“Have one of these instead,” Justin said, stretching to pull the biscuits across to us. “Tastier.”
I got a biscuit in one hand, dipped the other into the traveling case and found something hard and heavy. I came up holding what looked like a beaten-up wooden box; the lid had said “EM” once upon a time, in mother-of-pearl inlay, but there were only a few bits left. “Ah, excellent,” I said, opening the lid. “This is like the world’s best lucky dip.”
It was a music box, tarnished cylinder and splitting blue silk lining, and after a whirring second it plucked out a tune: “Greensleeves,” rusty and sweet. Rafe put a hand over the clockwork mouse, which was still fizzing halfheartedly. There was a long silence, just the crackle of the fire, while we listened.
“Beautiful,” Daniel said softly, closing the box, when the tune ended. “That’s beautiful. Next Christmas . . .”
“Can I have this in my room, to send me to sleep?” I asked. “Till Christmas?”
“Now you need lullabies?” Abby asked, but she was grinning at me. “Course you can.”
“I’m glad we didn’t find it before,” Justin said. “This must be valuable; they’d only have made us sell it, towards the taxes.”
“Not that valuable,” Rafe said, taking the box from me and examining it. “Basic ones like this go for about a hundred quid—a lot less in this condition. My grandmother used to collect them. Dozens of them, on every surface, just waiting to fall off and smash and send her into a fit if you walked too hard.”
“Knock it off,” Abby said, kicking his ankle—no pasts—but she didn’t sound seriously upset. For some reason, maybe just the mysterious alchemy you get among friends, all the tension of the last few days seemed to have vanished; we were happy together again, shoulders touching, Justin tugging down Abby’s sweater where it had slid up her back. “Sooner or later, though, we could find something valuable, in all this mess.”
“What would you do with the money?” Rafe asked, reaching for the biscuits. “A few grand, say.” In that second I heard Sam’s voice, close against my ear: That house is full of old bits and bobs, if there was something valuable in there . . .
“Get an Aga stove,” Abby said promptly. “The ones that heat the whole house. Warmth and a cooker that doesn’t crumble into lumps of rust if you look at it funny. Two birds, one stone.”
“You wild woman,” Justin said. “What about designer dresses and weekends in Monte Carlo?”
“I’d settle for no more frozen toes.”
Maybe she was supposed to give him something, I had said, and that’s what went wrong: she changed her mind . . . I realized I had my hand pressed down on the music box as if someone was trying to take it away. “I’d get the roof redone, I think,” Daniel said. “It shouldn’t disintegrate for another few years, but it would be nice not to wait that long.”
“You?” Rafe asked, giving him a sideways grin and winding the clockwork mouse again. “I’d have thought you’d never sell the thing, whatever it was; just frame it and hang it on the wall. Family history over filthy lucre.”
Daniel shook his head and held out a hand to me for his coffee mug—I had been dipping my biscuit in it. “What matters is the house,” he said, taking a sip and passing the mug back to me. “All the other things are just icing, really; I’m fond of them, but I’d sell them all in a heartbeat if we needed the money for roofing bills or something like that. The house carries enough history all by itself; and after all, we’re making our own, every day.”
“What would you do with it, Lex?” Abby asked.
That right there was, of course, the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, the one that was banging at the inside of my head like a tiny vicious hammer. Sam and Frank hadn’t followed up on the antique-deal-gone-wrong idea because, basically, nothing pointed that way. Death duties had cleared the good stuff out of the house, Lexie hadn’t been linked to any antique dealers or fences, and nothing had said she needed money; until now.
She had had eighty-eight quid in her bank account—barely enough to get her out of Ireland, never mind get her started anywhere else—and only a couple of months before the baby started showing, the father started noticing and it was too late. Last time she had sold her car; this time, she had had nothing to sell.
It’s amazing how cheaply you can ditch your life and get a new one, if you don’t ask for much and you’re willing to do any work that’s going. After Operation Vestal I spent a lot of predawn time online, checking hostel prices and job ads in various languages and doing the maths. There are plenty of cities where you can get a crap flat for three hundred quid a month, or a hostel bed for a tenner a night; figure in your flight, and enough cash to feed you for a few weeks while you answer ads for bar staff or sandwich makers or tour guides, and you’re talking a brand-new life for the price of a secondhand car. I had two grand saved up: more than enough.
And Lexie knew all that better than I did; she had done it before. She wouldn’t have needed to find a lost Rembrandt in the back of her wardrobe. All she would have needed was the right little trinket—a good bit of jewelry, a rare piece of porcelain, I’ve heard of teddy bears going for hundreds—and the right buyer; and the willingness to sell bits of this house, out from under the others.
She had run off in Chad’s car, but I would have been willing to swear on just about anything that that was different. This had been her home.
“I’d get us all new bed frames,” I said. “The springs in mine stick into me straight through the mattress, like the princess and the pea, and I can hear every time Justin turns over,” and I flipped the music box open again, to end this conversation.
Abby sang along, softly, turning the clay pipe in her hands: “Greensleeves is all my joy, Greensleeves is my delight . . .” Rafe turned the clockwork mouse over and started examining the gears. Justin flicked one of the marbles expertly into another, which rolled across the floor and clicked neatly against Daniel’s mug; he glanced up from a tin soldier, smiling, his hair falling across his forehead. I watched them and ran my fingers over the old silk and hoped to God I had been telling the truth.
12
The next evening, after dinner, I went fishing in Uncle Simon’s epic masterpiece for information about a dead Glenskehy girl. It would have been a lot simpler to do this on my own, but that would have meant throwing a sickie from college, and I didn’t want to worry the others unless I really needed to; so Rafe and Daniel and I were sitting on the spare-room floor, with the Marches’ family tree spread out between us. Abby and Justin were downstairs, playing piquet.
The family tree was a huge sheet of thick, tattered paper covered with a wild variety of handwritings, from delicate, browning ink at the top—James March, born ca. 1598, m. Elizabeth Kempe 1619—to Uncle Simon’s spider scrawl at the bottom: Edward Thomas Hanrahan, born 1975, and last of all Daniel James March, born 1979. “This is the only thing in this room that’s intelligible,” Daniel said, picking a bit of cobweb off the corner, “presumably because Simon didn’t write it himself. The rest . . . we can try having a look, Lexie, if you’re really that interested, but as far as I can tell he wrote most of it when he was very, very drunk.”
“Hey,” I said, leaning over to point. “There’s your William. The black sheep.”
“William Edward March,” Daniel said, putting a finger gently on the name. “Born 1894, died 1983. Yes; that’s him. I wonder where he ended up.” William was one of only a handful that had made it past forty. Sam had been right, the Marches died young.
“Let’s see if we can find him in here,” I said, pulling a box towards me. “I’m getting curious about this guy. I want to know what the big scandal was.”
“Girls,” Rafe said loftily, “always sniffing for gossip,” but he reached for another box.
Daniel was right, most of the saga was almost illegible—Uncle Simon went in for lots of underlining and no space between lines, Victorian-style. I didn’t need to read it; I was only scanning for the tall
curves of a capital W and M. I’m not sure what I was hoping we’d find. Nothing, maybe; or something that whacked the Rathowen story right out of court, proved that the girl had moved to London with her baby and set up a successful dressmaking business and lived happily ever after.
Downstairs I could hear Justin saying something and Abby laughing, faint and faraway. The three of us didn’t talk; the only sound was the soft, steady rustle of paper. The room was cool and dim, a blurred moon hanging outside the window, and the pages left a dry film of dust on my fingers.
“Oh, here we go,” Rafe said suddenly. “ ‘William March was the subject of much unjust and—sensational?—something, which finally cost him both his health and . . .’ Jesus, Daniel. Your uncle must have been trolleyed. Is this even in English?”
“Let me see,” Daniel said, leaning across to look. “ ‘Both his health and his rightful place in society,’ I think.” He took the sheaf of pages from Rafe and pushed his glasses up his nose. “ ‘The facts,’ ” he read slowly, running a finger under the line, “ ‘stripped of rumormongering, are as follows: from 1914 through 1915 William March served in the Great War, where he’—that has to be ‘acquitted’—‘himself well, later being awarded the Military Cross for his acts of bravery. This alone should—something—all low gossip. In 1915 William March was discharged, suffering from a shrapnel wound to the shoulder and from severe shell-shock—’ ”
“Post-traumatic stress,” Rafe said. He was leaning back against the wall, hands behind his head, to listen. “Poor bastard.”
“I can’t read this bit,” Daniel said. “Something about what he had seen—in battle, I assume; that word’s ‘cruel.’ Then it says: ‘He dissolved his engagement to Miss Alice West and took no part in the amusements of his set, preferring to spend his time among the common people of Glenskehy village, much to the anxiety of all parties. All concerned realized that this’—unnatural, I think—‘connection could not have a happy result.’ ”
“Snobs,” said Rafe.
“Look who’s talking,” I said, scooting across the floor to rest my chin on Daniel’s shoulder and try to make out the words. So far, no surprises, but I knew—could not have a happy result—this was it.
“ ‘About this time,’ ” Daniel read, tilting the page so I could see, “ ‘a young girl of the village found herself in an unfortunate situation, and named William March as the father of her unborn child. Whatever the truth may have been, the people of Glenskehy, who were then well trained in morals unlike these present times’ ”—“morals” was underlined twice—“ ‘were shocked at her loose conduct. It was the strong—belief ?—of all the village that the girl should remove her shame from their midst by entering a Magdalen convent, and till this should come about they made her an outcast among themselves.’ ”
No happy ending, no little dress shop in London. Some girls never escaped the Magdalen laundries. They stayed slaves—for getting pregnant, getting raped, being orphaned, being too pretty—till they went to nameless graves.
Daniel kept reading, quiet and even. I could feel the vibration of his voice against my shoulder. “ ‘The girl, however, either despairing of her soul or unwilling to perform the prescribed penance, took her life. William March—whether because he had in fact been her partner in sin, or because he had already witnessed too much bloodshed—was greatly affected by this. His health failed him, and when he recovered he abandoned family, friends and home to begin anew elsewhere. Little is known of his later life. These events may be taken as a lesson in the dangers of lust, or of mixing outside the boundaries of one’s natural level in society, or of . . .’ ” Daniel broke off. “I can’t read the rest. That’s all there is about William, anyway; the next paragraph is about a racehorse.”
“Jesus,” I said softly. The room felt cold all of a sudden, cold and too airy, as if the window had slammed open behind us.
“They treated her like a leper till she cracked,” Rafe said. There was a taut little twist to one corner of his mouth. “And till William had a breakdown and left town. So it’s not just a recent development, then, Glenskehy being Lunatic Central.”
I felt a slight shudder run down Daniel’s back. “That’s a nasty little story,” he said. “It really is. Sometimes I wonder if the best thing would be for ‘no pasts’ to apply to the house, as well. Although . . .” He glanced around, at the room full of dusty battered things, the ragged-papered walls; the dark-spotted mirror, down the corridor, reflecting the three of us in blues and shadows through the open door. “I’m not sure,” he said, almost to himself, “that that’s an option.”
He tapped the edges of the pages straight and put them carefully back in their case, closed the lid. “I don’t know about you two,” he said, “but I think I’ve had enough for tonight. Let’s go back to the others.”
* * *
“I think I’ve seen every piece of paperwork in the country that has the word ‘Glenskehy’ on it,” Sam said, when I phoned him later. He sounded wrecked and blurry—paper fatigue; I knew the note well—but satisfied. “I know a lot more about it than anyone needs to, and I’ve got three guys that fit your profile.”
I was in my tree, with my feet tucked up tight into the branches. The feeling of being watched had intensified to the point where I was actually hoping that whatever it was would jump me, just so I could get some kind of fix on it. I hadn’t mentioned this to Frank or, God forbid, Sam. As far as I could see, the main possibilities were my imagination, the ghost of Lexie Madison and a homicidal stalker with procrastination issues, and none of those was something I felt like sharing. During the day I figured it was imagination, maybe with some help from the resident wildlife, but at night it was harder to be sure. “Only three? Out of four hundred people?”
“Glenskehy’s dying,” Sam said flatly. “Almost half the population is over sixty-five. As soon as the kids are old enough, they pack up and move to Dublin, Cork, Wicklow town, anywhere that has a bit of life to it. The only ones who stay put are the ones who have a family farm or a family business to take over. There’s less than thirty fellas between twenty-five and thirty-five. I cut out the ones who commute for work, the unemployed ones, the ones who live alone and the ones who could get away during the day if they wanted to—night-shifters, fellas who work alone. That left me with three.”
“Jesus,” I said. I thought of the old man hobbling across an empty street, the tired houses where only one lace curtain had twitched.
“I suppose that’s progress for you. At least there’s jobs for them to go to.” Flick of paper: “Right, here’s my three lads. Declan Bannon, thirty-one, runs a small farm just outside Glenskehy with his wife and two young kids. John Naylor, twenty-nine, lives in the village with his parents and works on another man’s farm. And Michael McArdle, twenty-six, lives with his parents and does the day shift in the petrol station up on the Rathowen road. No known links to Whitethorn House anywhere. Any of the names ring a bell?”
“Not offhand,” I said, “sorry,” and then I almost fell out of my tree. “Ah, sure,” Sam was saying philosophically, “that would’ve been too much to expect,” but I barely heard him. John Naylor: finally, and about bloody time, I had someone who began with an N.
“Which one do you like?” I asked. I made sure I didn’t skip a beat. Of all the detectives I know, Sam is the best at pretending he’s missed things. It comes in useful more often than you might expect.
“It’s early days, but for now Bannon’s my favorite. He’s the only one with any kind of history. Five years ago, a couple of American tourists parked their car blocking one of Bannon’s gates while they went for a walk in the lanes. When Bannon turned up and couldn’t move his sheep, he kicked a pretty serious dent in the side of the car. Criminal damage and not playing nicely with outsiders; this vandalism could be right up his street.”
“The others are clean?”
“Byrne says he’s seen both of them a little the worse for wear, at one time or another, but not enough
that he could be bothered pulling them in for public drunkenness or anything like that. Any of them could have criminal activity we don’t know about, Glenskehy being what it is, but to look at, yeah, they’re clean.”
“Have you talked to them yet?” Somehow, I had to get a look at this John Naylor. Going down to the pub was out, obviously, and wandering innocently onto the farm where he worked was probably a bad idea, but if I could find a way to sit in on an interview—