MARIAN HOWARD
BORN MAY 15, 1963
DIED NOVEMBER 2, 1975
REQUIESCAT IN PACE
I thought of what Sandra said about her parents, that they hadn’t slept in the same bedroom “since Ma…” She had been going to say “since Marian died” but had stopped herself. I thought of Denis Finnegan tonight, drunk on fine scotch and a dream of the Howards, recalling the first time he’d set eyes on John Howard and his two angel girls. Two angel girls, only one still living.
I went and looked out the gates onto the road after that, in the hope that a car might drive by, or a truck, or a plane might fly overhead, or anything to take my thoughts away from here. But there was nothing but black cloud and mist and coal black night. I thought that this was right, with a dead child: there is no escape from it, and there is no prayer that can ease the pain of it. Then I thought of how little my feelings were worth in the scheme of things, and how little time I had to waste if I wanted this all to end. And then I turned around and went back to work.
The cover on the photo looked new; it certainly wasn’t weathered the way it should have been. And it seemed to be stuck on the headstone with glue, or resin. The grave had been visited recently; the earth was dented with marks, and there were even fresh prints in the softer mud leading up to the plot: the prints showed the kind of treads you get on motorcycle boots. There were prints small enough to be Emily’s, and prints large enough to be Jerry Dalton’s. And right around the child’s grave, someone had spread a trail of rowan berries.
There were lights on in Jerry Dalton’s house in Woodpark, but I would have knocked on his door even if there hadn’t been. I knocked like a bailiff about to repossess the place; it was only a matter of time before his neighbors were awake too. Emily Howard’s voice came from behind the door.
“Who is it?” she said.
“Ed Loy. It’s time we talked,” I said.
She opened the door, said “Hi, Ted” and went back inside. The door opened into a tiny hallway; a door led right into the living room. Emily sat in the middle of the floor in that knees-tucked-beneath-her way only women seem able to do. She wore indigo blue jeans and a black sweater; her newly black hair made her pale skin appear opalescent; her eyes were panda black, and her lashes were thick with mascara; her bloodstone rings gleamed in the glow from a gas fire. On the floor around her, she was surrounded by old photograph albums and journals; there was a smell of dust and worn paper in the room, of the faded and antique, of the past.
“They went through every album, picked out every photograph, and destroyed it. Even the shots of her as a baby. Isn’t that weird? No, isn’t that fucked-up?”
“Are you talking about Marian Howard?”
“Ye-ah.”
“What about the photograph on her headstone?”
“Oh, we put that up,” Emily said, staring at me through solemn brown eyes. She seemed to have aged several years in the hours since I’d seen her; I felt as if I was meeting her for the first time: a serious young adult.
“We?”
“Me and Jerry Dalton.”
“You and Jerry Dalton. You’re working together, are you?”
“I don’t know about ‘together.’ Don’t know about ‘working’ either. We’ve…he’s been getting sent this stuff about his real parents, about his background. And it crosses over with stuff about my family. So we’ve been, kind of, comparing notes. Trying to find out who fucked us up.”
“When I met your father, he said you’d been a perfectly normal girl, and then all of a sudden you’d had your hair dyed, broke up with your perfect boyfriend, gone off the rails entirely. Was that because you met Dalton?”
“I guess so. Jerry told me stuff about my family, about the ways people close to the Howards keep dying.”
“People like Audrey Howard and Stephen Casey and Eileen Casey?”
“You’ve been doing your detective thing, haven’t you? Yes, people like that, Ted. But you know, what my father said, about me being perfectly normal-I’ve been bulimic since I was thirteen, been in therapy since as long, my perfect boyfriend was a cokehead addicted to porn and that turned me on. How the fuck is any of that perfectly normal? And you know the joke of it? My parents didn’t even notice. They weren’t paying attention. Dad was too busy working, or lost in the land of rugby with fat Denis and all the Seafield man-boys, and Mum was obsessed with herself, with her looks or her fading looks, with her career or her fading career, with cheating on Dad with as many men as possible. I’m surprised Dad even noticed I was missing. Bet if he hadn’t received the ransom demand, he wouldn’t have.”
She said all this in a matter-of-fact tone, without any self-pity; as if she feared I might attribute some to her, she quickly added, “I’m not doing a poor little rich girl routine here, it’s just…there’s something
Her eyes welled up and spilled over. I had a clean handkerchief in my pocket. I offered it to her, and she dabbed her eyes with it, smearing the black makeup and mascara around her eyes. She looked at the black stains on the handkerchief and made herself laugh.
“I bet I look like some girl at a Debs dance now, who never wears eye makeup usually and doesn’t understand you’re not supposed to cry with it on.”
“You look fine,” I said. “And you’re never not supposed to cry.”
“Is that your philosophy, Ted?”
“I wish you’d stop calling me Ted.”
She giggled, then blew her nose, leaving it black on the tip. Then she went through the albums on the floor until she found something.
“So look,” she said. “I think I’m getting closer to finding out what’s wrong. Today Jerry got a photograph of Marian Howard, and a clipping. Look at this.”
She passed me an old scrap of yellowing newspaper, from the
DEATH OF DOCTOR’S CHILD
“TRAGIC ACCIDENT”
An inquest into the death by drowning of Marian Howard (12), the youngest daughter of well-known doctor John Howard, heard that the child was known to have a “mischievous” sense of humor, and that she had been in the habit of “messing around” in the large pond at the rear of the family home. Her elder sister Sandra said Marian used to hold her breath and hide underwater, fully clothed, often in one of the many crevices and breaks in the stone walls of the pond, as a practical joke, so that she and her brother and parents would panic and believe she had drowned. It was thought that in this instance, she became trapped by a large or unwieldy rock, which may have snagged on her clothing. A verdict of accidental death was recorded.
“It’s hilarious, isn’t it? The shit you can get away with if you’re a big rich doctor.”
“You think they just went along with whatever the family said to hush it up?”
“It was November, Ted. I mean, it’s bullshit anyway, there’s barely three feet of water in that pond, how the fuck you’d get jammed down there at the age of twelve, I don’t know. But say you did, and you couldn’t swim or something, and you had this yo-ho-ho mischievous sense of humor God help us, you might pull something like that
