Luanne Rice Read Free

granddaughter. Mara had had
such fair skin—so typically Irish, pale and freckled. Her parents—Mara’s, that
is—had been killed in a freak ferry accident on a trip to Mara’s mother’s
hometown in the west of Ireland.
    Maeve had
taken over raising their daughter, their only child; every time she’d ever
looked at Mara, she’d seen her son, Billy, and she’d loved her so much, more
than the stars in the sky, more than anything—because she was a direct link to
her darling boy, and she’d dutifully put sunscreen all over her freckled skin
before letting her go down to the beach.
    “You have
the soul of your father in your blue eyes,” Maeve would say, spreading the
lotion.
    “And my mother?”
    “Yes, Anna
too,” Maeve would say, because she had loved her Irish daughter-in-law almost
as if she’d been her own child. But the truth was , Mara had been all-Billy to Maeve. Maeve couldn’t help herself.
    So now she
just stood in her garden, clipping the dead heads from the rosebushes. She
tried to concentrate on finding the three-leaf sets, but she was distracted by
the two newspeople standing out by the road. They had their cameras out,
clicking away. Tomorrow—the anniversary of Mara’s disappearance—the headlines
would no doubt read, “Grandmother Still Waiting after All These Years” or
“Roses for Mara’s Remembrance” or some other malarkey.
    The local
newspeople had always made a cartoon of the situation—tried to boil everything
down into an easily palatable story for their readers to understand. When no one knew the whole truth—except Mara. Edward had
played his part in the terrible drama, and Maeve knew some segments, but only
Mara knew it all.
    Only Mara
had endured it.
    The state
police detective had learned some of it. Patrick Murphy,
another Hibernian, although not in the tradition of Irish cops that Maeve
remembered from growing up in the South End of Hartford. Those fellows
had been tough, all steel, no nonsense, and they’d seen the world in black and
white. Everything was one way or another. Not Patrick.
    Patrick was
different. Maeve had taught school for fifty years, and if she had ever had
Patrick Murphy in her class, she knew that she would never have pegged him to
be a police officer. Not that he hadn’t done a thorough
investigation —if anyone could find Mara, Maeve knew it would be Patrick.
But there was something in his makeup that reminded Maeve of Johnny Moore, an
Irish poet she had once known.
    She had
seen it the day he had come here to Maeve’s house, held her hand as they sat in
rockers on the porch, and told her about the blood they had found on Mara’s
kitchen floor. Maeve’s heart had frozen. It really had. She had felt her heart
freeze and constrict, felt the muscle shrink, pulling all her blood back from
her face and hands, so that her head had dropped down on her chest.
    And when
she’d come to, just a second or two later, Patrick was kneeling in front of her,
with tears in his eyes because he was thinking the same thing she had so often
feared would happen—that Mara was dead, the baby was dead, that Edward had
killed them both.
    Maeve had
only to think of the tears in Patrick Murphy’s blue eyes to feel her heart
twist now, again, as she snipped away at the tangled rosebushes. She knew that
he would come by—sometime in the next week or so—to check on her.
    Maeve held
the green plastic-handled garden shears in her pink-gloved hand, clipping her
rosebushes. Cutting far enough down, right to the place where new life in the
form of tiny green leaves emerged from the stem. Her arthritis was acting up.
    She could
almost feel the photographers wanting to ask her to go get the yellow boots and
watering can, stage the yard as it had been that day nine years ago tomorrow.
    “Hello,
Maeve.”
    Looking up,
she saw her neighbor and lifelong best friend, Clara Littlefield, coming
through the side yard. Clara carried a wicker picnic basket overflowing with
French