Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) by Adrian McKinty Read Free Book Online Page A

thirties folly in white stucco with Romanesque windows, gargoyles, three floors, and a little Gothic tower on the roof. I’d heard about this place, but I hadn’t been here before.
    The house had a name, the “Tiny Taj.”
    “The Tiny Taj?” I said, trying not to grin.
    She groaned.
    “It’s been called that since the 1930s when it was built by a retired member of the Indian Civil Service. Of course Dad couldn’t resist when he saw that. It’s totally embarrassing. Living in a house with a name is bad enough, but the Tiny Taj?”
    She laughed. Her face shone under the porch light.
    “You’ll see me again?” I asked.
    “I will.”
    “We’ll talk in school?”
    “Yes. We’ll go out next week. Give you a chance to actually read a Yeats poem.”
    “It will that.”
    “Ok. Night.”
    “Night.”
    She looked at me. Her eyes, dark, heavy, beautiful. Her lips full, red.
    “Well,” she said, “are you going to kiss me?”
    I didn’t say anything. I leaned forward and with great care, as if she were some delicate rose, I put my hand on her wet cheek and kissed her lips. She tasted of peaches. We stood there kissing in the rain and caught our breaths and she went up that big path to her house. And I walked home thinking, I don’t believe I’ll ever be this happy again.
    I was right.

3: THE BURNING GHAT
    W e hadn’t brought umbrellas. The day had started sunny. But it’s a funeral in eastern Ulster and who ever heard of sun for such an affair? Now from Donegal to the Mournes a smear of black cloud and thrashing rain. Raining so hard it makes divots in the clay.
    St. Nicholas’s Parish Church, Carrickfergus, June 12, 1995.
    Cold, hard to see what’s happening at the front. Impossible to hear. The funeral mass is in the style of the Church of Ireland. The simple pine coffin beside the font. Hymns. A memorial read by her older brother, Colin. The church dating back to the twelfth century. William Congreve and Jonathan Swift worshiped here. I stand there reluctantly. I didn’t want to come. The last funeral I was at … Ma. And where do you bury a Jewish atheist-humanist in Belfast? Not the synagogue. A rented hall. And who conducts the service? A man Dad met. An actor with a booming voice. Talking about Mum, whom he didn’t really know. He goes on forever until it becomes a farce. It is the opposite of catharsis—whatever that is.
    “Shit.”
    “Ssshhh,” John says.
    The service, handshakes. Tears. John, Facey, myself squeezed soaked into Facey’s Ford Fiesta.
    Rain guttering down Facey’s broken window wiper. The funeral procession. Facey dipping the clutch, stalling the car. Out along the sea front. White water on the lough. Black clouds. The turn up Downshire Road. The graveyard. Exiting. Hats on, umbrellas up and sucked outward by the wind. Cars parked. Only the men walking to the graveside. The women, as is traditional in Protestant Ulster, outside the cemetery gates or at home preparing the wake.
    The graves. Markings. Pictures on some. Wet flowers on others. Pitiful messages over children. And that one grave. The saddest here. Don’t even look down that row. Don’t even look. Visited it three times in six years. Pain. Numbing. Panic rising in my throat. A flash to that bed in the hospital, Mum on full meds, the pain racking her body, just me and her. Oh, God. John and Facey still beside me. I lean on John for a moment to steady myself.
    Mr. Patawasti, Colin and Stephen Patawasti and an uncle I don’t know carrying the coffin. Slipping in the mud with that deadweight inside the box. The story’s out now. Victoria murdered by a Mexican burglar at her apartment in Denver. So pointless. Such a waste.
    Mist on the hills. The Knockagh from the side in pale loops of gray and green. A smell. Damp earth. Around the graveyard the dungy aroma of a churned field. The service. The priest’s white cassock sodden and blowing around his face. Sixty men soaked in their dark suits. No one can hear what the