False Mermaid (25 page)

“That backpack looks kind of heavy,” the policewoman said. “You can set it down if you want. I’m not going to take it.”

Elizabeth hugged the pack closer, guilty about the stolen book inside. She didn’t want the police to know she was running away.

“Can you tell me your name?”

Elizabeth shook her head. She couldn’t look into the officer’s questioning eyes.

“Were you supposed to meet somebody here? It’s okay—you can tell me.”

Elizabeth heard kindness in the woman’s voice, but maybe it was all just an act. They wanted her to say something, but she couldn’t tell them about her mother, about why she was running away. Telling the police anything would just make her dad angry.

When another cop approached, the policewoman stood up suddenly and spoke under her breath: “Christ, will you look at her? The kids they’re pulling get younger all the time. Bastards.”

What were they talking about? Nobody had pulled her anywhere. The other officer was talking into his radio, but Elizabeth couldn’t understand what he was saying. It was like they all spoke a foreign language. She looked over and saw the guy from the pickup sitting in the back of another squad car. Finally, the policewoman returned and crouched down beside the open door again.

“You’re a very lucky girl, Elizabeth—that’s your name, isn’t it? Your mom and dad were pretty worried about you. They’re on their way down here right now to pick you up.”

As the policewoman spoke, one thought kept circling through Elizabeth’s brain:
She’s not my mother. She’s not my mother. I don’t care what anybody says. That witch Miranda Staunton will never be my mother.

After arriving back from their expedition to Port na Rón, Cormac was alone in the sitting room of his father’s house. Roz had gone upstairs to shower, and the house was quiet but for a steady wash of water down the exterior drain. The single high-button shoe at the house still plagued him. If Mary Heaney ran away, as her husband suggested, why would she have gone without one of her shoes? Women in her circumstances weren’t likely to have had more than one pair; they probably counted themselves lucky to have shoes at all. On the other hand, if she had regained her sealskin and returned to the sea, as the local legend allowed, the whole subject of footwear was academic… And why was he wasting time trying to reason it through?

Remembering what Roz had told him, he roused himself from the fireside chair and began to peruse the photographs hanging on the walls. His great-aunt Julia must have been a schoolteacher at one time; one picture showed her with a gaggle of pupils—all bare knees, freckles, and ears—outside Carrick National School. The pupils were in focus, but Julia Maguire appeared as a hazy specter in a dotted dress, as if she’d set the camera and not made it to her place in time for the shutter. It was the only image Cormac had ever seen of her. Another photo was a study of gaunt, dark men in long overcoats standing outside a church door, looking for all the world like a murder of crows. The photograph was labeled in pencil at one corner of the image,
Father’s Funeral, 1956
.

Cormac began to inspect the photos that hung on the opposite wall: crisp black-and-white images of standing stones up the Glen, the cliffs at Bunglas, modest homes of fishermen in Teelin. There were several of Donegal fiddle players—John Doherty, whom Cormac recognized from television, and a pair of middle-aged men, one dark, one with a shock of white hair and thick glasses. They were both playing fiddles, standing back to back.
Francie Dearg and Mici Bán,
read the caption. There were also, as Roz had noticed, many close-up shots exploring the wet, curious faces of seals. Each of the seal pictures was captioned as the others had
been, at the lower right corner, and in the same old-fashioned script as the letter he’d received from his great-aunt. So she had been something of an amateur photographer as well as a schoolteacher. Suddenly Cormac understood all the brown glass bottles in the windowless garden shed built onto the back of the house—her darkroom.

He ventured into his father’s bedroom. A chest of drawers stood before him—large, heavy, and dark, like all the furniture in this house, a legacy of the generations of Maguires who had been born and died here. It occurred to him that when his father died, he would become a part of that legacy as well. Scraps of shadowy lives a generation or two back, a few random details, that was all most people could reasonably manage. The rest faded into obscurity. Opening the drawers felt vaguely wrong, but he told himself that it was important to find out more about the old man in order to communicate with him. He was rationalizing, of course, unable to admit the curiosity that had consumed him for the past three years, growing in strength and intensity ever since Julia Maguire’s letter had arrived in the mail.

The drawer slid open easily. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find there, but was surprised to see stacks of neatly pressed handkerchiefs, some plain, some monogrammed with the initials ERM. A gold watch, a tray of loose coins—the old money—and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. It looked as if nothing in the drawer had been touched since his greatgrandfather’s death fifty years ago. For some reason, he had no trouble imagining hotheaded young Joseph Maguire turning his back on this, on all worldly goods. But in the end, even he could not divest himself entirely of the legacy of his ancestors. You could deny who you were, where you were from, for a time—but eventually it laid claim to you, and would not be denied. Again Cormac detected in his own thoughts a creeping acknowledgment of mortality. Perhaps the gene that controlled the onset of old age also triggered a need to hear the stories of those who had come before. Perhaps his own devotion to archaeology was just an errant expression of that need.

He shut the handkerchief drawer and crossed to the bedside table, checking the drawer for anything he ought to bring along to the hospital. As he lifted the reading glasses from the book on the table, he saw the crinkled edge of a small black-and-white photograph peeping from between the pages. He cracked open the book and found the snapshot of a young dark-haired woman, standing somewhere overlooking the sea
cliffs, head scarf untied and held aloft like a sail in a gesture of joyous abandon. His own mother. Could this have been taken in some oddly temperate stretch of days before he was born? He studied the smooth pliability of the flesh on her uplifted arms, trying to imagine his parents both young, flush with life and promise. The unique complexity of two individual lives became even more profoundly intricate with the addition of another life, a child. He had always wondered exactly what his arrival signified to his father, other than an unnecessary complication.

He slid the photo into his pocket for safekeeping and shut the book.
The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries
by W. Y. Evans-Wentz. He set it back, noting the title of the volume underneath:
On the Radical Nature of Love: From Plato to John Coltrane
. Perhaps his father was one of those people who found it impossible to apply abstract principles of philosophy to his own life. Cormac considered the title, remembering some of the freethinkers he’d met briefly at university, the ones who loved to rail against the plight of the downtrodden worker all night in pubs, oblivious to wives and girlfriends they themselves had left at home and up to their oxters in soiled nappies. Quare auld world.

He leaned over and pulled a pair of heavy brogues from under the nightstand. The same sort he wore on excavations. On a sudden whim, he set the shoes down on the floor and slipped his own feet into them. A perfect fit. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, staring down at the shoes, studying the cracks and creases in the leather, the places where the width of his father’s foot had strained the cobbler’s stitchery, the splatters of shiny red paint that matched the front door of this house. Apart from the shoes, he hadn’t found any of his father’s clothing. Rising from the bed, he crossed to the wardrobe that stood opposite. Inside, among print dresses and cardigans, and a pair of ancient worsted suits, he found a meager wardrobe of worn khakis and threadbare denim shirts, and a handknit jumper of undyed wool. Was it possible that this was all that Joseph Maguire had brought back with him from thirty years abroad? What was the old man doing here? Why had he come home? And as soon as the thought struck him, he quashed it. No point in worrying the question if he would never have an answer.

On the top shelf of the wardrobe he found a fiddle case. He took it down, and opened the case to find a stringless fiddle resting under a square of green velvet. Strange—he’d never known that anyone in his family had played music. Returning the fiddle case to the shelf, he found
a dusty old 78 rpm record. He carried the disc out to the sitting room, where the gramophone occupied a corner near the fireplace. The record was labeled in the same hand as the photos.
“Fiddle Duet. Glencolumbkille Hotel, June 8, 1950.”
Cormac nearly dropped the disc when he saw the names of the players below:
Joseph and Julia Maguire
. His father would have been about sixteen years old.

Heading back to the sitting room, Cormac slipped the record from its sleeve and placed it gently on the turntable, wound up the old-fashioned crank on the side, and set the needle in the groove. Two fiddles sang out in unison—a wild, hectic reel—and it was as if a puzzle box was opening itself before his eyes, each note a key to an unfathomed existence. He could hear the two instruments growling together on the low notes and wondered: Was it his father bearing down more fiercely on the bow or his great-aunt? They leapt together from the end of one tune straight into another, the angular movement of the bows evident in their tone, and Cormac felt the heart swell in his chest at the sound. Although he loved the Clare music that had surrounded him as a child, he had also felt the pull of the wild, distinctive voice of Donegal. He had never really understood why.

He closed his eyes and tried to conjure the dining room of the Glencolumbkille Hotel on that day, the starched white linens, the gleaming glassware and cutlery, all vibrating in sympathy, tuned to the sound of the fiddles. From somewhere in the back of his head, the notion began to take hold—that this music might stir the old man from slumber. He couldn’t have forgotten, not completely. The notes must remain somewhere within his subconscious, even if they had lain buried there for fifty years.

The B side was “Lord Mayo,” a slow air played by one fiddle, both a lament for a past time and an anthem to carrying on.

At a turn halfway through the tune, Roz Byrne’s voice carried over his shoulder: “What’s that you’re listening to?”

Cormac didn’t answer, but lifted the record from the turntable and handed it to her, marking her surprise as the names on the label registered.

“And you’d no idea at all?”

“I’ve seen my father exactly three times since I was nine years old, Roz. Somehow, the subject of music never came up.”

Roz shook her head. “I suppose he gave it up when he went off to university.
Donegal music was all but banned from the radio in those days. Too foreign-sounding, the RTÉ people said. Ridiculous.”

“It makes me wonder about all the other things I don’t know,” Cormac said.

Roz looked at him thoughtfully. “Did you have a look around at the pictures?”

He nodded. “The seals—they’re almost like character portraits.”

“I thought so, too. I wondered why there were so many, and your father told me a story, about his father—so that would be your grandfather and Julia’s brother. A melancholy, lonely man. He was away for years, studying medicine in France. When his father died, he came home and set up a practice here. After a few months, he took a fishing trip to Tory Island, and to the astonishment of everyone in the Glen, he came home with a wife. Being from Tory, she spoke an Irish that was different to the people around here. They called her ‘The Foreigner.’ She stayed on for a while, until Joe was born—”

“And then?”

“She ran off. Your father was still an infant at the time. He said his aunt Julia was the only mother he ever knew.”

Cormac felt thunderstruck. “Why did she leave?”

“No one ever knew. There was never any further communication; if she ever did get in touch with your grandfather, he never told anyone. He’d go and sit on the headland up at Port na Rón for hours, staring out to sea. It must have had a profound effect on Joe. He said when you came along, he wasn’t prepared to be a father. He had no idea what it actually meant. The responsibility terrified him.”

“We’re talking about the same man who traveled halfway around the globe to face down a military junta—and you’re saying a mewling infant terrified him?”

“I didn’t say it was plausible, only that it’s true.”

Nora spent the morning at the library, keeping an eye out for Harry Shaughnessy, and digging through newspaper databases for information on the murders of the Maine couple, Constance and Harris Nash. She found more than two dozen articles on the Nash case, beginning with the discovery of the grisly crime scene on the victims’ boat. The evidence trail implicated Jesse Benoit, a friend of the victims’ son. There was an underlying class element to the story that the newspapers touched on briefly but didn’t explore fully: Jesse Benoit’s mother cleaned house for the Nash family, which was how the two boys had become friends as children. Tripp Nash went away to boarding school, while Jesse Benoit attended local public schools.

She printed out each story as she read, trying to piece together the facts from the sketchy details provided. Benoit told police he had paddled his canoe out to the victims’ sailboat anchored in the harbor, and had gone on board intending to kill the couple as they slept. They’d been bludgeoned to death, Nash first, and then his wife, their faces completely destroyed. The murder happened while their son was away for the weekend, visiting a girlfriend in another part of the state. The murder weapon had never been recovered, but the police had found Jesse Benoit’s bloody fingerprints at the scene. Traces of the victims’ blood turned up in his canoe, and on clothing found stuffed in the back of his closet. A classic open-and-shut case. According to the newspaper reports, even though he confessed, Jesse Benoit had never offered any motive for the murders. After a psychiatric evaluation, he was found incompetent to stand trial and sent to the Augusta Mental Health Institute. After only a few weeks at Augusta, Jesse Benoit had taken his own life.