What old age? I sat in the freezing, dark car and gazed at the moonlit marsh and I remembered how I had once dreamed of bringing Roisin to this house; I had even dreamed, God help me, of raising her children on this shore, but she had scorned that dream as the sentimental witterings of a dull and unimaginative fool. I remembered her eyes after her execution, all fierceness gone, then I thought of Liam’s eyes that had been so accusing in the green lamplight. Poor Liam. After I had wrestled the sleeping bag about his corpse I had found his dried vomit on my hands and I had panicked as if I had been touched by a foul contagion. I remembered my childhood, and how Father Sifflard had told us of the one sin against the Holy Ghost that could never be forgiven, which sin no one seemed able to define, and I wondered if we all defined it for ourselves and if I was already guilty and thus doomed to the horrors of eternal punishment.
I rolled up the window, let in the clutch, and drove toward my house, which had been built 150 years before by a Captain Alexander Starbuck who, retiring from the profitable pursuit of whales in the Southern Ocean and quarrelling with his family on Nantucket, had come to this Cape Cod marsh and built himself a home snug against the Atlantic winds. My father had bought The Starbuck House from the estate of the Captain’s great-granddaughter and had dreamed of retiring to it, but the dream had never come true. Now I would make it home. I drove slowly up the driveway of crushed clam shells that splintered loudly under the tires, and stopped on the big turnaround in front of the house where my headlights shone stark on the silver-gray cedar shingles. It was a classic Cape Cod house: a simple low building with two windows either side of its front door, a steep staircase in the hallway and a snug dormer upstairs that must have reminded old Captain Starbuck of a whaling ship’s cabins. The house’s only addition since 1840 was the garage, which had been clad in the same cedar shingles as the house itself and thus looked as old as the rest of the building. It was a home as simple as a child’s drawing, a home at peace with its surroundings, and it was mine, and that thought was wondrously comforting as I killed the headlights and climbed out of the car. I took the sea-bag from the boot and found the house keys that I had kept safe these seven years, then walked to the front door.
My key scraped in the lock as it turned. There had never been electricity in the house, and I had no flashlight, but the moon shone brightly enough to illuminate the hallway. My sister Maureen, who used the house as a holiday home, had left some yellow rain-slickers hanging on the pegs by the door, but otherwise the shadowed hall looked just as I had left it seven years before. The antique wooden sea-trunk with its rope handles that I had bought in Provincetown still stood under the steep-pitched stairway, and on its painted lid was a candle in a pewter holder. I fumbled in the holder’s dish, hoping to find a book of matches.
At which point an electric light blazed about and dazzled me. I started back, but before I could escape something terrible struck my face and I was blinded. The pain made me want to scream, but I could not even breathe, and, vainly gasping for air and with my hands scrabbling like claws at my scorching eyes, I collapsed.
PART TWO
THE POLICE ARRIVED FIVE MINUTES LATER; THEIR TWO CARS rocking and wailing down the dirt track, then skidding ferociously as they braked on the clam-shell turnaround. A young excited officer, his pistol drawn, burst through the open front door and shouted at me not to move.
“Oh, go away and grow up,” I said wearily. “Do I look as if I’m about to run away?”
My sight had half returned and, through the painful tears, I could just see that the girl who had attacked me was now sitting on the stairs holding an antique whaling harpoon that used to hang on my bedroom wall. She had not used the vicious harpoon to cripple me, but a squeegee bottle which now stood beside her on the steep stairway. “He broke in,” the girl explained laconically to the three policemen who now piled excitedly into the hallway. “He says his name is O’Neill. Dr. O’Neill.” She sounded scornful. In the last few moments I had learned that this was one very tough lady.
“Do you want me to call the rescue squad?” the first policeman asked, while an older officer knelt beside me and gently pulled my hands from my face.
“What did you do to him?” the older man asked the girl.
“Ammonia.”
“Jesus. Did you dilute it?”
“No way!”
“Jesus! Get some water, Ted. Can we use your kitchen, ma’am?”
“Through there.”
“You used ammonia?” the first policeman asked in awed disbelief.
“Squirted him good.” The girl showed the officers the liquid soap bottle that she had used to lacerate me through the banister rails. “I used to know a policeman in Los Angeles,” the girl explained, “and he taught me never to piss a psychopath off, just to put the bastard down fast. Ammonia does that, and it’s legal.” The last three words were added defensively.
“Sure is.” One of the policemen had fetched a saucepan of water from the kitchen. My breath was more or less normal now, but the pain in my eyes was atrocious. The officer poured water on my face while outside the house the police radios sounded unnaturally loud in the still, cold night air.
“We’ll take him away in a moment, ma’am,” the older policeman, a sergeant, reassured the girl.
“Then bury the bastard,” the girl said vindictively.
“What did you say your name was, mister?” the sergeant asked.
“My name,” I said as grandly as I could, “is Dr. James O’Neill,” and I fumbled in an inside pocket for my false passport.
“Careful!” The sergeant moved to restrain me, then relaxed as he saw I was not pulling a gun. “I know you!” he said suddenly.
I blinked at him. My sight was still foully blurred, but I recognized the sergeant as Ted Nickerson, a guy I had last seen in twelfth grade. Damn it, I thought, but this was not what I had planned! I had planned to disappear in Cape Cod for a few weeks, hidden from sight while my ship came home, and the last thing I needed was for the word to spread that I had returned to America as bait for Michael Herlihy or il Hayaween.
“You’re Paul Shanahan!” Ted exclaimed. “Which means—” He stopped, glancing at the girl.
“Which means this is my house,” I confirmed.
“It’s not his house,” the girl insisted. “I rent this place! I’ve got a five-year lease!” She was shivering in a nightdress and an old woollen bath robe. My old woollen bath robe. She had bare feet, long black hair, and an Oriental face.
“This is the Shanahan house.” Ted Nickerson confirmed the ownership uncomfortably. He was still frowning at me. “You are Paul, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Bullshit!” the girl said with an explosively indignant force on the second syllable. “The house belongs to a guy in Boston, a guy called Patrick McPhee.”
“McPhee’s my brother-in-law,” I told her. “He’s married to my sister Maureen. Maureen holds the keys to the place while I’m away, that’s all! She uses it for summer vacations and odd weekends, nothing more.”
The girl stared at me. I guessed that by using Maureen’s name I had convinced her I was not your usual rapist breaking and entering, but might in fact be telling the truth. Ted Nickerson was still frowning, perhaps thinking about my false name. “How’s your face, Paul?”