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the garden. The cabbages were big but withering, as were the cauliflower, squash, and turnip plants. However, the quarter acre of potatoes farther up the hill seemed to be reveling in the hot, dry weather. In other fields McGarr could see corrugated folds of earth that marked former potato beds.
    He reached down and plucked a bright red tomato from the shadows of a plant. The vines were loaded with them, nobody seeming to care that they had fruited, grown prime, and now were beginning to rot back. He bit into it. The flavor was as sweet as anything he could ever hope to taste. A mere second it had been from vine to mouth. And no chemical fertilizer orinsecticide had ever touched this land, he didn’t doubt.
    At that moment, looking down the valley toward Lahinch and the ocean beyond, McGarr wished fervently that he had taken his uncle’s farm in Monaghan when it had been offered to him twenty-five years ago, that he had become a farmer and raised a tribe and followed his country’s footballers into Croke Park of a Sunday afternoon to cheer for his boys. In Rathmines, where McGarr now lived, he hardly knew more than a half-dozen people who lived on his street.
    But, he supposed, there was another side to this idyllic picture before him. The urban world had so intruded on the Clares and Donegals of Ireland that few young people chose to remain. Television, the press, movies, and magazines had made so many other places seem so much more glamorous that the young people were off as soon as they were old enough to scrape up the money. And few returned.
    McGarr thought of May Quirk and New York, and he knew what would greet him when he entered the house: two old people who had been forced into a sort of isolation in a farmhouse with nobody but themselves and some neighbors like them; in short, no real reason to have more than a small garden, a couple of chickens, and two dozen sheep. McGarr only hoped they were strong, for the death of their daughter would hit them doubly hard.
    McGarr didn’t bother to knock. He opened the front door and stepped into a hallway. The parlor door was open. The room was filled with two stuffed chairs, a divan, and a thick rug, all in some red color, and a sideboard with Waterford crystal on top. The mantel of the glazed-brick fireplace held an eight-day clock made in Japan and a gilded-frame picture of their only and nowdead daughter, May. But something else on the sideboard caught McGarr’s eye—a half-empty, open bottle of Canadian Club.
    Superintendent O’Malley seemed lost, both in the immensity of the divan and in his own thoughts. His blue eyes had clouded. He was gently touching his fingers to the plush of the upholstery. The balls of the clock spun in its vacuum. McGarr could hear a woman crying somewhere within the house and the low voice of an old man trying to soothe her. McGarr poured himself a very large whiskey, drank that off, and poured himself another. He filled a second glass and handed it to O’Malley. He then made a cursory search for the cap to the Canadian Club. He could find it neither in the parlor dustbin nor in the kitchen.
    After a while, John Quirk appeared in the doorway. He was a very tall man who had once carried a heavy frame. Now his neck was thin, his head skull-like, eyes sunken. His jawbone was visible right back to his ears, which were large and hairy. His face, however, like his daughter’s, was long and regular. His hand, which McGarr took, was massive and had once been heavily calloused. He wore a green woolen shirt and gray pants held up by leather suspenders. His socks were black.
    McGarr poured him a drink.
    “You’re from Dublin, are you?” John Quirk asked McGarr when he handed the old man the glass.
    McGarr nodded.
    “Are you going to catch the villain who did this to my May?”
    McGarr nodded again.
    “How can you be so sure?” The old man set the glass on a small table next to the stuffed chair in which he now sat. White doilies covered the