The Glass Lake (52 page)

What had she been doing in the office anyway? There was no need to ask. Everyone from Maura to Stevie to Sergeant O'Connor knew that she had pounced on the opportunity of Maura's going back across the road to come and have a rummage around, probably in Maura's handbag too. Not to take anything, mind, but to get information…find out how much there was in a post office book, see the age on a driving license, know what kind of letters she carried.

They didn't even bother to ask Kathleen why she was in there. Which was a relief to the older woman as she lay in the hospital recovering from her injuries and accepting the sympathy of Lough Glass.

         

“I shouldn't have gone across the road,” Maura said to Stevie.

“I shouldn't have been where I was.” He grinned.

“They mightn't have gone for me, fine strong woman that I am,” she said. Her voice was still shaky.

“My life is bad enough, Maura. If they did have a go at you I'd have to be looking at Martin McMahon for the rest of my life. I wouldn't have liked that. Just as the man has got a bit of a life for himself at last.”

Maura smiled with pleasure at that remark. “Did you know Helen?”

“Not really. Who knew her? She was, as they say, a looker, but even with my enthusiasm for ladies I think I probably felt a bit young for her.”

“I pity the woman you marry, Stevie Sullivan.”

“No you don't. People who say that have an insane urge to be part of the excitement.”

“Aren't you full of yourself! Will we start the cleanup tonight? Sean is finished with everything.”

“Oh God, no. Let's not go within a mile of it. Will you come down to Paddles' and I'll buy you a drink to help us recover?”

“No, Paddles doesn't like females. They upset the even tenor of his ways.”

Stevie laughed. “The Central, then?”

“No, honestly, I'll go back across the road. Poor Emmet doesn't know what's happening. Come with me there, Martin would be delighted.”

“I will. My legs are a bit shaky.” A lot of Stevie's shakes had to do with the fright he got when the love nest was so suddenly interrupted by the sergeant. He thought he was going to have to deal with all Orla Dillon's in-laws, and it would not have been an engagement he would have come out of alive.

He needed a drink. Anywhere.

         

Anna Kelly was sitting beside Emmet's bed. She wore a white cardigan over a pale blue dress, her blond hair, like Clio's, was shiny and the color of corn.

Stevie hadn't realized that she was such an attractive little thing. “Well, well. Lucky Emmet. His own little Florence Nightingale,” he said admiringly.

“We're playing Old Maid,” Anna explained.

“Never a fear that you'll be that, Anna,” Stevie smiled.

“Oh, I don't know, it could be worse. Imagine marrying anyone from round here.”

“You don't only have to choose from round here,” her aunt Maura said.

“You did,” Anna said.

“Yes, but that was when I was mature, shall we say, and knew that this is where I wanted to be. Now, Emmet, I was coming in, in case you were lonely…but you're not.”

“Have they caught them?” Emmet's eyes were eager and bright.

“Not yet,” Stevie said. “But don't worry, they're not hanging around. The guards think they have gone off out the back again, the way they got in. Up the lane and out by the church. They're halfway between here and Dublin now.”

“Why did they choose your place?” Anna asked.

“Fastest growing car business in the land,” Stevie said.

Anna looked at her aunt to confirm this.

“You don't think I'd be working there otherwise,” Maura said. “Come on, Stevie. I'll get you that drink I promised you.”

They went into the sitting room. Martin was on the phone to Kit. The robbery had been reported on the news. She had heard Lough Glass mentioned and wanted to know was everyone all right.

“Talk to her.” He gestured eagerly to Maura.

“Oh, Maura.” Kit burst into tears. “I was so afraid something might have happened to you. Thank God it was only batty old Kathleen.”

Maura held the receiver for a while before replacing it. She was hardly able to speak with the emotion she felt, that her stepdaughter should cry over her possible safety. It was more than she had ever hoped for. That, and the look of relief and love in Martin's eyes as he poured them all a large brandy. Purely medicinal of course.

         

Sister Madeleine poured out a cup of tea for Mrs. Dillon. “It's a hard world to understand all right,” she said.

“I came to you, Sister Madeleine, because you know all about the wickedness that goes on and you're not above in a pulpit preaching about it and forgiving people or not forgiving them as the case may be.” Mrs. Dillon from the newsagent's and confectioner's nodded her head vigorously as she spoke. This was serious praise for the hermit.

Sister Madeleine accepted the high regard. She didn't say that it wasn't actually her position to forgive sins or to ascend a pulpit. It was easier to let people think they had a second line of approach. An alternative confession, if you liked to put it that way.

The woman was very worried about the behavior of her daughter Orla. “Maybe she should never have married into that clan,” Mrs. Dillon said. “But Father Baily was very anxious that it should be done as quickly as possible not to give scandal, or ‘any more scandal,' as he put it.” Madeleine murmured and sighed as she always did, and people always took great comfort from it. No blame was being attributed. That was why people loved to come and see her. It was more soothing than anything. But when advice was being sought, she let you work it out.

“I fear that Orla may be neglecting her child and that I will not stand for.” Mrs. Dillon's head bobbed up and down. “But Sister Madeleine, you can't talk to young people these days. They're not afraid like we were.”

“She might be afraid of her husband's brothers though,” Sister Madeleine said eventually. “If you were to hint that they had been drinking somewhere and that a rumor had come to their ears. You might find that that would work wonders.”

Mrs. Dillon left, thanking the nun as if she had performed a miracle. This is exactly what she would do. That was precisely the route to take. Neither of them commented on the fact that it was a trick, a lie even. It would work.

Alone now, Sister Madeleine poured a saucer of milk for the blinded kitten that some children had brought her. The vet had said that it would be kinder to have put the animal to sleep but Sister Madeleine said that she would care for it, point it at the food, and keep it safe from anything that might be a danger. It was a frail little thing, trembling as well it might after all that had happened to it in its short life. But she was rewarded with the purring when it realized that its face had been pointed toward something as comforting as bread and milk.

Then she heard the sound. It was a rough, gasping breath. And very near her door. At first she thought it was an animal; once a deer had come right up to the water's edge in front of her cottage. But there was a grunt as well.

Sister Madeleine never felt fear. When the big form loomed up at the doorway she was calm, calmer than the man with the bushy eyebrows and blood-streaked arm, a man who had been in some fight and had been injured. He had very wild eyes and he was more startled to see her than she him. He had thought that the cottage was empty.

“Don't move and you won't get hurt,” he shouted at her.

Sister Madeleine stood without stirring; her hand was at her neck fingering the simple cross she wore on a chain. Her hair was pulled as always into a short gray veil. Her clothes marked her out as a nun. Not one that lived in a convent perhaps, but with the gray skirt and cardigan, the sensible laced shoes, she could be nothing else. The most nunlike thing about her was the fact that when asked not to move she stayed so utterly still. Her eyes never left his face.

After what seemed like a very long time his face began to crumple. “Help me, Sister. Please help me,” he said. And the tears began to pour down his face.

Very gently so as not to frighten him Sister Madeleine moved toward him, and motioned him to a chair. “Sit down, friend,” she said in a slow, calm voice. “Sit down and let me look at your poor arm.”

         

“At least it's not the tinkers,” Sean O'Connor said to his wife.

“Why should it be the unfortunate tinkers?” she defended them.

“That's what I'm saying. No one can say it was them, they've all gone off on some outing or horse fair, or whatever it is they do.”

“If you talked to them more instead of frightening the daylights out of them you'd know what they do,” said Maggie O'Connor.

“Jesus, isn't it hard to say anything to anyone these days without being taken up wrong,” said Sean O'Connor, feeling very hard done by.

They had no idea who had robbed Sullivan's and battered Kathleen so severely. It looked to be the work of a madman. But how had a madman got away so skillfully? It wasn't as if anyone in the neighborhood would hide him.

         

“It's no concern of anyone else's,” Sister Madeleine said as she washed the man's wound.

He kept asking her to look out the door, fearing that she would run off and tell someone that he was there. “Don't get out of where I can see you,” he said, his great frown darkening even further.

“I have to get more water.” Sister Madeleine spoke simply, without fear or any sense of making excuses. “It comes from the pump outside and then I have to boil it.” He lay back in the chair. There was something about her that made him feel she wouldn't turn him in.

“I'm in trouble,” he said eventually.

“I'm sure you are.” She said it mildly, as if he had said he was from Donegal or from Galway, a matter of no huge concern. She said that the wound didn't need to be stitched as far as she could see. If she bandaged it up the skin would probably knit together. “You might like to give yourself a bit of a splash out at the pump there. Mind your poor arm of course, try not to wet it…but it would make you more comfortable before we had tea.”

“Tea?” He couldn't believe it.

“I was going to put a lot of sugar in it, it gives you energy when you've had an accident.”

“It wasn't an accident.”

“Well, whatever it was. And I have some nice fresh bread that Mrs. Dillon brought…”

“People come here?” He was alert and watchful.

“Not at night. Go on now.” She was gentle and firm at the same time.

Soon he was sitting, half washed and more relaxed, at her table swallowing cup after cup of sugared tea. He had gulped slices of warm buttered bread. “You're a good woman,” he said eventually.

“No, I'm the same as anyone else.”

“You wouldn't want to let people like me come in and take a loan off you like this. Some of them wouldn't be decent men like I am.”

If she was hiding a smile he didn't see it. “No, I generally find people are generous and decent if you let them be.”

He pounded on the table with his spoon in agreement. “That's exactly it, but people
don't
let them be. That's where you're right.”

“Would you care to sleep the night here by the fire? There's a rug and a cushion.”

His big face almost crumpled. “You don't understand…you see.”

“I don't have to understand. The fire is there if you'd like to stay rather than going out into the wind.”

“Well, you see, Sister. There's a possibility that people would come looking for me.”

“Not in my house, not in the night they wouldn't.”

“I wouldn't sleep easy, I really wouldn't.”

She sighed and took him to the door. “Do you see in a straight line from here a big tree on its own away from the others?”

“Yes.” He squinted into the night.

“There's a tree house up there. Steps in the trunk and up there a secret tree house. Children made it a long time ago.”

“And would they want it now?”

“They're grown up and away from it now.”

         

It was the talk of the town. For days Mona Fitz said that her heart was in her mouth because those kind of gangs came back and did post offices, she had read of this happening. Wall's Hardware put padlocks on every door. If the gang had made their getaway down the back lane they might have seen all the pickings that lay waiting for them in Wall's. They could come back again another day.

Dan and Mildred O'Brien in the Central Hotel were depressed. The place was bad enough, they said, without having the reputation of a town where there were armed robberies. And of course it was written up in the local press.

T
HERE
was extensive coverage in the paper that Lena bought every week. She read the details of what seemed a violent and senseless crime. Without having to be told she could sense the town's relief that Maura McMahon had been on an errand of mercy and was not in her customary position. Reading between the lines, she knew that Kathleen Sullivan would have been snooping.