Uchenna's Apples (22 page)

“Like nails,” Emer said. “Or new sneakers. Probably not for long, though…”

From behind them they could hear cars driving up into the concrete plaza of the old gas station. Uchenna turned and saw the blue lights flashing, and immediately her heart started pounding again. The pounding got worse when, out of the first Garda car, Sergeant Moran got out … closely followed by Mr. Mallon, and her Mam.

Emer’s mom and the Garritys got out of the second Garda car, and they all headed for Uchenna and Emer and Jimmy. Uchenna suddenly got the urge to grab the Mammy’s halter, in case she should panic at the approach of all these people.
Or maybe it’s just so I have something to do to keep from freaking out…
Uchenna thought.

She hung onto the Mammy as all the adults surrounded them, and there was a brief period during which everybody seemed to be talking at once. Uchenna looked from her Mam (who was regarding the Mammy Horse and her foal with astonishment) to Mr. Mallon (who was shaking his head) to Sergeant Moran (whose frown seemed for the moment to have fallen off, replaced by an expression that was more resigned than annoyed). “Now tell me why I’m not surprised to find you three here,” the Sergeant said.

Emer actually shrugged at him as she put her phone away. “We deduced that this was where the Mammy was,” she said.

Uchenna rolled her eyes at the word. “It just made sense,” Jimmy said. “The Mammy Horse was the only one who didn’t come running down the street. So she was probably still be wherever they came from. Which was here. O’Shaughnessy’s Field.”

“But how did they get out?” Uchenna said—a question that, now that all the excitement seemed to be over, had started to bother her. “They were supposed to be locked up here so they could go to—wasn’t it the pound?”

“The ISPCA shelter,” said the Sergeant, glancing over his shoulder as another Garda car came along, followed by yet another white car with the blue and white ISPCA logo on one of its doors. “We finally got them sorted…and here comes the vet. So now that we’ve got the other horses all rounded up—”

“Thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Garrity—” Uchenna’s mother said.

They both smiled at her, and then gave the gathering Guards a rather grim, even smug look.

Sergeant Moran sighed. “Then maybe we should all go back to the school, because there are a few more questions that I’d like answered—”

“But
why
on Earth?” the Headmaster said. “You’ve now got all the horses you were looking for. Plus one.” There was some chuckling from behind him among the other Guards. “And as you told me on the way up here, you’ve got the man who’s been behind it all—”

“What? What man?” Uchenna said.

“A gent named Mihaul Tiernan,” said Sergeant Nolan, and got his frown back again.

“A former Garda,” said Mr. Garrity, with maybe a little too much relish, because the Sergeant turned and frowned at him.

“And you’ve got his phone,” said the Headmaster, “with all the calls and texts to his various accomplices, the people who kept moving the horses around. These kids are plainly nothing to do with it.”

“Well,” the Sergeant said, “there are still some—”

“Questions? What questions?” Mr. Garrity said. “Are you really going to ask Mrs. Flora there for her little girl’s cellphone records? After the record
you
people have with Tiernan? Bet the local papers would love hearing about that. Or RTE.”

One of those silences fell among the adults that was of the kind Uchenna immediately knew should not be broken by anything a kid might say. Emer, however, was now out of her own personal terror zone, and her cocky streak was beginning to assert itself. “Sorry,” she said, “but
how
did the horses get out again?”

“Mr. Tiernan,” said Mr. Garrity, “chased them out. That little white Ford that ran down the street after them? That was him.”

Sergeant Nolan was frowning harder now. “Apparently he and the… persons who were assisting him… had some bones to pick with the people whose land they were putting the horses on each night. And it has to be said that some of those people were of interest—” He stopped himself, looked around at Mr. Mallon and the others. “Well,” he said. “If there’s anything else that needs to be cleared up, we’ll be in touch—”

He went off toward his car. Uchenna watched him go, then looked at her Mam, who was looking with interest at the Mammy Horse, now grazing unconcernedly while her baby suckled, and at the ISPCA vet. Uchenna’s Mam went over to the vet, who was checking out the Mammy’s rear end. “Any complications?” she said.

The vet shook his head. “Don’t see any,” he said. “Textbook delivery.”

“We made her get up,” Jimmy said. “The foal came right away.”

“Good work, that,” the vet said. “The right move.”

“But what happens to her now?” Uchenna said. “Is everybody still going to be trying to find out who she belongs to?”

“We’ll make a last few inquiries,” said the vet. “But nobody’s reported a loss of a horse like this, and she’s just been seized in a criminal matter—so both of those together mean we get her: whoever the owner was, their negligence means we’d be taking her off them anyway.” The vet patted the Mammy. “She’ll go straight out to our nice big place out in Offaly, and we’ll take care of her and her foal until they’ve both had time to recover from all of this. Afterwards—we’ll find somebody to take care of them: but only somebody who’ll promise never to sell them on. No more being shuttled from field to field for these two.” He grinned.

That relieved the last of Uchenna’s fears—or almost the last. She went over to her Mam, still a little timidly. “Mam—”

Her Mam put an arm around her as the Mammy Horse’s head came up and looked at them both: that mild expression again. “What, sweet?”

“I had to help her.
You
know why!”

Uchenna’s Mam reached out very slowly and then started to rub the middle of that big broad forehead. The Mammy Horse’s ears flicked back, flicked forward. “Well,” her Mam said, “maybe. Maybe.” She sighed, then looked down at Uchenna and smiled. “Come on, you,” she said, “your dad’s going to be home soon, and he’ll want to know where we are. And I have to go back to work still…”

They turned and walked away together. Emer’s mom had her in tow now, and Emer, as usual, was tapping away at her phone. The Garritys caught up with them, having finally pried Jimmy away from the ISPCA vet and the Mammy. “That was a great job you did there in the road,” said Uchenna’s Mam to Mr. Garrity. “Especially keeping that one horse from running over the Sergeant—”

The Garritys both grinned. “Ah, sure, it’s not the kind of thing you can stand there and let happen,” Mr. Garrity said, “no matter how you feel about somebody.” And he gave Uchenna’s Mam a rather sheepish look as they made their way past the fence and out across the concrete. “Maybe,” he said, “it’s possible to say too much too soon—” And he looked a little sharply at Mrs. Garrity.

“Yeah, true,” said Mrs. Garrity after a moment.

Uchenna’s Mam just nodded. “So we’ll be seeing you up at the next parents’ meeting, then?” she said. “Somebody ought to introduce you around. Helps keep things going smoothly.”

“That’d be a kindness,” said Mrs. Garrity: she looked a little sheepish too.

“Two weeks from now, I think it is?” Uchenna’s Mam said. “No matter, my daughter has your son’s number, we’ll be in touch—”

The adults nodded to each other, headed off in their separate directions: Jimmy waved at Uchenna and Emer as his folks led him off. “Text ya—” Jimmy said.

Uchenna nodded as she and her Mam started the walk back up to where the SUV was still parked. She threw a last look over her shoulder. Through the fog she could just see the vet starting to lead the Mammy Horse toward one of the horse trailers: the foal was toddling along behind her, looking wide-eyed and amazed by everything. “Bye bye…” she said in a whisper.

They vanished, lost in the foggy dimness. Behind her, Emer and her mom were almost ghosts themselves. Uchenna’s Mam caught her glimpse around. “Such strange weather,” she said, glancing up into the sky toward a faint, faint white circle just starting to break through the clouds: the sun. “They say it’s going to break tomorrow…”

Uchenna nodded. “Meanwhile,” her Mam said, “dinner for you and Dad…then I’m off.” Her Mam hugged her as they walked, and Uchenna finally was able to relax, feeling at last that everything had really turned out all right.

It took something like a week for the rest of the details to sort themselves out: though the local papers started digging into the story right away, because it was full of what Uchenna’s dad described as “lots of delicious dirt”. The Naas People gave the story of the Great Adamstown Stampede four pages in the front of the paper. One of those pages even had a picture of the horses: Uchenna could just make out the Mammy and her foal in the background. But that was the only story Uchenna could find anywhere, even on the Web, that talked about the horses themselves very much. What everybody was really interested in was the man who’d been at the bottom of the way they kept moving around.

“Looks like your sergeant didn’t say quite as much as he might have about this Tiernan guy,” said Uchenna’s Dad a couple of days later, after dinner, as he was paging through the paper.

“He’d been up on some kind of corruption charge while he was still in the Guards, hadn’t he?” Uchenna’s Mam said.

Uchenna’s Dad nodded, turning another page and reaching out for another piece of pizza. Then he realized he was feeling around in an empty box: Emer and Jimmy, who were sitting next to each other on the opposite side of the table and busily texting each other, had been there before him. He sighed and reached out for the box holding the spare pizza on the nearby counter. “He was innocent, as it turned out,” he said. “But they wouldn’t give him his job back after they dismissed him. Or not ”wouldn’t’. Just—things kept coming up: excuses why they couldn’t do it right now, it was going to have to wait…”

“Uh huh,” Uchenna’s Mam said, taking another piece of pizza herself. “I’ve seen that at the hospital sometimes. Not outright refusal to do what you’re told. Just passive resistance…”

Her Dad nodded. “So he came up with a way to get back at his cronies at the station, by making them look… less than competent?” He smiled a small cynical smile. “Bought these horses from one of the horse fairs out West or someplace like that—supposedly they were destined for the glue factory—then got a few friends to start helping him move the horses around to various properties in the area. The friends slipped up a few times about feeding and watering the horses, and the ISPCA is going to be looking into that, apparently. But the thing about all those fields was that they all belonged to people who had dirty little secrets that had sort of slipped under the radar.” He reached out for the iced tea he’d been drinking. “One of those fields was being used to hide drugs stashes by one of those Eastern European gangs working out of Naas: the owner was taking big payoffs from them to keep quiet. The owner of another one had a long history of domestic abuse, though nothing the Guards had ever been able to prove before. Apparently they caught him in the act when they stopped by to ask questions.” Her Dad shook his head. “Somebody else had been hosting an illegal car-breaking ring in his barn. A regular little litany of trouble….” He turned another page of the paper. “And every time the local Guards started investigating one of these fields and looking into who owned it and what they might have been up to, these nasty little secrets started getting uncovered… some of them stuff the Gardai’d been trying to get to the bottom of for a long time.”

“Cute,” Uchenna’s Mam said, getting up to go get herself some coffee.

“Some of the kids at school say it’s the ghost’s revenge on all the people around there who were mean to her,” Jimmy said. “She fixed it so the horses were in all those fields.” Then he snickered and made an “oooo, oooo” horror-movie noise. “The dumb tossers.”

Emer laughed at him, and at the idea. They spent a few moments going “Oooo, oooo!” at each other.

“Well,” Uchenna’s Mam said, smiling slightly. “I guess it’s more interesting to have a local ghost story, this time of year, than something as boring as a dispute over a wrongful dismissal. But it’s all over now, I guess….”

“Oh, there’s more pressure on the local Guards to get Tiernan reinstated,” Uchenna’s Dad said. “I think they’re spending their time right now trying to figure out whether it makes them look dumb to prosecute him for incitement to trespass when he’s just helped them break up an international drug ring and an auto smuggling operation that between them may have been responsible for several unsolved murders.”

Emer’s phone went off suddenly. She and Jimmy moaned and rolled their eyes. “That’s it, you two,” said Uchenna’s Mam. “Your mams will be waiting for you. Uchenna, you can walk them down to the end of the driveway…”

She did, and watched Emer and Jimmy walk off together.
Not exactly holding hands yet,
Uchenna thought as she turned back toward the house.
That would weird them both out right now. Not to mention the other kids in class. But I get this feeling it won’t be too much longer…

Back in the kitchen, her Mam was laughing softly at something Uchenna’s Dad had said before she came back in: she finished stirring sugar into her coffee and headed into the living room. “Well, maybe things around here will quiet down now…”

“Till the next time,” said Uchenna’s Dad as he closed the paper and got up to follow her. “No telling what else might be going on around here under the surface…” He stretched and yawned. “But you can never tell what’s going on in an Irish town. There’s always more happening under the surface than most people ever see.”

Uchenna’s Mam chuckled. “You make it sound so mysterious.”

“But true,” her Dad said. “Blow-ins like you and me will never know about most stuff going on around here.”

“You
were born here!”

“I was born in
Ireland,”
Uchenna’s Dad said, amused. “Not born
here.
In Adamstown, we’re all just blow-ins together. But then, these days, so’s anybody in this country who wasn’t born where they live… which is most of the population. So you may as well just learn to enjoy it…”