“One of the downsides of being young,” Hugo told us all, apparently apropos of nothing, “is that you worry too much. Really, you do. It’s all going to be fine.” He laid a hand on Sallie’s curls, smiling at us. “Worse things happen at sea, as they say. Now, where shall we eat?”
We ate in the dining room—the thought of crime-scene dinner theater, as Leon put it, was well over everyone’s weirdness limit. The glossy old mahogany table was almost never used except for Christmas dinner, and I had to wipe off a film of dust. Susanna had closed the shutters on the garden and the overhead light was weak, leaving the room a smeared, confusing yellow. Nobody said very much; even Zach was subdued, picking through his pasta and pushing the mushrooms to one side without bitching about them. Sallie was yawning.
“We should go, after this,” Susanna said, glancing at Tom. “Will you guys be OK?”
“We’ll be fine,” Hugo said. “And I’m sure they’ll be packing up for the night soon enough, too. It’s you I’m worried about, leaving. Is that reporter woman still there?”
“I doubt it,” Tom said. He slid open the doors to the living room, went to the window and put one eye to the crack between the shutters. “Gone,” he said, coming back to the table.
“For now,” Leon said darkly.
Somewhere, a sound started up: a low, nasty, animal snarl that built rapidly till it vibrated all through the air, making it impossible to tell where it was coming from. One by one, our heads lifted; Hugo laid down his fork. It took all of us a moment to recognize it for what it was: a chainsaw, out in the garden, setting to work.
* * *
?When the daylight went, around eight, the cops went too. Rafferty came in to give us our update first, just like he had promised: “The tree surgeon hates my guts,” he said ruefully, picking chips of bark off his trousers. “That tree’s over two hundred years old, apparently, and there aren’t a lot of them left; Dutch elm disease got most of them. When I asked him to cut down a perfectly healthy one, I thought he was going to walk out on me. Didn’t blame him, either.”
“Is it done?” Hugo asked.
“Ah, God, no. We have to go slow: document everything, like I said. But we should have it done by the end of tomorrow. We’ll leave an officer here overnight.” At our blank stares: “It’s not that we think you’re in danger, nothing like that. We’re just ticking the boxes: we have to be able to say we had our eye on that tree the whole time. He’ll stay out in the garden, won’t be in your way at all.”
The thought of one of these guys wandering around the garden while we slept made my teeth clench—I had been checking my watch more and more obsessively, maybe at six o’clock they would fuck off and leave us to ourselves again, maybe at seven, surely to Jesus they had to knock off by eight—but we very obviously didn’t have a say in this. “Does he need anything?” Melissa asked.
“No, he’ll look after himself. Thanks very much.” Rafferty dropped the chips of wood into his jacket pocket and gave us a nod and the charm-smile, already turning towards the door. “See you in the morning.”
Hugo almost never turned on the television, but we watched the nine o’clock news that night. The story was fairly high up, below the incomprehensible EU machinations and the Northern Ireland political spat but above the sports: the brunette in the coral coat doing her somber voice in front of our steps, human remains found in a Dublin garden, Gardaí are at the scene; a shot of the laneway, looking bleak and run-down with wind twitching the forlorn clusters of dead leaves at the bottom of the wall, white figure climbing out of the white van, crime-scene tape across the garden door; anyone with any information please contact the Gardaí.
“There,” Hugo said, when the newsreader moved on to football. “It’s all very interesting. I never thought I’d have a ringside seat at a criminal investigation. There are an awful lot of people involved, aren’t there?” He maneuvered himself up off the sofa, joint by joint, and reached for his cane. He seemed a lot less unsettled by the whole thing than the rest of us, which I supposed made a certain amount of sense. “If it’s going to start all over again in the morning, though, I need to get some sleep.”
“Me too,” I said, switching off the telly. Melissa and I had started going to bed whenever Hugo did—we didn’t let him do the stairs by himself any more, if we could help it, and we liked to be within earshot when he was changing for bed—but although those made a convenient excuse, I couldn’t help being aware that I was also more exhausted than I’d been in weeks.
On the landing outside our bedrooms we stood for a moment looking at one another, in the dim glow of the stained-glass pendant lamp, as if there was some crucial thing that needed to be said and we were all hoping someone else knew what it was. It had occurred to me a few times by this point that it would make sense to ask Hugo whether he had any idea who the skull could be, but there didn’t seem to be any way to do it.
“Good night,” he said, smiling at us. “Sleep tight.” For a second I had the crazy impression that he was thinking about hugging us, but then he turned and went into his room and closed the door.
“He seems OK about all this,” I said to Melissa, in our room, as we put away the pile of clean clothes I had brought up and left on our bed that morning. It felt like weeks ago.
She nodded, rolling my socks into neat balls. “I think he is. It’s taking his mind off being sick.”
“What about you? Are you OK with it? I mean, this really isn’t what you signed up for.”
She thought about it, hands moving deftly, eyes down. “I’m not sure what I am,” she said, in the end. “I suppose it depends a lot on whether there are more bones in the tree or not.”
“Baby,” I said. I stopped sliding T-shirts into a drawer and put my arms around her from behind, pulling her close. “I know it’s creepy as hell. But whatever’s in there, they’ll get rid of it tomorrow. You should’ve gone back to your place for the night.”
Melissa shook her head, a quick decisive snap. “It’s not that. They’re just bones. I don’t think I believe in ghosts, and even if they’re out there, I don’t think the bones make any difference. I’d just like to know. A skull could have got there loads of ways. But a whole skeleton . . .”
“Rafferty said the tree’s over two hundred years old. Even if there’s a skeleton in there, it’s Victorian or something.”
“Then would it really be the Guards doing all this? Wouldn’t it be archaeologists?”
“They might not be able to tell the age straight off. They probably have to do tests. And there is an archaeologist. Rafferty said so.”
“You’re probably right.” She leaned back against my chest, hands coming up to cover mine. “I’d just like to know what we’re dealing with. That’s all.”
I kissed the top of her head. “I know. Me too.”
She tilted her head back to examine my face, upside down. “And you? Are you OK with all this?”
“I’m fine.” And when her face stayed upturned, waiting for more: “Well, it’s not what I had planned for the weekend. And yeah, I’d love them to just disappear. But it’s not a problem. Just a pain in the arse.”
Apparently I sounded convincing, or at least convincing enough. “Good,” Melissa said, smiling, and reached up an arm to pull my head down and kiss me, and then she went back to rolling socks.