In the Woods

by Tana French

  “The other thing,” she said, “is why I went in there in the first place.”

  Cassie has a mind like a cloverleaf flyover: it can spin off in wildly divergent directions and then, by some Escherian defiance of dimension, swoop dizzily back to the crux. “It wasn’t just for the marbles. He had this very thick country accent—Midlands, I think—and it sounded like he might have said, ‘Do you want marvels?’ I mean, I knew he hadn’t, I knew he’d said ‘marbles,’ but a part of me thought just maybe he was one of those mysterious old men out of stories, and inside the shed would be shelves and In the Woods 197

  shelves of scrying glasses and potions and ancient parchments and tiny dragons in cages. I knew it was only a shed and he was only a groundskeeper, but at the same time I thought this might just be my chance to be one of the children who go through the wardrobe into the other world, and I couldn’t stand the thought of spending the rest of my life knowing I’d missed it.”

  How can I ever make you understand Cassie and me? I would have to take you there, walk you down every path of our secret shared geography. The truism says it’s against all the odds for a straight man and woman to be real friends, platonic friends; we rolled thirteen, threw down five aces and ran away giggling. She was the summertime cousin out of storybooks, the one you taught to swim at some midge-humming lake and pestered with tadpoles down her swimsuit, with whom you practiced first kisses on a heather hillside and laughed about it years later over a clandestine joint in your granny’s cluttered attic. She painted my fingernails gold and dared me to leave them that way for work. I told Quigley that she thought Croke Park Stadium should be turned into a shopping center, and watched her try to decipher his outraged splutter. She cut up the packaging of her new mouse mat and stuck the part that said touch me—feel the difference to the back of my shirt, and I wore it half the day before I noticed. We climbed out her window and down the fire escape and lay on the roof of the extension below, drinking improvised cocktails and singing Tom Waits and watching the stars spin dizzily around us.

  No. These are stories I like to think about, small bright currency and not without value; but above all that, and underlying everything we did, she was my partner. I don’t know how to tell you what that word, even now, does to me; what it means. I could tell you about going room by room, guns twohanded at arm’s length, through silent houses where a suspect could be armed and waiting behind any door; or about long nights on surveillance, sitting in a dark car drinking black coffee from a thermos and trying to play gin rummy by the light of a streetlamp. Once we chased two hit-and-run joyriders through their own territory—graffiti and rubbish-dump wastelands whipping past the windows, sixty miles per hour, seventy, I floored it and stopped looking at the speedometer—until they spun into a wall, and then we held the sobbing fifteen-year-old driver between us, promising him that his mother and the ambulance would be there soon, while he died in 198

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  our arms. In a notorious tower block that would redraw the outlines of your image of humanity, a junkie pulled a syringe on me—we weren’t even interested in him, it was his brother we were after, and the conversation had seemed to be proceeding along normal lines until his hand moved too fast and suddenly there was a needle against my throat. While I stood frozen and sweating and wildly praying that neither of us would sneeze, Cassie sat down cross-legged on the reeking carpet, offered the guy a cigarette and talked to him for an hour and twenty minutes (in the course of which he demanded, variously, our wallets, a car, a fix, a Sprite and to be left alone); talked to him so matter-of-factly and with such frank interest that finally he dropped the syringe and slid down the wall to sit across from her, and he was starting to tell her his life story when I got my hands under control enough to slap the cuffs on him.

  The girls I dream of are the gentle ones, wistful by high windows or singing sweet old songs at a piano, long hair drifting, tender as apple blossom. But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver. Think of the first time you slept with someone, or the first time you fell in love: that blinding explosion that left you crackling to the fingertips with electricity, initiated and transformed. I tell you that was nothing, nothing at all, beside the power of putting your lives, simply and daily, into each other’s hands. 11

  T hat weekend I went over to my parents’ house for Sunday dinner. I do this every few weeks, although I’m not really sure why. We’re not close; the best we can do is a mutual state of amicable and faintly puzzled politeness, like people who met on a package tour and can’t figure out how to end the connection. Sometimes I bring Cassie with me. My parents love her—she teases my father about his gardening, and sometimes when she helps my mother in the kitchen I hear my mother laugh, full-throated and happy as a girl—and drop hopeful little hints about how close we are, which we cheerfully ignore.

  “Where’s Cassie today?” my mother asked after dinner. She had made macaroni and cheese—she has some idea that this is my favorite dish (which it may well have been, at some point in my life) and she cooks it, as a small timid expression of sympathy, whenever something in the papers indicates that a case of mine isn’t going well. Even the smell of it makes me claustrophobic and itchy. She and I were in the kitchen; I was washing up and she was drying. My father was in the sitting room, watching a Columbo movie on TV. The kitchen was dim and we had the light on, though it was only midafternoon.

  “I think she went to her aunt and uncle’s,” I said. Actually, Cassie was probably curled up on her sofa, reading and eating ice cream out of the carton—we hadn’t had much time to ourselves, the last couple of weeks, and Cassie, like me, needs a certain amount of solitude—but I knew it would upset my mother, the thought of her spending a Sunday alone.

  “That’ll be nice for her: being looked after. The pair of you must be shattered.”

  “We’re pretty tired,” I said.

  “All that back and forth to Knocknaree.”

  My parents and I don’t talk about my work, except in the most general terms, and we never mention Knocknaree. I looked up sharply, but my mother was tilting a plate to the light to look for wet streaks. 200

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  “It’s a long drive, all right,” I said.

  “I read in the paper,” my mother said carefully, “that the police were talking to Peter and Jamie’s families again. Was that yourself and Cassie?”

  “Not the Savages. I talked to Ms. Rowan, though, yes. Does this look clean to you?”

  “It’s grand,” my mother said, taking the baking dish out of my hand.

  “How’s Alicia now?”

  There was something in her voice that made me look up again, startled. She caught my gaze and flushed, wiping hair away from her cheek with the back of her wrist. “Ah, we used to be great friends. Alicia was . . . well, I suppose she was almost like a little sister to me. We got out of touch, after. I was just wondering how she was, is all.”

  I had a fast, queasy flash of retrospective panic: if I had known that Alicia Rowan and my mother had been close, I would never have gone near that house. “I think she’s all right,” I said. “As much as one could expect. She still has Jamie’s room the way it was.”

  My mother clicked her tongue unhappily. We washed up in silence for some time: clink of cutlery, Peter Falk cunningly interrogating someone in the next room. Outside the window, a pair of magpies landed on the grass and started picking over the tiny garden, discussing it raucously as they went.

  “Shoo,” my mother said automatically, rapping the glass, and sighed. “I suppose I’ve never forgiven myself for losing touch with Alicia. She’d no one else. She was such a sweet girl, a real innocent—she was still hoping Jamie’s father would leave his wife, after all that time, and they’d be a family. . . . Did she ever marry?”

  “No. But she doesn’t seem unhappy, really. She teaches yoga.” The suds in the basin had turned lukewarm and clammy; I reached for the kettl
e and added more hot water.

  “That’s one reason we moved away, you know,” my mother said. She had her back to me, sorting cutlery into a drawer. “I couldn’t face them—Alicia and Angela and Joseph. I had my son back safe and sound, and they were going through hell. . . . I could hardly go out of the house, in case I’d meet them. I know it sounds mad, but I felt guilty. I thought they must hate me for having you safe. I don’t see how they could help it.”

  This took me aback. I suppose all children are self-centered; it had never occurred to me, at any rate, that the move might have been for anyone’s In the Woods 201

  benefit but my own. “I never really thought about that,” I said. “Selfish brat that I was.”

  “You were a little darling,” my mother said, unexpectedly. “The most affectionate child that ever lived. When you came in from school or playing, you’d always give me a massive hug and a kiss—even when you were almost as big as me—and say, ‘Did you miss me, Mammy?’ Half the time you’d have something for me, a pretty stone or a flower. I still have most of them kept.”

  “Me?” I was glad I hadn’t brought Cassie. I could practically see the wicked glint in her eye if she’d heard this.

  “Yes, you. That’s why I was so worried when we couldn’t find you that day.” She gave my arm a sudden, almost violent little squeeze; even after all these years, I heard the strain in her voice. “I was panicking, you know. Everyone was saying, ‘Sure, they’ve only run away from home, children do that, we’ll have them found in no time. . . .’ But I said, ‘No. Not Adam.’

  You were a sweet boy; kind. I knew you wouldn’t do that to us.”

  Hearing the name cast in her voice sent something through me, something fast and primeval and dangerous. “I don’t remember myself as a particularly angelic child,” I said. My mother smiled, out the kitchen window; the abstracted look on her face, remembering things I didn’t, made me edgy. “Ah, not angelic. But thoughtful. You were growing up fast, that year. You made Peter and Jamie stop tormenting that poor wee boy, what was his name? The one with the glasses and the awful mammy who did the flowers for the church?”

  “Willy Little?” I said. “That wasn’t me, that was Peter. I would have been perfectly happy to go on tormenting him till the cows came home.”

  “No, that was you,” my mother said firmly. “The three of you did something or other that made him cry, and it upset you so badly, you decided you’d have to leave the poor boy alone. You were worried that Peter and Jamie wouldn’t understand. Do you not remember?”

  “Not really,” I said. Actually, this bothered me more than anything in this whole uncomfortable conversation. You’d think I’d have preferred her version of the story to my own, but I didn’t. It was entirely possible, of course, that she had unconsciously recast me as the hero, or that I had done it myself, lied to her at the time; but over the past few weeks I had come to think of my memories as solid, shining little things, to be hunted out and treasured, and it was deeply unsettling to think that they might be fool’s 202

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  gold, tricky and fog-shaped and not at all what they seemed. “If there aren’t any more dishes, I should probably go in and talk to Dad for a while.”

  “He’ll like that. Off you go—I can finish up here. Bring a couple of cans of Guinness with you; they’re in the fridge.”

  “Thanks for the dinner,” I said. “It was delicious.”

  “Adam,” my mother said suddenly, as I turned to leave; and that swift treacherous thing hit me under the breastbone again, and oh, God how I wanted to be that sweet child for one more moment, how I wanted to spin around and bury my face in her warm toast-smelling shoulder and tell her through great tearing sobs what these last weeks had been. I thought of what her face would look like if I actually did it, and bit my cheek hard to keep back an insane crack of laughter.

  “I just wanted you to know,” she said timidly, twisting the dishcloth in her hands. “We did our best for you, after. Sometimes I worry that we did it all wrong. . . . But we were afraid that whoever had—you know—that whoever it was would come back and . . . We were just trying to do what would be best for you.”

  “I know, Mum,” I said. “It’s fine,” and, with the sensation of some huge and narrow escape, I went out to the sitting room to watch Columbo with my father.

  “How’s work treating you?” my father said, during an ad break. He rummaged down the side of a cushion for the remote control and lowered the sound on the TV.

  “Fine,” I said. On the screen, a small child sitting on a toilet was conversing vehemently with a green, fanged cartoon creature surrounded by vapor trails.

  “You’re a good lad,” my father said, staring at the TV as if mesmerized by this. He took a swig from his can of Guinness. “You’ve always been a good lad.”

  “Thanks,” I said. Clearly he and my mother had had some kind of conversation about me, in preparation for this afternoon, although for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it might have entailed.

  “And work’s all right for you.”

  “Yes. Fine.”

  “That’s grand, then,” my father said, and turned the volume up again. In the Woods 203

  . . .

  I got back to the apartment around eight. I went into the kitchen and started making myself a sandwich, ham and Heather’s low-fat cheese—I’d forgotten to go shopping. The Guinness had left me bloated and uncomfortable—I’m not a beer drinker, but my father gets worried if I ask for anything else; he considers men drinking spirits to be a sign of either incipient alcoholism or incipient homosexuality—and I had some hazy paradoxical idea that eating something would soak up the beer and make me feel better. Heather was in the sitting room. Her Sunday evenings are devoted to something she calls

  “Me Time,” a process involving Sex and the City DVDs, a wide variety of mystifying implements and a lot of bustling between the bathroom and the sitting room with a look of grim, righteous determination. My phone beeped. Cassie: Give me a lift 2 court 2moro? Grown-up clothes + golf cart + weather =very bad look.

  “Oh, shit,” I said aloud. The Kavanagh case, an old woman beaten to death in Limerick during a break-in, sometime the year before: Cassie and I were giving evidence first thing in the morning. The prosecutor had been in to prep us, and we’d reminded each other on Friday and everything, but I’d promptly managed to forget all about it.

  “What’s wrong?” Heather piped eagerly, hurrying out of the sitting room at the prospect of an opening for conversation. I threw the cheese back into the fridge and slammed the door on it, not that that would do much good: Heather knows to a millimeter how much of everything she has left, and once sulked till I bought her a new bar of fancy organic soap because I’d come in drunk and washed my hands with hers. “Are you all right?” She was in her dressing gown, with what looked like Saran Wrap around her head, and she smelled of a headache-inducing array of flowery, chemical things.

  “Yeah, fine,” I said. I hit Reply and started texting Cassie back: As opposed to what? See you at 8:30ish. “I just forgot I’m in court tomorrow.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Heather, widening her eyes. Her nails were a tasteful pale pink; she waved them around to dry them. “I could help you get ready. Go over your notes with you or something.”

  “No, thanks.” Actually, I didn’t even have my notes. They were somewhere at work. I wondered whether I should drive in and get them, but I told myself I was probably still over the limit.

  “Oh . . . OK. That’s all right.” Heather blew on her nails and peered at 204

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  my sandwich. “Oh, did you go shopping? It’s actually your turn to buy toilet bleach, you know.”

  “I’m going tomorrow,” I said, gathering up my phone and my sandwich and heading for my room.

  “Oh. Well, I suppose it can wait till then. Is that my cheese?”

  I extricated myself from Heather—not without difficulty—and ate my sandwich, which
unsurprisingly didn’t undo the effects of the Guinness. Then I poured myself a vodka and tonic, following the same general logic, and lay on my back on the bed to run through the Kavanagh case in my mind.

  I couldn’t focus. All the peripheral details bounced into my head promptly, vividly and uselessly—the flickering red light of the Sacred Heart statue in the victim’s dark sitting room, the two teenage killers’ stringy little bangs, the awful clotted hole in the victim’s head, the damp-stained flowery wallpaper in the B&B where Cassie and I had stayed—but I couldn’t remember a single important fact: how we had tracked down the suspects or whether they had confessed or what they had stolen, or even their names. I got up and walked around my room, stuck my head out of the window for some cold air, but the harder I tried to concentrate, the less I remembered. After a while I couldn’t even be positive whether the victim’s name was Philomena or Fionnuala, although a couple of hours earlier I had known it without having to think (Philomena Mary Bridget).

  I was stunned. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I think I can say, without flattering myself, that I’ve always had an ironically good memory, the parroty kind that can absorb and regurgitate large amounts of information without much effort or understanding. This is how I managed to pass my A-levels, and also why I hadn’t freaked out too badly at the realization that I didn’t have my notes—I’d forgotten to go over them before, once or twice, and never been caught out.

  And it wasn’t as if I were trying to do anything particularly out of the ordinary, after all. In Murder you get used to juggling three or four investigations at once. If you pull a child-murder or a dead cop or something highpriority like that, you can hand off your open cases, the way we’d handed off the taxi-rank thing to Quigley and McCann, but you still have to deal with all the aftermath of the closed ones: paperwork, meetings with prose-In the Woods 205