The Dead of Achill Island Read online

  She took my hand and said, “Sweetheart, you deserve to go everywhere in the world. But our family is different from Emily’s.”

  “You mean, they’re rich and we’re poor?” I asked. “Is it because Dad’s a postman?”

  She dropped my hand and stepped back. “There’s nothing wrong with being a postman, Nora. Your father works hard and does an honest day’s work.” She paused but lost the battle against her anger. “That’s more than I can say for your uncle. It’s because of him that your father never went to college. Dad’s twice as smart as Bert.”

  “Then why didn’t Dad go to college?”

  “Granddad saved up for it, and Dad did too. He wanted to go to UMass, like his friends. So he worked two jobs, one after school and another on the weekends, but Bert pulled the rug out from under him. Bert’s the one that went to college. And he used Dad’s money to do it.”

  I pictured Bert finding a stash of money under Dad’s bed and taking it for himself. That would be really sneaky. Just to make sure, I asked, “How did he do it?”

  “He’s a con man, that’s how, and he’s always been one. He pulled the wool over the eyes of some naïve teacher—got her to convince Granddad he was a genius and they had to send him to a fine university. The teacher tutored him through his junior year and got him into Boston College. She helped him do his applications, including an essay about how he came from poverty: immigrant parents, his father just a garage mechanic, blah, blah, blah. It was a snow job.”

  “But isn’t Dad older than Uncle Bert? Why didn’t Dad go first, and then Uncle Bert?”

  “That’s what should have happened. Even though Dad was a year ahead of him in high school, Bert convinced Dad to turn over his own savings and go to work to help put Bert through college first. Bert claimed that with a degree from BC, he could earn enough money to pay for Dad to go to college, help Granddad buy the garage, and even pay off the mortgage on the family home. Well, Dad put off college and never got another chance to go, and Bert got his golden ticket to the high life. And guess what? He never did a damn thing for your father. If I use bad language about him, now you know why.”

  I went to bed left with the knowledge that Dad had been cheated and our family had paid the price. That’s why Dad was a postman and I couldn’t go to Paris and why Uncle Bert was a bastard.

  With that understanding, I made it my habit to avoid Uncle Bert. So I wasn’t pleased that Cousin Bridget seated our two families together at the Jubilee dinner. The place cards put Dad opposite Bert, Mom opposite Bert’s wife, Laura, and me opposite Cousin Emily, with lucky Toby and Angie paired at the end of the table. Years of practice keeping our distance at social events provided us with survival strategies. Dad and Bert exchanged a few words after the champagne toast and then spoke mainly to their respective spouses. Emily and I did some catching up. She asked me about my work; I asked about hers. I was an art history professor in Santa Rosa, California, and she worked for Uncle Bert, managing commercial real estate in Boston. I was married, she was single. After so many years apart, we found it difficult to connect. There was more silent eating than normal. I drank more wine than I generally do, and so did Mom and Dad. He called the waiter over to get extra bottles for our table. Bert was knocking back whiskeys like a native.

  I was relieved when the after-dinner dancing started and an Irish cousin invited me to partner him in a reel. Toby and Angie joined in, and we were caught up in set dancing for close to an hour. Exhausted at the end of a long round, I headed back to our table to fetch my purse on the way to the restroom. I saw Uncle Bert and Aunt Laura from behind. He was leaning back in his chair. Mom was half-standing, with one hand planted on the table, her arm straight as a pillar, while her free hand jabbed toward Bert’s chest. Her tone was threatening. I halted, like a squirrel in the middle of the road, listening. I made out phrases: “you little bastard . . . stole from your own brother . . . not enough for you?”

  Was she drunk? The thought unfroze me. I walked toward the table and tried to catch Mom’s eye. She had only Bert in the grip of her gaze. “Mom,” I said weakly.

  “Go away,” she hissed without looking at me.

  I backed off slowly. Aunt Laura turned toward me, looking lost. With a slight hand movement, she pled for me to stay. I stepped away out of Mom’s sight but stayed close enough to hear.

  “And now you think you’re entitled to keep the beach house on top of it! Well, you’re not getting that house! It’s as much Jim’s as yours.”

  “Gloria,” he barked, “you don’t know what you’re talking—”

  Mom cut him off. “I know more than you think.” She glanced at Laura, as if uncertain whether to proceed in front of her, but she couldn’t hold back. “You may have the title to the house, but you got it by taking advantage of your father, same as always.”

  “Grow up,” Bert said, at a volume fit for the stage. “I was the one who took care of him in his old age. He was sick and broke and he couldn’t pay his bills.”

  “Lucky for you,” Mom replied. “Gave you the chance to lend him bits of money and watch him go under. When you had him by the nuts, you took the title to the house.”

  Laura raised her well-manicured hand and said, “Gloria, dear, it’s not our business, is it? You and I should stay out of it.” She put on the sappy smile that had always repelled me.

  Mom kept on. “For God’s sake, Laura. By rights, that house should get passed down to all of our children. As long as their grandmother’s still living in it, my family can visit there. But what happens when she’s gone? I’ve heard you’re redoing the kitchen, right under her nose. Couldn’t you wait until she’s dead?”

  Bert darted his arm across the table and grasped Mom’s forearm. “You don’t talk to my wife that way!” he warned. He twisted Mom’s arm, and she gasped. “Get hold of yourself, Gloria,” he ordered. “I won’t stand for—”

  That’s when Dad arrived, coming up behind Bert. He placed his palms on his younger brother’s shoulders and said, “Cut it out, now.” Bert immediately let go of Mom’s arm. For the first time, I realized that Dad was taller than Uncle Bert, and Bert was intimidated. Was it Dad’s strength, or was it Bert’s knowledge that Dad knew the truth about him?

  Dad took Mom by the elbow, but she wasn’t finished. Leaning in even closer to Bert’s face, she said, “You’ve always been a scheming bastard. If you get that house, I hope you die in it. I hope the roof falls in on your swollen head.”

  And now here was Uncle Bert, lying in a roofless ruin with his head bashed in. What would the inspector make of that? From my perch on the hillside of the Deserted Village, I could see cars approaching the crossroads. The sedan, it turned out, carried the detectives, and the van belonged to the medical examiner. When the vehicles reached the parking area, Garda Mullen stopped his work at the crime scene and skidded down the slope to meet them. By the time the detectives reached me, they had been fully briefed. Mullen returned to his work.

  The taller of the two showed a wallet badge and introduced himself as Detective Inspector Kevin O’Donnell, then presented his colleague, Sergeant Pat Flynn. O’Donnell had cloudy gray eyes set in a skull too big for the rest of his body. He was slim to the point of bony. His collar seemed a size too large for his neck, perhaps to accommodate a bulging Adam’s apple, which bobbed as he talked. I guessed he was in his forties. Sergeant Flynn was younger, shorter, and broader.

  Flynn began by asking, formally, for my mobile number, home address, the purpose of my visit to Ireland, my arrival date, and traveling companions. He already knew my relation to the deceased. Were there other next of kin? I told him about Bert’s wife and daughter and where they were staying on the island. Flynn recorded my answers in a pocket-sized notebook.

  Then the inspector took over. “So your uncle was a real estate developer, from Boston?”

  “Yes, that’s right. I think he was here on business.”

  “We’re aware of that.” The inspector exchanged glances wit
h his sergeant and switched gears. “How close were you to your uncle?”

  “Not close. We didn’t see him very often.”

  “Was that because you lived far apart?” Inspector O’Donnell asked.

  “Fifty miles, maybe. Our families just led different lives.”

  “Was there bad blood between you?”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” I responded. I wouldn’t if I didn’t have to, I added silently.

  “And when did you last see your uncle, alive?”

  “That was yesterday,” I recalled, “at our cousin Bridget’s Jubilee.” I described the circumstances.

  “How did your uncle seem at the time? Nervous, fearful, worried about anything?”

  “Not that I noticed.” We had hardly spoken at the Jubilee, and the argument at Bridget’s party didn’t say anything about his general state of mind. So I shrugged. O’Donnell let seconds go by, then turned his eyes to Sergeant Flynn.

  “I’d like to go over your call to the emergency operator,” said Flynn, almost timidly. “What time do you think you found the body?”

  “It was seven fifteen. I checked my watch.”

  Flynn’s broad brow furrowed. “It was half seven when you phoned the emergency number. Why the delay?”

  The question sideswiped me. “I don’t—I didn’t realize I waited that long.”

  “There’s a phone record,” said the sergeant. “The call came in at seven thirty-two.”

  “I guess I was so jarred that I stood there a while.”

  “I see,” said the inspector. “When you rang emergency, you said that a man had been killed. You used that very word, ‘killed.’ You seemed sure of that.” He paused, waiting for an explanation.

  I tried to regain my footing. “As I told Garda Mullen, I could see damage to the back of my uncle’s head. It was covered in blood. And there was blood on a rock lying on the ground.”

  The inspector’s eyes narrowed. “So, you concluded that he’d been struck with a rock?”

  “That was my first thought, yes.”

  “Any other reason?”

  “No, just that.”

  Sergeant Flynn stepped toward me and asked the alibi question, “Can you tell me where you were last night and through this morning?”

  “Yes. Last night we had supper in Keel—my husband, my parents, my sister, and I—and then we came back to our cottages. Toby and I are renting one next door to my parents and sister. We watched some television and went to bed.”

  “What did you watch, then?” continued the sergeant.

  “We watched the Gaelic channel.”

  “You speak Irish, do you now?” asked Inspector O’Donnell. His thin lips pursed in disbelief.

  “No, but there was a documentary on Irish music. It was the best thing on. It had subtitles in English.” A faint smile relaxed the inspector’s gaunt face.

  “That sums up last night,” I said. “This morning I woke up early, had a cup of coffee, and came out here on my walk.”

  “Did you pass anyone on the way?” asked O’Donnell.

  “Not a soul. Just sheep.”

  He glanced over at the ruin. “We won’t know how long the body was exposed until the State Pathologist gives us the time of death. Your uncle may have died last night or early this morning. Do you have any idea why he might have come out here at night?”

  “No, not at night. But I suppose there’s nothing unusual about a visit here first thing in the morning. That was my intention, coming early to avoid the crowd. I was hoping to have the village to myself.”

  The inspector acknowledged my reply with a nod. The Deserted Village is the best-known tourist attraction on the island. No one knows exactly when its ghostly homes were built, but they were abandoned in the 1840s when the Great Famine struck. It’s an eerie site.

  “Very well,” O’Donnell said. “One final thing. Do you know of anyone who might have wished to harm your uncle?”

  There it was, the question I had been dreading. It would come out soon enough, the fight he had with my mother and the things she had said to his face at the Jubilee. There had been witnesses—Bert’s wife, for one. Well, they could find that out from her, not me.

  “Not really,” I said.

  The inspector grunted and gazed toward the ruin, where Garda Mullen was securing the tent. “All right,” said O’Donnell. “You’re free to go for now. Remain at your cottage, though. I’d like you to write up a brief statement, just how you discovered the body and what you saw. We’ll come by to get the statement after we’ve spoken to next of kin.” He turned and strode back to the ruin. His partner gave me a solemn nod and hustled after his chief.

  I unclenched my teeth. I hadn’t given anything away. But had they guessed I was holding something back? Only I could hear my heart thumping against my ribs, but had they noticed my shaking hands? I reached into the pocket of my jacket and nervously fingered the object I had found next to the body. Of course I knew what it was as soon as I picked it up—a silver button, from my mother’s sweater.

  2

  AS I JOGGED THE MILE-LONG PATH back toward our cottage, my mind was racing faster than my feet. Could my mother have murdered Uncle Bert? No, I wouldn’t accept that. There must be another explanation. Maybe the button belonged to someone else. Buttons of that sort aren’t unique. They’re machine-made from some shiny metal, not really silver. Anyone wearing a wool cardigan like hers could have lost one, right? Maybe it had been lost weeks ago and had no connection with Uncle Bert, or Mom. That was possible, wasn’t it? Tourists walked through the Deserted Village all the time. And yet.

  My mother despised Uncle Bert. She tried to control her feelings, but sometimes she lost the battle. There was a crisis the year Aunt Laura tried to host the family Christmas in genteel Wellesley and Mom refused to go. The whole week before Christmas, Mom raged at Dad, sending Eddie and me out in the snow so she could have at him in private. We lived in Rockport, where the winters are cutting. Icy winds off the ocean blew us back indoors before she had finished, so we absorbed the heat of the argument and some of its sense. Mom refused to set foot in the grand home Bert had built with his father’s money.

  Compared to Uncle Bert’s home, ours was a shack. Aunt Laura’s one visit to us in Rockport made me feel ashamed. I remember her adjusting her skirt carefully on the roughened canvas of what we called the television couch. She seemed to be trying to avoid the stains of our family life. She looked at my mother with curiosity mixed with pity. According to Mom, Bert had told Laura that Dad was never a bright boy and had no ambition; he would always need somebody’s help. “Bert claimed he got your father the job at the post office. And this disgusts me—he said your grandparents opposed our marriage because they thought Dad couldn’t provide for me. Bert told Laura that he saved the day by promising he’d help Dad and me if we were ever in need. It was all a lie, just to make him look good and Dad look bad.”

  Mom hated Bert for demeaning Dad. Long before I knew the word “condescending,” I sensed there was something wrong with the way Uncle Bert talked to my father. One time he came over when Mom was helping Dad lay linoleum in the bathroom. Bert made a show of marveling at Dad’s DIY skills, lamenting that he had to keep a handyman on salary to do repairs and improvements on his house in Wellesley. He characterized the linoleum as practical and then complained that Aunt Laura insisted on Spanish tile. I could see Mom calculating the income difference between our family and Bert’s. Every percentage of that difference was a sliver in her palm.

  I loved Dad’s gentleness, but I often wished he would stand up to his bully brother. Whenever Mom confronted him about this and other outrages, as she called them, Dad would remain silent, busying his hands with small manly tasks: draining the radiators, sealing a crack under a baseboard. Mom stood over him, forcing her argument, until he looked up, wincing, and said, “I know, Glo. It doesn’t matter.” The answer infuriated her. That’s when she became the witch, flitting around the house with her face crabbed
and tense. I was terrified when she was in that state, afraid that she would slaughter Dad, or Uncle Bert, or all of us. She never did, of course. But last night, in the Deserted Village, had her fury burst its reins?

  I alternately jogged and trudged along the narrow road lined by high bushes that blocked all but glimpses of mountain on one side and fields on the other. If a car were to come by, there would be barely room to squeeze out of the way. I hugged the verge as voices competed in my head. Mom finally did it, said one. No, she couldn’t have, said the other. I arrived at the turnoff for the Slievemore Cottages, carrying a weight of dread. It was an uphill climb to a plot of land dotted with small houses, but when I reached the top the ocean came back into view. The openness of the terrain, the morning sun, and the expanse of the sea returned me to clarity. It was up to me now to inform the family about Uncle Bert.

  Our two cottages, identical in style, sat side by side, mine and Toby’s and Mom and Dad’s. They had been built for family vacations, and they were functional rather than charming: one story, whitewashed stucco on the outside with gray slate roofs. The door to ours stood open to the morning breeze. Toby was at the kitchen table still in his bathrobe, finishing his coffee. Even in his disheveled state, he looked appealing to me. “Hi there,” he said, not lifting his eyes from the guidebook he was studying. I tried to respond, but my voice came out choked. He turned and asked, “What’s up?”

  “It’s my Uncle Bert,” I stammered. “He’s dead.” I spilled out everything I knew, in a torrent of words that subsided when I got to my suspicion about Mom.

  “Whoa, hold on,” said Toby, rising from his chair and wrapping his arms around me. His stubble scratched my cheek. “Don’t jump to conclusions. You don’t know what happened, let alone if your mother had anything to do with it. I can’t picture her smashing someone’s head in. Can you?”