Habit of Fear (29 page)

A new sound came—like that of a waterfall—and a cloud of dust rose from where Seamus had first passed from her view, searching for the cave’s entrance. The sound was the falling of crumbled rock. She pushed herself, stumbling, toward the rising dust and then passed between the jagged peaks.

She found him sitting, his feet spread, his back against rock, staring, it first seemed, at the curtain of dust at the mouth of the cave. She thought then that he was dead. But closer, she saw that his eyes blinked now and then. She ran to him, unzipped the jacket, and got the whisky. She talked, murmured, chattered, trying to coax a response while she uncapped the flask. “Open your mouth, Seamus. Please. … Can you hear me?”

His jaw dropped like that of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

“God, God, God …” She pulled his head back and poured the whisky into his mouth. It brought a gurgling sound from his throat and tears into his eyes.

“Can’t you speak?”

His eyes finally sought hers. He drew a deep breath and moaned. Then he moistened his lips and said, “Oh, Jesus …” and after a few seconds: “What a fool I am.”

“How would you have known? And you’re alive. That’s what matters.”

A crack of a smile, not enough to show teeth. “They almost trapped a booby.”

The pain was obviously bad when he tried to move, but he was soon able to speak. “I knew there was something and I almost jumped clear in time. It was a mine or some such I touched off. But look, I still have both feet and shoes on them.”

“Seamus, don’t make jokes about it. Tell me what to do and I’ll try to do it.”

“I wonder now if there’s another way that goes down to the sea. There must be, and I should have known it. Could you take great care and have a look?”

Julie approached the seaward ledge of rock. At one end there was a great fissure between it and the mountainous clump of stone within which, some thirty or so yards from its sea face, was the cave. The entrance was still roiling with dust when she looked back. She lay down on the level rock and eased herself, snakelike, to where she could look downward. She caught hold of scrub growth and managed a few inches more. She could see no life below but a buoy rocked in the choppy water. She could not see the shoreline for the projections of the cliff. She knew from her walks with Edna O’Shea that there were unmapped coast roads of short distances between local points, roads often lost to the tides or storm. The wind gusted. She lowered her head and hung on. In the lull that followed she studied another ledge a few feet below and roughly parallel to where she lay. It could be man-hewn, she thought, and the more she studied it, the more clearly she saw it to be a trail, faint and narrow, that would have started this side of the fissure and likely continued layer by layer down to the sea’s edge.

She squiggled back and returned to Seamus. He was on his feet, clutching at the wall, his face as pale as the seagulls’ feathers. They decided it was safest to try to go back the way they had come. Seamus sent her to see if the car was still where they had left it. It was. Solitary: the curious cottager and his dog were nowhere in sight.

“He’ll have heard, the cotter will,” Seamus said, “but he won’t let on. He may or may not know what’s here.”

“What where?”

“That’s what I’d like to know myself. I think I blew up everything that was going to blow. If only I could wiggle my arse, I’d go in, but whatever’s wrong is down near my backside. … Can you drive the car?”

“In an emergency.”

“It’s at hand,” he said.

The flashlight lay halfway between him and the cave entrance on the very rim of the hole the blast had left. Without a word, Julie retrieved it and, finding that it worked, went around the hole, staying every step of the way on solid rock. She avoided cracks and crevices. She groped her way through the thinning dust that now hung like a theater scrim between her and the cave’s entrance. Inside, the dust was more ancient and settled. The beam of her flashlight discovered wall supported by crude, knotty logs. To one side four plain wooden coffins stood roughly end to end. Whatever was or had been in them, the arrangement suggested that their tops might have been used as seats—or even beds, for there were sacks and moldering blankets stacked on one of them. A house door was stretched between four kegs and had been used as a table. Two other kegs might have served as chairs. On the table were pots and dishes, canned goods, a camp stove and a teapot. Someone would seem to have left in a hurry, for a shriveled potato and what might have been a carrot or turnip lay, shrunken tiny as mouse food, on a plate, along with the brown bone of a chicken leg. A five-gallon milk can might have contained water, but Julie was afraid to try it, much less offer anything from it to Seamus. Coils of rope lay in a heap alongside a machine of several wheels, a handle on one, so that Julie surmised it to be a pulley device. Then she came upon three cardboard boxes standing aside, and these were new. Very little dust on them. Over the grocery labels the word
Clothes
had been scrawled with a black marker on one; on a second were the words
Tinned Goods
and on a third, repeated in several places,
Caution.
She did not wait to examine them.

Seamus was of the opinion that they must get away at once. “It won’t be bloody safe to stay or to be found here. And the cotter may already have raised the alarm. I’m going down with you,” he went on fiercely. “It’s only pain, and you’ll spit in my face if I pass out.”

He pulled himself along the wall of rock by the scrub growth until they reached the open. There he shifted his hands onto Julie’s shoulders, then onto one shoulder, and ordered her to put an arm around him. His grasp was hard. She bit her lip and made no sound. “One, two … one, two,” he guided their steps in unison. “They work!” he cried out. “The bloody legs work!” Julie’s own legs were shaking, and she wished she could carry him on her back. There was no way—a hundred and eighty pounds of him. She might be able to drag him if she had to, his arms around her neck. “One … two …” Her legs became steadier, and well it was: downhill and on the overgrown path the footing was treacherous. “You’re doing grand,” Seamus shouted. “You’ve a gorgeous pair of shoulders on you and the back of an Amazon.”

“Save your breath,” Julie called back.

They paused every few steps. It could not be called resting, their having to stay on their feet lest Seamus not be able to get up, once down. When he came near to faltering, he hooked one arm around her neck and got the whisky from his pocket. “There’s enough for two.”

“Save it. It might make me sick anyway.”

“And the heart of a mother lion.”

“Oh, shut up, Seamus.”

“Mush!” he cried, and clasped her shoulders again.

Julie thought of the lion rampant, the weather vane on the tower of the Stone Ring.

It was a long time before he spoke again except to call the “One-two” by which they coordinated their steps. Then: “Julie … I don’t think I can make it, love, and I’ve got to piss.”

“Does it take two hands?”

“Three.”

They were saved by the need to laugh, even if they were scarcely able. He relieved himself, and then before they took the next step, he said: “When we reach where the old road circled—remember?—couldn’t you drive the car up and I’d wait here for you? I think I could make it. You just don’t want to be timid with it.”

Little did he know that her only experience of driving was from a summer at Amagansett, New York, when Jeff let her take the wheel on the country roads. “Refresh me on the gearshift,” she said.

“You’ll need nothing but low until we get out, and lean heavy on the petrol so it won’t stall on you.”

“J
UST LET ME PASS OUT
in the backseat,” Seamus had said, “and then don’t stop till you get to the hospital in Donegal.”

That was the way it happened. The sun was at their backs by the time she turned onto the road overlooking Donegal Bay, and by then she could say that she knew how to drive a car. She called to Seamus now and then, but although he moaned at times, he did not answer. She experimented with the car lights in advance but she did not need them. Though fading, the daylight was still sufficient when she pulled up at the emergency entrance to the county hospital. Seamus was in the X-ray room before anyone came to her. The nurse brought her tea and biscuits. And McNally’s wallet, from which she was to provide the hospital with such information as they needed. “And you’re to get onto the telephone for him to his ‘daily woman’ and ask her to take care of his dog. There’s an orthopedist coming down from Sligo. You’re not to worry.”

“When can I see him?”

“Let him rest. He’s under sedation, but the last thing he said was, ‘Tell her she’d better go to the Gardai with the story right off.’”

“W
E WERE WONDERING ABOUT
you, Mrs. Hayes,” the young policeman said. “Inspector Superintendent Fitzgerald inquires every day from Dublin if we’ve heard.”

“He knew where I was going,” Julie said. “There is no police station in Ballymahon.”

“But they’re on the telephone line, surely.”

“I should have phoned,” she admitted.

“You’ll be staying in Donegal town for a time now, won’t you? I’ll inform the inspector superintendent. At the Abbey again, is it?”

“Yes, sir.” She’d been gone almost a week, but she was given the same room by a desk clerk who remembered her. “Is there anything new on the Sligo murder, sir?”

“Not that I’d know of, Mrs. Hayes. It’s all inquiry from there and very little disclosure. I must call through to Special Branch on the discovery you and your companion made. The coffins, now, wouldn’t be of an archaeological nature, would they?”

“No, sir. Plain wooden coffins.”

“Hard to come by these days. It’s a Special Branch matter, sure. What were you doing there in the first place, if I may ask?”

“Exploring,” Julie said, knowing that she would have to tell the story many times to officials with more than local authority. The town Gardai, she suspected, rarely had to deal with violence that was not in the nature of a traffic accident or an after-hours donny brook.

“You’re an American,” he said, explaining her curiosity to his own satisfaction.

A
FTER SEVERAL ATTEMPTS
Julie reached McNally’s housekeeper by telephone. The woman was convinced he had been in a car collision and gave a determined, mournful account of how recklessly he drove and how she had foretold that this would happen. There seemed little point in trying to tell her what actually happened. In fact, it seemed better not to try. Julie promised that either she or Seamus would call again in the morning.

S
HE WAS AT HER DINNER
when the two detectives arrived, one an Inspector Costello of the Special Branch and the other, Sergeant Lawrence Carr, the Dublin Murder Team man who had been present during her interrogation by Inspector Superintendent Fitzgerald in Sligo. She ordered coffee for them and soon joined them in one of the lounges not open to the public that night. Carr’s warm smile was reassuring. Inspector Costello looked like a seasoned footballer—big shoulders and a knotty jaw that was crisscrossed with scars. The surprise about him was his voice: low and cultured. He had what Julie thought of as a university accent.

Both men listened without comment to her story. Costello’s first question: “And you did not look into the newly installed boxes?”

“No, sir. One of them was marked
Caution,
and I was feeling pretty cautious by then anyway.”

Costello made a sound that might have been sympathy. “What led you to so desolate a place, may I ask?”

“It isn’t far from Ballymahon, and it was where Mr. McNally had once gone himself to interview my father.”

“And it’s to search for him that you are in Ireland. Is that so?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And his name, Mrs. Hayes?”

“Thomas Francis Mooney.”

Inspector Costello nodded.

“Did you find him?” Carr sounded genuinely concerned.

“No, sir. He’s been gone from Ballymahon for seven years and is presumed dead. His boat was washed up three days after he disappeared at sea.”

“The interview between him and the writer, McNally,” Costello said, “it would have to have taken place before his disappearance.” He paused, then: “Tell me, would your father have been known among his own as Aengus?”

“Yes, Inspector.” She was not going to sort out what to tell and what not to tell this man who knew more about the IRA and its splinters than she would ever know.

“And who is it says they presume him dead, Mrs. Hayes?”

“His widow, my stepmother, and I suppose the other people in the village.”

“Are you impatient with me? Please don’t be,” the brawny detective said in a gentle purr.

“I didn’t mean to be.”

“The name of the widow?”

“Edna O’Shea.”

“The painter.” He sounded as though he’d now put everything in order. “Is it not remarkable that nothing of hers hangs in Ireland? Her work is well thought of in Britain. I wonder what it tells us about ourselves.”

Julie was surprised, almost suspicious.

He went on, “We shall have a forensic team arriving in Slievetooey in the morning, and they’ll go up from there. I wonder if they’ll see everything that you saw, Mrs. Hayes. Or will someone have tidied up after you? And for whom was the mine laid, and by whom? They could not have been expecting you. Troublesome questions. Could I have a drop more coffee, Mrs. Hayes?” Then: “Sergeant Carr, you’re wanting to get on to the murder of Edward Donavan, I know.” He settled back in the booth, his coffee cup and saucer in hand.

“I am,” Carr said and took out his pocket notebook. “The inspector superintendent sends you his concern and greetings, Mrs. Hayes. If he’d not something greatly important on his agenda, he’d have flown from Dublin himself.” He glanced at an open page in the notebook. “Do you know a Kevin Bourke in the States?”

Julie drew a quick breath. “Yes, sir. He runs an electrical equipment shop in New York.”

“A friend of yours?”

“An acquaintance really.”

“Why would a mere acquaintance hire a private security operative to convoy you through Ireland?”