Where the Wild Roses Grow Page 20

  She wanted the baby. She really wanted it, especially after what happened to the first one. Having a baby right now would make her forget the boy, would make her stop crying over him at night, make her stop dreaming about him. But how could she ever keep this baby? She was only fifteen years old. She felt like she could handle it, she felt much older, but the question was if anyone else felt that as well. If they would let her keep it.

  What if it this one died too?

  Violet felt sick just at the thought and ran to the restroom to throw up again. When she pulled up her head, she spotted Father Allen in the mirror. He had a serious look on his face. Violet’s heart dropped.

  Did he know?

  She turned to look at him, but he was gone. With her heart beating hard in her chest, Violet got up, washed her face and wiped it dry, then stormed into his office, where she found him sitting in his favorite chair by the books, smoking his pipe. He looked at her as she came in, then blew smoke into the room. Violet sat by his feet like she always did. His silence felt like knives to her skin.

  Please talk to me. Please just say something. Anything!

  Violet sat by his feet in silence for a long time while waiting for him to speak to her. She didn’t dare to say anything herself, since she was afraid of wakening his wrath. She knew the father had a temper. She had heard him yell at the clerk and at the nuns from time to time when they came with news from the home. Violet often listened in on their conversations, and mostly she would hear the father yell angrily at them.

  Don’t hate me. Don’t resent me for doing this to you. I am sorry this happened. I am so sorry.

  Violet felt sick to her stomach with worry and anxiety, when suddenly she felt the father’s hand on the top of her head. He started caressing her gently, like he always did. Violet closed her eyes. It felt so good. So wonderful. She sighed deeply in relief.

  The father wasn’t mad at her. He wasn’t going to yell. He wasn’t going to throw her out or send her back. At least she now had the hope that he wouldn’t.

  “We’ll figure this out somehow,” he said. “Don’t you worry, my dear. We’ll figure something out. For every problem, God has a solution.”

  81

  July 2015

  We followed them into the dense forest. I wasn’t very fond of walking in a forest in the darkness and kept imagining all kinds of creatures in there. Were there snakes in Ireland? Bears? Even a fox would creep me out.

  We used our cellphones as flashlights, but shut them off for most of the walk, since we didn’t want the two women to know we were following them. Luckily, the sky was clear and the moon lit up parts of the forest, enough for us to see the two women.

  They went into a clearing and approached the river. I guessed we weren’t far from where I had found Bridget Callaghan on our hike. I had read about bodies and how they acted in water. I knew they sank pretty much immediately after they were put in the water, so they weren’t carried far down the river. The river was very shallow and the water very clear, especially in these parts, so that was why I could see the body. My guess was that this area was where they had all been killed. Bridget Callaghan, Fiona Delaney, Carrick Mulligan, and now the killer was out for her fourth victim. Who this woman was that she was with now, I had no idea. I hadn’t been able to see her face properly yet. I kept a close eye on the shorthaired one.

  They stopped at the riverbank and I could hear them laughing. They were having a good time, it seemed. The longhaired woman put an arm around the shorthaired’s shoulder. The shorthaired put her head on the other’s shoulder. They stood like that for quite some time. The longhaired one pointed at something on the other side of the river, and they both seemed to be impressed with whatever it was. I guessed it was the roses. They were quite spectacular in these parts. Wild roses growing as far as the eye could see. Like an ocean of roses. With the moonlight falling on them, they looked dazzling. The perfect scene for a romantic date.

  “Maybe this is just a place where people around here bring a date if they want to get lucky,” Morten whispered. “Maybe the line from the song is something they all say. Have you thought about that?”

  I hadn’t. His remark annoyed me. I didn’t answer. I watched the couple as they engaged in a big embrace. It soon turned into a very hot kissing scene.

  “Oh, boy,” Morten whispered. “Are you sure we want to see this?”

  “I have to,” I said. “It might not be our guy…or girl…and it might get really embarrassing for us, but I have to know. I’ve got to be sure.”

  “Alright. It’s your choice.”

  Seconds later, the longhaired woman grabbed the shorthaired’s jacket and pulled it off. She was touching her breasts outside of her shirt. They kissed again. I kept staring at them, but started to feel uncomfortable. Was Morten right? Were they just your everyday gay couple about to have sex by the riverbank? How far would I take it? Would I stay and watch the entire act?

  I hadn’t thought it through.

  “I think we should go,” Morten whispered. He pulled my arm.

  “No, wait,” I said. “Look.”

  “I really don’t want to,” he said.

  “No, they’ve stopped. The longhaired is showing something to the shorthaired. Look, she is asking her to look to the left. She is grabbing something form the ground. Oh, my God, Morten we have to do something! It’s a rock. She’s grabbing a rock. Why is the longhaired woman grabbing a rock? Morten, I don’t get it. We have to do something!”

  Morten sprang from my side and ran through the trees. I followed him, even though I couldn’t keep up with him. I watched with an open mouth as the longhaired woman lifted the rock into the air, and I heard her mutter the words:

  “All beauty must die.”

  Just then, I let out a scream of terror, while imagining the rock hitting the back of the other woman’s head. My scream made the woman turn in time, just as Morten jumped the longhaired woman.

  82

  July 2015

  They were fighting. The rock had fallen to the ground and Morten was fighting the woman. Meanwhile, I came jogging into the clearing. The shorthaired woman stared at me, then back at the two fighting. They were grunting and groaning, giving punches, first one on top, then the other.

  The woman with the short hair started to scream. “Help! Someone help us we’re being attacked! HATE CRIME!!”

  I shook my head while catching my breath. “No, no,” I said. I pointed at the rock on the ground. “She was about to kill you.”

  Morten growled and grunted. He received a punch to his cheek that made him fly through the air towards the river.

  “Morten!”

  Morten landed on the bank and started sliding towards the water. I ran to him and grabbed his hand in mine. For once, it was great that I weighed more than him. My body weight stopped him from sliding and hitting the rocks below. I pulled him up and he landed in the grass. We were both panting heavily.

  “Can SOMEONE please explain to me what is going on here?!”

  I turned my head and looked up at the woman with the short hair and jeans. She looked like she had just fallen from the moon. The other woman was gone.

  “Crap,” I said. “She got away.”

  Morten lifted his head. I found my phone and lit the flashlight to better see his face. He was bleeding from his lip and had gotten a severe bruise on his cheek.

  “Did you see her face?” I asked.

  He shook his head, while wiping blood from his lip. “No. It was too dark.”

  “Crap again,” I said.

  “Who are you people?” the woman asked. “Can someone please tell me what is going on?”

  “She tried to kill you,” Morten said. “She was about to use that rock over there to crack your skull open.”

  We got up and approached her. She looked like she was about to cry. I couldn’t blame her. I put my arm around her shoulder and we started to walk back.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “We were having
such a great time. Why? Why would she try and kill me?”

  “I’ll explain everything,” I said. “Let’s give you a ride back to town. You live in Enniskerry, right?”

  She nodded with a small whimper. The reality of what had been going on was getting to her now. We walked to our car and she got in the back. The blue car was gone. I sat in the front seat and Morten got in as well. He turned on the engine. The woman was in shock. I grabbed her hand in mine and she looked at me.

  “So, what’s your name?” I asked.

  “Gael,” she said. “Gael Higgins.”

  “Okay, Gael. Tell me, what do you know about this woman you met with tonight?”

  “I…I don’t know much. Her name is Keira. She’s a patient at the dentist’s office where I work.”

  “What’s her last name?” Morten asked.

  “I…she…she never told me. I didn’t think to ask.”

  “Alright. The name is probably fake anyway,” I said. “What else do you know about her? Do you know where she lives? Where she works?”

  Gael shook her head. “It was our first date. We had coffee the other day. That’s all I know.”

  “What did you talk about? Was there anything that could tell you about her, who she was?” I asked.

  Gael shook her head. “I…I don’t know. We talked about many things, but mostly about me. I thought she was just really interested in me. She wanted to know everything about me. She did tell me that she had grown up in Dublin, that she had moved to this small town since it was so different. She liked the quietness. She also told me she dyed her hair. She didn’t really have black hair. She was actually blonde. I remember it because I thought she would be beautiful as a blonde.”

  “Okay, let me ask you something else, and this is not just me snooping in your life. It’s important. Is your mom or has she ever been a nun?”

  Gael looked at me with a startled look. “How did you know?”

  “I’m getting to that. Did she work at The Good Shepherd before she had you?” I asked.

  Gael nodded. “She used to, yes.”

  “Do you know anything about that place?” I asked, while watching the city sign of Enniskerry pass the window.

  Gael shook her head. “I know that a lot of the women that worked there are now living around town. I know that it was one of those Magdalene Laundries that were known to exploit young women around the country and make them work for free at the laundries. It was mostly troubled young women, my mother told me. She believed they needed disciplining. As far as I know, it is a very black part of the Catholic Church’s history. The Good Shepherd was closed in nineteen ninety-six by the Church.”

  I remembered having read about those laundries, but didn’t remember the details. I used my phone to look it up and quickly found out that the estimate of the number of women who were used as forced slave labor by the Catholic Church in Ireland alone went as high as thirty thousand over the entire time the Magdalene laundries were in operation. I couldn’t believe it. The Good Shepherd was the last one to close in ninety-six. How on earth had they managed to enslave women up till the mid-nineties? It sounded so medieval.

  “It says here that the women were locked in and not permitted to leave. And if they tried to get away, the cops would catch them and bring them back. They were quite literally Catholic slave labor working for the government and even…get this, even for Guinness, which would pay the laundries for the women’s slave labor. Half of the girls enslaved in these Catholic Church prisons were under the age of twenty-three. The youngest entrant was nine years old. I can’t believe this.” I looked at Morten.

  “How old are you, Gael?” I asked. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

  “I’m twenty-eight.”

  “So, you were born in eighty-seven, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you grow up with both your parents?”

  “Just my mother. I never knew my father. He left before I was born, and my mom didn’t want to talk about him. He was a bastard, not worth mentioning, she would always say.”

  “I see,” I said pensively. “Did you ever wonder about him?”

  “Constantly.”

  “Did your mother ever talk about why she stopped being a nun?”

  “Yes. She told me she wanted children. She regretted not having any and left the convent to create a family. I think she just wanted the child, not the man. I never got the feeling that she was sad he left.”

  Gael paused and looked out the window. “The police station is right over there,” she said.

  Morten stopped the car. I spotted the station out my window. I had grown to resent that place.

  “Alright,” I said with a sigh. “Let’s do this.”

  83

  July 2015

  Luckily, it was too late for Inspector Grady to be on duty, so Gael gave her statement to the officer on duty and we gave ours as well before we drove Gael home. She thanked us a million times, and then disappeared into her condominium. I didn’t feel good leaving her to herself like that, but she assured us she was going to be fine. I couldn’t stop thinking about the killer that was still on the loose out there and probably pissed as hell. Would she come after Gael again?

  We drove back to the hotel, where Bradan greeted us from behind the counter. “You folks are getting in late tonight, huh?” he asked with a grin, then handed us the key. I smiled.

  “Yes, it was quite the night.”

  “Let me get the door for you,” Bradan said, and walked around the counter, then opened the glass door for us. I thanked him before we walked up to our room. I threw myself on the bed with a deep sigh.

  “I can’t believe we were that close! We had her, Morten!”

  “I know,” he said. “At least now we know it’s a woman not a man. And the police have gotten her description from Gael. But she was one strong woman. I’ll tell you that. I can’t believe I couldn’t hold her down.”

  “Don’t blame yourself. You’re just a lightweight, that’s all,” I said with a chuckle.

  Morten leaned back on the bed next to me. I turned and looked at him, resting my elbow on the bed. He closed his eyes and slept a few seconds later. Fully dressed and everything. I felt tired too, but had a million thoughts in my head. That was when I spotted something.

  “What’s that?” I mumbled.

  Something was stuck in his collar. I reached out and grabbed it. I looked at it for a little while, and then put it in my pocket. Seconds later, I had fallen asleep myself.

  We slept in the next morning and didn’t wake till ten thirty. I felt so stupid for having spent so much time in bed, but at the same time, I knew we needed it desperately. The story about Gael and her encounter with the killer was nowhere in the news the next morning, much to my surprise. I would have thought that the reporters would have gotten it from the police report they received every morning when calling and asking what had happened overnight. These days, most police stations had the daily report online for the journalists to grab.

  I thought it was odd that no one talked about it. Not even the fact that The Rose Killer was a woman had been revealed.

  “Maybe they want to keep it a secret, so the killer doesn’t know that they’re on to her,” Morten suggested. “That’s how we would do it. The police have the advantage now.”

  “Yeah, but don’t you think she knows? Don’t you think she knows that Gael has spoken to the police?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe.” He continued reading his paper. “Hey, there’s a wake today at two o’clock at the church. It’s for Bridget Callaghan. I guess the medical examiner released her body to be buried.”

  “A wake you say, huh? Now, I have never been to a wake, have you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Maybe we should go.” I sipped my coffee slowly. “I think we should definitely go.”

  We went back to the room and I spent some time on my phone researching the Magdalene laundries, being shaken to the core from the stories that had
come out from there. I wrote it all down on my notepad and bookmarked the pages in my phone so I could find them again. I sat for a few minutes on the bed, trying to make everything sink in, when I heard a fumbling by the door. I walked towards it when something was pushed under it. I bent down and picked it up, then opened the door to see who it was, but the hallway was empty.

  “What’s that?” Morten asked.

  “It looks like it’s the rest of the diary. Violet’s diary. It has ripped pages, look. Some of the pages are missing. Those that were sent to the mothers.”

  I sat down in a chair in the corner, and then started reading the entire book from one end to the other, then finally googled some more before I stopped and looked at Morten.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I know who Violet is and what happened to her. There’s a complete article about her here. It’s from ninety-six, a few months before the convent closed. See.”

  I showed him the article and the picture. He scrolled with an appalled look on his face.

  “Oh, my God,” he said.

  “I know.”

  84

  September 1996

  Violet sat in the kitchen when Father Allen came out. She had prepared his breakfast, as always. She felt so tired, so worn out, she could hardly stand it. She could hardly stand the sight of him either. Everything about him made her so angry. Yet, she stayed with him even after all these years. Why? Because it was all she knew. It was the life she knew and she had nowhere else to go. At the age of thirty-two, she had no education, she didn’t know how to do anything, and most of all, she had no idea how things worked in the world outside. All she knew was cooking and cleaning and washing clothes. She was getting old and ugly, and who would want her?

  “I’m leaving today for Glasgow,” he said, eating with his mouth open. She hated when he ate with his mouth open. “I’ll be back in three days.”