Whispers in the Mist

by Lisa Alber

  “Promise?” she said. “You don’t know what he was talking about?”

  “No, and don’t you fret. He can find me again, and I’ll settle him out. And, before you ask—I doubt that man had anything to do with the message on your car.”

  She gave up for now. Liam with his unerring instincts had zeroed in on her next question, and shut her down too. His gimpy hand, a result of a long-ago run-in with a rock wall, landed on her arm. “Now focus.”

  Right. Focus. Merrit inhaled the comforting scent of vindaloo chicken coming off the nearest food kiosk and reached into her coat pocket to touch her inhaler. Its cool and smooth surface grounded her, allowed her lungs to relax. She adjusted Liam’s matchmaking ledger on her lap. The book had to weigh twenty pounds with its leather-bound cover and thick stock. It was a monstrosity, but it went with Liam’s image. She relaxed her clawed grip on the pen and wrote Seamus’s name on a fresh line.

  “I’m that ready to meet my second wife,” Seamus was saying. “The first one broke Brendan’s heart, doing a runner back to Dublin. Years ago now, but I’d eat a dirty nappy before I’d forgive her.”

  Liam wrapped an arm around the back of the divan. Merrit watched, fascinated, as Seamus reacted to Liam’s silent invitation to reveal his innermost thoughts. He shifted his hips toward Liam and reclined so that he almost touched Liam’s outstretched arm.

  “You already know Merrit,” Liam said, “my right-hand woman, learning the ways of the matchmaker because this old gent can’t live forever.”

  “Ay, we all know Merrit by now, don’t we?” Seamus said, his tone so neutral he might as well have shouted out his disdain.

  Last September news of her kinship with Liam had spread through the village faster than a windswept fire back in her native California. Twelve months hadn’t lessened her outsider’s status. If anything, the locals had gotten used to disliking her and enjoyed their communal dismissiveness. She knew what her detractors thought. She was a baby to the land, a mewling Yankee pretender to the matchmaking throne who dared to act like a proper Lisfenoran.

  If only the locals knew that she walked around the village, with its cobblestones and eighteenth-century storefronts, longing to feel part of the community. No way could she follow in Liam’s giant footsteps, but here she sat, in training for a time-honored position. She’d let Liam convince her that she had the talent for matchmaking—he said she was “charmed for it”—but she felt like a fraud. Evidently, the villagers agreed.

  Only fourteen more days until the end of September, the festival, and the daily public flaying under the village’s critical eye.

  Swallowing down her nerves, Merrit readied her pen and prepared herself to learn from Liam’s example. She already knew something about Seamus. He was well-known around the village, a man who drifted from job to government dole to job with cheerful ease. He spent most of his free time in the Plough and Trough. He’d moved to the village from Dublin years ago and made himself more local than some born to County Clare.

  Merrit grimaced down at the ledger. She hadn’t realized she’d absorbed so much gossip. Must be infectious. In any case, she’d often noted him at the center of the other regulars at the Plough, the first to call out a hello to his friends, always the jovial drunk.

  “My life is favorable these days, very favorable indeed,” Seamus said. “And my son Brendan has proved himself quite the man. I wager I’ll be living alone soon enough. I’d say it’s the right time to ponder my next stage in life.”

  Liam waited and Seamus obliged him by filling up the silence.

  “Brendan’s future—that’s what’s important. He’s doing well at the shop, and I’ve no doubts he’ll be made manager.” He waved at a few of his mates in the crowd. Good-natured jeers floated through tendrils of fog in return. “What I’ve found in the last few months is a bit of relief, and I want to share it with a good woman who knows how to cook. Call me a Neanderthal, but that’s what I want.”

  Merrit’s inner antennae quivered. She felt a familiar stirring, an instinct rising to the surface. She’d always experienced these sudden insights but had never paid attention to them until she arrived in Ireland. Liam called it her secret power, this intuition of hers, the best trait for a matchmaker.

  “For a chronic bachelor,” she blurted, “you’re suddenly eager for marriage. What’s most on your mind these days? There’s something, isn’t there?”

  Seamus stiffened. “What’s most on my mind is my old age, if you must know.”

  He was telling the truth and lying at the same time. He reminded her of the freckly man. His words hid other thoughts altogether.

  Merrit opened her mouth, but Liam intervened. “Seamus, you’re a pisser, you know that? I know just the woman you want. You’ve had too many years just you and the boy. You need a woman who likes home life and is sassy enough to mend your slovenly ways. You need a set of grooves to keep you on track, that’s what. You wouldn’t mind spending less time in the pubs, now would you?”

  Seamus speared Merrit with a gloating little glance. “Bloody psychic, you are. I wouldn’t mind someone to help me get this gut off meself, at that. But independent, like—I won’t be giving up the pubs altogether.”

  Merrit stared down at the page, without insight after all, and apologized to Liam after Seamus left. “I shouldn’t have spoken out like that. I didn’t have a proper handle on him.”

  “Trust your instinct. You’re witchy when you set aside distractions.”

  “Fat chance today,” Merrit said.

  “You weren’t far off with Seamus anyhow. He’s the last person I’d expect to set off on a course of self-improvement. We’ll take our time with him. He’s jumping the gun on something, possibly about Brendan. That boy never struck me as a go-getter. Seamus is ever hopeful about him, though.”

  “It’s obvious he dotes on his son.”

  “Oh yes, he’d do just about anything for that boy.”

  Merrit bent over to write Liam’s assessment in the ledger.

  Liam blew on his fingers. “Fetch us tea, would you? The damp is burrowing into my bones. And don’t you be worrying over me. I’m fine on my own.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Go now. I’ll take the ledger.”

  Liam wasn’t used to being watched over, and by a daughter at that, so she took her leave, relieved to be away from the shifting crowd. Fog streams that had started to roll in from the fields had thickened. Hazy figures merged with and split from the murk, looming into view and then disappearing again. In the muffling fog, they were closer than they sounded. Merrit spun around, looking for the freckled stranger.

  Instead, a girl with a hoodie drawn over her head filtered into view. Masses of curls leaked out the sides of her hood. She twitched away from a group of men and approached Merrit with shoulders hunched and jaw clenched. Quite determined, it seemed, not to mention socially awkward. Plenty of that to go around at the festival, though.

  “Hello.” Merrit smiled. “Can I help you?”

  With unsettling intensity, the girl stared at the moonstone pendant that Merrit always wore, the one she’d inherited from her mom. She raised her hand, signaling something.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand—” Merrit said.

  The girl inhaled with a quick hiss and leaned into Merrit. Before Merrit could react, the girl’s hand appeared out of the murk and grabbed the pendant. She yanked, and the silver chain dug into Merrit’s neck. Another yank, and the girl vanished into the fog along with Merrit’s necklace.

  THREE

  INSIDE THE PLOUGH AND Trough, Alan Bressard stood with his back toward his customers and, thus, toward the picture windows that looked onto the crowded plaza. He might have caught a glimpse of a girl darting away from Merrit Chase if he’d been inclined toward window gazing. But he wasn’t. Especially in September. He’d long ago lost interest in the Matchmaker’s Festival except for what it meant for his cash flow.

  He pondered a chalkboard that hung a
bove the cash register. Yes, he was done with this bit of wisdom. He erased a quote by Immanuel Kant: Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made. On either side of the chalkboard, rows of bottles hung upside down with optics attached to their ends to ensure one-ounce pours. Above them the elite liquors sat ignored and dusty.

  “How about something cheery for a change?” one of his regulars said. Before Alan knew it, the old fellas who lined his bar like crows on a telephone line added their shite to the mix. In fact, his regulars called themselves the “crows” and so did everyone else.

  “I’ve got a good one for you from a comedian, can’t remember who, though,” Mickey said. “If women ran the world we wouldn’t have wars, just intense negotiations every twenty-eight days.”

  “Give me Mae West,” said Mackey. “A hard man is good to find.”

  Mickey and Mackey were brothers, old, garrulous, and forever the bachelor farmers.

  “Especially with you lot,” Alan said, but his comment got lost amongst the cackles.

  There were about a dozen regulars who traded off during the day. Even now, at eleven in the morning, Alan could count on seeing at least two of them slouching on stools closest to the taps. They were the old guard of Irish drinkers with bulbous veined noses and thick accents mixed with middle-aged men following hard on their tracks. The pack leader, Seamus, one of the younger fellas—that is, mid-forties or thereabouts—carried the biggest nose of all. Seamus had just arrived full of news about engaging Liam to find a wife for him.

  Seamus to find a wife? Couldn’t be true. Not in this lifetime. Alan kept his mouth closed, however, and his ears open, curious despite himself.

  “What are you after, going to Liam anyhow, you daft bastard?” Mackey said. “Nothing like a woman to take the wind right out of yer sails.”

  Exactly, Alan thought.

  “I tell you this,” Seamus said, “we’re in for a sad time of it when Liam passes—God rest his future soul—because that Merrit has all the insight of a mealy potato.”

  “And a woman,” Elder Joe, another crow, snorted. He fiddled with the blue bow tie he always wore, a sure sign that he felt personally affronted.

  Joe Junior, younger than Elder Joe by all of five years, chimed in next. “What’s going to become of the festival, I ask ye? That lassie’s bad luck, you mark me.”

  Solemn assents all around.

  It was as if twelve days, not twelve months, had passed since Merrit’s arrival. The Irish loved to hang on to the past. Just their nature, Alan supposed. In those first weeks after her arrival, Merrit had managed to topple over their complacent village ways. It was like dominoes falling, her arrival and then bam—death of a leading citizen, bam—tales of bribery, bam—revelations about Liam’s dark-horse past, bam—an arrest no one saw coming. And the last, mightiest bam—Merrit as matchmaker-in-training.

  As an outsider himself, Alan knew she was in for a massive bollocking for years to come. He’d emigrated from France—he counted back—holy mother of everything, could it be gone twenty years ago now? It seemed so. He’d been an angry young lad, all of sixteen years old, and even this far along in time and maturity he still wasn’t considered a proper Lisfenoran.

  He shrugged to himself—c’est la vie—and blew in the general direction of the top shelf. A mote of dust puffed into the air. It drifted for a second, then dropped as if dejected by its shabby surroundings.

  Alan half turned to check the crows’ pints and noticed a stranger slouched amongst them, frowning into his coffee cup. Tidy button-down shirt, but unshaven and puffy-eyed. Yet another tourist after a night of festival-induced randiness. The uptight-looking ones sometimes let it go the most at the festival. Alan had long ago given up on classifying people, except if they were assholes. Male or female, assholes were assholes.

  The stranger caught Alan’s eye and asked—no mistaking his Dublin accent—about hotel vacancies in the village.

  “You might find a family willing to rent out a bedroom,” Alan said, “but I wouldn’t count on it. Let it go a little late, did you then?”

  “Couldn’t be helped,” came the response. “I didn’t know I was coming until the day before yesterday, and I didn’t have time to muddle about researching vacancies.”

  “You might try staying in Corofin or Ballyvaughan.”

  “I might, indeed, except that my car broke down on top of everything else.”

  Alan beckoned his junior barman to refill the sorry blighter’s coffee cup and turned back to the chalkboard. He’d forgotten what he’d meant to write. Every year, the festival exhausted him. It was one month out of each year that accounted for a hefty chunk of his profits, but by Christ, for that month he lived in the bar. His pub filled to capacity soon after opening, all the way through to closing. He offered the full Irish fry-up seven days a week instead of only on the weekends. Eggs, rashers, sausage, tomatoes, brown bread. The smell of it nauseated him at times, but the extra effort paid off.

  Behind him, conversation stuttered to a halt and resumed on a querulous note. Alan surveyed the pub to see who had caught the crows’ attention. He couldn’t miss the slight girl with darting eyes. If a human could be said to be slinking, then she was, like a cat trying to disappear in plain sight. He understood what bothered the crows; they were old-school enough to question the presence of a girl alone in a pub.

  Her eyes grazed over people as she passed them, then caught on Alan. From across the many heads, Alan saw their spark of intelligence, their fathomless brown depths that took in everything around her, and his heart clutched like a fool. Ah, merde. Quick as a light switch, he reminded himself that this was the festival talking. Hormones everywhere.

  The stranded Dubliner nodded at the girl. Belatedly, Alan realized that the girl’s gaze hadn’t lingered on his tattered self at all. She signed something to the coffee drinker, who waved his hand in acknowledgment. She continued weaving her way through the crowd. The way she contorted her body to avoid brushing against strangers reminded Alan of a modern dance performance he’d once seen. Odd, but oddly graceful at the same time.

  “Not the full shilling, that one,” Seamus said.

  “I’d wager she’s smarter than you,” the coffee drinker snapped. With a deep, what looked to be fortifying, breath he raised a hand in quick apology. “She’ll find a safe corner. She always does. Best to leave her be until she settles. She’s shy, like.”

  “And who are you now?” Seamus said with a proprietary air that amused Alan. God forbid an outsider trump him in conversation.

  “I’m Dermot, her brother.” He sipped his coffee. “She’s Gemma. And before you say anything else, Gemma functions in society, holds down a job, and pays her bills.”

  Alan eyed Dermot, comparing his sharp chin and nose against his sister’s features. The features looked better than good on Gemma and average on Dermot. He was at least ten years older than she was, and he looked it.

  “You’re sure about the girl then?” he said.

  The man’s lips pursed and he straightened. His tone turned frosty. “She’s older than she looks. Twenty-six.” He sagged as if leaning into a noose he’d never pull free from. “Believe me, I know how it looks, but she’s doing well. Fact that she came in at all is a bloody miracle. She avoids crowds if she can.”

  The girl-woman passed in front of the fireplace and aimed herself toward the back wall.

  “Ah, Christ.” Alan started forward, but Dermot had risen and held him back with a request to wait and watch.

  Bijou, Alan’s eighty-pound dog, lounged in a cozy corner to the right of the hall that led to the bathrooms and kitchen. Most strangers sidestepped the dog or ventured a tentative hand toward her for a sniff. This girl-woman, Gemma, however, entered into a crash course straight toward Bijou’s throne of a dog bed. She dropped onto the pillow and wiggled herself in between the dog and the wall. Bijou, delighted, pushed her oversized gargoyle head against Gemma’s in an ecstasy of licks.

  �
�Gemma’s more comfortable with animals than people,” Dermot said. “What the hell kind of dog is that, anyhow?”

  “That slobbering beast would be the fecking ugliest dog there is,” Seamus said. “Uglier than a toad’s arse.”

  “She’s a dogue de Bordeaux. A rare breed.” Alan raised his voice. “Or, a French mastiff to the lot of you crétins.”

  The crows laughed. It was something of a game with them to poke at Alan and for Alan to poke back.

  Alan addressed Dermot. “Just so Gemma doesn’t feed scraps to my dog. That’s forbidden.”

  “Ay, she’ll be fine. Like I said. You can tell her yourself if you want.”

  “She’ll hear me?” Alan said.

  “She hears just bloody fine, thank you kindly.” He shook his head. “Christ.”

  Gemma pushed a jumper hood off her head and out bounced a mass of tight curls. She gazed down at her lap, where her hands rubbed over an object Alan couldn’t make out.

  Remembering the quote he’d meant to write, he returned to the chalkboard. The meaning of a word is its use in language. He thought this was true, but whatever their usage, words were meaningless most of the time. Words fooled. Actions did not. He’d learned this lesson long ago, and it was a good one.

  “What’s that malarkey you’ve written now?” Elder Joe said.

  Alan didn’t bother answering as he set about pulling more pints. Outside, the fog pressed against windows and tried to breathe its isolation over the premises, over Alan. Inside, the bar counter shone and firelight cast a cozy glow onto his customers. His realm. The door opened and a slim figure stood silhouetted before Alan made out Merrit Chase. The fog must have been clammier than it appeared from the inside because Merrit made straight for the fireplace. She rotated in a shivery circle while scanning the room.

  “She’ll not make a matchmaker, that one,” Seamus said.

  Seamus muttered amongst his brethren as Alan stepped out from behind the bar toward Merrit. She’d cocked her head the way she did sometimes, no doubt aware that her presence always elicited speculation.