Mel was a lot more useful than Damien. She was tall and skinny and Scottish, with muscled brown arms and sandy hair in a messy ponytail, and she sat like a boy, feet planted firmly apart.
“Maybe you know this already, but she’s from the estate,” she said straightaway. “Or from somewhere round here, anyway.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“The local kids come around the site sometimes. There’s not much else for them to do during the summer. They mostly want to know if we’ve found buried treasure, or skeletons. I’ve seen her a few times.”
“When was the last time?”
“Maybe two, three weeks ago.”
“Was she with anyone?”
Mel shrugged. “Nobody that I remember. Just a bunch of other kids, I think.”
I liked Mel. She was shaken but refusing to show it; she was fidgeting with an elastic band, cat’s-cradling it into shapes between her callused fingers. She told basically the same story as Damien, but with a lot less coaxing and petting.
“At the end of the tea break, Mark told me to go mattock back around the ceremonial stone so we could see the base. Damien said he’d go, too—we don’t usually work on our own, it’s boring. Partway up the slope we saw something blue and white on the stone. Damien said, ‘What’s that?’ and I said, ‘Somebody’s jacket, maybe.’ When we got a bit closer I realized it was a kid. Damien shook her arm and checked whether she was breathing, but you could tell she was dead. I never saw a dead body before, but—” She bit the inside of her cheek, shook her head. “It’s bullshit, isn’t it, when they say, ‘Oh, he looked like he was just sleeping?’ You could tell.”
We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches. I thought of the stern Victorian determination to keep death in mind, the uncompromising tombstones: Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by, As you are now so once was I; As I am now so will you be.…Now death is un-cool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself. The body had shocked Mel Jackson far more deeply than it would have the most sheltered Victorian virgin.
“Could you have missed the body if it had been on the stone yesterday?” I asked.
Mel glanced up, wide eyed. “Ah, shit—you mean it was there all the time we were…?” Then she shook her head. “No. Mark and Dr. Hunt went round the whole site yesterday afternoon, to make a list of what needs doing. They’d have seen it—her. We only missed it this morning because we were all down the bottom of the site, at the end of the drainage ditch. The way the hill slopes, we couldn’t see the top of the stone.”
She hadn’t seen anyone or anything unusual, including Damien’s weirdo: “But I wouldn’t have anyway. I don’t take the bus. Most of us who aren’t from Dublin live in this house they rented for us, a couple of miles down the road. Mark and Dr. Hunt have cars, so they drive us back. We don’t go past the estate.”
The “anyway” interested me: it suggested that Mel, like me, had her doubts about the sinister tracksuit. Damien struck me as the type who would say just about anything if he thought it would make you happy. I wished I had thought of asking him whether the guy had been wearing stilettos.
Sophie and her baby techs had finished up with the ceremonial stone and were working their way outwards in a circle. I told her that Damien Donnelly had touched the body and leaned over it; we’d need his prints and hair, for elimination. “What an idiot,” Sophie said. “I suppose we should be thankful he didn’t decide to cover her up with his coat.” She was sweating in her coveralls. The boy tech covertly ripped a page out of his sketchbook, behind her back, and started over.
We left the car at the site and walked round to the estate by the road (I still remembered, somewhere in my muscles, going over the wall: where the foothold was, the scrape of the concrete on my kneecap, the jar of landing). Cassie demanded to go to the shop on the way; it was well past two o’clock and we might not have another chance at lunch for a while. Cassie eats like a teenage boy and hates missing meals, which normally I enjoy—women who live on weighed portions of salad annoy me—but I wanted to get today over with as quickly as possible.
I waited outside the shop, smoking, but Cassie came out with two sandwiches in plastic cartons and handed one to me. “Here.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Eat the damn sandwich, Ryan. I’m not carrying you home if you faint.” I have in fact never fainted in my life, but I do tend to forget to eat until I start getting irritable or spacy.
“I said I’m not hungry,” I said, hearing the whine in my voice, but I opened the sandwich anyway: Cassie had a point, it was likely to be a very long day. We sat on the curb, and she pulled a bottle of lemon Coke out of her satchel. The sandwich was officially chicken and stuffing, but it tasted mainly of plastic wrapper, and the Coke was warm and too sweet. I felt slightly sick.
I don’t want to give the impression that my life was blighted by what happened at Knocknaree, that I drifted through twenty years as some kind of tragic figure with a haunted past, smiling sadly at the world from behind a bittersweet veil of cigarette smoke and memories. Knocknaree didn’t leave me with night terrors or impotence or a pathological fear of trees or any of the other good stuff that, in a made-for-TV movie, would have led me to a therapist and redemption and a more communicative relationship with my supportive but frustrated wife. To be honest, I could go for months on end without ever thinking about it. Occasionally some newspaper or other would run a feature on missing people and there they would be, Peter and Jamie, smiling from the cover of a Sunday supplement in grainy photographs made premonitory by hindsight and overuse, between vanished tourists and runaway housewives and all the mythic, murmuring ranks of Ireland’s lost. I’d see the article and notice, detachedly, that my hands were shaking and it was hard to breathe, but this was purely a physical reflex and only lasted a few minutes anyway.
I suppose the whole thing must have had its effects on me, but it would be impossible—and, to my mind, pointless—to figure out exactly what they were. I was twelve, after all, an age at which kids are bewildered and amorphous, transforming overnight, no matter how stable their lives are; and a few weeks later I went to boarding school, which shaped and scarred me in far more dramatic, obvious ways. It would feel na?ve and basically cheesy to unweave my personality, hold up a strand and squeal: Golly, look, this one’s from Knocknaree! But here it was again, all of a sudden, resurfacing smugly and immovably in the middle of my life, and I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.
“That poor kid,” Cassie said suddenly, out of nowhere. “That poor, poor little kid.”