The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 Read online

  When the soup arrived steaming hot, he asked her what she judged the ring to be worth—had her grandda ever mentioned it in passing? In response her hand darted from beneath his own to hide in the shadows of her lap. “Mister,” she whispered.

  “What is it?”

  “Over there. Is it not herself?”

  Back over his shoulder he looked. Herself it was indeed. Peggy across the crowd, Peggy and a man, a man he’d never before set eyes on, leaving the place together, a couple, laughing, tipsy, her arm about his back as she smooched his cheek, his hand on the full of her fine, round rear.

  Lafferty listened to the blood clambering in his ear, the sound of a deal being sealed.

  He parted the coarse green curtain, raising up a cloud of dust. Rattigan’s Motor Court, an apt appellation. He was accustomed to cheap rooms, some of the happiest moments of his life had been squandered in cheap rooms, and he could only hope this would prove to be another. The hardest part was the waiting. Keeping the girl on an even keel. Keeping himself on one as well, his heart still smarting at the revelation of his wife’s perfidy. But Lafferty, ever the optimist, viewed it as motivation, pure and simple. Opportunity beating his door in. Outside the twilight lingered till he thought it would never come to an end.

  The little motorway in front led into Ballybeg, on the outskirts of which lay the church of St. Brigid, behind which lay the moss-covered graveyard, within which lay Mrs. Bernadette Moore, the granny of Roseena Brown. They’d driven by so he could see for himself the lay of the land, exactly as she’d described, the isolation of it, isolation enough at any rate, after midnight. Now the trick was getting midnight here. And Lafferty with his bowels raging perilously.

  As great and tempting as the reward might be, the cost was steep. There was, for one thing, the matter of the manual labor necessary to dislodge six feet of good, solid Ballybeg earth; Mrs. Lafferty had not raised her boy to work with his hands, and he’d always found hard labor distasteful. Not to mention the grisly and ghastly nature of communion with a corpse.

  “Mister.” Eena curled on her side in the bed, blanket pulled up to her chin. Underneath she was naked, quiet and still and lost in her thoughts, every bit the opposite of himself, pacing the floor in his boxers. “Maybe it isn’t such a good idea at that. Maybe we should call the whole thing off.”

  Lafferty paused at the window, giving the twilight another dusty glimpse. The first notion that popped into his mind, he was not proud to admit, was of himself carrying on, on his own, without her assistance at all. He knew everything he needed to know, the ring was there waiting like a potato in the ground, and how much assistance could she offer at any rate, wee little thing that she was. He would have to do the heavy lifting. But he overcame his selfish inclination. He was nothing if not a moral man. He looked at her there curled in the bed, the size of an orphan. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” he said, crawling into the bed behind her, gathering her up in his arms.

  “I’m scared,” she said, her heart pounding the cage of her ribs.

  “Aren’t you after telling me your granny would want you to have it? That she’d give it to you herself if she could? After all your troubles, all you been through, all the torment your man Ray has caused you, look at it as your just deserts.”

  She was still, a captured kitten.

  “Think past today. There’s a good girl. Think past the unpleasantness to the rewards that’ll follow. Think of us free and easy on our own, living the good life.”

  She was quiet for a long while, and he hoped the idea was soothing her, though still he could feel the working of her heart. “And what about Peggy, Mister?”

  What about Peggy indeed. His face began to burn. “Her just deserts as well,” he said.

  “How did you end up with the likes of her in the first place?”

  “Young and ignorant, I suppose. Seemed at the time like the proper thing to do. She was up the pole, so it was the honorable thing.”

  “And where’s the child then?”

  “After all that, she lost it.”

  Eena never turned. Her ear sticking up through her hair like a cookie there for him to nibble on. “Lost it,” said she, “or told you she lost it?”

  In the shadows of the hedgerow Peggy’s little brown Ford was invisible from the motorway. He wondered if she’d called the cops to report it stolen. Behind the church of mossy stone, the steeple glimmering in the black of the night with the light of a hidden moon, the graveyard climbed along a sloping hill. Beside it a row of trees all slanted and hunched from the wind through the years, like fingers pointing in from the sea. Lafferty waist-deep in the grave of Mrs. Bernadette Moore, his shirt clinging to his chest with the sweat, stinking of it, his hands on fire from the handle of the spade—Peggy’s spade he borrowed from her garden. Eena perched on a neighboring stone, sitting morose and worried, knees clapped together, fiddling with the torch in her hand she never once lit, like the candle on the chest in her room.

  “Could you spell me a minute, love?” said Lafferty, wiping the sweat from his face.

  She tried, but she was useless as tits on a bull, every other shovelful tipping and falling back into the hole. The spade was lanky in her hands, and she wielded it as though she were uncertain which end to stick into the ground. Reminded Lafferty of her awkward and clumsy way with a tray full of dishes, or how she was in the bed whenever he tried to teach her a new trick, forever shy and clumsy, ill-equipped for the task at hand. But by God earnest and eager. When she was embarrassed, or hard at work, or deep in thought, the tips of her ears became red.

  He caught his breath, looked up at the sky, gray notions of clouds scudding across it. Down across the slope past the church the village lay dark and quiet, save for the odd barking of a dog. A spot of light here, another there. Lafferty was soon impatient to take the spade from her hands. So close he could nearly taste it, the gold like icing on a cupcake, the sticky star clusters of emeralds. He considered she might be wrong, that maybe her old grandda was a liar—for wasn’t it after all too easy? A blow to his dreams to be sure, but he found, nearly to his surprise, the shattering of her dreams his foremost concern. He could imagine her all hollow and sad, imagine her shrinking, drying up, blowing away. And he found the oddest thing happening to his train of thoughts, found it twisting and heading down the side track. For it was this thing, the shattering of her dream, he was bound to deter, for if the worst were to happen he would take her, hold her, find the joy for her, somewhere, somehow. He was nothing if not an optimistic man, and in all his exhilaration, perched here on the verge of joy, Lafferty felt such a love for the girl struggling in the hole he wanted to pick her up and squeeze her. So there it was. The fortune scarcely in his mind at all, the joy the ring would bring her having surpassed the worth in value, and so he took the spade from her hands, helped her up out of the hole, and set about his business. He’d never felt more noble, and the feeling of it brought a shiver to his skin, a tear to his eye.

  By the time he was up to his chin in the dirt, nobility was fading fast. Exhaustion was only the half of it. The unholiness of the whole bloody project, the graveyard, the smell of earth and sweat, the girl on the stone, the half-lit sky, the wind twisting through the trees, wasn’t it all beginning to play on his mind. Wasn’t he beginning to worry there was no one buried at the bottom of this hole at all, that he could dig all the way to Pakistan and come up empty. Wasn’t he beginning to feel the panic of being down in the grave, the prospect grabbing him by the throat and squeezing tight that he might never come up out of it again. My mam always told me I’d end up digging dirt for a living, he said. But Eena up above never uttered a word of response, causing Lafferty to wonder if he’d really said it aloud or only thought it, or maybe only dreamt it. And then to wonder if his mam had in truth ever uttered the words, though he was fairly certain she had, as she’d never had a good word to spare him or his da, when indeed his da was home with them at all. For a long time he pictured her there in fro
nt of the stove in the dark tenement, the smoke lifting the smell of frying rashers, her back to him, her hand clenched up in a fist on the side of her apron, and the sight of it stayed with him till his shovel knocked on wood.

  “Are you there, Mister?”

  Lafferty might have grunted. The exhilaration was back, jumbled up with a grand dollop of apprehension, as he cleared off the top of the box. He knelt on the lid, on the lower half, and when he reached up to swing it open, he hesitated. He found he couldn’t lift the thing up. There was no physical barrier to him doing so, but he found he couldn’t lift the thing up at all.

  “Mister?” The whispered word sweet as an onion. Lafferty looked up at the head of her peering down. “What are you waiting for?”

  Lafferty stood. “Could you give us a kiss for courage?” She had to lie on the ground to do so, and that was the way they held one another, both perpendicular against the dirt, arms embracing, cheeks touching, tears mingling. He wasn’t surprised to find her weeping, too, for now the circuit was joined, the electricity coursing through them, locked there together and for good. “Okay then,” said he. “Okay.”

  He looked down at the box beneath his feet. “Will the smell of it be something awful?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. She’s been down there so long.”

  “Will she be dreadful? All rotted and the like?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. All dried up by now, I’d suppose.”

  Nevertheless he held his breath and closed his eyes and pulled up the top of the lid. Warm air rose up to his face. It was the bravest thing he ever did. It was an inanimate object in the box, he told himself, and he did what he had to do. Finally he stood, turning his face up again toward Eena, standing up looking down. “I have it.”

  “From off her finger?”

  “Of course from off her finger. From right where your grandda placed it.”

  “That one’s the fake.”

  “What fake?”

  “That’s not the real one. That’s the replica, crafted to look like the genuine article.”

  “You never mentioned a fake.”

  “The real one’s tucked beneath her. Underneath her arse.”

  Lafferty’s mind stalled in the processing of the words, as he stared at the black of the dirt, the fake ring clutched in his fist.

  “Just grab it, Mister. I’ll explain it to you later.”

  And so he did. He took a deep breath, diving in again. Never let the air out of him till he was standing once more. Dizzy, his mind still spinning. “Got it?” said she. He nods. “Hand it up then,” and so he did.

  She tilted her head as she took it, sticking it straight in the pocket of her jeans. He drew in a great chestful of air, all the dread leaking out of him, and, reaching up to take her hand, doesn’t he glimpse the oddest flash, too feeble for lightning, and doesn’t he hear the faintest roar, too weak for thunder, a sight and a sound he could put together only after the fact as the back of the shovel coming barreling gangways toward his face at great velocity, behind which was Eena, the wee girl swinging the thing for all she was worth, like a champion hurler on the pitch.

  Was he ever truly out? He was never truly certain, for it seemed as though no time had passed at all till he found himself slumped in the corner of the hole, on the lid of the box, white stars in his head drifting away, slowly letting blackness seep back in. And all the while the sight of Peggy in his mind, standing over him with her frying pan. He crawled up out of the hole, dirt crumbling back in with a rattle on the lid. Felt the lump on the side of his head, hair matted down in the dampness there. Down across the graveyard by the hedgerow, Peggy’s car was gone. A light or two down across the village. No sounds at all now, the dog having gone to sleep, or having been murdered, just the whisper of a breeze restless through the trees. Lafferty picked up the shovel, wondered what the bloody thing was doing in his hand, and dropped it into the hole with a clatter.

  He didn’t head down toward the road. He went up higher instead among the gravestones, resting himself up a ways by a mossy Celtic cross, not far from the hunched-over trees.

  There he waited. Not another five minutes gone by till he saw the headlamps. Sure enough, turning into the car park. Peggy’s little Ford, the girl climbing out, Eena. Scrambling up toward the grave of her granny. If indeed it was her granny at all.

  “Mister?” she cried. “Mister! Where are you? Jesus, I’m sorry!”

  Down the hill, down his nose, Lafferty watched her panicky antics. Lighting the torch, she pointed it down in the hole, the beam bounding up again as if swatted away, and then all about the graveyard in a skelter of bedlam. Far too feeble to reach him. Lafferty watched, breathing in the cool night air.

  “Where are you? Mister? Terrence? I don’t know whatever come over me.”

  He watched. Watched the spirit seeping out of her. Saw the torch beam droop and falter, then fail altogether. Watched the shadow of her trailing away back down across the graveyard to the car. He considered showing himself, confronting her, but in the end he couldn’t do it. In the end he couldn’t be certain the passenger seat of the car was empty.

  So he watched. She climbed into the car and drove away, tail lamps disappearing down the road. When they were gone, when the sound of the engine had trailed off altogether in the still night air, not until then did he unclench his fist, no easy feat, so cramped was it from the work and the will. He held the thing up. Beheld it there. Even in the black of the night it gleamed against the sky, the genuine article, the real glimmering thing, the actual Ring of Kerry.

  Mrs. Lafferty had not raised her son to work with his hands. He’d always found manual labor distasteful, and so it was with travel by foot. So it came to pass an hour or two later, maybe more, when the eastern sky was beginning to give in to gray and the car came up the motorway, that Lafferty changed his plan and stuck out his thumb.

  For a long while the magic of the ring on his finger had sustained him, the heft and history and beauty and sheer gold lifting him above his weariness, and he’d vowed to trek on till morning, get as far away as he could on foot, then find shelter, rest, then plan out the rest of his life. He’d have put the ring in his pocket in the first place, only there were holes there, bloody holes his bloody wife could never be bloody bothered to sew, so he’d slipped it on his pinkie instead, where it fit snug as a rubber. But the weariness at last overcame him, that and the ache of his head, and after first determining that the car in question bore no resemblance to the little brown Ford of his erstwhile wife, Lafferty stuck out his thumb.

  It was a big black car, posh and polished to a gleam, that came to a stop on the side of the road. Lafferty hustled up, climbing in. A man was behind the wheel, a man all dressed to the nines with his vest buttoned up, a man with a face full of smiling teeth, his hair pulled back in a ponytail and gleaming as bright as the car. “Lonely night for thumbing,” he said.

  “It is,” said Lafferty.

  “Where to?”

  He was totally unprepared for the question. “Which way are you heading?”

  The driver had to smile again, leaning up to the wheel. “West.”

  “West it is, then,” Lafferty said, pointing like a cowpoke. “West across the island.”

  There came a loud metallic click, the sound of the doors being locked, and Lafferty felt a jolt. The driver wasn’t driving. He nodded toward Lafferty’s lap, where his hand lay. “Lovely ring you’re wearing.”

  The first thing he was was surprised. The last thing he supposed was the thing could be seen in the dark. He was about to respond with the first inanity that popped into his head, nothing special, when he looked at the lap of the driver, where a gun was quietly glinting.

  “You’d be Ray, then,” he said.

  Ray smiled even broader. “And you’d be Mister Lafferty.” He nodded again toward the ring. “Hand it over.”

  “I can’t get it off.”

  “What do you mean you can’t get it off?”

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p; “I mean it won’t come off.”

  The gun twitched up with impatience. “Give it a yank then.”

  “I’m after giving it a yank. I’m after giving it a yank and a tug and a jerk and a pull. The bloody thing won’t budge.”

  “Try spitting on it.”

  “I’m after spitting on it, too—do you think I’m a bloody eejit?”

  “Try it again with the spit. Only wipe it off good before you hand it over.”

  To no avail again. Lafferty nearly pulling off the skin.

  “Stick it over here.” Lafferty did, and Ray grabbed and yanked, yanking the finger nearly out of the socket, the shoulder nearly out of its own. Nor did twisting, prying, cajoling, and cursing do any good at all. Ray sat back and slapped the wheel, twisting his head to glare out the window at the sky growing bright. “You’re spoiling my morning, Mister Lafferty.”

  “Get some butter,” Lafferty suggested. “Butter always works.”

  “Mister Lafferty,” said Ray, leaning over calm and peaceful. “I have no butter. Do you see any butter? Do you think I’m carrying butter in my fucking pocket?” The volume gradually increasing, as was the redness of his face. “Do you think there’s butter in the glovebox? There is no bloody butter! No butter on my person, in the car, lying out by the road, no butter within miles of this godforsaken shithole! There is no fucking butter!”