by The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2021
Grass.
Panicked, I stumbled down the road toward the center of Ballynafarragy. Not sure what to do, I ran to the café and pounded on the door. Mrs. Donnelly lived upstairs, and I was hoping she might be awake, readying for the day. As it turned out she wasn’t, and was in little mood to be awakened that early in the morning. The expression on her face changed as I explained what I’d seen. In my panic, I abandoned Irish and blurted everything out in English. She beckoned me inside and I stood, shivering, while she used the phone to call the nearest police station, in Dingle, a good ten miles away. While we waited she made more calls, and then after running back upstairs to dress she left the shop and marched to the church to summon Father Seamus. The result was that by the time the first Garda car arrived with its blue and red flashers a crowd of onlookers had gathered around the body, alternately gawking and trying to shield anyone from drawing too close.
“Grass?” I asked Mrs. Donnelly.
“Informer,” she whispered, not meeting my eyes.
Later that morning I was interviewed at length by an officer from the Dingle Garda office named Flaherty suspicious of my explanations for being out that early. Making things worse, he couldn’t understand why in the world an American would stoop to learning, in his words, “a useless language like Irish.” But his interrogation was nothing compared to the conversation I had the next day with two men with stern expressions and unfamiliar accents who I eventually determined to be police security officials from Belfast.
It turned out the body was that of a local boy named Sean Murphy. He’d grown up in Ballynafarragy, and then—like the majority of young people his age—left seeking work at eighteen, first to Limerick, then to Dublin. At some point he’d joined the IRA—it was never clear to me in exactly what capacity, whether as gunrunner or low-level thief funding their operations or some kind of muscleman—and ended up in the North. And then, apparently, he’d crossed someone or done something or said something that raised suspicions, and he’d been tortured and killed and his body deposited back home as a lesson to anyone in the Republic seeking to help the cause without the purest of motives.
“You’ve stuck your foot in it now, lad,” Father Seamus told me in the rectory at the end of the second day, after I’d finally been told I was free to go.
“I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“Nor have we,” he said, getting up and pouring me a second glass of whiskey. “And I hope that’s the last we ever do.”
I tried visiting Moira the next day, but she didn’t have time to talk. Her daughter, Siobhan, was down with a fever, and her son, Connor Jr., was in a bad way at school and needed help with his maths. There was no mention of our evening together three nights earlier. I wished her well and said I hoped to see her soon, once things were better. She smiled noncommittally.
I saw her sooner than I expected, however. Much sooner.
I tried to resume some semblance of my routine the following day, but to little avail. Doors that had opened to me for months now stayed shut, the voices behind them apologizing about busyness and suggesting another time, perhaps. Locals who cocked their head with a familiar nod as they passed me in trucks while I tramped along the peninsula road now stared straight ahead, ignoring me.
“They’re just nervous,” Father Seamus said to me late that afternoon as I sat again in his living room. “It took a lot for them to accept you here, a stranger like you were. Now they’re rethinking it all.”
“But all I did was find him—find the body, I mean,” I protested.
“They know that. But, I’m sorry, you Americans don’t grasp what it’s like over here, with what’s happening up north. The brutality. It’s not the movies for us. It’s real. And when the Troubles show up here, people look for explanations. For someone to blame, or at least suspect. You’re a big target, as a Yank.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Of course you didn’t. It’s not you—it’s where you’re from. If Paddy the potato farmer had found the body, someone we all knew, it would be different. Don’t worry. It’ll pass. You’ll be parsing your verb tenses again in no time. Gan dabht.”
Without a doubt. I wasn’t so sure, I thought as I walked back to my cottage. Under different circumstances, I should have been preparing for a visit to Cuas, or perhaps the pub. Instead, I stepped into the kitchen and set the kettle on for tea. I fixed a cup, settled down at the table, and read and took notes for an hour or more, absorbing hardly anything.
Night had fallen when I was startled by a pounding at the door. Cautiously, I walked across the living room and opened it. Moira stood before me, dripping wet from a chill rain, a look of what can only be described as sheer terror on her face. Behind her, down the lane leading to my cottage, sat her small car, running with its lights on.
“There’s men,” she said, trying to catch her breath. “In the village. Looking for you. You’ve got to go.”
“Men?”
“Two of them. They’re not from here. They’ve something to do with Sean. They’re asking after the American.”
“Are they police?”
“No!” she said, shaking her head violently. “You don’t understand. They’re trying to find whoever found Sean.”
“Why?”
“Are you thick?” she said, exasperation coating her voice. “They think you saw them dump his body.”
“I didn’t see anyone.”
“They don’t know that. And they’re not going to listen to you. They’re going to—”
“To what?” I said, fear gripping my insides.
“Leave, you fool. While you still can.”
“Leave? To where?”
“Anywhere. Just go.”
In confusion, I said, “Father Seamus. Perhaps he could—”
“No,” Moira hissed.
“Why not?”
“It’s him who’s helping them, you idiot.”
“You can’t be serious—”
“Hurry,” she said, and turned and ran down the lane to her car.
I closed the door and stumbled into the kitchen. I sat down, stunned. My heart pounded with terror. I had no context for what she’d just told me. Men—after me? Just because I’d found Sean Murphy? Father Seamus—helping them?
A phone. If I could just get to Mrs. Donnelly’s café, call over to Dingle, explain to someone official what was going on. Perhaps the impatient Garda officer, Flaherty, who’d interviewed me. Because this couldn’t be real. This sort of thing didn’t happen. I was a language student, nothing more or less. I was from Ohio! I stood up and ran into the bedroom. I tugged on my walking boots. I threw a fisherman’s sweater over my shirt and stepped back into the living room and slipped on my oilskin coat. I made for the door, stopped, bent over and retrieved the flashlight I kept beside a small drying rack for socks. A phone, I thought. A phone and I would be all right.
I opened the door. Two men stared at me below, standing on the road in the rain. Men I didn’t recognize. Men with faces of stone. They said nothing, but started to walk quickly toward my cottage. I slammed the door shut and threw the dead bolt, knowing instinctively it would slow them but a little. I dashed into the kitchen and went out the back way, into a little garden I’d tried half-heartedly to tend. Behind me I heard the sound of something crashing and the deep baritone of a man shouting. I wiped the rain from my eyes, lowered my head, and started to run. The path, I thought.
I was halfway to the summit when I heard a grunt, followed by a curse. They were right behind me—no surprise, since I’d foolishly kept the flashlight on to guide my way. One of them had fallen, but a quick glance around showed he was up again and they were both coming on fast, ominous moving shadows in the dark and rain. Near tears, I switched the light off and picked up my pace. One thing I had gained in recent months was a physicality I’d lacked in nearly all my youth. Even taking the path as a shortcut, I’d become accustomed to walking three to five miles each day, often more, and my stamina had
increased considerably in turn. Now I ran hard in the dark, trusting my knowledge of the path’s twists and turns gained after so many crossings. The sounds behind me faded.
When I reached the top and the lichen-covered granite spur I stopped to catch my breath. I realized I had no idea what I was doing. Continuing on would take me to Cuas, where shelter might or might not be forthcoming in the homes of the now suspicious villagers. I could try tramping east, across the moor, but that was uncertain territory for me. I could confront the men, but with what? The flashlight? My fluent Irish?
The sound of another grunt interrupted my thoughts and sent me into a new panic. I took a few steps forward, but it was too late. The men had been coming faster than I thought. They were nearly at the peak and would see me in another few moments. As my blood froze I stepped around the tall stone outcropping and crouched low, praying they’d pass by.
They didn’t. From my hiding spot I could just make out their silhouettes as they stopped, breathing hard, but also glancing around and listening, their heads turned to the side. Predators sniffing the air for prey. I saw in their hands the dark, cruel outlines of guns.
“Show yourself,” the man on the left said.
“We just need a few words,” the other man said.
For a moment nothing happened. The only sounds were the falling rain and the crashing of waves far below at the base of the inlet. The inlet. The precipice leading to it nearly invisible in the day, let alone at night. Slowly, quietly, heart crashing, I placed my right hand on the ground and felt through the cold, stiff grass. After a moment I found what I was looking for. A stone. I had no idea whether this would work. I assumed I would die anyway. But it was something.
Carefully, judging the distance in my mind, praying the dimensions I was envisioning were exactly as I’d seen them so many times on my daytime jaunts, I lobbed the stone underhanded through the air. A moment later it landed with a click as it struck a rock on the edge of the drop-off. The man on the left turned and rushed toward the sound, his right arm raising the gun in one smooth, practiced motion. And then he disappeared, plummeting over the side, his scream swiftly swallowed up by the dark and the rain and the wind.
“Tommy!” the other man yelled, turning in that direction. His back was to me. As if in a dream I left my hiding spot, moved around the granite spur, and ran toward him. I shoved him hard, in the direction Tommy had fallen. But he didn’t follow his mate. He was prepared, even in his unconsciousness. You didn’t live in his world and die quite that fast.
With a speed that stunned me he turned and grasped my right arm with his free hand even as he stumbled, pulling me toward him. Toward the precipice. He stared at me with a glance of controlled fury, features etched in anger, but a cold anger, like a face chiseled from ice. He was raising his gun when I jerked my arm back, through instinct or reflex or sheer terror, and he realized with a slight widening of his eyes that he had no purchase—the rain on my oil slicker caused his hand to slip away like butter falling from a hot knife. He tottered, shot a glance of outrage at me, and he, too, was gone, tumbling down to the sea and the rocks below.
Once I was sure there weren’t others, I returned quickly to my cottage. I gathered my notes, my wallet and my passport, and my flashlight, stuffed everything into my satchel, pulled the hood of my slicker over my head, and set off in the pouring rain. I wasn’t staying there another moment. I moved unseen through the village, its lone street abandoned thanks to the driving rain, though I saw lights on in the pub and heard voices and music. I glanced at the church rectory, numb with the thought of the priest’s betrayal. Its windows were dark.
It took me four long hours to reach Dingle because of the caution I took, ducking behind fuchsia hedges and stone walls each time I saw the lights of a car from either direction. Once in the small city I huddled under the eaves of a mausoleum in the graveyard of a church until dawn. When I saw the sky lighten I made my way to the harbor, waited until I saw a truck driver who seemed trustworthy, and asked for a ride east.
I didn’t go home, though. As irrational as it seems now, I worried that my presence there would bring trouble to my Ohio town, which when all was said and done was only a ten- or twelve-hour car ride from Boston and neighborhoods where someone might know the name Sean Murphy. Instead, I rode buses and trains until I reached Rosslare Harbour on the country’s southeastern coast, a grim determination to my passage that was new and different from the will that had taken me to a Gaeltacht to learn Irish. This was something more raw, and yet harder-edged. More than one tough on the street or in a railcar decided against approaching me during that journey after I shot a dead eye in his direction.
Three days later I landed at Le Havre on the southwestern coast of France. Emboldened that no authorities seemed to be seeking me, I made my way to Paris and the small suburb where I’d spent a sheltered semester abroad two years earlier, reading Balzac and memorizing verb conjugations while my fellow study abroad classmates partied in bars and dance clubs and soccer stadiums. I inquired after and found a position teaching English that came with a small apartment and few questions asked. I hunkered down and waited. For what, I wasn’t sure.
During that time I met a girl, another American, a public health student examining French medical care for a master’s thesis. Things between us went a lot faster than between me and Moira, and a lot farther. But after each time we were together, it was always Moira, with her shining green eyes and cream-textured face framed by black ringlets of hair, who I dreamed of holding.
“I’ll tell you what I can,” I wrote back to the reporter from the Beacon Star. And it’s the truth. I will give her a sanitized version of my time in Ireland. If I’m feeling generous I’ll provide her with a copy of a monograph I produced in graduate school at Illinois comparing Homeric and old Irish epic poems, featuring my own translation of each language.
I will not tell her of Paris, and the eventual knock that came on my apartment door. Of the meeting I took in the basement of a drab concrete office building with polite, nameless American men with flat Midwestern accents, buzzed haircuts, and black off-the-rack suits. Of the offer of funding for my graduate studies I received in exchange for assistance in certain matters of strategic interest in western Europe that a man with a talent for languages, and for extricating himself from difficult situations, might be able to provide. The names Sean Murphy and “Tommy” and, for that matter, Father Seamus, were never uttered. But an arrangement was reached.
No, I won’t tell the student any of that. I will explain to her, in vague terms, how I learned to admire the resilience of the Irish nation at the time of the Troubles, the little I saw of them. I will commend the coming speaker’s apparently legitimate conversion to peace. And I will relate, with a smile, that as odd as studying a language like Irish seemed at the time, the undertaking changed my life forever.
When the student is gone I will open my email and check the flight arrangements for a trip I’m taking in just a few weeks, over our ridiculously long Christmas break. To Helsinki first, and then points farther east. Ostensibly to study similarities between the Finnish and Basque languages that have always fascinated me. But it’s possible I’ll follow other paths as well.
*“The Path I Took” is based on my experience more than thirty-five years ago—absent the discovery of a body—learning Gaelic in a tiny village in Ireland’s County Kerry. I’d traveled there on a post-college scholarship that disallowed university study in favor of pursuing a creative project of your choice. Aside from language learning, one of the many eye-opening aspects of that experience was reading the daily accounts of violence in Northern Ireland, which didn’t receive nearly the same coverage in the States. After achieving passing fluency in Irish-Gaelic, I traveled to other regions where so-called “minority languages” were dominant, including Wales, Spain’s Catalonian region, and the Faroe Islands. Fast forward to 2017 and my overdue return to Europe to celebrate our older daughter’s wedding to her Catalonian husband
(talk about foreshadowing). That trip revived memories of my months in Ireland, including the impact of “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, and I plotted most of the story in my head on the flight home. Assisting me were the retrieval of typewritten reports I’d compiled from my original trip and an Irish language instructor at University College Cork who, via email, helped me dust off my rusty Gaelic so I could include phrases of the language in the narrative. After a couple rejections and lots of rewriting, my story found a home at Mystery Tribune, for which I’m forever grateful.
BONUS STORY
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (1842–1914?) was born in Meigs County, Ohio, but grew up in Indiana with his mother and eccentric father as the tenth of thirteen of children, all of whose names began with the letter A. When the Civil War broke out, he volunteered and was soon commissioned a first lieutenant in the Union Army, seeing action in the Battle of Shiloh.
Often described as America’s greatest writer of horror fiction in the years between the publications of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, Bierce also became one of the most important and influential journalists in America, writing columns for William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. His darkest book may be the devastating Devil’s Dictionary, in which he defined a saint as “a dead sinner revised and edited,” befriend as “to make an ingrate,” and birth as “the first and direst of all disasters.” His most famous story is probably “An Occurrence at Owl’s Creek Bridge” in which a condemned prisoner believes he has been reprieved—just before the rope snaps his neck. It was filmed three times and was twice made for television, by Rod Serling for The Twilight Zone and by Alfred Hitchcock for Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
