Malarkey

by Sheila Simonson

  "But..."

  "When the miscarriage happened, I thought I could help you. I knew you'd grieve. I did, too." His voice roughened. "I wanted to see your daughter, Lark. She would have been something wonderful."

  I burst into tears.

  Jay held me close and said other good things. Gradually I grew calmer, but I was still sniffling.

  "Entschuldige!" A bespectacled tourist backed hastily away from our haven. We watched him until he disappeared behind a clump of white-blossomed rhododendrons.

  Jay squeezed my shoulder. "Come on, let's walk. The damp's seeping through this jacket." He stood up in stages and pulled me to my feet.

  "You said you thought you could help me." I took his arm. "You did, but I couldn't get past the awful feeling of failure. I guess I had to deal with that on my own."

  He gave my hand a warm pat. "Maybe so."

  "It's like Dad and the car." I explained my fresh insight into my father's state of mind. "I think I'm okay now. I think I worked through it before you were kidnapped. I never seriously thought of leaving you, Jay. I love you too much. But it made me sick to think I'd failed you."

  He squeezed my shoulders and said my failure to conceive for so long was as likely to have been his problem as mine.

  "Yes, but losing the baby after all that..." I shook my head. "I knew my reaction wasn't reasonable."

  "But you're reasonable now?" He was half-teasing.

  "I have," I said with dignity, "regained my sanity. And my sense of balance. And maybe even my sense of humor. Let's go back before Dad writes a monograph."

  I'm afraid we didn't do justice to the Parnell estate. I drove away from it with cheerful abandon, scraping past a coach on the highway and zipping by a petrol tanker without flinching.

  Jay flinched. "Thank God I don't have to drive."

  "It's easy." I slowed for a curve. "You just have to trust the other guy."

  Jay grunted, skeptical.

  "Can you tell me about Liam or is that too raw to talk about?"

  "No, but I feel clumsy."

  "Clumsy!" Startled, I glanced at him and veered onto the shoulder. Gravel flew.

  Jay winced. "Liam was an eloquent guy, and I don't remember his exact words. I tried to tell Mahon the gist of what he said and made a hash of it. My own judgment kept interfering, skewing his ideas."

  "Give it a try. Did he tell you why?" I geared down to follow a tour bus. "Or maybe you could start with how. I still find it hard to believe a slight man who wasn't five nine could kill Slade Wheeler."

  Jay shrugged. "Duck soup."

  "If Liam had sneaked up on Slade from behind and administered a choke hold, yes, but you said he confronted Slade directly, that they actually fought."

  "It's not all that surprising. Slade was a lardy loudmouth, not a fighter. Before Liam went out to the Balkans he took a couple of unarmed combat classes. He said he wasn't good, not a black belt or anything, but Slade was no good at all."

  I thought of Slade's combat fatigues and polished boots. "I'll never understand men."

  Jay said patiently, "Slade talked tough. Liam was tough. Mentally, I mean."

  I was getting tired of dawdling. The road, though curving, seemed clear. I flashed my lights, the coach moved left, and I passed. I missed an oncoming sedan by a good yard. "So what happened?"

  Jay had flung up his arm to protect his face from the inevitable collision. He lowered it. "On the evening of Easter Sunday, Liam met Slade in the woods by appointment. He—Liam, I mean— brought Tommy Tierney with him because he wanted a witness. He knew Tommy had clashed with Slade."

  "I suppose Liam was trying to get Slade to discontinue the games?"

  "There was an element of self-righteousness, too. He wanted Tommy to see him challenge and defeat Slade. I'm reading between the lines, of course. Liam didn't say that."

  I was stuck behind another coach, this one French. I geared down. "Did he expect hand-to-hand combat when he went to meet Slade in the woods?"

  "I don't think so. Slade made the mistake of attacking Liam verbally."

  I brooded over that. Liam was clever with words.

  Jay eased the shoulder harness. "He could have talked Wheeler into a disengagement. They didn't have to fight, but they did, and Slade died. It was that simple."

  "Not murder."

  "The courts would have had a hard time proving intent. I think Mahon would have settled for manslaughter. Liam could have pleaded self-defense. If Tommy—and the jury—had cooperated."

  The coach pulled onto a lay-by. I shifted up and pressed the pedal. "He might have got away with it."

  "Probably not entirely. The disposition of the body was too...peculiar."

  "Symbolic."

  "Yes. Jesus, a one-lane bridge with a pub attached. Outstanding urban design."

  I had reached Avoca. It was Saturday and the pub on the bridge was doing land-office business. Pedestrians out for a look at the river had turned the bridge into an outdoor meeting hall. They stood there, beer glasses in hand, chatting. Some of them waved. I crept across the bridge in first gear. On the east side of the river, I had to make a right turn on a blind corner.

  Jay was as still as a mouse while I negotiated the passage. As we wound our way out of the village, he said, "I didn't see Slade's body, but it sounded like an artistic composition, a last satirical comment on Wheeler's war games. I thought that when you described it to me, and what Liam said confirmed my opinion."

  I turned onto the Killaveen road. "Then you suspected him?"

  Jay nodded. "And Novak. I'm not the only one. Joe Kennedy suspected Liam, because of the daub of paint and because of Grace Flynn. They were cousins."

  "You know that?" I felt a twinge of resentment I immediately suppressed. Jay was never going to tell me all he knew of a case.

  "Joe told me."

  Old boy's network. What a bore. I was not going to be secretive. I told Jay Maeve's theory about Diarmuid and Grainne and the mark on Diarmuid's forehead.

  He listened intently. When I wound down, he said, "Yeah, there could be some connection. The love mark would have appealed to Liam's sense of humor."

  I drove slowly through Killaveen. The car park of the pub was jammed. I didn't see anything funny about the legend. "Maeve said the disposition of the body was poetic."

  "Imaginative, anyway." Jay craned for a glimpse of the trout stream then sank back in the seat. "The hell of it is I kept fading in and out and so did Liam. What I heard was pretty disjointed."

  I waited for a car full of kids to turn onto Suicide Lane ahead of me. "I suppose Liam despised Slade for corrupting the game players."

  Jay nodded, but he was pursuing his own train of thought. "I wish I could have answered him. There was a lot of self-serving rationalization in what Liam was saying. He told me about an experience he had in Bosnia."

  I thought of our early visitors. "Alex said the Serbs forced him to witness atrocities."

  "Yes. He came away from that convinced that the terrorism in Ulster—on both sides—was the same kind of stupidity, and he hated Wheeler for feeding into it."

  That fitted with what Liam had told me at dinner the day I met him. "I can almost respect that."

  Jay touched the dressing on the side of his head. "He kept saying Wheeler had perverted the meaning of war. I wish I could have argued with him."

  War was a subject I avoided discussing with Jay. I had no experience of it, and he had too much.

  After a moment, he said, "Liam liked the Steins. He kept saying they had European minds. Whereas Wheeler was a real Yank icon, a violence junkie with no principles and no traditions."

  "You disagreed with that."

  He waited while a petrol tanker flashed past before he spoke. "It seemed to me that Wheeler boiled the structure of combat down to its essentials, but then I'm an American. I think like one."

  "Maybe Liam was right."

  "Come on, Lark," he snapped. "Wheeler's the victim here. He was a game junkie, if anythin
g. He was dumb, and insensitive to local complications, but he understood one thing. The violence was already there in the kids. He choreographed it. To some extent he defanged it. The gamers didn't kill anybody, and they didn't kill each other."

  "Well, okay, but—"

  He was intent on making his point. "The fact that Slade didn't pour a lot of windy ideas about freedom and justice and fatherland into their heads is to his credit, as far as I'm concerned."

  I was coming up on our turn-off. The lot at the church hall looked empty so I pulled into it and stopped. "You sound as if you approve of war gaming."

  "No. Wheeler was a schmuck, but I don't see how attaching principles to what the gamers were acting out would have made it better. The violence would just have perverted the principles. Liam didn't see it that way. He saw a wicked American corrupting Irish youth. He read me a real sermon on Yank ignorance. I think he saw himself as some kind of hero for ridding the country of Wheeler's influence."

  "A hero? Surely not."

  "Even cynics can con themselves. If Liam had been honest with himself he would have called the Gardai and told them the fight got out of hand. Instead he desecrated Wheeler's corpse to show the world how clever he was."

  "Isn't desecrated a strong word?"

  "You thought Slade had been shot in the head, didn't you?"

  "For a few seconds." We sat silent, I remembering the scene in the potting shed.

  Jay cleared his throat. "Liam and Tommy moved Slade's body twice, you know, once to conceal it and once to display it. It's the display part I find disgusting. That and the killing of Kayla Wheeler. I told Mahon to check the trunk of Liam's Saab. I'll bet there's a camera there with undeveloped pictures of both corpses."

  Liam as snuff artist? My mind rebelled, but the insight made too much sense to dismiss it out of hand. "Let's hope the press doesn't find the film."

  Jay gave a wry grin. "A gruesome thought."

  With the engine off, the car had begun to cool. I shivered. "Why did Liam kill Kayla? That doesn't make sense to me. You said it was murder."

  "Yeah, he got cocky. He thought, wrongly, that he wasn't a suspect in Slade's death and decided he might as well get rid of Kayla, too."

  "Get rid of her?"

  "That's what he said. He planned the second killing in detail. It was pretty nauseating. He went on about his cleverness, how he had flopped Kayla's dying body around to make it look as if she resisted."

  "My God." Nauseating was right. My stomach clenched.

  Jay leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes. "He counted on Kayla's solitude and her alcoholism. He killed her in cold blood and faked a fight scene. He was good at stage settings, and he gloated over that one. And he bragged about how he hid out waiting for Kayla in the bathroom, how he got rid of the nylon rope he used as a garrote, even how he laundered his clothes and showered afterwards, at home, to make sure there would be no physical evidence to incriminate him."

  "But why?" I burst out. "What had she ever done to him?"

  Jay opened his eyes and turned his head. His eyes were dark. "Nothing. Kayla was a non-person to him, a gross inconvenience. He decided Stonehall would run smoother with her out of the picture."

  "Did he do it for Grace?" I was looking for comfort, or logic.

  Jay shook his head. "Only in the sense that he thought he could manipulate Grace and Grace's child. Mind you, he didn't spend much time talking about Kayla or Grace. They were women and peripheral. He was too busy making sure I understood why he challenged and fought Slade. Kayla didn't interest him."

  I was shaken. I had liked Liam. I said so, adding, "I must have lousy taste."

  "He had a lot of charm—and some conscience. I think he did suffer post-traumatic stress over the Bosnian experience. I suspect he could have used that as a defense, even for Kayla's murder. But in all the elaborate explanations he gave me—mind you, he thought he was dying—he never once saw a connection between the Serbian atrocities and the atrocities he committed himself."

  The irony of that made me writhe. I started the engine.

  Jay said, "Nobody except you and George has tried to present the viewpoint of the victims. The Steins thought Kayla was tacky, and Slade was, at best, a convenient source of funds."

  I eased the car onto Suicide Lane and headed for Stanyon. "Mike Novak loathed Slade's interference and thought he was stupid. So did Tracy."

  "The Wheelers are dead. They didn't 'ask for it.'" Jay said the phrase with contempt. "As far as I can tell neither of them committed a crime worthy of capital punishment."

  I said hesitantly, "Slade did make a game of war."

  Jay snorted. "Slade made a parody of war." His voice softened. "He was an overgrown kid, but he didn't kill anyone himself, and, unlike his Serbian counterparts, the ones Liam kept comparing him to, he didn't egg the kids on to kill anybody either."

  That was true. A motorcycle roared past, and I thought briefly of Artie. I turned onto the graveled drive.

  Jay said, "I don't think Slade was a saint or even an innocent. I don't doubt he was hard to put up with on the job. If he was anything like his sister, he must have been an unhappy man. As for Kayla, when I saw her I was reminded of the profile of victims of child abuse, especially incest."

  He had to be right, though it would have taken me a long time to reach the same conclusion. "Her drinking?"

  He nodded. "And the ponderous flirting and the eating disorder. She needed help. She sure didn't need what she got."

  I had come to the Y. I stopped and looked down at Stanyon. A fairy tale castle. Most fairy tales, I reminded myself, are grim. I turned right and passed beneath the blood red blossoms of the rhododendrons.

  Jay said, "You asked me how I felt about Liam McDiarmuid. Sad, I guess. Angry. Maybe relieved that he's dead."

  I crept toward the cottage in first gear. "He tried to save your life."

  "So he said." Jay gave a short, unamused laugh. "I guess he decided I was an acceptable European-style non-tacky Yank. If my mouth hadn't been taped shut I could have set him straight. I hope I would have said something about Kayla."

  I hoped he would have, too.

  When we entered the cottage Dad greeted us with sandwiches and tea. It was almost like coming home.

  Epilogue

  And think of my happy condition,

  Surrounded by acres of clams.

  American song, sung to the Irish air, "Rosin the Beau"

  Jay called the Dean, who had watched the eleven o'clock news. The Dean was very solicitous. Jay had been hospitalized? He should by all means recover completely before he tried to fly home. Sick leave was something the Dean understood. Since Jay never used it, he had accumulated nearly a term's worth, so he invoked it and stayed until Saturday. I flew home with him.

  Mother's flight from New York arrived before our flight to Seattle took off, so all four of us had a nice reunion in Dublin Airport, and Joe and Maeve showed up before the plane left, too. One benefit of Jay's ordeal was that Maeve and I were now good friends, and Jay's hormones had decided he didn't need to challenge Joe to a duel.

  We had spent our six remaining days in Ireland very happily, though the press hovered, and Jay underwent two intensive interviews with Chief Inspector Mahon. Whenever Jay was free, I whipped out my itinerary and we took off. We did see Glendalough with its round towers and Celtic crosses. When we weren't dawdling around Quaker villages, we visited neolithic sites. We even drove north to Newgrange.

  We walked in the Stanyon Woods, too, partly to exorcise Jay's demons. He thought the wall-paintings in the folly were hilarious and wished he'd seen them before Tommy incarcerated him under the dolmen. I never did find my incised stone, though I looked for it.

  Maeve called me from Dublin a couple of weeks after Jay and I got home. She'd introduced my mother to the Wicklow poets, and she also wanted to tell me that Grace was doing well. The lawyer was pressing for the child's rights. The Steins were mounting a retrospective showing of Liam'
s photographs. I suspected that the idea for the exhibition came from Maeve herself, though she didn't claim credit for it. Stonehall Enterprises had hired an Irish MBA to replace Slade Wheeler.

  In October, Maeve called me again. She sounded shy.

  "Joe and I have decided to do it."

  "Do what?" My mind tossed up images of Regency porn.

  "Get married."

  I was delighted and said all the appropriate things.

  "When?"

  "After Easter."

  "Wonderful. Why don't you fly west and honeymoon on the Pacific? We'd love to see you both, and it should be reasonably peaceful here by that time."

  The honeymoon idea startled her, but she didn't reject it outright. We discussed the possibilities. Finally she said, "What do you mean peaceful? Are you expecting civil disturbances?"

  "Only in a manner of speaking." I felt shy, too, and I shifted on the kitchen chair. "The twins should be sleeping through the night by then."

  "Twins?"

  I cleared my throat and tested an Irish phrase I had overheard in a pub. "I'm up the pole."

  "Pregnant?" Maeve cackled like a moorhen. "Don't put it that way, idjit. It's very rude language." Her turn to ask when.

  "Early December. Little Scorpios. Two of them."

  "Aren't you overdoing it?"

  "Overcompensating maybe. Uh, Maeve—"

  "What is it?"

  "That double spiral design on the megaliths. Does it have any significance?"

  A crackling pause followed, but Maeve is not slow. "If you'd found a sheila-na-gig I could tell you it was a fertility symbol. We're not sure about the spirals."

  "I'm sure."

  "Are you happy?"

  "As a clam."

  In mid-December, at about the solstice, I gave birth to healthy fraternal twins, a boy and a girl. We called our son George James after his grandfather and his father. Our daughter we named Erin.

  About the Author

  I was born in Montana, raised in eastern Oregon, graduated from the University of Washington, and have advanced degrees in English and history. I taught at Clark College in Vancouver WA for many years before retiring to write fulltime. Of my fourteen published novels, Malarkey is number nine, the last of the Lark Dodge mysteries. I have a new regency, The Young Pretender, available from Uncial Press, and my current mystery, Beyond Confusion, is available from Perseverance Press in trade paperback and in Kindle format from Amazon.com.