In the Morning I'll Be Gone by Adrian McKinty

Author:Adrian McKinty [McKinty, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781616148782
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2014-02-04T22:00:00+00:00

We dandered along the Lough Neagh path. The sun was setting over the west shore and the light had taken on a color that you see sometimes in dreams. Wading birds of a dozen varieties were settling down for the night and the wind was stirring gently among the reeds. The blue lough itself was still and motionless but for a yacht cruising the north coast on an easy tack.

“It’s remarkable here,” I said.

“Yes,” she mumbled.

We walked farther along the track. A family of ducks got out of our way. Annie put her hand on my arm to stop me.

“What?” I asked her.

“You don’t judge me, do you, Sean? You never seemed the sort.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean, what did Dermot expect? He was in prison for five years. Five years. And before that he said that he knew they’d catch him sooner or later. He knew it. He gets to be the hero and where does it leave me? Alone. Living with my parents?”

“Annie, you don’t have to explain yourself—”

“You know what some of them say? They say that the first thing they’ll do when they get an independent thirty-two-county Ireland is to ban abortion and take away votes for women. Put women back in their place. The men in the fields, the women in the kitchen. That’s the kind of mind-set we’re dealing with here. You know?”

“I can’t believe Dermot ever said anything like that.”

“No . . . not really . . .” Her voice faded away.

The last arc of the sun had dipped behind the Sperrin Mountains and all the birds on the lough seemed to give a great collective sigh.

“Come on,” she said, and we walked a little farther on until we reached a huge Georgian house on the water’s edge with a pier and a boat dock to which a twenty-foot cabin cruiser had been moored.

“This is it,” Annie said.

“They have money, do they?”

“Aye. Harper’s father, Tommy McCullough, was a big . . . what’s the word?”

“Fish? Enchilada?”

“Magnate in these parts. His construction company built half of Antrim town. He was a Protestant but he was liked well enough by everybody. A real . . . uhm . . . character. Used to have these big Halloween and Christmas parties for all the local kids. That’s how Lizzie, Vanessa, and me got to know Harper. We’ve known him since he was a wee nipper. His dad was big into fishing and the rugby club.”

“He had a stroke, didn’t he?”

“Yeah. He was in a bad way for a while and died not too long after Lizzie’s accident. Harper was completely lost.”

“What about his mother?”

“Don’t mention his mother. She ran off to England with some actor when Harper was only five. She’s been pestering Harper for money since Tommy’s death. Of course, he gives it to her because it’s his mother, but she’s a frightful woman by all accounts.”

We opened the back gate and began walking up the garden path to the house, which I could see now was a lovely red sandstone manor from the 1780s or ’90s.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.