The Mysteries (11 page)

“Oh, God. Oh, hell. I'm sorry. You liked it. I didn't. I'm sorry, but I just didn't. I mean, the house was OK, but not where it is. I couldn't live out here. This is suburban
hell
. I'm sorry. We'll find a place we both like. We'll keep looking, I promise. Jenny, come on, don't cry. Please don't. Talk to me, Jenny, please.”

She stopped crying after a few minutes and snuffled into a tissue she found in her bag. But she wouldn't talk to me. I got the silent treatment all the way home.

Later, of course, we talked. I gave her a whole spiel about how I felt about such smug, white-bread, commuter-belt suburbs. It was the worst kind of ghetto. And as long as we were on the subject of where I wanted to live, I went on to confess that I'd never imagined myself settling down for good in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. I'd much rather go somewhere else. How did she feel about that?

Jenny was a Texan born and bred, but she came from San Antonio. She had no deep sentimental roots in North Texas. It was a job that had brought her there, just like me.

“I wouldn't mind going somewhere else,” she said. “I hear Dell is hiring.”

Her knowledge of this took me by surprise. I wondered if she'd been making her own private investigations, thinking thoughts and having dreams I knew nothing about. “Austin?” I thought about it. Austin reminded me a little bit of Madison, and could be a pretty appealing place to live, if you had to stay in Texas.

“That would be better than here,” I agreed. “But I was thinking of another state. I miss city life. I mean, a
real
city.”

Our eyes met, and for the first time in ages we were back on the same wavelength. Memories of past romantic vacations came bubbling up. The most romantic thing I'd ever done—maybe the only really big-scale romantic thing I'd ever done—was the time I'd surprised her with an anniversary trip to New York City. For a few seconds, we entertained the notion of it, then she said, “We couldn't afford to buy a broom closet in Manhattan.”

“A room in Queens?”

“Ha-ha.”

“How about Chicago? Chicago is a great city. You liked it, didn't you, when we were there?”

She shrugged. “I don't know. It was so
cold
that weekend.”

“I'm sure you'd like it. Well, we can think about it. It doesn't have to be Chicago. There are lots of other places. Why don't we start looking for jobs, see what's out there, what do you say?”

She compressed her lips and cast her eyes down thoughtfully, then nodded as if she agreed. So I thought it was settled. I thought we'd agreed to go forward, to start over again in a new place, together.

Together: That was the important thing.

But a week later, Jenny disappeared.

10. Armando

Armando Valdes Garrido, corporal second class in the Chilean army, was out on maneuvers with seven recruits stationed at Pampa Lluscuma, near Putre, in the spring of 1977. At 4:15 in the morning of April 25, Valdes abruptly and inexplicably vanished before the startled eyes of his men.

Fifteen minutes later, while they were still trying to figure out what had happened to their leader, he reappeared. He had no memory of what had happened to him; no awareness of having been absent for even one minute, never mind fifteen. And no one could explain how, in those missing minutes, the calendar on his watch had advanced by five days, indicating April 30, or why the formerly clean-shaven corporal now sported what was obviously a five-day growth of beard.

11. Etain

Rain finally drove me out of Golden Square. I was soaked before I reached the shelter of the underground station at Piccadilly Circus, then I had to stand in a crowded carriage, moist and gently steaming, all the way to Turnpike Lane.

Leaving the station, I noticed a young woman huddled in a blanket at the top of the stairs to the street. It was a prime site for beggars, but I hadn't seen her before. Life on the street had aged her, making it impossible to say if she was sixteen or twenty-six. Although it was June, she was dressed in heavy winter layers and wore a dark, knitted cap atop her long blond hair. She had a metal stud in her nose, and her blank face was dirty. She might have been drugged or half-asleep from the way she stared into space and mumbled almost inaudibly. I couldn't make out if she was talking to herself or asking passersby for spare change, but a yellow styrofoam food container, open by her side, held a few coins, so I dropped in a couple of pounds as I went past. I couldn't help wondering how she had come to this, and if, in her mind, it was an improvement on the life she'd left behind. Was anyone in the wide world searching for this girl? And if they were, would she want to be found?

The memory of her empty gaze haunted me during the short walk home. What did she think about all day? What did she make of her world? If you asked her, she might have said she was happy—I'd met people like that before. However bare and uncomfortable her life appeared to an outsider, it was probable she had no wish to be rescued. Peri Lensky could be living a similar half-life on the streets of any big city in the world. She might be a prostitute, a drug addict, a homeless beggar—or, on the other hand, she might have a completely new identity, be the pampered wife of some rich gangster, a well-paid porn star, or the mainstay of a small religious community, doing all her chores by hand and looking forward to the coming end. Even wanted criminals sometimes managed to create new identities for themselves and vanish into an alternative life. For someone like Peri, with an American passport and a clean record, once she'd managed to give her mother and boyfriend the slip, there were no limits to her freedom.

When I got in, after I'd changed my clothes yet again and brewed a fresh pot of coffee, strong and hot to clear my head, I settled down to work.

First, a list of questions to ask Laura Lensky. What did Peri take with her? When she flew to London for the Christmas holidays, did she have a single ticket or a return? And I needed some names to work with: Peri's friends from Texas, people (besides Hugh) she might have hung out with during her summer in London, and anyone who'd known her during her brief residence at Brown University.

It was possible, even probable, that Laura had done the basic legwork back when her daughter first went missing, but she might have overlooked something, or been sidetracked by her conviction that she knew Peri. As an outsider, it might be easier for me to see the truth.

Next, I ran some simple name and address searches, using the Internet and some databases I had on CD-ROM. There is nothing romantic or specialized about that kind of detective work, and anyone can do it; but it takes time and the willingness to sift through lots of dull, unrelated material. It could all be a waste of time if Peri had changed her name. That would seem to be the logical course for someone trying to hide out, but I had only to think of my father to know that lots of runaways never bothered with disguise. If Peri had gone back to America and needed a job, nothing could be simpler than to use the social security number she'd already been assigned. Of course she might be using her husband's name, but she would have needed to provide some ID to get married, in which case the name of Peregrine Alexandra Lensky would be awaiting discovery, along with her husband's name, in public records.

After more than four hours of searching I hadn't found anything that seemed like a lead, and I thought I'd better take a break before I folded. I was hungry, but I didn't feel like going out again, and I never feel like cooking. Fortunately there was one ready meal remaining in the freezer—Sausage and Mash, Tesco's Finest.

There was no room in the narrow little kitchen for a table and chairs, and I found I was not in the mood for my usual fine dining experience upstairs, slouched on the couch with the remote in one hand and a fork in the other, so after I'd nuked the frozen dinner I took it back to my desk with a glass of
eau de
North London. My stomach was starting to protest at the amount of coffee I'd poured into it, and there was nothing else to drink.

Ever since parting from Hugh Bell-Rivers I'd very deliberately
not
thought about his strange story and what it suggested to me. I'd told myself that Peri, like Jenny, had simply wanted a life in which her boyfriend played no part. She wasn't the predictable child her mother imagined, but a complex young woman who had gone off in pursuit of her own dream. We might never understand why she'd done it—possibly she couldn't even explain it herself—but, given enough time and a little bit of luck, I would find her living a more or less ordinary life somewhere, just as I'd found my father. I'd concentrated on the practical, tried-and-tested methods of tracking down a missing person.

As I munched away at my dinner my gaze swept along the stuffed bookshelves lining the walls of my office. It was something I often did, admiring certain choice finds, luxuriating in the accumulated knowledge, or despairing a little at the useless, dusty weight of all those pages I'd never read again, thinking of all the money I'd spent and wondering how much I'd get if I put them up for sale. Yet my eyes were drawn magnetically to a few particular books:
Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race,
an impressive volume, more than eighty years old, but with the gold lettering of the title still shining out of the dark green binding like new; and also the tattered black spine of an ancient Penguin Classic,
Early Irish Myths and Sagas.
Not far away were several other compilations of Celtic mythology, including Lady Gregory's
Gods and Fighting Men
and a thick, scholarly tome by W. Y. Evans-Wentz, and, the weirdest scientific treatise of all, Robert Kirk's brief yet mind-blowing
magnum opus
of 1691.

Those books, and several others grouped nearby, were the legacy of my first case. They had been left to me by a woman who had disappeared in Scotland nearly ten years ago.

That recollection made my heart pound harder and my mouth go dry. It had been years since I had looked inside any one of them, or had any need of them. More recently, they'd become a slight embarrassment to me, as I'd grown to doubt my own memories. And yet I'd have to be crazy to ignore the connections between Hugh's description of his last night with Peri and what had happened to me all those years ago in Scotland.

I had to clear more books off the library ladder before I could use it to reach the top shelf. Then I blew dust off the books I wanted and carried the stack back to my desk.

“The Wooing of Etain” was a longer and more complex story than I'd remembered. It fell into three separate sections, and there were some important variations to the basic tale. How it ended depended on who was doing the telling, and for what purpose it was being told. Yet certain basic things remained the same.

In all the stories, Mider was one of the Tuatha de Danann, immortal magic-users who were traditionally supposed to have ruled Ireland until their overthrow by the human Milesians forced them underground. The Otherworld in which they lived was perceived by the ancient Celts as a realm that could occasionally be visited by humans, although it also had connections to the afterlife.

The first part of the story began with Mider's decision to take to wife the most beautiful woman in Ireland, Etain Echrade, the daughter of Ailill. He sent his foster son (or half brother) Angus to negotiate the bride-price and bring her back.

However, Mider already had a wife, a powerful sorceress called Fuamnach, and when she saw Etain invading her space, she turned her into a pool of water. From the pool of water a worm was formed, which then turned into a red fly.

But what a fly! “This fly was the size of the head of the handsomest man in the land, and the sound of its voice and the beating of its wings were sweeter than pipes and harps and horns. Its eyes shone like precious stones in the dark, and its color and fragrance could sate hunger and quench thirst in any man; moreover, a sprinkling of the drops it shed from its wings could cure every sickness and affliction and disease.”

Mider felt so happy in the fly's presence that he didn't even want another woman. When Fuamnach found out how happy the fly made Mider, she conjured up a storm to blow it out of his palace. The wind blew the fly into Angus's palace. One immortal could always recognize another; he knew the fly was actually Mider's wife, and kept her safe in a crystal bower, until the jealous sorceress came to hear of it and again summoned a mighty wind. The poor fly was blown about for years and years, never able to find rest, until at last it landed on a house in Ulster where people were feasting. It fell into a drinking cup and was swallowed by the wife of a warrior named Etar. Nine months later—one thousand and twelve years from her first begetting by Ailill—Etain was born again.

Echu Airem was the king of Ireland, and determined to have the most beautiful woman in the land for his wife. In addition, she must be a woman no other man had known before him. Etain the daughter of Etar seemed his perfect match, so he took her as his bride to the high court at Tara.

There his brother, confusingly named Ailill, no sooner set eyes on Etain than he fell in love with her. He could not dishonor his brother, so he said nothing of his feelings to anyone and dwindled into an illness caused by his unrequited love until it seemed that he would die. Echu had business to attend to, so he left Etain with instructions to tend Ailill, to do everything possible to make him well, and to perform the proper funeral rituals for him when he died.

With Etain visiting him every day, Ailill quickly grew better, so that she began to suspect the cause of his illness and questioned him. “You should have told me sooner,” she said, when he confessed. “If it is in my power to heal you, I shall. Come to me tomorrow morning.”

Ailill lay awake with excitement all night, but then, at the hour agreed for their meeting, he fell sound asleep.

Etain went onto the hillside at the agreed time and saw a man who looked like Ailill. But he said nothing to her, and when she looked more closely, she saw he was a stranger, and went home. There she found Ailill just waking, lamenting his weakness. She told him the next day would do just as well for their tryst.

Three times Etain went to the hill, and three times she saw the man who looked like Ailill. Finally she demanded to know who he really was. He replied that his name was Mider and he had been her husband in another lifetime. He explained that he had made Ailill fall in love with her, and had now removed that desire. He asked her to come away with him, but she replied that she would not leave the king of Ireland for a man she did not know. She went home and found Ailill was cured.

One fine summer morning Echu was startled to discover a strange young warrior within the ramparts of his fortress.

The handsome young man introduced himself as Mider of Bri Leith, and proposed a game of chess. “If you win,” said Mider, “I will give you fifty dark brown horses, strong, swift, and steady, all finely bridled and saddled.” They played, and Mider lost, and he went away.

The next morning Mider returned leading the fifty horses, just as he had promised, and asked for another game. Again, Echu won, and this time he set Mider four hard tasks: to clear a field of stones, to drain a bog, to build a great road, and to plant a forest.

“You ask too much, but I shall do it,” said Mider. He went away and, after a year and a day, all four hard tasks were accomplished. Mider returned to Tara, in a much sterner mood this time, and challenged Echu to another game.

“The winner shall name the stake,” he said.

Mider won. For his prize, he wanted Etain.

Echu scowled. “I will not sell you my wife.”

“Then grant me the right to put my arms around her and receive a kiss from her lips.”

Echu felt he had no choice, in honor, but to agree. But he knew from past performance that Mider was very powerful, so he was careful. “Very well, but not today,” he replied. “Return in a month's time and you shall have what you ask.”

On the day appointed for Mider's return, Echu made sure his palace was surrounded by heavily armed men. All the doors were locked, and his best warriors stood guard along the walls. Surrounded on all sides, Echu and Etain sat at the table in the center of the great hall when suddenly Mider appeared before them, looking more splendid than ever.

“I have come for what you promised me,” said Mider to Echu. “I have come to take Etain.”

Etain turned red with shame and anger.

“There is no dishonor to you in this, Etain,” said Mider. “You would not abandon your husband, but he has agreed to give you away.”