“Why was that? I mean, if they’d all held out in the beginning.”
“Well, Sutherland had already paid them three or four times what their property was worth as farmland, and he was smart enough to offer them a hefty bonus beyond that – but only if they all sold. Sutherland was confident enough of the outcome to start building his dam. When the dam was nearly finished – this would have been early 1952 – the O’Coineens were the only holdouts, and things started to get nasty.”
“Friend against friend, neighbor against neighbor,” Howell said.
“Exactly. Donal O’Coineen’s barn was burned and some welldigging equipment destroyed – he had a welldigging business in addition to his farm. Things started to get rough for his child at school – there were two daughters; one of them had already graduated. Donal developed what I guess you’d call a siege mentality. He pulled the child out of school and wouldn’t let his wife shop in the town. They grew most of what they needed and he went over to Gainesville for the rest. There were rumors that Sutherland had offered them more than the others under the table, and that made things worse. The O’Coineens just pulled their heads in, like turtles, and refused to budge. Then Eric Sutherland closed the dam, and the water started to rise.”
Howell sat up straight. “Jesus, how could he do that?”
“Well, it was pretty high-handed, all right, but he had the signatures of all the landholders except O’Coineen, and they’d all been paid everything but the bonus. These people had allowed their homes and farm buildings to be pulled down and their timber cut; they’d found other farms and had money in their pockets. They’d scattered, of course; the old Irish community was gone. So Sutherland had the right to fill his lake right up to the road which was the boundary of O’Coineen’s property. The law prevented him from flooding the road and cutting O’Coineen off, but suppose there was some error in calculation on the part of the engineers? The roadbed was pretty high and formed a sort of earthen dam for O’Coineen’s property. After two or three weeks, the water on the one side of the road was actually higher than the level of his land, which fell away downhill from the road into a sort of hollow. That’s where his house was. He knew that if the roadbed caved in, he’d be flooded. And he still had his wife and daughters there, convinced, apparently, that they were all that was keeping Sutherland from letting the water rise any further. Things were getting pretty tense.”
“So, what happened?”
McCauliffe grinned; he was enjoying the storytelling, now. “What do you think happened?”
“How the hell should I know?” Howell cried. “What happened?”
“One of two things,” the lawyer said. “Some folks believe Eric Sutherland’s story, that he went out to the O’Coineen place one night and talked Donal into selling. O’Coineen signed a deed of transfer for his land and instructed Sutherland to put the money into his account at the bank. Then he took his wife and children and left the county that very night. The water continued its inexorable rise over the roadbed and flooded the farm.”
“And the other thing?”
“Other folks believe that Sutherland never saw O’Coineen. That the roadbed gave way and Donal O’Coineen, his wife, and.two daughters were drowned in the ensuing flood.”
“So? Which of those two things happened?”
“Nobody knows.”
“What do you mean, nobody knows? How could they not know?”
“Because, in any case, the O’Coineen family was never seen again, not by anybody who knew them, anyway.”
Howell was speechless for a moment. “What about the money? Didn’t O’Coineen take that?”
“The money is still right down the street there, in the bank, drawing interest.”
“You mean, then, that Eric Sutherland may be a murderer?”
“I wouldn’t put it as strongly as that. A manslaughterer, maybe. Around here, your view on that depends on how close are your economic ties to Eric Sutherland.”
Howell slumped back into his seat. “Jesus, that’s the most hair-raising thing I ever heard.”
McCauliffe grinned maliciously. “You ain’t heard nothing, yet, John.”
“There’s more?”
The lawyer nodded. “The elder daughter was about my age, nineteen or twenty at the time – she was blind. Her name was Joyce.” The lawyer waited a moment for that to sink in.
The hair on the back of John Howell’s neck began to move around.
“The younger girl, who was twelve or thirteen, I guess, was named Kathleen.”
Howell tried to speak but swallowed, hard, instead.
McCauliffe took a sip of his coffee, put down the cup, and sat back. “And in the Irish language, me bucko,” he said with a sigh, “the name ‘O’Coineen’ means ‘rabbit.' “
10
Bo Scully drove from his office south along the lake shore. He tried breathing deeply to dissolve the knot that grew tighter in him with every mile. It was always this way, he thought, as the knot continued to form; it always would be, he supposed. He turned through the wrought-iron gates, which stood open to receive him.
Their relationship had always been peculiar, he thought, since the very night Eric Sutherland had first spoken to him, as he limped off the field after a particularly bruising game in his junior year of high school. He had just turned seventeen. Sutherland had invited him to lunch the next day, and the event had been awkward for both of them. Sutherland had never married, had no immediate family; Bo was fatherless, so he had reckoned the man was simply extending a kindly hand to a fatherless boy. But there was nothing kindly about Sutherland, even when he was working hard to be hospitable. It had occurred to Bo that Sutherland might be queer, but there had never been any hint of that in their relationship, not since that first day, when they had eaten club sandwiches on the back terrace of the big house and talked stiffly of Bo’s football career.
He saw Sutherland infrequently, though they talked on the phone more often, when Sutherland needed something or wanted something done. The summonses to the house were infrequent, a few times a year, not counting the big annual party, and there was always something specific and of importance to discuss, as there had been when Sutherland had suggested – nearly ordered – that Bo run for the dead sheriffs unexpired term. Bo wondered what it would be today.
His heavy shoe struck the tiles of the front stoop with a hollow sound that somehow reminded Bo of the whole house. It was certainly well furnished, he thought, as the white-jacketed black man showed him into the house and down the hall to the study. But the house seemed unused, uninhabited by any real person. It might have been a photograph in a glossy magazine. Even the study, which he now entered, seemed to belong to some absent spirit rather than its owner, who had built it. Its order was too perfect, almost obsessive. Bo suspected that the leather-bound classics on the shelves had not been read, and he had never known Sutherland to use the expensive shotguns in the polished mahogany case. He thought that many of the things in the study might have belonged to Sutherland’s father, who Bo had never known. Sutherland nodded at a chair, and Bo sat in it. The servant noiselessly closed the door behind him.
“You all right?” Sutherland offered a box of cigars.
“I’m real good, Eric.” The man had insisted on being addressed by his Christian name ever since Bo had come back from Korea. Bo was the only person he knew who called him that, and Bo was not comfortable with it. He accepted the cigar; he thought it must be Cuban, though he had no way of knowing, since he despised cigars.
Sutherland came to the point quickly, as he always did. “I think it’s time Mr. John Howell departed us,” he said.
Bo stopped himself from objecting; first he wanted to know exactly what Sutherland meant by ‘depart.' He put the cigar in the ashtray next to him and left it there.