Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 152, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 926 & 927, November/December 2018

Jenny’s Necklace by O. A. Tynan

O. A. Tynan debuted in EQMM’s Department of First Stories in 2013. A longtime resident of Italy, she is a professional translator from Italian to English. As she explained on somethingisgoingtoliappen.net (EQMM’s blog) in 2017, despite her immersion in another culture, she continues to find her native Ireland, in the period of her childhood, the most fertile soil for her fiction.

The last time I saw Jenny, she was lying unconscious in the sandy hollow at the foot of Danagher’s Head. Its looming shadow concealed us from the eye of the summer sun. Her cheek lay against a sea-smooth stone, her blue dress flared from her waist like the gown of a fairy princess, a fleck of green seaweed was caught in her wavy brown hair. Her white high heels, her Sunday best, were nowhere to be seen. Her necklace, too, was gone. It was quiet in the hollow; even the seagulls wheeling overhead were silent. The only sound was the tide whispering in under the barrier of rocks and then a sudden hoarse shout as someone found us.

That was long ago, in the summer of 1961.I was nine years old at the time and still remember the horrible hushed atmosphere about the house after I was dragged, kicking and screaming, my dress soaked from the tide, away from Jenny. The window blinds were drawn halfway down, a sign a death had occurred. Jenny had only fainted, so perhaps it was the uncle who suffered from a weak heart. “Mark my words,” my mother often said. “One minute alive and breathing, the next dropped down dead at our feet. That is how it will be.”

The dead person was the uncle who suffered from a weak heart and who had dropped down dead at someone’s feet, and I was supposed to mourn him, but I could think only of Jenny. My mother warned me to stay out of the way in my room, but I stole out and flitted about, a skinny pigtailed ghost keeping watch for Jenny’s return. Any minute I expected to catch sight of her coming in the back door, hear the clang of the iron kettle as Philomena, my mother’s cook-housekeeper, a moody woman given to violent likes and dislikes but devoted to Jenny, offered her a cup of tea.

The comings and goings continued on through the afternoon. I recognized Sergeant Monaghan’s voice several times. He had a habit of coughing to clear his throat and then sounding hoarser than ever. Towards evening the doorbell stopped ringing, but Jenny still hadn’t returned. I was in the hall near the coat stand and burrowed just in time into the scratchy folds of a tweed greatcoat as my parents emerged from the sitting room. I stood statue-still and they stopped a few paces from my hiding place, unaware I could hear everything they said.

“My summer has been ruined,” my mother was saying. “Utterly ruined.”

“My dear, it is most unfortunate.” My father tried to console her in his courteous, elderly way and I imagined him patting her arm. “Perhaps,” he added tentatively, “we might consider putting the house up for sale?”

“Good gracious, don’t be absurd!”

I knew my mother when her voice sharpened like that. She said an unhappy fatality had occurred, tragic and shocking, yes, but they had more than exonerated their responsibilities in the matter by offering to shoulder the funeral expenses. Perhaps they might go abroad for the last week of August, fortunately imminent, saying the trip had been planned all along, but selling was absolutely out of the question. Summer holiday houses were becoming the fashion, and this particular stretch of Ireland’s southwest coast was very much sought after. “Where,” she asked my father, “would we ever find another summer house of the same distinction and in such a dominant position overlooking the town? Nowhere!” she answered for him.

In a more satisfied tone, she went on to say it might be wiser to remain at the seaside until the week was out, their departure from Kilcurtan mustn’t seem hasty. They could fly out from Shannon to somewhere on the Continent; Rome, or maybe Paris, several of her friends had already travelled to both places more than once. Or perhaps Vienna; the Austrian capital was becoming fashionable. As for me, it would be better to send me back home to Roscrea first thing in the morning; she would inform the caretaker’s wife of my arrival. But there was no real cause for concern; it was sufficient never to mention Jenny’s name in my presence again. “The child,” she said to my father, “will soon forget she ever had a governess named Jenny. And so will you.”

My father sighed, and I heard the faint brassy pop of a shirt-collar stud coming loose. “Stop that!” my mother snapped, and I imagined her pressing a wrist to her forehead as she told him to fetch her cigarets and a small glass of gin because she had a migraine coming on.

I never saw Jenny again and I was supposed to forget her, but how could I? When, in the winter before she disappeared, my mother led her up to the gloomy Roscrea schoolroom, I couldn’t believe that someone like Jenny was to be my new governess. Except for the darned woollen gloves and shabby clothes, Jenny looked nothing like my previous governesses, and I thought it was some kind of trick. Jenny’s cheeks bloomed with fairy softness. From under an old navy beret her hair descended in gleaming brown waves almost to her shoulders. I was probably glowering with mistrust, but Jenny smiled and held out her hand to me, and the bloom on her cheeks didn’t fade and her smile didn’t wither.

I hesitated, then started to inch away from the scratched schoolroom table and hurtled into Jenny’s arms. I hugged her so tightly I’m sure I almost choked her, but when at last I released my grip, Jenny’s brown eyes were still smiling and her scent of violets remained on my cheek. My mother glared at me for my bad manners, but said nothing as she left the schoolroom. Now it was up to Jenny to do something about my comportment and scholastic education.

From the first day, Jenny allowed me into her tiny bedroom, forbidden territory with my other governesses, and I could have watched for hours while she brushed her wavy brown hair. At night, Jenny went to bed without applying steel hair clips and a hairnet as my mother did, and woke the following morning with the same gleaming waves, which meant they were natural.

My mother was tall, fair-haired, and fair-skinned and much admired for her sophistication and the elegant way she held a cigaret. My father was plump and silver-haired and, because of his courteous manner, considered the perfect gentleman. I was an only child and didn’t resemble either parent in appearance or manner. My starved looks and thistly black pigtails were a trial to my mother and to me, although I pretended I didn’t care. But I knew how similar misfortunes came about. Sometimes mischievous fairies exchanged newborn babies in their cradles, and that was what had happened to me.

But it didn’t matter to Jenny how I looked, and she never pulled my pigtails. Her scent of violets, I discovered, came from a gold-capped flacon which she kept, together with her makeup and treasured keepsakes, in an old cardboard chocolate box with Christmas robins and snowy holly sprigs on the lid. Jenny never minded when I took the box onto my lap to examine each precious item: a rayon handkerchief printed with orange tulips, two lipstick stubs, a Pope John XXIII medal, a cracked pancake compact, a postcard signed by three orphanage nuns who’d taken a pilgrimage to Lourdes, and the gold-capped perfume flacon on which was written Nuits à Paris in violet lettering. Jenny and I pronounced it Newts a Pond and how we giggled over that. Jenny hadn’t known nuit meant night in French, which confirmed she wasn’t a very good governess, but that didn’t matter one jot to me as long as my mother didn’t find out. Instead of poring over schoolbooks, we played Beggar-my-neighbour, Noughts & Crosses, or daubed the pages of old copybooks with the colours from a tin paint box Jenny bought me one day as a present. The instant I heard my mother’s footsteps climbing the narrow wooden stairs up to the schoolroom, I would grab a school-book and start calling Jenny “Miss.”

“The Lord save us from all harm!” Jenny would gasp as soon as my mother had finished her sweeping inspection of the schoolroom and had left. “Sure, hasn’t she eyes in her head that would frighten the wits out of you.”

It was true that there were times my mother stared so intensely the whites of her eyes seemed wild and bloodshot. As the sound of her footsteps receded down the stairs, Jenny, still affrighted, would mumble a Hail Mary, sketch the Sign of the Cross — a hasty circuit of her forehead, breast, and left and right shoulder as though she wished to set a miniature windmill going — and then look relieved as though absolved from some guilty act or sin. I could never imagine what someone as gentle and devout as Jenny could do wrong; she always said her morning and night prayers, paid attention at Mass, and went to Confession once a week. I was the wicked one who sooner or later would end up breaking all the Ten Commandments.

Jenny was an orphan brought up by the Good Shepherd nuns, and had nowhere to go during the summer months, so my mother invited her to spend the holidays with us at Kilcurtan. The agreement was that, on half-pay, Jenny would keep me occupied and “help a little around the house.”

Afterwards, I discovered what that innocuous little phrase meant. It meant that Jenny had to get up at six every morning to sweep and clean and do the laundry, which included starching and ironing my father’s collars and shirts and my mother’s linen dresses. While my parents breakfasted, Jenny cleaned the bedrooms and made the beds, after which it was time to take charge of me and make sure I stayed out of everyone’s way. Everyone’s way included Philomena, the cook-housekeeper, who complained that I had a look in my eye that could turn milk sour.

But I didn’t care about my elegant mother, about my gentlemanly father, about half-mad Philomena, or even about Jenny when I discovered how overworked she was. I was filled with delight. The seaside had always seemed a dull place to me, but with Jenny everything was different. It was the most wonderful summer of my whole life — a summer that ended when Jenny disappeared. Jenny had never been to the seaside before, and together we made many exciting discoveries. We would skip down to the little town feeling the sun on our faces. We would take the shallow steps down onto the beach, where we paddled and splashed and built sandcastles that never lasted. We would stroll along the promenade, then take the winding path up to the top of Danagher’s Head, where we would gather pink and white sea flowers to make caterpillars that blew away with the wind.

Quite often, we would find that Sergeant Monaghan had followed us up to Danagher’s, and he would cough and clear his throat and try to talk to Jenny, or sometimes just stare at her. I would snigger behind my hands without quite knowing why, and Jenny would stop picking flowers and tuck her flapping skirt between her knees. Once, when my father anticipated his postprandial constitutional to the summit, Sergeant Monaghan happened to be there, staring. My father raised his Panama hat, bowed courteously to Jenny and to me, then paused, tapped the ferrule of his silver-knobbed cane on a rock, and said “Good day,” to the sergeant in a stern way. I watched as Sergeant Monaghan’s face became swollen and red. “Sure what would I be doing up here on a windy day like this,” he muttered hoarsely, “unless ’tis to warn ye keep away from the edge.”

Not long after that, Jenny said she didn’t want to make flower caterpillars anymore, so instead we found a spot on the barrier of rocks at the foot of Danagher’s Head. There, we would sit on a slab of pewter rock to gaze at the shifting jewel colours of the sea and laugh if sea spray caught us unawares. Sometimes, we would search among the rock pools for shells and unusual sea creatures, or play hide-and-seek using the gaps and hollows in the rocks as hiding places. When Jenny won, she would pounce and then cuddle me in case I’d taken fright.

As the days went by and my mother had no complaints to make, Jenny and I became bolder. We broke my mother’s rules and wandered through the little town like day-trippers, munching on chocolate bars or licking penny ice creams. We bought periwinkles wrapped in newspaper from noisy vendors and learned to extract with a pin the whorled mollusks that tasted so tart our tongues curled. We crossed the threshold of the moth-eaten cinema where musty smells clung to our clothes as we gazed at true love conquering all in flickering Technicolor.

And one Saturday afternoon, following the source of strange, chaotic music coming from a field behind Danagher’s Head, we plunged into the dizzying excitement of the carnival.

It was shortly before my bedtime on the evening of that same Saturday, in Jenny’s poky bedroom beside the pantry, that I first set eyes on Jenny’s necklace. Jenny was brushing her hair in front of the sea-rusted mirror propped on the warped dresser, and I kept bouncing up and down on Jenny’s rickety bed and breaking into hectic bursts of laughter, still excited from our afternoon at the carnival.

“Hush!” Jenny set her brush down and sketched the Sign of the Cross — the windmill dab on her forehead, breast, left and right shoulder. “Your mother might hear you.”

“And what if she does!” I shouted.

“Hush now and I’ll show you something.”

Jenny opened the top drawer of the dresser where she kept her cardboard treasure box, and I jumped to the floor and held my breath as she removed the lid and held up something pearly and white for me to see.

“Oh, Jenny,” I said. “It’s like something a princess might wear.”

Jenny smiled and with her free hand, stroked my cheek. Then she turned back to the rusted mirror, lifted her brown waves from her nape, and clipped on the pearly necklace. The bloom on Jenny’s cheeks never faded, but that day, wearing the necklace, she glowed with an enchanted radiance I had never seen before. She smiled and again came the sketchy windmill gesture, but with her left hand because with her right she was touching the necklace. I remembered that Father Clooney often warned against making the Sign of the Cross with the wrong hand, because it brought bad luck. He said it must always be the right because the left hand belonged to Beelzebub himself. But I didn’t say that to Jenny. Instead, I pulled at her skirt and asked if she could give me the necklace.

“I can’t give it to you, honeybunch,” she said. She often called me “honeybunch” which I liked; the nickname came from the Hollywood film-star magazine she had found one day on the beach. “I just can’t.”

“But why can’t you give it to me, Jenny? Why?”

“Oh, honeybunch, I can’t. I just can’t.”

Jenny seemed truly distraught that she had to refuse me and tried to console me with a stub of crimson lipstick instead. She made a game of painting my lips with it and adding some pancake to my cheeks, but the result was disappointing because my skin had turned a grubby brown from the sun and my pigtails seemed spikier than ever. I wasn’t ungrateful for the lipstick, but couldn’t help thinking that if Jenny had given me the necklace instead, my ugliness would slough from me like the skin of a lizard and I would look beautiful too.

“At least tell me why you can’t give it to me,” I kept saying. Poor Jenny, how I pestered her. I can still hear that petulant childish whine, and in the end, I wore her down, because she told me.

“It’s a present from my boyfriend,” she said softly. “I can’t give it to anyone — not even to you.”

“Sergeant Monaghan!” I said.

Jenny shuddered. “That fella!”

So Jenny had a boyfriend who wasn’t Sergeant Monaghan, and I was glad at least for that because I didn’t like him either. But I couldn’t speak. I felt betrayed, excluded, unloved by the one person I believed truly loved me.

But Jenny understood me. “Don’t be upset,” she said, kissing the top of my head. “That doesn’t mean I’d ever leave you. Sure, I’d never leave my little honeybunch. Never.”

She dabbed a spot of perfume behind her ears and dabbed a little behind mine too. Her gentleness and the scent of violets warmed me a little. “You never told me you had a boyfriend,” I said sullenly. “How long has he been your boyfriend?”

“I met him this afternoon at the carnival.”

“But I didn’t see you with anyone!”

“It was while you were on the swings,” she said apologetically. “He came up to me and asked me my name. He gave me the necklace and asked me to be his girl. He said he’d seen me in the town several times before, so it wasn’t as if we were strangers.”

Much of Jenny’s meagre salary was spent on Holy Masses for her mother, whom she had never known, but she had set aside a little pile of silver sixpences and shillings for cinema matinees, chocolate bars, and ice creams. At the carnival, Jenny had paid for several rides for me on “the swings,” a merry-go-round with seats suspended on chains that spun faster and faster and wider and wider so that it felt like flying above the earth. While I had been spinning through the air, Jenny had been below, a blur, talking with her boyfriend. And I hadn’t noticed.

“You were going to keep your boyfriend a secret from me, weren’t you?” I said.

She hesitated. “If the mistress ever found out...”

“Jenny! You don’t think I’d tell my mother on you.”

“Sure, don’t I know you wouldn’t. It’s not that at all.”

“What is it, then?”

Jenny’s smooth forehead wrinkled in a small, worried frown. “The Lord save us, I don’t know who to be more frightened of, your Ma or me boyfriend! He said I was to swear never to tell a soul about the pair of us.”

There were times Jenny lapsed into her country brogue and we usually giggled together over that. But not now.

“Jimmy’s after havin’ a little trouble with the police,” Jenny went on, “but it wasn’t his fault at all, he explained all that to me, they had it in for him. But if the mistress ever found out about him, she’d march the pair of us down to the police station and then sure wouldn’t he kill me stone dead!”

“Is he tall, dark, and handsome?”

“Is he handsome?” Jenny’s eyes sparkled. “Sure, isn’t he just like a Hollywood fillum star!”

I was eaten up with jealousy, but also thrilled that Jenny was being courted by someone who looked exactly like a film star and what was more, someone innocently in trouble with the police.

“So you’re going to meet him tonight,” I said, having understood the significance of the perfume and that she was changing into her Sunday best, her blue flared dress and white high heels.

Jenny nodded happily. “We’re going to meet on top of Danagher’s Head. He said he’d something very important to ask me, so I mustn’t be late.”

I looked up at Jenny. She was again touching the necklace.

“Can I try it on?” I asked.

“Of course you can.”

Jenny went to the trouble of removing the necklace and clasping it around my neck. Even standing on my toes, it was difficult to see the effect properly in the rusted mirror, and I gave the necklace back to her reluctantly.

“I know what I’ll do,” she said, smiling. “I’ll leave it to you in my will.”

“Does that mean that one day the necklace will be mine?”

“All yours, honeybunch. Cross my heart and hope to die,” she said, making the well-known gesture of sworn promises, as binding as any oath on the Bible.

Jenny raised her brown waves and clipped the necklace on again. Then she took my hand and led me off to bed. I was close to tears. I couldn’t have Jenny’s necklace and Jenny dying was something I couldn’t bear to think about. But that same evening, Jenny had blessed herself with her left hand and less than sixteen hours later, she was lying unconscious in the sandy hollow at the foot of Danagher’s Head.

The morning after Jenny disappeared, I was sent back to Roscrea by train. Just before dawn, I had tiptoed to Jenny’s poky room for a last time, wary of Philomena, who slept near the kitchen too and was a light sleeper.

But Jenny still hadn’t returned. Instead, I found her rickety bed stripped, the mattress rolled up, the dresser drawers emptied, Jenny’s few garments removed from their wire hangers which hung askew on the back of the door. The little room was bare of her presence but for the chocolate-box lid, a snowy corner of which I spotted protruding from under the dresser. I searched the little room again, but the rest of the box and its precious contents had vanished into thin air.

My parents left for the Continent and I remained in Roscrea. When my parents returned, my mother engaged a new governess who looked nothing like Jenny. I never stopped thinking about Jenny. I dreamed of her almost every night. Sometimes the dreams were nightmares. Jenny’s hair would be damp and straggled by the tide, her mouth silently agape, her nylon stockings tom, her toes bleeding, her white high heels gone, her necklace gone. There were times I smelled violets, as though Jenny stood behind me, but when I turned, she would not be there. I considered running away from home and taking the train to Kilcurtan to look for Jenny, but my mother would inevitably find out and send me to a reform school where they kept you forever if your wickedness knew no bounds.

Children are strange; they form strange ideas. When I think of myself as a child all those years ago, I see another person acting with an illogical childish logic. We are joined only by our sad memories of Jenny and the unsolved mystery of her disappearance.

That last evening, the evening I first saw Jenny’s necklace, we met my father in the corridor as Jenny led me off to bed. He bowed and complimented her, as he always did, on the way she starched and ironed his collars and shirts, and helped him find the shirt-collar studs he was constantly losing. He held her hand and patted it sadly, and I remember thinking it was because someone else had given her the necklace. As an afterthought, my father wished me pleasant dreams. Before Jenny came, I rarely saw my father, although when we happened to meet, he always had a kind word for me and when, ten years later, he died from pneumonia, he wished me to have his Panama hat.

“I’ll stay with you for a little while,” Jenny said as she arranged the bedcovers about me. “I’ll stay with you till you get to sleep.”

Jenny, sweet gentle Jenny, had realized I was still upset she couldn’t give me the necklace, and didn’t have the heart to rush away to meet her boyfriend until she was sure I had fallen asleep. But how cruel children can be. I can’t bear to remember how cruel I was. That evening sleep eluded me. I was wakeful and fretful and clung to Jenny’s hand as though I might die without her. When she tried to slip her hand away from mine, I gripped her fingers tighter. I heard the clock in the sitting room chime midnight, twelve slow notes. Jenny removed her blue dress to avoid crushing it, but not the necklace, and lay beside me. That was how Jenny passed the night — lying beside a fractious nine-year-old child who refused to sleep.

The following morning was warm and sunny. After ten-o’clock Mass, Jenny suggested we might take a stroll along the promenade in the direction of Danagher’s Head. She looked thoughtful and subdued. Because it was Sunday, she was wearing her Sunday best. And her new pearly necklace. She was fingering it every now and then and pausing to look anxiously over her shoulder. Perhaps she was thinking of her boyfriend and of how angry he would be because of the missed date. The “something very important” was surely a proposal of marriage. He would have gone down on bended knee, opened a small velvet box to reveal a sparkling engagement ring, and asked Jenny to do him the honour of becoming his wife.

I glanced at Jenny. Her cheeks were pale. I thought that if she sat on a rock with her legs folded under her, wearing the pearly necklace and singing a mournful song, she could be mistaken for a mermaid. She had the faraway look mermaids usually wore when they were sad or lovelorn.

When we came close to Danagher’s Head, Jenny wanted to take the path up to the summit, but I wanted to go down onto the beach instead and from there, climb onto the barrier of rocks at the foot of the cliff. A purple sea urchin we had captured a few days before had died, and I wanted to look for another among the rock pools. Jenny agreed halfheartedly, but by the time we had tramped over the sand and clambered onto the barrier, I had developed a sulk and told her I didn’t want the sea urchin anymore, that I wanted to climb to the top of Danagher’s instead.

“Oh, you mustn’t do that,” Jenny said, looking up at the summit. “It’s very steep. If you want to get to the top we must take the path.” Jenny hadn’t removed her white high heels or nylons for clambering onto the rocks, and I wondered if it was because she still hoped to meet her boyfriend.

“I don’t want to go all the way back,” I said. It wouldn’t have taken us long, but I wasn’t going to be crossed. “Besides, it’s not all that high and I’m sure lots of people have climbed up from here before.”

“They might have,” Jenny retorted. “But you’re not to. It’s very steep and you might slip and fall down onto the rocks. You could even get yourself killed.”

“But I want to!” I said.

“You’re not to go climbing up there now,” Jenny said even more crossly. It was all so unlike her. Then her brown eyes seemed to soften as she added sadly, “What would I do if anything ever happened to my little honeybunch?”

She was touching her necklace again. At the foot of Danagher’s it was more secluded, because swimming from the barrier was dangerous. Jenny hadn’t stopped looking over her shoulder, perhaps both hopeful and fearful that her boyfriend had followed her and might suddenly appear from nowhere.

There’s no doubt that Jenny was unlike herself that day. I was already more than halfway up the craggy face of the cliff when I heard her cry out from below. She called out I was to stay where I was, that she was coming for me. I continued to climb. I felt no fear, I wouldn’t fall, nothing could happen to me. I felt secure as a spider that can go anywhere it likes, my stick-thin arms and legs moving steadily. I heard Jenny’s voice getting closer and closer; she kept repeating I mustn’t move until she reached me, I mustn’t move.

“Please don’t move, please don’t move,” she kept saying. I looked down. She was a little below me, her beautiful face upturned, her lips moving all the time, coaxing, urging, soothing. I was glad she seemed to have forgotten her boyfriend, that now all her concern seemed only for me.

It’s hard to describe what happened next. Each time I remember a different version of those dreadful moments. I can still feel the pitted rock under my fingers, then the sudden hurting dazzle of the sun as I neared the summit. It seemed to me as Jenny reached my side and stretched out her hand to me, that her expression changed. But had it really? Had Jenny’s brown eyes seemed strange and unfamiliar because I was blinded by the sudden dazzle? And had the silent shadow that loomed over us been just a passing cloud? Or someone standing among the pink and white sea flowers, leaning over and staring down with ill intent as we clung to the rock face looking blindly up?

I often wonder about the silent shadow that had startled Jenny. The devil, I used to think, because the evening before she disappeared she had blessed herself with her left hand, Beelzebub’s hand. I worried too that I had put an evil spell on her because I had coveted the necklace, but as the years went by and Jenny still didn’t return, I evolved more rational theories.

Perhaps the shadow had been my father, concerned for Jenny’s safety and looking forward to an eternal search for shirt-collar studs. Or Jenny’s criminal boyfriend, angry for the lost night of love. Or Sergeant Monaghan, who hoped to keep Jenny all to himself. Or my mother, who had seized the moment to harm Jenny, afraid her circle of friends might start gossiping about her husband’s infatuation with a girl young enough to be his granddaughter. I even considered moody Philomena struck by a sudden rage, although she rarely left the house and, unlike my mother, I had never known her to walk as far as Danagher’s Head.

My father fell ill when I was eighteen and before he died he gave me his Panama hat. “It is my favourite hat,” he said, “and I should like you to have it.” As he spoke, I wondered if he was thinking of Jenny and the number of times he had raised that same hat to her.

My mother’s health deteriorated when I was in my forties and I left my job with a pictorial artists’ supply firm to look after her. My mother and I never spoke very much. Once, I asked her if she knew what had happened to Jenny, but she pretended not to remember the name and drifted off into a doze. It seemed a mercy to keep my mother supplied with gin and vodka; the clear, innocent-looking liquid went a long way towards easing whatever pain it was that had always tormented her. For what troubled her worn body she had other therapies that worked less effectively.

When she died, I sold the house in Roscrea and settled in Kilcurtan to be near the place where I had last seen Jenny. Sporadic pilgrimages when I could get someone to stay with my mother were never enough.

What is time? Time is that which has turned an unsightly child, girl, woman into an ageless crone, hard and sinewy as a whip. Winter and summer, I set myself up with my easel on the barrier of rocks at the foot of Danagher’s Head, overlooking the hollow where I had last seen Jenny.

I probably never will know who loomed over us the day Jenny disappeared. Perhaps it was only a passing cloud. Perhaps, had I kept looking upwards, the dazzle might have lessened and I would have seen if someone had really been there. In any case, Jenny, who must have kicked off her white high heels to climb after me, was beside me by then and as she reached out her hand — I am certain it was to help me down to safety, not because she was angry with me for the missed date with her boyfriend — but when I reached out my hand it was to grab for her necklace. Jenny’s outstretched hand flew to her throat as the string snapped and the pearls flew like magic dew-drops around in the air and she uttered a small cry, like a seagull lost at sea. Then she floated like a bird away from the cliff, down, down, down into the sandy hollow below.

I have never learned to paint. My pictures are just coloured copybook daubs, but the easel is my rationale to come here to this place where I last saw Jenny. I set aside palette and paintbrush, remove my father’s Panama hat, place a stone on the shredded brim so the breeze won’t carry it away. I look up at the craggy face of the cliff and start to climb. I feel as steady and fearless as I was on the day Jenny disappeared, all those years ago. I have searched for Jenny in her poky room, in the carnival field, in the cinema, until it was knocked down, in the town, for Sergeant Monaghan’s secret cellar. I have searched for Jenny among the pink and white sea flowers, on the curving beach, among the rocks where we used to play hide-and-seek, in the sandy hollow where I had seen her last. Perhaps I will find her here, close to the summit of Danagher’s Head, still wearing her pearly necklace, still clinging with one hand to the pitted rock, her other hand outstretched towards me, caught in the evermore, seconds before she fell.

© 2018 by O. A. Tynan