Hot Whispers of an Irishman (6 page)

Tired beyond thought, Vi pushed away from the table and checked in the fridge for a bedtime snack but found its shelves empty of quick edibles.

“Barren, eh?” she said to Nan and the other spirits watching over her. “Sharp. Grand joke, indeed.”

No doubt about it, the dead had nasty senses of humor.

The ambitious man is seldom at peace.

—I
RISH
P
ROVERB

V
i staggered downstairs at nearly ten the next morning, her crimson silk robe wrapped haphazardly about her, and her hair still in sleep tangles. She’d been restless past three o’clock with thoughts of Liam—a circuit of “what ifs” that had led her back to where she’d started: the past was unchangeable and the future not a matter of relevance. At five-thirty, Mam had begun to stir, with tea kettle shrilly whistling and television chattering away. Vi should have surrendered to the inevitable and started her day then. The additional doze she’d instead allowed herself had set her behind.

After a quick bit of snooping, she found Roger and Da in the kitchen, Da all suited up for his day with no work and Roger beneath the table, gnawing on a joint bone of some poor beast or another.

“Morning,” she said to her father.

He returned the greeting, then had a sip of orange juice. She noted that he was reading a brochure about employment opportunities in sales. He must be desperate, for her da was among the quietest men she knew. Both he and his namesake son, Michael, would happily go hours without talking if others didn’t shake words loose.

At floor-level, Roger drew her attention, growling and worrying at his bone as though it might escape.

“Give it back,” she said to her hound, not quite sure she wanted to touch it if he were willing. Rog backed until he was safely between her da’s feet.

“What, no meat for him, either?” Da asked. “Are you making over your dog in your own image?”

With Rog’s carnivore’s fondness for mice and hares, she stood no chance.

“Just avoiding another scolding from Mam. If she sees him acting a savage in her kitchen, he’ll be sleeping on the stoop.”

Da smiled. “I’ve already taken the scolding in Roger’s name. Your mother had planned the bone for her ham and bean soup, dreadful stuff that it is.”

“Which is exactly why you gave the bone to Rog, no doubt.”

“A wise man learns to avert disaster.” He set aside his glass of juice. “Speaking of which, are you off to Duncarraig again this morning?”

Unlike his mother or Vi herself, Da had never possessed a bit of the second sight, which left her wondering what disaster he might be referring to, if not Una Rafferty’s chicken feast.

“I am, and far later than I planned to be,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

He had the look of a man about to suffer. “Your mother’s at the bakery. The flower committee from church will be here this afternoon for a meeting. They’re fine women, all, for about twenty minutes. After that, my head begins to ring with their talking, and there’s no place away from them.”

Vi could imagine.

“You’re welcome to come along,” she said as she inventoried the cleaning supplies beneath the sink. Since Mam had enough to last to Armageddon, she’d not miss some liquid soap and a sponge or two. Vi emerged with her pilfered goods. “I have to say, Da, handsome as you are, you’re also overdressed to help me.”

He glanced briefly at the sales brochure still on the table. “I was thinking more of a visit in town today…a look-see for new opportunities. Hard to believe I grew up there, what little I’ve been back.”

Often enough to settle a friend’s jetsam on her, that much was certain. She found an empty grocery sack in a drawer by the back door and tucked her supplies inside. That done, Vi opened the fridge. It seemed that Mam’s priorities lay with cleanliness. Nothing had appeared in the refrigerator since last night except some rashers, and she’d leave the pig-nibbling to Roger.

Like Da, she settled for a glass of juice—the bottled, watery type that he preferred. The first swallow brought a wince. The second was enough to force surrender. Vi dumped the rest of the juice into the sink.

“Twenty minutes and we’ll be gone,” she said.

“Time enough,” her father replied.

Twenty minutes beyond that, as they headed toward Duncarraig, Da made his plans better known. “I doubt I’ll be as long as you will,” he said. “How about we drop you at your nan’s and I take your car back into town?”

Vi glanced over at him and was pleased to see that he appeared nearly content. He wasn’t a man to wear his unhappiness on the outside, and he hadn’t looked well in the days that she’d been home.

“Just promise to be back for me before sundown, if you could.” Candlelight was a fine thing, but not enough to clean by.

“Of course.”

They drove on in her da’s favored state—quiet—and soon made Duncarraig. Town was bustling under the thin sun. Mothers had babies out in prams, and in a sign of optimism, had rolled back the babies’ clear plastic weather shields that were nearly perpetually in place. Unwilling to travel the baby path any farther, Vi returned her focus to the road. Town dwindled, fields took over, and the narrow and rutted
bothareen
to Nan’s appeared.

As Vi neared the house, she spotted a new addition. A rusted red container almost large enough to hold her car sat beside the house. It seemed that in matters of trash, if not of the heart, Liam was better than his word. She parked in front of the house, then climbed out, leaving the motor running.

“C’mon, Rog,” she said, opening the back door. He hopped out, and she gathered her cleaning supplies. Da came around to the driver’s side.

“I’ll be back no later than teatime,” he said to Vi.

“Bring food,” Vi said over the grumbling of her stomach, which was noting its disapproval over both last night’s sparse supper and this morning’s tease of a breakfast. “Scones, and lots of them,” she called as he closed the car door and drove off.

With luck, he’d know that she was serious. Otherwise she would be left to forage among those of Nan’s herbs that had managed to reseed and survive encroaching weeds over the past decade. Vi bent down. Using her free hand, she pinched a leaf off a plant close to the weed-clotted stone walkway.

“Peppermint,” she said to Roger after rubbing the leaf between her fingers and inhaling its fragrance. “Nan always said it helped bring love.”

Roger lifted his leg, marked the plant, and trotted on.

Aye, and then there was that view, too.

Vi and dog entered the house, then headed back to the kitchen, where she’d made a decent dent in the chaos the day before. Sitting next to the sink was Nan’s garden journal, just where Vi had left it in her haste to avoid being too late to supper.

“Behind as I am, a few pages more of reading will make no difference,” she said to Rog.

Yesterday she’d made a nest of sorts for herself in the back bedroom—a chair that Nan had painted white and blue in a wild pattern, tucked into an old writing desk. Vi settled in and read, smiling at the knot designs her grandmother had imagined but never quite coaxed from the soil. Some of the herbal cures she’d listed had seen more success. Nan had even managed to persuade a few down Vi’s stubborn throat, and Vi in turn had given them more recently to her cold-ridden friends.

It was warm and quiet in the small room, with the sun shining in the south-facing window. She felt almost as though Nan’s comforting presence was with her. As the minutes passed, much needed sleep crept up on her. She closed the journal, folded her arms on the desk like a schoolchild, then cradled her head and finally, blissfully slept.

Liam wasn’t the sort to think much about God, though having a preteen in-house had tempted him to take the Creator’s name in vain more than once. When he’d been a child, God was the anonymous entity whom he’d involuntarily visited each Sunday in Duncarraig’s church. He’d spent his time stuck mid-pew among siblings and cousins, fantasizing about a hidden talent that might separate him from the pack whispering and elbowing about him.

Now grown, Liam found God in science, another view his traditional mother would deem near heretical. Whether it was the beauty of the formulae that permitted him to know just how deep he could dive and how long to decompress, or the complex mechanics involved in righting a damaged ship, it was all glorious religion to him.

This morning’s marvel was the ground-penetrating radar unit that had arrived at Nora’s market yesterday. It was a fine rig, more than adequate for his purposes. As it should be, since he was out nearly forty-five hundred euros for the pleasure of owning it. This with business bills mounting would seem irresponsible to some. For Liam, it was a necessary cost. Necessary to keep his mind moving as his regular work ground to a halt, and most of all, necessary to give him hope.

“Hope,” Liam said aloud, thinking what a small word it was to balance against the unpleasantness in life.

As Liam drove the slight distance from town to Nan Kilbride’s house, he mentally reviewed what more he’d learned this morning in his two-hour-long phone session with the GPR technician. It was already past noon and he had yet to do what he most craved—take the unit for a stroll on Nan’s potentially treasure-rich land.

Oh, he was aware that Vi owned the land now, but it was easier to nose about when he thought of himself as offending only Nan, who surely had better things to do than watch over him. Otherwise, he’d have been obliterated by a lightning bolt through the heart the day she died. Since he hadn’t, she was either occupied elsewhere or didn’t share Vi’s beliefs regarding his behavior that last Duncarraig summer.

Nosing looked to be an easy task today. No car was in front of the house, and the massive rubbish container he’d had Cousin Brian drop early this morning still sat untouched. Liam pulled past the dwelling and as far toward the open land behind it as the ruts in the road would permit. When at the lane’s end, he parked.

Using a mallet and stakes he’d also borrowed from Brian’s construction supplies, he marked the perimeter of the field in the grid pattern that the equipment’s training manual had instructed. Once done, it was back to the car. He fiddled for a while, coordinating the GPR unit’s wireless function with his laptop computer, all loaded with software to help him interpret what he might find.

Liam didn’t give a dead rat about fashion, but even he had to admit a certain amount of unhappiness with the next step. Thankful there was no one to witness him, he strapped the unit’s belt-and-brace rigging about his waist, shaking his head at the little black metal arm that now protruded in front of him. An aluminum foil cap and antennae for his head and he’d be bait for the local
Gardaí
to question. Luckily, Duncarraig had always been protective of its madmen, or half his family would be in trouble.

“Ready, then,” he said to himself. Liam locked the GPR unit onto the arm. This being part man and part machine definitely felt more natural in the sea than it did on land. He switched on the unit, gave one last check of his laptop, and then settled the computer on his car’s roof.

For the third time in less than a week, he walked Nan’s field. This time, though, he was far less interested in its topography than in what might be hidden beneath the surface. This land had passed down woman to woman for as long as anyone knew. And while Nan’s decrepit house was hardly modern, neither was it old enough to have been standing in the days of legend.

His shiny new GPR would map not only metal, but also remnants of former structures that Liam’s untrained though careful eyes might not discern. Ancient foundations, cisterns, and other voids beneath the earth’s surface would be revealed without so much as a needless shovelful of dirt being turned. Technology was miraculous, indeed, especially for a man with limited time to devote to a task.

If Liam found nothing, he could confess to Vi what madness he’d been up to…how he’d begun a chase based on a jeweler’s notations regarding sale of gold by a Rafferty in the 1800s. Hell, for all Liam knew, that long-ago Rafferty had sold a British general’s gold teeth rather than a piece of a trove long disappeared.

After Vi had cooled—for he knew she’d initially respond with fire—they would laugh it off as a grand joke. If he found something, well, that would be the more difficult conversation. Not that anything involving Vi had ever been easy. But up until the end, it had always been worth the price.

Liam walked to the northwest corner of the field and began his square grid pattern, keeping one eye on the GPR screen and one on the rough, pitted sod knotted with weeds below his feet. It was slow work, and mystifying, too. The bluish bars on the small display dipped and wavered from time to time as he tromped along. He had no idea what it meant, but his heart still jumped when the image in front of him did. After nearly an hour, he’d completed a quarter of the field.

As he made a right angle turn to cover the next quadrant in his grid, Liam stumbled. Once he’d caught his balance, he looked back to see what he might have caught his foot on, but the ground was no worse than what he’d already tread upon. Less rocky, in fact.

Odder yet was the sense that someone was watching him, even though he knew he was out of range of human eyes. As an Irishman, he was honor-bound to believe in the possibility of ghosts. As a man of science, he was equally compelled to believe that there was a concrete, rational explanation for these sensations. Either way, he didn’t like it. Head down, he walked on and tripped on nothing again. This time, it seemed that the watcher was laughing at him.

“Damn obnoxious annoyance,” he muttered to the thing that either existed or not, and thus could either hear or not. “Go the hell away.”