The Pig Did It (16 page)

“Tell Kieran Sweeney,” she had said, “tell him the button is sewn back and he can give up being critical of the way things are being done.”

It was at that point that Aaron—all his questions as yet unaddressed—had decided to tell in sequence the more than several amazements visited upon him within the past hour. But he couldn't quite reconstruct the exact order of things, his near-drowning after his own attempt to save Lolly's friend, or his determination that Sweeney was the murderer, convicted yesterday by the specifics given in his accusation of Kitty. Or was it Sweeney's hopeless love for Kitty? Or—and this he had already forgotten—Sweeney's rescue of him and the man's despairing regrets that he had saved a McCloud. Unable to untangle the events, he simply blurted out what he considered to be of greatest urgency. “Kieran Sweeney is in love with you.”

Both women gasped. Lolly was again the first to find a word, “Me?” she cried.

“No,” Aaron said. “You. Kitty.”

“Me?!” She put her hand to her throat.

“You.”

“Her?” asked Lolly, not disbelieving so much as surprised that she had not, by right, been given the preference.

“Her,” said Aaron.

“The man is daft. And a Sweeney besides,” said Kitty. “You're imagining things again.”

“No. I'm not. I swear I'm not.”

“And did he say the words himself?”

“It was clear enough without the actual words.”

“I don't want to hear.” Kitty shivered either to fight off the advances of a man so repellent or, more likely, to stifle the impulse to giggle. “He hates me as much as I hate him. If such is possible.”

Aaron watched his aunt's face shed all feeling, the features assuming a noncommittal, bland aspect as if she were posing for a passport photo. She was inviting Aaron to observe her indifference. He dutifully observed, then looked down at the floor.

“He saved my life,” Aaron said.

“He didn't save your life.”

“He saved my life. I was drowning.”

“How could you be drowning?”

“I was trying to save a friend of Lolly's.”

Lolly had pulled the button, now sewn onto the jacket, up to her mouth and took the thread between her teeth. She was about to snap it, but not before she'd said, “What friend?”

“That man. The one you were with in Dockery's last night. Oily hair. A sort of runt, I thought.”

“Who was in Dockery's?”

“You. With him. The runt.”

“I? In Dockery's?”

“Last night. I was there. I played darts. I won.”

“Well. Sorry I wasn't there for the event.”

“But I saw you.”

“Not me you saw. And I have no runt friends. Disgusting. Me? With a man like that? Me?”

“Well, actually, he was, I guess, for some maybe—well, maybe he was really not such a bad-looking guy. And—and just because he's shorter than I am—”

Lolly looked at Kitty, the thread not bitten through. “He's mad, your nephew. He's seeing things that were never there.”

“Imagining things, too. Saved by a Sweeney. Have you ever heard the like?”

“But I
was
saved. And I did try to—I mean—the man from Dockery's. I won the dart game. Ask anybody. You were there, but you left. Then I beat him at darts, and he didn't drown anyway. Don't ask me how. He was in a canoe. But without a paddle. And Sweeney's in love with you. And—and …”

Aaron let his voice trail off, not because he'd finished his protest but because he'd been given a sudden truth: Lolly hadn't cut her hair. It was long, as long as it had been yesterday. Nor was it as severe as he remembered it being last night. He'd been mistaken. The dim light in Dockery's had allowed him—encouraged him—to see Lolly. But it hadn't been Lolly. And she hadn't been there with the man in the canoe, the man whose nose he'd punched. For whatever reason, he was relieved.

“Yes, yes, yes,” his aunt was saying. “All right, all right, all right. Nobody's disagreeing. Are we, Lolly?”

“No. It's the truth itself if ever I heard it.”

“All right, then,” said Aaron, quite content to let the subject drop. “But I'll tell you something else. It was Sweeney did the murder.”

Lolly was patting the button down, making sure it was in place on the dead man's jacket. She stopped. Kitty lowered her hand from her chest where it had gone after clutching her throat. She let it flop onto the bed near Declan's thighbone.

“He did it,” said Aaron. “I know it. And I'm telling you now.”

“And he—Sweeney—he said as much?” Lolly let her hand slip away from the button and rest on the skeleton's pelvis.

“No. But I could tell. The way he knew how it was done. The way it happened. He was, of course, accusing you while he was saying it.”

“Me?” said Lolly.

“No. You. Kitty.”

Kitty calmly straightened Declan's tie. “Of course he'd say a thing like that. Especially since he's so godawful in love with me.”

“He even named the murder weapon. A tool in that bag. A—what's its name?”

“A leggett.” Again Kitty and Lolly spoke at the same time.

“Yes. A leggett.” Aaron paused, then asked, “How did you both know that?”

Kitty shrugged. Lolly extended her pursed lips, puckering them outward, then drew them in again. Neither woman said anything. Now Lolly straightened the tie and Kitty patted the button.

“Well,” Aaron said. “Believe me or don't believe me. It'll all be over soon. Sweeney said he's coming to take away the—the—he's coming for Declan Tovey. To take him away. To bury him proper, he said.”

“He won't!” said Lolly.

“He can't! said Kitty.

They both began smoothing out the blanket, proving themselves to be competent caregivers, concerned with the welfare of the patient. Lolly brought the blanket up to Declan's chest. Kitty folded it neatly back.

“He sounded determined,” Aaron said.

“Hah!” Lolly managed to get more contempt into one syllable than Aaron had ever thought possible. Kitty's contribution was limited to a small smile and a sly look in the eyes, narrowing them and bringing the lids down almost halfway. “I can't wait,” she said.

Nor did she have to. There was the sound of wheels on the gravel outside, then a growling halt.

“He's here,” Aaron said.

“Oh, my God,” said Lolly.

Kitty moved away from the bed. “He'll never so much as see him,” she said.

“But,” said Lolly, “he'll come in. Respect he has none of it. Not even for the priest's room.” She looked down at Declan. She seemed about to throw herself on the corpse, a sacrificial effort to hide and protect it.

“But why,” asked Aaron, “why can't you just let him take it—if you're not going to
give
it to the
gardaí?”

Lolly put her hand to her throat, scandalized; Kitty shook her head wearily, her preferred gesture of contempt.

“It would save all of us all this trouble and—”

“In one breath,” said Kitty, “you say he murdered the man. In the next you say hand him over, give him all the evidence against him. And where's the consistency in that?”

“Then at least let him see that we know what he's done; that we're the ones with the evidence. Let him come in. Let him see.”

“Aaron,” said Kitty sternly. “Don't interfere with things you know nothing about. We do not, on principle, let a Sweeney do as a Sweeney wishes.” She had moved over to the crucifix on the spindly table. “Now,” she said, “swear now, both of you, swear you never saw what you're going to see now.”

Aaron stood up straighter. “Swear?”

“Swear. Both of you. Not out loud if you don't want to, but swear. You never saw what you're going to see.”

With her fingernails she withdrew the nail from the left hand of the corpus on the cross. The hand stayed in place. She came back to the bed and reached up to where the oval picture had been hanging. Slowly she inserted the nail into the tiny hole where the original nail had been put into the wall. She took her fingers away and banged with her fist on the wall just to the left of the headboard. After listening a moment, she withdrew the nail and inserted it again. Again she listened. Again there seemed to be no response to what she'd done. After another moment she quickly pulled the nail out. “Of course. Wrong hand.”

The slam of the truck door rattled the shuttered window. “Oh,” said Lolly, her tone of voice close to a warning. Kitty had gone back to the crucifix, replaced the nail into the left hand, and withdrawn the nail from the right. This time the hand slipped slightly but stayed stuck to the wooden crossbeam. Kitty went to the wall, looked down at Declan Tovey as if to make sure he was all right, then put the nail into the wall. Immediately there was a click. Kitty banged again on the wall. Nothing. She banged again, lower down. A slow scraping sound was heard. Kitty moved back from the wall.

Aaron recognized the sound. It was the monster's scaly flesh rubbing against the tunnel walls, the beast coming closer and closer with each repeated scrape. The imagined sound of his childhood had become real, even to the steady increase of the noise as the monster continued its approach. As Aaron watched, a section of the wainscoting to the left of the bed—about three feet by three feet—slowly scraped open. A stench carried on a cold wind flooded the room. It was as if the sea itself had died and been left to rot. Putrid kelp and other seaweed sent their complaints into the room. Aaron felt that the room had sunk down to the depths of the decomposing sea and been left there untouched, unmoved, for years, taking into itself the depth and corruption of the long-buried waves, a chamber preserved for those chosen to know that even the sea would, at the last, molder and turn to rot. The wind stirred the bottom sheet near Declan Tovey's shoulder and pressed Aaron's salted clothes again against his flesh, sending their damp into his bones and, along the way, shivering his arms and forcing his legs to twitch.

This was the priests' tunnel to the beach. From here they had made their escape. The great secret of the house, denied him from his childhood on, had at last been revealed. Aaron resisted covering his nose. Long had he wanted to know what he now knew, long had he yearned to see what he now saw. To resist in any way whatsoever would be a sign of ingratitude, and he would not diminish his sense of wonder with the least display of distress. To prove himself worthy of the revelation, he purposely took in a deep breath, taking into his nose and into his lungs as much as he could of the putrefaction that assailed him now. He felt faint and reached out to steady himself on Declan Tovey's foot. The leather was gummy at his touch, the flesh of the foot perhaps still stuffed inside, but he kept his hold, so great was his need not to fall in a heap.

Lolly had covered her ears even though the assault had been to the nose. Next she clamped her hands over her mouth, then wrung the hands together in front of her breasts, and finally acknowledged the source of the attack by pinching shut her nostrils and saying, “Pee-yu.”

Waving her hand back and forth in front of the tunnel opening, Kitty seemed more to be fanning a flame than forcing back into the dark the ghastly stink that by now had filled the room. Accepting her attempts as useless, she simply stopped, put her hand to her forehead to test for fever, then said, “We'll put him in here.” She pulled a flashlight from the cabinet drawer, an old tin one. She held it out to Aaron. “Here.”

Aaron took the flashlight. “You want me to get in there?”

“And move back, but careful, it goes downhill fast, and it smells like slippery. But hurry. Lolly and I will hand him in.”

Aaron poked his head into the hole. The stink slammed into his face. Bent double, he stepped inside. Now the stink possessed him. He would become part of the rot. He beamed the flashlight ahead of him. It caught the slant leading down. He angled the light and saw, or thought he could see, a narrow stairway of rough-hewn stones that made a quick descent, then curved off to the left. As expected, the stones were slippery, but the crude cut, creating peaks and hollows, made a firm hold possible. He went down five steps, then turned, aiming the light back up toward the entry.

“Okay,” he whispered. “Hand him in.”

There was no echo, no reverberations. The dark growths on the steps and the walls absorbed all the sound as if the passageway were lined with felt. This helped him realize that he was being stifled. No air seemed to be coming in through the opening ahead of him, the gases surrounding him made impenetrable—almost solid—by the pollutants that seemed to be feeding on his flesh. “Hurry,” he said, not bothering to whisper. “I can't breathe.”

“Oh, shut up,” his aunt said. “We're the ones doing all the work.”

Aaron could hear a discreet rattling.

“Easy now,” Lolly was saying. “We don't want to make him all a jumble, do we?”

“Keep the sheet stretched,” his aunt said.

“Then don't come so close. Stay on your side.”

“It's you bending the sheet.”

“Pull back.”

“Climb over the bed. Just step on the mattress. Go ahead.”

The sound that followed was of a cascade of bones clattering together, falling against one another, some obviously dropping to the floor.

“Now you've done it.”

“You didn't lift your side.”

“Don't step there. Mind his arm.”

“It's his leg.”

“Mind his leg.”

“Put it back in his pants, there, above the shoe.”

Aaron tried to see what was happening, but the backside of his aunt had appropriated most of the opening. She was bent down and moving what seemed like her right arm. Swaying lightly, she kept working the arm.

“We can straighten him out when we get him inside.” It was Lolly who spoke. Then she began to
giggle.
“So intimate, isn't
it?
Do you suppose he knows we're handling him all over the place?”