Lake of Sorrows

1

Eleven days after Desmond Quill’s murderous spree had ended at Loughnabrone, the cottage at the Crosses was nearly restored to its former order. In the aftermath, Nora had focused on cleaning the house. It was something to do, something concrete. On hands and knees, scrubbing the wine stains from the floor and walls, she reflected that it might easily have been her blood spilled here. What had stopped Quill from slitting her throat—and why was she obsessed with the thought, unable to let it go? She knew enough about survivor guilt by now to recognize the signs, but that didn’t prevent her from seeing it again and again: Dominic Brazil’s inert body slumping sideways, the red flood creeping down Brona Scully’s chest, Quill’s dead hand grasping the bright gold collar.

Having something useful to do had helped to break up those visions over the past few days; they came less frequently now. And every minute she spent clearing away the damage down here was another minute she could avoid going upstairs and packing her suitcase, avoid thinking about how her time with Cormac was nearly at an end. The future loomed before her, unknown.

She considered the nameless, faceless creature her brother-in-law was supposed to be marrying in only four weeks’ time. It was easy to imagine the woman as reckless or desperate, perhaps not terribly bright. But Triona, beautiful and brilliant and usually very cautious, had fallen for him as well. Intelligence had little to do with it. Every relationship meant taking a chance, leaping headlong into the void, suspended by hope. And only some were lucky. She remembered the jumble of silk and the handcuffs from Owen Cadogan’s hidden stash, and the thin leather cord she’d seen around Ursula Downes’s throat. Maybe Ursula had been taking ever-greater chances, flirting with death, trusting that Owen Cadogan, or Desmond Quill, or whoever, for whatever reason, would loosen the cord in time to pull her back from the brink. For the first time Nora saw Ursula’s actions for what they had been, a cry for understanding and connection, born of a need as deep as that for food or water, or shelter, or warmth. Even Desmond Quill’s attraction to blood could be seen that way. A deep need for connection to something beyond themselves had been the very reason that ancient lake dwellers made sacrifices, sank weapons, gold—sometimes even fellow creatures—into dark and seemingly bottomless pools. Quill had been right about one thing, Nora thought; that we shouldn’t look back with contempt before taking a closer look at our own currently acceptable behavior.

She looked around at the books stacked back on the desk, the pictures repaired and rehung, the crockery—what was left of it—back on the sideboard shelves. She opened the box of new stoneware she’d found to replace the set Desmond Quill had smashed. Everything else that had been shattered in the past few days would be much harder to repair or put right, but this much was easy. Each piece was wrapped in crumpled tissue paper, cushioned against its fellows for transport. As she took out each new plate, unwrapped it and set it on the sideboard shelf, the same thoughts kept tumbling through her consciousness: Quill had known enough pertinent details about sacrificial victims found in bogs, and he had used that information to mislead the police into thinking that the recent murders might be some sort of ritual killings, stringing them together with Danny Brazil’s death. They had been rituals of a kind—Desmond Quill’s own blood homage to the talisman, the sacred object he sought.

Nora stood back to observe her work. The last plate was in place, and the dresser looked almost as it had before Quill had torn up the cottage looking for the drawing of the Loughnabrone collar. That was what they were calling it, now that it was safely in the hands of Niall Dawson and his fellow curators at the National Museum. The newspapers were calling it the find of the century, the television reporters breathlessly describing this spectacular new addition to the material heritage of Ireland. Once it had been examined, analyzed, and authenticated, it would no doubt go on display at the National Museum. She couldn’t help thinking of all the schoolchildren Quill had so scornfully envisioned, trooping past it, bored and jostling one another, oblivious to the collar’s ancient power and its recent bloody history.

It suddenly struck her that Quill had destroyed more than was necessary in searching for the drawing. He knew the drawing was in the book; all he’d had to do was find the book and take it. But he’d done much more: smashed all the crockery and the wine bottles, knocked over furniture; pulled random books out of the bookcases that lined the walls. This room was filled with evidence of a virulent anger and hatred, something she hadn’t witnessed in the admittedly brief time she’d spent with him. Contempt, yes, annoyance, condescension; but nothing like this. It was too late to find out what had triggered this fury. No one would ever know for certain.

Nora attacked the loose photos that had been dumped on the floor. She had previously just scooped them up and put them back in the box, but now she sat down to reorder them. She had a box like this herself, photographs that wouldn’t fit in any album, odd sizes, or single shots of events no one remembered. Most of these pictures were ruined, curled and with mottled, berrylike wine stains. She’d have to take them back to Evelyn and let her decide what to do with them. She started sorting through old black-and-white photographs of Gabriel and Evelyn in their younger days; snapshots taken at parties where everyone was drinking and smoking; pictures of Gabriel at work on an excavation; a copy of an image she’d seen at Cormac’s house, of himself and Gabriel in a trench, proudly displaying their discovery. About halfway into the pile was a faded color photo, crumpled into a ball. She opened up the wrinkled print and saw the image, faded now; Gabriel and Evelyn McCrossan, and Desmond Quill. Their hair had been darker in those days, their faces unlined. From the clothing, the men’s haircuts and long sideburns, Nora guessed the picture had been taken sometime in the early seventies.

Quill’s words came back to her like an echo. Haven’t you ever wanted something so much, Dr. Gavin, that you were willing to do anything to get it? She’d assumed he was talking about the collar, but perhaps he had meant something else as well. It suddenly came to her what Quill had meant out on the bog about Evelyn McCrossan being careless, leaving a key where anyone could find it. A shiver slid down her spine.

The front doorbell sounded, and Nora instinctively shoved the picture back in the box and put the lid on. She checked the small diamond-shaped window and saw Liam Ward standing outside the cottage door, head bent, his expression thoughtful.

“Good evening, Dr. Gavin. Sorry to be disturbing you again—”

“Not at all. Please come in, Detective.” Cormac was just coming down the stairs.

“Good, I’m glad you’re both here,” Ward said. “I have a bit of official business, one last question, if you have a minute.”

Nora was about to show Ward into the sitting room when Cormac’s mobile sounded. He looked at the number and said, “Sorry, I should take this.” He headed back upstairs, and they could hear him answer. “Hello, Mrs. Foyle. Is everything all right?” Geraldine Foyle was the neighbor Cormac had asked to check on his father from time to time, at the house up in Donegal—something that had proved a source of tension with his father several times before. Nora hoped it wasn’t something more serious this time.

She led Ward into the sitting room, where they settled in a couple of chairs near the fire, but the policeman seemed somewhat ill at ease. Nora studied his ever-present olive raincoat, the slender wrists and hands that emerged from the sleeves, the long nose and soft brown eyes, the wiry salt-and-pepper hair. This was a man who projected an air of gentleness, and Nora wondered again what had pulled him into police work. No doubt the same thing that drove her and countless others: intense curiosity, a need to know, to learn, to connect the dots—though now it seemed to her that the more you actually learned, the less it was possible to understand.

“I’ve just come from Michael Scully’s,” Ward said. “He said you’d be taking him to the hospital to see Brona in a while. I wanted to thank you for that, and for everything you’ve done.”

“It’s nothing. We’re happy to do it. You said you have one last question, but I hope you don’t mind if I have a few as well. I’ve been trying to work out how everything fits. Nothing is straightforward, is it? It all seems tangled up. How do you begin to unravel it?”

“Like untying a knot, I suppose; one thread at a time.”

“How do you know when to stop?”

“In my case, it’s usually not a matter of choice. Other cases begin pressing, and eventually the old ones have to be abandoned. It’s got to be that way; otherwise there would be no end. Not what you wanted to hear, is it?”

“No, but I understand. That’s the way it happens.”

Cormac rejoined them wearing a worried expression.

“Is everything all right?” Nora asked.

“It’s nothing urgent. I can tell you later,” he said. “Carry on.”

“I was just going to tell you that we found a lot of interesting material in Desmond Quill’s house in Dublin, including keys to a lockup that was filled with artifacts—mainly Iron Age, from what the experts are telling us. There were also detailed records showing that he’d been doing a great business in stolen antiquities, items nicked from museums. No one even knew they were missing. In addition to the items he’d sold, there were hundreds more he’d apparently kept for himself, all cataloged and documented. Quill was working for the National Museum at the time of the Loughnabrone hoard, overseeing conservation of items from the hoard. He would have had contact with the Brazils, working out here.”

“And they showed him drawings of the things they’d found,” Nora said. “Things they hadn’t handed over to the museum. Can you imagine someone like Quill, only able to see a drawing of that collar, one of the most magnificent archaeological finds in the last fifty years? It must have driven him nearly mad. You said his obsession was Iron Age artifacts?”

“There are a few items from other periods, but that seems to have been his particular fancy. All the items he’d kept were Iron Age, give or take a century.”

“That may be one reason he was so interested in the whole idea of triple death,” Nora said. “He tried to explain to me how he saw bloodletting and sacrifice as spiritual, as though he was giving Ursula and Rachel and Dominic Brazil something greater by killing them. He talked about the astonishing beauty of blood.”

Ward said, “We found at least a half-dozen ceremonial bronze daggers in the lockup, like the one he used on Dominic Brazil, and probably on the other victims as well.”

“One thing I don’t understand,” Nora said, “is why the Brazils would try to sell the collar in the first place. Why wouldn’t they be satisfied with a reward? Even if it was only a fraction of what the collar was worth, it would have been more money than they were ever likely to see in their lifetimes.”

“But to qualify for it,” Cormac said, “they’d have had to prove that they had acquired the collar legally, legitimately. The minute they moved it from the findspot, the provenance became suspect, and their claim would most likely be rendered invalid. Under the treasure-trove laws, the state could have seized the collar, and the Brazils wouldn’t have seen a penny of any reward. Quill was probably smart enough to make it seem as though their best choice was to turn it over to him.”

“And it’s easy for us to sit here and analyze after the fact. Situations like that only seem simple from the outside,” Ward said. “Mistrust is a very corrosive force, especially among three people. If Quill set the Brazils against each other, he knew exactly what he was doing. He probably hoped for a betrayal of some kind; he just didn’t anticipate that he would end up without the collar.”

“Here’s something I don’t understand,” Cormac said. “Why did Quill wait so long to try to find the collar? Danny Brazil disappeared twenty-six years ago. If Quill didn’t believe Danny went off on his own, why would he not try to find him, prove that he never went anywhere?”

Ward said, “I imagine he did try to trace Danny, and came up empty. He probably even suspected that Dominic had done away with his brother, but without a body or some evidence of foul play, there was no way he could prove anything.”

Nora said, “But from what Quill said out on the bog, it sounded as if he’d kept pressure on Dominic Brazil all these years. Dominic never broke, because he didn’t know where the collar was. But Quill didn’t know that for certain. He couldn’t risk killing the person who was his only possible lead. But when Danny Brazil turned up, Quill knew exactly who was responsible. He must have heard enough about Danny’s body to assume it was a triple death, and he made sure that his victims’ wounds matched Danny’s—maybe to throw you off, or maybe because he felt some attraction to the method, some connection to the idea of sacrifice. I think in some strange way, it pleased him to see the ritual angle being pursued.”

“All of this was buried for so long. What opened it up again?” Cormac asked.

“I suppose you could think of Ursula as the catalyst,” Nora said. “When Danny Brazil’s body turned up, she started investigating rumors about gold in the Loughnabrone hoard, and eventually she found the drawing. She knew it was a key to finding the collar, but she needed Quill’s help to decipher it.”

“The map wouldn’t make sense to anyone who didn’t know the area,” Ward said, “but to someone who’d been here dozens of times, as Quill had, it made perfect sense. He could see the lakeshore and the nine hives, and the inscription provided another clue. The bees made a nice protective shield. Who would think to look underneath a hive?”

Cormac pulled at his ear, puzzled. “I understand the whole connection between Quill and the Brazils, but what I can’t understand is how Ursula managed to figure it out.”

“Sometimes it’s just a tiny thing,” said Nora. “Ursula must have seen the same photograph that I saw hanging in Owen Cadogan’s office, showing the Brazils with their discovery. Desmond Quill was in the picture too; you couldn’t see his face, but he was wearing a tiepin that he still wore all these years later—a pretty distinctive triskelion. It took me a while to put my finger on where I’d seen it before. Once you start thinking about it, Quill is quite recognizable in the picture—something in the way he holds himself, that upright bearing. I can’t explain it beyond that, really.” It remained a small twist of fate, she thought, a mystery that would probably never be solved. She turned her attention to Ward. “No word on Teresa Brazil?”

“No, not a word,” Ward said. “No body turned up in the Brazil house, as you’ve probably heard by now. It’s as if she vanished into the air. The fire investigators tell me all the oxygen tanks and the gas taps on the cooker had been left open. All it took was one spark from the oil burner to set it off. Have you ever seen the aftermath of a gas explosion? The house was completely leveled. Nothing left.”

Nora had not mentioned to anyone how the explosion had transformed the sequence of events—how Quill’s attention turning to the Brazils’ house as it was blown to bits had given her one last chance to fight back. Or how the resulting conflagration had brought the fire brigade so quickly, and ultimately saved Brona’s life. All that, and more besides, they owed to Teresa Brazil. She had saved them both by destroying the lie she had lived for so long. Nora imagined her leaving the house, pulling the door shut to the hiss of gas escaping.

“Will you be staying the rest of the summer, then?” Ward asked.

Nora looked over at Cormac before answering. “That’s another thing we wanted to mention. I’m headed back to Dublin tomorrow, for the postmortem on the Loughnabrone bog man.”

“What is it you hope to find out from him?” Ward asked. He sounded genuinely curious.

“We look for a rough date and cause of death, any pathologies, and explanations for anything that does turn up. For my own research, I’m looking for a better understanding of what happens to preserve a body in a bog. We may be able to analyze his stomach contents, and that can tell us a lot about his diet and about social conditions at the time. I’m sure he’ll stir up a whole chorus of new debate about sacrifice. We look for all the same things you look for in investigating a crime, I suppose—who and how, but most of all why. It all comes down to human motivation in the end.”

“And what about you, Dr. Maguire? Is that your sort of thing as well?”

Cormac’s face darkened, and he glanced at Nora. “Normally it would be, but I won’t be able to go. I’ve just had a call from the woman who looks in on my father. She says he’s not doing very well at the moment, so I’m heading up there tomorrow. I’m sorry, Nora.”

Ward put his hands on his knees and stood up, his curly head nearly touching the low ceiling. “I’d better be off.”

He lifted his raincoat from the chair and turned toward the door, but Nora stopped him.

“Did we answer your question, Detective Ward? When you arrived you said you had a question for us.”

“Oh, yes—I almost forgot. It’s this,” he said, reaching into his breast pocket and pulling out a small black-and-white photograph, which he showed to each of them in turn. The picture showed a dark-eyed young woman in a peasant blouse. She was looking back at the camera over her left shoulder, and her eyes held the photographer in a frank and playful gaze. The immediate impression was one of luminous youth and startling intimacy. “Do either of you recognize this woman?” Ward asked.

“Yes, of course,” Cormac said. “I’m surprised you don’t know her yourself. It’s Evelyn McCrossan, the woman who owns this house. It’s an old photograph, though. She’s over sixty now.”

“The name on the back here is Evelyn Fitzgerald.”

“That was her family name, before she married,” Cormac said. “Where did you get this picture?”

“From a locked drawer in a desk at Desmond Quill’s house in Dublin. There were nearly a hundred photographs of the same woman—some taken a long time ago, like this one, and dozens taken more recently. Some were dated in the past few months.” The chill that had fingered Nora’s spine returned. Ward asked, “Any idea why Quill was so interested in Evelyn McCrossan?”

“Not a clue,” Cormac said, and Nora could only shake her head. One photograph in a jumble didn’t mean anything. Her heart fluttered as she spoke. “I suppose it wouldn’t be too startling if Quill knew Gabriel and Evelyn. He was an archaeologist years ago, and worked at the National Museum; I’m sure he and Gabriel were probably acquainted from way back. And if that was the case, he couldn’t help knowing Evelyn as well.”

“You can always ring me if you think of anything further,” Ward said. “When a suspect dies before the whole case is resolved, there are always these questions without answers. I do appreciate your time.”

As soon as Ward had gone, Nora went to the sideboard, to the box where she’d hidden the photograph of Quill with the McCrossans. She turned it over and read the inscription: Desmond, Evelyn, and Gabriel, Loughnabrone, 1967. She held it out to Cormac. “I found this photograph of the three of them this morning,” she said. “What year were Gabriel and Evelyn married?”

“I think about 1969 or ’70. I’m not exactly sure.”

“But they weren’t married when this picture was taken?”

“No, definitely not.” The question hung between them, unasked, unanswered.

“If they knew each other, I wonder why Gabriel never mentioned Quill. Maybe they parted ways, had a falling out.”

“Over Evelyn?”

“I suppose it’s possible.”

Nora studied the grainy faces in the photo. Did the atmosphere seem strained somehow, as if the two men were vying for the affections of the beautiful girl who sat between them? Quill’s arm snaked up behind Evelyn’s back on the snug cushion—a proprietary gesture. But how could you see the nuances of relationships in a snapshot, a fleeting moment frozen in time? They knew who had ultimately won Evelyn’s affections, and it was not Desmond Quill.

Nora said, “If Quill was interested in Evelyn, then some of the things he said to Dominic Brazil down at the lake—things about losing a treasure worth more than gold—make a lot more sense. Maybe he felt he deserved the collar, as compensation or reparation for some slight he’d suffered. Rejection by Evelyn would be one explanation.”

“Jesus, poor Evelyn. I’m sure she’d no notion about any of this.”

“Now that Quill is dead, surely it’s all over.” Nora slipped the photograph from Cormac’s hand; before he could object she had lit a match under it and cast it into the ashes in the fireplace. She watched the edges curl and blacken. The last fragment of the image to disappear was Desmond Quill’s smiling face. With any luck, Evelyn might be spared the anguish of being Quill’s final, posthumous victim.

2

Cormac dropped Michael Scully and Nora at the hospital’s front entrance, and Nora stood by anxiously as Michael climbed out of the passenger seat. He moved slowly, but she wasn’t sure how much assistance to give, and didn’t know whether he might be offended by the offer of a wheelchair. When they’d made it through the sliding doors into the hospital foyer, Scully turned to her and tipped his head toward several wheelchairs that stood waiting just inside the entrance. “I think it may be a good idea to take a lift in one of those,” he said, “if you wouldn’t mind.”

She went to fetch one of the wheelchairs, and Michael sank into it, exhausted, though he’d walked only about thirty yards from the car. Taking her place behind the chair, Nora looked down at his thin shoulders moving up and down from the effort of breathing, his face showing the weariness of constant pain. His hands gripped the wheelchair’s arms, and she saw the veins standing out between the tendons. They would probably not meet again, after she left this place.

As they approached Brona’s room, Michael Scully raised a hand for Nora to stop the wheelchair outside the door. He looked in at his daughter, asleep in the bed, her injured throat still swathed in bandages. Brona had lost quite a lot of blood by the time they got her to the hospital, so her condition had been critical for the first couple of days, but she seemed to have suffered no brain damage from oxygen deprivation. In the past several days she was much improved, and yesterday they’d found her sitting up in bed. She would probably have a scar, but by some miracle Quill’s blade had missed the major vessels in her throat.

“Let her be,” Scully said. “I can wait a few minutes to see her.” Nora turned the chair around, and they went back down the hospital corridor in silence.

Scully finally spoke. “I’ve been thinking. There’s not much more I could do for Brona, even if I were going to be here. She’ll have to make her own decisions. But I want to be sure that she can make up her own mind, and not have others trying to do it for her.”

“I’m sorry that we have to go away tomorrow,” Nora said. “How will you manage your doctor visits?”

“I’ll drive myself as long as I can, and when she’s recovered, Brona can drive me, if I’m not able.” He looked at Nora’s startled expression. “Oh, yes, she has a driving license, and a Leaving Cert. She’s a very capable, independent young woman. But you can see the kinds of preconceived notions she faces, even from people like yourself.”

“I shouldn’t have assumed—”

“Nearly everyone does,” Scully said. “No harm done.”

“I’m curious about how you communicate—or I suppose a better question would be how Brona communicates with you. How does she tell you what she feels, what she needs?”

“You’d be amazed what can pass between two people without a word being spoken,” Scully said. “I’m not saying it isn’t difficult, but we’ve always managed. Even people who speak have trouble making themselves understood.”

Nora felt the words acutely, knowing how difficult it had been for her to tell Cormac she was leaving. “But she doesn’t write, she doesn’t use any kind of sign language?”

“Not really,” Scully said. “It’s difficult to describe. She does make herself understood in our daily life. It must be a terribly lonely life for her, out here on the bog with me, but she doesn’t complain. She cooks and keeps the house, she helps me with my work, she reads. We used to look forward to Gabriel and Evelyn coming down every summer; it took away some of the loneliness for a while. I sometimes thought of leaving here, but I didn’t have a notion where else to go. Where on this earth can a person be spared from loneliness? And I understand it’s sometimes far worse when you’re surrounded by people. Here it may rain enough to drown fish; it may not be the most picturesque part of Ireland nor the most desirable—but it’s my place, this.”

As he was speaking, Nora felt the stab of longing for her other home, where snow buried broken cornstalks in the prairie winter, where the river bluffs glowed golden in the autumn light, and the glorious, towering sky dwarfed all that lay beneath it. There was a great flatness and openness that she missed dreadfully, even out here on the black bog, and she envied Michael Scully that feeling of belonging somewhere.

“I’ve decided that I’d prefer not to be in here, when the time comes,” Scully said. “I’d rather be in my own home, on my own patch. I know I’ve asked a lot of you already, but is there some way you could help me arrange that?”

“If you’re talking about hospice care, yes, I could give you the names of some people who would be able to help.”

They continued down the corridor, both carried in the constant flow of their own thoughts. Nora wondered what would happen to the hoard of knowledge Michael Scully had built up over a lifetime—more than a lifetime, if you considered all the people from whom he’d gleaned bits of history over the years. He had all those incredible files, of course; but reading them wasn’t the same thing as walking out with someone who could take you to the very spot where three ravens had sung over the grave of a king.

Down the long corridor a white-coated figure was approaching, a brisk, clean-shaven young man, probably a resident. Nora stopped the wheelchair when he reached them, and saw the nervous way the man gripped the chair’s arm and ducked his head to speak to Michael. “Mr. Scully, before you go in to your daughter, I wonder if we might have a word—in private.”

Scully said to Nora, “Dr. Conran has been minding Brona.” He turned back to the physician. “This is Dr. Gavin, who has been looking after me. If she doesn’t mind, I’d like to have her with me, whatever the news.”

“As you wish,” said Conran. “We can go into the office here.” He led them a few yards down the hallway into a small room where three cluttered desks were pushed into the corners. The young doctor began cautiously: “Yesterday, as you know, Brona seemed to be having quite a bit of pain in her lower back and legs, and this morning we decided we should check to see whether she might be suffering from a compression fracture. It’s routine, when scheduling a pelvic X ray, to perform several blood tests before exposing a woman of child-bearing age to even such a small amount of radiation. One of those routine blood tests is a pregnancy test.” He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I have to inform you that your daughter’s result on that test came back positive.”

“Are you saying Brona is pregnant?”

The doctor ran one hand over his chin. “Yes. I had the laboratory run the test a second time, to be sure it wasn’t a false positive. The thing is, Mr. Scully, when your daughter was brought into casualty, we didn’t do any sort of examination for sexual assault. No one asked for it—”

Nora’s mind raced over the details of that awful day. Was it possible that Brona had been hiding in the weeds at the apiary because she’d been attacked?

“Do you have some reason to believe my daughter was sexually assaulted?” Scully asked. “Something I didn’t know about? Was she injured in some way—”

The young resident was alarmed. “No, no, nothing like that. But, as I said, we didn’t examine her…”

Michael Scully was silent for a long moment. When he did speak, his voice sounded rough and tired, but not unkind.

“Thank you, Dr. Conran, for being forthright about all this. I do appreciate it. But I have two questions for you. First, I wonder why you would assume that Brona was the victim of an assault?”

“Well, she—I thought—” Nora watched the resident’s face and knew he was terrified that Michael Scully would be angry about an oversight that might get him, his colleagues, and the hospital into trouble. It was also clear that he thought Brona suffered from somewhat diminished mental capacity. Nora pitied the young doctor, but couldn’t fault him; hadn’t she assumed the very same thing?

Scully went on: “Second, if you have some news about her medical condition, I wonder why you’d convey that news to me and not to the patient herself. My daughter is twenty-two years of age, Dr. Conran. She’s not deaf, and her mental faculties are perfectly intact.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know—that is, I wasn’t sure. She’s been sedated, and—”

“I’ll go and speak to her. You can consider yourself absolved of that duty.”

The relief that broke across the resident’s face was almost unseemly. He had a bit of work to do on his bedside manner, Nora thought; but when he spoke, her irritation lifted somewhat. “I appreciate your honesty as well. I’m very sorry if I jumped to any wrong conclusions, Mr. Scully, and I apologize sincerely if I’ve offended you. I’ll remember our conversation before making any assumptions.” He offered his hand, and Michael Scully took it. “I’ll leave you now,” Conran said. “You can stay here in the office for a while if you like.”

When he had gone, Nora took her place behind the wheelchair and maneuvered Scully down the hall to Brona’s room again. When they were perhaps ten feet from the door, Michael put up his hand to stop the chair once more. Nora looked into the room to see what had made him pull up short; Brona was still asleep, but tossing in the bed, her hands clasping the bedclothes.

“I have a confession to make,” Scully said. “The night Brona was out until late—the night I rang you—it wasn’t the first time. She wasn’t at home at all the night Ursula Downes was killed. Something awakened me that night. It was a quarter past two, and I went to make sure she was all right. But she wasn’t in her room; she wasn’t anywhere in the house. She didn’t come home all night, and the next day her clothes smelled of wood smoke. When I heard about the murder, I should have said something, told Liam that Brona had been out that night, but I kept quiet. I was worried for her safety, and I thought the fewer people who knew she’d been out that night, the better off we would all be.”

Nora looked down at Scully and saw his shoulders lift in an involuntary sigh, saw the furrowed face, the bright tear trembling at the margin of his eye. “I thought I could protect her. But if I find that someone hurt her, and I kept quiet…”

At that moment, Brona’s eyes opened. She saw them outside the door, and gathered her father in with such a look of affectionate devotion that, standing beside him, Nora felt herself gathered in as well.

Then Brona looked straight into her, past all the fear and trepidation, and Nora felt her breath flowing in and out, felt herself transfixed by the girl’s eyes. Her look was a benediction, a blessing, a knowing acknowledgment of all they had shared. Then Brona’s eyes drifted shut again, and Nora felt as though she’d been released from some sort of thrall.

3

Liam Ward stood in front of his open cupboard, feeling uninspired by the tins of beans, the bottled curry sauce that met his gaze. He was standing there out of habit, talking to Lugh, who was doing his usual pointing routine at the sight of the dog food tins in the cupboard. This was a ritual they followed every night, and one that still delighted both of them, after all these years together.

“What will it be this evening—mutton stew, or steak and kidney pie?” Lugh raised his tail like a flag. “Steak and kidney pie it is. A wise choice.”

As he opened the tin and filled the dog’s dish, watching him lunge hungrily at the meat and gravy, Ward’s thoughts turned to the case again. He had difficulty letting go until he’d worked out the major knots, though there were always some that refused to disentangle, no matter how much time and patience were applied.

Charlie Brazil’s story about building the bonfire had checked out, but they had no indication of how long he’d stayed there. He’d also omitted one major detail; he had not been alone. Ward had conducted his own search of the scene, and had trod on something in the ashes. Beneath his foot was the bracelet he and Eithne had given Brona for her tenth birthday. It was made of several slender strands of gold metal, twisted into a kind of torc. As far as he knew, Brona always wore the thing, never took it off.

He had picked the bracelet up and slipped it into his pocket, guilt clawing at his conscience. He’d told himself he would not keep its existence hidden if it proved to be significant. But he had already tampered with possible evidence. He pulled the bracelet out of his pocket and stared at it for a few minutes, turning it in his fingers. Time to return it to Brona.

He thought of all the things, like this bracelet, that had something to do with the case but would never find their way into his report. There were too many connections, too many stories that the case did not require, though they were part and parcel of it. Things such as the box full of trophies in Ursula Downes’s flat, things she had evidently nicked from dozens of men. Each object was tagged and documented with a first name and a date, and sometimes there were as many as three or four dates within the space of a single week. What pathological need, what lack had Ursula Downes been trying to fill?

Rachel Briscoe had indeed been the daughter of Thomas Power, as Maguire had surmised. After her parents divorced, the girl had moved to England with her mother, and they’d taken the mother’s maiden name. All of this had been confirmed for them by Sarah Briscoe, who had arrived more than a week ago to claim her daughter’s body. She’d not been interested in what they’d found in Rachel’s flat in Dublin: notebooks filled with tiny, crabbed writing, meticulously documenting her surveillance of Ursula Downes in the weeks and months before the excavation.

They were almost impossible to read, the scribblings of an increasingly disordered mind, but the one thing Ward had taken away from it was that Rachel Briscoe was not a killer, despite what Desmond Quill had said—unless you counted suicide as self-murder. Because that had been the girl’s plan: to find Ursula Downes, to get close to her somehow, and finally to cut her own wrists before the woman who had poisoned her existence.

His own blood had gone cold as he read those words, perhaps written at the very moment the idea had taken shape in Rachel Briscoe’s mind. It had been a long and difficult night, but he had forced himself to continue reading, living through her writings the tormented existence of a young woman who truly wished to die, thinking of another suffering he had been unable to ease.

He looked down at Lugh, who was just finishing the last bit of gravy in his bowl, nudging it across the floor.

“Nice work, old son. Hunger is great sauce, isn’t it? I suppose you’ll be ready for your walk soon.” Lugh’s head lifted at the word “walk,” another of their evening rituals, so Ward fetched the lead and fastened it to the dog’s collar. Their customary path was out the road by the hurling pitch, to the crossroads, up the hill past the castle ruin, and back home again on the small road that ran along the Silver River. They both looked forward to it on an evening like this, when the long light stretched over the hills. But when Ward opened his front door, he found Catherine Friel standing on his doorstep.

“Hello, Liam,” she said, recovering quickly. “I hope you don’t mind my dropping in on you like this. Maureen Brennan told me where to find you.” She handed him an envelope. “I wanted to make sure you got my report as soon as possible, and—”

Lugh poked his nose out the door and nuzzled her free hand, looking for a scratch, and she stooped to stroke his soft ears and look down into his face. Ward had to admit he felt slightly unsettled. Why would Dr. Friel drive all the way out here just to deliver a report he’d have had in the morning anyway?

The dog moved in closer, appreciating the unexpected attention, and tried to lick their visitor, but she held him off. “He’s terribly affectionate. What’s his name?”

“Lugh.”

“Lovely name. God of light, victorious over darkness.” Her glance upward was quick, as if to gauge by Ward’s expression whether Lugh had managed to live up to his name. “My son has been lobbying hard for a dog for the past eighteen months. I’ve been telling him I don’t know. I’m away from home so much with this new job. But I suppose to him that’s as much an argument for having the dog as against it. I keep hoping he’ll give up and let it go, but he’s been very persistent.”

“What’s your son’s name?”

“Johnny—John, after his father. I keep forgetting that he wants to be called John nowadays.”

“What age is he?”

“Ten in October. Both his sisters are away at school, so he’s on his own a lot. I suppose it would be good for him to have a companion.”

“And what does his father say?”

A look of pure astonishment crossed her face, and she turned away slightly before answering. “I lost my husband, three years ago.”

“I’m sorry, Catherine—I didn’t know. I didn’t want to presume—” He looked down. “Not much of a detective, am I?”

She met his gaze with a wry smile that made his chest tighten alarmingly. “Nonsense. You’re a fine detective. You’ve had a lot to deal with these past few days.” She suddenly leaned down to give Lugh one last scratch behind the ears, evidently a gesture of farewell. “I really should go.”

Ward felt his chance slipping away. In a few seconds it might be gone forever, and he couldn’t let that happen. He heard himself say, “I had a wonderful time at dinner the other night.”

“I did too, Liam.”

Ward was remembering how much he had held back during dinner, how many times he’d struggled to keep his emotions reined in so that hope wouldn’t get the best of him. Now, faced with his first real opportunity, he was nearly paralyzed.

They both stood motionless in the open doorway, until she finally spoke again. “For a time after my husband died, I tried living my life backward. But I found that it doesn’t work. The only direction I can live is forward. It’s terrifying, but it’s the only option I can see.” She reached up and brushed her lips against his in a brief farewell, but let her face remain close to his, so that he felt the warmth radiating from her skin. He felt momentarily unable to breathe, to think. But when she began to pull away, he caught her arm with his left hand.

“Catherine—I don’t suppose I could prevail upon you to stay one more night, to have dinner with me again?” Something in her eyes lit the dry tinder of his soul, and he felt a slow flame, damped down and presumed dead for so long, suddenly flicker to life in his chest.

“You could, Liam,” she said. “You could indeed prevail.”

4

Charlie Brazil picked his way through the charred remains of the house in which he’d been reared, searching for familiar remnants, any bits of his former life that might be worth salvaging. But the destruction was complete; all he saw was singed upholstery, charred bits of chairs and wardrobes, broken glass and shattered concrete. The fire brigade said it had been a gas explosion. His mother had known exactly what she was doing. She’d turned the sheep loose herself to keep him away from the house and out of harm’s way. He’d been confused, but he now saw it as the proof that she had wanted him to live. He didn’t want to think about his father.

Where was his mother now? He tried to imagine her, contained within herself, casting a shadow that moved somewhere across the earth, and knew he’d never see her again. He wasn’t quite sure what he felt. Maybe the anger, the worry would come later. For now, he was just relieved that she had not been in the house. He wanted her to live, too. He dug a toe into the debris, turned over the blackened radio that had rested on the kitchen shelf since his earliest memory.

Now he had a reason for the feeling he’d always had about this house—that there was something wrong here. His father had always talked about the house being unlucky, but Charlie was convinced, more than ever, that it wasn’t the house, nor the ground it was built upon. And yet there was something to the claim. Some negative force resided here. Never once did he remember his father turning in at night without checking the doors and windows, without shaking holy water over the doorjambs and the fireplace, warding off whatever might come in. It was as if he had expected an invasion. No doubt he had known of all sorts of dangers, of which Charlie and his mother had lived unaware.

After the rescue workers had taken his father’s body from the apiary, they had removed the body of the man they said had killed him, a man called Desmond Quill. The corpse was wearing a collar and tie, but the object that caught Charlie’s attention was the tie pin, a simple bronze disc with three whorls. He looked back at the dead man’s pale face and saw it younger, nearly twenty years younger, smiling out of the window of a car that had pulled up beside him on the road. The man had said he was a friend, that Charlie’s parents had been called away on a family emergency and had sent him to collect their son, to take him out for supper while they were away, and then bring him home. Charlie had been afraid to go against his father’s wishes, so he had agreed. He remembered being mistrustful at first, but the man had done exactly what he said he would. They’d gone to a posh restaurant somewhere in the Slieve Bloom mountains. He remembered the drive into the mountains with the sun still high. It had been early summer, and the bushes on either side of the road had blushed pink with blossoms. He remembered the greed that had overtaken him at the sight of the food brought to their table; he had eaten extravagantly: roast beef and gravy, and two desserts, and all the while the man across from him had watched, smiling and smoking and saying very little. After dinner, with the man’s warm hand resting uncomfortably on his neck, they had phoned his father from the restaurant lobby, and he’d had to speak on the phone. But before he’d had a chance to tell about his magnificent meal, the man had pulled the phone away and spoken into it: You know what I want. I think it’s a fair exchange, he’d said. I just wanted you to know how easy it was.

Charlie remembered the sound of his father’s voice, no words, but the notes desperate and pleading. After that he’d been afraid on the ride home, but the man had dropped him at the gate and driven off without a word, the taillights of his car growing smaller and smaller and then disappearing into the night. His father had come out of the house then, shaken him by the neck and cuffed him, and told him never to get into a car with a stranger, no matter what, and never to tell his mother what had happened that evening, because it would surely kill her. He never had told his mother; and since no great harm had come of it, eventually the memory had simply faded away. It was after that extraordinary evening that his father had begun checking the doors and windows each night. Now he realized what grave danger he’d been in, and why his father’s reaction had been so extreme. But the question still remained: Why had Desmond Quill decided to spare his life?

He had never seen Quill in the intervening years, but he had seen that same desperate look come into his father’s eyes. It was when the Guards had come to the house, asking questions about some animals that had been mutilated and killed out along the bog road, two lambs and a kid goat taken from his mother’s small flock. Everyone had thought he was responsible, Charlie knew well, but they had all been wrong; he could never have done those things to any animal. The memory of blood in the pictures they’d shown made him feel ill, even now.

Charlie whirled as something brushed against him from behind. Turning in place, he found that he was alone. He had felt a distinct touch—unless he was imagining things—in the very same place where Desmond Quill’s hand had once rested on the back of his neck. Trying to shake off the feeling of disquiet, he moved through the ruin, surveying the splintered mass of debris where a few days ago there had been a house. If there had been no explosion, the structure would eventually have collapsed from the weight of knowledge, the roof beams finally unable to withstand the burden of shame and guilt they had supported for so long. All the things he had wondered about—his mother’s secret absences, the photograph of her he’d found in his beekeeping shed, the artifacts hidden under the flagstones—were fragments of the picture beginning to take shape in his mind.

If it was true, what Ward had told him, then Danny Brazil might have been something more than his uncle. He remembered the first jarring sight of the body in the bog, the cord around its neck, and his fingers moved unconsciously to his own leather charm. He’d tied it there nearly ten years ago and had never taken it off since, believing those three knots somehow held the power to protect him from harm. No one had explained to him exactly how Danny had died out on the bog. They didn’t have to; he’d seen enough for himself to imagine how it had happened. He couldn’t avoid thinking about it. Over the past several days, going about his work out on the bog, he would suddenly picture the scene, and the earth would feel as though it were dropping away beneath his feet. He would stumble or tip backward, feeling unbalanced, disoriented, and dizzy.

It didn’t help that he’d hardly been able to eat or sleep for worry about Brona. He had to see her again soon—he couldn’t keep away. He understood that if he showed his face at the hospital everyone would know, but none of that seemed to matter anymore.

Three times over the past eleven nights he had sneaked into the hospital to see her. The first two times he’d just watched her as she slept. But last night she’d been awake, and when he’d reached out to touch her face she had taken his hand, placed it over her own beating heart and then down over the curved softness of her belly. He had closed his eyes and traveled back to the night of their third miraculous meeting.

He had lit the bonfire and was watching the flames, thinking of Brona, aching inside to see her again, to feel her fluttering pulse beneath his hand, when suddenly across the fire he saw her face, illuminated in the flickering blaze. She started circling slowly around the fire, and for some reason he moved in the opposite direction, away from her. Three times they circled the bonfire. He knew almost instinctively what had to be done, and felt the hair prickle at the back of his neck. For the first time in his life, he felt no hesitation. He seized Brona’s hand and together they took a few steps back, then threw themselves forward and hurdled the fire. He felt its scorching heat and the flames licking at the soles of his shoes. If they fell they would surely be done for—but he knew they wouldn’t fall. They landed safely on the far side, heels first, and toppled forward. Before he could recover himself, Brona Scully was lifting him up, taking his face in her hands. Her fingertips felt lovely and cool.

Standing beside her hospital bed, he had opened his eyes again and looked down at the place where his hand rested, and had felt filled up, vibrating and brimming over with life. The vision of Brona cloaked in living insects still haunted him and filled him with wonder. In a flash he had understood what she must have felt.

Charlie moved through the debris and stood in the place that had once been his room. He saw how few steps it actually was from the door, the sitting room, the kitchen. He finally saw the very small universe in which his family had traced the separate orbits of their daily lives, avoiding one another more often than not. He lifted a piece of roofing to find that the shelf where he’d kept all his beekeeping books was flattened sideways, the books charred at the edges and warped from the water used to douse the fire. He felt their loss acutely, although he knew that everything he needed from them had already been absorbed, and was locked up safe inside his head, worn into his consciousness. He needed no more lessons; he knew what was to be done simply by gauging the temperature and rainfall, feeling the dampness in the air, anticipating the seasons for trees and meadow flowers, reading the moods of the bees themselves.

He began climbing the hill and looked back at the empty space his parents’ house had once occupied, and knew at that moment that he didn’t want or need to know which of the Brazil brothers had actually been responsible for his existence. When the time came, he would bury two fathers. There was no need to think about it right now. At this moment he had Brona to think about. Besides, it was midsummer, and the bees needed looking after.

5

On their return from the hospital, Nora tried once again to persuade Michael Scully to come and stay at the cottage, or at least to let her or Cormac stay the night with him, but he scoffed at the notion.

“Haven’t I survived here on my own this last week and a half? I’m not so bad that I can’t endure one more night. Go,” he said, “and enjoy the time you have together. You’ll not budge me on that, so you may as well give up and be gone, the pair of you.”

“All right,” Nora said, “but we’ll be back to say good-bye before we have to leave tomorrow.”

“Just one more thing before you go,” Scully said. “Do you happen to know what’s become of Charlie Brazil? Has he any place to stay? I should have inquired before now, I realize, but—”

“You’ve had plenty of other worries, Michael. And Charlie’s all right. I saw him in Kilcormac the other day and he told me he’d found a bedsit above one of the shops there. Probably not ideal, but he’s got a roof over his head, at least.”

Scully nodded. “Good. That’s very good.”

Nora returned to the Crosses thinking about Michael Scully’s question. Had it just been neighborly concern, or was there some other reason he might be interested in Charlie Brazil’s welfare?

“Fancy a walk up the hill before the sun is gone?” she asked Cormac.

“Lead on,” he said.

They walked up the hill, close but not touching, as they had when Nora first arrived. With each step they took toward the setting sun, she felt time diminishing, slipping away. Night’s cloak would cover the landscape for a few short hours before the daylight came again, and with it, as the song said, a dreary parting.

At the topmost point of the hill they came upon a huge pile of ashes, the remains of a bonfire. They walked around it, either side. Nora saw two sets of deep footprints, the heel marks deeper than the rest. “Look at this,” she said to Cormac. “What do you suppose happened here?”

“Did you ever hear of midsummer bonfires?” Nora shook her head, and Cormac continued, “It’s one of those leftover pagan traditions that’s probably fallen off in most areas. Sometimes it was just a family, but sometimes a whole community would come together and build a fire big enough to burn all night. It was supposed to be a time for blessing the house, the crops, the animals. People walked three times sunwise around the fire to ward off sickness, and sometimes young people would leap the flames.”

“You think somebody jumped over this fire?”

“Looks that way to me. After the fire died down, you were supposed to drive the animals through the ashes or singe their backs with a hazel wand. Everyone carried a burning stick home from the bonfire, and the first one to bring it into the house was supposed to bring good luck with him. They’d also take home a glowing ember from the fire and carry it around the house three times, and save some of the ashes as well, to mix with the seed for the following spring. I didn’t know anyone here still built a midsummer fire. I’d love to know who it was.”

You could ask Brona Scully, Nora thought, but she said nothing. Perhaps Brona and Michael Scully would like to keep their family matters private, and she wasn’t about to talk about things that had been told to her in confidence, even with Cormac. “I meant to ask what Mrs. Foyle said about your father. Is it something serious? You’ve never had to go up there to sort them out before.”

“No, it’s not that. My father’s had a small stroke,” Cormac said, trying to downplay it, no doubt for her benefit. “Not life-threatening, but Mrs. Foyle doesn’t want to be overstepping her bounds, she says. I’ve got to go and see what’s going on. I’ll probably be back in Dublin before you have to leave; I just won’t know what’s happening until I get there.”

“I could come with you for a couple of days—”

“Ah, no, I couldn’t ask you to do that, to miss the exam on the bog man. It’s important.”

“You’re important to me too.”

He took her hand. “Thanks. I appreciate the offer. But I know how much that examination means to your work. You’ll never have another chance at him, not like this one.”

“Why does Donegal have to be so far away? Why couldn’t your father be from Kildare?”

“I suppose he could be, but then he wouldn’t be my father, would he?”

Nora thought of Joseph Maguire, whom she’d never seen except in pictures, a fierce-looking, white-haired oak tree of a man. “No, you’re right.”

They came over the top of the hill and the sudden sight of Brona Scully’s fairy tree, bedecked in all its ragged finery, once more took Nora’s breath away. She leaned her back against its trunk and looked up into the twisting branches. “What is it about this place that I love so much? I just wanted to come here once more, because it might look very different when I come back, and I want to soak up every detail.”

Cormac leaned on a low branch beside her. “Are you saying you will come back?”

His doubt was a quick knife. “I know I’ve not been very forthcoming. I hope you can understand why I have to go home. It’s not that I want to be away from you—”

“I understand loyalty. I understand keeping a promise. So even if you have to go away for a while, it can’t be for too long. Too long doesn’t exist.”

“I want to believe that…. I just don’t know that we should make any promises.” The searching look in his eyes unsettled her.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe it’s best if we just leave things as they are. But wait here for a minute, will you?”

She stretched out beneath the tree while he crossed to a stand of hazel wands growing from a nearby stump. Taking a penknife from his pocket, he sliced through several narrow green shoots, cutting pieces about twelve inches in length. Then he came back and stretched out on the grass beside her. “It’s well known that hazel is a powerful charm against mischief,” he said. She watched intently as he bent the supple greenwood in his hands, then quickly fashioned a simple plait, like those she had seen in museums—a love knot. “Here,” he said, “keep this with you.”

She took it, knowing that, whatever happened, she would never let it go. She would carry it with her always, that hopeful pledge, unspoken. She pulled him down beside her and they lay in the tall grass, limbs tangled together, gazing up into the fairy tree’s wild profusion. She thought of what faced each of them in the days to come—an opportunity to look death in the face, to find out more about themselves and the people they loved than they ever wished to know. She would be far from this sanctuary. She knew it was just an illusion, that there was no real protection here, no place of safety, and yet she felt it more strongly than in any other place she’d ever been.

As if he’d been reading her thoughts, Cormac turned to her and said, “There’s just one thing… I don’t want you to go around thinking you’re invincible, now that you have that.” He reached out and fingered the hazel knot. “It may be powerful, but it doesn’t mean you can throw caution to the wind. Please be careful, Nora.”

She hadn’t told him the real reason she was going home. How would she have explained it—that she hoped to prevent her sister’s killer from claiming any new victims? But at that moment she realized that Cormac knew why she had to go and that, even if he feared for her, he understood.

The sun hung just above the western horizon, a bright orange disc in the dark haze of churned-up peat dust. She thought once again of Mide, the middle province, and felt Cormac close beside her. If she left now, it was possible that they would never find their way back to this place. Would she remember this spot as a sanctuary, or as a place of sacrifice? Perhaps the ancients had been right in their belief that those things were one and the same.

Keeping Cormac’s hand tightly clasped in her own, Nora sat up and faced out toward Loughnabrone, Lake of Sorrows, thinking of the ancient people who had named this place. What sacrifices, what sorrows, what infinite griefs had they borne here? What riddles had they tried to answer about the beginning of life and its end? She held very still and watched a solitary heron wading slowly, elegantly through the shallows until a passing flash of silver caught its downcast eye.