Splintered Silence Page 15

  “This isn’t good,” Colm said. His voice was laced with panic.

  “You think?” I snapped, instantly realizing—and grateful—that my words hadn’t even registered in his shocked face.

  Wilco let loose with a high-pitched whine, followed by a series of sharp barks, his eyes taking in the chaos. I frantically scanned the crowd, hoping Gran was safe.

  I heard Pusser talking to the officer. “Backup better get here fast, or we’re gonna have a full-out riot on our hands.” I looked back to see him holster the Taser and grab one of Doogan’s arms. “Let’s get him loaded.” They double-teamed him, one on each side of his cuffed arms, and dragged him into the cruiser.

  I knelt down by Wilco, calming him or calming me, I wasn’t sure which. Again, I searched the crowd for Gran, hoping she wasn’t caught up in the chaos, but instead my eyes landed on someone else—Maybelle from work. She brandished a crudely fashioned sign with some sort of anti-gypsy slogan. Her T-shirt clung to her ample breasts, which bobbed up and down with each upward thrust of her fist. Our eyes connected. Hers were full of hostility. Hostility that seemed to be directed solely at me. Behind her stood someone else I recognized. It was Al, the jerk from the bar with the cheesy Fu Manchu, the one who wouldn’t take no for an answer. He was also eyeing me—not with lust this time, but with unmistakable hatred.

  I shivered and broke eye contact as two more police cars screamed onto the scene. Lights flashed, sirens wailed. Pusser ushered Dub toward another cruiser while barking out orders to the new officers, but the presence of additional police seemed to agitate things more. A rock flew out of the crowd and hit one of the cop cars. Someone yelled. Off to the right I heard a loud crashing sound and looked to see a man repeatedly slamming his sign against someone’s garbage can. Gran. I need to make sure she’s safe. I pulled at Wilco and turned back toward our trailer when I caught a glimpse of Colm coming my way. Gran was with him, and her hand was pressed to the side of her face.

  I ran to them. “What’s happened?”

  Colm’s gaze penetrated mine. “She’s okay. Just get her out of here.” I grabbed Gran’s elbow and headed toward the trailer. Colm headed back toward the chaos. I yelled after him, told him it was crazy, futile, but he ignored me and kept on going. I was grateful he’d focused his efforts on Gran; priests were good at one-on-one situations, but I doubted he was up to a frenzied mob. At this point, I didn’t care. I needed to take care of Gran.

  * * *

  The chaos raged on. It wasn’t until late that night that things calmed down outside. After it was all said and done, a half dozen people had been arrested, mostly Pavees, and several others were taken to the hospital for minor injuries. Colm had stopped by to check on Gran, then left again. He’d asked me to bring her by the church tomorrow, to finalize burial arrangements for Tuesday. I had a feeling he had wanted to discuss something else too, but I didn’t want to overtax Gran, so I’d hurried him along.

  Gramps had been characteristically miserable about everything: Gran shouldn’t have been out there; we Pavees needed to stick together better; those settled ones were scum; the law always favored the townsfolk; and the litany went on. It took all the strength I could muster to put up with his intermittent glares at me, as if I somehow had instigated or approved of the brawl. All I wanted was to care for Gran, but right now, her tending to Gramps seemed to be the best medicine for her.

  After we got Gramps fed and situated in his recliner in front of the television, I lured Gran into the kitchen, where we could speak in private. Wilco was there too, curled up and snoring soundly in front of the still-warm oven. His eyelids flicked, and his paws moved in time with his dream, probably a rehash of today’s successful search. He was smiling in his sleep. A second “task well done” for him in less than a week. A second dead body, a second murdered woman.

  “I need some answers, Gran.” I placed a hot cup of tea in front of her and sat down, scooting my chair in close so we could speak quietly together.

  She looked down and fidgeted with the frayed edges of a dish towel. A lengthy silence ensued. I remained quiet, determined to wait it out. She abandoned the towel, picked up her tea, and took a quick sip, only to put down the cup again and go back to worrying the dish towel. An undercurrent of anxiety ran below her sadness. Something heavy weighed on her mind.

  She fixed her gaze on me. “I never wanted to hurt you, child. Never. Everything I did, right or wrong, I did out of love for you.”

  My gut knotted, both from resentment and out of pity for her, but I didn’t dare react, so I said nothing.

  She rubbed the muscles in the back of her neck.

  “Are you sure you feel okay, Gran?” Earlier, she’d been caught up in the ebb of the crowd and gotten bumped on the head. It didn’t seem serious at the time, certainly nothing that warranted a trip into the doctor, but at her age . . .

  “Fine. I’m fine, please don’t fuss over me.” She looked about, and I realized she was concerned that Gramps might overhear our conversation. What could be so terrible? Dread filled me. I shifted away and folded my arms tightly around my chest, a subconscious shield against whatever was coming.

  “Your mother was independent,” she started. “Much like you, and wild. A free spirit, I used to say.” She chuckled. “Stubborn and disobedient is what she was. Still, I loved her more than life itself. Perhaps that was the problem. I tended to indulge her, you see. Which left your grandfather as the disciplinarian. Of course, he was on the road, so Mary often ran wild and out of control. Once she got older, I realized the need to reel her in, place more boundaries and stricter rules. But it was too late by then. She rebelled. That’s when the trouble began. She met a boy . . .”

  “My father?”

  Gran’s mouth drooped. “Yes. A settled boy. We didn’t know his name. She wouldn’t tell us.” Her eyes darted away, then back again. “Or she didn’t know. She had a lot of boyfriends. All settled boys.”

  Dub’s previous words screamed through my mind. Whoring around. Suddenly chilled, I rubbed at my arms and tried to shut out the previous events of the day: the long trek through the woods, finding another body, then Doogan twitching and convulsing in pain, the angry crowd, Dub’s ugly words about Sheila and someone named Rooney . . . the name clicked: Eamon Rooney, Meg’s boyfriend? Unless there was another man named Rooney in Bone Gap. Yet somehow I doubted it. Poor Meg. I lifted my chin. I’d put that off for later. One worry at a time.

  Gran continued. “We’d hoped she’d calm down after you came along. But instead, she took up with a bad crowd in town. Staying out all night, or coming home drunk.”

  Like mother, like daughter.

  Gran’s hands worked over the dish towel some more. Her eyes took on a faraway look. “I remember that awful night like it was yesterday. She came rushing back home—you were just a baby, maybe a month old—and she was hysterical, crying and blabbing on about how someone was going to kill her. I couldn’t soothe her.” Regret tinged her voice. “My own baby, and I couldn’t comfort her.”

  I leaned closer. “Someone was going to kill her? Why?”

  “I wish I knew, child. I only know that she was frightened. So terribly frightened. She packed up her stuff. Said she had to leave. Your grandfather was home. He tried to talk some sense into her, but there was no stopping her.”

  “What about me?”

  “She asked me to watch over you. Said she’d come back for you when it was safe.”

  “But she never did.”

  Gran’s gaze met mine, then fell back to the dish towel as she continued. “Later, maybe a couple weeks after Mary left, the police came around, harassing our people. Said they were looking for a Pavee girl with a baby.”

  Looking for a Pavee girl? I thought back to the article I’d found at the motel. The timing would be just about right . . .

  Gran was still talking. “The muskers were asking all sorts of questions. We got scared, so we took to the road for a while.”

  “Why didn’
t you just tell me all this? Why lie and tell me she was dead?”

  She hesitated. But a slight tilt of her head gave it away.

  “It was Gramps’ idea, wasn’t it? But you agreed to it. Why didn’t you try to find her? Bring her back. Help her?”

  She squeezed her eyes tight and pinched the bridge of her nose. “We did. We found her in Memphis. She wasn’t herself. She was living like an animal on the streets, taking drugs, selling herself . . .”

  Gypsy whore. If the moniker fits . . . images of Sheila’s picture at the Sleep Sleazy, of the slimy condoms I’d shaken out of the motel sheets, and of my mother’s blood-soaked hair all came together in an ugly reminder of the taunts we’d heard all our lives. But it didn’t have to be that way. “She wasn’t dead. Maybe you could have helped her.”

  “We did everything we could. You have to believe that, Brynn. But she was lost. We’d lost her to the settled world.” She met my gaze with dull, wet eyes. “All we knew for sure was that we couldn’t bear to lose you too. But you wouldn’t let it go. Even as a youngster, you asked about her all the time. And then when you got older, you became obsessed with finding her. You spent all your time on the computer, searching her name. Guess you could never let a question go unanswered.”

  “And suicide covered all the bases, didn’t it?” I was growing angry again. “Because otherwise, I would have wondered why we didn’t have a wake. Instead, you convinced me that her death was shameful. That we had to hide it, keep it a secret. And I believed you.”

  “We did what we thought was best at the time. That’s all any of us can ever do.” She looked away.

  “When did she contact you?”

  Nothing.

  “When did she contact you, Gran?”

  Gran exhaled. “Last month. She wrote a note, just a brief note, saying that she was still alive and that she . . . she loved us. She had her parish priest send it.”

  She pulled a small white envelope from her pocket and passed it to me. I took out the note, carefully unfolded it, and read the simple message: Dear Mam, I want you to know that I’m still alive and miss you. All of you. Love, Mary.

  “All of you?” That’s it? I was nothing more than one of the “all of you.”

  I flipped the paper over, looked at the blank back side, and flipped it back again. Two short sentences. That was it. Nothing more. “The priest sent this to you?”

  “No. To Father Colm. He brought it to me.”

  “Father Colm?” That explained Colm’s recent connection to my family. Guilt. He’d helped bring my mother back here, back to her death.

  “Yes. I begged him not to tell the police about it. I didn’t want them involved in our personal matters. Nothing good ever comes from the police.” She lifted her chin defiantly, her eyes sliding my way. Then she blinked, and a tear streamed down her cheek. “It was such a shock to hear from her after all these years. I wrote right back. Told her about your grandfather’s sickness. Told her all about you. I begged her to come home.”

  “Did she mention me in her reply? Did she . . . did she want to see me?”

  Gran’s features clouded over. “I never heard back from her. I thought she’d changed her mind. It wasn’t until . . .” She pressed her lips tightly, her chin trembling. Tears flowed freely now.

  I covered her hand in mine. “It’s okay, Gran. It’s okay.”

  She swallowed back a sob and forced a small smile. Leaning forward, she brushed back a strand of my hair and tucked it gently behind my ear. All of a sudden, I was seven years old again, upset and hurt after a brawl at school. I’d taken on a fifth grader after he’d said something nasty about my family. The fight hadn’t gone well for me. I was small; he wasn’t. It wasn’t the physical pain, however, that needed to be assuaged, but my injured pride. It was one of the first times I realized that I was different. My family was different. We were fringers, as I’d grown to think of us. Living on the edge of what was considered normal. It was one of those pivotal points of childhood. From that day forward, I defined myself as different. I’d even somehow prided myself in that fact, at least until I grew old enough to disobey my clan’s basic rules. Then? I became a disgrace.

  And now? I wasn’t just an alienated bastard but a whore’s maimed and drunken bastard. A total misfit. An outcast.

  Except at home. At home, there was always Gran.

  I closed my eyes, exhaled the hurt and pain, and let her touch console me. Just like then. Just like I needed now . . .

  “I’m sorry, child. Can you forgive me?”

  I nodded my head and cried.

  CHAPTER 12

  I tossed and turned in bed, unable to get to sleep, my mind churning over everything I’d learned about my mother. The old newspaper clipping kept popping to the forefront of my thoughts. Was it merely a coincidence that the timing of that decades-old crime and my mother’s departure from the clan coincided? I doubted it. Now I’d heard from Gran’s own lips that the police had been looking for a Pavee girl with a baby soon after my mother disappeared. The article stated the authorities were seeking Billy Drake’s girlfriend, a Bone Gap girl. Could that have been my mother?

  What did I really know? Just that sometime back around the year I was born, Billy Drake’s body was found, and he’d presumably been involved in a theft and the drugstore owner’s murder. And he had a Bone Gap girlfriend. I also knew my mother had birthed me by a settled boy and then, frightened for her life, had run off. That didn’t necessarily mean these incidents were connected—certainly my mother wasn’t the only one of our clan girls to be chummy with settled boys. I mean, look at me and Colm. I cringed. Don’t go there, Brynn, stay on track.

  Facts, I needed dates and facts.

  I rolled over and snapped on my nightstand light, pushed Wilco off my legs, and got out of bed. After kicking through the dirty laundry, I found the jeans with the article still in the pocket. I skimmed over it again and found myself wondering about Billy Drake. Was Billy my mother’s boyfriend? Or was it like Gran had said, my mother had a lot of boyfriends? Was I his child? After all these years, I wanted to believe that I’d found my father, but I could be grasping at straws here. But how could I really know?

  I shuffled across the room to my dresser and pulled out the bottom drawer. Would it still be there? Yes! Gran had kept my things for me. I withdrew an old shoebox and settled back on my bed. My fingertips traced along the worn cardboard edges of the box that held my first pair of heels—white, sparkly two-inch pumps—bought for my First Communion. Gran was so sure I’d love them. I told her I did, of course, but in the end, I’d switched them out for my more comfortable sneakers. There’d been a gasp or two from the ladies in the pews, when I knelt for communion and my black sneakers peeked out from under the billows of white taffeta. First Holy Communion was akin to a wedding; little Traveller girls were garbed in princess-style white gowns complete with long flowing trains, white gloves, and puffy veils, their hair done up in elaborate styles and makeup garishly applied. It was a grand pageant, and the little girls were put on display like beauty contestants or mail-order brides. In fact, many of the arranged marriages occurred soon after this display of our too-young and too-innocent girls. Our souls sanctified to God in our First Communion and our bodies sold off to the highest bidder, all in one fell swoop.

  Backroom deals were the order of the day; it’s when Gramps and old man Costello, Dub’s grandfather, shook hands and negotiated my future like a used car salesman would with someone interested in a Buick. Bitterness crept over me. One “test drive” was all Dub got from this Buick before I crashed and burned. The phrase caught me off guard, and I smirked at the irony, rubbed my neck. Get over yourself, Brynn; you’ve got a task to do.

  I removed the shoes and lifted the tissue under them, where my little treasures nestled beneath it. I skimmed the memories I’d squirreled away over the years: a squished penny Gran and I had placed on the train track, a dried meadow flower from a walk with Colm, ticket stubs from a rock concert I
’d snuck out to see . . . and at the bottom, tucked between the pages of a forbidden paperback novel, my mother’s picture. The only one I’d ever found. While I expected Gran had an album somewhere, most of my mother’s pictures were removed from the house when I was an early teen. Out of sight, out of mind. I’d found this one by mistake, and I’d treasured it.

  I stared at her image. My mother had been beautiful. Large green eyes, dark auburn hair, fair skin and soft, even features. I looked nothing like her. My dark hair and strong features, I’d always assumed, came from my father. Again, I found myself wanting to know more. The whole story. Ugly or not, I needed to know about her life if I wanted to solve her death. Was that old crime somehow connected to her? And could it also be connected to her murder these many years later?

  I thought of the clipping and how I’d found it, tangled up in the bedsheets. Dropped by someone? I’d thought of Johnny Drake at first, since it named someone related to him. But what sense did that make? Johnny wouldn’t have been sleeping in one of the motel rooms. Or had my mother checked into the Sleep Easy on her return trip here and had it with her? It was the only lodging on this side of the mountain, so it’d make sense that she might have booked a room there. But . . . why check in at any motel at all? Why not just come home?

  I glanced at the clock on my nightstand. Only a little after 9:00 P.M. I snatched up my cell and punched in the number for the Sleep Easy, hoping to get Johnny Drake’s personal number from the clerk. No one answered. Great way to run a business. I hung up and dialed Meg’s number, thinking she might know how to get hold of him, but she didn’t answer either. Frustrated, and intent on getting some answers, I pulled on some clothes and gave Wilco a quick hug. “Stay here, boy. Rest up. I’ll be back in a jiff.”