In the Woods

Though I had come to think of Knocknaree as though it had happened to another and unknown person, some part of me had been here all along.

Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass.

Contrary to what you might assume, I did not become a detective on some quixotic quest to solve my childhood mystery.

As it is, nobody is likely to link up Detective Rob and his English accent with little Adam Ryan from Knocknaree.

It was these arcana I craved, these near-invisible textures like a Braille legible only to the initiated. They were like thoroughbreds, those two Murder detectives passing through Ballygobackwards; like trapeze artists honed to a sizzling shine.

What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this—two things: I crave truth. And I lie.

And I suppose, if I’m being honest, it appealed both to my ego and to my sense of the picturesque, the idea of carrying this strange, charged secret through the case unsuspected. I

I could give you almost none of the actual words. This strikes me as odd and, in certain moods, as very magical, linking the evening to those fugue states that over the centuries have been blamed on fairies or witches or aliens, and from which no one returns unchanged.

There was a time when I believed, with the police and the media and my stunned parents, that I was the redeemed one, the boy borne safely home on the ebb of whatever freak tide carried Peter and Jamie away. Not any more. In ways too dark and crucial to be called metaphorical, I never left that wood.