The Book of Killowen (Nora Gavin #4) (6 page)

“I’m sorry. I did explain all this to the woman at the agency but it’s all been so rushed. We’re headed to Tipperary, it should only be for a day or two. The lodging is all sorted—we’re staying at some sort of artists’ retreat. You’ll have your own room, of course, and access to kitchen facilities, everything you’ll need to look after my father—although we won’t really have to fend for ourselves; it’s the sort of place where the cooking is done for us. Nora and I will be able to help you, when we’re not out at the site.”

“Tipperary?” she said. “I didn’t know there truly was such a place.”

“Oh, yes,” Cormac said. “And not even such a long way as you’ve probably supposed.” He checked his watch. “In fact, if we can manage to push off soon, we might even arrive in time for lunch.”

They had just crossed the Tipperary border outside Birr when Nora glanced down at the map. Better start paying attention; she was meant to be navigating this last bit of the journey to their lodgings. The drive had taken them out of Dublin, southwest along the M7, through Kildare and Laois, and now into the area known as Ely O’Carroll. She rode in back with Joseph nodding beside her; Cormac and Eliana sat in front, and she enjoyed listening to the buzz of their conversation without hearing exactly what was said. Now and again a word or phrase would float back to her—Cormac inquiring about Eliana’s home in Spain, she asking a few general questions about the daily routine. Nora was grateful to be left alone with her thoughts.

She let her gaze caress the back of Cormac’s head, admiring, as she so often did, the curve of his skull, how pleasingly it intersected with the angle of his jaw. Whenever he turned to speak she once again remembered the meandering path those same lips had traced across her bare skin only a few short hours ago.

That intimate portion of her life, in particular, didn’t seem quite true. She felt the unreality most acutely each morning when she awakened beside him. Would she ever learn to stop holding her breath, waiting for the next bad thing to happen? Lately she had begun to feel a gradual easing, another few degrees of difference each day, but would it ever be enough? After wandering so long in the underworld after her sister’s death, the past year had felt like trying to claw her way back into the realm of the living. She had yet to face the fight for her niece’s good opinion, a struggle that hadn’t yet begun. Elizabeth refused to see her, wouldn’t even speak her name. You couldn’t blame the child for clinging to her father’s memory, refusing to accept the part he had played in her mother’s death. Cormac kept saying that Elizabeth would come around, but it hadn’t happened yet. And Nora refused to press. How could you ask a twelve-year-old to see such things?

She glanced over at Joseph, nodding beside her. In some ways,
he remained in a shadowy otherworld, bound by a tangled thicket of words without meaning. As she studied the delicate, translucent skin at his temples, the darting movement under his eyelids, she wished for even a fleeting glimpse of the images taking shape inside his head. Were a person’s dreams transformed when words slipped their meaning?

They had spent a lot of time together in the back garden these past few months—she on her knees in the dirt, Joseph basking in a chair—on the days when the sun god deigned to show his face. After her own father, she’d taken to cultivating roses and had found restoration in tending to growing things. Cormac’s father, too, seemed to find a sense of calm in being surrounded by virescent life. The back garden had become an oasis for the two of them.

In all the days they had spent together, she had yet to discern any sort of pattern in Joseph’s speech, or to crack the garbled code of his stroke-damaged brain. He could speak quite easily, and indeed often rambled on and on, but there seemed no logic to it—one day “fork” meant “tree”; the next day it meant another word entirely. That was the trouble—if there was a code, it was corrupt, the circuits faulty. Only his frustration level remained constant.

Once in a great while, he would have a small breakthrough. Two days ago, she’d been standing at the kitchen sink doing the washing up after supper, looking out into the garden and absently singing under her breath the words of an old song that she and Tríona used to sing to pass the time on long car journeys:

Up the airy mountain
,

down the rushy glen
,

We daren’t go a-hunting

for fear of little men—

She heard a noise and turned to find Joseph standing behind her. He’d looked agitated, his collar askew, white hair sticking straight up from the side of his head.

“Can you do her angle?” he said, and opened his mouth. “Bowling over, to-to-to give it up. Get up the barking again.”

Did he want her to keep singing or to stop?

“The barking! Um, umma.” He took her by the hand and gestured to his mouth, to suggest something pouring out. “Do-do the hemming!”

She began to sing once more, slowly drawing out the words—“Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen”—and watching as his lips began to move, following along.

He joined in then, each word perfectly formed and clear: “We daren’t go a-hunting for fear of little men.”

She pressed on: “Wee folk, good folk, trooping all together.”

Joseph finished the line once more, on his own, in a scratchy but rather tuneful baritone: “Green jacket, red cap, and white owl’s feather!”

He let her hand drop and shook his head. “Ah, God, a shinna what’s gone,” he said. And then, with sudden vehemence, “Feckin’ gyroscope!”

They stared at each other for a long moment.

“You can say that again,” she’d offered.

“Feckin’
gyroscope
,” he growled.

It had taken her a moment to realize that he had repeated himself—on purpose. He seemed to detect that some shift had occurred as well. His face began to screw up. She had thought at first that he might weep, but the sound that trickled from him was a barely audible chuckle, which grew into a chortle, and then to a full-throated guffaw, which Nora couldn’t help joining in—especially when she realized that it was the first time she had ever heard him laugh. When Cormac had entered the kitchen a few minutes later, he’d found them both propped against the cupboards, weak from laughter.

The stroke literature talked about how memorized words and phrases were sometimes unaffected by stroke damage, how they were apparently stored in a separate place in the brain. Joseph had once come out with a few phrases in Spanish, but since neither she nor Cormac spoke Spanish, they couldn’t tell whether he was making sense. So many mysteries left inside the human skull. She often imagined how much more difficult the current situation must be for Cormac than it was for her, since she had never met Joseph Maguire before his words had become disconnected. To Cormac, the contrast between this absurd, nattering old man and the larger-than-life figure his father had once been must be more than shocking.

A few words of conversation floated to her ears from the front seat.

“—and is this your first time in Ireland?” Cormac was asking Eliana.

“Yes. I wanted a bit more time speaking English before I begin my studies in September.”

Glancing at Joseph, Nora could perceive that his eyes were open, though his drooping posture still feigned sleep. There was probably more understanding than they knew.

“Where will you go to school?” Cormac asked.

“Trinity. I’m excited—such a historic place.”

Nora knew from teaching there about Trinity’s high admissions standards. This girl must be exceptional. She leaned forward to join the conversation. “What will you study?”

“English literature,” Eliana said, turning slightly to include her. The girl had an especially striking profile: delicately arched brows and dramatically sculpted cheekbones, a generous, bow-shaped mouth. Dark chestnut hair and deep brown eyes set off her complexion, which was a pale shade of ivory. Suitable pallor for a bookworm, Nora thought.

“I love the sound of English,” Eliana was saying. “I don’t know why, it seems sometimes quite . . . ” She hesitated, searching for the right word. “Plain? Is that the right way to say it? Unlike Spanish!” She laughed lightly, and the sound seemed to rouse Joseph from his false slumber. His eyes opened wider as he concentrated on the girl’s profile and seemed suddenly tuned in to the sound of her voice. All at once his eyes began to brim. His face was immobile as bright, shivering tears traced shining trails down his cheeks.

Cormac was looking forward to meeting Niall Dawson and tackling the job at hand. It had been well over a year since he’d been out in the field, the longest he’d ever gone without getting his hands dirty, and he missed it. They were on their way out to the site, after dropping his father and Eliana at the lodging Dawson had set up for them. Killowen was a working farm but also some kind of artists’ colony, and while not exactly posh, the place was immaculately clean and quite comfortable. And whatever they were cooking for lunch smelled fantastic. He felt a twinge of guilt, leaving the old man in a strange place with a caretaker he’d only just met, but realistically speaking, what other choice did they have? If they wanted to improve the bog man’s chance for survival for a few more centuries, there was little time to waste.

He looked over at Nora and reached for her hand. “Thanks for agreeing to this job. You could have said no.”

“Yes, well, in our line of work, it’s not like we can just wait around when a bog man turns up. Best to take the opportunity we get, isn’t it?”

As the car crested the top of the drive from Killowen, a swath of bogland hove into view just beyond a formidable wall of furze bushes. Cormac turned left out of the drive and then down a narrow, rutted laneway a short distance from the farm. Killowen Bog lay at the bottom of a hollow between rolling hills. Random fir trees and scrubby birches sprouted from its damp center. The blades of a wind farm spun lazily, silently on top of the next ridge. Cormac tried to imagine what the place must have looked like when the bog man sank to his death many centuries ago. This whole area east of the Shannon had once been wall-to-wall monasteries, little islands of learning in the midst of wild bog. As a kid, he’d loved reading about the illicit graffiti scribbled by Irish monks at the edges of their manuscripts. There was one in particular he remembered: “I am Cormach, son of Cosnamach, and there is some devil in this ink.” He had felt an immediate kinship with his namesake, imagining him young and perhaps a bit gawky, fed up with errant
splodges as he struggled to make it through his copying. Remembering that tiny flare of fellow feeling, Cormac couldn’t suppress a smile.

“What is it?” Nora asked.

“Nothing, just imagining what it must have been like here long ago.”

Cormac found himself a little unprepared for the carnival-like activity at the site. Upwards of twenty people were standing around, including Guards officers and a few local gawkers. A couple of television vans stood along the road, their camera crews off vying for interviews with the digger operator. There was even a van peddling fish and chips and burgers, no doubt hoping to cash in on feeding the pack of journalists. A small swarm, some journos and some locals, had gathered out at the edge of the drain. They were being kept well away from the body by uniformed Guards officers and crime scene tape, but they still craned to catch a glimpse past the white tarp wall erected by the coroner’s crew.

He slowed the car to a crawl, trying to get through the crowds. “Bloody hell. Niall’s not going to be happy.” At last a space opened at the side of the road and he pulled over and looked at Nora. “This is it. Look, I’d understand if you want to change your mind, especially with all this.”

Her eyes held his gaze, steady and calm. “No,” she said. “Let’s go.”

They collected their site kits and started out across the bog. A dark-haired woman stood beside Dawson—she must be the police. Dawson was about to speak when the woman stepped forward and introduced herself: “Detective Stella Cusack. Before you begin, I want to stress that the site is still technically a crime scene—that is, until we can figure out what the body’s doing here, or if the vehicle is connected to any crime. At the very least, we could be talking about disturbing human remains, but that’s still a chargeable offense.”

“We’re always careful to document everything as we go along,” Cormac said. “And of course we can defer to you or the crime scene investigators whenever you think it necessary.”

Stella Cusack seemed satisfied. “At this point we’re thinking the car may have been involved in a hit-and-run. Some
amadán
out for a joyride gets into a smashup, thinks he’ll just scuttle the evidence. Obviously didn’t reckon on a bog body turning up.”

“Anything else we ought to know?” Dawson asked.

“Well, Dr. Friel—the state pathologist—said she thought there
might be evidence of sharp-force wounds. So it may be murder after all, but I think we’re safe filing it as a cold case.”

She led them past a group of people standing just beyond the police line near the tent. Dawson followed along and spoke under his breath, “Sorry about the mob scene. I’d love to know who went and blabbed to the press. We’ve tried a couple of times to get people to leave, but of course when the media got here, the landowner insisted on staying. That’s him at the end of the barrier—Vincent Claffey. Been a right bollocks, to be perfectly honest.”