White Bones

by Graham Masterton

  “So what can I do?”

  “Nothing, I’m afraid. I do have several other coma cases here, where parents and children sit with their afflicted loved ones, and talk to them every day, and play them their favorite music. It’s always very well publicized when somebody recovers, but in my experience this very rarely happens. You’ll have to face up to something very grim, Katie. To all intents and purposes, Katie, the Paul you knew died in the back of that car.”

  “What if he’s aware?”

  “He’s not, I assure you.”

  “How can you be certain? You just said yourself that you didn’t know what thoughts he was having.”

  “Katie, barring a miracle from God, he’s lost to you for ever. I’m very sorry.”

  She went alone into Paul’s room and stood beside him. He looked deeply peaceful, as if he were simply sleeping after a long day’s betting on the horses at Fairyhouse and too much Guinness. She knew now that her life had changed for ever; and that the dreams she had harbored when she was young were never to be. She felt as if her dreams had been a curse on everybody who came into contact with her, even her dog.

  She didn’t kiss him, couldn’t. What was the point? Instead, she walked out through the swing doors and into the parking-lot where it was raining in torrents and ran to her car. She started the engine, then she turned it off again. Then she picked up her cellphone and dialed Jury’s Inn.

  “Lucy? Lucy, it’s Katie Maguire. Do you mind if we meet?”

  49

  As she pulled away from the Y-junction at Victoria Cross, a pick-up truck came right through the lights opposite The Crow’s Nest pub and collided with her nearside passenger door. The truck wasn’t going fast, but the noise was tremendous, and Katie’s car was pushed sideways across the road so that her rear offside bumper was hit by a hackney coming in the opposite direction.

  She climbed out into the pouring rain. The pick-up’s wheel-arch had become entangled with hers, and when the driver tried to reverse there was a crackling, groaning sound of metal and plastic.

  Turning up her collar, she walked around to the driver’s door and held up her badge.

  “Oh feck,” said the driver. He was a young man with a shaven head and earrings and a donkey-jacket with orange fluorescent patches on it.

  “You went right through a red light without stopping,” Katie told him. “I want your name and address and the name of your insurance company.”

  “I’m sorry, my girlfriend’s having a baby and I was trying to get home quick.”

  “I don’t care if the hounds of hell are after you, you could have killed somebody, driving like that.”

  She called the traffic department at Anglesea Street and then ordered the pick-up driver to pull in by the side of the road. Her car was still drivable, even though the tire chafed against the twisted wheel-arch with a chuffing sound like maracas. By the time a squad car had arrived and she had redirected two miles of congested traffic, she was soaked through, and trembling with cold.

  “Not your week, superintendent,” said Garda Nial O’Gorman, climbing out of the squad car and putting on his cap.

  Lucy was waiting for her in the bar, at a table by the window, working on her laptop. She was wearing a fluffy white rollneck sweater and black leather trousers. “My God,” she said, when Katie walked in. “What happened to you?”

  “Minor car accident, that’s all. Nobody hurt, nothing to worry about.”

  “You’re drenched. Do you want a drink?”

  “I’m still on duty, but I’ll have a coffee maybe.”

  She sat down. Through the window she could see the lights of Western Road and the glossy black river, sliding by. “What are you working on?” she asked, nodding at the laptop. “Are you making any progress with this Mor-Rioghain thing?”

  “A little,” said Lucy. “I went up to Knocknadeenly again this morning and had a look at the site by the wood. There’s no doubt that it’s the sort of place that would have had great magical significance in druidic times. There are Celtic stone markers at Ballynahina to the south, at Tullig to the west, at Rathfilode cave to the east, and at the megalithic tomb at Kilgallan to the north. If you draw lines from each of these locations, they converge precisely on Knocknadeenly, practically down to the meter. Then, of course, we have Iollan’s Wood, which is a natural gateway through to the Invisible Kingdom.”

  Katie was trying to listen, but Lucy’s voice was beginning to echo, and she felt as if she was not really there, and was looking at Lucy through the eye-holes in a mask.

  Lucy said, “I’ve already found two early poems by a local filí which mention Mor-Rioghain in the context of Knocknadeenly. One of them talks about ‘the frantic death-dancing of thirteen women on the hill of the gray people’, and it also mentions ‘the woman with living hair who comes from the land beyond the land’.”

  She hesitated, and said, “Katie – are you all right? You’re looking very white.”

  “I’m grand. Cold, I think, that’s all. And tired. I had some bad news about Paul this afternoon.”

  Lucy took hold of her hand. “Tell me,” she said.

  “It seems as if he’s never going to – ” She stopped, and puckered her lips. She couldn’t make her throat work.

  “Take your time. It seems as if he’s never going to what?”

  “The doctor said that – ” She waved her hand, trying to pull herself together, trying to explain herself. But then she couldn’t stop the tears from running down her cheeks and she couldn’t stop herself from sobbing.

  The waiter came up with her coffee, but Lucy said, “That’s all right, forget it, this lady’s kind of upset. Come on, Katie, you come up to my room with me and have a lie-down for a while. You’re shaking like a leaf.”

  Lucy helped her up from her chair and led her across the bar and she didn’t resist. Just at the moment, after everything that had happened, she had no more resistance left. Even her pride and her natural determination and her strict Templemore training couldn’t protect her from grief.

  They walked upstairs to Lucy’s first-floor room and Lucy held her hand all the way. Room 223 was plain, but it was warm and comfortable, with beige walls and a double bed with a rusty-colored bedspread. Lucy drew the curtains and then she pulled down the covers.

  “Here,” she said, and helped Katie out of her sodden coat. “God, even your blouse is wet. Listen – why don’t you let me run you a bath, that’ll warm you up.”

  “You don’t have to go to any trouble.”

  “What are friends for? You’d do the same for me, wouldn’t you?”

  “All right, a bath would be very welcome, thanks.”

  Lucy brought Katie a white toweling robe from the bathroom and then started running the water. Katie sat on the side of the bed and undressed very slowly. She felt aching, exhausted and disoriented as if she had tumbled down six flights of stairs and knocked her head at the bottom.

  “I hope you like Chanel No. 5 bath foam,” Lucy called out. “It does wonders for the skin.”

  “I usually use whatever’s on special offer at Dunnes Stores.”

  “There,” said Lucy, coming out of the bathroom. “You have a good long relaxing soak and I’ll hang your blouse on the air-conditioner.”

  Katie climbed into the bath and sat there for a long time staring at nothing at all. She wanted to empty her mind of everything. Of struggling to escape from her car, as it sank backward into the river. Of Declan, shuddering in the flowerbed with half of his leg missing. Of Sergeant, a Daliesque nightmare hanging in the trees. Of Paul, on his long dark journey to the end of his life. Of little Seamus, cold as ice.

  “Everything okay?” said Lucy.

  “Fine, thank you, yes. This bath smells gorgeous.”

  “You know what my mother used to say to me? She said, sometimes you just have to admit to yourself that you’ve had enough, you know? Sometimes you just have to say, I can’t cope, I can’t fight this any more. I have to give in.”

>   Katie nodded, even though Lucy couldn’t see her. She picked up the facecloth from the side of the tub and it was then that she really started to cry. It hit her so unexpectedly that she couldn’t believe she was doing it, and she was actually cross with herself for sobbing. But the crosser she got, the more she cried, until she was leaning forward with her nose almost touching the bubbles, her mouth dragged down, her throat aching with self-pity.

  Lucy tapped gently at the door. “Katie? Are you all right?”

  Again, Katie nodded, but she couldn’t speak.

  “Katie? You’re not crying, are you?”

  Lucy hesitated for a moment and then she opened the door. “Oh, Katie,” she said. She knelt down beside the bath, rolled up the sleeves of her sweater and put her arms around Katie’s shoulders. “Katie, you poor darling. Everybody expects you to be so strong, don’t they? They forget that you’re human, like all the rest of us.”

  She kissed Katie on the cheek, twice, in the way that a mother would kiss a weeping child. Then she said, “You relax. I’m going to wash your hair for you and massage your back and you’ll feel ten times better, I promise you.”

  Katie sat without saying a word as Lucy unhooked the shower attachment and wet her hair. She worked shampoo into her scalp with a strong circular movement and the feeling was so soothing that Katie found herself closing her eyes.

  “I always wash my hair whenever I’m feeling tired or depressed or hung-over,” said Lucy. “I wash my hair and then I sit down and eat a whole bar of chocolate. Like, if nobody else is going to pamper me, then why not pamper myself?”

  She rinsed Katie’s hair and then she took a handful of body shampoo and started to massage her neck muscles and her back.

  “That’s wonderful,” said Katie. “Where did you learn to do that?”

  “My boyfriend used to work for Gold’s Gym. He taught me massage and reflexology and all kinds of tricks that you can do to relax yourself.”

  With her thumbs, she located all of the knots of tension down Katie’s spine, and loosened them. “I could do with more of this,” said Katie.

  “You really are incredibly tense,” Lucy told her. “It’s like your whole body is wound up tight, like a clock-spring.”

  “Do you still see him?”

  “Who?”

  “The boyfriend who taught you how to massage people.”

  Lucy shook her head. “I’m afraid I’ve never been very lucky with men. Either I frighten them, or else they see me as some kind of challenge. I guess it’s the penalty you pay for being tall and well-educated.”

  “Better than being small and bossy, like me.”

  “It’s your job to be bossy, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not my job to be obnoxious.”

  Lucy massaged her neck and her upper back. Katie kept her eyes closed and she could almost feel her stress dissolving into the bathwater. Then, without any hesitation, Lucy squirted more body shampoo into her hand and started to massage her breasts.

  Katie thought, Holy Mary, what’s she doing? She opened her eyes and stared at Lucy, but Lucy looked completely calm, as if this was a natural part of the massage. She gave Katie a friendly little smile and Katie thought that if she tried to pull her hands away she would look like a prude. This was a woman, massaging her, that’s all, and even if she hadn’t been expecting her to touch her breasts, it didn’t seem to be intended as a sexual advance.

  Lucy squeezed and caressed her shampoo-slippery breasts and Katie dared herself to close her eyes again, and relax, and simply enjoy what Lucy was doing. Lucy came from California, after all, and she knew that American women were much more at ease with nudity than most convent-educated Irish women. God, if only Sister Brigid could see me now.

  “You should do this yourself, at least once a week,” said Lucy. “It helps to firm your breasts and stimulate your breast-tissue, and of course it’s important to check for lumps.”

  Katie said nothing. The sensation of having her breasts massaged was beginning to arouse her, especially when Lucy pulled gently at her nipples and rolled them between her fingers. It had been a long time since anybody had touched her as lovingly as this, as if they really cared about her. She began to think that if she allowed Lucy to carry on, she might even be able to reach an orgasm, simply from having her breasts caressed.

  But then Lucy said, “Come on, now, you don’t want to get cold,” and kissed her on the forehead. She pulled the plug and helped Katie to climb out of the bath and wrap a towel around herself.

  When Katie was dry, Lucy poured them both a whiskey from the mini-bar and they lay side by side on the bed, talking. Katie felt as if she could lie there for ever.

  “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever had a really close woman friend,” said Lucy. “I guess it’s because I get so-o-o bored by women’s conversation. All they want to talk about is their repulsive children, or their husbands’ careers in accountancy or how to make a tantalizing pie out of left-over turkey.”

  Katie smiled. She felt warm now, and much more peaceful, and she realized that while Lucy’s massage had been disturbingly intimate, it must have been the kind of hands-on sisterly gesture that Californian women considered to be perfectly natural. Just because Sister Boniface at Our Lady of Lourdes would have been scandalized…

  She said, “I used to have some wonderful friends at school, but most of them are married now, with seven kids. One of them’s a teacher at a special school in Kilkenny, and one went to Dublin to sing in a choir, but the rest of them fell pregnant as soon as they’d finished their leaving certs, or even before.

  She turned to Lucy. “Did you ever think about getting married?”

  Lucy shook her head.

  “Children?”

  “One day, maybe, if things work out the way I want them to.”

  “Do you know, I’m not sure what I’m going to do now, with Paul in a coma. I’m still going to be married, aren’t I? But how can you be married to somebody who’s never going to wake up?”

  Lucy touched her bare shoulder. “He’s gone, Katie. You’re going to have to get used to the idea.”

  “I suppose so. But it’s hard.”

  They lay in silence for a long time. Katie closed her eyes and felt that she could easily drift off to sleep. But after a while Lucy said, “This guy, Tómas Ó Conaill. Do you really think that you’re going to get a conviction?”

  Katie opened her eyes and blinked at her.

  “You have a whole lot of evidence, don’t you? The fingerprints, the footprints.”

  Katie said, “Well, you’re right. The circumstantial evidence is very strong, and Ó Conaill’s got a bad reputation, but still – I don’t know – something doesn’t quite fit. He said that Mor-Rioghain could only be raised by a witch, a woman. Yet our eye-witness report suggests that Fiona Kelly was almost certainly abducted by a man, and Dr Reidy says that the physical strength required to kill her and cut her up would have been way beyond a woman’s capabilities. Not only that, I’ve been reading through the FBI profiles, and it’s extremely rare for a lone woman to be a serial killer, and almost unheard-of for a woman to be a serial killer with any kind of mythical or fantasy motive.”

  “So you think it could have been a partnership?”

  “It’s a possibility. Especially since we still haven’t been able to find Siobhan Buckley, and Mor-Rioghain needs one more sacrifice before she can make her appearance.”

  “You’re beginning to sound as if you believe in Mor-Rioghain.”

  “I’m simply trying to think like our killer, that’s all. Or killers. They believe she exists, and because of that, I have to believe in her, too.”

  “And do you have any suspicions about who they might be?”

  “John Meagher told me that he actually saw Mor-Rioghain. Or a figure of some kind, anyway, standing in the field where he found Fiona’s body.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “He swore it. He said he saw it as plain as the nose on his fac
e.”

  “He’s probably hallucinating. It must have been a hell of a shock, finding Fiona’s body like that.”

  “All right. But when you think about it, John Meagher has a very compelling motive for wanting to raise up a spirit like Mor-Rioghain – a spirit who can help people to solve all of their problems. He hates farming, he’s gradually going bankrupt. And his mother… well, she may not be a real witch but she certainly looks like one. And she might very well have known about the bones buried under the feedstore. After all, she’s been living at Meagher’s Farm ever since she was nineteen years old.”

  “Do you have any material evidence that the Meaghers could have been involved?”

  “None. We searched the fields, the outbuildings, the farmhouse. We even dug up the floor of the piggery.”

  “In that case, maybe you can get them to confess? Always presuming they did it, of course.”

  “Easier said than done. If they did it together, mother and son, it’s going to be very difficult to break that kind of a relationship. I had to deal with a father-and-daughter situation a couple of years ago, in Carrigaline, the father got together with the daughter and crushed his wife’s head under his tractor, with the daughter actually holding her mother down. I knew they’d done it, and they knew that I knew that they’d done it, but I could never get either of them to admit it, and they’re still free today. Jesus, I saw them shopping in Roches Stores.”

  “Maybe I can help you,” said Lucy, propping herself up on one elbow. “After all, I know just about everything there is to know about Mor-Rioghain, and how she’s summoned up, and the rituals that have to be performed to persuade her to help you. If you and I can talk to the Meaghers together… well, there’s a possibility that we could get them to slip up, isn’t there?”