“For agreeing to help those people. Who were they?”
“You didn’t know them?” I asked.
“Not really.” She turned away. “That’s why you came, right? To find out about them?”
“Yes,” I lied. I had come because I wanted to resurrect Roisin in her sister.
“You want to walk?” Kathleen asked.
“Sure.”
“If you go five miles down that track you come to the Chesapeake Bay.” She pointed eastwards. “I had this idea that in summer I’d bike down there and have lazy days on the water.”
“You and a million mosquitoes, right?”
She nodded. “And the ticks.” She led me to the road and we walked slowly toward the small town. The landscape was very flat, accentuating the sky and reminding me of Flanders. “It was the girl who came to me, Sarah Sing Tennyson?” Kathleen said. “She said you’d thrown her out of the house, and that she wanted to get inside to rescue her paintings, and that if I took you for a walk then she knew she’d be safe.” Kathleen blushed slightly. “She was very persuasive.”
“I can imagine.” I kicked a dry pine cone ahead of me. “I wonder how she found you?”
“That was easy. You remember I hired a private detective to find out about you? Well he visited the house when she was there, and I guess he and she talked. But she never told me she was taking men with her, or that they planned to beat you up. I couldn’t believe it!” Her voice rose in innocent protest as she remembered the violence. “I phoned the police!”
“I know, thank you.”
“So what happened?”
“They locked me up for a while.”
“Who were they?”
“They were from Ireland,” I told her.
“So what happened?”
I shrugged. “They were looking for something. And when I told them where it was, they let me go.”
She looked up at me. “I felt badly. I didn’t feel badly when I agreed to help Sarah Tennyson, because I thought she was being real straight and you’d been a pig to me in Belgium and I thought I’d enjoy getting back at you. But you were different on Cape Cod.”
I walked in silence for a few paces. The bushes beside the road looked dead and dry, the meadows were pale. “I wanted to tell someone the truth,” I said, “and I’d decided to trust you.”
She nodded, then laughed as she realized that I had trusted her when she had been deceiving me, and vice versa. She bit her lip. “What fools we all are.”
“I thought that after so many years of lies it would be a change to tell the truth,” I explained, “like giving up smoking, or going off the booze.”
“And is it a change?” she asked.
“It makes life less complicated.”
“Like I thought small-town life would be, only it isn’t really less complicated, there’s just less of it. This is it.” She nodded at the main street. “Two churches, a town office, a bank, feed store, convenience store, coffee shop, and a post office. The movie house closed down, the service station moved to Route Five, but you can buy gas from Ed’s feed store if he really likes you and his son isn’t watching.”
“What’s wrong with Ed’s son?”
“He’s in the State Police and he can’t stand his dad, not since his mom told him about his dad’s fling with Mary Hammond who used to deliver the mail before Bobby Evans’s dog bit her leg and it went septic. The leg not the dog.”
“And you like living here?” I asked.
“I hate it.”
We both laughed. “And you’re too stubborn to admit you’ve made a mistake,” I challenged her, “because you’re so like Roisin.”
“Am I like Roisin?” she asked. We had stopped in the main street and were facing each other. “Am I really?”
“Yes. In looks, anyway.”
She frowned. “Does that make it hard for you?”
I hesitated, then told the truth. “Yes.”
“Don’t,” she told me. She was frowning.
“Don’t?” It seemed the world trembled on an edge, and I knew it was not going to fall my way. I had built a dizzying scaffold impossibly high and had dared to think she would want to share it with me.
“I’ve got a guy, Paul,” Kathleen said gently. “He teaches school in Frederick.”
“I didn’t mean that,” I said, but I had meant it, and she knew I had meant it, and suddenly I felt such a fool and just wanted to be out of this damn chicken town.
“He’s a good man,” she went on.
“I’m sure he is.” I felt as though my dizzying scaffold was collapsing all around me in splintering poles.
“Let’s have a coffee,” she said, and we sat in the coffee shop and she told me about her trip to Europe, and about her adventures in Dublin and Belfast, but I was not really listening. I did a good job of pretending to listen; I smiled at the right places, made intelligible comments, but inside I was desolate. I was alone. Roisin was gone for ever. I had thought she could be clawed back from the past, out of her Beka’a grave, but it was not to be.
“I hope you found out what you wanted to know,” Kathleen told me when we walked back to the truck.
“I did, thanks.”
“I guess you won’t see Sarah Sing Tennyson again?”
“I guess not.”
She put her hand on my sleeve when we reached the truck. “I’m sorry, Paul.”
Me too, I thought, me too. “Good luck with the teacher.”
“Sure. Thanks.” She smiled. “Good luck in Washington, eh?”
“Sure,” I said, “sure,” and drove back to Cape Cod.
It was past one o’clock when I reached the house. It was a dark night and the moon was hidden by high flying clouds. I was too tired to open the garage so I just left the truck on the clam-shell turnabout then walked to the kitchen door. I was weary and I was disgusted with myself. I had made a fool of myself. Dear God, I thought, but I had really believed I could fall in love with a ghost. I unlocked the door, pushed into the kitchen, and froze. I could smell tea. It was not an overpowering smell, just an aroma, but unmistakable. Tea.
My M1 carbine was hidden in the living room so, for a weapon, I pulled out my fish-filleting knife that had a wicked sharp blade and then, very slowly, I edged toward the living-room door.
It was jet dark in the house. I could hear the wind and the eternal beat of the far waves, and I could still smell tea. Had Sarah Sing Tennyson dared come back here? I had an idea that women drank more tea than men, but the Irish also drank tea, so had Herlihy sent someone to kill me after all? I reached the living-room door. For a second I contemplated turning on the light, then decided that darkness was probably a better friend than the sudden dazzle of the electric bulb.
I pressed down the door lever, crouched, and pushed the door open. It swung into the living room’s darkness. I was crouched low, the knife in my right hand. The M1 was hidden four paces from me, held by strips of duct tape to the underside of the long table. I was gauging just how long it would take me to free the weapon when a man’s voice sleepily spoke my name. “Shanahan?” The voice came from my right.
My heart leaped in panic, but I managed to stay still and to say nothing.
“Shanahan?” the man said again, and this time I heard the fear in his voice. I suspected he had been dozing and was now scared of what the darkness had brought into this cold room. “I’m going to turn a light on, OK?” the man said, and I suddenly recognized the voice of my CIA interrogator.