Howell moved around to the sofa and sat down. Bo didn’t stop him, but moved around with him, leaving his back to the fireplace. Howell was hoping Scotty would remember that her pistol was in his desk drawer, but, maddeningly, she rolled the office chair toward the sofa, away from the desk, clearly fascinated by his story. When she moved, though, he saw on the desk behind her the red glow of the ‘on’ light of his tape recorder. Good girl, he thought.

Howell continued. “The Irish in the valley were staunch Catholics, of course, and they wouldn’t intermarry with the locals hereabouts who were all Baptists and Methodists and other such heathens. And, unlike the Mormons, they didn’t have instructions from an angel of God to practice polygamy, so – God knows how it began – somehow, they came around to incest. Father with daughter, brother with sister, that sort of thing.”

“Jesus Christ,” Scotty said.

“Well you might say,” Howell said, “and you might wonder why they didn’t, themselves, and why the Church didn’t keep them from it. They were Christians, after all, and the Faith clearly prohibits incest. On the other hand, it prohibits a number of other things that good Christians often quite proudly do and advocate. Well, who knows exactly how they rationalized it, but they managed. And since they were choosing their priests from among their own number every generation or so, they were able to send young men to the seminary in Ireland who had grown up with the local idea, who understood, who felt an obligation to their families and friends to help perpetuate their community, no matter how they had to do it. Which is how poor Father Harry came to grief.”

“He married Mama Kelly and her brother in the Church,” Scotty said.

“Right,” Howell replied, “and a great many more besides, I suspect. He was a priest for a long time around here, after all. But the Kellys didn’t live in the valley; they didn’t have the protective insularity of the community. Eric Sutherland noticed, and he got involved. He blew the whistle on Father Harry.”

“How did you find out about all this?” Scotty asked.

“Some from Father Harry, some from Eric Sutherland’s will, and, most important, some from Mama Kelly. A piece here and a piece there,” Howell replied, “but Sutherland’s affidavit was the most interesting. He went to some lengths to justify himself.”

“What made him get involved?” Scotty asked. “I mean, if this had been going on for a hundred years or more, why go after the priest?”

“Aha!” Howell exclaimed, raising a forefinger, “now you’re getting at the heart of things. You see, in 1930, Eric Sutherland fell in love. He met a lovely young Irish lass from the valley, and he went head over heels, perhaps more so than she. She was unhappy with the way things were going in the valley, as were some others in the community. Once in a while, a girl would break away and find herself a beau from the outside; at least, long enough to get pregnant.” Howell knew about this from personal experience. He glanced at Bo, who was staring, glassy-eyed, into the middle distance. He still gripped the shotgun, though.

“As you might imagine, a few generations of interbreeding were having their effect on the community. This girl had already borne a retarded child by her brother, and she wanted a healthy baby. Then, as soon as she knew for sure she was pregnant, she broke it off with Sutherland. He was devastated. He didn’t understand what had happened for a long time, but when he finally did, he determined to bring what was going on in the valley to a halt. He was in a position to do it. He started with Father Harry.”

Howell eased his feet onto the sofa and leaned back, apparently to make his sore ribs more comfortable. The move also brought one arm closer to Bo Scully’s shotgun.

“Sutherland was, as we all know, a very straitlaced sort, and the last thing he wanted was a huge scandal in his neck of the woods, getting in the newspapers and all that, especially when he was so personally involved. So, because the Kellys didn’t live in the valley, he used them to discredit the priest. He went to the archbishop, told him that Father Harry had married this couple, brother and sister. The archbishop, horrified, called in Father Harry, who admitted it, but nothing more, I suspect, and in short order, the priest was officially ‘silenced’ – that is, he could no longer say mass or perform weddings – and was quietly pensioned off. That was a blow to the families in the valley, but, of course, Sutherland wasn’t finished. He had a civil engineering degree, and he saw the possibilities for a lake where the valley was. A lake would suit his moral purpose as well as his business ones. He went to work buying up the land. You understand, he didn’t put every word of this into his affidavit; I’m filling in the cracks. How’m I doing, Bo?”

“Not bad,” Bo replied, absently.

Howell continued. “And then Eric Sutherland ran smack up against Donal O’Coineen. O’Coineen was an independent sort, one of the ones in the valley who was horrified by what interbreeding was doing to the community. He had a blind daughter, Joyce, whose affliction was probably related to her ancestry. He wanted to farm his land, dig wells on the side for cash money, and raise his children in the valley like a normal human being. He made a point of sending the girls to the town school instead of the one in the valley. He wanted them both to eventually make marriages with young men who were untainted by the valley’s interbreeding.“

“Wasn’t Joyce the one who was engaged to Bo?” Scotty asked.

“That’s right, and Donal O’Coineen objected violently to the match. Bo was, in O’Coineen’s eyes, tainted. He was from a valley family. That right, Bo?”

Bo nodded. He seemed almost in another place. “He made Joyce break our engagement. He ran me off.”

“And then everything came to a head,” Howell said, slowly. “Sutherland had bought all the land in the valley, except Donal O’Coineen’s. Sutherland had built the dam and closed it; the water was rising – the road past the O’Coineen place was all that was holding it back. O’Coineen had pulled Kathleen out of school, but not because of a siege mentality. He had still been trying to make it work, for his children to have a normal life. No, he had another reason for bringing Kathleen home.”

“What?” Scotty demanded. “What reason?”

Howell ignored her. “The screws were tightening on everybody; on Sutherland, on O’Coineen, and…” He paused. “On Deputy Sheriff Christopher Francis Scully, known to one and all as Bo.”

Howell was flying by the seat of his pants, now. He had played nearly all his cards, told nearly all he knew, and, if he was to learn any more, he would have to get Bo Scully into the game.

“Here was a young man who was deeply ashamed of his family history: an ambitious young man who had come back from serving his country in Korea and was, with the help of Eric Sutherland, working his way out of the valley into the sunlight of a normal, respectable life. And now, the valley, with its dying gasp, had come back to haunt him. He couldn’t have the girl he loved, because he was tainted with the valley’s sin.” Howell looked at Bo expectantly. He was laying it on thick, now; he had to get Bo to play.

“And then,” Howell said, “a few weeks after Donal O’Coineen had denied him the marriage he wanted, at the very height of all the tension surrounding the building of the lake, young Bo Scully went out to the O’Coineen place, the place he had been driven from.” Howell made his voice soft and as gentle as he could. “You know what day it is, Bo?” Howell asked. “It’s September 10, 1976; it’s twenty-five years to the day since you went out there to get Donal O’Coineen’s signature on a deed of transfer.”

Howell held his breath. Bo either played now, or it was all over. Not Howell nor anyone else would ever know what had happened at the O’Coineen place, and, before dawn, both he and Scotty would be under the lake.