Kilmoon: A County Clare Mystery (14 page)

“Don’t do this, Ellen. Not now. Just drive.”

Ellen shook her head and dashed the back of her hand across her eyes.

Danny struggled to keep his voice low. “Get your head on straight. This isn’t about you.”

On his lap, Merrit’s respiratory efforts slackened. She quivered and gulped in shallow breaths, which scared Danny more than her gasps. She stared up at him with no expression except a mute fear of death—which was expression enough for anyone.

“Drive, woman!”

As Danny knew she would, Ellen focused her indignation into managing the steering wheel along the narrow lane, almost hitting their neighbor, who waved and called out that the children would be fine. Danny grabbed his mobile off Ellen’s lap and called the local emergency number. He yelled at a triage nurse to send an ambulance out to them. “We’re on our way to Ennis. Have the ambulance meet us on the road. We’ll high-beam him to stop. I don’t care if this is irregular. We’re thirty miles away from the hospital, for Christ’s sake. That’s too long to wait.”

By the time they screeched to a halt in front of the emergency entrance at Mid-Western Regional Hospital Ennis, the emergency services technicians had stabilized Merrit. One of the technicians snapped at Danny to keep out of the way and waved two hospital orderlies with a gurney toward the ambulance. Quickly, they lifted Merrit onto the gurney and ran her inside the hospital, leaving Danny alone in the parking lot with his fractured family.

Danny hovered halfway between the emergency entrance and Merrit’s Nissan, out of which Ellen had shot the moment she’d turned off the engine. The supernatural glow from the outdoor floodlights veered her pale complexion into the green zone. Ellen with her tousled braid stood barefoot in a summer nightgown. Dirt on her feet. Dainty crucifix flipped over her shoulder. A woman Danny didn’t know anymore.

As Danny turned to face Ellen straight on, Marcus heaved himself out of the car. In the silence after the hospital doors swallowed Merrit, Marcus’s voice erupted as a wail. “I turned my back for a second, only a second, and she was on the ground.”

A sound echoed against the hospital walls as ethereal and earthy as an animal’s death cries. Ellen keened with two years’ worth of grief. Marcus backed into the car door and stretched for the bottle. Danny held his ground, for once unwilling to mollify Ellen, protect Marcus. Oh please God oh please God, he whispered to himself.

Ellen’s despair softened into heaves not unlike Merrit’s. Then she was around the car and face-to-face with her father. She thrust out her chin. Marcus gazed at her almost in wonder. This was the closest they’d stood since Ellen tossed him out of the house.

“Don’t you drink,” she said with depleted voice. “Don’t you soften your misery. I’ve carried it for the both of us so don’t—you—dare—drink—from—that—bottle.”

Marcus raised his hands in mute supplication. His lips quivered. He raised his hands a little more and gin sloshed onto Ellen’s feet. She thrust herself at the offending bottle and smashed it against the car roof.

“You think I feel sorry for you? I don’t. You’ve had it easy. You haven’t had to live under Beth’s roof, you haven’t had to face Danny every day knowing that”—she choked to a stop and lowered her voice—“knowing that he ought to hate me.”

She stepped away from Marcus, swaying. On a long inhale she straightened herself, her nightgown, and her necklace. “Take me home,” she said to Danny. “
He
can remain here to wait for his friend.”

During the drive home, Ellen leaned against the window and stared at herself in the side-view mirror. Danny hoped to Christ she saw herself clearly. He braked in front of the house. Their neighbor waved the OK as he closed their front door and went home. Ellen blinked and roused herself. “What does that woman want with
him
anyhow?”

“Say his name.”

“With Marcus, my father, satisfied?”

“Not enough, I’m not.”

Ellen’s nightgown billowed around her knees as she strode toward the house. Danny considered dashing after her to apologize, but for what? He couldn’t keep begging forgiveness for everything—his inability to keep up with the housework plus obtain a promotion; his close relationship with Kevin and Liam; even his faith in Liam’s matchmaking skills despite their marital problems. “This mess is Liam’s fault,” Ellen had ranted on many occasions. “Why did he think we were a good match? He’s a fraud.”

But Liam was no more magician than Danny himself. Liam couldn’t have predicted Beth’s death, or Marcus’s disintegration, or Ellen’s inability to forgive, or Danny’s imploding life.

He turned Merrit’s car around for the return trip to the hospital.

Julia Chase’s notebook

We most often meet at Our Lady of the Kilmoon at night, which is fine by me because the insomnia is back. It never seems to stay away for long . . .

I often wonder how to write up the private Liam, the mighty lion undone by a silver moon. Last night, light softened the edges of all it touched, and the air scented us with dew-laden grass, livestock, sea salt, and the overheated-engine smell of peat smoke. Kilmoon Church stood in genteel isolation, open air to the night as if shrugging off its Christian ties and embracing a more benevolent lunar goddess. The church seemed to watch us, indulging us our frail humanity and our unseemly trespass. We strolled around the site, taking in the uneven stones and skinny windows, the crumbling gravestones and tall Celtic crosses. We then stepped over a crumbling wall and piles of sheep dung as we approached the Celtic standing stone, which to me represented Liam and his nouveau-old ways.

Liam spoke little. He was preoccupied with Andrew, silly man, not understanding that Andrew is only a subject for the article—the skeptic—and nothing but a familiarity from my childhood. My world was filled with old-fashioned gents like him. My father, uncles, all of them expressed their affection through bank accounts and a kind of chauvinistic chivalry. In fact, Andrew reminds me of the stifling life I left behind. Contrary though it seems given Liam’s career, Liam is the New World to Andrew’s Old.

• 26 •

Kevin parked alongside the plaza, hardly aware of the drive from home much less the half bottle of Jameson’s he’d just sucked down. Across the street and half a block down stood the village church and between him and the church, two pubs. Tourists and locals alike drifted between them. Lonnie’s death hadn’t lessened the festivities in the plaza. In fact, Michael, the bakery owner, had set up his sound system, and dozens of couples swung around in time to tinny-sounding Celtic jigs.

Kevin imagined the inevitable whispers, curious glances, and stilted
’
allos
that would follow him on his rounds. By now, everyone knew that he’d been questioned about Lonnie’s death. What they couldn’t know, of course, was the way Clarkson had almost pestered Kevin into confessing to Lonnie’s murder just so Clarkson could call himself a hero and suckle his way that much closer to the O’Briens.

A pub crawl wasn’t a grand idea, after all. Kevin angled out of his crooked parking job and drove on to the church. Deacon Fitzgerald’s cottage sat in back of the parking lot. Kevin knocked, paused, and then continued knocking until a light ignited the pane above the door. Fitz’s double-chinned, cherubic face appeared in the door crack. “Holy Mary, you’re a sore on the eyes. Do you know it’s after midnight?”

Kevin was tempted to offer him a swig of whiskey. Instead, he nudged the door open to reveal Fitz in blue flannel pajamas. “Have you the grace to let a sloppy, disillusioned man into the church?”

Fitz tilted his head back to view Kevin through his bifocals. “What’s got you in this state?”

How to explain that he—who considered the gospels a genius stroke of propaganda perpetuated by the early church and who looked on Liam as the closest thing to a deity he could believe in—would like to idle awhile in hopes of absorbing generations’ worth of faith that had soaked into the cool, stone walls.

“Solace for the sinner?”

“Cheeky.” Fitz grabbed the bottle. “You’ll not be taking that in with you, and you’ll not be telling anyone about this either.”

Fitz strutted ahead of Kevin with keys jangling. He clucked like a discontented hen. “Mary, mother of God, Kevin Donellan, you’re fit to be laid out in a drunken stupor. Just see to it you don’t do it on one of the pews. The bottle waits for you outside the side door. God bless you, son.”

The church welcomed Kevin with stones set firm as arms crossed over chest, its cavernous silence the only embrace. In the faint light that filtered through the windows, the altar saints looked inconsequential while they waited for their vigil candles and tears. Crucified Jesus’s crossed feet and thin legs faded into the loin cloth that faded into the dark. Kevin slipped into a smooth oak pew, genuflecting as the nuns had taught him.

Foolish to think Liam could live up to Kevin’s expectations. No one was that good, not even the saints themselves who had foundered on their vices until they supposedly wised up.

With faith, he might learn to accept the current changes in his life. But his was the road to balk at change whatever its form, especially when it came to not one—bad enough, that—but two sisters. No doubt they had arrived to battle it out over Liam and the rights to his bloodline. He imagined them in fisticuffs. He imagined them punching each other with left hooks and upper cuts. He imagined them cartwheeling into chop-chop kicks and whizzing their arms around like blunt sabers.

“Oh Christ,” Kevin said just to hear the words bounce back.

Footsteps sounded behind him. “Is that the sound of prayer I hear?”

Father Dooley’s low and sonorous voice drifted along the saints’ alcoves. Kevin crossed himself instinctively and stood to face the priest, who wasn’t much older than Kevin but wore the smile of a soul with wisdom to spare.

“May I sit?” Father Dooley said.

Kevin nodded, hoping the whiskey hadn’t started to ooze out his pores yet. The rustle of black fabric soothed him, and he relaxed down beside the priest. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

“Chronic ailment then?”

Kevin shrugged in response to the jesting—or was that sardonic?—tone in Father Dooley’s voice. “Deac-Fitz knew you were in here, did he?”

Father Dooley nodded.

“I suppose I could use an ear. Confidence of the confessional?”

Father Dooley nodded again.

Kevin stared into a darkened corner where a St. Patrick statue stood ankle deep in snakes. “Liam lied. He said the knife that killed Lonnie was his, but it’s mine. He said he bought it from an artisan in Galway, but I worked the wood myself. He said he opens letters with it, but I store it in my shop. He said he needed it to open birthday presents, which is true, but I brought it along because Liam is loath to admit to weakness. He lied to the bloody Garda, and I went along with it to save my hide against false accusations.”

A leathery whoosh dipped toward them and away. The belfry bat. “That’s your sin?” Father Dooley said.

Kevin slouched so his knees hit the pew in front of them and his bum slipped off the bench. He leaned his head back to stare into the gloomy interiors where gothic-style arches looked like ribs and a bat slept upside down. “Isn’t that sin enough?”

“Hmm,” Father Dooley said with the open-ended signal that Kevin remembered from his youth.

“I’m selfish. I don’t want to share them with Liam.”

“Hmm?”

Kevin related his family’s 200 percent growth spurt. Kate and Merrit. Merrit and Kate. He angled his head to check on Father Dooley’s expression. But no, the man was adept at his job, and besides yet, he’d heard worse. “I’m envious of them. That’s the sin of it. I covet their blood ties.”

Father Dooley cleared his throat, and in the murk Kevin thought he saw his eyelids flicker. “Envy is the signal that there’s something you’re to learn. Given your conflicts, I almost dare not say this, but have faith. Liam and you are father and son. God meant this test for reasons you may never know.”

Kevin righted himself with a groan and leaned forward with elbows on the pew in front of them. “Do you believe in fate?”

“No. I counsel on the choice we have to sin, or not. Fate implies that choice is an illusion. It implies an untrustworthy and fallible God. He doesn’t play that game. His will allows for choice and change.”

The whiskey felt like acid in Kevin’s stomach. He swallowed against the ache. “You believe God meant Liam and me to be father and son. How’s that differ from fate?”

“One involves faith, the other doesn’t. One offers hope, the other, nothing.”

Out of the gloom a silver flask similar to Marcus’s appeared.

“Shame on you, Father.” Kevin accepted the offer. “Ah, Jesus, what is that shite?” he sputtered a moment later.

“Cognac. The finest there is so don’t you be lifting your nose at it. I often have a quiet nightcap or two here when I can’t sleep.”

Father Dooley stood. He kissed his fingertips, moved his hand in the sign of the cross over Kevin, and disappeared into the gloom. “Don’t go hiding behind the philosophical questions. Go deeper. What scares you so?”

“What indeed?” Kevin whispered, and then louder, “Cheers, Father.”

“God bless, and watch where the whiskey takes you.”

At the side door, Kevin retrieved his bottle and stood for a long moment inhaling the scent of dew about to form. He wavered, listening to tinny tunes echoing from the plaza, then started walking.

• 27 •

P
lease ring doorbell on your left and wait
, the sign said. So Danny did. Five minutes later, an Internal Care Unit nurse opened the door, glanced at him with bleary eyes and sighed. “No, Detective Sergeant, she is not awake yet.”

She shut the door in his face.

Danny returned to the second-floor waiting room with its blue plastic chairs and garishly pink walls. He squeezed in next to Marcus on the sofa seat. Marcus dozed with head angled to the left, arms crossed over his stomach, and feet pigeon-toed. No one noticed them, just two more poor souls waiting out an illness as the early morning light filtered through a high window. Danny had decided to sleep in the hospital rather than return home to Ellen’s wrath.

When the sunshine, weak as it was, reached Marcus, he jerked awake and doubled over, retching. A passing nurse paused and two steps into the room stopped in her tracks. All she had to do was sniff to know Marcus’s ailment. Danny drew her back into the corridor with its yellow walls and dingy floor tiles.

“Can you help him with something to ease the shakes?”

The nurse’s hair net slipped as she strode away from him. “I’m sorry.”

“Surely there’s a medicine you can give him?” he called after her.

To revive himself, Danny fetched Cokes and Cadbury Dairy Milk bars from the machines located inside the first-floor waiting room. The sun cast an ever-shorter shadow across the bubble-gum walls while he and Marcus waited. After two Cokes and a Cadbury, Danny told himself that it was no use leaving now only to turn around again when Merrit woke up—which had to be soon. Besides, he had nowhere to go. Not home. And the only thing calling him to the station now that he was off the case was unfinished paperwork.

He drummed his fingers against his thighs, knowing he had to do something. Anything. He couldn’t take this waiting anymore. Waiting for Ellen to return to the land of the living. Waiting for his career to grind into the proper gear. Waiting for the bloody doctor for that matter.

“I doubt Ellen and I will make it,” Danny said, the words like an emergency warning test. “Unless I finally do something. And even then, who knows? The children are growing stunted under the affliction that is our household. Ellen refuses to do anything to help herself—counseling, antidepressants, I don’t care what. It’s been two years. I’m not looking for miracles, but I do need her to try for Mandy’s and Petey’s sakes.”

Beside him, Marcus gulped at his Coke. A sickly sheen covered his face, and he squirmed with feverish, eye-darting anxiety.

“Time to squeeze out the infection. At home I’ll start with Beth’s room. Here and now, I begin with you.”

Marcus shook his head. “Ah, no, Danny, no.”

Danny beckoned another passing nurse, this one with hair so short she didn’t need a hair net. “Do you have a place for people with alcohol problems?”

“There’s a treatment center up the coast. Just outside Ballyvaughn. The owner refurbished the old family home herself, so I hear.”

“A bit rich, is it?”

“Payment plans if you’re eligible.”

“I ought to be. Fetch me the number, will you?”

He followed her away from the waiting room and jabbed at the Internal Care Unit button another ten times. The craving for progress of any kind felt like a sore tooth he couldn’t yank out.

“Stop that.” The nurse with short hair had returned. She waved him away from the ICU door. “Believe me, everyone knows you’re out here.”

She handed Danny the treatment center’s phone number and strode away. He returned to Marcus and his expression of hurt-dog betrayal.

“I’m not leaving,” Marcus said. “Merrit needs me.”

“You’re going to a treatment center, and when you’re sober you’ll have the den back. If Ellen and I fail it will be because I did what’s right.” He handed Marcus a Cadbury. “What do you really know about Merrit anyhow?”

Marcus spoke in a whispery monotone. “She has a crooked pinkie finger and looks a sight too snobbish and dainty when she’s knitting—the way it pokes up. Broke it jumping her mum’s horse—right after she died, this was—Christ, my head—the same day her father shipped the horse off to auction—just like that—one morning, fresh from crying all night, Merrit rode for solace and broke a finger but decided not to tell. Truth be told, she was that scared of him, she was—his anger.” Marcus unwrapped the Cadbury, sniffed it, and set it aside with a gagging sound. “Later that day she came home from school and the horse that reminded her of her mum—gone. And her da never noticed the finger or the endless crying—imagine that—this is what I know about Merrit. And that she’d never send me away either.”

“How would she help you then?”

Marcus shook his head against the cushion. “Piss off. Go find your bloody doctor.”

But Danny at long last didn’t need to because Doctor Timms entered just then. “Miss Chase is still asleep,” he said in a harassed voice. “As I said earlier, a nurse will fetch you when she’s ready for visitors. Might be awhile yet. I haven’t seen an asthma attack like that—”

“I told the first doctor that she’s not asthmatic.”

Dr. Timms pursed his lips in a prissy scowl. The skin around his mouth had the soft, withered look of powdered old ladies. “She was diagnosed with a severe attack. We don’t commonly take the word of amateurs, Detective Sergeant.”

This man hovered in his late thirties, like Danny. This man probably made five times Danny’s salary and didn’t fret about money, didn’t fret about promotions, didn’t fret full stop. This man was a puke.

With a fortifying breath, Danny began again. “Merrit Chase is under investigation. As such, I confiscated one of her inhalers. It contained a saline solution. She’s prone to panic attacks. Care to explain how she’s suddenly become asthmatic?”

“If, as you say, she’s not asthmatic, then we have a problem.”

“Bloody right we do. Don’t you yobs talk to each other? The inhaler she used last night should already be at a lab somewhere with a rush order to analyze its contents. One of the emergency docs, a Dr. Patel, said he’d see to it himself. Check it, will you?”

Doctor Timms returned to his imperial world removed from the amateurs.

***

Kevin entered the waiting room and spotted Danny on the only comfortable seat. Danny drooped over his knees with head in his hands, apparently as knackered as Kevin felt after his night of whiskey and no-good deeds. Kevin had woken up at about eleven to find himself on a lumpy mattress with Father Dooley’s words about looking deeper repeating themselves like a bad mantra.

Best to get the confession off his chest then. Kevin shook Danny, who shot up with whites rimming his eyes. “Whah?” He goggled at Kevin. “What the devil are you doing here?”

“Good morning to you too.”

Danny fumbled for a Coke, drained it, and let his head sink again. “Jesus God, I’ve gone and done it now.”

“Fancy that, so have I.” Kevin pulled up a chair and propped his feet on the cushion beside Danny. “You first or me?”

“You’ve got nothing on me. I’m just after bullying Marcus into treatment, only you need to be a bloody millionaire to afford the place so I’ll be borrowing against the house without notifying Ellen, who won’t accept Marcus back anyhow.”

Kevin decided now wasn’t the time to reveal his drunken escapade. “Where’s Marcus now?”

“Upstairs on a twenty-four-hour hold. He’ll be transferred to a place called Callahan House tomorrow afternoon.” Danny jiggled his empty Coke can. “What brings you here?”

“Liam, who else? I woke up too late to drive Liam to the plaza—he drove himself, unfortunately. So I caught up with him at the festival, and he asked me to check on Merrit’s status. I almost refused but a good deed might serve me well about now. Nice of you to wake up Liam last night, by the way.”

“Not me, the hospital. The hospital-admitting lass asked me if she had family here.” Danny straightened. “And since you’re lucky enough to be family too, you can get us into the Internal Care Unit.”

Kevin grimaced. “If it will help you liberate me from Clarkson, fine.”

“Fat chance, that.” Danny stood. “What did you want to tell me?”

“Nothing that won’t keep.”