Below the writing there was a circle drawn in ink; in the top left-hand corner, someone had drawn a red and green cross. Emily pointed to the model of the pond, with its perimeter wall of pebbles glued together; she reached finger and thumb down into the top left-hand corner, dislodged a loose pebble and extracted a small length of red and green tartan cloth, rolled in a small tube. She held it up, and then placed it on the surface of the model pool.
Then she kicked off her motorcycle boots and jumped into the actual pool. Martha followed her with the camera as she waded toward the spot marked on the map. Then she vanished beneath the water. Dave Donnelly looked at me, and I nodded, as if to say, it’s okay. I didn’t know whether it was okay or not. The flames from the blazing house burned dark gold and blood orange; the dawn washed the sky a darker, deeper pink. Emily came up for air, and nodded to me, and almost smiled, and went beneath the dark water again.
“What’s she looking for, Ed?” Dave said.
“A child,” I said. “A dead child. A son.”
The metal cross atop the round tower stood black and indifferent against the inferno. Jonathan had told his family to go to hell, but that’s where they had been living all along. He had just lit the flames. I thought of Sandra, and I felt shame at how I had used her to get to the truth, and sorrow for what might have been, and anger that she didn’t trust me sooner, or at all. But it was too late for her, had been too late from the day her father touched her. I wondered in the long years she lived in Rowan House if she had sometimes envied her sister’s death. I thought of Mary Howard, with her message to her granddaughter from beyond the grave. I thought of Marian Howard’s child, and the dead children left in barns and church doorways and buried in fields and in gardens all across Ireland, all for the same reason, for shame, for shame. And I thought of the message last night from my ex-wife, the mother of my dead child, telling me she had given birth to a son.
When Emily came up for breath a second time, she wasn’t smiling. She wiped dirt and dead leaves from her face, then reached back down into the water and lifted out a tiny sodden red and green bundle. As she walked toward us, the water dripping from the bloodstone around her neck, she unfolded the bundle. It was a small child’s school pinafore that had been rolled into swaddling. She carefully reached a hand inside. I could see the red flames of the house burning through the trees, hear the crackle of the fire like the beating of wings. I could see the tears rolling down Emily Howard’s cheeks. As she brought her hand up and threw away the pinafore and held the tiny bones of Marian Howard’s baby in her outstretched hands, her rings skimmed the water and the dawn flushed deep red as the sky all over Dublin turned the color of blood.
About the Author
DECLAN HUGHES has worked for more than twenty years in the theater in Dublin as director and playwright. In 1984, he co-founded Rough Magic, Ireland’s leading independent theater company. He has been writer in association with the Abbey Theatre and remains an artistic associate of Rough Magic. His third Ed Loy thriller, The Price of Blood, is now available in hardcover from William Morrow. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.
