Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (55 page)

Rose came back with milk and eggs and bread. The talking went on for hours—the questioning; the retreading old ground; the new ideas, which, no matter how wild, he wanted to hear. It’s a clear enough picture—he leaning forward, never taking his eyes off me, not making notes, me blabbing and blathering, and rampaging across the story and back again.

He told me to come to Cork two days on. By then he’d have “talked to a few people,” and he’d have “an idea how to proceed.” And he told me, “Calm down, keep your head cool, like.”

I’ll go straight to the upshot: Petey found that the company road show’s holiday had been canceled, and that they had scattered to the four winds. They’d left the cars parked in Salthill; of the big van no trace—the police found it in Galway near the train station, with all the scenery in it.

In Cork, furious discussion had opened up in the police station—was this a kidnapping? Would a man kidnap—or have somebody kidnap—his own granddaughter? Some argued, “This man would.” They’d all read the Luke Nagle paper. But would a judge think so? There the arguments began to founder.

Petey, aided and abetted from a distance by Luke Nagle (who also wanted Petey to marry Rose), got permission to reopen the Lough Gur murder. They brought King Kelly in for questioning, and they used the occasion to ask him about his missing granddaughter.

I never heard what he said about Venetia and me—but I read it many years later, in the police record. He didn’t go as far as to say that I’d raped her, but he portrayed me as a stagestruck fortune hunter, and proceeded to tell them the story of my father and Venetia.

“So the young fellow comes in, the young bull, and he elbows the old bull out of the way. And he comes to me, and he asks, straight out he asks it, that the farm, which I acquired by legitimate transaction, he asks that it be made over to him and his wife—my granddaughter. He’s after marrying her illegally on a ship in Galway Bay. I mean, look at it, look at the facts. Now tell me whose side you’d be on.”

Every which way they tried to shake him up, but he never shook. The
art of illusion: He gave the impression that he was the downtrodden one, who had lost his granddaughter, and his housekeeper, to whom he was devoted. Perhaps, after all, he was the best actor in that family. Or he knew how to tell the Big Lie. Like Hitler.

He almost cracked one morning; I was there; I watched him. Petey had wangled permission from his superiors to drag Lough Gur. A confidential operation—nobody to be told except King Kelly and me, and my focus changed horribly that morning.

Petey the detective told me that they still wished to connect King Kelly to the death of his wife all those years ago, and would drag the lake for further evidence. As I got there, it also struck me that they intended to drag for other bodies, more recently put there. Swallowing my throat almost, I went forward to the point where everybody had gathered—including King Kelly.

Since then, methods have advanced—for which, be thankful. Today we have divers—they used to be called frogmen—with breathing equipment. We had no such facilities in 1932, hence what they called “dragging.” They attached weights, hooks, and grapnels to long lines and went out in a boat. Do you have any idea how sharp the hooks are, how piercing the grapnel? I thought of Venetia’s neck, her breasts.

Did I say it out loud? Beside me, Luke Nagle, glittering in the early sunshine, said, “Imagine the damage them hooks’d do to a body.”

King Kelly heard and turned away, coughing. Luke Nagle, old as he was, spry as he was, walked the few paces to King Kelly and said, in a voice that he wanted everybody to hear, “See them ropes? I’d hang you here now with one of ’em.”

The boatmen pushed off. They took some time to settle the hooks and grapnels on the bed of the lake and began their first drag, a sweep all along the bank. Would a body—her body—would it lie softly on the bed of the lake? Had they attached weights?

Up along the first curve of the horseshoe they went, the lines snaking out behind them. We began to walk after them, Petey, Rose, Luke Nagle, and I, stumbling in the wet grasses along the bank. King Kelly stayed behind, watched over by a uniformed guard.

The boat stopped abruptly, yanked back a little by something in which the line had snagged. Along with the others I gasped.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Rose. “We should be saying a prayer for her.”

Her father, ever the policeman, said, “I hope we get an arrest out of this.”

The men in the boat hauled and grappled. A large shapeless mass came to the surface slowly. Two of the men—they all wore thigh-high rubber waders—jumped out and attended to it. They hauled and scrabbled and poked.

“Weed,” shouted one. A dense web of weed and algae had wrapped itself around the grapnel.

They took half an hour to untangle it. The sun pushed the early-morning nip from the air. Birds corresponded from every tree. Far away, tiny black-and-white cows flooded back into a high meadow through a gate from a lane. And over all of us hung the thoughts of two lovely tall women, one the granddaughter of the other.

The boatmen reset themselves and went on. They had predetermined their path—their sweep would go all around the lake a few yards outside the deep fringe of tall reeds. Some of the sedges wore startling, acid-yellow bonnets. I asked Petey about searching the reeds too.

“We did that, boy.”

Luke Nagle said, “They were out here with pitchforks this past two days.”

I nearly fell over. Instead I turned away.

Lough Gur isn’t a big lake and they had dragged their mapped perimeter in a few hours. Now and then they hit more weed, not as serious as the first, not as tangled. They came ashore for lunch, and little was said.

King Kelly sat by himself; I had been unable, almost, to look at him. Now I walked over and sat down on the grass beside him. I handed him a sandwich; he all but knocked it out of my hand with his brusque shove.

“Look at you. Look at you.”

Was it the words that made me uncomfortable? I had so much distress in my arteries that I couldn’t define a new onset. But the words did disturb me; where had I heard them before and with that inflection:
“Look at you”
?

“What happened?” I said. Don’t ask me how I kept my voice from cracking; I don’t know how. “Just—tell me what happened. You of all people know how lovely she was.”

He didn’t, wouldn’t, answer.

“Come on. She loved you.”

Not a word. He kept his head turned away.

“Have you told her mother—does Sarah know?”

He moved his jaw like a man chewing, but said nothing.

“Sarah’ll go crazy,” I said. “Or does she know you killed her mother?”

Not a single word did he say. Not a word. He turned his head farther away, then rose to his feet. And walked away. He had a new walking stick, not as posh as the old one.

“I might break that stick across your head,” I shouted. “They should hang you. I should do it myself.”

Luke Nagle, Rose, Petey, the other police—all turned their heads. Petey strolled over.

“Listen here to me, boy. He could ask me to caution you and I’d have to ask you to leave, right?”

The point was made, though it cooled me not at all.

S
oon, the boat set out again, this time to drag up and down, up and down, the middle parts of the lake. They found nothing—some old sacking, more weed, a rusty wheel, nothing else. King Kelly walked to the police car and waited. Petey went back to Cork with his colleagues, and I drove Rose and Luke Nagle home. We talked into the small hours, and I began to feel a little calmer; I stayed in their house that night, and next day I braved the house in Charleville.

What am I left with? Anything? And what now? What next?

Those and similar thoughts took me into the hallway and the kitchen. I got practical—I recommend it. Checking everything, I made a list—food, milk, eggs, the rest. I counted the money, close to three thousand pounds—a fortune, a hundred thousand and more in today’s values.

At the bank I confirmed the signing permissions on the bank account; I had complete access. Now all I could do was wait until the prosecution of King Kelly played out. If they found that they had enough evidence to charge him with anything, then they’d search for Venetia and Mrs. Haas.

When they went to pull the files from the drowning of King Kelly’s wife, most of the documentation had gone missing. No medical report, no autopsy report, even the coroner’s proceedings—all gone.

The scrutiny of Venetia’s disappearance gave them even less material to prosecute him. King Kelly never spent a night behind bars. He had a few days of discomfort, and that was all.

I filled in a missing-persons report; in the circumstances they allowed me to break the three-month rule by six weeks. Newspapers picked up the story, but not very energetically. A few sightings were reported, never of two women together. A man said he saw Mrs. Haas on the docks at Cork, then said he wasn’t sure. In Dublin, a maid said that Venetia had stayed in a hotel room; questioned, the description only fitted Venetia in that the woman was tall and alone.

Overall, though, hung the notion that Venetia and Mrs. Haas had gone away of their own volition. One newspaper observed the closing of the show and the fire precautions. My name never appeared.

Then began the rest of my life. Then began the slow, slow acceptance. Then began the shaping of the life that took so long to shape. It would lead me to places in my soul that I never knew existed. It would lead me to landscapes barer and colder than that of the moon. It would lead me to make an interpretation of this calamity, an interpretation that turned into a life.

And it would lead me to embrace the most powerful emotion in the world. That, you say, would be love, wouldn’t it? No. The most powerful emotion in the world is hope. I should know.

I
reached for James Clare. I reached for him through Miss Fay. I reached for her too, my first step to my own salvation. By the time I went to her house, I had come to believe that the rock bottom I had reached was where my life would be lived. I locked the Daimler in her garage and, as it turned out, left it there for many years: When I took it out again, it had become a vintage curiosity.

No answer to my knocking or bell-ringing; I sat on the bench in the front garden until she came home. Her housekeeper, Allie, whose shouting always irked me, was deaf, and had never heard my calls.

When they perceive their friends in trouble, good people say nothing. They draw them into their own lives, and see that as the best way of taking care. Miss Fay greeted me with not much more than a shrewd up-and-down look, and led me to the room in which I had slept last time.

“I have some work to do, not for long—make yourself at home.”

“Is James here?”

“I’ll drop him a note.”

In my room, among the engineering instruments and souvenirs, among the mechanical artifacts of precision, I began to learn that I had to put away the wonderful life I had glimpsed. Trouble was, I didn’t know how to build a new life, a new anything. Venetia had, in a short time, become my certainty, and all certainty had gone.