OUR COTTAGE WAS EMPTY when I got back. I welcomed the solitude and crept into bed. As soon as I stretched out, I felt myself sliding into a heavy sleep, the kind that comes from emotional weight.
I was deep into a thought-obliterating snooze when the sound of a strumming harp jerked me up fast. On one elbow, I located my phone and answered the call, feeling invaded and cranky. It was my one friend in Ireland, Maggie McBride, an art historian from Dublin. We had met the previous winter at a conference in France and managed to stay close through emails, texts, and FaceTime. Maggie was fun, and Toby was fond of her too, so we had asked her to meet us while we were on Achill. She accepted, on her own terms: namely, she would find her own lodging, and she couldn’t say just when she would come. This call announced her arrival. She was at a teahouse nearby and could be with us in minutes—bearing chocolate cake and her dog, Happy.
A visit from Maggie was just what I needed. It didn’t take long for us to get sloppy with cake and frosting. Pretty quickly I got sloppy with emotions too. Somehow, my redheaded, cheerful friend drew all my feelings to the surface. She got to see the strain I had been hiding from my parents and listened patiently to my story, edited to exclude the button. After a while, I composed myself and we looked at my uncle’s death from every angle, although I didn’t share my deepest fear about Mom. Then Maggie slapped her hand on the table. Happy barked assent. He had been a frisky puppy when I had last seen him. He was almost fully grown now but just as rambunctious and affectionate.
“We’re going out,” Maggie announced. “You need to clear your head.” What Maggie had in mind was the Atlantic Drive, a touristic circuit of rural roads leading to miles of seaside cliffs. It would be my first chance to see the rest of the island, and I leapt at the idea. I hoped that Toby and my parents were doing the same, not wasting a fine day at the garda station.
While driving swiftly, way too swiftly, past bogs and scruff, Maggie brought me up to date on her love life. Toby and I had met her at a conference in France at the beginning of her romance with a graduate student named Thierry, who was younger than Maggie by more than a decade. We liked him very much. Maggie’s dalliance with Thierry (pronounced tee-ary) had blossomed into a love affair, which lasted the six months of Maggie’s research leave in France. It would be put to the test this fall, with Maggie back teaching in Dublin. She was frank about the challenge of maintaining a long-distance relationship but didn’t sound deeply concerned. I was concerned for Thierry, however, when I learned where she was staying on Achill.
“My friend Declan has a cottage on Keel strand. He’s putting me up.”
“Is he one of your exes?” I asked. Maggie, I knew, had gone through a number of “friends” before Thierry. She referred to them in the plural as her exes.
“He is, and we’ve stayed in touch. You’ll meet him. He owns a gallery in Dublin specializing in Irish paintings. He collects for himself as well.” Maggie’s description of the collection intrigued me, and I was equally intrigued by the warmth in her voice when she spoke of her ex. It led me to wonder if he was really exed-out or if he was more an ex-plus.
A sharp turn off the main road put us on a narrow, gently curving road lined with pink rhododendrons. Beyond the bright bushes lay bare flatlands massed with yellow gorse. For a stretch, land that had been harvested long ago was now a bog. The black turf, cut into trenches and boxes, was blanketed by mauve grass. Soon the bog gave way to sandy flats, and suddenly at our left lay the waters of Achill Sound, gray and unruffled. A passing cloud had put land and sea in shadow. It was in that moody light that I first saw the ruin of Kildownet Church.
Maggie tilted her head toward the church, acknowledging the presence of a site worth exploring. She slowed as we approached an acre of ancient tombstones, both small and grand. We pulled to the side, well before the church, and Maggie let Happy out. “My boy needs a run,” she said. “Walk around and get the feel of the place. Then I’ll tell you about it.” She took off after Happy, who was dodging standing crosses as he ran toward the water.
I felt myself drawn to the old church. The roof was completely gone, but the stonework stood firm. Someone had strewn pebbles over the floor of the nave. At the east end, right where it belonged, stood an altar constructed of a four-foot base stone topped by a slab the size of a coffee table. The structure looked new, perhaps only a guess at what stood for an altar eight hundred years ago. Visitors had treated it like a tomb, placing rocks on the tabletop in tribute to the dead.
Outside, I roamed among plots studded with blunt stone crosses buried up to their arms, a section behind the church with slabs flat on the ground, and a graveled terrace close to the sea. I heard Happy scampering and saw Maggie coming. She told me I was treading on the Famine grave, filled with the bones of starved men, women, and children. “The anonymity of all these dead is humbling, isn’t it?” she said. “In the other field, you see headstones you can read. They’re trying to fight oblivion with a stone and a name. Can’t be done for this poor lot.”
That led my thoughts back to my uncle. Burial in a cemetery back home would include a gravestone giving him the dignity of a name, but only a successful investigation would establish responsibility for his death.
“Of course it’s the communal graves connected with the prophecy that everyone comes to see,” Maggie went on.
“What prophecy?” I asked.
“Do you not know about the Achill prophecy?”
“I guess not.”
“Folks swear it’s true. Now, some of them believe in leprechauns.” She smiled.
“Even so, let me hear it,” I said. We stood side by side, looking out across Achill Sound, as Maggie told the story.
“It goes back to the seventeenth century, when an Irish prophet named Brian the Red predicted that, one day, carriages on iron wheels would come to Achill Island, belching smoke and fire. What’s more, on their first and final journeys, these carriages would be carrying the dead. Sure enough, when the railroad came to Achill in the 1890s, the first train carried home the bodies of thirty migrants who had drowned on their way to jobs across the sea in Scotland.”
“How awful,” I said.
“That was just the first tragedy,” continued Maggie. “In the thirties, a score of boys from Achill, also migrant laborers in Scotland, died in a terrible fire. Their bodies also came home by train, on the last run before the line shut down. They’re buried over there.” She pointed.
I followed Maggie into a plot of grass marked off by an iron fence topped with sharp iron crosses. At the far side of the enclosure stood a high tombstone listing the names of those drowned in 1894. There were as many women as men, and some Achill families lost more than one member. “You can see why the story became a legend,” Maggie said. “The deaths were a calamity for the whole island.”
“It’s heartbreaking,” I said. “I can see why people would resent my uncle’s plan. A honky-tonk version of the railroad would mock the tragedies.”
Maggie nodded. “Achill’s a small island with a tiny population. There’s hardly a family here that wasn’t touched by one disaster or the other. The resentment could go deep.”
Here was another possible motive for my uncle’s murder and another avenue for the gardai to pursue.
Maggie consulted her watch. “Let’s move on. I’d like to get out to the other end of the island and show you Keem Bay.” She whistled for Happy, who came bounding out from behind a tombstone, his pink tongue lolling on one side of his mouth. He danced around Maggie’s ankles as we walked to the car. “In you go,” she said.
A short way beyond the graveyard, we passed a fifteenth-century watchtower that once belonged to the pirate queen Grace O’Malley. “She was a terror, that one,” said Maggie. “My kind of woman.”
The scenery grew flat again as we followed the perimeter of the island, with dramatic ocean views on one side of the road and windswept, treeless bogs on the other. Occasionally we passed whitewashed houses and Blackface mountain sheep. “Sheep outnumber people five to one on Achill,” Maggie said, braking to allow a poky pair to meander across the road. We waited for the sheep to get across, and then we set out again. In the distance, green hills and gray mountains gave definition to the landscape. We also passed walls of imposing cliffs. Those at the western end of the island are said to be the tallest in Europe.
We turned inland near the hamlet of Dooega in order to join the main road leading out to Achill Head. This road spans the width of the island (about fifteen miles) from the Michael Davitt Bridge, linking the island to the mainland, all the way to the tip at Keem Bay. It passes through the tiny villages of Keel and Dooagh, the houses all white with gray tile roofs.
Then comes a spectacular stretch where the narrow road climbs steeply and the land falls away in a dizzying drop to the sea. I was glad I wasn’t driving. For an American, it’s bad enough to always be on the “wrong” side of the road in Ireland; here you are on the wrong side of the road at the edge of a cliff. “Almost there,” said Maggie, by way of comfort. That was before a series of corkscrew turns.
Finally, she pulled into a dirt parking area looking out at ocean, cliffs, and, far below, a crescent, sandy beach. We got out to explore. The beach was pristine and deserted. Intrepid swimmers had access by means of a steep descending road, but there were no takers today. The water glowed with a surreal aquamarine light. “This used to be a favorite spot for shark fishing,” said Maggie. Maybe that explained the absence of swimmers.
Happy bellied up to the edge to look over, his snout on his forelegs. We gazed for a minute or two. “Maggie,” I said, breaking the spell, “what’s the story with you and this guy you’re staying with, if you don’t mind my being nosy.”
“Declan? We’re just old friends. We used to be more, but that was years ago.”
“So this is just a platonic visit?”
“More or less,” said Maggie, wiggling one hand.
“Okay, then. What’s he like?”
“Declan’s older. A confirmed bachelor, lives by himself. He’s well off and does what he pleases. He can be charming when he wants to. You can tell me if you think he’s good-looking. He’s smart. He thinks a lot of himself, though, and he’s got a know-it-all side that puts some people off. We had fun for a while, but he was too pushy for me. Or maybe I wasn’t ready for someone like that. I was young at the time.”
“How do you mean, pushy?”
She looked at me slyly. “He wanted us to try a swingers’ club! I was mortified, really I was. If I’d had time to consider, I might have come round, but Declan pushed me, and I didn’t like it. I walked right out the door—didn’t talk to him for five years.”
I felt my eyebrows go up.
“I was a young eejit. I’d do differently now.” She bent down to pull Happy back and lift him into her arms.
“You think you’d go?” I asked.
“Don’t pretend to be surprised, girl. It’s the twenty-first century.”
“I’m not naïve,” I protested. “I’ve heard of those clubs. Where was this, in Dublin?”
“They have them in Dublin for sure, but no. It was right here on the island.”
“There was a swingers’ club on Achill Island?”
“Not just ‘was.’ There still is. It’s an open secret, and it’s been going on for years. You know, there’s not much else to do here, especially in the winter. The weather is miserable. There’s nothing like a pagan orgy to warm things up. A small circle of locals keeps the thing going. At least, that’s what Declan tells me.”
I had a hard time getting my head around the idea. We had come to Achill on the advice of a nun, my cousin, to get a glimpse of the old ways of life in Ireland, expecting—what? Turf smoldering in the fireplace, Céillí dancers, fiddles and shillelaghs, tales about the little people, maybe, but certainly not this. “I’m speechless,” I said (illogically). Wait until Toby hears about this, I thought.