Safe House Read Free

telling me about the IRA!”
    Liam nursed his throbbing foot and sipped his tea.
    Jack Cassidy cleared his throat. “About your mum and da,” he said to Liam. “Mrs. Sheridan and Mrs. Coyne from down the street will stay with them until we can arrange to have them taken away. It would be better if we did it before any of your kinfolk see them. They’d be spared that at least.”
    Liam said nothing to Jack Cassidy, but he had no kinfolk, none he had ever met anyway. He knew his da had a much older brother who went to England when he was a teenager and never came back. He might even be dead.
    Delia Cassidy sent her husband and Rory off to bed. “There’s nothing to be done until the police come—if they come,” she said to them. To Liam she said, “I’ll make up a bed for you on the couch.” She kneeled beside the couch and reached her arms around him. “Try to get some sleep,”
    He disliked being hugged. His mum and his da were not touchy-feely people, and he wasn’t used to it. But he let Delia Cassidy hug him, feeling nothing, feeling empty.

…the graveyard…
    The Cassidy home was dark and hushed and filled with grief.
    Over on the other side of the street Liam’s house was now a tomb. He pictured the two old women, Mrs. Sheridan and Mrs. Coyne, sitting with his mum and his da, “keeping vigil” Delia Cassidy had called it, in the bullet-wrecked, blood-soaked room. Across the hall, his own bedroom would be empty, its bedsheets and covers snarled, twisted and cold, and his circus posters—Charles Blondin crossing the Niagara Falls Gorge on a high-wire; Cirque du Soleil’s trapeze artists, aerialists and clowns; the Great Wallendas’ high-wire pyramid act; Bozo the Clown—left staring blindly into dark empty space.
    The Cassidy household had gone back upstairs to bed except for Prissy the cat, curled up in a chair.
    Liam lay restlessly on the couch. Every small noise in the house or on the street made him twitch nervously. His head still echoed with the sounds of death in his own home two hours earlier: the splintering blast of the front door as the killers launched their attack, the thump of boots on the stairs, the exploding guns, the smoke and reek of gunpowder. And the blood.
    He tried to sleep, but his nerves and sinews were wide-awake. The mournful sound of wind and rain in the street outside fell on his ears like a dirge, as though Nature were lamenting the deaths of his beloved parents. Again, the thought of his mum and his da made him want to cry, but there was a dam in his throat that resisted tears. Fists and eyes clenched shut in desperation, he thrashed about on the narrow couch, twisting and turning, throwing off the covers. Sleep was impossible.
    Sleep, like death.
    A car went by outside with a splash of tires on the wet street. The wind moaned in the eaves. Rain pelted the window. The muted scream of a faraway ambulance siren joined with the melancholy sound of the wind
    The roar of a motorcycle assaulted the silence. It stopped, down at the end of the street it sounded like. Nobody in the street owned a motorcycle, did they? He listened for the noise to start up again but there was only the wind and the rain.
    He reached down to the floor and retrieved the covers, but when they were back in place, he twisted and turned once more until they ended up back on the floor. He felt hot and clammy. He should take off the sweat suit, the bottoms anyway.
    He could hear a sound, the faintest scrape of—what? A shoe or boot? There was someone outside. Ears straining, eyes staring at the shadows and patterns caused by the streetlight through the drawn curtains, he held his breath. There it was again! The night growl of a tomcat? Or the wind blowing a sodden cardboard box down the street?
    Or maybe it was the mole man, coming for him. He waited, listening.
    Silence. Then a faint scratching sound.
    Fear skewered him. He