The Snowmelt River (The Three Powers) Read Free

Bridey became their nanny. Then when Daddy died at the mission in Africa, she blamed the planes.”
    “She blamed the planes?”
    “For taking him to Africa.”
    Alan shook his head.
    “She’s convinced the house is cursed.”
    “Cursed?”
    “By what went on—in the old asylum.”
    He smiled. “You’ve got to admit it’s a weird-looking house!”
    “All the time I was growing up here I thought I was living in the same world that Lewis Carroll wrote about.”
    The original house must have been compact and square, with sash windows divided up into small Georgian panes. But somebody, maybe the Victorian asylum keeper, had inserted an octagonal tower on one corner. Alan was standing right outside it, looking up at a structure of wooden frames filled with small glass panes, capped by an amazing minaret-style tower that soared to a tiny flagpole bearing the Irish flag. Onthe gable ends of the house he saw other additions, very likely arising out of the same fantastic imagination. Ornate canopies topped fussy bay windows and porticos surrounded the front and back doors. There were additional dormer windows on the roof adjacent to soaring chimneys. The surrounding gardens were a labyrinth of arbors for roses, honeysuckle and other colorful flowering plants, contributing to a sort of fairyland of scents and colors.
    They kept going around to the back, taking a course that avoided some large greenhouses with peeling paintwork and several broken panes.
    He murmured, “Looks to me like Bridey had a point!”
    “It’s nothing that a bit of fixing wouldn’t make right. They were properly cared for when Grandad was alive. He was interested in plants, an amateur like me. But Fergal is too busy to take proper care of them. Bridey wants to knock them all down. She’s terrified something bad will happen to us here. But we’re the only Shaunessys left of the family and the grounds are full of old memories from when Daddy and Uncle Fergal were growing up. So Fergal can’t bring himself to do it.”
    She led Alan along a neglected path, overgrown with elderberry and nettles, which brought them face to face with a tunnel big enough to drive a car through. When they stepped inside, it was dank and gloomy. A hesitant light hovered around the entrance, as if fearful to penetrate deeper.
    “I used to hide here from Bridey when we played hide-and-seek. It cuts right under the main road. Then there are all sorts of secret carriageways and tunnels before it finally comes out in the grounds of the hospital.”
    “This still leads to the asylum?”
    Kate nodded. “It’s called a mental hospital now. Once I saw a picture of the old superintendent. He had huge sideburns and a beard like Father Christmas. The whole place was arranged so patients could never leave, even when they came to work out here in the gardens.”
    “Creepy!”
    Kate hooted with laughter at the expression on his face. “Some of the mental cases still try to escape this way. Oh, I know I shouldn’t call them that. There are times I feel crazier than any of them myself. But Bridey could tell you stories. Those poor souls, they wade out into the river until it comes up to their chins. Then they shriek to the nurses that they’ll drown themselves if anybody tries to come and save them.”
    “Shee—it!”
    She led him back to the house where they did a tour of the downstairs rooms. Bridey appeared with two glasses of orange juice. They carried their drinks into a study filled with collections of tropical insects mounted in frames.
    “Your uncle works with insects?”
    “He’s an entomologist at University College Cork. He’s off right now counting new species in the African jungle before they become extinct.” Then, with whatseemed like a clumsy abruptness, she just came right out with it and asked him how his parents had died.
    Alan was startled into silence.
    “You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to.”
    “There isn’t much to say. It was an