The Book of Killowen (Nora Gavin #4) (48 page)

“Pregnant?” Nora asked.

“Yes, yes, pregnant when she was taken. No one knew but
mi abuela
.” Eliana turned to the old man, who crumpled slightly and let out a low groan, the terrible knowledge like a dull spike to the heart. “How could you know? And
mi abuela
, she said she could not punish you that way. What if my mother had been killed, and there was no child? But she could not stop, she had to know. It’s strange to think now, but the people in charge, they kept such good records of their prisoners, of all the people they killed. And so my grandmother found my mother’s name in the secret files of the military hospital in Montevideo. She found a man there also who remembered my mother and how he was told to put her child into a basket and to bring that basket to the wife of a policeman, a woman who had no children of her own.”

Joseph closed his eyes.
“Cóndor,”
he murmured.

“Sí,”
Eliana replied.
“Operación Cóndor.”

Cormac felt a knot under his rib cage. Twenty years after it ended, the whole world knew of Operation Condor. About the torture and the killings, the kidnapped children of the “disappeared,” who were robbed of their families, their very identities.

“When did all this happen, Eliana? I mean, when did your grandmother find you?”

“Three years ago. But still we didn’t know the truth, not for certain. The man in the hospital, he could have lied or made a mistake. And so I went for a test, ADN, which you call by something else, I think—”

“DNA,” Nora said.

“DNA, yes.” She turned to the old man, gripped his hand. “That’s when I knew, when I could be certain.
Yo soy su hija
.”

The old man’s fingertips reached out and barely brushed her face. When he finally spoke, his voice was hoarse:
“He soñado—contigo.”

“And I have dreamed of you also,
papá
—” Eliana broke off, unable to speak. Her eyes locked on the old man’s, and his on hers, and upon that thread hung a look of such infinite joy and desolation that Cormac felt his own heart might crack.

Eliana managed to smile through her tears. “How strange it is, to feel at once so full and yet so empty still.”

Cormac could bear to look no longer. He turned away. The earth itself had broken open, the continents shifted, and nothing would ever be the same.

Stella Cusack snapped into action when she returned home from the wake, pegging all the dirty delft straight into the dishwasher, picking up the sheets she’d stripped from her bed and bundling them into the washing machine. She knew that it was only a feeble attempt to erase all imprints, all residues of Fergal Molloy, but it was the best she could manage right now. She sat on a chair, watching the water sloshing around inside the machine and sobbing like a child.

When the cycle finished, she sat in the silent kitchen, staring at the mobile phone resting on the table before her. She was trying to screw up her courage—time to ring her daughter, see if they could talk things over before it was too late.

Stella reached for the phone and flinched as it began to buzz and vibrate on the table. The blue window said “Cusack.” She punched a button to answer.

“Stella, it’s me.” He’d always been on to her that way, ever since she’d known him.
It’s me.
As if he were the only possible
me
. “It’s Barry.”

But something was up. She picked up on a subtle difference in the sound of his voice, a note of something—was it regret?—that she had never heard before.

“Barry, where are you?”

He hesitated. “Outside.”

She found him standing in the shadows, wearing his olive-green mac, even though the sky was clear. “Thanks. Didn’t want people to think you had a stalker.” He glanced sideways at the twitch of a curtain at the neighbors’ window. “Can I come in?” She turned and walked away, leaving the door open. He stepped into the foyer but didn’t remove his coat.

“What is it, Barry? What do you need?”

He seemed insulted. “Do I have to need something to come and talk to you? Why do you—” He closed his eyes and stopped himself from saying any more.

“Whatever it is, Barry, just say it and get it over with. We need to talk about Lia.”

He looked so awkward and miserable, standing in the middle of the foyer with his raincoat on, that Stella found herself beginning to take pity on him.

“Take your coat off, then. Do you need a drink? I know I do.”

“I wouldn’t mind, if you’ve got something. That’s one of the things I miss, just having a drink with you, Stella.” He was looking at her strangely as he peeled off the mac and draped it over the back of the sofa.

She’d crossed to the liquor cabinet and was pouring out a couple of short glasses of whiskey when she felt Barry standing behind her. So close that she could smell him, could feel his warm breath against her hair.

“Where’s Allison tonight?” she asked, her own breath coming fast and shallow.

Barry didn’t respond, just slipped his hands around her shoulders. “Stella—”

She turned, seizing the two glasses and ducking under his arm in one motion, before he could react. She shoved one of the glasses into his hand as she passed.

Barry squinted at her in puzzlement. She could almost hear the gears turning inside his skull. They were both adults. What was the point of denying physical need? And besides which, hadn’t he got lucky here just a couple of weeks ago?

Stella took a sip of the whiskey to steady herself. “Well, since you won’t tell me what you want, I’ll tell you what I need: Lia home with me, now. I want her to stop playing us. She knows exactly how to get what she wants, and we both know she’s better off here. We also know that you can’t keep this up forever, the whole engaged father act. It’s been what—four whole days now? That’s got to be getting old.”

Barry looked at her with an expression she’d never seen before. He was sizing her up, taking her measure. “I’ll drop Lia home on my way to the office in the morning.”

Stella still couldn’t suss out what was going on. Why was he being so agreeable? “You never said where Allison was tonight.”

Barry’s head dropped forward. “You know, I’m not sure where she is,
and I’m not sure I care. I was wrong about her.” He glanced up. “And wrong about you as well.”

Stella could feel him checking for a reaction, so she didn’t react, but she found herself backing up as he moved closer. “Relax,” he said, gently bumping her glass against his own. “Just offering a toast. To you, Stella, for being a great mum.” He paused. “And, all told, a pretty fuckin’ great wife.”

“Cormac? Are you awake?” Nora’s whisper came whooshing out of the velvety darkness to curl around his ear.

He turned to her. “Can’t sleep. You?”

She brushed his cheek with a cool palm. “Too much going on. Would you be up for a soak downstairs? Might help you sleep.”

They slipped, hand in hand, past the closed doors of the other slumbering guests, down the main stairs, and into the corridor outside the thermal suite. As they passed the courtyard windows, the garden was awash in pale moonlight. All at once a bolt of lightning seemed to flash through the grass at the edge of the herb beds. Nora jumped. “Did you see that? What the hell was it?”

At first Cormac couldn’t imagine, but after a moment, he understood. “Do you know something odd? We’re quite far inland, but this place seems overrun with eels. They must come up the rivers and canals into the bogs.”

“I suppose they’ve been here forever, if the monks figured a way to use their gallbladders for ink,” Nora said. “Maybe they’re like salmon, living their whole lives in the sea, until they return to freshwater to spawn.”

Cormac had a sudden feeling that he had been forever tracing a line inside the twisted maze of the past. “Strange . . . ”

“What’s strange?” Nora asked.

“To think that the gold ink in our bog Psalter, or the Book of Killowen, could have been made from the ancestors of eels who still swim up the rivers here. If you keep going backward, it’s entirely possible. That homing instinct—part of the great mystery, I suppose. All we know about the natural world at this stage, and we’re only beginning to scratch the surface.”

They continued to the thermal suite, and ten minutes later the soaking tub was full of brown peaty water, and candles around the room cast
a flickering, golden light. Two piles of clothes sat at the top of the stairs down into the pool.

“Have you heard any news of what’s going to happen to Deirdre Claffey and her baby?” Cormac asked.

“Claire told me Mairéad Broome is working with Social Services,” Nora said. “She’s going to see if she can bring Deirdre and the child to live with her. What’s going to happen to the Book of Killowen?”

“Anthony’s decided to donate it to the National Museum. The book, and the Psalter, and all the other artifacts discovered here will make an amazing exhibit someday. I think that’s what Anthony would like, to see his family’s legacy preserved. And I’m sure there are academics who’d like to pick his brain about the Book of Killowen and its whole colorful history. What’s happened here in the last few days could change his life completely.”

“I don’t know. It seems to me that Anthony might be content to carry on tending his cattle, fishing for eels, and making vellum for Martin Gwynne. Although Martin did tell me that he’s finally teaching Anthony how to read and write.”

“I wish you had seen the Book of Killowen, Nora. I can’t begin to describe the illuminations. It’s almost like the creatures in it are alive—and from what Martin Gwynne says, the ideas in it are equally electrifying. He believes the book contains the handwriting of this ninth-century scholar Eriugena and his scribe. Gwynne says it may be the final proof that scholars needed to establish their identities, once and for all. I don’t suppose there’s any way to be certain of our bog man’s identity, whether he could be the great man himself? I mean, we’ve got his wax tablet. Maybe the writing in the tablet could be linked to the text in the Book of Killowen—”

“I just don’t see how his identity could be definitively proved, unfortunately. We have no way to run his fingerprints, nothing to compare his DNA. We’ll just have to be satisfied with the tantalizing possibility, I’m afraid.” Her expression turned serious. “Speaking of identity, can I ask you something? Did you ever suspect that your father had another family in Chile?”

Cormac winced. “Jesus, Nora, you make it sound like he was a bigamist.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I know, I’m sorry. For so long, I was certain he had another family. Another son. At one point, I had myself convinced that it was the reason he left. It never occurred to me that he might have felt bound to a cause rather than to any flesh-and-blood person. I suppose I always thought if it was danger he was after, he could have found that just as easily in Ireland.”

“Some people—and maybe your father is one of them—I don’t know how to describe it, exactly, except to say that they aren’t born in their own skins. I’ve known people like that, who have to go looking for a place, or a purpose, that feels like home to them.”

“What are you saying? Do you not feel at home here?”

“I wasn’t talking about myself. No, I’m afraid you’re stuck with me, like it or not.” Cormac felt Nora’s hand under the water, her fingers twining through his own.

He said, “Do you know what baffles me? That even though they spent all those years apart, my father and mother were still married, right up to the day she died. My father offered to come back to Ireland then, and I wouldn’t have it. I sent him packing. It never occurred to me that he would have been grieving as much as I was. That wedding picture we found, of my father and Paz—it was taken long after my mother died.”

“Are there not some things that defy understanding, things we just have to let be?” Nora’s chin rested on her drawn-up knee, a pale island in their peat-laden pool. Her eyes glowed, even larger and more luminous in the wavering candlelight.

“When my mother died, it seemed as if I’d lost the only person to whom I felt . . . bound. I had to learn to be on my own, and I got used to it. Then came you, Nora. And now I suddenly find my family doubled, tripled”—he glanced up to the ceiling, beyond which his father and sister slept—“quadrupled. Just like that. Difficult to take it all in.”

Without a word, Nora slid over and tucked herself around him, wrapping her legs about him, twining her arms through his, until they were bound together like a pair of interlaced figures from the pages of an ancient book. She leaned forward and laid her head on his shoulder, and he could feel her heart beating, through solid flesh, in quiet double rhythm with his own.