Finnegan's Field

by Angela Slatter

  She thought briefly about their adolescent fumblings behind the sports shed, how clever his fingers had been then, making promises his cock didn’t bother to keep when she’d at last agreed to go all the way; how selfish he’d been. Not like Brian with his saggy bum, potbelly, and full head of greying hair, Brian who’d stepped up when she found herself pregnant, and Jasper off at the Academy and not answering letters or returning calls. She’d never told him her oldest was his, that Brian was a better man than he was; that all the while he spent being transferred around the state, collecting promotions and wives like trophies, Brian had done what he couldn’t have, and done it far better.

  Anne wondered how she looked to him now. She never sensed any flicker of interest. Wasn’t sure it had been there much past the night she gave it all up to him. There was the chase and the catch and the kill; after that, the hunter was sated. She knew she still looked good, better than Brian did, but then again, the greys were outnumbering the browns on her head, the skin beneath her eyes wasn’t as firm any more, nor was her jawline, and thin runnels radiated out from her mouth even though she’d stopped smoking years before when Jason came along. Maddie would have grown up to look like her if …

  She shook her head and smiled. None of that mattered anymore.

  “What do you need, Annie?”

  “I just … I just wanted to talk about Maddie. How she was found…”

  She could see from the way his lips tightened and whitened that he was annoyed. Annoyed at having to go over this again, at having to discuss why he couldn’t find her little girl in the first place, and why she’d come back. How she’d come back. He was pissed off because he hadn’t been the one to bring her home, Anne thought.

  “Look, Anne. I don’t have any answers. All I know is we looked high and low. You were there; you saw how hard everyone worked, saw how no one got any sleep for days and days on end. You know how determined everyone was, the cops, the searchers, the social workers … everyone.” He ran a hand through hair he no longer had. “Whoever took her hid her incredibly well. How she escaped—surely, she escaped, because the sort of person who steals children generally doesn’t let them go—I don’t know.”

  “I know, I know. And I’m grateful, Jasper; don’t ever think I’m not.” He’d been there for them all, a shoulder for both her and Brian, avuncular to Jason. Even after the search had been scaled down, then called off, he’d still visited, came to dinner, dropped over of an afternoon or morning, just to let them know they’d not been forgotten, not by him, at least. “I was just wondering was there anyone you looked at in particular? Anyone apart from the ones we already know about … and not just the drifters…?”

  “Annie, you know I can’t—”

  “You know what they say: most crimes are committed by someone known to the victim.”

  “Annie—”

  “What about Bill Watkins at the chemist? Ted Doran over at the water authority? The baker’s boy, Toby Anderson? People talk.” She dug, found inspiration. “Mrs Flynn! What about nosy old Mrs Flynn?”

  His face turned hard. “Mrs Flynn lost a kid of her own, same as you did, only years ago. Don’t you remember? Stop it, Annie. You got Maddie back. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  As if the Barkers, who’d lost old friends—those offended by what police questioning implied—as well as all ability to judge who they could and could not trust … as if they could go back to the way they were by this simple act of restoration.

  After last night …

  Anne sighed and sipped her coffee. She hadn’t known about Mrs Flynn, or hadn’t remembered. She couldn’t tell Jasper what she’d seen, what she’d heard. “I know. I’m sorry. I know everyone did their best, especially you, Jasper; I know that. It’s just…”

  “She’s home, Annie. She’s home. Everything’s okay with her, right?”

  “Of course!” she lied too brightly. “Everything’s fine. Sometimes, my curiosity gets the better of me.”

  “You know what curiosity did to the cat, Annie.” He laughed and grinned fondly. The radio at his belt squawked, and he said, “I gotta go. Give my love to everyone.”

  She nodded. “Thanks for humouring me. Come over for dinner again soon; we’ve not seen you for a while. Don’t be a stranger, Jasper; you’re family.”

  He hugged her tightly, then rose and walked away, hooking the handset up to answer the call.

  Anne stared after him. She’d been foolish to think he’d give up names. She swirled the dregs of her cappuccino, drank them down, and then waited a few moments before pulling the to-do list from her handbag. Chemist (painkillers, facewash, pantyliners, Bill Watkins); bakery (bread rolls, maybe a date slice, Toby Anderson); supermarket (loo paper, laundry liquid, three-litre bottle of milk, Bodie Hogan). Brian would be taking Maddie and D-fer for a walk. She’d be done soon; she’d go home and put on dinner. Afterwards, she’d try to think up a new strategy.

  * * *

  Mrs Flynn was watering her front yard when Anne pulled into the drive. She didn’t go up to the garage door, didn’t hit the remote, but killed the engine, got out of the car, and walked across the road. The old lady’s white hair caught the afternoon light and seemed to glow, and her smile was friendly and sad as Anne approached.

  There was no good way, thought Anne, no easy way. She blurted, “I’m sorry, but … I know you lost a child…”

  She may as well as have slapped the woman’s sweet face. No, punched it, pressed it in as far as she could for the features appeared to collapse in on themselves. Anne put out a hand to stop her from turning away. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be cruel, but I have to talk to someone.”

  Mrs Flynn nodded slowly, waited; made Anne speak.

  “Were there any suspects?” She didn’t know if that was the thing to ask, but it was all her mind released from its depths.

  The old woman shook her head but said, “Plenty, love. Plenty, but none as they could prove and none as they could pin it on.”

  “Anyone who’s still here?”

  “Mick Galbraith, Neil Rooney. Aidan Hanrahan’s older brother Liam, him as hung himself from a tree out by Deadman’s Mount a year after my Bridie went missing. An unlikely suspect for you, to be sure.”

  Galbraith and Rooney were old, old men now, both in the Care Home on the South Side. Neither was sufficiently mobile to grab a small child and spirit her away; they certainly hadn’t been any more limber three years earlier. Anne rubbed her hands hard over her face, concentrating on the pressure, trying to anchor herself to something solid-seeming.

  “Worst day of my life, Annie. Realising she’d not come home from school, then waiting and waiting and saying all the prayers I was ever going to have in me. Making promises to a shite of a God while the men searched high and low, through paddocks and bush, dredged the rivers and dams, turned people’s homes inside out, looking for my little girl. And all those prayers, Annie, all that begging and what did it get me? Nowt. Not even a body to bury.” She puffed, trying to get her breath back; then Anne realised she was wheezing a laugh up from her ancient lungs. Mrs Flynn said something then, so low Anne doubted she heard properly: “Perhaps there’s something worse, though, having one come home.”

  The old woman turned away, twisting the hose nozzle to shut the water off, and reeling in the sinuous length of its body as she shuffled up her drive before Anne could say anymore.

  Returning across the road, Anne saw the front door of her own house opening and Madrigal flew out, for all intents and purposes a little girl happy to see her mother home with the shopping, hopeful of a treat or two. It was only as they drew closer that Maddie’s expression changed, twisted, became hateful, her nose twitching, nostrils widening to take in some odour Anne wasn’t sensitive enough to detect.

  Maddie steamtrained towards her and latched onto the nearest wrist, her nails digging into the skin, and her teeth—those lovely small teeth!—tore into the flesh. Anne registered the white-hot pain of something tha
t grew and dug deeper than it should, Brian’s shout from the doorway, D-fer’s whimpering, then passed out from an agony that seemed all out of proportion.

  * * *

  “It wasn’t her fault,” she said desperately to Dr Marten, sitting on the edge of the trolleybed. “Not her fault at all.”

  “Anne, she could have killed you.”

  You don’t know the half of it.

  “Look, it was me, my fault. Maddie hasn’t been sleeping well and I … I put half a Valium in her hot chocolate last night. Maybe it reacted with the anti-anxiety meds?” Anne knew she was clutching at straws but saw him pause, considering. She went on.“ She’s been through so much, Terry. It’s not her fault. Surely, she was due some kind of a fit like this? Jason was telling me that she’s bound to have some anger issues that we didn’t find her, that we left her to whatever happened. It’s not a conscious thing.”

  “Well, I’m no psychologist, but…”

  “Let us take her home. If she’s calm now, please just let us take her home. I can’t bear to leave her here. She needs us and we need her.”

  “She’s calmed right down, but she’s still restrained. I’ll tell the nurses to release her.” He shook a finger. “I’m not best pleased about this.”

  “I know, Terry. But I’m her mum. I know her. She needs me.” She kissed his wrinkled cheek. “Thank you.”

  The painkillers took the edge off the physical pain but not the mental anguish. Anne paused outside the door of Madrigal’s private room. She’d seen Brian disappear down the corridor towards the cafeteria and figured she didn’t have long. She slipped inside and found the not-daughter staring at her, as if it had known she was coming.

  “I’m sorry,” it said formally, briskly. “The child remains and she is strong. She smelled the scent on you, and she overwhelmed me. It is … it is not how I would have had it. I am … poisoned by her, compromised.”

  The thought gave Anne a little pleasure, a tiny pride that her baby clung on so tenaciously, but she put sternness into her tone. “Will it happen again?”

  “She knows now it was not you, that she was mistaken. She is calm. She is sorry.”

  “Maddie?” said Anne, talking beyond the creature, addressing her daughter as if she stood over its shoulder. “Maddie, hang on, love. We’ll finish it tonight.”

  * * *

  Brian didn’t argue when she offered him the tablets before bed. The way his eyes seemed to shuttle back and forth, left to right, the way his leg bounced up and down restlessly as he sat, even as he drove them home from the hospital, the way his fingers tapped and his hands shook, and he kept swallowing.

  When her husband was snoring, if not happily then at least consistently, Anne dressed in black jeans and T-shirt, sneakers so old she wouldn’t care if she had to get rid of them, then went to her daughter’s room.

  Madrigal was already prepared, neat in identical attire, her hair pulled into a tidy bun. She sat on the edge of the bed, small feet dangling, kicking as if she was waiting for a play date. She responded to the jerk of Anne’s head and trotted along beside her. As they stepped outside into the midnight dark, she slipped her little hand into Anne’s, who felt that not only were her fingers being squeezed, but her heart as well.

  They’d not put the car in the garage that night. Don’t bother, Brian, we’re too tired, straight to bed, the lot of us, she’d said, and he hadn’t insisted. She released the brake and let it roll down the slope of the drive, then strained to push it along the street a little ways before getting in at the next intersection and starting the engine. All the windows in the cul-de-sac were blackened eyes, bar one. Anne thought she saw a curtain twitch at Mrs Flynn’s but didn’t pay much attention. She didn’t think the old lady would be a problem.

  Twenty minutes later, out beyond the town’s boundaries, Anne turned off the headlights and slowed, hoping they wouldn’t hit anything. She was about to swing into a long winding driveway until she saw headlights coming towards her; she slammed into reverse and back off the road, into a stand of tall fescue grass, praying the vehicle wouldn’t go right because then they’d have no chance of staying hidden.

  “What—” Maddie began.

  “Shhhhh!” Anne hissed as if they might be heard, laying a finger against the girl’s lips. When the other car turned left with barely a tap of the brakes, Anne sighed. She turned the key in the ignition, keeping the lights off, and followed. Ten minutes, and her quarry took another left, and Anne continued on for a kilometre. When she pulled over, she nosed behind a cluster of dwarf banksia shrubs. She closed her door quietly, knowing how sound travelled at night. Maddie copied her.

  “This way,” said Anne, and the little hand returned to hers, and this time, she squeezed back.

  Deadman’s Mount sat roughly in the middle of the north paddock of Hanrahan’s farm. It rose like a burial mound, twenty-odd feet high, dotted with rocks and sheep droppings, scraggy grass and bindi-eyes. Even if her sense of direction hadn’t been so good, Anne would have been able to navigate from the silhouette it made against the night sky, blotting out the stars. Unspeaking, they walked carefully, attentive to the ground pitted with animal tracks, the holes cattle had made during the wet season, and which had dried, hardened into an obstacle course that could break an ankle or twist a knee.

  They had to circumnavigate half of the tumulus before they found him, Maddie’s little nose sniff-sniff-sniffing all the way.

  Anne watched a little while as he dug a hole in the side of the Mount, a small hollow, not quite a tunnel, just a niche where a child might be hidden, nestled, cocooned. He’d parked the police car, one of its back doors open, so the headlights were directed to where he worked. She could see patches of sweat dark against the light green T-shirt. He’d wiped his forehead at some point and left a smear of dirt across it.

  “Why, Jasper?”

  He stopped at the sound of her voice but didn’t drop the shovel.

  “I’m sorry, Annie.” And she thought from his tone he probably was. “Normally, I don’t take from home, not from Finnegan’s Field, but … I’d driven around and around; I’d tried all the towns near and far, and found no one. Time was running out, and I couldn’t fail. I saw Maddie walking home from school. I’m sorry, Annie. I would never have hurt you if I’d had a choice—and I had no choice.”

  She marvelled that he didn’t try to deny it; she wondered if he thought she’d just shrug and say, Well, that’s all right, then, if you had no choice. Or did he think it wouldn’t matter if he told her everything because she and her daughter wouldn’t last long this night? She’d been pondering, since she’d woken in the hospital, how he’d not been to their house since Madrigal came home, but only ever phoned. He’d been on leave when she was found and not seen Maddie at all, not then and not since. At the time, Anne thought perhaps he’d been embarrassed by his failure, but maybe, somehow he knew … sensed … Had he lain awake at night, wondering if the little girl would name him? If his own constables would arrive at his door to ask questions that would destroy him? As the days and weeks dragged on, did he fear less or more? Anne thought of him with his career as mindless and repetitive as a hamster wheel, his trophy wives who never stayed, the emptiness of the power he’d claimed as a reward from the Fae in return for all these tiny lives …

  There was too much inside Anne; she thought she might burst, that the cyclone of sadness and rage would corkscrew up and tear her apart. She swallowed and swallowed again, forcing all the emotions down, forcing them not to hurt and not to burn, making them hibernate, until at last she could bring herself to give Madrigal a single nod.

  The girl leapt at Jasper, taking him so swiftly that all he had time to do was drop the shovel but not raise his hands to protect himself. He seemed utterly surprised by the child’s speed and strength, possibly because, having once carried her off all unresisting to Deadman’s Mount, he simply didn’t believe her a serious threat. But Maddie bore him to the ground in a matter of seconds and began h
er work.

  Anne did not look away. She found neither regret nor sorrow, neither satisfaction nor disgust inside; she thought she might be empty now. She wondered if sensations, emotions, would return, but it didn’t bother her, the idea of permanent lack.

  With a bite, Jasper’s muscular neck was torn open, exposing for a few seconds sinews and oesophagus, before the dark red welled and the creature took more mouthfuls, barely chewing before she swallowed. The shifting of her throat as the morsels moved down, down, down to her gullet for a long digestion was hypnotic. Soon, Jasper’s head hung loosely by a few bloody threads and the child’s tongue wound itself through the white vertebrae peeking above his shoulders, picking them clean of meat. Anne watched as her daughter subjected Jasper to the same kind of scavenging she had the drifter. Soon, there was nothing left of Anne’s former lover, nothing left of Finnegan’s Field’s Mr Underhill.

  “What now?” she dully asked the gore-covered child, who shrugged as she cleaned her face much as a cat would, with a licking of hands and a rubbing of cheeks and forehead.

  “I go back beneath. Your child will let me be at last.”

  “Release her,” said Anne quietly. Then louder, but more pleadingly. “Please give her to me.”

  The creature shook its head. “There is not enough of her left. She would not fill this body, this brain. There has only been the desire for revenge and that is fulfilled … She will fade quickly. Nothing remains for a mother to hang her heart upon.”