as possible, and listened.
Besides an occasional drip, it was deadly silent. There is no one in there, there is no one in there. What kind of animal might burrow its way in here? Obviously, this was built by man. She didn’t know any animal who knew how to lay a limestone floor and a timber roof. But had an animal taken advantage of the space to hang out? Was she going into a fox den?
Shit, she hated herself for getting herself into this, and knowing that there was no way she could turn back now. If she didn’t go all the way up to the entrance, she would torture herself about it for the rest of her life.
The thought made her keep crawling. Finally, she was at the mouth of the opening; she could feel the dampness spreading even before she turned on the light. She took a moment and tried to look into it without the flashlight, but it was pitch black. She breathed. She listened. She heard water dripping. It was definitely wetter in here. She took a deep breath, said a little prayer, and turned on the light.
It was a small, round, dirt room, a tiny cave. Against the back wall a bench had been carved out of stone. It looked as if she would be able to stand up in the middle of the room, but have to scrunch over on the sides. Carlene had to admit that after all the fear, worry, and fuss, it was a tad disappointing as far as hidden underground spaces were concerned. She shone the light along the left wall, half expecting to see old milk bottles or something to prove that it had been a caveman’s refrigerator. Instead, it was eerily empty. She read that some of the spaces had a duct in the ceiling and a fire pit. Excitement, strike two—this one did not. Confident and calm, she swung the light to the right. There, lying on the floor, was a human skeleton.
Hanging off its bones was a tattered gray dress. The skull was tilted back, the jaw gaped open as if she died mid-scream, empty eye sockets stared at the ceiling. Carlene screamed, and screamed, and screamed, but she couldn’t move. Then adrenaline kicked in. Ignoring the pain in her knees, Carlene began what could only be described as sprint-crawling. As she scrambled out as if her life depended on it, the lone light continued to shine upon the abandoned bones.
CHAPTER 39
Bringing in the Guards
There was no question of what to do—the police had to be called. Carlene had no idea who was lying down there or for how long, and although it was some comfort that it was a skeleton and not a fresh body, it was still something she could not mull over, not for a second. She rushed into the pub and picked up the phone. There was no dial tone. Carlene put it down and picked it up again. It was definitely dead. She examined the lines going into the phone. It seemed perfectly fine. She ran upstairs and grabbed her cell phone out of her purse. Shit. What did you dial for 911 in Ireland? How could she still not know?
She ran over to Joe’s shop. He was seated at the counter, hunched over, reading his newspaper.
“Call the police,” she said. “Quick.” She didn’t know why she said quick—the skeleton had been down there for quite some time—but she still felt panicked.
“What the devil is going on?” Joe asked. He looked her up and down. She forgot what a mess she was, dirty and wet, and shaking.
“I found a skeleton on my property,” she said.
“A what?”
“A woman, Joe. I found a woman’s skeleton.”
“How do ye know it’s a woman?”
“It’s wearing a dress.”
“Right, right,” Joe said. “Where did ye find it?
”
“Underground,” Carlene said.
“You dug up a grave?” Joe asked.
“No,” Carlene said. “Please. Just call the guards.” Carlene had rushed in so fast, she hadn’t even bothered to look around. Now she sensed people staring at her. This time it wasn’t a christening, but there were several women doing their shopping, and all had stopped to listen to her. If she had hoped to keep this a secret, there wasn’t a chance of it now.
It didn’t take long for Mike Murphy and a second guard to arrive, followed by Father Duggan. Joe tagged along, as well as all five customers who had been in the shop. Carlene wished she had time to change and take a shower, but they were all anxious to get to the skeleton. Carlene wanted to ask Father Duggan why he was there—it was obviously too late for last rites, and besides, how would they know if the skeleton was even Catholic? She realized, as they all gathered in the backyard, that she should call the McBrides. She asked Mike Murphy if he would wait for them before going after the skeleton. The guards spent the time circling the entrance to the passage, then they cordoned off a square around it with crime scene tape.
Carlene used the phone in Joe’s shop to call Mary McBride. Katie answered and Carlene quickly filled her in. Katie agreed to call the rest of them, including Ronan. When Carlene returned to the passage, the guards were taking pictures of the entrance.
“How did you find this?” Father Duggan asked Carlene.
“My cat found it,” Carlene said. The folks who gathered in her backyard were all chattering at once, wondering whose body it was. Joe pulled her aside.