“Definitely.”
“She won’t hesitate to finish what she started.” Eamon jabbed his finger through Gethsemane’s bandage into her skull.
She shuddered as her head buzzed. “Then it’s a race. I get her to confess before she kills me. And don’t go poking your finger into people’s brains. It’s rude.”
“Listening to reason’s obviously not on your agenda, so what’re you going to do?”
“Come up with a plan. Maybe you could—”
“No. I’ve told you I want no part of this confession nonsense. I won’t help you get yourself killed. I’ve done dead. It’s not much fun. Don’t be in such a rush to join me.”
“I can’t just sit back and wait.”
“Don’t wait. Write O’Reilly a note outlining your theory, catch the next train out of town, swallow your pride and borrow plane fare from one of your siblings, and mail the note from the airport as you’re boarding a plane back to the States where Pegeen can’t get at you.”
“You mean run.”
“Yes. Just as fast and as far as you possibly can.”
“I won’t run.”
“Darlin’, Gethsemane,” Eamon leaned down to look Gethsemane in the eye, “I’ve seen this movie. It doesn’t end well. Be sensible.”
“You’re not going to talk me out of this. I know what I have to do.”
She headed for the hall.
Eamon called after her, “Where’re you going?”
“To bring a murderer to justice. And since you won’t help me, I’ll find someone who will.”
“O’Reilly, like I told you?”
“Francis Grennan. I’ll let you know what we come up with.” Gethsemane marched to the door.
Francis lived in the bachelor schoolmasters’ quarters, Erasmus Hall, on the eastern edge of St. Brennan’s campus. Gethsemane found him bending over a rose bush in a garden in the rear of the Georgian building.
“Hoy, Grennan.”
Francis waved. “Looking for new lodgings? The west wing’s nearly deserted. You’d have your pick of suites.”
“I’m looking for you.” Gethsemane noticed he held a spade. “What are you doing?”
“Planting roses, while the soil’s still warm. ‘James Galway’ and ‘Galway Bay.’”
“Math teacher, amateur botanist, archer, rosarian. I hope your many talents include getting women to say things they don’t want to say.”
“According to my ex-wife.”
“Ex-wi—Never mind. I need your help. Again.” Gethsemane explained about Pegeen having committed all the murders and her dilemma over lacking evidence. “So, how do I trick Pegeen into confessing?”
“Trick her into confessing to—” Francis counted on his fingers “—six, seven murders?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t. Pegeen Sullivan may be insane, but she’s not stupid. She’s not going to admit anything.”
“Pegeen Sullivan is a cold-blooded killer who’s gotten away with murder for decades. If someone doesn’t stop her she’ll go on killing.”
“Allow me to ask the obvious. Why you?”
“Who else but me? My digging into the McCarthy murders woke a sleeping dragon. It’s up to me to slay it. With your help.”
“Remind me why you come to me whenever you need help with something dangerous.”
“Frankie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
“Casablanca explains every situation.” Francis set the spade down. “I don’t know what it is about you but I can’t seem to tell you no.”
“Have you got any ideas? Short of water-boarding?”
“Give me a day to think on it. I’ll meet you tomorrow after school at the Rabbit.”
“Not the pub. Word would be all over town before you finished your first drink.”
“I drink fast. Maybe before I finished my third. But I see your point.”
“How about Carnock? It’s isolated, no one will see or overhear us.”
“Golgotha? Are you fecking serious? You won’t get me near that place, I don’t care how many Casablanca quotes you throw at me. Let’s meet at The Athaneum. Come to think of it, that’s probably the best place to set up Pegeen. She’s a history there with her father. Having to face those demons might throw her off-kilter, give us the advantage.”
“I knew you were my only man. Excellent idea. How do we lure Pegeen to the theater?”
“I don’t know yet, do I? I said give me a day, not half a minute.”
Gethsemane hugged Francis and kissed him on the cheek. “You’re a sound fella, Grennan.”
Francis blushed and backed into a rose bush.
“Take some advice. Go to O’Reilly and tell him what you know.”
“You too? I’m not running.”
“Don’t run. But don’t wait for proof you might not get. If this plan goes arseways, which it probably will, at least the guards will have some idea of where to start looking for your murderer.”
She had to stop Pegeen. What could she use against her? Gethsemane walked back to her bike. Two of Pegeen’s first three victims were men who’d rejected her, like her father. Maybe she—
Something caught her eye as she mounted the bicycle seat—a cigarette butt and a shiny object, a button or a pin, near a copse of hedges. One of the boys sneaking a smoke, probably. No big deal.
The smell hit her a few yards past the garda station. Not leather and soap. White roses and vetiver. She stopped. “Orla? Orla McCarthy, are you there?” The fragrance wrapped itself around her and drew her attention to the Athaneum up ahead. Why not go there now, look around, try to come up with a plan herself to lure Pegeen?
She tried front, side, and back doors of the theater. All locked. Halfway through her litany of curses about her luck, the back door latch clicked and the door swung open. She peered inside. “Orla?”
“No.” A blast of leather and soap accompanied Eamon’s voice. “It’s me.” He materialized next to her. “I’m here to talk you out of this suicide mission.”
Gethsemane followed him inside. Eamon walked instead of vanishing and reappearing as he usually did, letting his aura’s saffron glow illuminate their path backstage. They stopped in front of Sullivan the Magnificent’s poster.
“This is your fault, Joe.” Eamon glared at the magician’s likeness. “If you hadn’t been such a shite father—”
“How can we use that against Pegeen?”
“I’m not helping you do this. I’m here to talk sense to you.”
“We’ve had this conversation. I’ve plenty of sense, enough to know that without a confession, Pegeen gets away with murder. Murders, multiple.”
“Damn it, woman, I’ve lost my oldest friend. I don’t want to lose my newest too.”
“Eamon, I am your friend, which is why I can’t let Pegeen get away with what she did to you.”
“I can’t watch this.” Eamon vanished, leaving Gethsemane to find her way out in the dark. She missed a flash of straw-colored hair slipping outside just before her.
Sixteen
Back at her teaching duties the next morning, Gethsemane pretended not to watch the clock. She jumped as soon as the lunch bell rang. She couldn’t wait until after school to speak to Francis.
She waded through a tide of hungry boys to be met at the door by the headmaster’s secretary. The woman handed her a telephone message slip. “You received a call from the garda station. Said it was urgent you meet Inspector O’Reilly at Our Lady.”
Gethsemane thanked her. The inspector had been out when she’d gone to see him after meeting Francis. In Cork, she’d been told. Maybe he’d found something concrete to tie Pegeen to Oisin’s death. She stopped by Francis’s classroom on the way out but he’d already gone to lu
nch. She’d fill him in later. She’d have to hurry if she wanted to meet O’Reilly and make it back to school in time for her first class after lunch.
Eamon sat at the piano concentrating on the final movement of a new concerto. Crumpled paper littered the floor. A pen floated across a sheet of music paper, leaving a complex design of musical notation in its wake. He didn’t hear Pegeen come in.
“You could stampede a herd of elephants through a room and you wouldn’t hear it while you were composing,” she said. “Some things never change.”
Eamon spun. The pen hovered in the air for a second then clattered onto the piano keyboard.
“Yes,” Pegeen said. “I can see you.”
Eamon spoke.
Pegeen waited until his lips stopped moving. “Can’t hear you, though.” She chuckled. “Funny, isn’t it? All those years we knew each other you could hear me but couldn’t see me. Not really. Orla blinded you to the truth. I could see her, too, for a while. ’Til I borrowed one of Father Keating’s spell books and banished her.”
Eamon’s mouth moved again.
“Did you never wonder why you couldn’t find her? Why she never found you? The sight of the two of you together during life sickened me. Couldn’t bear the idea of the two of you together in the afterlife.”
Eamon glowed blue then froze. Why couldn’t he form an orb?
Pegeen recited something in Latin.
Eamon traced the pattern in the carpet through his outstretched hands as he dematerialized. He faded—solid, semi-solid, transparent, nothing. The last thing he heard was Pegeen’s, “Don’t worry. Wherever you’re going Orla won’t be there. I made sure of that.”
Gethsemane pulled up in front of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows. The yard was deserted. She leaned her bicycle against the fence and walked into the church, calling out as she went through the narthex into the nave. “Inspector? Inspector O’Reilly? I’m here. You wanted to see me?”
She passed rows of empty pews on her way to the chapel. No one there. She continued to the chancel and climbed the three steps.
“Inspector? Where are you?”
She stepped behind the rood screen. No one in the choir stall. The message said to meet O’Reilly at church. Maybe he hadn’t meant in church.
A noise. Or not. Hard to be sure with “Pathétique” blaring in her head drowning out all other sound. She stepped back into the nave. Still nothing but empty pews.
“Inspector? ’S that you?”
No answer other than Tchaikovsky.
“Father Keating?”
No response. Gethsemane shivered. Empty churches were as eerie as darkened theaters. And she’d ignored her inner warning system to her peril these past several days. Better wait outside. As soon as she checked one final place. She walked to the sanctuary and knocked on the sacristy door.
“Father Keating? Are you in there? Is anybody here?”
“I’m here.”
Gethsemane spun. Pegeen Sullivan sat in the choir stall.
“Will I do?” she asked.
“Actually,” Gethsemane said, “I’m expecting Inspector O’Reilly. He’s probably waiting for me.”
“In the poison garden, maybe?”
“Please excuse me.”
Pegeen blocked her path. “About that message…”
Gethsemane froze, less to do with Pegeen’s words than with the object she held in her hand—a gun. “Inspector O’Reilly’s not coming, is he?”
“Not in your lifetime.” Pegeen motioned to the choir stall. “Have a seat.”
Gethsemane sat on one of the benches.
Pegeen sneered. “So you thought you could trick me into confessing to murder, did you?”
“Not murder,” Gethsemane said. “Murders, plural.”
Pegeen spat.
“I’m pretty sure spitting in church is sacrilegious.”
Pegeen cocked her revolver. “Well, when you meet God you can ask Him what He intends to do about it.”
“Something involving fire and brimstone, most likely.”
Pegeen raised the revolver and pointed it at Gethsemane’s chest. “You’ve quite the mouth for someone on the wrong end of a weapon.”
“Sorry, habit. I get smart when I’m nervous. Right now I’m fecking brilliant.”
“Soon enough you’ll be fecking dead.”
Gethsemane tensed. Was the choir stall’s wood thick enough to stop a bullet?
“Please be so good as to sign that note, Dr. Brown.” Pegeen motioned to the bench next to Gethsemane.
Gethsemane looked down at several items laid out near her: a typed note, a pen, an open bottle of Waddell and Dobb Double-Oaked, and a lead crystal whiskey glass filled with bourbon and ice. “Ice, how thoughtful.”
“Sign the note,” Pegeen said.
“I never sign anything without reading it first.”
“I’ll summarize for you. It’s your suicide note. You describe how stupid you felt when you discovered that Eamon McCarthy had, somehow, managed to kill his wife and then himself, after all. You couldn’t face the humiliation and ridicule of being wrong after all the trouble you’d caused so you decided to end it.”
“An honor suicide? By drinking poisoned whiskey? Just like Eamon?”
“I like the symmetry of it.”
“And you really think you can get away with this?”
Pegeen smirked. “I got away with all the others.”
“It doesn’t faze you, does it? All this killing.”
“I never killed any who didn’t deserve it.”
“That’s how you justify serial murder? You convinced yourself that seven people—”
“Eight,” Pegeen said, “including you.”
“Or nine? Grennan knows about you. Won’t you have to kill him?”
“Let Frankie’s death be on your head. You shouldn’t have dragged him into this.”
“How about ten? O’Reilly? Eleven? The cold case inspector from Cork? They know Oisin was murdered. They know the McCarthys were murdered. They know Oisin and Eamon were both poisoned with digitalis. How long before they discover you tried to kill yourself with the same drug? How long before they connect the deaths to you?”
“Stop it.” Pegeen tightened her grip on the gun.
“When does it end?” Gethsemane kept her eyes on Pegeen’s hand.
“When it’s over…When I decide it’s over! That’s when it ends! Sign the damned note!”
Gethsemane took a deep breath. She forced the fear from her voice. “No, I won’t sign it. I’m not signing a bogus suicide note,” Gethsemane said. “I’m not making this easy for you.”
Pegeen balled her free hand into a fist and clenched her jaw so tight Gethsemane thought she might break teeth.
“Did the others make it easy for you?” Gethsemane asked. “Oisin?”
The unpleasant smile reappeared. “Quite easy. I just slipped some digitalis tablets in with the pills he usually popped. Washed ’em right down with his cider, never noticed.”
“What about Orla? Throwing someone off a cliff’s not as easy as mixing pills with their alcohol but she was a tiny thing. Couldn’t have put up much fight. Or was she tougher than she looked?”
“Not tough at all.”
“Why’d she go out so late?”
“Thought Eamon had come home early from Dublin to surprise her.”
“Wonder where she got that idea?”
“Someone slipped a note under her door. Eamon’s handwriting’s pure easy to copy. Been doing it since we were at school. Used to write his English papers for him.”
“How thoughtful.”
Pegeen frowned. “Didn’t he show his appreciation? Orla’d never have done any such thing for him. I did more for Eam
on than Orla ever did and he thanked me by marrying that silly cow. The silly cow who hurried up to the lighthouse to meet him. Running up Carrick Point Road all alone so late at night. Easy to slip, twist an ankle, go tumbling off a cliff. She never saw it coming.”
“Another sneak attack. They seem to be your specialty. Ambush with a bat on a drunk. An arrow to the heart from—how far away?”
“Across the green. Clock tower.”
“No big deal for a champion archer. But why do it? Why kill Hurley? He and Lynch helped you, covered for you by shifting blame for Orla’s death to Eamon. Was it your car Jimmy saw?
“I’ve no idea whose car he saw, if he saw one. Probably another of his lies. I didn’t drive, I took the footpaths over the cliffs. Hurley and Lynch weren’t helping none but themselves. Pathological opportunists, both of them. They saw a chance to be rid of a thorn from their sides and grabbed it. Lucky me.”
“So you killed Hurley because…?”
“Because your snooping got him to thinking maybe blackmail would be a way to supplement his pension. Back in the day, before the booze took hold, he was a decent investigator. Some vestige of the garda he once was remained under that alcohol-sodden exterior. He got hold of that damned evidence box—”
Gethsemane interrupted. “And did what he failed to do twenty-five years ago. Examined it. And connected what, the bourbon bottle, to you? So you killed him and stole the evidence box. But you missed the bottle stashed among Hurley’s impressive collection.”
“Aren’t you the clever one? I’d have had more time to search for it if you hadn’t been Janey-on-the-spot raising the alarm.”
“I’m not apologizing. What about Siobhan?”
“Blackmail is a common pastime in Dunmullach,” Pegeen said. “Siobhan saw me buy a bottle of the Waddell and Dobb. She found out I’d stolen tablets from the pharmacy too. Aoife shot off her mouth, no doubt. I stopped Siobhan from bleeding me and Aoife from telling anyone else.”
“Siobhan mailed a newspaper clipping to me, didn’t she?” Gethsemane asked. “A hint there might be more to Oisin’s death than an accidental overdose. That his death might be connected to Eamon’s.”
Murder in G Major (A Gethsemane Brown Mystery Book 1) Page 26
