Uchenna's Apples (19 page)

As Uchenna came up to the kids by the gate, something strange happened: those who saw her coming actually backed away from her a little. She had no idea what to make of this: she stopped, staring at them. “What?”

“The horses are back,” one of the kids at the back of the crowd said.

It was all Uchenna could do to keep from acting like this meant anything in particular to her. “So?”

“They’re in O’Shaughnessy’s Field,” said someone else.

Uchenna shook her head. “Where’s that?”

“You don’t get it,” said the first girl who’d spoken, one of the third-formers who Uchenna didn’t know. “You really wouldn’t want to go there.”

Uchenna looked from face to face, mystified. She had never seen any of the kids here, a streetwise and hard-edged bunch for the most part, looking so freaked. “There was a murder there,” someone said, very low.

“It was a long time ago. Four or five years. And it wasn’t a murder,” said the third-form girl, pushing dark hair out of her eyes, a nervous gesture. “She just died. No one ever proved—”

“She was homeless, who was ever gonna go to court over that? When she had the baby—”

“The baby?” Uchenna said, feeling a sudden wash of horror without any good reason for it.

“This girl was on drugs or something,” said another voice from back in the crowd: a third-form boy. “She was pregnant, she needed to go to the hospital but yer man wouldn’t take her. He was beating on her all the time, so she ran off, she didn’t have anywhere to go—”

“She had the baby there—”

“They found it in a ditch. It was dead. They found her the next day—”

The story trailed off. Uchenna looked around at the kids and thought,
None of them wants to be the first to say the word ‘haunted.’ But they’re all thinking it—

“So when did the horses get there?” she said.

Some of the kids shook their heads. “No one knows,” said the third-form girl. “They were just… there.”

“The people over on that side called the Guards. They’ll be coming…” said the third-form boy, craning his neck a little to see out the gate. But it was hopeless: the morning fog was still so thick that there was no way to see halfway down the street, let alone all the way to one of the fields at the end of town.

Uchenna shook her head and walked on past the crowd, up the steps. In any other situation it would have struck her as funny that these kids, who spent all their time playing videogames full of death and destruction and laughing about it afterwards, should now be so scared by a little fog and a bunch of horses. Yet Uchenna couldn’t now get out of her mind the thought of what she and all the others in her class in the form would have been studying about right now—horses as the messengers of the dead, go-betweens between the real world and …
what,
exactly? She couldn’t help but shiver, herself. A pregnant unwed mother driven away from wherever she’d been living. A dead mum, a dead baby. And here, suddenly, a pregnant horse, appearing, disappearing. Uchenna thought of that one brown eye, looking at her, saying…
what?

She shook her head as she went through the door. Just inside them, off to one side as if trying not to be noticed, Emer was waiting for her. Uchenna went over to her. “Where’ve you been?” she said. “I was looking for you. Why didn’t you text me?”

“Too weirded out,” Emer said under her breath. “You heard—”

“Couldn’t help it,” Uchenna said as the two of them walked down the corridor. “It’s like… I don’t know…”

“Like they know,” Emer said, even more softly. “About
us.”

“Sssh,” Uchenna said. But that thought had occurred to her too. It was hard to keep a secret around here sometimes. There were just too many houses, too many windows: there was always somebody to see what you were doing, even when you thought you were being as careful as you could.
But maybe it just seems that way because I’ve never done anything around here that I
needed
to hide,
Uchenna thought.
Now, though—
And she shivered again.

Uchenna tried hard to pay attention in class that morning: but it was tough, for once again the Mammy Horse was on her mind…along with a lot more. Nervous thoughts about O’Shaughnessy’s Field, about the Guards, about the story of the unwed mum and her baby, kept going around and around in her head. Fortunately she was well enough prepared with her homework that when in the History and Culture unit she got called on to answer questions about the old Samhain feast, she was all ready. But the odd looks that her classmates gave her while Uchenna was reciting made her twitch a little, especially when she got to the part about the horses. Even Emer, in her seat across the class from Uchenna, seemed to be looking at her oddly. Uchenna ignored it all as best she could, sat down again, looked away toward the door—and then saw what Emer had really been looking at: a dark shape that she just had time to see through the glass window in the classroom door as he turned away, outside in the hall, speaking in muffled tones to someone else out there—a shape wearing a uniform. It was a Guard. Specifically, it was Garda Sergeant Moran.

Uchenna could just feel the blood draining out of her face as she tried to act like she was paying attention to the next student whose turn it was to recite. It was almost impossible to pull this off, though; and when she stole a glance back at Emer, her friend looked as stricken as Uchenna felt. When one of the school office staff came in toward the end of the class and just before lunchtime with a note for their morning teacher, Uchenna could do nothing but sit there and feel cold with fear as she opened and read it.

All the rest of the class was watching too, and none of them missed the teacher’s quick glance at Uchenna and then at Emer. When it was time for the lunch break, and the bell rang and everybody started to get up, all Mrs. Hanlon said was “Uchenna and Emer, please stay a moment—”

The expressions of the other kids, as they got out of the room as fast as they could, came in every shade from sympathetic horror to unconcerned curiosity to a sheer eager interest to see how much trouble the two of them were in. The room couldn’t empty out fast enough for Uchenna: several of the kids who passed her by glanced at her and snickered. One of them, she noticed, was the kid who’d made the crack about “her friend the creamer” the day before.

Finally everyone was outside. Mrs. Hanlon looked at Uchenna and Emer and said, “You’re wanted in the Headmaster’s office right away. They’ll be waiting for you.”

They
, Uchenna thought, and shivered all over. “Yes, miss,” she said, glancing at Emer. The two of them picked up their book bags and headed out of the classroom into the hallway.

Out there it seemed as if the whole class was still standing around, watching them with varying expressions of pity or nasty anticipation. Uchenna walked through them, trying to keep her head high but also trying to avoid any of their eyes: something inside her didn’t want any of them to have the satisfaction of seeing for themselves how freaked she was. When the snickering and muttering started again behind them, Uchenna did her best to ignore it for as long as it took to get around the corner into the next corridor and out of earshot.

The walk down to the school’s office wing, in the back, seemed both to take forever and to take almost no time at all. The lady who handled the outer office desk nodded them toward the bench outside one of the three inside offices, the one that said Headmaster. There they sat down, straining their ears to hear what was going on inside. There were muffled adult voices speaking, but no telling what they were saying: the door was too thick.

Emer stared at the floor, looking a little green. “You okay?” Uchenna whispered.

Emer nodded. “My stomach,” she whispered back. “It gets nervous….”

Uchenna nodded: hers was doing flipflops too. “What’re we going to say?” Emer said.

Uchenna shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “If we try making something up, we’re just gonna get in trouble—”

“If we tell them what happened we’re gonna get in trouble anyway!”

Uchenna had been thinking this very thing. She rubbed her face: she was sweating, and the sweat was cold. As she was wiping her hands on her skirt, from inside Mr. Mallon’s office she heard the sound of a chair being pushed back. Then footsteps to the door, and the door opening. “Come in, girls,” said the Headmaster.

They went into his office. Uchenna was cold with fear, but couldn’t resist looking around curiously at the room that so many other kids she knew had been inside of, but until now she never had. Somehow she’d expected it to be bare and plain: but there was nice-looking furniture, some simple but well-cushioned chairs, a digital photoframe with pictures of kids playing on a lawn, and actual paintings on the walls—watercolors of plants in pots, and a hillside view with big clouds in blue sky. Uchenna would have found these personal touches reassuring if the room had not seemed half full of the tall, glowering presence of Garda Sergeant Moran, standing next to Mr. Mallon’s desk. Up close Sergeant Moran was even bigger and more unnerving than he’d seemed on the auditorium stage yesterday, and Uchenna looked at him and gulped. The frown she’d seen on him yesterday looked deeper and more annoyed, if possible.

“Here are two of the three,” the Headmaster said. “Girls, you remember Detective Sergeant Moran, I’m sure. Sergeant, these are Uchenna O’Connor and Emer Daley.”

The two of them stood where they were, not having been told it was all right to sit. Sergeant Moran looked at them as if neither of them, somehow, was exactly what he was expecting. But that frown didn’t come off his face. “This is the girl with the apple tree?” he said, glancing at the Headmaster and then at Emer.

“No,” Uchenna said, but it came out more as a squeak than anything else. She gulped again and got control of her voice, then managed to say, “The tree’s in my yard.”

“Girls,” Mr. Mallon said, “sit down.”

They did, though Uchenna was immediately wishing that they hadn’t been, because it plainly meant that they were going to be here for a while. Sergeant Moran was looking at Uchenna with that annoyed frown, which he then turned on Emer. “Well,” he said, “we’re still missing the one they were seen with. Not your friend here,” he said to Uchenna. “Someone a lot shorter: and white.”

Uchenn dropped her gaze and began to study the floor. The carpeting in here was a particularly ugly color of orange, and needed vacuuming.

Emer was quiet for several moments. Finally she said, “We promised we wouldn’t tell.”

“Tell what?” said Sergeant Moran.

Emer didn’t say anything else.

“We weren’t doing anything wrong,” Uchenna said. “We were just feeding them.”

“And going to a lot of trouble to do it,” said Sergeant Moran. “Why? They’re somebody else’s property. Not your business. Unless maybe somebody made it worth your while—” The frown got deeper. “I think we all know what kind of family our missing third party comes from.”

Uchenna snatched a glance at Emer, who had joined her in staring at the ugly rug. “Girls,” said the Headmaster. “Look at me, please.”

They didn’t have much choice. “Please help me out here,” he said, “so that this doesn’t have to go any further. What does Jimmy Garrity have to do with these horses?”

Emer didn’t speak. Uchenna swallowed again. “Nothing,” she said.

“How do you know?” said the Sergeant.

Uchenna wouldn’t say anything more. It already felt like she’d said too much.

Mr. Mallon and the Sergeant exchanged a glance. “Girls,” Mr. Mallon said, “if you won’t answer the Sergeant’s questions, the school has no choice but to take notice of your refusal to cooperate—”

“This is a serious matter!” said Sergeant Moran, starting to sound angry. “And it’s not something that we’re going to allow to be held up by some schoolyard oath of secrecy! No matter what you may have promised one of your friends, you have to break that promise now. Otherwise you may find yourselves down at the station being questioned as part of a criminal investigation.”

Uchenna started to sweat cold again. When the Headmaster spoke again, he sounded angry too, though for a different reason. “Sergeant,” he said, “I understand your concern, but that isn’t the kind of thing you can say to these girls without their parents present.”

“Then maybe you’d better have them present themselves,” the Sergeant said, and the frown got deeper still. “Their parents, and Garrity’s. And where is he?”

“He didn’t come in this morning,” Mr. Mallon said. “I’ve called and texted his parents. No answer as yet, just the voice mail at home.”

“Typical,” the Sergeant growled. “You can never pin those people down: they’re always somewhere else, it’s always somebody else’s fault—”

There was a soft knock at the door. “Come,” Mr. Mallon said.

The door opened, and the Headmaster’s secretary put her head in. “I’ve got Mrs. Garrity on the line,” she said. “Jimmy wasn’t feeling well this morning, she kept him in. She says she forgot to text the absentee number—”

“I bet,” Sergeant Moran said under his breath.

The Headmaster gave him a look. “Probably it’ll make most sense to see them all together,” he said. “After class, ideally: it’ll give the other parents time to get in. Four o’clock?”

Sergeant Moran nodded and went out. Uchenna didn’t dare look directly at him, or say what she really wanted to:
how are the horses? Are they okay? How is the Mammy!
But it would be deadly now to say anything of the kind.
How am I going to explain the apples? What’s Mam going to say? I am going to be in so much trouble, I’m gonna be grounded forever. And when she sees Jimmy and his folks in this little meeting—

“Four o’clock,” Sergeant Moran said as he opened the door. He threw one last glance at the girls, stepped out.

Mr. Mallon sat looking at them in silence for several moments. That silence was terrifying. “You’d better go to your next class session,” he said.

“That’s lunch,” Uchenna said in a small voice.

The Headmaster sighed. “Be surprised if you have any appetite for it,” he said, “because sure, I won’t.” He looked out the window of his office into the mist, which was still thick outside. “So, four o’clock,” he said. “Don’t leave the building. After your class, go to the library and wait there.”