Lake of Sorrows

When the coffee was ready, she poured it into her travel mug, added a drop of milk, and took it out to the car. Maybe it would be best to leave her files here today; that way Cormac could get started looking through them if he felt like it. She set the coffee in the car and went around to the trunk to unload her files. Lugging the heavy box into the house, she noticed that Cormac’s waterproofs, which had been hanging on the hook outside the back door, were no longer there. It seemed curious. Why would he have moved them since last night? She didn’t have time to puzzle over it at the moment. She was going to be late for her shift, sorting through drain spoil again today.

She knew her way to the bog by now, through the maze of crooked, unmarked lanes and hedge-choked byways. The distance was only a mile and a quarter, but the journey took at least fifteen minutes on these small roads. The power plant’s strange, enormous towers were always a marker in the landscape. Cormac had been coming here for years, and must know every knoll and back road. Last night, from the hilltop, he’d given her a glimpse into the life of the place, into all the human activity—large and small—that had scratched the surface here.

She was approaching the house that Cormac had pointed out as Ursula’s temporary home. Why did the woman make her so uneasy? Ursula’s face rose up in Nora’s memory, and for some reason she remembered the tissue in Cormac’s bathroom bin, the soft, sensual impression of a woman’s lips. She tried to banish the thought from her mind, but it clung like a cobweb to the edge of her consciousness.

It wasn’t until she was past Ursula’s house that Nora registered something odd about it. Checking to make sure that no one was behind her on the road, she slowly backed up to take a closer look. Her fleeting impression had been right; the front door was standing wide open, and what she presumed to be the sitting-room window was smashed.

Nora parked the car as far off the road as she could. She opened the trunk and reached for the tire iron, then slowly made her way up around the back of the house. The kitchen window was also broken, and the back door and shed door were wide open as well. Something was definitely not right here. Ursula should have been down on the bog already, and she wouldn’t have left all the doors open. The house was still.

Nora approached, tire iron in hand, checking for broken glass on the ground. A few clumps of moss bloomed on the concrete foundation, and a painted clay drainpipe emerged from the wall under the bathroom window, probably from the tub or shower. She heard the drip, drip, drip of the pipe before tracing it all the way to the drain at the bottom, and looking down she felt a sharp electric jolt of fear. The small pool below the drain was dark crimson with blood. There was no mistaking the color.

She entered by the back door. A wine bottle and two glasses, one empty and one half-full, stood on the kitchen table. A few drops of blood spattered the floor in front of the sink and one of the chairs near the table. Nora moved quietly down the hall to the bathroom, barely breathing, and she looked in through the open door, unprepared for the full horror that awaited her there.

Ursula’s wrists and ankles rested on the lip of the claw-footed tub, pale as porcelain. Her body was submerged beneath the water’s surface, and mounds of peat had been heaped all around the base of the tub. The stillness, the strange and terrible intimacy of the scene before her, was so surreal that it took a moment to register. Then the natural flood of confusion and horror broke loose, and a thousand jumbled thoughts began rushing through Nora’s head: she shouldn’t be in here, she should phone the police immediately, she should get out, call Cormac, run away and hide. What if someone was still in the house?

Listening closely for any noise, she fought her fear and edged closer to the bathtub. Her conscious mind understood that it was too late, but she checked for a pulse inside Ursula’s left ankle just to be sure, and found the pale skin cold to the touch. Nora withdrew her hand and cast her eyes around the bathroom. They would ask her to describe exactly what she had seen. Nothing was registering but the peat, the blood on the wall, and the pale, cold limbs emerging from the water. She forced herself to turn and look, to concentrate on the white tiles, the strange green walls, the purple bathrobe lying on the floor beside the tub, the single bare bulb that hung on a wire from the ceiling, the black peat under Ursula’s fingernails. Several candles on the windowsill had burned down and guttered out. Nora backed out of the bathroom slowly with the tire iron still in one hand, trying to hold the scene in her mind. The faucet dripped slowly, and nothing else moved, only the bright clear water steadily dripping into crimson, counting the seconds.