Page 61 of Christmas with the Irish Devil
She nods, and the nod breaks the ice that held her. She presses her mouth to Liam’s forehead and speaks to him in a voice that lives at the bottom of a well. He does not wake, not fully, but he turns toward the sound and breathes her name on the exhale, and I find the back of a chair with my hand before my knees decide to show me how tired a man can be after one hour that lasts a year.
I send them upstairs with two men posted at the landing and one at the end of the hall and two in the garden below the nursery windows, and I go to the study because there is work that belongs to midnight and I would rather do it now than dream about it later.
Kieran comes first, then Eddie, then Seamus last, hair damp from the mist outside, shoulders tense from stillness rather than action. I close the door and all three of them lower their eyes because they know what is coming. I take the note from my pocket and place it flat on the desk between us and let them read without comment. When Eddie lifts his head there is something like apology in him, and something like fury too.
“Find the window man,” I say, and I keep my voice low because low carries farther in a house like this where the walls are trained to confess. “He knew how to lift a thirty-year-old latch without a sound. He knew where the dogs go when the rain starts and which hedge is thin enough to throw meat throughwithout snapping branches. That kind of knowing is earned with years or bought with names.”
Kieran nods once. “Inside or close. I will start with the gardener’s seasonal lads, the electricians who ran the new feed to the nanny wing, the night cleaner rota from the last six months, and the guard who waved the flowers through.”
“Good,” I say. “Eddie, the van. Find where it sat before it came to us, find the garage that patched that back bumper, find the man who bought the beef that put the dogs to sleep, find the kid who sold him the plate off a junker. You will hear that the trail ends in a fire. If it does, you will dig in the ashes.”
“I’ll take two crews and split the work,” he answers, relief in the doing.
“Seamus,” I say, and he is already reaching for his tablet. “Everyone who could pull camera feeds from the street outside the house without coming here. City maintenance, private security firms, the parish lot for the seven o’clock mass crowd, the deli with the good corned beef that keeps a lens on its cash machine. Pay for the footage if you must, steal it if you cannot, and flag anyone who asked for east-lane archives in the last month.”
He nods, then hesitates. “And the note, boss?”
I look at the paper again. The letters are too careful, the spacing too exact, the kind of neatness a teacher might praise, which tells me nothing about the person who wrote it except that they are patient and they like to be believed.
“This was written for me and for her,” I say. “Which means it was written by someone who understands that fear is cheaper to produce when you split it between people who love the same thing. It also means they think I can be moved by threat rather than by pride, and that is a mistake they will not make twice.”
The door is half-open, a hand-width of dark where the hall waits, and in that hand-width there is a shape I know withoutlooking. Aoife stands there barefoot in a long sweater, her hair braided and falling over one shoulder, her mouth pale, the look a woman gives when she is about to pray or curse. She does not step in. She does not ask a question. She listens, because she wants the truth and she is not sure I will give it to her if she asks for it rather than steals it.
I do not send the men away for her sake, because sending them away would be a lie told with courtesy, and we are far beyond that kind of theater. I give the last instruction to Kieran and then I move to the door and open it the rest of the way.
“Come in,” I say, and there is no surprise in her eyes when she does, only the set of a jaw that has learned tonight it will clench rather than tremble.
She looks down at the note where it lies on the desk, flattened by my hand. She does not reach for it. She does not need to. She has already understood that words like those are a rope thrown from a dark shore you are meant to climb to your own hanging.
“You will do what you have to do,” she says, quiet and even, not an accusation, not forgiveness either.
“I will do exactly that,” I answer, and in the silence that follows something changes in the room, not between us only but in the house itself, as if the old wood has shifted and made room for a new weight.
“Go to him,” I add, softer. “He will wake soon, and I want the first thing he sees to be your face.”
She nods and turns away and the braid swings like a bell rope down her back. She pauses at the threshold, one hand on the frame the way she held the nursery doorway, a touch that says keep the hinges oiled and the exits known. She does not look back into the room when she speaks.
“Do not let this become a story he has to carry,” she says.
“I will not,” I promise, and she goes.
When the door is shut I sit, and the three men who have been mine longest sit with me without an invitation because they know that what I am about to say does not require witnesses so much as accomplices. I tell Kieran who will lose their job before dawn and who will lose their kneecaps if they lie to me again. I tell Eddie which garages to raid and which to burn by accident so the insurance does not find a pattern. I tell Seamus which priests to wake and which to leave sleeping because the ones still drinking will have heard more useful sins tonight than the sober ones ever do. I tell them to make noise in three directions so the fourth will look quiet, and I tell them to keep a man on every corner near the schools in our neighborhoods because a city is only ours if our children are.
The instructions are quiet, almost gentle, and they leave the room carrying them like parcels that ought to be delivered by hand. When I am alone I take the note back out of my pocket and hold it over the candle that burns for the dead on the shelf above the desk. I do not set it alight. I let the paper feel heat as a warning and then I slide it into the safe with the small metal box where I keep the pieces of my father’s watch.
On my way up the stairs I pass the landing where the two men stand with their eyes forward. I pause at the nursery door and look in. The lamp with the fox is still on, the fox looking up as if asking for a story he has not heard yet. Liam sleeps on his side with one arm thrown over his head, a posture I know better than my own, and his hair curls at the nape of his neck in a damp little comma. Aoife sits in the chair beside the bed with her knees pulled up, wrapped in that sweater, her cheek on her forearm, and her eyes are closed not because she trusts anything around her but because a body will demand its due after a night like this.
I close the door almost all the way, leave a slice of warm light in the hall, and go back down to the study where the old clock marks the hour with a sound like a heart refusing to stop.
25
AOIFE
Morning arrives like a soft apology, thin winter light pressed against the nursery curtains, the quiet a little too careful, as if the house itself is trying not to wake old fear. I keep Liam with me from the first blink. We eat breakfast on the window seat in my room, knees touching, a duvet pulled around our legs. I make porridge on a low flame and stir in cream until it looks like mist over a lake, then dot the top with butter and brown sugar and exactly five raisins because he is very firm about quantities, and when the butter melts it leaves little gold moons that he chases with his spoon, whispering sound effects under his breath because the spoon is a boat and the raisins are sea monsters and the brown sugar is a sandbank that tastes like Christmas.
“Another monster,” he says, pointing, and I place a sixth raisin with a stage gasp.
“Impossible,” I say. “Our insurance won’t cover it.”
