Katie didn't know what to say to him. But it was like listening to somebody recount a very old nightmare that you hadn't ever told to anyone.
'Thank you,' she said. 'I'll see if I can have some of the lace samples analyzed here.'
Dr. Reidy said, 'I'm not a superstitious man, Superintendent. I don't believe in signs and wonders. But my knees tell me with great reliability when the weather's going to be wet, and my scalp tingles when there's any kind of evil around; and there is.'
That afternoon, Katie took one of the dollies out of its evidence bag, removed all the hooks and the screws, and carefully unfolded it. It had been fashioned out of a long strip of linen, roughly torn, with a lacy hem. She tucked it into an envelope and took it around to Eileen O'Mara, who ran a Victorian-style lace shop in what had once been the old Savoy Cinema, in Patrick Street. Katie opened the door to her little triangular shop, with all of its period nightgowns and its lace pillow covers and its bowls of potpourri, and the bell jingled.
Eileen came out of the back room with an armful of embroidered bathrobes. She was only twenty-four but she had taken a course in Brussels on lace making and needlework and she was an expert on anything sewn or embroidered. She had wavy brown hair and fiery red cheeks and she always reminded Katie of a souvenir doll, too Irish to be true.
'Katie! Haven't seen you for months.'
'Oh, well, I've been busy enough. How's business?'
'It's quiet now, but that's what you'd expect in the winter. I saw you on TV, all those old skeletons up at Knocknadeenly. That must have been desperate!'
'That's partly the reason I'm here.'
'I didn't kill anybody, honest!'
'No,' said Katie, and took the strip of linen out of her purse. 'There was some fabric found up there, quite a few pieces of it, that looked like a woman's petticoat. It has a lace edging on it, if you look here, but it's not Irish; that's what they say in Dublin anyway. I was wondering if you knew where it might have come from. Bearing in mind, now, it's probably eighty years old.'
Eileen picked up the fabric and held it up to the light. 'I don't know. It's very old, I'd say. Not a pattern that I've ever seen before. You'll have to give me a little time on it. But I can tell you straightaway that it's handmade and that your man in Dublin has got it right, it certainly isn't Irish.'
'My woman in Dublin, actually.'
'I might have guessed. But this lace isn't based on any machine-made patterns, like Alencon or Chantilly or Valenciennes. And it certainly bears no resemblance at all to anything I've ever seen in Ireland. My first guess is that it's Belgian, or German.'
'Well, I don't know what that tells me,' said Katie.
'All it tells you is that whoever it belonged to, she was probably quite wealthy. This is very fine work, and it would have cost a lot of money, even eighty years ago.'
'I see.' Katie took the lace back and held it up to the light. If it had been really expensive, then the likelihood that it had been taken from any of the women who had died up at Meagher's Farm was extremely remote. She didn't have a complete list of all the women who had gone missing in the North Cork area between the summer of 1915 and the spring of 1916, but those whose names had appeared in the
So whose was it? And where had it come from? And if it was such fine lace, why had it had been ripped up?
Katie left the Savoy Center and walked across Patrick's Bridge, back to her car. Two crows were sitting precariously on rotten wooden posts in the middle of the river. She was beginning to feel that they were watching her, following her, like a witch's familiars.
17
John Meagher was standing outside the front door of his farmhouse when Katie drove into the courtyard. It was almost as if he were expecting her. The rain had stopped but the morning was still gray, and the clouds were almost as low as the tops of the elm trees.
'Hi,' he said, opening the car door for her. He was wearing a navy-blue waterproof jacket and tan corduroy pants. He looked more like a model from a men's casual wear catalog than a Cork farmer.
She climbed out. 'I just came up to tell you that the case is officially closed and you can carry on with your building work.'
'That's it, then? We never get to find out who did it?'
'Well, I hope we do. We're not pursuing it as an active investigation, but we haven't closed it completely. Everybody deserves justice, even if it's eighty years too late.'
'Sure, I guess they do.'
She looked around the courtyard. 'If you do happen to come across anything else?maybe not bones, but anything that strikes you as out of the ordinary?'
'Oh, sure. I won't hesitate. You gave me your number. Listen-I'm being very rude here-how about a cup of tea or a cup of coffee?'
Katie hesitated, but then she smiled and said, 'All right. That'd be welcome.' John Meagher had an air about him that really attracted her. It wasn't just his looks-even though she had always liked men with dark, curly hair and chocolate-brown eyes. It was his quiet, amused, self-contained manner, and his cultured West Coast accent. She felt that he would always be interesting, and protective, too.
He led her into the house. His mother was sitting at the kitchen table, sewing, with a cigarette dangling between her lips.
