The Lake

Peggy sighed at her reflection; mottled and tarnished in the old mirror. Sure what was the point, anyway? She might have good hair, but her pale skin and rosy cheeks were nowhere to be found on the pages of her magazine. And she’d have to lose two stone to be anywhere near as skinny as those girls. Like Carla. Carla could wear miniskirts and little dresses. Carla had legs like stilts. But she doesn’t have my hair, Peggy thought meanly.

She glanced at the clock on the wall. A quarter past three. She would be here soon. Peggy looked back at her own reflection, processing her feelings. Right now, she was looking forward to her sister’s arrival. The week was quiet with only Jerome’s unpredictable appearances to bring life to the place. But she knew it wouldn’t last. It wouldn’t be long before she’d hear Carla’s little car pull up outside, and the neighbour’s dog would bark, and Carla would bark back at it. She’d come through and into the bar, stooping a little at the archway, and they’d smile at each other. And it would be all downhill from there. No matter how sincere Peggy’s sisterly love was for Carla, she knew that by Monday morning there would be no sound more pleasing to her than that of her sister’s car pulling away on its early return journey to Wexford.

But then, she also knew that her hard-wired sibling sensibilities would contrive to rebuild an eager anticipation of her sister’s return the following Friday. And then Carla would appear, and the cycle would repeat itself. Peggy had long thought that, were she and Carla mere school friends, they would have parted company years ago. They were simply incompatible. And yet, every week, she fooled herself into thinking that things might be different.

The silence of the bar was suddenly broken by the telephone’s ring. Just as she reached to answer it, Peggy heard a car on the gravel outside. She looked at the clock again. Carla was early.

‘Angler’s Rest? Hello?’

‘Peggy? Is that you? ’Tis Bernie here.’

‘Hello Mrs. O’Shea.’ Peggy instinctively pushed the phone closer to her ear. It was unlike Bernie O’Shea to pay for a phone call when she could send Enda over on foot with a message. ‘Everything all right?’

‘Yes, yes. I will be having Detective Ryan from Dublin staying with me tonight, and I wanted to check that you would be serving food this evening. I can of course prepare something for him here, but it would have to be cold. It’s bridge night at the Corcoran’s. And who knows what time he will come in from the lake, or whatever it is he will be doing.’ Bernie O’Shea’s game of bridge was clearly not going to be disrupted, even for a dead body. ‘Can I direct him to you? Will you look after him?’

‘Of course, Mrs. O’Shea.’ Peggy waved at Carla who had stalked into the room, and dropped her bag against the wall. Carla stuck her tongue out at the phone when she heard the name. Her low opinion of Mrs. O’Shea had been honed during the summer of 1970 when she and Enda O’Shea Junior were secretly courting. At least, until such time as Mrs. O’Shea had caught them fumbling in one of her guest bedrooms.

Peggy glared at her sister. ‘I’ll be sure to feed him, Mrs. O’Shea. Thank you for the referral.’

Carla snorted as she stooped to grab a Coke bottle from the shelf behind her.

Peggy replaced the receiver. ‘What?’ She looked at Carla. They were already on their slippery slope and she wasn’t in the bar thirty seconds.

‘Referral?’ Carla sniggered, and took a swig from the bottle.

‘What about it?’ Peggy lifted a clean glass from a shelf and placed it on the counter.

Carla ignored it. She walked around and sat on one of the high stools like a customer. ‘Who is she referring to anyway?’

‘A guard up from Dublin.’ Peggy picked up a cloth and started polishing pint glasses. ‘A body was found down by the lake last night.’

Carla’s eyes widened. ‘You’re jokin’!’

‘Yeah. Some anglers, pulling in their boat. Apparently they saw it buried at the shore.’

‘Jesus.’ Carla straightened her neck. ‘They saw an actual body?’

‘Well, no. I don’t know exactly. The waterline’s so far back; the lake’s lower than it’s ever been. I think they saw the outline. Of the body. It might have been a coffin.’ Peggy could sense the shock-factor of her news diminishing. ‘I’m not really sure.’

Carla’s shoulders slumped. ‘So it could have been there since the valley was flooded?’

‘Maybe. They don’t know.’

Carla swigged from the bottle. Peggy noticed her fingernails were painted a deep pink. What was a schoolteacher doing painting her nails midweek? It was a nice colour though.

‘Sure it’s probably just one of the graves they moved before the dam went up,’ Carla said. ‘Or rather, one of the graves they should have moved.’

‘But the graveyard was on the other side of the valley. Close to where the new one is.’

‘Hmm.’ Carla considered this. She drained her bottle and handed it to Peggy. ‘Sure we might hear more if your referral appears looking for his dinner.’

Exasperated. That’s a good word to describe how she makes me feel, thought Peggy, as she slid the Coke bottle into an empty crate on the floor next to her. Carla reached for Peggy’s magazine and sat looking at the pages, all the while pushing back her cuticles with a pink talon. Peggy tried to distract herself with thoughts about the Irish stew she had prepared that morning. She would need to get it back into the Aga by four. The phone on the wall rang again.

‘Angler’s Rest? Hello?’ If she had it in by four, it would ready for five. Half past at the latest. ‘Hello?’ she said again to the silence on the line.

‘Eh, hello. Would Miss Cas … eh Carla, be there please?’

Peggy turned to Carla who had lifted her gaze and was questioning her sister with her stare. She shrugged and pointed to the receiver in her hand. ‘Who should I say is calling?’ She waited. Carla was shaking her head violently. Peggy noticed the colour of her cheeks change. ‘Eh, no Tom,’ she said. ‘Carla hasn’t arrived yet, although I am expecting her. I will of course. She has your number?’ By now Carla was making angry hang up gestures at her. ‘I will of course. Thank you, Tom.’ She hung the handset back in its cradle.

‘Jesus, I thought you were going to ask after his family,’ Carla spat. ‘Couldn’t you just have said, “she’s not here”?’

Indignant. There’s another word for how she makes me feel, thought Peggy. ‘What’s your problem?’ she threw back at her. ‘Who is Tom anyway?’

Carla looked at her, and retreated. ‘No one,’ she said.

‘Tom.’ Peggy wasn’t in the humour to give her sister any easy ride. ‘Not Tom Devereux? Your school principal?’ Carla said nothing. ‘Maybe I should have asked after his family.’ Peggy couldn’t help feeling shocked, and Carla’s reddening cheeks were doing little to allay her suspicions. ‘He is married, isn’t he?’

Carla flicked a little too quickly through Peggy’s magazine. ‘And why are you assuming he wasn’t calling about work?’ She didn’t raise her eyes from the pages.

Peggy reached out and rubbed her thumb over one of Carla’s painted nails. ‘I assumed you would take the call if it was just about work,’ she said. Carla pulled her hand away. Peggy drew the cloth from her shoulder and resumed polishing the glasses.

‘I’m not judging,’ she said, after some moments of silence.

‘Good,’ Carla replied, hopping off the stool and picking up her bag from the floor. She stood for a second, fiddling with the strap. ‘Thank you.’ The words were barely audible. She made her way towards a door in the back of the bar, leading to the main house. ‘I’m going inside,’ she said.

‘I’ll need you later,’ Peggy said. ‘Jerome’s staying in Dublin tonight.’ She waited for a tirade of complaints and bitching about her and her brother’s inability to manage the family business. It didn’t come.

‘Okay,’ Carla said. ‘That’s another Casey on a shady road to iniquity.’ Peggy looked up from her work to see if Carla’s face betrayed her true meaning, but all she saw was her sister’s back as she disappeared into the house.

FIVE

From the moment Garda O’Dowd tucked his long limbs into Frank’s car, he seemed to forget all about the body at the lake, and focus only on the Capri’s interior; staring in unabashed awe at the dashboard; tracing his fingers along the radio casing, only lifting his gaze once or twice to give Frank directions as they drove from the station towards the lake. When the boreen they were on finally came to an abrupt dead end, Garda O’Dowd seemed to remember what he was supposed to be doing, and pointed out Frank’s side window.

‘There. You can pull in there.’

Frank drove slowly into a clearing, where grass was trying but largely failing in its effort to push through the sun-baked ground. With the engine off, they sat in eerie silence, staring out over the lake. They had stopped in what seemed to be a makeshift car park, where fishermen could conveniently leave their cars and trailers while they went off on the water. It was really just a small field, edged by tall evergreens to the back, and opening out to the lake at the front. Parked as they were, facing the lake, Frank could see how low the water level was. A person could easily walk twenty yards from the edge of the clearing before their feet would get wet, and it was apparent from the barrenness of the grey sand that those twenty yards were unaccustomed to being exposed to the air.

Frank got out of the car and walked to the edge of the grass where the clearing met the lakeshore proper. A small drop, less than a foot in places, showed where the lake’s water habitually lapped. Now, Frank could step down onto the silty soil, littered with small rocks and pebbles, and walk on the lakebed with ease.

Garda O’Dowd followed him. ‘It’s just over here.’ He pointed past Frank to his right. ‘A little way along. I left one of the O’Malley lads at the site.’ He glanced up at Frank with apparent unease. ‘I was reluctant to leave it unguarded. Not that I’d expect any interference. But you never know.’

Frank said nothing, but walked in the direction the younger guard had indicated. He looked around him as he went, taking in the lake, the shoreline, the somehow unnatural layout of it all. He felt the ground beneath his feet soften as they ventured further. Garda O’Dowd hurried ahead, his hand up, shielding his eyes from the afternoon sun. Wetness oozed around Frank’s leather shoes as they got closer to the water’s edge. The shoreline jutted out a little just ahead of them, and the trunks of tall evergreens blocked the view somewhat; their long needles swinging and swishing high above. Frank began to feel the dampness in his feet, and was considering taking his shoes and socks off when he noticed a lad of no more than eighteen walking towards them. Garda O’Dowd spoke quietly to him, and the lad nodded his tight red curls in earnest, and pointed to a spot only yards from where they stood.

Garda O’Dowd turned to Frank. ‘It’s just here, Detective Sergeant.’

Unlike a sandy seaside beach, the silty ground between the water’s edge and the natural shoreline was grey and flat. The stones that littered the area closer to the shore were absent further out, and the area of ground Garda O’Dowd gestured towards seemed to Frank to be an unvarying expanse of plain, drying mud. But as they got closer, Frank could see that one part of the ground, a strip of about five feet by two, was a darker grey than the rest, and that the silt around this shape was uneven, sagging in places, and rounding at the edges.

Despite the heat, Frank shivered. He looked up at the two men, only to see them looking back at him expectantly. Frank acknowledged the young lad with a nod.

‘Sir,’ the lad said.

‘You haven’t disturbed it at all?’

‘No, sir.’ The lad looked from one officer to the other. They were still ten feet from the ominous shape on the ground, but all seemed to share an apparent reluctance to encroach any further.

‘’Twas two fishermen found it, Detective Sergeant. ‘Garda O’Dowd took a small notebook from his trouser pocket and flipped over a few pages before settling on one filled with scribbled notes. ‘Late last evening. A John Forkin and a Thomas O’Reilly. They’re not locals, but they say that they would return should we need to speak with them again.’

Frank looked up at the young guard.

‘I did interview them, of course,’ he continued, glancing quickly at the young red-headed boy who was still standing close by. ‘Last night, here, at the scene. One of them, eh,’ he consulted his notes, ‘Thomas O’Reilly. He went on up to the Hanleys’ up the way.’ He gestured with his notebook up along the road they had just driven down. ‘And I was summoned. And I came down here.’ He wiped the back of his hand across his brow. ‘To the scene of the crime, as it were.’

Frank looked down at the shape under the sand. ‘Well, we don’t know if it is a crime yet, of course,’ he said. He knew he was teasing, but it was difficult not to. The young officer invited ridicule with his baby face and his nervous manner.

‘Of course, sir. Of course.’ Garda O’Dowd flushed red. ‘Some of the locals suggested that it might be an old grave. From before the dam.’

‘This whole valley was flooded,’ the boy spoke suddenly, his eyes wide, his arms outstretched across the lake. ‘There was a whole village here once, sir, before they built the dam. The whole thing was drown’ded. Out there.’ He pointed out to the middle of the lake.

Frank followed his gaze. He could just make out some sort of stone, or rock, protruding from the still water.

‘The water’s so low now you can see the tops of them buildin’s, sir. Although most were blasted down, they say. But some were left.’

‘Yes, thank you, Cormac,’ Garda O’Dowd glared at the boy. He took a handkerchief from his other trouser pocket and mopped the perspiration from his brow again. He turned back to Frank. ‘It is possible of course, sir,’ he said. ‘The main graveyard over at the old manor estate was moved at the time, plot by plot, to a site higher up Slieve Mart. But that’s over the other side of the village.’ He tipped his head back towards the spot Cormac had been pointing to. ‘So it couldn’t be one of those. Coleman thinks it must be from another time altogether.’

‘Coleman?’ Frank started to step tentatively towards the shape in the ground.

‘He’d be the eldest around here,’ Cormac saw fit to interject again before being hushed by another glare from Garda O’Dowd.

‘He’s lived here all his life,’ Garda O’Dowd said to Frank. ‘Since before the flooding even. He’d be, oh, certainly in his seventies.’ He raised his eyebrows at Cormac who nodded in agreement.

‘The local sage,’ Frank said to himself. He stood as close to the shape as he could, and crouched down until his face was only a couple of feet from whatever it was that was buried there. The sand was smooth, except for the end closest to the shore, where it appeared disturbed, and Frank could see some type of cloth sticking out of the silt.

‘Ah, that is where I investigated last evening, sir,’ Garda O’Dowd said from his standing point five feet off. ‘The shape of the mound was, of course, suggestive of a grave, or, eh, a body,’ he coughed. ‘But I felt the need to be sure, sir, before I alerted the Superintendent. I didn’t want to be causing a commotion for a, eh, false alarm, sir.’

Frank didn’t answer. He leaned in as close to the exposed material as he could without falling onto the sand himself. It was coarse, like flax or some other type of sacking. It was certainly somewhat degraded. Definitely not new. He reached down and lifted the raw edge a little. Without turning, he could sense the trepidation of his two companions.

‘It’s just beneath the sacking, sir.’ Garda O’Dowd swallowed loudly. ‘You can, I think, see some, eh, remains.’

Sure enough, Frank could make out what seemed to him to be matted, black hair. Human hair. He dropped the cloth and stood up straight, wiping his hand roughly on his jeans.

A moment of silence passed between them. Cormac O’Malley blessed himself quickly three times, the reality of what he had been guarding only apparently dawning on him at that second.

Frank collected himself. ‘You were right to call it in, Garda O’Dowd,’ he said at last.

The younger man flushed, nodding in vindication. Frank stared down at the pitiful strip of mounded sand. What poor unfortunate had ended up here? He was fairly sure it was an old grave, but not old enough, he guessed, that it predated a coffin burial. Whoever it was, they had been buried in a sack, and that was no fitting end for any of God’s creatures. He ran his hand through his hair, damp from the heat of the afternoon.

‘You’ll stay here a while longer, Cormac?’ He looked at the boy, who nodded, clearly delighted to be considered worthy of assisting a Detective Sergeant all the way from Dublin.

‘Sir,’ was all he said.

Frank looked at Garda O’Dowd. ‘We’ll go up to the station, Michael,’ he said. ‘I’ll need to call the pathologist, and update him on the situation. And you, Michael,’ he lowered his gaze back to where the tiniest glimpse of black hair was visible in the ground, ‘you might go and bring the priest.’

SIX

The bar was a little busier than usual that evening. Although the local angling club’s competition had been cancelled due to the low water level in the lake, some of the more committed fishermen had decided to make the journey anyway. Since five o’clock, Peggy had already fed two groups of three, when another two strangers walked in through the door of the pub in sleeveless poacher jackets and bucket hats. They sat up at the bar, and one of them ordered two pints of Guinness. Peggy half filled two glasses and left them to settle.

‘Would ye like to see the menu?’ she asked.

‘Ara, no thanks love.’ The older of the two looked at his companion. ‘I’ll have to make tracks after this one. I told herself I’d be back for the dinner.’

Peggy nodded, and finished pulling the two pints. She thought of how busy the weekend could have been. Sometimes a hundred people attended the last competition of the season. They wouldn’t all have eaten in the pub, of course, but it could have been a really lucrative weekend, nonetheless. Even in the days before they had started serving food, the Casey teenagers would have been expected to hang around on competition weekends in case they were needed in the bar.

She put the two pints in front of the men and took the money handed to her. It would have been around this time of year when she had first been asked to help out herself. A rite of passage in their household, she still remembered the day clearly. She had been sitting outside under the big tree, reading Little Women, when her father’s bald head had appeared at the door of the pub. He had asked her to collect the empty glasses that had been abandoned on the wooden bench outside. After leaving them on the bar, she had stayed, listening to the fishermen talk as they stood drinking pints, hiding behind them so her father wouldn’t see her.

But after a while, she had realized that her father was too busy with customers to notice her at all, and she had started to clear empties from tables inside the pub too. She’d watched Carla, probably only fifteen at the time, flirting with strange men from Dublin as she wiped spills and stacked used pint glasses in the crook of her arm. Carla had been tall even back then. She could easily have passed for seventeen, or even eighteen. Hugo and Jerome had been behind the bar with her father. Peggy closed her eyes for a moment, trying to see her mother in the picture. She turned back to the two anglers who were ogling their untouched pints. She handed the older one his change. Where had her mother been that day? And then she remembered, and she could see her sitting in the back kitchen next to the Aga, her face pale with pain, her hands thin and anxious, her smile bright as she saw Peggy come in from the bar to make her a cup of tea.

That had been the first day she had worked for her father in the bar, but not the last. Who would have thought, that of the four of them, it would be Peggy working here alone now most days? Not for the first time, she tried to imagine her father’s reaction to the situation. He would certainly have been surprised. He would have expected Peggy to be working in one of the hotels in Galway or Dublin by now, maybe even assistant manager of one of the smaller ones. That had been the plan. But then isn’t that the way with plans? They have a tendency not to pan out as expected. And he would have been disappointed in Jerome and Hugo, that was for sure. Especially Hugo. Peggy thought about her eldest brother, away in London, working at God only knows what. He had been expected to take over the family business, like a million eldest sons before him. Their father had expected it, their mother had expected it, the whole village had expected it. Peggy herself had taken it as a fact of life. When her father needed him to, Hugo would come back from London, or wherever he might have been, and pick up where Patrick Casey had left off. It was generally assumed that Mr. Casey had died of a broken heart. But Peggy was of the opinion that the shock of Hugo’s refusal to stay on in Crumm after their mother’s funeral did more damage to their father.

‘Another round? Miss? Are you with us?’

Before Peggy could react, a voice from behind her said, ‘three pints? I’ll drop them down,’ and Carla materialized out of nowhere. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ She took three pint glasses from the shelf and tilted one under the tap. ‘Are you asleep? It’s not Waterford crystal you know.’ She nodded at the tumbler Peggy was polishing with a cloth.

Peggy looked at the glass and put it down on the shelf. ‘Where did you come out of?’

‘I was just checking to see if you needed any help.’ Carla started on the third pint. ‘I can stay here for a while if you like. Do you want to get some dinner in the back?’

‘No. No thanks.’ Peggy stood up and flexed her shoulders. ‘I’m grand here.’ She walked out from behind the bar and went to collect empty plates from a table where three men were sitting.

One of them smiled up at her. ‘That was lovely now, thanks girl,’ he said, his ruddy cheeks and crackled nose telling of many seasons on the lake. ‘Did you make it yourself?’

‘I did.’ Peggy smiled back.

‘Beautiful, beautiful.’ One of the other two men at the table lifted his hand in thanks, his eyes never leaving the pint glass in front of him, his grey beard bouncing against his collar.

‘Could ye be tempted to a slice of homemade apple tart with cream?’ Peggy asked.

‘Oh Lord,’ the affable, red-faced man patted his ample stomach. ‘I’m sure we shouldn’t but if it’s as good as the stew, sure we’d better give it a go.’ He nodded at the other two who seemed happy to go along with whatever their companion decided.

Peggy smiled at him and took the plates behind the bar. ‘I’ll just be a sec’,’ she told Carla, and went in through the door to the kitchen.

Five minutes later, she walked back into the bar carrying three plates of warm apple tart; a little cloud of cream melting on each one. She sensed immediately that the bar was fuller, and noticed a new table of three men, younger than the usual fishermen, the three of them watching Carla as she placed their pints before them. She put the plates of apple tart down to appreciative grunts and gentle chants of ‘beautiful, beautiful,’ from the bearded man. Back behind the bar, when she looked up, there was a man sitting right at the end of the counter on a high stool.

‘Oh, sorry,’ she smiled. ‘I didn’t see you there. What can I get you?’

The man looked amused. ‘Have I stumbled onto some Amazonian public house?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Peggy looked directly at him.

He glanced over at Carla. ‘It’s not often you come across bars being run only by women,’ he said.

‘Who’s to say I haven’t got a big lump of a man out the back?’ Peggy cocked her head towards the back door.

The man laughed, but then seemed to collect himself. He sat up straighter on the stool. ‘I’m sure you have no need of one,’ he said. ‘I’ll have a pint, so.’