EVEN TEA-SOAKED, the Barnes family sleeps like hounds before a hearth, but Toby was jagged by the caffeine. He sent me to bed, while he stayed up reading, in the kitchen. The better to hear any further pranksters, he said. When I came seeking breakfast four hours later, he was still at the table, with a satisfied smile.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Ah, the question is, What’s under?” He reached under the table and pulled up a muddy boom box. “Haven’t seen one of these in a while, have you?” he asked.
“I had one in my dorm. Where did you find it?”
“On the other side of the hedge, where you saw the green ghosts. I went out at dawn, just in case I’d find anything they left behind—a hat or a coat. And there it was, a boom box with a CD in the slot, and here’s what it plays.”
He pressed a button, and a whistle split the air. My hands flew to my ears, and he turned the volume down. The whistle gave way to metal wheels squealing against iron tracks, as the steam engine propelled its train forward.
“There you have it,” said Toby, punching the off button. “The ghost train rides again!”
“Clever devils,” I said. “How did they get hold of train sounds like that?”
“They could get any sound effect off the internet, and you’d think they would have played it from a phone or a tablet. That would have been risky, though. If they dropped a device like that, we could trace who they were. Someone went to the trouble of burning a CD from their sound source.”
I remembered Angie’s role in the upcoming play. “There’s a theater group here,” I told him. “Someone must do their sound effects.”
“Sure. Let’s ask Bobby about who’s in the group and whether they have a boom box.”
“First thing after Fruit Loops,” I replied. I was starved.
“Fruit Loops and coffee coming up. You need a kick start.”
The sight of Toby stirring instant espresso powder into a mug of hot water put me well off coffee. “I’ll stick to that excuse for orange juice in the waxed carton,” I said.
He put the coffee mug in front of me anyway. “Frank Hickey just called to remind us we’re invited to tea this afternoon to see the Paul Henry painting, the one Bert bought for their railway poster. You said you wanted to see it. Still interested?”
“I am. What time?”
“We’re due at his place at three. But if you don’t mind my saying so, you look a wreck. Drink up.”
That gave me the jolt I needed. Here was the chance to kill a flock of birds with one stone. I could see an important Paul Henry painting up close, one that had never been shown to the public. For the sake of Aunt Laura and Emily (now half owners), I could assess its value if they were to resell it here in Ireland, where it would fetch a better price than in the States. And most important, while we were visiting, Toby and I could size up Frank himself. What exactly was his stake in Bert’s railway project? Did he stand to gain from Bert’s death, or to lose? I wanted to know.
After washing mud off his hands, Toby brought me the tourist map and pointed to the south side of the island. “He lives way down here in this village at the tip. Derreens. Looks touristic.”
What Toby meant was that there were multiple symbols on the tourist map marking its location: a pyramid with a cross on it (meaning a church), two lines of crosses (a historical cemetery), a castle turret, a boat, fish, and a sprinkle of dots (a sandy beach). I knew the spot. Derreens was near Kildownet Church, where Maggie had taken me. I hadn’t noticed a village, but among the map’s touristic symbols were the letters P.O., so there were enough living residents to warrant a post office. I had seen the dead residents already at the ruined church.
“On the way, I can show you Kildownet graveyard, where they buried the bodies from the disasters. It’s beginning to look like the killer is connected to the train project—maybe one of the environmentalists who want to stop it, or a descendant of one of the families involved in the tragedies.”
“Does that mean you’ve stopped worrying that your mom is guilty?”
“It means that if I could find evidence pointing to someone else, I could stop worrying. So far it’s all speculation.”
I asked Toby to drive so I could navigate. Both my memory and the map said that the turnoff from the main road was just before the town hall at Achill Sound. I looked for a sign for Derreens, or the Atlantic Drive, or the pirate queen’s castle, or Kildownet Church. But if the sign existed, we missed it. We turned around for a second try, and this time we saw a low panel displaying the symbols for water, church, and castle. The words were in Irish and looked unrelated to our destinations, but the symbols were promising.
When we turned, I recognized the pink rhododendrons, the yellow gorse, and the flatlands beyond. This territory was different from our side of the island. Here there was a strong sense of isolation. You tended to see only one house at a time, hugging the road for safety or daring to roost near the water, surrounded by acres of scrub grass. The land wasn’t farmed, and we saw no cattle, but I spotted a rundown bar at the corner of a lane. A handmade sign indicated the way to Derreens. As far as I could see, there was no town in that direction, only the dry slope of an unnamed mountain.
The sight of the familiar ruined church, roofless and open to the sky at the side of the waters, was heartening, a sign of human community, past and present. Toby pulled over and parked on a grassy strip by the side of the road. There was no real place to park, but since we were the only visitors, that wasn’t a problem. We got out and crossed the road. A light breeze stirred the grass.
“Let’s see the graves first,” said Toby. “Then we can do the church.” He swung the creaking gate, which scraped across its stone base. I led him to the right of the church and showed him the stony Famine plot. We stood for a long while, gazing at the ground containing countless starved bodies. I was thinking of my ancestors and what they must have suffered in those horrid times.
Shaking off that disaster, I led Toby to the other. We stepped over sunken spots and, taking care not to step on recessed gravestones, we crossed behind the church and wended our way among small and large headstones from a jumble of periods—the 1950s, the 1920s, then some from the 1800s. We stopped now and then to read the names and inscriptions, when they were decipherable. We came finally to a communal plot segregated from the other graves by a low iron fence. I saw again that its iron bars created a square of grass that might have been a park, if it weren’t for the fact that dozens of skeletons lay beneath the ground. In the back of the square, on the side by the water, rose the tall monument topped by an Irish cross. Under the cross was a request to passersby: “Of your charity, pray for the souls of”—and then came the names of thirty-two young people who, as it said on the base of the monument, “were accidentally drowned in Clew Bay on June 14th 1894.”
Between Maggie and my reading, I had pieced together the story of the tragedy. Because the island was so poor, its young men and women used to work in Britain in the summers as seasonal farm laborers. Those buried here were bound for Scotland to work in the potato fields. Several hundred workers boarded four boats on June 14, 1894, departing from Darby’s Point on the south end of the island. They were sailing only a short distance to Westport on the mainland, where they would transfer to a large steamship for Scotland. But the small boats were overloaded, and trouble struck as they neared the harbor, where the steamship was waiting for them. Many of the youngsters had never seen a ship that size, and to get a better look, they crowded to one side of their boat, shifting the load and causing the boat to capsize. The thirty-two who drowned ranged in age from twelve to forty. To the small community of Achill, it was a devastating loss.
“Imagine losing your son like that,” Toby said. “Or your daughter. Half of these are girls’ names.” He paused, to read more. “And half the girls are Marys. Look. One family lost four children—the Cooneys. The O’Haras lost three.”
“And they all came home in coffins on the Westport-Achill rail line,” I said. It must have doubled the horror when people remembered the old prophecy that one day iron carriages would come to the island spitting smoke and fire and carrying death.
Toby asked, “How did it happen that it was the train’s first trip?”
“At the time of the drowning, the line had been completed but it hadn’t opened yet,” I explained. “It was pressed into service early to bring the bodies home.”
Toby shook his head in dismay. “Then what happened on the last train run?”
“That was in 1937. A fire in a dormitory in Scotland killed ten boys from Achill who had gone there to pick potatoes. They brought the bodies home on the last train to Achill before the line closed. How eerie is that? You can say it was just coincidence, but no wonder people believed the prophecy had come true.”
Toby was staring at the monument. He pointed to a name. “The three O’Hara girls, for instance. Sisters, maybe. Think of the parents waiting at the new train station to claim the bodies. The whole island probably turned out for the funeral. And the telling of what happened would come down through the generations. You can see how the islanders wouldn’t want their tragedy used to make money.”
“You’re thinking of Michael O’Hara, aren’t you?” I asked.
“He started that bar fight over this, and he was one of the leaders at the protest yesterday,” Toby pointed out. “He’s got a hot temper.”
“And a motive for wanting my uncle dead and out of the way.”
“Correct, although there are others on the island who had the same motive.”
We stood in silence, contemplating the scene. I pictured the crowd gathered around the plot on the day of interment. I wondered what the weather was that day. For us, the sun shone, sparkling on the water at the edge of the graveyard’s slope. A pair of cawing gulls dipped and turned out over the channel. Old headstones leaned this way and that. “Come on, let’s go see the church,” Toby said.
He reached the ruin before I did. I was calling out something about getting on our way to Frank Hickey’s so we wouldn’t be late when I heard Toby say, “No!” In a moment I saw the reason why. We weren’t late. Frank Hickey was. He was laid out at the foot of the stone altar, his blank eyes looking up but blind to the sky. I thought of the old man at the megalithic tomb; he had prophesied another death, and here was the corpse of Frank Hickey. Toby knelt and checked for a pulse, then shook his head.
“Better not touch anything,” I said, though at first I saw nothing at the scene that suggested violence. There was no blood or any injury to the body except a scratch on the left cheek. I pointed to it and said, “Toby, what do you make of that little scrape?”
He leaned over the body and peered at the cheek. “I guess it could have happened if he fell against the altar. Or somebody could have hit him.”
“Could a bare fist leave that kind of mark?”
Toby looked again. “Something with a sharp edge might. A ring maybe.”
“A claddagh ring?”
“Yeah, that would do it.” Toby got to his feet. “We better call the guards.”