Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (113 page)

Was she prey or predator? She couldn’t tell, only knew that fear filled her, electrifying her nerve endings, making her run on in pursuit of the man, though it felt as if her heart would burst with the effort.

And then, in the odd time slip way of dreams, she was at the water’s edge. The man she pursued stood thigh-deep in the cold stream, blood on his legs and back, pooling in ribbons around his thighs. Closer to, she could see his smooth skin was really a pelt of fine, fawn-colored hair and that he was neither man nor beast, but rather something else that only existed in the netherland of dream. She could see how his body heaved with the effort of breath, and knew he was badly wounded, was dying here where the water froze in delicate geometry against the black earth. She called to him, but could not say what name fell from her tongue, nor how she knew what word would summon him.

And then he turned and she screamed, for he had no face.

She came awake with a start, the dream still pounding in her blood, making her skin feel thin and fragile, and the bones beneath aching as though she really had been running all night.

“Where’s Lawrence?” she asked immediately, eyes not focused yet, so that it seemed she still saw the faceless man in front of her, overlaying the dim glow of the peat fire in the hearth.

“I don’t know, that’s why I woke ye. I felt uneasy about the lad an’ so I called Pat. Lawrence was supposed to go there, aye? But Pat didn’t know anything about it; he said Lawrence hadn’t made arrangements with him.”

She was all the way awake now. Tree branches were scraping against the window and the wind was moaning about the corners of the house. “We have to find him,” she said, fumbling to get out of the bed, limbs still stiff with sleep.

“Aye we do, but I think it’d be best did ye stay here.”

“No,” she shook her head, “I’m coming with you, and that’s an end to it.”

Casey gave her a look of taxed patience and she braced herself for an argument. “Jewel, be reasonable, if the boy comes back here an’ the place is empty he might pull another runner on us. Ye need to stay here an’ keep watch. I won’t be long.” He leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead.

“No. Casey, I have to come with you.”

He gave her a searching look, his own face white with worry. Then he nodded slowly. “Alright then, I’ll meet ye downstairs once yer dressed.”

Outside, the rain was sweeping in great horizontal draughts, the wind blowing hard enough to steal the breath from her lungs. The car was cold, but Casey did not wait for it to warm, but rather leaned forward wiping the windshield periodically, as they drove down the narrow, dark laneways toward Belfast.

They did not speak, each caught up in the thoughts of what scenario awaited them. It had been months since Lawrence had missed his curfew.

The dream still lingered about Pamela, laying an icy touch upon her skin. And she remembered too clearly the night Lawrence had told her his dream about the faceless man in the woods.

“I’ve a feelin’ that if he ever turns around an’ I do see his face, somethin’ truly awful will happen in the daylight.”
The words echoed in her head with the force of prophecy. How had the dream found its way unbidden into the recesses of her own subconscious?

A memory came to her suddenly, of being lost herself. When she was found, her father had first hugged her and then just as swiftly yelled at her, an anger in his face she’d never seen before. It had frightened her—that lightning swift change in him, and she’d burst into tears, and he had hugged her again until the tears stopped. She could still smell him, the warm scent of Bay Rum cologne, and the under note of green things he always seemed to exude from his person. She felt a surge of longing for him, for the reassurance of a father’s presence. The arms around you that kept you shielded from the world.

She closed her eyes and prayed silently.
“Please Daddy, please let him be safe. I don’t know if Casey can survive it if he isn’t. I know I can’t.”

She opened her eyes to the sight of a three-storied hotel, sagging about its edges, paint peeling and the odd window stuffed with rags. The sort of place people went when they needed anonymity.

“Why here?” she asked, a choking fear suddenly gripping her throat.

“Because if the boy is in trouble it’ll be because of Morris Jones. This is one place he brings boys,” Casey said flatly.

“How do you know that?”

“Because I asked around until someone told me.”

It was a small hotel, with filthy threadbare carpets in the lobby and a sleeping attendant behind the desk. Casey leaned over the desk and grabbed the man by his dirty collar and yanked him halfway across the desk. “D’ye have a lad upstairs—about fifteen, tall, skinny an’ ginger-haired?”

“Ye can’t feckin’ come in here an’—” whatever protest the goggle-eyed man had been about to make was swiftly cut off by the simple expedient of Casey twisting his collar until the man resembled a blowfish on the verge of explosion.

“Just answer the focking question.”

The man twisted his head far enough to look in Casey’s face. Something there made him gulp, his adam’s apple bobbing like a cork above the torn blue collar. “Room number four, on the right at the end of the hall.”

Casey threw him back and ran up the stairs two at a time. Pamela followed in his wake, nausea clawing its way up her throat. She saw him stop at the door, and then raise a leg to kick it in with a force that made the floor shake all the way down the hall.

“Wait out here,” he said to her grimly.

For a long time there was only a dreadful silence from the room, a weight like wet sand clogging up the atmosphere, making it hard to breathe. She put a hand to the door and it must have made some small noise of protest, for Casey spoke then.

“Don’t come in,” his voice was hoarse, each syllable limned in fear and something else that made her step back involuntarily. She knew very suddenly that to look beyond the door was to change her perception of the world. And yet there was no way back from this edge place and so she stepped through the doorway.

The scene before her eyes was laid out starkly, grimy sheets that had once been white, arrayed with large crimson blooms. The wallpaper was a nasty shade of brown, peeling at its seams. She noted these things, mind staving off what it was not ready to see. For on the bed, amid crimson-blossoming sheets, lay the nude body of a thin boy, barely into adolescence. The ginger hair was pale against the red that spiralled out from under his head. She opened her mouth but couldn’t find sound, couldn’t find breath.

His ankles, milk-blue with the absence of life, lay askew, veins already retreating from the surface. There were bruises on the back of the pale thighs. She forced herself to look higher, though she could smell the evidence of what had taken place in this room. The air reeked of it, as well as a colder scent that she knew as the perfume of recent death.

Casey knelt by the bed, hands fisted in front of him. Slowly he uncurled them and she saw how badly they shook. “Pamela, there’s a blanket on the chair, pass it to me.”

“We can’t cover him,” she whispered, “we could destroy evidence.”

He turned, eyes ablaze with fury. “Fock evidence. I don’t need a policeman to tell me who did this. Give me the blanket so I can cover the boy.”

She retrieved the blanket. The smell of cigarette smoke filled the air as Casey shook it out and laid it gently over Lawrence. He drew it up to the boy’s neck, tucking it about him as though he were merely asleep on his own narrow bed at home, and not dead with the smell of sex ripe on the air about him.

Casey brushed a large hand across Lawrence’s head, moving the cowlick that had hung over his eyes away. And then the hand, callused and powerful, lay there trembling.

“I have failed him. I have put him here,” Casey said, a terrible hollow at the heart of his words that reverberated in her own chest.

“No you didn’t—we couldn’t have...” the words died away in her throat though, for she
had
known and had foolishly believed Lawrence’s ties to that old world had been severed.

“Aye I did and yes, we should have,” Casey said. “Because I promised him he would be safe, but he never really was. And he knew it. And so he kept trying to make things right an’ this is where it put him.”

The hand on Lawrence’s head stilled, and a chill planted itself firmly at the base of her spine, sending quicksilver shots up through her nerves. Though Casey did not speak, she had the strong feeling that he was laying some sort of oath upon the boy, for his eyes were closed and his face wore an inward look that was both a sealed book and a revelation to the core of the man. She knew suddenly that he was swearing vengeance, promising a letting of blood in payment for this murder. His face was touched with a cold fire that simmered like black ice beneath his skin. The chill in her spine was dread—dread that this night had unlocked a door within Casey that had never been properly shut. He was so still, like a stone figure that had weathered through a thousand years overlooking a barren plain. The constraints of civilization had always ridden uneasily upon his shoulders. She feared the ropes of it had been cut away completely this day.

Casey opened his eyes and stood, and seemed once again only a man. “I must go for the police,” he said.

She nodded and then reached out to touch her hand to his face, before turning from her husband and lying down on the bed beside Lawrence. She felt oddly weightless, as though she were a feather, blown about in the winds of chance, resting here in this cold place for a moment before the next gale tore her away.

“Pamela,” Casey said hoarsely, “what are ye doin’?”

“I’ll not have him alone right now,” she said fiercely.

Casey nodded slowly, his face blankly smooth, like the stone man he resembled. But she could see already the rivers of grief that ran beneath, and how they would over-swell their channels and crack the foundation of his humanity.

She turned away and clutched Lawrence tighter, the scent of his hair smoky, but with an under note of Polo mints. She closed her eyes, a spasm of pain flashing down her center that made her want to curl up in the dark for all eternity.

“Go get the police,” she said, “I’ll stay with him.”

She heard the scrape of Casey’s shoes against the filthy carpet, and a thump as he stumbled into the doorway on his way out. But she did not look round. Some small thing inside warned her to be very still, that somehow if she didn’t move she could stop the planet flying off its very axis here in this grubby room. Because she knew once the police came, once they removed Lawrence, it would be real and the core of pain would crack wide in her and then there would be no way to stop the headlong plunge into the frozen abyss of space.

Like all children, he had come into the world trusting in a mother’s love, but that mother had gone so long ago that love was not even a memory upon his skin, nor a trace within his blood. And so he had abandoned faith in the world of adults, until he had been pulled toward the warmth and light of she and Casey’s home, the intangible one that was not built of stone and wood, but rather of love and trust.

She thought they had brought him within that shelter, but saw now that they had not. That though he had drawn near the windows of family, aglow with the promise of warmth and security; he had somehow found those windows barred and himself unable to enter. Though she thought he had tried over and over, despite the understanding that he could not breach the entry.

Maybe every child abandoned to the cruelties of the world, every child left, abused, neglected, was somehow frozen in that place where first they had known the pain the world could inflict on the young, the fragile, the deserted. And if they could not find shelter soon enough, perhaps they were stranded on the shores of Neverland forever, where the Captain Hooks and the crocodiles were all too real.

She laid her cheek against the chill silk of his hair, arm tight around his long, gawky height and began to store him in the mine of her memory. The milk-white skin, the laughter that always cracked into a higher register—Christ his voice hadn’t even done breaking yet—the clumsy grace of him, his devotion to Finbar—oh God, the thought of the dog put a hairline fissure in the core. She took a deep breath; time was short, the police would be here soon and she had something she would say to the boy first.

“It’s alright now,” she whispered. “Don’t stop—don’t let anything stop you, you’re free to fly now Lawrence. There’s nothing to stop you. Just remember,” she took his young slender hand in her own, curling its cold resistance to the living warmth of her fingers, “it’s the second star from the right and straight on to morning.”

And then she simply lay silent, holding a dead child in her arms, knowing that some lost boys could never be found.

AT FIRST PAT THOUGHT CHURCH BELLS were ringing, and wondered how he’d slept in so long. Then he realized that it was the phone ringing, and knew it had been ringing on for some time. He stumbled from the bed, cursing as his foot wound up in the sheet and caused him to stumble.

“Are ye alright?” Sylvie murmured.

“Aye,” he said, making his way out to the kitchen where the phone sat, still blaring its clarion noise out into the night.

“Hello,” he said, peering through the half-light to the clock that hung on the wall above the table. Two o’clock in the morning. Christ, it couldn’t be good news at this hour.

“Is this Pat Riordan?” asked a whisper on the other end.

“Aye,” he said, the voice sending an odd shiver down his spine and waking him up.

“I’m calling from the barracks. It’s about David Kendall.”

“I’m listening,” Pat said tersely.

There was a deep breath at the other end of the phone and then the voice rushed on. “He was due back here about two hours ago, he’s never late. I wouldn’t normally worry but this is David and—and—”

“He’s never late,” Pat finished for him, understanding now what had the caller so frightened.

“No, but it’s more where he went tonight.”