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“Because I was just dumped by the director and the lead actor in the same day,” said Betty.
We’re stocking up on crap movies and ice cream and then heading back to your place.” “Ugh. That’s so cliché.” “So’s penicillin for pneumonia. Take the damn cure.”
“Shouldn’t you be trying to kill her with ice cream and Adam Sandler? She’s your best friend?” Gemma looked at her in surprise. “Betty, you’re my best friend,” she said, as if that was obvious.
I remember your hands. You had very big hands. You had a silver ring on one of them. I thought it was strange because it looked like a woman’s ring.
One of them, eh?
He’s something scary pretending to be something nice. He’s something that’s very good at pretending.”
My mother keeps asking me where my sister is. She thinks it’s my fault. She thinks I lost her. I want to find her again but I’ve run out of places to look. I think she’s in the box.
Is that what happened to her sister? Did she disappear after their visit to the set? Kinda sus
Kate had once described how, if you had displeased her, her mother would simply erase your existence.
“Do you hate me, Ma?” she asked. “I do,” said Etain. Ashling burst out laughing. She couldn’t help it. The casual way it had been said. The utter, total lack of hesitation. The perfect, if unwitting, comic timing of it. You had to laugh. You had to laugh. Even Etain gave a husky chuckle.
LOl Dang she cold and dont give AF
“You didn’t even mention my hair,” said Ashling. “I prefer not to speak ill of the dead,” said Kate. “Thanks.” “Was that you I saw on that autopsy table in Roswell?” “Fuck off.”
LOL Kate is such a hilariously cool aunt!
There were bouncers, but it seemed that the only criteria being applied to those queuing to get in was that they be bipedal, and even that seemed more like a loose guideline.
that was the night that “With or Without You” had started playing and two women in the club had launched into a perfectly choreographed dance number.
She had failed. She had not been strong enough. And the joy was so fierce it burned.
But simply saying there was corruption was one thing. Getting someone in government to attest on the record was something else entirely.
“Oh, a few witnesses testified to seeing a man matching his description with a child matching hers driving away from the school. Very insubstantial. He had an alibi. He was at work at the time, his colleagues attested to it. Nothing proven.”
She had believed in Barry Mallen’s innocence. But how unlucky could one man be?
Niamh Mallen’s mother had also been abducted herself ten years ago? That her father was a suspect in another disappearance?”
“I’m Patricia Skelton,” she said, without a hint of pretense. “I’ll cover the bloody Rose of Tralee if the mood takes me.”
Ah, there was the word. “Family.” It was an old Irish word. It meant: “Do nothing. Challenge nothing. Change nothing.”
She hated giving condolences. It always felt like adding to someone’s suffering, not taking away. Forcing them to acknowledge you. To thank you for the gift of useless, meaningless words.
D’you ever feel like you can’t trust anything anyone says? Like you’re living in a little room and people are talking to you through the letterbox and they’re telling you about … everything.
And, for whatever reason, she felt the same awful wrongness now. A sense that the gravel beneath her feet had been the site of some appalling transgression.
“It’s the same ring…” he whispered to himself. “It’s the same fucking ring. Why did he have the same ring?”
“It was a jeweler’s in Youghal,” he told her over the sound of the rain’s drumbeat on the windshield. “I was just going past and I saw it in the window and I just … I knew I had to buy it. I had to give it to Etain. I felt like the rest of my life was just hinging on that moment, like.”
She wasn’t entirely sure if her annoyance was righteous feminist indignation or simple vanity. What? Just because I’m in my forties I couldn’t get a Barry Mallen?
Once again Barry Mallen had convinced her of his innocence simply by being … Barry Mallen. There was a guileless innocence to his whole manner that made it impossible to distrust him.
The old man gave a smile that was … Patricia did not know the word.
Patricia wondered if Barry noticed the sudden, almost imperceptible stiffening of the old man’s body before he seemed to relax and launch into what sounded like a well-rehearsed spiel. “Ohhhhh yes, yes, yes. Fáinne an Mór-Ríoghan. It’s a Morrigan ring.”
That was when he saw her looking at him, and met her gaze. It felt like falling down a well into icy water. No. Not water. Simply cold. Sheer, icy nothingness. There was nothing in the man.
Whenever strangers knew his name, it was never a good omen.
He noticed dully that the priest was wearing gloves indoors, which seemed odd.
I was always taught that suicide is a sin and I believe that. It’s a terrible thing to do to those you leave behind. But I’m running out of reasons not to…”
The look of total, banal indifference on the priest’s face was chilling.
He laid a piece of paper on the nightstand, folded so that it formed a neat little tent, plainly visible to anyone who entered the room. My suicide note, Barry thought bitterly.
I’m trying to save the bastard. There’s someone after him. Tell him to watch out. Tell him to watch his fucking back.” Patricia was frantically pulling her notepad and pen out of her bag. “Who? Who’s trying to kill him?” she said thickly, the phone wedged between her cheek and shoulder. “A priest. Tell him to look out for a priest,” said the voice, and hung up.
She saw the empty pill bottle in his hands. She had been with him for most of the day, so unless he had brought it with him to Scarnagh, it was not his.
In that moment she was sure of nothing but this: the piece of paper was the same one that she had seen in the priest’s hands in the hotel bar. And whatever words it now contained, Barry Mallen had not written them.
It was an enlarged photocopy of a picture of a man drinking in the back of a pub, a man Ruairí did not recognize. He had a thin, emaciated face, a scraggly beard, and hair the color of wet ash.
The farmer on the hill
“Kate … I’m sorry, Barry’s dead.” She seemed to jolt with the words. He did not know what he expected her to say but it was not this: “What did she do?” Keano didn’t know what he could possibly say to that. He didn’t even know who “she” was.
“Well, after what happened with Niamh they say…” He watched the color drain from her face and Keano suddenly wished that the plane that had taken him to London had gone down in the Irish Sea.
she felt something like happiness to see that door again. Or perhaps happiness was the wrong word. Satisfaction. The contented pride of looking at an old scar and remembering something that had tried to kill you and failed.
“What are you doing out here?” Kate asked. “A bit of … trimming…” Etain wheezed. For the first time, Kate noticed the large pair of secateurs lying on the long grass by Etain’s hip.
Oh god bet she just cut off her finger
Kate screamed as she caught a glimpse, a mere frame of Etain’s hand and the giant crimson spider of blood gushing between the fingers that she was clamping over the severed stump of her left ring finger.
Yep, this is when she did it
“I’m not s’posed to talk to strangers,” it mumbled apologetically. The child most likely did not intend that to feel like a knife to the gut, but it did.
Kate gripped the ax tightly in her hand, raised it above her head, and resisted the urge to yell, “HERE’S JOHNNY!”
hehe
The idea that her mother could be in the wrong was clearly troubling on a deep, theological level.
Ashling towed her gently into the living room. She raised a tiny hand with a finger outstretched and pointed to the television set. A little ashamed, she turned to look at Kate. “I broke it,” she whispered. “I was trying to let her out.”
Ah she broke it herself
And even then, she remembered, Etain had not wanted the second child. She would always hold Niamh, and let Barry or Kate or Anne or someone else hold Ashling. It had been whatever the opposite of imprinting was.
I ask him: Did you abduct her? No. Not an abduction. She wanted to go with him. Gave him a big hug. He always remembered that. She ran up to him after school and gave him a big hug. Why was he at the school? He had been told to go there and collect the girl.
