Stony River (34 page)

The station was all bustle and dark wood, a few glassed-in offices around a room where several people slumped on wooden benches. Tereza approached a high desk and a cop about twenty-five or so. He had fat earlobes it might be fun to suck.

She made her eyes sappy and her voice all pleading like Debra Paget's in
Love Me Tender,
“Oh please Vance, please, for my sake,” the exact line Paget was saying the first time Buddy's hand gripped Tereza's crotch. She introduced herself, lifting her ring hand to the desk. Asked if the cop remembered a Mister Haggerty who'd died and left a daughter. She told him she'd just happened to be near the Haggerty house the day two cops took the girl away, a girl she needed to track down.

“You know the officers' names, Mrs. Jukes?”

“No.” She bet this cop wouldn't care about mouth germs.

“You a relative?”

“No.”

He leaned over the desk, checked her out. “You here to report her officially missing?”

“No.”

“Then I don't think we can help you.” He laughed, flashing a gold tooth. “Chances are she's only missing to you.”

He probably had bad breath.

“Any idea how I could find her?”

“You could put an ad in the paper.”

THE
STONY RIVER RECORD
sat between Dinah's Luncheonette and the Savings Institution in a building with a big glass window, the printing press right up front where everyone could see the guy running it. He probably couldn't goof off for a second.

A bored-looking woman behind a typewriter, wearing glasses
held together with tape, helped Tereza compose the ad.
Miranda Haggerty: I have something that belongs to you. Please write to Ladonna at Stony River Record, Box 42
. Tereza was glad she didn't have to leave an address or phone number; she could call to find out if anybody answered and then come by to pick up the letter.

“How long you want the ad to run?”

“Don't know.”

“I can give you four weeks for the price of three.”

Tereza paid in cash.

Tereza's ad would run for the first time in a week. Realizing she might hear from Miranda that soon gave her chills. She'd have to come clean about how she'd gotten the money.

EIGHTEEN

SEPTEMBER 5, 1957
. Carolyn is braving her third day in kindergarten as Cian lies tummy and elbows down in front of the television. His two-year-old playmate, Mickey, naps on the floor beside him. Doris is at work.

Miranda brews a pot of tea from a recipe in the
grimoire
she found in James's desk. Its early entries are in a language she doesn't know, possibly written by her grandmother and great-grandmother. But James entered various spells and formulas in English. For her sake, she likes to think—needs to think.

At St. Bernadette's he slipped away from her a little at a time, like water in a cupped hand. His letters resurrect someone alien and portray a reality to which she was oblivious. She's read them all now, some more than once, drawn to them like a tongue to an aching tooth. She gets through each day by pretending what's in them is of no consequence. Drawing whatever nourishment she can from the thin gruel of his few tender words about her.

She knows the truth now about the most powerful moment in her life: when a great force overtook her and she floated like a visitor from another realm, convinced with all her being that Danú possessed her womb and was leading Cian through the birth canal. What has brought her heart to its knees is this from James when
Cian was a mere three months old:
I look at the lad and must concede the experiment failed. What arrogance to believe I had the power to do this, or the right.

Not a word of the awe she saw in his face when he first held the babe.

She pours herself a cup of tea then spreads the letters out on a square of early afternoon sun lighting the burled maple dining room table, hoping to make more sense of their meanderings. She's tried to assess them dispassionately, as a scientist might, noting James's progression over the years from
I'm the Weaver, spinning my magic
to
I'm the Wanderer, leading you astray
. From optimism about his grand experiment to
drifting through fields of nothingness in search of meaning
. Miranda knows those fields. She plunges headlong into them on the edge of sleep and stumbles across them occasionally during the day when her attention needs to be on the children. Their tall grasses whisper of annihilation. Insanity.

James could have been wrong about Cian. By the time of that letter—Miranda was fourteen—he claimed he no longer knew what he believed,
only what I experience and that is a bewildering madness
.
I'm addicted to the feeling of air moving through me when I leave my tortured mind and go into that dark void. It's not just her isolation I need. It's mine, away from the well intentioned who would seek to “cure” me.

Miranda blows on her tea and thinks on this addiction, this yearning to enter another dimension and leave yourself behind. How powerful it must have been in James to drive him to lock her away. She tries to resist when the detective who smells like cherries and pine needles comes to call, asking her “just one more time” to enter Bill Nolan's hat, his jacket, shoes or gun. Will she feel the sudden flush, the chill? Fall into the darkness vaster than sleep? She fears losing herself there one day, and never coming back to Cian. Yet she's lured, as James must have been, by
the deeper state of existence she senses beneath her superficial daily tasks.

Mickey flops over on his back, still sucking his thumb, and Cian passes gas.

Nothing James revealed about the preparations for Cian's birth surprises her. He was forthright about what he wanted to do and how
. A notion has made itself known to me, nay, a conviction that it's possible to produce a child that is not of this world,
he wrote on her eleventh birthday
. I've been meditating on the best way to do it. It must not be out of lust.
She agreed they would both walk around the house naked as eels until he could look on her without desire. She never found his body more than an intriguing counterpart to hers. He gave no hint, later, of doubting their success.

The psychiatrist said, “When an adult in a position of trust persuades a child that what the adult wants is also what the child wants, the adult has stolen the child's right to make her own choices.” Miranda never questioned the morality of having a divine child, much less the probability. So accepting she was, the
quiet child,
the
good lass
James wrote about to Eileen.

She can picture him at his desk, flask in hand, growing more and more inebriated as he contemplates another lonely year with his tedious daughter and their freak of a son.

I blame myself. I should have waited to woo you. Your grief was too raw, not even a year old, when you faced the prospect of bringing a child into a world that had taken everyone else you'd loved. I was too bloody-minded to understand you couldn't risk another loss. With a longing that wrenches deep inside with fingers of pain I look for you on the dark winding paths of the Isle of Ghosts
.

Such dross.

I kneel and call out to my ancestors and yours. Thank their soft Irish hearts for welcoming you. Ask them to forgive you for taking your own life and me for not preventing it.

Miranda draws on the calming oil of bergamot in her tea. That's it then. Eileen could not bear to live any longer for fear she'd lose James and Miranda one day as she had the rest of her family in that dreadful storm. She had not wanted a child for the same reason. She had not wanted Miranda.

NINETEEN

SEPTEMBER 14, 1957
. “How goes it, Doris?” Police Detective Enzo Rotella stood at attention on her front step, crisp as toast in a navy blue cable-knit sweater vest, white shirt and sharply creased gray trousers. Under his hands, a book and a newspaper. He'd taken on Bill's case the moment he heard the call on his walkie-talkie. Gone straight to the site to collect evidence and was still at it. She hoped he wasn't here to interrogate Miranda again.

“It goes, Enzo, that's all I can say. What's up?” She couldn't recall him smelling as strongly of cologne. Bill never wore the stuff. He reeked, instead, of Frank's cigars.

“Miranda in?”

“Yeah, but we're about to take the kids down the street to the playground.”

“Won't keep you long. I was checking on an ad I placed and stumbled across her name in yesterday's
Record
. I wondered if she'd seen it.” He handed Doris the paper and pointed to a classified he'd circled.

She read it quickly. “I'll be darned. C'mon in.”

He scraped his brown suede oxfords on the mat and dipped his head slightly before stepping into the tile patch that served as an entryway. His hairline was in serious retreat; what hair remained was trimmed close to the scalp.

“She's getting the kids ready to go out. Hear the ruckus?”

“No.”

“Exactly. You hardly hear a chirp when they're with her. Like they're under some spell, especially when she reads to them.” Which she did incessantly, wasting time that could have been spent having them scrub their hands and pick up their toys.

He nodded. “She does seem to have stepped from an enchanted forest.”

He should try leaving three kids with Miranda each day, not knowing if the fairy princess would be off in Neverland and forget to put the boys down for naps. Doris was as bad as Bill had been, calling a couple of times a day to check on things. She'd come home more than once lately and found Mickey curled up asleep on the floor, sucking his thumb, or both boys wandering around in their birthday suits. Miranda would emerge from the bathroom looking as if she'd been crying, but she'd assure Doris she was fine. Doris had gone back to Children's Aid nearly three months ago, counting on escaping the ache in the house through office work, but anxiety over what might be happening at home kept her on edge.

“Mind if I sit?”

She'd never get rid of him now.