The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (144 page)

“God, why does it have to be the night that John is out, the one night in the whole year? Will I come up there? Eddie could push me.”

“No, there are too many people up at the bridge. There’s nothing you can do. The children are all right here. I know it’s hard, but stay where you are.”

She saw the reason in this.

“I’ll call Patrick,” she said firmly. “Otherwise he’s bound to get a garbled version too, above in the lodge. Are his two there?”

“They’re here,” Fergus said grimly.

He looked at Grace and Michael clinging to each other wrapped in a blanket, Grace unable to stop shivering and refusing to be parted from Michael even to the point where she could remove her wet bathing suit under her dress.

Kerry was sitting on a chair, his handsome face drawn with shock. Tucked into his side, almost under his arm, was Dara Ryan, white and still disbelieving what had happened. Kerry absently stroked Dara’s dark hair, which had a curiously inappropriate artificial rose stuck in the side.

Fergus didn’t like to see the young Ryans so firmly enmeshed with the O’Neills. But this wasn’t a time for such thoughts. He tried to put the haunting little face of Maggie Daly—those huge worried eyes and all that massive hair—way out of his mind. What could have possessed a frail nervy little thing like that to jump from a high bridge? And why didn’t some of the others stop her? Looking around the stricken group in his house Fergus realized that this is what they must all be thinking too.

The night seemed to go on forever.

John Joe Conway’s father excused himself from the bar and went into his workshop at the back. There would be need of a small coffin.

John Joe followed him out and railed at him. Why did his father always have to think of business, and making money, when someone was dead, for God’s sake? John Joe kept saying the word over and over because he couldn’t believe it.

His father was short on explanations and excuses.

“What would you like us to do with Maggie? Leave her lying there looking at the sky? The only thing we
can
do for the dead is to give them a decent burial. If this is ever going to be your place John Joe, you’ll have to learn that.”

“I don’t want to run a business, I don’t want to be grown up,” John Joe said.

His father gave him a long look. “I know son, it’s not the greatest thing in the world being grown up and being in business. But look at the alternative.”

For the first time in their lives John Joe Conway and his father looked at each other with something like understanding.

   Rachel was in her room reading when she heard the commotion from the bridge. At first she thought it was just horseplay and high spirits. Then she became worried. She closed her book and came downstairs. Loretto was standing fearfully on the doorstep, her hand at her mouth.

“There’s been an accident,” she said to Rachel. “Jack Coyne’s just run up to see what happened. I couldn’t go myself.”

“Of course not.” Rachel knew the story of how Barney Quinn had been taken from the river in his new truck that he was so proud of. She put her arm around Loretto’s shoulder.

“Come back in. Can you make us a cup of tea? Jack will come and tell us soon. We can’t help by peering out here.”

Gratefully Loretto went back into the kitchen.

They were barely sitting at the table when Jack Coyne rushed in. He had tears in his eyes, something the women had never expected to see.

“Poor stupid little girl,” he said over and over before he could even manage to give them her name.

“Poor stupid little thing, she hadn’t begun to live and now she’s lying under the bridge with a broken neck.”

   Even though Jacinta and Liam’s mother had come down to collect them, they wanted to stay with the others. They wanted to stay in the unreal world of Mr. Slattery’s, where there were cups of tea and people pressed biscuits on them, where the night began to fall outside and the electric bars of the two fires began to glow red in the room where nobody turned on the light.

Fergus was in and out, reassuring without fussing them. Comforting them by the very fact that he didn’t say it was all right, he said it was terrible.

Marian Johnson arrived to know whether she could take the O’Neill children back to the lodge. Fergus looked into the room and raised his eyebrows in a question. The children had heard her voice in the hall. Kerry shook his head. Grace said nothing, just huddled closer to Michael.

“I’m sorry, Marian, they think they should stay here for the moment. I’ll get them home later, or their father will.”

Marian was disappointed not to be able to participate.

“One feels so helpless,” she said to Fergus. “I just wish there was something I could do to help.”

He felt a wave of affection for Marian. She was ridiculous and snobby at times of course, but she was lonely, and what was so vile about regarding Patrick O’Neill as possible husband material? Marian was a decent honorable person for all her nonsenses. Fergus added to his list of things he disliked about Patrick O’Neill the way he made a fool of this woman. Leading her on to believe there was some interest, when everyone knew he had installed his mistress in rooms above Loretto Quinn’s huckster’s shop.

   Sergeant Sheehan had seen a few sad things in the course of his work. And many accidents that were the result of thoughtlessness. He had no daughters, only sons, he would always have liked a little girl. He thought fondly that a daughter would have hung on his every word in a way that his wife did not. A daughter would not have been ambitious for him and wanted his promotion and preferment, and even for him to meet people of importance and be recognized by them. He knew it was a sentimental notion. People with daughters had just as many problems with them as he had with his sons.

Look at poor Mrs. Meagher and that Teresa for example. And Dr. White’s little girl could be a bit of a madam, they said.

But poor Maggie Daly. Nobody had ever anything to say against her. Even her own disagreeable mother could only complain that the child was not constantly in the church at prayer.

Seamus Sheehan’s hands were gentle as he lifted the broken body off the raft and laid it on the stretcher.

He and Martin White had been up to their waists in water pulling the raft toward them. The doctor had pronounced life extinct.

Seamus Sheehan had closed Maggie Daly’s huge frightened eyes tenderly and arranged her thin body with the arms straight by her sides. He was watched by a crowd of about fifty people.

The child looked incongruous and unsuitable for death in her skimpy blue bathing suit. Young Grace O’Neill had lifted a shabby print dress in a faded color and given it to him.

“That’s what she was wearing.”

“You’re meant to be back up in Mr. Slattery’s house.”

“I couldn’t bear her to be without her clothes. You know Maggie,” the child said.

Then Michael Ryan had come running to take Grace away.

Sergeant Sheehan thought the shabby dress was even less suitable. But he laid it over her, before they drew the sheet over her head.

Quietly and with great dignity in front of the shocked and silent crowd Dr. White and Sergeant Sheehan carried Maggie Daly back up to the stretcher. The ambulance had come from the town very quickly. But now that there would be no need to speed back the men stood waiting while Maggie’s own people lifted her body from the river. She would be taken to the hospital; the post-mortem formalities would have to go ahead. The date for the inquest would be fixed and then the body would be released to come home to Mountfern, to lie surrounded by candles in her own house, and then the church and then the graveyard.

A great sense of heaviness came over Sergeant Sheehan. He wished he could stand in the water and cry all alone.

The sun was becoming a red ball of fire, and mocking them with its beauty and its sense of peace in the light it shed over the small town.

Fergus realized that when the O’Neills went home everyone else would.

Patrick’s big car drew up outside his door and he came in with his quick light step.

Grace had somehow managed to disentangle herself from Michael, and was in her father’s arms.

Then Fergus saw him put a hand on Kerry’s shoulder.

“I’ve come to take you home,” he said firmly. “None of us are going to help Maggie by sitting here in the dark. Maggie is at peace now.”

It was a good thing to say somehow. Fergus wished he had said something like that himself. It seemed to break the stranglehold.

The children began to move normally, not like puppets. They even got ready to go back to their homes.

Tommy Leonard said he’d walk up River Road with the Ryans.

Liam pulled Jacinta and said to come on, their mother would be annoyed and would come looking for them again.

“I can’t believe it,” Dara said. “It’s not something you can believe, I keep looking around for Maggie, I feel she should be here, coming with us. She should be running to the door ahead of us.”

Dara had put into words what they all felt.

Their group was never together without Maggie, and running to the door is exactly what she would have been doing, hurrying people up, apologizing to Mr. Slattery for having stayed so long, asking anxiously where they were going to meet next morning in case there was some change, and they were all going to meet without her.

There was a charged silence when Dara spoke. It was almost too true in its realizing the way they were all thinking.

Suddenly something in Jacinta snapped. “Well, if it hadn’t been for you, Dara, she’d never have done it,” she said. Taking no heed of the horrified looks she went on. “Stop being all upset now that it’s too late. You were horrible to her yesterday and had her crying and running after you, and even today you were just showing off and didn’t throw a word to her.

“Maggie would never have done a dive like that unless she was trying to show that she was as good as the rest of us. Show Dara, please Dara. That’s all Maggie ever wanted to do. It wasn’t much, and now she’s dead, she is dead from trying to please Dara …”

Jacinta began a laugh which veered from tears to laughing, and the sound got higher and higher.

Patrick O’Neill let go his daughter and strode over to Jacinta. The one quick crack across the face was all it took. Jacinta was silent.

“I want to go home,” she said eventually.

“Take her home, Liam. I suppose your father will dislike me more than ever now but try to tell him it had to be done, will you?”

Patrick took his children out of the door, down the stone steps and into the car. Fergus saw him lift Kerry’s bicycle and fling it into the boot as lightly as if it had been a toy.

Tommy Leonard and Michael took one of Dara’s arms each.

“She was hysterical,” Fergus said. “It takes people different ways. She didn’t mean a word of it. None of it is true.”

The little procession went silently to the door.

“It was a terrible accident, that’s what it was. An accident,” he called after them into the night. And it stirred something in his mind, something about people telling
him
it was a terrible accident three years ago when Kate Ryan had gone into the town in an ambulance.

   As expected the hospital released Maggie Daly’s body within twenty-four hours.

Mr. Conway had been in there to see to things.

Mrs. Daly wanted her laid out in the house.

Dr. White protested. This was a child, it would be too distressing for everyone. A child didn’t have the tradition that a lot of the older people might know and want. Better to close the coffin and leave it overnight in the church.

Mrs. Daly had said with that ominous calm that she thanked the doctor for all his services so far, but his words were useless. Friends and neighbors would come to pray for Maggie’s soul by her body in the way it had been done for centuries.

Martin White went in a rage to the presbytery.

“Canon Moran, you have a duty, a duty I tell you to stop that madwoman talking about sins on Maggie Daly’s soul. There are no sins, for God’s sake. What kind of a mockery is this, getting people into a hysteria, coming and droning prayers for nonexistent sins?”

“Calm yourself, Dr. White, I beg you.” The old canon’s faded eyes looked at him kindly. “You’re not going to tell me that prayers to God and his Blessed Mother could ever be wasted, could ever go unheard?”

“Oh, forget it, Canon,” Dr. White said and banged the presbytery door behind him.

“He’s under great strain, poor man,” the canon said forgivingly to young Father Hogan, who was making a poor attempt at scrambling some eggs for the two of them.

   Martin White had to admit that the American had done the right thing to his daughter. He had heard an account of the scene both from Fergus Slattery and from young Liam.

Jacinta was unwilling to speak about the incident.

Her father came and sat by her bed.

“We all lose our tempers, you know,” he began.

Nothing.

“I lost mine with the canon now, it’s an easy thing to do. You must have inherited it from me.”

Silence.

“The only thing to do is to apologize for it as soon as possible. That neutralizes it a bit, like an acid and an alkali. You know?”