John looked tired and he sounded as if he were going down with a very bad cold. 'This is the last thing I need. I've had a hell of a year and now this. I tried to sell three milk cows yesterday and nobody wanted to touch them. The local farmers seem to think I'm in league with Satan. They practically cross themselves whenever I walk into the pub.'
'Do you mind if I see the place where you discovered the first eleven women?' asked Lucy.
Katie turned to Mr. and Mrs. Kelly. 'You can wait here for a while if you want to. Then we'll walk to the place where they found Fiona.'
Both Mr. and Mrs. Kelly were in tears. 'That's all right. You do whatever you have to do.'
Katie followed John and Lucy to the back of the farmhouse, where the feed store had already been completely demolished, and brick foundations laid. Lucy circled around the foundations for a while, stepping long- legged over the rubble, and then she stopped, and frowned, and looked left and right, as if she could sense a disturbance in the air. In the distance, a flock of hooded crows rose over the trees, not cawing, but circling, and eventually settling back on the branches.
'This is where the bones were found? All mixed up?'
'That's right.'
'I doubt if this was where their bodies were originally laid out, after they were killed. I would guess that their bodies were originally spread out in the same place where Fiona Kelly was found. When the birds and the animals had eaten their flesh, their bones were buried here to conceal the evidence.'
They trudged up the deeply furrowed field, with the Kellys close behind them, to look at the place where John had discovered Fiona's remains. The drizzle was so intense that they could barely see the farmhouse, or Iollan's Wood behind them.
'I think we could observe a minute's silence here,' Katie suggested, and the four of them stood in the field with the rain sifting down, and remembered Fiona, and all children who die before their parents. Katie crossed herself.
Lucy said, 'From a mythological point of view, this spot is very important. Every doorway to the Invisible Kingdom is hidden beneath a copse, or a small wood. This is because the roots of the trees wriggle deep into the ground and the branches reach high into the sky, so that they form a natural connection between the real world and the world of the fairies.'
'They call this Iollan's Wood,' said Katie.
'Well, yes, that fits in. Iollan was one of the greatest of the Fianna, the ancient warriors who could visit the Invisible Kingdom whenever they wanted to. Iollan even had a fairy mistress, called Fair Breast, and a very jealous mistress she was, too.'
'I hate to put a damper on this,' Mr. Kelly interrupted, 'but my daughter died here. I don't think I really want to hear about fairies.'
Lucy took off her sunglasses. 'When the Irish speak of 'fairies,' Mr Kelly, most people think of cheerful little leprechauns out of
'My daughter was killed by a psychopath, Professor Quinn, not a fairy.'
'Are you a religious man, Mr. Kelly?' Lucy asked him.
'Yes, I am.'
'Do you believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost?'
'Yes, I do.'
'So you subscribe to the idea that there's another world, beyond this one?'
'Yes, in that sense, I guess I do.'
Lucy walked around him, and in an unexpectedly intimate gesture, began to rub his shoulders. 'You need to relax more, Mr. Kelly. You should open your mind to other realities. If you believe in heaven and hell, why can't you believe in the Invisible Kingdom?'
Mrs. Kelly looked anxious, and took hold of her husband's hand.
Lucy said, 'The answer to your daughter's death lies right here. She was sacrificed to the witch Mor-Rioghain by somebody who thought that they could summon the witch from the land of the fairies and ask her for anything their heart desired. Somebody who truly believed that it was possible.'
'Whoever it was-they must have been out of their mind.'
'Do you think you're out of your mind, because you get down on your knees every Sunday and pray to a divine being that you've never heard, and never seen, and for whose existence you have absolutely no proof whatsoever?'
Mr. Kelly pulled Lucy's hands away from his shoulders. 'I came here to mourn my daughter, Professor Quinn. I didn't expect to have a lecture on comparative mythology.'
'I'm sorry,' said Lucy. 'I'm really sorry. I just thought that I could help you to understand why your daughter died. It wasn't a meaningless act of sadism. It was done for a purpose, no matter how cruel and inexplicable that purpose might seem.'
'I think you could leave us alone for a while, if you don't mind.'
'Of course. I'm really sorry.'
Mr. Kelly turned away. Katie took Lucy's arm and led her back down the field, leaving Mr. and Mrs. Kelly standing in the rain on the angled, plowed ridge where Fiona's body had been discovered. As they neared the farmyard, Lucy said, 'I hope I didn't upset them too much. I only wanted them to understand that Fiona didn't die
