Haunted Ground

1

By the time Cormac crossed over the Galway border at Portumna, the day-long drizzle had turned to lashing rain. The roads and ditches had melted into a watery blur of gray and green, and the poor visibility, along with the steady pulse of the wipers and the random drumbeat of the rain on the roof of the car, had begun to wear on his nerves. The journey was nearly over, he told himself, only ten miles farther. He’d been plagued by second thoughts throughout the trip west, knowing that he’d phoned Osborne for purely selfish reasons, because it meant a chance to spend more time with Nora Gavin. It was too late now to be sorry he’d agreed to the job.

He’d felt at a loss in the weeks since Gabriel’s death—uneasy, and unable to concentrate. He remembered the old man’s hand at rest on that pad of paper. When the ambulance drivers had taken Gabriel’s body away, he’d stayed on, studying the blot of ink that obscured those final words. Of all the indelible details of that strange tableau, this was the image that haunted him. What, if anything, had been in the old man’s mind the moment his pen had refused to move? Did he suffer pain? Did he understand what was happening, or was conscious thought simply swept away by the sudden insult to his brain?

They had been together at the site of so many burials, never venturing to speak about their own mortality. Gabriel must have thought about it. A man couldn’t work so intimately with the meager remains of the dead without contemplating his own passing. But they had never spoken of it. Gabriel must have shared those confidences with his wife; he had been cremated, and there was no religious service, only a memorial gathering at their home in Dublin. The McCrossans had no children, but sitting in their front room among the old man’s neighbors, old school friends, colleagues from the university, Evelyn’s friends from the world of writing and publishing, Cormac had realized how small his own circle of acquaintances really was.

No one had gained admittance to his unguarded thoughts the way Gabriel McCrossan had. Cormac had in a sense packed his father’s bags even before anyone knew that Joseph Maguire was actually leaving Ireland for good. That place in his heart had remained empty until he had met Gabriel. With only one survey course in archaeology behind him, Cormac had signed on for the summer as one of a dozen or so students helping with the excavation of a 2,500-year-old bog road.

McCrossan had had a habit of addressing the students before setting them to work. They’d stand before him quietly, fiddling with their tools, eager to begin. He’d pace back and forth in front of them, just as he would have done in a lecture hall.

“Now it may seem to you,” he’d say, “that we’re only uncovering a few old waterlogged pieces of timber. But what we’re really after is the thinking of the people who put these objects in this place. Their beliefs, their ideals, their intentions are all present with these sodden old logs—along with information about the kinds of tools they used to fell the trees, or to bind them into a trackway, the system of labor it took to accomplish this—and these, ladies and gentlemen, are some of the only concrete clues we have as to what their whole society and way of life was like. I invite you to become the discoverers of what lies in this hallowed ground.”

Cormac remembered voicing his frustration to Gabriel at the slow pace of their work; there was always too little time, too little money and manpower to do the work as it should be done. The ground was teeming with treasure, and vital knowledge of the past was being destroyed every day.

“Aye, certainly it is. You’ll get disillusioned very quickly if you begin thinking like that,” Gabriel had said. “Patience is the first requirement in this job. It’s best to remind yourself to just keep digging.”

At Clonco Bridge, Cormac turned off the main route onto the narrow road that ran past Drumcleggan Bog and Bracklyn House. The rain was still pelting down hard. The front gateway at Bracklyn resembled a graceful set of Gothic chess pieces, with arched doorways to either side of the main gate, and ravenlike birds topping each of the four capitals. A nineteenth-century add-on, he guessed, as he turned the jeep down the long gravel drive; the gate’s original purpose was assuredly more for ostentation than for defense.

The deep wooded area around the estate’s perimeter gave way almost immediately beyond the gate to a circular drive at the front entrance of the house. Within the circle stood a formal geometric garden, separate triangles of rosebushes enclosed by a miniature box hedge. Though the place did not seem uncared for, exactly, the grass was unevenly trimmed and overrun with clover and daisies, and the strict edges of the formal garden had been noticeably softened by time. This approach had once enjoyed better days, and Cormac sensed the effort it took to keep the wildness at bay.

He parked a short distance from the house along the curve of the drive, and sat in the jeep for a moment to see whether the rain might let up. Bracklyn House itself was a well-proportioned Jacobean mansion, much larger than he had imagined upon his first glimpse of it from the road. The building’s original function as fortress was still evident, from the thickness of the stone walls and the firing holes in its four-square flanking towers. But the profusion of windows also told him that this house had probably been built sometime in the early seventeenth century, a short period of peace when Ireland’s aristocracy began forsaking their thick-walled towers in favor of houses that offered grand vistas of their surrounding lands. Their optimism came about a century too soon, however; some of them would have done better to keep their easily defensible fortresses in the face of the invading English. The country was littered with the burned-out ruins of such houses.

The rain only seemed to be coming down harder; he’d have to make a run for it. Grabbing his bag, Cormac sprinted across the gravel and up the semicircular steps. He was soaked to the skin, and glad to find the front door unlocked, as Osborne had said it would be. Pushing against the four-inch thickness of oak, he found himself in a formal front hall with a black-and-white marble floor, dark wood-paneled walls, and a huge brass chandelier, under which stood a pedestal table bearing an arrangement of long-stemmed red tulips and bright yellow budding twigs. All was still but for the echoing tock, tock, tock of a large grandfather clock that stood against the wall at the foot of the massive oak staircase. Cormac set his case down beside the door; he was dripping all over the floor, and didn’t want to venture any farther without making his presence known. He tried shouting a couple of hullos, but there was no response, so he began pulling off his sodden jacket.

“May I help you?” The female voice came from above; the accent was English and decidedly upper class. The woman had begun to descend the last turn in the stairs, and Cormac sensed her dismay at finding him in the front hall of Bracklyn House. She was extremely thin and plain of face, but impeccably groomed, her dark hair swept up at the back and her nails manicured into perfect ovals. She wore a pale brown sweater set and a finely pleated wool skirt in shades of brown and black, cut in a style that flattered her slender figure. The woman’s age was difficult to discern; her angular countenance was unlined, but her ivory skin had a translucent cast, and her hands were beginning to show the first sinuous signs of aging. Cormac imagined that if she were nearer, he might see a fine network of lines radiating from the corners of her eyes. She descended unhurriedly, conveying a sense of urgency without losing an ounce of her carefully cultivated air of decorum.

“I’m sorry, but this is a private home; we don’t offer public tours. I’m sure the local tourist office has a complete list of nearby houses that are open to the public.”

She strode briskly past him to the arched doorway and, grasping the iron ring handle with both hands, swung the door open, though it took all her strength. Cormac was unprepared for the hardness in the woman’s pale gray eyes. He had just opened his mouth to explain when Hugh Osborne’s voice sounded on the staircase behind him.

“I see you’ve met our guest,” Osborne said, loping easily down the stairs. He seemed to assume that Cormac had just entered through the open door. “My cousin, Lucy Osborne; Lucy, this is Cormac Maguire, the archaeologist I told you about. I may have neglected to mention that he’ll be staying here with us while he oversees the excavation at the priory.”

An instant transformation took place in Lucy Osborne’s eyes. She smiled and extended her hand. As he took it, Cormac was struck by the sinewy strength beneath her cool, dry skin. “Welcome to Bracklyn House,” she said. “I do hope you’ll forgive my mistake. We sometimes get the odd tourist wandering in off the road. It’s not something we like to encourage; I’m sure you understand.”

“I’m sorry I forgot to mention it, Lucy,” said Hugh. “We only just made the arrangements yesterday. I thought I’d put him in the green bedroom, if that’s all right?”

She nodded. “Yes, quite.”

“You’ll find in pretty short order that Lucy runs the household,” Osborne said. “Things would most certainly fall apart without her.”

Lucy acknowledged this small bit of flattery with a slight, almost imperceptible tightening of her smile. “I hope you have a very pleasant stay with us,” she said. “You will let me know if you need anything at all, won’t you?” And with that, she turned and disappeared through the doorway under the stairs.

“Excuse me for a moment,” Hugh Osborne said as he hurried after her. All Cormac could hear was a brief murmured exchange, too low for him to make out what they were saying. Osborne soon returned, looking slightly preoccupied.

“Sorry about that. She dreads leaving the front door unlocked, but I refuse to live in a fortress—ironic as that might seem.” He finally noticed that Cormac’s clothes were creating a standing pool of rainwater. “God, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were dripping. Come on, I’ll show you to your room.”

“There’s something I really ought to mention right away,” Cormac said. “I thought it might be a good idea to enlist some help for this project—I hope you don’t mind. There’d be no extra expense. I found a volunteer, Nora Gavin—Dr. Gavin, I should say—the colleague who was here with me out on the bog.” He watched the shadow of that strange day pass over Hugh Osborne’s face. “I’m very sorry about springing this on you, I should have mentioned it when I phoned.”

“She’s arriving here this evening?” Cormac couldn’t tell whether Osborne was displeased, or merely trying to work out the logistics.

“She said she might be able to make it by around six. If it’s any extra trouble—”

“No trouble at all. I’ll just ask Lucy to ready another guest room.”

Hugh Osborne led the way up the massive staircase hung with paintings of richly dressed men from various periods.

“Family portraits?” Cormac asked.

“Rogues’ gallery is more like it. The first blackguard, there at the bottom,” Osborne said, stopping to point out the picture of a dark-haired man in a stiff white collar, “is Hugo Osborne, the first of the family to settle in Ireland. He actually worked for William Petty—I assume you’ve heard of him—the chap who did the first complete ordnance survey maps of Ireland. They all came here as adventurers, part of Cromwell’s grand resettlement scheme in the 1650s. Hugo basically robbed the whole of this estate from a family called O’Flaherty, first getting them shifted west, then making sure the family’s only son and heir was shipped off to a life of penal servitude in the colonies. The next chap there beside Hugo is his ne’er-do-well son, Edmund.” Cormac paused in front of a handsome ginger-haired character in a richly brocaded coat and breeches, and was dumbfounded by the resemblance between Hugh Osborne’s features—particularly the heavy-lidded eyes and handsomely cleft chin—and those of his distant ancestor, who no doubt had led his own guests up this same staircase four centuries ago.

2

At twenty minutes past six o’clock, Nora Gavin pressed the doorbell at the front entrance to Bracklyn House and waited. She felt uncomfortable about meeting Cormac again after last night. The memory made her face burn; she reached up and touched the place his fingers had rested. She’d been completely shocked. And what had she said to him? Something about being a coward? He must think her very odd. Glancing up, she noticed an overhang jutting out from the story above, and counted three openings above her head, all apparently blocked with mortar and stone. She heard the heavy door open behind her, and turned to find Hugh Osborne framed in the Gothic arch.

“Dr. Gavin? We’ve been expecting you.”

Having only seen him briefly out on the bog, Nora was disconcerted by the impression Hugh Osborne made face to face. He was dressed more formally now, and was taller and more powerful than she remembered, with strong bones and a weathered complexion that made him undeniably attractive. The deep-set, hooded eyes regarded her with equanimity. But you could look directly into the eyes of a killer and see nothing at all unto-ward; she knew because she had done it. Osborne obviously had no recollection of her, which was just as well.

“I was wondering about this—” She pointed upward. “I’m not even sure what to call it.”

“A machicolation. Something the original owners would’ve installed for dropping stones or boiling water on unwanted visitors. We don’t actually use it anymore, as you can see.” Nora studied Osborne’s benign expression. Getting rid of a body was no simple task—two bodies must be much more difficult. How had he done it? And how had he gotten away with it this long?

“You’re in time for supper,” he said, “but perhaps you’d like to see where you’ll be staying first.” She followed him up the huge main staircase, noting his silent, measured footsteps on the Oriental carpeting beneath their feet. Upstairs, he led her halfway down the central corridor. He pushed open a door and stepped aside, gesturing for Nora to enter. A heavy four-poster bed dominated the room, which was darkly paneled and even more darkly furnished. The windows were draped in a heavy wine-colored brocade. The effect was impressive, if rather gloomy.

“I apologize if the room is a bit musty. It’s been a long time since we had visitors.”

“I’m sure I’ll be fine,” she said.

“Good. Supper’s in the kitchen—below the hall where you came in; just go through the door under the main staircase.”

Nora heard a knock as she lifted her small case onto the bed. Cormac stuck his head through the open door.

“Thought I heard voices, but I wasn’t sure. My room’s all the way down at the other end of the corridor. Anyway, welcome.”

“Thanks again for letting me come along. Cormac, I’m sorry about last night….”

Even from across the room, she could feel his warm eyes envelop her. “Don’t worry about it. I was out of line. See you below?”

“Wait, I have something to show you—can you come in for a second? You might want to shut the door.” She reached into her briefcase and pulled out a file as he joined her beside the bed. “Have a look at those.” Cormac sat on the bed to scan the first few photographs, the documentary shots from the conservation lab.

“Keep going.” He flipped through the prints until he came to several grainy, indistinct images, video stills from the endoscopic exam.

“That’s it,” Nora said. “The piece of metal in the girl’s mouth that showed up on the X rays. You still can’t see what it is. But we’ve got to wait for official approval from the museum before trying to remove it.”

“Any more about the cause of death?”

“Well, Drummond concurred that there’s no evidence of blunt trauma to the head. There’s also no evidence of strangulation. I told him my idea about execution, and he agrees that it’s one possibility, especially given that flap of skin missing from her chin. But he says the remains are too old and too fragile for the definitive tests that would say whether decapitation occurred pre-or post-mortem.”

“I suppose it’s as much as we can expect,” Cormac said, still studying the video image. “May I keep these?”

“Of course.” She hoped her next question wouldn’t sound too pointed. “You’ve met Hugh Osborne a couple of times now, Cormac. What’s your impression?”

“I’ve hardly seen him since I arrived. I wouldn’t say he’s overly friendly, but that’s understandable. We’re only here to do a job for him.”

“Did he say anything about what happened out at the bog?”

“No. The longest conversation we had was about his family, all those portraits on the stairs. Evidently his branch of the family came to Ireland with Cromwell.”

A person couldn’t have Irish connections and avoid hearing about Oliver Cromwell’s legacy: the dispossession and transplantation of Catholic landowners, the half million who died and the thousands more who were transported or sold into slavery in the colonies.

“He said the man in the painting at the bottom of the stairs, Hugo Osborne, got this house and lands from an Irishman named O’Flaherty.”

“I’m amazed that he’d go into all that.”

“It is more than three hundred and fifty years ago, Nora. I don’t think Osborne can be unacquainted with his family’s reputation, any more than he’s ignorant of what people are saying behind his own back now.”

3

Nora spent the entire meal studying Hugh Osborne. He’d put together a fine curry for supper, and while she watched the two men eat heartily, Nora found she wasn’t the least bit hungry. She was picking at the remains of her dinner when the outside door opened, and a boy about seventeen years of age stumbled into the kitchen. His dark hair was severely cropped, and his dirty sweater, several sizes too large, hung on his slender frame. After a brief silence Osborne said, “I’m glad you’re back.” The boy looked down at the floor and tried to brush past them, but tripped and staggered directly into Nora; his right hand struck her wineglass, which tipped over the edge of the table and smashed to pieces on the flagstone floor. She tried to catch him, but he fell heavily against her, his face pressing into her chest. He seemed to think this was terribly funny, and let out a half-strangled chuckle, filling her nostrils with his volatile whiskey breath.

“Are you all right?” she asked, taking the boy by the shoulders and setting him upright. He swayed, but remained standing.

“Jeremy,” Hugh said, “please be careful of the glass there.” The boy stood in front of Nora for a moment longer, his dark, glassy eyes staring as though he could barely see her through a haze. Despite being thin and dirty, not to mention flushed and red-eyed from drink at the moment, he was extremely beautiful, in an almost feminine way, with long eyelashes, and flawless porcelain skin.

“Don’t mind me,” the boy said thickly. “Carry on.” He turned and made a shaky retreat out the door that led upstairs.

“I’m terribly, terribly sorry,” Osborne said to her. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Please, it was nothing, an accident. But maybe we should get rid of this broken glass before anybody steps on it.” Nora stooped to gather up the larger pieces, and as Hugh Osborne went into the hall to fetch a broom, she whispered to Cormac: “Devaney never said—”

Hugh Osborne evidently overheard her. “Jeremy doesn’t belong to me. He’s Lucy’s son.” A slight upward movement of Cormac’s eyebrows indicated his surprise, and Nora wondered what the mother must be like. While Osborne finished sweeping up the glass, she began to clear away the table.

“Jeremy and his mother live here with you?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Osborne. “They came here from England eight years ago, after Jeremy’s father died. Daniel was a distant cousin; we only met at university. But I never had much in the way of family, so I rather enjoyed having a cousin.”

“What happened to him?” Nora asked. Hugh Osborne looked at her cautiously, as if he’d spoken to strangers once too often and regretted it, but he continued.

“A suicide. He apparently made some rather questionable investments, and lost everything. I gather there was a possibility of criminal prosecution as well. I suppose he couldn’t face it. He, ah—” Here Osborne paused, as if he’d momentarily lost his train of thought. “He shot himself. Jeremy was the one who found him.”

“God help him,” Cormac murmured.

“Everything they had—including Lucy’s family home—had to be sold to pay off the debt. She and Jeremy had nowhere else to go, so I offered them a place here. It was her own idea to take up the housekeeping; it’s not something I would have asked. And I must say she’s been a rock—” Here Osborne stopped, as if suddenly aware that his guests were devoting their full attention to him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t burden you with family troubles.” With deliberate care, he placed the last piece of crockery in the sink. “I’ll show you the priory plans now, shall I?”

“I’ve never been big on pseudo—thatched cottage tourism,” he continued, on the way up the stairs. “Such a blatant swindle, all of it, and not even necessary. I’m convinced that most people would be interested in a more honest approach to the history and culture of a place, if you’d give them half a chance.”

In his library, Hugh Osborne unrolled a rather unwieldy blueprint across his desk. “This first drawing is the priory and grounds as they exist now. Here’s the area we’re planning to develop. The priory itself was excavated about six years ago, and is actually maintained by Duchas—the Heritage Service. But recent gradiometer and magnetometer readings show areas of disturbed soil here. They’re well outside the newer priory enclosure, but very near where we’d planned to put the new buildings. That’s what we need to take a look at before we can put in the gas and electric lines to the site.” Cormac was studying the irregular shapes on the drawing, evidently trying to decipher what they could mean.

“This drawing,” Osborne said, pulling a second plan from beneath the first, “shows the existing priory, and the new workshop buildings in the adjacent field. We’ll have room for three potters along the west wall, with a kiln here in the northwest corner; metal, glass, and woodworkers here on the southern wall; and weaving studios and dyeworks along the east. The whole complex will generate its own power with solar panels and a wind turbine. Half of this larger building has been designated as a shop for the artists, and the other half as an open public space, where we can serve food but also hold meetings and lectures, or concerts, that sort of thing. We hope to add an interpretive element that will explain the site’s archaeology, and eventually a separate interpretive center focusing on the nearby bog habitat.”

“I understand there’s some controversy about Drumcleggan,” Cormac said. “I’ve seen all sorts of signs posted along the road. Anything we should be concerned about?”

Hugh Osborne sighed. “I hope not. Drumcleggan has just been designated as a Special Area of Conservation, to bring us in line with other countries in the European Community. Essentially, that means turf-cutting isn’t going to be allowed for much longer. Machine cutting is already banned outright. People around here have always relied on turf for fuel, and it’s almost impossible to get them to think about the long-term impact that has on the environment. The government have recently exempted people who hand-cut turf for their own domestic use for another ten years, but it hasn’t really assuaged any fears. Those signs have been posted all over the place.”

“A sort of citizens’ protest?” Cormac asked.

“I suppose. There’s been a whole lot of rumor and speculation, and claims that some boundaries have been changed to suit developers, myself included.”

“And have they?” Nora’s question was a bit blunter than she’d intended, but Osborne didn’t appear to take offense.

“No,” he said, “but tempers are a bit frayed. People around here are sensitive about outsiders telling them what they can and cannot do—and it’s understandable enough, I suppose, given their history.”

“What does Drumcleggan actually mean?” Nora asked.

“‘Ridge of the skull,’” Cormac said.

“Right,” said Osborne, observing Cormac with the eager anticipation of a man whose obsession has found its way into conversation by happy accident. “Are you interested in place-names?”

“Interested, but not very knowledgeable, I’m afraid.”

“It’s my main area of study, so I’m liable to get carried away. I’ll endeavor not to bore you too often on the subject.”

“I’d enjoy hearing more about it,” Cormac said. “I don’t suppose there’s very much historical information on the priory itself.”

“Not as much as I’d like. The existing buildings date from the twelfth century. Its most recent incarnation was the family chapel, but there was a fire in 1660, and it was never rebuilt. I have a copy of the old report on file at Duchas. You can have a look through it if you like.” He dug a thick manuscript from a drawer and passed it to Nora.

Nothing remains of the first monastery founded here by Saint Dalach, who died around 809. Some time after 1140, the O’Flaherty family founded a priory for the Augustinian Canons for whom the existing church was built in the late 12th or early 13th century, one of several Augustinian houses in the area. After a disastrous fire in 1404, the priory was restored on a much grander scale. By the mid 15th century the monastery had become corrupt, and in 1443, the Pope took the priory under his protection. The monastery was dissolved around 1540, but the Augustinian friars returned in 1632 when they subdivided the church, and remained until 1650. A fire in 1660 destroyed the newer complex. There is a fine west doorway inserted in 1471 showing Saint Michael, Saint John, Saint Catherine, and Saint Augustine. Other notable fifteenth-century features include a vaulted rood screen, east window, and portion of the cloister arcade.

“You know, if you don’t mind,” Cormac said, “I think I should fetch down my own maps. I won’t be a minute.”

“Great enthusiasm for his work,” Hugh Osborne said to Nora when they were alone.

“He has that.”

“Listen, if you’d like to turn in, do, by all means—don’t feel as if you’ve got to stay here.”

“I’m fine.”

“It’s just that we really should go over these drawings if he’s planning to begin first thing in the morning.”

“No, it’s actually very interesting…” Nora said, her voice trailing off as her gaze fell upon a silver-framed photograph of a dark-haired woman and child on the table behind Osborne’s desk. The woman’s coffee-colored skin, dark hair, and sloe eyes were reiterated in the features of the child she held facing her. One of the baby’s chubby hands reached out to touch his mother’s face. Hugh Osborne evidently registered the picture’s effect, because when Nora raised her eyes, his frankly wary look told her he knew everything she’d heard about him. “Yes,” he said. “My wife and son.”

Nora searched for the hint of a rebuttal in his eyes, and found none. They both looked away. She knew that her own countenance too often betrayed what she was feeling. What had he seen in her eyes? She suspected that in future she and Hugh Osborne would observe a polite but measured distance, like two magnets repelled by opposing poles. What exactly had she gotten herself and Cormac into here? Why had she ever considered it an acceptable idea to stay in this man’s home?

“Well, we’re very lucky,” Cormac said as he returned with the oversized map book. “There’s quite a lot of detail for this area.” He stopped short when he saw them. “Have I missed something?”

“I was actually just saying good night. I think I’m going to turn in early.” Cormac looked startled, but said nothing.

“The stairs are just to your left through the next room,” Hugh Osborne said. “I trust you can find your way.”

“I’m sure I can,” Nora said. She left the library feeling not a little disconcerted at the way the scene there had played out, and the way she’d reacted to Osborne’s statement. What should she have said? “I’m sorry”? What words could possibly be appropriate in addressing a bereft husband who was also the prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance? The paneled door to her left was dark and heavy, with an ornate iron latch that did not move until she applied all her weight to pull it down hard. The hinges were badly in need of oil. She found herself not in the front foyer, but in another, narrower hallway, paneled with dark wood and dimly lit. This couldn’t be right—it wasn’t at all like the way they’d come up from the kitchen. Nora tried a door to her right, which led into a dining room furnished with a Baroque-looking table and sideboard, ornately carved with the leering faces of fauns and nymphs. The evening light was completely gone now, and in the gloom, the faces that peered out from the carved wood seemed to take malicious delight in her discomfort. She proceeded cautiously through the room to the next closed door, but when she turned one huge handle with both hands and pushed, nothing happened. She could simply retrace her steps, but that meant crossing the roomful of faces again, and besides, she’d be damned before she’d go back into that library to ask for directions. This was ridiculous. She turned and pushed once more with all her might, and at last the door gave, and sent her stumbling forward.

The room was dark, but she could see from the moonlight streaming in from the windows that the plastered walls were painted a deep shade of scarlet, and that its woodwork, including tall shutters on the windows, had been painted many times over in a glossy white. As in the library, the ceiling was elegantly coved plasterwork, but in this room curls of peeling white paint clung precariously to its surface. The floor was made from broad planks of oak, and the huge Persian carpet that very nearly covered it was threadbare. The room was decorated in a jumble of periods and styles. There were two settees, with slender carved legs, upholstered in gold damask, facing one another in front of a huge stone fireplace. Above the mantel hung a portrait of an aristocratic-looking woman in full riding habit but sans horse. An elaborately carved wooden screen and a large hookah hinted at some family member’s military service in India. Along with spoils of empire, this room also held the requisite hunting trophies from a country estate: stuffed pheasants and foxes, even the huge mounted antlers of an ancient Irish elk. Though the estate must undoubtedly be worth some serious money, this room and everything in it spoke of declining fortunes at Bracklyn House.

Nora pushed open one set of heavy double doors at the far side of the sitting room. The stairs had to be close by now; she felt as though she’d been going around in circles. The next shadowy chamber was some kind of office, but much of it was draped in dustcovers. She’d gone several paces into the room when she turned and saw in the darkness before her a pair of large yellow eyes. An involuntary cry escaped her lips. To her left, a door hidden in the paneling opened suddenly, and through it came Hugh Osborne, who quickly crossed to switch on the light. Cormac followed close on his heels.

“Nora, what is it? Is everything all right?”

“I’m fine. I just got lost,” she said, peering at the thing that had startled her: in the light it was nothing but a large brown and yellow butterfly in a bell jar. Nora’s eyes traveled upward and around the room. Butterflies—hundreds of them, some as tiny as bees, others with wingspans of nearly ten inches—filled nearly every inch of wall space. They were iridescent blue, and yellow, and brilliant orange, with eye spots and swallowtails, each one pierced through with a pin, neatly labeled and displayed under glass. Such beauty, but the vibrant colors and lifelike poses somehow did not make up for the fact that these lovely insects were all dead.

Hugh Osborne finally said, “I’d quite forgotten the impression this room can make. My grandfather had rather an avid interest, for an amateur collector. I remember him drilling me on all the scientific names.”

“I’ve never seen so many,” Cormac said. “Barring a museum.”

“I’m sure he intended them to end up in some museum, but in later years he lost interest in collecting.”

“What could make him give it up—apart from already having one of everything?” Cormac asked. Osborne hesitated, and Nora watched him study Cormac for a moment, apparently deciding how to answer.

“He’d been away on an expedition, and my parents were on their way to meet him off the boat in Rosslare when their car went off the road. They were both killed. My grandfather hadn’t much appetite for anything after that.”

4

“It’s got to stop, Lucy, before he gets hurt, or—God help us—before he does injury to someone else.” Hugh Osborne’s voice was agitated, and Cormac guessed that he was talking about Jeremy. He’d just come from taking another look at the priory plans in the library, and was returning to his room to collect the last of the gear for the morning’s dig. He’d reached the landing when he heard voices coming from behind a half-open door at the top. He knew he ought not to be listening in on a private conversation, and yet he felt caught, not knowing whether to retreat or advance.

“I’m very grateful for your concern.” It was Lucy’s voice. “Heaven knows you’ve tried to be like a father. But most boys Jeremy’s age go through a period of rebellion. Your worry is quite out of proportion.”

“He came into the house last night so drunk he could barely stand. Please, Lucy, we have to do something.”

“What can we do? He’s not a child anymore. I’ve already spoken to him on this subject more than once.” There was a pause.

“There are very good treatment programs—”

“I won’t have him taken away and locked up. I couldn’t bear that, Hugh, I truly couldn’t.” Their voices receded suddenly, as if they’d become aware of how loudly they’d been speaking.

Cormac began to climb the stairs once more. His eye caught a movement in a large mirror just beside the open door, and he could see Jeremy Osborne’s dark features reflected in its surface. The boy was standing in a doorway opposite the mirror; he appeared to have been listening as well. His face was deathly pale, and Cormac could see dark circles almost like bruises under his eyes. When Jeremy saw that he’d been observed, he pulled the door shut.

God, the drink was a bastard. What age could that boy have been when he found his father dead? He couldn’t be more than seventeen or eighteen now, if that. Cormac remembered his own complex feelings when he was ten, and his almost complete inability to express them. He remembered his hurt and anger when his father had left them, the dreadful helplessness he felt when he looked at his mother’s face.

He was sitting on the steps of his gran’s house, listening to his mother and grandmother argue below in the kitchen. They didn’t know he was there. He’d gone upstairs to get his hurling ball, and couldn’t slip out without being seen, so he decided to wait and listen. He pulled out his pocketknife to see if he could pry up a corner of the leather on the ball to find out what was inside.

“And he told you all this in a letter?” He could hear the indignation in his grandmother’s voice, her anger boiling over as she stirred the sugar into her tea with a force that threatened to shatter the cup. “Didn’t even have the courage to tell you to your face. And what about Cormac? What about looking after his own son?”

“I’ve told you all I know, Mam,” his mother said, sounding completely exhausted. “Must we go over it all again?”

“What business is it of his what they do off in Bolivia—”

“It’s Chile, Mammy. People are disappearing.”

“I don’t care how much they need him in any godforsaken country on earth, he belongs here with his family. He’d no business getting mixed up in all that in the first place.” They went on talking, but Cormac listened more to the sound of their voices than the actual words.

They’d received his father’s letter a few days before, and he had watched first his mother’s anticipation, then her anguish, which she’d tried to keep hidden but couldn’t. After about an hour, she’d asked him to sit with her on the sofa. It was very important work that his daddy was doing, she’d said; he was trying to help a lot of people who were in desperate trouble, and he had to stay for another while, he didn’t know how long. Daddy had written that he loved them both, but it was far too dangerous for them to be with him, and that at least for now, he had to remain where he was needed. Cormac knew there was more she wasn’t telling.

The women’s voices floated up to him as he sat on the steps, and he began to realize that his father would never be coming home. He looked down at what had been a perfectly good hurling ball, now a loose flap of leather and a sphere of cork, pitted and gouged from all the places he’d stuck his penknife in it.

The memory unsettled him. He remembered how often as a boy he’d wished his father ill, but it was the kind of misfortune that a ten-year-old child could imagine: that he might trip and fall, or suffer some other small humiliation. He had never actually wished his father dead. But suppose he had? And suppose his father had then died? A suicide must be even worse, he thought, remembering the hours he’d spent trying to divine if there was something he might have said or done that could have driven his father away. No wonder Jeremy Osborne was a mess.

As Cormac slung his map book under his left arm and gripped the worn leather handles of his site bag, he knew that what he saw in Jeremy’s face could have been reflected in his ten-year-old self a quarter-century ago. All the wishing in the world had not altered reality, and yet life had not ended. He had survived, and the wounds had eventually scarred over. If there were only some way he could communicate that hope to Jeremy Osborne. But he was here to dig. That was all.

5

Nora was waiting for a call from the National Museum when Cormac left the house, so he had set off for the priory on his own. As he nosed the jeep down Bracklyn’s shaded drive, he thought about how trees had come to be a sign of privilege in Ireland, their presence associated with the walled estates of the English and Anglo-Irish aristocracy. In some cases, the big houses were long gone, and only the trees and walls remained as a legacy of the landlord class. Outside the gates the woodland soon gave way to green pastures on either side. Almost at once, Cormac spied the gray stone ruins of ecclesiastical buildings off to his right, and he pulled onto the muddy gravel lane that led to the priory. Without all the equipment he had to transport, he might easily have walked the distance in ten minutes. The nearby fields had been fenced for cattle, and a large gate blocked the end of the lane. Osborne had arranged for an excavator to come this afternoon and clear away topsoil before they could begin on the test trenches. Slinging a camera over his shoulder and grabbing a notebook from his site kit, he climbed through the wire fence to have a look at the priory itself before making his walking survey and taking some pictures of the excavation site.

Osborne had said that Duchas maintained the priory, but from the state of the place, it appeared to be fairly low on the priority list. Someone had made a rather halfhearted attempt to arrange the fallen stones, and long grass grew up between them. The sweet scent of hay hung in the cool, damp morning breeze. Cormac shut his eyes and took a deep breath, letting his lungs fill with the fragrance. As much as he loved his work and enjoyed living in the city, he missed the sensory feast of the countryside. The ground was soaking from yesterday’s heavy showers, but the wind was pushing the clouds steadily across the sky, occasionally letting the morning sun break through. As he entered the cloistered square, he disturbed a flock of hooded crows, which took off in a great noisy, wing-flapping crowd.

Pillared archways were all that remained of the covered walkways, built to protect the monks from the elements as they went from church to work to sleeping rooms. The knee-high remains of storerooms, kitchen, and monastic cells lined the cloister’s outer rim. These stones, their worn surfaces incised with patterns, some carved into the shapes of dogs’ heads, had been laid by some monastic mason 850 years ago. There was a beauty, a rightness of scale in these old buildings that stirred some aesthetic appreciation in him, and a sense of wonder about the lives of the men who had lived here. Cormac looked into each room as he passed, imagining robed monks kneeling alongside the rude rush beds; working the surrounding fields; sharing a communal meal. At the base of one of the doorways, he knelt to take a closer look at a carving of a fernlike plant he could not name, perhaps six inches in height, its curling, pinnate leaves rendered in shallow relief.

He passed through an archway, its wooden door long ago removed or consumed by fire, and stepped into the nave of a small church. Though it was roofless and full of morning light, he imagined the echoes of medieval prayers offered in the chilly hours before sunrise every day of the year, and conjured the damp, visible breath of the Augustinian brothers as they knelt together in candlelight on these stones. In the niche left by a fallen crossbeam, he glimpsed the small figure of a sile na gig, an ancient fertility symbol. This one was typical: a wild-eyed female figure with splayed legs, her hands grasping at the outsized genitalia beneath her grotesquely swollen belly. Why these figures were often found among church ruins was an anthropological conundrum, often taken as a sign that Ireland’s pagan past had never really disappeared, only receded, and that Catholicism was only a modern facade on a much more primitive and atavistic religion. After snapping a photo, Cormac recorded the location of the figure in his notebook, and continued on his survey.

An opening at the far side of the chapel framed a small rectangle of green and a larger one of blue sky. Several lichen-covered gravestones tilted into the frame as well. Off in the far corner of the enclosure was a life-sized stone figure of Christ, streaked with rust and mottled with white lichen like the surrounding stones. Its feet were submerged to the ankles in grass dotted with tiny daisies. The left arm was missing entirely, and the right was broken in several places, leaving the iron rods that had once supported stone fingers curled into a rusty fist. Despite its ruined state, Cormac felt the vital energy in the figure’s naked torso, the sidelong droop of its head, and found himself strangely moved.

He backtracked to the graveyard. In among the antique graves were fresh stones; their polished surfaces and sharply incised lettering stood out against the weathered slabs from the eighteenth century and before. No doubt Hugh Osborne’s parents were buried here somewhere. Cormac crouched by one of the old stones and tried to read the inscription. Vegetation and damp had obscured most of the writing, but he could make out the name, Miles Gorman, and the dates, 1604 to 1660. He reached out to touch the ruffled, papery-dry edges of the yellow-green lichen that bloomed on the stone.

“If you’re looking for the Osbornes, they’re all under the floor inside.” The gruff voice came from about three graves away. Cormac looked up, shading his eyes against the bright sunshine, and saw Brendan McGann silhouetted against the sky. He was in shirtsleeves, and carried a hay fork. Against the sunlight, Cormac couldn’t tell if Brendan’s eyes held mischief or malice. How long had he been there?

“Thought you’d packed off home,” Brendan continued.

“I did. But I’m back here on a job. Hugh Osborne’s asked me to—”

“That fucking squireen,” Brendan said, his face darkening. “Never had any use for this land the past twenty years. Then he sends me a letter saying he would be ‘obliged’ if I would shift my cattle from the pasture beyond within two weeks’ time.”

“Surely you knew about his plans for the site,” Cormac said. “He said your sister’s been involved—”

“He ought to be leaving this place alone. You can see for yourself how peaceful it is. What we don’t need is a lot of tourists coming around, gawping at us and clogging up the roads.”

Cormac found it hard to believe that an increase in traffic was really foremost among Brendan McGann’s concerns.

“Seems like this area could do with a bit of help—” he began, but Brendan cut him off again.

“We don’t need any help,” he said, looking at the ground, and the vehemence in his voice was suddenly alarming.

“The workshop seems to have a good bit of support,” Cormac said, “I gather—”

“I don’t give a fuck what you gather. If you were a wise man, you’d pack up right now and drive straight back to Dublin and let us settle things here on our own.” His words weren’t quite a threat, but the next thing to it.

“As soon as I’m finished here,” Cormac said, hoping he sounded calmer than he actually felt. Did Osborne have any idea of the animosity borne him so close to home?

“No good will come of this,” Brendan said, his muscles visibly tightening. “No good. You’ll see.” Then he turned and tramped stolidly away, leaving Cormac to wonder what kind of hornet’s nest he had stumbled into here. There were Osborne’s missing wife and child, perhaps the victims of foul play; young Jeremy Osborne’s self-destructive bent; and now Brendan McGann’s seething hatred of his neighbor. He thought back to the way Brendan had glared at Osborne out on the bog, and the look on Una’s face as she defended Hugh against whispered accusations about his wife’s disappearance. Maybe that was it—Brendan believed, or at least harbored a strong suspicion, that his sister was involved with Hugh Osborne. And maybe he wasn’t the only one—hadn’t Fintan said that he wished Una would wise up?

“Hello? Cormac? Where are you?” It was Nora.

“Over here.” He heard her footsteps approaching.

“Sorry that phone call took so long. I should have been here ages ago, I know.” She came around the corner of the church, following the sound of his voice. “You’ll be happy to know it paid off. Dawson’s agreed to let us remove the piece of metal that showed up in the X rays. So that means I’ll have to be back for the dental exam on Monday, but you have my full assistance until then.” She paused, waiting for his response. “Well, isn’t that good news? You do want to find out who she is, don’t you?” He stood silent and frowning.

“Hello? Cormac?” Nora said, waving a hand in front of his face. “You haven’t heard a word I said.”

“No, I have, I have. But I’ve just been carrying on a very odd conversation myself.”

“With whom? There’s nobody here.”

“Brendan McGann. He’s just gone.” Cormac related the gist of his exchange with Brendan, and tried to describe what he’d seen in the man’s eyes when they spoke of Osborne.

“So Brendan believes there’s something between Hugh and his sister? What do you think?”

“I don’t know. Hugh Osborne’s a married man.”

“Whose wife has disappeared,” Nora said.

“This is none of our business anyway. Maybe we should give up speculating and try sticking to hard science while we’re here.”

They unloaded the surveying equipment from the jeep and, working from the maps Hugh Osborne had provided, began to measure the site and set up markers where the excavator should begin digging. The sound of car tires on gravel broke the silence, and soon Garrett Devaney approached them.

“How are you getting on?”

“Have you developed an interest in archaeology since we last met, Detective?” Cormac asked.

“Not exactly. I ran into Fintan McGann, and he told me what you were up to out here. I’ve been going through the old Osborne case file. And I thought with you working out here for a while, and staying up at the house, you might happen to pick up something useful.”

“Do you really think anybody’s going to talk to us? We’re strangers here.”

“You never know,” Devaney said. “But what I had in mind was more just keeping your eyes and ears open, letting me know if you notice anything that seems out of the ordinary.” He handed each of them a card. “The first number is the station in Loughrea, and the second is my home number; you can call at any time.”

“And what should we consider out of the ordinary?” Nora asked.

“You’ll know. Why? Was there something you’d like to tell me about?”

Cormac cut in. “No, Detective, I don’t think so, just wondering what you consider strange. Perfectly innocent behavior might appear unusual if you don’t know the background.”

“Indeed. I’m not asking you to betray any confidences, only to keep your eyes and ears open. A woman and a child have gone missing. They may very well be dead, and not one suspect has ever been charged. At this point, I’m willing to follow any sort of lead.”

When Devaney had returned to his car, Nora turned to Cormac. “You’re very cautious.”

“There’s a simple explanation for everything we’ve seen. Lots of farmers get a bit narky about traffic on the roads where they drive cattle. And lots of young lads get maggoty drunk once or twice. Not exactly front-page news.”

“You might feel different if it were someone you knew who was missing. Or dead.”

6

Just past midday, Una McGann was working at the loom when she heard a crash from the other side of the house. Brendan was off with Fintan tending the cattle; they weren’t due back until teatime, and Aoife was upstairs taking a nap after a long morning of make-believe. She stopped her shuttle to listen, trying to pinpoint where the noise was coming from. Sliding off the long bench seat, she moved quietly to the front hall, and followed the sounds to the closed door of Brendan’s room, directly behind the sitting room.

Una threw open the door to find a slightly dazed-looking hooded crow peering up at her from the middle of the floor, black wings shiny against the soft gray of its back.

“Well, Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph,” she said, her surprise melting into relief that it wasn’t a more dangerous intruder. “Just let me get the broom, you dirty bugger, and you’ll be outside before you know it.” She closed the door again, and retreated to the kitchen, where she fetched the broom, then opened the front door of the house. As she stepped into Brendan’s room, she and the bird eyed one another, each expecting the other to make the first move. The bird turned slowly on its large claws, keeping its head cocked and one shining black eye pointed in her direction.

“Out with you now,” she said, making a sudden lunge with the broom. “Out that door you go, now.”

But the bird opened its wings and tried to take off inside the small room, fluttering awkwardly over the bed and down behind it. Una gripped the bedpost and gave a mighty pull, then swept the astonished bird along the floor and straight out the bedroom door. Out in the hallway, it began once more to flap, but found the narrow walls too constricting, and skated on its claws toward the open front door, broom straw at its back. Outside, the bird remained grounded for only a brief instant before opening its dark wings and lifting up into the air and away.

Una’s heart was pounding. She could not imagine how the bloody thing had gotten into the house. Brendan was usually so careful about stopping all the chimneys with netting. She returned to his room to put things right. The books on his table were all awry. She knew he wouldn’t be at all pleased to know that she’d been in here messing about with his things, crow or no crow, so she tried to replace everything exactly as it had been. She straightened the coverlet on the narrow bed and was about to shove it back against the wall when she noticed a bit of paper sticking out from a hole in the plaster. There was a small hollowed-out place behind the head of the bed, with a folded sheet of paper hanging precariously from it. She smiled at the idea of Brendan keeping a secret place like a schoolboy, and was just pushing the paper back into place when she saw a bit of handwriting that spelled out her own name.

She hesitated, not wanting to intrude upon her brother’s privacy, but feeling that she was entitled to read something that bore her name. Slowly she drew the paper from its crevice.

“Eire—Ireland,” the heading ran, “BIRTH CERTIFICATE issued in pursuance of Births and Deaths Registration Acts 1863 to 1972.” Everything was written twice, in Irish and in English. “Ainm (ma tugadh)/Name (if any),” and in the space below, “Aoife.” Her own name was written in the space labeled “Name and Surname and Maiden Surname of Mother.” The space under “Name and Surname and Dwelling Place of Father” was blank.

Her first reaction was to tear up this reminder of the day, five years ago, when her daughter was born, a day that should have been a joyous celebration but instead had been twisted into something shameful by the vaguely disapproving looks of the nurses at the hospital in Dublin. She had never told anyone who Aoife’s father was, maintaining that it could have been any one of a half-dozen lads she’d known from university. Her aim had been to shock the prying busybodies, and judging from their looks she had succeeded, but it was an empty victory.

Why would Brendan have a copy of this certificate? And why should he keep it hidden? As she reached in to extract whatever else might be in the hiding place, she heard a small metallic clatter at her knee, and looked down to find a gold hair clasp. She turned it over to find two filigree elephants with their trunks entwined. Holding the clasp in her hand, feeling the weight of it, the roughness of the filigree against her fingers, Una remembered where she’d seen it before.

It was nearly three years ago now. She and Aoife had stopped in at Pilkington’s to pick up a bottle of ammonia, which she used as a mordant for her dyes. She’d seen Mina Osborne standing at the counter holding her son, who was a bit younger than Aoife. The child wore a brand-new pair of red wellingtons. Mina Osborne had shifted the child from one hip to the other. The tired little boy had put a thumb in his mouth and reached up the other hand to twine his fingers in his mother’s hair, and in this small gesture of self-comfort accidentally touched the clip that held her long black hair in place. The clasp had sprung open, frightening the child, who immediately began to wail, and as the mother comforted him, the hair clasp slid off and fell to the ground at Una’s feet. Both women had stooped to pick it up, and Una noticed the intricate metalwork, and its distinctive design of two elephants. What a beautiful clasp, she had said, handing it back. Mina Osborne had looked at her so strangely that Una hoped it was not the sight of herself and Aoife that had caused the pain and sadness in those lovely dark eyes. Mina had taken the clasp with barely audible thanks and left the shop. It was the very afternoon she had disappeared.

Una looked down at the clasp in her hand. Two or three long black hairs were caught in its hinge. She reached back into Brendan’s hiding place, this time pulling out a pile of carefully folded newspaper cuttings. “Wife, Son of Local Man Missing,” said one. “Family Appeals for Aid in Tracing Mother and Child,” read another. “Gardai Resume Bogland Search Today,” and finally, “Gardai Baffled by Disappearance.”

Why was Brendan hoarding all these things? What explanation could he possibly have? She hurriedly shoved all her discoveries back into the hole, not knowing or caring whether they were in exactly the same place. She nudged the bed back against the wall. Brendan had always been hot-headed; he’d go off by himself when he needed to think, walking the bog or the mountain, or sitting by the lake until he had worked things out or calmed down a bit. He often snapped at her and Fintan. But she’d always believed he was anything but a hard man inside. He could be very gentle with Aoife. She’d lived with her brother in this house for more than twenty years, but did she know him well? Willing her fears not to be true, Una set the pictures on the walls to rights and closed the door to Brendan’s room once more. She decided to say nothing about the crow.

7

Dunbeg reminded Cormac of his own home place in many ways: the humpback bridge, the small lace-curtained windows on the white, pink, and green pebble-dash houses that lined the only main street. The original Irish name for this place was dun beag, “small fort.” It was possible that there had been no fort here for a thousand years, but the name lived on. A couple of sagging shop fronts stood abandoned, with weeds sprouting in their rain gutters, and a thin layer of soot seemed to cover everything. Even the lowering gray sky contributed to the town’s pervading air of pessimism. There had obviously been a recent push to tidy up and present a good face, as evidenced by a couple of freshly painted pub fronts with hanging pots of flowers. But the roar of the Celtic Tiger had yet to be heard here, and Dunbeg was not near any of the main roads so frequented by cars full of tourists. Cormac guessed any holiday-makers here tended to be solitary anglers looking for a quiet spot to fish.

As he pulled to a stop at the curb, a muscular, short-haired terrier and a shaggy black and white sheepdog ambled past, taking turns for a sniff and a piddle at each doorway, a couple of old comrades out on a spree. He climbed out of the jeep and ventured toward a nearby window that displayed a miscellany typical of a small-town hardware shop: a pitchfork and spade, wallpaper brushes and paint scrapers, pots and pans, clocks, locks, trowels, dog leashes, flashlights, and fishing poles. A plainly painted antique sign above the window said, “J. Pilkington.” As he drew nearer, a white placard propped in the window caught his eye; below the quatrefoil emblem of the Garda Siochana, the national police force, was a black-and-white image of a woman and child. The notice was dated almost a year ago. Cormac stooped to read the smaller type. “In the approach to the second anniversary of the disappearance of Mina and Christopher Osborne, the Gardai are renewing their appeal for information that would or might help in the ongoing investigation.” The paragraphs that followed gave physical descriptions and details of what the two were last seen wearing. As he read, Cormac became aware of a pair of eyes looking intently at him from the other side of the glass. When he glanced up, the woman inside pretended to be dusting the shelves below the window.

He entered the shop, and as he went about picking up the things he’d need for the dig, had the distinct sensation that he was still being watched, though every time he raised his eyes, there was no one in sight. When he’d gathered all he needed, he proceeded to the counter.

“Can I help you find anything else, sir, or is that the lot?” piped a bright-eyed pixie of a woman. Hers was the face that had been staring at him through the front window. She was thin and dark, and wore a loud polka-dotted black smock. The woman’s wispy haircut further emphasized her elfin character.

“I’ll also need a roll of baling plastic and a half-dozen planks of wood, if you have them, about eight feet long.”

“Ah, we do,” the woman said. “I’ll get the young lad to fetch them out for you.” She stuck her head through the doorway to the back room, and communicated his order to a red-haired boy of about fourteen who was sweeping the floor inside.

“You must be the archaeologist fella who was here before,” said the elf-woman, leaning forward on the till. Cormac smiled faintly.

“I am.”

“Dolly Pilkington’s my name. You’re very welcome to Dunbeg.”

“Cormac Maguire. I have a letter here somewhere from Hugh Osborne, giving me leave to charge these things to his account,” he said, patting his various pockets to locate the paper.

“Now, don’t trouble yourself, there’s no need for that at all.” She began totting up his purchases with pencil and paper. “I don’t suppose there’s any news on your bog person then?” she asked. “Oh Lord, you should have heard the rumors flying here a few days ago. Horrible they were, too. Desperate stories about murderers and banshees. There was grown men and women didn’t sleep in their beds that night, I’m tellin’ you.”

“I heard it was somebody’s chopped-off head,” said the freckly red-haired boy, who’d returned with the plastic sheeting and boards.

“This conversation is none of your concern,” said Mrs. Pilkington. “Set those things outside the door, and then back on the broom with you, before I give you a box.” The boy’s lower lip jutted defiantly, but he did as he was told.

Cormac was unsure how to respond, knowing that the next person to make a purchase at Pilkington’s would no doubt emerge with as much knowledge of the cailin rua as he was willing to divulge. But better they should have the basic facts than to let rumors breed. “We really don’t have much information at all at this point,” he said, “apart from the fact that it’s a young woman with red hair.” He searched for the least sensational combination of words. “And we didn’t find her body.”

Mrs. Pilkington made a hurried sign of the cross. “Be the holy mother o’ God. Well, of course the first thing we all thought was that it was the pair of them,” she said, pointing toward the placard in the window. “And wasn’t it strange that Mr. Osborne was right here in the shop, standing where you are now, when my Oliver came in with the news about a body bein’ found in the bog—well, I suppose you’re after saying it wasn’t a body at all, but we didn’t know that at the time, now, did we? Anyway, poor Mr. Osborne went pale, so he did, the very same as the color of chalk, and took hold of Oliver by the shoulders, asking where had he heard it, and where did they say it was, and was he certain he’d heard it right, till I thought he’d shake the life out of the poor lad. And as soon as Oliver answered him, he bolted straight out that door, never even waited for his packages or his change. I had to send Oliver round with the parcels and the money this morning, because he never came back for them, not that day, nor the next, isn’t that so, Oliver?”

“Yeah,” the boy said glumly, without looking up. Cormac guessed that he’d been called upon to corroborate his mother’s story more than once before in this manner.

“Why was it strange that Osborne was here?” Cormac asked.

“Because this is the last place we saw his missus and the little lad before they disappeared,” said Mrs. Pilkington. “Dreadful, isn’t it? They used always to be coming in here, you know, a very nice quiet lady she was—a proper Catholic, too, though you mightn’t think it to look at her, she was as dark as a black African, that one. And little Christopher. He’d always stop and say hello to me when he came into the village with his daddy. Such lovely manners, he had, for such a small little lad. Do you have any children yourself, Mr. Maguire?”

“I’m not married.”

“Well, sure, the want of a wedding doesn’t stop them,” she said. “There’s plenty around here proof enough of that. Ah, but you’re better off as you are, really, for all the heartache you’d suffer with them.” Cormac glanced over at Oliver Pilkington’s bowed head, and wondered what heartache he’d been responsible for thus far.

“What do people make of it—the disappearance?” Cormac asked.

“Depends on them you speak to. Now, I don’t hold with gossiping. I’ll tell you straight out. It’s a sin. There’s some round here and they’ve nothing better to do than sit and natter about other people’s misfortunes. For instance,” she said, suddenly lowering her voice, “there’s a few would be delighted to tell you how Mr. Osborne’s always had a bit of a name for himself as jack-the-lad; they say the wife got fed up with his carry-on, and took the child and ran off. Some look at the money he’s supposed to get from the insurance and say she’s murdered in the bog and he’s the one that done it. Ah God, it’s shocking altogether, what people will say.” She gestured dramatically, as if she could bear to talk about it no longer.

“So what do you think yourself?”

Dolly Pilkington’s eyes narrowed, and she regarded Cormac as if trying to decide whether he could be trusted. Evidently he passed muster, for she gestured for him to come closer so that she could speak more quietly. “I can only tell you the same thing I told the police. Missus Osborne was upset over something that day she went missing. You could see she’d been crying her eyes out, poor thing. I don’t believe she and the child are still walking this earth,” she whispered. “God forgive me for saying such a thing. It’s just a feeling. But I can’t credit the husband having any hand in it. No way.”

“Why not?”

“Because he was standing right before me where you are now when he got the news about the bog. The very spot, and he was absolutely devastated. Nobody could just put on something like that.” Cormac pitied anyone who might try to budge Dolly Pilkington’s opinion on the matter. “Now ask me about some others, and I might be able to tell you a few things,” she continued. “That cousin of his, she’s a quare customer if ever there was one, and the young lad—” She clucked and gasped and crossed herself again. “So wild! I get down on me two knees every day and thank God my Oliver’s not that way inclined.” Sensing another imminent tirade, Cormac tried desperately to steer her off.

“Ah—I wonder, Mrs. Pilkington, you seem very knowledgeable. I’m trying to find out whatever I can about the girl in the bog, and I wonder if you could help me locate any local historical records.”

“Well, there’s the Heritage Center over in Woodford.”

“And what sorts of documents might they have?”

“Ah, sure, I wouldn’t have a clue. I just know they have loads of Americans going up there searching for their ‘roots.’”

“What about anybody who has a particular interest in the local history or folklore?” He waited while Dolly Pilkington measured his words, and endeavoring not to boast, she said, “Well, there’s nothing happened here in the last fifty years I wouldn’t know about, meself, you know.”

“I’m afraid we might have to go back a bit further than that. The bank of turf where the girl was found hasn’t been cut in the last hundred years or so, maybe even longer.”

“Is that so? Well, in that case, I’d go and speak to Ned Raftery if I was you.”

“The schoolteacher?”

“The very same—or used to be, I should say, before he lost his eyesight, God bless him. You’d think being stone blind was not a bother on him at all. Why, he was in here the other day, buying a garden shears, if you don’t mind, and what do you think he’s going to get up to with them things?”

8

While Cormac was in town, Nora showered off the muck and sweat of the day’s work. They’d only scratched the surface at the excavation site, but her muscles ached from wielding a shovel all afternoon. As the water coursed down her limbs, she remembered the policeman’s words: At this point, I’m willing to follow any sort of lead.

She dressed and decided to go in search of Cormac; maybe by now he’d returned from the village. The hallway was a twisting maze of right angles, its dark wood wainscoting featuring the same carved motif she had seen in the downstairs rooms, but the wood was cracked in places and looked in need of repair. Just outside her room, however, she noticed an open door leading into a side stairwell. The space was darker, narrower, and much less grand than the carved masterpiece of open stairwork to the ground floor. There was no illumination here, apart from the wan daylight that struggled through a narrow and dusty leaded-glass window on the landing, and not a whisper from above or below. Casting a quick glance back down the hallway, Nora ventured upward.

The few small rooms directly at the top of the stairs seemed to be used for storage. The largest door opened into a long gallery-like space. Unlike the rest of the house, this room was sparsely furnished, and filled with light. About a dozen blank stretched canvases were stacked against the wall, and a large easel draped with a scrap of linen canvas stood in the center of the bare wood floor. A few finished but unframed paintings leaned against the bits of furniture around the room. Nora stepped closer to the nearest canvas. Its central subject was a pair of detached, slightly abstracted white wings. The painting’s surface had the texture of a decaying fresco, and its background was filled with shadowy images of exotic plants and animals behind a veil of golden light. She could make out a few scarlet petals of a flower, the sinuous curve of a snake, and the irregular spots on a leopard’s shadowy flank—like a hazy impression of some unreachable Eden. Each canvas was more obscure than the last, until the elements had become completely abstracted, like a dream retreating into the subconscious at the moment of waking. On the easel, she found an unfinished canvas in which she could see the painter’s technique of layering and scraping that gave these works their unique texture and depth. The table beside her was filled with tubes of paint and jars full of brushes. Nothing out of the ordinary for an artist’s studio, but how curious that most of the items were brand-new, and unused. Nora ran her fingers over the thick bristles of one brush. There were no curtains on the windows, and she finally noticed that this room offered a breathtaking view of the lake, and a small island about a hundred yards from shore.

She paused for a moment. Had she heard something? It came again, the barely audible but unmistakable pitch of a child’s voice. The sound seemed to be coming from the stairwell. Nora abandoned the silent paintings and retraced her steps to the floor below.

She approached the door just opposite her own and tried the handle. Locked. She continued down the hall, until she heard a child’s laughter, closer this time. “No, you” came a small voice, followed by a low adult murmur. “No, Mummy, you.” The voice came from a room just past the main staircase, whose door was slightly ajar. Nora knew she shouldn’t, but felt compelled. She knocked at the door. No reply. She pushed it slowly open. This room was full of dark, ornately carved furniture, much like her own. There was no one here, but a television in a large corner cabinet was on, and the video image showed the same woman and child Nora had seen in the photograph downstairs. The little boy was older here, a toddler now, sitting on his mother’s lap. Her back was to the camera. The mother leaned forward, pretending to tickle the little boy; he shrieked with helpless delight. Who had left this tape running? It couldn’t have been Hugh Osborne; he’d been away all day teaching at the university in Galway. That left Jeremy, or Lucy Osborne, whom Nora had yet to meet. She switched off the television and video player, and suddenly realized that she was probably in Hugh Osborne’s bedroom. She was paralyzed for a moment by feelings of both guilt and curiosity, and had to fight a sudden urge to fling open the wardrobe doors and dig through the chest of drawers. How absurd to think that she might discover something that the police had missed. And yet she couldn’t leave, not yet. She walked around the huge four-poster bed, which Hugh Osborne must once have shared with his wife.

What was it that made a person think he could just discard another human being, like something he’d got the best use of and no longer needed? The one thing that she could not begin to fathom was the frightening absence of feeling such an act must require—not even a lack of love or tenderness, but simple fellow feeling. Nora closed her eyes; when she opened them, she saw another door straight ahead of her. Crossing the threshold, she saw that it was a child’s room, a nursery. An old rocking horse stood in one corner, sporting a painted saddle on its well-worn hide, and a real horsehair tail. A small table and chairs, a toy box, a brightly painted wardrobe, and a chest of drawers completed the furnishings. The air in the room was cool and musty, as in the studio upstairs, as if it had been closed up for a long time. She crossed to the nearest window and pulled it open, drinking in the freshness of the scented spring air. Only then did she turn and notice the figure in the bed. Jeremy Osborne was much too large for the child’s cot, but lay curled up on his side. The coverlet was halfheartedly drawn around him, as if he’d grown cold but couldn’t manage to pull it up properly. Abruptly awakened, Jeremy sat up looking slightly disoriented, but also as if he might bolt for the door. He wore the same clothes he’d had on the night before.

“Hello again,” she said, and from the deep flush rising in the boy’s cheeks she surmised that he remembered their first meeting all too well, despite his considerable state of inebriation at the time.

“Sorry, I heard the television and didn’t realize anyone was in here.” Jeremy said nothing, and looked as if he wished he could disappear. He made a feeble attempt to smooth the coverlet beside him. “I’m afraid we got off on the wrong foot last night. What if we forget about it, and start again?” Still no response. “It was you looking at that video, wasn’t it?” Jeremy Osborne looked up for the first time, and Nora thought she saw the faint glimmer of hope in his eyes, only to see it abruptly extinguished.

“You must be Miss Gavin,” said a woman’s voice from the doorway. Nora turned to the elegant, smoothly coiffed woman standing at her elbow. “I’m sorry I haven’t had the opportunity to meet you before; I’m Lucy Osborne.”

“Please call me Nora.”

“What part of America are you from?” Lucy asked. Her cool fingers pressed lightly into Nora’s warm palm.

“Minnesota,” said Nora, aware that this probably meant nothing to Lucy Osborne. “The Midwest. I was actually born in Clare, but my parents emigrated when I was very young.”

“And what made you decide to return to Ireland?” Lucy asked pleasantly, crossing to close and latch the window Nora had left open.

“A temporary teaching job at Trinity College. But I’ve spent summers here since I was a child. It’s always seemed like home to me.”

“I’m sure it has,” Lucy said, with the slightest glance around the room that suggested Nora shouldn’t be feeling quite so much at home here. She changed the subject. “Hugh phoned a short while ago to say that he mightn’t make it home in time for your evening meal, so I’ve taken the liberty of preparing a cold supper for you.”

“That’s very kind. Cormac should be back very shortly, if you wouldn’t mind waiting.”

The polite smile that crossed Lucy Osborne’s face suggested that Nora had a lot to learn about the inhabitants of Bracklyn House. “Jeremy and I usually take our supper in my sitting room.” Lucy crossed to the bed, where her son sat staring silently at the carpet.

“Are you feeling all right, darling? You look a bit pale.” She pressed the back of a hand to his forehead. He still said nothing, so she straightened his collar, which had gotten tucked in on itself. The boy’s reaction to this motherly gesture was nothing more than a slight shrug of one shoulder, but it did not escape Nora’s attention. From below came the sound of a car on the gravel driveway.

“That must be Cormac now,” Nora said.

“If you’d like to go down to the kitchen,” Lucy said. Nora gathered that it was not really a suggestion.

“It was very kind of you to fix a meal—”

“Nonsense, you’re our guests,” Lucy said, finally taking her eyes from her son’s face. “Run along, now, my dear.”

As Nora turned to pull the door closed behind her, she caught a glimpse of mother and son sitting together on the edge of the small bed. Jeremy’s hands still rested, inert, in his lap. Lucy put one hand up to stroke the hair at the nape of his neck once more, and again, he seemed to tense slightly at her touch. Lucy inclined her head until it was touching Jeremy’s, and whispered something in his ear. He made no reply, but nodded twice. Lucy said something more, and although his dark head remained downcast, Nora could have sworn that on the boy’s lips played the barest suggestion of a reluctant smile.

9

“I don’t know about you,” Nora said to Cormac as they were finishing their meal in the kitchen, “but I find this place depressing as hell. Would you like to go for a walk or something? We’ve a good hour of daylight left.”

“I was going to try to write up some notes from the dig—” he began, but was stopped by Nora’s incredulous look.

“We’ve put in nearly nine hours today already, and we haven’t even had a good look around the place.” She stood up. “Come on. Aren’t you the least bit curious? Have you been down to the lake?” she asked.

“Not yet. Lead on.”

They left by the kitchen door, and walked slowly to take in the magnificent scene. The clouds had broken, and the sun was just beginning to descend, its waning golden light playing on the small, random waves that clapped together on the surface of the lake. A long expanse of green lawn stretched before them, and the forested area that surrounded the lake had been judiciously cleared to afford an almost surreally beautiful vista, a painter’s landscape come to life. A hundred yards from shore on a small island stood a tumbling ruin of gray stone. The lawn sloped gently downhill toward the water, where a low shelf of earth blocked the view of the shallow, stony beachfront from the house.

“Look, there’s a boat!” Nora said, pointing a short distance down the shore, and Cormac had a sudden vision of what she must have been like as a child, with a curiosity and sense of adventure that remained undiminished all these years later. Before he knew it, she was struggling to overturn the bright blue rowboat, so he leapt down the small ledge to give her a hand. The craft was small, but seemed seaworthy enough.

“Hop in,” he said to Nora, “I’ll shove off.” Once aboard, he set the yellow oars in their locks, then turned the rowboat toward the island, and began to pull against the water with long, steady strokes.

“You’re a pretty handy oarsman.”

“We had a boat like this when I was a kid. And I still row a bit, when I have the time. It’s a great place to be alone with your thoughts, out on the water.”

Within a moment or two he managed to pull the little boat alongside the island. What a place to live, exposed out here on a treeless, rocky island, at the mercy of wind and water. Some of the earliest settlements in Ireland had been built on islands in the middle of great marshy lakes, timber-fenced earthwork fortresses surrounded by water to defend against raiders. Later had come stone forts like this one, then the Norman-style tower houses, and eventually fortified mansions like Bracklyn House. All built to keep invaders out. All failing in their purpose, until they were piled, one almost on top of the other. Where in that continuum did the cailin rua fall? Would she ever have seen what Cormac was seeing now? What name might she have had for this island, this body of water?

The only sounds were the hollow lapping of the waves against the sturdy side of the wooden boat, and the steady creaking of the oars. They came around the far side of the island, and Cormac stopped rowing. From this distance, Bracklyn House was more impressive, more the stately fortress and less the crumbling manor house than it seemed up close. It cast a sharp, looming shadow over the brilliant emerald lawn, and the rough surface of its stone walls looked almost gilded against the faintly purpled clouds of the gathering dusk. One day, it too would be reduced to a ruin like the pile of rubble on the island. It was impossible not to think of all the human lives that had been bound up in the defense, the capture, the possession of this particular parcel of land in the long march of history. And of the lives Bracklyn House contained now, including his and Nora’s, which had eventually been touched by that conflict.

He watched her, only an arm’s length away in the stern of the boat. She seemed oblivious to his scrutiny, and stared down into the clear water. He was intrigued by the way Nora’s dark hair fell softly against her face. What was her story? He studied the hollow at the base of her throat, the way her right hand gripped the boat’s rim, the soft curve of her hip on the bench seat, remembering the abandon in the way she’d sung those words:my generous lover, you’re welcome to me. What he felt right now, looking at Nora, was something even stronger than physical desire—though he felt that intensely, too, he had to admit. But desire was swallowed up in a larger yearning to gain entrance, to wander the rooms and passageways inside her head, her heart, if she would allow him. Of course, that meant throwing open the doors, allowing her into his own hidden places as well. And for the first time in his life, that prospect actually seemed possible.

“Nora—”

“Do you think they’re down there somewhere?” she asked suddenly.

Cormac felt his momentary chance dissolve. “Who do you mean?”

“Mina Osborne and her son.”

“Devaney said the divers never found anything.”

“It’s an awfully big lake.” She turned toward him. “By the way, I met Jeremy’s mother while you were in town. I heard a noise down the hall from my room. It turned out to be a video of Mina Osborne and the little boy.”

Cormac remembered the notice he’d seen in the shop window. “Christopher.”

“Was that his name? Christopher. There was nobody watching the video, but I found Jeremy sleeping in the next room—what looked like a nursery. It was very weird. Anyway, that’s when his mother made her entrance. I don’t think we hit it off.”

Cormac recalled his own first encounter with Lucy Osborne. “If it’s any comfort, I didn’t make a very good first impression either.”

They floated for another while, until the boat gradually drew near the shore, where O’Flaherty’s Tower stood in silhouette against the darkening sky. There was no sign of the mob of crows Cormac had first seen around the tower’s top.

“I’ve been wondering about that place,” Nora said, shielding her eyes from the sun’s golden glare. “Know anything about it?”

“Just that it’s called O’Flaherty’s Tower. They were the landowners here at one time. Una McGann told me it belongs to the estate. And she said it’s supposed to be haunted. I don’t know any more about it than that.”

“Haunted? And you asked no more about it?”

“Oh, I forgot to mention,” Cormac said, suddenly remembering his conversation with Dolly Pilkington. “I found somebody who might tell us something about the local history. Ned Raftery, a retired schoolteacher. We’ll have to phone up and see if he’s willing.”

They had reached the shore again. Cormac turned the oars to stow them, then jumped out to pull the boat up the pebbly beachfront. “I was hoping we could put in another full day on the dig tomorrow, if you’re up to it. But I thought I might take care of some other things on Sunday, as long as you’re heading back for the dental exam on the cailin rua.”

“The what?” Nora asked, and Cormac realized he’d never used that name before, at least not aloud. “The red girl,” she said. Perhaps he shouldn’t be surprised that she had a bit of Irish.

“I suppose we ought to call her something more official, like ‘the Drumcleggan girl.’”

“No, I like cailin rua. It’s like something from a song,” Nora said, taking the hand he offered her. “I’m happy to work a full day tomorrow. And I don’t actually have to be back in Dublin until Monday afternoon, so whatever you need done on Sunday, I’m happy to pitch in.”

Something in her frank blue eyes disconcerted him, and he had a sudden vision of doors being thrown open. Maybe he wasn’t as ready for all this as he’d thought. “I appreciate the offer,” he said, letting go of her hand. “But I’m afraid Sunday’s personal.”

As they climbed the small embankment, Cormac thought he glimpsed a pale figure in one of the high windows at Bracklyn House, but when he focused on the place again, whatever had caught his eye was gone.

10

At half past nine on Saturday evening, Devaney sat at his kitchen table, disgusted that he had turned up nothing in the Osborne file. The truth was he’d barely had a chance to look at it. But this case was always on his mind. No one remembered passing Mina and Christopher on the road from town, so it was possible that they had never returned home. Or that they’d taken a different route, a shortcut away from the road. Hard to do with a pushchair, though, and everyone had seen her with it in the village.

He took a swallow of tea. Christ, he’d give anything for a cigarette right now, to help him concentrate, focus his mind on what was missing. He was going in circles.

Who stood to gain from Mina Osborne’s death? Her family in India had money, but the father had supposedly disowned her when she married. That sizable insurance policy might look dodgy, but without a body, Osborne would have to wait seven years to get any money. Besides, everybody said the man was devoted to the wife—but that’s what people always said, wasn’t it? That’s what they’d said about Barney Harrington down in Cork, who’d bludgeoned the wife with a frying pan when she criticized his cooking. The gossipmongers were having a field day now speculating about Hugh Osborne and Una McGann. Perhaps he should find out whether there was any truth to the rumors, and if so, how long the affair might have been going on. If he was going to look into the jealousy angle, why not Lucy Osborne? Say she’s living at Bracklyn House for several years, getting on with Osborne like a house on fire, when he suddenly up and marries someone else. Mina’s arrival must have been a blow, if Lucy had ever had any designs on the man. Nothing stayed secret for long in a town like Dunbeg. If there was anything funny going on, Mina Osborne was bound to have found out. Maybe she had just walked away.

He opened the file, flipping past the first few witness-statement forms until he came to a statement taken by telephone from Jaronimo Gonsalves, Mina Osborne’s father, who was living in India. He had sworn that no one in the family had made contact with Mina for several years.

He ought to have a word with the parents again, Devaney thought, just to satisfy himself that they had no further information. Better to ring from the sitting room, where he could shut the door and not be disturbed. He checked the spelling again. Gonsalves. What sort of name was that? It wasn’t like an Indian name at all—sounded Spanish or something. He carried the file to the sitting room as he repeated the name aloud: “Gonsalves, Gonsalves.” The foreign-sounding syllables felt strange on his tongue, but he repeated them until the sound started to become familiar, then picked up the phone. But what would he say? Your daughter is still missing, and we’ve made a complete bollocks of the case? The parents must be getting on in years. How would it affect them to have the past dredged up again? He pulled the file closer and punched in the number. A rapid rat-a-tat-tattat-tat on the other end told him it was ringing. A high-pitched woman’s voice came on the line: “Who’s calling, please?”

He hadn’t bothered to calculate the time difference—it might be the middle of the night in Bombay for all he knew.

“Who is calling, please?” the tinny-sounding voice repeated, and Devaney cleared his throat.

“Detective Garrett Devaney calling from Ireland. I’m trying to reach Mr. Jaronimo Gonsalves.” There was no immediate answer. Had he pronounced the name incorrectly? “I hope I’m not ringing too late.”

There was another brief pause, during which Devaney imagined his voice traveling to India, as he heard a faint echo of what he had just said on the line. When the woman’s voice responded, it sounded slightly weary, but not unkind.

“I am afraid you are too late, Detective. My husband died quite suddenly six months ago. Is there some way that I may help you? Do you have some news of my daughter?” The woman’s musical accent gave away the trepidation behind her question, and Devaney cursed the most terrible duty of his profession.

“I’m afraid I have no news, Mrs. Gonsalves. I’m just going back over the details, and I wanted to make sure that she still hadn’t contacted you or any other family members.”

There was another pause. “I have not heard from my daughter for the past two and a half years.”

“Excuse me?” Devaney said, thinking he must have misheard. “Your husband said—”

“When Mina first went missing,” Mrs. Gonsalves continued, “the police spoke to my husband. He told them that he had broken with our daughter when she married Hugh Osborne, three years earlier. And that was true—for him. You see, my husband was a very strict man, a proud man, Detective. He could be very hard. But I ask you, how could a mother who has brought a child into this world, and cared for her, just turn away one day—deny her existence, simply because that child fell foolishly in love?”

“You kept in contact with your daughter?” Devaney’s mind was racing; he was sure this information had never appeared anywhere in the file.

“Mina and I continued our regular correspondence, without my husband’s knowledge, of course. She sent her letters in care of my sister. But they suddenly stopped without warning. One week later, my husband received a call from your Irish police. He thought he spoke for both of us; how could he know he did not? I couldn’t go against him. His heart was already broken. I’m only sorry I didn’t contact you sooner.”

“And do you still have the letters?”

“Every one.”

“I wonder if you’d be willing to send them to me? There’s a chance they might contain some detail that would help us. I will return them to you.”

“Of course, of course, anything I can do.”

“And was there—” Devaney hesitated. “Was there ever any indication in these letters that your daughter was troubled, or in any way fearful?” He winced, hoping the last part of the question didn’t betray his suspicions. There was a brief silence on the other end of the line as Mrs. Gonsalves considered his question. God, his reflexes had completely gone.

“If you’re asking whether my daughter was afraid of her husband, I think the answer is no. But of course there were things that troubled her. Who among us has no worries? I’ve no doubt that all these facts are in your files, but when you read her letters, I think you’ll understand that my daughter was already carrying their child when she and Hugh were married. I think it remained a question always in the back of her mind, whether they would have married if—well, if the circumstances had been different.”

“I appreciate your frankness, Mrs. Gonsalves.”

“I know you suspect my son-in-law. And I know it’s only natural in a case of this sort. But I’ve come to know Hugh Osborne very well, I think. I’m convinced that he loved Mina and could never harm her in any way.”

“You mean he’s contacted you?” This, also, was not in the file.

“Oh, yes. He rang us when Mina first disappeared, but my husband refused to speak with him. But when he heard of my husband’s death, he wrote me a letter. We’ve spoken on the telephone many times since then, and I would say we’ve become very good friends.” Unfortunately, Devaney thought, this could be either a genuine gesture on Osborne’s part, or just a cold-blooded ploy to gain a powerful ally.

“All this happened just when I thought that Mina and her father might reconcile. She’d talked about coming to visit us, bringing Christopher, but—”

“Would your daughter have gone against her husband’s wishes? Would she have tried to make the trip anyway, even if he opposed it?”

“I don’t know. If she did, she has never arrived home. I would give anything to see my daughter’s face.”

A silence fell on the telephone line. “I’ll do everything I can,” he said.

“You’ll let me know any news you might discover about my child?” She seemed at once old and young, Devaney thought: young in the way that she referred to Mina as her child, and old in the knowledge that her daughter and grandson were most likely dead.

“I will, indeed. There’s one more thing. Would you mind sending the letters to my home address? It’s a long story, but the investigation has been transferred to a task force in Dublin. I’m not supposed to be working on the case anymore.” As Devaney slowly walked her through the particulars, his heart held tandem hopes: that the letters would contain something useful, and that this decision would not get him booted from the Guards.

“I am getting to be an old woman, Detective. There are days when I am so very tired. But like you, I have not entirely given up hope. I know you will do what you can. Good night.”

Devaney hung up the phone, considering the benediction he had just received. He checked his watch. Nine forty-five. It must be nearly four in the morning in Bombay. When he returned to the kitchen, he found Roisin sitting at the kitchen table, writing in a composition book. Devaney poured himself a whiskey, then joined his daughter at the table, watching her dark head bent in concentration over her work.

“You’re up very late, aren’t you, Roisin? What are you writing there?”

She shrugged, but didn’t look up. “Nothing. Just things I think about.”

“And what do you think about, mo chroi?”

“About how everything got all mixed up the way it is.” Devaney felt his heart swell in his throat.

“What we all wonder,” he said, thinking of Mrs. Gonsalves, and admiring the mixture of profound sadness and innocence in his daughter’s deep blue eyes. They sat in silence for a moment, studying each other across the table. Roisin returned to her composition book, and concentrated on making a long line of curlicues across one of its thin blue rules.

“Daddy,” she said, when she had finished the last loop, “do you think I’m too old to start playing the fiddle?”

11

The churchyard in Kilgarvan appeared exactly the same to Cormac as it had nineteen years ago when his mother was buried there. The gray stone of the church seemed bleak against the vigorous green of the grass between the gravestones. Both the church and the grass were symbols of endurance, he thought. In the face of weather, time, the rash acts of man, both remained, one bound by tradition, staunchly resisting the forces of change, one engaged in a constant, defiant cycle of death and renewal. He walked slowly along the gravel path through the graveyard, reading the inscriptions, some moss-covered and worn with age, some newly made and sharp as the pain of loss.

He took the first left on the path, to the newer section of the walled-in yard, under a huge beech tree. He remembered hearing the gravediggers cursing as they tried to excavate the spot, running into tree roots as thick as a man’s arm, having to hack through them with picks and axes before they could proceed. How well kept his mother’s grave was. Maguire, read the Irish script on the stone; beneath that her first name, Eilis, and the dates. Someone had planted a small bunch of violets below the headstone. The heart-shaped leaves looked freshly watered, and grew in a thick profusion. He knelt on the grass, feeling the unmistakable ache of her absence once again.

She was growing steadily weaker, according to the nurse who looked after her while he was away at college. He had just started his second year at university, as she’d insisted, but on weekends he’d take the train from Dublin or get a lift down to be with her. One Friday in October, he’d caught an earlier train than usual—he was coming down to tell her he wasn’t going back to Dublin anymore. He was just thanking the salesman who’d given him a lift from Ennis when he saw his mother at the churchyard gate. She was in a wheelchair, and though he was more than a hundred yards away, he knew that the white-haired man pushing the chair was Joseph Maguire. His father. He hung back to observe them; he could see his mother’s head tilt, the better to hear the voice that spoke at her ear, and he felt somehow betrayed by the way she looked up at her husband. He was still her husband. They had never gone through the formality of a legal separation. He watched his mother’s frail body in the chair, her thin shoulders covered by a sweater and a Spanish shawl. When his parents entered the churchyard, Cormac crossed the street and moved closer to the gate. He watched as they moved slowly up the path. He’d taken the same walk with her only a few weeks ago, when test results had shown that further treatment was useless against the rampant cancer cells, and she had wanted to show him the place she would be buried.

He turned away and pressed his back against the gatepost, trying to work out what to do. He felt a fury of hurt and anger and jealousy. He stepped away from the curb and began walking blindly until he reached the coast road, where he turned northward, climbed down the rocks, and began trudging along in the sand. He felt ridiculous—he was nearly a grown man, and yet he felt like that confused and abandoned child of all those years ago. He understood when he saw them together that his mother still loved Joseph Maguire, a man who didn’t deserve to be so loved. Why couldn’t his father be the one who was dying? He dropped his pack on the sand, fell to his knees, and pitched forward, the pain in his chest feeling as if it would tear his rib cage apart. Hot tears seeped under his eyelids; he tried to breathe, inhaling in the salty, seaweed-smelling air of the beach. How long he lay there, he did not know. She was obviously happy to see him. What could he do now but feign gratitude at the old man’s return? It soothed him to think of the way things had to be. The wet sand was cool against his face, and eventually he felt a sense of calm returning. He pushed himself to his feet, brushed as much of the sand off his clothes as he could, and slung his rucksack over one shoulder for the walk back to the town….

The memory slowly faded. Cormac reached out one hand to touch the letters of his mother’s name, then rose from his knees at the graveside, quickly retracing his route back down the gravel path and out the cemetery gate. When he was growing up, Kilgarvan had been just a single, narrow row of houses and a few shops with their backs to the sea. Now holiday homes had succeeded fishing as the main economic force, and modern, sterile-looking developments had sprung up on concrete slabs in hay fields surrounding the town. Tiny flags signified that the natural dunes above the strand had become sand traps in a golf course. He turned onto the coast road, and walked the quarter mile that used to seem endless when he was a boy. When he stopped in front of a two-story house, now painted yellow with green trim, he was pleased to notice that the rosebushes his mother had tended so lovingly still flourished all around the edge of the front garden.

No one seemed to be about when he arrived home, but a small gray Ford with a car-hire sticker was parked in the drive. He pushed open the front door and found his mother tucked up on her favorite antique chaise, her face bright with anticipation, as he had known it would be.

“Cormac,” she said, and in that instant, she saw that he already knew what she was about to tell him. She looked at him with a mixture of hope and pleading. He stood and returned her gaze, hoping that his look communicated understanding, or at least forbearance. The door from the kitchen swung open, and in backed Joseph Maguire, bearing a tea tray. “I’ve set three cups,” he was saying. “I think he’s bound to turn up soon—”

He watched his father straighten out of a slightly solicitous crouch. This man was white-haired and rumpled in a professorial way, not at all the image of the dashing, dark-haired warrior he had kept in his head all these years. The two of them looked in unison toward Eilis. Her eyes shone. Speak to each other, they urged silently. Say something.

“Hello, Cormac,” said his father, still holding the tea tray and looking slightly ridiculous.

“Hello,” he replied. How many times had he rehearsed this scene, trying to work out what their first words might be, what great deed he might have accomplished to bring his father all the way back across the ocean? Now the moment was here, and he was surprised how little he actually felt. Perhaps he’d spent all the feeling he had out on the strand.

“I was going to tell you, Cormac,” his mother said. “But somehow we got the dates mixed up, and your father arrived a day earlier than I anticipated.”

“Your mother wrote me,” Joseph said, still gripping the handles of the tray. Only then did it occur to Cormac that this might be awkward for his father as well. “And we thought it would be best for me to come, to take some of the pressure off you while you’re at your studies. It can’t be easy traveling such a distance every weekend.”

It isn’t, he wanted to say, but the real hardship was going back to Dublin at the end of each visit, knowing that she might not be here when he returned. “I don’t mind,” he said.

Cormac’s thoughts were still in the past when the front door of the house opened, and out stepped a girl with pink-streaked hair, dressed in the current fashion, and tottering slightly on platform shoes. As she approached down the footpath, he decided she couldn’t be more than about fifteen; her lips were painted a deep shade of blue, and three tiny gold rings pierced her left eyebrow. “Are ye all right?” she asked. “Are ye looking for someone?”

“No, I used to live in this house. My mother planted all these roses, and the apple tree in the back garden, if it’s still there.”

“Yeah, it’s there.” He could sense annoyance as the girl studied him, worried that he’d want to have a look at that, too. She was late for something, he guessed, but didn’t like leaving the house with this lunatic hanging about the front gate.

“I don’t mean to hold you up,” he said. “Just wanted to see what the old place looked like.” He wondered as he walked slowly back to the church whether there was an actual physical threshold in the mind, a point at which the past filled up more of one’s thoughts than the future.

12

On Sunday evening, Garrett Devaney sat in a straight-backed kitchen chair opposite his daughter Roisin. Her head tipped toward her left shoulder, where the body of his fiddle rested, its slender neck cradled in the curve of her hand.

“There,” said Devaney, sitting back. “How does that feel?”

“A bit strange.”

“It might feel that way at first, but you’ll get used to it. It might even feel comfortable after a while. The main thing is to stay relaxed, especially here—” He reached out and pressed gently on his daughter’s shoulders, observing how small and thin she felt beneath the weight of his hands. It had been a long time since he’d actually made any sort of physical contact with one of his children. “Ready for the bow?”

“Yes,” she said firmly.

“All right.” He’d let her tighten the octagonal nut at the end of the bow, and slide the rosin block up and down its length. “Remember that you must never touch the hairs on the bow.” He guided her fingers around the frog, placing each one where it ought to go, then let her feel the weight of it in her hand, and finally, in her whole arm. “It all happens with the elbow and the wrist, not the shoulder—like this,” he said, demonstrating with an invisible bow. “Keep in mind that you’re making music, not sawing wood.” Roisin nodded.

“Now the fingering,” Devaney said. Leaning forward, he gently placed his daughter’s fingers in the positions she would use to play a simple scale and called out the names of the notes as he did so. He waited for a moment, touched by the sincerity of her gaze as she concentrated on all the strange new sensations. Devaney felt disarmed, utterly defenseless in the presence of this fierce determination.

“Lash away,” he said, and she looked at him with eyes grown round in disbelief. “Go ahead,” he said, “make some noise.” She tentatively set the bow on the fiddle strings, where it bounced a couple of times, then pulled, letting the weight of it make a deep, vibrating groan. A small smile and a look of surprise and pleasure crossed her face, then she wrinkled her nose.

“Go mad,” he said. “Try them all.”

Roisin bent the bow this way and that, testing the sonorous, deep notes, the high, thin sounds she could produce, chording two notes together as she pulled the rosin-laden bow over the strings. He gestured, showing her in mime how to use the full length of the bow, and she followed his example, at least as far as her short arms would allow. Even as he beheld the pleasure she took in these first few sounds, Devaney pictured the hurdles they still faced, and felt suddenly inadequate as a musician, as a teacher, and as a father. As he listened to Roisin’s first dreadful attempt at a scale, he thought of Orla and Padraig, and how he’d missed the few chances he had to be closer to them. He’d better not ruin this—his final chance, as he thought of it—by proving too harsh a teacher.

“Is there any tune you know that you’d like to play? How about ‘Paidin O’Rafferty’? You know that one, don’t you?” He lilted the first few bars, until the spark of recognition lit up her face.

“That’s the tune they play at the end of ‘Ceili House’ on the radio.” Devaney hadn’t even realized it, but Roisin was right. She was already listening like a musician, and there was no substitute for that. They worked away at the melody for the next half hour, stumbling painfully through it a few times, until she had the notes and the fingering right.

“Well, how did you like your first lesson?”

“Daddy,” she said, chiding him for teasing her.

“That was it. And what you can do now is to take the fiddle to someplace nice and quiet”—not to mention as far away from human hearing as possible, he thought to himself—“and practice that tune and a few scales, and get used to it, especially the feel of the bow. We’ll try another tune tomorrow.”

She looked slightly incredulous, but nodded anyway.

“And we should see about getting you a smaller fiddle. I’ll ask around. Then you can practice whenever you like.”

Roisin held the fiddle and bow in her left hand, and bent at the knees to gather up the case from the table. “Don’t worry, Daddy, I’ll be careful,” she said when she reached the door. “I’m going to practice a lot and be very good, I promise.” She scurried off down the hall, holding the fiddle before her like a prize.

“We’ll see,” said Devaney quietly to himself. He resisted the urge to be as enthusiastic as he wanted to be. He’d already let himself imagine playing a duet with Roisin here in the kitchen, a vision that had prompted a curious tightness in his chest.

He turned his attention to a thick file that lay on the table. For several days he’d thought of almost nothing but the Osborne case, going over and over the details, trying to find a loose corner, a crack in someone’s story. There had to be some way in. The opening was here—probably staring him in the face, if he only knew where to look. He tried to focus his mind on Mina Osborne’s journey between Point A, Pilkington’s shop in Dunbeg, and Point B, Bracklyn House. Where did she stop? Had she gladly accepted the offer of a lift from someone she knew, or been bundled into a windowless van against her will? And what wild creature along that empty stretch of road had been a witness to what actually transpired? Then there was Osborne, somewhere off on the periphery, on his way from Shannon, he said, and the only person in the whole equation who had no one to vouch for him during that time, and he was the one person who had the strongest motive. The best possibilities were still murder or flight. If it was murder, why were items of clothing missing from the house? And whose word did they have that the pair had never arrived home? Only that of Jeremy and Lucy Osborne, who might be looking after their own best interests. They could even be involved in some way. Devaney’s head ached. If only he had someone he could use as a sounding board. The details were disjointed from every angle. Nothing seemed to fit—but it must fit one way, and that was the way it had really happened. This kitchen-table detective work was fucking hopeless. He should be out there talking to people, doing something, instead of sitting here getting tied up in knots.

Everything rested on getting to the essence of this fellow Osborne. Some of the statements from people in the village had mentioned his reputation as a playboy in years past, with a whole string of girlfriends—a different one every time he was home from university, people said, and many of them foreigners. So the man had a taste for the exotic. He was also handsome, considerate, apparently well off—on the face of it, exactly the kind of man that women generally adored.

Devaney started sketching out the scenario: Osborne meets Mina Gonsalves while he’s over teaching a summer course at Oxford. Nature follows its course and she gets pregnant, so he does the honorable thing and marries her; they settle back in Ireland. Devaney now felt he could see a hairline crack in the perfect marriage. They’re reasonably happy, for a time, but then he’s back at his old ways. Maybe he’d married her for money, not anticipating that the father might cut her off.

Now that his wife was out of the picture, Osborne had enlisted the support of Una McGann and Mrs. Gonsalves. Interesting how it was always the women who believed in his innocence. No doubt if Osborne ever went to prison for this crime, there would be some female trying to rally supporters in his defense. There was nothing quite so dangerous as a professional pity-hound, Devaney thought. A man like that could twist the good nature in people to his own purposes, even have them feeling sorry for him, and trying to rationalize his violent outbursts.

He flipped to the page listing Osborne’s assets. For a member of the so-called gentry, the poor sod didn’t have much—a modest salary from the university, not many investments, nothing but a couple of small parcels of land and the house. A house like that was always in need of major repairs, not to mention a bugger of a tax liability. What would happen if a man like Osborne got to feeling boxed in by marriage and money troubles at the same time?

All right, supposing Osborne wanted money, Devaney thought, leaning back in his chair. The development scheme could be one way to get it; banks would see a model public/private investment, and no doubt the government ministers in Dublin would piss themselves for the chance to fund such a worthwhile cultural project. But would that be enough? Osborne had no more land to sell off, no other major assets that he could liquidate, except the house and the insurance. When he’d phoned a couple of days ago, Reidy the insurance agent had told him Osborne kept up to date on the premiums after his wife’s disappearance. Nothing funny about that; he’d probably been advised to keep paying. If the wife was dead, why not just produce the body? Why drag it out, unless there was something that would point the finger at him, or unless—

Devaney sat forward abruptly, and the front legs of his chair hit the ground with a solid thump. Unless there was no body. Unless Osborne’s wife and son were still alive. Maybe he really was as devoted as some said. And if he needed money, why not send the wife and kid safely away somewhere, stage a disappearance, act the grieving husband, and collect at the end of seven years? Add the insurance settlement to the development money, and he’d have a fairly tidy sum. Nobody gets hurt, except the insurance company and the banks, and everyone knows they’re a bunch of fucking robbers anyhow.

Devaney thought about where a person might hide a wife and child who were supposed to be dead. Ireland, even Dublin, was too small a place to be safe. The logical place to hide a couple of East Indians, he thought, would be among lots of other East Indians. Mina and Christopher could have been smuggled out of Ireland, but presumably Osborne wouldn’t go seven years without seeing them, particularly if he was so devoted. So where had Osborne traveled in the past two years—assuming he’d traveled under his own name? Perhaps he’d left some trail. Credit cards, traveler’s checks, something. There was a major problem with this scenario as well. What would happen at the end of seven years? Supposing Osborne went ahead and collected his money, then what? He couldn’t bring the wife and kid back, so what would he do at that point? Sell off the family home, stage his own disappearance, and start a new life somewhere else? All of these same arguments worked just as well in the case of outright murder. They had no evidence to pin any of this on Osborne. But there was that hole in his story, the drive from Shannon to Dunbeg that left nearly four hours unaccounted for. It didn’t seem as if anyone had been following the man’s movements since that intense period of scrutiny right after the disappearance. If Osborne’s statements about the past provided no clues, maybe something in his current actions would.

Devaney heard the faint, scraping sound of a scale coming from upstairs as Roisin tried to coax a few pleasing notes from his fiddle. He wished her success. He wasn’t having much himself.

13

The red-haired girl’s dental exam wasn’t due to begin until two o’clock, but Nora Gavin was in the conservation lab at one, anxious to begin. She walked around the table, observing the instruments lying in their trays, the light above the table, and the familiar unwieldy bundle wrapped in black plastic. Immediately following its discovery, the head of the cailin rua had undergone a battery of examinations and tests. For the last several days, the remains had been stored at a temperature just above freezing here at the lab, and had no doubt been set out several hours before today’s examination was to begin, so that the tissues—and most particularly the jaw muscles—would become pliable enough to manipulate as they tried to extract the object that was lodged in the girl’s mouth.

Nora had returned to Dublin Saturday night, after a long and unproductive day with Cormac on the priory excavation. They seemed to be turning up nothing but gravel. And every time she’d brought up Mina Osborne’s disappearance, he seemed to wish she’d talk about something else. It was possible that he’d never been confronted with bald-faced deceit, and was actually taken in by Hugh Osborne. The man had a convincing air of sincerity, she had to admit.

But at least Cormac hadn’t refused her help on the dig. And so far he hadn’t told her to calm down. She could hear a voice from the past—Marc Staunton’s voice—suggesting that she take a few deep breaths and try to calm herself. When she’d first met Marc, she had loved his voice, that rumbling baritone she’d first heard through a surgical mask on an operating room visit during med school. She’d been smitten before she ever laid eyes on his face. For a long time, it seemed as if they couldn’t have been better matched: he loved music and theater, they’d read the same books, and had always been interested in one another’s specialties. And although her parents had never pressured her to get married, she knew they’d adored Marc, and were delighted when he’d introduced her sister to one of his college roommates. That was how she’d met Peter Hallett. The four of them had spent a lot of time together, before Peter and Triona were married, going out to dinner or a play, spending summer weekends on Peter’s sailboat down at Lake Pepin. At times she felt overwhelmed, realizing that all the happiness she’d experienced then was gone now, wiped away like some dream of a life that never really existed.

When Triona was killed, it was as if Marc had become the self-appointed arbiter of rationality, while she could only feel. He hadn’t even heard the patronizing tone he began to use whenever she complained about the lack of news from the police. It was true that she had been utterly consumed by her sister’s terrible death; it had been a conscious choice, and one she still didn’t regret. But she’d been wrong to trust that Marc would help her, especially when the police started investigating his friend. Little by little, she’d felt Marc’s loyalty beginning to shift. First he’d warned her that she was becoming too emotionally involved, and ended up trying to convince her that she was coming unglued, even imagining things that never happened. Her “obsession,” as he referred to it, had finally driven them apart. As she had watched him pack his suitcase with the same meticulous precision he used in the operating room, Nora had felt that she had never really known Marc, despite the fact that they had been lovers since medical school, and had lived together for more than eight years. At least she hadn’t married him, she thought bitterly. The sound of his voice in her ears made her want to plunge farther into the shadowy thicket of Mina Osborne’s disappearance. But why did she presume that she could make a difference this time?

With effort, Nora roused herself. It wasn’t even one-thirty yet. She pulled a white lab coat over her street clothes in preparation for the dental exam. As she did so, she noticed the file of written reports that lay on the near end of the exam table. She leaned forward to open it.

At the postmortem examination on 6 May, Dr. Malachy Drummond, Chief State Pathologist, assisted by Dr. Nora Gavin, Trinity College Medical School, made the following observations:

General: The specimen appeared to be the head of a young female, approx. 18-25 years of age, found two days previous at Drumcleggan Bog, near Dunbeg, Co. Galway.

Preservation: Much of the soft tissue was remarkably well preserved. The scalp and hair were well preserved on the right side, which had been uppermost in the bog. There was no evidence of injury to the skull. The face was very well preserved; the hair appeared wavy and approximately 40 cm in length, and retained its reddish tint. The eyelids, eyelashes, and eyebrows were all present, with evidence of some tissue remaining in both sockets, the right eye being visible through the partially open lid. The cartilage and skin over the nose were well preserved. Both ears were present, the right ear in a state of good preservation, the left infiltrated with bog plants. There was a small portion of skin missing from the chin, leaving an exposed area of adipocere and bone. The neck was severed between the third and fourth vertebrae, although it was impossible to tell through naked-eye examination whether this injury occurred before or after death.

Report by Dr. R. Kinsella, Professor of Radiology, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, assisted by Mrs. Maire Donegan and Mr. Anthony McHugh, Senior Radiographers, Beaumont Hospital, Dublin, on radiograph and CT scan:

Plain Radiographs: Skull: No fracture can be identified. The slightly shrunken brain is well seen. The convolutional markings are clearly identifiable, as also are the cisterns. The ventricles are small, but not greatly distorted, and there is evidence of some air in them. In the lateral projection of the skull, there is a well-defined opacity within the mouth cavity. It is not certain whether this is part of the dental structure, or a foreign body inserted before or after death.

Computerized Tomography: Extensive computerized tomographic images were made of the individual’s skull. No fractures are visible in the skull vault. The brain is not greatly shrunken and does not appear to be surrounded by air. The differentiation of gray and white matter can be identified within the dense brain stem extending into the spinal cord. As in the radiographs, there is a well-defined opacity of indeterminate origin, suggesting some sort of foreign body lodged in the individual’s mouth.

Report on the endoscopy performed by Dr. J. S. Mitchell, Department of Clinical Medicine, Trinity College, Dublin:

The interior of the mouth was very well preserved. The tissues were moist and much less stained than external tissues. They were brownish in color, and the membranes were not particularly fragile. The object appearing in previous radiographs and scans was present here also, but from its position against soft tissue, it was difficult to discern what exactly this object might be, or any details about its composition.

There was nothing in these reports that Nora didn’t already know. She closed the file and slowly circled the table, focusing on the awkwardly wrapped package and imagining the cold horror that waited there. Who are you? she asked silently. What happened to you? She reached out a hand and rested it on the twisted black polythene. Tell me. As soon as the thought flashed through her mind, Nora felt a sudden impulse to withdraw her hand, but couldn’t. She felt a pang of heartsickness as strong as any she had ever experienced, and stood with eyes closed, fixed to the spot until the sensation slowly dissipated. She opened her eyes and took her hand away.

Though she had been there dozens of times, the lab’s bright light and bare, polished surfaces seemed somehow foreign and strange. The others will be here any minute, she told herself. Get a grip. She took the X rays from a brown folder beneath the reports, put them up on the viewer, and switched on the light, studying the location of the “opacity” that they would try to extricate today.

Ray Flynn, the conservation technician, interrupted her thoughts, pushing through the door with his camera in hand. He was screwing on the flash attachment and checking to see that it was in working order. “Anxious to have at it, eh, Dr. Gavin?”

“Guilty.”

“You’re as bad as my kids at Christmastime.” Flynn pushed back through the door, nearly bumping into Niall Dawson. As assistant keeper of antiquities at the National Museum, Dawson was actually the person in charge of the operation today.

“Hello, Nora,” Dawson said, smiling. “We’ll be getting started any moment now, as soon as Fitzpatrick makes an entrance.”

“What do you think of the execution idea?” Nora asked.

“It’s a definite possibility. The electron microscopy shows damage to the vertebra consistent with use of a blade of some sort. Our problem is that we can’t tell definitively whether decapitation took place preor postmortem. We may have to be satisfied with what we have.”

“I know we can find out who she was,” Nora said. As soon as she spoke the words she felt foolish, as though she’d blurted out some secret. “I know it’s completely daft, but I do.”

“You’re wishing for something that may not happen. Promise you won’t be downhearted when it turns out to be nothing.”

“I’ll promise no such thing.”

Thirty minutes later, Barry Fitzpatrick, the plumpish, gray-haired dental lecturer from Trinity, was in the midst of his preliminary naked-eye assessment, speaking with the deliberate, measured tones of a teacher used to dictation: “The mandible appears to be only slightly dislocated due to postmortem events.” Grasping the crown of the red-haired girl’s head with one hand, he tried shifting the jawbone, first slightly from side to side, then up and down, with the other. “The jaw remains quite flexible. Because of the remarkable preservation of facial skin and muscle tissue, it will be necessary to open the mandible in order to gain access to the teeth. Mr. Flynn, if I could ask you to be ready with the camera as we open the mouth? Thank you.”

Fitzpatrick pulled gingerly at the lower jaw, eventually loosening the red-haired girl’s teeth from where they had bitten through her lower lip. He opened her mouth as wide as he could, peered inside, then reached in with a latex-gloved finger to check for missing teeth and molars.

“There appears to be full dentition present, the third molars being fully erupted. The teeth are brown in color, and there appears to be a complete absence of tooth enamel. Assessment of the individual’s age at death is difficult in this case, since enamel provides the most accurate indication of tooth wear. The first molars show slight to moderate wear of the dentine, while the third molars—if you could move the light just a little closer, please, Mr. Flynn—show little or no wear. Probable age at death was approximately twenty to twenty-five years. Now, Dr. Gavin,” said Fitzpatrick, looking up from his work and wrinkling his nose in an effort to keep his glasses from sliding down any more, “if you could give me an indication of where we should begin searching for this famous foreign body…”

“It appears to be fairly far back in the throat,” Nora said, pointing to the spot on the X-ray film, “and closer to the left side than the right.” Fitzpatrick glanced at the negative image, then bent to his task again, using his dental mirror as a tongue depressor.

“I want to avoid damaging the surrounding tissue if I can,” he said, “but it’ll be difficult not to push whatever it is even farther back, unless—Mr. Flynn, do you have a very large tweezers of some sort? That will do nicely, thank you.”

It was all Nora could do to keep from pressing next to Fitzpatrick so that she could see what he saw through the magnifying viewer.

“Come on,” he said, coaxing the thing forward, “this way out. Here it is.” Fitzpatrick lifted the object aloft, and four pairs of eyes beheld a band of finely worked gold, centered with a dark red stone. “I’d say it was a man’s ring, wouldn’t you, Dawson?” said Fitzpatrick, clearly delighted with his discovery. They all drew around to examine it more closely.

“Appears to be,” Dawson said. “And look inside. There’s some sort of inscription.” He struggled to make out the letters through the magnifying lens: “COF, then the number sixteen, letters IHS, another number, fifty-two. Then more letters, AOF.”

That’s it, Nora thought, the message she’d known was there. Had this girl tried to swallow the ring, or simply to hide it? What other explanation could there be? What thoughts must have raced through her mind in the last few seconds before she died? Nora looked back to the top of the table where the girl’s mouth was still propped open at an awkward angle under the glaring light. She felt suddenly ashamed. “Gentlemen,” she said, “if we’re finished, hadn’t we better cover her up again?”

14

The loom’s rhythmic sound usually had a calming effect on Una McGann’s mind, but tonight she felt slightly on edge. Brendan refused to have a television in the house, so each of them was engaged in some customary evening occupation: Fintan worked at the table, cutting new reeds for his pipes, making an occasional squawk as he blew through each thin piece of bamboo to test its sound. Aoife knelt on the floor beside him, enacting some story with an unlikely foursome that included a spotted salamander, a winged fairy, an elephant, and a giraffe. Brendan sat apart from them, on a stool near the fire, meticulously grinding a keen edge on one of his half-dozen sickles. Brendan kept a vast collection of old tools in the shed; some had belonged to their father and grandfather, while others came from neighbors who knew that he was interested and offered him their old implements when they ceased cutting turf or making hay by hand, as nearly everyone in the locality had done. His collection included spades and pitchforks, billhooks for cutting ditches, punch forks and hand rakes for thatching, foot sleans and breast sleans. Brendan kept each one shining, never letting the damp turn to rust on their blades.

Fintan waited for Una’s eyes to meet his, and his eyebrows raised in a question. He’d asked her advice earlier this afternoon; he was dying to break the news to Brendan about his plans to leave Dunbeg. She’d tried to put him off, saying that now wasn’t the time; as long as he wasn’t planning to leave until the autumn, there was no point in telling Brendan so soon. He’d only stew about it all summer, she warned. Fintan had disagreed. He still wanted to tell Brendan tonight. She could feel the anticipation in every gesture he made. He’d planned to go to America for years, he’d told her, but only recently had saved enough money to make it possible. He had enough to live on for a few months, anyway, even if he didn’t find work right away. And a friend in New York had promised to set up some gigs for him. Fintan was only two years younger than she was, but tonight Una felt decades older than her brother, seeing him practically bursting with the news.

What would this house be like without Fintan? Una wasn’t sure that she and Aoife could remain if he left, but leaving Brendan completely on his own was a thought she had tried to avoid.

She watched her elder brother as he held the sickle against his left knee, tracing the silvery half-moon shape of it over and over again with the pink round of a sharpening stone. Every few strokes, he’d pause to feel its edge against the thick skin of his thumb. It must soothe him somehow, to sit and smoke the pipe and work at these things. How sad that she couldn’t really talk to Brendan, and tell him what was in her heart, as she could do so easily with Fintan. But Brendan had always been so serious, trying to act like a grown man by the time he was fourteen years of age. He’d never seemed to have time to play when she was a girl, but then he was six years older than she was, already busy with farmwork when she and Fintan were still small.

Had Brendan ever given any thought to marrying? He’d certainly shown no interest in anyone she knew about. And there weren’t many opportunities for a social life in Dunbeg. Brendan was never one for dances or the other usual functions where people could meet. He went to Mass, of course, and he might go into the pub, but he’d always have his pint standing at the bar, nodding wordlessly to the half-dozen other regulars who drained their glasses beside him.

Brendan looked up from the sickle, not at her, but at Fintan, who held a reed up to the light to check its thickness. Brendan looked as if he were about to utter some expression of annoyance over his brother’s foolish waste of time, but instead he paused, evidently thought better of it, and returned to his work.

How much had she given up to come back here? She missed the laughing faces of her Dublin neighbors, Celia and Jane. Despite Dublin’s gray concrete walls, the graffiti-covered dustbins, the noise and grime of the city, Una had felt warmly accepted, enveloped, even, when she was with them. Celia worked in a bookshop; Jane was a writer. They were as poor as she was, but in a joyful, bohemian way that she always admired but could never quite achieve. Their flat was filled with books, with conversation and cigarette smoke. Perhaps what buoyed her friends was the love they shared, a tenderness forbidden where they came from, but tolerated, or at least ignored in the city, far from the prying eyes and clucking tongues of the villages where they’d grown up. Una had no such close friends in Dunbeg. What a relief it had been to be with Celia and Jane, to feel as if she could let go and say what she really thought. But another part of her spirit had never felt at home in the city. She had missed the smells, the sounds, even the very quietness of Dunbeg, the breathing space one could experience even in a room with several other souls. That silence, that solitude in company existed for her nowhere but here.

Una looked at her daughter’s bright head bent over her tiny tea set, as the child whispered an entire conversation in the various voices of her odd menagerie. Una understood Brendan’s desire to keep things as they had been forever. Weren’t there times—like this very moment, in fact—that she wished she could spare Aoife all the pain and disappointment of growing up? But she knew that sheltering her daughter from pain would also take away the profoundest joy, like the feeling she’d known when Aoife was born, seeing the damp crown of her daughter’s head covered in pale down. The nurses didn’t like it, but Una had sometimes unwrapped her completely, to drink in every detail of her compact and perfect naked body. You must keep the child covered up, they’d clucked, she’ll catch her death. As if death itself were contagious. Una had made up her mind to raise Aoife without shame, if she could, and took the greatest satisfaction in seeing her little girl growing up as blissfully alive in her physical self as Una had felt painfully repressed. Her parents had not been entirely to blame for that, she knew. It was the place, the time, and the stifling Catholic morality in the atmosphere they all breathed.

She was glad Fintan knew what he wanted. He had started at the tin whistle, and saved enough money for a set of practice pipes by the time he was thirteen. Brendan considered him lazy, she knew, but Fintan’s thoughts were always on the music, to the point of distraction at times. You can’t live on music, Brendan had often told him, but Una could see in Fintan’s eyes the fiercest desire to prove their brother wrong. For years, he’d worked all winter long weaving simple Brigid’s crosses to sell to tourist shops in Scarriff and Mountshannon, and he’d saved every penny he ever earned playing music for hire. Hardly laziness. Una also understood Fintan’s desire to explore the world beyond a place like Dunbeg, where the future was mapped out for you almost from birth, depending on who your father was, and how much tillable land you owned, and what the people in your family had done for generations upon generations. Tradition could be a prison sentence, as much as a point of pride.

The hidden things in Brendan’s room pressed on her heart more each day. There must be some plausible explanation. Surely. So why was she afraid? He’d always been a moody man, but the darkness seemed to have grown worse recently, and she’d started remembering things he’d said or done that troubled her. This morning, rounding the corner of the house, she’d remembered something that had taken place on that very spot nearly twenty years earlier: Brendan, about twelve years old, with a hen whose head he was about to strike off. He held the bird’s struggling body between his knees, stretching her neck with his left hand, and chopped the head off with one stroke of the bread knife. He looked up and saw Una but didn’t move or utter a word as the hen’s body quivered, and then went still. He studied her for a moment, then rose from his crouch, and held out the dripping carcass to her by its scrawny legs. Here, he said, take this to Mam. She thought he was trying to frighten her, but when she looked up at Brendan’s face, there was nothing in his eyes; his expression had been completely blank.

Disturbed by the memory, Una pulled the bar on the loom firmly back, then slid off her bench. “Come on, Aoife, love, time for slumber.”

“But, Mammy, it’s not even dark.”

“No, and it’s not going to be, either, until past your bedtime. Don’t you want to see where our book takes us tonight?” They’d been reading since the winter, one chapter each evening. Aoife’s face brightened, then clouded over again as she considered which prospect appealed to her most at the moment. Una loved to study the landscape of her daughter’s face, which was tempered by moods as changeable as Irish weather.

“Come on, upstairs with you now,” she said in a mock-threatening tone. “Give the lads a kiss.” She stood and waited as Aoife planted her lips firmly on Brendan’s whiskery cheek, then on Fintan’s. He looked at Una again, and there was mischief in his eyes.

Not now, she mouthed in reply, but Una could see that he didn’t plan to heed her advice.

Upstairs in their room, she tore through the bedtime story, prompting Aoife to say, “Mammy, you’re going too fast.”

“Sorry, love,” Una said, slowing her pace, but, as she did, straining to hear what might be passing between her brothers downstairs. The fact that she could hear nothing made her even more tense.

“That’s all for tonight,” she said, closing the book at the end of the chapter and giving Aoife a quick kiss. “Sleep well, a chroi.”

Una knew the moment she opened the door that the silence below did not bode well. Brendan’s voice was quiet, but there was fury in it.

“America, is it? I might have known. Can’t wait to get away from us, can you? And not just down the road, you have to go halfway round the world, and it’s still not far enough. And how are you going to get enough money to go live in America?”

“I’ve saved a good bit. And I thought I’d sell off my share of the farm.” Brendan didn’t respond, so Fintan continued: “I went to the solicitor. He told me that Una and I have equal shares in the farm, same as yourself. How long did you think you could keep that from us, Brendan? But don’t worry, I’ll give you a fair price.”

Brendan stood, trembling, with the handle of the sickle gripped tightly in his right hand.

“You fucking whelp,” he said, on the last word bringing the blade of the sickle down on the table, where it stuck fast. Fintan scrambled backward, upending his chair, his face openmouthed in shock at what his words had unleashed. Brendan’s rage dissolved into bewilderment, then further into remorse. He sagged to his knees, and rested his head against the edge of the table.

“Fintan, you’d better leave,” Una said. “Just for a while.”

“I’m not leaving you here—”

“Fintan,” she said again, sharply. “Will you get out? We’ll be all right.”

Fintan climbed to his feet, and left hurriedly by the front door. Una stood where she was for a moment, then walked deliberately to the table, where she wrested the sickle from its place. She felt its dead weight in her hand as she opened the back door, walked to the shed, and hung it up among the other tools neatly arranged on hooks above her head.

When she returned to the kitchen, Una saw the door to the front hall closing, and heard Brendan’s footsteps treading the length of the hallway to his room. Perhaps it was the relief of not having to speak to him at this moment; she put her hands to her face and drew in a long, gasping sob.

“Mammy?” came a small voice from above. Aoife stood at the top of the staircase in her nightdress. “Mammy, what’s happening? I’m afraid.” Una sprinted up the short flight of steps and knelt to hold Aoife tight.

“It’s all right, my love,” she said, smoothing her daughter’s hair. “The boys had a bit of a row, but it’s over now. It’s all over.”

15

Tiny beads of perspiration were beginning to form on Nora’s forehead as she walked on the treadmill. She had sublet this flat from a Trinity colleague off in America on a visiting professorship. Although she loved its location on the Grand Canal, and the large windows that looked out over the southwest sector of the city, she had never warmed to its spare, modern space. She did like the treadmill, though; walking put her in a meditative state. She had been at it nearly forty minutes now, relaxing into the steady rhythm, feeling the blood coursing through her muscles, focusing her vision on a place far outside the large plate-glass window. Dublin was still an astonishingly residential metropolis, and she could see far beyond the canal onto the roofs of Harold’s Cross and Crumlin, watching the blinking lights appear in the gathering dusk over the city. It was this time of day, and particularly the memory of the setting sun over the Mississippi River bluffs around Saint Paul, that made her homesick for her own home and family. Her parents would both be working right now. She imagined her father checking some experiment in his research lab at the university medical school, her mother listening to the heartbeats of East African women and children, who made up the bulk of her clientele at the community clinic. She hadn’t spoken to her parents in more than a week; she should try to remember to phone them before it got too late.

For some reason, she was also remembering a remark that Evelyn McCrossan, Gabriel’s wife, had made one evening when they were discussing the progress on the catalog of bog remains. When I see those people in the museum, Evelyn had said, I always think it’s a pity they have to be on display like that. I mean, they’re human beings, aren’t they? Or were. I always say a little prayer for them. Nora thought about the cailin rua’s matted hair drying against the surface of the examination table. Those tangled strands would remain forever just as they’d been found, wild and uncombed. The circumstances of the red-haired girl’s death, combined with the accident of her preservation, meant that she had somehow ceased to be a corpse like any other; she had become an artifact.

After the exam this afternoon, Nora had buttonholed Niall Dawson from the museum to ask him about the inscription they’d found in the ring.

“Well, for one thing, it tells us that whoever owned the ring was most probably a Catholic,” Dawson said.

“How do you figure?”

“The ‘IHS’ in the center of the date is a liturgical symbol pretty distinctly associated with the Catholic Church.”

“What does it stand for?” Dawson raised an eyebrow. “I wasn’t really raised in the Church,” Nora explained.

He smiled. “The Christian Brothers used to tell us it meant ‘I Have Suffered.’ But if you want the real story, it was actually a miscopying of ‘IHSOYS,’ the Greek word for ‘Jesus,’ translated into Latin and eventually adopted by the Church as a sort of acronym or monogram. They put various interpretations forward over the years, if I could only think…” Dawson scoured his memory. “The only one I can recall is Iesus Hominum Salvator—’Jesus, Savior of Men.’”

“I’m impressed.”

“Yes, well, all that drilling on Christian doctrine obviously made more of an impression than I’m willing to admit.”

“And what about the other initials?”

“I’m guessing it was a wedding ring,” Dawson had said. “At that time it was the custom for a man to give his own ring as a pledge of marriage. And the two sets of initials with a date would seem to bear that out.”

So if the ring did belong to the red-haired girl, and it was indeed a wedding ring, where had her husband and protector gone? Off to war somewhere? Perhaps he was in the bog beside her, and sooner or later some turf cutter would eventually uncover his remains as well. The inscription was a break; with a date and a set of initials, maybe Robbie McSweeney could find something more specific.

Nora checked her distance on the treadmill’s display; she’d done nearly three miles already, but didn’t feel like stopping now. Her thoughts strayed to the notion of marriage, and the custom of rings given as a pledge. What were the words? To love, honor, and cherish. As if it were as simple as a promise.

Devaney had used the phrase “perfect marriage” to describe Hugh and Mina Osborne—false and reductive words that had also been used to describe Peter and Triona. Of all the mysteries in the universe, how two people could find continuing joy and satisfaction in one another was one of the greatest puzzles. Even the sincerest attempt at pairing with another human being was bound to involve a delicate balance between conflicting egos and desires, a process that had to be at least as complicated as the two individuals, and perhaps even more so. Who might be able to tell her more about Hugh and Mina Osborne?

A droplet of sweat trickled down and stung Nora’s eye, interrupting her train of thought. Why the hell was it that every time she tried to concentrate on the red-haired girl, she always came around again to Triona—and to the missing woman in the photograph? And why was she so anxious to see Hugh Osborne guilty of murder? She knew next to nothing about the case, only what Devaney had told them, and she wasn’t likely to learn any more. She couldn’t let another piece of unfinished business chase after her the rest of her life. She pushed the buttons to gradually slow her pace. The dusk was gone, replaced by darkness, and she could see herself reflected in the window. Leave this, said the voice in her head. She watched the outline of her shoulders rise and fall with each breath. Let it go. She stepped from the machine, feeling as she always did after a long workout: buoyant, as if she walked on air. An answer to the internal voice floated up inside her: I’ll try. I can’t promise, but I will try.

16

Devaney sat in the car parked just outside the gate of Bracklyn House. This couldn’t really be considered proper surveillance, but it was the best he could do. He’d managed to persuade Nuala to lend him her car, provided he got it back in time for her to meet some clients for a drink. She’d picked out this car on her own, paid for it herself as a point of pride.

He’d never used the car phone, and was fiddling idly with the buttons when a dusty black Volvo wagon came out of the gate. It was Osborne. Devaney waited a few seconds, then pulled out behind the Volvo. He could keep his distance around Dunbeg, aided by the fact that there were not many roads in this part of the countryside. Osborne seemed to be heading north, toward Loughrea. Devaney checked his watch. Seven o’clock. He’d break off when he had to in order to get home by half-nine.

At Loughrea, Osborne turned onto the N6 heading west. There’d be more traffic on this road, less chance of being spotted. He eased onto the highway after the black Volvo, leaving a couple of cars between them. Osborne continued into Galway, following the signposts for the city center. Devaney nearly lost him on the first roundabout, but caught sight of the car and made the turn at the last minute. He checked his watch again. Nearly a quarter past eight. He should try to call Nuala, let her know that at this rate he might be a few minutes late. She could always take his car, a point he’d brought up when they’d made the switch. To pick up clients? she’d said. He’d gathered it was out of the question.

He lifted the car phone from its cradle, but slammed it down again when he had to turn a corner to keep the Volvo in sight. No use trying until he was stopped somewhere, if that ever happened, unless he wanted to crash the car in addition to being late. He followed as Osborne edged his way around Eyre Square, then pulled into a tiny side street near the docks.

Hugh Osborne parked his car, then entered an unmarked doorway on street level. Devaney would have to drive closer or approach on foot, but either way he’d run the risk of being spotted. He parked about thirty yards away, and waited. He peered up and down the street. No fucking chance of a phone box when you needed one, was there? He looked down at the mobile, and felt the sleek black case with its tiny red and green lights mocking him. How was it Nuala could just figure out all this technology, make it part of her life as she went sailing forth into the world, and leave him standing on the dock? He picked up the handset, held it to his ear. Silence. Maybe you had to press something to turn the bloody thing on. He pushed gingerly on a tiny button marked “Speak,” and a loud dial tone filled the car. He slammed the phone down, pushing buttons furiously to cut off the noise, which must have been audible all up and down the quiet street.

Just then, Osborne emerged from the doorway, looking shaken. He went to his own car and opened the door, but before getting in he seemed to have some sort of a spell, grasping the car door for support, and lowering his head, as if he were going to be sick. And he doesn’t even know anyone’s watching him here, Devaney thought, unless I’ve completely blown it. As he retraced the journey, trying to remember if there were any points at which Osborne might have caught a glimpse of him, the Volvo’s engine started, and it pulled abruptly away from the curb. Devaney put his car in gear and followed, hoping Osborne hadn’t gotten too much of a head start. When he rounded the corner, there was a lorry dead ahead, maneuvering its way into position to drop off a load of empty Guinness kegs. Devaney slammed on the brakes, narrowly missing the man who was directing the lorry, and came to a stop about eighteen inches from its rear end.

“Watch where ye’re going, ya dowsy bollocks,” shouted the man, pounding the nose of the car with his fist. “You could have fuckin’ killed me.” Devaney reversed out of the side street, and went back the way he’d come. Osborne was lost. There was no way to find him again. It was nearly half past eight. If he left now, he could head home and not be more than a quarter of an hour late. But what had happened when Osborne went into that building? He pulled up near the doorway to have a closer look. A thirtyish, sandy-haired man in a leather jacket stood at the door, evidently having trouble with the lock. He tried a second key, and was just trying the third when Devaney came up behind him.

“Closed for the evening, are you?” Devaney asked. The man looked up, startled. His face was narrow, slightly ruddy, and there was a shaving cut just below his right ear. The plaque beside the door read “Eddie Dolphin, Private Investigations.” Mustn’t have had the place for long, Devaney thought, if he’s still fishing for the key.

“Why don’t you open up again, Eddie, so we can have a bit of a chat?” The man’s startled look transformed to wariness, then took on an air of forced nonchalance, the mark of a bad actor. There was something else in the set of his jaw; he didn’t want to lose a job, if that’s what Devaney turned out to be.

“I was just headin’ home. Why don’t I give you me card, and you can ring me or come round in the morning—” His manner altered visibly once more, to nervous agitation, when Devaney produced his identification.

“Let’s do it now, if you don’t mind. While I’m in the neighborhood.”

Eddie Dolphin opened the door again, and led the way up the wooden steps. He might as well have been climbing to the gallows. When they entered the office, he slumped into his office chair, staring glumly at the cluttered desktop.

Devaney studied Dolphin’s demeanor, then looked about, gathering the facts of his surroundings. He took his time, partly to get a firm grasp of his bearings, and the better to prepare Mr. Dolphin for questioning. The building had the look of an old barracks: two stories, single windows at regular intervals. Dolphin’s tiny office had two windows, one facing the street, one overlooking warehouse loading areas to the rear, its grimy surface barely admitting a slanting shaft of light from a street lamp. The place smelled of dust and faintly of mildew. The coat of paint on the walls and window sashes was fresh, but carelessly applied. The closet in one corner had evidently been set up as a makeshift darkroom: a large bottle of developer stood inside the door, along with several brand-new computers still in cartons. The trash bin was overflowing with empty pint bottles of Guinness and take-away containers. Late nights, Devaney thought as he turned once more to Dolphin, who had begun picking nervously at one of the several piles of papers that seemed to have randomly accumulated on his desktop.

“Has Osborne been a client for long, Eddie?” Devaney asked, crossing his arms and leaning back casually against the door frame.

“Look, I don’t have to answer any questions. There’s such a thing as confidentiality, you know.” He spoke as if he’d only just learned the word.

“If you’re a priest, or maybe a solicitor,” Devaney said. “You a solicitor, Eddie? I know you’re not a priest.” He kept perfectly still, looking mildly at Dolphin. The silence grew.

“About six months.” Dolphin’s look was apprehensive, as though he now expected an onslaught of questions. His jaw worked nervously. Devaney kept quiet and waited.

“He came here last winter. Said he wanted me to help him look for his wife and kid. Gone missing. I told him it didn’t look good, but—” Dolphin looked up briefly. “He was a steady client, paid up regular, and I took the job. I did some checking, went around a few places with photos. I’ve got four kids already, and another one on the way,” he said, a new note of pleading in his voice. “I needed the work. And there’s no one better at finding people. I’d have come up with something.”

“So what was he here for this evening?”

“Somebody sent him a package.”

“What was in it?”

“How should I know?” Dolphin said, contriving to look injured at the suggestion. “I don’t go round opening up packages addressed to clients.”

“Well, and what sort of a detective does that make you, Eddie? Of course, if I wanted to know the answer to that, all I’d have to do is get in touch with my friend Michael Noonan in the collator’s office down at Mill Street Station. I’m sure he has a little card in his file with all sorts of information about you.”

“I’ve done nothin’ wrong. For fuck’s sake, you can’t just come barging in here—” Dolphin spluttered, glancing nervously at the open closet door.

“I’ve been meaning to give Michael a ring. Haven’t seen him in ages. That fella has the most phenomenal memory—never forgets anything. He could give you chapter and verse about every sort of robbery, large and small, that’s been perpetrated in these parts over the past five years. Isn’t that amazing? You’ve never seen such a memory.”

“All right, all right,” Dolphin said. “It was just a fuckin’ letter, all right? A couple of pages, handwritten. Going on about ‘I know what ye’re up to, ye bastard, and ye’ll never get away with it,’ and like that. There was something else as well, some sort of metal yoke, I don’t know what it was. But he fucked off out of here as soon as he read it. Forgot all about my retainer that was due.”

“Never mind about the retainer, Eddie. Describe this metal yoke for me.”

“It seemed like—I don’t know, a brooch or something. Two elephants, like this,” and he pushed his fists together, “buttin’ heads, like.” Devaney froze. Mina Osborne’s hair clip. What else could it be?

“How would anyone know to contact Osborne here?” Devaney asked.

“Must have seen one of my adverts. They’re not cheap either, them, and it’s all come out of my pocket so far.”

Osborne’s reaction to the body at the cutaway pushed its way to the front of Devaney’s mind. If there was no way to search a whole bog, there had to be some way to force Osborne’s hand. He’d put the pressure on around Bracklyn. Lucy Osborne knew more than she was willing to tell. And the lad—Devaney had seen him often enough at Lynch’s—might speak out of turn if pressed.

“Look, I’ve got to get home,” Dolphin said. “The wife was expecting me ages ago.”

Wife. Jesus. Devaney checked his own watch. Nearly nine o’clock, and he was an hour away from home at least. “I’ll be in touch,” he said to Dolphin. He might be able to find a phone and try to patch things up at home.

He jammed the keys into the ignition. How had it gotten so late? He darted through the city traffic, keeping an eye out for a phone box, seeing none along his route. Finally, at the outskirts of the city he saw one standing alone at the roadside. He pulled up and leapt from the car, fumbling for coins in his pocket. He lifted the telephone and was greeted by silence in place of the usual buzz, and only then noticed that the cord had been severed. He slammed the receiver down, and trudged back to the car. When he lifted the handle, it took him a split second to realize what had happened. Of all the fucking stupid—the car’s security system had locked the doors automatically. This whole adventure was turning into a colossal disaster. He landed a vicious kick on the nearest tire. Just then a fat droplet struck him in the left eye, then another, and another, and in the space of a few seconds he was wet to the skin in the pelting rain.

It was close to midnight when he reached home. He’d been able to flag down a couple with a mobile within five or ten minutes, but waiting for the locksmith to open the car took a good hour and a half. He’d tried phoning home on the borrowed mobile as well, but no one answered. He was still soaking, and must have been a bedraggled-looking sight when he pushed open the kitchen door. Nuala was sitting at the table with a cup of tea. She gave him a reproachful look that had become all too familiar.

“I had to cancel the meeting. You know, Gar, I’m not angry for myself,” she said wearily. “I’m really past that. But you completely forgot you were to take Roisin out to look at that fiddle tonight, didn’t you?”

Christ. That’s what had been niggling at him all day, the one thing he knew he was forgetting. He sat wearily in the chair opposite Nuala, but she rose from the table, and her look might as well have been a slap.

“She’s in bed, but I don’t think she’s asleep. You might tell her you’re sorry.”

He kept silent, knowing any attempts to explain at this stage would only make matters that much worse. She left him sitting there, and each footstep that took her away from him was like a blow to his heart. No case was worth this. He had once felt that they moved in tandem, in everything they did. He remembered drinking in the scent of her as if it were nourishment. The feeling was still there, but it had been buried under the avalanche of practicalities that jobs and responsibilities and life with three children had brought. He felt like rushing after her, tackling her to the ground if he had to, and burying his face in her softness. Instead he took a towel from the cupboard near the cooker, and began drying his hair as he climbed the stairs to speak to Roisin. She stirred when the light from the hall spilled into her room. He sat at the edge of her bed, looking into his daughter’s solemn eyes, their pupils large in the murky darkness.

“I’m so sorry, Roisin,” he said. “I got caught up in what I was doing, and the fiddle completely slipped my mind.”

“It’s all right, Daddy. I forgave you right away.” She leaned forward and patted his arm in a gesture of comfort. “I don’t think Mammy has. But don’t worry, she will.”

Devaney sat on the side of the bed, looking down at his shoes, trying to imagine how such a thing might come to pass.

17

Nora thought she was dreaming when her phone began to ring in the middle of the night. She often had nightmares that ended with a telephone ringing, unanswered, somewhere in the distance, but she gradually realized that this wasn’t a dream, and picked up the receiver beside the bed, feeling disoriented and panicky, and nearly deafened by the sound of her own heart clamoring in her chest.

“Hello?” When there was no response, she said again: “Hello?” She peered at the clock: 12:47. That meant that it was past six in the evening at home. She remembered the call she’d received from her father the night Triona’s body was found, and felt a stab of apprehension. When there was still no response, she heard her own tentative question: “Daddy?”

The voice in the receiver was not her father, but a disembodied, breathy whisper that was neither male nor female: “Leave it alone.”

“Leave what alone?” Nora demanded. “Who is this?” For a fragment of a second, her thoughts concentrated on Triona. She was sure she’d told no one here about her sister’s death.

“They’re better off.”

“What do you mean? Who’s better off?” Nora’s brain pitched wildly in its half-conscious state, until she hit upon another possible meaning.

“Do you mean Mina and Christopher Osborne? What do you know about it?” The only response she received this time was the flat-line buzz of a dial tone.

Was it just a crank call, some bizarre accident? And if it was about Mina Osborne, why should anyone call her? Who knew she was even interested? Nora searched her memory, trying to figure out who knew she’d been out at Bracklyn House. She sat in the dark amid the rumpled bedclothes for several more minutes, trying to work out some answers to a relentless torrent of questions. Not least of all, she had to convince herself that the call had actually happened.

It was no use trying to sleep now. Her eyes traveled the room, and rested for a moment upon the laptop sitting on her desk. There was one simple way to find more about the basic facts of Mina Osborne’s disappearance. She crossed to the desk and pressed the necessary keys to connect to the Internet. The Irish Times website came up before her, and she quickly went to its archive search. She typed in “Mina Osborne,” but hesitated before pressing “Search.” What was she prepared to find out? And what about the consequences? She and Cormac might find themselves in trouble if they knew any more. This was her own private compulsion; why drag him into it? And yet he was the one who had agreed to go back to Bracklyn. Perhaps his own curiosity was as great as her own. Nora hesitated a second longer, then pressed the button. In an instant, a list of articles appeared. She scanned the headlines:

She opened the first story, dated almost three years ago:

Nora devoured every scrap of information, alert for any discrepancy, any fissure that might serve at least as a temporary foothold. Looking through the list again, another headline jumped out at her:

Gardai to Examine Serial Killer Possibility

The Garda commissioner, Mr Patrick Neary, has ordered the setting up of a special detective task force to examine cases of missing and murdered women, and to see if there is a serial killer in this State. The move was prompted by the disappearance on August 12th of Fidelma O’Connor (20), a student nurse last seen walking near her home in Abbeyleix, Co Laois. There are similarities between the disappearances, mainly that the women were last seen walking along or near busy rural roads.

What better way to avoid suspicion than to make your wife’s disappearance look like the work of a serial killer? It could work, especially in the absence of any physical evidence. The next article gave a list of all seven disappearance cases that had been reopened. None of the seven women had ever been found. All had been alone when they disappeared. None had had a child with her, except Mina Osborne. Nora remembered Devaney’s discomfort about this detail. There was something else as well, she learned from this newspaper account. The seven women were nineteen or twenty, and Mina Osborne was twenty-nine years old. Nora stared absently at the words glowing on her computer screen. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning. She remembered the look on Jeremy Osborne’s face when she asked if he’d been watching that video. He hadn’t been allowed to answer. If she played it right, maybe she could get the boy to talk.

18

Cormac threw off the sheets and sat up on the edge of the high bed. It was no use trying to sleep; he’d be better off doing something else. He switched on the lamp and checked his wristwatch on the bedside table. Twenty past two.

Perhaps he shouldn’t have gone back to Kilgarvan. The visit had only dredged up the confusion he’d thought was long past. He’d come back last night, and flung himself into his solitary work at the priory all day long. He should be worn out, and yet his mind would not rest. He had lain in the bed in that hyperaware state that sometimes accompanies sleeplessness, eyes open, trying to make out the looming shapes in the unfamiliar darkness. The room felt airless, despite the window he’d cracked open.

He hoped Nora was getting on all right in Dublin. For a brief second, he allowed himself to imagine her pale neck and shoulders contrasted against the dark green sheets on the bed beside him. He put out a hand and felt the warmth of the place he had lain. Enough of that, he told himself. It wasn’t that he was a monk. He’d been involved, at various times, with several intelligent, generous women he’d cared for deeply; every one had taught him a great deal. But in each relationship, he’d somehow felt more like an observer than a full participant. He should have felt like a participant, surely. And he knew they had perceived this lack in him, since each one had called it quits before he managed to figure out what wasn’t quite right. Now Nora Gavin had managed to unsettle him in a way he’d never been unsettled before. He remembered the expression on her face as she sang, the way her smoky voice dipped and slid so easily through the notes, finding unexpected intervals that had pierced him through. But it wasn’t just the beauty of her voice that struck him; he also marveled at her bravery. Singing unaccompanied must be the next thing to stripping off in a room full of people.

With a sigh, Cormac put on his glasses, and crossed to sit at the table in the tower alcove, where he’d laid out all his maps, notes, and photographs of the priory dig. He switched on the table lamp and opened the map book to the page where the village of Dunbeg appeared. Six inches to the mile. The purpose of these maps was to help pinpoint the location of archaeological activity; they showed the subtle curve of every road and stream, tiny lanes and byways that were invisible on any road map, all kinds of ruins and earthworks otherwise known only to farmers and their cattle. He looked at the thin black lines that represented features of the landscape, the built environment, and the empty white spaces between. The excavation at the priory was in just such an empty space. How often had he and his colleagues dug for days, even weeks or months on a site, only to end up filing a report that noted ‘nothing of archaeological significance’? What if he and Nora helped Devaney delve into the lives of these people and it turned out there was no reason to do so? What if Mina Osborne had simply walked away? It could have happened that way. Any other possibility meant that someone at Bracklyn House could be involved in murder. Mrs. Pilkington said there were some in the village who’d already convicted Hugh Osborne.

Perhaps Brendan McGann was right, and he should just pack it in. But why was Brendan so anxious to get rid of him? Cormac thought of the man’s face at the priory. There could be any number of reasons for such ill will, but he wondered whether Brendan could hate Hugh Osborne enough to harm his family…. Would you listen to yourself? Prattling on like some bloody policeman, he thought. No wonder he couldn’t sleep. And they were no closer to solving the riddle of the cailin rua, which was the primary reason they’d come back here. Cormac took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, then leaned forward and opened the window as far as it would go, and switched off the lamp at his elbow. The moon had set, so the darkness was almost palpable. Looking out into the blackness beyond his window, he tried to let a Zen-like feeling of nothingness replace the ticking of his thoughts. He would finish the dig as soon as possible, and be off, and worry no more about this. He pushed the thought away, focusing once more on the oblong darkness, trying to imagine himself floating in the center of that darkness, when he saw at its edge, and only for the briefest instant, a tiny speck of light. Cormac quickly put his glasses back on, and strained to make it out again, but no light flickered. The night was still. He waited, feeling his breath flowing in and out. Just as he decided that he must have imagined it, the light appeared again, this time approaching rapidly. The bright spot jogged up and down, like a torch being carried over rough terrain. Then the jogging motion stopped, and the light moved steadily closer, disappearing for a few seconds at a time. It seemed to be moving through the wood that lay to the southeast of Bracklyn House, flickering as it traveled through the trees, then becoming a steady beacon as it skirted the edge of the wood and drew nearer to the house. When it reached what Cormac judged to be a wall at the edge of the back lawn, the light abruptly vanished altogether.

What was it Devaney had said? Anything that seems out of the ordinary. But he couldn’t be sure what this was, or even whether it had to do with someone belonging to this house. Leave it, the voice in his head urged. Get back into the bed and try to salvage a few hours’ sleep. Instead Cormac switched the lamp on again, threw on a pullover and a pair of jeans, and stepped into his shoes. He picked up the small torch he kept in his site kit, testing the strength of its beam against the palm of his hand. Couldn’t sleep, he’d say if he encountered anyone. Thought I’d help myself to a nightcap if that’s all right. He checked the hallway outside his room. All was quiet. He stepped lightly down the carpeted stairway to the foyer and, seeing no one, continued down the stairs to the kitchen. Hugh had cooked them a small supper a few hours ago, and the scent of sauteed onions still hung faintly in the air. The kitchen, too, was dark and quiet, and Cormac began to feel as though he might have dreamt the whole thing. He stood still, listening, then shone his flashlight on the door that led outside. It was bolted shut. He opened the door and stepped outside to look along the back wall of the house. Someone could have entered, he supposed, but gone up by one of the side stairs; there was one set just outside his bedroom, and he guessed that another similar communicating stairwell ran between floors at the opposite end of the house. He felt suddenly foolish at his curiosity, and annoyed with himself for giving in to it so easily. He closed and bolted the door again, and was just turning to go up the stairs to the foyer when he heard the sound of a wooden chair skidding across a stone floor. The noise came from behind a door just to his left, opposite the kitchen at the foot of the stairs. The door was slightly ajar, so he gave it a tentative push, and found himself in a whitewashed stone hallway with several open doorways. A gash of light fell from one.

Hugh Osborne was sitting at a table, one eye closed in concentration as he threaded a large needle with sturdy white cord. The single lamp on the table cast a warm yellow glow. At his elbow on a workbench were the guts of a book, signatures neatly stacked, and an empty leather-clad cover. A series of different-size tools, including a variety of awls, presses, and clamps, hung on a wooden rack within arm’s reach. The ceiling in the room was quite low, and shiny black paneling reached halfway up the walls; the rest was whitewashed like the hallway, hung with antique maps in plain black frames. To the left of the doorway was built-in shelving, painted glossy black like the paneling, and containing many leather-bound books, which gave the small space the familiar musty smell of a library.

Cormac cleared his throat in greeting. “Evening.”

Osborne turned on his stool, peering over a pair of magnifying glasses that had slid down his nose. He looked worn, the lines in his face exaggerated by the light of his work lamp.

“Ah, Cormac.” He seemed neither surprised, nor particularly displeased, to see his guest wandering about this time of night. “Don’t tell me that sleep has escaped you as well.”

“It has. I just came down to get something to drink and heard a noise. What’s that you’re working at?”

“Just putting a sturdier binding on my old copy of Tom Jones. There’s some single-malt in the cupboard there to your left; if you’d have a drop, I’ll join you.”

Cormac moved to pour them each a measure of whiskey in the pair of tumblers he found beside the bottle. If Osborne had been outside, he’d made a smooth transition. He wore a dark blue sweater and gray wool dress trousers, not the usual kit for knocking about in the woods.

“Oh, by the way,” Osborne said, “I meant to mention to you this evening that I have to go to London tomorrow on some business. Just for a few days. I hope you and Dr. Gavin will be all right here on your own.”

“No bother, I’m sure we’ll be fine.” As he poured the whiskey, Cormac found himself checking Osborne’s footwear for any traces of mud or dew, but the man’s feet were ensconced in a pair of worn leather bedroom slippers. Cormac capped the bottle and held out a drink to Hugh Osborne. “To books with backbone.”

“Indeed,” Osborne said. “Where would literature be without a spine?”

Cormac sat on a cot against the wall and let his eyes travel around the room. Three butterfly nets, each one larger than the last, stood in one corner. The cot made up one side of a sitting area in front of the small fireplace, along with a slipcovered armchair and a threadbare Oriental rug on the stone floor. A meager turf fire helped dispel the evening’s chill. Despite the few attempts to make it cozy, the room was bare as a monk’s cell compared with the heavy opulence of the upstairs rooms. Osborne saw his appraising look.

“I come here often,” he said. “It helps to have something to do.” He spoke simply, without self-pity. Osborne looked away, and Cormac made no attempt to reply. What could one say to a man preparing to live the rest of his life in uncertainty? Instead, he sat on the cot, glass in hand, and let the silence rest between them for a moment. It was curious that no matter how objectively he might consider the possible role Osborne played in his wife’s disappearance, all suspicion immediately vanished when he was in a room with the man. Cormac supposed he’d never make a good policeman for just that reason. When he finally did speak, it was to change the subject, for which Osborne was apparently grateful.

“I’ve been admiring your maps,” he said. “They look authentic.”

Osborne nodded. “That one”—he gestured to the frame hanging above the fireplace—“was the first comprehensive map of this area, drawn up by Hugo Osborne, the chap in the portrait I showed you upstairs. I think I mentioned he was one of William Petty’s men. The story is that he surveyed everything himself.” Cormac stood to peruse the map. According to this drawing, the estate consisted of a large area around the house, and various other small pockets and parcels of land scattered throughout the parish. There was a crude, three-dimensional view of Bracklyn House itself, and the nearby priory, the tower, heavily wooded areas, small clusters of houses, the lake and surrounding bogland, and in the lower right corner, a computation of all the estate’s arable lands.

“No mention of Drumcleggan here at all,” Cormac said.

“That’s what I first noticed about it as well. Says something about the attitude of the conqueror, doesn’t it? Fortunately, the visual detail is spot-on. When you think about it, our vocations aren’t all that different. When you excavate a site, you’re cutting down through the actual physical evidence of human activity that took place there; in studying place-names, I dig through layers as well, but they’re usually layers of maps and papers, all jumbled up with Irish names, English, Danish, Norman names, some altered beyond all recognition. Bad translations are my greatest challenge.”

“Are all those tapes?” Cormac asked, indicating the rows of white reel-to-reel tape boxes he’d just noticed lining the shelves behind the door.

Osborne was warming to his subject now. “Yes, my own project. Interviews with old people from the area, on the subject of place-names. It’s amazing what some of them can recall, from years and years ago, if only one thinks to ask. And how place-names in particular have a tendency to stick where they’ve been put down. I’m afraid I’ve let the project slide recently, but there’s a whole lot of valuable documentation there; I’m thinking I should resurrect it one day. You should see some of the blunders being perpetuated on the maps and road signs. If you’re going to return to the old names, isn’t it important that they be correct, and not just quasi-Gaelic versions of bad translations? At some point it does get down to academic hair-splitting, I grant you, but there is principle involved.” He gave a wry smile. “Regretting now you ever got me started?”

“Ah—actually, I did mean to ask how you became interested in bookbinding,” Cormac said, consciously playing into Hugh Osborne’s self-deprecation. Osborne drained his glass and rose briefly to pour them each another tott. Cormac was relieved that his remark had been received in the spirit in which it was intended.

“At university, actually. I read history as an undergraduate, and was amazed that they’d actually let us handle all those rare papers and manuscripts. The conservator at the library used to let me lend a hand now and again. I set up this workshop a few years ago. Bookbinding is only a sideline, really; maps and documents are my speciality. I do a bit of work for libraries and collectors, partly because it brings in a few shillings, but mostly because I enjoy it. We’ve a whole lot of old family papers about the place, deeds and records of births, letters from a few historical figures that I think are worth preserving for the stories they tell.” His voice softened slightly, and Cormac felt he was about to receive a confidence that might not have been shared, if it weren’t for the hour and their mutual malady. “All things I’d hoped to pass along to my son, as they’d been passed to me.” Osborne raised his face slightly, and the two men regarded one another for a moment.

Cormac got the sense that he could change the subject a hundred times, but the conversation would turn back to this place time and time again. He regretted harboring suspicion against this man. He pictured Hugh Osborne as a sea captain lashed to his wheel, staying his course through gales, high seas, and necromancers’ spells. After a moment, Osborne returned to his work, and Cormac’s eyes came to rest on a large pair of black wellingtons that stood in the shadow of the workbench. Was it his imagination, or perhaps a trick of the light, he wondered, or was their dark surface glistening with wetness?