Empty Fields

“No more to her maidens

The light dance is dear,

Since the death of our darling

O’Sullivan Beare.”

Anonymous

“Lament for O’Sullivan Beare”



James stood in the center of the field, his back to them as the flashlight searched the ground. Adam approached him like a poacher stalking prey downwind, closing the distance to twenty feet, then ten, then eight. James was too focused on his task to notice, or maybe any sound was lost in the fury of the ocean closer to the cliffs along with the wind and rain. He didn’t turn, and Meg was torn what to do. Follow Adam and brazen it out, or be more cautious and approach from a different direction just in case . . .

In case of what?

She found it hard to wrap her mind around the possibilities, but she couldn’t discount what instinct and Adam’s certainty told her. Instead of following Adam directly, she cut across the field at an angle that would put her a little ahead of James and she pushed herself even faster.

Racing through the tall grass studded with rocks and yellow furze, she had almost reached them when James suddenly swung around and shone the flashlight at Adam’s face. “Adam?” His voice was raw over the roar of the wind and the crash of the waves pummeling the cliffs as he shouted. “What are you doing here?”

He seemed more puzzled than alarmed, and he let the light drop a few inches. But there was something about his words, the way he stood, the way he moved, that made Meg freeze in her tracks.

“What do you want, Adam? Are you following me?” Behind the light his features were swallowed within the hood of his orange jacket, leaving darkness where his eyes should have been.

Adam backed a step. “You said you were coming to look for Kieran.”

“I am. I saw something moving out here. Some one moving.”

“On the ground?”

“I thought maybe Kieran might have fallen, but I don’t see him. It must have been a trick of the storm.” James shrugged and stepped closer again and waved his flashlight back toward the village. “Since you’re here, you may as well help me check the buildings. Come on.”

Again it was nothing concrete, but a sense of wrongness sent Meg into motion, and James’ own sixth sense must have tingled because he swung around. Something glittered in the grass between him and Meg as the flashlight rocked past it, and they all saw it at the same time. Adam and James both dove at it, but Adam reached it a second sooner. Keeping a hard grip on whatever it was, he wrestled it away from James and ran to stand at Meg’s shoulder.

It was an instrument, a metal pole with a circular wand at one end with a square display box below the handle. Meg peered down at it. “A metal detector?” she asked. “That’s what you’re searching for?”

Adam swung back around to James. “I thought you were looking for Kieran.”

“I’m just as surprised as you are—but that explains why Kieran is out here.” James turned and swept the flashlight around the field, starting from where the metal detector had been. “Come out, Kieran,” he shouted. “No more games. You might as well show yourself.”

Adam’s eyes narrowed. “Why would he be using the metal detector in this storm?”

“Because he knows I found a potential site yesterday.” James turned slowly back around, rain glittering in the flashlight’s glow. “There, I’ve admitted it. I found a site, but it has nothing to do with Kieran or his ideas. Only Kieran—I don’t know. Maybe he figured out he’s getting fired, and he’s desperate. Or maybe he wants the credit. Maybe he just wants to make trouble—it’s what he’s good at doing.”

There was fury in James’ voice but also a hard edge of panic that made Meg shift in front of Adam and put herself between them. The nape of her neck prickled at the idea of Kieran hiding among the grass and furze and rocks behind her, volatile and unseen, but every nerve screamed a protest at the thought of turning her back on James.

“When?” Adam didn’t take his eyes from James. “If you’re saying he came out here, tell me when he took the metal detector. You’re the one who checked the lab in the village, and you said there was nothing missing. And where has he been all day? Why didn’t anyone else see him?”

“What?” James shook his head. “Why does it matter when he took it? This afternoon—or this morning. Gemma was working on sheep bones at the dig site most of the day, so I couldn’t leave the volunteers to go do site surveys. The equipment was locked in the village, but Kieran has a key. He could have taken it anytime. I didn’t check every item in there—the place was dark and the shovels and GPR and the tablets were in their usual places. It looked all right, but you’re right. I should have checked more carefully.”

His words, his actions, everything was possible, plausible. Meg had seen him herself at the dig off and on all day, working with the volunteers, checking any little thing that anyone found, inspecting what remained in the sifting screens, slicing fresh sod away from the soil to expand the excavation grid. And Kieran was the one who was volatile and dangerous—she had seen that, too.

She wanted to believe James, she did, but still there was that prickle on the back of her neck that she’d learned long since was usually her subconscious mind noticing details or anomalies that her conscious self couldn’t process quick enough.

And it was James who Adam disliked, not Kieran, and Adam had watched them both for weeks.

She pulled out an old reporter’s trick. “Well, we’re not going to figure this out here. We should head back. We’re getting cold and wet, and it’s a waste of time standing in the field when Kieran isn’t here. I’m sure we could all use something warm to drink.”

“Exactly,” James said, nodding with evident relief.

Meg took two steps back toward the village, then she paused. “Out of curiosity, though, James—and I’m sorry, it’s just that I don’t understand archaeology very well. Wouldn’t it have been easier to give Kieran what he wanted all this time and get him to stop pestering you? Why didn’t you want to survey out here?”

“This again?” The beam of the flashlight blinded her as James moved his hand impatiently. “It’s not that I didn’t want to—look, there’s a reason metal detectors are illegal in Ireland. We have to be licensed to use them even for an archaeological site because it’s the only way we ensure a methodological framework. Documentation. Context. All that takes time and patience. Somewhere like Dursey, that’s even harder, right? There could be important sites across most of the island. St. Michael’s was thirteenth or fourteenth century and built over a much older church. There’s the ruined monastery by Oileán Beag and a place name in the middle of the island suggests a possible third church site. Then there are holy wells, Neolithic standing stones and artwork, probable Bronze Age burials, a hill fort with a series of tunnels. Another separate tunnel may have been part of the Corr Áit complex where Morty Óg O’Sullivan kept the men he was taking over for the Irish Brigades. That same site was likely also used by the Viking slavers, but its origin is prehistoric. There could be finds anywhere—not rich, glamorous ones probably, but that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve attention.”

“And that’s not what Kieran wanted?” Meg asked.

“He wanted to prove his theory. That’s not what we’re supposed to do.” The wind stripped the emotion from James’ voice, making it even harder to read, and with the beam of the flashlight in front of him, Meg still couldn’t see his expression. Rain dripped from her hood, running in cold streams down her face. Mingling with the salted wind, it stung her eyes and the raw skin beneath her stitches.

She switched on the portable lantern Adam had given her and pivoted to scan the soggy field where the brush rustled and swayed and the grass was being pummeled by the downpour. There was no sign of Kieran, no movement, no luminous figure that might have been anything at all—Kieran with a flashlight or a bean sidhe or a figment of Meg’s imagination. In the pressing darkness she sensed only wind and rain and the distant sheep and a story she would have bet her soul was there, somewhere, lurking in the shadows. The kind of story that made her heart quicken, but it was also more than a story: it was real, with real people, real problems, and fear of what it all meant was already beginning to make her stomach roil.

“Okay, we really should get back,” she said, meaning it this time. “I’m sorry, Adam, but even if Kieran is out here, we’re not going to find him. Not like this, and for all we know, he might be at the house by now. We can all check the village together on the way, make sure he isn’t there, and then let’s go get ourselves dried off and sit down and figure out what to do next.”

James shone the flashlight around the field one more time, then he lowered it. “We need to find him,” he said in an odd, strained tone. “We have to find him.”

It was the first thing that he had said that had the ring of absolute truth, and Meg found herself wanting to reassure him as much as she wanted to reassure Adam. “We will,” she said. “We absolutely will.”