Authors: Al Sarrantonio
Beatrice was at the park two days later.
“Where were you?” Anna demanded.
Beatrice laughed; today she had on a green blouse, which nearly matched the color of an acorn. There were newly fallen acorns around the shaded perimeter of the tree.
“My mother kept me in—I was being punished.” She laughed again.
“For what?”
“Are you always so serious? How old are you—three?”
“I’m five,” Anna responded.
“Well I’m almost seven, and I don’t like to do homework. Mrs. Greene sent home a note, and I was punished.” She smiled. “But here I am!”
Beatrice noted the scattered acorns at the base of the tree. “We’ll have to start with a new tree—if you want to play acorns again.”
“I do.”
Beatrice sighed. “Well I don’t. It’s too much work. Why don’t we just sit and tell stories?”
Anna stood still, and watched as Beatrice sat herself down with her back against the tree, brushing acorns out of her way.
“Well?” she said, looking at Anna. “Has anyone ever told you you’re funny looking?”
Beatrice laughed, and Anna walked purposefully to the tree and stood above her. She squatted on her haunches and touched the other girl.
Touch, look
.
She stared into Beatrice’s eyes, and Beatrice gave a little gasping sigh. Her head fell to one side and she sat motionless, staring into nothing.
Anna stared at her for a few moments, before straightening and walking to the black car.
“Take me home,” she said.
Samhain was as close to livid as he ever became. “You must understand,” he said, “how important it is for silence. The police were here, because of the car. Someone saw it leave the park. The priest did a good job of explanation, but this cannot happen again.”
Anna said nothing.
“Do you understand?” Samhain almost screeched.
“Of course.”
“The sixth Halloween is almost here. Detective Grant has found us, and we must leave. I have made arrangements. Mr. and Mrs. Finch—”
“I will attend to them.”
Samhain grew calmer, but his voice was now filled with something like curiosity. “I must ask you: why, exactly, did you kill the little girl?”
But Anna was already on the stairs, and did not answer.
The biggest bender of his life.
Grant had no idea how long it had been, though by the length of his beard stubble and the chill now in the air outside the open window, he knew it must have been at least a week. Maybe more. It had started innocently enough, with him staring at the wall or at the piece of paper Samhain had left for him in Massachusetts. “Don’t follow,” it had said, but of course Grant had come back to Orangefield and tried to find Samhain in every corner of the town. He had waited for a rash of what the locals called Sam Sightings, when the Lord of Death was supposedly (and sometimes actually) sighted by locals, in the woods, by certain trees, sometimes in town itself. There had always been Sam Sightings this time of year, ever since Grant had come to Orangefield as a young cop a lifetime ago.
But this year there had been none.
Grant had spent whole afternoons sitting in the lawn chair at Riley Gates’ farm, facing the fallow pumpkin ruts and waiting for Samhain to appear. The Lord of Death
had done so before. But all he had gained was a stiff back, and all he had witnessed was, amid the bang and buzz and whir of machinery, and the distant shouts of workers, the near-completion of Halloweenland next door. The Ferris wheel was done; Grant had watched as they tested it, the giant metal orb turning at a stately pace. He saw the main tent through a yawning burned-out gap in Riley’s house—it was a lurid shade of orange, with white piping.
One day before going back to the hotel he had driven to the front gate and stopped to see two more rides erected—a giant hollow can with straps on the inside to hold passengers in place while it spun and tilted, and a magnificent carousel, which must have been trucked in whole, and which now dominated the area just behind the ticket booth and just to the right of the nearly completed midway.
And there, one moist palm on the flank of a painted horse whose head was thrown back in a permanent openmouthed scream, was Dickens, staring out at him calmly.
The flapper of a hand raised in mock salute as Grant gunned the engine and turned around, leaving dust in his wake.
And that day, the last before the bender began, was when?
Grant shook his head, and went to the room’s sink and turned on the cold water. He lifted handfuls up, shocking his face until his eyes focused. He vigorously toweled himself dry and looked out the window. It was either dawn or dusk, the sky purpled.
He beheld the room, the perpetually-on computer screen glowing like a rectangular ghost, the litter of liquor bottles and beer cans and take-out food cartons and pizza boxes, a scatter of dropped clothing.
And nothing else.
No answers, not from the bottles, not from the cryptic note in his pocket, not in the streets or woods of Orangefield.
I’ve gone home.
Don’t follow me.
“I did, and you aren’t here. I know it. I know it in my gut.”
Long time no see.
That was the puzzler: why would Samhain even bother to taunt him? He had the girl, had hidden her for five years. Why give Grant any hint at all of where he was?
One thing Grant had come to know after all these years was that there was always a reason for what Samhain did.
Grant looked around for a partially full scotch bottle, but there wasn’t one. He went to the window and stared out at what he now realized was the rising sun in the east. So it was dawn.
Don’t follow me.
I’m going home.
And, suddenly, Grant knew where Samhain was.
Home.
He searched in the wreckage of his hotel room for his cell phone, and dialed a number, and made an airline reservation.
It was raining in Dublin when Aer Lingus flight 332 landed. It was four-thirty in the morning, Irish time, and the rain streaked the window next to Grant’s head. Everything looked surreal outside: rain, blue dark night going toward morning, the sharp pinpricks of airport lights. Grant could feel jet lag trying to grab him already—it was just around the time he would be going to sleep back in Orangefield. But, between driving and the overhead airline television sets glaring and just plain anticipation, and the fact that it wasn’t time to sleep yet, he hadn’t slept a wink.
Grant had been amazed: as soon as the Airbus 310 had hit the clouds over JFK Airport, the stewardesses and stewards had hit the aisles, selling merchandise. And they did a brisk business in the packed plane: cigarettes and booze at duty free prices, and there was even a catalog they distributed with all kinds of Gaelic goods for sale: crystal, woolen shawls, even a bodhran, a goatskin Irish drum. And then the televisions had flickered on overhead, showing American shows like the animated
The Simpsons,
as well as some insipid laugh-tracked BBC programs, and Grant had known he was in for a long flight. No old John Wayne movies for him tonight. Already he wanted one of those cigarettes they were selling, but of course smoking on the plane was prohibited.
And here he was now, snaking his way through customs with his passport clutched in his hand, towing his wheeled luggage like every other visitor to the ancestral homeland, and already wondering if he had made a mistake.
No—in his gut he knew he had done the right thing.
He was sure of it.
For the first time in days, weeks, Grant allowed himself to feel something like hope.
This was what Samhain had meant by “home.”
Samhain was in Ireland.
“Bill Grant, you old bastard!”
Weary as he was, Grant had to smile at the sight of Tom Malone’s face. It had hardly changed in the ten years since Grant had last seen him, in this same airport but in a different world.
Malone took him by the shoulders and then gave him a bear hug. They stood in the nearly empty Dublin Airport terminal as the day began to break on the streets outside. Grant saw through the big glass doors that it was still raining.
Malone held him at arm’s length, studying him closely. “My God, man, what’s happened to you? You look a hundred years old.”
“And you don’t,” Grant growled, trying to smile but failing.
“You’ll tell me all about it, yes?”
Grant nodded. “I can’t thank you enough for taking my call, and coming to get me, and everything else.”
“Bah,” Malone said, and Grant was amused by the faint brogue the former New York City cop had picked up
in Ireland. “Anything for an old friend. But then again, you’re still in the game, right?”
Grant shook his head. “Not anymore. Threw the badge on the desk a few weeks ago.”
“That bastard Farrow. I should have strangled him when he was a rookie in Queens. I’m sorry I ever sent him upstate to bother you. I should have stopped after I sent Riley Gates to Orangefield.”
Malone looked down at the Styrofoam cup in Grant’s hand. “Where did you get that swill?”
Grant pointed to a coffee machine against the far wall. “Nothing open yet.”
Malone pried the cup out of Grant’s hand and threw it in a nearby waste bin. He took the handle of Grant’s rolling suitcase away from him. “Follow me,” he said, and Grant followed.
An hour later found them in the lobby of the Burlington Hotel. Grant was amazed at the amount of activity—everywhere he looked were young businessmen and woman holding breakfast meetings. Waiters bustled, and there was the constant clang of placed silverware. Grant pushed the plate of scones away from him, full and content, and drained his third cup of good coffee. Malone’s fleshy, florid face regarded him closely.
“You really do look like shit,” he said.
Grant made a face. “Been a rough few years, Tom.”
Malone nodded. “I wanted to get back to the states when Rose died, but—”
“I told you not to come. I told everybody not to come. There was more going on than Rose dying.”
Malone looked puzzled.
Grant decided to back off. He let his voice go soft. “She was bad for a long time, and then she got worse,
ended up in Killborne mental hospital. That was the second time. She was just so . . . unhappy all the time.”
Malone sat back in his chair and blew out a breath. “Nothing like that first time we all came over here, eh? You and Rose, me and Florence, and Riley and . . . what was her name?”
Grant smiled. “You knew about them breaking up before Riley died, yes?”
“Of course! He called her The Witch, for Pete’s sake!”
Grant let himself remember for a moment.
“Riley was a great guy, and a damn good cop,” Malone said. “Better than any of us.”
Grant nodded. “Amen.”
“God, we were all pretty young back then. Only you were even younger, you and Rose. The babies of the bunch. We had a good time that trip. Saw everything there was to see. Remember that bus tour? Only the six of us and those two couples from Michigan? We had the whole damn bus to ourselves! And that fellow, the bus driver, with his tour itinerary pointing out this and that with his microphone and driving that damn huge bus around curves the rest of us couldn’t have negotiated with a motor bike! What did we see, then? Nearly the whole western part of the damn country! It was great, Bill. And when it was all over . . .”
“Riley and I went home, and you and Flo stayed here.”
Malone nodded with satisfaction. “Yes! Hell, I just had my twenty years in by then anyway, and I knew love when I saw it. Would have been crazy to do anything else. And it was really great until Flo passed on, and now it’s just merely wonderful.”
Grant nodded, letting the moment pass.
“So . . .” Malone began, diplomatically.
Grant leveled his gaze at his old friend.
“What do you know about Samhain?” Grant asked.
They set out the next morning, which dawned blue and bright. Grant didn’t want to get out of bed, but forced himself to. He felt as if he’d been rolled over by a log. He knew it would take a couple of days to get the jet lag out of him, and that there was nothing to do but fight through it. The bottle of Paddy Irish whiskey they had shared the night before (Malone had scoffed when Grant requested scotch, and after the second drink Grant had to agree with his old friend that Irish whiskey was, indeed, smoother and easier on the belly than any scotch) had helped him sleep but also made him even more reluctant to rise.
But Malone was there in the doorway, hitting the back of a frying pan with a spoon and yelling, “Get up, you bastard! No laggards in my house!” and ten minutes later Grant was in the tiny toilet, shaving and making himself presentable in whatever way he could.