1989
By half nine the summer carnival had stopped pretending it belonged to children.
The toddlers with painted cheeks had been carried home sticky with sugar. The parish raffle had ended in a dispute over a ham nobody admitted wanting. Teenagers had taken possession of the grass behind Saint Brigid’s Hall, the older boys leaning against the railings as if they had personally invented cigarettes, the girls moving in bright packs between the music tent and the harbour road. Beyond them, strings of coloured bulbs climbed from pole to pole, shivering whenever the wind came up from the water.
Ellen Tierney stood beside the ring-toss stall with a leather satchel pressed against her ribs and tried not to look at the man watching her.
She knew he was watching because he had been in three places she had been in the last twenty minutes.
First, near the raffle tent, when she had been with Siobhan.
Then by the chip van, though he had not bought anything.
Now he stood across the green beneath a yellow bulb, one hand in his trouser pocket, his face turned towards the bandstand as if the teenagers murdering a Bryan Ferry song had become suddenly important to him.
Ellen looked away before he could know she had noticed.
“You’re squeezing that bag like it owes you money,” Siobhan said.
Ellen loosened her grip.
“I’m holding it.”
“You’re strangling it.”
“It’s leather. It’ll live.”
Siobhan peered at her over the paper rim of a cup of lemonade. She was sixteen too, but she had the irritating ability to look forty when she disapproved of something. Tonight she had tied a green ribbon through her dark hair and stolen her sister’s silver hoop earrings, which gave her an air of senior management.
“You said you were bringing papers.”
“I did.”
“You did not say you were bringing enough papers to establish a new government.”
Ellen glanced down at the satchel.
The bag had belonged to her grandfather before anyone in the family had decided old things were tasteful. The corners were scuffed pale. One buckle had been repaired with a strip of darker leather. If you opened it, there were no love letters, no secret diary, none of the rubbish people imagined girls hid when they lowered their voices and used words like troubled.
There were photocopies.
Maintenance sheets.
A typed incident report that had no incident on it.
Three letters written by a dead deckhand’s widow, two unanswered.
A page from a company ledger with a payment beside initials Ellen had spent six weeks trying to identify.
And a handwritten note from a harbour engineer who had apparently possessed the dangerous belief that if a winch was going to fail, someone ought to fix it before it killed a man.
Ellen had found the first letter by accident in a locked drawer that was not, in fact, very well locked. Everything after that had been choice.
Bad choice, according to Declan.
Dangerous choice, according to Siobhan.
The only choice she could live with, according to Ellen.
“You can still not go,” Siobhan said.
“I can also stop breathing. I’m not planning that either.”
“That is exactly the sort of line people say before the bad part of the story.”
Ellen almost smiled. “You watch too much telly.”
“And you think because you read three newspaper investigations in the library you’re Woodward and Bernstein.”
“Which one am I?”
“The short one.”
“I don’t think either of them is a girl.”
“Then the prettier one.”
“That’s better.”
The music crashed to an end. Applause rose from the grass, generous because nearly everyone knew somebody on the stage. Behind the hall, a church bell struck the half hour, the sound low and thick in the damp air.
Ellen looked across the green again.
The man beneath the yellow bulb was gone.
That was worse.
She shifted the satchel higher on her shoulder.
Siobhan saw it. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Your nothing has a face.”
Ellen scanned the crowd without moving her head much. The mayor was being cornered by two women from the residents’ association. Her old maths teacher had acquired a paper plate of chips and the expression of a man who had achieved spiritual peace. A group of boys from the grammar school were throwing balled napkins at one another. At the edge of the road, headlights crawled past towards Northglass.
No pale jacket.
No familiar dark car.
No reason for the skin between her shoulder blades to feel cold.
“I thought I saw someone,” she said.
“Who?”
“Someone from my father’s office.”
Siobhan’s lemonade lowered.
“Ellen.”
“He might just be here.”
“At a parish carnival?”
“People attend parish carnivals.”
“Not men who look like they sue parish carnivals.”
That got the laugh Ellen had been trying not to give her.
Siobhan did not laugh back.
“Go home,” she said.
“No.”
“Give me the bag. I’ll hide it at ours.”
“No.”
“Then give it to Declan.”
“Absolutely not.”
“He’s your brother.”
“He’s nineteen and terrified of our father.”
“That does not make him useless.”
“No. It makes him nineteen and terrified of our father.”
Siobhan folded her arms.
Ellen looked past her towards the game stalls, though what she saw was Declan two nights earlier in the kitchen at Tierney House, standing with both hands flat on the table while she whispered what she had found.
He had gone white before she had finished.
Not shocked-white. Knowing-white.
That had frightened her more than the letters.
He had told her to put everything back.
She had asked whether he knew the name Patrick Sloane.
Declan had said, “Keep your voice down.”
She had asked again.
He had caught her wrist too hard, then let go as if burned.
“Ellie, please. You don’t understand who you’re accusing.”
“I’m not accusing anyone. I’m asking why a man died after reporting broken equipment and why Da’s company paid his widow through a solicitor instead of an insurer.”
“You don’t know what that payment was.”
“Neither do you, apparently. So why are you scared?”
He had looked at the kitchen door.
That was the moment Ellen understood there were questions people asked because they wanted answers, and questions people avoided because they already had them.
Tonight, Declan had found her before she left for the carnival. He had stood in the driveway in shirtsleeves, his tie undone, as if he had run out from dinner.
“Don’t meet anyone,” he had said.
Ellen had put her bicycle between them.
“I’m going to the carnival.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Do I?”
“Stop making this a game.”
“I’m not.”
His face had changed then. The fear had broken through the annoyance.
“Just wait,” he had said. “Give me a day.”
“A day for what?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Exactly.”
He had caught the handlebars when she tried to wheel past.
“Ellen.”
“Let go.”
“I’m trying to keep you out of something.”
“You’re trying to keep me quiet.”
“There’s a difference.”
“Not from where I’m standing.”
She had yanked the bicycle free.
Declan had not followed.
Now, twenty minutes before she was supposed to meet the reporter, Ellen hated that part of herself wanted him to appear.
Not to stop her.
Just to stand beside her while she did it.
Siobhan touched the satchel. “At least tell me his name.”
“The reporter?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because if you don’t know, you can’t be made to say.”
Siobhan stared at her.
Ellen sighed. “That sounded more dramatic out loud.”
“It sounded deranged.”
“It sounded sensible.”
“You are sixteen.”
“So are you.”
“Yes, and I have accepted that this makes me an idiot. You seem to think it makes you bulletproof.”
Ellen’s smile faded.
For a few seconds they listened to the carnival breathing around them: coins hitting wooden counters, gulls complaining above the roofline, laughter bursting and breaking apart, a child somewhere refusing with great conviction to leave a plastic sword behind.
“I don’t think I’m bulletproof,” Ellen said.
“Then act like it.”
“I think if adults did something bad and everybody else keeps pretending they didn’t because they have money, then someone has to stop pretending.”
“That someone could be an adult.”
“I tried one.”
“Who?”
Ellen gave her a look.
Siobhan swore softly. “Declan does not count as an adult.”
“Tell him that. He’ll be devastated.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
Another song began on the bandstand. The singer missed the opening note so completely that several people cheered.
Ellen looked at the clock fixed high on Saint Brigid’s Hall.
Nine thirty-seven.
The reporter had said ten o’clock.
Old Tierney boathouse, Lough Dara road.
Come alone if you can.
Bring copies, not originals.
Do not tell your family.
The last instruction had made Ellen laugh when she first read it. By then the family was the whole reason she was going.
“Walk with me to the bicycle stand,” she said.
Siobhan’s expression hardened. “No.”
“I’m not asking permission.”
“Then I’m coming with you.”
“No.”
“I know where the boathouse is.”
Ellen stopped.
Siobhan lifted one shoulder. “You have mentioned it seventeen times this week.”
“I did not.”
“Fourteen, then.”
“You are not coming.”
“Why?”
“Because if this is stupid, one of us should remain available to say I told you so.”
Siobhan reached for the satchel. Ellen stepped back.
“Stop.”
“Give me half the papers.”
“What?”
“If you insist on going, don’t carry everything. Give me half. If someone takes the bag, they don’t get all of it.”
The idea was so practical Ellen felt offended she had not thought of it first.
She glanced around.
The crowd had thickened near the bandstand. No pale jacket. No one obviously looking at them.
“Fine,” she said.
They ducked behind the ring-toss stall, where a canvas side wall blocked the wind and most of the light. Ellen crouched and opened the satchel.
Siobhan’s face changed as she saw the files.
“Jesus, Ellen.”
“Keep your voice down.”
“You photocopied company documents?”
“The library machine does not ask moral questions.”
“You broke into your father’s office.”
“I used a hairpin.”
“That is still breaking in.”
“It was barely locked.”
“That is not a legal defence.”
“Since when are you legal counsel?”
“Since your actual family legal counsel may be stalking you around a carnival.”
Ellen froze.
Siobhan did too.
Neither spoke for a moment.
Then Ellen took the top third of the papers, folded them once, and pushed them into Siobhan’s canvas shoulder bag beneath a cardigan.
“Not half,” Siobhan said.
“It’s enough.”
“Ellen.”
“Take them home. Put them somewhere your mam won’t tidy.”
“That eliminates the entire house.”
“Under your mattress.”
“My mam changes the sheets.”
“In that hideous sewing basket.”
“It was my granny’s.”
“It’s still hideous.”
Siobhan closed her bag. “If you are not back by eleven, I call Declan.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“He’ll tell Da.”
“Then be back by eleven.”
Ellen buckled the satchel.
Siobhan caught her hand before she could stand.
“Listen to me. If anything feels wrong, leave. You do not owe a dead stranger your own life.”
Ellen looked at her friend’s fingers around hers.
“No,” she said quietly. “But somebody owed him the truth.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“Maybe not.”
“It absolutely is not.”
Ellen squeezed her hand. “Eleven.”
“Ten forty-five.”
“Eleven.”
“Ten fifty.”
“Done.”
They stood.
Siobhan’s eyes flicked over Ellen’s shoulder.
The humour left her face so fast Ellen felt it before she turned.
Declan was crossing the green.
He came quickly, not running, but with the determined stride of someone who had decided public embarrassment was preferable to whatever came next. He had put on a jacket over his shirtsleeves. His hair was damp at the temples.
When he reached them, his gaze went first to Ellen, then to the satchel, then to Siobhan’s bag.
He noticed too much.
“Give it to me,” he said.
Siobhan looked between them. “Hello to you too.”
“Go home, Siobhan.”
“No.”
Declan ignored her. “Ellen. Bag.”
“Still mine.”
“You cannot do this.”
“Watch me.”
“Da knows you were in the office.”
The carnival seemed to move half a step away from Ellen.
“How?”
Declan’s mouth tightened.
“How does he know?” she asked again.
“He knows files were moved.”
“So?”
“So he knows you’ve been asking questions. He asked me where you were.”
“And what did you say?”
“That I didn’t know.”
A small piece of fear inside Ellen changed shape.
“Why did you lie?”
“Because I’m standing here, aren’t I?”
“You could have told him I was at the carnival.”
“I told him you were with Siobhan.”
Siobhan lifted a hand. “Delighted to be useful.”
Declan lowered his voice. “Ellie, listen. Whatever you found, give it to me. Let me speak to him.”
“You have had two days.”
“I needed time.”
“You needed courage.”
His face flinched.
Ellen regretted it and did not take it back.
“Please,” he said.
It was the please that almost did it.
Not the family name. Not his warning. Not his size or the fact that he could have taken the satchel if he truly wanted. Just her older brother, scared and asking.
She thought of Patrick Sloane’s widow writing the same sentence three times in three different letters.
Please tell me what happened.
Please tell me what happened.
Please tell me what happened.
Ellen stepped around Declan.
He caught her arm.
Not hard this time.
“Who are you meeting?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“Do they know your age?”
She nearly laughed. “I’m meeting a reporter, not eloping.”
His grip tightened by accident.
“Which reporter?”
“I said no.”
“From the Harbour Gazette?”
Ellen said nothing.
Declan’s eyes closed briefly.
That was answer enough for him.
“Right,” he said. “Fine. Then I’m coming.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“The whole point is they need to know I’m not being managed by the family.”
“You are not going to a boathouse alone at ten at night.”
Siobhan made a small noise.
Ellen turned on her. “Seriously?”
“You told me by accident on Tuesday.”
Declan looked furious. “Lough Dara?”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Oh, now we’re worried about discretion?”
“Declan—”
“You’re not going.”
There it was.
The Tierney tone.
Not their father’s voice exactly. Declan was too young for that, too unsure. But the shape of it was the same: concern hardening into authority the second love failed to get obedience.
Ellen pulled her arm free.
“Do not do that.”
“Do what?”
“Turn into him because you’re frightened.”
Declan went still.
For the first time all night, Ellen saw anger overtake fear.
“Maybe I’m frightened because you have no idea what you’re walking into.”
“Then tell me.”
“I can’t.”
“Won’t.”
“Can’t.”
“Same family disease.”
His face changed again.
Ellen wished immediately that she had chosen any other words.
But neither of them apologised.
On the bandstand, someone announced the final raffle winner had finally been located. A cheer rose. Behind the cheer, a car engine started on the harbour road.
Ellen looked towards the sound.
A dark saloon pulled away from the kerb fifty yards beyond the green.
She could not see the driver.
Declan followed her gaze.
His face emptied.
“Who is that?” Ellen asked.
“No one.”
“Declan.”
“No one.”
“You know the car.”
“I said I don’t.”
“You didn’t say that.”
His eyes came back to hers.
Siobhan whispered, “Oh, God.”
Ellen had never understood until then that a lie could be frightening because of how quickly it arrived.
Declan reached for the satchel again.
Ellen stepped backwards.
“Ten fifty,” Siobhan said sharply. “Remember?”
Ellen nodded once.
Then she turned and ran.
Not away from them. Towards the bicycle stand.
Declan shouted her name.
She reached her bicycle, jerked the chain free, swung onto the seat and pushed hard into the road before he could catch up. Someone cursed as she cut past a parked van. Her skirt snagged briefly on the saddle. The satchel thumped against her hip.
Behind her, Siobhan shouted something she could not hear.
Then the carnival fell away.
The road towards Lough Dara climbed first, then narrowed between hedges. Ellen pedalled until her lungs hurt. Streetlights thinned. The coloured carnival bulbs became a glow behind her, then nothing.
She told herself Declan would follow.
She told herself she did not want him to.
She told herself the dark car had gone the other direction.
At the first bend she looked back.
No headlights.
At the second bend, still none.
She coasted for a few yards, letting the bicycle slow beneath her. The road here ran above the water, and through breaks in the hedge she could see the harbour lights far behind: cranes, ferries, warehouses, the long orange line of the quays. Tierney ships had used those waters before Ellen was born. Her father spoke about the company as if it were another relative, older than all of them and entitled to loyalty.
At dinner he said things like our people and our responsibility. He knew deckhands’ children by name at Christmas. He paid hospital bills nobody heard about until somebody else praised him for it. Ellen had never thought of him as cruel. That would have been easier.
The letters in her satchel were difficult because they had been written to a man who could be kind.
Mrs Sloane’s first letter had been polite. Patrick had raised concerns about the winch before the accident. Could someone please explain whether the maintenance report had been received?
The second was less polite.
The third had no greeting.
Please tell me what happened.
Ellen had read that line sitting cross-legged on the office carpet, the locked drawer open beside her, while rain tapped the windows and her father entertained two councillors downstairs. She had expected the next page to explain everything. Instead she found a typed note from the family solicitor recommending that all future contact with the widow be centralised.
Centralised.
Such a clean word.
As though grief were a delivery route.
The payment appeared six weeks later. It had no description beyond CONSULTATION / FINAL.
Ellen had stared at it until the numbers stopped being numbers and became a door somebody had closed.
The next morning she had asked her father, over toast, whether anybody had ever died working for the company.
Michael Tierney had looked up from the business pages.
“People die in every industry, Ellen.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
Her mother had told her not to start one of her moods before school.
Her father folded the newspaper.
“What have you heard?”
Not what do you mean.
Not why are you asking.
What have you heard.
Ellen had lied then. She said a teacher mentioned workplace safety. Her father studied her for another second, then reopened the paper.
“Most accidents are more complicated than the people looking backwards like to admit.”
That sentence had followed her for days.
Complicated.
It was the adult cousin of unfortunate. Both words seemed able to walk into a room, put a cloth over something ugly and call the job finished.
She began pedalling again.
The satchel knocked against her hip in time with the bicycle.
Some of the copies were missing now, safe with Siobhan. That mattered. For the first time since leaving the green, Ellen felt she had done one thing properly. If somebody took the bag, there would still be evidence somewhere else. If the reporter did not believe her, Siobhan had enough to prove she had not invented it. If her father searched her room, he would not find everything.
She almost turned back just to tell Siobhan she had been right.
Almost.
Then she imagined returning to the carnival and seeing Declan’s relief. He would take the satchel. He would promise to fix it. Her father would sit her down in the study and explain responsibility until the dead deckhand became a regrettable event in a larger story about livelihoods and reputation. By Monday the drawer would be empty. By Tuesday Ellen would be told she had misunderstood. By the following year, perhaps she would wonder whether she had.
That possibility frightened her more than being followed.
Not the lie.
Getting used to it.
The road dipped through trees. Lough Dara opened ahead, a dark sheet between the hills. Ellen knew every turn here. When she was ten, Declan had taught her to row badly from the old landing, laughing so hard when she dropped an oar that he nearly fell into the water. When she was twelve, she and Siobhan had hidden in the boathouse during a family garden party and eaten an entire plate of miniature pavlovas stolen from the kitchen. At fourteen, Ellen had carved her initials into the underside of the workbench and then panicked for a week that her father would notice.
The place belonged to her childhood.
That was why the reporter had chosen it after Ellen mentioned the empty property. Private enough to talk. Familiar enough that she would not be frightened.
Now she wondered whether familiarity had been mistaken for safety.
She looked behind her again.
Still no headlights.
Maybe the man from the carnival had never been following her. Maybe Declan’s reaction to the dark car had been about something else. Maybe fear, once invited in, simply started assigning itself to every shadow.
Ellen breathed out.
Ten fifty, she reminded herself.
If the reporter was late, she would wait ten minutes and leave. No heroics. No standing around to prove a point. She would go to Siobhan’s, ring Declan from there and decide what happened next with the copies already out of the house.
A plan.
Siobhan would be delighted to discover Ellen had one.
By the time she reached the old turnoff towards the Tierney summer property, her shirt stuck between her shoulder blades.
She slowed.
The lane to the boathouse was gravel and weeds, too rough to ride quickly. Trees crowded both sides, their branches knitting over the track. Beyond them, the lake showed in pieces—black, then silver, then black again when clouds crossed the moon.
Ellen dismounted.
The bicycle wheels crackled over stones.
Every sound became too exact.
The tick of cooling metal.
Her shoes on gravel.
The leather buckle tapping the satchel.
A night bird somewhere across the water.
She checked her watch.
Nine fifty-eight.
Perfect.
Nothing was wrong.
She was early enough to be brave.
The old boathouse appeared through the trees, a low dark shape at the water’s edge. It had once belonged to her grandfather, back when the family still pretended summer meant boats instead of business calls taken on terraces. Now one side sagged towards the lake and the wooden landing had been patched so many times it looked quilted.
There was no car.
No reporter.
No light.
Ellen stopped ten yards from the door.
“Hello?”
The lake answered against the pilings.
She considered leaving.
Siobhan’s voice came back to her with infuriating clarity: If anything feels wrong, leave.
Ellen looked at her watch again.
Ten o’clock.
She waited.
At ten-oh-two, headlights briefly moved through the trees on the upper road.
At ten-oh-three, they disappeared.
At ten-oh-four, Ellen heard a car door close somewhere behind her.
Not at the boathouse.
Up the lane.
She turned.
The path was empty.
“Declan?”
No answer.
The smart thing was to get on the bicycle and go.
The brave thing, she had always assumed, was the opposite of the smart thing.
That was childish. She knew that even then.
Still, she did not move.
Footsteps came down the gravel.
Slow.
Unhurried.
The person walking towards her was not trying to hide.
That frightened her more than running would have.
Ellen took the satchel off her shoulder and held it in both hands.
The figure appeared at the bend in the lane.
Pale summer jacket.
Dark trousers.
A familiar adult shape from rooms where children were expected to leave when money was discussed.
Ellen’s first feeling was relief.
Her second was shame for feeling it.
Her third was the clean, cold certainty that Siobhan had been right.
She stepped backwards towards the boathouse door.
The man kept coming.
“Where’s the reporter?” she called.
He did not answer the question.
“Ellen,” he said, with the weary patience adults used when they wanted a child to feel foolish. “Give me the bag.”
Behind her, the old landing creaked over black water.
Ellen tightened both hands around the satchel.
“No.”