Chapter and Curse

by Nancy Warren

  I had to do something. I couldn’t stand all the frustrated energy that was coursing through me. I wanted to find out who had killed Brenda and why. And please let it be nothing to do with me or any ancestor I possessed, or any curse-laden grimoire that may have accidently come into my hands. I didn’t want to think that Brenda had been killed by a surprised burglar or a random murderer, but I preferred both those theories to one where I or my family were somehow involved. And as for that yew tree, I would go up there right now, and if those tree surgeons were at work, I’d make them stop. I’d put a spell on them if I had to.

  Now that I had a purpose, I grabbed the bicycle that was leaning against the side of my shed. I was too wired to drive. The exercise would do me good. I got on the bike and began to pedal. At least this dispelled some of my crazy energy. I rode through town and then turned onto the road that led to the church. I was going so fast that when I turned down the lane to see if the tree surgeons were still at work, I took the curve much too wide and all but collided with a dusty van coming toward me.

  I hit my brakes hard and turned the front wheel, not even thinking, just acting on instinct. I spewed gravel, and the bike, meant for meandering down country lanes, not the Tour de France, skidded out from under me. I felt myself fly through the air and landed on my back in the middle of the lane. I felt the impact and wondered for a second if I might be dead. I couldn’t breathe.

  The dusty van that had nearly hit me also came to a gravel-spewing halt. I heard the engine stall, and then while I tried to get my breath back, heard the door open and slam. Footsteps approached. If I could just take a breath, I might manage to get up. I didn’t want to lie here in the gravel while some stranger came upon me.

  The footsteps stopped. I was conscious of a figure bending, and then into my line of vision came the very concerned face of Dr. Andrew Milsom, or Drew as he insisted I call him. Instead of saying what any other person would have said—which was “Are you all right?”—he said, “Lie still.” Very bossy. Still, I had no choice. I couldn’t get my lungs to work. I just lay there as he’d told me to.

  “Why aren’t you wearing a helmet?” he said, sounding very annoyed.

  There hadn’t been a helmet in the shed. But I could see now that I’d been pretty stupid not to wear one. He ran his hands over me very professionally. Finally, I could take a breath. It was short and sharp, but at least I got some air into my lungs. “I’m okay,” I gasped.

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  “Who do you think you are, God?”

  I felt irritable and manhandled. And really humiliated to be lying on my back in the middle of a gravel road.

  “Not God, but close. The only doctor in Ballydehag. You want to stay on my good side.”

  The words were sort of humorous, but his expression anything but. Finally, he seemed satisfied. “You’ve not broken anything. Did you hit your head?”

  “How am I supposed to remember? I fell off my bike.” How humiliating. I hadn’t done that since I was about ten years old.

  He helped me to my feet. And stood ready in case I collapsed. Which I didn’t. I pulled up the sleeve of my sweater, and my elbow was bleeding. My palm was cut and had small pieces of gravel embedded in it. And my hip and knee were sore. But other than that, I thought I’d got off pretty lightly.

  He took my hand in his and turned it palm up. “Come on back to the surgery. I’ll get that cleaned up.”

  I wanted to tell him I could take care of it myself. I had a salve and some spells. But freaking out the doctor, and as he’d so rightly pointed out, the only doctor in town, was probably not a great idea. Without me even answering him, he picked up my bike and put it in the back of the van.

  He took my arm, even though I didn’t ask him to, and helped me to the passenger-side door. Probably just as well, because when I tried to walk, my knee threatened to give way. Still, I sucked it up and managed to get myself into the passenger seat of the van. He walked around and got back into the driver’s side and turned around and headed back toward his home, where he had his surgery.

  “How did you come to be driving like a bat out of hell? And on the wrong side of the road?”

  “Bat out of hell is a bit strong, don’t you think? That old bike only has one speed. Besides, I’m American. I keep getting confused about which is the correct side of the road.”

  “Well, until you get it right, I strongly recommend that you slow down.”

  “Good advice.”

  He turned and shot me a sharp glance. “And get yourself a helmet.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yes, Dad.”

  “Dad? You really think I’m old enough to be your father?” He sounded so shocked that I suspected what he wanted to say was, have a look in the mirror.

  He pulled up to his surgery, and by this time, my knee was really stiffening up. He had to help me out of the van, and I hopped. Luckily, it wasn’t too far. He helped me inside, and I was glad that his surgery was closed at the moment so there were only the two of us in it, and I didn’t have an audience to witness me bashed up and humiliated.

  It was also his day off. “I’m really sorry to trouble you in your time off,” I said.

  “And so you should be. I’ll expect all the newest fishing books published as payment.”

  Was he joking? The trouble with Andrew Milsom was it was difficult to tell. He had that wry English humor that I didn’t entirely get.

  “Can you get up on the examining table? Or do you need a hand?”

  “I can do it.” Still, it was a struggle.

  “I’d insist on the hospital, but I think you’ve merely wrenched your knee, and I can take care of that hand quite quickly. However, if the pain doesn’t go away or the limp gets worse, you’ll have to go to the A and E.”

  “A and E?”

  “What you’d call the emergency room.”

  “Where is it?” I hadn’t seen a hospital anywhere near here.

  “In Cork city. That’s the closest.” It was where Brenda had been taken only last night.

  I was sure I’d be fine. Still, before he even troubled with my hand, he opened my eyes and shone a light in them. I knew he was checking me for concussion. “I didn’t hit my head,” I reminded him.

  “It’s very easy to hit your head and not remember it. Especially if you have a concussion.”

  When he’d satisfied himself that I didn’t have a concussion, Drew cleaned up my hand and elbow for me. He was gentle and quick. I felt awful, though, because he was dressed for the outdoors. I didn’t think he got a lot of time off. “What am I taking you from?”

  “Fishing.”

  “Of course. I should have realized.” The only time he’d been in my shop, it had been to pick up a fishing book he’d ordered. “Is that why you moved here?” I was curious why anyone who hadn’t grown up in this small village even discovered it, never mind decided to make it their home. Unless, like me, you’d been essentially banished here.

  “That’s right. I came up here on a fishing trip a few years ago and always thought I’d come back. Maybe retire here. It happened a little quicker than I thought.”

  There was clearly a story here, but he didn’t seem in a hurry to tell me more, and I didn’t pry. I wondered if Karen’s gossip had been correct and he’d left London because of a cheating wife and best friend. He dabbed a final disinfectant cream on the heel of my hand where the scraping was the worst. “There’s not much point bandaging it. Try and keep it clean.”

  He wrote me out a prescription. “This is for anti-inflammatory pills for your knee and hip. The chemist in town will carry the drugs.”

  I nodded. “I feel terrible that I interrupted your fishing.”

  “You didn’t, really. I’ll drop you and your bike back at your cottage, and then I’ll be on my way. I’m only an hour later than I’d hoped to be. The fish will wait.”

  It was a little embarrassing how much he had to help me get back to his van and hoist myself up again into
the passenger seat. I’d stiffened up even more just in the brief time I’d been in his surgery. “I really should have examined that leg.”

  I shook my head. It would have been so weird. I was wearing jeans, and he’d have had to find me a gown, and I think both of us felt a little awkward. It would be different if his nurse was sitting out front, and the surgery was open, but being here off hours, I really didn’t feel like taking my pants off in front of the only single man in town who was around my age.

  It flashed across my mind that at some point I would have to have my lady parts checked. A Pap test and so on. I needed to find a female doctor in a nearby town.

  “Where were you going to in such a hurry, anyway?” he asked me as we drove slowly back to my cottage.

  It was Saturday. I’d wanted to stop the tree surgeons before I opened the shop at ten. If I hadn’t been so freaked out, I’d have realized that tree surgeons probably didn’t work on a Saturday. However, I’d also needed to get rid of some of the adrenaline coursing through me since nearly being squeezed to death by tree branches and finding out an ancestor of mine might have been involved in Brenda O’Donnell’s murder.

  I went with part of the truth. “I’m pretty upset about Brenda.”

  He nodded. “I’m sorry you had to see her like that.”

  “Me, too. But at least she had someone with her. Archie was completely freaked out when I got there.”

  He shot me a sideways glance. “Archie’s a nice lad but not one you want to rely on in an emergency. I’m glad you were with her too.”

  “Mostly I held her hand and talked to her. I kept assuring her that help was on its way and she’d feel better soon. Just babbling. I felt so helpless.”

  “No. It was the right thing to do. To let her know she was safe.”

  “Did she say anything to you?”

  He sent me a curious look as though he was rethinking his diagnosis about the concussion. “Brenda O’Donnell?”

  “Yes. She asked me for some water, but by the time I got it for her, she’d lost consciousness. I wonder if she said anything on her way to the hospital.”

  He swerved to miss a pothole, and it seemed to take all his attention. Then, with a tiny shake of his head, as though he knew he were breaking the rules by telling me, he admitted, “She said, ‘Our Father.’ ”

  I turned to look at him, and even moving my head hurt. I took care not to wince, though, or he’d have me in the hospital having a CAT scan. I was certain I’d only had the wind knocked out of me, but every muscle in my body was seizing up. I needed a very hot bath and some of my potent herbs. And I needed them soon. Much as I appreciated the muscle relaxants, I’d use my own remedies.

  I needed to stop thinking about my own aches and pains and focus. When was I going to get another chance to interview Andrew Milsom? “Our Father. That’s all she said?”

  “It is.”

  “What do you think it meant?”

  He glanced over at me. “The woman was near death. We’re in Ireland. I think it meant she wanted a priest to administer her last rites.”

  Brenda had seemed a very modern Irish woman. I wasn’t entirely certain that I agreed with him. However, I was curious. “So did she get them?”

  He nodded. “We managed it, in the nick of time. We couldn’t save her life, but at least she was given last rites by a priest.”

  “Our Father,” I said again softly, almost to myself.

  “I wish I could have saved her. She seemed like a nice woman.”

  I nodded. “Too nice to kill.”

  Chapter 10

  Tuesday, I was working in the shop when an older woman came in. It took me a second to recognize her as Brenda’s former teacher, Bridget Sullivan. She didn’t even pretend she was here to look at books. She came straight up to me and took my hand. “I heard that you were the one that found our poor Brenda.”

  She seemed so much older than the last time I’d seen her. “It was Archie Mahoney who discovered her, but I was there soon after. Would you like to sit down?” I gestured to the pair of overstuffed, chintz chairs where I’d given Brenda tea only a few days earlier. She nodded and sat down. “I don’t know why I came to you. I wanted… I need to understand what happened.”

  I understood how she felt. “All I can tell you is what I found. Do you really want to hear it?”

  “No, I don’t want to. But I feel I should. I can’t stop thinking about poor Brenda.”

  There was someone waiting at the till to pay, so I asked her to wait a moment. I took care of my customer and then put the “back in ten minutes” sign on the door. I put the kettle on and brewed a cup of tea. If I’d ever seen anyone who needed a cup of calming tea, it was Bridget Sullivan.

  “Thank you, dear,” she said, then she sipped and sat back and seemed to gather her forces together. “Tell me what you found.”

  I respected this woman too much to lie to her, but I could honestly say that I didn’t think Brenda had suffered. I told her she’d asked me for water when I got there and that she’d seemed to fall asleep. And then Andrew Milsom had gone with her in the ambulance to the hospital.

  She nodded. “That’s good. I’m glad she wasn’t alone at the end. She had people who cared about her.”

  “Yes, she did.”

  I asked Bridget Sullivan what I’d been asking myself over and over. “But who would do such a thing?”

  She looked at me with her sharp, old eyes and then dropped her gaze back down to her tea. I was transported back to the argument I’d witnessed at Billy O’Donnell’s wake. “I saw you with Brenda and a man at the wake. They were arguing, and you broke it up. You told him he couldn’t come inside the house. I didn’t overhear everything, but I’m sure he told you that Brenda had ruined his life.”

  Her laugh sounded bitter and rusty. “The boot was on the other foot. Jack Buckley was one of those boys who seemed they could do anything they turned their mind to. He was always beautiful and engaging and cheeky, and he used to get away with murder. Brenda was studious. One of the brightest minds I ever had the pleasure of teaching. And she loved to learn. But when a girl gets to a certain age, she enters a period where scholarship isn’t the most important thing on her mind. No doubt you know exactly what I mean.”

  I’d been a teenager. Naturally, I knew. “So, Brenda and Jack?”

  She nodded. “Inseparable they were. I didn’t like it. I didn’t think he was a good influence on her. But he was a charmer, and she was quite willing to be charmed.”

  “What happened?”

  She put her hand to her forehead as though it was paining her. “If that poor girl weren’t lying dead, I would never tell you what I am about to share. And even though she is, I ask that you keep this confidential. It all happened a long time ago, and she became a wonderful, strong woman. That’s the person we must remember.”

  “Of course.”

  “Drugs. That’s what happened.”

  I’d thought of ways that a naïve girl who was too smart for her own good could get in trouble with a swaggering smoothie like Jack, and drugs were not the first thing that had leapt to my mind. I felt my eyes open wide. “Drugs? Really?”

  “I know. Astonishing, isn’t it? It happens in the best families. I can tell you as a former teacher, it happens in all families. But it was Jack who got her into the drugs. Her marks went down. Her attitude changed. She began missing school, something that was unheard of for her. She denied that she was taking drugs, but I’d been around too long to be fooled.”

  I so felt for her. I could imagine a dedicated teacher with one of her brightest students going off the rails like that and how helpless she’d feel. And how enraged. “What did you do?”

  “I went to her father. He was furious and heartbroken and tried various forms of punishment, none of which worked. I went to Jack’s parents. By that time, he’d already left school. They were unable or unwilling to help. Lord knows how long it would have continued or how it would have ended, except Jack was
arrested.”

  “Arrested for drug trafficking?”

  She shook her head. “For manslaughter.”

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood, as though someone had blown chilly air. “Jack killed someone?”

  “Had a fight with his dealer, didn’t he? They were both high as kites. But the man died. And Jack went to jail.”

  “And then Brenda saw that he was bad news and cleaned up?”

  She shook her head. “I wish she had. But Brenda stood by him. He swore up and down that he was innocent. He hadn’t killed the man. Somebody else had. And Brenda believed him. He could have said the sun was black and she’d have believed that too. In fact, for her, I think the sun did turn black when they took him away.

  “I was beside myself. There was a slim chance that we could help her turn her life around, but how? Perhaps I was a bit devious. But I said to her the best way she could help Jack was to go to university and study to become a lawyer. She could take his case, prove him innocent and get him out of jail. I told her stories of convicted criminals being set free years later.”

  “That was smart of you.”

  She sipped tea. “It fired her imagination. She saw herself as a heroine rescuing the love of her life and exonerating an innocent man. We were nearly too late, however. Her grades had slipped so badly. But she was brilliant, she was tenacious, and I’ve never seen anyone work so hard as she did. She got into Cork University. She had to get herself off the drugs first. And that’s not an easy feat. Not for anyone. But that girl has grit and determination. And she did it. And she got on so brilliantly that she ended up at Trinity College.” Bridget sounded as proud as though Brenda had been her own child.

  “And did she plead his case and get him out of jail?”

  The old teacher shook her head. “She reviewed the evidence and didn’t believe him. No. She didn’t get him out. And he never forgave her for it. Eight years he spent in prison. And he blames her. Not himself for his foolish choices and his bad temper. He blamed that beautiful woman.”

  “Did he blame her enough to kill her?”