False Mermaid

Heading back to the sitting room, Cormac slipped the record from its sleeve and placed it gently on the turntable, wound up the old-fashioned crank on the side, and set the needle in the groove. Two fiddles sang out in unison—a wild, hectic reel—and it was as if a puzzle box was opening itself before his eyes, each note a key to an unfathomed existence. He could hear the two instruments growling together on the low notes and wondered: Was it his father bearing down more fiercely on the bow or his great-aunt? They leapt together from the end of one tune straight into another, the angular movement of the bows evident in their tone, and Cormac felt the heart swell in his chest at the sound. Although he loved the Clare music that had surrounded him as a child, he had also felt the pull of the wild, distinctive voice of Donegal. He had never really understood why.

He closed his eyes and tried to conjure the dining room of the Glencolumbkille Hotel on that day, the starched white linens, the gleaming glassware and cutlery, all vibrating in sympathy, tuned to the sound of the fiddles. From somewhere in the back of his head, the notion began to take hold—that this music might stir the old man from slumber. He couldn’t have forgotten, not completely. The notes must remain somewhere within his subconscious, even if they had lain buried there for fifty years.

The B side was “Lord Mayo,” a slow air played by one fiddle, both a lament for a past time and an anthem to carrying on.

At a turn halfway through the tune, Roz Byrne’s voice carried over his shoulder: “What’s that you’re listening to?”

Cormac didn’t answer, but lifted the record from the turntable and handed it to her, marking her surprise as the names on the label registered.

“And you’d no idea at all?”

“I’ve seen my father exactly three times since I was nine years old, Roz. Somehow, the subject of music never came up.”

Roz shook her head. “I suppose he gave it up when he went off to university. Donegal music was all but banned from the radio in those days. Too foreign-sounding, the RTÉ people said. Ridiculous.”

“It makes me wonder about all the other things I don’t know,” Cormac said.

Roz looked at him thoughtfully. “Did you have a look around at the pictures?”

He nodded. “The seals—they’re almost like character portraits.”

“I thought so, too. I wondered why there were so many, and your father told me a story, about his father—so that would be your grandfather and Julia’s brother. A melancholy, lonely man. He was away for years, studying medicine in France. When his father died, he came home and set up a practice here. After a few months, he took a fishing trip to Tory Island, and to the astonishment of everyone in the Glen, he came home with a wife. Being from Tory, she spoke an Irish that was different to the people around here. They called her ‘The Foreigner.’ She stayed on for a while, until Joe was born—”

“And then?”

“She ran off. Your father was still an infant at the time. He said his aunt Julia was the only mother he ever knew.”

Cormac felt thunderstruck. “Why did she leave?”

“No one ever knew. There was never any further communication; if she ever did get in touch with your grandfather, he never told anyone. He’d go and sit on the headland up at Port na Rón for hours, staring out to sea. It must have had a profound effect on Joe. He said when you came along, he wasn’t prepared to be a father. He had no idea what it actually meant. The responsibility terrified him.”

“We’re talking about the same man who traveled halfway around the globe to face down a military junta—and you’re saying a mewling infant terrified him?”

“I didn’t say it was plausible, only that it’s true.”

6

Nora spent the morning at the library, keeping an eye out for Harry Shaughnessy, and digging through newspaper databases for information on the murders of the Maine couple, Constance and Harris Nash. She found more than two dozen articles on the Nash case, beginning with the discovery of the grisly crime scene on the victims’ boat. The evidence trail implicated Jesse Benoit, a friend of the victims’ son. There was an underlying class element to the story that the newspapers touched on briefly but didn’t explore fully: Jesse Benoit’s mother cleaned house for the Nash family, which was how the two boys had become friends as children. Tripp Nash went away to boarding school, while Jesse Benoit attended local public schools.