The Dead Yard (18 page)

"That’s about the best we’re going to do," I said to Touched. "I think we should head."

"Aye. Let’s go," he said.

We ran out of the bank and into the sunshine. We sprinted through the woods and climbed into
the Toyota. Ski masks off.

Kit was breathing hard and her face was white. Touched drove us up 128 like a goddamn maniac,
hitting a ton before he came to an intersection. Kit threw up into her ski mask. She opened the
window to dump it out, but I shook my head.

"No, just wait," I said.

At the intersection, Touched headed us south back towards the Massachusetts border along the
Alan B. Shepard Jr. Highway.

When he reckoned we were safe, Touched playfully slapped Seamus on the back of the head and
looked at Kit and myself in the rearview mirror.

"You did well, lads. Did well. We did it. We fucking did it. Yeah. Jesus. Sweet and fast.
Shit, yeah," Touched said, driving now at a more sensible speed.

"Went pretty smooth," Seamus said.

"Oh my God, yeah. So quick. Under two minutes, I reckon. Dead impressed. You all did very
well…."

We drove to Route 1 and pulled the Toyota onto a swampy piece of land where Touched had left
his own car, a green Mercedes, behind an old ruined factory or warehouse. We got out of the
vehicle. Touched collected the ski masks and the gloves, put them in a bag and threw them in the
swamp. Kit had left vomit on the floor of the Toyota.

"What about the vomit?" I asked.

"What about it?"

"Can you trace DNA through vomit?" I asked.

"Better scrape it up, Kit," Touched said.

"I’ll do it," I said and used the baby wipes to clean up the mess.

We got into the Mercedes. Seamus in the front, very quiet now. Touched, exhilarated, flipping
through the rock channels until he found Garth Brooks. Kit looking like one of the undead, all
the color gone from her cheeks and pale lips. I put my hand on her neck, rubbed the tension out
of it, smiled at her. She put on a brave face and smiled back. I took her hand and held it. She’d
been a lot more terrified about this than she’d been the night her father had been shot at. I
suppose she’d known about this plan for a while and had been dreading it all morning.

"You did great," I whispered.

"I didn’t do anything," she replied.

"No, you were fabulous," I said.

Within fifteen minutes of getting in the Mercedes we were pulling up to Gerry McCaghan’s
enormous house on Plum Island. Kit held my hand all the way to the front door. I squeezed it and
let go only when Gerry came in sight.

The house sat above the dunes right on the Atlantic Ocean. The previous owner, Gerry proudly
told me later, was a vice president of the
Penthouse
company and before that it had been
the summer retreat of a New England shipping family.

Gerry had extended the already "improved"
Penthouse
dwelling both laterally and
vertically and now it was an eleven-bedroom mansion with a five-bedroom guesthouse on the other
side of a four-car garage. The style was 1920s Hamptons Long Island Estate meets 1990s Internet
Millionaire Monstrosity.

The original structure had an elegant wood facade, painted a dull white that had weathered
into a lovely pinkish gray. The extensions were brash, futuristic abutments that seemed to be all
tinted windows, harsh metallic angles, silver paint, and a few space-age air-conditioning ducts.
A set of flagpoles dominated the driveway. In defiance of convention, the highest-flying flag was
the Irish tricolor; slightly lower there was a "Harp on a Green Field"—an old flag of Irish
republicanism—and lower still the Stars and Stripes. There was no garden, merely dunes and
crabgrass on the ocean side and a sandy driveway at the back.

It was a house in poor taste and it made me wonder about Gerry’s overall judgment and
certainly his construction skills; but perhaps it looked better from the sea. Preferably out
beyond the three-mile limit.

Gerry had seen the Mercedes arrive and came out to greet us. He was dressed in a white Lacoste
polo shirt and enormous blue shorts. His feet were bare and his Red Sox hat was on backwards. He
ignored me and approached Touched. I was ill at ease, but my doubts were dispelled when, after a
brief conversation, he walked over to me and gave me a hug.

"I’m glad you’re with us, Sean, Touched says you were great," he said, squeezing the life out
of me in what, for a moment, I thought was the subtlest murder attempt I’d ever experienced in my
life.

He released his grip and embraced Kit, too. He lifted her up in the air. Kit so small and
frail, Gerry a man mountain. For a moment it was like the footage of the little kid who falls
into the gorilla cage.

"I heard you were great too, Kit," Gerry said.

"I was ok. Sean was the star," Kit said.

Touched slapped me on the back.

"Damn right he was. You know me, Gerry, I’m a bit liable to fly off the handle. Fucking Sean,
cool as a cucumber. He was a bloody natural."

"Is that right, Sean?" Gerry asked happily.

"Nah, wee bit of exaggeration. Touched ran the show. I was just helping out."

Gerry patted me on the head with his meaty paw.

"He’s modest, too, unlike some people I could mention," he said, looking inside the house.
Hinting, perhaps, that Jackie was not flavor of the month.

Touched put his arm round me and led me to one side.

"Ok, mate, do you trust me to divvy up?" he asked, his cold, greedy eyes waiting for an
answer.

What choice did I have?

"Of course, Touched."

"Good lad. One thing about me, I’m honest, never cheated a mate in me life. Pal of mine will
buy the stash for eighty percent of cost. He’ll wash it in one of the casinos in New Hampshire.
We’ll lose a fifth but still, it’s going to be a good score," Touched said.

I knew what that meant. After the "washing" and the divvying up, Touched was going to steal
about half the money for himself.

Gerry dragged me away from Touched’s claws.

"Come on inside. We’re sitting down to dinner and then we’re all going to go to the beach.
We’ve had the maid make up your room in the guesthouse, you’ll be living here now, not in that
shithole," Gerry said.

"Thank you very much, but my stuff is over at—"

"It’s already been brought over. You’re one of us now, Sean. Part of the family. Now come on
in, Natalia has made the most amazing dinner for us and Kit has been working on a pie."

I walked inside the house.

"Kit, you give him a quick tour, but it has to be quick, we’re sitting down to dinner in five
minutes."

Kit breezed me through the house. All eleven bedrooms, six bathrooms, observation deck, TV
room, lounge, and finally dining room. It was actually worse than I was expecting, the McCaghans
combining their talents to create a bad-taste masterpiece. Sonia, who seemed to have an old-money
sophistication about her, was either colorblind or had decided that decor was not a place to
fight her battles.

The paint scheme was gold, green, and silver. The carpets three-inch-thick white shag on which
zebra-patterned throw rugs had been placed for contrast. No window was free of lace curtains,
taffeta bows, ivy, and other elaborate treatments. Entire rooms were filled with white leather
furniture, pictures of dirty gamins, kittens, and puppies. They had delicate and unfunctional
chairs that you wouldn’t dare touch, never mind use, and the beds were huge puffy affairs on
which stuffed animals slept in cozy proximity. It also wasn’t unusual to find antique porcelain
dolls sitting on chairs, gazing out to sea with creepy eyes. No books anywhere but the coffee
tables displayed copies of
Architectural Digest, New England Home,
and
France
Sud
. Gerry had also invested in a great store of contemporary Irish art. The usual tat: the
stony fields of the Burren, rain in the Mourne Mountains, sheep in the Antrim Plateau, deserted
beaches in Donegal, gap-toothed children sitting in rowboats. Dozens of these artworks, in lovely
antique gilt frames and placed seemingly at random all over the house.

The whole thing would have turned the stomach of a weaker man, but fortunately I was made of
sterner stuff.

Kit’s room was the only sane one in the house and even that was a bit overboard. She had
painted the walls black, hung a massive Indian shawl from her ceiling, and put up several askew
posters proclaiming her loyalty to The Cure, Nick Cave, and, alas, Poison. There were statues of
the Buddha, Ganesh, and that scary deity with swords and lots of legs.

"Nice," I said.

She brought me downstairs to the dining room, which was relatively subdued and dominated
anyway by a spectacular view of the Atlantic coast: the curve of Plum Island and Cape Ann
stretching to the south, New Hampshire and Maine to the north.

"Amazing view," I said to Gerry.

"Can you believe they only had a tiny window in this room before we bought it? I knocked out
the wall and stuck in support columns. Best view in PI."

Sonia showed me to my place next to Kit and facing the ocean. The sun had set, so the sea had
become a bewitching shade of lavender and it would have been perfect had I not been sitting
opposite Jackie, who looked as if he’d fallen off a bus. Something that gave me a tremendous and
childish feeling of satisfaction. Two black eyes, a cut chin, a cut lip, bruises on his
cheeks.

"Goodness, Jackie, are you ok? Kit told me you’re thinking of suing the End of the State,
because something fell on you? Is that right?"

"Aye," he said sourly and sipped from a Waterford crystal glass that was filled with fizzy
beer.

Touched sat next to Jackie. Gerry sat at one end of the table, Sonia at the other. Seamus,
Touched explained, was not feeling well and had gone next door to the guesthouse for a wee lie
down.

There were two Mexican servants who brought in several bottles of expensive white wine and a
formal dinner of soup, lobster, another fish course, and finally lamb. Although it seemed that
their command of English was not particularly impressive, I could see that we were not to allude
to this afternoon’s events except in the most oblique of terms.

Gerry, though, was in rare form and pontificated on international politics, domestic politics,
and baseball. Touched contradicted him here and there and Sonia was the voice of reason. Or if
not reason exactly, at least of more informed comment than either of the other two. Jackie
remained sullen for most of the meal and before the dessert came, asked permission to excuse
himself from the table.

"Gerry, do you mind if I leave? The tide marker is giving me the heave-ho," he said.

"No, of course not, we’ll all be joining you later. Off you go, Jackie," Gerry said.

Jackie stood and it was then that I noticed he was wearing board shorts and wet-suit booties.
He ran to the guesthouse next door and appeared on the dunes in front of the house wearing an
ankle strap and black rash guard, and carrying a surfboard.

"What was he talking about? The tide marker?" I asked Kit.

"That thing on the wall," she said, pointing at a clock with LOW and HIGH where the twelve and
six should be.

"So what does that mean?" I asked.

"Well, if you look, the arrow is almost into the low, so that means for the next few hours
surfing conditions will be pretty close to perfect on the Plum Island beach break."

"Jackie surfs?"

"Yeah, he’s very good. He had an amateur tryout at Montauk a few weeks ago. He was seventh out
of about forty or fifty. We all surf, well, me and Jackie do. Jamie as well, before he ran away.
But Daddy and Sonia both bodyboard."

"I love the ocean," Gerry said. "I love the feeling of being in the ocean."

Sonia nodded in agreement.

"It’s really the best feature of living on Plum Island," Sonia said. "It can be such a hassle,
sometimes the bridge is closed and I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, Sean, but there can be a
lot of insects…."

"No."

"Well, that’s the downside but the upside is a beautiful unspoiled beach, and you should see
what it’s like in the wildlife refuge, it’s America before the white man came and wrecked the
place," Sonia continued.

"I’ll have to check it out," I said, trying to sound sincere.

"Oh, it’s a family rule, if you live in this house, you have to do something in water," Gerry
insisted.

"Even made me boogie board and I hate the fucking stuff," Touched said.

I turned to Kit.

"Where did Jackie learn to surf? He’s a goddamn Mick. We don’t surf. Charley don’t surf. Micks
don’t surf. That’s it."

"Oh no, he’s from Sligo, that’s a big undiscovered surfing mecca. Amazing breaks out there,
completely unspoiled. He’s very good," she said with admiration.

Many a good pejorative Yeats line about the eejits from Sligo but Sean wouldn’t know them.

"So how come you’re not going out there with him?" I said, trying to keep the sneer out of my
voice.

"Oh, it’s too gnarly at the moment, I need the really low tide. But Jackie’s good enough to
surf it right now."

Something remarkably like jealousy was growing in my breast and Gerry mercifully changed the
subject to the island itself.

"It’s all changed, Sean. Plum Island used to be very poor. Irish crab, lobster, and clam men
eking out a desperate living on a bleak spit of sand south of the Merrimack River. Thoreau once
called the dunes of PI the ’most desolate walk in New England.’ And in the book
Albion’s
Seed…
well, anyway, I’m growing prolix, but things are quite different now. Boston spreads
her influence north and more people have begun commuting into the city using the highway or Route
1."

"The real boom is going to start once the light rail hub’s finished in Newburyport, the train
taking you to North Station in downtown Boston in less than an hour," Sonia added.

"Oh yes, Sean, I could see all this a couple of years ago when we moved. What was once an
unwholesome spot for poor crabbers and a couple of summer houses is now valuable real estate.
Once we get water and sewage lines here it’s going to be paradise itself."