Malarkey (29 page)

Joe's frown shifted from Maeve to me.

I told him about my incised stone, gathering confidence as I
spoke. Maeve trotted out the etching that showed the mound. Joe
flicked his fingers over the drawing. "Faugh, we know there's a hill. I
don't see your point."

She gave him a sweet smile. "That's because you don't
understand the nature of follies."

"A serious flaw in my otherwise sterling character."

She ignored his sarcasm. "Face it, you're thinking of a
gazebo, a nice little circle of columns with a roof. A folly was a fake
ruin."

He made a sound expressive of extreme skepticism.

"A folly could take any shape, and the diary says, explicitly,
that the Stanyon folly was an extension of the tomb, the dolmen
that's buried beneath all that dirt and all those rows of trees. It's a
cave, Joe, an underground bunker."

He drew noisily on his fifth cup of tea and set his mug back
on the tray. "If it is, it's a cave without an entrance."

"The devil. Your men didn't
find
the entrance. It's
concealed. But Orangemen met there in the last century and de
Valera's boys stored ammunition in it in the twenties. We know that
much. I'll lay any odds you like there are a dozen old-line republicans
in the county who could walk right into the shelter. Notably Toss
Tierney."

"We've a warrant out for Tommy Tierney's hide. How much
cooperation do you think we'll get from Toss?"

"He's is a twister," Maeve said coolly. "Teresa is another
story, though, and Toss listens to her. Let me call her."

"No!" Joe thrust his fingers through his thick black hair.
Maeve took another tack. "The tomb faces north. I'm sure of that
from the description in the diary. Whssht, man, I could draw you a
picture. I shall draw you a picture. I've an ordnance map in the boot."
She stood up, tea forgotten on the arm of the chair. "Let me bring my
excavation team to the woods in the morning. They're idle
tomorrow, settling into their quarters.
We'll
find the
folly."

"Ha! If you fancy Mahon will put up with a crew of university
students mucking about his crime scene, you're daft." Joe paced to
the desk, wheeled, and paced back.

My father, dozing on a corner of the couch, snorted and sat
up.

"If it's just Mahon..." Maeve began, as if persuading the chief
inspector were the easiest thing in the world.

Joe stopped dead on the gray and white rug. "No, it's not just
Mahon. It's the whole mad notion. What makes you think they're
holding Jay anywhere near here?"

Maeve made a wide gesture. "'They.' There is no they. We
are speaking of Liam McDiarmuid. I'll wager he sneaked out of
Stanyon the back way, overpowered Jay, and took him into the
woods in the space of half an hour or less. He was back at his desk at
Stanyon by the time you called. He could have done that easily,
without his absence causing comment, but he couldn't have spirited
Jay off to Dublin or Cork."

"Not without accomplices," Joe agreed.

I shivered, wondering who the accomplices might be.

The telephone rang. All of us jumped. Joe answered. From
the scraps I heard of his side of the conversation I gathered he was
speaking to Mahon and that something had happened. My stomach
roiled.

Dad took my hand.

Joe hung up. "Neither Liam nor his Saab is on the ferry."

Maeve took a step toward him. "That means nothing." I
could see she was shaken.

"Nor in the car park at the terminal. Nor do the customs men
at Rosslare remember seeing anyone of his description."

"Even so."

"It no good, Maeve," he said softly. "I was mad to listen to
you."

I said, "Wherever he may be, Liam is missing." I knew that
because, at some earlier point in the surreal evening, Declan Byrne
had called in. He had sweet-talked the landlady into a search of
Liam's flat. Liam wasn't there or at the neighborhood pub or at any
of his known hangouts. And, as we now knew, not on the Rosslare
ferry.

"He disappeared. The timing can't be a coincidence," I added
after an exhausted pause. I was tired to the bone and wide awake. It
was past three in the morning. "Maybe Liam's a victim, too." That got
their attention, if only because it was a fresh thought. Dad put in a
half-hearted vote for the idea.

He sounded as tired as I felt, and I was, abruptly, reminded
of the state of his health. I persuaded him to go to bed on the premise
that one of us would have to be functional the next day. I went
downstairs myself, took a hot shower, and changed into sweats.

As I was brushing my hair dry I heard the phone ring again.
The bedsprings creaked in Dad's room.

"It's okay," I hissed. "Just the phone." I tiptoed upstairs.

Joe was listening and rubbing his eyes with his free hand.
Maeve had gone into the kitchen. I joined her. She looked fresh as a
jonquil and had spread her ordnance map out on the table. She was
working on a bird's eye sketch of the folly entrance, to scale.

She gave me a smile. "He's in the folly. I'll lay odds."

"Alive?" I let the question hang between us.

She laid down her pencil. "You're imagining horrors, Lark.
Liam had no reason to kill Jay."

I said flatly, "He had no reason to kill Kayla either."

"No reason we know of. Look at this." She tapped the map at
a spot where isometric lines indicated a small hillock. "That's the
mound. The entrance to the tomb ran along here." Her finger traced a
short line. "It's my guess the Stanyon uncle extended the opening
northward and roofed over the original earthwork. See? The mound
is asymmetrical in that direction. A long north-south passage with
the dolmen at the southern end."

"I'm convinced, but wouldn't later users—the Orangemen
and so on—have altered things?"

She tapped the pencil again. "No doubt they did—and
concealed the entry. That's why we need Toss Tierney." She flashed
me another smile. "Toss and a pair of thumbscrews." She cocked her
head.

Joe had hung up. He came into the kitchen and looked me in
the eye. "They've taken Tommy Tierney into custody at a motel
outside Limerick. He was making for Shannon Airport. He's not
talking."

Then make him talk. I felt like screaming that. Instead I
cleared my throat. "If he won't talk, how do you know he was
involved in the kidnapping?"

"We don't." Joe pulled a chair and sat. "However, he did have
your husband's passport and the Aer Lingus ticket in the pocket of
his jacket. Both were crudely altered." He hesitated. "He'd been in a
barny."

"What do you mean?"

"In a brawl," Maeve translated.

Joe knuckled his eyes. "The police surgeon thinks one of the
cuts on his body is a knife wound. It's a new wound."

My blood ran cold.

When shaws been sheen and shrads full
fair
And leaves both large and long
'Tis merry in the fair
forest
To hear the small bird's song

Child ballad

At eight in the morning, my mother called from New York.
She had watched the eleven o'clock news. There was a story.

"Jay's been abducted." I winced at the sound of my own
voice, as if saying the hard fact made it truer.

"Oh, my dear!" Ma said good things. She has an instinct for
that. Through her verbal facility, I caught the undernote of genuine
concern. Both of my parents loved Jay. As I answered, or tried to
answer, my mother's questions, I thought how strange it was that
they had come round so thoroughly. Both had had reservations
about my marriage. As far as I knew, Jay had made no extraordinary
effort to win their affection, yet he had it.

I answered the telephone myself, because Joe had gone, and
took it into the kitchen, because Maeve was napping on the couch in
the living room.

At first light, when the police ground-search began, Joe had
joined it. In spite of his reservations about Maeve's theory, he
wanted to make sure the searchers looked for the remains of the
Stanyon folly. He had been gone nearly two hours.

I listened as Ma worked her way around to asking about my
father's health and state of mind. I wished she would hang up. I
didn't want to talk, yet I kept making noises.

"May I speak to George?"

"He's asleep. He was up until three, and I hate to wake him
so soon."

I could hear in her hesitation that she approved of my
solicitude, though she wanted to talk things over with Dad. "Ah. Well,
when he wakes, tell him to call me and never mind what time it is
here."

"All right, Ma."

"I love you, darling."

"Thanks," I said with stiff lips. "I love you, too."

"I'm sorry, Lark."

"I know."

When she hung up I felt wrung dry. I went into the kitchen,
but the thought of another cup of coffee revolted me. I ate a piece of
bread. It seemed to calm my stomach. After a while, I went out on the
tiny stone porch to see what I could see.

The sun was bright and the sky an innocent, smogless blue
with fat white clouds out of a children's book illustration. A light
breeze off the Irish Sea lifted the leaves of the shrubs across the
graveled drive. At the far end, where the drive turned down to
Stanyon Hall, I could see that the rhododendrons had bloomed at
last, blood red.

The search had taken its way well into the woods and
surrounding fields. I saw files of dim figures in the sheep pasture
that rose up to the northeast, and, farther to the west, from among
the trees, I heard an occasional cry as if someone found something. I
could see movement in the woods, but nothing specific, no one
identifiable.

A helicopter rose like a horse fly in the direction of Arklow.
It hovered a long minute over Stanyon Hall, the whop-whop of the
rotors steady. The noise intensified as the chopper moved toward
the cottage and the woods. It was a sound out of Jay's worst
nightmares, but I hoped he was where he could hear it, because at
least then he would know someone was doing something.

I ached to do something myself, though I wasn't sure what.
My teeth clenched with the effort to keep still, not to run to the stile,
leap over it, dash through the trees calling Jay's name.

Maeve and I were not allowed to enter the woods until the
official search for evidence associated with the kidnapping was over.
If the searchers found the entrance to the folly, well and good. If not,
Maeve could supervise a limited excavation after they left. The site
was not registered, and she had permission from the owners to dig,
so the only red tape would be crime-scene tape.

As soon as Joe left, Maeve rousted her assistant, a doctoral
candidate, and warned the sleepy student he would be needed and
why. At the very least, she wanted her theodolite and the chest of
excavation tools. It goes without saying that I eavesdropped on
Maeve's conversation. She spoke longingly of sensors that could
detect variations in density and magnetism beneath the mound's
surface. However, such devices were costly. Locating them and
getting permission to use them would have taken too long.

Too long for what, I wondered, chilled. Jay had been gone
more than twelve hours. If the kidnapper had in fact imprisoned him
in the folly, did he have water? Air? Was he warm enough?
Hypothermia was a frightening possibility. The night had been
cold.

When Maeve finally hung up, she yawned, stretched, and
announced she was going to take a kip on the sofa. Fine with me. I
was deadly tired but could not close my eyes.

I sat in the kitchen and tried to read the sf novel I'd bought
in Dublin. My mind wouldn't focus on the page. I kept thinking about
Jay. I tried to call up recollections of the many good times we had
shared, but my mind returned, over and over, to the image of a man
tied to a chair in a cold dark cave, a man, it might be, with an
untreated knife wound.

When the helicopter swung back on its return flight, it flew
so low I thought I could feel the prop-wash on my face. I waited
outside until it disappeared and the noise dwindled to a distant
throbbing. Then I went back into the cottage.

Maeve slept, curled on the couch like a cat. She didn't move.
I retrieved the telephone directory and the printout of useful phone
numbers from the desk. If I couldn't do anything to assist in the
search, at least I could take care of niggling details. I called Aer
Lingus.

It was the time of morning for business flights out of Dublin.
The first clerk heard my woeful story with impatience, but she
transferred me to a man who was willing to listen. He had heard of
Jay's abduction on the radio, and he sounded both sympathetic and
excited. People can't help it. A disaster, especially someone else's
disaster, stirs the blood. He agreed to cancel Jay's reservation for the
Sunday flight to Seattle—there was no direct flight to Portland—and
to place him on standby. Jay would have to pay a fee, of course, but
not a large one. I thanked the man, accepted his sympathies, and
hung up.

When I called the embassy, the clerk sounded as if she
hadn't had her morning tea fix. Yes, we could pick up the
replacement passport Monday. After ten. In view of her evident
grogginess, I decided not to tell her the Gardai had retrieved the
original passport along with the thief. I assumed Tommy Tierney had
been our burglar. At some level, a message to that effect had
probably already got through to the embassy, though I supposed it
would take days to percolate down to the people who dealt with
distressed citizens face to face.

I decided my third call would have to wait. I ought to notify
the Dean of Instruction that Jay was missing. It was not yet two in the
morning at home, however. No point trying to get through much
before four in the afternoon, Greenwich Time. If I woke him, the
Dean would just dither. He had an ulcer.

Almost as soon as I replaced the receiver after my call to the
embassy, the phone rang. Maeve stirred. I said hello, low-
voiced.