Chapter 6: The Casserole and the Warning

I went back to the cottage and made tea and sat down at the table with the black boots in front of me and the page of names beside them, and I did the arithmetic of grief.

The woman with the grey plait had told me Siobhan had been frightened, and had started something she could not stop, and had died a week before the full moon. The letter in the charter said the same thing in different words. My sister had been running from a clock, and the clock had caught her.

But there was a second pair of boots in this cottage, and a roll to the right foot, and mud from the high ground in the treads, and I had spent a year learning that the person who lives in a house usually leaves more of themselves behind than they mean to. I went through the cottage again with the boots in my hands, and this time I was looking for the woman who wore them.

I found her in the bedroom, in the bottom of the wardrobe, behind a box of Christmas decorations. A canvas bag, cheap, the kind you get at a market, with a change of clothes in it and a toothbrush and a folded bus ticket from Galway to Dún Aonghasa dated the third of March. There was a purse in the bottom with no money in it and a library card from a branch in Dublin, and the name on the card was not Siobhan's.

The name on the card was Bridget.

I sat on the floor of my sister's bedroom with the bag in my lap and the bus ticket in my hand and felt the case turn over the way a case does when a small thing does not fit the shape of the story. My sister had hidden a woman in this cottage in March. The woman had gone up to the high ground. And my sister had written a letter that said, if you are reading this, then you are what I was.

Which meant Siobhan had been like me. Which meant the thing that was supposed to happen to me on Saturday had already happened to my sister, and she had kept it from me for fifteen years.

The knock at the front door came at half ten, and I had the bag back in the wardrobe and the boots back by the door and the tea things on the table before I opened it.

It was Nora from the shop, with a tea towel over a dish and her coat buttoned up to her chin and a face arranged into the kind of kindness that has a job to do.

"I brought you a casserole," she said. "You will not have eaten. Nobody eats at a wake and then they wonder why they feel so low the next day."

I took the dish. It was hot and it smelled of lamb and onion and it was the second casserole I had been given since the funeral, the first having come from the post office woman the night before, and I had a sudden, uncharitable picture of the whole village rotating dishes through my kitchen as a way of keeping count of me.

"Come in," I said. "I have the kettle on."

She came in and sat down in the chair where Declan had sat and folded her hands on the table and looked around the kitchen at the plates and the cups and the boots by the door. Her eyes stopped on the boots for a moment. Then she looked at me and smiled.

"You are not sleeping," she said.

"I am not. I never sleep well in a strange house."

"This is not a strange house. This is your sister's house. You grew up in it."

"I grew up in the house on the hill. This one Siobhan bought with her own money after our mother died." I poured the tea. "I have been here three days and I have not slept a full night yet. I keep hearing things."

"That would be the gulls." Nora took the cup. "Or the wind. There is a great deal of wind on this coast and it makes a noise like a person."

"It makes a noise like a person walking on the shore road at four in the morning, and the other night I looked out of that window and there was a wolf on the headland."

The cup stopped halfway to her mouth. She put it down very carefully in the saucer and the china made a small click.

"There are no wolves in this part of Ireland," she said.

"That is what my father told me."

"Your father was right." She was watching me and her face had lost the kindness and found something underneath it, something watchful and a bit afraid. "Niamh. You have come home to bury your sister and you have been asking questions about the boats and the full moon and now you are talking about wolves. People notice. This is a small village and people notice, and the wrong kind of noticing is not good for a person here."

"The wrong kind of noticing." I put my own cup down and looked at her. "Nora, my sister is dead. The coroner says she went into the water off the headland. She was a strong swimmer and she knew that coast better than anyone in this village and she went into the water at night in March. That is not an accident, that is a puzzle, and I have spent my whole working life solving puzzles. So tell me plainly. What happens in this village on the full moon?"

Nora's hands were flat on the table. She looked at the window, and then at the door, and then at me, and I watched her decide something, and the thing she decided was not the thing I wanted.

"On the full moon," she said, slowly, "the fleet stays in. That is the rule. It has been the rule since before I was born. It is in the charter and everyone in this village keeps it, and the reason we keep it is that the one time in living memory a boat went out on a full moon, the whole crew was lost, and the co-op has never forgotten it." She picked up her cup again. "There. That is the answer to your question. It is an old rule about an old drowning. It has nothing to do with your sister."

"And my sister's death?"

"Was a drowning." She said it firmly. "The coroner said so. The sergeant said so. Father Byrne said so at the graveside. You were there."

"I was there."

"Then let it be, love." She reached across the table and put her hand over mine and her fingers were warm and dry. "You are grieving and you are looking for someone to blame, and there is no one to blame. The sea does not need a reason. It takes people. It took your father and it took your mother and it took your sister, and if you go on asking questions in this village the only thing you will find is a lot of people who loved Siobhan and who do not want to hear her death turned into a mystery."

I let her hold my hand. I let her finish her tea. She talked about the weather and the price of diesel and the fact that the co-op hall needed a new roof, and she stood up and put on her coat and said she would bring another casserole on Friday, and she was at the door with her hand on the latch when she said the thing I had been waiting for.

"You know," she said, not turning round, "there was a woman in the shop in February. A stranger, from Dublin by the accent. She bought a map of the high ground and a box of matches and a bar of chocolate, and she asked me which way the peat cuts were, and I told her, and then Siobhan came in the next day and asked me had I seen a woman from Dublin, and I said I had, and Siobhan went very quiet." Nora's hand was still on the latch. "She said, 'If she comes back, do not tell her where I live.' And I said, 'Why not?' and Siobhan said, 'Because she is not safe to know and neither am I.'"

I did not move. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you are asking questions about the full moon and talking about wolves on the headland, and because the woman in the shop was afraid of something, and your sister was afraid of something, and I have a bad feeling about this spring that I cannot put into words." Nora opened the door. "And because your sister was kind to my daughter when my daughter was in trouble, and I have not repaid it, and I am not a woman who likes to owe." She stepped out onto the step and pulled her collar up. "Do not go up to the high ground. Not on Saturday. That is all I will say."

She walked off down the path. I stood in the doorway and watched her go, and then I went back inside and locked the door and stood in the kitchen with my back against it.

Nora had told me three things and two of them were lies. The rule about the full moon was not about an old drowning; the line across the ledgers went back forty years in fair weather and foul. But the woman from Dublin was real, and the casserole was real, and the warning not to go up to the high ground on Saturday was real, and I had now been warned about Saturday by two separate women in one morning.

The third thing was the strangest. Nora had been sitting at my table with her hand over mine and the whole time she had been talking about the sea taking people, I had been able to smell her fear. Not see it. Smell it. It came off her like a change in the weather, a sourness under the lavender soap, and it had got stronger when she said the word wolf.

I went to the window and looked out at the harbor. The boats were in. They were always in. And on the shore road below the cottage, a figure was walking up from the pier with a jacket over his arm and his auburn hair catching the light. Declan. He was early. It was not yet six.

I opened the door before he knocked.

"I found the second key," I said.

He stopped on the step. "What second key?"

"The one Siobhan wrote about. She left a chart in the airing cupboard with the Mary Rose circled and a note that said, ask D about the second key." I held his eyes. "What does she mean, Declan? What second key opens what?"

He looked at me for a long moment, and his face did something I had not seen it do before, which was to go entirely still and entirely honest at once, the way a man's face goes when he has decided to stop carrying a thing.

"The second key opens the boathouse locker," he said. "But that is not the important part. The important part is that only three people in this village have ever had a key to that locker. Siobhan, myself, and the Alpha." He came up onto the step and his voice dropped. "And I gave mine to your sister in February, because she asked me to, and because she told me she was going to put something in that locker that would end Mairéad's rule, and then she went into the water a week later and the locker was emptied before the funeral."

"Then we find out who emptied it."

"We cannot. The boathouse was burned last night." He said it plainly, and watched my face. "I came up here at four to tell you and I saw the smoke from the pier. There is nothing left of it but the stone walls and the black water in the slip. Someone burned it while we were standing on the shore talking to Mrs O'Rourke, and whoever it was knew exactly what was in that locker and exactly how long they had to take it."