Free The Lake by Sheena Lambert

the questions in her eyes so that she wouldn’t have to articulate them. But Carla’s gaze didn’t move from the mug in front of her.
    ‘So,’ Peggy said.
    Carla looked at her hard. ‘So?’
    Peggy opened her mouth but closed it again. ‘The body thing’s weird, isn’t it?’ she said, at last.
    Carla looked back down at her mug, and Peggy exhaled heavily.
    ‘Yeah. I suppose it is.’ Carla picked at a piece of nail varnish that was flaking off her thumbnail. ‘I wonder who it is. Was.’
    ‘Could be an IRA thing,’ Peggy said. She was glad to have some neutral topic of conversation to discuss with her sister, even if it was a dead body. ‘Maybe it’s a Loyalist. Or a snitch. They’ve killed people like that before, and buried their bodies.’
    ‘Ah Peggy. Don’t be daft.’
    Peggy shrugged her shoulders. It was well known that the hills around Ballyknock and Crumm had been notorious during the civil war, littered with safe- houses, and scenes of infamous skirmishes between the Staters and the Republicans.
    ‘Maybe it’s older?’ she said. ‘From the twenties?’
    ‘Huh.’ Carla stood suddenly, the scraping of her chair legs on the tiled floor shattering the calm of the room. ‘It’s probably just some fool that refused to move when they flooded the valley.’ She brought her plate over to the sink. ‘Some stubborn eejit that sat in her house as the water rose around her ankles until she had no choice but to go under with the rest of it.’ She stood at the door leading to the rest of the house and pulled her cardigan tightly around herself. ‘Or some idiot, like Coleman Quirke, who thought that a moonlit walk over the bridge after ten pints was a great idea.’
    The gentle banter was evidently over. Peggy just sipped her tea and let her sister rant and bluster.
    ‘There’ll be no great story. It’ll be no one famous or important. And your Detective Sergeant will go back to Dublin, and you’ll never hear from him again, Peg. So don’t get your hopes up. Right?’
    Peggy tried her utmost to keep all expression from her face. ‘Right,’ she said.
    Carla paused a moment, and for a second, Peggy thought she was considering sitting down again. But then her sister yanked the door handle and turned on her heel. ‘Goodnight, so,’ she said as she disappeared into the house.
    Peggy sat unmoving for a moment. She had read in one of her magazines that it was good practice to breathe slowly and count silently to ten when you wanted to stop yourself from screaming and punching someone. She almost had to marvel at how Carla could, without a word having been spoken on the matter, find the fontanel of her thoughts, and stamp up and down on it unabashedly.
    Frank. Of course, she had thought him attractive. Any normal girl would. She was fairly convinced that Carla herself had had an appreciation of his presence in The Angler’s Rest that evening. But had she really thought more of it? Maybe Carla had been one step ahead of her subconscious. She seemed to have worked through their attraction, affair, and Peggy’s broken heart before Peggy herself had had the chance to mull over the possibility of it.
    Well, maybe Carla was right. This was Crumm, after all. Not the type of place where handsome men from Dublin came to find love. It was Crumm, where nothing ever happened; a village forever anchored to a painful and brutal past, the truth of which seemed to cast a lake-shaped shadow on the people who lived there.
    Peggy sat in the quiet kitchen and thought about Coleman. It was rare to get more than a few sentences out of him on any occasion, and she had never heard him tell the story of the evacuation before. She had, of course, been aware of the history of the place; how their pub had once stood more than half a mile from the river water that now lapped less than one hundred feet away. But that is what it had always been. History. Before her time. She had only been a baby when the valley was flooded, and she