Read Online Shade by Neil Jordan - Free Book Online Page B

there,” said Dan, and they clambered up, large laced boots and shining buttons. Dan thwacked the reins and drew the mare in a half-circle. She moved off unwillingly with the extra load.
    “So where is she?” asked the first, fixing the last buttons on his greatcoat.
    Dan shot the officer a disapproving glance.
    “Across from the Lady’s Finger. I’ll drop off the childer first and take you there.”
    “A bad business.”
    “Maybe.”
    So he left them by the gates to make their way up the avenue on their own.
    “Don’t be bothering your little heads, now,” he said. “Nina will take you to Mary Dagge for your tea.”
    The three of them walked over the crunching pale gravel, the death now unmentioned between them. To her two new friends, if friends they were, the sight of this gaunt facade was like another entrance, another house. They had seen its jumble from behind, the crumbling wall of an orchard, the long triangle of glass and rusted metal, the stone arch leading to the stables, but this looming thing, this dark rectangle with the sun now right behind its bunched chimneys, this was neither house nor home, church nor castle, this was some unimagined, unimaginable fact they would have to find new words for.
    The large front door was ajar and Nina pushed it open with her shoulder. The sound of a piano, soft and measured, came from the living room. She held the door open for Janie and George and looked down at George’s bare feet as he tested the tuft of the carpet, his splayed toes pressing it as if he expected it to ooze between them like mud. Then she walked towards the sound of the piano. George and Janie followed, stepping in her brief footprints in the carpet, fearful that the area outside them would indeed turn to mud, the kind of mud that sank for ever, that they would vanish beneath that red and purple leaf-shaped pattern, hardly leaving a ripple.
    Nina walked over the varnished wood round the doorway on to a different carpet. George and Janie stayed by the door jamb, as if another carpet was more than they could negotiate today. Her mother wore a cream blouse, hair falling around her sculpted cheeks in an untidy but not unpleasing tangle. A glass with a lemon-slice held back the pages of The Well-Tempered Clavier. The pearly notes cascaded round her and she looked at her only daughter through a concentrated haze.
    “Nina, you’re a disgrace,” she murmured, looking at her stained white smock and her smudged shoes, then towards the door. “And who are these two other disgraces?”
    ~
    “Would he have placed her in the river, Ma’am?” the nearest policeman asks Janie in a low mumble, designed to be unheard by George.
    “Did you put Nina in the river?” Janie asks George, her teeth clenched, her fist scratching at her watery eyelids.
    “The river,” George repeats.
    “Is she in the river, George?” Janie asks again.
    “She’s in the river,” says George, “and the seaweed is her hair.”
    “Not her, George,” says Janie. “Nina. We’re talking about Nina.”
    “What was that about seaweed?” Buttsy Flanagan asks.
    “We found a body once, when we were children, tangled in the seaweed—”
    “Her hair,” says George.
    “Isobel Shawcross,” says Janie. “Check the coroner’s records. She drowned.”
    “The river took her,” says George.
    “Took who?” asks Dr. Hannon.
    “Took Boinn—”
    “Who’s Boinn?”
    “Only one place the river could take her,” says a policeman. “Out to sea.”
    “You don’t understand,” says Janie, “he’s confusing one thing with another—”
    “Why did the river take her?” asks the doctor.
    “For her hair—”
    “Jesus Christ—”
    “Let him speak—”
    “She’s not in the river, Georgie, is she?” asks Janie. “That would be too simple.”
    “Much too simple,” says George.
    “Why did you kill her, George?” Janie says slowly.
    “Kill who?” says George.
    “Nina,” says Janie, and her closed fist scratches again