A bucket of ashes (13 page)

“Of course not.”

“I didn’t cry at the funeral,” she said. “I didn’t even cry when Cyril told me he’d died. I haven’t yet. I want to, but I just can’t. It’s as if there’s this great black storm cloud inside me, swollen with rain, but the rain just won’t come.”

“Is it because you hadn’t seen him in so long, do you think?”

“I suppose so. It just doesn’t feel real.
Jamie
doesn’t even seem real anymore. He’s like one of those bleary, faraway memories, where you’re not sure if it really happened or you just dreamt it. I didn’t even see his body. Cyril wouldn’t let me, because of... you know. Its condition.”

“He was right. You wouldn’t have wanted to see your brother like that, Nell.”

“No, I should have. At least then, this wouldn’t be like some bad dream I just can’t seem to shake off. It would be
real
. I saw Jamie’s photograph when Cyril took me to speak to the chief constable, but it isn’t the same.”

“Give it time, Nell. Grief is a complicated thing. The last thing you need right now is to feel guilty because you’re not grieving exactly the way you think you ought to be.”

She turned her head to smile at him. “I’ve missed this, Will. You’ve always been so easy to talk to.”

“Most people would disagree with you, I think. I’m very glad you’re not one of them.” He turned her hand over and stroked his thumb across her palm and wrist, sending warm shivers up her arm and into her chest. “So it’s ‘Cyril’ now,” he said quietly.

“I’m sorry?”

“Your Dr. Greaves. You call him Cyril.”

“He asked me to.”

“Mm.” He pulled a cigarette case out of his trouser pocket and stared at it, as if trying to decide whether to give in to temptation.

“I should be going back,” Nell said.

Will looked as if there was something he wanted to say, or ask, but in the end, he just stood and offered her his hand. He walked her across the lawn and onto the back porch, where he kissed her again, with great tenderness this time.

“I wish I could sleep with you,” he whispered as he rubbed his cheek against hers. “Just that. Just fall asleep curled up with you between cool sheets, feeling the breeze from the bay through the window, and hearing the sound of the waves.”

“It sounds like heaven.”

“Good night, Nell.”

“Goodnight.”

“They’re out back gettin’ supper started,” said the big, rumpled fellow who opened the front door of Hannah Gilmartin’s farmhouse-cum-boardinghouse late Monday morning. “Chicken soup with dumplings. My mouth’s waterin’ already.”

Nell and Will followed him through the rambling old house, most walls of which were adorned with at least one crucifix or steel engraving of the Holy Mother. They passed through the kitchen, in which three men were sitting around a big pine table drinking coffee, and out the back door to the barnyard—a patch of packed earth bordered by a gnarled old oak, a peach tree heavy with fruit, a dilapidated barn, and a handful of other small outbuildings. One of them was a chicken coop, judging from the furious squawking and scrabbling emanating from within. Steam rose from a huge copper kettle hanging over a fire pit next to a crude lean-to housing clotheslines and wooden laundry racks.

“That’s Mrs. G. over there.” Their escort pointed across the yard to a large woman tying a length of cord to a branch of the oak, and retreated back into the house.

“Mrs. Gilmartin?” said Will as they approached her. “May we have a word with you?”

Turning, she gave them each a swift head-to-toe appraisal as she finished tying the cord, at the end of which was a little noose. She wasn’t so much obese as burly, a red-faced, sweat-sheened giantess in a headscarf, darkly stained apron, and pigskin gloves. “I don’t rent rooms to couples or females,” she said in a deep-chested voice seasoned with a bit of a brogue. “Or Protestants.”

“We’re not here to rent a room, ma’am.” Will handed her his card. “I’m William Hewitt, and this is Miss Cornelia Sweeney. Miss Sweeney is the sister of James Murphy, the young man who died when your cranberry shed burned down.”

“Stepsister,” Nell amended, remembering Chief Bryce’s puzzlement over her name.

Mrs. Gilmartin surveyed Nell’s chic black walking dress, shirred bonnet, and crochet gloves as she pulled a leather knife sheath from an apron pocket. “You don’t look much like the sister of a roughneck like that.” Turning toward the chicken coop, she cupped her hands around her mouth and bellowed, “Claire Caitlin, what the divil’s takin’ you so long?”

“I’m
tryin’,
” came a high-pitched, breathless voice from within the coop.

Mrs. Gilmartin raised her exasperated gaze to heaven.

Nell said, “I’m very distressed about how my brother died, as you can imagine, and I was hoping to reconstruct his final days.”

“Ain’t nothin’ I can tell you about that Murphy fella other than I wish he’d of picked somebody else’s place to hide out at—and set fire to. I can’t get too het up about it, though, seein’ as it was the good Lord’s work. An eye for an eye. That’s what I told that chief Bryce, and that’s what I’ll tell you, stepsister or no.”

“Perhaps your daughter—”

“My daughter don’t know nothin’ about no murderin’ thief.”

Will bristled on Nell’s behalf. Touching his arm, she said, “My brother and I followed different paths in life, but he was the only family I had left, so I’m sure you can understand why I’m curious about his death and the days that led up to it.” As Mrs. Gilmartin, looking unmoved, was opening her mouth to respond, Nell said, “You know, I think I’ve seen you. Don’t you attend early Mass at St. Catherine’s?” Nell did, in fact, recognize her from church, as Father Donnelly had said she would; Hannah Gilmartin was a hard woman to miss.

Mrs. Gilmartin blinked in surprise, her expression softening. She slid a bone handled hunting knife from the sheath, produced a whetstone, and set about sharpening the blade. “Yeah, I reckon you mighta seen me at St. Cat’s. Hunh. I took you for one of them lace curtain lasses of the Orange persuasion ‘cause of the way you’re flashed up. Sorry for the insult, miss.”

Will looked down and rubbed his chin to hide his smile. He was as pale as ever, with an indolent heaviness to his eyes that served as a constant reminder to Nell of his seemingly inextinguishable appetite for opiates.

She’d lain awake for hours last night contemplating the evolution of her relationship with Will over the past two and a half years, culminating in Saturday night’s bittersweet reunion in the boathouse. She’d finally fallen asleep around two in the morning, only to awaken sweating and shaking from a dream that the house was burning down around her, and there was no one to put it out but she—a bucket brigade of one. She grabbed the basin off the washstand and ran into the bathroom, but when she tried to fill it up, all that came out of the faucet was a series of long, excruciatingly slow drips. The drips gleamed in the fiery luminescence, each one striking the porcelain sink with a metallic clatter. Nell had looked closer, only to find the sink filling up steadily, inexorably, with hypodermic needles.

That morning, over the dawn breakfast on the back porch that had become Viola and Nell’s summer ritual, Viola said, during a pause in the conversation,
You know it would be quite all right with me if you were to remarry. You’ll be a free woman soon, with any luck, so I thought you should feel... unencumbered.
Nell, quite certain that she’d been expected to remain unwed until Gracie’s early adolescence, had ruminated on the matter over her eggs
bourgeoise
before asking Viola if she wouldn’t please avoid mentioning the divorce petition to others, including Will. After several long minutes of disconcerting silence Viola said,
Do be careful in your choice of a husband, Nell. I know something of the safe and convenient marriage. I also know something of ardor. The former should only be chosen over the latter when one has exhausted every option at one’s disposal. We humans are weak and needful creatures, and there is really no substitute for true passion.

“I got her! I got her!” A wanly pretty girl in a striped apron lurched out of the chicken house gripping a screaming red hen upside down by its feet.

“Bring her here, then,” said Mrs. Gilmartin as she ground the knife over the whetstone with purposeful strokes. “And keep ahold of her. If she gits loose from you now, there’ll be no catchin’ her a second time, you can be sure of that.”

The girl stared at Nell and Will—but especially at Nell—as she carried the writhing bird to her mother, holding it at arms length. She was as delicate as her mother was brawny, a waifish little thing with brown hair and guileless eyes. Nell supposed she must have seen this girl at St. Catherine’s in past summers, although she couldn’t place her. Where she did recognize her from, Nell realized with a start, was Jamie’s funeral. Claire had been one of the weeping females whom Nell had taken for a heartbroken admirer of her brother.

“This here’s the sister of that fella that burned up in the cranberry shed,” Mrs. Gilmartin told Claire, gesturing toward Nell with a knife. “I told her we don’t know nothin’ ‘cept what we told the constables.”

Nell said, “Claire, didn’t I see you two weeks ago at my bro—”

“Maybe in town,” she said with a furtive little shake of her head. “Maybe at the market.”

“Get that bird trussed up,” her mother told her, “before she gets away from you.”

Claire looped the noose around the chicken’s feet and pulled it snug, all the while standing as far from the thrashing creature as she could.

“Get the pail,” her mother told her, “and this time don’t tarry. You got to do it fast when the time comes.”

The girl lifted a dented tin pail from the ground and held it under the hen, averting her gaze and squeezing her eyes shut.

Mrs. Gilmartin seized the hen by its beak, stretched its neck, and sliced off its head. The bird let out a screech; so did Claire.

“The pail!” Her mother yelled as blood sprayed from the flapping, headless chicken, spattering her and her daughter both. Nell and Will backed up hastily; it was fortunate that they were both dressed entirely in black.

Claire thrust the pail up over the bird, holding it there until it had ceased twitching, which didn’t take long. She set it on the ground directly under the limp hen to catch the remaining dribbles of blood.

“I said
fast
.” Mrs. Gilmartin threw the chicken head at Claire, who sidestepped it with a squeal.

“Sorry, Ma.” Claire was, indeed, a “young” nineteen, as Cyril had said, with her high, thready voice and timid manner. She wore her hair in two braids; a silver crucifix hung around her neck.

“I understand you got trapped in the burning cranberry shed trying to help my brother,” Nell told Claire. “You risked your life for him. I’m grateful for that.”

Mrs. Gilmartin, crouching down to clean the blood off her knife by stabbing it into the dirt, let out a disapproving grunt.

“Where
is
the cranberry shed?” Will asked, looking around at the outbuildings, none of which appeared to have been exposed to fire.

Gesturing toward a patch of woods to the south, Claire said, “It’s off thataway, between the cranberry bogs and Mill Pond Road.”

“Had you known he was hiding out in there before the fire?” Will asked.

“Of course she didn’t,” said Mrs. Gilmartin as she straightened up, pulling off her gloves and stuffing them in her apron pockets. “What kind of a question is that? Claire, fetch me a peck basket from the barn, the one with the swing handle.”

As Claire ran off to do her mother’s bidding, Will said, “I’m just asking because it sounds as if that shed is pretty isolated. I was wondering what she was doing there.”

“The harvest starts soon,” said Mrs. Gilmartin as she untied the apron and slung it over her big shoulder. It’s Claire’s job to clean up the shed and get it ready, ‘cause we use it for storage and what-not the rest of the year. See, that’s where the berries are taken after they’re picked. We pack ‘em in bushel boxes to cure—or my workers do, the fellas I hire at harvest time. After about a week or ten days, they’re sorted and barreled and sent off to market.”

“When did you start cleaning the shed?” Nell asked Claire as the girl returned from the barn and handed the basket to her mother.

“It’s a big job, so I start around the middle of July.”

“Most years,” said Mrs. Gilmartin, shooting a look at her daughter as she plucked a peach from the tree and sniffed at. “But this year, she kept putting it off, one excuse after another. That’s how come we didn’t know Murphy was there till the night of the thirty-first, when it burned down.”

“You were cleaning it at night?” Nell asked Claire.

“I got other chores to do during the day. So I headed down there after supper, and when I started getting close, I smelled smoke, and I heard him—your brother—I heard him scream, so I ran and I seen the shed was on fire. I guess I thought I should do somethin’, so I—”

“He screamed for help?” Nell asked. “He actually said, ‘help me’?”

“Well, yeah,” she said, seeming a little thrown by the question. “Anyways, that’s how I knew he was in there.”

“Was he still screaming after you got inside the shed?” Nell asked.