Wind and Dark Water Page 2

  He sank into the chair and opened a novel he’d brought with him, a lengthy work of nearly four hundred pages about the survivors of the Bosnian war. The night folded itself around him, and the wind rose, roaring around the corners of the house and rattling the windowpanes. There was no other sound except the quiet ticking of the clock.

  Chapter Two

  TADHG HEANEY—when he was a boy, everyone had trouble with the pronunciation of his archaic Celtic name, voiced like the first syllable of the word ‘tiger’—tried to suppress the sick feeling in his stomach, watching from the side as Tom Single’s digger lowered the stone down onto fresh cement. Five years since his father had died and they were only now getting around to this, him and his brother Declan. It was Dec’s fault, but it always was. He was gallivanting around Australia or somewhere with his latest conquest, a tender young thing named Ariadne or Helena or something like that. Tadhg didn’t remember and he didn’t really care. All he knew was the girl was Greek and her father was a shipping magnate, a real Onassis type who had more money than God.

  I think it’s best if we agree on the design as soon as possible. That way, we can get the stone placed before the frost sets into the ground. He’d emailed Declan in care of his company, a London banking firm that sent him all around the world doing God knows what while they paid him a hefty salary and gave him an expense account to rival the riches of Croesus.

  Dec replied he didn’t care what Tadhg put on it. Just be glad the old fucker is in the ground.

  “What’s that look like to ye, Tadhg?” Tommy Single leaned out of the cab and shouted over the engine noise. “Is it straight?”

  Tadhg stepped forward and regarded the flat slab of granite in the last of the late afternoon’s fading light. “Looks good,” he said. “Finest kind, my son.” He wanted this over and done with. He hated this time of year and this time of day when the light went away early and didn’t come back for far too long. As a young boy he’d dreaded winter with its early dusk and interminable nights, sitting with the family in the living room and feigning interest in the six o’clock news and the game shows that came afterwards. His mother sat sewing in the rocking chair, pushed so far back into the corner that she didn’t even seem to be in the room. And his old man, front and centre in the easy chair, legs spread wide on the footrest, argued with the television as if the people on there could hear a word he said, the volume up on bust. He always had to get the last word.

  “So you’re all right with that?” Tommy turned off the machine and hopped down out of the cab. “If you’re not, I don’t mind—”

  “That’s fine,” Tadhg cut in. He realised how abrupt it sounded and softened it with a grin. “Honest, Tommy, it looks grand.” He reached into his hip pocket and brought out his wallet, counted out some bills, and handed them across. Tommy flicked through them, then looked up at Tadhg with a confused expression.

  “You gave me too much, bhoy.” He peeled off the excess and made to give it back. “We said forty dollars, and that’s all I’m charging ye.”

  “Keep it,” Tadhg said. “Please.” He felt absurdly grateful to Tommy, who had made this distasteful task so much easier. “God love ye, give it to Margaret for her Christmas baking.” Tommy’s wife Margaret made almost all the holiday cakes for the little town of Guernsey and even exported some to area shops and restaurants. She inevitably took top prize at the community fair every fall for her dark boiled fruitcake.

  “You’re sure?” Tommy hesitated, the money still in his outstretched hand.

  Tadhg reached out and closed his fingers around it. “Take it.” He bent in the growing darkness to look at the simple flat plaque resting on its bed of fresh cement. It had his father’s name and his birth and death dates. That was it. Tadhg didn’t have the stomach to include a flowery sentimental phrase. Sentiment wasn’t something he felt when he considered his father. Besides, what was the old bastard going to do, rise up out of the ground and smack Tadhg a good one in the back of the head? You did enough of that when you were alive, you old cunt.

  The placement of his father’s headstone coincided with this trip to Guernsey. Old Eleazar Quirke was dead, and Tadhg hoped to snatch up the now-empty family homestead and turn it into a holiday let. Mainlanders and other come-from-aways loved the island, now that it was prosperous; there were expensive foreign cars on the roads and private sailing clubs for the oil company executives and their skinny trophy wives. True, most of them lived in the city, but they were always looking for the perfect weekend getaway, and rural Newfoundland, with its close resemblance and relative proximity to Ireland, seemed tailor-made for them. Tadhg didn’t anticipate any difficulties in procuring the property. Old Eleazar’s only living relatives were his grandchildren, Danny Quirke and his sister, Sandra—and Danny was in Ireland, seconded to the Garda Síochána from the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary. He couldn’t see Sandra coming back to Guernsey any time soon. Like him, she’d been keen to get away after high school. Also like him, she was out the door the day she passed her final exams. The last he’d heard, she had become a successful jewelry designer and was living in Portugal with a man friend, or maybe he was her common-law husband. Tadhg hadn’t seen her in nearly thirty years. It had been almost that long since he’d last seen Danny.

  He was reasonably sure Danny wasn’t interested in seeing him.

  Tadhg had done well since high school. He went on to university where he studied business and commerce, like his old man wanted him to. He’d had no choice. He knew he wouldn’t get one red cent unless he did what his father wanted, and what his father wanted was for Tadhg to eventually take over the family business. Tadhg was the natural choice—Declan wanted nothing to do with the Heaney’s fleet of seagoing vessels and even less to do with the Heaney Ocean Group, the fish processing plant they owned—but at the last minute Tadhg had confounded his father’s expectations and set himself up as a property developer.

  His old man had been livid. Tadhg had driven from town on a Sunday morning to have dinner with his parents and tell his father the news. He was twenty-five and had closed a deal worth two million dollars to develop a new subdivision outside Carbonear, a bedroom community to accommodate the hundreds of new oil-patch workers and their families. He’d acquired the land for a song from the grieving grandchildren of a recently deceased fisherman who had inherited it from his grandfather. Tadhg told them he intended to use the land as a history and heritage site, a green space for the community. Plans were being drawn up, and consultations with local government officials were underway. By the time they realised his true intentions, the deed had been signed over to him, and the first phase of site-clearing work had begun.

  “You made a promise.” The daughter had shown up at the site one Monday morning. She found Tadhg sitting in his pickup truck, looking over the plans. “You said—”

  “I changed my mind.”

  “That land belonged to my grandfather! My ancestors came over from Bristol with John Guy.”

  Tadhg shrugged. “And mine came from County Wexford. Big deal.”

  She stared at him, her face expressionless. “I can’t believe you. You don’t care about nothing, do ye?”

  It was mostly true. He cared about money; he cared about Lily. That was it. What else was there? His father had been pissed off. He turned the family dinner into a battlefield, roaring and ranting, pounding on the table so hard he made the glassware rattle. He kept Tadhg behind for hours after the meal had finished, haranguing him, attempting to manipulate with recriminations and yes, even tears. If an argument wasn’t going his way, he’d switch into what Tadhg thought of as Good Father Mode. “I loves all my children the same,” he’d say. “You and Declan, you’re everything to me. It’s just too bad you don’t see it, Tadhg.” He’d walk around the room, praying aloud, “Oh lord Jesus, please forgive your wayward son, a sinner.” It was a sickening spectacle, and Tadhg had long since grown weary of his father’s perverse attempts at emotional manipulation.

  “I won’t run the fish plant,” he said. “I’ve got plans of my own.”

  “You’ll do what’s right, my son, or else. It says in the Bible to honour your father and mother.”

  Tadhg had calmly told him to fuck off. His father’s face had turned a shade of red he’d never seen. “Oh, you can curse and swear as much as you like. Won’t change the truth.”

  Tadhg watched now as Tommy climbed aboard the digger and backed slowly out of the cemetery, turned, and drove away. Tadhg felt sorry for anybody stuck behind him on the road, but then again, this was Guernsey. The rate of traffic was maybe one vehicle per hour on a busy summer weekend, three or four if there happened to be a funeral passing by.

  When he arrived at the family home twenty minutes later, the door was locked, and all the windows were dark. He hadn’t expected any different. No one had lived there for the past five years, ever since his father died. Neither he nor Declan had expressed any interest in opening the place up. Tadhg supposed he could have had a key cut, but he had no desire or reason to go inside. He’d made a home for himself and Lily on Eigus, the largest of the smaller islands in Conception Bay, and that was more than good enough. He’d bought the island outright for less than half its value and erected a huge house. Truth be told, the house was much too big for only him and Lily, but wasn’t that the point? People judged you by what you owned and how much you had, and Tadhg had lots.

  He parked his Range Rover and got out. He had never been able to drive past the old place without at least a look. It was cold. He could see his breath steaming out in front of him, dispersing into eddies in the indigo twilight like the swirling shapes around Van Gogh’s illuminated stars. His fingers cramped with pain, his Raynaud’s Syndrome making them stiff and clumsy. He tried to push his c
ar keys into his pocket but dropped them on the ground. It was still there, etched into the cement of the foundation: TADHG 1986. He’d written it one hot July day when the new house—this house—was being built. It seemed an appropriate thing to do. He was nineteen, home for the weekend from the university’s summer session, and at loose ends. Danny Quirke was home too, and from the same university—indeed, he and Tadhg were in some of the same classes—but ever since Tadhg’s disastrous involvement with Danny’s sister, Sandra, Danny wanted nothing to do with him. As for Sandra…. “The best thing for you to do,” Danny had said, “is to fly the fuck out of here. You done enough damage already.”

  Tadhg had kept himself informed of Danny’s career via social media and the local papers. After two years in university, Danny had gone for police training and had spent the intervening thirty years working his way up the career ladder. From traffic patrol he moved to the detective division, becoming a detective constable a mere two years after he’d joined up. A promotion to detective sergeant quickly followed, then inspector. He and Tadhg were the same age; Tadhg couldn’t figure out why the silly fucker hadn’t taken early retirement. The Evening Telegram and the Sunday Herald printed some police-related story nearly every day, and Danny was featured in a fair few of these. He seemed to deal mostly with kidnapping and domestic violence, child abuse, and the one or two murders that occurred in the city every year. In 2017 he’d been seconded to the Garda Síochána in Dublin as part of an officer exchange program. It hadn’t gone well for him. There had been some kind of altercation with a suspect, and Danny had narrowly escaped criminal charges. Since then, he’d vanished off the radar.

  It had been a very long time since Tadhg had seen Danny, but his feelings for his old friend remained unchanged. As children, they’d been close, sharing a David-and-Jonathon relationship “passing the love of women.” Danny told Tadhg things he had never told another living soul, and Tadhg confided the often-painful details of his family life to Danny, knowing it would go no further.

  Tadhg stood up, cursing the pain in his knees and the tightness of his calf muscles. This getting older bullshit was depressing as hell, he thought. Bad enough he had to use reading glasses now without the rest of it. He went round to the south side of the house, climbing onto a short stack of cinder blocks to look in the window. Why, he didn’t know. He’d seen it all before. There was the kitchen with its gorgeous labradorite countertops, the butcher’s-block table his mother used as a work surface, and the enormous Wolf stove, special ordered from the States. You couldn’t get a stove like that in town, even in the city, in 1986. “Nothing but the best,” his father had said. “I don’t want no old garbage.” The old man insisted on spreading his money around. It was the only thing he had to give, and the only thing he cared about.

  On the opposite side of the house was the dining room with its three-paned french window opening onto a teak patio. Tadhg remembered they had a barbecue once: hamburgers and hotdogs for himself and Declan, steak for his parents. The charcoal never really caught fire well enough to roast the meat, and his father, out of patience, hurled the entire thing into the yard. After that, the patio became a storage place for the lawn mower, rakes and shovels, and occasional bags of potting soil his mother bought for her houseplants. He hoped there were at least one or two indoor plants where she was now.

  Tadhg’s mother had developed Lewy body dementia shortly after her fiftieth birthday. At first her condition seemed innocuous, merely some difficulty picking things up and holding on to them, or problems navigating the stairs in their home. She became abnormally forgetful, pouring a cup of tea and wandering off without drinking it, then returning to the kitchen several more times to make more tea that she also forgot about. It wasn’t uncommon for Tadhg to turn up and find ten or more mugs of tea lined up across the kitchen counter. His father had to buy a kettle with an automatic shutoff, because she would turn it on and forget about it, leaving it to boil dry. She left the stove on, opened windows in the middle of foul weather and forgot to close them, hung dirty laundry to dry outside in the yard. His father, predictably, saw all this as an attempt to irritate him.

  “There’s nothing wrong with her. She just does it now to spite me.” The conversation with Tadhg’s father took place over the telephone. He’d been home once since the onset of his mother’s illness—arriving on a Sunday for dinner and planning to stay the night—but left early when his father’s behaviour became too much to bear. He’d sat at the dining table complaining as his wife struggled to put the meal together, and nothing she’d cooked suited him. The potatoes were undercooked; the carrots were mushy; the portion of salt beef she’d given him was too fatty. His mother tried to put the best face on it, chatting with Tadhg and asking where his sister was, and why hadn’t she turned up for Sunday dinner?

  “I haven’t got a sister, Mam.” Tadhg ignored his father’s derisive laugh. “It’s just Declan and me.”

  “Who am I thinking about, then?” She struggled to remember.

  “Probably Aunt Joyce. That’s your sister.”

  His mother looked for a long time at Tadhg’s father. “I didn’t think you worked here,” she said. “Who’s Declan?”

  It went downhill from there. By the time the meal was finished, Tadhg’s throat was so tight he could barely swallow. He helped clear the table and washed the dishes, then collected his coat and car keys and left. His father met him in the front hall. “Where the Jesus do you think you’re going, then?”

  Tadhg didn’t even bother saying anything. He just left. From time to time, he would call his mother, but her conversation made little sense, and she was frequently too afraid to speak on the telephone, fearing that someone was listening to and recording her conversation. Tadhg’s father rang him late one night at his home on Eigus. “I think she’s after losing her mind. Somebody got to do something with her. She’s off her head.”

  As usual, Declan was unreachable. Tadhg called his office and left a message with the receptionist. Then he arranged an appointment with a neurologist in the city, who ran a series of tests. Dementia with Lewy Bodies, he said, “…but not to worry. Many people live for five to eight years after diagnosis.” In the end it wasn’t an issue. Tadhg’s mother developed pneumonia and died in hospital eighteen months later. He managed to track Declan down in Austria. His brother showed up drunk to the funeral with a woman in tow, a nice enough girl who spoke barely any English. As soon as his mother’s coffin was interred, Declan was gone again. Tadhg stood over the grave after the rest of the mourners had left and remembered something he’d said to Danny Quirke when they were teenagers: “My whole fucking family is good for nothing.”

  And now Eleazar Quirke had finally kicked off, and Danny would come back to Guernsey. It wasn’t an idea Tadhg relished, but he knew he would have to face Danny sometime. Better sooner than later, he supposed, and now that Eleazar was gone, there were some things he needed to tell Danny, things Danny very much needed to know.

  DANNY WOKE the next morning to the insistent buzzing of his phone. He’d put aside his book somewhere after midnight and had the first good night’s sleep he’d had in a while. He picked up the phone and glared at it. “Danny Quirke.”

  “Danny! Good God, did I wake you? I’m so sorry.” Rosemary Dean’s bright voice exploded in his ear. The goddamn woman was too cheerful for this time of the morning. “I wanted to go over a few things before the viewing.”

  He hauled himself out of bed and rubbed a hand over his face. “Right.”