It takes us almost an hour to reach the site where they found Erin’s body. It’s a half mile or so from Katerina Greiner’s grave, in a little stand of trees, just as Brian described it. It’s been six months now and the summer’s come and gone, and you can barely see where they excavated, then filled the earth back in. Golden grass has mostly covered the site. It’s late autumn and unseasonably warm, and the mountains are the way I remember them from long ago, rusty brown and purple, no small, trickling streams to be heard.
I think of her grave at St. Patrick’s, the simple writing Uncle Danny chose, a small engraved flower and cross. He goes nearly every day and it’s helped him, to be able to talk to her. His heart is better. He looks younger than he has in years. I thought it would kill him, finding out about Brian, but instead it’s as though something’s lifted.
“I didn’t understand, until I read the letter from Father Anthony, why she came here,” I tell him. “She’d decided to tell us what happened. She didn’t care about the statute of limitations or anything. She just wanted to … tell the truth. And he’d told her about this place, in his letter.” I can almost recite it from memory now.
Dear Erin,
You have been very, very brave and I want you to know that I am willing to testify about what I know, if you should decide that you want me to. I have struggled, as I know you have struggled, to know what to do.
Many years ago, when I was in seminary in Ireland, I went to the Wicklow Mountains with a group of other seminarians and we walked and camped in the mountains near Glendalough, a holy place where St. Kevin retreated many years ago, to be with God, and with himself. We weren’t far from the Wicklow Way, when we came upon a rough stone altar in the woods. It was a mass rock, where mass would have been celebrated during the years that Catholicism was outlawed in Ireland. One of the boys who was from the area told us that a priest had been killed there and that it was known to locals as a very holy place.
Erin, I felt the presence of that priest, and I felt the presence of God, and I felt the presence of myself in those woods, of the very essence of myself. I have never felt so sure of my vocation, and of my humanness.
I urge you to find that place for yourself, the quiet place where you can talk to God and discover what is in your heart, what is right for you. And when you do, I am here to support you, whatever that may look like.
“She came here looking for that mass rock,” I tell him. “The first time she came down, she couldn’t find it, and then she just wanted to get out of Dublin, because of Brian, and she came down again, so she could look again.” I pause and gaze out across the expanse of rust-colored bog. “I know they’ve looked and looked. I know it’s unlikely. But I like to think she found it, that she experienced that peace before she died.”
“And she left the necklace for you to find so you’d think of the priest.”
“I think she left the scarf and the ID for me, to say, ‘Maggie, pay attention. It’s me.’ It was the only thing she had, when she saw him. She must have known what was going to happen. And then the necklace was the message. ‘Father Anthony knew. Look in the box he gave me.’”
“And you did, you found her,” Roly says. “Anything going to happen to the brother and his friends?”
“I don’t know.” I can’t talk about Frank. I haven’t gotten ahold of that anger and it’s always threatening to rise up and take over my body. I still have to shut it down.
“How are you, D’arcy?” Roly asks after a few minutes. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m okay now, better,” I tell him. “It’s been tough with Lilly. She swings back and forth between hating me and clinging to me. I’m grateful to Emer and her girlfriend for having her at their holiday house in Galway for a week. She needs a little time away from me. I saw Niamh when I was out there dropping Lilly off. She’s actually doing really well.”
“Grand. And how about the thing with Brenda Donaghy’s family, huh?” he says. “When Griz told me they’d rung in to the tip line, I could scarcely believe it. All these years.”
The call had come into the tip line in the chaotic days after they arrested Cathal Deasey. Ann Forde, seventy-two, of Limerick, had seen the call for any information about a Brenda Donaghy Flaherty who had left Ireland in the late ’60s or early ’70s. It had taken her a few weeks to remember that her sister Brigid had loved the name Brenda, had seen it on a television program once and had thought it was beautiful and dramatic.
She told me that Brigid had gone to New York in 1968. She had stayed in touch for a few months and then she hadn’t. They weren’t a close family and she assumed that Brigid had just wanted to start over.
In 1983 Ann had moved back to Ireland from London, and into her mother’s flat in Balbriggan. One day a package came from the States, from a man in Texas who said he’d been Brigid’s landlord. She had passed away, from heart failure, he said the doctors told him, and here was her driver’s license and did Ann want her things? The license said Brigid Forde, which had been her actual name. Donaghy was her mother’s maiden name and she liked to use it. Brenda Donaghy had been an invention, a wish. I met Ann at the Skerries South beach right after Lilly and I arrived and I showed her a picture of Erin and told her what had happened.
I turn to look at Roly. He’s squinting into the sun, looking out across the golden brown bog.
“How about you?” I ask him. “You’re kind of the big man these days, huh? You got Cathal Deasey, you’ll get the conviction on Teresa and June, on Niamh.”
“Couldn’t have done it without you, D’arcy. You’re a bit of a celebrity, too, you know.”
“Ah, you would have gotten him. You had the thing on the truck and you would have figured out about Croydon. Or Griz would have.” I smile at him.
“I don’t know. We were so fixed on Niall Deasey, we didn’t think about the fact that Cathal Deasey had the same roots over here. That he knew the area, too. That the mountains meant something to him. That he would have come over to visit for Petey Deasey’s eightieth birthday party. We’re checking other murders in the UK now. During the years that he and Niall were running the garage over there, he got around a lot. We’ve got some psych stuff, too. Apparently he had kind of a love/hate thing with his father. He worshipped him and he resented him, for making him English rather than Irish, for abandoning him.”
“How did Niall Deasey take it?”
“He was shocked, so he was,” Roly says. “I really think he didn’t know his brother was a psychopath.”
“What about John White?” I ask him. “You decided what you’re going to do about him?”
“I’m going to let that sit for right now, thank you very much,” Roly says. “That’s the last fucking thing I need.” He glares at me a little.
“No judgment here,” I say. “We do what we have to do.”
“Anyway, thanks, D’arcy. For all you did.”
He smiles and puts an arm around me and we stay there for a long time, feeling the last of the day on our backs, looking out across the hills and valleys. He’s warm and solid. We don’t turn around and head back until we’ve soaked up every last bit of the dying sun.