The Glass Lake (65 page)

“You're really determined to make that place a success, aren't you?”

“Well, it would make a nice change from the way it was handed to me, I can tell you that.” His voice sounded bitter for a second.

“Your mother must be very proud of you…”

“You know my mother, she's proud of nothing. Oh God, that reminds me…could you hang on till I make a phone call.” They were just coming out of the hotel door but he searched his pockets for change and headed to the phone. He turned back to say, “I totally forgot that my mother's staying with her sister…and I'm meant to be responsible for that young hooligan Michael.”

“How can you be responsible for him from here?”

“A good question. But I said I'd phone him at midnight to check that he was home and I'd kick the arse off him if he wasn't.”

Kit laughed. He didn't have to tell her whom he was phoning, but somehow it was a relief. Stevie Sullivan must have had a lot of telephone numbers he could call. Even this late on a Saturday night.

She watched the dancers leaving and the hotel wind down. Kit thought that it had been about as successful as it could possibly have been. She had definitely taken his mind off that baby-faced Anna. Anna would go back to Emmet for consolation. It was all going according to the plan.

Stevie was walking over to her, but there was something different about his face. “Hey, let's sit down for a minute.” He indicated a group of chairs.

“But aren't we going to go? They're cleaning up.”

“It'll take only a minute…”

“Was Michael not there?” She knew something had happened.

“No, he was there all right, but…”

“But what?”

“But he said that there had been an accident, that your father had got hurt.”

“Oh my God, a car crash, the new car. They weren't used to it?”

“No, nothing like that, an intruder. But he's fine, your father. He's in hospital, but he'll be out in a day or two, truly.”

Kit thought of scatty young Michael Sullivan and didn't put very much faith in his judgment. Kit's face was white with anxiety, she felt light-headed as if she were going to faint. Father in an accident with an intruder…what did it mean?

“Please, I tell you, it's going to be all right.” She didn't even have to say it, Stevie realized. “No, I didn't take Michael's word for it, I went back through the exchange to Mona Fitz in the post office. There was some kind of madman, they caught him. He hit your father but it's going to be all right…”

“It might have been the same people who hit your mother.”

“Yes, it might.”

“I feel sick with shock thinking about poor Father,” Kit said.

“It's all right, go home and get on a nice warm coat and I'll drive you back to him.”

“Will you?” She looked at him trustingly. All flirtatious behavior was long forgotten now. He put his arm around her shoulder and walked her to the car. “Maybe I'm only delaying you. I'll go like this,” she said.

“No, you can't go like that, not into a hospital. You'll frighten the wits out of them.” Yes, he was right. “And another thing, I couldn't drive all those miles beside you dressed in that getup. It would be more than flesh and blood could bear to keep my hands off you.”

“Then I'll get changed,” she said, her tone mute.

And he seemed sorry to have made the remark. Kit was worried about her father, it had been a coarse sort of thing to say. “I'm sorry, Kit,” he said simply. “Sometimes I'm very rough, I disgust myself.”

“No, it doesn't matter,” she said. They were talking like friends, real friends who knew each other very well. He sat in the car while she went in to change.

She hung up the dress that had worked such wonders and looked at her pale face in the mirror. It all seemed very childish and unimportant compared with poor Father. She wished she knew more about what had happened. Wasn't it lucky that Stevie had phoned home. She had never known that he was the kind of fellow who would actually mind his younger brother. There were a lot of things she hadn't known about him until tonight.

The towns and the fields, the woods, the crossroads and the farmhouses, slipped past in the night. Kit felt it was all so unreal.

“Try to sleep,” Stevie said. “There's a rug there, you could put it under your head like a cushion.” She sat, small and frightened in her black polo-necked sweater and her black and red skirt. She had taken a jacket and a warm woolly scarf too but she didn't need them. The luxurious car was very warm.

“Did Mona Fitz say any more?” she asked.

“No, I didn't keep her on the phone, I thought it was better just to head out there.”

“Much better,” she said. Her voice was small.

“You'll be fine,” Stevie said.

“I know.”

“These things don't happen,” he said.

She looked at him, his face was very handsome in the moonlight. “What things?”

“There's some fairness in the world,” Stevie Sullivan said. “I mean, they wouldn't let you lose your mother
and
your father. He's got to be all right.”

         

Sergeant Sean O'Connor woke with a start. It was seven-thirty in the morning. He had suddenly made sense of all the jumble of names, and of the man talking about his sister. He went into the cell, he kicked the bed and the man sat up alarmed.

“Tell me about Sister,” he said.

“What, what?”

“Sister Madeleine. Did you hurt her? Did you lay a hand on her? If you touched her I'll have you beaten to death in this station and then give myself up.”

“No, no.” The man was frightened.

“I'm going down to her house this minute, and you'd better pray to your God that you didn't harm her. That woman is a living saint.”

“No, no.” The man was like an animal crouched and frightened. “She was good to me. I stayed with her. She hid me, you see. She hid me in her house, first up a tree in the tree house, and then in her own cottage. I wouldn't hurt Sister Madeleine, she's the only person who was ever good to me.”

He parked the Garda car outside Paddles' bar and walked down the narrow path to the hermit's cottage. He stopped outside the window and peered in. The small bent figure was lifting her heavy black kettle from the hook over the fire. That at least was good timing. They could talk over tea.

She was pleased to see him. “This is a real treat for me now. I was thinking wouldn't I love a friendly soul to come in and have something to eat and drink with me. Not to be doing it on my own.”

“But don't you choose to live on your own? Aren't you a solitary person?” His eyes were narrow as he looked at her.

“Ah, there's solitude and solitude.” A silence fell between them. Eventually the hermit said “Is there anything troubling you, Sean?”

“Is there anything troubling
you
, Sister Madeleine?”

Her eyes seemed to see through him, right across the corner of the lake and up to the prison cell where the frightened madman had lain on his bunk bed babbling her name. “You found Francis, Sean, is that it?”

“I don't know what his bloody name is, but he said he'd stayed here, that you looked after him.”

“I did what I had to.”

“Harbor a lunatic?”

“Well, I couldn't let him off on his own, he was wounded. And anyway he was frightened.”

“What was he frightened of?”

“That you'd catch him, and punish him.”

“But he hadn't done anything yet, had he?”

“The garage, Kathleen Sullivan…you
know
all this, Sean.”

And suddenly it all clicked together in Sean O'Connor's head. “You knew he had beaten that woman and still you hid him. You harbored a criminal.”

“That's being too harsh.”

“For God's sake, he's put two people in the County Hospital. What do you call that, peace and light?”

“Two people?”

“Yeah. He beat Martin McMahon senseless last night.”

Sister Madeleine's hands went up over her face, her shoulders shook. “The poor man,” she said. “The poor, poor man.”

Sergeant Sean O'Connor sat there, grim-faced. He would have liked to believe that the poor man she was feeling such sympathy for was Martin McMahon, coming innocently up his own stairs into his kitchen and seeing his wife being attacked.

But he feared it was the disturbed mind of the prisoner in his cell, the man she called Francis. “Tell me about Francis,” he said wearily.

“You won't hurt him?”

“No. We'll get him looked after.”

“You promise?”

Sean got a wave of impatience. Why did he have to do deals with people over something as basic as this? “Did he tell you where he came from, Sister?” he said slowly and deliberately.

“He said he'd come back when he got settled. Come back for his things.”

“How long has he been gone?”

“Only three days.”

“Well, he didn't get far, up to the main street of the town, it seems. Into the kitchen of the McMahons to beat them all with a chair.”

“I can't believe it,” she said.

“Where did you think he was going?”

“I didn't know, he said he wanted to be free.” She looked very upset.

Sean O'Connor forced himself to lower his tone and be gentle. “And how long was he here altogether, would you say?”

“I suppose about six weeks…who can tell? Time has no meaning.”

“Immediately after the garage, and Kathleen being taken to hospital, would it be?”

“I expect it must have been.” Her voice was very flat.

“And you never thought of telling us he was here?”

“Never.”

“You have a strange sense of responsibility to the community, if I may say so, Sister Madeleine.”

“I felt he couldn't do any harm while he was here.” Her eyes were clear in their sincerity.

“True, but he sure did the very moment he left you.”

“I didn't know.” There was another long silence. “I'll get you his things,” Sister Madeleine said. She produced a blue carrier bag with money, checks, motor registration books, and the few cheap ornaments he had taken from the office in Sullivan Motors.

Sean O'Connor looked through them in disbelief. “We've had half the country searching for all this.” She said nothing. “How did you hide him? People come in and out. I've been in and out myself, for God's sake!”

“He lived in the tree house during the day,” she said simply, as if it were a perfectly natural thing to do.

The sergeant stood up. “It wasn't the right thing to do, Sister. He's not a fox or a rabbit, or a poor little duck with a broken wing. He's a man, a disturbed man who injured people badly, who could have killed them. You did him no service by giving him this Alice in Wonderland place to live.”

“He was happy here,” she said. Sean O'Connor didn't trust himself to speak. He was afraid he would lose his temper and say something he would regret. “Sean?”

“Yes, Sister?”

“Can I come and see him? Up in the station?” There was a long pause. “It couldn't do any harm, it might possibly do some good.”

         

Stevie Sullivan had left Kit at the door of the hospital.

“Aren't you coming in?”

“No, I'd be in the way, he's all right I tell you. I wouldn't leave you to face things if he weren't.”

“Thank you very, very much, Stevie. You've been wonderful to me.”

“Glad I was there,” he said. She didn't want him to leave. And she felt he didn't want her to go. “I'll see you later in the day,” he said.

“When you've talked the Mass goers into buying tractors,” she said with an attempt at a watery smile.

“That's the girl,” he said, and drove the E-type out of the hospital grounds in a flourish.

“Your mother and brother are with him, he's talking now,” the nurse said.

Kit got a shock for a moment. The wild idea that Lena had flown over from London to be at his side crossed her mind. Then she realized. “He's going to be all right?” she said, searching the nurse's face.

“Oh definitely,” the nurse said. “Come on and I'll bring you up there.”

Maura and Emmet jumped up with shock and delight to see her. She went straight to her father. He was on an IV, there was a lot of bruising and bandaging around his head. “I look worse than I am, Kit,” he said.

“You look grand to me,” she said, and put her head on his bed and burst into tears.

They knew that he was in no danger but they wanted to stay nearby. The hospital provided beds for them all. Kit lay under her rug and tried to sleep. Her mind was too full of images. There was the dance. The shock of Father's face with the bruises and cuts. There was Emmet crying that it was his fault, if only he had closed the door. There was Maura holding Father's hand with such love in her eyes that Kit almost had to look away.

And there was Stevie Sullivan's handsome face as he leaned out of the car, still in his dinner jacket but his white shirt open at the neck. “I'll see you later in the day,” he had said. Later in the day.

Finally she fell into a sort of sleep.

         

When they got back to Lough Glass, they all hesitated before going up the stairs to the scene of all the violence the night before.

Sergeant O'Connor had said that the place would be tidied up a bit for them. And so it was. The broken chair had been removed. Someone had washed the blood from the sisal floor covering. There was a dark damp stain but at least it didn't look like blood. The place seemed gray and empty.

Maura opened a note that had been left through the door. “That's very kind,” she exclaimed. Philip O'Brien from the hotel had invited them to come and have breakfast when they returned. They wouldn't be in the mood to cook anything for themselves. “Will we do that?” she asked Emmet and Kit. “It would give us energy to face the day.” They knew she wanted to, so they agreed.