Mr. Flood's Last Resort(48)

“So Marguerite was unruly?”

“Marguerite was an antichrist. They say that when the Floods took her to the beach the child ran into the sea and drowned herself. Foaming at the mouth she was and seeing monsters.” Mrs. O’Leary snorts. “Monsters, she saw, in County Wexford. Mary, who’d been having a nap for herself on the sand, nearly died with the grief.”

“They say a lot of things about the Floods.”

The housekeeper opens the door and points up the path. “Now aim yourself in that direction and don’t come back. Pretending to be a police without even making an appointment.”

When I’m halfway down the path I glance back at the house. Mrs. Frog has closed the door and hopped off to squat in the kitchen and encourage the flies, but I feel certain that Father Quigley is watching me from behind the net-curtained window of his study.

*

AS I wait for the bus I think about Father Quigley and his housekeeper, each holding a portrait of Mary in their minds. Mary the good woman, the grieving mother, the woman astray in the head, who slept on the beach while her child drowned.

I add their memories to my own portrait of Mary. The regal beauty who married a rich old widower and cried when he died. Who burnt faces from photographs and wore Dorothy-red shoes and carried gold clutch bags. Who fell down, down a staircase, from top to bottom and never woke up again.

But then I think about what St. Dymphna says about the memory. And I wonder: In all these long years of remembering Mary has she changed at all for the people who knew her? Have they welded new bits onto their memory of her, or revised it completely? Or have the details stayed sharp and clear and true?

Should I tell them, if they don’t already know? Memory is like a wayward dog. Sometimes it drops the ball and sometimes it brings it, and sometimes it doesn’t bring a ball at all; it brings a shoe.





CHAPTER 19


The wind grabbed a handful of sand and scattered it like bright confetti along the hard-packed, sea-scoured, deserted beach. The sky had a newly rinsed look, the clouds spun and wrung out on high.

I remember now what she was wearing: a halter-neck dress in pale-blue lace.

We slipped off our sandals when we reached the planked walkway through the dune field. The wood was warm and weatherworn. She told me to wait and then she walked off across the sand.

A scowling angel, shoulder blades like wing buds. Blown brown halo of hair.

Three things were different on the day Deirdre disappeared: it was properly hot (for the first and only time that summer), the sky was empty of seabirds (when usually they screamed and tumbled above us with clamorous joy), and Old Noel’s kiosk was closed.





CHAPTER 20




I’d have a job to hear Cathal creeping up behind me with the sound of my own heart thumping in my ears. I climb quickly, picking my way through the landslide of curiosities on the staircase. I only hope Beckett has survived his incarceration and I’m not risking my life for a dead cat.

Mary Flood still haunts the portrait on the landing with her burning hair and fugitive beauty. Frozen by conflicting impulses: should she stay or should she run?

This must have been how Cathal first saw her: a stricken young widow dressed in black. I edge along the landing and open the door to the white room.

There is no sign of Beckett, other than a dip in the counterpane and a few pale hairs. Otherwise the room is exactly as I left it, with the door to the dressing room open and Mary’s gowns slung over the chair.

And her initials still on the mirror, etched in dust.

M F

I don’t know why, but I expected the letters to be gone. I walk over and study them closely. As I’d rummaged through the frocks next door, had a ghost drifted into the room, glided up to this mirror, and traced these letters in the dust?

I touch nothing; although I feel bad leaving Mary’s things strewn around, tidying up could incriminate me. I leave the room, closing the door quietly.

I’m at the top of the stairs when I hear a scratching noise. I stop and listen. Next I hear a faint plaintive meowing. Swearing softly to myself, I track back along the landing. A few doors on from the white room there’s the muffled scrabbling of claws against wood.

“Beckett?” I whisper.

I try the handle. The cat bounds past me and down the stairs without a backwards glance, knocking over artifacts and instruments.

The sound reverberates through the house.

In the musty depths of Cathal’s lair, one eye flicks open.

Noise has pulled on the strings of his web, setting his long limbs twitching. He’ll be slinking out of his trapdoor and threading through the rubbish. Crawling up the staircase with a knife clamped between his dentures and a lasso of fuse wire in his hand, ready to garrote me and hack me to pieces.

I listen. Nothing moves below.

I step inside the room and close the door behind me. The curtains are closed and the light switch doesn’t work. I cross the carpet and pull the drapes open.

My retinas are awash.

It is a mirror image of the white room. On the left is the door I know will lead to a dressing room. There is a bed fit for a princess and a dressing table before the window.

Only the color is different. This room is red, as red as the devil’s own dancing shoes. All shades are represented here, from carmine to garnet, ruby to cardinal, maroon to vermillion. On the walls a pattern as big as a tea tray is repeated, gouts of claret arc from three-tiered fountains silhouetted in black. The bed is dressed with red brocades, satins, and velvets. On the wall above in a lacquered frame, a line of splayed and pinned moths, every insect a dark clot of a warning. At the center is a furred beast of monumental proportions, the fat stalk of its body covered in plush. One white spot on each outstretched wing of black funeral crepe: two blind eyes. On either side smaller insects are ranged, their wings showing deco patterns, filigrees of red on black, like blood vessels.