Malarkey (27 page)

Maeve had done her homework. Slips of paper marked the
references to Stanyon and the folly. She read a description of the
artifacts to us, turning pink with indignation as she commented on
the looting of ancient sites in that era. I was more interested in the
two relevant illustrations.

They were etchings, protected by delicate translucent paper.
One showed a foreshortened view of a low mound with a handsome
Georgian house below it and to the left. I screwed up my face, trying
to superimpose Stanyon now on Stanyon then. Where in the woods
would the mound be, if the present house had been built on the site
of the first? The slope I had walked up seemed steeper than the slope
of the mound in the drawing.

"I don't know that the house was built on the original site."
Maeve read my mind. "In any case, the artist's sense of proportion is
off. Look at the size of that donkey cart in relation to the house."

"Then all this does is verify the existence of a mound."

"And that it was an earthwork, not a natural formation.
That's useful. What do you think of the folly?"

"Not much. It looks like a cave. Hey, is that my stone?" I
squinted. "No, just a boulder. So the loopy uncle left most of the
mound intact and excavated the tomb opening."

"Apparently. He must have had prodigious luck to find it. I
wonder how the tomb was oriented."

"Oriented?"

"At the Brugh na Boinne, in the valley of the River Boyne, the
monuments have a seasonal orientation, south toward the
midwinter sun or east toward the sun at spring equinox."

"Like Stonehenge?"

"Stonehenge is oriented to the summer solstice. It is," she
said loftily, "later, smaller, and less important than Newgrange."

Dad chuckled. "And entirely different."

Maeve flushed and gave him a rueful answering smile.
"Allow me a little chauvinism. Newgrange and Knowth are
spectacular passage graves, Lark, among the most important in
Europe. They date to the third millennium BC. However, your
father's wrong. There are some minor similarities between the
Newgrange site and Stonehenge. The ring of pillar stones and the
heel stone, for instance. When you said you'd found an incised stone,
I thought immediately of the spirals on the threshold stone at
Newgrange. Double spirals?"

Dad had heard nothing of my stone, and I hadn't really
described it to Maeve either. Under her expert questioning I
managed to give some sense of the design and the sheer bulk of the
stone. She got rather excited and talked in technical detail about
similar markings elsewhere.

I made another pot of tea.

Dad munched a cookie. "Where's Jay?"

I looked at my watch. He had been gone more than an hour.
A chill ran up my spine. "Out for a walk." My voice was commendably
calm. "I'm a little surprised he hasn't come back yet. I know he
wanted to see Maeve's book."

Maeve looked at me, eyes narrowed. "Shall we go look for
him?"

I said, "Give him fifteen minutes. I'm sure he'll turn up
soon."

But he didn't.

I ate another cookie and drank a cup of tea. Maeve read us a
couple of passages that dealt with quaint local characters in a
patronizing upper-class way. The cookie sat in my stomach like a
lump of concrete.

When Jay had been gone two hours I called Joe Kennedy. He
said he'd be right over.

By that time we had moved to the living room, and I was
frankly pacing. I refused to allow my imagination to paint a picture of
what might have happened to Jay. He was a grown man and trained
in who knows how many kinds of self-defense. No mad strangler was
going to lay hands on my husband.

It took Joe half an hour to get to the cottage. Maeve had
made more tea. She poured him a cup while he questioned me about
Jay's disappearance.

"Which way did he go?"

"I was baking cookies. I didn't see." I tried to sound
reasonable. I should have gone with Jay. No, that was foolish. I'd had
my hands in the cookie dough, and Maeve was coming. "He made a
joke about avoiding reporters by diving into the bushes."

"In the woods?"

I cleared my throat. It felt awful, as if it might close and
choke me. "I don't think he'd go there. He bawled me out for walking
in the woods." Jay was neither inconsistent nor hypocritical. "I think
he usually walks up to the road and over to the convenience
market."

"Findley's? East, then." He was taking notes, neglecting his
tea. "Did you...er, what was his state of mind?"

"We didn't quarrel."

Dad's turn to clear his throat. I looked at him, pleading, and
he said nothing.

I drew a breath. "Jay was worried about the impact of that
article in the
Times
."

"Sure, he didn't like it." Joe's irony was mild. Jay had made
his displeasure extremely plain on the phone.

"The story worried him," I repeated. "It made him sound as
if he were taking an important role in the investigation." My voice
trembled in spite of me. "All he wanted to do was make sure we were
safe and then go home."

"But the plane ticket was stolen, and the passport."

"Aer Lingus agreed to replace the ticket, and we were...we
are going to the embassy tomorrow to pick up a new passport. That
can't have anything to do with—"

Joe said, "I'm sorry, Lark. I was thinking aloud." He fiddled
with the notebook. "I reported your husband's disappearance as a
suspicious circumstance. When an adult vanishes, Gardai policy is to
wait twenty-four hours."

"I won't wait. I want to do something, find him. You should
be searching the woods."

"Why the woods? I thought you said he wouldn't go
there."

"Where else can he be?" I looked at Dad. He was frowning
and rather gray. I stood up. "I haven't called Stanyon. Maybe he's..." I
broke off. Joe was shaking his head.

"I rang up the Steins from the station directly you notified
me. Liam McDiarmuid answered. He asked the others and called me
back. They've not seen Jay at all, nor did Declan Byrne when he
drove through the estate an hour ago. The area hospitals and the
traffic control officers saw nothing of your husband either. However,
I must ring up Findley's. May I use your telephone?"

"Please."

We waited, silent, while Joe spoke into the phone. He hung
up slowly. "No, he's not stopped in there today. Moira Findley would
have recognized him. She said they chatted each time he bought a
paper, and she attended the inquest, so she knows who he is. She's a
keen observer, Moira, and she watches the road. She says she'd have
seen him if he'd walked past the shop, too." He picked up the
receiver again and tapped out a number.

"He's bound to be all right, Lark," Dad said for the third time,
adding, "Jay can take care of himself. Perhaps he went for a walk in
the woods and got lost."

"Then they should search the woods." My voice sounded
harsher than I intended. I bit my lip. "I'm sorry. Is it time for your
pills? I don't want to have to worry about you collapsing." That was
tactless of me, but I was beyond tact.

He got up. "I'll go take them, and I won't collapse, my dear. I
promise."

"I'll hold you to it."

I watched him walk downstairs, shoulders hunched.

Joe was saying, "Yes, sir, I know. Call Mahon if you like. He
can bloody authorize it. Wasn't Mahon the one gave out the
information to that journalist? I want a team in the woods and
another at Stanyon. Ah, bollocks. Call in the volunteers, then. I'll stay
at the cottage for the time being." He read off the telephone
number.

Maeve said, "Are you going to do a search?"

"In the morning." Joe avoided my eyes.

I strode to the wall near the kitchen and yanked my anorak
off its peg. "I'm going out now, before dark."

Maeve said, "I'll come with you."

Joe hesitated, as if he meant to object and changed his mind.
"All right, but stay together and don't go deep into the trees. Call his
name. If he's there and has stumbled into a trap—"

"A trap?" I envisaged booby traps, mines, explosions. No. My
brain stopped whirling. "Like a pit with sharpened stakes?"

"More likely just a pit, though we found nothing like that
earlier. If he's injured he'll hear you and may be able to
respond."

I struggled into the jacket. I was having trouble with simple
things, like putting my arm in the right hole.

"I'll sit here by the telephone," Joe went on. "I'm expecting
Mahon to ring up. There's a fog forming, so be careful. I don't need
three missing persons on my plate."

Maeve had retrieved her duffle coat. She followed me to the
door.

"Tell my father where I've gone," I called, and went out into
the late afternoon drizzle. "Soft" weather, but not yet a fog. The air
was motionless.

Maeve and I entered the woods by climbing the stile I had
used before. I stood still, orienting myself, then I called Jay's name.
My voice echoed. So did the silence.

"No response," Maeve said. "Show me your stone."

"It's fairly deep in the trees, up that way." I pointed. "At least
I think it's there. I'm not sure I can find it again."

"Give it a try."

So I led her into the darkening woods. Every ten yards or so
I called for Jay. We heard rustlings and birdcalls. The rows of
identical trees told me nothing. The occasional blot of red paint,
fainter than before, led nowhere. After ten minutes, I was lost.

I stopped in my tracks and looked around me. "I'm sorry. I
have no idea where the stone is, or where we are." Mist curled
around the middle branches above our head and left my face wet. It
was getting darker.

Maeve turned slowly around, lips pursed in a silent whistle.
"I do see the problem. Airy, isn't it?"

It was eerier than a Halloween spookhouse. I felt my throat
closing again so I yelled Jay's name. No response. The needle-thick
ground beneath our feet was slippery.

"Pity the light's so poor." Maeve was staring to the right.
North, I thought. That's north. I hoped it was north.

"Ja—a—ay!" I called again. No answer.

Something hooted close by and a bush rustled. I whirled but
saw nothing.

Maeve touched my arm. "Let's go back. I want to look at the
book again. I need to check one of the descriptions."

I took a few paces up the slope and called once more
without result. I drew calming breaths. "Okay. This is doing no good.
We need light and more searchers."

"In the morning," she said gently.

"Which way did we come?" I should have known but the fog
and my anxiety left me clueless.

She pointed to the left, downhill. "That way."

"Are you sure?"

"No."

We walked perhaps ten yards through twining mist. I called
again.

Maeve took my arm. "Is that it?" She pointed.

My heartbeat quickened, but the stone she indicated was
much too small. "It's a megalith," I snapped.

"I wasn't sure you'd recognize one."

"I saw the dolmens." I coughed. My throat felt rough with all
that yelling. "Tell me about dolmens." Not that I cared, at that point. I
just wanted her to talk.

She led me down through the trees. "They're among the
oldest monuments in Ireland. Pre-Celtic, of course."

"Really?"

"Really. The Celts didn't invade Ireland—or more likely, filter
in—until the Romans and the Germanic tribes began pushing them
west. These people, the ones who erected the dolmens, were much
older. Formorians, in Celtic myth. The Celts weren't great builders in
stone until the Christian era. Of course they invented legends about
the stone works they found in Ireland, which were obviously the
work of giants."

"Obviously." My teeth had begun to chatter. The mist clung
in beads to Maeve's hair and, I suppose, mine. It swirled round our
knees.

Maeve went slowly, her eyes on the ground. "Dolmens figure
in the legends associated with Finn MacCool. He was a great hero
who founded and led a band of warriors called the Fianna."

I swallowed my panic. "Feena? Oh, Fianna as in Fianna Fail."
I named the major nationalist political party. They were out of power
just then, but I'd been in the country long enough to hear the name
and see it in print.

"That's right," Maeve said easily. We avoided a mist-heavy
bush. She knew and I knew she was telling me stories to keep me
from panicking. "Fianna Fail nowadays and the Fenians in the
nineteenth century."

"So tell me about Finn. Did his warriors use the dolmens as
fortifications?"

"No, it's stranger than that. In his old age, Finn took a
beautiful young bride named Grainne."

"Did you see something move?"

We stood and stared into the murk. Maeve took my arm.
"No, I did not, and the fog's settling. I was telling you about Diarmuid
and Grainne."

I stumbled on the slippery surface, and Maeve's grip
tightened. "Go on. You were talking about Finn's Abishag."

"Like King David's concubine?" She gave an easy laugh, light-
hearted. "Grainne wasn't exactly a bed-warmer. She was the
daughter of the high king, so marrying her enhanced Finn's prestige
and brought him wealth and power, not that he needed them. Still, he
liked to show her off."

"And one of the warriors fell in love with her." My sleeve
caught on a bush and water sprayed us both. "Sorry."

"In love? No. He was true Irishman, cold as a clam." A note of
bitterness rang in her voice, and I remembered her quarrel with Joe.
"'Twas the other way round. Grainne fell in love with the warrior. His
name was Diarmuid, and he was more thoughtful than most of the
Fianna, a brooder. The goddess of youth had marked him on the
forehead with a love-mark guaranteed to make any young woman
wild for him..." Her voice trailed.

"What is it?" She had stopped on the spongy surface which
was flatter now. "Did you see something?"

She gave herself a small shake. "No. Well, Grainne fell in love
with her brooding warrior. He was too honorable to shame the king
by seducing her—or too cold-blooded, take your pick."