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  Haunted Ground

  ( Nora Gavin - 1 )

  Erin Hart

  Haunted by mystery. Haunted by music. Haunted by murder….

  A grisly discovery is made deep in an Irish peat bog—the perfectly preserved severed head of a red-haired young woman. Has she been buried for decades, centuries, or longer? Who is she and why was she killed? American pathologist Nora Gavin and archaeologist Cormac Maguire are called in to investigate, only to find that the girl’s violent death may have shocking ties to the present—including the disappearance of a local landowner’s wife and son. Aided by a homicide detective who refuses to let the missing be forgotten, Nora and Cormac slowly uncover a dark history of secrets, betrayal, and death in which the shocking revelations of the past may lead to murder in the future….

  Erin Hart

  HAUNTED GROUND

  A Novel

  To Paddy

  mo ghra geal

  One crow, sorrow.

  Two crows, mirth.

  Three crows, a wedding.

  Four crows, birth.

  Five crows, wealth.

  Six crows, strife.

  Seven crows, travel.

  Eight, a troubled life.

  —Traditional counting rhyme

  Book One

  A FATEFUL WOUND

  Creacht do dhail me im arthach galair.

  A fateful wound hath made me a hulk of sadness.

  —Irish poet Daibhi O Bruadair, 1652

  1

  With a sodden rasp, Brendan McGann’s turf spade sliced into the bank of earth below his feet. Had he known all that he’d turn up with the winter’s fuel, perhaps he would have stopped that moment, climbed up onto the bank, and filled his shed with the uniform sods of extruded turf that a person could order nowadays by the lorry-load.

  But Brendan continued, loosening each sopping black brick with the square-bladed turf spade, tossing it over the bank, where it landed with a plump slap. He performed his task with a grace and facility that comes from repeating the same motion times without number. Though his father and grandfather and generations before had taken their turf from this same patch of bog, Brendan never thought of himself as carrying on an age-old tradition, any more than he considered the life cycles of all the ancient, primitive plants whose resting place he now disturbed. This annual chore was the only way he’d ever known to stave off the bitter cold that crept under his door each November.

  Chilblains were the farthest thing from Brendan’s mind this unusually sun-drenched late-April morning. A steady westerly breeze swept over the bog, chasing high clouds across the watery blue of the sky, and teasing the moisture from the turf. Good drying today, his father would have said. Brendan worked in his shirtsleeves; his wool jacket, elbows permanently jointed from constant wearing, lay on the bank above his head. He paused, balancing his left arm on the handle of the upright slean, and, with one rolled-up sleeve, mopped the sweat from his forehead, pushing away the damp, dark hair that stuck there. The skin on his face and forearms was beginning to feel the first pleasant tightness of a sunburn. Hunger was strong upon him at the moment, but just beyond it was an equally hollow feeling of anxiety. This might be the last year he could cut turf on his own land without interference. The thought of it burned in the pit of his stomach. As he clambered up the bank to fetch the handkerchief from his coat pocket, he searched the horizon for a bicycle.

  Forty yards away, his younger brother Fintan made a comic figure as he struggled against the weight of a turf-laden wheelbarrow. Fintan dumped his two dozen wet sods at the end of a long row, one of many that lent the surface of the bog the temporary texture of corduroy. For a good square mile around them, little huts of footed turf covered the landscape. Here and there on the neighbors’ allotments, large white plastic bags bulged with sods dried as hard as dung.

  “Any sign of her yet?” Brendan shouted to his brother, who raised his shoulders in a shrug and kept at his work. The two men had been hard at it since nine, with only a short tea break midmorning. Their sister Una was to bring them sandwiches and tea, and pitch in with footing the turf. It was cumbersome, backbreaking work, turning the sods by hand so that they dried in the sun. It would be another month before this lot could be drawn home.

  Tucking his handkerchief in his back pocket, Brendan descended once more into his gravelike void, noting with a small grimace of satisfaction the angled pattern his slean had made down the wall of the bank. He was reaching the good black turf now, more appreciated in these parts for its long-burning density than for the fact that it had remained in this place, undisturbed and undecayed, for perhaps eight thousand years.

  He set to work again, trying to drown out the rumbling in his belly by concentrating on the sound and the rhythm of cutting. He was used to hard physical labor, but there was no doubt about it, something in the bog air put a fierce hunger on a man. What might the day’s lunch be? Chicken sandwiches, or egg, or perhaps a bit of salty red bacon on a slab of brown bread. Each stroke became a wolfish bite, a slug of hot sweet tea to wash it down. One more row, he thought, heaving each successive sod with more violence, just one more row—and then his blade stopped dead.

  “Shite!”

  Fintan’s head poked into view at the edge of the cutaway. “What’s the matter? Strike a bit of Noah’s ark down there?”

  “Ah, no,” Brendan said. “Only a bit of horsehair.”

  There were four things, their father always said, that could stop a man cutting turf. Brendan could hear the old man’s voice: Wig, water, blocks, and horsehair. Then he’d hold up four fingers in front of their faces. Meet any of them, boys, and it’s your Waterloo.

  “Hand us down the spade, will yeh?”

  Fintan obliged, then leaned on the handle of his fork to watch. Though these things typically turned out to be tree trunks and roots, other wonders turned up in bogs occasionally—rough beams of oak, ancient oxcarts, wheels of cheese or wooden tubs of butter. Stores buried for keeping in cool wetness and long since forgotten—objects caught and suspended outside of time by the watery, airless, preserving power of the bog.

  Working deliberately, Brendan dug around the perimeter of the fibrous mat, probing for its edges, and scraping away loose bits of peat. He knelt on the spongy bank and pulled at the strands that began to emerge from the soaking turf. This was not horsehair; it was tangled and matted, all right, but it was too long, and far too fine to be the rooty material his father called horsehair. Brendan worked his broad fingers into the dense black peat he’d pried loose with the spade. Without warning, a block in his left hand gave way, and he cast it aside.

  “Holy Christ,” Fintan whispered, and Brendan looked down. Almost touching his knee were the unmistakable and delicate curves of a human ear. It was stained a dark tobacco brown, and though the face was not visible, something in the line of the jaw, and the dripping tangle of fine hair above it, told him at once that this ear belonged to a woman. Brendan struggled to his feet, only dimly aware of the cold water that was seeping through the knees of his trousers and down into his wellingtons.

  “Sorry, lads. You must be perished with the hunger.” Una’s breathless apology carried toward them on a bit of breeze. “But you should have seen me. I was literally up to my elbows…” Her voice trailed off when she saw the faces her brothers turned toward her. Brendan watched her stained fingers tighten their grip on the flask, and on the sandwiches she’d wrapped hastily in paper, as Una stepped to the edge of the bank beside Fintan and looked down at their awful discovery.

  “Ah, Jaysus, poor creature” was all that she could say.

  2

  Cormac Maguire was in the shower when the call came. He let it ring, as he customarily did, until the answerphone came on. But heari
ng the excitement in Peadar Wynne’s voice, he hastily wrapped himself in a towel and sprinted down the stairs, hoping to catch Peadar before he rang off. Cormac stood just over six feet and, though he’d begun to feel a few creaks during the passage of his thirty-ninth year, still possessed a rower’s lean, muscular frame. His dark brown hair was cut short; intense dark eyes, a long, straight nose, and a square jaw defined his angular face. His pale olive complexion would soak up sun as he spent time in the field during the summer months. He had neglected to shave for the past couple of days, and now water dripped at irregular intervals from his chin to his bare chest.

  Peadar—a technician in the archaeology department at University College Dublin, where Cormac was on the faculty—was a normally languid young man, whose concave frame and large hands invariably put Cormac in mind of a stick figure from an ancient cave painting. The cause of Peadar’s agitation was soon clear: some farmers cutting turf had discovered a body yesterday in a raised bog near Lough Derg in the southeast corner of County Galway, about two and a half hours west of Dublin.

  Although hundreds of bog bodies had turned up in central Europe, mostly in Germany and Denmark, they were somewhat of a rarity in Ireland. Fewer than fifty such discoveries had been made in Irish bogs, and they offered an unparalleled opportunity to gaze directly into the past. Peat bogs not only preserved skin, hair, and vital organs, but even subtle facial expressions, and often revealed what a person who drew his dying breath twenty centuries ago had taken for his last meal on earth. Modern turf-cutting methods often damaged bog bodies. If this was a complete specimen, it would be the first in nearly twenty-five years, since the ancient remains of a woman had been discovered at Meenybraddan in Donegal. This body had been found by a man cutting turf by hand, so there was a good chance that it was intact.

  With Peadar’s voice seeping into his ear, Cormac crossed to the desk to put on his glasses and culled from the flow of words the few that were pertinent to the matter at hand. “Has Drummond been there?” he asked. Malachy Drummond, the chief state pathologist, visited the scene of any suspicious death, to decide whether it should be classified as a police matter. Drummond had been to the site this morning, Peadar said, and upon examination of the remains had declared it a case for the archaeologists rather than the police. The National Museum had jurisdiction over all such bog remains, but as it happened, Peadar explained, their entire conservation staff had just left for a conference in Belgium and would be away for the next four days, so the museum’s keeper of conservation had phoned from Brussels to see whether Cormac would be available to do the excavation.

  “He said he realized you were on leave, but that he’d consider it a personal favor.”

  “Phone back, would you, Peadar, and tell him I’m on my way.”

  Cormac paused to clear his throat before he broached the next subject. “I presume somebody’s informed Dr. Gavin.” Nora Gavin was a lecturer in anatomy at Trinity College Medical School, an American with a particular interest in bog bodies—and as it turned out, the one person Cormac felt disinclined to have working beside him, though he didn’t see how it could be avoided. It would be easier if he didn’t have to phone her himself.

  “She’s already been notified. Says she’ll meet you there,” Peadar said.

  Twenty minutes later, Cormac was on the road. What would they find at the bog? Given the natural preservatives in peat, it was difficult to tell at first how long someone had been buried in it—he remembered an account of English workmen uncovering the remains of a middle-aged female in a fen during the 1950s, spurring a tearful confession from a local man who told police he’d killed his wife and dumped her body in the marsh. Later—shortly after the remorseful husband hanged himself in his prison cell—the corpse in question turned out to be a woman who died sometime in the late Iron Age. The remains of the missing wife never turned up.

  Cormac felt a growing excitement as he considered the possible significance of this new find. It had been ten years or so since he himself had been involved in an excavation of bog remains; he and a colleague had uncovered a fully articulated hand and arm at a bog road site in Offaly. He remembered studying the grooved and brown-stained fingernails, in particular. It was curious how arbitrary preservation in bog environments could be; sometimes bones were completely decalcified, but the skin, hair, and internal organs were intact. A well-preserved ancient body could often be found alongside completely skeletized remains in what one would quite naturally presume were the same conditions.

  Cormac was dressed for the field, in jeans, a dark cotton pullover, and a bright blue anorak; he had tossed his waterproofs and wellingtons in the back of the jeep. As he drove through the confusion of suburban developments that had begun sprouting along the major roads out of the city, past the point where the built-up areas began to give way to the expansive pastures of prosperous farms and the tree-lined edges of stone-walled estates, he looked forward to escaping the din of Dublin. This journey would take him west across the great shallow basin of low bogland and pasture that formed the Midlands, and to the lip of the Shannon estuary, the place he always considered the most significant border on this little island. The larger world invariably imagined Ireland divided into north and south, but for him a greater division had always existed between east and west, especially between the lush, fertile planters’ dominion around Dublin that early English settlers had dubbed “the Pale” and the stony, wind-beaten west, where the last vestiges of Gaelic Ireland had long since been quite literally banished. You could still hear the echo of an ancient culture in the traditional music, of course, but it was also in the way people spoke, in their manner, in the very pace of their lives, which seemed to slow perceptibly the farther west he traveled. This drive always seemed to take him backward in time.

  The trip would take at least two and a half hours, so Cormac fished with one hand in the glove box and brought out a tape of Jack Dolan, a flute player of the old puff-and-blow Leitrim style. Beside him on the passenger seat was his wooden flute case—East Galway was an area fairly saturated with flute players, and you never knew when a bit of music might turn up. Alongside the instrument case was Cormac’s site kit, which he carried in his father’s old medical bag. The small gilt “J.M.” on its worn leather surface reminded him that he was also heading back into his own past, to a place only an hour’s drive from where he had grown up, on the west coast of Clare. He should, he knew, make a trip to the church in Kilgarvan where his mother was buried. He berated himself for harboring such ambivalence about her. There was nothing to be done now, except to try to understand her better in death than he had in life. He’d visit her grave—if he had a chance.

  Cormac disliked driving the motorways. When he wasn’t in a hurry, he savored crawling along the secondary routes. Today there was a reason for haste: once removed from its sterile environment, a bog body was susceptible to dehydration and rapid decomposition. The usual procedure was to excavate around and then cut away the entire section of turf containing the body, continuing to use the peat in its preservative capacity even after the remains reached the lab at Collins Barracks in Dublin. Conservation methods used on bog bodies so far—tanning, freeze-drying—had yet to prove successful over the long term. Bacteria and mold still set in too easily. The current approach was to pack remains in wet peat, then in several layers of black plastic sheeting, and keep them refrigerated indefinitely at 4 degrees Celsius. The National Museum recently had a room-sized unit built specially for the purpose. Not ideal, certainly, but the best current option.

  Cormac began sorting out the details of the excavation. If one cubic meter of waterlogged peat weighed a ton, what type of crate would have to be built to contain two cubic meters? And how long would it take to excavate the whole area by hand? But beneath the ticking metronome of these conscious thoughts was a hidden melody, aroused by a chance connection to a human being whose life and death were about to intersect with his own. He wondered for the first time whether this new bog bod
y was man or woman. It mattered little to his work whether the person was male or female, ancient or modern, but each individual found in the bog—and indeed any human remains—had a unique story to tell. The question was always how well you could decipher the story from what was left behind.

  It’s easy to get caught up in the methodology, in all the highly technical aspects of what we do, his colleague and mentor Gabriel McCrossan had once told him. But that’s just our way of seeking knowledge, it’s not the essence of what we’re about. Keep in mind that our main concern is people—we learn about ourselves by studying those who have come before.

  This would be his first trip into the field without Gabriel. Only three weeks ago, he had dropped by the office and found the old man dead at his desk. The fountain pen had tumbled from his right hand, and a large blot of ink had formed where it had last made contact with the paper. Cormac knew the old man would have shared his excitement about this new find.

  Gabriel had always maintained that all scientific inquiry, whether it was undertaken through the lens of a microscope or the lens of a telescope, consisted of peering at the vast universe through one tiny peephole. He had often spoken of their archaeological work as seeing through a glass darkly, trying to reconstruct the past with sparse and imperfect evidence. Gabriel had relished the moments when something turned up. Another piece of the puzzle, my boy, he’d say, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. Another little piece of the puzzle.

  Cormac had just crossed over the Roscommon border at Athlone, noting the gradually shrinking proportions of the fields, the increasing narrowness of the roads, the first signs that he was well and truly in the West, when he remembered the potentially awkward situation that awaited him at the site. Gabriel had first introduced him to Nora Gavin. Although Nora was American, her parents were from Ireland, and she and the old man had some sort of prior connection; he’d been at university with her father or something. It was hard to tell how old she was; probably somewhere in her late thirties. From the way Gabriel had kept mentioning Nora, and insisting that Cormac must meet her, he also guessed that she was unattached. She seemed intelligent, and pleasant enough on the few occasions when they’d met, but nothing had come of Gabriel’s prodding. Then one evening about six months ago, he and Nora had both been among a small group of people invited to supper at Gabriel’s house, and the old man had pressed him into giving her a lift home. Cormac remembered how annoyed he’d felt, letting himself be maneuvered into a corner. Nora lived in one of those modern blocks of flats along the Grand Canal, not far from his own place. He’d hardly spoken a word to her on the drive, and hadn’t even waited to see whether she got inside safely. As he pulled away, he glanced into the rearview mirror to find her at the curbside looking after him. He hadn’t seen her since. Surely she’d been at Gabriel’s memorial, but his memory of that day was too clouded by grief to be trusted.