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“What’s the plan?” Curse asks as we head north to Thornhill.
“Not sure,” I say honestly. I don’t have a specific goal in mind. But I’ve wanted to check out the house for a while now. See what kind of shape it’s in. I doubt O’Malley has returned. Even he isn’t stupid enough to do that. “I just want to look around.”
We’re silent for the rest of the drive, and we don’t speak as we pull up to O’Malley’s place. It looks alright from the outside. Nobody’s torched it or anything. But it’s clear nobody’s been living here. The driveway hasn’t been ploughed in weeks, and there are no recent footprints or tire tracks.
Curse and I approach the door. I had a key for this lock cut more than a year ago, but I’ve never actually used it before. This door was unlocked on New Year’s Eve, probably because of the party. I don’t need to use the key now, either. The door is unlocked, which doesn’t surprise me, considering the shit storm that accompanied the abandonment of this house. O’Malley knew he was leaving for good. I guess he saw no point in locking the door behind him, even though he’d left the most important fucking thing in the world behind.
The visceral hatred I feel for O’Malley briefly makes pain flare, like fireworks, in my head and side. I’ll never forget the sight of him running, running across the snow for his worthless, miserable, putrid life, while that Camorra soldier aimed his gun at Deirdre. It’s a scene that came to me more than once in my fever dreams. Sometimes, she was standing in the snow, just like that night. Sometimes fire.
The inside of the house is nowhere near as untouched at the outside looks. The place is absolutely trashed. It’s obvious that anything of value has been stripped out of here and the rest was destroyed just for the hell of it. Couches sliced open, glass and dishes shattered on the ground, stains on the walls. Entire appliances have been yanked out of the kitchen. The cupboards hang open and empty, like dead, toothless mouths. Considering how fast I paid off Sev, I doubt this is the Camorra’s work. No, this was probably Darragh taking out his rage after O’Malley disappeared and I snatched Deirdre out from under him.
Curse and I move through the wrecked house together. I can sense how alert he is, constantly checking the surroundings for any danger, but there’s nothing. No one’s here.
We head upstairs. While I’ve never been up here, I know the general layout of the house. At least, I know where Deirdre’s room is, based on where I’ve seen the balcony outside. I head there first, and even though I don’t give a shit about any of this stuff, because it was from her life before me and therefore it means nothing now, it still makes my insides go dark with fury when I see that Darragh smashed his ugly way through Deirdre’s room too.
The bed has been sliced open with a big, jagged cut down the middle. Maybe Darragh was looking for money or valuables. Or maybe he was trying to send her a message if she ever dared to come back here. Her closet is open, her clothes torn and trampled. If there was a laptop or other computer in here, it’s long gone, along with any other electronics. My shoe crunches on something, and I look down to find myself stepping on the flat glass of a picture frame. I crouch and then open the frame from the back, sliding the photograph out and holding it up to my face. While there’s enough moonlight pouring in from the glass doors leading out to the balcony for me to have surveyed the overall state of the room, it’s not bright enough to get a good look at the photo.
“Light?” I ask, knowing Curse is close by. I hear him hunt around the room. The only lamp in here has been smashed, but evidently the power hasn’t been cut, because when he finds a wall switch, the room comes to vivid life. It makes the violent mess in here look even worse than before, but I ignore it and focus on the photo in my hands.
It’s a picture of Deirdre and her mother, Fiona. While Deirdre may have gotten her colouring from her papa, she got all her mamma’s beauty. The tanned, smiling face of the blonde woman in the photo has echoes of the freckled face I love so much. It makes me feel like I know this ghost of a woman, even though she died long before I ever even learned her name.
Deirdre can’t be more than nine or ten in the picture. I wonder if this was taken the summer before Fiona died. Deirdre’s smile is almost as big as her mamma’s, both of them beaming, locked in an affectionate embrace in front of a tangle of rainbow arches that I recognize as roller coasters. I think they’re at the big amusement park in Vaughn, a little to the northwest of here. Deirdre is holding a stick with a cotton candy puff bigger than her head. Her mamma is holding her.
This photograph makes me feel things I don’t know what to do with. I don’t have any photos of my mamma, and if I did I’m not sure if I could even stand to look at them. To see her beautiful face again, forever smiling and trapped in a photograph, a static slice of a memory. But at the same time, I have no doubt that if there were photos of my mamma floating around out there to find, I would fucking want them, whether I planned to actually look at them or not. I can even forgive the fact that it was probably O’Malley who took this photograph as I stand and slide it into my pocket. At least he isn’t in the photo with them. If he were, I’d have to cut him out.
There isn’t much left to look at in here. Curse heads out onto the balcony to look around while I head back towards the closet. There’s no jewellery or anything of real value left here, just ruined clothes that she doesn’t need because I will buy her new ones. There is a box, though. A carboard box on the floor. It’s been ripped open but was ultimately left behind. When I bend over to peer inside, I see why. Because there was nothing in there for Darragh to destroy – the thing inside was already broken.
It isn’t even a thing at all. It’s a collection of pieces, curving and jagged-edged. Some nearly as large as my hand, others smaller than a baby tooth. The broken material is hard and white, and some pieces are intact enough to see the painted image of blooming roses. When I reach into the box and pull out an intact spout, I know exactly what it is I’m looking at.
It's the teapot. Deirdre’s mamma’s teapot. The one she broke after the funeral.
It’s pretty fucking ruined. I can see why Deirdre didn’t even bother trying to piece it back together. But even so, even though I know it’s pointless – the thing is shattered and dead and done – I find myself returning the spout to the box, picking the whole thing up, and putting the box beneath my arm.
“What’s that?” Curse asks as he steps back into the room from the outside balcony, closing the door behind him.
“Something broken.”
His gaze lingers on the box, but he doesn’t ask any more questions about it. Which is probably good, considering I don’t have any more answers.
We turn off the light and leave Deirdre’s old bedroom, heading down the hall to the house’s primary bedroom. It’s just as topsy turvy as the rest of the house – mattress sliced open and tossed down to the floor, clothes everywhere, anything of value long gone. There’s even a safe that’s been left open. I don’t know if O’Malley emptied it himself or if one of Darragh’s guys managed to get it open after the fact, but either way there’s no money or gold or anything in there. There are a couple of pieces of paper littering the floor in front of the safe that Darragh must have deemed worthless. There are some random legal documents, Jack and Fiona’s marriage license, Fiona’s long-expired passport. There’s another piece of paper that just looks like a letter, and I turn on the lights in here so I can read it, wondering why it was once hidden away in a safe.
It's addressed to Jack O’Malley. There’s very little text in the body of the letter, just one sentence, and the text itself isn’t all that unusual.
If the terms of the loan repayment are not met in a timely fashion then I will be forced to engage in other less desirable forms of recourse.
It’s signed by some guy named Charlie, no last name included. I don’t think I know anyone named Charlie or Charles, but it doesn’t surprise me that O’Malley ran up other debts besides the ones I already know about.
No, there’s nothing particularly odd about this letter.
Except…
The date.
My eyes snag on it and stay there.
And it’s like the rest of the room, the entire fucking world, disappears.
I have devoted almost two years to learning everything I can about my Songbird. I know her birthday. I know her exam schedules.
