Malarkey

by Sheila Simonson

  I whistled. "A suspicious character."

  "He is that, but his da thinks the sun rises and sets in him. Good evening then, Mrs. Dodge." Kennedy rang off without further chat. Perhaps he regretted his openness. I supposed Mahon was giving him some heat for misplacing a suspect.

  As for me, I didn't care a great deal about the Tierneys one way or the other, not having met either of them, though the younger Tierney's flight suggested plausible scenarios. My mind was on Jay.

  I fumed through the preparation for dinner. The potatoes scorched, an instance of sympathetic magic. By the time Dad appeared, looking refreshed, I had calmed down enough to report Jay's imminent arrival without swearing and throwing things.

  "Jay's coming?" My father's face lit like a candle. "Splendid. We can go fishing."

  The next morning, I gave myself two hours for what should have been a one hour drive to Dublin airport.

  In the intervening time I had done a lot of thinking about Jay, and about our marriage, mostly in tight, angry loops. My father's pleasure at the thought of Jay's arrival tempered my fury somewhat. On the surface, the two men had little in common, though Jay's undergraduate degree is in history. Dad had greeted the news of my decision to marry a police detective without enthusiasm. At some point, however, the two men had bonded over fly fishing.

  It was a good thing somebody wanted to fish with my father. My brother, Tod, a stock broker, loathes wading for hours in frigid streams. He once took a cell phone on a fishing trip with Dad and disgraced himself by beeping. Dad could fish for hours in dead silence. So, apparently, could my husband. I had no idea what they talked about when they did speak.

  "Fishing." I passed a dawdling car with vicious effectiveness in the face of an oncoming coach. I was muttering to myself, partly because the only radio station I could find was broadcasting in Irish. "I'll dump the pair of them at a trout stream and leave them while I do my own thing." I wasn't sure what that stale cliché represented. Maybe I'd hang out at pubs. Or explore the used bookstores. Or search out the remaining 1398 dolmens in Ireland.

  The Toyota labored up the wooded gorge beyond Ashford and sped onto the southernmost stretch of motorway. North of Newtownmountkennedy the road narrowed again and twisted through glens that had to be prime trout fishing country. I was making good time despite the tag-end of the rush hour traffic.

  What I wanted Jay to do, beyond leaving me some space, I didn't know. I realized my anger was excessive. Any husband would worry about any wife embroiled with the law in a foreign country. Jay had a right to worry, but he should have trusted my judgment.

  I had once found myself caught in the investigation of an English murder. Jay had flown to the rescue then, too, and his presence had eased my relations with the Metropolitan Police. But this time I wasn't a suspect. I was peripheral to the investigation, a mere witness after the fact. I didn't need to be rescued, and neither did Dad. I was coping.

  As I approached the Stillorgan Road, it occurred to me that I could exact a measure of revenge by making Jay drive the Toyota back to the cottage. On the other hand, I had to ride in the car, too, and I hoped to live a bit longer. I wondered what his cop-mind would make of local driving customs.

  Possibly because of my preoccupation, I got lost on the Eastlink and wound up at Malahide Castle. Malahide Castle is north of the airport. It was also, that spring, the focus of major road construction. When I finally found the N1 and headed for the airport, I had three minutes to meet the plane. I chucked the car in the short- term parking structure and sprinted down concrete stairs and across a wide asphalt apron to the terminal. I wondered how long Jay would wait for me before he called Interpol.

  That was a little unfair. He looked unruffled when I found him. He was standing near the now-deserted arrival gate, frowning at something on his ticket folder the way he does when he isn't wearing his reading glasses. His face looked a little bare without the mustache he had shaved off that spring, but, hey, I recognized him.

  When he looked up and spotted me, his face went blank. He was trained to look impassive when revealing emotion might be compromising. I wondered what emotion he was masking.

  I said, "I got lost. Sorry I'm late."

  He gave me a spousal peck on the cheek, stuck his plane ticket in the breast pocket of his jacket, and hoisted his ancient garment bag from the carpet. The carrying case for his notebook computer hung from one tweedy shoulder by its long strap. I took it by way of being useful. The computer weighed four pounds, but he'd stuffed books and papers in the case, too.

  "How are you?" Sagging slightly under the weight of the case, I led him back along the concourse.

  "Doped."

  That was not surprising. Jay has a well-founded flying phobia, and the sensible way to deal with it is prescription tranquilizers. I should have been grateful he'd taken them. "Then I won't ask you to drive."

  "Good thing." He swung along beside me. After a moment, he added, "I can't anyway. You didn't list me as one of the drivers when you hired the car."

  True. He was at my mercy. I cheered up. Slightly.

  I waited until I had negotiated the maze of roundabouts leading from the airport to the Nl before I asked the obvious question.

  "Why did you come?"

  He flinched as a large tanker sped by on the right. "I talked to your mother. We're concerned about George. Mary thought I might be able to smooth the way."

  "There is no way to smooth," I said coldly, thinking I would have a few good words to say to my mother. Nor was I mollified. Jay was capable of resisting my mother's suggestions. "The Gardai have been very considerate. Dad wasn't called to testify at the inquest."

  "But you were?"

  "A formality." The tires squealed when I made a sharp left onto Griffith Avenue. I'd almost missed the turn-off. The alternative was O'Connell Street on a business day, a choice too horrible to contemplate, according to the travel experts.

  Jay yawned. "Suppose you tell me what happened."

  "Okay, fine, I'll do that." I bit back a rude comment about police interrogations. "You'd better rummage in my coin purse for the bridge toll, though. I need fifty-five pee."

  As he dug in my handbag and sorted through the unfamiliar coins, I gave him a terse account of my discovery of Slade Wheeler's body. I also went on to describe the scarifying dinner party and the dramatis personae in some detail. Mind you, all the while I talked I was threading my way past the east Dublin docks, flinging the correct change into the toll basket, crossing the Liffey, tangling myself in a major roundabout, and merging onto the Stillorgan Road without ramming anybody. I thought it was an impressive performance.

  When I pulled up at a stoplight I looked over at Jay.

  He yawned.

  "Sorry to bore you."

  "I'm not bored, but I'm not tracking either."

  "Okay, I understand. But I still want to know why you dropped everything and roared over here at the first hint of trouble."

  He stifled another yawn. "I can tell that you're spoiling for a fight, Lark, and I'm willing to oblige when my brain starts functioning."

  "What if I'd rather have it out now?" The road had changed to highway. I picked up the pace.

  "Hmm. Well, you may want to, but I'm pretty sure you won't insist."

  "Really? Why is that?"

  He yawned again. "Because you always fight fair."

  That silenced me as he knew it would. He slouched against the door and fell asleep. I thought about turning on the Irish broadcast at full volume, but I was not supposed to be petty.

  My father was waiting at the door when I drew up in front of the cottage. I set the brake and poked Jay.

  He started and woke up completely, wide-eyed.

  "We're here."

  Dad had come out the door. Jay disentangled himself from the seatbelt and got out. He gave Dad a hug. That surprised me until I remembered that Jay hadn't seen my father since the stroke.

  I popped the trunk lid and wriggled out of the car. My f
ather is about four inches taller than Jay. Arm still on Jay's shoulder, Dad was guiding my husband into the cottage with the air of a squire welcoming the heir to the manor house.

  That's your son-in-law, Dad, I thought, cranky. I'm the heir. I hefted the garment bag and the computer from the trunk and carried them into the house. "Porter service."

  Jay smiled at me. "Thanks. George looks terrific, doesn't he?"

  I had to smile back. "Grand is the local word for terrific."

  Dad beamed on both of us like the rising sun. "This calls for a drink. I have a bottle of Jameson's I bought on the plane."

  I was scandalized. "Before lunch?"

  "With. I made sandwiches."

  Jay rubbed the back of his neck. "I suppose a glass of Jameson's won't kill me." He rarely touches hard liquor.

  "The tranquilizers!" I was doubly scandalized.

  Dad said, "A spot of cheer, Lark. Lighten up."

  I stared.

  "It's what my students say."

  So each of us had a shot of Jameson's, neat. I must say it tasted good all the way down. Lunch was sloppy but generous ham sandwiches.

  I took Jay downstairs after that to show him the scene of the crime, but he spotted the futon.

  "Sleep." He ripped off his jacket and tie.

  "You slept all the way through scenic Wicklow, the Garden of Ireland."

  "Too bad." He kicked off his shoes, lay down on top of the duvet, and fell asleep. Like that.

  Chapter 6

  The host is riding from Knocknarea

  And over the grave of Clooth na Bare,

  Caoilte tossing his burning hair

  And Niamh calling, Away, come away.

  Empty your heart of its mortal dream...

  Yeats, "The Hosting of the Sidhe"

  I started a pot of spaghetti sauce while Jay slept and Dad worked on his notes. The sauce took me about fifteen minutes. When I finished, Jay was still asleep and Dad was still deep in the records of the Dublin Meeting. So I shoved the pot onto the cool side of the Rayburn and went for a walk.

  Bright yellow crime-scene tape isolated the potting shed. The Stanyon gardeners were working on the mucked up area of lawn, raking out boot prints and replanting. I said hello and watched the men a while, but my presence seemed to inhibit them. I climbed back up the flagstone path and decided to see where the road led, other than to the big house.

  It tunneled through an arch of rhododendrons. In a week or so, the rhodies would burst into exuberant blossom. Now the span of dark leaves drooped like the gateway to the Underworld. I ducked below it, shivering, and emerged into the open again. Gravel gave way to packed dirt. The road skirted the pond I had seen from the cottage the first day. The pond might at some time have been an ornamental lake. Close to, I could see that it needed to be cleaned out. Clumps of weed and twists of rusting metal had trapped human and animal litter, but a couple of mallards swam in the turgid water.

  I walked past two roofless stone outbuildings. There the lane shrank to the status of a path and dead-ended at a low stone wall. I found a stile, climbed over it, and entered the Stanyon woods.

  It was a plantation, not a natural copse. Stately oaks, lesser trees I didn't recognize, laurels, two giant hollies, male and female, and assorted bushes that looked as if they were about to bloom formed a screen to hide the fiduciary heart of the grove.

  Beyond the screen, long before the Steins bought the estate, some tree accountant had set out rows of conifers with spacing appropriate to moderate growth. In the not distant future, the trees would be harvested like wheat. The current accountant would see to that. Perhaps Slade Wheeler would have seen to it when he tired of his war games.

  The trees looked tall and spindly in the gray light, and their uniformity depressed me. Someone had mowed the undergrowth that spring. I felt as if I were walking through a field of living telephone poles. In a hundred years the great evergreen forests of the Pacific Northwest were going to resemble Stanyon. Hundreds of square miles of telephone poles.

  Some of the conifers, I think they were Scotch pine, sported red blazes as if a displaced timber cruiser had marked them for cutting. It took me a few minutes to realize the marks were left over from Wheeler's wargames.

  When I stepped onto the mat of fallen needles I made no sound. I walked without haste, trying to imagine what it would be like to stalk and be stalked in this tame wilderness. The land sloped upward, and a few bushes here and there had survived to provide lurking places. Ferns sprouted like feather dusters over the mown areas. Foreign birds sang. I couldn't decipher their song. It sounded like a lament. A light wind brushed my cheek.

  I was beginning to spook myself. In a lifetime of reading I had encountered enough enchanted forests to know that Stanyon Woods was too dull for magic. It wasn't even haunted. Slade Wheeler's ghost, if it lingered at all, hugged the ground like a patch of stale smog.

  I made myself look for signs of a police search. The Gardai had to have searched the woods for the site of the murder, if, as Kayla said, they were assuming her brother was killed by one of the game players. Once I put my mind to it, I spotted broken branches, trampled ferns, scuffed needles. The cops had been there all right.

  I hiked upward, shoving branches aside when I had to. I wasn't lost because I knew the woods were not a forest. If I walked a quarter mile farther, I'd come to a cow pasture or a potato field plowed and ready for seeding. When I stopped and looked around me, though, I saw only the stiff rows of conifers. Watery gray light sifted through the needles. I might as well have been lost.

  As the thought formed, I caught motion at the edge of my visual field. I whirled and stared. Nothing—a trembling of leaves that might have been caused by the wind. I took another few steps and stopped again, the hairs on the nape of my neck prickling. Somebody or something was watching me.

  I stood very still, though my berserker impulse was to run, screeching, directly at the spot where I had sensed the intruder. Or perhaps I was the intruder.

  I breathed in, out. Finally, I started walking toward the trembling bush. Slowly. With dignity. So what if there were game players hiding in the woods? I thought of Grace Flynn's "protector." He was shorter than I was and no heavier. I could handle Artie.

  I parted the offending bush and entered a tiny glade. Nothing. I said, "Okay, who's here?" Nobody answered. Then, on the far side of the clearing, I saw the stone.

  It was huge, a boulder of dolmen dimensions scabbed with lichen, and it was splotched with red paint. As I walked over to it, I caught what might have been the blur of someone else's passage in the calf-high ferns. The trail, if it was a trail and not a trick of light, led up the slope and into the trees.

  I approached the stone warily. Nothing. A faint sound from the woods halted me in my tracks. I listened until my ears ached but heard nothing more and, indeed, it may have been nothing. The red paint, a blotch at waist height, was dry to my touch. I leaned against the stone and scanned the undergrowth.

  The wind was picking up. Clouds scudded overhead. I straightened and started to walk away. As I glanced back over my shoulder at the stone, I saw the design. A huge double spiral in the form of a figure eight lying on its side incised the flat surface. At the heart of each vortex was an eye.

  When I examined it, I could see the carving was ancient. Indeed it was so overgrown with lichen it was visible only at an angle, or up close if the observer knew it was there. I traced it with my finger from the unblinking eyes at the center to the outer rim, half-afraid that if I reversed and followed the maze inward I would be sucked into the heart of the stone. My hand shook. I stood still so long the birds started their song again.

  Eventually the breeze picked up, the light changed, and I came out of my reverie. It was time to go back to the spaghetti sauce.

  My mind had calmed. I reentered the woods without trepidation, though there was no path and one row of trees looked like the next. I had walked steadily up the slope. Now I walked steadily down it. It was not u
ntil I reached the stone wall and found the stile again that I realized I had forgotten the mysterious watcher in the woods. He or it was irrelevant to the stone carving.

  Dad was pottering around the Rayburn, heating water for tea. He gave me a tentative smile. "Been for a walk?"

  I nodded, not quite ready for speech. A glance at the kitchen clock told me I'd been gone about an hour. I had the sensation that something had happened, something important, but the meaning eluded me.

  While Dad brewed a pot of Earl Grey, I went downstairs and poked Jay until he woke up. He'd had enough sleep, too much, probably. If I let him sleep until he felt like waking, he'd spend the night reading Anthony Trollope.

  Finally, he flopped over onto his back and blinked up at me.

  I said, "Without prejudice to our quarrel, do you want to make love?"

  He blinked, grinned, pulled me down onto the futon.

  Afterwards we showered in sequence, dressed, and went upstairs. Dad had gone back to his notes. "Tea's cold," he murmured without looking up. His pen made a squiggle on a photocopied document.

  It was ten past six. I set the kettle on the cooker and gave the sauce a stir. It seemed to be stewing nicely. Jay took a drink of water from the tap and made a face. I ought to have warned him to drink the Evian water in the refrigerator. The tap water was potable, but it had a chemical odor.

  "Do you want tea or a cocktail?"

  Jay raised an eyebrow.

  "I just remembered that Barbara invited Dad and me to drop in. The Steins hold a happy hour at six thirty. I should warn them their cottage has another tenant."

  "Well..."

  "I could phone but it's a nice walk, and you might as well take a look at the suspects." I described Kayla Wheeler.

  His eyes narrowed. "Okay. Let's go. You can tell me about the rest of the cast on the way."

  We didn't leave immediately. I replaced the steaming kettle with a large pot of hot water for the pasta and set the pot on the cooler side of the Rayburn. When we returned I'd have water ready to cook the spaghetti fast.