Lake of Sorrows

The bathwater was beginning to cool. She lathered up one of the poufs that hung from the tap and began scrubbing at her face and forearms. Ursula had been right about the peat getting in your pores. Nora reached for a nailbrush to go after the black stuff under her fingernails, and remembered the peat under the dead man’s bitten-off nails. What did that tell them? That he had worked in a bog? Or that despite his wounds, he had still been alive when he went into it? Tomorrow they might be able to find the answer—along with any other secrets he’d been keeping under the peat. She tried to imagine falling into a bog hole—the cold, the wet, the damp-earth smell, what it must be like to feel completely enveloped, paralyzed. She had read about air hunger; in cases of suffocation, the instinctive reaction to being deprived of oxygen was usually fierce struggle. That might explain the peat under the nails as well.

Out of the bath, she began to feel more human again. She dressed and ruffled her hair in front of the mirror, then clipped her fingernails as short as possible. Looking for a place to deposit the clippings, she opened the cabinet below the sink. Resting at the bottom of the empty bin was a single tissue, stamped with a perfect parenthesis of dark mauve lipstick. It was an absolutely precise impression, down to the tiny grooves bearing a slightly heavier stain of pigment. It was fresh, and not a shade she’d ever seen Evelyn McCrossan wear. Nora set the wastebasket back, shutting out a chorus of half-whispered questions as she quickly closed the cabinet doors.

7

No one was in the kitchen when Charlie Brazil arrived home from work, but the radio droned faintly into the empty room. They always ate their dinner without him; it was better that way. He removed his jacket and shirt and went to the sink to rinse away the peat dust that clung to his face and the back of his neck. He still had the uneasy feeling that something else was going to happen before the sun set. He was no more superstitious than the next man, but everyone knew that strange occurrences came in threes. First there had been the peat storm—a rare event; they’d not had more than two days in a row of fine weather in the six years he’d worked at Loughnabrone, and the wind had to be just right. He couldn’t remember ever seeing such a storm, a wall of dust so vast it had blotted out earth and sky, even the light of the sun. He’d come across that woman and her car in the midst of it. He might have killed her, but he had stopped the tractor just in time. Surely that was a sign of something—but what?

Those gombeens in the workshop hadn’t let up on him all afternoon, slagging him about the way the Yank had looked at him, asking was it true that American women were all mad for it? He detested that kind of talk, and he had felt as though his head would split. It was the same every day; they always found some way, large or small, of having a go at him. He’d almost grown used to it. He certainly knew that they talked about him, and even what they said, that he wasn’t quite the full shilling. What they didn’t understand was that all of his quirks were defenses, conscious choices he’d made to keep them at a distance.

A short time after he’d returned to the workshop, someone else had arrived with news that the archaeologists doing the bog road excavation had found another body, and this one was beginning to look suspicious, judging by all the police cars and vans. It was hard to keep anyone from knowing the score when police cars were swarming the place, visible from miles away on the empty bog roads. Word had spread until the air felt thick with shocked whispers, everyone trying to imagine who the victim might be—that young one from the next parish, some said, or another ancient corpse. There were murmurs, mutterings, and he could feel them all looking at him, asking the questions with their eyes.