Malarkey (31 page)

Maeve surveyed the unpromising slope with narrowed eyes.
"Right. We have secateurs and pruning shears in the chest. We're
going to need axes and a saw, preferably powered. Meanwhile, we'll
pace it off. And I want grid-lines, chaps. Johnnie, set up the theodolite
over there." She gestured.

I'd forgotten the tedium involved at the start of a dig. I had
once spent an amateur summer on an archaeological dig in northern
California. That was where I met Jay. I thought back, trying to
remember the site on my first day. It seemed to me the university
had sent a reconnaissance team out well before the excavation
began, that the site had been surveyed and marked before we set up
our tents. This site was much smaller, of course, but if Maeve insisted
on a text-book job it might be days before she dug through to the
passageway into the tomb.

I sat on a boulder and thought dark thoughts. Joe sent one of
the Gardai back in search of axes and saws—and permission from the
Steins to fell their timber. By the book.

Part of my uncharacteristic funk arose from my uselessness.
I could do nothing helpful until the grunt work began, so I sat there
and brooded. A crow cawed. Every once in a while a car or lorry
passed along the road, and I heard the hum of their engines. Mahon
appeared with his sergeant and constable in tow, and the police
conferred in a clump while Maeve's team laid out the first of the
gridlines. They used metal stakes and heavy yellow twine. The
assistant, Johnnie Poole, called out numbers from time to time.
Maeve supervised.

They had worked a good two hours, sweating in the sun,
cutting brush, marking their lines, before Maeve was satisfied. I had
wandered around a bit, kicking the needles, brooding, but I kept
coming back to watch. Now I could do something. I went over to the
chest of gear, now nearly empty, and pulled out a shovel.

"Hi," one of the Gardai shouted. "You two. This is a crime
scene. What're you doing here?"

All of us turned to stare as my father and the
unprepossessing figure of Grace Flynn's escort, Artie, emerged from
the forest.

Dad looked splendid. He gave me a smile then turned to
Mahon who had stepped forward, scowling. "Ah, inspector. This
young man tells me his name is Arthur Sullivan. I think you should
hear him out."

Mahon grunted.

Sunlight winked off the stud in Artie's nose. His eyes shifted,
and his cheeks turned pink under our combined stare.

Joe sighed. "Why did you come here, Artie? Speak up,
lad."

He wiped his sleeve across his nose. "Grace sent me."

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,
That
saved a wretch like me.

Hymn

"Grace sent you," Joe repeated in the calm, unthreatening
tone I had once heard Jay use with a nervous gunman. "Can you tell
us why, lad?"

Artie ducked his head, mumbling.

"You can what?"

"Show yez the way into the bolt hole, ye fooking idjit."

The breath went out of my body. Dad beamed as if a favored
student had just passed his orals.

My heart hammered in my chest, and everyone began
talking at once. I put my hands over my ears.

"Quiet!" boomed my father with the weight of forty years of
lectures in his voice.

"Do you truly know the way in, Artie?" Maeve asked.

"Sure, and didn't Tommy show me ages ago? He learnt it
from his da. Old Toss." Artie snickered. "It was a secret we had, me
and Tom. The captain didn't know."

By captain he had to mean Slade Wheeler.

"For Godsake, Artie, show us," I said hoarsely.

Mahon didn't wait for the moment of revelation. He
whipped out his cellular phone and called for an ambulance. He also
sent one of the uniformed men off toward the police van to direct
incoming traffic, or so I supposed afterwards when I was capable of
thought.

While Mahon was giving the dispatcher explicit instructions
as to where the ambulance should come—by the lane through the
sheep pasture—Artie surveyed the archaeologists' work. Shivering, I
watched him.

A half-grin curled his lip. He was drawing out the suspense,
showing off. "Where do yez think it is, then?"

Maeve pointed to a steep patch on the slope of the mound. It
lay between two uninteresting rock faces, and her crew had cleared
it of vines.

Artie giggled. "Close. It's the fooking rock, though." He
strolled over, touched the lichened gray surface of the farther stone,
slid his hand sideways, and tugged.

Slowly the entire rough-hewn slab pivoted to reveal a black
gap about my height and twice as wide as a broad-shouldered man.
In the open position, the "door" cut the space in thirds with the slab
taking up the middle segment. Needles and small stones sifted down
from the mound above.

Artie spat. "It's a fooking fake, see. Tommy and me used to
nip in and smoke our fags and look at the dirty pictures. The walls is
covered with 'em." He snickered again. "And wasn't the captain and
the lads hunting us the whole bleeding time? They never did find
us."

I was halfway to Artie's side before he finished
speaking.

Joe intercepted me. "No."

"I want to go in. I want Jay."

"Let me enter first, Lark. He may not be there."

He has to be there! I swallowed the instinctive protest.

Joe raised his voice. "Did any damned fool think to bring a
torch?"

One of the uniforms took a half-step forward, but Maeve
strode to her bottomless tool chest and pulled out a long
businesslike flashlight. Joe took it from her with a curt nod.

Mahon said heavily, "Mind the blood, sergeant."

I gasped and took another step toward the black
opening.

Joe thumbed the flashlight on and shone it at the packed
earth floor of the entrance. A brown stain had been trampled into the
dirt at the opening. It had dried in ridges. Footprints trailed into the
dark.

I was biting my fists.

"I'm going in," Joe muttered.

Mahon's morose constable forestalled him, pulled out a
camera, and took at least three shots of the entryway before Joe said
with quiet menace, "Move aside, if you please."

"Constable." Mahon jerked his head, and the man stepped
out of the way.

Joe inched sideways past the muddy patch, but he
straightened at once, as if the passage had widened, and was soon
out of sight. Mahon's camera-toting constable turned the lens on the
hidden latch. His flash attachment strobed.

Maeve's students were talking in low voices, and I heard
Artie giggle once, but I was so focused on the passageway the rest of
the world receded. Dad walked over and wrapped his arms around
me as he had done when I was a child. I buried my face for a moment
in the tweedy shoulder. It seemed a very long time, though it was at
most ten minutes, before Joe emerged.

He came straight to me. "He's there, unconscious but alive.
I'm less certain of Liam McDiarmuid."

"Jay...oh, God, oh, thank God." I was half-crying, half-laughing
and certainly not registering anomalies.

"Hush," Dad said. "Hush, darling, it's all right."

Joe turned to Mahon. "They're all the way in, at the
end."

Mahon nodded. His constable took a step forward, but
Mahon waved him back without looking at him.

Maeve touched the sleeve of Joe's blue uniform. "Liam's
there, too? I don't understand."

"He was bound hand and foot, like Jay, and he has at least
one serious knife wound. It bled a lot. His flesh is cold." Joe drew a
breath. "They're both cold. I cut the ropes."

Maeve's hand dropped. I shivered again.

A klaxon sounded in the distance. Mahon must have had the
ambulance crew on alert for his summons, the response was so
quick. Either he had given Maeve's theory full credence, or he was a
man who liked to cover all his bases.

I leaned on my father and listened as the sound drew nearer
and broke off in mid-hoot. Mahon was on the phone again, a little
apart. I couldn't follow what he said. Maeve was frankly brooding.
Her students exchanged looks.

Perhaps ten minutes later, the uniformed Garda and a team
of paramedics bearing a stretcher made their way to us through the
trees. Joe led the medics into the passage. Another interminable
pause.

They brought Jay out first, wrestling the stretcher past the
fake stone door. They had wrapped him in a thermal blanket and
strapped him to the stretcher. The collar of his blue anorak peeked
from beneath the blanket. His eyes were clenched shut, and he didn't
move.

I ran to him and stroked his cold, bristly cheek, but he didn't
respond to my touch. His eyes must have shuttered in an involuntary
reaction to the brilliant sunlight. He had been in the dark a long time.
The area around his mouth was raw, smudged, his lower lip bleeding
a little. He smelled of sweat and blood and fear.

Joe took my elbow and tugged me back so the medics could
do their job. "His mouth was taped shut. I ripped the tape off. It may
be I shouldn't have."

A third medic, probably the driver, reeled through the trees
with a heavy looking case. The others dived into it, muttering.

Mahon was still talking on the cell phone while they set up
an IV. A saline drip, I thought, or glucose. Jay was dehydrated, they
said. He was also very cold. They told me his body temperature in
Celsius degrees. My numbed brain refused to make the calculations,
but I knew it was low. He had a knot on the side of his head, high in
the hairline. They didn't think his skull was fractured.

I tried not to get in the paramedics' way, but I hung close to
the stretcher. I was vaguely aware of noises. Maeve's team began to
pack their gear. Dad and Joe conferred. Maeve was cross-examining
Artie about Grace Flynn. How had Grace found out about the search
for the folly, how had she known of the folly in the first place, and so
on.

I heard all that and on some level registered it, but my full
focus was on Jay. He might be bruised, filthy, unshaven, unconscious,
and swaddled like a mummy in a gray thermal blanket, but I thought
he was beautiful.

A crashing in the brush announced the arrival of a second
team of paramedics. Mahon must have sent for another
ambulance.

The new medics went in for Liam about the time the leader
of the first team announced they could move Jay. One of the Gardai
who had guided us to the mound hefted the back end of Jay's
stretcher while a medic hovered over the IV. The apparatus stuck up
like a flower stem stripped of petals.

"Easy does it, lads."

I followed on their heels.

Mahon's sergeant found his tongue at last. "You can't go
with them, missus!"

I ignored him. Nothing and no one could have stopped me
from riding in that ambulance with Jay. To the medics' credit they
made no attempt to stop me.

Maeve trotted after me. "I'll bring your father to the hospital,
Lark. Do you need anything?"

"Uh, my purse." I ducked sideways around a tree branch, my
eyes on the Garda's solid blue shoulders, my feet scuffing fallen
needles on the path. There was something I should say, something
important. "Uh, thanks, Maeve. And thank Artie for me."

The jolting ambulance ride is a blur in memory. I squished in
near Jay's head. I could see marks on his exposed wrist from the rope
that had bound him. The driver used the klaxon often, and we had at
least one close call with an oncoming lorry. The medics made terse
comments to each other. I was watching Jay's face. Once, when I
touched his cheek, his eyelids fluttered.

The hospital was a new building, tastefully modern and full
of light, with a sprinkling of bad religious statuary. I know that the
Virgin has to wear symbolic colors, but why robin's egg blue? In the
emergency room, the medics dislodged me from Jay's side, and a
graying nun in semi-civilian garb came up with a clipboard to record
vital statistics and insurance information. She asked if Jay had
conditions the doctors ought to know about.

"Appalling nightmares." I stared at her round amiable face.
Not to mention a flying phobia.

"Medical conditions," she said patiently. "Allergies, heart
irregularities, and so on."

"He was shot in the stomach twelve, no, thirteen years ago."
The nun's eyebrows disappeared into her modified wimple.

I plodded on. "The doctors say he's all right now, but he has
to be careful what he eats and drinks. Because of the possibility of
ulcers." I had learned to cook thanks to Jay's balky stomach. I
thought of saying something about a bland diet, then it occurred to
me I was in a hospital in the Republic of Ireland. They were not going
to feed Jay
fajitas
with
salsa picante
.

The nun bent to her form and scribbled. Then she thanked
me and let me go.

I kicked my heels for what seemed like hours among the
anxious and the curious before a nurse in full starch beckoned to me.
"Mrs. Dodge?"

I nodded.

"You can join your husband now in the ward. He's been
sedated, but he's asking for you."

I gulped, sure I was going to cry, and followed her down a
squeaky clean corridor, into a lift, and up to the second floor. They
had put Jay in a two-bed ward, but the other bed was empty and a
privacy curtain had been drawn. A uniformed Garda withdrew
discreetly as I entered the room.

I poked my head around the edge of the curtain and startled
a grizzled man in tweeds who was checking the dressing on Jay's
head.

He turned. "Ah, you're the missus. I'm Seamus Hanlon. They
called me in because of the head injury. He's doing very well now
we've warmed him up."

"Lark..."

I was at Jay's side in an instant, holding his free hand. The
other was taped to an IV needle.

"Mmm," he said sleepily. "Year."

That's what it sounded like. I kissed his cheek. "Yes, I'm
here."