BARRY’S GENERAL STORE is rather drab and cluttered, selling a few dusty sand toys and a small selection of groceries. There’s a glass case holding a birthday cake with complicated icing, and a handwritten notice announces “Erin’s Celebration Cakes!!” A convection heater gives off a hot, scorched smell.
Sylvie chooses her KitKat, then wanders off to the back of the shop to look at some plastic windmills. Adam is by the counter, choosing a packet of potato chips.
I flick through the postcards. I want to write to Karen: the memory of the phone call still upsets me. I can hear her voice in my head, all the outrage in it. You can’t be doing this, Grace, you can’t. I mean, for Chris-sake, Grace . . .
The woman who runs the shop is leaning on the counter. She has a mug of coffee, and a magazine open at the horoscope page. She’s a wiry, angular woman with lipstick pink as cotton candy, and her gaze through her thick glasses is glittery and intent.
“You’re on holiday here, then?” says the woman to Adam.
Adam nods. “We’re staying at St. Vincent’s.”
“And very nice too,” says the woman. “I hope that Brigid is pulling out all the stops for you.”
She sips her drink. There are little stains of coffee around her mouth.
“She certainly is. She does a brilliant breakfast,” says Adam.
“And you’re getting a chance to explore our wonderful countryside?”
Her eyes are bright and curious.
“We drove over toward Ballykilleen this morning,” Adam tells her. “By the longer route, round the coast. The views from that road are amazing.”
“So they are,” says the woman.
She pauses for a moment, her gaze flicking over our faces, as though there’s something that she expects us to say.
Adam smiles vaguely, selects his packet of potato chips.
“I heard you were having a little look at Flag Cottage,” says the woman then.
I turn sharply toward her.
But Adam nods and just moves smoothly on.
“It’s got such a great situation, that house.” He’s unperturbed, as though this is perfectly normal. As though you’d expect a total stranger to know your every movement. “We were wondering why it was empty.”
“Gordon’s decided to put it on the market,” says the woman.
There’s satisfaction in her voice, in sharing this inside knowledge.
Adam nods. “His neighbor told us,” he says.
The woman lowers her voice a little. “Well, obviously, he wouldn’t want to live there anymore.”
She watches him, her lips pressed tight together. Her lipstick seems too vivid for the pallor of her face.
“Gordon isn’t too keen on village life, then?” says Adam.
She licks the coffee from her mouth.
“Who was it you spoke to?” she says. “Was it Paddy O’Hanlon, next door? Thickset guy with a Border collie?”
“That sounds like him,” says Adam.
“Paddy didn’t tell you, then? Didn’t tell you what happened?”
Adam shakes his head with a slight, apologetic smile.
The woman’s voice is hushed. “Time flies, it seems like yesterday. But it must be years ago now . . .”
She’s counting on her fingers. Adam waits for her.
She shakes her head. “You know, it must be seven years since Alice disappeared. That’s Alice Murphy—Gordon’s wife,” she says.
“Since Alice disappeared? They’re divorced, then, Gordon and Alice?” says Adam carefully.
The woman doesn’t say anything. Her pupils through the thick glasses are like tiny, glossy beads.
“The neighbor we spoke to—Paddy,” Adam goes on. “I did notice that he never mentioned Alice, and I thought they might be separated.”
“I wish,” says the woman. “No, nothing so straightforward . . . I mean, don’t get me wrong. The ending of a marriage is a terrible thing, of course, don’t think that I’m belittling it. But Alice Murphy—it wasn’t like that. She simply vanished—off the face of the earth. And her little daughter with her.”
A thrill of cold goes through me. I glance at Sylvie. She’s still looking at the windmills. She doesn’t seem to have heard.
“Alice walked out, then?” says Adam, keeping his voice quite level. “Just packed her bags and took her child and left?”
“We don’t know. Nobody knows.”
“But what about the gardai? Why didn’t anyone find them? It’s not that easy to vanish.”
“It wasn’t for want of trying,” says the woman. “We had detectives from Dublin here. They talked to all of us, really combed through everything. I had to go to the garda station in Ballykilleen to give my statement. He was very insistent, the sergeant I saw—went over it all again and again. So you see why Gordon wouldn’t want to live there anymore.”
“Absolutely,” says Adam.
“It was a bad time,” says the woman. “A bad time for all of us.” She closes up her magazine. “When something like that happens, you feel how fragile everything is.”
We leave the car outside the shop and walk along the seafront, Sylvie clutching her KitKat. There’s a slight wind blowing up that carries the smells of the harbor—diesel fumes and rotten fish and the chill salt scent of the sea. The water is moving very gently, like some great scaly animal that stretches and stirs in its sleep. There’s hardly anyone about.
We sit at the top of the steps that lead to the beach. There’s a white splash of birdshit on the concrete.
“Sylvie, can you tell me who lived in your house?” Adam asks her. “Who lived in Flag Cottage?”
“Me, Adam. I told you.”
“D’you know what the people were called?” he says.
Sylvie frowns.
“People live with their family, Adam,” she says.
I know he won’t ask her directly about Alice Murphy, remembering what happened when I first talked to her about Coldharbour: once you’ve suggested something, you never really know.
“Can you remember anyone’s name?” he asks her. “Anyone who lived there?”
“Me and Lennie, of course,” she says.
“Anyone else at all, Sylvie?”
“They were my family, Adam. My family lived in my house. I told you.”
“What happened to your family, Sylvie?” he says.
Her face glazes over. She turns a little away.
“Can you remember anything that happened, Sylvie?” he says, his voice too eager.
But there’s a small dead bird she’s noticed on the pavement, pale feathers scattered, a wing bone torn and straggling, the bones of its legs so delicate you feel you could see through.
“The bird died, Grace,” she says.
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“Try and think, Sylvie,” says Adam.
She’s peering at the blue, translucent bones. Her face is shuttered.
Then she turns to me, pulls at my sleeve. “I want to go off now. I want to look at the boats.”
She’s impatient. I know that now she won’t say anything more.
“Okay, sweetheart.”
She runs off to the jetty with rapid, confident steps. The salt wind tangles her hair.
I turn to Adam. “Is that the death we’re looking for? Could it be Alice Murphy or her daughter?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“It’s scary,” I say.
“Grace, there are lots of ifs about it. We don’t know for sure if Alice and the little girl died. We don’t even know if Sylvie really recognized Flag Cottage, or just liked it because it reminded her of her dollhouse . . .”
He’s reticent in what he says, but he has that look, his eyes wide-open, like everything amazes him.
“It gives us a place to start from, though?”
“Absolutely,” he says. “And that woman at Barry’s said there’s a garda station in Ballykilleen. I think we should go and talk to them.”
“But if we go to the gardai—what on earth shall we say?”
He grins. “We’ll be devious.”
We sit there quietly for a moment. The sun is coming out through the cloud, and the sea holds every color you can think of—turquoise in the shallows, giving back the sky color, and farther out a richer cobalt shade. There’s a line of deeper blue where the sea meets the sky. A sense of the strangeness of what we are doing here surges through me.
“When I was a kid,” I tell him, “I used to wonder about the horizon. It bothered me. You know—what happens there? What happens over the edge? Did you ever think that?”
He grins. “I guess you were deeper than me, Grace. I was far too busy worrying about my stick of rock. How they’d managed to write ‘Whitley Bay’ inside it.”
I smile. I like to think of him as a child. When everything was ordinary, before the wreck, before it broke apart. I have an image of him in my mind—lanky, vivid, a little unpredictable.
“I used to try and work it out,” I tell him. “What happened at the horizon. And I couldn’t get my mind round it. That there’s this edge, this limit to your sight, but if you got there, there wouldn’t be an ending, there’d just be still more sea . . . There are places where your mind stops.”
“Yes, there are,” he says.
“And when you get older, you don’t think things like that so much. But it’s not that you’ve understood them now, it’s just that you’ve given up trying . . .”
I have a sudden sense of loneliness, of our separateness from one another—here in this place among strangers, at what feels like the rim of the world. I glance at Adam, wanting someone to pull me out of this sadness, but I can’t tell him, can’t express it.