The City of Strangers (32 page)

Niamh said very little that night. She was absorbed in her own thoughts and it was best to leave her there. Stefan and Kate wanted to know where they were, how far there was to go; she seemed to want to know nothing. It was enough that it was happening and somehow simply letting it happen was the easiest way to deal with it. Talking about the journey across the lake and getting to the boat in Montreal made her anxious. She didn’t want to think ahead, even a few hours ahead; the fear of being snatched back into empty captivity was never far away. Being with Jimmy Palmer had pushed it from her mind, but it was all around her again now, and much closer without him. She did what she could to shut it out, and whatever she was thinking about, it kept her calm at least. She had spent eighteen months in a room on her own, barely speaking to anybody except the nurses and cleaners who came in and out to do their work. She was used to silence.

Some of the time Stefan Gillespie and Kate O’Donnell talked, but they avoided what was about to happen; they both knew Niamh wasn’t sleeping. They asked each other questions, aware that it was something to do to pass the time, but aware too that they were interested in the answers in a way that was about more than passing time.

In the throwaway shorthand Stefan was good at, Kate found out about the farm at Kilranelagh, and Tom, and David and Helena, and Maeve’s death, so long ago now that there was nothing really to say about it except that it explained some things and not others. She felt that the reasons he had stopped working in Dublin as a detective four years earlier were brushed away too quickly; they were about more than a decision to be with his son. She sensed too, with surprising ease, the restlessness that lay behind his jokes about a country policeman’s life.

When the conversation stopped and they tried to sleep, before it started again because they couldn’t sleep, she thought he was comfortable with the way he talked about himself, and she liked that. But she wondered if the words didn’t come too easily, because he wasn’t really talking about himself; he was talking about his son, or his parents, or where he lived, or telling a funny story about missing cattle or raiding dance halls that was almost too well rehearsed. Maybe he was trying to keep her spirits up, but he talked more than he needed to for the kind of man she felt he was, as if he was offering her a surface there wasn’t as much behind as he might have liked. But he did keep her spirits up. And she liked his voice. Several times, as she dozed off for a moment, she woke abruptly to find her head on his shoulder. The first few times she moved away, shuffling sideways along the back wall of the truck, but after a while she only lifted her head. She felt better for being beside him, better for feeling him there.

If there were things Kate O’Donnell didn’t talk about, they seemed obvious enough to Stefan for the most part. She didn’t talk about her sister because her sister was there. She talked a bit about growing up in Dún Laoghaire, with a mother and father who had both been teachers and with brothers and a sister who were all a lot older. If there was more to say about that and about how she felt when, quite suddenly, they had all left home, it wasn’t said. Her words didn’t disguise the fact that it had been sudden and that she remembered that still. It had mattered when she found herself the only child in a house that was unnaturally empty. He was an only child; it wasn’t something he could ever feel in the same way.

She told him she had left school and had gone to the National College of Art; she had worked as a designer and artist for a time with an advertising agency; for a time at the Gaiety Theatre; for a time dressing windows at Clery’s in O’Connell Street. When the opportunity to work at the Irish Pavilion at the World’s Fair had come she had fought hard to get it, harder than she had ever fought for anything.

As Stefan tried to understand her, in the gaps in their talking, he knew she had been driven by more than her career. It was the woman who sat on the other side of her, staring into the darkness.

For both Stefan and Kate the intermittent conversation was something to do, but the time each of them spent piecing together what the other said wasn’t idle. There was a kind of intimacy in the darkness; they felt closer to each other than anything they talked about warranted. And there were things both of them waited for and didn’t hear. If there was a woman in Stefan Gillespie’s life, Kate O’Donnell had no sense of it; if there was a man in Ireland, waiting for her, he had no sense of that either. The unspoken, unanswered questions seemed foolish enough. And as the long time-out-of-time journey came to an end they each pushed them away.

It had already started to get light as the fish truck turned off Interstate 11. The land was flat; a thin mist hung in the air. It was very quiet; for a time even the birds had not yet started to sing. There were empty, straight dirt roads and small fields backed by clumps of woodland, barely in leaf, fragile and ghostly in the mist. There were clapboard houses strung out along the highways where no one was awake. The only eyes that watched the fish truck belonged to Holstein cows. The town of Mexico was empty too as they drove through it. Three miles on they turned off the road that ran from Mexico to the lake, just before the boatyards and the jetties along the Little Salmon River at Texas.

Niamh Carroll knew the roads well enough to find the way but something about being there had increased her anxiety. She was in the cab with Sam and Rick, and even they felt it. It wasn’t a happy place for her; she was only remembering how unhappy it was now that she saw it.

The house was at the end of a wedge of flat, wooded land between the Little Salmon River and the small, brown stream that was called Sage Creek. The dirt track ran in a perfectly straight line through the trees, which were thick here, until it reached the lake. Then Ontario stretched out across the horizon like a sea. The track turned right along the shore. There was a small painted sign that read ‘Loch Eske’; it was the name of the tiny lake in Donegal where Dominic Carroll had fished with his grandfather as a child.

The truck stopped outside the house. Rick opened the back up; Stefan and Kate climbed down, blinking in the morning light. Niamh was on the wooden veranda, kneeling down. She pulled up a loose plank and reached down to produce a key. She made no move to go in. She stood with the key until Kate took it from her and opened the front door; she didn’t go inside until her sister grabbed her hand and pulled her into the house. Longie Zwillman’s men said their goodbyes, tired themselves now, and the truck turned in front of the house to make the long journey back to New York.

‘One in the morning at the jetty, with a light,’ shouted Sam. ‘You got it?’

‘They are going to be there?’

It was said with a smile, but Stefan still wanted the reassurance of the answer. This was a long way from anywhere. There was no phone and there was no way out. They were completely reliant on people they didn’t know.

‘If Mr Zwillman says they’ll be there, they’ll be there!’

Then the truck was gone. It disappeared almost as soon as it pulled into the trees, and by the time Stefan reached the door the noise had gone too. He looked around. The only sound now was the sound of birds. As long as the boat came it was a good place to wait. No one would see them here.

The house smelt damp and musty; no one had been here for a long time. It was a small, two-storey clapboard house that had stood beside the lake for maybe a hundred and fifty years. Farmers and fishermen had lived there, but now it was the vacation home of a man who almost never used it. There were two rooms downstairs and three bedrooms upstairs. A single-storey extension had been added to one side. There was no electricity, and in the years when Dominic Carroll had brought his first wife and his young sons there, he had made a point of keeping everything as simple as possible; it reminded him of where he came from.

The years when his sons had cared about the simple life hadn’t been very many; and after his wife’s death he hadn’t cared much about it either. He had visited the house by the lake as a shrine, not a home. When he finally remarried and brought Niamh there, it was where he discovered that he had made a mistake. It was where Niamh discovered that she had married a man who wanted her for two things; to ornament his life in New York when required and to provide the sex he despised himself for wanting with any woman other than his dead wife. Some of those thoughts were in Niamh Carroll’s mind as she stood in the living room.

Kate clattered back down the stairs just as Stefan came in. ‘There’s a stove in the kitchen and there’s a fire in here. Niamh says there’s wood in a shed behind the house. Please God, let’s have some heat!’

‘I’ll get some in,’ said Stefan. He walked across to the fireplace and picked up a wicker basket. He turned to Niamh. ‘What about oil lamps? We’ll need to show lights tonight. How far is this jetty from the house?’

‘It’s just through the trees. There’s a boathouse there.’ Niamh answered quite brightly suddenly, pulling herself from the past into the present. Getting away was all that mattered.

She moved across to the stairs. There was a small door underneath them. ‘There’s a cellar. There should be lamps down there and some drums of kerosene.’ She unbolted the door and pushed it open, then walked to the sofa in front of the fireplace and sat down. She laid her head back and closed her eyes; she would try to sleep.

‘You can get out to the back from here,’ said Kate.

She walked through a door into the kitchen; Stefan followed.

‘Is Niamh all right?’

‘She doesn’t like being here. I don’t know why, just unhappy memories. It’s Jimmy too, leaving him behind. She felt safe with him. I know she thinks there’s some way they can be together, somewhere. She was talking about London. I know he played there. It’s not that easy, is it?’

She shrugged, shaking her head. He didn’t reply.

He walked to the door and went outside. It wasn’t that easy, a black man and a white woman. It was a lot harder when the black man was dead.

There was soon a fire in the big grate in the living room and there was the smell of ham and eggs frying on the stove in the kitchen, and the aroma of coffee driving out the mustiness of the house and the stink of fish that was in their nostrils. Rick had picked up some food at a gas station near Syracuse, and they sat round the living room fire eating the ham and eggs and drinking the coffee, as much to get rid of the cold that was still in their bones as because they were hungry.

They all felt more alive, even Niamh. Warmth made the house more comfortable, but it was full of things she didn’t want to think about again. Kate could feel some of it, but she had no idea how deep it went for her sister. This was Dominic’s place; even the musty smell reminded Niamh of him. Upstairs the master bedroom was still as it had been when his wife Maureen was alive. When he had brought Niamh here she had been allowed to sleep in it; when he wanted sex he took her to another room.

‘There are some bedclothes in a cupboard upstairs,’ said Kate. ‘I can air them and make up the beds. We should try and get a bit of sleep. I don’t know how long we’ll be on the lake tonight. We all need to get some rest.’

‘I’ll stay down here.’ Niamh curled up on the sofa again.

‘I’ll look at the jetty.’ Stefan got up.

Behind the house the grass sloped gently down to a line of trees along Lake Ontario. As Stefan Gillespie walked towards the lake shore the sky was clear above him. There had been cloud earlier, but now most of it had gone. The spring sun was warm on his face for a moment. The birdsong was loud and full of life. Among the trees the grass petered out into mud-grey, pebbly sand, and the sand disappeared into the lapping water of the lake. To the right, along the shore, there was another building, a wooden boathouse, almost at the water’s edge; there was a rickety jetty reaching out a dozen yards into the lake.

He stepped on to the boards of the jetty and went to the end. The tree-lined shores of Mexico Bay stretched out on either side, but across the water he thought he could see something dark on the horizon; it was land, and it had to be Canadian land. He could have no idea how long it would take but it didn’t seem so far. Everything depended on Longie Zwillman and Longie’s contacts in Canada. They would be, presumably, in the same line of work as Zwillman himself, what the gangster referred to as ‘business’. But their business wasn’t Stefan’s business, not here anyway, and whatever it was that motivated Longie Zwillman and had drawn him and John Cavendish into an unlikely alliance, he seemed nothing if not reliable.

He turned back to the boathouse, set just back from the jetty. Inside it was dark. There were three boats; two rowing boats and a small dinghy. There was a workbench at the back of the boathouse; oars hung from the wall behind it; there was a heavy, padlocked sail chest. None of it looked like it had been used in a very long time. Underneath the workbench, rusty and dust-and-dirt-covered from years of neglect, were two children’s scooters, a toy wheelbarrow, a tricycle with one wheel, a bundle of small fishing rods tied together. He turned round and walked out to the light.

In the cellar beneath the house Stefan was filling lamps with kerosene. When he had returned, with another basket of wood, Niamh was asleep on the sofa. Kate was in the kitchen washing the dishes they had used. He heard her footsteps above him now, walking towards the fire, throwing on more wood.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.’

It was Kate’s voice. Underneath the rugs the floor was bare boards on joists. He could have been in the room.

‘I wasn’t really asleep, just dozing,’ said Niamh.

‘I’ve made up some beds. Try and get some proper rest.’

‘No, it’s bad enough being down here.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It doesn’t matter, Kate. It’s not somewhere I want to be. The first time I came I thought it was beautiful. Within a day I hated it. That’s when I found out I could never be anything to Dominic because I wasn’t her – Maureen. He’d always been kind. That stopped. Here. The first time we –’

‘Come on, sis.’ He heard Kate walk over to the sofa.