Mr. Flood's Last Resort(95)

I pick it up. It’s a postcard.

It’s been ripped to pieces and put back together again. The repair is illuminated with seams of glowing gold.

Greetings from Pearl Strand

It is a wild empty place, the place on the postcard. A place where the ocean meets the sky and seabirds scream and reel in wide, wide, borderless blue. Where dunes are three stories high or no more than an anthill. Where the sand has a sheen to it, a certain luster in the right light (moonlight, starlight, dawnlight). A long crescent swoon of a beach.

I turn the postcard over. In pale-blue ink, big loopy letters dotted with a love heart:

Wish you were here.





CHAPTER 48




Chief Constable Frank Gaunt, retired, will drive us there: Renata, in dark glasses and a wax jacket, the dog, and me.

Frank waits in the hallway under the sour glower of Johnny Cash and the benign gaze of Jesus Christ. Renata finds her handbag, her keys. He remarks on how much Stella has grown.

“She’s spoilt,” Renata says with a smile.

I watch them watching the dog and wonder how I will get through this day.

*

THE HOUSE is boarded up. At the top you can see empty windows and charcoaled joists. In wet weather the smell of smoke rises again.

They have cleared the grounds of the rubbish that made the fire brigade’s job so difficult. It was a warren, they said, impossible to get their equipment down, which is why the damage was so severe. The caravan has survived, along with the icehouse and the gate lodge with its mullioned windows. I can see them now, past the cut-down bushes and wooden walkways. The well is still covered with a tent.

We meet the police officer in charge; I don’t catch his name but he has hair gel and a shaving rash and a habit of pushing the tip of his tongue between his lips after every sentence. We shake hands and he walks us round. Renata grills him; she’s only interested in the forensics and she wants all the details. The police officer looks at her in desperation as he guides her over uneven surfaces. Frank brings up the rear with Stella dancing on her lead.

Renata takes my arm and squeezes it. She still has moments of panic outdoors. When she does we do breathing exercises and sing show tunes. I look up to see if she’s struggling. She kisses me and offers a tissue from her handbag. Then I realize it’s me that’s crying.

*

“DID THE fox ever come back?” I ask the police officer.

He nods. “It’s been seen hanging around.”

“And the cats?”

“A few; some of the builders have rehomed them.”

I wonder about Beckett, but with eyes like his he would have easily found a home. Stella pulls at her lead, as if she’s caught a sniff of something. Or maybe it’s just the word.

*

AS FOR the saints: there are no saints today. No faint bobbing of a veil outside the perimeter fence, no flick and slap of a pacing sandal.

Instead, all around me stand Bridlemere’s dead.

I can’t see them but I’m sure they are there. Mary Flood, relaxed in a shirtdress, puts a steadying hand on my shoulder. Maggie, standing a little apart, flashes me a quick grin. Cathal raises the still-dark caterpillars of his eyebrows.

And the others?

There are no others. There are some fires even the dead can’t survive.



I LAY flowers at the gate alongside wilted bouquets and teddy bears. Marguerites for Maggie. Roses: red and white for Mary, and for Cathal, a single perfect yellow bloom.

*

LILLIAN HAD cleaned it and wrapped it up until I was ready to look at it: the frame I had taken from the wall of the white room as the fire brigade fought to save Bridlemere, as the staircase fell, as the sparks shot up into the night.

The moths were intact, pale and pristine under glass. I worked the back free and found what I was looking for: the counterpart to the envelope hidden in the red room. Inside, on three sheets of paper, executed in small neat handwriting: Mary Flood’s confession.

*

SHE HAD read the story on her son’s face before he even opened his mouth. She had lost one child. So she promised not to tell.

But she began to fear that she would. That in a moment of weakness it would burst out of her. She’d be at church, or talking to Mrs. Cabello, and out it would come.

She had kept secrets before but this one was different. It festered and suppurated. It pressed against the sides of her skull. It was a dark mass at the back of her tongue. It strangled her heart and soured her stomach. She felt it lodged there, heavy and corrupt, like poison. Mary was consumed with the urge to tell, to vomit the whole story up.

She couldn’t tell her husband and she couldn’t tell her priest; she couldn’t tell her doctor and she couldn’t bring herself to tell her god.

So Mary wrote it down.

*

SHE WOULD sit and stare at her reflection. Sometimes in the red room, sometimes in the white; it didn’t matter. Both belonged to Maggie really, not to Mary. Furnished for a princess, not a queen. Neither room had been used by the girl; Cathal had readied them against visits that never happened. For the father doted on the child, despite everything. She was his fairy-tale girl, she could have everything, twice.

Rose Red, Snow White became Alice and fell down, down, down the rabbit hole.

Mary would sit for hours. Sometimes in the white room, sometimes in the red; it didn’t matter. For both mirrors showed the same woman: sealed mouth, hair of dust, and eyes of stone.