spun in a circle. Where are you? Please, tell me—
But there was nothing, nothing except the distant screams of the gulls on the cliffs, the only sobs her own, night falling, the sky closing in like the walls of a dark, dark room.
Chapter 25
Lost and Found
Kate opened her eyes to a blackened sky. She sat up in confusion, finding herself in an exposed field, unsure of how much time had passed. Hours perhaps, the stars having shifted in the sky, as if the world were off kilter. She didn’t know where she was, only she had to find her mother. She couldn’t lose her again. She thought she heard a whimper, crawled toward the source. The crying, the crying. Unmarked graves at every turn. There hadn’t been time for burials.
That crying. Her sobs mixed with the sound, as if they were one being, her skin colder still as she went deeper into that place, nothing to pull her back, and yet maybe this was where she was meant to be, this was her fate. She was so tired. She could just close her eyes and sleep.
A dog barked. She hardly registered the noise. She staggered forward, on her feet again, down a nameless road. The sky was bruised, stars flecks of bone. The wind keened in the grass. She heard the dog panting at her heels, paws scrabbling in the dirt. Another ghost? She didn’t turn to look, had to focus on finding her mother, but the dog wouldn’t leave, bumped its head against her hip, barked again. She pushed it away, but it stayed with her, wouldn’t let her be lost to that place.
A car sputtered along behind them, headlights trained on her back. She stood in the middle of the lane, bewildered. She couldn’t hear the crying anymore. “Where are you?”
A door slammed. Footsteps approached. A shape. A person, faceless in the shadows.
“Have you seen her? I have to find her.” Kate fell to her knees, shivering. Blood on her hands, her legs.
“Find who?” Two hands on her arms, holding her at last. “Calm down, Kate. Tell me what’s wrong. Jaysus, look at you—”
Kate. Yes, she had a name. She was there.
“Don’t you recognize me? It’s, Bernie, and Fergus too. We have to get you warm. You’re chilled to the bone.”
“I heard her,” Kate said.
“Who?”
“My mother. She died last February, but she was there—”
She heard a sharp intake of breath.
“Where?” Bernie asked.
Kate waved her arm. “I don’t know. She was crying. Now she isn’t anymore, and I—” She couldn’t stop shaking. “Oh, God, why is this happening?”
Bernie put an arm around Kate and led her to the car. “It’s going to be all right. Let’s get you home.”
“The bicycle…” Kate remembered it distantly, as if in a dream. “It’s somewhere, that way—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Bernie said. “We’ll find it later.”
As they drove eastward, Kate stared out the window, her face reflected in the glass, but she felt as if she wasn’t there.
“I was so worried,” Bernie said. “Sullivan’s been looking for you. I told him you’d headed to his cottage—”
“Yes,” she said. Sullivan. It seemed so long ago. “I got lost.”
“Where were you?”
Kate tried to explain.
Bernie was quiet for a moment. “I know the place,” she said. “No one goes there anymore.”
“Why?”
“It’s just a story.” She kept her eyes on the road.
“Please, tell me. I need to know.”
Bernie sighed. “It’s the famine village I told you about when you first arrived. No one survived, cut down by illness or starvation. A girl had a baby toward the end, ailing herself. There was no one to take care of the child. When help finally arrived, it was too late, the babe was gone, the mother too. They couldn’t bury them—the ground was too hard, and everyone too weak and fearful. People say their bones are still there. That they wail at night, searching for each other in the dark.” She hesitated.
“What else?”
“I shouldn’t mention it.”
“I’ll hear it from someone else, if not you.”
“They say that only those who have suffered such a loss themselves can hear the ghosts cry.”
Years ago, Bernie and John had prepared the room, a cradle, a crib, a mobile of bluebirds, a border of forget-me-nots along the walls, a changing table. When the pains started, she knew it was too early. She was baking a wild berry pie that morning. She was mad for the baking in those days, “nesting,” John said, hugging her from behind. The sky was impossibly clear that morning. She was