All Chapters of The Luna They Buried: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

I did not sleep. I sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea that went cold in my hands and watched the window for the wolf until the grey light came up over the harbor and the gulls started arguing on the pier. By morning I had decided two things. The first was that I had seen what I had seen. The second was that I was going to be very careful about who I told.The weight was not on the table. Declan had taken it, and the empty spot where it had sat was a clean circle in the dust, and I sat looking at that circle and drinking cold tea and thinking about a man who would pocket a dead woman's things and then tell me not to ask questions.I had interviewed men like him. That was the trouble. I had sat across from men like him in grey rooms with bad coffee and watched them be reasonable and helpful and steady, and half of them had been exactly what they seemed and the other half had been something else entirely, and the tell was always small. A man who gave you too much detail. A man wh

The funeral was small, the way Siobhan would have wanted it, which meant the church was full of people who had known her and half of them sang. Father Byrne said the mass in Irish and English both, and the woman from the post office did a reading, and when they carried the coffin out into the rain the whole village followed it up to the little graveyard on the hill behind the church. I stood at the graveside in my good black coat and watched the clay go in and did not cry. I had done my crying in the car outside Galway, at a service station, with a cup of tea going cold in the holder, and I did not have any left for the hill.Afterward they came up to me one by one and said the things people say. I said thank you. I said she would have loved the singing. I said yes, I would be staying a few more days to sort out the house.That last one was a lie I told so smoothly that it frightened me a little. I had no intention of going back to Dublin until I knew what had happened to my sister, a

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

Cormac put the black boots on the desk between us. They were muddier than they had been when I found them, and there was a tear in the left one that I had not noticed, and the laces had been cut rather than untied. Declan looked at his son and did not say anything for a while. Then he said, very quietly, "Sit down, Cormac. You look like you are going to fall over.""I am not going to sit down." The boy's voice was a raw thing, high and thin. "She sent me up to the cottage at seven with a can of petrol and a box of matches and she told me to put the boots and the bag in the yard and burn them and then come back and tell her it was done. And I carried the can up the road and I stood outside the gate for ten minutes and I could not do it. And then I came here." He looked at me, and his grey eyes were wet, and he wiped them with the back of his hand like a child. "I burned the boathouse for her last night. I did not know what was in it. She told me it was rubbish from the old days and it

Declan did not answer me for a long time. The candle had burned down to a stub and the wax was pooling on the step, and he sat with his hands on his knees and his eyes on the wall at the bottom of the stairs."There was no one else in the office," he said at last. "I would have smelled them. The harbor office is one room over a net store and there is nowhere in it to hide. She came in, she stood by the stove, she said what she said, and she went out again.""Then it was not the office she was afraid of." I pulled the blanket up over my shoulders. "She was afraid of something before she came in and it was still on her when she left. And now it is on you.""It is on me because I have been carrying it for a month." He turned his head. "You are asking whether I think your sister's death was planned. I have thought that every night since the coroner's report. I have no proof of it. I have a promise I was asked to make and a fight I did not go to and a woman who came down the hill with clea