Lake of Sorrows ng-2 Page 7

  Among the jumbled police reports, the autopsy findings and witness statements, she’d seen the corner of a color snapshot, and pulled it out. It was Triona in profile, caught in a rare moment of contemplation, looking out the window into a grove of trees. Nora had taken the picture on a trip to the North Shore of Lake Superior. She had studied the lovely, lost features for a long, long time, then set the picture aside and begun sorting through the drifts of paper.

  It had taken her nearly four hours to get the files organized again. How many times had she read all these notes and police reports? But this time one statement seemed to leap from the page: “Because the body was moved, the location of the primary crime scene remains unknown.” The primary crime scene. The place that had witnessed an act of savagery. Places did not forget such things. But where was it? The police had searched the garage and basement of Peter and Triona’s house and found nothing; they’d searched Peter’s office and come up empty there as well. And all this had happened nearly five years ago; what chance was there that any trace evidence would be left after such a length of time? The phrase kept echoing in Nora’s consciousness: the primary crime scene remains unknown.

  That night she’d awakened with Cormac sleeping beside her, knowing that she would have to leave him as soon as her work on the bog was over. She lay beside him, studying the outline of his face in the shadows, seized by desperate, overwhelming desire, but afraid to touch him. At last his eyes had slid open, and without a word he’d understood and answered. She knew that her fierce ardor that night had startled him; it had surprised her as well. But after they’d made love, she hadn’t been able to keep from weeping. He thought it was something he’d done, and she couldn’t find any words to explain.

  The bathwater was beginning to cool. She lathered up one of the poufs that hung from the tap and began scrubbing at her face and forearms. Ursula had been right about the peat getting in your pores. Nora reached for a nailbrush to go after the black stuff under her fingernails, and remembered the peat under the dead man’s bitten-off nails. What did that tell them? That he had worked in a bog? Or that despite his wounds, he had still been alive when he went into it? Tomorrow they might be able to find the answer—along with any other secrets he’d been keeping under the peat. She tried to imagine falling into a bog hole—the cold, the wet, the damp-earth smell, what it must be like to feel completely enveloped, paralyzed. She had read about air hunger; in cases of suffocation, the instinctive reaction to being deprived of oxygen was usually fierce struggle. That might explain the peat under the nails as well.

  Out of the bath, she began to feel more human again. She dressed and ruffled her hair in front of the mirror, then clipped her fingernails as short as possible. Looking for a place to deposit the clippings, she opened the cabinet below the sink. Resting at the bottom of the empty bin was a single tissue, stamped with a perfect parenthesis of dark mauve lipstick. It was an absolutely precise impression, down to the tiny grooves bearing a slightly heavier stain of pigment. It was fresh, and not a shade she’d ever seen Evelyn McCrossan wear. Nora set the wastebasket back, shutting out a chorus of half-whispered questions as she quickly closed the cabinet doors.

  7

  No one was in the kitchen when Charlie Brazil arrived home from work, but the radio droned faintly into the empty room. They always ate their dinner without him; it was better that way. He removed his jacket and shirt and went to the sink to rinse away the peat dust that clung to his face and the back of his neck. He still had the uneasy feeling that something else was going to happen before the sun set. He was no more superstitious than the next man, but everyone knew that strange occurrences came in threes. First there had been the peat storm—a rare event; they’d not had more than two days in a row of fine weather in the six years he’d worked at Loughnabrone, and the wind had to be just right. He couldn’t remember ever seeing such a storm, a wall of dust so vast it had blotted out earth and sky, even the light of the sun. He’d come across that woman and her car in the midst of it. He might have killed her, but he had stopped the tractor just in time. Surely that was a sign of something—but what?

  Those gombeens in the workshop hadn’t let up on him all afternoon, slagging him about the way the Yank had looked at him, asking was it true that American women were all mad for it? He detested that kind of talk, and he had felt as though his head would split. It was the same every day; they always found some way, large or small, of having a go at him. He’d almost grown used to it. He certainly knew that they talked about him, and even what they said, that he wasn’t quite the full shilling. What they didn’t understand was that all of his quirks were defenses, conscious choices he’d made to keep them at a distance.

  A short time after he’d returned to the workshop, someone else had arrived with news that the archaeologists doing the bog road excavation had found another body, and this one was beginning to look suspicious, judging by all the police cars and vans. It was hard to keep anyone from knowing the score when police cars were swarming the place, visible from miles away on the empty bog roads. Word had spread until the air felt thick with shocked whispers, everyone trying to imagine who the victim might be—that young one from the next parish, some said, or another ancient corpse. There were murmurs, mutterings, and he could feel them all looking at him, asking the questions with their eyes.

  Charlie slipped into the fresh shirt his mother had left for him on the chair near the hallway. He removed his dinner from the oven, using a towel to protect his fingers from the hot plate, and set it in the place laid for him at the table. He knew his father’s illness would not let him live much longer. For a time they’d all tried to pretend that it wasn’t so, but what was the point of denying it now, with the tubes and oxygen tanks, the death rattle at the bottom of his watery cough? In the meantime, someone had to keep the place from falling asunder. It wasn’t a large farm, but there was still a load of work to do each day when he got home from the bog: feeding the calves, getting the hay in, not to mention keeping the house in good repair and the tractor running. He fell into bed exhausted every night and was up again at six in the morning for his shift on the bog. There was no end to it, ever. He deeply resented the position he was in, and still felt guilty for not doing more. He wolfed his food, eager to fill the gnawing void in his belly and be off. One boiled potato remained on his plate when his mother emerged from the sitting room, bearing a tray with his father’s half-eaten dinner; each day he ate a bit less than the day before. The treacly music coming from the radio suddenly cut out, replaced by a heavy drumbeat signaling the seriousness of what was to follow:

  “And here’s the latest news from Radio Midlands. Gardai have launched an investigation into the death of a man whose well-preserved body was found in Loughnabrone Bog this afternoon. The body was found by archaeologists working at the site, and has not yet been identified. A postmortem examination will be carried out in the morning, and Gardai are looking into missing-persons cases from the area.”

  The newsreader’s reassuring murmur continued, talking about shrinking dole queues and rural road construction grants, but Charlie’s attention was concentrated on his mother’s expression as she unloaded the tray full of dishes into the sink. She was someplace far away from him, away from his father, away from this place. He had studied her so often, tracing their similarities and differences: they had the same skin, pale and lightly freckled; the same cheekbones, nose, and hairline. There were times when she seemed to be illuminated from the inside, but there were also times like this, when she was unreachable, like something seen through a dark window that showed only his own reflection when he approached. Perhaps, like him, she had no idea how to gather up all those shape-shifting, unformed thoughts and begin to translate them into words. All at once he was back out on the bog, staring down at dark, wet peat cradling the dead man’s misshapen head.

  “I saw it,” he said.

  She turned to him as if she’d just awakened from a dream. “What?”


  “That body in the bog. All black, it was—”

  “For God’s sake, Charlie! I don’t want to hear that.”

  “It’ll be on the television and in all the papers tomorrow. But they didn’t even mention the strangest bit. I was there. I saw it. He had a leather cord around his neck with three knots in it—and he was wearing a watch.” His mother’s hands stopped suddenly, and she stood staring down at them, immobile in the soapy water. She spoke only after a long pause.

  “What sort of watch?”

  “I don’t know—just an ordinary sort of wristwatch with a metal band. I couldn’t see very well and it was all corroded.”

  Why had he told her about it? He’d developed a habit of telling his mother lies just to provoke a reaction. The story he’d just told her sounded like one of his more outrageous tales—except that it was all true. He hadn’t told her what had unsettled him most—that the leather circlet around the dead man’s neck was almost identical to the good luck charm he’d fashioned for himself from a length of cord.

  Charlie stood and carried his plate to the sink. He knew his mother was watching him from the kitchen window as he left the house and walked toward the fencerow at the back of the haggard. He couldn’t help it; he had to get out of the house, to take the fresh summer air deep into his lungs. Sometimes he began to feel suffocated in those rooms, weighted down with the silence. He wanted to cast it all off, all the expectations they had of him, and especially the desperate, killing worry about what people might think. He crossed the field behind the house in long strides, making his way toward the whitethorn tree in the corner, where he’d slip through the fence and follow the path up across the next small hill to his apiary.

  There was a lot of work to be done this evening, and it was already getting on for six o’clock. It wasn’t that he resented the work, exactly; he enjoyed the time he spent with the bees. But the farm work, though there was much less since they’d let most of the fields to neighbors when his father became ill, was still too much for one person alone. The constant grind was beginning to wear on him. If things stayed as they were, he’d end up just like his father, old before his time, and he wasn’t going to let that happen. He remembered how hard his father had labored when he was a child, and look what those years of work had brought the old man: decrepitude and early death, from breathing in all that black peat. Charlie could feel the same thing for himself, in the constant wind out on the bog. That was why he wore the mask. He knew they all laughed at him, but he didn’t care. They’d stop laughing when it hurt just to breathe.

  He wondered what his mother had been thinking when he told her about the body. He knew she was intelligent; he caught the glimmer of it in her eyes, in the way she turned and looked at him when he asked her a question. But then the doors would shut again. She must once have had a desire for more than she had—endless days of labor beside a sullen ditcher driver of a husband who came home in the evening and had to put in another shift working the farm. She must have had dreams and ideas when she was young. What had happened? Charlie thought he knew the answer: his father, Dominic Brazil. Her family had never questioned the match. To them he was a good few acres, not bad to look at. What more could a girl in her position expect? He’d heard it often enough in their voices—what was life but a grim penance to be borne?

  How his parents had come together in the first place had always been an unfathomable mystery to him. The only photograph he had of them was a blurry snapshot he’d found and now kept in the box under his bed: it showed his father looking defiant, even a little dangerous, as he leaned back against a wall, cigarette in his mouth, conscious of the camera. Teresa was leaning toward him, but half turned away, the side of her face a blur. Charlie thought he understood why she had turned away, even then. The one thing he’d always known was that Dominic Brazil loved his packet of fags and his pint of Guinness far more than he had ever loved any other human being. And yet she still washed his socks and made his bed, cooked his food, waited on him. And now hooked up a new oxygen tank when he needed it.

  Charlie had spent a good deal of his childhood wondering what he’d done to earn his father’s animosity. It was never an anger that expressed itself in physical violence, but the looks he received had done as much damage as blows. He’d sometimes watched other fathers with their sons, and he knew that his face had been a portrait of naked envy when he saw a bout of mock sparring, or when the sight of a man’s hand on a son’s shoulder would squeeze his heart into a cinder. Such things didn’t hurt him the same way anymore, not really, but he wondered about them still.

  He’d overheard his mother talking to her sister once, about his own difficult birth. From what he could understand, his entry into this world had very nearly killed his mother. “The doctor said I wasn’t to consider having any more children,” she’d said. He remembered wondering what that meant, whether it was anything to do with the fact that his parents kept separate rooms. From that point onward, the suspicion that he bore the dreadful responsibility for the rift between them had lurked in the nether regions of his consciousness. If he ever had a wife, he told himself, they would sleep and wake together. But what hope had he of ever finding someone? He’d always regarded girls as otherworldly creatures, as unapproachable as they were unattainable, on another plane of reality entirely from him, whose ears and face turned seven shades of crimson at the mere possibility of eye contact. He never thought of any specific woman when he gave in to temptation and touched himself, late at night, feeling the aching pleasure, the joy and shame at the moment of release. What hope, indeed?

  He tried to remember how he’d come to the conclusion that his mother was at least as odd as he in some ways. Some of it had come from watching her work with the sheep. She always had soft hands, from the lanolin in the wool. He’d seen her work around the clock at lambing time, her shirt and trousers sticky with blood and afterbirth, and he knew she felt much more than she ever gave away. Once he’d watched her chasing a carrion crow away from a lamb, the firstborn of a pair of twins. As the ewe struggled giving birth to the second lamb, the bird had settled beside the firstborn and plucked out one of its eyes. He remembered his mother running at the crow with a strange, strangled cry in her throat, flapping her arms like a madwoman, and taking the wounded lamb into her arms. They hadn’t been able to save it.

  When he was fourteen, he had found out by accident that his mother wasn’t at home some days. He’d mitched from school one day and sneaked back to the house, only to find that there wasn’t any need for stealth; his mother wasn’t even in the house. She’d returned about two hours later with no parcels, no evidence of where she’d been all morning. The following week he’d mitched again and followed her, ducking behind hedges, using all the skills he’d acquired playing spies. It had been a warm October day, and she’d taken the same path he was taking now, up through the pasture behind the house and along the lane that led to an old orchard. He’d gone there occasionally as a child, but eventually the bees had kept him away. He hadn’t set foot in the place for years. He’d watched his mother wade through the tall weeds toward a small stone house with grass sprouting from its rotting thatched roof. No one else was about. He crouched by the roadside and watched, breathless with secret knowledge, as she pushed open the old door. There was no one else inside. Through the windows he could see her moving slowly around the small room, occasionally reaching out to touch an object on the windowsill or hanging from the wall. After a few minutes, she sat down on the cot against the wall opposite the door. She drew her legs up to her chest and sat like that in the ruined house for a solitary hour, in silence.

  He’d had to keep shifting his weight so that his legs wouldn’t go to sleep, and he breathed silently, conscious of every sound and movement that might draw her attention. As he crouched there, he heard a sound, a faraway droning; he didn’t quite realize what it was until a single honeybee dropped onto the sleeve of his jacket. He held perfectly still as the bee clumsily traversed his c
oat’s brown canvas hills and valleys. After about a minute it had given up and flown away, and he’d looked up to see his mother’s face in profile through the door of the ruined cottage. Suddenly he remembered the feeling that had spread across his chest at that moment, the slow realization that every creature on earth had a secret interior life. The idea had filled him, traveled like electricity out to the ends of his fingertips. It felt enormous. And far from feeling betrayed, he remembered thinking it quite fantastic that his mother could be alone with her thoughts, away from him and away from his father, totally separate from them. He’d sunk down in the weeds and sat watching. He didn’t know what this place was to her, and he decided at that moment that he didn’t want to know.

  After another thirty minutes, she’d risen from the cot and left the orchard, retracing the same path she’d taken earlier. This time he’d followed her only as far as the back fence. When he came into the house twenty minutes later, he searched for any sign that she’d seen him. But she was calmly laying the table for their dinner as usual, without a word, with no outward sign that she’d been out of the house all afternoon. His guilt about spying on her was assuaged somewhat by his gladness that she had another life.

  He’d decided not to follow her again, but a few days later he had trod the narrow path up to the orchard, to explore the place. What he’d discovered was an apiary, a circle of nine rotting wooden hives half hidden beneath the nettles and buachalans that had nearly taken over the grove. The first hive he’d uncovered was tipped over and encrusted with granulated honey. There was an enormous hole in the side of the box where bees were coming and going. The keeper had obviously abandoned them, but the bees had carried on, unmindful of human indifference. He’d tried to lean in and see into the hole, but when he lost his balance and tried to steady himself on the hive, a stream of angry bees started pouring out of the opening. He’d had to make a run for it, ducking under whitethorn branches until he was safely out of their path.