She remembered the first faltering steps that she and Cormac had made toward each other. Even as it happened, she hadn’t been at all sure it was a wise or prudent thing. She’d denied the voice in her head, the one that kept warning her not to go there. Sometimes she felt like the selkie, the seal woman who comes ashore in human form, knowing that she cannot stay, that she must eventually return to the sea. She’d been on such tenuous ground, and he’d been so solid, so substantial. And now she was going to deliberately tear herself from his side, where she had felt so safe. She didn’t know if she could take another keening, another period of mourning. Was there anything she could have done about the way things had unfolded between them? She was sure that Cormac had been as surprised as she by the rediscovery of desire, something she could only ever describe as a kind of wild, secret sweetness, like the fleeting taste of nectar on the tongue. It was far too late for any regrets. But every minute that went by sealed them together, and would make it that much more difficult when they had to part.
Two days earlier, when she had first received news about the Loughnabrone bog man, she’d dug around the high shelves in the bedroom closet for her waterproofs, unused since the previous summer. One of the shelf supports must have been weak; a box full of dog-eared files had upended, knocking her backward and sending a flurry of loose papers to the floor. She’d sat for a moment, dazed by the fall, looking around at the scattered documents. It was her own case file on Triona’s murder. She had read and reread every one of the papers in the file, scouring their neat typescript and scrawled ciphers for any pattern, any particle of information that might help the police prove who was responsible for her sister’s death. She had felt a stab of remorse, remembering that when she first arrived in Dublin, this box had held a place at the center of her kitchen table. It was the constant reminder of what she’d left behind, unfinished. It had eventually shifted to the floor to make room for Cormac at the table. A few months later, she’d moved this box to the bedroom, but she had no memory of putting it up on the shelf in the closet. Was that how far she’d pushed Triona out of her life?
Among the jumbled police reports, the autopsy findings and witness statements, she’d seen the corner of a color snapshot, and pulled it out. It was Triona in profile, caught in a rare moment of contemplation, looking out the window into a grove of trees. Nora had taken the picture on a trip to the North Shore of Lake Superior. She had studied the lovely, lost features for a long, long time, then set the picture aside and begun sorting through the drifts of paper.
It had taken her nearly four hours to get the files organized again. How many times had she read all these notes and police reports? But this time one statement seemed to leap from the page: “Because the body was moved, the location of the primary crime scene remains unknown.” The primary crime scene. The place that had witnessed an act of savagery. Places did not forget such things. But where was it? The police had searched the garage and basement of Peter and Triona’s house and found nothing; they’d searched Peter’s office and come up empty there as well. And all this had happened nearly five years ago; what chance was there that any trace evidence would be left after such a length of time? The phrase kept echoing in Nora’s consciousness: the primary crime scene remains unknown.
That night she’d awakened with Cormac sleeping beside her, knowing that she would have to leave him as soon as her work on the bog was over. She lay beside him, studying the outline of his face in the shadows, seized by desperate, overwhelming desire, but afraid to touch him. At last his eyes had slid open, and without a word he’d understood and answered. She knew that her fierce ardor that night had startled him; it had surprised her as well. But after they’d made love, she hadn’t been able to keep from weeping. He thought it was something he’d done, and she couldn’t find any words to explain.