"Leonard Bernstein, actually," Cassie said, happily banging down her phone and bouncing out of her chair, "but you'll do for today."
We stopped at Lowry's and bought Mrs. Fitzgerald a tin of shortbread, to make up for the fact that we still hadn't found her purse. Big mistake: that generation is compulsively competitive about generosity, and the biscuits meant she had to get a bag of scones out of the freezer and defrost them in the microwave and butter them and decant jam into a battered little dish, while I sat on the edge of her slippery sofa manically jiggling one knee until Cassie gave me a hairy look and I forced myself to stop. I knew I had to eat the damn things, too, or the "Ah, go on" phase could last for hours.
Mrs. Fitzgerald watched sharply, screwing up her eyes to peer at us, until we had each swallowed a sip of tea-it was so strong I could feel my mouth shriveling-and a bite of scone. Then she sighed with satisfaction and settled back into her armchair. "I love a nice white scone," she said. "Them fruit ones get stuck in my falsies."
"Mrs. Fitzgerald," Cassie said, "do you remember the two children who disappeared in the wood, about twenty years ago?" I resented, suddenly and fiercely, the fact that I needed her to say this, but I didn't have the nerve to do it myself. I was superstitiously certain that some shake in my voice would give me away, make Mrs. Fitzgerald suspicious enough to look harder at me and remember that third child. Then we really would have been there all day.
"I do, of course," she said indignantly. "Terrible, that was. They never found hide nor hair of them. No proper funeral nor nothing."
"What do you think happened to them?" Cassie asked suddenly.
I wanted to kick her for wasting time, but I did, grudgingly, understand why she had asked. Mrs. Fitzgerald was like a sly old woman from a fairy tale, peering out of some dilapidated cottage in the woods, mischievous and watchful; you couldn't help half-believing she would give you the answer to your riddle, even though it might be in a form too cryptic to unravel.
She inspected her scone thoughtfully, took a bite and dabbed at her lips with a paper napkin. She was making us wait, enjoying the suspense. "Some mentaler threw them in the river," she said at last. "God rest them. Some unfortunate fella who should never have been let out."
I noticed that my body was having the old, infuriating automatic reaction to this conversation: shaking hands, racing pulse. I put down my cup. "You believe they were murdered, then," I said, deepening my voice to make sure it stayed under control.
"Sure, what else, young fella? My mammy, may she rest in peace-she was still alive then; she died three year after, of the influenza-she always said it was the pooka took them. But she was fierce old-fashioned, God love her." This one took me by surprise. The pooka is an ancient child-scarer out of legend, a wild mischief-making descendant of Pan and ancestor of Puck. He had not been on Kiernan and McCabe's list of persons of interest. "No, they went into the river, or otherwise your lot would've found the bodies. There's people say they still haunt the wood, poor wee things. Theresa King from the Lane saw them only last year, when she was bringing in her washing."
I hadn't been expecting this one, either, though I probably should have been. Two children vanished forever in the local wood; how could they have failed to become part of Knocknaree folklore? I don't believe in ghosts, but the thought-small flitting shapes at dusk, wordless calls-still sent a bright icy chill through me, along with a strange twinge of outrage: how dared some woman from the Lane see them, instead of me?
"At the time," I said, aiming the conversation back on track, "you told the police that three rough young men used to hang around the edge of the wood."
"Little gurriers," Mrs. Fitzgerald said with relish. "Spitting on the ground and all. My father always said that was a sure sign of bad rearing, spitting. Ah, but two of them turned out all right in the end, so they did. Concepta Mills's young fella does the computers now. He's after moving into town-Blackrock,
"What about the third boy?" I asked. "Shane Waters?"
She pursed her lips and took a prim sip of tea. "I wouldn't know about the likes of him."
"Ah…turned out badly, did he?" Cassie said confidentially. "Could I take another scone, Mrs. Fitzgerald? These are the nicest ones I've had in ages." They were the only ones she'd had in ages. She dislikes scones on the grounds that they "don't taste like food."
"Go on, love; sure, you could do with a bit of meat on you. There's plenty more where those came from. Now that my daughter's after buying me the microwave, I do make six dozen at once and put them away in the freezer till I need them."
