IT WAS ONE OF THOSE OLD GRAVEYARDS UP IN THE mountains, with a small ruined church within the high granite walls, and an archway with a locked gate that had a sign pinned to it with the name and address of the caretaker. You’d call it an old country graveyard, except the city had come to meet it: there were redbrick cul-de-sac developments on either side, and a line of new bungalows across the road. There were no lights on in any of the houses, and no light in the sky either. But the ivy-clad wall was old and broken enough to offer as many footholds and handholds as I needed to scale it with relative ease, and I took a torch from the car to check the names on the graves, limiting my search to those that looked relatively new; there were many old stones and crosses on the uneven ground, and a scurrying underfoot that might have been rabbits, or rats; I didn’t want to be there at two o’clock in the morning and yet, as soon as I had received the text from Martha with the directions, I knew I had to go there at once.
The Howard plot was in a corner, shaded by yew trees and a single rowan; a big Celtic cross of black marble marked where John Howard lay; I assumed his wife had gone into the same grave; her name hadn’t been added to the headstone yet. The other grave had a stone of white marble and gold lettering and a photograph that fitted into a plastic cover. The photograph was of a girl of twelve, with strawberry blond hair and large blue eyes and a slight overbite and a cheeky smile on her face that said she knew she had been naughty but she was sure she could get away with it. She was holding a blue pig with one ear beneath her arm; her school pinafore was red and green tartan. What was written on the grave was:
MARIAN HOWARD
BORN MAY 15, 1963
DIED NOVEMBER 2, 1975
REQUIESCAT IN PACE
I thought of what Sandra said about her parents, that they hadn’t slept in the same bedroom “since Ma…” She had been going to say “since Marian died” but had stopped herself. I thought of Denis Finnegan tonight, drunk on fine scotch and a dream of the Howards, recalling the first time he’d set eyes on John Howard and his two angel girls. Two angel girls, only one still living.
I went and looked out the gates onto the road after that, in the hope that a car might drive by, or a truck, or a plane might fly overhead, or anything to take my thoughts away from here. But there was nothing but black cloud and mist and coal black night. I thought that this was right, with a dead child: there is no escape from it, and there is no prayer that can ease the pain of it. Then I thought of how little my feelings were worth in the scheme of things, and how little time I had to waste if I wanted this all to end. And then I turned around and went back to work.
The cover on the photo looked new; it certainly wasn’t weathered the way it should have been. And it seemed to be stuck on the headstone with glue, or resin. The grave had been visited recently; the earth was dented with marks, and there were even fresh prints in the softer mud leading up to the plot: the prints showed the kind of treads you get on motorcycle boots. There were prints small enough to be Emily’s, and prints large enough to be Jerry Dalton’s. And right around the child’s grave, someone had spread a trail of rowan berries.
There were lights on in Jerry Dalton’s house in Woodpark, but I would have knocked on his door even if there hadn’t been. I knocked like a bailiff about to repossess the place; it was only a matter of time before his neighbors were awake too. Emily Howard’s voice came from behind the door.
“Who is it?” she said.
“Ed Loy. It’s time we talked,” I said.
She opened the door, said “Hi, Ted” and went back inside. The door opened into a tiny hallway; a door led right into the living room. Emily sat in the middle of the floor in that knees-tucked-beneath-her way only women seem able to do. She wore indigo blue jeans and a black sweater; her newly black hair made her pale skin appear opalescent; her eyes were panda black, and her lashes were thick with mascara; her bloodstone rings gleamed in the glow from a gas fire. On the floor around her, she was surrounded by old photograph albums and journals; there was a smell of dust and worn paper in the room, of the faded and antique, of the past.
“They went through every album, picked out every photograph, and destroyed it. Even the shots of her as a baby. Isn’t that weird? No, isn’t that fucked-up?”
“Are you talking about Marian Howard?”
“Ye-ah.”
“What about the photograph on her headstone?”
“Oh, we put that up,” Emily said, staring at me through solemn brown eyes. She seemed to have aged several years in the hours since I’d seen her; I felt as if I was meeting her for the first time: a serious young adult.
“We?”
“Me and Jerry Dalton.”
“You and Jerry Dalton. You’re working together, are you?”
“I don’t know about ‘together.’ Don’t know about ‘working’ either. We’ve…he’s been getting sent this stuff about his real parents, about his background. And it crosses over with stuff about my family. So we’ve been, kind of, comparing notes. Trying to find out who fucked us up.”
“When I met your father, he said you’d been a perfectly normal girl, and then all of a sudden you’d had your hair dyed, broke up with your perfect boyfriend, gone off the rails entirely. Was that because you met Dalton?”
“I guess so. Jerry told me stuff about my family, about the ways people close to the Howards keep dying.”
“People like Audrey Howard and Stephen Casey and Eileen Casey?”
“You’ve been doing your detective thing, haven’t you? Yes, people like that, Ted. But you know, what my father said, about me being perfectly normal-I’ve been bulimic since I was thirteen, been in therapy since as long, my perfect boyfriend was a cokehead addicted to porn and that turned me on. How the fuck is any of that perfectly normal? And you know the joke of it? My parents didn’t even notice. They weren’t paying attention. Dad was too busy working, or lost in the land of rugby with fat Denis and all the Seafield man-boys, and Mum was obsessed with herself, with her looks or her fading looks, with her career or her fading career, with cheating on Dad with as many men as possible. I’m surprised Dad even noticed I was missing. Bet if he hadn’t received the ransom demand, he wouldn’t have.”
She said all this in a matter-of-fact tone, without any self-pity; as if she feared I might attribute some to her, she quickly added, “I’m not doing a poor little rich girl routine here, it’s just…there’s something wrong. Something wrong with my aunt thinking it’s okay for me to screw my cousin, something wrong with me for doing it, something wrong for her to put me in therapy and not tell my folks, something wrong with me for going along with it. Even if I was the child, I’m not anymore. But I didn’t seem to have it in me to do anything about it on my own. Jerry said, what’s the problem? Something’s wrong in my family. What’s the solution? Well, if six years of therapy isn’t telling you, maybe it isn’t all in your head: chances are you need to find out for real. And I was getting somewhere, feeling better just searching, you know, looking at the Howards, at Dad, at Aunt Sandra, at Jonny even, trying to figure out what lies they were telling when half the time they didn’t seem to know themselves. And dumping David Brady, who was like my sick addiction. And then this fucking porno thing comes back to haunt me, Jesus.”
Her eyes welled up and spilled over. I had a clean handkerchief in my pocket. I offered it to her, and she dabbed her eyes with it, smearing the black makeup and mascara around her eyes. She looked at the black stains on the handkerchief and made herself laugh.
“I bet I look like some girl at a Debs dance now, who never wears eye makeup usually and doesn’t understand you’re not supposed to cry with it on.”
“You look fine,” I said. “And you’re never not supposed to cry.”
“Is that your philosophy, Ted?”
“I wish you’d stop calling me Ted.”
She giggled, then blew her nose, leaving it black on the tip. Then she went through the albums on the floor until she found something.
“So look,” she said. “I think I’m getting closer to finding out what’s wrong. Today Jerry got a photograph of Marian Howard, and a clipping. Look at this.”
She passed me an old scrap of yellowing newspaper, from the Irish Independent dated January 18, 1976.
DEATH OF DOCTOR’S CHILD
“TRAGIC ACCIDENT”
An inquest into the death by drowning of Marian Howard (12), the youngest daughter of well-known doctor John Howard, heard that the child was known to have a “mischievous” sense of humor, and that she had been in the habit of “messing around” in the large pond at the rear of the family home. Her elder sister Sandra said Marian used to hold her breath and hide underwater, fully clothed, often in one of the many crevices and breaks in the stone walls of the pond, as a practical joke, so that she and her brother and parents would panic and believe she had drowned. It was thought that in this instance, she became trapped by a large or unwieldy rock, which may have snagged on her clothing. A verdict of accidental death was recorded.
“It’s hilarious, isn’t it? The shit you can get away with if you’re a big rich doctor.”
“You think they just went along with whatever the family said to hush it up?”
“It was November, Ted. I mean, it’s bullshit anyway, there’s barely three feet of water in that pond, how the fuck you’d get jammed down there at the age of twelve, I don’t know. But say you did, and you couldn’t swim or something, and you had this yo-ho-ho mischievous sense of humor God help us, you might pull something like that in July or August, but November? I mean, who’d think to look in the pond, who’d be out in the fucking garden in November? It’s freezing, for fuck’s sake. Complete joke.”
“What do you think happened?” I said.
“I don’t know. But listen, a childhood accident, right, a kid drowns. My aunt. How is it Dad never told me? How is it Sandra never told Jonny? I mean, it was thirty years ago, obviously upsetting, but they’ve gotten over it, right? Except if they haven’t. And why haven’t they?”
“Where did you get all the photo albums?”
“Granny Howard left them to me. There are journals as well. Stuff she wrote, some stuff the kids wrote. That’s another thing, when Granny Howard died, she was cremated. I didn’t think anything, but it would have been the normal thing to bury her with Granddad. But if we had visited the grave, we would have found out about Marian.”
“Did you take them from Rowan House?”
Emily nodded.
“This morning the cops came and asked me questions about Mum, and David. They talked to Sandra too. And then David Manuel showed up, and Sandra felt it was safe to go off to the clinic to boss people around, the way she likes. And I talked to David a while, then he left.”
“What did you say to David Manuel?”
“Not a lot. Not then. I spoke to him again later. I forgot, before then I had another row with my cousin, because he thought I shouldn’t be talking to David, and I thought he should. I said it was time to tell the truth about everything. But Jonny, my God, he is a true Howard, he wants to keep it all covered up. And…oh, other stuff.”
“What other stuff?”
Emily rolled her eyes.
“He wanted to have sex with me. He always wants to have sex with me. And I haven’t for ages, except in that fucking porno. That was David Brady’s idea, to spite me, or get back at me for dumping him, or something. And I suppose I thought, well maybe it would be better than a complete stranger. You see, normal again. So he stormed off in his long black coat. I always slag him, he looks like one of those guys who shoot up classrooms.”
“Jonathan said you had sex together all afternoon, in the house in Honeypark.”
“He said that? How could we have? He wasn’t fucking there.”
“He what? Where was he?”
“He took off in the morning and came back not long before you arrived. He looked in a bad way.”
“He said that’s what you did. And that when you came back, you showered and changed all your clothes.”
Emily stared at me, her blackened eyes widening.
“Jesus Christ. He was trying to point the finger at me.”
“Did he shower and change his clothes when he came back?”
She nodded, and tears sprang into her eyes again.
“Why would he want people to think I had killed anyone?”
“Maybe he was afraid I might think he had. Did you leave the house in Honeypark?”
“For a while. I went to see Jerry at the Woodpark Inn, his band was supposed to have a rehearsal. But I couldn’t find him.”
“That would have been what time?”
“About midday. I had a cup of coffee there, came back around two. Still no sign of Jonny.”
“All right. Let’s get back to yesterday. After you had the row with Jonny.”
“He stormed off. And I was left alone. Sandra had given the staff the day off. So I went through to the old house. Wandered about, looking for…you know, something wrong.”
“And you found all these?” I said, indicating the photograph albums and journals.
“I don’t think Sandra wanted me to have them. Thought I’d grab them while the coast was clear. Also, I went into a room…a little girl’s room with Sleeping Beauty wallpaper-”
“I was in that room too.”
“And a dolls’ house model of Rowan House.”
“Did you look under the roof?”
She nodded and swallowed hard.
“You must have turned the flap back to face the wall again.”
“I thought it was Sandra’s room. I thought, here it is, I’ve found it at last, Aunt Sandra was abused by my grandfather, that’s what’s wrong…and I went back to my room in the bungalow, with the photograph albums, I didn’t know what I was going to do, who I could tell. I mean, the idea of telling Dad, he’d just lose it. You cannot say a thing about Sandra, or about Granddad.”
“So what did you do?”
“I gathered up all the books and papers, I rang a cab, and I got out of there. I came straight here, and Jerry let me in. And before I could tell him what I had seen, he showed me the photo of Marian and the clipping. And it all fit: the girl’s room preserved as if she was still alive, but frozen at the age of twelve. And we decided we should go to the cemetery-”
“How did you know where it was?”
“It was written on the back of the photograph. We’d go there and put the picture on the headstone if there was one, and…I don’t know what we thought after that. We were too upset, at least I was. Twelve years old. Jesus.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“I phoned David Manuel…and Jonathan. I thought he had a right to know. His aunt too, she would have been. He freaked out completely. Said I wasn’t to tell anyone else, that this was the family’s business, and it should be kept within the family.”
“You told him you had told David Manuel then?”
“Yes. Why?”
I thought about how Manuel had died, and who might have done it, and decided Emily didn’t need to know that yet.
“No reason. Is there anything in the journals?”
“I’m going through them. Accounts of holidays, bridge evenings, family gatherings around the piano, that sort of thing. Occasionally the kids are allowed to write things. Here’s one from Sandra:
Went with Dad to see Seafield play Old Wesley. Seafield won 24-16. I had a bag of Tayto and a Trigger Bar. Dad said it was a great try from Rock O’Connor. Kept warm in my new coat with fur trim hood and fur pom-poms.
“That was in 1968, she would have been eight or nine.”
“She sounds like an ordinary girl of eight or nine,” I said.
Neither of us looked at each other, or said what was on our minds: that she wasn’t an ordinary little girl, or that if she had been, she wasn’t for long. I gave Emily my card.
“I’ve got to go,” I said. “If you come across anything you think I should know about, call me. The other person you might like to talk to is Martha O’Connor, do you know who I mean?”
Emily smiled.
“Jonny’s half sister? The journalist? I know who she is, I’ve never met her.”
“If you can’t get hold of me, call her. She’s good at letting people know about things.”
“You mean, she’s got a big mouth?”
“In a good way.”
I left Emily on the floor, poring over the spidery writing in one of a pile of Mary Howard’s journals, then turned at the front door and came back.
“Two things: the other dollhouse, the one in your bedroom in Bayview-have you always had that?”
“No. No, that came from Granny Howard too, she left it to me. I’ve barely looked at it, to be honest. What’s the other thing?”
“There’s rowan berries across the threshold out there. What’s going on with that? That was you left them up at Marian’s grave as well, wasn’t it?”
She nodded.
“They’re supposed to ward off evil spirits. They say.”
“Hasn’t worked out very well so far, has it?”
Emily rubbed the rings on her fingers together.
“We live in hope, Ted. We live in hope.”