Never Never by Susan Kiernan-Lewis Page B

Chezzie whimpered. “Let me talk to him.”
    It had to be him. It couldn’t not be him. How many times had Bill complained about his brother in the Garda? Complained about that sadistic son of a bitch living in Dublin with electricity and hot meals and nothing changed for him? A throb of doubt wheedled its way into Chezzie’s fervor of fear and desperation.
    The Hurley that Bill talked about was no officer. No commander of anything.
    Chezzie drove the splinter of doubt away. It was all he had. If he was wrong he was worse than dead. Allowing these men to kill him was one thing. Being eaten piece by screaming, flailing piece by a lion every bit as hungry as Chezzie was—was beyond the worst of any of Chezzie’s nightmares.
    â€œPlease,” he begged. “I didn’t even steal the chicken.”
    â€œShirrup,” one of the soldiers said.
    The door handle began to twist and Chezzie felt a scream welling up inside him. The door opened and a large bald headed man with shoulders the width of two men and cold, dead eyes strode into the room. He was wearing a uniform, his boots polished so they looked like black mirrors. His face twisted into a grimace of revulsion.
    â€œPlease, sir…” Chezzie said, his eyes tearing up. This was his chance. His only chance.
    â€œHe says he knows you, Commander,” a soldier behind Hurley said.
    Hurley’s face remained contorted into an expression of having to endure a bad smell.
    â€œNot…no,” Chezzie said. “Your brother. I knew your brother, Bill.”
    An image of fingers laying down a hand of cards on a green-felted tablecloth flashed across Chezzie’s mind. Betting everything—his life and a death too terrible to imagine—on one gambit. No room for maneuvering. No second chances.
    â€œYou know Bill?”
    Chezzie forced himself not to weep. In three words he took a step back from the precipice. Just a bit. Just enough.
    â€œWe worked together at…Mrs. Branigan’s camp for…” Chezzie struggled for the name of the rape camp, not sure he’d ever really known.
    â€œI know where he worked,” Hurley said, his eyes narrowing, his lip finally uncurling at Chezzie’s stench. “Where is my brother now?”
    â€œMurdered,” Chezzie said excitedly, “at a secret nunnery down south. I can take you there.”

15
    S arah saw the castle from twenty miles away. Around the final bend, the land stretched like a treeless tableau, creating a stark moonscape of green, flanked on the west by a thick forest, beyond which they could hear the muted roar of the sea. The road straightened out, flat as a ruler for the final distance leading to the castle.
    On the eastern side of the road were fields, now dormant and unused these past five years.
    What had happened to the farmers and shepherds who lived here before the bomb? Why had no one planted the fields since then?
    The castled perched on the horizon like a cutout from a child’s activity book. Its stark outline of storybook crenellated towers—two of them visible even from this distance—anchored the broad expanse of limestone in between. It looked ominous, wicked, haunted.
    It did not look like home.
    â€œWhat do you think?” Mike asked as he rode up beside her wagon. “Crackin’, isn’t it?”
    Sarah didn’t respond.
    â€œThe ocean is behind it. And there will be a stream or water of some kind nearby. Irish castles were always built by a water source.”
    â€œCor, Mike, it’s beautiful,” Tommy said from the driver’s seat of the wagon. “Truly it is.”
    â€œIt’s built up high like that so they can see anyone coming,” Mike said, his eyes bright with zeal. “We’re still a good distance away but if there’s anyone inside, they already know we’re here.”
    The fields gave way to the beginnings of a village on the eastern side of the road.