Lake of Sorrows

After the rescue workers had taken his father’s body from the apiary, they had removed the body of the man they said had killed him, a man called Desmond Quill. The corpse was wearing a collar and tie, but the object that caught Charlie’s attention was the tie pin, a simple bronze disc with three whorls. He looked back at the dead man’s pale face and saw it younger, nearly twenty years younger, smiling out of the window of a car that had pulled up beside him on the road. The man had said he was a friend, that Charlie’s parents had been called away on a family emergency and had sent him to collect their son, to take him out for supper while they were away, and then bring him home. Charlie had been afraid to go against his father’s wishes, so he had agreed. He remembered being mistrustful at first, but the man had done exactly what he said he would. They’d gone to a posh restaurant somewhere in the Slieve Bloom mountains. He remembered the drive into the mountains with the sun still high. It had been early summer, and the bushes on either side of the road had blushed pink with blossoms. He remembered the greed that had overtaken him at the sight of the food brought to their table; he had eaten extravagantly: roast beef and gravy, and two desserts, and all the while the man across from him had watched, smiling and smoking and saying very little. After dinner, with the man’s warm hand resting uncomfortably on his neck, they had phoned his father from the restaurant lobby, and he’d had to speak on the phone. But before he’d had a chance to tell about his magnificent meal, the man had pulled the phone away and spoken into it: You know what I want. I think it’s a fair exchange, he’d said. I just wanted you to know how easy it was.

Charlie remembered the sound of his father’s voice, no words, but the notes desperate and pleading. After that he’d been afraid on the ride home, but the man had dropped him at the gate and driven off without a word, the taillights of his car growing smaller and smaller and then disappearing into the night. His father had come out of the house then, shaken him by the neck and cuffed him, and told him never to get into a car with a stranger, no matter what, and never to tell his mother what had happened that evening, because it would surely kill her. He never had told his mother; and since no great harm had come of it, eventually the memory had simply faded away. It was after that extraordinary evening that his father had begun checking the doors and windows each night. Now he realized what grave danger he’d been in, and why his father’s reaction had been so extreme. But the question still remained: Why had Desmond Quill decided to spare his life?

He had never seen Quill in the intervening years, but he had seen that same desperate look come into his father’s eyes. It was when the Guards had come to the house, asking questions about some animals that had been mutilated and killed out along the bog road, two lambs and a kid goat taken from his mother’s small flock. Everyone had thought he was responsible, Charlie knew well, but they had all been wrong; he could never have done those things to any animal. The memory of blood in the pictures they’d shown made him feel ill, even now.

Charlie whirled as something brushed against him from behind. Turning in place, he found that he was alone. He had felt a distinct touch—unless he was imagining things—in the very same place where Desmond Quill’s hand had once rested on the back of his neck. Trying to shake off the feeling of disquiet, he moved through the ruin, surveying the splintered mass of debris where a few days ago there had been a house. If there had been no explosion, the structure would eventually have collapsed from the weight of knowledge, the roof beams finally unable to withstand the burden of shame and guilt they had supported for so long. All the things he had wondered about—his mother’s secret absences, the photograph of her he’d found in his beekeeping shed, the artifacts hidden under the flagstones—were fragments of the picture beginning to take shape in his mind.

If it was true, what Ward had told him, then Danny Brazil might have been something more than his uncle. He remembered the first jarring sight of the body in the bog, the cord around its neck, and his fingers moved unconsciously to his own leather charm. He’d tied it there nearly ten years ago and had never taken it off since, believing those three knots somehow held the power to protect him from harm. No one had explained to him exactly how Danny had died out on the bog. They didn’t have to; he’d seen enough for himself to imagine how it had happened. He couldn’t avoid thinking about it. Over the past several days, going about his work out on the bog, he would suddenly picture the scene, and the earth would feel as though it were dropping away beneath his feet. He would stumble or tip backward, feeling unbalanced, disoriented, and dizzy.