Mercy of St Jude (29 page)
Still, there was one obstacle she couldn't face. It was only when Mona Burke began to question her hesitation that Mercedes knew she had to deal with it.
She chose a cool fall Saturday morning. Rising before the sun, she set off along the back trail; she did not want to meet anyone along the way. Dressed in warm clothes and sensible shoes, she made her way through the low bush at the edge of the woods, gradually heading into denser growth. She'd travelled this route often as a girl, back in the naiveté of childhood when she'd taken her environment, and her life, for granted.
Yet somehow it seemed new, the auburn of autumn, the scarlet reds of the falling leaves, the bushes and trees in emerald and jaded greens. Nothing moved except the birds.
The house appeared alone in the distance. She walked resolutely towards it.
The back door was missing and most of the windows were smashed. Broken glass littered the ground. Garbage had gathered in tight piles in the windswept corners. Mercedes did not care about the exterior. She stepped over the debris and through the door.
For years, against her will, she had pictured the freeze-frames that would slap her in the face if she ever walked into that house again. But nothing happened. Harmless memories drifted through her mind; she and Callum and Joe huddled around the stove to stay warm, Callum helping her with homework, Joe stirring porridge on cold winter mornings. It was nothing like she had dreaded for so long.
The mattress from her father's daybed lay on the floor. Sticking out from under it she saw a nylon stocking and a pair of soiled underwear. The bed on which Farley had sprawled drunkenly so often had been put to other uses during her absence. At the stairwell she hesitated, unsure if she was ready to take those last steps. She heard a meow. A thin black cat sashayed around her ankles, pressing his raised back into her calves. In fine feline form, the animal started up, his haunches gliding seductively. Each foot forward had a confidence, a certainty of belonging, a grace that only a cat could possess in a stranger's house. She felt compelled to follow.
At the top, the cat stretched and yawned, his tiny mouth opening larger than his whole face had ever seemed. He continued towards her bedroom. So did Mercedes.
Her progress up to that point had been so smooth that she was unprepared for what happened next. She felt an immense pressure pushing against her, as if the walls were caving in, forcing her to the floor, while at the same time, her mind was bombarded with images: the bloody knife, the bloodlust in his eyes, her father's blood, blood everywhere. She smelt again his stinking breath, felt again his body pressing against her, pushing into her, then the knife, the knife cutting.
She clawed at the floor, afraid to open her mouth. She struggled to breathe through her nose, but it was as if no oxygen could permeate. She gagged. Nothing rose from her belly but a sour slime that burnt her throat. She stumbled from the room, down the stairs and out into the fresh, crisp air.
When her vision cleared, she was astounded to be faced with the quiet harmony of before. How could such tranquility exist next to that house? She swung around to face it, stared hard at it, waited for it to show its true self. It stood there, harmless.
A fresh burst of rage struck her, at once fuelled and dampened by the sheer incongruity of the place. She forced herself to go back inside. She marched upstairs. She crossed the hall, her heart beating the devil inside her chest. Nausea threatened; she shoved it back. She stopped, turned, looked inside.
Nothing remained except the bed frame. After Callum had left that night, she'd stripped the room. The bloody mattress she'd hauled beneath the house where she hacked at it until it was just a mess of stuffing to blaze in the wood stove. She made similar work of the blankets. She scoured the walls and floors, every inch over which the bodies might have passed, and then she cleaned the rest of the house as well. By the time she was finished, two days had passed, forty-eight hours in which she'd worked her fingers past layers of skin, trying to wipe out all memory of that night.
If only it were that easy.
While any physical evidence may have been disposed of seven years before, nothing short of setting the house aflame could match the fire that burned within Mercedes. On her hands and knees on the bedroom floor, she searched each board for signs of blood, a smeared fingerprint, streaks of brown.
Surely some stain would remain, some proof of her shattered life. She crawled along, her nose almost touching the floor as her fingertips traced the grain.
Finally, she spotted an irregular darkening in the wood. She analysed this, carefully considering if something else might have caused it, something other than her father's blood beating an arc to the floor, or Paddy's blood, or her own.
Convinced at last, she rose. Raising the window, she stared out at the spot where she imagined he must have spied in on her. Gathering all her saliva in her mouth, she leaned her head out and spat the whole wad in the direction of the woods. Then she shut the window and pulled the shade.
Descending the stairs, her fury mounted again, transcending all rational impulses. The only thing that saved the house from instant incineration was her lack of a match.
In the end she was grateful. Paddy Griffin had taken her innocence, her childhood, and any hope for a normal life. All she had left was this house and the good memories it evoked, time spent with Callum and Joe before they went away, before her life changed forever. More importantly, she had the possibility of dignity as a useful member of St. Jude. She could not allow Paddy Griffin to take that from her too.
Over the next week Mercedes dragged every item in the house either outside to the burn pile or upstairs to her old room. There was nothing worth keeping, in her opinion, but one of her brothers might want something someday. She left that room untouched, except for the padlock she installed. She kept the key on a chain around her neck.
Mercedes moved back into the house a month later, alone except for a large black dog that rarely left her side. The structure was actually solidly built with a good foundation, and she spent the next few years renovating it. The men she hired knocked down some walls and erected new ones. They painted and sanded, they shingled and gutted, they replaced windows and doors.
Except the front screen door. They fixed that up as best they could, but it still had that noisy hinge, even on stormy winter nights. Mercedes wanted to know when someone was on her doorstep.
Since their night at Dewey's, Gerry had left a string of messages. Annie had ignored them all. Far from playing hard to get in some coquettish game, she honestly did not want to see him. She felt she'd compromised her standards, which she might have been able to stomach if he hadn't lied to her, even if it was a lie of omission.
So when Gerry stopped by the house the next weekend when she was out in St. Jude, Annie was far from pleased, and even less so when she heard her father inviting him in. She threw her book on her bed and marched downstairs to find Gerry sitting at the table across from Dermot. Lucinda was chopping carrots at the counter.
“And how are you today, Gerry?” Lucinda was saying. She was too polite to ask him what he was doing there but she cast a suspicious glance at Annie standing stiffly in the doorway.
Gerry smiled. “Fine, thanks, Mrs. Byrne.” He did not look at Annie.
“Saw your mother down at the church earlier.” Lucinda slashed open a bag of potatoes. “She must have a reservation in heaven, the time she spends in there.”
“So Gerry,” said Dermot, giving his wife a wary eye, “do you run into many from home at the university? Nice to see a familiar face now and then, what?”
“Yes, it sure is. Like yesterday, I ran into Cathy Green.”
“Cathy, lovely girl, she is. And quite the looker. Too bad that Cyril Maher got to her first, eh?” Dermot said with a saucy wink.
“Cyril's a lucky one, all right. We had a fine talk, me and Cathy, so good we were both late for class.” He looked straight at Annie. “Some conversations are like that, especially when they're about people you know. Right Annie?”
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the Byrne kitchen was so busy with people coming and going and everyday life that Annie's discomfort would likely have gone unnoticed. But now she could feel her mother's eyes studying her.
“Yeah, right. You must be here for that book you wanted,”
Annie said with as civil a tone as she could muster. “Come on downstairs.”
She led them straight to the far corner of the cramped basement room that had served as a high school hangout. Gerry had never been there.
He flashed a sheet of paper in her face. “Read this before you say another word.”
“Don't you be telling me what to do, Gerry Griffin!”
“Would you just listen for once?” His mouth tightened, puckering the small scar on his lip.
Never had she seen him so mad, even as a kid being teased about his father, or lack of one. She wasn't sure what to think of this new side of him, but she did shut up.
“You think you know everything,” he railed on, “but just for one frigging minute try to pretend you're not the three wise men all rolled up into one.” They glared at each other, the musty basement air heavy between them.
She snatched the paper and started to read. In her hand was a financial agreement, including interest, between Gerard Griffin and Mercedes Hann, from the office of Tom Kennedy â a fully legal document. “But Cathy saidâ”
“I know what Cathy said.” He blew out an exasperated breath. “The truth is, your aunt did offer to pay. But I didn't feel right about it so she agreed to lend me the money at the family rate. But I never told Ma. She'd be fit to be tied if she knew.”
“Sorry, it's justâ¦after I went and begged and still didn't get a dime, and thinking she was paying everything for you, it was so rotten.”
Annie felt humiliated and strangely jealous all at once. Mercedes and Gerry's relationship had always bothered her but she'd never stopped to figure out why she let it matter so much.
“She thinks a lot of you, Annie.”
“Yeah, sure, that's why she offered to pay for you and not me,” she said, freshly stung. They'd obviously talked about her. “Can we just leave her out of it?”
“Fine by me. There's something else I wanted to ask you anyway.”
“What?” Annie only wanted the conversation to end so she could go hide in her bedroom.
But then he moved closer. “It's about that night we went to Dewey's.”
She was acutely aware of her heartbeat, and that it, like her breathing, was quicker than before.
“I had a really good time that night, Annie. I thought you did too.”
“Yeah,” she mumbled. “I guess so.”
“That's why I was so confused when you didn't call me back.”
“Sorry about that.” She looked down at the floor. Her hair fell forward from behind her left ear.
“That's okay now.” He reached up and tucked her hair back in place. He did it slowly, his finger seeming to linger an extra second on her ear lobe. “But I was wondering, do you want to do it again sometime?”
A woodsy aroma of aftershave drifted past her nose. “Um, like, how...I mean⦔ she mumbled, the opposite of the poised woman she dreamed of being.
“You know⦔ His voice took on a determined tone. “Go out on a real date?”
“Okayâ¦yeah, sure. Back in town though, not here,” she said, her own usually firm voice nothing but a throaty mumble.
“Right,” he agreed instantly. “Let's wait till we're back at school.”
Silence hung about them for several seconds.
“How about Friday night?” he asked, his voice now as low as hers.
Their bodies seemed to be tilting inward, but whether it was to better hear each other or from some libidinal gravitational pull, she wasn't sure.