“Looks like your sergeant didn’t say quite as much as he might have about this Tiernan guy,” said Uchenna’s Dad a couple of days later, after dinner, as he was paging through the paper.
“He’d been up on some kind of corruption charge while he was still in the Guards, hadn’t he?” Uchenna’s Mam said.
Uchenna’s Dad nodded, turning another page and reaching out for another piece of pizza. Then he realized he was feeling around in an empty box: Emer and Jimmy, who were sitting next to each other on the opposite side of the table and busily texting each other, had been there before him. He sighed and reached out for the box holding the spare pizza on the nearby counter. “He was innocent, as it turned out,” he said. “But they wouldn’t give him his job back after they dismissed him. Or not ”wouldn’t’. Just—things kept coming up: excuses why they couldn’t do it right now, it was going to have to wait…”
“Uh huh,” Uchenna’s Mam said, taking another piece of pizza herself. “I’ve seen that at the hospital sometimes. Not outright refusal to do what you’re told. Just passive resistance…”
Her Dad nodded. “So he came up with a way to get back at his cronies at the station, by making them look… less than competent?” He smiled a small cynical smile. “Bought these horses from one of the horse fairs out West or someplace like that—supposedly they were destined for the glue factory—then got a few friends to start helping him move the horses around to various properties in the area. The friends slipped up a few times about feeding and watering the horses, and the ISPCA is going to be looking into that, apparently. But the thing about all those fields was that they all belonged to people who had dirty little secrets that had sort of slipped under the radar.” He reached out for the iced tea he’d been drinking. “One of those fields was being used to hide drugs stashes by one of those Eastern European gangs working out of Naas: the owner was taking big payoffs from them to keep quiet. The owner of another one had a long history of domestic abuse, though nothing the Guards had ever been able to prove before. Apparently they caught him in the act when they stopped by to ask questions.” Her Dad shook his head. “Somebody else had been hosting an illegal car-breaking ring in his barn. A regular little litany of trouble….” He turned another page of the paper. “And every time the local Guards started investigating one of these fields and looking into who owned it and what they might have been up to, these nasty little secrets started getting uncovered… some of them stuff the Gardai’d been trying to get to the bottom of for a long time.”
“Cute,” Uchenna’s Mam said, getting up to go get herself some coffee.
“Some of the kids at school say it’s the ghost’s revenge on all the people around there who were mean to her,” Jimmy said. “She fixed it so the horses were in all those fields.” Then he snickered and made an “oooo, oooo” horror-movie noise. “The dumb tossers.”
Emer laughed at him, and at the idea. They spent a few moments going “Oooo, oooo!” at each other.
“Well,” Uchenna’s Mam said, smiling slightly. “I guess it’s more interesting to have a local ghost story, this time of year, than something as boring as a dispute over a wrongful dismissal. But it’s all over now, I guess….”
“Oh, there’s more pressure on the local Guards to get Tiernan reinstated,” Uchenna’s Dad said. “I think they’re spending their time right now trying to figure out whether it makes them look dumb to prosecute him for incitement to trespass when he’s just helped them break up an international drug ring and an auto smuggling operation that between them may have been responsible for several unsolved murders.”
Emer’s phone went off suddenly. She and Jimmy moaned and rolled their eyes. “That’s it, you two,” said Uchenna’s Mam. “Your mams will be waiting for you. Uchenna, you can walk them down to the end of the driveway…”
She did, and watched Emer and Jimmy walk off together. Not exactly holding hands yet, Uchenna thought as she turned back toward the house. That would weird them both out right now. Not to mention the other kids in class. But I get this feeling it won’t be too much longer…
Back in the kitchen, her Mam was laughing softly at something Uchenna’s Dad had said before she came back in: she finished stirring sugar into her coffee and headed into the living room. “Well, maybe things around here will quiet down now…”
“Till the next time,” said Uchenna’s Dad as he closed the paper and got up to follow her. “No telling what else might be going on around here under the surface…” He stretched and yawned. “But you can never tell what’s going on in an Irish town. There’s always more happening under the surface than most people ever see.”
Uchenna’s Mam chuckled. “You make it sound so mysterious.”
“But true,” her Dad said. “Blow-ins like you and me will never know about most stuff going on around here.”
“You were born here!”
“I was born in Ireland,” Uchenna’s Dad said, amused. “Not born here. In Adamstown, we’re all just blow-ins together. But then, these days, so’s anybody in this country who wasn’t born where they live… which is most of the population. So you may as well just learn to enjoy it…”
He flopped down on the sofa with the laptop open again, and Uchenna’s Mam flopped down beside him, reaching for the TV remote. Uchenna took the newspaper off the kitchen table and wandered upstairs with it. She finished her homework for the evening, websurfed a little while, listlessly, and eventually went to bed before her Mam came upstairs and made her. But for quite a while before she turned off the light, she lay reading and rereading the newspaper story, looking at the grainy little picture of the Mammy Horse.
When she woke up the next morning, it was early: much too early—her alarm wasn’t anywhere near going off yet. But the room was full of pale colorless light, and Uchenna yawned and rubbed her eyes and went over to the front window, idly looking out it.
The streetlight there was still on, though it was faint and flickering, about to go out because of how bright it was now. What surprised Uchenna was the fog. Still there, she thought. I thought Mam said it was supposed to stop today… It was lighter, though: not as thick or impenetrable as it had been the day before. She yawned again and was about to turn away from the window —
— when in the fog, something moved. Uchenna stared. Something white? It was hard to see in that uncertain light. Uchenna peered harder into the mist: rubbed her eyes again.
A dark eye, looking up at her: placid. A big white shape, tail swishing; and a smaller shape beside it, gamboling up beside its Mammy out of the mist, then kicking its little pale hind hooves up into the air, turning and running into the fog again. The bigger white shape gathered a curl of mist around itself, turned a broad side to Uchenna’s view: faded away…
The mist swirled a little more, started to lift. Uchenna stood there holding her breath. Maybe Daddy’s right, she thought after a moment, as the sun started to break through, showing her nothing beyond the wall but empty field, dew on the grass, the new morning coming along once more at its usual pace. Maybe you never really know what’s going to happen here.
And that’s so cool!
Uchenna went to get her bathrobe, and on the way out of her bedroom, caught a glimpse out the back window of something bright among the leaves of her tree: an apple, green normally, but in that morning light, gone golden.
Uchenna went out and shut the bedroom door behind her, smiling a secret smile.
Also from Diane Duane
The Young Wizards Series:
So You Want to Be a Wizard * Deep Wizardry
High Wizardry * The Wizard’s Dilemma
A Wizard Alone * Wizard’s Holiday
Wizards at War *A Wizard of Mars
For mature readers:
The Middle Kingdoms Series
The Door into Fire * The Door into Shadow
The Door into Sunset
In the Star Trek (TM) universe:
The Wounded Sky * My Enemy, My Ally
The Romulan Way * Spock’s World
Dark Mirror * Intellivore
Swordhunt * Honor Blade
The Empty Chair
…and many others
For more information, visit
http://ebooksdirect.dianeduane.com
Or Diane’s main website at
http://www.dianeduane.com
Diane Duane, Uchenna's Apples
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