The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (161 page)

Still, it would be exciting in the hotel.

Jim Costello had told her that there was nothing as heady as a successful hotel, the place buzzed with activity and you got the feeling that it was alive twenty-four hours a day. She smiled at the memory.

He had added that every hotel needed a really beautiful woman to be at the center of it, and now Fernscourt was going to have that as well as everything else.

Kerry came out, his hair damp, wearing clean white trousers and a white sweater.

“That’s more like it,” he grinned at her. “Now tell me what you’ve been doing.”

Grace felt that it was he who should do the telling. She had been doing nothing, she said.

“Nothing? Every day, all day, off on a bicycle with young Ryan. Don’t tell me you’ve been doing nothing.” His eyes were very bright.

“Well, you know, we’ve been fishing and talking and just fooling around.” She giggled apologetically.

His face looked hard somehow. “What kind of fooling around?”

“Oh heavens, you know. Nothing too serious.”

“It had better not be serious, it had damn well better not be.”

“What do you mean?” She was frightened.

“Don’t make yourself cheap; you’re not to throw yourself away on some kid from a pub who’s wet behind the ears but who knows like any animal what he wants and will do all he can to take it.”

Grace jumped up, eyes blazing. “Michael is
not
an animal. I will not have you speak of him like that.”

“I will until I know he has done you no harm, that he hasn’t forced you to do anything you shouldn’t have done.”

“I’ve done plenty of things I shouldn’t have done, like you have as well,” Grace cried with spirit. “Anything I do with Michael I do because I want to.”

“You must not want to; he must not make you
want
to. You’re so young, you’re my sister, you shouldn’t put out for any country hick.”

“It’s not like that.”

“It had better not be.”

“And what about you, you and Dara, why is nobody saying anything to you about all this?”

“That’s different.” He was dismissive.

“But why is it different?”

“I’m a man; it’s different for men.”

“Dara isn’t a man.”

The phone rang sharply into the silence between them.

“That’s Michael,” Grace said in relief. But it wasn’t; it was a man with a Northern Ireland accent to speak to Kerry.

   Kate sent Declan away when she heard that the doctor had arrived.

Martin White smiled at the youngest Ryan, who hadn’t yet turned into a hooligan like his brother Eddie.

“Will you miss them when they go back tomorrow, or will it be a bit of peace for you?” he asked.

“I suppose I’ll feel they can get up to less trouble inside the walls of the convent and the brothers’ than roaming wild around this place,” Kate sighed.

“I know, my two have gone cracked on this riding nonsense, hard hats and crops and boots, and God knows what else, you’re lucky you were spared that. You’re pale, any pains and aches?”

“I’ve an upset stomach, I seem a bit nauseous somehow, but I think that’s only tasting all this food we’re going to be offering in the café … if there’s anyone to offer it to.”

“Do you need to take this on?”

“It’s take this on or go under.”

“The compensation maybe?” he suggested tentatively.

“It won’t keep a family, Martin. Oh Lord God how I’m dreading Thursday, the palms of my hands start to sweat at the thought.”

   Dr. White said that he would give Kate a mild tranquilizer on the day of the case.

“Will it make me dopey and stupid-sounding?” Kate wanted to know.

“Nothing could do that.” Dr. White was amused.

“Maybe I don’t need any tranquilizer. I’m slow enough already.” She seemed very down.

“It will take the sharp edge off the anxiety, that’s all. It won’t affect your powers to say yes or no to a million pounds.”

“I’m not the one saying yes or no. It’ll be John—John and Fergus.”

He looked at her sharply. In the last few weeks she had seemed less alive to him. It was hard to pinpoint exactly what it was.

“I know I don’t have a degree in psychiatry, but is there anything wrong, Kate? Anything you want to talk about?”

She gave him a brittle smile. “Anything wrong apart from being paralyzed, in a wheelchair for life, possibly losing all our trade to a bar across the river? No, not much.”

Dr. White was often accused of having a poor bedside manner. He was unsparing of his time and energy to help a patient but he was never at hand with the coaxing and condolences that a lot of the parish felt they needed from time to time.

He stood up and prepared to leave. He didn’t even acknowledge what Kate had said.

“See you on Thursday,” he said briefly and was almost out the door when Kate called out.

“Martin. I’m sorry.”

“Why should
you
be sorry?” He had his hand on the door.

“I mean for being a smart aleck. You were being kind. There
is
something wrong. But it’s very hard to say it.”

Dr. Martin White stood sympathetically waiting for her to find the words. He would have stood there all day and all night if necessary and Kate knew it.

“I’m not in charge anymore. I’m not a person who decides things …” She fumbled with a lace-edged handkerchief. The doctor looked at her, trying to get her to say more.

“It’s just that there’s no
me
nowadays, as if I’d lost my personality or something.”

He was blank in his lack of comprehension. “I don’t know what to say to you except that you must be half cracked. Aren’t you a legend for miles around, and as for being in charge, wouldn’t you buy and sell the rest of us? They say it was you that thought up that café idea. Bound to be a gold mine.”

Kate knew when there was no more to be gained. She thanked the doctor, said that it must be just an attack of nerves over the court case, and told herself again that it was a strange irony that the only one in the whole place who understood what she felt was Patrick O’Neill. She had a very strange dream about Patrick that kept coming back to her because it was so vivid.

She dreamed that she was in Coyne’s wood with him and he had taken out a huge shovel and started to dig a great hole.

It was a grave, he said, like one of the mass famine graves and it was for all the people in Mountfern. They should have died over a hundred years back at the time of the Famine, but they had gone on living by mistake. That was why he had come back, to finish the job properly.

In the dream she asked him if anyone would be saved, and he had said only Kate herself could go free. She wasn’t from this place to begin with, and so if she ran now, she could go back to where she came from. She had tried to run and had woken in terror with none of the usual joy that a dreamer would feel waking from a dream like that. Because asleep or awake, Kate Ryan would never run through the wood, and she kept seeing Patrick’s face smiling sympathetically at her. He seemed to be across a room as he smiled. A courtroom.

   Michael and Dara walked quickly across the bridge.

They told each other they had better hurry to Leonard’s to buy exercise books and pencils for tomorrow. They ran past the presbytery and up Bridge Street. They weren’t really hurrying to buy their stationery, they wanted to be over the bridge before the thoughts started to come, as they always did.

And because in their different ways they wanted to think about the tunnel.

Dara thought that if Michael had taken Grace there, then she too could have used it. It made her furious to think that this was why she had lost Kerry O’Neill, because she wouldn’t trust him, she wouldn’t love him properly. And she had wanted to so very much. Why hadn’t she told Michael ages ago that she would take Kerry to the tunnel?

There it would all have been safe and it would have been like a home.

Grace and Michael obviously thought so, she told herself bitterly, remembering the sofa piled with cushions.

Michael had thought they would never leave the tunnel. Everywhere he could see signs of Grace and he being there together. It was astonishing that Dara hadn’t noticed. But what was alarming him much more was what he had seen. The cushions on the sofa like that—he and Grace hadn’t put them there, and there was a rug that didn’t belong to them. There were matches and some orange peel.

Somebody else had been in the tunnel.

He could not believe that Grace would have told anyone else. And it wasn’t possible to believe that she might have been there with anyone else.

   Jim Costello spoke briefly to Brian Doyle.

He said he knew O’Neill’s demand to have the rooms ready was ridiculous, but for God’s sake let Doyle not forget who was paying their salaries.

“He’s more nervous about the bloody court case than he is about sinking his whole fortune in the hotel,” Jim said wonderingly.

“Wouldn’t you think he’d have more sense?” Brian had little time for finer feelings.

“In a way I can see what he means. The whole place is waiting eagerly to know what will happen. If Kate Ryan doesn’t get enough, the mood will turn against him fast. It won’t be easy for him to carry on here.”

“Ah, that’s only a small problem compared to the troubles he has with his family life …”

Jim hadn’t gotten where he was by being a gossip. “I don’t know much about that, I only see the work side of him.”

“You do in your arse. You know like the rest of us know that his son had a go at his woman, and if the place doesn’t go up in fireworks over that, then it never will.”

“At least his daughter is no trouble to him,” Jim said primly.

Brian knew everything. “I saw you had your eye peeled in that direction. Sound man,” he said approvingly.

“She’s only a child, but are we going to see your fiancée Peggy at the opening?”

“Probably,” Brian muttered without any great enthusiasm.

“Good, make sure she’s on the invitation list, they’re posting them next week.”

“Isn’t it a miracle that it’s going to open at last?” Brian looked around him in surprise.

“Take that look off your face, Brian, people will think you’re surprised it’s staying up. That’s not good for business.”

   Kerry was listening carefully to the voice at the other end of the phone.

The lady had told the bank that after all she had made a mistake, the check had not been stolen.

Kerry let out a great sigh of relief. Rachel must have seen that it was pointless.

He had never felt so relieved in his whole life. But the voice on the phone told Kerry that his problems were far from over. They were only starting. There would be no criminal proceedings since the check was no longer deemed stolen. But it was still stopped. It could not be cashed.

Kerry still had to find his thousand pounds.

“It’s impossible,” he said in a thin unnatural voice.

There was a silence.

Then he was given a proposition. He could do something for them instead. Repay his debt that way.

His whole body strained and his knuckles were white as he waited to hear what they wanted him to do.

It would involve storing some merchandise out of sight in a very safe place. A place that nobody knew about.

Kerry could feel his muscles relaxing. He knew the exact place.

   Michael went to the lodge that evening.

Miss Hayes had come back on the excursion train from Dublin, she was showing her materials to Grace.

“I’d make you a dress for the opening, but you’ll want something smarter from the shops,” Miss Hayes said.

“Why can’t you wait till the opening?”

“The ship sails before.”

Michael seemed impatient and not anxious to join in the conversation. Grace eventually seemed to understand and went outside with him.

“Did you tell anybody? About the tunnel—did you tell anyone else?” His eyes looked wild.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“I went there today with Dara. She didn’t notice we’d been there, but it’s all changed, someone else has been there, maybe even sleeping there.”

Suddenly it clicked in Grace’s mind. Of course that was where Kerry had been spending the nights.

Michael had made her swear she would tell nobody, but she had told Kerry the last time he was home from Donegal. She hadn’t thought it mattered. Not Kerry.

Looking at Michael’s face she realized it did matter.

“No,” Grace said. “Of course I didn’t, you told me not to tell anyone, didn’t you?”

   Dara walked in Coyne’s wood. She didn’t expect to see him, and she didn’t want to see him.

But he was there, as some part of her knew he would be. Because she didn’t feel very surprised.

He looked happy and relaxed, not strained as he had been before.

Dara said nothing. She stood there in her yellow and white candy-striped dress with the big artificial yellow rose pinned to it. Mademoiselle Stephanie had given her that when she was leaving France, that and a wink of complicity.

Tomorrow she would go back to school, and this strange summer would be over. There was no birthday party planned for the twins this year. Their party room was a café now, and the date was almost coinciding with their mother’s compensation case.

She looked at him levelly.

He put his head on one side and smiled.

Dara would not smile back.

“What is it? Tell me.”

“You know. The whole town knows.”

“I don’t.” He was innocent and bewildered.

“Mrs. Fine.”

“She’s pathetic,” he said with scorn. “She is quite pathetic. You know that she fancied my father for years, he got tired of her and now she made … Well, it’s too much to talk about really.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Well, she made some silly advances toward me, she got all drunk and slobbery, and crying, and saying she loved it here in Mountfern and these are her type of people and why couldn’t she stay …”

It sounded familiar and likely from Mrs. Fine’s conversations with Dara’s mother. From what she had overheard and picked up in the past.

“And then she became silly. Well, it’s gross, and I had to untangle myself, and put her to bed. I went back the next morning to see that she hadn’t done herself in or anything, and I got her breakfast and because I did these uncharacteristically nice things the whole place says I’m sleeping with her.”