15

      Jack woke up earlier than Gloria, as usual. Her head rested on his chest, her long brown hair spread across his skin, tickling where it fell down alongside his ribs. He silently and very slowly moved his body from under hers and slipped out of bed. Gloria moaned sleepily and settled back down with a peaceful look on her face. He showered and dressed and left the bungalow before she had even stirred.

      Every morning he left their home before she did to be at work at eight a.m. Gloria didn’t start work as a guide in Foynes Flying Boat Museum until ten o’clock. The museum was Foynes’ number-one tourist attraction, celebrating the era between 1939 and 1945 when Foynes was the centre of the aviation world, with air traffic between the US and Europe. Gloria, always more than willing to talk and help people, worked as a multilingual guide in the museum from March until October.

      Apart from the museum, Foynes was famous for one other thing: the invention of Irish coffee. During cold and rainy weather, people waiting at the air terminal needed something stronger than coffee to keep them warm. Thus Irish coffee was born.

      In a matter of days from now, Foynes would be overrun by bands playing music on the festival stage, the farmers’ market in museum square, the regatta, and the children’s street art would decorate the town for the Irish Coffee Summer Festival. As usual, the celebratory fireworks would be sponsored by the Shannon Foynes Port Company, which was exactly where Jack was headed that morning.

      After greeting and consulting his colleagues, Jack took his place in the gigantic metal crane and got to work loading cargo. He enjoyed his job and felt a sense of satisfaction, knowing that someone just like him, somewhere on foreign soil, would unload the gift he had helped wrap. He enjoyed placing things where they belonged. He knew everything and everyone had a place in life: every piece of cargo that lay stocked up on the docks and every man and woman who worked alongside him had a space to slot into and a part to play. Every day he had the same goal: moving things and putting them where they belonged.

      He could hear Sandy’s voice in his head, repeating the same sentence over and over again. I can only assume that there’s only one thing more frustrating than not being able to find someone, and that’s not being found. I would want someone to find me, more than anything.

      He carefully placed the cargo onto the ship, lowered himself to the ground, to the surprise of his watching colleagues, took off his helmet, threw it to the ground and ran. Some watched in confusion, some in anger, but those closest to him viewed his exit with sympathy, for they guessed that even a year on, Jack could no longer sit in his perch high above the ground, so high he felt he could see the entire county and all that was in it, except his brother.

      For Jack, running down to his car, all he could think about was finding Sandy, so she could bring Donal back to where he belonged.

      Jack’s continuous questions about Sandy Shortt to the hotels, inns and bed-and-breakfasts in Glin were beginning to raise eyebrows. Impatience was entering the voices of the once-friendly members of staff, and diversions of his phone calls to duty managers were becoming more frequent. Now, with still no clues as to where Sandy was, Jack found himself taking deep breaths of fresh air down by the Shannon Estuary. The River Shannon had been a prominent feature in Jack’s life. Ever since he was a child he had wanted to work in Shannon Foynes Port. He had loved the excitement of the bustling docks that housed the monstrous machines that roamed the river’s edge like metal herons with long steely legs and beaks.

      He had always felt a connection with the river and wanted to be a part of helping all it carried. His mother and father had brought the family to Leitrim on a summer holiday one year, the holiday that remained more vivid in Jack’s mind than any other. Donal wasn’t born and Jack hadn’t yet reached ten years old. It was on that holiday he learned where and how the great river began, slowly and quietly at first in County Cavan before it picked up speed, gathering the secrets and spirit of each county with each part of soil it eroded. Each tributary was like an artery being pumped from the heart of the country, whispering its secrets in hushed and excited babbles until it eventually carried them to the Atlantic where they were lost with the rest of the world’s whispered hopes and regrets. It was like Chinese whispers, starting out small but eventually growing and becoming exaggerated, from the freshly painted wooden boats that bobbed on the surface in Carrick-on-Shannon, to finally carrying steel and metal ships alongside cranes and warehouses that was the grand excitement of Shannon Foynes Port.

      Jack rambled aimlessly down a quiet road along the Shannon Estuary, grateful for the peace and quiet. Glin Castle disappeared behind the trees as he walked further down the track. A splash of bright red glowed from behind the greenery in an area that had long ago been used as a car park but was now overgrown and merely used as a walk for ramblers and birdwatchers. The gravel was uneven, the white lines had faded and weeds grew from between every crack. There sat an old red Fiesta, battered and dented, its gleam long ago rubbed away. Jack stopped in his tracks, immediately recognising the car as the Venus flytrap that had captured the long-legged beauty from the garage the previous morning.

      His heart quickened as he looked around to find her but there was no sight or sound of any other presence. A coffee-filled Styrofoam cup sat on the dashboard, newspapers piled up on the passenger seat alongside a towel, which led Jack’s overactive imagination to believe she was jogging nearby. He moved away from the car in fear she would return to find him peering through the windows. The coincidence of them meeting once again in another deserted area filled him with far too much curiosity for him to walk away. And saying hello to her again would be a welcome joy to a day lacking in results.

      After forty-five minutes of waiting around, Jack began to feel bored and foolish. The car looked like it had been abandoned years ago in the forgotten area, yet he knew for sure that he had seen it being driven yesterday morning. He moved closer and pressed his face against the glass.

      His heart almost stopped. Goose bumps rose on his skin as a shiver ran through his body.

      There on the dashboard, beside the cup of coffee and a mobile phone with missed calls, was a thick brown file with ‘Donal Ruttle’ written in neat handwriting across the front.